Essay Part V: The Stories Our Customers Live By

Twenty-first-century organizations have to compete on brands because they have nothing left. They can’t get product differentiation; they can’t get superior pricing, distribution or promotion, so branding strategy is it. – Don Schultz, from Measuring Brand Communication

Brands were developed to create differences for products that were in danger of becoming as hard to tell apart as chunks of gravel. – Kevin Roberts, from Lovemarks

So who needs to worry about myth and symbol and that mushy brand thing if we actually have the gumption to innovate? I’ve spent most of my career in the tech industry, so I understand that line of thought fairly well. (And yes having a remarkable product is a very primo position to be in.)

Knowing our customers’ stories always make us better innovators.

Branding became imperative after the surpluses of World War II. And it was cemented as a marketing vehicle in the June Cleaver era of the 1950’s when everyone scurried to watch the very same television shows. Back when mass media really did attract mass audiences.

Even tried and true brand mavens like P&G are picking up the pace of innovation. CEO A.G. Lafley has said, “[W]e don’t care where the ideas come from.” And that includes customers.

P&G, Samsung, and others like them put great energy into learning what their customers crave [via new ethnographic and behavioral practices from anthropology and psychology] - and into designing their innovation process to satisfy them. So close are they to their customers that they are beginning to co-create with them.... Success increasingly goes to those companies who focus on creating better things with their customers, not for them. – “The Innovatioon Economy” issue editorial, from Business Week, October 11, 2004

And P&G’s revenues have climbed steadily since Lafley’s tenure.

In the “Just Do It” heyday of Nike, then head of advertising Scott Bedbury made sure that Nike’s marketing was sitting down with its customers to understand their lives. “We craved more information about how certain key consumer groups viewed a number of burning issues – as opposed to specific advertising ideas – that might greatly impact our business.” Finding out whether they preferred the silver or black trim on next year’s model was very much secondary. They wanted to get into their customer’s world and inside their minds. Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist doing exploratory research for new product directions at Intel, calls this “deep hanging out.” Bell says, “"It's not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it's going to be useful to consumers.” Listening to the stories of your customers’ lives is where new product conceptions are hatched. “Doing ethnographically inspired work allows us to get at that disconnect between what people say they do and what they are really doing." Bell continues, "It gives us a powerful voice for thinking about our consumers, in their own voice, in their own language, from their own perspective.”

There is something magical about a truly useful product or service with an indescribable “je ne sais quoi” that dares to go beyond a compulsory bullet list of features directly to our hearts and minds. A great product ought to be enough. But it isn’t. We want the symbol and the story too. And that’s partly because we spend an inordinate amount of our brain capacity in sense-making and meaning-making – some would say practically all of our time.

What is life about? What sense can we make of the events that befall us? At every instance, our brains work overtime to provide us with answers, with causal explanations that create a feeling of meaning, of knowing, of understanding. This brain work proceeds automatically, unconsciously, and as we ponder the reasons why things happen, from the blissful joy of true love to the nightmarish horror of a terrorist attack, the answers seem merely to pop into our heads, for we cannot glimpse the hidden mental machinations that produced them. In recent years psychologists have begun to unlock the mysteries of those unseen mental processes. As people make meaning of the events in their lives, they sometimes fall prey to predictable biases, as in the case of whether to follow your first gut hunch. Yet even with such biases recognized, it is worth pausing to marvel at the majesty of the ability to make meaning that is a core component of each and every human brain. – Neal Roese, Ph.D., from If Only

The Industrial Revolution didn’t suddenly make us want things and the stories that went along with them. The Industrial Revolution was the result of our materialism, not the cause of it. But we don’t always know we want. If we knew what things meant, we could choose among them on the basis of some inner need. But we don’t know. So in a sense we are not materialistic enough. That’s why stories can get between us and objects. We desperately want meaning; things can’t supply it, so we install it via narrative, via branding. – James Twitchell, from Branded Nation

My point is it’s not simply about product innovation. Nor is it simply about the brand. A winning combo is an innovative product that fulfills a need and stands for something even greater. Hitting the mark on both the product front and the symbol front requires a firm foundation in actually knowing your customers’ stories. And that starts with a bit of “deep hanging out.” Perhaps a conversation or two that doesn’t skirt around the “burning issues.”

Comments

[Colleen]

So my question is, what happened to Nike *after* its heyday? Did they stop listening? Stop deep listening?

I so well remember clients begging for "Nike work." Never mind that they wouldn't know breakthrough creative if it fell on them; they didn't even understand the process of gathering the information and creating a product that could make for "Nike work."

Who understands anymore--and engages in--the deep listening necessary to create a successful relationship with one's customers? Really--who's doing it?

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Colleen, That is a GREAT question - deserving of its own post. I HIGHLY recommend Chapter 2 (heck, the whole book) in A New Brand World, by Scott Bedbury. My guess is they brought in the professional market researchers - something Nike eschewed for a long time. If so, they stopped listening for the burning issues and just focused on testing ad campaigns and product features. And it's also easy for a company to lose a sense of their own soul, what makes them tick, what their essence is.

Here's a nice snippet on how they thought internally in the "heydey": "The brand was supposed to be FELT, not scripted. Everything had to be absorbed at a visceral level, not talked about, conceptualized, or abstracted. And NEVER framed on a wall."

Ah, who's doing it right these days... Another good question.

[great link buildng]

qtqQk0 Thanks-a-mundo for the blog.Really looking forward to read more. Much obliged.