Tag Archives: customers

Innovation Is Creative Thinking With Purpose

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Innovation is creativity with a purpose. It is the creation and use of knowledge with intent. It is not only creating new ideas but creating with a specific intention and with plans to take those ideas and make something that will find purpose the world. Innovation is ideas in action, not the ideas themselves. Innovation is also a word that gets thrown about, often without really considering the reality that it is, in fact, damn hard work. What makes it hard work isn’t the generation of new ideas, but the fact that turning complexities into simple, clear realities can be excruciatingly difficult, but that is precisely what needs to be done to make innovation useful. Simplicity and clarity are tough to do.

Innovation, whether we’re talking about product design or a marketing plan, should be simple, understandable, and open for a wide range of people. Innovation is becoming more of an open process, or it should be. The days of the closed-door R&D session is gone as we incorporate more engagement of users, customers, stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees in the process. Most companies are very good at launching, promoting and selling their products and services, but they often struggle with the front end of the innovation process, those stages dealing with turning research and brainstorming insights into new ideas.  The creating, analyzing, and developing side of things is often murky or done in a haphazard way. Articulating a simple system with clearly defined activities is central to bringing innovation to life and involving a wide variety of stakeholders and collaborators who can understand and engage in making the beginning stage of the innovation process less confused. It is as much art as it is science.

Easier said than done – you need a starting point. The simplest and most obvious element in this is to begin with a system of innovation best practices. You would typically generate multiple ideas and then synthesize relevant multiple ideas logically together in the form of a well-developed concept. This is the no-holds-barred side of the idea generation process and allows for people to begin exploring multiple trajectories. The key is to make sure the ideas don’t remain in a vacuum, but are open to everyone. With that in mind, it is extremely important to ensure that ideas are captured and stored in one place, whether electronically or on a wall (literally) dedicated to the task. Truly breakthrough innovations are not solitary work, they are part of a shared experience where ideas build on each other. They are the result of collaboration. This means that the work involves others to help you generate ideas, develop concepts, and communicate the concepts in meaningful and memorable ways. The more open the process, the more likely it is to get buy-in as people engage directly in the innovation process.

Next, make sure people have access to all the information available to them. Research around a problem or a people is often lost once the report is handed over and the presentation of findings complete. Central to the success of an innovation project is to make sure themes and experiences are captured and easily available to the people tasked with generating ideas. So make it visible, make it simple and make sure people are returning to the research (and researchers) again and again. This is about more than posting personas on boards around a room. It involves thinking about and articulating cultural practices in such a way that they are visible, clear and upfront. As people think and create they should constantly be reminded of the people and contexts for which they are creating.

Once the stage is set, the problem and hopeful outcomes need to be made clear. This is fairly obvious, but it’s easy to drift away from the goals as ideas emerge and people have time to simply forget why we’re innovating (or attempting to innovate ate any rate). So make them real, crystallize the problems and challenges. Make them visible at every step of the process.  In addition to posting the goals, be sure to have space to pose questions that are grounded in the problems or opportunities for innovation. Categorize the types of questions and ask that people visit them every step of the way to ensure the process stays on track and is grounded in the goals of the project. Categories of question types to consider might include:

  • How Will This Impact the Community: How can we help people, build communities and reflect the cultures and practices for which we are designing?
  • What is the Opportunity: How can we create something that provides a better life for the intended users?
  • Is It New or are We Simply Tweaking Something: How can the thing we’re creating change the current situation or are we simply creating a variation on an established theme?
  • How Will It Be Interpreted: What challenges do we face in getting people to accept the concepts and what cultural or psychological barriers do we need to overcome?

These are just a few examples, but they represent some of the ideas that might emerge when thinking of new designs, models and messaging strategies. They will, of course, vary depending on the goals of the organization. If your goal is to build a new delivery system for medications or if it is to do something as broad as change the way people eat, then the questions will change. The point is to have a space that opens up the dialog, not just a space to throw out ideas.

The point to all this is that in order to innovate, you need to clarify a simple system that all the various contributors can use. Establish a system and stick to it. Identify and write down the areas you would like to innovate in, get all the parties who will contribute involved and make sure they engage in an open environment. Create questions to ask and areas of exploration. Do that and you will move from a complex mess to something that can be acted upon.

From Personas to Stories: Creating Better Tools for Design and Marketing

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Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct meaning of their lives are contextually mitigated, highly variable and culturally specific. on the central premise of ethnography is that it assumes that we must first discover what people actually do and why they do it before we can assign to their actions and behaviors to design changes or innovation. The ultimate goal is to uncover pertinent insights about a population’s experience and translate their actions, goals, worldview and perspectives as they directly relate to a brand, object or activity, and the role that these pieces play with regards to interactions with their environment. Often, the information results in a large-scale, broad document, but it also often results in the development of personas.

The idea is that personas bring customer research to life and make it actionable, ensuring the right decisions are made by a design or marketing team based on the right information. The approach to persona development typically draws from both quantitative and qualitative tools and methodologies, but because of the very personal nature of ethnography, the methodology often leads the charge. The use of ethnographic research helps the creation of a number of archetype (fictions, in the most positive sense) that can be used to develop products that deliver positive user experiences. They personalize the information and allow designers and marketers to think about creating around specific individuals.

But there are problems with personas. Don’t get me wrong, I believe personas can be useful and help design teams. But I also believe they can reduce the human condition to a series of attributes and lose the spirit of what personas are designed to do. First, in terms of scientific logic, because personas are fictional, they have no clear relationship to real customers and therefore cannot be considered scientific. So much for the science.

For practical implementation, personas often distance a team from engagement with real users and their needs by reducing them to a series of parts. The personas, then, do the opposite of what they are intended to, forcing design teams down a path that gives the illusion of user-centricity while actually reflecting the interpretations or the individual designers. Creating hypothetical users with real names, stories and personalities may seem unserious and whimsical to some teams within an organization and be, consequently, dismissed as so much fluff. But by far, the biggest problem, at least to my way of seeing things, is that while we want to use personas to humanize potential customers and users, we in fact reduce them to objects and a laundry list of actions, personality quirks and minimalist descriptions.

I’m not advocating the dismissal of personas, but I am suggesting that perhaps there are alternatives. One place to start is to admit we are writing fiction when we construct these tools and expand upon that notion. We should be adding to the mix humanistic narratives. Customer novellas, so to speak. It requires more time and effort, both on the part of the person/people creating them as well as those using them, but it also gives greater depth and insight into the needs, beliefs and practices of the people for whom we design and to whom we market. Rather than relying exclusively on a dry report or a poster with a list of attributes.  In this model, the idea is to create a short story in which actors (the eventual personas) engage with each other, a wider range of people, and a range of contexts. Doing so allows us to see interactions and situations that lead to greater insights. It allows us to look at symbolic and functional relationships and tease out elements that get at the heart of the fictional characters we create.

Why is that important? Because it does precisely what personas are meant to do but typically fail at – provide depth and characterization, establish a sense of personal connection between designers and users and provide breakthrough insight and inspiration. Anyone who has read history vs. historical novels is familiar with the idea. It is easy to reduce Julius Caesar to a series of exploits and personality traits, but in doing so we lose the feel for who the man was. A historical novel, in contrast, adds flavor by injecting conversation, feelings, motivations and interactions. We walk away with a feeling for who he was and what affect he had on others, good and bad.

Imagine developing a persona for Frodo from The Lord of the Rings. We could say the following and attribute it to all Hobbits: Frodo is enamored by adventure but frightened by it. He loves mushrooms, has no wife, is extremely loyal to his friends and will work at any task he is given until it is done, regardless of the difficulty or potential for personal harm. He disdains shoes and has a love of waist coats.

There’s nothing wrong with this description, but for anyone who had read the trilogy or even seen the movies, the shortcomings are obvious. We miss the bulk of Frodo’s personality. In exploring the novel, we come to develop a rich understanding of Frodo, a deep understanding of his motivations and personality and his relationship with other members of the party, including the Ring.

For the literalists out there, I am not suggesting we create anything as vast as a novel, particularly one as expansive as The Lord of the Rings, but I am suggesting that we move beyond attributes and create stories that more fully develop the people behind the personas. Several pages of engaging writing is sufficient. Not only does it provide deeper insights, but it engages the reader more fully, inspiring them to go beyond the “data” and explore a wider array of design, brand and marketing options. Again, it isn’t meant to replace personas (or the research report), but to add to it. It requires more effort and time on the part of the person creating it as well as the person consuming it, something people are often disinclined to do, but the end result is better design, greater innovation and a more complete vision of what could be.

Co-Creation and Managing What Matters

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Co-creation has become a central theme for brands and innovators over the last decade, and rightfully so. The idea of collaboration in a postmodern world where information and opinions reach millions in the blink of an eye is a necessity. But what do we mean when we talk about co-creation and is it the panacea it’s made out to be?

Co-creation views products, brands and markets as forums for companies and customers to share, combine and renew each other’s resources and capabilities.  This creates value through new forms of interaction, service and learning mechanisms. In other words, it ideally establishes a dialog between all actors involved in the company’s offerings.  Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organization, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Value is co-created with customers if and when a customer is able to personalize his or her experience using a firm’s brand promise and product/service proposition to a level that is best suited to get his or her tasks done or need fulfilled. This, in turn, allows the company to derive greater value from its product-service investment in the form of new knowledge, higher profitability and/or increased brand loyalty.  The interaction established through co-creation produces a sort of community where the company and the user/buyer engage in an ongoing, continuously evolving relationship, defined by and defining a shared set of actions and beliefs.

A key element in all of this is the notion of personalization on the part of the customer.  But what does personalization mean? Personalization is about the customer becoming a co-creator of the content of their experiences.  This doesn’t mean providing products and content that can then be tweaked to meet their needs, because that is still largely a passive process – the company makes it, the consumer buys it and then reconstructs it in something of a vacuum. There is no feedback loop.  In a true co-creation model, customers and actors inside the company are taking active roles in developing and sharing new ideas. Competencies of the consumer and stakeholders within the company come to interact and harness a range of ideas, functional and symbolic.

This is done along four axes: engage in dialogue with customers, mobilize communities, manage customer diversity and co-create experiences with customers. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage customers for a shared creative experience, going beyond insights and creating a constant interaction that produces brand experiences and better products and services. The increase in the number of collaborators and the numerous interactions among them, across each stage of development, leads to products and services that better meet customer needs.  We see a greater diversity of individuals, functions across organizations and stakeholders across the product/service/brand ecosystem getting involved.

While I am a proponent of co-creation, there are problems with a co-creative model. A customer who believes he or she has the expertise and chooses to co-produce may be more likely to make self-attributions for success and failure than a customer who lacks the expertise. A customer who lacks the expertise but feels forced to co-produce may make more negative attributions about co-production. The dialog can backfire.

The second pitfall is that co-creation assumes customers can readily articulate what they want and need. Customers take on roles, which means what they tell the stakeholders inside the organization may not reflect anything more than a whim. Think of cars with 17 cup holders and fins a mile high. What we can articulate is often a manifestation of something else, something we can’t articulate well, which may lead to creating the absurd. Rather than taking suggestions at face value, ideas need to be analyzed through the lens of detachment and we need to tease out meaning and innovation from the unsaid as well as the said.

Finally, co-creation often assumes a fixed identity for the customer, meaning that the person with whom we’re working and the person for whom we’re building changes according to context. If the co-creating customer is in the role of “mom” in one instance, she may be in the role of “artist” later in the day. The dramaturgical shift in identity will shape what he or she says and does as it relates to a brand, product or service at any given point in time. So even though the idea is well developed and well thought out in the co-creation process, whether that be an ideation session or an online forum, it may have little relevance once that stage is abandoned and the customer moves on with the rest of his or her day.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them, companies get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. But it is not without risk. As co-creation becomes a mainstay at companies, we will need to figure out how to keep a diverse set of participants engaged, how to share the risks and value of innovation, how to manage the complexity of the system without laying out too many constraints. We will need to learn how to tease out what is actually needed and what are simply flights of fancy. We will need to learn to balance the said and the unsaid. But in the end, the payoffs can and will be tremendous.

Why Training Matters for Good Ethnography

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Ethnography is a powerful tool, but it’s being so watered down as to become nearly meaningless in many cases. What ethnographers do, or should do, is uncover meaning and complexity. There is, frankly, a lot of crap being produced by so-called ethnographers. Being able to conduct a good interview does not make a person an ethnographer anymore than being able to balance a checkbook makes someone a mathematician. It comes down to being able to talk about depth of knowledge and make connections that others overlook.  Not everyone is a painter and we accept that. Not everyone is an ethnographer. While it may come across as arrogant, that is not the intention. The point is to say that what we learn from training and experience has value and while the goal in the current economic climate is to be good, fast and cheap (something that can, in fact, be attained), it is ultimately none of these things if the end work is not grounded in solid methodology or training. This isn’t to say one needs a PhD in anthropology from the Harvard or the University of Chicago, but it is to say that simply calling yourself an ethnographer doesn’t make it so.

And to be fair, there are times that it is possible to be, or at least appear, too academic. It is a criticism well deserved. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the output and thinking depth of academics, but in a business context it’s difficult make the transition. They are not trained to think in business terms — they simply don’t speak the native tongue. Some are tossing that perspective out the window as much out of necessity as anything else. Some anthropologists, both in and out of academia, I think, are afraid of losing their “anthropologist” identity. That can be a tremendously threatening thing. Anthropologists started as rogue methodologists in many ways, developing theories and barrowing methods in order to get to a deeper truth. They no doubt need to return to that in all areas of anthropology, but especially on the applied side. People like Boas were looking for understanding the human condition in the broadest sense. By 1960 it was about defining the discipline.

But returning to the original point, a solid academic grounding in behavioral and cultural theory is imperative to doing the job well, whether it’s in helping create a marketing plan or designing a new product. Simply taking into account what people tell you in an interview is misleading and often dangerous. For example, if participants tell you that they make a point of eating dinner every night as a family, it would be easy to take that information and build a marketing plan or product around that statement. The catch is it doesn’t address the unsaid. How much clutter is on the dining room table? What discarded boxes are in the garbage? What is the weekly schedule of activities? Are the kids there when the fieldwork takes place at 6:00 p.m.?

At a deeper level, the underpinnings of meaning are lost. What are the various meanings of “family” in a given context. How is dinner time used to establish or co-create meaning? What is the symbolic role of food? How does ritual factor into purchase and preparation choices? How does that carry over in the store?  These are the host of observational data points that are frequently overlooked by researchers who lack a theoretical grounding. Now imagine what it means to lose that depth of understanding when designing something as complex and expensive as a new type of car. If you get it wrong, you may well waste millions going down a rabbit hole. Regardless of the product, service or message you are designing it makes a great deal of sense to have a research team that can get at these issues and translate them into meaningful insights. Business anthropology represents the synthesis of academic anthropology with the professional practice of marketing and design. It seeks to understand what it means to be human, the diversity of human practices and values, and then turn these practices and values into tangible experiences. Getting it right means getting the right people.

Adding Value to Social Media Monitoring: More Than A Word Search Game

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It is difficult to get an accurate reading on how commonly a word is used in a given society. In fact, the task of measuring word frequency fully objectively is inherently impossible. The results will always be affected by the size of the corpus and the choice of the texts entered in it. On a global scale, where words take on subtle new meanings as they are appropriated into the semiotic structure of the actor and thereby changed, the problem becomes even more obvious.  Frequency means nothing without cultural context.

This is not to say that frequency isn’t important. It is important and revealing. Frequencies are only broadly indicative of cultural salience and they can only be used as one among many sources of information about a society’s cultural preoccupations. But measurements only tell part of the story. And when they are decontextualized or proscribed meanings based on the person developing the algorithm that assigns sentiment. They give a potentially false understanding. To be correctly interpreted, figures have to be considered in the context of an in-depth analysis of meanings.

If four thousand people call a product “shitty,” it is fair to say that four thousand people reacted negatively to it. But that measurement can’t tell us about the culture of those people – are they engineers addressing it from a technological angle? Are they Venezuelan students reacting to a larger political issue? We assume that a word can be easily categorized along a linear trajectory – negative/positive, etc. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Words can be studied as focal points around which cultural domains are organized. By exploring these focal points in depth, we may be able to show the general organization principles which lend structure and coherence to a cultural domain as a whole, and which often have an explanatory power extending across multiple domains.

The underlying principle lacking in current social media monitoring processes is allolexy. The term allolexy refers to the fact that the same element of meaning may be expressed in a language in two or more different ways. Just as one word can be associated with multiple meanings, one meaning can often have two or more different lexical exponents. For example, in English, I and me are allolexes of the same primitive concept (In Latin, Ego).  Often allolexes of a semantic primitive are in complimentary distribution. So in English, a combination of the semantic primitives someone and all is realized as everyone or everybody. In these particular contexts –one and –body can be seen as allolexes of someone; and –thing can be seen as an allolex of something. This notion of allolexy plays a particularly important role in social media monitoring because it allows us to build inflectional categories. For example, the forms  am doing, did, and will do used without temporal adjuncts convey different meanings, but when combined with the temporal adjuncts now, before now, and after now, as in the sentences below, they are in complementary distribution and can be seen as allolexes of the same primitive DO:

  1. I am doing it now.
  2. I did it before now.
  3. I will do it after now.

When we apply an approach derived from an allolexical perspective, we can start to determine where sentences or words “match,” semantically, across languages, even though inflectional categories can differ considerably from language to language. In other words, if a word is taken out the process of discourse, it loses meaning and is therefore subject to interpretation that lacks a way of accounting for either semantic variance or semantic stability – it is nothing short of a guess.

In a sense it is true that words have no “fixed” meanings because meanings of words change. But if they were always fluid and without any “true” content, they could not change either. Words do have identifiable, “true” meanings, the precise outlines of which can be established on an empirical basis by studying their range of use and articulating the contexts that subtly repurpose them. The key point is that social media monitoring today does not account for semantic deviation and language as fundamentally tied to speech and discourse. For companies that take the time and effort to do that, the financial rewards are tremendous.

Loyalty, Consumption and Religious Experience

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Loyalty is the focal point of many, if not most, brands. Understandably, getting repeat customers who will also serve as advocates is a smart move in a world where, due to the ease of online transactions, volume simply isn’t enough. But is loyalty enough or should we strive for something more? Should we strive for developing a shopping experience or brand that is largely impervious to economic conditions and the small mistakes and hiccups that all brands have to deal with during their lifetimes, no matter how good they may be at avoiding missteps? Of course. The question is how. The answer lies not just in how we execute the experience, but in how we conceive of the shopping experience. Shopping is a practice that has ritual structure and involves the creation of value and relationships. Loyalty stems from the development of these relationships but loyalty, though a strong influence on the power of a brand, has limitations and is subject to cultural shifts, a weak economy, etc. The goal is to move shoppers and consumers to the level of the truly devoted. In other words, we need to think of shopping in the context of sacred devotion.

Devotion is an ardent, often selfless dedication to a person or belief, but it can be extended to a brand and retail setting. Loyalty, in this sense, goes from feelings of strong but limited dedication to a state that borders on the divine. Like religious experience, it might even begin to manifest elements of cosmology. From my point of view, this is a far more powerful position for a brand to be in, but it requires more work. And to those who would question whether or not it’s worth the effort I would point to the growth of Apple stock in the last five years and the near fanatical nature of its devotees.

Devotion in the religious sense means paying homage and this carries over to brands and retail in that the devotee-shopper ritualizes the experience and treats the brand and retail space with a higher degree of engagement and devotion. In this case the nature of devotion is consumerism and the forging of identity through shopping. There is a public expression of respect to someone or something to whom or to which one feels indebted, as through an honor, tribute or reference. In the case of a brand, the devotee makes “pilgrimages” to its retail outlets and uses both logo and products as badges to signal inclusion for fellow believers, to recruit new believers and to keep non-believers away. After all, the goal is not in bring the half-hearted into the fold, but to draw in those who will embrace brand with the same degree of devotion and come to see the retail space as a manifestation of identity. When a consumer/shopper transitions from loyalty to devotion justifications of function and costs are set aside because they lose meaning to the devoted. All that really matters is the object of the devotion and the losing of one’s sense of self in the shared experience.

But it is not as if the devotee doesn’t get something in return. The devotee gets something back – a sense of fulfillment, a sense of greater meaning, a sense of belonging to a “special” group of people, a sense of ownership in the belief system. This leads to a sense of love that goes beyond romanticism and takes on an element of duty and personal involvement – and devotion. Rational interest becomes an expression of love which is not just an externally-focused love, but one that is co-authored. It is not the love of eros (passionate love, or the love of sensual desire) but the love of agape, or the notion that love is based on adulation, which being transcendent is not based on appraisal but rather the totalizing of otherness. It is not love subject to reason or explanation and is therefore unqualified. The aim of this sort of love is the loss of self through the merging with the beloved other. It is a creative act.

Devotional space leads to long-term repeat behavior on the part of the shopper. Even if they don’t make a purchase every time, they come to see the retail environment as a place of worship and the brand as a focal point in their own sense of identity. This leads to two centrally important points. First, when they do make a purchase cost is of minimal issue, though they may say otherwise. New product releases will garner immediate attention and devotees will wait an almost unimaginable amount of time to buy the product in the retail space. It is not enough to buy it online or at another venue – communion with the retail space is a rite. Second, devotees will bring others with them or advocate wherever they can, going from advocates to apostles.

So how does a brand achieve this level of devotion? There are several key points that lead to transforming the retail space to devotional space, all of which work together. It is an all-or-nothing proposition, but the payoff is worth the effort.

1. The Products

While it may seem obvious, retailers often forget about the power their products have on deep, social and cultural levels. The products must be of good quality, but they needn’t be the pinnacle of the industry. Retailers tend to spend a great deal of time talking about features and not enough time talking to shoppers and consumers about what the products do for them in terms of creating an image, a feeling, or a sense of well-being. It can be extremely difficult for us to remember that our products may be the best in the world, but if we do not articulate how they fit into the daily lives of our consumers they lose their relevance.

2. The Environment

The retail space is an extension of the brand, not simply a place to display merchandise. This means that in addition to the consideration put into the initial design of the space, a retailer must think about the space as a destination, a place of pilgrimage. Human perceptions of space, although derived from sensory tools that all humans share, are shaped and patterned by culture. Differing cultural frameworks for defining and organizing space are internalized by all people at an unconscious, usually shared level, and can lead to serious failures of communication. At the macro-level, these sensibilities shape cultural expectations about how every environment we interact with should be properly organized. This also means that settings can and do take on a “personality” depending on how they relate to cultural archetypes we posses about a given spatial frame. The surrounding stores and neighborhood need to be a reflection of or antithetical to your brand, the goal being to produce strong emotional responses. Products need to be displayed in such a way as to make them visually reverential (e.g. on a pedestal and under directed lighting). Touch needs to be elevated to tactile play and experimentation. Events must be incorporated into the retail space, allowing people to ritualize their visits and feel as if they are part of an ongoing, transformational experience. It isn’t enough to make the store look inviting and to reflect the brand standards of the company. The retail space needs to become a destination and take on a sense of “place.”

3. The Re-creation of Self

From an anthropological perspective, the individual is less of a coherent whole and more of a collection of various cultural identifiers. Culture, as a social practice, is not something that individuals possess. It is a process in which individuals participate. As such, culture is an important factor in shaping identity. In a retail setting this means that identity is developed as part of a shared system and that the retail space becomes a focal point around which people gather to find unity and shared understanding. As with religious communities, devotional space produces a heightened sense of belonging and a sense of being part of something “bigger” than the individual. Staff must appear to be part of the elect and use language and non-verbal communication to signal that the shopper has left the mundane world and has joined a special group, embodied in the retail setting. Architecturally, the gateway into the store must signal a transitional zone. Every element  of the entry process must let the shopper know that he or she is now part of something pure and experiential.

Increasingly, retailers are getting the point that loyalty stems from a more intricate retail experience. But it isn’t enough to cultivate simple loyalty. Understanding the retail experience as devotional space means thinking about the retail experience and the brand in general in a more holistic sense and thinking about how it can be used to cultivate a sense of shared identity among consumers. Again, shopping is a practice that has ritual structure and involves the creation of value and relationships. It is, or should be, a practice that goes beyond transaction to a sense of transcendence. Make your retail space a point of sacred devotion and you become inseparable from the lives of your consumers.

It’s Not Just the Products

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Shopping habits can be observed in multiple ways: how people react during social interaction, how they present and see themselves, and how they define situations with others. In other words, people need emotional connections to what you sell and how you sell it as much as they need to know about the products in your store. They need to feel a sense of increased social and psychic capital when they enter your store and when they leave it. Apple, after all, sells computers just like everyone else, but they have successfully bridged the gap between customer emotion and product knowledge. Steve Jobs challenged Apple with “changing the world” rather than simply fulfilling a function. It’s hard to deny that Apple has changed the world of how people see computers, tablets and MP3 players, and Apple’s growing market share is a testament to the strategy.

In terms of marketing materials and communication with your customers, creating an emotional connection does not mean using clichés and gimmicky messaging. It means conveying the things your products enable. By the time many customers actually consider locating a retailer, they have spent significant time researching specs, consumer reviews and feature lists. Therefore, it’s important to interact with your customers and ask key questions accordingly – giving them the information they need based on what they already know about the product. Marketing materials that convey how a product or service will fit into their daily lives in a realistic way are far more likely to capture their attention than price listings and technical information.

Keep in mind when creating ads and promotional materials:

  • Incorporate references to how non-tech-savvy people might actually use the phone.
  • Explain benefits in a realistic way.
  • In addition to listing performance and feature information, list at least one direct connection between these things and an activity a consumer might engage in.

Segmentation Myths and Ethnography

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The simple purpose of market segmentation is to discover meaningful differences among a target audience.  It categorizes and simplifies, giving designers, business strategists, retailers, manufacturers, etc. something they can wrap their heads around when doing their jobs.  Segmentation is a character study in statistical form.

Unfortunately, many efforts at segmenting markets result in vague categories arbitrarily cut up into artificial statistical markers. You could spend a lifetime creating market segmentation studies, and there are those who do.  But you will never hear a female consumer describe herself as “sassy, professional empty-nester.” No thirty-something male will refer to himself by the elements that make him a “tech-savvy professional.” And that self-definition is important because it points to the inherrant complexity of who we are – that unquantifiable rabble that is humanity. And yet that’s how many seemingly sophisticated segmentations pan out. The net result is marketers and business development teams coming to think of their consumers and users as  numerically defined caricatures. They lack a cultural or an emotion understanding of who this person is.

Segmentation has devolved into one of marketing’s greatest distractions. Like the focus group, it is often a parody. In fact, the obsession with segmentation causes many companies to spend excessive time and money trying to find new customers when they can’t even adequately profile their best customers.

Instead of focusing on product attributes and on market size data, companies must learn what jobs customers want to perform and use this as their marketing guidepost.  And when I say ”jobs” I mean more than simple tasks.  I mean the roles they assume, the games they play and how different parts of their lives fit together as a whole.

Endless attitudinal statements, with scales for “agree” and “disagree” are constructed and by the very nature of the question structure have severe limits. Most conventional research consists of predetermined questions and parameters that force research subjects into narrow channels of response. And these are often as much a bias of the researcher (or the boss) as a reflection of the customer’s worldview. The very nature of posing a direct question immediately primes the respondent to seek the “right” answer. Because of this structure, marketers feel compelled to portion the market in some way or another. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be called segments. So, at the outset, market researchers are determined to find differences, and they do, even if they have to invent them.

In contrast, ethnographic research routinely reveals customers are more alike than different at the source of their behavior.  And where the differences lie, they are far more profound and surprising than the answers segmentation will reveal.  It uncovers how the entire human experience translates into the act of being a customer for a particular brand, product, or service.  It moves beyond attributes. It provides a clear view of cultural and behavioral categories based on the social, cultural and psychological needs and barriers driving customer feelings and thoughts.  And because it looks through the lens of a holistic system structure,  it yields a more realistic understanding of the customer than traditional methods. It produces insights and understandings that can be more predictive of the possibilities of the future than demographic, attitudinal or psychographic data.