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Marketing professionals love talking about consumer
experience. Terms like engaging, responsive, and targeted make up the usual jargon when we take part in any
conversation on consumer experience. My interest here is not to double down on
the jargon. Rather than convincing you that I have the formula that will make
your consumer experience ‘engaging’ I will take a step back....
If I want to
convince you of something is perhaps of re-thinking the value of consumer experience: the term is not esoteric or ambiguous. It is, simply put, the way in which your clients, regulars or buyers relate
and think about your product. There are a myriad of ways in which this can be done.
However, in order to be engaging and awesome companies must first understand
what their consumers want and expect. It is at this stage where we tend to
simplify and assume too much about what our customers want and what our product
delivers.
There are in particular three aspects that deserve our attention: 1)
numbers are wonderful, but they can trick us into making unjustified
generalizations—acting in fact like a blindfold on our strategic objectives, 2)
qualitative data is many times overestimated and we sometimes exaggerate the
value of their conclusions—this is what I call the focus group confusion, and
3) many B2B companies tend to dismiss the whole consumer experience discussion
as not applicable to them—the truth of the matter is that, if they do, they are
missing out on a valuable opportunity to get to know their clients and to leverage
the value of their offering.
1.
The numbers blindfold
Scholars like Deirdre McCloskey have blamed
economists of being gullible when it comes to the use of mathematical sophistication:
the more complex the mathematics the more people will take an economic argument
seriously. Her point is simple: numbers are not relevant in and of themselves and thinking otherwise is foolish.
Consumer and market research can be plagued with
numbers, which usually tend to confirm most of the intuitions that motivated it
from the start. Numbers will allow you to define boundaries for your overall
strategic goals. Numbers, however, are often used to make generalizations about
consumer behavior. As Nicolas Taleb’s argued in his Black Swan: be always cautious with generalizations and relying too much on predictions. In particular avoid simplifying your product’s audience. People
may naturally share opinions, but if you truly want to understand your
customers then segmentation and qualitative analysis cannot be ignored. To
learn and eventually create a consumer for your product—think IPod or
Walkman—simplifying is not the way to go.
Instead, learn, gather and synthesize consumer information, in order to
create memorable experiences.
2.
The focus group confusion:
Many research companies and a few agencies love making
focus groups. Some even sneer on the quantitative researchers who are unable to
grasp the richness of analysis of a focus group. The truth however is that
focus groups are anything but absolute truths. There results can never be taken
as a last word and comparison with other sources is always desirable.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink
is a must read in this respect. He discusses in detail the, perhaps now
exemplary case, of what can happen when a company is too complacent with
conclusions on consumer behavior product of focus groups and of controlled
psychological experiments in general. The case in point was the 1980’s Pepsi challenge, which asserted that if
faced with a blind test, consumers would always choose Pepsi over Coke. What
happened next is what is truly remarkable. Coca Cola conducted blind test
replicating the Pepsi challenge and actually concluded that the results were
correct: people preferred Pepsi to Coke. Coke’s move was to bring to the market
New Coke, which in a word proved to be a marketing disaster.
The lesson then is: never use focus groups! ... I’m
kidding of course or half kidding. The reason is that controlled experiments
are truly that: controlled circumstances. These circumstances are almost never
identical or even similar to the normal circumstances under which a product is
consumed. Take the Pepsi challenge, for instance. When does a cola (or
soda/pop) consumer will buy a coke, take a sip of it and then proceed to
discuss its taste, in lecture fashion, with a third party?
3.
The B2B deception
For many companies the issue of customer experience is
completely pushed aside by appealing to their B2B nature: ‘we don’t have
customers, we have clients and they are companies so consumer experience is not
relevant for us’. Right (?) Well, wrong actually. B2B changes but does not
eliminate the importance of understanding and creating the right customer
experience. There are two aspects that must be taken into account in the case
of B2B: 1) who are the final users of your product or service and 2) what is
the relationship between users and partner managers. If your user’s opinion is
unknown then your company is missing out on a huge opportunity to learn about
what works and doesn’t with your user experience. If, however, your
relationship with your client is mediated by a partner manager or simply by
someone other than the actual user, this does raise a challenge, which is, in
any case, worthwhile taking head on. The strategic goal is to get your client
to understand the merits of the unique user experience that your product or
your service delivers. Once she gets how important this is for your company,
she will be interested in, either allowing you to have direct contact with your
final user, or she will be more than willing to relay valuable information
coming from your final user to you. The goal is that both parties understand
that doing so entails a win-win situation for both.
There are, to be sure, plenty of ways to reconfigure
the way you look at consumer experience. The lesson, if there is one, is not to
forget it nor think you can do without knowing it. Keep an eye on this second
season of writing in the factish—subscription
is completely free and you will not be getting any unsolicited emails. Just
remember: sharing is caring.
Written by Daniel Vargas Gómez
Written by Daniel Vargas Gómez
