Do customers live on Mars?

Posted in General

I recently posted a survey on how well customers are understood in an organization. There were some very interesting replies depending on who was answering the question.

Surprise – Startups are as guilty as large organizations!

The first question was – Do you think “who our customers are” is uniformly understood at all levels in your organization?

I was expecting small organizations (startups, <35 employee) to consistently answer ‘Yes’ because of small size, ease of communication across all employees and sharp focus area. But the answers were equally split between yes and no. A startup typically begins with a solution to a specific or focused problem. Is it that frequent pivot or broadening the problem/solution space starts to create the gap in customer understanding?

who are your customers

As expected increase in organization size leads to larger variations in employee’s understanding of the customer.

What can organizations do?

I don’t think this is surprising. But what is perhaps important is what organizations can do to create a common understanding of their customers. Startups can consider a good communication strategy when they change their strategy and secondly, ensuring that new hires are on board with their understanding of the customers.

It may seem a losing cause for large organizations as they start to build pockets of different offerings based on large product portfolio, geo-locations, multiple departments and integration of acquired companies. At least within those pockets, at the department level a common understanding must be built.

The other interesting question is if having multiple perspective about customers can actually help large organizations in achieving higher customer satisfaction and larger business. And hence is a necessary evil.

On the other side…

One of my very knowledgeable friends Ramakrishnan pointed out that there is another perspective about customers. It is just not sufficient to know “who the customers are”. It is also important for organizations to understand the value that customers bring once organization starts engaging with them and change in the value during the  lifecycle of product or service.

iPad Mini is Apple’s priced possession

Posted in General, Marketing & SoMe

Someone recently pointed out to article mentioning Gartner report titled Apple’s iPad Mini makes up 60 percent of iOS sales

Are you surprised?  As a value buyer, I am not surprised. I always thought of buying iPad Mini as it provides the greatest value for what premium tablet can provide.

ipadmini

It will be interesting to know if this trend started in 2013 or earlier. Will there be pressure on Apple to provide higher value for every $ that customers are spending? It can perhaps consider three options –

1. More features & no price change
2. Same features & less price
3. New model (like Mini) with less features and less price.

Interesting time ahead for Apple 🙂

Can your product or application talk? It can be good for marketing!

Posted in General, Marketing & SoMe

When you develop a software product or application, a major concern is if users will adopt and use the product or application. Many startups have mastered the art of elevator pitch that can be delivered effectively in person. But when you are targeting a large user base, how can you deliver this pitch? How about making your product or application talk the pitch?

An important question then is why make it difficult to write the first demo or test application? Here are top three reasons why first application should take less than XXX minutes to develop.

1. Overcome fear of learning
This is one of the biggest reason that creates resistance to adoption If a user knows he has to spend an entire day or even more to write the first application. That day may not come (not till there is a major push or incentive).

2. Instant gratification
Being able to write an application (even if it is “Hello World”) and seeing the results quickly can be very satisfying and lead to quicker adoption.

3. Improves decision making
A user can build a better sense of value that your product offers by quickly trying it out. Even the marketing materials, customer quotes and case studies start to make much more sense. Better understanding leads to better decision making.

touch_feel_product

I explicitly left out recommending any ideal time. What do you think should be maximum time for first trial usage? Does it depend on type of product or application? If yes, what are those parameters? How can you overcome them?

Is there a bigger challenge for large, matured products with update cycles where core product is already built? How can such products make it easy for users to try out new features?

How to destroy an expensive marketing campaign – Cadbury story

Posted in General, Marketing & SoMe

Cadbury, India’s #1 chocolate brand relaunched its Bournville brand of dark chocolates in India in 2009. This was backed by a campaign with a punchline of  “You don’t buy a Bournville you earn it” .

They used a tv commercial showing an American travel host speaking to the camera in the village of Bournville in Britain. The commercial was aired extensively in India and I think it was very well done. It was also successful in the sense that the punchline did find its place in the long term memory storage of many folks and people started associating the Bournville brand with the idea of earning it!

But very recently Cadbury released an offer of free Bournville with Dairy Milk Silk.

cadbury

I don’t know if Bournville is a commercial success or not but Cadbury has ruined the entire brand perception that they created with their campaign.

You no longer need to earn Bournville, you get it for free! What a waste.

 

Facebook Page report – How much data can you really digest?

Posted in Data visualization, Marketing & SoMe

I was recently playing with Facebook page report and could not help noticing the endless number of sheets that are present in the downloaded Excel file.

The excel file contains 63 sheets with one of them having 75 columns of data. Most other sheets have 6-10 columns. Roughly 500 data points that are available to you to analyze and compare. Ironically, the sheet with 75 columns is labelled “Key metrics”!

too much data

I tried of thinking of ways where I would need information from all data points. I think this is too much information that is presented in a way that makes any analysis difficult. Can you really digest so much information? How do you deal with such large data sets? Ignore it? Create a coefficient out of it?

My topmost key information is “People Talking about This” (PTT) that encapsulates following actions by user:

– Like your page
– Posts to your page wall
– Likes, comments on or shares on page posts
– Answers a question you posted
– Mentions your page
– Tags your page

What interesting data points that you have found in Facebook report? Should Facebook cut down on some of the irrelevant data points that no one ever cares about?