Next time you're in the shower

…think about how you can make people’s lives better.

Last week, I went to a Contagious lecture called Brand as Interface. This means, in this cluttered world, where every brand is vying for a piece of your time, brands need to work harder to justify the time they want in peoples’ lives.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, to satisfy our client’s objectives we need to put the customer at the heart of the solution, creating a valuable exchange. How can we do this? Let me explain through an example:

The Red Tomato VIP Hungry Button, is a button you push and it automatically orders your desired pizza from Red Tomato, a pizza company in Dubai. 

The objective was how can we get people ordering more pizza?

Rather than going to the old standby offer - buy one get one free, etc., they looked at the barriers to ordering a pizza. Instead of looking to gain more market share, they looked internally at their customer journey first, and realised there was a significant language barrier when people were calling to make their order. The realised that in Dubai, with people from so many different countries with many different accents, the typical call to order took something like 9-minutes. The barriers were too high to order pizza regularly.

Taking this insight, they created a button people register online with their mobile number and favourite order. Then when they're hungry for a pizza, all they have to do is push the button and within 30-minutes their pizza is delivered.

They distributed the button to their existing customers, passing out about 3,000 buttons, which resulted in around 97,000 requests for the button after hearing about it.  This simple solution increased deliveries by 500% in only 4 weeks. And it only cost the business $9,000 to make!

A simple solution, with massive impact, because it provided meaningful value to their customers, while also meeting the business' objectives.

So next time we get a brief from a client to do a promotion pushing more product, get more people to do ‘X’, etc, lets take a step back and look at what’s preventing people from doing what the client wants them to do, and start thinking of the solution from here, looking for the desired outcomes first, in relation to the customer, and then devising the solution.

So, I challenge all of us, when we’re in the shower, cycling or walking into work, lets think about what we can create, on behalf of our clients, to make people’s lives better.

Questions before Answers

48 Sheets, Facebook pages, TV commercials, mobile apps, Pinterest boards, etc. are not questions. Rather, they may be the answer...maybe!

To get to the answer, we need a specific question - a question based on a business specific challenge/opportunity/etc. (i.e. our NPS is low, our conversion rate a low, retention keeps declining, our call center calls are doubling, we're losing margin, we have a random group of people who have found a new use for our product, etc.), while centering it around the customer's needs - what's the outcome/result we're trying to achieve for the customer.

It's important to map out the customer's journey in relation to the client's objectives to determine the task. Mapping the journey begins to identify gaps, pain points and other opportunities the organization to can solve to enhance to person's experience, providing them with genuine value. Once you have a particular gap identified, you can begin to frame your question/task.  And only at this point can you start to explore the types of technology and/or platforms you can leverage to solve this question.

So, the next time you think your brand needs an app, ask why? What am I really trying to achieve here? Maybe an app isn't the right solution, maybe there's a more effective and meaningful solution at the heart of my actual objective.

The same goes for agencies - the next time your client asks for a Pinterest idea, etc., ask why before saying yes. Determine the root business challenge they're trying to solve. Then say yes to solving that question, which may result in a partnership program, a bespoke community, a new product, who knows what it could be, but at least you can be sure your client's objectives are being met with the consumer's interests and needs in mind, resulting in an effective, insight driven piece of work that matters.

Spontaneous Brand Value

Last week, my flat was robbed, and to my surprise an interesting brand related observation came about.

To anyone whose home has been broken into, I'm sure you will agree it's an awful feeling - knowing someone has riffled through your things, without any consideration of the personal value you have for your possessions, picking and choosing what to take based on what they think will sell the fastest and for the highest price.

It's a horrible experience, but I couldn't help but think, "what an interesting way to gauge spontaneous brand value!"

In my case, Apple and Tiffany were clear winners of high spontaneous brand value.

The scene was strange to me, with a Louis Vuitton speedy bag, Chanel earrings and an external hard drive laying on the bed, along with my Tiffany silver key necklace on top of the chest of drawers. What wasn't there made the scene even more bizarre - surprise surprise my MacBook and iPad were gone, along with all my heirloom jewellery. Then after a couple hours of the initial shock, I realised the robbers took my empty Tiffany boxes, but left the actual Tiffany necklace on the chest of drawers!!

Wow! Talk about the power of well branded packaging! It proved to have higher spontaneous brand value than the product itself!

The famous Tiffany blue and it's iconic boxes are imbedded in people's minds around the world as a symbol of high value products that even my robbers, who are clearly not very bright, leaving Chanel boxes, let alone the jewellery, behind, assumed high return on theft based on the packaging alone - no matter what's inside, the blue box told him it's worth something.

This made me realise there's an interesting way to determine/measure brand value - ask your ideal consumers to take what ever they think has the greatest value (which would be first to sell and for the greatest amount) on first sight, from a selection of you and your competitors' products.

This then tells you if all your marketing initiatives are adequately adding up to a strong positioning and perceived value in your market.

Even though I could have done without this experience, it's always best to look for opportunities. This is why I'm going to see how long I can go without a computer, relying solely on my iPhone for all my personal computing needs, hence this post has been written on my iPhone this afternoon :)


Chat soon,
Nik