BMW Gets Flexible

I’ve written about BMW before, and will probably write about their work again because they’ve got a rare handle innovation. Plus, they manage to articulate their process well. The video below includes an interview with Chris Bangle, Design Director, in which he highlights a few important innovation principles: question your assumptions, change your perspective, let materials express themselves, and making designs more human allows deeper emotional connections.

I love this design concept because it’s anthropomorphic, and I’ve always seen cars as an extension of identity. I even associate certain kinds of faces with different front-grills of cars.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlRXMFxfkmU

It felt really weird to me when the hood opened up to expose the engine … sometime like open heart surgery. How does this design make you feel?

Mad Men: Old School Marketing

This is my favorite clip from the Mad Men series. In this scene, Don Draper, a 1950’s Madison Avenue advertising executive, pitches a concept for a new Kodak slide presentation tray. I don’t want to diminish the experience of watching the clip by describing the concept, but the clip touches on a marketing phenomena that is rare and worth noting. Sometimes a campaign/brand is so successful that it becomes the defacto name for a category of products. For example, there are many brands of tissue, but they are universally referred to as Kleenex. And, in contemporary culture, to search  has become synonymous with “to google” no matter which search engine we’re using … and sometimes, even if we’re not using a search engine at all.

The second reason I find this clip so compelling is the way Draper connects the dots between a few ideas that resonate deeply on a emotional level. And, while he does this, he manages to articulate a brand concept that sounds completely familiar even though his clients had never heard it before. Though this scene is set in the broadcast era, when brands were managed in a top down way, I think this ability is still relevant today. Marketers are still charged with articulating something that’s already out there, but which hasn’t yet been stated. The only difference today is that marketers are tasked to re-articulate what customers are saying back to the organization they work for. It’s as if the conduit of marketing has reversed direction.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY

Feel First, Think Second: 4 Reasons Marketing Is Changing

Market research shows that improving customer experience improves loyalty, advocacy, and spending, but it’s still difficult to tie back investments in overall customer experience to ROI within your organization. Marketers often have to rely on aggregate industry data to support the case for making these investments. Unfortunately, if you can’t get a customer experience practice going at your organization, you might end up on the wrong side of the Peak-end Rule.

Smart marketers understand that it’s no longer about overloading communication channels with top-down messages. As brands proliferate, diversity, and serve niches in the market this mass-market approach becomes less and less effective, and reduces customer experience though cluttering, irrelevant, and interrupting experiences. The landscape in which marketing works has fundamentally shifted, and our tactics must change accordingly. I argue that the solution is to focus intensely on customer experience and satisfaction. In order to do this, we must understand the forces that are changing the landscape.

  • LOSS OF CONTROL:  Marketers no longer own the brand, their customers do. Not only that, many have lost their handle on communication channels through the proliferation of consumer generated media. Customers are empowered now, and marketing needs to transform itself into an amplifier of the customer’s voice within the company.
  • MORE COMPLEXITY: it’s more challenging to create consistent experiences across channels and touch-points, because there are more of them. Marketers need to focus less on developing messages, and more building a platform to support existing conversations with resources that drive continuity.
  • GREATER PARITY FOR PRODUCTS AND PRICE: With more competition in niche markets, feature sets are no longer the primary driver of competitive advantage. I like to say, “the feature wars are over” because we’ve entered the era of customer experience. Marketers need to develop a solid customer experience assessment practice.
  • INCREASINGLY CRITICAL: More brands serving smaller niches means customers can be increasingly critical and discriminating. It also means there is less tolerance for poor experiences because there are lower barriers to exploring other options. Marketers need to leverage their platform to return value to customers in exchange for their input.

I like the expression “feel first, think second” because it emphasizes the need to listen to customers before acting. The thinking part is about building the infrastructure to be able to channel the voice of the customer into your organization. This is no small task because many of the internal organs within organizations are not used to, or set up to, get direct feedback from customers. Part of the challange that marketers face is how to take re-articulate the customer’s perspective in a way that is palatable and valulable to internal business units.

If you have an example of how you’ve re-articulated the costumer perspective in a way that drove change at your organization, please share!