Category: marketing

The truth

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The Stanford Prison Experiment is an extremely popular experiment in social psychology. It featured normal people taking on the role of prisoners and guards. And most importantly, it featured fights, abuse, dehumanization, nervous breakdowns, bullying, and more. Despite a series of dubious practices, for decades it was considered a legitimate study.

The BBC Prison Study is a not-quite-as-popular experiment in social psychology. It featured normal people taking on the role of prisoners and guards. And most importantly, it featured camaraderie, compassion, some moderate conflict over food, negotiation, the institution of a commune, and long discussions on how to govern the whole group. Despite the fact it was reality TV, it led to a number of academic papers that were eventually accepted in official psychology curricula.

The point is, not always the story that is closer to facts and reality is the most popular. A story just has to be repeated enough times to become plausible, and when that happens, it is very difficult to later convince people it was a hoax, and actually things work in a different way.

This is something we know.

And it is our responsibility as marketers, advertisers, communicators, and change-seekers, to use such power with great care.

Assumptions

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If you want to get an idea of how dangerous (for a business) assumptions and groupthink are, have a look at the two graphs below (research by Profitwell).

What 1,200 product leaders think of the last 5,000 features they released.
What 1.2M customers think of those features (in terms of Willingness to Pay and Preference).

We think we are building products and services that deliver high value and for which customers are willing to pay premium price. In reality, customers perceive those products and services as average and not particularly worth of their money.

The executives and leaders at a company are rarely the ideal audience for what they are buiilding. This is true when the company is young, and it is even more true once the company gets traction and grows.

You ought to free your decision-making process of assumptions and start looking at qualitative and quantitative data that come from customers. You should have done that yesterday. You can still make it happen today and have a huge competitive advantage nonetheless.

When coffee and kale compete

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Every person wants progress, and when we design or market products and services we should focus on the progress we are enabling customers to make.

This is the foundation of Jobs To Be Done (JTBD).

With this approach, two things happen.

First, value is no longer seen as a transaction. It does not run out the moment a purchase is done or a service is delivered. Progress extends over time. The best way for a company to serve their customers is to understand the system of progress they are in – a good example being Weber, that does not stop at producing high-quality grills, and completes the offer with tools and resources to make the customer the grill master they want to be.

Design your product to deliver customers an ongoing feeling of progress – Alan Klement

Second, competition is no longer restricted to products or services that have a similar functionality or physical appearance. Anything that helps the customer achieve the progress they have envisioned (or might envision) for themselves is competition.

A Job To Be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her

Alan Klement, When Coffee and Kale Compete
When Coffee and Kale Compete – Book Cover

Someone else

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There is always someone else.

No matter how skilled you are, no matter how wonderful your product is, no matter how supposedly unique your culture is. There is someone else out there offering the exact same thing, covering the exact same spot, addressing the exact same problem.

And you have two things to do to mitigate this problem.

First, understand who someone else is – and by the way, this is a decision of those you are serving.

Second, be as specific as possible in figuring out and expressing what you are.

The alternative is most of B2B marketing nowadays: companies with fantastic products and services playing in broad and fuzzy markets to increase their customers’ productivity. All the same type of better, faster, cheaper.

Pass.

Additive bias

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The reason why your value prop is full of “and”, your product is full of features, and your strategy is full of verticals and use cases (and exceptions to both), is that we are biased towards additive solutions.

We think that adding is better than subtracting when we look for solutions.

Of course, it is not.

But convincing others will always need a lot of work.