I’m pretty late with stuff, and so I was while reading Seth Godin’s Small is a New Big. I’ve come across a line there that is a quintessence of what’s been building in my head for the last 5 years. On page 100 he boldly proclaims “functionality is a new marketing”. Godin hits the nail on the head. After years of being brainwashed by 4P die-hards, push marketers and advocates of ATL it suddenly came to me that product is …KING (well… some say it’s content …they’re almost right).
Back in old days, you needed to have a fat comms budget, and could get away with flogging crap products to folks. These days don’t bother spending your millions if your product sucks. Push gives in, in favour of pull. It never stops amazing me that some companies spend millions on mass marketing bringing the traffic, only to see the conversion decrease, as they undervalue their product. I suppose it’s easy to explain. Mass marketing is easy. Give a budget to your agency and off they go to bring your traffic. You make the bad ad. Bad luck, take it off the next day and try something else. Product work is hard. You need to find out what you need/lack, research it, check your competitors, spec it, build it, test it, build it, test it, rebuild it, test some more and so it goes. It takes time and money. You need to fight with attitudes & personal habits of senior managers who happen to use the product in their own way, with IT who think you’re crazy, deal with competitors who constantly benchmark each other and raise the bar. With marketing it’s just you and your agency to come up with a new concept, low entry cost, low exit cost. Product is opposite. High entry & exit costs. 48 stakeholders, each one with vested interest in your product, each one wanting your product to be their own vehicle. And it’s not that easy to get out of bad online products either. Once you build bad functionality, too much functionality, misplaced functionality, redundant functionality, it’s damn hard to get rid of it. You just end up saying: users don’t get it. They’re not ready for it. We’ve pushed the envelop too far. But did we? All in all. Product work is way too difficult. So what we do? Spend cash on marketing instead. Users use mediocre products, cause they don’t know any better, marketing is happy cause the traffic is flowing in. Corporate status quo maintained. I’m harsh I know. Not all companies are like it, but far too many behave like that and lack guts to do good products. I hope this will change. Why?
If 4P model holds any validity for the online world. The product P is a massive giant P monster and all other ps are its little servants. If I was to draw a pyramid, at the bottom of it, you’d find all biz support functions, like finance, accounting, IT, and at the top Marketing, with the sharp tip of it being the product. If I threw this pyramid into the water it would be your classic iceberg, with all support functions sitting below the water level (effectively invisible to the customer) and with marketing and product boldly sticking out of the water. I reckon, last couple of years saw the icebergs sink deeper, moving the marketing part below the water level, rendering it virtually invisible to the user with only a sharp tips of products communicating uniqueness of each offer in the marketplace. I think this shift has profound consequences on the marketing industry. More resources should be pumped up the pyramid, to make the product shine, to let people notice it without having to yell out how good you are. Cause if we all yell out, noone can hear you anyway. Why bother yelling, go ask your user what they think about your product and make it better.
So what do I mean by Product? Product = Brand, why?. Brand = User expectations + User experience. User experience is emotions invoked while interacting with your product. It’s not just the object they came to pick up, but how they came, how they entered, how they heard about you, did they smile while using it for the first time etc. Not just the obvious touchpoints, but all the micro-moments when your product flashed through their synapses. Product person should be as much Freud as he is a Frank Lloyd Wright.
Here’s my checklist of what constitutes a good product & user experience?
- Solve a problem. Your product has to solve a problem or fulfil a need. If yours doesn’t, get back to the drawing board.
- Focus. Best if your product does one thing only, but does it very well. Don’t expose features that will be used by 5% of your audience. Recently I’ve been toying with this MindMap manager app. Boy it has a featuritis. I bet, if they tested it, they’d find 80% of stuff there never got to be used by anyone after the QA person touched it last time.
- Design. Your product has to be elegant and classy. Honestly, there’s plenty of awesome products, with horrendous look & feel. Just look at ryanair.com. Doing design doesn’t make you gay. Design is not reserved for fashion or FMCG. You should equally invest in design if you’re making sewerage systems, nails or sell legal consulting.
- Simplify. Your product has to be simple to grasp. If you need a user manual to use the product, no one is going to bother. These days you don’t read manuals, faqs, labels, tooltips. Think of a hammer, screwdriver, pen, google, Mac OS X. You don’t need a manual.
- Watch your customer use your product. You have to talk to your customers, get to know them, become their friend, involve them in creating, finetuning, enhancing your product. Rather then sending 10000 Xmas cards to your user base, spend this budget on rewarding your 5 heavy users for opening their front door and letting you come and see them at home, yes – at home, see your products being used in real life environment.
- Be a usability freak. Your product has to be ergonomic. Usability is a foundation. Employ standards, test usability regularly, identify show-stoppers, implement users’ suggestions. Easier said than done, but incredibly rewarding. Have low conversion? Check your usability first.
- Use your own product. You have to use the product yourself and make your staff use your stuff. Engage your staff ASAP, let them be beta testers, give them discounts, better – give it away for free (unless you’re Mercedes, then call me). Ask them for feedback and reward for good suggestions.
- Staple yourself to your product. Identify touch-points between customer and your business & product. Surely, touch points pop up way before the customer uses your product for the first time. It might be at a party when a friend drops a story about your product. It will be when your client walks inside and asks for a brochure. And it will be after they used it trashed it and went to a competitor. Each of these moments is worth having a good look at. Each of them is an opportunity to communicate a value, inspire, gratify. Once you identify the touch point…
- Measure it. Measure your product, measure your user, measure all touch-points. Seriously, how many companies measure every inch of their factory floor, operations, call-centres, TQM and reengineer the bottom of the iceberg, not knowing basic statistical info about the product or the user. One of the reasons I love web so much, is because it’s so measurable. Just take Omniture, mix it up with Hitwise, add Legenhit (just for Poland I think) sprinkle with your logs and you’ll figure out a shoe size and a wife’s name of the customer who at 4:13am GMT clicked your “book” button. Almost!. But you wait.
I laugh each time Windows asks me if I want to send a bug report after an app crash on me. Why bother asking. Websites don’t. Don’t ask and log it to improve your product. - Make it sexy. Your product has to be sexy for the user you’re trying to reach. I know, this is so vague. What is sexy? Sexy is new, sexy is cool, sexy is contentious, sexy is funny, sexy is in, sexy is stylish, sexy is relevant, sexy is viral, sexy is magnetic. If your product is sexy to at least one segment of the society, you’re onto something. If your product isn’t sexy for anyone, you better go back and rethink some elements. Sexy is the final output. It’s a combination of price, packaging, design, UX, emotions, problems solved, satisfaction, promises, brand, self-actualization… (stick another 50 marketing jargon words). That’s what sexy.
- Serve emotions with your functionality. I don’t think customers buy your product only to get their problems sorted out. They also buy it to become someone, to be recognized, to belong to a group, to be associated with a trend, to stand out. Because they believe, agree, hate, respect, admire. Aspirational products are functionality bundled with personality. Does your product have personality?
This list is probably not complete and we could all add couple of points there, but if you manage to tick 80% of it, go suck your marketers and with the money saved, take a long holiday. When you get back, your business will rock!
Filed under: (in English), UEX & UI, business & strategy, marketing
Many, many salient points. As we look at measuring “all touchpoints,” we need to realize that all individual customer interactions, or touchpoints, are not created equal. I cringe at all of these hotel satisfaction surveys that ask how satisfied I am with all their various areas/functions (registration, restaurant, gift shop, etc.) without an effort to understand the relative importance of any of the areas to my repurchase decision.
As we look at groups of touchpoints (experiences) or individual touchpoints, we need to gain the answers to four key questions: 1. What is my (the customer’s) need at that touchpoint or experience? 2. How did the organization perform relative to meeting that need? 3. What is the relative importance of that touchpoint or experience to desired behavior or relationship (purchase, repurchase, loyalty, advocacy)? 4. How best to improve the touchpoint or experience?
The resultant information not only helps to prioritize our efforts, but provides insights into how best to correct underperforming touchpoints or experiences that are key to driving desired prospect or customer behavior.
Exactly.
Not all touch points have been made equal.
Good starting point could be gauging their relative importance by asking your user what is important to her and applying weights to each criteria / micro-touchpoint. Based on this research, you could determine that you have 2 distinct personas among your customers: ie. 1) business 2) leisure. For the first one, location, wifi, conference facilities will be important. For the second one it will be more: concierge, tours offered, dinner menu, etc. So the way you calculate the overall score should be different for these two groups.
Touchpoints is such a vast topic, we could go on and on and not exhaust all aspects of it. Bottom line is. Awareness is a good starting point, as still not many businesses realized potential of identifying, measuring & improving their customer touch points.
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