Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need
Filed under: Decision-Making, Marketing, Product Management, Strategy
The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone.
The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need.
“If entrepreneurs want to succeed…they’d better be selling aspirin rather than vitamins. Vitamins are nice; they’re healthy. But aspirin cures your pain; it’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a must have.”
The article speaks to our tendency to become enamored with our own ideas and offerings, and to make the leap that because everyone can benefit from this (a vitamin), they will jump at the opportunity to buy. They provide a number of great examples from the publishing and technology arenas.
In my own experience, technology businesses do this all of the time, often as they race to either out-feature competitors or to blindly reflect the input of customers. Not that beating competitors or listening to customers are bad ideas, but both can lead you down blind trails if you’re not careful.
I know better than to fall victim to “The Felt Need,” yet, I’ve produced a number of vitamins during the past few years. On several occasions, I’ve invested considerable time in creating programs that I would take a bullet for as offering career-critical content. While no one disagreed with me on the importance of the programs or the value of the content, they responded to them much like people respond to their gym membership in February.
4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need:
1. Measure and monitor the success of your new offerings. Are they selling like vitamins or, are they selling like aspirins. If you’re listening to your clients properly, they will tell you loud and clear what level of pain that you are addressing.
2. Evaluate new offerings and investment ideas with the filter of “The Felt Need.” It’s not difficult to assess if your marketer, developer or product manager can substantiate true audience pain. Ask tough questions. I love people that are passionate about their ideas, however, I still advocate a “trust but verify before investing” approach.
3. Quality-check your “Voice of the Customer” processes. Many a well-intentioned firm or product manager has listened carefully to customers only to find out that the requests, while valid, were not material. Too much blind followership leads to a bad case of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
4. Cultivate the practice of social anthropology. Ensure that your people are out in the market and in customers’ businesses observing. Ask someone a question and you will get an answer, but watch them in their own environment and you will learn something about them.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Read the article and spend some time looking at your own mix of current and planned offerings. While as the article indicates, you might end up with some vitamins, you better have a good number of aspirins to address burning pain points. Make certain that your primary strategy is not “follow the competitor” or, “the customer’s need is our command.” You need good systems and great people to observe, translate and mostly uncover true pain points that merit a cure. And remember the Heath’s warning about building a better mousetrap. Most people aren’t interested in a better mousetrap. They simply want a dead mouse.
A Rave Against Miserable Customer Service, Lousy Leaders and Protectionist Policies
Filed under: Leadership, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders
One of my favorite, provocative business thinkers, Gary Hamel, says what we’ve all been thinking about in his Wall Street Journal blog post, “Too Many Industries Suffering from Detroititis.”
While the term “Detroititis” is not yet in common use, it isn’t hard to intuit the meaning. A mix of myopic thinking, short-term management approaches and a damn the consumer mentality, all jump to my mind.
Hamel appropriately skewers the U.S. airline industry for suffering from a chronic case of this newly named malady. He also chastises the U.S. government for propping up this industry with a “blatantly protectionist policy” that bars foreign ownership of U.S. air carriers.
Note from Art: this protectionist policy and the adverse implications for consumers and for society speak to the heart of my post: If Ayn Rand Could See Us Now.
The U.S. airlines are easy and deserving targets. It is nearly impossible to find any customer satisfaction, much less enjoyment flying with these broken-down flying bus companies. (Apologies to any bus companies that I’ve insulted.)
More often than not, you deal with ridiculous lines, grumpy attendants and flight personnel that visibly hate their jobs. Most of the customer service practices recently put into place are shortsighted and designed with the carrier in mind, not the customer.
In the vernacular of one of my favorite recent books, Tuned-In, the carriers truly do create remarkable customer experiences. Unfortunately, they missed the memo on making these experiences positive ones.
The contrast between the customer experience on a U.S. Air Carrier and an overseas carrier is stark. Fly Singapore Airlines or JAL and you’ll spend most of your trip in shock over how nice the experience can be. Something will feel very different and out of place. The poor treatment is gone, replaced by great service provided by people that seem to enjoy creating nice experiences for customers.
Other than the cathartic exercise of criticizing the U.S. carriers (of which I have over 1 million miles on), there are a few reminders for all of us in our businesses as we work to immunize our thinking against the deadly disease of “Detroititis.”
- Keep the government out of the business of artificially protecting under performing industries and companies. Hamel is right. If Singapore Airlines wants to compete for routes in the U.S., they should have that option.
- Evaluate what your customers truly think about their experience with your firm and DO SOMETHING to improve the experience. The airlines employ legions of marketing people to fly around the globe and evaluating customer experiences…but nothing seems to come out from this effort other than dumb policies and new fees.
- Fight for the customer like you livelihood depends upon it. It does.
- As a leader, work unceasingly to instill a sense of pride and commitment to customers in your workplace. If your business is a high-contact customer business, every person that touches a customer must strive to create a positive experience. Working a ticket counter at terminal B at O’Hare may involve dealing with thousands of people per day who are stressed and frustrated. Take away a little of their stress and frustration, treat them like humans and show them that you care! Send thousands of people home everyday with an improved experience, and maybe your business will improve. Go figure.
- No one ever wants to talk to someone that they cannot understand and that they cannot hear on the telephone. Stop subjecting us to these horrendous phone experiences. If you are in charge of this area of your customer experience, what the blank are you thinking?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The people that I don’t get are the managers and leaders responsible for managing and leading the customer service representatives in organizations that clearly have lousy customer service. Fire yourself, please.
The customer experience at Gate C14 starts at the top of the organization. The same goes for your firm. Unfortunately, we can all learn a lot about what not to do from the auto companies and air carriers in the U.S.
Now quit reading and find something that you can do to improve the experience for your customers!
The Last Yard: AT&T’s Failure to Fully Satisfy in Spite of A Competition Killing Product
I suspect from the crowd at the Crystal Lake, IL AT&T store on the day after Christmas, that I was not the only person in America that had decided to surprise someone in their family with a new Apple 3G iPhone. While I cannot be certain what it was like at the Verizon store where they do not carry the iPhone, the AT&T location was filled with people seeking to port their numbers and accounts over to this exclusive provider for the iPhone.
Before I get too far, my issue and our learning opportunities come from AT&T’s System for on-boarding new customers with the iPhone. The store team on the ground in Crystal Lake was great throughout the entire process.
My issue is more with AT&T’s seemingly incomplete and poor system (not the store’s) for helping customers ramp up on this season’s ultimate killer product.
Here’s a quick synopsis of what it took.
- I started the process of acquiring a new iPhone for my college-age son a few weeks ago. I use AT&T in my business, but the family was with the other guys. I needed to find out how I could add a phone and deal with the texting, internet and voice needs of a serial texter. I called AT&T and spoke with 2 reps who were completely incapable of confidently telling me what my options were and what the final costs would be to add a second line, switch to family talk and meet my son’s specs for usage. Time investment…approximately one hour and no satisfaction whatsoever.
- I tried the website. Same result…no luck. I defy anyone to pull off this simple transaction using their website. Also, on this prime shopping day during prime daytime hours, the site was down for quite awhile undergoing maintenance. Hmmm. I wonder who scheduled that event?
- I went to the store in Crystal Lake, IL and 45 minutes later I walked out with a new iPhone and Brett’s assurance that I could bring it back after Christmas to port my son’s Verizon number and move all of his contacts. I also had the 800 number for the AT&T porting service in case I wanted to try that on my own. Outstanding! Score one for dealing with real live people face to face.
- Christmas Day…the iPhone was a huge hit and a total surprise. My wife and I had resorted to a little bit of Christmas present cruelty by just mumbling and groaning something about contracts every time my son raised the question of whether there was an iPhone in his future. OK, it was mean, but the kid is tough, the world is not always kind, and it sure heightened his surprise!
- Christmas Day again. I wondered whether AT&T was aggressive enough to have people standing by to help their many, many new customers activate their freshly unwrapped products and start the meter running for billing purposes. No such luck. The recorded message indicated that they were closed for the day. (OK, I feel a bit Scrooge-like here, but if I have a killer product like the iPhone and my success is a function of getting people smiling and dialing or texting as quickly as possible, I might have taken a different path on the holiday.)
- December 26. I power-dialed the 800 number at AT&T, put the speakerphone on and wrote a blog post, answered e-mail and reviewed the latest draft of a presentation. After one hour and twenty minutes of being on-hold, I gave up. The next step was the store.
- We were early, and got right up to the counter. Another helpful Rep efficiently ported over my son’s 245 contacts from the Verizon phone (big score!) and then started the phone number port process. The dedicated line for store reps must have been slammed. He was on hold for 34 minutes before anyone answered. During this time, the store filled, the line grew and everyone was after the same thing. The family next to us had a shopping bag filled with iPhones needing numbers. Before long, every rep in the store was on the phone and customer service ground to a halt.
- Truth be told, once our rep was connected with someone on the AT&T side, the port was carried out smoothly and we were quickly on our way. Probably not a moment too soon, as the people in line were getting a little feisty as the reps continued to be stuck on hold waiting for help.
My Points:
Again, this is not one of those 8 hours on the tarmac with no food or water and the toilets clogged, stories that the airlines are so good at creating. And yet from this experience, I can’t help but think that AT&T doesn’t get it.
- Any opportunity to capture a competitor’s subscribers must be a huge opportunity for the phone companies. There has to be a natural motivation to create happy new customers. All of those Verizon converts are viable prospects for internet, cable and any of the other products that they come up with to slowly bleed consumers dry. The iPhone is the killer-app for converting customers, and its star power may not last forever.
- The iPhone is a resonator…(Tuned In). It is truly a remarkable device that practically sells itself. And while the device offers a remarkable experience (not necessarily for the phone portion), AT&T missed the chapter on creating remarkable customer experiences.
- If you are AT&T, what chucklehead decided that it was OK to staff the call center with a Rep level that had customers waiting for hours on the phone or almost an hour in-store to get their new products up and running? Someone somewhere focused on costs, kept the staff lean and forgot that they were in the business of creating great customer experiences. And oh yeah, I would have had people working on Christmas Day to help satisfy their overwhelming urge to use this great new product.
The Bottom-Line:
Thanks to the team in Crystal Lake for helping us out so effectively, and thanks to Apple for such a great product. As for you AT&T, I can think of other industries and companies that are disappearing because they failed to execute on the last yard. Any leader or any company that is arrogant and complacent about taking care of customers is likely not a good long-term bet. Perhaps they will figure out the “system” to satisfy customers with the next killer product that comes along once in a lifetime.
Leader, What Are You Doing to Improve Your Value Creation?
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation
How much value are you creating as a leader?
How much more value can you create?
How are you supporting the ability of your customers (employees) to create value? Where should you improve to strengthen your value creation?
What are your core processes as a leader?
How much waste do you generate through your leadership activities?
Borrowing from the principles espoused in “Lean” these are just a few of the key questions that every leader should ask himself/herself as part of their own personal development initiatives. Unfortunately, in my experience, few if any of these questions are asked or answered either by individuals or their direct leaders. This has to change.
In a world that is begging for radical reinvention of business and leadership practices, the organizations and individuals that are diligent in pursuit of the answers to these and related questions will make it through the storm.
Leadership should be one of the principal value creation components of the management system, yet poor leadership practices often result in increased complexity, added waste and blocked attempts to streamline processes and make improvements that would otherwise benefit the organization and its customers.
One of the key reasons that leaders and leadership practices often fail to create value (or to create more value) is the lack of a common operational and actionable definition for the role of a leader. Another cause is the lack of top management commitment to ensuring that leaders are accountable for ever-increasing contributions to the firm’s value creation mission. I’ll focus on the former in today’s post.
During the course of my career, I’ve developed and leveraged something that I describe as The Leader’s Charter, to help develop other leaders as well as to remind me of my True North as a leader. It reads as follows:
The Leader’s Charter:
Your primary role as a leader is to create an environment that:
•facilitates high individual and team performance against company and industry standards…
•supports innovation in processes, programs and approaches…
•encourages collaboration where necessary for objective achievement…
•promotes the development of your associates in roles that leverage their talents and interests and challenge them to new and greater accomplishments.
As I sit here and think about the Charter’s application and relevance for helping leaders in context of the questions at the top of the post and in light of the world situation, I suspect that it is time for another update. The next update must add specificity to the people development issues covered in the current version, while incorporating all of the primary “value creation” processes that a leader controls and impacts.
I don’t intend on wordsmithing the 2009 version of The Leader’s Charter here in this post, but I will take a stab at identifying a broader universe of areas that leaders must be held accountable for in their roles. I would love your inputs, additions and constructive suggestions via comments or by e-mail.
The Value Creation Processes/Activities of a Leader
- Developing others through coaching, feedback and by encouraging and supporting the pursuit of developmental (stretch) activities.
- Creating a working environment that draws out the collective knowledge and skills of team members in pursuit of solving customer problems.
- Ensuring that the standards for accountability, values, general behavior and communication are understood and adhered to by all participants.
- Clarifying and communicating a Vision that anchors organizational goals and aspirations and gives context to team and individual activities.
- Creating forums to gain ideas and insights into customer issues as part of strategy formulation. Involving everyone in capturing and translating the Voice of the Customer into strategies and actions.
- Ensuring that individuals and teams have the resources they need to carry out their tasks.
- Ensuring that teams and individuals gain access to skills development and educational opportunities.
- Eliminating fear from the workplace (Deming) and replacing it with a focus on customers and improvements.
- Determining what measures contribute to improving understanding and continuous improvement and implementing the systems to monitor and act on these measures.
- Look at the workplace as a system and support the continuous improvement of the entire system. (genesis: Deming.)
It would be easy to keep adding to this list with a series of increasingly granular tasks. My focus is on making this granular enough to be actionable and high-level enough to not be prescriptive.
Let me know your thoughts on other ways/areas that leaders must focus on to create value in their roles and for their organizations.
Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times: Rethinking Customer Segmentation
(Note from Art Petty: this is the first post at the new Management Excellence blog. If you are receiving this update via e-mail, please take the opportunity to visit the site and check out the new tools and resources. And of course, the 160 plus posts on Best Practices in Leadership, Strategy and Sales and Marketing from the former site, Art Petty on Management, are all available at the new site.)
Ian MacMillan and Larry Selden writing, “Change With Your Customers and Win Big” in the December, 2008 Harvard Business Review, suggest that firms should look for advantage during an economic downturn by rethinking how they segment their customer groups.
They offer an example of a retailer of premium priced, private-label organic products who instead of viewing their market segment through traditional lenses, might break it into the following segments;
- Health-conscious consumers who will stay pay a premium for foods that they perceive as having health benefits.
- Frequent restaurant goers looking to trim expenses that might consider a line of high-quality carry out foods as an alternative.
- Companies looking to rein in corporate catering costs that might substitute with the firm’s offerings.
Art’s Suggestions:
Many firms preoccupy on cutting costs and scaling back offerings, when they should be doubling their efforts to understand the unresolved problems of their customers. However, breaking the back of conventional thinking about either what to do in a recession or how to view your customer groups is a difficult task for many organizations. Start by putting your team to work.
Instead of losing precious time and corporate energy to the collective nervousness that paralyzes organizations during tough times, get your team out into the field and into the market where your customers and their customers are. Listen, ask questions and most of all, observe. Where are they struggling? What might help? How do they use your products? How do they use other products? What unresolved problems can you identify?
Bring your observations back and get some help in what creatives like to describe as “ideating.” We mere mortals call it brainstorming. Regardless of the label, get your entire organization thinking about and generating ideas that might help your customer address their issues. If you are looking for a process, pick up a copy of Tuned In and start with the formula that the authors suggest for creating “resonators,” offerings that solve unresolved problems so perfectly that they practically sell themselves.
The Bottom-Line For Now:
Rethinking your customer segmentation model is a potentially powerful approach for differentiating versus key competitors and for finding new needs that you can fulfill with your core capabilities. Experiment with the various ideas and strengthen your team’s execution skills in the process. In additional to the potential tremendous upside from solving customer problems, the energy and excitement generated during this process will convert the organization’s “sense of fear” into a “sense of urgency.”
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