Category: Media Articles

Having seen a few incidents in the world, this one will definitely be remembered. The tears of sadness, separation, anxiety, sickness, and bad economics are all spinning in circles around us personally and professionally. What comes next are the changes.

They say in Washington DC to ‘never waste a crisis’. I believe it’s an unspoken reality for many throughout the world that many organizations will see massive change. Not a need for efficiency or adaptation but wholesale change – driven by us, the buyers. I have experienced a few times in my career what a massive upheaval looks like but no one has seen this.

Here is what I believe comes next:

Adapt to what customers are instantly going to need. The old ways are not going to work fast enough or understand what people’s needs are fast enough. The old way of measuring and predicting will not work well enough. You’re not going go by search terms you’re not going to post things on social media including this and it’s not going to do much of anything.

(Some) leadership will become very adaptive. Because that’s who they are as people. An event like this will force leadership to truly become adaptive or not. It’s ‘chutes and ladders’ time.

Organizational adaptability, manifested through leadership becomes a critical component of adaptability in general. If the people in the warehouse don’t understand the change, it not going to work. It could be something culturally is stopping leadership. It’s possible that this part can be coached through with enough dedication. More likely, there’s either a fast or dragged out demise to the organizations that don’t change.

The old ways of building product change. Whom are we listening to? How fast do we take in new predictive data and what forms of insight tells us what products our future customers will demand in a changing environment? You likely don’t have any data here. If you do you’re one of the few.

The old ways of marketing change. I’m old enough to remember TV media buys, direct mail, catalogs, search terms, list trades, email, social media. None of these things will drive your brand in an upheaval. The tools are not what will drive success. You need to take advantage of media and double down on a deep understanding of ‘why people buy’. It’s not going be media metrics it’s going to be people metrics. What are people metrics? Why we decide what deep down convinced us to buy a product. What aligned that product to solving our unmet needs.

Disruptive innovation, the kind that Clayton Christensen spoke so much about will find a place in the right organization. Efficiency innovation and sustaining innovation may help but they’re not going to be the answer. Of course, the old expression “Strategy is not in the fox hole” will haunt us. If you’re going down the road of disruption it better go fast.

There will be a set of new winners, likely 3 to 5 years. New names will show up and move from challenger brands using new technologies.

Some organizations in adjacent markets will attack week, stodgy old ways of doing business.

It’s efficiency and it’s also hyperfocus on customers.

We won’t be selling as much as solving what our customers need.

We are going to fast track Product-Market Fit. Not that old legacy way.

And it’s underway at a restart, startup, or bold new leader now.

We live in a hype cycle. First, there was the dot com era and any business with a website was going to rule the world. Then it was social, and he who has the most likes, friends, followers wins, right? Remember that? Somewhere in between it was all about Google search rankings and website visitors and duration of site visit (if you were more sophisticated).

All these metrics to track and report, yet no one gets customers. Did you hear me? No one gets revenue or the customer. Do you want likes and engagement and page views and server-melting numbers of website visitors, or do you want customers?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume you want customers. If you think “well, likes and engagement LEAD to more customers”, just think different for a few more minutes. Keep an open mind.

So you want customers. Or, more accurately, you want sales. Where do sales come from? They come from customers. Who are your customers? Do you know? You have a CRM, that’s good. You know their names and purchase history. What else do you know about them?

Personality Predicts Desire. Desire Drives Purchase Decisions.

We already know that personality predicts things like career choice, success in school, what kind of person you’re going to marry. It predicts what Netflix will script (oh yes, they get this).

So, it follows that personality would predict…purchases! Right?

What do you know about your customers’ personalities? How would you even begin to know that? It’s hard to suss out personality traits based on the data you have in your CRM. How does one’s name, or zip code, or credit card transactions over the last 30 days translate into personality?

What makes a human being a human? More importantly, why do you care?

Personalities – Why Bother?

If your main goal is to increase revenue, customers, volume, it might strike you as silly to be talking about personality traits. Fair enough. You have a choice: keep doing what you’re doing and hope for the best as you watch Amazon continue to take over the entire f*cking global retail economy, or you can do something about it.

Demographics vs Desires

Your CRM, if you’re a company that’s fairly sophisticated in their customer data management, is probably divided up into a variety of buckets. Your customers have detailed profiles including all the information that you’ve gathered on them over the course of your relationship, like how many purchases they’ve made, and when. Where they live. What they do for a living. The various ways you can harass them with your latest marketing offer — via email, physical mail, push and so on…

You know things about your customers. And you store this “customer intelligence” in your CRM. You may even have developed customer personas based on what you think you know about your customers, to help the marketing department tailor messaging based on the 3-5 different customer personas so you’re speaking to each person’s needs using language they understand.

That’s great. If you’re doing these things, or even if you’re not but you realize that this is the current state of best practices for marketing and CRM, then you are the kind of person who will understand this next bit. This is where it gets complicated.

You’re an experimenter, you’re an early adopter. You at least know that doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, and you also know that you’re miles ahead of all the other companies who are obviously doing it wrong. It stands to reason that there’s an even better way — the next next step — and you may even be one of the very first people who learn what it is.

You understand that what you’ve been doing is working…sort of. Sometimes. But not as well as you’d want. And you’re not always sure why.

Quantifying Human Desire: Your CRM on Steroids

We’ve talked about personality. Now let’s talk about how all of this comes together.

Clicks and cookies do not equal behavior. Much less intelligence. What does real Customer Intelligence mean? Can you predict customers? By quantifying human desire you can do things that normal CRM “order history machines” can’t do. Predict based on theories.

Clayton Christensen speak a lot about theories and why the wrong math ship wrecks. We get that.

Our technology is a data set consisting of millions. The primary key is a calculated (predictive) personality type of each person based on real world data. Most people attempt to extend click and cookie data as “behaviors” or personas. True personality is the closest we have to predicting why people cry, laugh and buy.

Personality is the combination of traits that form an individual’s distinctive character.

Some aspects of personality are inherited, but most are learned through experience, much of it early in a person’s life. Once formed, personality changes very little during later life. It turns out that calculating a noninvasive personality defines who our best customers are. When coupled with CRM data, it places ‘guard rails’ on how that personality sees the business.

You can perform (prescriptive) merchandising and recommendations far better because suggestions are based on desire, personality and expectations of future customers. Sales go up because you are “delighting” and surprising customers and using elements of the past to drive the theories of future profits.

By allowing a business to have a precise view of their best customers and a clear “go to market” strategy. Brands stop wasting time on unprofitable personality types. Just like dating, some people don’t get along. Same for business.

[Writers note: In late 2014, we wrote this article. We had not invented our CRM technology, but we knew that there had to be something better than simple demographic data to segment customers.]

The customer journey is complex. It has always been that way. The human mind is not something you drop into a Skinner Box. There has not been a linear path to anything since the days of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker. Follow that?

When attempting to sell something, build brand, profitably, you have far too many things to contend with. Where do you start?

One place I like to start is with finding customer density and potential customer density. Ideally, starting in neighborhoods and then down to the individual. In the chart attached to this post, you see an example of great differences in eCommerce sales density vs store sales density. By avoiding averaging of customers, by area, by segment by product sold, you avoid average results.

My 4 items to look at:

1. Building audience, one area and person at a time. Start by finding audiences and determine where audiences are not. That is the most basic of segmenting audiences. The marketing ecosystem often oversells media. Just look at your CTR and conversion rate. Why have these numbers been accepted? I think it is this way, in part, because we average results. Add in Viewable impression data and up to 70% non-human traffic and something is wrong with how current technology chooses audience. Audience data, both cookie and pre-cookie is a critical first step. Avoiding averaged audiences is a great step. (2018 note: we are still firm believers in not averaging customers, but now we’re got a much better way to bucket them. Also, take a look at metrics beyond Google Analytics. Customers are more than just click-throughs. Our CRM has human activities that tell us why people buy.)
2. Focus media in areas where the FULL customer journey will work – where things like quality display, social and search will create more brand search in dark areas. That is the point of all this, right? Where you drive early stage media should result in growing brand demand, no matter how small the business. (2018 notes: media media media. Oi. That’s all that was available in 2014! Pouring all of your money in media is not the best tactic because it’s still averaging your customers.)
3. The customer journey will NOT work in areas where weak existing and future customers exist. The customer journey is too costly and that will be the case for the vast majority of people and neighborhoods in the world. I know of many companies who maintain great acquisition cost in 1,000 or so ‘nooks’ but see 10x the cost in 10,000 ‘nooks’. Follow? Can you get past the 1,000? Sure but start where it is profitable. So, don’t average areas. Focus on the “A” areas first and once that has been settled, the “B” areas deserve your attention.
4. Why location? Something I will write about in coming posts. A: Real social circles. I bet you are not walking out of your house today in a pink suit. Why? Social circles. What we do in social environments, both on and offline impacts our purchase behavior. Something that has been well know since IBM did the original heat maps in 1899.

In summary: Taking a first step in customer segmentation and media segmentation helps a lot. It might cut some audience and media spend but in the long run, it drives sales growth in a predictable and profitable way.

In early 2015, I revisited this article, so here’s some almost 3-year-old commentary:

1 Feb 2015:

I have been running into some very interesting media examples. Some media is being mixed together several chains down. A mix of low value media with high CTR ‘gamed clicks’ averages out to average CTR, filled orders. Rotten to the consumer and buyer, good for the ad network and a poor plan for the long run for all.

2018 final notes:

When you develop a good strategy, updating your tactics keeps it working. In 2014, media was king so we had to play the game. In 2018, we’re saying pump the brakes on media. You can spend money on the right media, showing to the right audience, using the right message. We know other ways to speak to your customers, and we can get you look-a-like customers too. Make 2018 your year.

Customer delight is a form of happiness.  It is a well-documented, but a hard to achieve KPI. Jeff Bezos understands how important it is and has 5 teams working on it at Amazon. It’s that important. Why?

Customer delight is broken down into 3 key elements:

1. Create customer loyalty. Instead of rebuying your customers through paid media, how can we get people back easier?
2. More profits. Easy to say, hard to execute. While many businesses are offering discounts right away, having customer delight slows down the coupon bus. Apple does not have coupons, you don’t need them either.  
3. Reviews. A customer who gets it, says nice things, online and to friends. They own it, flaunt it and you win.

According to a Bain & Company report on Net promotor score and profits, only 9% of organizations surveyed could sustainable profits and growth for 10 years. 9! NINE! I don’t want to look for a job that often.

A 5% increase in customer retention can yield 25% to 100% increase in profits.  

My focus for 20 years is finding ways to create customer delight and balance that with keeping you happy as well. An organization that is happy, along with its customers is a great place to work. But how can this happen in 2018? It seems so hard.  

For one, most organizations I know, hundreds of them so far, have very little predictive capabilities. Furthermore, very few have predictive down to the people level.  

When we install customer delight, the focus one the organization on the customer changes and the corporate culture as well. People, process and leadership align on balancing the customer with the employee.  

By linking customer delight to the core values and goals of the organizations connect people to profits in a positive way. When things are aligned, they move fast.

To learn more and see how we can help you, please contact us. We promise a call is worth the effort.

This article was written by Madelyn Skinner.

The Story.

I am fascinated by subscription boxes, although a little overwhelmed, too. My friends are constantly talking about their monthly makeup boxes, their newest shipment of “ugly” food, a miracle face scrub, etc. in my curiosity, I found a website that aggregates many of these subscription boxes and includes reviews.

Two weeks later, I see an ad for this site on Facebook. It’s eye-catching: they’re advertising a monthly plant delivery service, and I absolutely love succulents. I clicked through. I rarely click though on Facebook ads. I look at the plant subscription service and then go to the main page with all the boxes, and before I get halfway down the page I get a pop up.

“50% off your first box with this promo”

The Dilemma.

What?! The box right below the pop up was a natural skin care box for $60 a month, with a value of $120, so I’d only pay $30 for my first one. Seems like a great deal at first, and I’m tempted. What’s the issue here?

I was already interested, but now they’re acting desperate. PLEASE BUY SOMETHING I’LL GIVE YOU A DISCOUNT.

Why do companies think they need to give discounts to first-time customers? I was already browsing intently, I could have been a customer! Giving me a discount on my first box is a mistake: it’s like I’m lured in through false promises. I’ll have to pay double the amount next time. If I am lured in by a discount, do you think I’ll want to pay full price? Not likely.

The Solution.

Here’s what to do.

Don’t rely on a discount strategy to lure customers. Stop assuming people will not order if they don’t have discounts. When you do this, you are averaging people who are already on the fence with people who could be your next best customers. But they’re turned off now.

Focus on your branding. What’s unique about you? Don’t sell yourself short.

Bucket your customers according to personalities. Maybe you don’t need to get as granular as diving up by ESTP or INFJ, but at least understand that people are unique beyond age group and income.

We understand why companies do this, and we want to help you. Give us a call, or write and we can help develop the right strategy to get the best customers.

In 2013, Christopher Skinner was the keynote speaker at a Google ThinkFinance event in Mountainview. Five years is a long time when you’re thinking about digital, yet the concepts here still ring true. Let’s revisit each lesson from the presentation and apply it to 2018 digital thinking.

1. The Customer Journey is Just Like Dating

Would you walk up to a stranger on the street and ask them on a trip to Paris? No. To get there, you suggest a coffee date, then a dinner date, and then the romantic getaway. You need to treat your potential customers the same way. If you show them the big discount or offer right away, you’re going to have a low response rate. No trips to Paris or the checkout.

2. Think of Your Business Like a Lawn

And the blades of grass are your profits. When you’re watering and fertilizing, you’re making the grass grow – that’s your branding. When you’re mowing – that’s your Direct Response. Your lawn needs both these efforts to grow its greenest and its best. By the same token, a healthy marketing strategy is made up of Branding and Direct Response efforts in perfect balance.

3. Stop Looking Over the Back of the Boat

This is our favorite metaphor. In 2013, we did not have our prediction technology, but we were on the way to making it. MakeBuzz recommended strategically buying media, using your data to see where they live and what they do to make predictions. Now, we look well beyond basic demographics. We look at human activities to make our predictions. We’re at the crow’s nest on our ship seeing what’s ahead.

4. Pay Attention to Real Social Circles

Offline word of mouth is still a thing! In 2013, a study found that 93% of word of mouth is offline. We expect that statistic to be unchanged since then. So how did we suggest to get people talking in 2013? Concentrate media in geographic areas.

With our predictive technology, we’d tell you to do more than that. We are more precise. Tailor your message to your best customers. Reach out to potential customers in a way that delights them so they will start conversations. We think Netflix is particularly good at this. They create shows to entertain certain personalities, which end up creating a buzz (think of Stranger Things!).

5. Your Brand Search Terms are Not Gifts from God

Back to our previous concept, you need to put effort into your branding to begin awareness. No one will search for you if they have no idea who you are! Create awareness before pushing a potential customer to buy your product (have a coffee date before a trip to Paris!).

Certain people will accept your brand, and others will not. Focus on the right groups. Google won’t help. Use tools outside of GA.

6. Profitability is Like Chicken Soup

In other words, it’s not the same from one end of the bowl to another. A variety of markets exist in one city, changing from one zip code to the next. You can now bucket your customers based on personalities.

It seems like advice from 2013 would be irrelevant, but good concepts take a while to become outdated. If you follow an overarching strategy and guidelines you can update your tactics. In 2013, we were really into bucketing customers by zip codes and media, but now we think you should bucket customers by their shared traits.

Once you understand people at a people level, you can move beyond media tactics.

Got some questions for us? Write to us and we will be happy to help!