Customer Crossroads

Integrated Customer Experience Applied to the Bathroom

When you are trying to build a branded customer experience, you have some very specific operational levers you can use as a manager.** When I start to think about a client's situation, I systematically work through all of the operational dimensions to make sure we consider everything. So let's do this together with the ladies room, and see what we learn.

Product

Doesn't really seem to apply to the ladiesroom, as we are assuming that the basic functionality exists. If your ladiesroom is missing the basic functionality expected, you're wasting your effort on anything else.

The term product can open debates about what it is you are actually selling. My solution is this: it's the literal answer a customer would give if you asked them what they are buying.  So Disney may be selling "happy memories", but if you ask people what they just paid for, they will likely say "admission to Disneyland". A bank may be selling "financial security", but people say they are paying for "a chequing account". It's a way of distinguishing product features and benefits from other elements of customer experience.

People

Unless you have employees holding hand-towels in your public washrooms, this isn't about your employees, their roles and their behavior. Except that you might train them how to give directions to the ladiesroom discreetly. You need to have standards for the cleaners. And some approach to the bathroom key if you are going to make people ask for a key.

Price

When I was growing up, the bathrooms in department stores cost 10 cents to use, so my Mom and I shared. [Thank goodness those days are mostly over.] So price isn't really a lever with the ladies room, because we are going to assume you don't charge for it directly. However, your customers will expect all of your facilities to "match". Best Western's facilties can be less luxurious than Hilton's, but need to be better than Motel 6. This is why we talk about "integrated customer experience" - it all needs to fit together.

Communications

Your marketing communications probably don't need to reference the ladies room. But...consider the tremendous word of mouth McDonald's has had over the years for their bathrooms, which are almost always amply proportioned, fitted out with baby changing tables, and reasonably clean. It's a part of their brand promise, isn't it? And in their early days, this was a point of differentiation from the local greasy spoon. Now it's the minimum we expect, especially from a national franchise. If you are ever in doubt as to the minimum standards for a public bathroom, check out the McDonald's in your area, because they have defined the line. If you are below this standard, most people are going to think you're cheap or uncaring.

McD's also seems to take the viewpoint that we are all their customer -- which we pretty much are -- therefore don't worry about people coming in just to use your washroom. There are McD's that police their washrooms for non-customers, but they are infrequent, and are usually in troubled neighborhoods.

So we owe a debt of gratitude to McDonald's for raising the bar on bathrooms in the past.

Place & Process

These are the two dimensions left, and they are intimately linked in the ladiesroom. Because the place determines the process. So let's look next at the two P's that relate to the ladiesroom.

There's a lot to say about that, and we'll be saying it in the next post.

References, Resources, and more about the Bathroom Blogfest:

** Six rings of value: We call them the six rings of value, because they all link together to create an experience. There's a nice graphic here.

McDonald's: an improv group put a tuxedoed bathroom attendant in the Times Square McDonald's, and handed out free amenities like combs and cologne, explaining it was a head office promotion. People seemed to accept this at face value. Read the amazing story and see the pics here.

The bathroom can be a restroom, a place of restorative calm. Reshma Anand tells why she loves the bathrooms at the Taj Mahal hotel. CB Whittemore provides examples of the bathroom as work of art. These are differentiated bathrooms, memorable bathrooms, bathrooms that show imagination and pride of ownership.

The bathroom is clearly a place of secrets. Sara posts pictures about handwashing, and statistics about who does and doesn't wash their hands, including Sara herself.  Maria Palma reveals that she is uncomfortable in bathrooms, and amuses herself by studying shoes.

Differentiating and the Zone of Goodness

Does a better bathroom count with customers?

This is an important question, since virtually all service level improvements cost money, and we know plumbing is always expensive.

Last week at the qualitative conference, I told colleagues Tima and Michelle about the Bathroom Blogfest project. They quickly started talking about nightclubs with interesting ladiesrooms. In fact, they easily came up with an amazing list of clubs with memorable and interesting ladies rooms. There was one club with separate stall areas, but a mixed gender sink and mirror area. Another has one way mirrors that lets the ladies see the men primping in the mirror. Another offers free spa services inside the ladiesroom.  (I'm still hoping for pictures to share with you, but they may have other things on their minds when they are clubbing!)

The Theory (Stay with me here, this is important)

If we were to measure consumer choices in any dimension, we are looking for a relationship along these lines: more (or sometimes less) of the dimension translates into more purchasing, more loyalty, more satisfaction, etc. The dimension could be anything such as speed of service, choice of colors, knowledgeable staff, convenient location.

Minimum acceptable standard

There are three zones of importance here, divided by two threshold lines. The first threshold is the minimum acceptable standard. If your performance is below this standard, you will see an impact on loyalty and repurchasing. All of this is pretty specific to each category, and sometimes to each customer segment.

For example, consider location convenience relative to the drycleaning category. There is some distance beyond which you will not travel no matter how much you like the drycleaner. This would be the minimum acceptable standard for convenience.

But there is likely a limit to how much "more convenient location" translates to loyalty. Once you've got door-to-door delivery, you've pretty much maxed out on convenience.

Hygiene factors

You might hear the phrase "hygiene factor" from a marketer. A hygiene factor is a dimension that has to meet a minimum standard, but once having met that, more is not better. Usually this is something like cleanliness: something can be dirty or clean, but there's no benefit to "more clean".

With other dimensions, customers can tell the difference between the minimum standard and a better standard, but it does not influence their behavior. Wait-time is often a dimension like this. Long line-ups can be frustrating, but people won't always move their business just to get a short line-up.

So there are really two kinds of hygiene factors: dimensions where there is no potential for differentiation, and dimensions where we can tell the difference, but we don't care about the difference.

I suspect that most shopping mall owners and other places with public washrooms think of bathroom quality as a hygiene factor. If it's clean and functional, that's all it has to be. These businesses make sure they are in the "minimum standard" zone, and stop there.

The Differentiation Line and Zone of Goodness

A differentiated customer experience is always up there in the Zone of Goodness, where we can see the difference, and we care about the difference, enough that it influences our behavior.   

What the heck does all this mean for the ladiesroom???
I don't think we choose a shopping mall or an airline based on the quality of the ladiesroom.  But it certainly registers as part of the total experience. Everything goes into the mix of emotion and memory, and we know that our emotional judgements about things affect our interest in repeating the experience.

We also know that our minimum standards are starting to go up, up, up in almost every dimension. If you don't believe me, consider the free spa services Tima and Michelle told me about.

More on the Bathroom Blogfest 2006:

Yesterday:  the bathroom in your establishment is a thin-slice, litmus-test for the rest of your experience. 

Bloggers participating are listed in the first group of blogroll links over on the left.

Thanks to David Polinchock at Experience Manifesto for picking up our theme and posting on the Blogfest. Guys do care.

Stephanie Weaver at Experienceology discusses bathrooms around the world, and sets the minimum standard: clean and functional.

CB Whittemore at Flooring the Customer examines the quality dimension, ranging from horrific to over-the-top.

Reshma Anand wonders why there can't be gender specific bathrooms on airplanes.

Linda Tischler asks the key question: Would you want your wife to pee in this place?

We are continuing to sign up bloggers, so send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view etc.

Bathroom Blogfest: Clubs

Welcome to this week's Bathroom Blogfest.  I'll have a few posts this week about the ladiesroom experience, and so will some other fine bloggers, listed at the end of this post.

I thought we should start with some of the good examples, deconstruct those, and then take those lessons on to the less savory aspects.

So here's a pop-quiz to get us started.

One of these images is the ladies room in an a members-only private club. The other is in a public restaurant. They're in the same office complex. A or B???

A

B

If you guessed that A was the private club and B was the public restaurant, you are correct.  The private club has some nice amenities of course. There are hand-towels stacked up against the wall, and mouthwash with disposable cups, as well as hand lotion. The decor doesn't appear to have changed since the 70s, and the rest of the club is even dustier. The ladiesroom stalls are the same metal things you would find in a baseball stadium.  There is one really weird amenity, actually -- it's a sonic glasses cleaning machine. I've never seen anyone use it. It looks like it hasn't been cleaned in a while.

The beautiful wooden door is the cubicle in the ladiesroom in a restaurant in the same office complex as the club. There are actually two hooks on the door, one for your briefcase or purse, and one for your coat. And the stalls have a mirror, so you can check your lipstick. 

All the dark wood and amenities make the Soul of the Vine ladiesroom a much nicer, more elegant environment than the Ontario Club, which will be no surprise to anyone who has been to both. It's not just the food that's better. The service is better. The ladiesrooms are better. They are much better at making you feel special. Amazingly enough, the Soul of the Vine is very affordable. Its cousin, Far Niente, located one floor up is at a much higher price point.

But either one is a much better place to take a client, and these places are in the heart of Toronto's financial district. 

A great many private clubs are struggling to stay alive, and it's no surprise, really. They have not moved with the times. They don't have business centres where the free-agent nation can drop in and work, because they have assumed we have an office downtown.

The food is often pedestrian at best. The coffee is often poor, and served in little cups that are half the size most people now want.

It's not really a ladiesroom, it's a litmus test for the whole operation. Or a thin-slice of the experience, to use the Gladwellian term. 

Meet the ladies here.

Qualitative Research Conference: Toronto October 2006

Why you need rubber soled shoes

It's cheaper and faster than ever to collect reams of information: it's wisdom in using this information that is in short supply. And you really should have some rubber soled shoes.

These were some of the things Paco Underhill talked about in his keynote last week at the joint QRCA/MRIA-QRD conference. Paco is the hugely successful analyst of shopping behaviors and author of very successful books on the subject, Why We Buy and Call of the Mall. 

Inner Context of the Shopper

One of the most interesting observations he made is that we all shop more often, even though we live in a state of accelerated time. We go into a store with a specific mission, and if we don't fulfil it, may leave empty handed.  That mission, even for the same person in the same store in the space of the same week, could have very different characteristics, based on the value system and emotion at play due to the inner context.

For example, shopping for a child's birthday cake, shopping for tonight's dinner, and shopping for the weekend when the relatives you dislike will be visiting. And in some respects, we need to treat each of those scenarios as if we were dealing with a different customer.

The Key Question

The key question, for Underhill, is always: "how do I respond to local market conditions and build same store sales?"  Depending where in the world you are, these challenges are vastly different.

When speaking of the global middle class, 2/3 of our expenditures are discretionary. We don't need to spend money on much -- someone has to entice us to spend.

In other parts of the world, money is a new and exciting toy, and that's where all the innovation is happening in retail.  Underhill shared some excellent examples of this.

Roppongi Hills, Tokyo

Underhill described Roppongi Hills as the "All Mall". It has hotels, an art gallery, residential towers, and a multitude of recreation facilities. One of the unusual elements is the large amount of public art that has been included throughout the facility, both inside and outside.

Creative use of space in Johannesburg

What you are looking at here is a drive-in movie theatre on the roof of a shopping mall (the Menlyn). A great use of space, and a good way to bring more traffic into the mall.

Another example cited by Underhill was a mall owner who built a stadium for student athletic activities on adjacent land, solely to drive traffic into the food court of the mall.

Forget about Parking in Sao Paolo

In order to bring traffic into the mall from the nearby office towers, this mall offers a free shuttle bus service that will pick people up and then run them back in complete safety so they can shop over their lunch hour.

Finding Happiness in Tokyo

Three Minutes of Happiness is the name of a chain of stores in Tokyo that sell inexpensive items for everyday use. Here's the description from Frommer's guide:

Bargain yen shops have opened all over Japan the past few years, but this is one of the best I've seen. It carries tableware, household goods, office supplies, cosmetics, watches, sunglasses, some basic clothing, and many other simple items, mostly in bright and happy colors like lime green and sky blue.

Although these shops seem very well designed, they are reminiscent of one of the fastest growing categories of shopping at home: the dollar store, and other deep discount formats, that are the antithesis of good design.

Dubai, Dubai

Underhill compared Dubai to the cantina scene in the original Star Wars movie, and called it the first place on the globe that is ready to receive the intergalactic traveller. You can get anything you want, and you can pay in any currency you choose.  Dubai apparently has fifty major shopping malls, in addition to the more traditional souks.

The Challenge

Underhill believes that landlords of shopping malls must go from being landlords to being placemakers. And the best ones are reaching for this. But there is still a lot of room for improvement.

His main recommendation, which we heartily endorse: get some good shoes, and get out the office to see what's going on.

Marketing with YouTube

This morning I received an e-mail from speaking coach Mark Bowden. He had been interviewed on CBC Television about the local mayoralty race. And he included a link to YouTube where he had uploaded the video clip.

Brilliant small business marketing!  He gives people the chance to view the clip with an easy link and load, rather than sending us to an archive that may have the clip embedded in a longer program. He adds his one-slide marketing message at the end. And he doesn't even have to host the bandwidth for this.

I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of this.

Personalization Trend Watch: Consumers Become Producers

The personalization trend is being driven at the core by the desire of people to be the producers and creators of their own lives. This is the conclusion of an excellent opinion piece by Thomas de Zengotita in the LA Times: The iPod as a Reflection of You, (free registration required) and his analysis is spot on.

But what's going on underneath all this is that consumers want to displace producers entirely. What customers really want is to produce for themselves. And not just for themselves. Ultimately, they want to produce themselves.

Things being what they are — things like refrigerators and cars and stoves — consumers can't actually become manufacturers. But wherever media technologies are making it possible for consumers to become the producers, they are doing it. The terms "customer" and "customize" have always been affiliated. Now they are fusing.

The challenge I see around me is that many (most?) organizations have finally figured out branding, and finally  got control of the global brand, and the last thing they want to do is give up any of that control to the consumer.

In some respects, it's easy for Apple: because they've given you content control, the look and feel are all clearly Apple, through and through.  But what do you do when you are Citibank or Ford?

It's all well and good to say "be more like Apple", the challenge is translating this personalization & customization desire in a meaningful way to other industries.  The organizations that figure out how to permit maximum consumer empowerment while simultaneously supporting a strong brand will be the winners in the next few years.

It's all happening at the loo

The ladies have had it and we're going on a quest to clean up the ladiesrooms of the world. What started as a casual conversation between Stephanie Weaver and I has quickly turned into the Bathroom Blogfest.

During the week of October 30, we'll be plunging into the ladies room and posting on the customer experience. Does it matter to your customers? And if it does, how does yours stack up? What's the good, bad and ugly of the ladiesroom experience?  If someone hired us to fix this horror-show, what would we all suggest be done? Tune in to these fine blogs Hallowe'en week (and isn't that fitting?) to get the nitty gritty on the ladiesroom:

• Experiencology
• Church of the Customer
• Flooring the Consumer
• What I do for a living
• the curious shopper
• Customers Are Always
• Fast Company Now

We were pretty chuffed when Linda Tischler (Fast Company) and Jackie Huba (Church of the Customer) agreed to scrub in. And Reshma Anand (What I do for a living) will be giving her thoughtful perspective from Bangalore. But there's still room in the cubicle if you want to squeeze in.

And if you have ideas, comments, pet peeves, and even better - PICTURES -- of the best and the worst, please send me a note. 

Power dynamics in customer relationships

This is a story about your relationship with your customers, although it may not seem like it at first. Walk with me for a bit ...

I went back to my hometown this summer, a place I hadn't been in many years. My high school, when I went back to look at it, seemed surprisingly benign, although they've made the windows smaller, so I may be mistaken about that.

How I got kicked out of Latin class

Wandering around town spotting the landmarks of my youth, I could not for the life of me remember why I had to take Grade 12 math in summer school one year, riding my bike across town every day with the morning traffic. This morning, at about 5:40 a.m., the pieces fell into place for me, and I woke up remembering. I had been kicked out of Latin class, and was thereby was missing a credit needed to get into university.  (This is what our brains are up to when we aren't paying attention.)

Here's what happened.  Bored and restless in Latin class, I started writing a letter to my best friend. Miss H grabbed the letter and started to read it in class. Horrified at this prospect, I grabbed it back. The net result is that I got kicked out, but not before being yelled at -- literally -- by several people. It was a horrible experience, and I'm glad I forgot about it for a few decades.

This morning, I thought about Miss H, the young and pretty Latin teacher. She probably didn't have a lot of tools in her student management kit. But she went straight to the big guns of humiliation when she felt threatened. She didn't even try to just say: "Put the letter away and pay attention". She did not understand herself to be in a position of significant power relative to her students. But she wanted victory, and she wanted it definitive. And when things escalated, so did everyone else.

You have power over your customers

Think about how similar the power dynamics of the classroom are to the situation of a customer with a problem. Perhaps they couldn't get the car loan because their credit was bad, and you had to tell them. Perhaps they overspent on downloads with their phone, and didn't understand it would cost a fortune. Maybe they can't get your backup software working, and just fried their data.

Whatever it is, the more difficult the situation becomes, the more the big organization has a tendency to get up on its hind legs and start hitting. Saying things like "you can't speak to our agents this way", and "don't use that tone of voice", or the familiar "no one else has had this problem". Eventually, you might even say, "so if you don't like it, sue us".

But when you think about it, the customer is just one little person, and you, on the other hand, are a gazillion dollar enterprise. You hold almost all the cards.

How customers get justice

Customers don't hold very many cards at all. They can leave -- but that's not too satisfying if you already fired them in some sense. They can complain, but that takes time, and they may not believe there is much chance of effecting an improvement in their situation. In fact, they may be so distressed at this point that they can't cope with your organization any more. Their last option is to say bad things about you.

And that is how customers even the score. They tell everyone over a long period of time how negatively they view your organization.

What to do when things go off the rails and badly

1. Remember that it's not personal for you, it's personal for the customer. They don't even know you. You are not the target.
2. Remember how much power you wield on behalf of the organization, even if you feel powerless, and don't even think about using it. After all, from their perspective, things are already going horribly wrong. Don't add fuel to the fire.
3. Be gentle. Be gracious. Take a breath. Tell everyone to take a breath. Get everyone a glass of water and a chair.
4. Recognize that few of us respond well to tremendous stress and frustration. Not them, and not you. Make allowances for them, even if they won't make them for you. (Because it's not about you, it's about the organization)
5. Never forget that the most loyal customers in the world are people who had a problem and had it solved. This is your opportunity to make that happen.
6. And of course, if there's anything I learned from Latin class it's this: semper ubi sub ubi*

*always wear under wear 

Corporate Blogging: Just a fad, or built to last?

Companies are still wondering if they need to enter into an uncontrolled conversation with their customers. Well, the indicators are all there that this trend is not going away any time soon. (Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto, way back when in 2000?  An earlier indication of this trend, perhaps even the tipping point.)

Typepad has now launched Business Class service, designed to support large scale enterprise blogging efforts. I'd say that's more than a straw in the wind, given how good these folks are at meeting customer needs and wants.

It's really about content management that is not centrally controlled. It's not about blogs, per se. But of course blogs, per se, are not scary -- lack of central control over content, on the other hand, is very scary. Or I'm guessing that's how the average executive in most organizations reacts to this idea.

But you don't have to say no. You can start with the tiniest little yes, and build on that.

McDonald's McChronicles: Brand Loyalty in Action

There's a McDonald's in Rosemont Illinois, that has the current era version of a jukebox available to customers.  Plus, it's apparently the cleanest McD anyone has ever seen. This all according to McChronicles, a blog about McDonald's written from the customer viewpoint. 

These folks clearly love McDonald's, and are horror-stricken when standards fall.  Witness this post about people pawing through the straw dispenser.  There's also some thoughtful commentary about the vegetarian option (are these McChroniclers really qual researchers in disguise??) and what it takes to change customer perceptions.

I did not know that McD has a corporate blog related to social responsibility, but I found out at McChronicles.

And I was not aware of McD's standing offer to give them feedback, which is here. And unlike most of these forms, this one makes sense, and provides a great big space for commentary, as well as not asking you to classify your feedback or other irritating stuff.  Just tell us who you are and what you want to tell us.

Turns out that McD's is now offering an Arch card, a reloadable store payment card. That's the arch card up there in the picture. And what a good idea that is, even if it did take a while.

Continued browsing turned up a list of other McDonald's fanatics, like McKroes McPictures Blog where you can see pictures of McD's all over the world, and McDone Media, which posts news and photos of McD's around the world.

Now that's a brand. And whatever you may think about McDonald's recent history or future prospects, you have to admire the power in that kind of customer connection.

References:

Tip of the hat to Glenn Ross at www.allbusiness.com for the lead

Coming Events: Neuromarketing Webcast

Neuromarketing is the latest hot trend in research circles. Stuffing people into MRI machines and then showing them advertising, and that kind of thing.  If you want to find out what's up with this stuff, you can attend a free web-cast on this topic Nov. 2, sponsored by the Qualitative Research Consultants Association.

Neuroscience seems to be the latest buzz in the research world. There’s as much fear as there is wonderment about it. The purpose of this presentation is to define what neuroscience is and means in the research world, exploring the latest developments and their bearing on qualitative research. It will debunk the myths and set out a set of principles which can be used to inform and substantiate qualitative insight. One of the topics covered will be the neuro principle of ‘hardwiring’, which tells us why people so annoyingly always seem to remember old campaign messages despite millions of dollars being spent on later, more up-to-date campaigns – and what can be done about this.

Details:

"Brains and Brands: How Neuroscience is Impacting Marketing and Market Research"
November 2, 2006
12:00 – 1:30 p.m. ET (GMT -5)
Register HERE
(Note: registration is free, and will also give you access to the archive of other great web-casts, all sponsored by the association to educate our clients and the public. Don't you wish everyone did this?)

Paco's coming to town

If you are in the Toronto area next week, you can take in a good one-day conference on qualitative research, and also hear Paco Underhill (author of Why We Buy and Call of the Mall) speak on Friday, Oct. 20.  It's a joint event sponsored by MRIA and QRCA, about 200 people, and a nice location to boot. Details here.

I am volunteering on the conference evaluation committee, and we've done some pretty radical overhauling of the evaluation forms. (Some of it is even printed in color! What will they think of next!)  I'll show you what we did and tell you how it worked in a couple of weeks.

More on Consumer Confidence: What a surprise when things work the first time

Why your customers are putting off buying stuff they want and can afford

I have new evidence for my latest hypothesis, that people put off buying goods and services they want because they are expecting a hassle.  They are expecting uncertainty, delays, and distress. They are actually surprised when this doesn't happen.

Here's my proof, for which I need to tell you a mother story. A real one, about my own cool mom, who probably would prefer that I not reveal what decade she was born in, let alone her actual age.

She's had a few computers over the years, and been through the pain of installation and upgrades. She's dealt with viruses and hard-drive crashes. She pays her bills online, and monitors and trades her stocks online, and has done all this for quite a few years. She e-mails digital photos of her hiking trips. In short, not a Luddite.

Surprise, it works!

What my mom did not have, until yesterday, was high-speed internet access. She wanted it. She's wanted it for a long time, actually.  But to get high speed, she had to switch ISPs, and convert to a cable hookup. And she was expecting that switch, and the house-call to install the cable, both to be a big headache. 

When it wasn't a big hassle, she was genuinely surprised.

Shocking to think that people put off buying your service even though they want it. Revenue forever lost, because someone expected the customer experience to be painful.

Integrate for your customers and win their hearts

C.B. Whittemore at her rather unusual business blog, tells the story of her mother shopping for carpet. It's the usual horror show, told in three installments, with confusion, too much choice, things going wrong, no one explaining, mom getting frustrated....

Among the things that happened to C.B.'s mom, (who I have to think is beyond the age where you want to hump furniture around by yourself), was being asked to move her own furniture. She wasn't told she could keep the waste carpet. She wasn't told a lot of things, in fact. I guess she was just supposed to know.

Are you relying on your customer to keep track of everything?
The thing that really struck me about this story was that the customer had to do the work of integrating that the company had not bothered to organize. In fact, the company was relying on her to know what was going on.

I think consumers/customers have come to expect this kind of headache, and it stops them from buying some kinds of things that they might otherwise do e.g. new flooring, new kitchen -- anything that might be complex to organize.  Because we know no one will really help us, and if things go wrong, we are on our own.

Consumer Confidence

When economists talk about consumer confidence, they don't mention this, do they? That we are confident that things will go wrong, confident that the delivery will be late, confident that the installers will have muddy feet or whatever. Confident that the hassle may well outweigh the good times.

You have to live with everyone's reputation for service, not just your own

If you are in a customer experience kind of a business, it's not just your own reputation you have to deal with, unfortunately, it is the reputation of everyone who has let your customer down in the past.  Your experience might be flawless, but they don't know that yet.  You have to overcome their bad memories of those other banks, other contractors, and other carpet retailers. 

Testimonials, service standards, guarantees, etc.
Overcoming other people's bad behavior is one reason testimonials are effective. It's not just you saying, "we're different" -- it's your customer saying that.

Service standards also help here, especially when you make them public, so people can hold you accountable. Money-back guarantees used to accomplish this, before people started hedging on the guarantee commitment by asking you to return the thing in the original box, and similar nonsense.

References:

Here's the link to the story, Endless Frustrations [and what an apt title!]

C.B'.s blog is about floor coverings, and marketing to women.  I just love her title, which is Director, In-Store Innovation.  Maybe you should give that title to someone in your organization and see what happens.

Survey Research: Are all the same people answering all the surveys?

Advertising Age has an interesting piece about survey research: Consumers Rebel Against Marketer's Endless Surveys: 30 Top Industry Execs Gather to Discuss 'Opinion Fatigue' Crisis

At a roundtable held among execs of large consumer products firms and their researchers in Chicago, there was serious handwringing about survey fatigue and non-responders.  Perhaps survey research is not as valid as it used to be, too small a sliver of the population is making money as professional respondents, etc. 

If you are hearing this kind of thing and wondering what to do in your own organization, my suggestions are these:

Treat your respondents with respect.

Ask smart questions. Ask only what you can act on, not what would be nice-to-know. Pre-test all surveys with a small sample of the target group and interview them. Then fix the problems with confusing or irritating questions.  This does cost a bit extra, but you will get much better results.

Out of a sense of obligation to the industry, I try to participate in all research I am not barred from. And I am frankly shocked at how much of it is frustrating to participate in. Maybe you've had this experience yourself, and it's disrespectful of you as a consumer or a customer or a voter or a taxpayer.

Be quick about it.
Challenge yourself to make your next survey half the length of the last one.

Use multiple methods.
Multi-method projects come together on the problem from several angles. This can add tremendously to your understanding. You'll also avoid being blindsided by a sampling or response bias issue from a single survey instrument. 
You could combine an internet survey with a site intercept questionnaire, with some depth interviews. If something doesn't seem to fit, test again.

Consider paying people for their opinions.
I know this is unpopular in research circles. And indeed, paying people to be on large research panels is part of the problem. But if you want people to spend some of their free time answering your questions, maybe you should reward them appropriately. After all, how do you yourself feel about this?

Spend the money for real research
Your research supplier should be a member of a professional research association in your country. These organizations have standards and ethics and auditing bodies. They conduct training and education programs, publish useful articles and journals, and generally try to maintain high standards. 

If your supplier isn't part of one of these organizations, you need to ask yourself why. Would you go to a doctor that didn't participate in continuing education? Even your car mechanic and hair stylist is likely to have recent educational certificates on display.

This problem is really the tragedy of the commons all over again. Because it is getting cheaper to do survey research, there's lots more of it, and the natural tendency of most people to co-operate and be helpful has been abused to the point where a lot of people just don't want to play anymore.

Personalization & Co-creation Trend: HP's its personal campaign

HP's new campaign, it's personal, is letting me create my own little video ad.  You can see it here:

Or you can go make your own.
 

HP has tapped into something important here with the notion of "it's personal". Our computers are extensions of our hands and our brains, more and more. Losing a hard drive is now worse than losing your wallet. When you can't use your computer, it feels very difficult to be productive. Amazing how this has happened so quickly.

Apparently some of HP's enterprise customers are exercised about the new campaign, because they have been telling their employees that the computers are not personal, are in fact company equipment, and should not be shared with kids or used to download music, edit personal pictures, etc. Someone needs to tell these companies that they crossed the work-personal boundary first, by expecting employees to be available anytime, anywhere.

The personalization trend we have spoken about here before is more than just acknowledging this, however, it is giving people the ability to have their own preferences met. This seems like a good start. Is HP thinking about customers the way Apple does? We can only hope.

Taking a customer-centric view of the world

I attended a roundtable session earlier this week where a guest from HP talked about their marketing strategy and their competition. HP operates in a complex world, where they have tiny customers, and massive customers, and they sell things that are relatively simple, as well as enterprise solutions that are tremendously complex.

The speaker did a great job of explaining their view of the market segments, and how they are trying to integrate. Some very nifty video, btw, which I'll post on tomorrow.

One of the charts presented made me ponder how we tend to define a given market from our own perspective, not from the customer's perspective. We define the product or service categories more or less based on our own product and service line-up.  So we see a chart that has our own organization with an X in every row, just like the first chart above.  And we then look at the competition from the same perspective.

Our customers and prospects define the market and competition in terms of all their needs and potential needs. Their chart looks more like the chart below, where no one company can meet all their needs. 

The implication of this, of course, is that we wind up sounding like simpletons when we address the customer's requirements, because we ignore the ones we can't help with.

When you think about your competition, think broadly. Think in terms of your customer's view of the world. It's not fast food, it's food. It's not CBS versus NBC, it's entertainment. This does complicate things, of course. But it will get you to a better place.