Innovation via your inner consumer voice

All of us walk through the world with our own mental filters... our filters determine what we pay attention to and what we block out... when I walk down the streets of New York with a certain friend of mine from college, I notice all the dogs that trot past us... he notices the different architectural styles that imbue the many buildings ... for him the dogs are invisible... for me, the buildings.

However, there exists a quiet world which we both share. One all of us have in common, yet often pay little attention to... our inner voices. Those little whispers. So faint that they often go undetected. So what does this have to do with innovation? Everything.

Marketers must learn to hear their own whispers
For consumer-based marketers especially, it's essential to develop a refined ear. One that can tune into our own little day-to-day whispers -- particularly those whispers that relate to the products, services and consumer needs that underpin our businesses. It's through listening to these whispers that deep insights & innovation come bubbling up to the surface.

We all know that consumers do a notoriously poor job of communicating their unmet needs. Much of this is because most people have not developed the capabilities for tapping into their inner voices. And despite the many tools & sophisticated approaches, marketing research continues to have difficulty drawing out those unmet needs. This is why the onus falls on marketers to cultivate their own consumer inner voices.

Whether you're maniacally thumbing through a magazine in an unsuccessful search for the front-page article, or trying to figure out how to place an order at the funky new sandwich shop on your block, learning to "listen" to your day-to-day thoughts & feelings can provide tremendous opportunities for innovation. As I mentioned above, this is particularly relevant & powerful if you are also a consumer of the very products or services that your company sells.

Innovating around your inner consumer voice in the shower
Let's take a brief example of innovating around one's inner voice... there I am a few weeks ago taking my nightly shower before I go to bed. As I look down at the soap dish I notice that the soap is completely worn out - a thin slab of what was once a thick, meaty bar of glycerin. This situation is one that I have probably experienced hundreds of times in my life and yet not until a few weeks ago did I come to register the discomfort it creates. The soap was too small to be effective for washing yet it still has some useful life left. What I typically do is grab a new bar of soap and leave the old bar to slowly decompose in the soap dish, creating a soupy, soapy water concoction in the dish. For whatever reason, I cannot bring myself to simply throw away these tiny bars of just-about-unusable soaps.

It was only then, when I had acknowledged my discomfort, that I was able to think up ways to innovate around this discomfort which had remained dormant to myself for so long. Standing there in the shower I came up with a few decent concepts. One such concept was a contraption for tossing unusuable soaps into, which after getting filled-up with soaps, would act like a molding vice, mushing the soaps together, and producing a brand new bar of soap. Viola! While perhaps not a patent-worthy concept, that is besides the point.

The opportunity for innovation in the above example stemmed directly from becoming mindful of a mundane, everyday experience that generated displeasure for me, albeit not one of the 'life or death' variety. However, in today's modern world, with most of our basic needs already met, much of the opportunities for innovation lie within this 'valley of the subtle'; hence the need for marketers to refine their inner consumer voices. It is one of the key capabilities for marketers to develop in order to better identify opportunity areas for effective innovation.

Some of my favorite books on innovation

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) 

• The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

• Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas

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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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Marketers and the "us vs. them" illusion

As marketers there seems to exist a cognitive split between our work brains and our non-work brains, which I refer to as the "us vs. them illusion".

Our work brains view customers as "other"; an assemblage of abstract people whom we often glob together in our minds and try to "do things to" in order to influence their behaviors in ways that are beneficial for them as well as for the company. Under this mindset, which I have found to be a pervasive one among marketers, we forget that "we", in many ways are "them".

As a result of our inability to see ourselves in our customers, we often do not ask some of the most basic questions about the products & services that we market. For example, "would I buy my product? If so, why? When? If not, why not? What would have to happen, or how would the product have to be different for me to consider buying it?"

While it's very dangerous to project our answers to such questions onto our customers or prospects, and assume their answers are our answers, it's even more dangerous to not ask these questions at all.

As marketers, we need mechanisms & tools to help us comfortably "walk in our customers shoes", and minimize the cognitive divide that exists between our work brains and our non-work brains.

One such tool that I like to use is what I call the purchase journal. The journal helps me become more conscious and cognizant of why I purchase what I purchase; how I go about making these decisions, even the most subtle ones, such as the purchasing of a cup of coffee at Joe's deli instead of La Petite deli.

With the journal I am able to reflect on all of the nuanced and almost invisible, tiny forces that act on me and pave the way for a myriad of different purchase decisions that I make - the small ones and the big ones. I like to think of the approach as the consumer equivalent of getting in touch with your "inner consumer voice".

So what exactly is the purchase journal?
While I consider the purchase journal one of my many "trade secrets", in brief, it is essentially a log of the purchases you make over a period of time, including--most importantly--the reasons behind your purchase decisions.

As you build your purchase journal, you'll begin to tap into your "inner consumer voice", and in the process become a more mindful consumer. Buddhist analogies aside, as you cultivate this mindfulness, you'll significantly enhance your ability to move closer to "the truth" about how consumer decisions are made with a rich appreciation for the subtleties of many of these decisions.

Ultimately, this process will help you develop the skills for identifying insights about the consumers of your products - the types of insights that lead to more sustainable competitive advantage; the types of deep insights that can only be gleaned by becoming the Indiana Jones of your own consumer mind.

To learn more about the Purchase Journal - 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... take 2
• Marketers and the "us vs. them" illusion... take 3

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Focus on Product BENEFITS not features

Features, features, features... whether a product (e.g., a car) or a service (e.g., a vacation resort), it's sure to have plenty of features... bells & whistles... "goods"... "extras"...

I often find my eyes crossing as I read through descriptions of products or services. They often seem to be written for "insiders" - either people who work within the industry (e.g., car engineers, resort business managers) or the "pro-sumer" segment of the market (i.e., those consumers who are near experts when it comes to the product or service).

The challenge I find that many have within a given industry is remembering what it was like before one became an industry insider - i.e., to remember what it was like when one was simply "one of the masses".

When it comes to marketing a product or service, I find that this dynamic is one of the biggest challenges plaguing many who are in the business of marketing their products or services. The old adage of "putting yourself in your customers' shoes" is as necessary today as ever. Perhaps it is even more important given the pace at which new technologies and new products are introduced into the market.

The bottom line is that the more one lives & breathes a given industry, the more & more challenging it becomes to "put oneself in the shoes of one's customers". Industry jargon and features with non-intuitive benefits, begin to bleed into the marketing communications, leaving many consumers dumbfounded & confused.

Valvetronic technology... A 5-link/5-beam rear suspension... Does BMW expect me to know what these engineering terms refer to? I'm an average consumer with limited knowledge of cars. Words such as these make my eyes cross, and my brain hurt. They no doubt mean a lot to the engineers who developed the car; and likely to autophiles as well. But to me these terms resemble some form of early Greek. And I have neither the time nor the desire to learn a new language. My days are busy enough as it is.

So the burning question we are left with is how should BMW talk "Valetronic technology"? Clearly they're excited about it. So what should they say & do?...

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