STRATEGY CENTRAL

I had a jaw drop moment while reading Bill Taylor’s most recent HBR blog post, Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand.  Although the article is about brands and organizational culture, the story he told about the way USAA employees learn to meet the needs of their customers was very compelling and I realized right away that you’d want to hear about this.

His article highlights USAA (the insurance and financial-services firm that only does business with active or retired members of the U.S. military and their families) and their intense drive to meet the needs of their customer.  They do that by building a culture that seeks to understand the life that our military and their families live.

This is where the article brought me to a jaw-drop moment.  USAA employees are known for their empathy.  They develop that empathy through a series of immersion activities.  For example, when they’re about to start training USAA team members:

• “Get a ‘deployment letter’ like the ones real soldiers get: ‘Report to the personnel processing-facility’ tomorrow, the letter reads, and get your affairs in order beforehand.’”
• “Eat MREs (meals ready to eat) on many occasions during their training, to get a ‘taste’ for the life of a soldier”
• “Walk around in 65-pound backpacks.”
• “Read actual letters from soldiers in the field to their families back home.”

All of this is part of a strategy that “USAA calls it ‘Surround Sound’ — immerse employees in the real life and emotional needs of customers.”  One consultant said, “There is nobody on this earth who understands their customer better than USAA.”

Wow!  Isn’t what we all do worth that kind of immersion?  Wouldn’t we all like to be known as the organization that understands their customers better than anyone else!

What would it have to look like for our teams to really understand our customers in this way?

What can actually pull off as a marketer or a leader?  Can you really expect to please everybody?  No.  Can you really expect to satisfy all segments?  No.  Can you pull broadly from across demographics?  No.

You’ve got to love Seth Godin’s take on marketing and leadership.  Here’s his take on the two choices of every marketer or leader:

The first is to realize that people will never ever be satisfied
with you, they’ll even whine when you give away something for free.
Embrace the whining and realize that this attitude gives you an
opportunity to answer the question with, "no! Wait, there’s more!"

The second is to understand that a hug and a smile from a true friend is it. Along
the way, marketers of stuff have tried to offer that stuff as a
replacement to the thing that
children/consumers/employees/customers/spouses really seek, which is
connection and meaning and belonging and love.

Can’t be all things to all people.  Can provide the good stuff for your customer.  Isn’t it joyous when it happens?

You’ve seen them buying elsewhere.  You’ve wondered what you’ve got to do to get them.  But have you done anything about it?  Mike Wagner has a great post with an exercise that will help you get them.

One of Peter Drucker’s best known contributions is a list of the right questions.  One of the right questions is, "Who is your customer?"  Do you know who your customer is?  Some of us do, but many of us are really designed to settle for whoever shows up.

Loved this line from a New York Times article on Herb Kelleher’s (the founder of Southwest Airlines) retirement.  When asked what has kept Southwest successful all these years, Robert W. Mann Jr., the president of R. W. Mann & Company, an airline consulting firm said:

“The single focus that has kept Southwest on the road to success is
that they always knew who their customers were: they were people who
had to make the choice to either fly or drive."

Do you know who your customer is?

What are you aware of in the experience of your customers?  There’s a concept in Peter Sheahan’s Flip that’s really got potential…don’t think it’s 100% accurate…but with a little tweaking it could be very helpful.  It’s referred to as the Total Ownership Experience and he uses a diagram like this to describe the concept.  The basic idea?

• Service describes the tip of the experience iceberg.  It’s how it "feels to buy your product or service."
• Form is how it "feels to use your product or service."  It’s about "design, appearance and ergonomics."
• Functionality is about how it "feels to own the product or service."
• Story is about how it "feels for customers to say they own the product or service."

Personal caveat: I’m pretty sure it’s just that I’m not buying the use of the terms "form" and "function".  If you’re into the idea that "form follows function" you can see the dilemma here.  It should be that functionality describes how it feels to use the product or service.  Then I’d use a term that Sheahan uses later for the next layer, "aspirational inside", to describe how it feels to own the product or service.

I’m going to unpack the concept over the next few days, but think about it like an iceberg…not a pyramid.  Makes a lot of sense.  So much more going on in terms of the total ownership experience.  This is more than an interesting concept.  Like in Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow there is definitely something here that all of us could benefit from understanding.  It’s not simple or obvious, but with some thought I bet we can give our customers a better experience.

One of the most influential books I read this year (2007) was Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.  Really a great book with lots to think about in the area of exceeding your customer’s expectations.  One of the great aspects of the book was the reading list at the end of every chapter and one of the books cited was How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman.

I’m about 120 pages into it and suffice it to say this is an interesting book.  Not light reading.  Not holiday reading.  But definitely the kind of information that could transform the way you look at your customer.  Want a taste?  Think about this:

"Ninety-five percent of thinking takes place in our unconscious minds—that wonderful, if messy, stew of memories, emotions, thoughts, and other cognitive processes we’re not aware of or that we can’t articulate."

What’s it mean?  Ponder the idea that 95% of all the thinking your customer is doing is happening at a level that even they don’t understand.  The other 5% is the part attempting to make sense of the decisions they’ve really already made.

Hmmmmm.  What’s that say about how we’re designing what we’re doing?

What I’m loving about the book?  There’s more than just where things are unfathomable.  Lot’s here too about how to dig deep enough to understand how to design it to appeal to the "cognitive unconscious."

What do you give to your customers?  Ever thought about it?  Oh, I know you’ve thought about it…but have you ever really thought about the intangibles that you give them?  And I know this doesn’t apply as obviously to all of us.  But it does apply.  It’s just something that’s not obvious.  Here’s what I’m talking about:

What if we decided that we were going to give our customers the joy of discovering something new?  Or what if we decided that we were going to give them

I was over at the Mavericks at Work blog today.  Polly LaBarre, one of the authors of Mavericks at Work had a really insightful piece about Starbucks.  Here’s the paragraph that really caught my attention:

"Sure, customers love a good deal, but what they love even more is
feeling like they’ve discovered something new. Increasingly, the best
brands are waking up to the fact that the way to establish an enduring
connection with customers is not to push their own stuff, but to act as
a host to a whole universe of stuff they think will click with people
based on shared values—to introduce them to new things, make them
smarter, help them feel more connected to the front edge of culture."

Or how about this one:

"Marketing is all about leading people down a path, but the tightest,
most passionate connections are forged when people discover something
on their own."

Interesting, don’t you think?  Couldn’t we give our customers an intangible like that?  Isn’t that what we should be aspiring to do?  There’s a lot in this paragraph.  Tons.  But what if we could just do that one thing?  Deliver on the idea of helping our customers experience the joy of discovering something new?

By the way, I still think Mavericks at Work is one of the best books out in a number of years.  If you haven’t read it you should and you can pick it up right here.

They’ve got a great series going over at Church Marketing Sucks.  Don’t be fooled by the name.  We all need this information.  Lessons In Not Sucking is packed with great insights and ideas on how to improve your communication and creativity.  Today’s post is all about Knowing Your Audience.  We’ve talked quite a bit about knowing the mindset of your customer.  This is a great take with some really good action steps.  My favorite?

8. Observe their behavior.
This is the opposite of immersing yourself in what they do. Instead of
doing what they do, observe how they interact with what they do. See
what makes them cry, what makes them laugh. What scares them? What
moves them to action?

I think we all probably struggle here.  It is tough to really put ourselves in the shoes of our audience or our customer.  But without it…we’re never really going to reach them.

Be sure and check out the whole post.  Good stuff.

What is your organization’s goal for customer satisfaction?  Are you working as hard as you can to meet their expectations?  Staying up late, pulling in focus groups and painstakingly surveying first time guests?  Turns out that in most cases that won’t be enough to vault to the top of the heap.  In fact, according to Chip Conley, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, satisfaction (meeting a customer’s basic expectations) is only the beginning.

Only the beginning?  Yep!  What comes next?  It’s about understanding desires and then even meeting unrecognized needs.  Ever even think about anything beyond taking care of basic expectations?  Ever go the extra mile and work at discovering what their desires are?  Hmmmmm.  This is a different ball game.

When you’re making a decision about a sales or marketing issue how carefully are you looking at the mindset of your customer?  In other words, does the mindset of the customer enter into your equation?  How early do you go there?  After the proposal is written?  Before?

Amazing how many of us only think about the customer when we have to or when our first attempt fails.  Careful discipline.  Learning from our mistakes.  Remembering our mistakes.  All of these should lead us to the point where we bring the customer’s needs right into our planning…but they rarely do.

One of the characteristics of Peter Drucker’s writing is his constant awareness of the customer’s point of view.   Drucker wrote that "in marketing one does not begin with the question: ‘what do we want?’  One begins with the questions: ‘What does the other party want?  What are its values?  What are its goals?  What does it consider results? The Daily Drucker, p. 135).’"

Ever really slow down long enough to think through what your customer really wants?  Here’s the crazy part.  For lots of us, the customer is not easily defined.  For lots of us, the customer could turn out to be any of several kinds of people.  My definition?  The customer is the one who hasn’t yet gotten to the inside.  And my question is, "What would we have to value to reach that customer?"