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Safety in Social Media: An Impossible Dream?

May 15, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

Social media is a powerful tool you can leverage to build your brand, but it can also leave you vulnerable to the the cruel contempt of the masses who think nothing of trashing your brand equity one “Like” at a time. That’s the thrust of this article in AdWeek, which details any number of social media “fails.” One misstep by a marketer—a poorly posed model, or too much enthusiasm for milkshakes—and suddenly, there’s a tornado in the Twitterverse.

No one, we’re to understand, is safe. Henry Copeland of Blogads was quoted as saying, “The hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people out there are going to take your idea, and they’re going to try to shred it or tear it apart and find what’s weak or stupid in it.”

Obviously, this is bad news. Nobody wants the backlash. The situation gets worse when there’s no positive traction as a result of the campaign. An offensive marketing message is bad; an offensive marketing message that doesn’t resonate with your existing and likely potential customer base is worse.

Social media is starting to sound pretty precarious.

Are we faced with a Quixotic quest? Is communicating with our customers in an effective, compelling fashion while simultaneously avoiding starting Facebook firestorms even possible?

These are good questions. Answering them becomes easier when we have access to superior customer knowledge and the objective, analytic tools provided by Brand Modeling.

Social Media: The Challenge of Uncertainty

The biggest problem marketers are facing today is the biggest problem they’ve been facing for a long time. Well before Jack Dorsey sent his first tweet, business owners and entrepreneurs have been longing for a way to predict customer response to marketing messaging—preferably before the campaign is even launched.

Without the ability to predict customer response, we are in an undesirable state of uncertainty.

If we knew that a given campaign would be hugely, overwhelmingly popular and effective with our target audience, would that outweigh the impact of any potential controversy? That’s a legitimate decision, and one that leading brands have often made. What if the same campaign would only be moderately popular? What if the same campaign seemed to elicit no positive response at all? Dodging the controversy becomes much more appealing if there’s no identifiable benefit to be gained.

Without the ability to predict customer response, we can’t make intelligent, strategic decisions to secure and enhance our organization’s standing. It’s impossible. You can guess, of course, and lots and lots of companies are—but as the AdWeek article points out, there’s a better than good chance you’ll guess wrong at least once.

In Customers First: Dominate Your Market by Winning Them Over Where It Counts the Most we discuss the process of Brand Modeling, and how combining insights about the unconscious psychological drivers that motivate customer behavior with targeted statistical analysis makes it possible to predict, with a high degree of certainty, how customers will respond to your efforts to connect with them.

Yes, social media has been a game changer. It’s translated the cultural environment we were used to into a fast paced, dynamic and sometimes dangerous space. There’s no guarantee of safety here, but by making smart, strategic choices it is possible for your organization to consistently make the right choices, reaping benefits that far outweigh even the hottest Facebook firestorm.

We think Don Quixote would approve this message.

Customers First: Understanding the Need To Belong

May 8, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” John Updike once said, and it was with this in mind that I took in a debate between Johnathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground and Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.

I’m not particularly interested in the substance of the conspiracy theory, really, beyond a rock-solid conviction that Han shot first. However, this conversation went in a particularly interesting direction, examining in some depth why people are drawn to and choose to believe in conspiracy theories.

Johnathan Kay came to the question when he began researching conspiracy theories in general. He started by asking people what they believed, and found himself overwhelmed with stories. Really long stories. So he shifted his question and began asking people when they started believing in their favored conspiracy theory.

This was a significant paradigm shift. Instead of an infinite number of individual narratives, Kay was now hearing one tale. People were sharing the moment that they lost faith in the government, in media, in traditional social structures. This was a pivotal point for people: from the moment they began to believe whatever they chose to believe (that 9/11 was an inside job, that JFK was killed by the mob, etc) they no longer perceived themselves as a member of the society they once belonged to. They’d joined another group entirely; the society of people who ‘knew’ the true facts about any given society—and by extension, according to Kay, a larger society of individuals defined by their skepticism, unable or unwilling to trust without independent verification.

Webster Tarpley was right there with his own thoughts on the subject. “Why are hegemonic institutions no longer hegemonic?” he asked. His answers include the fact that many people are experiencing a significant decline in their standard of living at the same time that these behemoth cultural institutions are being discredited directly as a result of their own behavior. When you have documented systemic failures such as the recent financial crisis and the Catholic Church sex scandals, it’s not hard to understand people’s reluctance to believe.

Customers First: Understanding The Need To Belong

Part of the reason this discussion is fascinating is that it covers some of the same ground we went over in Customers First: Dominate Your Market by Winning Them Over Where It Counts the Most. Kay and Tarpley have identified this key loss of faith. We’ve seen the same thing ourselves. The loss of faith in institutions changes people’s self-perception, whether they’re consciously aware of this or not. We’re all hard-wired to belong to a group; it’s a fundamental biological driver that’s part of every human’s experience. When we no longer believe as our peers believe, we no longer fit into the group in quite the same way as we used to.

This creates an internal tension that we can not abide. It’s too uncomfortable psychologically and emotionally. To remedy this tension, we gravitate toward other groups where we feel that we can belong—especially those groups that overtly, openly welcome us and value our participation. Kay and Tarpley see this manifesting through participation in the conspiracy theory culture, which is valid but only accounts for a relatively small segment of the population. More pervasive and prevalent is the public’s tendency to elevate other organizations, namely commercial brands, into that position.

It’s important to note that it has been bad behavior and the failure to perform as expected on the part of these larger cultural organizations that has created this paradigm. As business leaders, we must be aware of the many nuanced levels of customer expectation, and understand what, exactly and in depth, our customers are turning to us for. It’s more than our products or services or even the experience we provide. Customers want—customers need—something to believe in. They need a group to belong to. Companies that provide that well are rewarded with fanatical customer loyalty. It’s as simple as that. No conspiracy theory required!

Tags: conspiracy theory, Customers First, Johnathan Kay, need to belong, Webster Tarpley

Can You Listen to Your Customer?

April 30, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

If you were to conduct an immediate survey right now, this very instant, of all of the leadership of all of the companies you interact with, in one form or another, over the course of any given 24 hour period, I can say, with a pretty high degree of confidence, that they’ll all tell you they listen to their customers.

Some of these companies are telling you the truth.

Others, not so much. It’s not an intentional deception, mind you. These organizations think they’re tuned right in to their customers. They point to tall, towering, extremely expensive piles of market research and demographic data with pride. All of this accumulated information must prove they’re listening to their customer.

Then we watch these companies in action. Inevitably, a point arises where it becomes clear to the uninterested observer that there’s a significant disconnect between the company and the customer. When that disconnect reaches a critical point, the brand suffers serious damage.

We saw this happen when Reed Hastings tried to split Netflix into two companies, provoking a firestorm of customer wrath and cancelled memberships. We saw this happen when Burger King used a creepy animated clown as their national icon, alienating far more customers than they attracted. We saw this happen when Motrin’s irony-heavy approach to babywearing proved that if Mama’s not happy, nobody’s happy.

All of these companies thought they’d been listening to their customers. Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of “Do you listen to your customers?” we should be asking, “Can you listen to your customer?”

Customers First:What Do You Need to Listen to Your Customer?

Gathering information about your customer is not the same thing as listening to them. You can accumulate data all day long, only to discover that you’re not protected from making the same exact type of mistake that Netflix, Burger King, and Motrin made. To avoid that kind of situation, you have to be able to listen not only to what your customers say, but what they mean.

Let’s look at the Motrin story. It’s safe to assume that at some point, via market research or focus groups, Advil figured out that being a good mom was important to a good portion of their market. So far, so good. The need to nurture is what we call a universal driver. The compulsion to care for the next generation is a pretty significant asset for the species that wants to stick around for a while. There’s a caregiver instinct hardwired into our psyche.

Motrin, of course, is also very interested in talking to people with backaches. When you put those pieces together, you get this ad. There’s even an explicit call-out to the “be a good mom” message. It blew up in their faces in a magnificent way because they didn’t know how to listen to their customer, completely and in a meaningful way.

It’s important to the customer to be a good mom. What, then, does being a good mom mean?

It sounds like a simple question. It doesn’t, however, have a simple answer. We all have our own personal definition of what it means to be a good mom, based on our own experiences, but that’s not where the story should end. We need to understand what being a good mom means for the customer. The definition varies by community and culture. Within each group, you’ll find that being a good mom comes with its own set of expectations and norms—a set of rules to be followed by anyone wanting to be seen and acknowledged as a good mom within the group.

Some of these rules are overtly articulated, while others are conveyed via subtle social pressures. The customer begins internalizing these rules from the moment she’s born, and continues to do so throughout her life. Becoming a parent and having small children pushes these rules very prominently into consciousness; this is all information that is highly useful and relevant to have as she navigates a new experience.

As an organization, you really need to know what those rules are. You need to respect and honor the importance of these core beliefs in your customer’s life. Motrin went wrong because the ad campaign violated two major, if unwritten, laws of American motherhood:

All parenting choices are made in the best interest of the child.
Mothers do not experience physical pain or exhaustion.

By suggesting that some mothers chose baby wearing in order to follow the whims of fashion, and that this could cause backaches, Motrin introduced a tension into their customers’ lives. It may be entirely true that a woman chose to wear her baby in a sling because she thought it was a cool, trendy way to carry the baby, and that it was that exact choice that contributed to her back pain—but it is equally true that to admit to these sentiments goes directly against powerful cultural norms. This tension can be experienced wholly on the unconscious level, but it is powerful enough to make the customer uncomfortable.

It is human nature to avoid the uncomfortable. Rather than confront the validity of cultural norms, especially in relation to our own personal experience, it’s easier to avoid the brand that introduced the tension into our lives. Anger and hostility are common responses to the tension as well, as evidenced by the heated response to the Motrin babywearing campaign.

Had Motrin known what their customers meant when they said they wanted to be a good mom, they could have easily avoided violating these rules. Dominant organizations are those that commit to the search for meaning.

With the right tools, you can move beyond hearing what your customers say into listening to what they mean. Delving deeper into your customer’s behavior and experiences makes it easier to develop a more comprehensive understanding you can use to connect effectively and efficiently with them—without any of the headaches Motrin experienced. That’s the value of putting customers first.

Tags: Burger King, Customers First, listening to the customer, Motrin, Netflix

Leveling Up: Why The UBS/Guggenheim Collaboration Makes Good Sense

April 24, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

The contemporary art world is buzzing about a newly announced collaboration between UBS Wealth Management and the Guggenheim Museum. It’s easy to see what the excitement is about, especially from a creative perspective. The five year initiative is going to chart creative activity and contemporary art from all around the world.

Many of the stories you’ll see about this collaboration will focus, with good cause, on the fact that the project is a substantial investment in moving the current conversation about contemporary art from a very Western point of view to a more global perspective.

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative will identify and support a network of art, artists, and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa as part of a comprehensive program involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities. It’s a huge project, with the potential to change everything we think we know about contemporary art and creative vision.

What we haven’t seen yet is an in-depth examination of why this collaboration is a good move for UBS Wealth Management. There’s no confirmed numbers available yet, but art experts have suggested that this type of project will easily set UBS back more than $40 million.

Why is UBS choosing to spend this much money, in this fashion? This New York Times story hints at some of their thinking. Jürg Zeltner, the chief executive of UBS Wealth Management, is quoted as saying, “As art is becoming more and more of an asset class, UBS is looking to increase our profile in these kinds of special fields of interest. More and more we are refocusing our strategy to reach emerging markets, and this project seemed like a perfect fit.”

That explanation comes from a place of logic and rationality, and does a great deal to explain why the collaboration will likely benefit UBS greatly. It’s interesting to move the conversation to another dimension, and examine the unconscious psychological factors that will make this initiative appealing to UBS’s customers.

Customers First: What Motivates Your Customers?

Let’s take a moment to talk about Maslow. (Yes, that pyramid picture was a hint! Thanks for playing along.)

As you remember, Maslow’s research focused on identifying and prioritizing the compelling, if often unarticulated, needs that guide human behavior. At the bottom of the pyramid, we find all the familiar needs—food, shelter, water, sex. We certainly spend a lot of time here talking about the need to belong to a group and the esteem needs—it is essential that we find ourselves held in regard by those we respect, if we’re going to be contented human beings. For most businesses, identifying and meeting needs on this level can be an absolute game changer. This is where dominant organizations begin to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.

But there’s another level on the pyramid. At the apex, the point of self-actualization, we see the needs for creativity, expression, morality—with an emphasis on agape and philanthropy—and freedom from prejudice. It’s important to note that these are needs everyone has, to some degree or another, but we don’t aren’t all equally consciously aware of or focused on them. Self-actualization is not a top priority for everyone.

However, UBS’s clientele is uniquely positioned to ensure that they have their self-actualization needs met. Absent any other differentiating factors, an audience that is relatively free from the constraints of material wants will choose the wealth management service that provides the extra value of meeting these higher-order self-actualization needs. The collaboration with the Guggenheim allows UBS’s clients to participate in a creative endeavor on a global scale.

Will participating in this project gain UBS new clients? We’re not sure. But we can say with absolute confidence that it will strengthen the bond UBS has with their existing base, especially those who are most in touch with and aware of their ability to effect meaningful change in the world. It’s a pretty picture for all involved. That’s why the UBS/Guggenheim collaboration makes good sense.

Tags: Guggenheim, Maslow, UBS Wealth Management, unconscious needs

The French Frontier: The Power of Predictability For Global Brands

April 10, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

Starbucks, it turns out, is not synonymous with seamless, stress-free success. Embracing a global strategy is an integral part of the coffee retailer’s much-talked about turnaround strategy, but after ten years of effort, things still aren’t great in Europe. Particularly not in France, according to this New York Times story.

Starbucks has embarked on a multimillion dollar campaign to win over the European marketplace. Their efforts are pretty straightforward, and from our perspective, logical: everything from the the coffee recipe to the physical plant is being examined and altered to bring it more in alignment with the tastes and preferences of the local customer.

The changes may help—the strategy, after all, bears a close resemblance to what works for other American chain eateries that have gone global. But it raises one unavoidable question: How would things look different for Starbucks if they had done the groundwork to enter the European marketplace more effectively ahead of time? We’re not privy, of course, to the inner workings of their leadership team, but it seems a fair guess that not having to spend millions of dollars is always better for your financial position than being forced to spend millions in order to remain even vaguely competitive.

In other words, there’s power in predictability. One of the key concepts of Brand Modeling is that developing a deep, comprehensive, humanistic understanding of your company’s best customers allows you to predict, with a high degree of certainty, how those customers will respond to your offerings. This allows you to be selective and efficient in your organizational decision making process.

For example, had Starbucks spent the time and energy to fully understand their best customers in France, they likely would have discovered their expectation—framed by the cultural mythos that permeates French life—that one does not walk down the sidewalk with a paper coffee cup in hand. Coffee is meant to be enjoyed in the cafe, at a leisurely pace. Armed with that knowledge, it would have been easier to see that the French Starbucks should include adequate seating space and avoid investing resources in takeaway coffee.

In Britain, incidentally, the situation is reversed. There, takeaway coffee enjoys popularity favorably comparable to the American experience. You can see where this is valuable information to have prior to breaking ground and building shops.

Starbucks isn’t alone in this situation. Going global has stymied some brands. Burger King was a flop in Europe, whereas McDonald’s, who came very early to the wisdom of listening to local markets comprehensively and in detail, thrives.

It all comes down to customer knowledge. We are all competing in the environment full of empowered consumers. They know they have choices. The French consumer is not suffering from a lack of cafes to visit if Starbucks fails to please them. Dominant organizations are, and continue to be, those brands that are truly willing to step up and put their customers first.

Tags: Brand Modeling, predictability, starbucks

Nestle: Trust Building Is Essential To Our Success

April 2, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

Almost two years ago, Jose Lopez, executive VP of Operations for Nestle, was explaining to the Business Standard why the global foods, health, and nutrition brand, which claims to have a billion customers a day, is so successful. A particular focus of the interview was how Nestle decided to enter a marketplace, as well as their decision to source raw materials and labor in local markets.

What is revealed is that Nestle places a high value on knowing their customers, on a number of levels. They’ve identified the universal concerns that cause their best customers to choose Nestle brand products rather than any other—product safety and high nutritional value tops the lists—and the local, market-specific criteria that helps Nestle bond with customers on an individual basis.

“Our factories here (in India) use Indian raw materials produced by Indian farmers to make products that are made to Indian tastes and are sold in the country. That is the way we operate.”

Nestle has been successful with this approach. The growth continues, according to this recent Wall Street Journal article, Nestle Projects Growth from Emerging Markets.

Customers First: How Nestle Reached the Top

Lopez is very forthcoming about the reason for Nestle’s growth. “The first thing that comes to mind is clearly the trust that we have been able to build in our consumers. Second, is our passion for quality, and third, simple and clear business processes.”

Building that level of personal, profitable trust with customers is directly dependent on superior levels of customer knowledge. Before you trust someone, you have to know them, and before that trust can be returning in any meaningful way, they have to know you. Transparent business practices are essential (and if Nestle has had stumbling blocks along the way, it has always been in those areas where they are perceived to be less than transparent in their marketing practices, particularly in the area of infant formula).

In Customers First:Dominate Your Market By Winning Them Over Where It Counts the Most, we examine some of the powerful unconscious psychological forces that motivate customer behavior. There’s a universal need that we all share: we have a profound need to believe that we belong to a group, that we are valued and cared for as a member of society. We want to know—no, scratch that; it’s that we need to know—that we’re cared about.

This is a message that must reach the customer’s ears, heart, and mind. It’s always good to have the leadership spelling it out. In the Business Standard interview, Lopez said, “We want to provide the consumer a good diet. In addition to formulating such products, we want to teach them what’s good for them. Every Nestle product has a nutritional panel or compass on the pack which helps in understanding its nutritional value. The nutritional aspect of the products is what pleases the consumer, but it is also our responsibility to explain to him why it is good for him. The last thing we want is our consumers becoming victims of lifestyle-related diseases.” (emphasis ours)

Nestle’s making use of every touch point to convey their care and concern for customer health. Couple this with the substantial commitment the brand has made to understanding their customers wants and needs, and it becomes easy to see why the Nestle brand is one of the most successful in the world. That’s what happens when you put Customers First!

Tags: Brand Modeling, Customers First, Nestle

Check Out the New Book: Customers First: Dominate Your Market By Winning Them Over Where It Counts The Most

March 26, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

Customers are skeptical. They’ve been lied to by just about everyone who’s had the opportunity to do so. From role models who can’t keep extramarital affairs from wrecking their golf game to behemoth corporations betting against their own customers’ investments to politicians regularly resigning for engaging in the very activities they legislated against, no one has been telling the truth. You need an element of trust to get genuine customer buy-in, but we’ve spent a generation and a half teaching the
public to trust nobody.

This creates a problem for today’s business leaders. How do you connect with these empowered, educated, skeptical consumers?

This is a question of some urgency. If you don’t have the answer, you have to figure it out now, and you have to keep your business thriving at the same time. There’s absolutely no time to hesitate. If you cannot connect with your customers in a meaningful way, you will become irrelevant to them. When you’re irrelevant, you’re replaceable, and your customers will inevitably replace you with a brand that they do feel connected to.

Irrelevancy arrives in those still moments when an organization is facing uncertainty. These are the times when the
company is trying to figure out what to do. Choosing the right course is difficult: if you opt for the wrong direction, you’ll saddle your company with the burden of invisibility when you’re least prepared to bear it.

Customers First: How To Choose The Right Course Consistently

Choosing the right course is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Dominant organizations—companies like Nike, Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Ikea—seem to consistently pick the right course. They seem to know what the customer wants, even before the customers know they want it. They enjoy unparalleled customer loyalty, and that’s not all. Dominant organizations seem to make fewer mistakes than their competitors. They make better decisions and enjoy greater profitability.

As a business leader, don’t you want to know how that happens? Don’t you want to be able to do it too? It’s possible when you have the right tools. That’s where Brand Modeling comes in. We’ve been doing exciting work, helping leading companies delve into the unconscious psychological factors that drive customer behavior, pinpointing those places where brand and consumer can form strong, lasting, and profitable bonds.

When you’re equipped with a comprehensive, multi-dimensional understanding of your customer, you can consistently choose the right course for your company.

That’s the topic of the new book, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon. I have to say, we’re pretty excited about this book. We worked hard to create the most complete, accessible explanation of the combination of complex psychological factors that control consumer behavior and what they mean to good companies striving to become great companies. Brand Modeling can provide your company with an unbeatable competitive advantage. You might want to check it out!

Tags: Brand Modeling, Customers First, Customers First by BJ Bueno

Ace Hardware: Putting Customers First in a Quest to Double Market Share

March 19, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

Normally, when we talk about watching paint dry, we’re referring to something tedious or boring. But for the leadership at Ace Hardware, paint is pretty exciting. According to this New York Times article, a new product line (coupled with an insightful marketing approach) may be what it takes to allow the 4,300+ hardware and home improvement store chain to double their share of the domestic paint market.

Brand Modeling and the Search for a New Growth Strategy

Dominant organizations are engaged in a continual search for growth opportunities. What are the best ways to increase market share, raise a brand’s visibility, and connect more effectively with their customers? It’s easy to generate potential strategies that should create growth, but it’s remarkably difficult to assess ahead of time which strategies are going to succeed. It’s even tougher to tell which campaigns will be the most successful and deliver the highest return on investment.

Which brings us to Ace Hardware. This well-established brand has numerous options available to it. Ace Hardware has the resources and ability to pursue growth in any of several directions. We think that Ace’s leadership team has made a smart decision by focusing on the paint portion of their business. Their approach shows that there’s been a concerted effort to understand and better serve their customer.

Know Your Customer To Build Your Brand

What is the power of paint? Some analysts have compared painting the house to the famous lipstick effect—a quick and affordable way to lift the spirits when it’s not economically feasible to make larger, more indulgent purchases. Ace Hardware’s customers may not be in a position to renovate the entire kitchen or do over the bathroom. Yet they’re still driven by the need to make positive changes in their environment.

Painting a room delivers a powerful visual and emotional impact for a relatively small financial investment. Ace is demonstrating superior customer knowledge by providing a way to fill a significant emotional need while being sensitive to the current economic tensions and challenges their customer base is facing.

At the same time, Ace has used a very gender-specific, romance-oriented approach to marketing their new line of paint. Color choices are overwhelmingly made by women, according to Dana Larsen, an Ace Brand manager. The new campaign is based around the need for strong, satisfying, loving relationships—finding the perfect shade, color, or hue is referred to as finding your “soul paint.”

This recognizes and capitalizes on the biological driver that urges us to form lasting bonds. Couple it with some visual humor (after all, there’s something inherently funny about a line-up of 8 purple people) and you have a message that appeals to Ace’s customers on a number of levels.

Will Ace be able to meet their goal of doubling their market share by 2015? Appealing to their customers through multiple psychologically-appealing channels is not a bad start. Understanding the tensions and pressures facing their customer base, providing an economical means to satisfying compelling emotional needs, and honoring the underlying unconscious drivers of customer behavior are all steps dominant organizations use when they want to grow. That’s the value of putting customers first.

Tags: Ace Hardware, Brand Modeling, build your brand, Customers First, paint

The Sweet Smell of Success: How Understanding Your Customer’s Unconscious Motivations Can Help Build Your Brand

March 6, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

There is a great article in Forbes discussing how P&G revived the Febreze brand, bringing it back from near-death status to one of the company’s leading money makers. It illustrates very well how critical it is to understand the unconscious factors that motivate customer behavior.

Febreze, if you’re not familiar, is a specific kind of air freshener that can be used to treat upholstery, carpeting, and other items that can’t be washed. P&G tried to market Febreze as an odor eliminator. That effort failed, in part because there were not many customers who thought that their lives were all that smelly.

When P&G changed their efforts and marketed using Febreze as a rewarding experience after you’d cleaned a room, sales went through the roof. When we stop to think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Who are P&G’s best customers? (The people we call Brand Lovers?) By and large, they’re people who do a lot of cleaning. A clean, tidy home is important to them. They’re not people who are going to eagerly proclaim that they have bad smells in their home—in fact, many would find that type of admission very shameful.

Positioning Febreze as a reward for something that P&G’s best customer’s were already doing (cleaning the room) was a transformative exercise. No longer was using Febreze a tacit admission that your housekeeping efforts just didn’t cut the mustard. Instead, using Febreze was a sign of a job well done; a pleasant sensory experience that you could enjoy as a reward for your efforts.

Unconscious Factors That Guide Customer Behavior

If we were going to reduce the Febreze situation to it’s simplest terms, we have this: in one mode, using Febreze made the customer feel like a failure. In the other situation, the customer feels good about using Febreze—it’s a treat to be enjoyed and savored. The emotional impact of the two scenarios are very different.

We gravitate toward emotional experiences that make us feel good. We want to be happy. We like to be rewarded. To be told we’re doing a good job—especially in scent form, for olfactory cues are some of the strongest emotional triggers—is a powerful thing.

Identifying the Emotional Experience

It’s essential to identify the emotional experience that your customers are seeking. P&G initially marketed Febreze in a way that provoked a negative emotional reaction: no one enjoys feeling shamed and inadequate. By identifying a different emotional reaction that is more in keeping with what P&G customers were seeking—a feeling of pride, satisfaction in a job well done, the sense of being rewarded—it became possible for the customer to enthusiastically embrace the brand.

Up to 90% of customer behavior is unconsciously motivated. Many times, customers are oblivious to what leads them to choose one product over another.

You’re not going to see people standing in the cleaning product aisle saying, “Hmm, this provokes deep, uncomfortable feelings of shame in me, while this one makes me feel good about myself, virtuous, and hard-working.” But that conversation is happening on some level in your customer’s mind. Companies that understand that can position their products to occupy the more desirable position, and that’s why they win.

Tags: Brand Lovers, Brand Modeling, Febreze, P&G

Success by the Slice: Does Being “Flawsome” Work For Domino’s?

February 27, 2012 by BJ Bueno | No comments

Perfection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Just ask the folks at Domino’s Pizza. In 2009, the company’s pizza came in last in a national taste test—tying with Chuck E. Cheese, an eatery known more for the presence of video games and children’s amusements than anything on the menu. At that point, (and after bringing on a new CEO, Patrick Doyle) Domino’s launched a new marketing campaign, admitting that they weren’t perfect.

In fact, they were pretty far from perfect. This campaign featured images of horrendous looking pizzas and consumer panels admitting, on camera, that they didn’t think there was any actual real cheese to be found on a Domino’s pie. The company vowed to improve, and made a very public spectacle of their efforts to fix things. They even posted a live feed of customer Tweets in Times Square: a highly visible, real-time response to their improvements for all the world to see.

As a result, Domino’s has seen their sales numbers improving steadily. Investor confidence in the brand has skyrocketed. In 2011, Domino’s stock prices rose 110%. Being “Flawsome” appears to be a smart strategic decision for Domino’s. But why did it work?

Understanding the Brand Lover

The relationship between a consumer and a brand is a complex and nuanced one. There are many, many factors that lead a person to order pizza from one restaurant rather than another. When we start delving into what the underlying appeal of what a marketing message of “We weren’t very good, really, but we’re trying to get better!” might be, we have to examine not only how the customer views the pizza restaurant in question, but how they view the world in general, and their place in it.

We are dealing right now with a consumer base that has been trained to be skeptical about everything. Having faith or trust in an institution is viewed as a nostalgic form of naivete; we’re sure that there’s going to be a fly in our bowl of soup. Reaching this market with a message of perfection or idealism isn’t going to work. This audience is not capable of believing such things. They know nothing in this world is perfect and they prefer to do business with a company that is honest about their imperfections.

Organizations that can acknowledge their own shortcomings, while putting forward a reasonable plan to remedy the solution with a sense of humor and maturity, appeal to these customers. The customer can identify with the brand—after all, they know they’re not perfect people. They’ve screwed up themselves, once or twice, over the years. They may have had to go through their own process of rebuilding. There are common points of experience between Domino’s and the legions of customers driving the brand’s turnaround. The brands that are the easiest for customers to bond with are the brands that are most human—and haven’t we been told that to err is human?

There’s a lot to learn from Domino’s. Organizations that move in a more humanistic fashion, understanding and embracing those traits that bring them closer into alignment with their Brand Lover’s experiences and world view, are those that are going to dominate, even in a crowded marketplace. There is value in being “flawsome.”

Tags: Brand Lovers, Domino's, flawsome, humanistic business

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