How to STOP Being Irrelevant to Your Customers

It’s easy to lose perspective.

When you’re constantly in the midst of getting things done in your company, it’s hard to step back and consider other perspectives.

One perspective that gets lost easily is perhaps the most important one: the customer’s.

And when you stop focusing on the customer’s perspective, it’s easy to slip into irrelevancy.

This week’s newsletter highlights strategies and tactics to help you focus on the customer’s perspective and remain relevant to them.

This Week:

• Marketing: Are You Having The Right Conversation With Your Customers?

• Branding: Why Your Loyal Customers May Be Cheating On You

• Advertising: The Tactic You Should Be Using To Capture More Attention Than Your Competitors

• Five-Bullet Book Summary: Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become? By Michael Schrage​

• Three Other Things I'm Paying Attention To: Sleep, Processes, and Product Innovation

Marketing: Are You Having The Right Conversation With Your Customers?

Marketing shouldn't try to create needs.

It should take advantage of the problems potential customers face. It should make those problems feel more intense. And then it should position you to be the solution to those problems.

Marketing should enter the conversation that customers already have, not create a new one.

But there's something many companies miss when they try to enter the conversation: not every customer is at the same point in the conversation.

Some customers don't even know they have a problem. Some have just discovered their problem. Some are actively trying to find a solution. And some have long-standing relationships with you.

What these customers need to hear is very different.

Someone just getting into running needs to hear something different than someone who has been running for years.

And someone who's been running for years but has never heard of you needs to hear something different than a long-time customer.

In short, you need to be relevant to the conversation in two dimensions:

1. Where the customer is in their journey to solving a problem.

2. Where the customer is in their relationship with your company.

If you don't get those two pieces right, you end up trying to have a different conversation than the one in the customer's mind.

And that makes you irrelevant to the customers.

Branding: Why Your Loyal Customers May Be Cheating On You

Distraction is customer loyalty’s kryptonite.

Customer loyalty happens when you become a customer’s default choice. You’ve proven yourself in the past, so they’re more likely to consider purchasing from you first. You become their go-to.

But when customers are constantly bombarded with new information, they’re distracted from thinking about you.

They start thinking about other things. Other companies will be grabbing their attention. And if they hold that attention, they can also be considered for purchase.

Distraction makes customers susceptible to new information. It can erode the loyalty you’ve worked hard to build.

And customers are more distracted than ever. They’re increasingly less likely to be loyal.

So, to remain relevant to loyal customers, don’t think of loyal customers as something you have that won’t go away. Instead, think of loyalty as a foot in the door. It puts you on their radar.

But you still have to compete with all of the other offers they get bombarded with.

You need to stay on their radar.

Loyalty isn’t a battle that’s won. It’s something you have to constantly fight to maintain to be more relevant than everything else competing for your customers’ attention.

Loyalty gives you the upper hand. But it doesn’t win the battle.

Advertising: The Tactic You Should Be Using To Capture More Attention Than Your Competitors

Average processes produce average results.

When you engage in an average process, so do many of your competitors. You all come up with similar results. Nobody stands out.

This is something that plagues most ad creative sessions I've seen.

The group comes up with a few ideas. The ideas get debated. One of the options wins.

But it's easy to come up with just a few ideas. And when you stop at a few ideas, they're usually the obvious ones. They're the type of ideas that competitors can just as easily develop with the same average process.

Great ideas come when you push the creative process.

Set aside the decision-making. Just focus on producing ideas. A lot of ideas.

It doesn't matter if they're good. Sometimes, a bad idea inspires a spark in someone else. And they come up with a great idea.

In fact, according to many scientific articles, the more ideas you have, the higher the quality of ideas you'll produce.

It seems counterintuitive until you realize that ideas beget ideas. So, when you produce more ideas, you end up creating ideas that are more robust, more creative, and more original.

You end up with ideas that competitors don't.

When you turn that idea into an ad, you're more likely to stand out. Customers are more likely to notice you. And when they notice you, they're more likely to consider you.

So, to produce a lot of ideas, you need a process that encourages it. It won't just happen on its own. And if you leave it up to chance, you'll just end up back in the realm of a few ideas.

One of the best processes for producing a lot of ideas is creativity coach Tom Monahan's 100 MPH Thinking.

In Monahan’s words:

This method hacks your natural tendencies and produces great ideas: By prioritizing speed and quantity, you take the pressure off perfection. And by creating a lot of ideas, you inevitably create a lot of good ones (remember, quantity begets quality).

You may even create a great one that makes you stand out, grabs your customers' attention, and, ultimately, gets them to purchase from you.

Standing out from your competition starts with having processes that make you stand out from the competition.

• You can read more about 100 MPH thinking and other creative techniques in The Do It Yourself Lobotomy: Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking by Tom Monahan.

Five-Bullet Book Summary: Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become? By Michael Schrage

Two weeks ago, I mentioned Michael Schrage’s book Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? in the marketing segment of this newsletter.

Schrage’s question is one of the most important questions for companies to answer. And it has fallen under the radar.

So, this week, I’m including a five-bullet book summary to highlight its importance in long-term decision-making.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮:

How to use product innovation to create better customers.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐠 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚:

Innovations ask customers to do something different. Ultimately, innovations change the customer. And winning innovations change the customers in ways that make them better customers of your company and worse customers of competitors’ companies.

𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐬:

1. Companies should have customer vision statements.

The type of customer you have today isn’t the type of customer you need to make long-term visions successful. So, your innovations should change your customers in ways that turn them into the customers who would love the future business you’re working toward building.

Your customer vision statement should describe the customer you need to make your long-term vision a reality. And then your innovations should turn the customer of today into that customer of tomorrow.

2. Customers change by doing.

Don’t ask your customers to do too much at once. Change shouldn’t be sudden. It should happen slowly, over time.

Asking customers to engage in slightly new behaviors makes them adapt. And when they continually adapt over a long period, they end up as significantly different customers than they are today.

𝐀 𝐪𝐮𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐞:

“Conventional management wisdom has evolved from thinking about innovation as designing for customers, to innovation as designing with customers. The Ask takes the next essential leap: thinking about innovation as designing customers.”

(Note: The Ask is Schrage’s shorthand for the question, “Who do you want your customers to become?”)

Three Other Things I'm Paying Attention To: Sleep, Processes, and Product Innovation

• Sleep: Lately, I'm working on improving my sleeping habits, focusing on getting to sleep at the time I want. So far, the best resource I've found on improving sleep is neuroscientist Andrew Huberman's "Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing." It's a pretty in-depth episode of his show, Huberman Lab, focusing on practical tools from the latest research on improving your sleep. It is a must-watch or listen for anyone looking to get better sleep.

• Processes: As an expert advisor, I see my goal as not only helping clients create better ideas but also constantly improving the processes to deliver those ideas. Last year, I became a fan of Alan Weiss and his thoughts on consulting. So, next on my list of books is Process Consulting by Alan Weiss.

• Product Innovation: When I’ve created detailed 3-year visions for companies, one of the most significant benefits is that marketing gains a clearer understanding of where product development is headed. Usually, marketing and product development operate in silos until the product is just about to launch. This approach is suboptimal because marketing could inform product development with relevant customer data, and product development could inform marketing so that marketing understands the bigger vision of where the company is headed. Last week, I read SingleStore CMO Madhukar Kumar’s article about giving marketing a central role in product development. It’s a worthwhile read. You can read Kumar's article “The Elephant Test: A Tale of Product Trust and Marketing Genius” by clicking here.