Voices: the CMB Blog

Originally posted in the SMEI blog

At some point all business leaders are challenged to “innovate” in order to grow their company’s bottom line.

Done right, innovation creates value for both the company and the customer through new-to –the-world solutions to needs. It’s logical that products and services are where companies start their innovation efforts because, after all, these are very tangible sources of value. However, brand and marketing can also be powerful drivers of value and differentiation and should not be overlooked as potential anchors for innovation.Many innovation initiatives begin with a brainstorming session in which a bunch of internal folks sit around and try to generate new ideas for products or services they think customers want. For a fresh take on this process, consider “brand-storming” as the starting point for inspiration.

What is a “brand-storming” session, exactly? Well, in marketing speak, it’s generating innovative ideas for brand extensions, leveraging brand equity (a very valuable asset) to push into adjacent or even totally new product areas.

Start a successful brand-storm with  a clear articulation of your brand strategy, brand attributes and positioning. Then do creativity exercises that apply key brand attributes to new markets or to new solutions to existing customers.

Need to get the juices flowing? Look for examples in the marketplace:

• Consumer products are the easiest place to start. For example, consider Arm & Hammer Baking Soda’s extension to toothpaste (“clean” and “white”) or Duracell’s introduction of the PowerMat to recharge phones and other devices (e.g. “long lasting power”).

• Virgin is probably the poster child for brand-centered innovation, using its well-defined and unique positioning to extend into everything from airlines to cell phones.

All of this is not to say that brand should be the only source of invention. But brand-storming brings a new part of the company to the innovation table and adds another angle for sparking new, powerful ideas for growth. 

In our upcoming webinar we will look at some of the common pitfalls of innovation initiatives and explore how to use “brand” and “brand attributes” as well as innovative go-to-market strategies to unlock growth opportunities in new, unexpected directions. Hope to see you there!

Posted by J. Mark Carr, Mark is co-founder and managing partner of South Street Strategy Group.

Last year, when Gizmodo released a copy of Apple’s Genius Bar training manual, there was much talk that the company was educating Geniuses to engage in a type of psychological manipulation. Why were so many people distressed by these sales and marketing techniques? Using these techniques to “frame” the customer experience is hardly a new concept. Maybe it was because Apple’s product and service offerings are so strong and so beloved, some people forgot that the Apple Store is just that, a store, where things are bought and sold. 

This led me to wonder about how such training approaches have changed over the years –after all we’re so much more highly evolved nowadays, right? Ha! Enter the 1950 Packard Service Management Training Manual. Obvious cultural tags of the times aside (“That’s a swell idea.”), there’s almost nothing Apple purportedly tells Geniuses to do that Packard didn’t tell its employees 60+ years ago!

Take this line: “Although the merchandise and services we have to offer consists of: parts, accessories, lubrication and service labor, they are not the items the owner is buying. The owner wants to buy results. So, let’s sell him results such as: economy, safety, performance, comfort, convenience, and pride of ownership.”

Translated to a modern day perspective with a swap of only a few words:  “Although the merchandise and services we have to offer consist of: [smartphones, MP3 players], accessories, and service, they are not the items the owner is buying. The owner wants to buy results. So, let’s sell [her] results such as: performance, convenience, and pride of ownership.” This could be Apple, or many other consumer-oriented service companies.

A hilarious 1950-style exchange…

This brings me full circle to 2013 and Amazon’s Vine reviewer program—a program which provides an elite group of customers products to review, and often to keep.  The program has drawn a bit of attention lately, including a recent NPR piece. Some commenters are ambivalent, and a good number take a strong position that this is manipulative or biased (even if they sometimes sound envious), and a few defend it. In 1950, Packard reps were told to focus on their town doctors, and the logic holds up—doctors needed their cars to make house calls, they were highly respected community members and, guess what, they were the ones with money to buy new Packards! Was this strategic or manipulative? Or did it just feed off of basic human nature, for better or worse?

Speaking of worse, one thing that has changed across the decades is that individual sales and marketers aren’t allowed to take responsibility for, or acknowledge mistakes directly. As a Packard rep in 1950 you were encouraged to take responsibility for errors, omissions, or other flaws by directly addressing them with the customer. Nowadays legal compliance departments appear to have outlawed use of any terms that imply responsibility. 

So what’s a marketer to do? How to be honest while simultaneously “framing” your product/service strategically? Well, it helps to start with a solid offering (yes, I am a fan of Apple). If your product doesn’t meet the basic promises, don’t expect to build success on that with brilliant service—it won’t ring true. Measure the connection of what you promise and what customers perceive so that you can focus on what matters.

We help clients do this every day with customer studies—call them voice of the customer, customer experience, customer satisfaction, even call them customer journey mapping or NPS. Our focus is on providing the insights from customers that will answer business questions like:  What motivates customers to advocate our brand/product and how can we drive more of it? Or, Where are customers getting “stuck” in their “journey” with us and how do we remove barriers to repeat purchase?

But sadly, none of this work is of much use other than for a self-satisfied pat on the back if employees are telling customers to give a high score, instead of just earning it and allowing the process to work to get the real feedback for change. I cringe when staff say things like, “You will be getting a survey and we must get all 10s or I will (fill in the blank: be fired, lose a bonus, etc.).” They are seriously undermining the premise that this research is being done to learn what to improve and make better customer experiences. And even if I loved the service, I will then often not want to complete the survey.

To that end, kudos to Jiffy Lube, for whom I recently took a post-service satisfaction study where they explicitly asked if their rep had told me to give a good score. Probably as a research geek I noticed this in a way that the average person would not. Nevertheless, it was refreshing! It allowed me to give true customer feedback and feel confident the company really wanted to know what I thought, not just check a box, so they could make it better for the next person.  Satisfying as a customer and as a researcher.

It’s been accepted wisdom, for the past 10 years, that customer experiences should align with a company’s brand value proposition. Simply put, operations should focus on making sure the brand promises, implicitly (or explicitly) conveyed in market communication, are actually delivered.I recently stumbled across an entire industry that not only isn’t taking this view of brand-experience alignment, it doesn’t seem to realize that experience matters at all. It's not that they don’t care about their customers’ experience once they are customers (they care very much), but they seem completely blind to the importance of experience in the purchase process. Indeed the disregard for this type of experience is so commonplace that I didn’t notice it until I heard about a glaring exception.

I’m talking about higher education. This past spring, I toured many colleges in the Northeast with my 18 year-old son as he went through the selection and application process. Each of these colleges clearly spent a lot of money on sales and marketing. They all had very strong collateral, high quality mailings, hosted events designed to attract students, and I’m sure had a lot of other marketing activities as well. But when it came to delivering a pivotal experience—the guided campus tour, they all completely blundered.

The first tour at a highly regarded small liberal arts school in Maine was typical. It was conducted by an intelligent, friendly student. It would have been a great tour if my son had been primarily interested in how easy it is to make friends, how many good friends the guide has, how she found her art major and the greatness of the creative arts facilities. Of course she talked about other things, but these subjects were where her passion came through.

At another small college in upstate New York, the tour would have been great if my son loved playing Frisbee and wanted to know about all the wacky stuff the kids do to have a fun social life without a Greek system.

These tours weren’t bad, but they didn’t click with my son. He liked both colleges, but the tours did nothing to further his progress along the “journey” to becoming a student.

I didn’t think much of this until I had a conversation with a colleague whose daughter was also visiting colleges, and he told me about their visit to Elon University. He described how great the tour was. The student guide made everyone feel at ease, asked questions, and made sure the tour and conversations catered to everyone's interests and needs. She wasn’t salesy, she took a genuine interest in her charges and apparently tailored tour content on the fly.

My colleague mentioned that on the drive home (after seeing seven colleges) he asked his daughter which schools most interested her. Elon University was one of the three she mentioned. This surprised him because, while a very good school, it didn’t seem to be a particularly good fit academically or socially. His daughter soon came to the same conclusion and dismissed Elon from consideration. It struck him that the tour experience was central to creating such a strong impression. Imagine if Elon had offered a more fitting academic and social environment for my colleague’s daughter, it’s very likely that the tour would have sealed the deal.

So that brings me to my conclusion and recommendation. From my small convenience sample, it seems that most colleges and universities are ignorant of, or are just ignoring, the power of personal experience in the buying process. They spend a lot of time and money moving candidates through the purchase funnel, and then when they’re at the bottom and literally knocking on the door (to mix a metaphor); they fail to give that final little push.

I don’t know anything about how student tour guides are selected or trained. But surely it would be very easy to select the most outgoing, flexible, appealing work-study students, and then give them basic sales training on how to make people feel comfortable, ask the right questions and then tailor their approach to their customers’ needs and interests. Of course they wouldn’t call it sales training.  It could be a short seminar called “The Need for Understanding and Flexibility in Human interaction, 101.”

Rich is Senior VP and Chief Methodologist at CMB, he's the proud father of a brand new college freshman.

Join Tauck's Jeremy Palmer, CMB's Judy Melanson and South Street Strategy Group's Mark Carr on September 12th at noon (EDT) for a webinar: Focused Innovation: Creating New Value for a Legacy Brand

Just when you thought you had cracked the nut on the Hispanic Consumer, a new nut has just knocked you on your head. As everyone knows, America’s demographics are shifting, driven in large part by explosive growth in the Hispanic population.  According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the Hispanic population in the United States grew from 35 million in 2000 to 52 million in 2011; a whopping 48% growth rate.  By 2060 that number is expected to more than double to 129 million, which will make nearly one in three US residents Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau. If the population numbers alone don’t peak a marketer’s interest, surely the estimated $1.5 trillion (that’s trillion with a “t”) in buying power by 2015 will. That $1.5 trillion in buying power would make the US Hispanic market the 14^th largest economy in the world if it were its own country.  Yet, for years, this consumer segment has been held at arm’s length or worse, ignored by marketers altogether. Perhaps they are confident that their strength in the “general market” will carry them, or are foolish enough not to believe in the importance of the Hispanic consumer to their bottom line. Savvier brands, largely consumer packaged goods companies, know better and have invested a lot in understanding these consumers; others continue to wander aimlessly in a sea of misconceptions and inaccuracies. Many brands have long held beliefs that are simply no longer true; chief among those is a view of Hispanics as largely homogenous, unacculturated, Spanish speaking consumers.  Unfortunately for those folks, one sobering, yet immensely important, fact evades them: more and more, the Hispanic consumer is looking and sounding less like the Hispanic consumer of yesteryear’s marketers. Despite what the prevalence of immigration related headlines today might have you believe, the growth in the Hispanic population is not totally a recent occurrence.  Latinos have long had a presence in the United States even before the well documented immigration booms of the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s which led to immense growth in the amount of second, third, fourth and fifth generation Latinos (ever heard of the saying, “the border crossed us, we didn’t cross the border?”). In fact, the past decade’s growth has less to do with immigration than you might expect. The same Pew Hispanic Center study which showed the impressive overall growth of the Hispanic population over the past decade, also notes a 57% growth rate in the native born population over the same period of time.  Today, 64% of all Hispanics in the United States were born here.  That’s right folks; the growth in the Hispanic population is driven by US-born Latinos, most of whom speak English as their primary language and end up straddling two very distinctive cultural lines.

What evades most marketers is that these consumers are unique: not quite the same behaviorally or attitudinally as their parents or grandparents, but not like their “general market” counterparts either.  They form an ever-growing faction of bicultural Latinos.  For a crash course in what it mean to be bicultural, check out this clip from the timeless classic, “Selena,” and let Edward James Olmos tell you in his own words (spoiler alert: we have to be more American than Americans and more Latino than Latinos.  It’s exhausting!).  One study by Horowitz Associates places the percentage of Hispanics who self-identify as a mix of both Latino and American at 39%, a close second to those who identify as fully Latino at 43% (those who say they are fully American lag far behind at 18%). As such, Latinos have largely exhibited a non-traditional acculturation trajectory where full acculturation is no longer the norm or to be expected.  In fact, evidence of retro-acculturation, where previously acculturated segments of Latinos work to regain traces of their Hispanic culture, is well documented (as was the case with Selena who was a Mexican-American woman who learned to speak Spanish later in life).  Clearly, the realities of Latino acculturation coupled with the projected growth of the population have significant implications that will one day redefine the “general market” as we know it, requiring long term shifts in brand strategies for many. 

But before putting the cart in front of the horse, brands must consider what they can do here and now. Tapping into the burgeoning potential of the US Hispanic market requires a concerted effort to understand the consumer beyond language and recognize differences in behaviors, attitudes and beliefs. The most impactful Hispanic strategies incorporate a comprehensive approach to connect with both unacculturated and bicultural consumers.  At times, the approach will include similar elements for both, while at others, it will be necessary to target a specific segment.  For instance, special media buys during award shows such “Premios Juventud” on Univision have the potential to reach both consumer segments who tune-in in droves to watch the show.  However, Univision does not always appeal to the bicultural segment. 45% of Latinos overall watch TV mostly in English; that number jumps to 69% by the second generation and 83% among the third generation and higher.  For these consumers, culturally relevant (and I can’t stress culturally relevant enough!) communication on English TV, or bicultural TV such as Mun2 or MTV Tr3s, is likely to be more effective.

Certainly, understanding the Hispanic consumer can be complex and perhaps daunting for some, but it is an unavoidable bridge to cross for most brands. For many, the key will be to do away with long held beliefs. A small step for sure, but it all begins con un granito de arena (with a grain of sand). 

Elvis is a Project Manager with CMB’s Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare Practice and the company’s bicultural Chapin (Guatemalan-American) in residence.  He is also founder and president of Casa Guatemala, an educational non-profit organization serving the Latino youth of Waltham, MA.

What do Crayola, Amazon, Cheerios, Apple, and Subway have in common?

Over the years they’ve each been named one of America’s most loved brands. Of course there are lots of strong brands (nearly as many as there are “most loved brands” lists) but what is it that makes those brands so strong? No one will deny the importance of the brand name, positioning, or communications, but what these beloved brands have in common is how they deliver their brand experience.When M3 Insurance, Wisconsin’s largest privately held provider of commercial insurance, decided they wanted to strengthen their brand position, they had a few options. One common approach is to invest time and money into a brand’s value proposition and the brand promises they’re making to their customers. A company that takes this approach will spend a lot of time building enthusiasm and energy around a brand position, both internally and externally.  They might have banners, posters, and many companywide meetings to communicate the brand to employees.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this traditional approach, but our experience tells us that it rarely, if ever, goes far enough. Brands that stand out are able to find ways that empower their employees to make decisions that support the brand.  They’re able to articulate how employees can/should act to deliver on the brand promises and benefits—they use each interaction with their customers as a chance to deliver brand value—something even the best company-wide meetings can’t inspire alone.

With M3, our approach was both practical and comprehensive. At center, was the need to ensure customers’ experience aligned with M3’s brand promise. Guided by that core principle we developed a plan to determine how (customer facing) employees should behave to deliver the brand promise. Want to learn how we did it? Join M3’s Traci Mandell and me this Thursday to learn a new approach to developing and measuring truly brand-building customer experiences.

Click here to register.

Posted by Amy Modini. Amy is Account Director for CMB’s Healthcare and Insurance Practice, when she gets the time she loves going to the beach with her two kids.