As the year winds down, we look back on our successes and failures in marketing and in life. All marketing ventures involve risk. The voice of the customer - due diligence - helps mitigate the risk. There is however always uncertainty, which is part of the adventure! And we can certainly learn from the inevitable failures.

Michael Jordan put it this way:

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Failure is a necessary part of greatness. So my friends, take the shot!

Happy holidays everyone!   (Thanks to Karen Halle for putting Mikey's quote in her San Diego American Marketing Association VP bio). 

Don't you hate when that happens!?!

You invest a lot of time and money into a new business model, an innovative product concept, an exciting promotional campaign. Then you try to sell it. And it doesn't work. Customers fundamentally tell you - directly or indirectly - that you're wrong. Now customers are not always right (that's the subject of a forthcoming blog entry), but disagreement with you is NOT a good reason to dismiss their perspective. That's not your business savvy getting in the way, it's your ego. 

I was meeting with a very bright and seasoned CEO recently who, after describing his company's downturn in winning sales, exclaimed about his sales prospects: "They just don't get it!" Now he could have labored on about how it's all the customers fault, how can they not understand, etc. But he knew better than to go there. Instead he humbled himself and said, "We must be doing something wrong." Then we proceeded to talk about how they could better understand the customer's multiple perspectives and apply those insights to improve their value proposition and win sales.

In our work with business leaders, we recommend imagining the customer is in the room with you at all times, especially during difficult business decisions. I'm giving a talk on this on December 7th at University of San Diego called "Why customers should run your company." Would love to see you there and hear your thoughts if you're in town!

I was talking with my colleague Frank Bailey, a very smart guy who heads up Education and Outreach at AARP. What came up was this: As an organization grows, as new leadership chooses its path, and as the world changes, do you turn to customers to tell you what they want you to do, or do you exert leadership and simply move forward? 

My answer is this:

1. Always keep the pulse of your customers and the market. Ask them what they want and need, but not in a vacuum. Provide boundaries to the inquiry, which should come from your mission and vision.
2. Marketing research, which we do a lot of and believe in, should inform leadership certainly, but it is not leadership.
3. Do NOT abdicate your responsibility as a business leader to commit, and to make the decisions you need to make.

It's up to you decide what you will do as an organization. Customers can tell you what they value and don’t value; not what you should do. Ultimately it comes down to your core values, what you can do better than any other company, what drives your economic engine, what sets you apart, and what sells in the market. These are your leadership decision tools.

Old Spice figured out who holds the purchasing power in their target market's household. In previous campaigns, they targeted end users' (men's) awareness and liking. Look at their old ad with the shouting macho dude that would annoy maybe 200% of women. However, men may actually like the fact that women don't like the ad, with this logic: Because women don't like it, it is automatically manly. Who said we're not shallow.

Now to focus on a better outcome - selling their product - in the newer campaign, they are targeting and winning the buyers' preference by appealing to women, and through women, to their men.

This ad has multiple messages. What women doesn't want a man to bake them a cake in the dream kitchen he built with his own hands??  But the message doesn't negatively affect men's awareness or liking of Old Spice. Men appreciate that Old Spice understands their "situation" - another way to sell manliness.

As marketers, we know Old Spice probably conducted copious amounts of research to intimately get to know and understand their customers and the the purchase decision process. To Joe Bro, it feels like he just had a "manversation" consisting of mostly grunts, nods, and maybe a fist bump with Old Spice. Then the product he (and she) wants magically appears in his bathtub. Cha-ching.

Recently, NPR told the story of a Texas hospital that is trying to use the "speed dating" concept to win new patients and bolster physician loyalty as well. Selected doctors and prospective patients pair off and chat for five minutes, then rotate into the next conversation. Check out the hospital's promotional video:

Clever idea. Attention-getting tactic. Yet there are numerous questions to consider... Will most physicians participate? Will referrals to the hospital increase? How scalable is it?  

And the bottom line question is: Can a good physician-patient match be made through a brief, patient-driven conversation? A Medscape poll shows that only 21% of physicians feel "speed dating" would be effective for their practice.

The key is asking the right questions, that is, questions that are predictive of a good doctor-patient match. And that is a work in progress.

How do we persuade people to do or buy things? In the health and medical field, we usually rely on educating them. This is the "direct" path to persuasion. Give lots of detailed information, the "customer" will scrutinize it, think hard about it, and come to a rational conclusion. Right? Wrong.

Years of research has shown that this approach usually doesn't work very well. For most people most of the time, the "indirect" path to persuasion is far more effective. On the indirect path, people are influenced by things like who the spokesperson is and what feelings are being conveyed, rather than the rational argument. They are not thinking deeply. Instead, they are relying on, say the credibility of the spokesperson, as a shortcut to making a quick decision. The upside is people are engaged. The downside is that the persuasion that does result may be shorter lived. 

I see the real win as what I would call involvement conversion. Use the indirect path to get people initially interested. Then once they are "in the door" so to speak, their positive experience should convert them to care more deeply and find the personal relevance in what you are selling. Just make it worth their while.

Note: I know, I know. There's a popular business book called the 5 Paths to Persuasion. The two paths I am touting are fundamentally based on whether people personally connect with your message or not. Think about what path you take when faced with a barrage of communications.

Most of us assume customers want a lot of choices. Nobody likes being told what to do. Right? Maybe not.

In the book The Paradox Of Choice: Why More is Less, psychologist Barry Schwartz tells the story of going into the Gap to buy a pair of jeans. The salesperson asks him what kind of jeans- slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, or baggy? Stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Button fly or zipper? On and on the choices grew. He replies - a bit confused - jeans, just regular jeans like he always buys. Then he started worrying, well maybe it matters and should he try on 14 different styles? The myriad of choices created an uncomfortable "need."

In our consulting work helping companies really understand what their customers want, need, and value, we invariably find that too many choices is just as bad as no choices. For example, when working with our federal Medicare agency (CMS) to investigate what choices seniors want in selecting health insurance plans, we found they tended to want two or three good choices. And they really valued a trusted resource that could present them with the best two or three options for their situation.

Therein lies the marketing opportunity. Sometimes people are overwhelmed by choices. They want to be told what to do, especially in a domain where they have little or no expertise, like say, evaluating healthcare systems. So step up and make it easier for your customers by reducing their number of choices. Call it "peace of mind" marketing.

P.S. This is where my marketing pseudonym "Les S. Moore" comes into play.

We're just wrapping up a marketing study with primary care doctors across the country to test the appeal of potential new medical equipment and services. I am constantly hearing doctors lamenting the condition of healthcare in America, and very clearly saying what they do everyday - how they treat patients - is directly affected by what is r eimbursable by insurance and what kind of coverage a patient has. It is both understandable and frightening. 

In the midst of healthcare reform, are you and I willing to sacrifice our benefits for the greater good?  As the cartoon suggests, many lawmakers have a double standard and would not. Wouldn't that be like a marketer representing a product they don't believe in? Not a good thing. And it always shows. Integrity: Don't leave home without it!

There's a new website business called Uplaya by Music Intelligence Solutions with "Hit Song Science" software that predicts what songs will be big hits, then helps with promotion and distribution. The company's CEO sees the algorythm that looks for common patterns of rhythm, harmony, chord progression, length and lyrics, as a way to democratize the music industry, a process he likens to an electronic American ldol (listen to today's NPR interview).

This reminds me of popular singer/songwriter named Michael Bolton who may be best known for singing well-known covers in the 1980s & 90s. Turns out most of his work is original and quite popular, but he was often criticized as a "formula" singer, without much originality. So too are some songwriters critical - or fearful - of an algorythm shaping artistry. It would eliminate innovation and narrow the range of creative possibilities they say. Should artists be driven by what their fans want? Or just sing, write, paint, or create what is in their hearts? My belief is there is a balance. By definition, significant innovation - whether for new products, services, or songs - is something that is hard to evaluate using existing mental templates.

I made the point this way in a Global Marketing seminar I taught last week: Imagine 30 years ago (for a few students, this would have been before they were born... hmm.), someone would have you shown you a small flat box that had a little TV screen and a typewriter built in. They explained to you that with no wires, this "thing" would let you write letters and use spreadsheets, instantly send notes to people anywhere in the world, and just as quickly tap into a worldwide encyclopedia, company directory and shopping network. Could you have even conceived of it? Sure, predictive software is great. And there will always be a place for unscripted creativity that breaks the bounds of what is now known and accepted as good.