This morning, I had an interesting experience. Among many emails, tweets and webinar offerings, I managed to expose myself blindly to two that focused on one challenge I have to overcome the most – talking too much and listening too little. Interestingly enough, neither of the messages was specifically targeting individual or style shortcomings, and the subject line of these presentations was not about listening skills. If this is not a moment of serendipity, then I don’t know what is. BTW it also synch with my favorite definition of serendipity: “…is when you come to look for a needle in a stack of hay, and you end up finding a farmer’s daughter.”
The first piece of content is a video from http://www.entselling.com/ that talks about challenges of entrepreneurial selling and is not focused on the selling or listening style at all. It is very good and I strongly recommend it to any startup team, but the listening piece resonated with me the most. I’ve been trained on the importance of this skill for selling many years ago, and judging by my performance at the time, I have even learned to apply it. However, as it may be obvious to people who know me, it is not one of my natural qualities . The more I get excited about the subject of conversation, the less patient I get with listening to my conversation partners, particularly if I think I already figured out what they are trying to communicate.
I may be right about that, but it doesn’t create a great conversation experience, nor does it make them feel that they have been heard and that I actually do understand their concerns or problems I am proposing to address with my product or service. Apparently, it is a very common problem undermining many startup founders who are understandably excited about their creations to a detriment of their potential customers’ comfort, and subsequently a sales success. Maybe I should start looking for a startup founders “shut up and listen” support group. Please let me know if such a group exists.
The second piece is even more interesting and was presented by Rebel Brown at the Defy Gravity webinar sponsored by TreeHouseInteractive. Rebel is a very dynamic and passionate speaker, and she was talking about many marketers trying to use social media as traditional content broadcasting channel. The main lesson I took out of this presentation is about a challenge of institutionalized listening that needs to become a part of personalized conversation if a brand wants to be successful in social media. I suppose that no brand will be able to survive without social engagement with their customers, as the customers are creators of a brand.
“Advertising can help you sell good products, but only your customers can help you build a great Brand!”
The challenge is in learning what is important to your customers and communicating with them about this, as opposed to focusing on your product or your brand. I think the most difficult part is to not assume that we already know what it is, and not be afraid to learn from these communications.
Rebel also made a great point about the practice of counting followers and “likes” as a result of social media efforts. I will paraphrase it here as, “Do not confuse tactical metrics with actual meaningful results.” Let’s face it – these only exist because they are easy to count. Their relevance to business outcomes is very questionable, and the only thing they help to learn is how to manipulate or game the counting mechanisms.
I don’t think a “real” marketer can be helped by a mere support group or volunteer 12-step program. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a true “rehab.” All you need is a recovering marketing celebrity lending their name to this venture.
“You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” Those are well known and accepted words of wisdom that have been taught to thousands of MBA students for decades. There is a lesser popular truth though—that measuring wrong things can really hurt your business. Definition, selection and design of appropriate, balanced and concise metrics, as well as the processes for continuous delivery of these metrics, are the key management challenges for every organization.
1. Focusing on the “wrong” metrics will create unintended results.
One of the more graphic examples of “wrong” metrics is a ratio of successful convictions, widely used to measure success or reputation of public prosecutors. This one causes US taxpayers to waste hundreds of millions of dollars in court costs, compensation for wrongful imprisonment and lost productivity every year. Essentially this metric is measuring a percentage of tried cases that result in conviction against the total number of cases tried by the prosecutor. The higher the percentage of convictions, the more “successful” the prosecutor is considered to be regardless of how well justice is served, how many lives are destroyed and how much financial damage is inflicted.
Another example is the evaluation of a Product Manager performance based on the attainment of product forecast goals. While I am familiar with a popular definition of a Product Manager’s role as a “Product CEO,” the organizational reality does not often support this definition, as product managers rarely have administrative authority to enforce their decisions and act mostly as influencers. It is intellectually dishonest to keep them accountable for a result of a sum of aggregated decisions made by a multitude of people, but most importantly it does not help to bring desired improvements in products performance.
2. Focusing on unbalanced metrics will promote bad behavior.
Performance is often measured by a singular metric, yet people are rarely expected to behave one-dimensionally. Everyone knows that a lot of digressions will be forgiven to a salesman who consistently makes his quota, even though his lack of desire and/or skill to forecast costs your company serious hits to profit margin. Imagine it is the end of a quarter and you are deeply discounting your product in a desperate attempt to make your company revenue numbers, just to see your “best” performer bringing in a “bluebird” deal you had no visibility of. He just caused you to give away profits, and you did not need to sacrifice for “please sign today” deals. A secondary measurement attached to accuracy of forecast and associated with commission structure can dramatically improve a company’s profitability.
3. Concise metrics promote action.
Conversely, the convoluted metrics are a waste of time, expense and opportunity. Many Customer Satisfaction measurements are falling into this category because they are often too general, and the best cause of action you may take is to do more studies. Most companies do not even consider competitive influences on their customer’s assessment of their satisfaction with their products or services. Unless feedback from customer analysis of every key component of customer experience is continuously conducted, and in relation to competitive options available to the customers, it is very difficult to figure out why overall Customer Satisfaction is moving higher or lower, who should take any action and what kind of action should be taken.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that any performance metric has to be evaluated in a holistic model as it is very easy to come up with a clever way to improve one aspect of a specific performance at a detriment of the long-term well-being of the company as a whole.
The discussions on importance of innovation are all over Social Media. The calls for innovating ourselves out from the current economic malaise are coming from the President of Consumer Electronics Association to the President of the United States. In the words of Louis XIV (or was it Mel Brooks?) – “It’s good to be the King!” – for the rest of us it would be helpful to put some definitions around these terms. I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of innovation, but I like to be specific and want to offer some ideas for discussion.
So what differentiate commercially successful product or service from the innovation?
I would like to propose that successful products gain market traction, meet their sales forecasts and generate anticipated profit margins. Innovative products re-shape the market place, create new categories, and generate blockbusting profits. Innovative products successfully defeat the competitors’ assaults for long periods of time.
Development and introduction of successful products or services is a very challenging and risky endeavor, as we are well aware.
The Recent Portfolio Management Benchmark Survey sponsored by Planview, reported that only 52.3% of products meet with commercial success, while 21.2% were “killed prior to launch”. They did not specify the type of products or industries covered by this survey, but my personal experience pegs the success ratio well under 40% mark.
The risk level for innovation is even higher. It is estimated that only 1 out 3,000 new innovative ideas becomes a commercial success. We also know that most innovative products rarely have anything to do with technological inventions, but have everything to do with the scale of market adoption. Peter Dreker, the father of modern Management Science, wrote in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, that a 15 year “gestation” period is the average time observed between the time of an original invention and the time of its commercial realization.
We all know examples of such innovations as Ford T, Microsoft Word, iPod and iPad to name a few that dominated and still dominate their product categories. These are very different products, however the thought process, methods and techniques of the people who are behind the creation of these products, are a mystery we want to discover.
I would like to propose that the key difference between really good Product Managers and the Innovators is in a way they perceive and understand the markets they target.
While a Product Manager segments the markets in terms of demographics or personae for which they develop a product, an Innovator is focused on the Customer Experience of people, who struggle to use existing products to do their chores, and interprets these struggles into the definition of innovative vision for new generation products.
In other words they concentrate on improvement of EXPERIENCE as oppose to improvement of a PRODUCT.
With introductions of new tablets from major players taking place almost every week now, we decided to check the “pulse” of customer perceptions with products of this market segment. We limited the list to four most popular products in the interest of keeping the chart neat, but you can check the reputation of other tablets we track by going to http://tinyurl.com/aaidemo, entering the product name or number like “Apple iPad 2″ and clicking on “Submit” button. The system will aggregate and analyze customer reviews to calculate the reputation metrics for you and will let you read the reviews if you want to. You can also compare it to the other tablets reviewed.
Below is a screen shot of Customer Intelligence Analysis dashboard (in private beta) that compares scores of the attributes that are most important to their customers. The importance value is indicated on the right side and measured as an average percentage of all opinions expressed for these products.
Click on this image to enlarge it.
6,314 customer reviews were processed by the Opinion Miner® software to produce these results. It appears that Reliability (i.e. availability of the device’s to provide intended functionality to a customer) is the most important attribute of the tablet devices as 8.21% of all opinions expressed are focused on that part of the experience. Please contact us for the access to the detailed analysis of ALL attributes for these, or any other products of interest to you. Our customers use this information in their product planning process and for tuning their marketing communications.
Our research shows that customers who purchased Apple iPad 2 report their overall (CSI) expectations were exceeded by over 36%. It is 8% higher than the results achieved by original iPad and newly released Motorola Xoom.
These results, particularly about the newly introduced tablets, will most likely change within a few weeks as the customers will have more time and opportunity to experience them in wider range of circumstances, and more reviews will be posted online. We will continue to monitor the market segment perceptions as new products are introduced and keep you posted.
Social Media – customer generated content found on Amazon, Best Buy, Cnet and other popular consumer sites.
Total of 115 mobile phones from 9 major manufacturers were analyzed for this report. 18,194 customer reviews were located, processed and analyzed to measure difference between customer expectations and their experiences. The measurements are represented by a 2 point scale from 0 (unacceptable) to 2 (delighted), where 1 indicates that customers experienced exactly what they have expected.
As customers continue to buy these products and publish their reviews online, these findings, and conclusions drawn from them, may change over time. Judging by these products’ WoM history, no severe fluctuations in perception are likely within a monthly period.
Methodology:
Only customer’s generated content is analyzed. Consumers’ opinions, without ownership reference, are not part of this analysis. The customer generated content was located, authenticated, de-duped and aggregated for the analysis.
The findings are organized to facilitate discovery of the products that have negative impact on a Brand Equity, compare Customer Perception of the Brands and specific products that roll up to these Brands.
Discovery of specific product attributes and customer insights that help to understand why customers selected to purchase this product or passed it up for a competitor are not part of this analysis, but can be performed using Customer Intelligence dashboard.
Access to verbatim of the analyzed customer reviews can be obtained by following this link and entering the name of the phone associated with these reviews.
Findings
RIM has the highest average Brand reputation score (1.16) which means that Blackberry phones exceed average customer’ expectations by 16.1%, while Nokia and Motorola brands where most disappointing to their customers.
Apple and HTC brands are the only two other brands that on average exceeded their Customer expectations, yet further analysis shows that Samsung Galaxy S phones are among the most reputable products of this segment.
In order to understand the impact of specific products on Brand Equity we have applied additional filters:
1. All metrics have to be above 1(instead of just CSI) and
2. Only phones that are currently being sold are being considered.
The results are showing five phones, currently sold, that have the highest average Customer Satisfaction scores.
It is not surprising to find two Blackberry phones in the group, as the RIM is the top Brand when it comes to average customer satisfaction. However the fact that Sony and Samsung phones are among the top 5, yet the Brands have overall low standings, is telling that the “dogs” of these manufacturers are dragging down their Brand Equity.
This begs the question – which Sony and Samsung phones are these “dogs”, that destroy their Brand Equity?
To answer this question we need to apply a different filter that would expose the 5 lowest CSI scored phones from these Brands.
Functionally, only Samsung Glide was really an unsuccessful phone as indicated on the chart below.
A closer look at the Reliability reputation of these phones reveals the reason for customer disappointment.
All of this analysis was performed by using Market Intelligence Dashboard
It is very hard to sell to people we don’t understand. We turn to market research for help to understand who our best potential customers are. This quest usually starts with assumptions about common characteristics these people have to be predisposed to our products or services. It is common to assume that certain age and gender groups, or their residence, would make them more interested and capable to spend their money on our offering. Normally we come to these assumptions based on our personal experiences and intuition that we call “common sense”.
I wonder if that “common sense” is the same one that came with very accurate definition of what happen to us when we ASSUME?
I am sure that most people would prefer to KNOW instead of assuming and estimating, but there is no good way to know what does not exist yet. However there is a way of making better assumptions and estimates.
Steve Jobs is often and rightly credited as the genius behind Apple’s great success in assuming what consumers really want, but I wonder if there is a method behind his magic. Just how much sorcery is needed to figure out the requirements for iPod if you take a really close look on what customers, who purchased MP3 players, have experienced? Imagine watching these people figuring out tiny menus trying to find and play a music track they want to hear. Surely the age and gender may influence just how much of inconvenience one can tolerate, but the very fact that these people have made a decision to spend their money for something that is so imperfect, uniquely qualify them as a special market segment that supersede the traditional market segmentation criteria based on demographics.
The special applications tablets and digital e-readers were around for a few years and relatively large number of people and companies spent considerable time and money using these devices. Wouldn’t it make sense to learn from them what could make their investment even more compelling, and as the result attractive to even larger audience?
Consistency of the Apple success in introducing the products customers want suggests scalable methodology and transferable skill. I think the vision of current, successful products of your potential competitors as an early prototype of your future blockbuster is at the foundation of this methodology. The skill of creative analysis of customer experience with these products provides a detail road map to the future success.
Please RSVP by Monday, January 24. Registration is limited.
Questions? E-mail the Webcast Team or call 703-907-7797.
Description:
Participants will learn the methods, techniques and best practices for use of online Word of Mouth (WOM) to stimulate demand for CE products; methodology and tools for market research of social media to measure product reputation and customer satisfaction without breaking the bank.
Who should attend:
Marketing Product Managers, Market Research and Market Intelligence professionals, PR and Marketing Communications professionals interested in product and brand equity management.
Presenter Bio:
Gregory Yankelovich has been involved with customer centric product management and marketing, CRM process best practices and their automation for the last 15 years. He currently serves as CEO of Amplified Analytics, the firm that specializes in use of opinion mining and natural language processing technologies for analysis of CE Customer reviews, word of mouth and other forms of customer feedback.
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Here are some static examples (screen-shots) of customer feedback analysis for E-Readers and Tablets. The reason I mixed them together is because I have found that customers often investigate one before they purchase another. It appears that this category “divide” is largely historic and the two may eventually merge into one, just like laptops and notebooks have done.
This is the result of automated analysis of customer reviews published online. Opinions are measured on the scale from “0″ (unacceptable) to “2″ (delighted), with “1″ indicating satisfaction (expectation=experience). The importance is expressed by the line across bars and measured by a weighted average of total number of opinions about specific attribute of a specific product.
List of Attributes is extracted from customer’s conversations, not preconceived by any individual.
The dashboard controls allows a user to select and filter subsets of data for more targeted analysis. Below is an example of one-to-one comparison between Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook Color
Further “drilling” into the 5 (for example) most “important” to the E-Readers customers attributes may be achieved by selecting these attributes at the top left list of Attributes. The screen-shot below reveals that while both e-readers exceed their customers Usability expectations by a wide margin, Amazon holds 3% lead over the Nook Color which is within margin of error (+/- 7.2%). However its Reliability (second most important attribute) is 12% higher than Amazon Kindle. Both e-readers offer their customers a very good value exceeding their expectation by a wide margin, but the Nook pulls ahead again when it comes to Quality of Display.
I am getting ready to buy one, but buying one is just a beginning of the experience. The trick is to select the DMR that will give me more joy than a headache. Somebody said that there are 3 kinds of people:
1. people who learn from other people mistakes
2. people who learn from their own ones, and
3. people who never learn.
Let’s try to be the first kind of people and learn from others about their DMR experiences.
Let’s start with filtering the DMRs that have most customer reviews available on Social Media venues as there is a safety in numbers. I am not saying “Eat shit – 5,000,000 flies can’t be wrong!”, but there is a value in statistically representative information and it is much more difficult to plant a large number of reasonably descriptive customer reviews – just ask the Idiot Marketers who tried and got caught.
Comparing the “stars” of these receivers does not reveal much
as all of them sport 3.5-4 stars forcing me to sift through hundreds of reviews to decipher which one would give me the most satisfaction with the least risk and headache. This problem provided motivation for development of Opinion Miner® software and applications that are using it to produce the following score card.
The green shadowed cells indicate the highest score for an attribute and the red one highlight customer disappointment.
This makes my selection much easier as I can see that Roku XD delighted their customers with most of the attributes important to them. More than any other receiver we considered. However I also have information to make this decision personal, not just following the math – I do not buy from a company that disappoints their customers with Customer Support that makes…..
Drum rolls please!
The winner of 2010 Piplzchoice Award in the Digital Receiver Category is Apple TV 2010
This morning, I had an interesting experience. Among many emails, tweets and webinar offerings, I managed to expose myself blindly to two that focused on one challenge I have to overcome the most – talking too much and listening too little. Interestingly enough, neither of the messages was specifically targeting individual or style shortcomings, and the subject line of these presentations was not about listening skills. If this is not a moment of serendipity, then I don’t know what is. BTW it also synch with my favorite definition of serendipity: “…is when you come to look for a needle in a stack of hay, and you end up finding a farmer’s daughter.”
. The more I get excited about the subject of conversation, the less patient I get with listening to my conversation partners, particularly if I think I already figured out what they are trying to communicate.
