More Growth - consumer insight, brand positioning, growth strategy

Boris v Ken - what can we learn about how customers make choices?

Using your existing data?

  How can you discover the Power Attributes that determine why consumers choose your brand without doing new and expensive surveys?  Our answer is that you can and should take a stab at it.  Whilst doing new research will be more robust, you can understand valuable insights about your Power Attributes by analysing whatever data or insight you already have or can easily gather.  This ezine shows you an example of how to do this.  We have analysed the result of the London Mayoral election to illustrate how this can work.

Analysis of Boris victory?

Voters' and customers' choices can seem a bit odd. So how come the electorate plumped for Boris, who had been seen as a bit a bit of a joke and prone to gaffs and offered an uncertain prospect of being competent?  We have analysed the Power Attributes to understand how voters made this choice.   

It is possible to take a good stab at understanding the Power Attributes using available published data.  In this case we have located two very different pre election polls to help us work out the Power Attributes.

Conquest's Metaphorix Poll for ITV London
IPSOS Mori poll for Unison

Power Attributes must possess both importance and uniqueness. So Power Attributes for the candidates are ones that are both important to voters and in some degree are unique to the candidate.  Attributes will have both functional and emotional elements and both will influence the customers decision to purchase.  In this case of this election functional really means policy issues and emotional attributes relate to the candidate's personality.  We started by looking at policy attributes.  MORI revealed the ranking of importance of the policy issues.

Importance ranking to voters

1. Crime/Policing
2. Transport
3. Healthcare/NHS
4. Cost of living
5. Education
6. Pollution/environment

It was difficult for the candidates to get uniqueness on these issues - even though the candidates were able to offer some differences in their policies.  Ken had a good track record on transport.  Brian Paddick had been a policeman.  Boris talked a lot about crime reduction. When you look beyond crime and transport, the next three issues lay completely outside the control of the Mayor (NHS, Cost of living, Education).

The personalities of the candidates offered much more scope for uniqueness

So personality attributes may offer more scope for real power. When we look for clues about these more emotional attributes, the metaphorix survey done by Conquest for ITV London was able to highlight the emotional beliefs about the personalities of the candidates.  If we start by looking at the importance of the different personality attributes, we discover that the most important attribute is

Trustworthy

However none of the candidates possessed this to any adequate or differential degree.  So despite trustworthy being important as an attribute, it lacked power as a means to choose between the candidates.  So we need to look further to find attributes that are powerful for each candidate.  Conquest discovered there were some attributes where the candidates differed.

 

Ken	Boris	Brian
arrogant	refreshing	boring
confident	confident	focused
capable	approachable	honest

We can eliminate confident as this did not distinguish Ken or Boris and also knock out boring as this is not a positive.  The remaining attributes provide the clues as to why Boris won. 

Boris won the day by being approachable and refreshing. Ken's lead on capable was outdone by Londoners' desire for a change. For Brian Paddick, being focused and honest was just not important enough to Londoners.

Power Attributes for London Mayor

The Power Attributes for this London Mayoral election were to offer a change from a tired and slightly arrogant incumbent and promise to address violent crime alongside transport issues.

No doubt the national issues of healthcare, cost of living and education played a part.  Ken would have suffered by his association with a struggling Labour government.   But since these issues remain outside the direct control of the Mayor and were difficult for the any candidates to discuss.

For an attribute to be powerful you must be able to create some uniqueness. The most powerful attributes were those where the candidates could establish some uniqueness.  It is the combination of an attribute being both important and unique, that creates the power to influence voters or consumers choices.

 

Which is more important?

Helping your customers or selling to customers? 

The business answer is we need to do both.  But what would the vote be in your business if you were told you could only do one of these and you had to choose?

My experience of trying to buy a flat screen TV last week would suggest the answer varies in different organisations.  I tried three different places:

Google: lots of helpful information, no selling, independent advice (no product experience).
John Lewis: helpful, little selling, clarity about the solution, real product experience.
Currys:  no help, stressful experience, plenty of selling, lots of offers, a good credit deal.

Interestingly Google and John Lewis are doing quite well whereas DSG (Currys) are suffering in these more turbulent times.  DSG management seem to be blaming the economic difficulties, but I am left wondering if their problems are to do with too much selling and not enough helping.

Google and John Lewis know that they must help their customers whereas in many businesses the emphasis on marketing and sales has been about getting the message across, making the offer, closing the deal.  But is this really want customers want?  Is this what is most important to customers?  Is this the most effective way to get more growth?

Businesses sometimes struggle to see what is most important to their customers.  Last ezine we discussed ways around this.  This article takes this one step further and suggests that by starting with selling as the source of growth many businesses are distracted from what is important to their customers.   This distraction and neglect of what is really important to customers is likely to lead to less growth and less success.

How well do you understand your customers problems?

How do you ensure your products and services help your customers?  Do you or your colleagues struggle to see that what customers want is help to solve a problem?  Do you focus on selling at the exclusion of helping?

Increasingly businesses that help are more successful than those that just sell.  Google is the ultimate "help not sell" company and seems to enjoy the highest brand valuation in the world (BrandZ published today)

How did this work in the case of my TV purchase.  My problem or opportunity is that I want to be able to relax with the TV only when really I feel the need.  I do not want the machine in my face every time I sit down in the living room, so we will put it in a smaller separate room.  When I go to the internet or the store I am looking for some help to solve these problems.  So my search extends to appearance, size, discreteness, on demand TV services, as well as picture quality and sound quality (the only thing anyone talked about was picture quality).

Customers do not want is to be sold a product.  Customers want to solve problems issues and realise opportunities that they face in their lives.  Features of products and services that businesses can offer them are only important when they help with this.  Businesses that help their customers will win.  Those that just sell to their customers are likely to lose out to smarter competitors.

So when you go and ask your customers what is important to them, ask them about their lives and their problems not just the features of your products and services.

Now if you were forced to choose between only helping your customers or only selling to your customers, which would you choose

If you are interested to arrange a free introductory consultation to help you understand what your Power Attributes might be, then click here to find out more about this. free consultation

If you think you know what your Power Attributes are but are struggling to get your colleagues to see it that way, then click here take a look at our marketing influence ideas click here.

How do you know what is important to customers?

Why is it that once we walk through the door of the business each day we are programmed to want customers to believe that what we are doing is the answer to their problems and that the features and benefits of our products will be important and useful to them.  Suddenly the world seems to be centred around the products and brands that we sell.

Somehow the corporate mission or our own ambition can blind us to insights we acquire every day.   As we spend our home and shopping lives being customers and making choices between products we can develop a good understanding of what it means to be a customer.  We can understand what is important and how trivial or important different decisions are to us.

I have been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, The Black Swan,

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

See our discussion  click here   

He has been reminding me how easily we can get persuaded by the "narrative" explanations that exist within the business.  How easily we tend to seek confirmation of what we would like to believe in the anecdotes and events around us.  How difficult and more challenging it is to rigorously assess the evidence. 

How do you deal with this?

As a successful business person you know you must cut through this and you should understand what is important to your customers.   

But how much time and money do you devote specifically to find out what is really important to customers so you can act on it?   And if you do spend time on it, what is the best way to discover what is important to our customers?

But you may be thinking that you already know what is important to customers.  Why should you invest more money and time in finding out what is important to customers.  Just stay with us for 2 more minutes reading this ezine and we will give you the chance to assess whether you have done enough.

What we have found

We have frequently observed in project after project and study after study is that successful business people do know a lot about what is important to their customers.  Especially sales people who are talking regularly with customers and marketers who choose to spend time listening to consumers.

We have noticed that the managers in the business tend to get it 80% to 90% right.  Which sounds great.  And would that we could get everything 80-90% right!  But the problem is the thing you miss out or get wrong is often the important attribute feature or benefit that could make all the difference.

Here are some examples from our own studies

Examples where managers think something is important but consumers think is less important than other things

Healthy snacks - less than 3% fat, not embarrassing to eat in public
Gardening - used by professionals, use less peat
Reinsurance - can offer independent advice, harnesses innovation.

Examples where consumers think something is important but managers did not spot it

Healthy Snacks - is a satisfying eat
Gardening - Is attractive to wild life, forgives me if I forget to water it.
Reinsurance - Flexible to my needs, fixes problems rapidly

How can you know what is important to customers?

Inevitably the most straightforward answer is to ask them and we would be the first to say that asking them in any form is better than not asking them.  But there are a few pointers that we have learned.

• We have found the concept of an attribute is valuable to help distinguish what is more important or less important
• Don't get too tangled up in whether the attribute is a feature a benefit an emotion or an image, it does not matter.  What matters is which attributes are important
• Ask the customers/consumers to help you prepare your list of attributes.  They will often come up with some attributes that you did not think of.
• A third party conversation is more likely to reveal the truth, if you have a relationship with your customers, this can get in the way of a truly transparent conversation.  On line or paper survey tools can also do this very well
• Plan the approach so you do not lead them to give you the answer you want to hear.
• Ranking attributes from 1-10 or 1-20 is more revealing than asking for a score on a scale where 1 is not important and 5 is very important.

Attribute importance is a fundamentally important part of helping our clients understand how customers make choices between brands.  The really useful concept of Power Attributes is based around what is important to customers and how you can differentiate yourself to them.

You can download our paper on this click here

You can see our website discussion on this click here

You can see our case study examples click here

You can see our blog posts on Power Attributes click here

Why you should worry less about the future?

I was listening to this fascinating discussion on Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 on Monday

We are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate and categorize – and we don’t even realise it. What we should understand, argues the academic and city trader NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, is that our world is dominated by 'black swans', highly improbable events that have a massive impact and are nearly impossible to predict. Black swans, he says, mean we should ignore ‘experts’, stop reading newspapers and learn to take advantage of uncertainty. Nassim Nicholas Taleb will be delivering lectures on The Black Swan at the University of Oxford on Wednesday 5 March and at the London School of Economics on Thursday 6 March. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is published by Penguin.

Here is the podcast link  Nassim is in the last 15 minutes

I got 5 points from the discussion

• What actually happens is often not possible to predict
• Measuring (empirical?) what is happening is more useful
• Projecting current trends is more reliable than expert predictions
• Our assessment of the risks we take will be wrong.
• Newspapers, colleagues and experts often try to convince us we can predict and manage risk.

It got me thinking, so what does this mean for businesses in pursuit of more growth? 

You should spend less time worrying less about the future.  So reduce the time you spend

• Worrying about things you cannot control
• Forecasting future events (since we will be wrong)
  
• Predicting competitor reaction
• Reacting to the latest hot topic in the marketing press

You should spend more time strengthening your ability to withstand unexpected shocks. To do this, measure what is actually happening to the business and assume it will continue until you create change by doing these things

• Discover your customers frustrations and unmet needs
• Know and measure what is important to customers
• Discover how to make this more available to customers
• Take action based on these insights and measure the results

You can do a simple audit to see where the balance of your time is spent.  Is it more on worrying about the future or could you do more to strengthen your competitive ability.

Corporate teams can easily get sucked into worrying about the future, whereas entrepreneurs tend to focus on things they can do now.

In the meantime.  I am off to the LSE on Thursday to gain some more insight into how we can strengthen our approach to helping you translate insights about customers into practical steps that will create more growth.

If you would like a free telephone audit to discover if you are worrying about the future too much or are doing enough to get on with the present, then email us or phone us on 020 8334 7202 to arrange it.

P. S.  This is exactly what Power Categories and Power Attributes and Power Channels will help you achieve this action orientation and address the business fundamentals.  The approach is about translating insights about customers into practical steps that will strengthen your competitive position in the market.

King Canute, ITV, BA, Easyjet, Google and Zopa

I have lost count of the number of times I have sat in meetings where King Canute reigned and new ideas were put in the trash can because of the risk that they would substitute the existing sales in the business

Meanwhile, some-one else bowls a long, creates the idea and the sales substitution is done by new competition.  The traditional business is left struggling to catch up.

Remember when ITV dominated ad spending and took more ad money than anybody else?  But see what happened last year

An analysis for The Times shows that Google generated £327 million in advertising between July and September, compared with an estimated £317 million for all of ITV1 across the UK during the same three-month period.

10 years ago just think how inconceivable it would be to suggest that on airline selling low cost seats on the internet would be the dominant short haul airline out of Gatwick.  Now Easyjet dominate short haul rather than BA.

Who could have predicted that strangers would trade and trust each other through their computers.  Many retail markets declare their growth or declines and this often excludes substantial trading volumes on Ebay and Amazon and elsewhere that are not tracked by conventional stats.

Growth orientated marketers need to be looking for new ideas to stay ahead and not be afraid to compete with themselves and create new approaches to conduct their business. 

So what are the next markets that will be transformed or at least attacked ny New Internet models.  I cannot be sure these will succeed but they are all doing something very new that could transform the way markets work.

Savings and investments     http://uk.zoba.com

 

Book buying and borrowing   www.bookmooch.com

Travel guides and hotel bookings  www.world66.com

Book and media publishing     www.lulu.com

These are all ideas that have long legs and real depth.  They are not a retail concept slapped onto the internet.  They do things that only the internet can do by using information and communications.   The have identified a real customer problem and they are solving it.

Lulu - self publishing is so expensive

World66 - how to find out what normal people think (not massaged by journalists or promoters)

Bookmooch - what to do with my old books?

Zoba - banks tend to rip me off and cannot be trusted

Whether they succeed will depend on many things, not least how well they are executed and whether people are ready for these radical new ways of doing things yet.  But the traditional industries they are attacking have to decide if they want to end up struggling like BA and ITV and EMI or if they are going to embrace a whole new world.

For us we need to keep an eye out for new models that attack our business.  or even better stay one step ahead and spot the opportunity.  In the language of the Growth game, if you know the Power attributes of your customers, then you will know what they want that traditional businesses do not supply.  So go find out about your customers' Power Attributes

How much do you help your customers through the tyranny of choice?

Two experiences in the last 24 hours have  prompted me to think about why less is often more.   What a relief it is when a supplier, manufacturer or retailer helps you to find your way through the amazing choice of products and services that confront us these days.

The first was when I was in B&Q today.  They offer a massive selection in the core home and building products, but have more limited choice in the Garden Centre area.  As some one with a limited appreciation of gardening and in search of quick convenient solutions, this proved to be a huge relief.  Their range was not just limited but very well selected to cover all the task and needs and presented in a way that made it easier to choose.  Three powerful attributes seemed to make the range work.

1.  Limited to a size I could survey and understand
2.  Covered all the tasks and needs so there was something to address each issue
3.  Merchandised by task and clearly explained how to choose.

I have to say my foray into the bathroom and kitchens section was more dazzling and confusing as the choice expanded.

These thoughts on choice were forcefully echoed by some consumers in research groups last night who when examining the array fo products available in the category we were exploring, made a straightforward and simple appeal.

Please simplify our choice, tell us what the product does for me, what type it is and put a window on the front so I can see what is inside.  All this other technical detail can go on the back.

I am sure that offering people manageable choices and helping them choose can be turned into a Power Attribute and can be used to differentiate your offer wherever you do business.

So could you do more to help your customers through the tyranny of choice?

Do you promote what you do well or what matters to customers?

If you want to discover the Power Attributes that drive your customers to choose your brand rather than the competition, you have to have start by generating a list of possible attributes.  When we help clients do this, we get the initial attribute list from talking to the customers.  You can only really rely on customers to think like customers.    However, the business team can think of attributes that customers cannot even begin to imagine, so we also get some valuable attribute ideas from the client management team.

We do this through our facilitated workshop approach.  These workshop events often attract a senior audience.   When we work with these knowledgeable and experienced managers we often find that the list of attributes is a list of features or things that the company does well.   But that is not always what we need.  We know that what will be powerful for the customer is a specific benefit or a special way the business helps the customer solve a problem. 

So for example the director of a financial services firm tells us that what really matters to the customers is "we give independent advice",  which we translate  into a more customer focused benefit "has independent advice I can trust", but when we talk to the customers, this is still not good enough, the most powerful attribute turns out to be "makes my business more successful" .

Time after time, we discover that the hot power attributes are all about the customer and the cold attributes are all about the business and the brand.

Experience this week brought this home to me and showed that directors may not always be the best choice when we are generating potential insights about what matters to customers.

In one of our current projects we are trying to discover some Power Attributes in a whole new category for the business.  We ran a workshop this week where we wanted to generate a list of candidate attributes that we plan to investigate with customers.  The investigation and consumer research will establish which attributes are most powerful in influencing customers to choose a product. 

The project is being led by the sales director who helped us bring a fresh approach. Rather than directors, he invited a number of the PA's and front line team to the session and this proved to be an inspired choice.  They seemed to think more like customers and in a more natural way.  As a result, we have come up with a list I am confident is much closer to what customers will suggest.  This means when we do workshops with the customers we are already part of the way there and we will be able to spend time discovering why the attributes are powerful rather than just generating the list.

Our ezine always aims to deliver practical advice, so I would suggest you can take two things out of this When you are thinking about what is important to your customers,

1.    always challenge yourself to think "is this about the brand or about the customer"  I can pretty much guarantee that if it is about the brand it will not be that important to the customer.
2.    go and ask some customers or at least a few "real" people around the office, they might just shed some insight on your thinking.

Our Power Attributes paper discusses how you can come up with this insight in more detail click here

Do you struggle with too much data or not enough insight?

Tabloid newspapers are powerful communicators and can exert influence on how people think.  One of the most effective tools they use (and abuse?) are concepts that simplify reality and allow people to see what is happening.  So a politician is "beleaguered", a celebrity is on the way "up" or "down",  a government is either "on a roll" or "stumbling".  Many people say that the papers influence opinion and they argue they just reflect it.  But whichever of these is true they cut through lots of data and create insight.

 

As marketers we need to create insight and become powerful communicators to win over the business to our ideas for growth.  There are often many ideas but this is accompanied by great uncertainty about which will produce the right results.  This uncertainty seems to derive from two sources.  Either there is too much data, so it is difficult to sift out what is important or there is a shortage of real customer driven insight because there is little market research available or affordable.

 

 

Have you found yourself sitting through analytical or descriptive presentations that provide some interesting content, but few actionable recommendations? 

 

Or sometimes have you found yourself struggling to come up with insights and unable to justify the investment in high price market research to create the customer understanding that will bring clarity to your decisions?

 

One of the breakthrough tools we have developed to cut through data and create insight is to develop "really useful concepts" that help you to see through the mist and bring clarity to decisions about what to do.  We have found it makes a huge difference and supports a cost effective approach.

• When there is too much data, the "really useful concept" slices through the data to bring out the compelling insights.
• When there is not enough money for new research, the "really useful concept" supports a structured approach to thinking through the issues and coming up with answers.  This approach may be done with customers or just your colleagues in the business.

You will probably have heard us talk about the concepts we use. What characterises all of them, is that they are built around an important business decision rather than just descriptive of an approach to analysis or discussion.

 

• Power Categories - where should we invest to get the most profitable growth?
• Power Attributes - what features and benefits most powerfully influence customers to choose our products?
• Power Propositions - products and services that deliver power attributes.
• Power Channels - where does the product or service need to be seen and be available so our customers will discover it and can buy it?

We also have two additional ideas that have provided valuable support.

• Rocketing - the tendency for customers to trade up and spend disproportionately on things that are really important to them
• Internal Entrepreneur - describes the skills and behaviours of the people who can make things happen and influence the organisation to change and actively create growth.

We were recently challenged about why our website and our conversation does not use the conventional language of the brand marketing world. So why we do not talk about market segmentation, brand positioning, marketing communications, brand pyramids, brand wheels and so forth? The question caused me to think about this and reflect on whether by being different, we are just confusing the issue.  In our experience this marketing speak can encourage debate, but often does not lead to decisions.  So we plan to stick to these "really useful concepts" because they are just that "really useful".
                                  
We know that internal entrepreneurs succeed when they become great communicators. Maybe we can learn from the Tabloid press and use simpler more powerful concepts.  When our clients adopt these "really useful concepts" they find it helps to create a common understanding about the decisions that the business must make.  This helps engage the business team and win support for the ideas. 
                                  

What is it that makes a concept "really useful". It must have the following characteristics

• It creates insight about an important business decision or action.
• It communicates.  It is easy to grasp and possible to have an idea of what it is about from the title.
• It is adaptable and can help you derive insight from robust data or management discussion.
• It has been proven to work through robust analysis or previous practical examples.

 

 

 

What "really useful concepts" do you use to make decisions?  If you want to share them, you can look at the blog version of this article and post a comment.

                                  

 

 

 

 

 

Our next due date for an ezine is 25th December, so we will skip that one and the next issue will be a New Year perspective on 2nd January.

                                  

In the meantime have a great holiday break.  The Differentiate team will be taking the chance to get some skiing in.  But we are back shortly after Christmas and will be fired up for the New Year.

Is PJ losing share because it lost the power attribute?

Marketing reported this week that PJ Smoothies have continued to lose share against Innocent. See news report.  The report states that this has happened despite a major revamp to the pack design.

So why is this?  PJ smoothies were the first into the category, they now have the marketing and distribution power of PepsiCo, a range of great tasting products and some attractive new designs.

Innocent have also suffered some adverse publicity in recent months for making excessive health claims about their products.

I suspect the answer lies in the observation that Innocent have commandeered the Power Attribute in the category whilst PJ's seem to have neglected it.

Innocent have made a big play on the fact that they are just crushed fruit and nothing else, whereas a quick study of PJ's bottle reveals fruit juices and concentrates.  This affects both taste and authenticity.  When you combine this relative weakness with the fact that many food service outlets will only stock one brand, it becomes it hard for PJ's to make headway.

This would need a consumer led view of what is important in smoothies to validate it.  But the hypothesis illustrates an important point about understanding Power Attributes so you can ensure your brand is competitive.

I remain astonished at how much discussion takes place in the marketing press about packaging and advertising and how little on whether the fundamental proposition is less attractive or uncompetitive.

Why do people say one thing and then do another

The importance of looking at what people do, not just what they say, was bought home to me by a humorous example from Dr Clotiare Rapaille last week.

In research potential passengers what they would like to see in a new plane if money was no object.   You won’t be surprised to know it was more space, greater comfort, better service. 

This is all very well but there is a problem.  People’s actual behaviour when money is no object is completely different.  As soon as they can afford it they take a private jet; which has less space, less comfort and poorer or no service!

Why the discrepancy?  Why do people’s behaviour result in the exact opposite of what they say they want?  It is because when money is no object they focus on eliminating the things they really hate.  Of course they would like more space or better service but what they want most of all is “no airport”.  Private jets enable them to get as close to this as possible.  Sufficiently close in fact that they will forgo the space, comfort and service in order to minimise the airport experience.

On the basis of this you can be pretty sure that “simple, quick airport experience” could be a power attribute for an airline!

What can we learn from this?  Framing the context of any research is critical.  In this example for instance people make their travel decisions on a much broader set of attributes than just what happens on the plane.  By limiting research to just what happens on board potential opportunities to improve the whole experience are missed.