Customer Crossroads

Conversations become markets: The rise of online marketplaces and monetization of digital content

When Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger told us in The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) "Markets are conversations" we should have readily seen the corollary would not be far behind: Conversations become markets.

The first web marketplaces democratized the ability to sell physical goods, such as E-Bay  (founded 1995) and Etsy (founded 2005). 

Amazon, started in 1995, launched third-party selling as Zshops in 1999. That change, along with services to independent publishers, really made Amazon a marketplace rather than just a retailer.

Digital goods marketplaces got going with photography. The one that comes to mind (there were likely others) is iStockPhoto, started in 2000. Typography, icons, and other graphic elements are all now available in marketplaces such as Creative Market (founded 2011.)

Do you really see your customers? Or are stereotypes affecting your judgment?

I started volunteering with a group that hangs art in a hospital. About every 6 weeks we turn over a new show with about 80 paintings from local artists. It's a surprisingly large time commitment, much of it during the workday, so most of the volunteers are retired. (I'm the young blood - scary!)

I took some offense from remarks one of the older fellows made to me -- he was operating on a lot of sexist assumptions. Like ... my husband made the frames for my own paintings. (I paint as a hobby, and I build my own frames. I even have tools!) He assumed I was a lady of leisure, with lots of free time.  (Nope, I still run a business.)  There was something terribly patronizing about his whole attitude that I really took offense to. It was hard to put my finger on it. He was amazed that I took offense, genuinely surprised. I guess he doesn't encounter women like me very often in his world, or if he does, they suffer in silence.

He was operating from stereotypes. But I have to admit, I know almost nothing about this guy myself! I'm also operating on stereotypes based on his age and a few brief exchanges. Which may be why I took offense, instead of just laughing at his foolishness.

Behavioral Economics fun

Some professors from Ivey Business School have written a nice little PDF e-book about behavioral economics. Behavioral Economics for Kids 

As you read it, you may think that you have heard some of these things before, from sociology, from anthropology, from psychology. And indeed you have.

What you are hearing now are things about how humans behave that were figured out by economists.

Essentially where we are now with this stuff is that economists seem to have finally determined that rational theories of behavior are in fact not descriptive of reality. Other disciplines knew that, but we are finally getting some convergence of research. So this is a good thing. But it isn't all new.

Can marketing save the world?

A startling factoid has been circulating in social media: Did you know that the crowd scenes in top-grossing movies are more than 80% male? This came from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, launched out of concern over the impact of gender stereotypes on her children.

Perhaps these stereotypes are a by-product of the Hays code, enforced in Hollywood from 1934 to 1968. Based on a belief that film could be a powerful force for the “improvement of mankind”, the code prohibited, among other things, depictions of sexuality, childbirth and methods of smuggling.

Today, obesity, eating and food are major topics in public policy discussion. Food culture is diverse and fascinating. We have raw food advocates, gluten-free advocates, eat-for-your-blood-type advocates, and even food porn. We carry our coffee cups and water bottles around and snack freely anywhere – behaviors not tolerated in the past, when coffee breaks were scheduled. The type of coffee you drink, whether you make it yourself and with what device, all say something about you, your values, and your aspirations. Cooking advocates see home cooking as a path to family bonding and a better society, as well as healthier eating.

School boards are attempting to change dietary habits by controlling cafeteria menus. Without creating a compelling experience of healthy eating, these efforts have been relatively ineffective, a predictable result to any marketer or marketing researcher.

The public pays for poor health outcomes in many ways, so has a vested interest in good health outcomes. This territory is ripe for regulation, and we have already seen many signs of this, from labelling requirements to ingredient regulation.

If we want behavior change on a large scale, we have options:

• Forcing people to eat apples instead of pre-packaged apple products is one idea.
• Another is to deny processed apple products the right to market themselves, a strategy that proved very effective with tobacco.
• A more intriguing idea, to me, is to help the healthy food compete on a level playing field with better marketing resources.

Culture in our modern era is not monolithic, it is continually shifting around us. We engage in dozens of daily choices about the right way to be and to live, about achieving success, and what kind of success we should aspire to. We spend our lives in the creation of ourselves.

Learning how to influence our culture for the greater good without resorting to the Hays Code is one of the challenges of modern public policy.

More food for thought:

CBC Ideas program on this topic, in two parts, called Stuffed Part 1 and Stuffed Part 2.

Henrik Fexeus tells me about mind reading

I had a delightful conversation with Henrik Fexeus, author of the acclaimed book,The Art of Reading Minds, which is now available in English.

I confess to some trepidation prior to the interview -- this guy sounded like the real world equivalent of Patrick Jane. But I had the Atlantic Ocean as a buffer zone, so it seemed safe enough. And we had a great conversation for about 50 minutes, which has been edited down in the video below.

I was interested in the book in the first place because it has a lot of information on building rapport and on understanding the body language of others. These are skills that are useful to anyone, but critical in the work of the qualitative researcher or facilitator -- if I can't build rapport, and pretty quickly, the research will be seriously compromised.

A few of the things Henrik told me about, and where to find them on the video:

 :50    Why he became interested in this area, and I think the answer will surprise you, but make sense, as it did for me.

2:18   How our beliefs about the separation of mind and body (the concept of duality that originated with Descartes) have held us back from a better understanding of how we really communicate.

4:45   Henrik says he is not naturally gifted in this area, and had to learn this ability as well.

6:50   The secret not in the book.

8:20   The topic that readers give him the most positive feedback on. (Which gave me hope for humanity, actually).

10:10  Leakage. The emotional kind.

13:50  Anchoring. The emotional kind.

16:50  Now that you know what anchoring is, a good way to use it in day to day life.

17:45  Why he wrote the book.

19:00  People that are naturally good at this, and the professionals that they migrate to. (Can you guess?)

 

I've been way too busy for months, but have a bit more free time these days, and lots to talk about. Upcoming soon: a report on the fantastic speakers at Innovation Day at CPSI 2012, and what happened at Dell's Customer ThinkTank.

What happens when you let people set their own prices

In the previous post I laid out the circumstances of our little experiment at the annual street sale.

Here's what happened:

Some of the early arrivals, who are usually dedicated bargain hunters, suggested very low prices were appropriate for everything.

For example, the woman who cleaned out a dozen full length movie DVDs told me a fair price for them was 50 cents each. After asking me several times if I had purchased them at a flea market (No, I bought them all new, I assured her), and if they were good quality (Yes, I bought them all new, like I said.) She also told me she didn't want me to think she was cheap.

Confusion reigns

As the day wore on, one pattern became clear. Most people had no idea what to do, and kept wanting us to name a value. Some people were so flummoxed that they left rather than guess. 

Some people, mainly those of greater means, by the look of things, wanted to donate MORE because it was a good cause. These folks were also worried about whether they were contributing enough. Typically they gave us $5 for a book. They were also concerned about appearances and social judgments, and did not want to "be cheap" or "ungenerous."  One lady actually contributed a book she had just finished reading, as well as paying $5 for a book. She told us she was doing a charity run the next day for the same hospital. Our actual neighbors also fell into this category -- these are people we know and would be seeing later that day at a social event.

What does it all mean

First, let's look at the absence of a price.

Determining value is not as easy as we think it is. Plus, for many people, they would be buying something they probably don't buy very often, such as hardcover fiction books, for example. Price is one of the things we use to JUDGE value, especially relative value. In the absence of a price, it's hard to form a benchmark. One price in isolation creates the same problem. However, if you have a couple of priced items, you can start making comparisons.This kind of comparison, in fact, is usually how pricing research is done.

Left to our own devices, we are not good at setting values on many things -- real estate and used cars are both good examples. Most people overprice these items unless working with a professional.

Why did some people want to pay more?

The second thing that interested me was the very wide divergence of "fair price" in the situation set up. I think a concept called social capital was mediating the event. Social capital is about the norms and exchanges that govern social relationships rather than commercial exchanges. And we had set this up as a social exchange (not keeping the money, not setting prices). Except for many people, they did not see us as part of their network, and were kind of uncomfortable with something that was NOT a commercial exchange.

For people actually in our social network (neighbors), or connected somehow (like the lady doing the charity run for the same hospital) the exchange was about something else altogether. Recipocity is one of the notions that comes into play. For these people, our yard sale had turned into a charity fundraiser, and they were more concerned about making a reciprocal exchange that honored social norms than getting a good deal.

If you are a behavioral scientist, you would set up a whole bunch of experiments like this and actually measure what makes a difference. For example, did our sign saying "Thank you" affect the average amount of money in the jar? What about the sign saying "Thank you for your generosity?"

One person accused us of trying to put a "guilt trip" on her. For her, we were violating the social norms of a yard sale, where there might be haggling, but you have an asking price.

I can tell you one thing with certainty: the guy that got the arm chair for $10 got a heckuva deal, no matter how skeptical his wife looked when she came by.

Experiments in psychology at the annual street sale

My neighborhood holds an annual street sale, during which many of the households hold a yard sale, then we all get together for a BBQ after. It's a great event, but we have found the haggling over prices to be a bit exhausting at times, and kinds of saps the fun out of things.

This year we tried something different.

We posted signs that said "Pay what you think is fair. All proceeds will be donated to Sunnybrook Hospital."  We put all the books and things on a couple of tables, along with a big glass jar seeded with some money. And there were a few starburst signs that said "Thank you" and "Thank you for your generosity."

Take a second and predict what you think the resulting behavior would be under these circumstances.  I'll wait while you do that.

Tomorrow's post will have the result.

Things we only notice when they don't work: the emotional landscape of utilities and banks

 

Life is full of things that we sort of don't pay much attention to until something goes clunk

Utilities are the originals. The gas and electricity we use in our homes, for example, is largely unappreciated except in two instances. One, when we pay the bill and may feel some annoyance at the cost. It's rare that we say,  

"Wow, for only a few hundred dollars, something ephermeral like gas that was formed millions of years ago and lives a mile underground was brought up from the ground, purified, transported thousands of miles, and has now been safely burned in my furnace to keep me warm all winter. Not a bad deal."

The other time we notice a utility is when it isn't working of course, and again, feel mainly negative emotions. Power failures would be the obvious example, but I also marvel at the land-line telephone. The uptime on the phone system is so amazing, that it's remarkable when it is NOT working. A symptom of a larger problem almost always -- a cut cable at the least, worst case perhaps a war-of-the-worlds Martian invasion scenario.

Interestingly, the problems utilities solve for us are big ones, right near the foundation of that familiar Maslow triangle. Being cold. Being in the dark. We are highly motivated to solve these problems, and communities will invest a lot in solving them. But once solved, we quickly habituate to all that warmth and light. We only experience their power in their absence -- irritation quickly building to rage and even fear as we face the elements as defenceless as a squirrel.

Other categories of services tend to behave this way too.

Bank machines do little to charm or endear themselves -- they generate emotion largely when they are out of order or being recharged with cash.

Support services in the business world tend to be that way. When everything is working, that's what we paid for, after all. It's when something goes wrong that we get all "what are you people thinking over there???"

Cloud computing / SaaS is surely in that category now -- a service that we get either for free (but still expect to work pretty much six sigma), or we pay a relatively small cost monthly, in which case our expectations are even higher.

I have to say that there are a few services in the cloud category that have made my life so much simpler I do actually appreciate them a lot -- Dropbox for example. But how long will it be before I am so dependent on it that any lapse of service causes major frustration?

You'll never be loved as a lifestyle brand

If you are in the position of marketing such services, you are working in a rather challenging emotional landscape. Your boss may be telling you they want to be as loved as Apple or Coach, but your reality looks more like the graphic above.

A bizarre flip side of these services is how we feel treated as consumers. We often feel like these providers barely notice us unless we try to leave. Or unless they are trying to gain our business. When we are just dutifully paying our bills, they appear to be as indifferent to us as we are to them.

For example, the phone company and cable company are all excited with offers for you if you'll move from a competitor. But once you are there, that's it. No more freebies for you! Same thing with your credit card company, who was all hot for your business until you moved, and you can no longer get in on all those great advertised offers.

With utilities, customers often feel unappreciated, even taken for granted. The same emotional play is working on both sides. If customers start leaving in droves, it's like the power went down at HQ -- suddenly everyone is paying attention.

I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's wonderful book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I'm hoping I'll learn some fresh insights into this scenario. If I do, I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, I'll try not to take you, my reader, for granted.

Decision Fatigue: it wasn't your imagination

You know what happens when you have to make too many decisions -- it's exhausting.

Science has now proven that this is true, even when the decisions are very important. John Tierney reported on research conducted by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University in a recent New York Times article. Their research showed that the possibility of getting paroled depended more on what time of day your case was heard than other facts.

If judges, who are used to long periods of concentration, can be affected by this phenomenon, imagine how challenging an extended shopping trip is?

Ego Depletion

Another scientist, Roy F. Baumeister, developed the idea of ego depletion, which appears to be at least part of the explanation for what is going on. The process of making decisions involves self-regulating behavior. And our capacity for this is not unlimited -- to the contrary, it deteriorates and needs regular re-charging.

Some of the specific scenarios discussed are well-known overload situations, like choosing items for a wedding registry, or selecting fabric from a choice of thousands for a custom-made suit.

At last, the explanation for the hideous choices suggested for gifts at wedding registries -- the couple in question were exhausted, or they would never have selected that $150 gravy boat.

More difficult for the poor - because they have to make more tradeoffs

One very interesting finding reported on is that shopping is even more tiring for those of limited means, because they have so many more trade-offs to make. The drain of 'willpower' that results from this constant need to make trade-off decisions leaves less energy available for activities that might alleviate poverty, such as studying or starting a micro-business.

Other research confirms that people will spend more money in some shopping situations if faced with expensive decisions after their energy stores are depleted.

Implications for designing a better customer experience

We run an ethical blog here, so we're not going to help you extract more dollars from exhausted decision-makers. Plus, we know that people will often choose NOT to decide, and just walk away, if they are faced with too much choice.

A better way to look at this situation is to understand that people will benefit from taking a break when faced with a lot of decisions and trade-offs. Food also helps to restore our capabilities.

You could build a small break area for your clients where they can have a coffee and cookies before they finish choosing automobile options or mortgage options, for example.

Another strategy to reduce the distress would be to simply reduce the number of choices by presenting customers with a limited set that is most suited to their situation.

For yourself, when you feel fatigue setting in, go for a coffee and a muffin, it will help you regain your ability to make sensible choices. And you won't wind up with a bunch of costly crap that you wonder why you bought.

Resources:

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue, by John Tierney, The New York Times, August 17, 2011

We need to name things to remember them

I'm recently back from a stay in a cabin on a lake, where Bruce and I canoed hither and yon most days. Like most northern lakes, the trees and shoreline tend to look the same from one corner to the next, and it's hard to describe where you want to go.

"Let's go where we went yesterday, up that big inlet" "The third one on the left, right?" "No, it was just past that island, the one with the dead tree." 

To avoid spending long periods in such meaningless conversations, you quickly give names to such features as you can identify. Green Dockhouse point. Moose marsh. Otter bay. It's the only way to actually describe things.

I find the same thing happens at the gym. You learn a ton of cool exercises from a trainer or in a class which you can't remember when you go back in on your own. I have a workout buddy, and we have a lot of inane conversations like this:

"Let's do that thing where one leg is on the BOSU ball." "Where you do sit-ups" "No, not that one. The one where you are on your back"

To counter this problem, we are trying to give memorable names to the exercises. We learned one called "Dead Bug", and believe me, we remember how to do that one. It looks just like a dead bug.

We need names, we need acronyms, we need ways to remember and file things. And the more complex and similar the things we are trying to remember, the more critical the naming distinctions become. 

(Doctors seem to know a gazillion acronyms for things -- no doubt because they need to remember a gazillion symptom lists, etc. Like RICE for soft tissue injuries - Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.)

I was thinking how meaningless many service product names are in this regard. Check out any bank website for good examples of this.

Your take?

How do we use this knowledge of what people are like to improve the customer experience?

MadMen shows us a stratified society: things HAVE changed

I am a MadMen addict, and with the start of the new season, I was marveling at how much our society really has changed since the 60's.

We have more social equality, but actually less economic equality

Although many of the show's characters are very affluent, the post WWII decades were an era of unparalleled egalitarianism in North America. At the same time as economic equality was within reach, socially society was still quite stratified.

A brief vignette when our protagonist, Don Draper, walks into his office and practically tosses his briefcase and hat to his personal secretary, followed by his coat for her to hang, really highlighted this for me.

Today, the reverse is true. I live in a world where people are largely unwilling to acknowledge social stratification, but economic opportunity is highly stratified. A few people -- entertainers, sports figures, financial engineers -- gather a disproportionate amount of the total wealth in society.

I'm just as bad as you

In terms of customer experience expectations, this change has a couple of very real world implications.

The person who buffs your nails in a salon does not think of themselves as a lesser being. In fact, the clientele at the spa may well include those who have saved up for this kind of a treat: Baristas and others in relatively low paying positions.

It's hard to identify many occupations or professions that are still held in high esteem, regardless of their earning power.

For service cultures, this societal flattening means that many people are not prepared to engage in the kind of role-playing that dedicated personal service requires. So when you ask for something, you hear "no problem" instead of "I'd be pleased to get that" or "yes ma'am", or some similar nicety.

When we don't think others are better than we are, it changes the service dynamic. And I don't think we have really come to grips with this.

Because not only has the cultural environment changed, but corporations are resistant to paying good wages for front line staff, and aggressively automating wherever possible.

Isn't it ironic

This situation creates some serious irony. In our roles as customers, we wonder what has happened to service. But in our roles as service providers, we demand a level of respect, we don't want to grovel, we don't want to deal with people who are rude and impatient, and we resist any behaviors that would imply something less than equal status. 

What's your take?

Am I imagining this? Or have you observed this too?

Wishing for pleasant surprises

I am just writing up the report for a big project that has to do with computerization / automated functions.

Our experience of automation - which is pretty extensive now -- is usually that any random event is a negative event. Computers break. Software does not work. Orders do not go through. I'm sure we could create a long list of such things. Ticket dispensers on the fritz.

When we talk about customer experience and customer service, very often people talk about surprise and delight. I'm not totally a fan of this idea, because i think it creates a standard that is ultimately not meetable. However, that's not what i want to talk about today.

Today, what is on my mind is that we haven't built much surprise or delight into our automated world. Your machine doesn't give you a lollipop. At best, it does what is is supposed to, and it does it correctly. It also does it the same every time.

There are no random acts of delight in the automated world. Unless you are at a casino. That needs to change. We need to start making it a lot more fun.

Focus Groups: how can a table and some chairs cause such controversy?

Dan Pallotta created an interesting range of comments in response to his trashing of focus groups on his HBR blog post, Real Leaders Don't Do Focus Groups.

The comments are a much better read than the actual post, which coughs up the same tired mythologies you've already heard a hundred, if not a thousand, times. [e.g. Henry Ford and the "faster horse" soundbite, the "Apple doesn't do research" myth, and more of the same.]

Mr. Pallotta talks about his experience creating a successful charity fundraiser ride as if he created it in a complete vacuum, but it was successful because it was bold.

There are truths to be made on both sides of any controversy.

Truth #1:  Good ideas are sometimes killed with bad research. I've experienced this personally, although I'm bold enough to claim that I haven't contributed the bad research, just some good ideas that died at the hands of others.

Truth #2: Leaders who claim to not need insight research are either idiots, or they have a strong pipeline of connection to customers that they are calling "not research." Sometimes the connection is a simple one -- they are part of the target group personally. More often, in large organizations, a lot of people are actually gathering insights all the time. But they might not call it that.

Truth #3:  The focus group is only as good as the people using it. [aka: It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools.]

A few of the more insightful comments:

From Tony Flanders:

"The new model is --- engage, listen, dialogue, synthesize -- oops; that's actually the old focus group model." 

[Tony has posted an interesting article on focus groups on his blog, here]

From Nick Coster:

"The opportunities for innovation exist when we are able to strip what the market says it wants back to it’s underlying needs.This removes any given solution from the discussion (ie horse or internal combustion engine car) and abstracts it to I need to get from A to B in less that 1 hour."

From Richard Harris: 

"First, congratulations. I think you're the first person to post something on the HBR blog that pissed people off.
Second, I would have been curious to know what market-sensing mechanisms you do use to decide things like how bold to be. Something made you choose 7 days/600 miles/$2000 as your standard. It sounds bold, but you weren't so bold as to go for the round trip. How did you know how far to push the envelope?"

From Matt Towers:

"On the surface, it is sort of a flat Earth mentality that advocates that less information is better than more. It bespeaks a lack of confidence in understanding how to use information to make decisions."

And this gem: "Apple does do research, they just don't talk about it."

From Steve Willson:

"The key point that runs through the discussion is that to be successful an organization needs to listen to it's customers. They are talking, so you need to pay attention.

Whatever methods you use to engage them in a constructive dialog are better than shutting yourself off from the world and emerging with a set of features that are based on what you can build, not on what people want."

Care to add your own experiences? Please do.

Truth, lies and feedback (Part 4 final amazing installment)

I've been posting for a few days on this topic of how to get truthful feedback. Here are the links to Part 1 which poses a question, Part 2 about how to seek face-to-face feedback, and Part 3 which is about a questionnaire virtually designed to elicit falsehood.

Today, I want to look at the most challenging of all truth-finding situations, the police investigator.

This is a situation that makes the work of commercial interviewers of all sorts look like absolute child's play. People generally volunteer to talk to us, most times we actually pay them. The worst downside they are likely to experience is cognitive dissonance or perhaps embarrassment, possibly boredom.

The legal investigator, of course, is faced with someone highly motivated to lie for a number of reasons, social, cultural, psychological and rational. Everything is working against them.

This is why I found a recent presentation I attended by Donna M. Pence, a retired Special Agent who is now an educator, so totally absorbing.

If I was marketing her course, I'd probably call it something like impossible interviews, but she called her topic "When getting the truth is critical: Interviewing techniques used by law enforcement professionals".

It's not like on TV

One of the most interesting things Ms. Pence mentioned was the length of time spent preparing for, setting up, and actually interviewing.

There's the interview-before-the-interview, which is designed to develop a sense of who the subject is, how they respond to non-threatening questions, and even what their general comprehension level is. Then they seek to understand the answer style when under pressure, in a state of fear or anxiety. The protocol she teaches is called PEACE: Preparation, Engagement, Account, Closure, Evaluation.

She was very clear that every question asked has to have a defensible purpose that will withstand questioning in court. No "fishing expeditions" allowed.  This is a key difference from insight  research work -- our questions need to have a purpose, and do, but we are almost always going on a fishing expedition.

When you expect everyone to lie, you plan differently

Like a good insight seeker or facilitator, the good law enforcement interviewer sets the stage in terms of the environment, privacy, clothing, tone and manner, the actual interview space. They consider gender, ethnic and racial matching (matching or deliberately unmatching).

Unlike insight researchers, they are often seeking to disarm or destabilize. We saw her shift roles and accents like a skilled actor, and honestly, I was really glad I wasn't interacting with her professionally, so to speak!

The level of detail required to support criminal charges is, in her words, "excruciating". So one thing that is probably true from TV is the phrase "let's go over this again".

I truly loved some of her phrasing. Let me give you an example:

"I've never called anybody a liar. I say, 'I think you're not being as truthful as you could be.'  Or for a good ole boy, 'That dawg won't hunt'"

My top takeaways

These are approaches that we can all learn from, whether you are interviewing, or just trying to be a better communicator.

[1] Cognitive interviewing -- show the subject that you see them as an individual with a unique set of needs. In turn, present yourself as an identifiable person. Depersonalizing reduces the amount of information you will obtain/receive.

[2] Interact meaningfully -- don't just ask a list of predetermined questions.

[3] Communicate empathy -- see the situation from their point of view.

[4] Give your undivided attention -- convey that you want to listen and can be trusted. Give reassurance and support.

[5] Let them talk until they run out of steam.

Why does anyone talk to them?

The most amazing part, for me, was Ms. Pence's answer to my question of why anyone really talks to them, despite her persuasive methods. Her answer provided telling insight into the human condition.

For the most part, she says her tone is clear, calm, slow and matter-of-fact. She has often interviewed people who have violated foundational cultural taboos, such as child molesters, rapists, murderers.  She says things like, "You can't offend, embarass or surprise me", "I'm not going to be upset at anything you tell me. I've talked to many people in your situation".

While people are initially motivated to talk to get themselves out of trouble, if possible, they also want to give their side of the story, to provide an explanation for what happened. 

My take

We all live the existential problem -- we are alone in our own experience. The ability to share that inner world -- even a little bit -- is a powerful drug. I often wondered how law enforcement officers get people to tell them the truth, and I think this is the essence of it: empathy.

And on a less sobering note, if you meet someone like Ms. Pence in a police station, you are in serious big trouble, because she is one amazing interviewer.

Resources

Donna Pence recommends the book, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, by Dr. Paul Eckman

All of the graphics in this post were created by me, based on diagrams presented by Ms. Pence.

I heard Ms. Pence speak at the annual QRCA conference. If you love qualitative methods, you should join us sometime.

Truth, lies and feedback (part 3)

I've been posting about truth, lies and feedback -- you can read the previous posts here and here.

On the same trip to Baja Mexico referenced earlier, we were traveling while the H1N1 situation [scare? epidemic? what are we calling it now?] was still rolling. Going in and out of Mexico, we had to pass through an extra screening at the airport.

There was a woman on our outbound trip who wore a face mask on the plane. Whether worn to protect herself or others was not clear to me, as she seemed the picture of health. But the mask quickly disappeared before we left the plane.

Both times, we had to fill in a small questionnaire and have our temperature taken and recorded on the same slip of paper. Questions had things like "have you had a fever in the past week", "do you have symptoms ...", and weirdly, our e-mail address.

It wasn't totally clear what would happen to you if you answered yes to any of these questions. Or what would happen if you had an elevated temperature. Most people likely assumed, as I did, that we might be denied passage.

The real mystery here is why anyone would answer such a questionnaire honestly. I would guess that most of the questionnaires were completed with a line of "no" answers.

The whole procedure was so apparently meaningless that I thought it was an exercise in government relations.

There are times people are really inclined to lie. This was definitely one of them.

I recently heard a law enforcement specialist speak about this topic, and it was fascinating. I'll cover that in the next post.

[Meanwhile, if anyone can shed light on the temperature screening process, please take a minute and add a comment.]

Truth lies and feedback (part 2)

I mentioned the story of my kayak guide asking for feedback before the trip was over in the previous post. It's pretty easy to see why we all provided something less than full and frank disclosure to this man.

• We liked the guy. Despite our gripes, we now had something of a social relationship with him, after several days of constant contact.  SOCIAL INFLUENCES

• We were painfully aware of our abundant wealth compared to most everyone we encountered, including our guide. As right-thinking liberal minded educated persons, we didn't want to place inappropriate expectations on someone from a less developed country without our advantages. At it's worst, this pattern is the bigotry of low expectations. But I'm going to call it just CULTURAL INFLUENCES

• This person was in a position of significant influence. Not only was he cooking our meals, we were entrusting him with our safety in a wilderness environment. POWER INFLUENCES

• In a couple of days, we'd be on an airplane headed home. Why risk damaging the last couple of days of our holiday just to give him some feedback? RISK REWARD IMBALANCE

The other traveler in our small group assumed there would be an internet questionnaire when we got home. But there wasn't. So the guide, wanting feedback, was left to his own resources.

How to ask for feedback in person

In this situation, our guide could have obtained much better and more informative feedback by changing his questioning strategy. 

First, he needed to leverage the social connection more to make us feel more obliged to help. For example, he might say how much he valued our opinion as the wonderful people we were, and how important it was to his livelihood to stay competitive.

Then, he could have avoided some of the other challenges by asking us for future help, not past commentary. His question might go something like this:

"I'm thinking about making some changes to improve this trip for next time. What things would you change if you were me? What things would you definitely keep?"

The strategy here is to focus on what can be changed -- the future -- rather than the past. Clearly solicit both positive and negative. Shift the discussion away from the person to the activity or behavior.

Balanced feedback

In coaching, this technique is called balanced feedback. You provide the positives, and you provide the "next time", future oriented feedback.

At the end of events I facilitate, I often ask people to put up sticky notes under three headings: do more of, do less of, do the same. Sticky notes create the feeling of anonymity. But inevitably, in the debrief, people will volunteer to explain their sticky note. The "do less" column is the negatives, of course.

If there are no negatives in your feedback, this is a big clue that you're not getting the whole story.

[Unless of course your customer experience truly IS perfect. In which case, please get in touch, because I'd like to interview you for this blog.] 

Your thoughts?

On truth, lies and feedback (part 1)

How many times this month have you already been asked for feedback or invited to fill in some kind of a questionnaire? Take a minute...

Probably quite a few.

When we are the people seeking the information, we tend to act as if the answers we get are generally truthful. Maybe not a good assumption.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and will be looking at the issue from a few angles in the next couple of posts.

One of the situations that got me thinking was on a recent holiday. My beloved and I were on a kayak trip in Baja, with one other traveler and our guide. We were a good day's paddle away from civilization, and had about a day and a half left in our trip. Our guide was also our cook, and was about to make dinner. 

He asked what we thought of the guiding on the trip, in almost those exact words.

As you might suspect, none of us chose that moment to say anything that wasn't completely positive and flattering, even though we had been muttering amongst ourselves about our various gripes.

The guide seemed quite satisfied with our response and said, "That's usually what I hear. I've never had a complaint".

Maybe you've noticed something like this yourself?

Multiculturalism: what's really going on

I had the pleasure of hearing Will Kymlicka from Queen's University speak on the topic of multiculturalism at a CIFAR event recently. Fascinating topic, and his paper on the subject is available here.

Multiculturalism in this context does not mean having a lot of immigrants in your society -- it actually references a policy about supporting cultural heritage for immigrants, as opposed to a policy of assimilation.

If you are running a business in a nation with a lot of immigrants -- and who is not, now? -- you need to consider that the mindset of your customers may not be what you think or expect it to be.

Some excellent research has been compiled and analyzed by Dr. Kymlicka, some of it showing surprising results.

Let me see if I can distill this down to the key points. [But you should read the paper, it is fascinating stuff.]

[1] the debate on this subject is highly ritualized, and hasn't changed much in the 35 years Canada has had a formal policy. But it needs to change now, because the situation has actually changed.

[2] success of such a policy is measured in terms of economic, political and social integration of immigrants. According to Dr. Kymlicka:  "On all of these dimensions, there is growing evidence that immigrants to Canada fare better than most if not all other Western democracies." [WD for short] 

I was actually surprised to hear this. Which shows you how often public discourse is dominated by positions, not facts.

Immigrants to Canada are more likely to become citizens, more likely to vote, more likely to run for political office than in other western democracies. There are more foreign-born citizens elected to Parliament than in any other WD, in numbers and as a percentage.

Dr. Kymlicka's conclusions are striking in their directness:

"The evidence generated by these recent studies – all of which appeared from 2006 to 2008 – provide strong evidence that multiculturalism in Canada promotes integration and citizenship, both through its individual-level effects on attitudes, self-understandings and identities, and through its society-level effects on institutions."

[3] There has been some apparent pulling back from multicultural policies, notably by the Dutch, but not only them. "If we look below the surface, we find that several de facto multiculturalist programs remain in place in several European countries even when their governments disavow the term – the “retreat” from multiculturalism is more rhetorical than real."

Many of the problems attributed to multiculturalism in other countries don't have strong factual support.

[4] There are real issues, however. Religion is the big one. Immigration in Canada was largely from Judeo-Christian traditions until relatively recently. So people brought with them values that were not at all in conflict with the core values of the population. 

As you have likely noticed, this is no longer the case.

As Dr. Kymlicka points out, we can't expect the Supreme Court to adjudicate every problem -- we need to come to some kind of public consensus about what is reasonable and what isn't.

Media is another real issue. Who can forget the Danish cartoon debacle?

In Canada, we have constitutionally entrenched rights for founding groups: English, French and Aboriginal. We're going to have to figure out how multiculturalism fits in. 

Racism and discrimination have not gone away. Many of our institutional responses relate to "visible minorities" but this distinction doesn't adequately describe many groups experiencing discrimination. Anti-Muslim predjudice is not the same as anti-black predjudice as anti-Aboriginal predjudice. [Yup, it's complicated.]

Finally, the economic progress of recent immigrants is far below that of previous generations of immigrants. They take longer to catch up to the mainstream.

Resources:

Will Kymlicka, The Current State of Multiculturalism in Canada. Downloaded 2009.

Delightful postcards from hotel web site charm road warrior: Holiday Inn nails the insight

As hotels continue the march up the sustainable innovation curve, they just get better and better, don't they? My current hotel started out as a motel on a strip development, but looks more like an oasis for road warriors now.

In-room amenities include a two-tiered desk suitable for a laptop as well as the piles of paper we all still seem to need. A giant Philips flat screen TV looks almost like art. [I'm here working at a trade-show type of event, and looking forward to the design innovations I'll get to see later on.]

Such pedestrian items as a blow-dryer, in-room coffee maker, and luxurious bed are now pretty much mandatory to stay in the game. Free parking and free in-room internet are among the distinctions between this kind of a place and a major downtown hotel.  Even the quality of the restaurant food has improved, no longer smacking of diner-with-a-garnish entrees.

But I had a genuine surprise when I logged in to the internet this morning. Charming post-cards you can customize and send! [I suggested just such an application to a business a couple of years ago. Too bad they didn't try it to support their hair care product line. But I digress...]

These postcards could charm the kids you are traveling with, or the road warrior keeping in touch.

The insight: when you are traveling, you are either having an adventure with family and friends, or you are lonely and missing them - or perhaps just knowing that they are missing you.  The postcards neatly nail this insight and speak to it. So they win on two counts: they show that the hotel 'gets it', and they give you something nice to do with those emotions.

I was also pleased to see a truly useful web site, with things like 'check your flight' and 'local dining'. Best I have seen in quite a while. Good on you, Holiday Inn. Or should I start calling you Holly, to reflect your new sensibility?

Where does insight come from?

I have had people ask me how I can be so sure of finding insights, or helping other people find them. I wish I could tell you I had a brilliant answer ready to hand, thereby reinforcing my insight-guru mission. I was thinking about this today.

One way you find insight is to develop a lot of good questions, and be willing to open your mind to ask these questions. It helps to organize the environment to be conducive to asking questions (even silent ones), but the questions themselves are paramount.

I saw a great list of such questions today, aimed at helping people solve problems, which is known as the Phoenix List. It is purported to originate with CIA training, but who knows? [And who cares. It's a good list of questions.]

The list is published in Thinkertoys, an excellent book of creative thinking techniques by Michael Michalko [see resources below]. The list has also been reproduced online in a few places, such as here and here.

So I guess the answer is actually a question. Find good questions. Ask them. Listen. Ask more.

Resources:

Thinkertoys, by Michael Michalko, 1991 + 2006, Ten Speed Press. There are so many methods in this book, it's a bit overwhelming. But it works very well as a desk reference, a place to find new ideas, as well as many of the classics, such as the SCAMPER method. I like that it uses business examples, and acknowledges the reality of the workplace (lots of people who are not comfortable with creative thinking methods).

Is body language as useful as we think? How to tell if someone is lying

Clients often have a strong preference for in-person qualitative research. They say it is because the body language and facial expressions of the respondents are important. I know one of the reasons is that they find it more engaging.

How important is body language anyway? Can you get anything more than gross indications of interest from it?

People have been researching lying to try to help, in particular, the police, child protection workers, and security services. Here is some of what they have learned, according to a recent story in The New York Times.

• Liars do not avert their eyes more than people telling the truth
• Liars do not fidget, sweat or slump more than truth-tellers
• There are fleeting changes in expression, but these are difficult to analyze

It turns out that content analysis is actually more useful.

People who are lying tend to try to stick to a script, to avoid getting caught in a lie.
People telling the truth don't have a script, so they tend to recall more extraneous details, and make mistakes. And the more they talk about a given experience, the more of these details come to mind.

This is particularly noticeable if you have some baseline for how a given individual tells a story, so the recommended procedure is to start with a basic story.

My take:

In my work, it's not so much that people are lying, as that they are posturing, or saying things that they believe to be more socially acceptable. It's nice to learn that the words are just as important as the non-verbal to truly understand.

Resources:

Judging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets, by Benedict Carey, The New York Times, May 12, 2009

Deep diving customer needs: What we can learn from solicitations

Dear Mr. [your name here]:
I am personally pleased to announce your selection for the Institute's esteemed MAN OF THE YEAR representing your country for 2009. This Award exemplified the importance and validation of deeds well done.

The letter goes on in this fashion for a couple of pages. For $295 USD you can get yourself a nice plaque for your wall that says you have been named Man of the Year by the American Biographical Institute. 

The award itself is "an elegant 8 x 10 inch plaque in a cherrywood piano finish with a black gloss insert and gold lettering." And it's guaranteed against material defects during shipment.

Just think of the margin on this operation.

It seems to be a very successful business, in operation since 1967.

But it reminds me of something I once heard about the wine industry, along these lines... if you can't win a medal in a wine industry contest, you need to start a new contest.

I guess you could just go out and buy your own plaque. But that probably feels just slightly less satisfying, and where's the fun in that.

Susan's take:

OK, maybe you don't want to sell people overpriced plaques. But people need and want to feel special and unique and they want their achievements recognized. In a world of six billion people, getting a little recognition counts for a lot.

Maybe there is a better way to achieve that.

Resources:

Wikipedia entry on American Biographical Institute, showing some of the awards they make available. 

Benazir Bhutto was apparently awarded the 2000 Millennium Medal of Honor in November 1998.

A university professor issued a press release on his award.

It looks like there's a similar operation in the UK, called the International Biographical Centre.

Check out the list of awards this 'surgeon' has. Clearly, this individual understands the importance of third party confirmation in getting people to trust you.

Predictable novelty keeps things appealing

I was reading in the paper that it has now been proven scientifically that a television program is more interesting if interrupted with commercials.

We adapt quickly to pleasurable experiences, according to Prof. Leif Nelson of UC San Diego, who conducted the study. So the brief interruption of the advertisement enhances the program. (Unless it has a fast-moving, complicated plot. Hello 24.)

In other research, Dr. Nelson has found that interruptions of an unpleasant experience similarly increase the unpleasantness. 

There are a couple of implications for experience designers. First, when you have something unpleasant, try to get it over with in one session. Example: returning goods for refund.

More generally, I think we need to bring some novelty into good experiences that are predictable, just to break them up a bit and reduce the adaptation. This is why seasonal specialties add so much to the experience in restaurants and coffee shops. We have the pleasure of anticipation of seasonal treats, but don't have them on the menu long enough to get fully adapted to them, and therefore bored.

I think of this as predictable novelty. We like novelty, but not too much. We like small surprises, small delights that exceed our expectations. But we do want to be able to rely on those expectations a bit, too -- things that are complete novelties are difficult to navigate, and generally not pleasurable at all.

For another example, consider artists that completely break with artistic traditions -- they often receive a cold welcome from the public and from art critics, who need time to understand the new thing in order to enjoy it.

The completely predictable is boring. But the completely novel is unsettling. Predictable novelty is pleasurable.

Dr. Nelson has a number of interesting papers on his web site at UC San Diego.

Free e-book: Painless Insight Planning helps you set objectives, avoid wasting money on qualitative research

 

I've refined a number of tools to use in my work over the years. A few of them are tools designed to help clients in one way or another. This free e-book, Painless Insight Planning, is one of these tools with some narrative wrapped around it.

[Download Painless Insight Planning now]

One thing I've found that is often a challenge at the start of a project is getting clear objectives. People may have a problem or concern, but it is often not clearly articulated.

And I can tell you one thing for certain: a good way to waste money on research is not having clear objectives at the beginning.  I know this sounds perfectly obvious, but it is an issue more often than you would suspect.

Sometimes the problem is clear, but other elements are not. Such as -- who could we get insight from, otherwise known as "the research target."

I can't sit down with everyone individually and work through this, as I do with clients. So I thought I would put the whole thing into an e-book that you can download and use as much as you want. And then you'll have clear objectives for your research projects. And the world will be in a better place.

Because we really need insights these days, more than ever. And people inside companies can't afford to waste money or appear to waste money, get fired and be unemployed. Suppliers like me also can't afford to waste client's money. We all need to ramp UP on the insight quality and the innovation / ideation, but keep a lid on costs. 

What's it worth to get this answer?

An even harder thing for many clients is figuring out how much to spend. They ask me, what will it cost? 

WRONG QUESTION!  WRONG QUESTION!  WRONG QUESTION! 

The right question is "what is it worth to get good information on this situation?"

I have created a nice little rule to help figure this out. Not a complicated ROI on research thing. Just a back-of-the-envelope, cocktail-napkin kind of formula that I call the 10 Times Value Rule. It's a great place to start figuring out what you should consider spending to get some insight into your problem / challenge / situation.

[Download Painless Insight Planning now]

Easy worksheets

I hate filling in forms. Most people do. So there aren't forms in this book. There are easy worksheets designed to spur creative thinking to get you started. Here's an example.

Bonus content

If you download the book and actually read it, you'll find a link to some bonus content that will save you even more time. 

A small request - no strings attached

I'm simply putting this handy e-book out there for free with no strings attached. You can even add this e-book (with no changes) to your own site or blog for your own customers and prospects to use.  But I do have a small request.

If you think this e-book is of any value, please add this blog to your RSS feed reader. I also send out a newsletter about six times a year. You can add yourself to that list if you want to hear about other e-books I plan to release, or just get the newsletter. You can check out the previous issues here.

Thanks for reading. And good luck with your insights research projects!

[Download Painless Insight Planning now]

Innovation breakthroughs: now really IS the time or why recycling does not work for insights.

 

People are cutting back. [Oh, you heard that, too?]

I've had a couple of projects cancelled or postponed indefinitely in the last short while. One of them was to help an organization identify new markets so they could escape the commodity price-cycle trap of their current markets.

This is exactly the kind of project you definitely should not cancel -- projects that will help you crack new revenue sources. So what will this company do instead? I'm guessing, they will just push harder at existing markets, and find themselves in the same place a year or two down the road.

While having these thoughts, I bumped into a nice article in Marketing Profs. [Now that the economy is tanking, maybe we can catch up on our reading.] The quote from Jeffrey Immelt leapt off the page.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt has established a class of projects now well-known as "imagination breakthroughs," consisting of ideas that are "really hard or really important" and might generate significant revenues over a three-year period, the time that GE usually takes to implement a new idea. "Imagination breakthroughs are a protected class of ideas — safe from the budget slashers because I've blessed each one."

If it takes you a couple of years or more to really get an idea off the ground, then the fuzzy front end you cut now will leave you in even more serious glue in two to three years time. And if you kill the stuff already in the pipeline, you're not going to have anything new to launch in 2009 either.

I really wish clients would say instead: "Can you get me something substantive with less money?" That's a better challenge than dropping the idea creation process.

Caveat

The article this came from is filled with good ideas from the Zaltmans. But like many of their ilk, they firmly believe that no approach other than their technique (individual metaphorical interviews) can get to the good stuff. Not true, in my experience.

"These deeper ideas are not available from survey responses to statements such as "financial planning is difficult" or in focus groups where each participant has on average about 10 minutes of air time." 

OK, you are definitely not going to get these deep meanings from a survey. I agree. But individual interviews are not the gold standard either.

There may still be people running focus groups with 12 bodies in them. However, most of the kids I hang with have shifted to small groups when they are using a group discussion method. Small being five or six. And researchers frequently add advance activities such as blogging / electronic diaries / collage assignments / videos / you name it. And there's no rule about 90 minutes or two hours either -- you can keep people humming along for three hours quite easily. And yes, you can uncover metaphorical meanings in focus groups, in online research methods, and in many other ways.

In truth, the generation of insight has a lot more to do with the skill, knowledge and art inside the researcher's head than the method employed. There's no method going that guarantees insight.

As anthropologist Grant McCracken has said, the proof is in the pudding. If you got insight, you got insight. If you didn't, you didn't.

I have friends in the marketing world who have used Gerry's Zmet technique to great effect. And I believe all of methodological infighting and territory claiming must defer to this. If the method works, the method is good. The proof of the pudding has nothing to do with the theory of the pudding or the method of the pudding. The proof of the pudding is a client who says: "This was illuminating. I understand my consumer and my market in ways that I did not, could not before."

Back to the main point

This is no time to be cutting your future revenue streams by shutting down the insight machine. In fact, if you plan to be standing when things turn around, you should be cranking up the insight machine. Certainly, your customers and consumers brains are grinding away on many things right now. Not a good time to recycle some old insights.

Resources:

How to Foster "Workable Wondering", by Gerald Zaltman and Linday Zaltman. In marketing profs, reprinted from HBS.

The Zaltman Method, by Grant McCracken in his blog, 2006.

Understanding people by cultivating a sense of empathy: OR there's a reason we call it a deep dive

If you want to get deep insights into people and what they are up to in the great canvas of their lives, you must cultivate a very good sense of empathy. Good in the way a microtome slices off a tissue sample that is so fine, if you touch it, it disappears. And also good in the way of large earth-moving equipment, with the ability to shovel a lot of data around. This is industrial strength empathy.

It's different than the kind of empathy of people who are natural empaths. Most people with an MBTI feelings preference have a pretty strong sense of empathy. It's often a sympathetic empathy, it seems to me -- a Kleenex tissue of empathy, a warm hug of empathy, sometimes a down jacket. A lovely thing to have around, it's warm and protective and frankly pretty useful in a great many situations.

A good researcher needs the other thing.

Which is why, no doubt about it, the people who have truly world class empathy of this analytical kind are a bit strange. I have talked to a few. They acknowledge that they have lost, to an extent, the ability to interact with the world in the way others do, unaware of themselves interacting. The watcher is always watching, just a little bit.

Now I don't claim to be one of these world class empaths. But I'm always studying, taking my earth-mover out for drives and practicing manoeuvres. I'm taking the night classes, as it were.

There are times it feels like dangerous work.

For example, yesterday, I was doing a little exercise called "illumination" that Synectics has. I took home an insight about our consumer, and created a little talk to bring it to life. Having thought about it for several hours, (on top of the days of work already into the project), I gave my five minute talk to our creative team in the voice of our consumer. It was intended to be amusing but informative. And suddenly the real person I'd been envisioning crashed right through. I felt the weight of all her worries, all her hopes, all her dreams, just for an instant, the reality of her life. It was like something on an old Star Trek episode. Almost overwhelming.

How much easier to think of consumers as cardboard cutouts.

I've learned, for the most part, to avoid detailed stories about detainees in some godforsaken place. I want to bear witness, but I also know that I will take in a little too much. And I can't extract those experiences from memory as easily as they go in.

Which is why I'm kind of not thinking too hard about what people are going through right now with this financial crisis. The ocean of human experience is over the seawall, and the storm is still raging. Dreams are being battered, people are hanging on to broken things just for the sake of hanging on to something.

These are difficult times. We haven't even really seen the extent of the difficulty. But it's also a time of new dreams, new heroic ideas, and that is an exciting thing to witness.

One thing is certain. There will be diving.

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)

Self-expression in the office: Staples M line

In our culture, we are all engaged in a labour of self-creation. We create and present the self to the world through all of our many choices -- where we live, the kind of work we do, our hobbies, our clothes, our accessories. This is the essence of a consumer culture, and a major reason that brands are so important. Brands are signifiers of meanings, and this project of self-creation is a process of building and communicating meanings. [Yes, we are getting to office supplies.]

Staples has discovered that office supplies are a form of self-expression. Even those that can go get a pen from a stationery closet spend their own money on office supplies. Fascinating too that men spend more:

"Staples reports that consumer appetite for such things is so strong that they spend their own money rather than charge it as an business expense. On average, workers spend $90.14 per year on office supplies that reflect their style, with men spending an average of $134.00 per year, and women spending $101.00." (MediaPost, May 13, 2008)

Personally, I know that the ring-bound notebooks and classification file folders I take into meetings have garnered comments more than once from clients. [And I wish they were a little more unique. If Staples was offering classification folders with style, I'd be putting in an order today. I have to work with what's shown below.]

We know that expensive pens have been the mark of executive for years. In some industries, it's not just a pen, it has to be a fountain pen. Or a felt-pen or gel-writer if you are a creative type. And either a limited-edition design, or a genuine antique.

Staples has research that suggests a huge majority -- 82% -- notice office supplies such as "an eye-catching file folder or pen", more than they notice shoes, for example. Which totally makes sense -- how much time do you spend looking under the table at meetings anyway?

Staples has launched this venture with a completely un-Staples looking web site.

If you visit a few of these pages you'll immediately see the message of indulgence. These items are being presented like cupcakes and petits-fours. There are charming push-pins shaped like old typewriter keys, and paperclips too fancy to throw away.

The look of these materials suggests to me that Staples has learned a lot from the success of the scrap-booking industry, where people spend hours just to make a single photograph look nice.

Susan's take:

Some brands are all about the organization. It's all "we, we, we". But customers are all about "me, me, me". Buy Apple and it says you are a person who appreciates good design, and you are probably creative too. Buy Starbucks and it says you are an urban sophisticate with a European sense of style. But what the heck does HSBC say about you? What does Fidelity say about you? What does AT&T say about you? In my view, not much -- most services brands are about the service, not about the customer. Virgin is one of the real exceptions to this pattern.

For readers:

Our assignment this week is to see how the Blackberry brigade adds their unique style to their berry. All observations welcome. Extra credit for photos or links to Flickr, etc.

Resources:

Staples Says File Folders Sum Up One's Personal Style by Sarah Mahoney, MediaPost, May 13, 2008

Using personality type in marketing

I wrote earlier this week about personality type and how it affects fitness activity choices.

I've been interested in the topic of personality preferences and how this influences consumer behavior for years, but there's been very little done on this topic, which has always surprised me.

On a recent foray to seek out research, I found this bibliography, which is pretty thin for such a big topic. CAPT maintains a listing of all research into psychological type. While it may not be complete, it's usually the best place to start.

The dominant ethos of people who work in psychological type is that it is a tool useful for personal growth and development, useful to help people communicate better, and good for organizational and management development applications. There is a real resistance to going outside that realm, as somehow cheapening the use of the MBTI instrument.

The result of this is that if you want to include personality type in marketing research, you are looking at custom work, for the most part.

There is one instrument I am aware of that incorporates psychological type in a meaningful way, and translates type preferences into values orientation. It's the Market Evaluer tool. I've heard Maddie Hamill speak at QRCA events, and have been intrigued to use the evaluer instrument in a project. [Which has not happened yet. I think they were offering free trials at the last conference, but being the ENTP type that I am, all the materials from that conference are still sitting in a pile on my credenza waiting to be sorted, filed, or otherwise utilized].

You don't have to get fancy with this stuff to take personality type into account, however. A considerable amount of research is readily available on type and career choices. So, for example, if you know you are marketing to nurses, you know you are dealing with people who are predominantly Feeling in their judging orientation: they make decisions based on what is good for people. Hospital administrators, on the other hand, don't share that outlook.

Virtually every profession has been studied in this way, from airline pilots to medical specialties. Not only this, but if you understand the language of type, you can see these patterns emerging often through how people communicate.

While type is a finely nuanced field, some of the big differentiators are readily apparent in people. whether we love routine or hate it; whether we love detail or hate it; whether we love closure or want to keep gathering new information; whether we value facts more or ideas more. And so on.

Where we go wrong in marketing

We all tend to wonder why the rest of the world is not more like us. And we communicate in ways that make sense to us. Here's the problem -- even if your temperament is shared by a lot of people, it's not shared by everyone.

Here's a good example in action. I just finished a project where I talked to a large number of retail sales people. They told me that customers didn't care for the aesthetics of the brand in question, much preferring the design qualities of brand y. I passed this information along to the project team. At which point, the brand manager said, "I don't understand that. I like the design of our brand much better than brand y."

Well, it's okay to say that. But it's a so-what as far as improving your marketing performance goes.

The rest of the world is not like you. You may have suspected this before. And now you know.

Resources
If you want to know more about psychological type, there are many links and resources listed here.

Temperament is a different lens for viewing psychological type, and the dominant thinker in temperament continues to be David Keirsey. His very informative web site is here.

The value of novelty

Driving through a heavy rainstorm late one night, I had the chance to listen to a wonderful interview with Jerome Kagan on CBC's Ideas. (Unfortunately it is not available on a podcast.)

Kagan, you may know, is one of the great minds in developmental psychology. He has studied the nature vs nurture thing for decades. Kagan, and others, have clearly shown that some human temperaments are inborn. One of these is how much we enjoy new stimuli. About 40% of people enjoy new stimuli a lot. About 20% really dislike change and novelty except on a carefully managed basis. These tendencies are managed better as we grow up -- we don't go all stiff in our cribs and cry. But the tendency is still there.

For all humans, Kagan says, "we enjoy novelty that we understand." Well worth contemplating when thinking about customer experience, communications, and most anything else that involves human beings.

For example, we enjoy a new shampoo, a new fragrance, a new spice mix. We may not enjoy a new job quite so much. A new world order, that's seriously stressing.

We enjoy novelty that we understand. Words of wisdom.

The need for instant anywhere anything: Hair Pod

We seem to want to get anything we want on our own schedule and pretty much anywhere.
A big part of this trend is the desire to wedge something useful, fun or productive into any little snippet of time. Everyone is in a rush. We all feel like we are behind. We want little luxuries, but we want them in the most convenient possible way.
Which is why getting your nails done or having a quick massage in an airport is happening, as I reported on a while back.

Organizations that recognize and respond to this desire are finding ways to wedge little experiences in to the places where we have to wait. The latest one to cross my path is this: Hair Pod.

Hair Pod is an instant hair salon set up to do trims. It looks like it's mainly targeted at guys, but I can think of a few times a quick bang trim would have been well worth it on a trip.

There are a number of interesting design features, including a vacuum system to clear away all the cut hair, a mirror, storage for luggage / shopping and a coat cupboard. And the whole thing folds up and has closing panels when not in use.

It feels like the natural evolution of the shoe-shine stand.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Reshma Anand for sending this along to me.

The evolution of the hotel lobby: just plug your MP3 in here

On a recent trip through the lobby of the Sheraton in downtown Toronto, I noticed these unusual rocking chairs. They have audio plugs and holders in the arm, and speakers behind the headrest. The idea is that you plug in your MP3 player, and you can listen to your music through the speakers in the chair.

While I was taking the pictures, one of the hotel staff told me that the chairs are really popular with guests. They are usually facing the interior courtyard (which has a waterfall and large trees), and guests can look out at the courtyard and relax to their own music.

I think this reflects a desire to be part of the social milieu at the same time as having a very personally engineered sound environment: headphones shut you out a bit too completely.

I noticed something similar while downhill skiing over the holidays. Many skiers now wear headphones, and ski jackets are sold with specialized pockets and wire carriers for this same purpose. But skiing is more social than it appears, and I witnessed several instances where the headphones were interfering with communication in small groups. One woman said to her companion: "I'm talking loud enough, your headphones are why you can't hear what I'm saying."

Thoughtful quote for today

Reading Karen von Hahn recently, I pondered her evolution from the writer of the Super Shopper column -- to the writer of Noticed. With this remark, taken from her analysis of the current incarnation of the hooded sweatshirt, I believe she has officially crossed over and is now a professional noticer:

"Nothing is just itself any more. Everything out there is a symphony of signifiers, a mille feuille of meaning, encapsulating -- just like the print hoodie -- many layers at the same moment in time." [Karen von Hahn, Globe & Mail, 10 Nov 07]

Although I enjoy her column, this journey represents a journey we all seem to be on. By way of evidence, let's look at what has happened to the Women's section of the daily newspaper.

It goes something like this...

If you want to write in the LifeStyle section now, you need to aspire to cultural observer status, and even better if you can bring some interpretive chops to the party.

As we all engage in a life mission to make meaning, with few formal rules to guide us, we need our experts more than ever.

Web 2.0 watch: why Facebook is the new LinkedIn, or something like that

Perhaps, like me and one of my blog buddies, Stephanie Weaver, you have been avoiding the whole Facebook thing. You thought it was for 'young people'. You thought it was about getting hooked up, and not in a business-kind of way.
So did I.

Then I saw who was starting to fool around on Facebook. So I came to the party, albeit a bit late. [I'm hoping to claim fast-follower status here ... is it too late for that??]

LinkedIn is a great application in terms of business contact information. It's much easier to maintain LinkedIn than it is to maintain your own Outlook contacts. So it's a bit like one of those updating services, but without the annoying e-mails form other people's executive assistants, asking you to update your business card. The problem with LinkedIn is that it is kind of ... dull. Static. There's no sense of connection.

Enter Facebook. Once I got on to it, I could see why it is so magnetic. You get the feeling -- however foolish and unfounded it may be -- that you are keeping in touch with people. It's actually kind of fun.

What we really need is some kind of marriage of these two things.

More important... there are many more commercial applications being tested, just like there have been in Second Life. Here are two I'm interested in right now -- stodgy banks, OK?  But they are experimenting, and trying to find their way.

Royal Bank - RBC Financial -- has something called Campus Connection. And TD Canada Trust has the Money Lounge.

I had no idea there were so many employee groups. Bank branches. Store locations. You name it. I think the corporate IT people are trying to shut this kind of thing down, just as they have with blogs. Several of my clients would like to be able to monitor blogs as part of their work, however they are blocked by the corporate firewall. [I know, I know  ... !!!]

What to do, what to do...
Don't be thinking you've seen it all. This stuff seems to be picking up speed every day. I'm wondering if it might be a more useful collaboration tool than the online thing I've been paying big bucks for and nobody seems to want to use.

And don't be thinking you've got to get it right, waiting on the sidelines. How well did that strategy serve anyone in the early days of the web??? I'm not saying, go blow the bankroll. What I am saying is ...

Start experimenting. In small ways. With audiences that might be more receptive. Be transparent, in case you didn't already know. No fake Facebooking, OK?

Give it a little budget and resources. If I can spend half the day on this stuff without even trying, building something meaningful is going to take actual time. And probably some out-of-pocket cash. Maybe not huge, but don't ask people to do it on the side of their desk. That's not the way to success.

But you also need to get the learning started. Soon. It's September... what are you doing this month?

Resources

I found some of Grant McCracken's posts on this topic quite informative. Try this one: How Social Networks Work

Same thing for Sean Moffitt, aka Buzz Canuck. You might want to start with this post: Facebook: the United Nations of Digital Life.