This has to be one of the most tedious, well planned and interesting videos we’ve seen in a long time. Kudos.
Here is the story of the build and the shoot.
All this talk about Google Chrome OS. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does it really mean? What’s the thought behind it? Here’s a video that explains Google’s next step towards world domination.
If you are complete nerds like us, you can read more on Mashable, here.
Watch this and then think again:
9:00 AM Friday November 13, 2009
ANDREW MCAFEE
You’ve probably heard by now that “your brand is no longer yours.” The assertion’s based on simple math. In the era of blogs, discussion boards, Facebook, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 tools, virtually everyone can get online and talk about your company and its offerings. As a result, the amount of information your marketing and PR departments can generate is only a small percentage of the total volume of content on the Internet about your firm.
What’s more, if some of the external voices become as popular, or perish the thought, more popular than your official voice, then they’re going to show up high in organic (as opposed to paid) search results. For example, I just typed “Hummer” into Google. The second result is the Wikipedia entry about the vehicle, and the fourth one is a site full of user-submitted photos that are not likely to please the brand’s owner.
Every large organization I’m aware of is highly sensitive about its brand, and few are happy about losing or even sharing control over it. They react to the reality of Web 2.0 era in many ways, but most of them amount to some form of trying to exert or reestablish control. Some move their mass media campaigns online to counteract the outside conversation. Some try to influence the influential external voices. Many companies monitor the new online conversations, and also participate in them by setting up official Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and so on. More than a few try “sock puppeting” or having someone on the payroll pose as an outsider with nothing but good things to say. This rarely works; Web users are reasonably good at sniffing out inauthentic voices and ignoring or blowing the whistle on them.
A few large, brand-sensitive organizations have taken another approach; they’ve accepted their lack of brand control and have actively encouraged insiders to join the online conversation without making any attempt to censor or even guide them. They’ve said, essentially, “You know us really well. Talk about us on the Web. We want the world to hear what you have to say.”
Does that sound risky to you? Can you envision dozens of ways in which that approach can go horribly wrong? Me, too. And yet, I keep reading stories like the recent one in the New York Times about MIT’s student bloggers, and they make me appreciate the brilliance of this approach.
Five years ago Ben Jones, then the director of communications in MIT’s admissions office, added a single student blog to the office’s web page; there are now eleven of them. Student bloggers are selected after submitting writing samples, and are paid $10 per hour.
I was an undergrad at MIT (just a few years before the blog era) and I assure you that most students there would treat the administration’s suggestions about appropriate self-expression about the same way Roger Federer might treat the local club pro’s tips on improving his forehand. The admissions office understands this, and wisely doesn’t try to edit posts or comments.
And not all content reflects glowingly on the institution. One blogger complained about problems with the resident advising system, while another wrote that she’s felt several times that she didn’t fit in at MIT. She also went on to say, as the Times story reports, that “MIT is the closest you can get to living on the Internet…IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.”
MIT could spend lots of money on their brand and image and never come up with a better advertising tag line than “The closest you can get to living on the Internet.” Indeed, part of what makes it so effective is not just its clarity and cleverness, but the fact that it’s being shouted across the Internet by a current student who is clearly speaking in her own voice. It’s just tremendous marketing; the admissions office couldn’t ask for, or pay for better.
Putting student blogs front and center is a mark of MIT’s confidence: confidence in itself as a healthy organization where the pros outweigh the cons, confidence in the members of its community who represent it to the world, and confidence that the people who come to its website will know how to interpret the information they find there. According to the Times article, potential applicants to the university are “less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.” Does that sound at all like your customers?
Is your organization as confident as MIT? Are you ready and willing to let more internal voices communicate and shape your brand over time? If not, why not? Is it that you don’t trust your people, or your customers? Is it that you don’t want any negativity at all to appear on your digital properties? Or is it that you’re afraid there might be too much negativity?
I don’t think these are unfair questions, or trivial ones. Their answers will reveal not only how your organization sees itself, but also about how it’s responding to a world of reduced control over brands, conversations, and messages. Leading organizations are embracing this trend and, like MIT, they’re giving up tight control even when and where they don’t have to.
Lagging organizations are holding on to the illusion that tight control is still possible.
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The original post is from the Harvard Business Review and can be found here. It was written by Andrew McAfee. Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. He also maintains a Facebook profile and Twitter account.
McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT. McAfee is the author of Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (2009, Harvard Business Press).
Thursday October 29, 2009
by Ron Ashkenas
Have you noticed that more and more companies are marketing “simplicity” as a reason to buy their products or services? For example, Philips Electronics advertises “Sense and simplicity” while Bank of America promotes “Clear, easy-to-understand products.” Simplicity also is the subtle message that Schwab conveys when it says “Talk to Chuck” and that Fidelity suggests when it says just “Stay on the line.”
The reality is that simplicity is highly appealing in a world that is getting more and more complex — where consumers have too many choices, where technology is constantly evolving, and where the political and economic environment is unpredictable. In the midst of all this instability and change, people want to get back to basics. They want uncomplicated products, straightforward guidance, and things that work quickly and simply the first time, without lots of extra effort.
What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it is in sharp contrast with the thinking of the past few years — which was that consumers wanted unlimited choice so that they could customize their products and services to fit their own unique needs and lifestyles. As such, technology companies pushed for more and more bells and whistles, while other firms drove towards mass customization. The result was a huge array of choices that became almost overwhelming and costly.
For example, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller discovered that it was giving consumers so many choices for customizing its popular Aeron chair that it had to be prepared to produce over four million variations on the basic model — even though only a few thousand configurations were actually being ordered. Similarly, Cisco Systems learned from its top corporate customers that all the new features in its networking products were actually causing instability in the corporate networks because they couldn’t be integrated easily with existing hardware and software.
It’s easy to create slogans and marketing materials about simplicity. The challenge is to truly make things easier for the customer so that simplicity becomes a competitive advantage.
To do that, companies need to listen to their customers and truly engage them in dialogue about their needs — and their perceptions of products and services offered. For example, Cisco works with a number of customer advisory groups that meet regularly with senior executives and product developers; Fidelity executives either answer their 800-number consumer phone lines or listen to tapes of the calls; ConAgra Foods product managers make field visits to consumers’ homes and to grocery stores.
In addition to listening to customers, companies also need to design their products and services from the customer perspective. When Intuit developed its small business accounting software package, the product developers realized that most small business owners were not familiar with accounting jargon, and in fact were intimidated by it. So instead of using the term “accounts receivable”, they called it “money in.” Similarly, “accounts payable” became “money out.” As a result of developing a product from the customer perspective, Intuit sold 100,000 copies of the software the first year.
Not every company needs to create its own version of the iPod, an icon of simplicity. But there is no reason why every company can’t listen to their own customers and design products and services in ways that better satisfy their customers’ desires for greater simplicity and ease of use. If you don’t, your competitors probably will.
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the forthcoming book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done
This article is from the Harvard Business Blog. Original article can be found here.
By Anthony Tjan via harvardbusiness.org.
I recently sat down with my BlackBerry voice recorder and Mats Lederhausen to ask him to share his philosophy of “purpose bigger than product.” Mats is a great entrepreneur and also had one of the most successful careers at McDonald’s where he was a driving force for its turnaround. He currently runs his private investment vehicle Be-Cause and is a Special Partner at our firm, Cue Ball.
What is your philosophy of “purpose bigger than product” all about?
At its core, it is about being real and idea-driven. Trust is perhaps the most important currency in business, and big ideas may be the only true source of competitive advantage. Lack of trust is a form of tax. And that tax rate has increased in the past number of years. Customers simply don’t trust institutions as much today. Particularly large businesses. The main reason is that we now live in an “information everywhere” and more transparent world. Every customer has a camera in their cell phone, a Facebook in their pocket and Twitter at their fingertips. This means we hear and see evidence of businesses not walking their talk. Their products don’t match their promise. In order to regain this trust you must simply make sure that all your products, your merchandising, your advertising, your people and the totality of your touch points with consumers sing from the same hymn. And that hymn is what I call purpose. Some people call it vision. Others call it focus. It is the same thing. It is source of your promise. It answers the question: Why are you here?
Talk a little more on the notion of “big ideas.”
I often talk about “altitude creates attitude”. When you meet people that have a big idea it is almost impossible to be unaffected. It is like a perfume. You can smell it miles away. I firmly believe that the source of human energy and creativity can be found in the distance between where we are and where we’d like to be. It is that creative dissonance that is the entrepreneurial rocket fuel. If human beings could have walked everywhere on the planet I don’t believe we would have invented trains, planes and automobiles. So, if you really want to build great companies you need big ideas.
Certainly, not all big ideas may be viable in all incarnations. What about the reality of these ideas?
Of course they have to be believable. They can’t be pipedreams. Or as John Naisbitt once said: You can’t get so far ahead of the parade that no one knows you’re in it.
From an execution perspective, you have to think big, start small, and scale fast. You can’t think big and start big, that’s almost impossible. You need miniature versions of your grand idea so you can validate its parts, and then iterate and tweak constantly. There’s nothing wrong with having a really big idea and launching only aspects of that idea. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Take Chipotle, for example. Steve Ells had a very big idea about food, but he didn’t start by executing 100% of his vision; he gradually did what he could towards that theme.
It is also important to remember that your purpose is not what you “tell” customers, but what you do. The best way to disappoint everyone is to over-promise and under-deliver. Therefore you must be humble AND committed at the same time. In fact, customers are more forgiving when you make mistakes if those mistakes are honest efforts in trying to improve towards a known and worthwhile direction.
How can a purpose be instrumental in leading an organization?
I look at purpose as the guiding star. The compass. The soul. Steve Jobs once said “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation”. And everything we do is design in one form or the other. And if you have a fuzzy idea of your own soul, your design will suffer. On the other hand, like Steve Jobs does, if you have a sharp idea of your soul and what footprints you want to leave, all your design will complement and reinforce that soul of yours.
How did you come to have this philosophy?
There are a few parts of the answer. First, to be honest, it’s hard to know the answers to the bigger questions in life, like why we believe what we believe. To a certain extent it’s the result of the sum of all of our experiences since birth. Second, I’ve been influenced by seeing what really works. I think strong conviction and a sense of purpose enables focus, and the biggest culprit of bad performance in a company is lack of focus. It’s hard to set direction if you don’t know who you are. Thirdly, I’ve decided that I only want to work with companies that are trying to do something important. It’s about human progress and adding value to society.
What do mean when you say “important?”
While we have significant global issues to be concerned about, an important business doesn’t have to be grandiose or socially driven in order to be important. General contribution to the well-being of another human being is worthwhile. It could be a restaurant that’s creating jobs and leaving customers just a tad bit happier than when they arrived. Or a concept such as MiniLuxe, our Cue Ball investment that is trying to “Starbuck” the nail salon, which has innovated a lot around hygiene and customer experience. It is an example of a business with a clear purpose that is trying to do something remarkably better than the industry norm.
What companies really celebrate this philosophy?
Nike is a company that understands it. They have always had this idea that it’s more than a sneaker. They are about getting into the game, being more than a spectator in life, and embracing activity. In their words, “Just do it.” If you go to their headquarters in Oregon, it’s like being in a gym: it breathes “active lifestyle.” That’s what they’re about and they have consistently executed around it.
Southwest Airlines is about giving people the freedom to fly. They are about seeking and loving freedom, and they enjoy being a bit nutty about celebrating that notion. And there are many others as well. Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Google, Patagonia, IKEA, and a host of others. There is one thing that is interesting to me to note about all these companies. They are very different in so many ways. But they are also very similar in one way. They all have their founders alive and kicking. When the source of the original idea is still around it is harder to lose why you came to this world in the first place.
Sometimes an image is just so powerful it stops you and makes you pay attention. This, in our opinion, is one of those images. There is an entire story captured in a moment. We love work like this.
The state of the “ADVERTISING” business.
Preview:
The Breakup:
The plot thickens:
Thought for the day:
Build relationships. Not impressions.
There is a quote that I have loved for a while:
“Push yourself farther than you think you can go or you’ll never know how far you can reach”.
I’m not sure where this came from but it’s been a powerful push in my life for a while now. This article from HarvardBusiness.org seemed appropriate for today. –Tim
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Why You Need to Fail
Monday July 6, 2009
PETER BREGMAN
“Peter, I’d like you to stay for a minute after class.” Calvin teaches my favorite body conditioning class at the gym.
“What’d I do?” I asked him.
“It’s what you didn’t do.”
“What didn’t I do?”
“Fail.”
“You kept me after class for not failing?”
“This,” he began to mimic my casual weight lifting style, using weights that were obviously too light, “is not going to get you anywhere. A muscle only grows if you work it till it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail.”
Calvin’s onto something.
Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward — not just a step, but a leap — failure is always on the list. For some it was the loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.
Yet most of us spend a tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure.
According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, we have a mindset problem. Dweck has done a tremendous amount of research to understand what makes someone give up in the face of adversity versus strive to overcome it.
It turns out the answer is deceptively simple. It’s all in your head.
If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.
Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.
But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.
Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn’t discourage him: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.
In business, we have to be discriminating about when we choose to challenge ourselves. In high risk, high leverage situations, it’s better to stay within your current capability. In lower risk situations, where the consequences of failure are less, better to push the envelope. The important point is to know that pushing the envelope, that failing, is how you learn and grow and succeed. It’s your opportunity.
Here’s the good news: you can change your success by changing your mindset. When Dweck trained children to view themselves as capable of growing their intelligence, they worked harder, more persistently, and with greater success on math problems they had previously abandoned as unsolvable.
A growth mindset is the secret to maximizing potential. Want to grow your staff? Give them tasks above their ability. They don’t think they could do it? Tell them you expect them to work at it for a while, struggle with it. That it will take more time than the tasks they’re used to doing. That you expect they’ll make some mistakes along the way. But you know they could do it.
Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals where you have a 50–70% chance of success. According to Psychologist and Harvard researcher the late David McClelland, that’s the sweet spot for high achievers. Then, when you fail half the time, figure out what you should do differently and try again. That’s practice. And according to recent studies, 10,000 hours of that kind of practice will make you an expert in anything. No matter where you start.
The next class I did with Calvin, I doubled the weight I was using. Yeah, that’s right. Unfortunately, that gave me tendonitis in my elbow, which I’m nursing with rest and ice. Sometimes you can even fail when you’re trying to fail.
Hey, I’m learning.
The original article can be found here.
With all of the “information” about Social Media running rampant out there we’ve decided to start an ongoing list of Social Media references and links that we’ve found useful. Feel free to send yours over!
General Social Media:
Twitter Resources:
Blog Resources:
Facebook Resources:
Tools we like and use:
We will continue updating and adding so check back often. If you find any dead or inactive links please let us know.
We just launched a new web site for Affect Strategies (www.affectstrategies.com), and we’re pretty darn proud of it.
Now to be clear here, let’s talk about what we didn’t do. When we first started discussing this assignment, the original wireframe, basic structure and starting look had already been established, so there wasn’t much here for us as a “creative” company, right? We honestly believe that’s where a lot of companies miss the boat. Instead, we looked at this as a great way to get to know a new partner/client AND to demonstrate that creativity and professionalism is not only based on how hot your designs are.
Our role in this project was to take the clients’ vision and execute it in a way that was functional and effective, both consumer facing and on the back end. If the back end is too complicated or difficult to use, it won’t be utilized properly and the content will get stale quickly. As Affect Strategies is a driven and growing company, they are extremely active both on the primary web site and on their blog (www.techaffect.com), we had to make sure that it was functional, accessible and intuitive.
From the consumer perspective the site is very content heavy. So, how did we execute the volume of information that is contained in a way that doesn’t appear daunting to viewers when exploring the site? We utilized very subtle ways. With careful choice of typeface and colours, to the way that the content is divided between the pages, to the tiny details of line spacing and distance between content, we were able to keep it simple looking while communicating a lot of content.
Working with a great client who has a clear vision and expectations is a wonderful thing. The President and founder, Sandra Fathi, and VP, Partner, Leslie Campisi, made themselves available for discussions and were always open to ideas and suggestions. This definitely allowed a great two-way conversation and helped make this project a success.
Take a few minutes and explore affectstrategies.com and meet a great group of people who are passionate about what they do. Explore the site and enjoy it for what it is, a communications portal that represents a professional company that offers their clients a myriad of services to help their business grow.
We at THEM! always strive to add that extra effort and creative thinking that help our clients be more successful. Regardless of how simple or complex your project might be we’ll help you take it to a great place. Visit us at www.themdidit.com.
Evan Williams is the co-founder of Twitter, the addictive messaging service that connects the world 140 characters at a time.
Many, many years ago, I was living in Ft. Lauderdale trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had recently moved from Southern California where I had left behind a six-figure sales and consulting job. I had been extremely successful at sales after some intense training while working for LifeTouch Studios, a fantastic school photo company based in Minneapolis. So, I was good at sales but I wasn’t truly passionate about the traditional corporate sales process and was feeling restless.
I accepted a position for another photography company in South Florida thinking that a change was what I needed and quickly found out that I was wrong. Shortly thereafter, I left that job and started waiting tables at Mangos, a trendy restaurant on Las Olas Blvd., while I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I had purchased my first Apple computer (IIvx baby!) a few years before and had done a couple of “ads” for small businesses previously. I knew I really enjoyed doing that and I knew that I was absolutely horrible at it.
So I did some research and found that the Miami Ad School had opened on South Beach the year before and looked really interesting. I took a second job at a local service bureau (remember those?) to learn more about the computer. I waited tables during the day, ran film in the afternoon and started classes at Miami Ad School in the evening. I arranged to sleep on the floor of the back room at the service bureau at night so I would have access to the computers to do my homework. Long days indeed.
I had some really great teachers at Miami Ad School including Alex Bogusky, Bruce Turkel and many others. In the middle of all this, I received a job offer from a local magazine to do sales for them. The money was really good and I was really struggling. Not sure what to do, I went to Bruce Turkel for advice. What I got was advice that has helped guide my success to this day.
I remember vividly standing out in the parking lot of the school talking with Bruce about an ad I had done for a “client” that had come to the owner of the service bureau where I was working. I still have that “ad” and still hear Bruce’s voice kindly telling me that there was “no big idea” to my masterpiece and to go back to the beginning and come up with an idea.
Secondly, when I asked him about my job dilemma he said this: “It would be really easy to take the money, get comfortable and miss out on the passion you have for what you’re learning now. It’ll be much easier to keep sacrificing now for what you really want, then to take the money and then later have to walk away from it to begin your career in advertising”. Wise words indeed.
Bruce owned a successful agency called Turkel Advertising, had mercy on me and hired me to do production. This was my first “real” advertising job.
Day after day, I was able to observe how truly big ideas and concepts were developed. I got to see how these ideas were produced and executed. I got to work with Bruce and learn to pay extreme attention to details. I can’t tell you how many times I got to go back to the computer and fix the leading and kerning until it was right, how many times I had to hand comp a presentation brochure or pitch book until it was perfect. I would not trade that education for all of the money in the world.
Another one of the great things I learned from Bruce was that great ideas can come from anywhere. I will not forget the day that we were working on a pitch for Carnival Airlines and Bruce called everyone from the office into the small conference room in the front corner of the office across from the receptionist. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. In fact, he locked the front door and had the entire office, from the creative teams, account teams, receptionist and cleaning staff all in this little conference room. If I remember correctly, there was even a UPS driver who was there and we were all quickly briefed and throwing out ideas and thoughts as quick as we possibly could. This also left an indelible impression on me that would help me for years to come.
Bruce was not only my first creative mentor; he was a brilliant and ethical businessman as well. All of the things that he taught me and all that I was able to observe have helped to guide me through my career. I’ve had the honor of being a creative director at agencies like Y&R, ATTIK and TracyLocke on some of the biggest brands in the world and I would never have had these opportunities if it wasn’t for people that took the time to guide and mentor me. Now, I get to use all of that knowledge and experience in our work at THEM! in ways that make us a successful little agency. For that, Bruce, I say thank you.
Now as we are in difficult times in our business, I challenge you all to take the time to find young, hungry minds and share your knowledge. With all of the technology available to us, with all of the methods to get messages out there, there is still no substitute for a great idea and attention to the little things. These are the things that make good, great and make our work, work.
Lastly, don’t forget to take the time to say thank you to the people that have taken the time to help you. You know who they are.
Here are a few of mine:
Bruce Turkel
Cliff Courtney
Alex Bogusky
Miami Ad School
Will Travis
James Sommerville
Jim Hord
Thank you all.
Great explanation and great execution.
AdFreak Brand New
Tap into Your Super-Consumers
Tap into Your Super-Consumers
8:39 AM Wednesday November 25, 2009 by Eddie Yoon
In any product category, roughly 10% of the consumers account for more than 50% of the profits. These super-consumers, as we call them, are the hot dog buyers who eat five pounds of hot dogs a month, wolfing down as many as 4 per sitting. They are the stapler users who own 8 different staplers. They know what they want, they’ll buy a lot of it, and they’ll pay a premium for it. They’re passionate and engaged — sometimes even a little obsessive — and they exist in every category, from soft drinks and air travel to fast-food and oral care products. Many managers assume that their super-consumers are a unique species whose extreme appetites say little about what more casual consumers might go for. They also figure that their super-consumers are already sated, so there’s no point in probing them further. That’s a mistake.
We’ve found that companies that listen to their super-consumers and use their insights to refine their message ultimately grow sales and margins across all segments. These companies aren’t trying to convert light users into heavy users. Rather, they’re figuring out what it is the super-consumers like so much and then offering it to them. Invariably, acting on the insights from those consumers who spend disproportionate time and energy in the category uncovers insights and innovations that encourage trade-up behaviors across other segments as well.
Consider this: A stapler company we consulted for found itself heading for a price war with competitors. What to do? Market research with its community of stapler groupies — users who stapled ten times as much as the average person — found that they valued anti-jamming above all other features, and would happily pay a premium for high-performance, jam-free staplers. Running with this insight, the company redesigned its point of sale to emphasize electric staplers and refocused its marketing message across all products on benefits (like reliability) rather than features (like color). The strategy boosted sales by 20% and improved margins overall. Not only did electric stapler sales increase (fueled by super-consumers), but the merchandizing strategy emphasizing the benefits of trading up increased sales of heavy-duty manual staplers across other segments.
Or consider how a refrigerated-meat manufacturer used super-consumer feedback to develop a fuller understanding of its true core customers — teenage boys and their moms. Their heaviest users, they found, were not summertime backyard grillers, as they’d thought, but households with teenage boys who eat hot dogs for after school snacks. The boys liked the taste of the all-beef products, and how filling and easy to cook they were. The moms liked their quality (certainly compared to the junk teenage boys normally eat). Armed with this insight, the manufacturer focused its portfolio strategy on all-beef products, emphasized taste at point of sale, and shifted its marketing to extreme sports and gaming environments to build awareness among teen boys — who’d push their moms to buy the brand.
While these decisions were grounded in the insights of the super-consumers, the strategy ultimately paid off across all segments. The brand grew over 40% in three years, increased its share of household penetration and successfully usurped the number one position in the category. While super-consumers accounted for more than 40% of that growth, those weekend backyard grillers drove a nearly equal percentage, with the remaining 20% realized through category expansion. Delivering the optimal product to super-consumers was certainly the primary goal, but in the process the brand succeeded in commanding a price premium and encouraging trade-up behavior across other segments as well.
Has your company tapped the wisdom of its super-consumers? Are you willing to listen to them — and respond?
Eddie Yoon is a Principal with The Cambridge Group. During his more than ten year tenure with the firm he has helped global clients across industries leverage super-consumer insights to fuel profitable growth.
This post is originally from HarvardBusiness.org and can be found here.