Much the way The Ultimate Warrior fought his way to the top through his courage & determination, I am calling on all marketers to reach into their "inner Warriors" and fight for the single most important long-term success factor of any company, your customers. It's up to you to ensure that your customer remains king within your organization. To pull a couple of quotes from the modern-day Plato of business, the late Peter Drucker, everything begins & ends with the customer: Battling product-centric thinking While I find such topics fascinating, this post in not about exploring what cognitive science can tell us about business thinking. It's about making one thing clear to all marketers, and that is that within your organization you are the ultimate champion of the customer. And without your strong voice, your organization's long-term future may be put in jeopardy. It's a heck of a responsibility to have, which makes it all the more rewarding. What I have attempted to do in previous posts is to introduce concepts to help us become more customer-centric in our thinking, and in our approach to business. Whether it be through the help of tools such as the purchase journal, talking to your mother, or the cultivating of your inner consumer voice, developing fluency in customer-centric thought is key to great marketing as well as successful business outcomes.
Whenever I need a little marketing pick-me-up, I turn to this guy, The Ultimate Warrior (the nice-looking gentleman pictured to the right). A beacon of strength, courage & determination, Ultimate fought his way to the top of the World Wrestling Federation during my youth, despite the greater popularity of Hulk Hogan. Sure, much of his energy was likely derived from illicit muscle-enhancers pumping through his body, but that's beside the point."The purpose of a business is to create a customer"
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself"
While the business world purports to live in the age of customer-centricity, I am convinced that we still live in an era of product-centered thought. There are numerous factors that underlie this, from organizational structure to the science of human cognition & our inability to hold onto abstract concepts such as needs (vs. far more concrete concepts like products or services).
In closing, a few wisdoms for us to keep in mind
As always, please post your comments, questions or thoughts, or feel free to send me an email. Happy marketing, fellow Warriors.
Marketing warriors, fight for thy customer!
Innoviation via other worlds: a tool for generating powerful ideas for your business
I'm not quite referring to Mars or Pluto when I say "other worlds". Although, there is no doubt 
that even a few seconds of stargazing can inspire & fuel your innovation efforts.
By "other worlds" I'm talking a little closer to home than Mars or Pluto. What I am referring to is a great framework for innovation in which we explore other worlds (i.e., people, places or things) that provide the samehigher-order benefits as those provided by our product or service.
The Analogous Worlds Framework consists of three steps:
- Identifying the higher-order benefit(s) provided by your product/service (e.g., save money, save time, guidance, peace of mind, confidence, social connectedness, pleasure, etc.)
- Making a list of those people, places or things that provide the same higher-order benefit (s)
- Asking how these "other worlds" that you identified in step 2 go about providing the higher-order benefit. Is there anything about what they do or how they do it which you could incorporate into your product, or use in aspects of your marketing strategy*?
The Analogous Worlds Framework: a brief example - BMW
Let's take "the ultimate driving machine" for a test drive through the framework and see what we can come up with...
Step 1: Identify the high-order benefits provided by a BMW:
- Saves time. Transportation inventions such as the automobile have cut down the time it takes to get from point A to point B in dramatic fashion (assuming you don't line in LA).
- Provides feeling of importance; status. This should come as no surprise from the Bimmer.
- Provides access; empowerment. BMWs, and cars in general are incredibly empowering tools, enabling people to explore places that otherwise would have been unreachable by foot, horse, bike or train.
Step 2: Make a list of those people, places or things that provide the same higher-order benefit(s):
Here are a few of many thoughts that come to mind (note that I have bolded those items in the BMW framework above which led to the ideas below):
- The BMW butler. Leverage the butler concept and design an on board, voice-activated, computerized "butler" that can do various tasks for you while you drive - e.g., manage the radio settings, climate control, seat positioning, etc.
- The Car Doorman. Leverage the concept of a doorman, and develop a feature that allows drivers to push a button and have the car door open for them, saving them the time & effort of having to open the doors for themselves - an activity which is especially difficult when their hands are full (e.g., when carrying bags of groceries, carrying children).
- In-car Google. Leverage Google's approach to providing access (via pertinent information now!), and develop a voice-activated capability that allows drivers to access information about local traffic, road conditions, local commerce, the "health" of the car, etc.
- Your driving anthem. Similar to the Nike+ / iPod "Power Song" feature that allows runners to push a button and listen to their favorite high-adrenaline song, develop a button under the steering wheel which plays your favorite "cruising song" when pushed. This concept leverages the method via which Tony Robbins provides "empowerment".
Hopefully the BMW example will give you a taste of the potential power of The Analogous Worlds Framework. It's a framework that effectively "shakes things up" and gets you to think in terms of the higher-order benefit(s) provided by your product, getting you out of the feature-focused, product-centric paralysis that consumes all of us from time to time.
Please feel free to download the framework, pass it along to your friends & colleagues - and more important than anything, use it. Like many tools, the more you use it, the more it will work for you, and help you generate high-impact, game-changing opportunities.
As always, feel free to contact me with any of your thoughts, comments, or questions.
Great books on innovation & creativity
Marketing & the 5 W's: a framework for marketing innovation
In my prior post I introduced the wonders of the 5 W's, and how you could benefit from utilizing this foundation of journalism in your efforts to innovate & develop potent marketing strategies. In this post I provide a peak into one of several dozen 5W's frameworks you can use to turbo-charge your marketing efforts.
5 W's Consumer Journey Framework
This framework
(click to download as PDF)
2. Take each customer journey dimension (e.g., demand, search, purchase, etc.) through each of the 5W's, one at a time. Note that some of the Ws will be less relevant to some of the journey dimensions. Despite this, always push yourself to generate insights - 9 times out 10 they exist but just require a little extra brain juice. Within each journey/W box, write as many ideas & thoughts that come to mind.
3. Redo the exercise a few days later and see what additional thoughts you are able to generate. Allowing a little incubation time for your thoughts rarely fails to deliver some powerful new ideas.
4. Now, with your fully blown-out matrix in-front of you, ask yourself some of the following questions:
- What new channels might I want to explore for increasing product awareness, improving the product search, selling, & servicing ?
- What new consumer needs are likely generated at various points along the consumer journey and how might I benefit from them?
- What complementary products or services might I want to offer or bundle with my product at various stages along the customer journey or to specific customer segments?
- What new partnerships might we want to explore to provide greater total value to our customers at various points along the customer journey?
- What marcom approaches might we want to test or use with certain customer segments, within certain contexts, or at different stages along the consumer journey?
- What new products or features might I want to offer to meet the needs of certain customer segments within certain contexts and during specific stages of the customer journey?
- What ways can I improve & influence the search & decision-making process for customers / specific customer segments?
- What ways can I can improve the {purchase & payment, delivery & installation, usage & maintenance, disposal, repurchase & renewal} experience for customers / specific customer segments?
So I'd like to ask each of you to try the tool out on a product or service that you currently sell or manage. After you have run through the tool and the battery of follow-up questions for improving your business, let me know what insights or ideas you were able to generate - I would love to hear about them, and have you share them with the rest of our marketing community.
And of course, please let me know if you have any questions along the way - I am more than happy to answer them.
Have fun, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the innovative ideas & insights you come up with!
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Related posts
- Innovation using analogous people, places & things (powerful tool)
Marketing & the 5 W's: why every marketer should take a journalism class
Journalism 101. Who, what, when, where, why, how?... these key dimensions that are the 
The 5 W's as they have been dubbed, can serve as a powerful tool for gaining deep insight into the contextual nature surrounding the need for and use of your product. I like to think of the 5W's as the marketing equivalent of an industrial-grade power shovel, allowing you to "dig deep" so you can get to those precious consumer gems that lay beneath your feet.
Context is king
Powering the 5W's is the essential notion that everything that we do is embedded in a context, and the better you, the marketer, understand the different contexts in which the need for/use of your product occurs, the better equipped you will be to develop marketing strategies or innovations that truly pop!
How do I use the 5 W's?
The simplest way to begin using the 5W's is to start with the most basic question and loop it through each W:
- {When/Where/Why/How/For whom} might the need for my product arise?
As you begin to use the 5W's, one thing that will become clear to you is that one or two of the Ws will often be more relevant to your product than others. You'll also notice that the Ws will frequently interact with each other in meaningful ways, and that you'll often want to drill down on a given insight using "follow-up" Ws. Note these interactions and drill-downs and allow them to generate further insight into the contextual nature of demand for your product. Often the deepest insights lay in these pockets.
Gatorade: a brief example of the 5 W's in action
Let's take Gatorade, that cold, refreshing beverage that most of us have purchased at some point in our lives. Reaching into our magic hat of W's, we come up with "Where?", leading us to ask, "Where might the need for Gatorade arise?"
Given that Gatorade is 'the ultimate thirst quencher', I begin to think of places where the need for thirst-quenching is likely to arise. A few examples that come to mind include basketball courts, hot climates (e.g., Phoenix, The Mojave Desert), marathons, and the Dead Sea.
Let's reach into the hat again... this time I pull out "When?", leading us to ask, "When might the need for Gatorade (thirst-quenching) arise?" Some initial thoughts that come to mind include summertime, playing sports, during a long hike, the morning following a night of drinking, a few hours after eating extremely salty food, and last but certainly not least, during a prolonged bout of diarrhea.
Let's now drill down on one of the "When's" - during a prolonged bout of diarrhea - and ask, "Where might such bouts occur?" One thought that comes to mind is certain poor villages around the globe where outbreaks occur regularly. Gatorade could be used in such places to quickly rehydrate people, especially children, who can die from the dehydration caused by the outbreak. Needless to say the potential benefits to Gatorade, the Gatorade brand, and the people of such villages would be numerous.
5 W's Recap
How to use the 5W's for developing marketing strategies & for business innovation likely merits an entire book; perhaps we'll put one together in the near future. Hopefully in this post I've given you a little taste of how one of the bedrocks of journalism can also serve as a potent tool for marketers & innovators alike. Much more to come.
More posts on the 5 W's:
How to target your best prospects and maximize your ROI
In a prior post I discussed customer segmentation, a topic renowned for producing headaches and mild bouts of anxiety among even the sharpest of business people. The makers of Tylenol might want to consider becoming a sponsor for seminars on the topic; of course, providing free samples for those in need throughout.
In that earlier post I promised that I would discuss some of the ways in which segmentation can be used; in this post I'd like to talk about one such way - segmenting customers by profitability, and then using this knowledge to significantly improve your prospect targeting, and hence your ROI.
The concept behind segmenting your customers by profitability makes intuitive sense. Wouldn't you want to know which of your customers are providing you with your profits, and how to find prospects who look just like them?... wouldn't you also want to know which customers say adios to your service mere days after signing up for it - especially after you've spent so much effort & money acquiring them?
The friendship analogy
The analogy that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is that of friendships. Did you ever have a friend who would constantly borrow money from you and never pay you back? And, of course, whenever you needed a favor, he was nowhere to be found. My guess is that such a friend would likely not be the best man at your wedding, if he received an invitation at all.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the angelic friend. The friend who would give you the shirt off his back. The friend who carried you miles to the nearest hospital after you twisted your ankle during your annual camping trip.
To ask the obvious follow-up question, which of these two friends did you prefer? And, for future "friend-making", if you could buy a crystal ball that would allow you to discern "the angels" from "the moochers", would you purchase it? I know I would.
Bringing it full circle
Segmenting your customers by profitability, and using the insights to improve your prospect targeting is a lot like picking new friends.
When picking new friends you want to look for people who have the same qualities as those of of your closest, dearest friends (i.e., "the angels"). So too is the case with your prospect targeting - you want to target those prospects who share the same qualities as your most profitable customers (e.g., have similar information profiles in your database). And in addition, you want to limit or stop targeting those prospects who look like your unprofitable customers (i.e., "the moochers").
Plenty more on segmentation to come in future posts. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions or would be interested in discussing the topic in more detail.
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More posts on segmentation:
- Using the 5Ws for segmentation & marketing innovation
- Using segmentation to develop your marketing strategy
- What is customer segmentation?
Great books & articles on segmentation:
- Making Segmentation Work (PDF)
- Market Segmentation: How to do it, how to profit from it
- Counterintuitive Marketing: Achieve Great Results Using Uncommon Sense
(One of the best general marketing books with an excellent chapter on segmentation)
Your product's lemming factor: are you following your competitors off a cliff?
The Lemming Effect
Ok, enough of the philo-babble. The "lemming effect" as I call it is no doubt present within many organizations, and all of us at one time or another fall into its trap. Its influence within product management & product development is pervasive, frequently resulting in products that get bulkier & costlier over time. But we would be remiss to equate the proliferation of bells, whistles & "performance enhancers" with greater levels of customer value.
There are many drivers of the phenomenon of "Frankensteining" a product, and the lemming effect is at the top of the list. It all starts when we become more focused on our competitors than on our customers. One day Acme, our arch rival, increases the performance of its product or adds a new feature. "Hmmm", we think to ourselves, "What does Acme know that we don't? Are customers demanding greater levels of performance?" And then, voila, with limited thought or analysis we quickly 'upgrade' our product. Acme no doubts catches wind of our "2.0", and the arms race ensues.
All the while, our customers might not even be looking for the increased performance or the new bell or whistle. Perhaps our target customer looks a little different from Acme's target customer, and have somewhat differing needs. Perhaps Acme's reason for making enhancements to its product were ill-conceived or driven by internal factors that are invisible to us. Regardless of the reason, the one thing we have successfully achieved is increasing the cost of both our product as well as Acme's, who will no doubt follow suite with their "3.0". Whether we're able to "pass along" this incremental cost to our customers in the form of higher prices is something we certainly hope we can do.
Never take your eyes off your customers
The moral of the above faux situation, and of the lemming effect in general is to be wary of the moves that your competitors make. Do not assume the moves they are making are the right ones or that they have generated an insight that has given them the secret to building the perfect service for customers. The remedy to the lemming effect is quite straightforward, yet often ignored. Stay abreast of what your competitors are doing, but keep your eye on the ball - aka, your customers! Stay close to your customers. Develop multiple channels & methods for gaining access to the "voices of your customers". Understand their needs, desires, motivations, decision-making processes, changes in their outlooks or needs, etc. If you do these things right, you will be far less vulnerable to the lemming instinct, and far more confident in product decisions that you choose to make.
How watching Seinfeld can help you become more innovative
"Did you ever wonder why...?"
The above phrase captures the thematic brilliance of Seinfeld, both the show as well as the comedian. In addition to providing a foundation for Seinfeld's comedy, it also serves as a framework for exploring the world with more innovative eyes.
One of the core premises of this famous "Seinfeldian" phrase is the idea that not everything that is necessarily makes sense or should be. Most people, being extremely busy and having grown up in an environment in which "it has always been this way", are less likely to notice "the absurd" in everyday life.
Taking the time out to put on the "Seinfeld glasses" allows you to take a step back and make the types of observations that can lead to major innovations for products, services & processes. As I have written about in prior posts, becoming a more mindful marketer is the name of the game, and Seinfeld's mindfulness is one such variation on the theme.
So the next time your thinking about a product, a service, a process, or what have you, take a 60-second timeout out and ask yourself, "What about this do I find annoying? What irritates me or seems unnecessary, silly, or overly cumbersome?"
After you have discovered these irritants or apparent absurdities, challenge yourself to come up with solutions, knowing that they are waiting to be discovered.