I had the pleasure of speaking at the FutureM conference last year in their 20/20 track. It took me awhile, but I uploaded the slides here.
This is what I had to say… or at least what my notes said I was planning on saying:
Turning Up the Awesome
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Category Archives: marketing
The Peoples’ Club
Jolie O’Dell wrote a fantastic smack down of some misogynistic marketing recently. The company at fault had a bunch of sexified disembodied lady body parts drapped around some sound system to try to get people to attend their booth at CES.
Cool, guys. Creative.
But what really made me pause was the last note in her article:
” *Note: Dirk Marketing is run by Angie Dirk, a woman. Patriarchy wouldn’t be patriarchy without women’s participation, and we wish Ms. Dirk would have had the wherewithal to do better work and demand higher standards of her clients.”
Here’s where I don’t have any answers. In 2013 when we talk about being ‘one of the boys’, I think what we really mean is being able to develop the kinds of relationships with people where you can be both casual and off-the-cuff when the situation calls for it and then be highly professional and buttoned-up when the situation calls for that.
More frequently today, thank goodness, that’s not a gender-specific ‘Boys’ Club’ but a gender-neutral ‘Peoples’ Club’ – meaning people with personality, not just some body at a desk staring at a computer screen. It’s a real skill to be able to develop those relationships and switch back and forth at will. It’s also the place where you end up being super-productive, creative and happy. (I’m lucky in that this is how the large majority of my professional experiences are and have been.)
I think, though, that it can be challenging for women to figure out the line between this kind of healthy banter and the kind of negative actions that are detrimental to the advancement of women in the workplace. With so many men still dominating a lot of businesses, I think for some women it still feels like this kind of relationship is still exclusively male, so you need to bend to misogynic attitudes if you want to play the game.
I don’t have an answer and I don’t know how to teach anyone how to find that line. But I do think it’s possible to not to freak out about things that just don’t matter while being able to put your foot down and tell it like it is when something does matter, with everyone in your life.
Maybe Ms. Dirk at this ad agency thought the ad was just ‘boys being boys’. But they weren’t acting like people and it’s an idiotic, cheap campaign. She should have called them out on that, no matter how much she wanted the contract or to maintain the relationship.
Verbing Nouns for Adjective Subjects
In last week’s journey into learning at Intelligent.ly, Mike Troiano took a whole bunch of us to school teaching us how tell our brand story, a.k.a. positioning – here are the slides! They are informative and also aesthetically pleasing.
The short story of Mike’s branding framework goes like this:
For [target] who are [segment], [brand] provides the [category] with [distinction] because of [proof].
- target – actionable universe of buyers
- segment – key, predisposing attribute: one question that defines your segment in a target audience
- brand – name you call yourself
- category – competitive frame for the buyer
- distinction – what makes you unique
- proof – perceived evidence of truth
Everyone is the class partnered up and tried to come up with their sentence.
This is hard.
Even when all you do all day [and night and at brunch and at parties and ohmygodihatemyself] is talk about what you’re working on. It’s still really challenging to write a good sentence. Mine got destroyed. It was way too long, and didn’t really differentiate and yea, keep working. But every comment I heard from the other folks in the class (thanks Gemma!) was so helpful that it’s embarrassing they even had to say it out loud.
Of course, this is not really embarrassing – it’s great. This class gave me some great new framing tools for positioning, but of equal import it let 30 of us get together and crank through words to ratchet up a little higher on the way to a solid positioning statement. An hour and a half well spent. Let’s do it again sometime.
Sidebar: I particularly liked Mike’s framework because sometimes I play my own Mad Lib game in my head where I try to describe a brand as “verbing nouns for adjective subjects”. Like, New Balance: designing sneakers for innovative athletes. Or, the Gates Foundation: donating money for big-thinking humanitarians. This is a fun game – you should play it with your friends at parties. [If your friends are super nerdy. (And maybe make it a drinking game first. {And let me know if you have any success with that - we should be friends.})]
Choose your own amphibian adventure: a design psych class recap
The learning game at Intelligent.ly yesterday was hosted by Dr. Amy Bucher and focused on design psychology. She was super organized and a great presenter. Two thumbs up. Check out this neat sketchnote for an overview.
A key point I honed in on falls under Autonomy and is the idea of ‘constrained choice’. Basically, you want to set up a universe for your user, but let them make fluid decisions inside that world. Like a Choose Your Adventure book. In those books after choosing every possible ending, I’d read all the way through just to make sure I’d found every twist. Some people, I’m sure, just read straight through from the beginning, plot line be damned. And I guess maybe some people chose one adventure and never read outside their chosen story (really? raise your hand. that’s weird).
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about exploring why versus what or how when creating content (see: last post from an intelligent.ly class). Why attract people to our service? Because I believe, for example, that a community empowered to easily access, visualize and share their own information will create more powerful new knowledge more quickly than individuals without that empowerment (duh. but important in health care). So prior to tonight, the stages of developing and rolling out said product were seeming to make sense in a fairly linear fashion… get everyone in the network to achieve step 1, then move on to step 2 etc. like so:
1. Access information – > 2. Engage with your own information –> 3. Give back new information –> 4. Engage with other people’s information
But now I’m wondering if really we need to make sure that anyone can start at and move between these functions easily. More like adventure choosing. Maybe some people just want to access their information and will never move beyond (laterally? diagonally?) from there. Or maybe some people want to contribute, but never actually use the information. Or maybe we’ll get people excited by having them engage with other people’s data and then they’ll share their own. Or some use cases I haven’t thought of yet.
In a constrained choice (Choose Your Own Adventure) environment maybe it’s better to have a super clear answer for “Why?” but then present the user with a bunch of lily pads all anchored in your big pond of Why and just let the user hop around. UI and design are the little lily pads that make sure your user can navigate their own environment.
Does that work as a structure? Maybe. Maybe I just really like frogs. And Word-created Shape graphics (sexy). Anyways, look up Dr. Bucher if you need someone who can pack serious punch of complex, high value ideas into 90 minutes. And go take a class.
Pro Tip: if you’re a Massachusetts resident you can get into the Harvard Museum of Natural History for free on Sunday mornings. They have some super sweet tree frogs. And a bunch of other stuff, apparently, but I just go for the frogs.
creative commons image from matt macgillivray
How to get your Customers to Drive you to the Airport
I went to a super cool class at Intelligent.ly on product management, taught by Christopher O’Donnell who does some kind of awesome at HubSpot. Check out these things, but wait till you’re done reading my post.
Walking home I was listening to the best song ever right now. You may know it. So in this here song, Carly Rae Whatever sings to her brandy new boyfriend, “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad, I missed you so bad.” And this echoed a key idea about customer love that Christopher put forward in his talk. He said that as a product manager you should take a step back and figure out what it is that your customers will miss so bad before you come into their lives. Ok, not in those words.
What he actually said was that it’s a super valuable exercise to write a love letter to your product from the perspective of a customer in the future. It’s a cheesy activity. But so is pop music. And I dig them both.
So you pick apart your letter and figure out what values make a customer *love* your product. What is it exactly that makes your customer want to snuggle up with your product and a glass of shiraz? Cook it scallops in cream sauce. Drive it to the airport for a 6am flight. Stuff like that. Then you can read your letter, translate your sappy sentiments into core values and understand the customer for whom you’re building.
Great idea.
Then I started thinking about if it’s necessary to love your own products. And struggled with that. If you love something it’s hard to see the flaws, it’s hard to demand change and it’s really hard to kill pieces of it. It’s probably better NOT to love your product, right? In fact you might want to hate parts of it. So, Christopher, I thought to myself, all indignant, “How am I supposed to expect my customers to love my product if I don’t love my product? Hmmm?”
Oh wait, self. Duh.
It’s not a love letter to the product, it’s a love letter to the values the product delivers. That’s what he was getting at with wading through the cheese to find the value. It’s not about *loving* the way a navigation tool functions, it’s about loving that you find your information quickly. Hopefully I took this message home right, but I don’t think you should love any one feature or set of features, because someday you might kill it. But it is important to absolutely love and (even more importantly) understand the core values your product delivers to your customers.
Sidebar: in adding the links to this I went over to Mr. O’Donnell’s blog and found this post. Rock on:
If no one ever hates anything about your product, there is a good chance you are trying to build a “faster horse.” Fierce objections to a feature or approach indicate a break from the traditional worldview, and therefore an opportunity to change the world. - @markitecht
A picture is worth the eyes of the beholder
If you (are lucky enough to) live in the Cambridge/Somerville area you may have seen a series of bus stop ads featuring large-format faces holding seashells up to their ears (these ads may also be in other places, I don’t know). Cases in point:
What you don’t see on those seashell ads is a call to action. Or any real indication of the feature, service or benefit that the person, group or company who paid for the ads might be offering. All you get is a tiny little URL at the bottom of the ad: www.theseaiscalling.com
Now, it turns out that these particular ads are for Royal Caribbean because they want you to go on a cruise. But what really struck me about them was that they were actually perfectly targeted to yours truly. With the exception that I have absolutely no desire to go on a cruise. However, the idea of a person using a shell as a phone plays to both my love of technology as well as my prior research interest in Strombus gigas (a different story). It’s a goofy picture and the copy is pun-tastic, but you wouldn’t even need the copy to get my attention. I actually stopped running, took out my phone and hit up the URL. And was kind of disappointed that it was for a cruise ship. Don’t ask me what I thought it might have been that would have been more exciting.
So what? It’s not like Royal Caribbean is the first company to have vague, odd images and copy to pique a viewers curiosity, nor are they the first ones to have a discreet call to action, so you feel like you’ve discovered something secret. What I think is interesting though, is that nowadays here in 2012 they can do this on a street corner and a large segment of people have the capability to stop and look up the website right there on their mobile devices (not saying a large percentage will do this, just that the have the technology). I would love to know what percentage of hits that website gets from mobile.
Here’s my concluding question. I was drawn to that ad because it combined two ideas that I identify with in an unexpected image. Visual images are obviously very powerful marketing tools (duh) but can also be used for market research (check out this Prezi on ZMET). ZMET is a technique designed to get people to use images to delve deeper into their connections with certain products and brands. If you could target your audience demographic closely enough one could, presumably, also figure out what images would make that target audience pick up their mobile device and go to a website. Do you even need the images to relate to your product? Do you need copy? Could we live in a world where all advertising is just large format images precisely selected, arranged and designed to get a specific targeted customer to stop, locate the website* and visit it on spot?
I don’t know. But it would make for a much prettier advertising landscape.
*Sidebar: this is what I think was the real use for (now defunct, i think) stickybits. so ahead of your time, stickybits. also maybe QR codes. or something.
