Marketers & the "us vs. them" illusion... take 3

Another helpful tool for marketers to use to further undermine the "us vs. them" illusion is as easy as a few Google searches and a couple of mouse clicks.

Open your web browser, hop onto Google or your favorite search engine, and track down some discussion boards or social networking sites that pertain to your industry and read away. You'll gain instance access to the voice of the customer, free of charge... no need for focus groups or expensive surveys.

Now, of course, I'm cognizant of the bias factors involved in this approach (e.g., reading the words of a self-selecting population). I would never suggest that a marketer take what she hears on some discussion boards and draw firm conclusions about customers - their current concerns, needs, friction points, etc. However, it's a heck of a solid way for generating hypotheses that can then be validated quickly using relevant market-research technologies.

Start doing this immediately. Block out 30 minutes a week on your calendar for "cruising" industry-relevant discussion boards. It's such a small investment, which over time will pay you back major dividends.

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Marketers and the "us vs. them" illusion... take 2

As I have written about in a recent post the "us vs. them illusion" is a powerful force that blasts its way into the minds of marketers while in the workplace. Marketers entering the hallowed halls of their office buildings is the corporate equivalent of Clark Kent stepping into a telephone booth and transforming himself into a completely different person.

To reiterate the point that I made in my prior post -- marketers tend to think of consumers as "other" - as something alien to themselves that must be studied, understood, and influenced. Even the use of the word "consumer" or "customer" has an innate distancing effect, propelling the "us vs. them" mindset.

In my prior post, I introduced the Purchase Journal, a simple tool for helping marketing managers get back into the skin of their customers through reflecting on their own "consumerness". In this post I'd like to introduce another helpful tool, which I call MyFavorites.

The MyFavorites tool, as with the Purchase Journal, facilitates inward reflection , helping marketers get more in touch with their "inner consumer voices". The MyFavorites tool centers around asking oneself questions such as:

• What are my favorite brands/products/services and why?

• What are the best (worst) customer experiences I have ever had? What was it about them that made them so great (terrible)?

• What brands, stores, relationships have my full loyalty and why? Was their a particular experience that generated my loyalty, or a set of experiences over time? What was it about these experiences that helped to cultivate my loyalty?

While the above questions represent a brief glimpse at the MyFavorites tool, it should become clear from reading them that the key to MyFavorites, as with The Purchase Journal is to facilitate consumer-based self reflection. There are few more powerful skills that a marketer can develop than to seamlessly be able to ease into the skin of their customers - and MyFavorties is a very effective tool for developing such a capability.

To learn more about the MyFavorites - what it is and how to use it within your business, please feel free to contact me via email.

Related Posts

• Marketers and the "us vs. them" illusion
• Marketers and the "us vs. them" illusion... take 3

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