theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Sticky receipts: how to get people from the pump to the store

I was getting gas for the Vespa yesterday. [Mostly I don't have to get gas, as house elves seem to keep the four-wheeled vehicle fueled. The house-elves don't ride, however. So a whole new world of customer experiences is opening up for me here.]
I used my VISA card to pay at the pump, and at the end got a message that says "receipt available inside". Interesting on several levels:

• reduces the operational demands on the pump. No printer, no paper to replace. Might even be something they can say is greener, because it reduces paper litter
• provides an alternative that encourages you to go in to the store where you might buy something
• is only a slight inconvenience to achieve these benefits

Additional remarks posted July 1
There are some pretty interesting comments below. I admit to having been being mildly annoyed by this process. But others are much more seriously ticked. I'd love to know what the real story is here. [i.e. what the real strategy is, and if it is working].

As an alternative method to get people into your store, I'd suggest printing a receipt with a tear-off coupon or offer on it for a discounted coffee, chips, etc.

Three big takeaways

A reader suggested I try to summarize the key themes from this year's Idea City. I could hardly lay claim to customer experience expertise and fail to respond to readers, now could I?  So here are my big takeaways, along with what I think this means for marketers and those who create customer experiences. [And thanks for the suggestion, Estaban.]

[1] The information technology curve is not linear, it's exponential. It is still picking up speed.

This might sound pretty pedestrian at the outset, but it isn't. Exponential curves tend to look slower in the beginning and faster later on. We've seen this many times in terms of adoption rates, improvement in technology performance, total production of information in a year, etcetera. [Example: for a long time, people thought there was no role for computers in the home. Now we have computers everywhere.And we keep finding new places to put them.]

What I learned at Idea City was that human biology has been treated somewhat mechanistically in the past. Now it is being treated -- by scientists -- as an information system. So things like medical research and commercialization of that learning will now start to follow this pattern.

There are many societal implications of this, but I see a number for marketers and customer experience folk as well. One is that social networking applications are going to just get better and better. It is not a passing fad. The future might not be Facebook, but clearly we like the possibilities of connecting virtually. Whatever clunkiness exists will disappear. There is not going to be an easier time to get in the game and start the organizational learning process. Further delays will only leave you behind the curve.

[2] People are going to start living a lot longer, and this is going to happen faster than we expected

Boomers have no plans to fade into the sunset. We can already see the impact of this. But science seems to be on the verge of really making an impact on aging.

If we get longer lives with reasonable health -- say the health and vitality of a fifty-year-old  into our nineties -- every institution, public and private, is going to be affected. Most of the speakers focused on the science that is going to make this happen. A few touched on the implications for public policy, like pensions. But the impacts will be pervasive.

[3] There are no rules

People who make big advances in any field are the ones who ignore the conventional wisdom. Jun Ye, the builder of an atomic clock that ticks 430 trillion times per second said this: "At the edge of the universe, you are looking at the universe that was just formed. At the beginning of the universe, physical laws could not all be the same as they are today". So even the laws of physics may not be immutable.

If you want to do something in your business that is exceptional, you need to extract the conventional from your thinking.

[4] Teaching is not as interesting as sharing the experience of passion. Humor is also highly engaging.

The best speakers are always those that just talk about what they are interested in and do it in a way that the foundational knowledge for their field does not become a barrier. They tell stories. They talk about implications. And they make people laugh. They are not all serious.

If scientists can be this interesting, surely we can do better in our customer communications: stop being so serious; tell more stories; and show some passion for the content.

 

Idea City 08 - what I learned about ideas today

The best speaker this morning was Matthew Diffee, who does hilarious cartoons for The New Yorker. And had some pretty interesting things to say about ideas as well.

"In any business, coming up with ideas helps."

He says the question he gets asked most often is, how do you come up with your ideas? His answer: "Like you, I think of them."

He went on to explain that ideas are actually work, and require thinking. He suggests that it is a good idea to get in the habit of creating new ideas frequently. The important thing is not to have "one great idea" -- it's to have "thousands of good ideas."

His closing thoughts were also pretty wise, despite being humorous: "You're probably not as good as you think you are. But you're also probably not as bad as some other people think you are."

Good words to remember on those days when you think you might never have another good idea.

Idea City 08: more great quotes and snippets

We had a great party last nite at Spice Route. Good wine from Dan Akroyd's winery, and a lot of interesting nibbles. But I know you really want to hear more of the great quotes from these amazing speakers at Idea City.

Curtis Suttle, a CIFAR scientist, and microbiologist on viruses, provided some amazing information about the smallest life forms.
"You are actually carrying around five to 10 kilos of bacteria [in your body] right now."
"95 per cent of the living material in the oceans is microbial, by weight."
He also told us that of the new DNA sequences they are mapping for microbes, more than 90 per cent represent undiscovered organisms.

Trying to use Typepad on the Macs here is making me sympathetic with Mark Chen, the cosmologist who spoke about the search for dark matter happening two kilometres under the surface of the Earth in Sudbury. At one point he explained why he could not show us the short video clip he had planned: "My movie is collateral damage in the Microsoft vs. Apple battle." It turns out that the atoms we are familiar with only constitute about 4.6 per cent of the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy.

Alan Broadbent, one of those guys with a list of titles as long as your arm, spoke about the need for governance reform for Canadian cities. He summed up the situation as follows: "Cities are like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire -- dependent on the kindness of strangers." He noted that Toronto exports tax funds amounting to about $15 billion annually to the rest of the country. "If we could keep even $1 billion of this, we could realize our dreams, and the whole country would be better off."

Bill Marovita, a senator from Illinois and gun control activist, gave us shocking statistics about gun crime and children dying from guns in the U.S. The truly shocking part was the stories he told about the NRA efforts to stifle political change in this area. He also shared for us his hope for a change of government in the U.S. in November. "Never in my lifetime has the U.S. been held in such disrespect, disregard and distrust as it is today. If Obama is elected, it would send a message to the world that America is back." I only wish I could have written more of these inspiring words. I sure hope he is right.

I'm not going to take time to add links or pics, but I think you would be as fascinated as I was to learn about the 100 square foot house that Jay Shafer lives in. He also builds these gems for other people. (You can find out more at www.tumbleweedhouses.com). He said something that we should all emblazon above our desks or on our office doors: "If a project doesn't seem absolutely necessary from the get-go, I don't even start it."

I'm going to wrap by telling you a bit of what Ezra Levant had to say. He's a far right-wing writer and I wasn't expecting to agree with much of what he said. However, he spoke about how out of control the human rights commissions now are in Canada (as a victim himself), and how they are now truly abridging our rights to free speech.

Much of this is due to complaints from parts of the Muslim community, who believe that being offended is tantamount to being discriminated against. Levant noted that it is OK to make fun of every other religious group, and even to make offensive art using other religious symbols. The public pressure amounts to a "soft jihad" where we lose our confidence, start to doubt ourselves, and self-censorship becomes pervasive.

Levant believes this trend has "devastated our western traditions of healthy vigorous debate." He believes that the proper response to offensive speech is social control (eg. ostracism).

What is less political, and more relevant to our pursuits was this thought that he closed on: "You need to hear ideas you don't like because all progress depends on it."

It's so joyous to take a walk with these brilliant minds. Now, off to grab a snack before the late afternoon session starts, and another party tonight!

Idea City 08

I'm blogging from Idea City this week, Toronto's answer to TED.
We had a wonderful line-up of speakers this morning, and I'm not going to try to capture all the good stuff. Instead, I thought I would just share a few of the most interesting quotes, and a couple of personal insights.

First insight: A very lively rendition including a drum solo is a great way to energize the start of a conference. [Note to self: use music more often everywhere to set the mood.] Isaiah Gibbons, 12, was our drummer.

From Chris Wood, author of Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America: "We're in ecological overdraft".

From Donald Yeomans, who studies asteroids at the Jet PRopulsion laboratory: Asteroid contact "is the only natural disaster that you can actually do something about."

From Alfons Weersink, a food economist: "Human creativity is not finite"

From Gina Mallet, food critic and author: "There's been a rise in the puritanical eater; you're either saving your life, or you're saving the planet's life."

From Claudio Aprile, molecular chef, talking about his first job at a donut shop at age 14: "I filled the donuts up with three or four times the prescribed amount of jelly. I pushed the envelope to see how far I coud go before the donut exploded."

Steve Scherer, molecular geneticist, called a standard medical visit an "observational interview".

There's more, but I'm keeping people waiting who want to party and eat. So there's more tomorrow.

Engagement on steroids: Doritos grabbed me with their Quest

Browsing a blog today, I saw an ad for what I thought must be a new adventure game reality TV show: The Quest.

Turns out it is a very cool creation of the Doritos people. You simply have to start by looking at this engaging landing page, which has several interactive elements.

I've been addicted to Nacho Cheese Doritos for years, but I guess I've been too busy wolfing the stuff down to notice their cool new marketing. This thing really caught me in my Riven and Syberia soft spot, so I clicked around.

The Quest turns out to be a contest with puzzles, not unlike the PC games mentioned above. The contest builds to a finale with a $100,000 prize.

Fortunately, they gave me hints to help me with the first puzzle, because I only ever pick up the nacho cheese, and had no idea of the bizarre flavors now available.

Pretty cool stuff, this.

Good games of this type provide frequent reinforcement [not unlike gaming machines] to keep you wanting more. Talk about sticky applications -- if you want me this weekend, I'll probably still be working on the next puzzle.

My take

Makes me wonder, once again, why some sites have to be so dull and boring. Granted, this is a snack food. But I keep wondering what a creative bank could do with this kind of thing. Or any kind of online training.

Greenification watch: Behavior is shifting rapidly in some areas

Decades of badgering from environmentalists has had relatively little impact on our driving habits, just as badgering from nutritionists has not solved the obesity problem. But things are changing rapidly on the environmental front these days, and mostly in a good way. Let's look at a couple of core samples.

Hybrid car purchases

The demand for hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and Camry Hybrid is so high, automakers can't keep up, according to a story in the Detroit Free Press. Ford and GM hybrid vehicles face the same situation. Dealers are telling stories about recent buyers of large SUVs, especially those that run on diesel, trying to trade in for a hybrid, even though it's going to cost them big.

Closer to home, my own recent purchase of a Vespa was actually more motivated around (a) avoiding insane parking charges for short meetings downtown, (b) a desire to avoid the crowds on the subway and (c) have fun doing it. Being green was just a bonus.

But sales of two-wheeled vehicles are rising, and it seems that gas prices have succeeded where the cool factor has been insufficient.

As with many consumer behaviors, single motivators are insufficient. If you can pile up several motivators, you change behavior.

Leaving the cardboard at the store

A recent trip to IKEA revealed a new trend here that is well established in some countries: the practice of unpacking things at the store. It was always a nuisance to bundle up all that cardboard to recycle. Now that there are limitations on how much we can put out at the curb -- even of paper recycling -- people are starting to manage their usage down in creative ways.

The predictable unintended side-effect will be an increase in illegal dumping of all sorts of things, in order to avoid garbage charges. And avoid the nuisance of figuring out how to even get the truck guys to pick up an extra container. [Just exactly how do I pay? And who do I pay?]

My take

We are hearing a lot these days about "being hit in the pocketbook", which is a way of explaining all human behavior in terms of monetary consequences. This is not correct, in my view. the reality is that you need a bunch of motivators to change behavior, and $ is one of them. If you can get people feeling good, feeling righteous even, and add some $ consequences to that mix, you're much better off. If you can pile coolness, status, and other social motivators on top of that, you are in great shape.

And this is why the science of human behavior will ultimately succeed where environmentalist hectoring has failed. Because being hectored isn't much of a motivator for change.

Resources:

Hybrid sales plunge as demand keeps rising; battery shortage limits Toyota supply. by Brent Snavely, Detroit Free Press, June 11, 2008  (via Marketing Daily)

The "me" portal: Why you need a Facebook portal strategy, not just a viral/WOM marketing strategy

Finextra reported on a survey that says about half of Facebook users (25 to 34 year olds at least) are interested in banking on Facebook.

The sponsor of the study, Worklight, builds secure Web 2.0 applications. (Such as, presumably, banking on Facebook. But also corporate collaboration on Facebook).

While I am skeptical of the value of some of the findings, in the absence of a lot more detail, this is certainly a clear indication of where things are headed. I'd like to put this in context for you, because we look at far too many of these things as isolated events. They aren't.

I did a major trend study in 2001 on wealth management on the web. At that time, banks were still hoping to become portals, a strategy I predicted would fail. (And it did.) I also predicted Yodlee and its aggregation strategy would fail, because of the security and privacy fears expressed by people. Despite, I might add, the real interest people had in aggregation. Well, Yodlee didn't fail.

Yodlee, as we now know, changed tactics, and became a platform for trusted front-end providers like Citibank, thereby neatly solving the security and privacy concerns for many. The build in the area of aggregation has taken a lot longer than many thought it would, however. Seven years later, it's still kind of leading edge. Perhaps because the FIs themselves are wondering what the real benefit is from their perspective.

We also investigated stock trading on your cellphone. There was a surprising -- at least surprising to me -- amount of interest. It wasn't high, but it was a lot higher than I expected for 2001. And everyone had the usual concerns. But this was before the smart phone as we now know it had really arrived. Cellphones are quickly becoming a communication hub for many, especially youth. As time goes by, people will wonder why they can't get SMS alerts on interest rates, stock price movements, and many other financial things. They'll want to transfer money to a friend by phone, instead of just by e-mail.

Small payments are a natural for the cellphone, and are hampered in their growth largely by existing stakeholders. Where there are fewer entrenched stakeholders, lower barriers to entry, and less built-out infrastructure, cellphone payments have taken off. Seriously, why would you want to dig around in your wallet for coins or cards for a can of liquid refreshment when you already have your cellphone on your hip or in your hand?

Finally, the ME portal

Facebook, and it's cousins, are becoming a kind of portal. As meatier applications are added, it's easy to envision a time when your Facebook account is open at least as often as your e-mail/calendar manager. Indeed, would I want Outlook if I could get that kind of functionality on something like Facebook or LinkedIn? Although some of the features on FB and its cousins are kind of clunky still, the trend is definitely moving in this direction -- the "me" portal.

Why wouldn't I want package tracking for FedEx in Facebook, instead of having to log in somewhere else? Sure I get e-mail, but then I have to manage it.

Why wouldn't I want E-Bay watch-list tracking in Facebook, instead of having to log in somewhere else? Again, the messages would be there when I want them, but I wouldn't have to wade through them.

Surely we could make this "Why wouldn't I" list longer. [What's on YOUR list?]

Will Facebook be the winner? Who knows. What we do know is that these applications are picking up steam, not slowing down. If you aren't thinking about social network strategy, you need to start. Because it isn't all about viral marketing. It's also about real functionality and access points.

Resources:

Facebook users want web 2.0 banking, Finextra, June 4 2008.

Remember the fun of playing in the sandbox: Innovation in business

I mentioned Walter Derzko's master class in idea generation and opportunity spotting in an earlier post.  It was well worth the time to attend. I want to share with you a couple of the ideas he covered.

Idea generation
I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about this topic lately, as I'm getting more and more requests to help on challenges involving innovation. [This may be a side-effect of writing a book. No one reads the book, but they think you know something about the topic. This is totally the best job in the world.]

So my office is a sea of books and papers, to the point where I can no longer see my comfy reading chair, and all flat surfaces are long gone. Some of this stuff feels only marginally useful, I am sorry to say. So when you hear something that really rocks, it's like the heavens opened.

I got to try out a really useful technique in Friday's session. Ironically, I had read about it earlier this week when another smart innovation guy, Philip Coppard, sent me an article from HBR on the identical topic. Enough preamble, here it is.

Think of some things you had as a kid. Spend three or four minutes, make a good list.

My list included: book-bags and haversacks, rubber boots, adventure play with my friends, using art supplies, riding my bike, collecting cards.

Now think of an adult version of that activity. Try to come up with one or two ideas for each thing you thought of, by extracting a key element, by taking it to the extreme, or by creating exceptional quality / adult flavors.

I thought of several businesses/products already in existence including the luxury motorcycle market, messenger bags and briefcase backpacks, scrapbooking, high-end rubber boots, and adventure travel.

But I also thought of a few that don't exist yet. When you're a kid, you get to play fireman. But no one is offering this as a fun adult experience.

I hope you can already see the power of this activity, because several existing businesses have come from just this sort of thing. Haagen-Dazs ice-cream, Rollerblade, and fancy Wellington's are a few examples. In the case of the scrapbooking supplies, new life was given to a product that had been killed by desktop publishing -- rub-on text (remember Letraset?).

As a group, we were able to think of several ideas for potential businesses that do not yet exist, that have some initial appeal. This is a fast, easy method to generate a starting point of ideas that can be worked and built upon.

Innovation models and toolboxes

According to Mr. Derzko, the linear and sequential approach to innovation as captured by models such as CPS are useful, but force the brain into a sequence of linearity that is not natural to our thinking. He believes the toolbox approach works better: use the tools that fit the situation, and don't get too fussed about moving back and forth, up and down, on the linear sequence.

I was delighted to hear this, because I've found these linear sequences frustrating at times, even as one of the creatives whose only job is to brainstorm well. [We always value another's viewpoint when it agrees with our own.]

He is also of the view -- as are many others in this field -- that we generally spend too much time on idea generation instead of problem definition.

This certainly fits with my own experience. Quite often, the problem that is presented to a consultant or researcher is not the actual problem at all. Or not foundational enough. By settling on a definition of the problem too early, even world-class idea generation will yield mostly yawners for ideas.

Myths debunked

In the research conducted for The Innovative Organization, we learned that successful business innovation is rarely about the big breakthrough from a single creative person. There's a whole chapter about myths that we debunked.

In the workshop, Walter took a strong stand in this direction as well. It's much better to look for templates and methods to find solid new ideas than to stare at a blank page waiting for blinding insight to strike.

Let me give you a concrete example. I have several friends who are artists and designers. They find it amusing that people assume they 'just pick up a paintbrush and the images just flow onto the canvas', as one put it. The real process is much more thought intensive, much more one of using or practicing known approaches and deliberately reaching for a compelling assemblage of existing templates. There is also exploration of things, usually leading to messy or ugly mistakes. Often called 'pushing it over the edge.' If you have ever studied the life work of a great artist, this pattern is very evident. To see an artist do a demonstration, speaking aloud all the while, is to see that same thought process made visible.

Bringing it home

Isn't it encouraging to think that business innovation is a lot like building a deck? You need tools, you need plans, you need to doodle and draw, you need to define your challenge. But we can all build a deck. We can find templates and adapt them to our needs. It is not the purview of only great architects, it is available to anyone who is prepared to make an effort.

Resources

Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box, by Kevin P.Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, Renee Dye. Harvard Business Review, December 2007.