Surrender Control to Your Customer

We were in a meeting with Envano an innovative social media marketing firm and the owner shared Joe Pulizzi's book Get Content. Get Customers. with us. Turns out one of their clients is featured in the book.

I am a big fan of Joe Pulizzi. Other than the fact that he is enormously articulate, he's right. Here's a summary of his take on content:

Content marketing is not easy because you actually have to listen to your customers and know what their challenges are. You cannot solve your marketing woes through buying advertising space. You must make a connection to your customers, and get new customers, by focusing on their true pain points and healing them with information.

There are millions of "social media experts" out there. Unfortunately, the majority are experts on tools, devices, and technology. Very few are experts on understanding the customer. Why? Because it's hard.

The recent Johnson & Johnson Motrin debacle is a great example.

Why Understanding the Customer is Hard.

Getting insights about the customer is not the challenge. A wealth of data is readily available. The real barrier is "surrendering control". I would argue that marketers know what their customers' want, but the marketers are unwilling to surrender control. Johnson & Johnson's ad agency tried to tell the customer who they are (or control brand perception) and it blew up in their face. Recently, we did a market study for an ad agency and gave them the unvarnished truth about the customer and the tools needed to engage them (lots of social media). They responded that they didn't want that. They either didn't know how to do what we recommended or didn't know how to make money doing it. They asked us to change the report to include tools they knew how to produce and could make money doing. WARNING! This is the norm not the exception.

Technology Isn't the Answer

Now the opposite of the example above is also true. Don't look to the new world of social media to solve the problem. It is not a solution. It is a wonderful tool to help marketers solve the problem. The problem is engaging the customer. The other problem is all the resources (vendors) available to help marketers don't care about engaging the customer, they only care about selling the services they offer.

Don't Try to Be the Smartest Person in the Room

The day's of Darren Stevens are over. Marketers don't need to be geniuses trying to create the next "big idea". They simply need to listen to their customers and give them what they want--not what marketers want to sell.

It's About Content.

As Joe Pulizzi points out, it is all about content; content that is meaningful and valuable to the customer. To do that, you must be willing to surrender control to the customer.

Keep up the good work Joe!

Three Types of Customer-Centric Strategies

What can you do to be more customer-centric?

First, let me share my definition of customer-centric: Solving specific customer problems cheaper, faster, or easier.

So how can you do that?

According to Clayton Christensen there are three distinct ways:

1. Sustaining Innovation
2. Low-End Disruptive Innovation
3. New Market Disruptive Innovation



1. Sustaining Innovation
Deliver better performance to highly demanding buyers in an existing market. Crowd Spring is my favorite example. In the new transparent world of social media, graphic designers and ad agencies are struggling with the commodization of their product. As one of my graphic designer friends said upon seeing Crowd Spring for the first time, "This makes me sick to my stomach." Crowd Spring is a crowd sharing web site for graphic designers. A buyer simply posts a project and creative brief on the site with a budget--a very low budget. For example a logo and identity for a new architectural firm for $500. Depending on what market you're in, that is either very low or "wouldn't buy me a cup of coffee" low. Here's the really bad part for designers: Fully developed concepts are submitted from graphic designers all over the world. Hundreds of them. When the buyer selects the concept he or she likes, then the $500 is released to that designer. Bottomline: For $500, this buyer gets to see hundreds of concepts and ideas and only pay for the one they choose. Crowd Spring is providing remarkably better performance (in the form of same quality for much cheaper prices) to highly demanding buyers in an existing market.



2. Low-End Disruptive Innovation
Give “over-served” buyers “good enough” performance at lower prices. My hero R. Sam Bowers described it this way: In the old world, sellers always sought to exceed the buyer's expectations--go above and beyond what is being asked for. Today, buyers have learned that the extra effort costs money. What buyers want is "good enough" at lower prices. A great example of this is healthcare where striving for the highest quality has been the mantra. This mission has also resulted in the runaway costs of healthcare. Minute Clinic discovered that there are many ailments for which patients just want "good enough". For $40 you can get diagnosed and get presciption meds and be on your way in less than an hour. These patients don't need a doctor, a nurse practioner will do. Minute Clinic is providing "over-served" patients with "good enough" care at much lower prices.



3. New Market Disruptive Innovation
Provide “excluded buyers” a simple, lower cost, easy solution. Traditionally, there have been services or products that have been priced beyond the reach of many potential buyers. One of these is business legal services. LegalZoom has changed all that. Now, small businesses can get the legal documents and services they need for prices that fit their budgets. LegalZoom has created a new market by finding a significantly cheaper way to deliver the service.


In today's new customer-centric world, marketers need ways to increase their competitive advantage and win more business. Employ one or more of these three customer-centric strategies and you will be amazed by the results.

A final note about profit and margin. The only example above that diminishes margin is Crowd Spring. But it diminishes it for a commodity. You can't put lipstick on a pig and you can't add margin to a commodity. The other two invent better processes that actually increase margin while dramatically lowering price.

How to Interview Your Customers and Find Out What They Really Want

You can't hardly hit a blog or business feed without hearing about the importance of understanding your customer. And to do it, you've got to talk to your customers and find out what they want.

Seems like pretty straight forward stuff, right? Not true.

Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen says the current tools on which business relies for understanding customers are no longer relevant because they are not designed to uncover complex demands.

Any type of research that asks customers direct questions fails to uncover what the customer can't describe or simply does not understand. Focus groups, quantitative surveys, and even voice-of-the-customer all rely on the customers' ability to describe what they want.

But when it comes to the emotional and social aspects, customers don't know what they want. At the very least, they don't know how to describe what they want.

So how do you find out? Here's how to interview a customer and uncover what they really want:

1. Be Their Psychiatrist - Do not drive the questioning in an attempt to get them to "tell you the answer" -- because they won't. They don't know the answer. Once they identify an area of frustration, stop talking and listen. Let them talk. When there is a lull, use words of encouragement to keep them going such as "How is that impacting you?" or "Do you think it will ever change?"

2. Don't sell--ever - The reason marketers struggle getting good information from their customers is they don't listen; they sell. The minute a customer begins describing a problem, our brains shut off and we go into "sales mode" and begin convincing the customer our product can solve that problem. These are not sales calls. If you start selling, you'll learn nothing.

3. Do not make it a product issue - Avoid your instincts to drive the conversation to your product. Let it happen naturally. If it's a product issue, they'll get there all by themselves.

4. Focus on their world - It's not about you, it's about them. You need to understand the full scope of the job the customer needs to get done. Your product only plays a small part. Sorry, you're not that important.

5. Focus on how they use the product and why - They hire your product to do a job. Focus on the job they're using your product to do. What works well and what doesn't work so well--or what isn't working at all. Remember, there's a huge difference between how well your product performs the job it's designed to do verses how well it performs the job the customer needs it do.

Is it important to talk to your customers? Absolutely. It's critical to your success. But you have to do it right or you'll learn nothing and perpetuate the same old practices.

The Future CMO -- a Publisher?

NOTE: This is from ADWEEK. Please be sure to visit their site.

Why understanding an old craft is crucial to mastering new techniques
Oct 1, 2008

-By Joe Pulizzi

Considering technology has enabled marketing to make use of once implausible platforms -- mobile phones, interactive displays and even virtual worlds -- who would have guessed that the next generation of CMOs would need an in-depth understanding of a trade that goes back to the days of Benjamin Franklin? The answer: not many. Even so, publishing is the driving force behind today's most successful brands.

Even the word "publishing" sounds old-fashioned, so it's understandably difficult to fathom how the process could possibly be revolutionizing the marketing techniques used by the largest organizations in the world.

Publishing and Trust
Do you know IBM's most important marketing objective? According to Ed Abrams, vp of marketing for IBM, it's to "create and develop trust with technology decision makers."

Eduardo Conrado, corporate vp of business and technology for Motorola, is singing the same tune: Motorola's most important goal is to "become a trusted partner and resource to customers."

But how are they meeting this objective? By publishing online content, Webcasts, Webinars, videos, educational newsletters, white papers, content microsites. The list goes on. In order to create an environment of trust, marketers must develop valuable, relevant and compelling content on a consistent basis. That's publishing -- and now, marketing.

The challenge for corporate marketers is that most do not have the skill base or a clear understanding of the elements required for publishing.

Marketing Is Publishing
If you have any doubts as to whether marketing is morphing into publishing, just compare, side-by-side, the products of any media company and the communication tactics used by major marketing organizations. They are almost identical. The only difference is how they are measured. While media companies measure each product with an individual P&L, marketers measure their tactics through customer growth and retention.

While this is great news for non-media companies (advertising agencies and agency-side content providers) and client-side CMOs, it also explains why most media companies are hurting. The media's main competition is no longer other media companies; it's past clients, companies like yours.

This is a recent but rampant and steady shift. Up until just a few years ago, corporate marketers were still primarily dependent on aligning their products with media brands to distribute their overall message to their target audience. Now, they're cutting out the middleman (that would be traditional media) and communicating directly to their customers.

There are two major elements primarily responsible for this shift: Search engines, which have democratized the playing field, and technology, which is so cheap that there are essentially no barriers to publishing the messages you want to your target buyers.

The Publisher's Skill Set
While the metrics, the marketing knowledge and the concepts of integrated marketing are still extremely valuable, the differentiator between the haves and have-nots of leading marketing executives comes down to the process of delivering valuable, relevant and compelling content on a consistent basis.

What are the defining traits of publishers? And how can your average CMO adopt them to do his or her job more effectively? In short, CMOs need to think like publishers and understand concepts such as:

-- The ongoing informational needs of the buyer (outside your products and services).
-- Anticipating the informational needs of buyers and presenting cutting-edge industry trends (again, not product- or service-related).
-- The art of storytelling and its role within the organization.
-- Audience development tactics that rely on in-depth knowledge of buyer personas.
-- Content tactics that cut through the marketing clutter and gain readership.

The CMO publisher allocates resources much like a media company would, including:

-- Aligning an expert content network of journalists and custom publishers.
-- Developing an editorial plan and content schedule.
-- Leveraging employees to be part of the content-generation process and positioning them as industry experts.
-- Creating an online, in-print and in-person content strategy as part of the integrated marketing program.

It Comes Down to Trust
Most leading organizations still leverage traditional media, and will continue to do so for a long time to come. During this "transition" period between traditional and alternative media strategies, big brands such as IBM, Siemens and Procter & Gamble are beginning to leverage vast amounts of traditional media to market their own content. IBM pushes buyers to their DNA portals. Siemens promotes to their Siemens Answers content program. P&G integrates both traditional and nontraditional marketing efforts toward sites like HomeMadeSimple.com and BeingGirl.com, which have both been big wins for the company.

These are publishing efforts that are designed to engender buyer trust. The new rules of marketing dictate trust over all other objectives. Trust leads to long-term relationships. Trust leads to the purchase. Trust leads to online and offline word of mouth.

Without publishing consistent and valuable content to customer segments, trust is hard to come by, even with a revolutionary product or service.

The Opportunity Is Now
Although organizations across the globe are starting to catch on, we are still at the beginning stages of the publishing and content marketing revolution. The average company spends about 30 percent of its total budget on the creation and execution of its own content. Over the next few years this number will grow to 50 percent. This means that more emphasis will need to be on best-in-class publishing methods and less on traditional measurements.

In today's climate, a majority of Americans are more inclined to trust business than they are government or media (source: 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer). That means you start off with the deck stacked in your favor: your customers want to trust you. By publishing your brand message in the form of useful information, your company and brand are in a position to become "the trusted information resource" and to create lifelong brand loyalists. Those that don't will be left on the outside looking in, and by that time, a publishing mentality may be too late.

Joe Pulizzi, author, speaker and evangelist for content marketing, is founder of Junta42 Match, the leading custom content marketplace, and author of Get Content. Get Customers.

Dying is Easy. Customer-Centric is Hard.

British actor and director Sir Donald Wolfit reportedly spoke these last words on his death bed: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." I was thinking of Sir Donald the other day while helping a client get past a “product-centric” moment. Customer-centric is not intuitive. Not for a marketer anyway.

There is something in your DNA that makes you a marketer vs. a brain surgeon or rocket scientist. That something keeps you “pitching”. Next time you’re at a party, scan the crowd and see if you can find the marketer. It’s easy. They’re always pitching something. A restaurant, a movie, a book, whatever. They’re always pitching.

Customer-centric behavior is the antimatter of what we know as marketing. It’s as if Robert Preston suddenly became Freud. Pitching is replaced with listening and diagnosis. The welfare of the customer is far more important than selling a widget today. Try that one out on your board next month.

My Dad was a neurosurgeon. He performed hundreds of back surgeries. He told me once about a patient who was complaining of lower back pain and wanted it fixed. My Dad told the patient that surgery may ultimately be required but that his condition wasn’t serious enough to warrant the risk. I was stunned. My Dad unsold the buyer. Why? Because the customer experience would have been poor! My Dad isn’t a marketer. He was acting in the best interests of his patient. Regardless of the sales results. That is customer-centric.

To be customer-centric, sales cannot be the mission but the outcome. Now that’s hard.

The personal computer gets more personalized

MDW: See my post on Johnson Controls below and then read this article from MSNBC.

In a world of look-alike PCs, manufacturers are aiming to differentiate their computers more than ever with features such as antimicrobial keyboards (for the “Monk” in you) to facial recognition security, as well as colorful shapes and designs.

Buyers have an array of options, from all-in-one desktops that eliminate the standard rectangular, gray or silver CPU boxes, to laptops with Blu-ray players and widescreens.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26273914/