Archives for "Product Marketing"
3 steps to getting cheap, easy and relevant product feedback (Step 3: Live it)
This is the final installment on how to gather and use relevant product feedback. In an earlier post I laid out this three-step framework:
In Step 1 I offered advice on how to collect good market information, and in Step 2 I described the importance of sharing that information with the rest of your organization.
The premise behind Step 3 is that it’s one thing to have a conceptual understanding of the buyers in your market, but it’s another to walk a mile in their shoes. In order to truly understand your buyers, step away from your desk and go see them in action. If you can, go live a day in the life of your customer.
Step 3: Live it. See what your customers see. Think what they think.
There are a lot of ways to get a better understanding of the buyers in your market. Here are some of my favorite ways to live it:
- Take a field trip. Visit your customers and talk to the people who made the decision to buy your product. Watch them use your product and ask them to articulate the value they get from it.
- Attend the same trade shows and conferences as your buyers, even if you’re not exhibiting. Have casual conversations at lunch or between sessions.
- If applicable, attend your company’s training classes and listen to your new customers’ expectations for your product.
- Create in-person focus groups or advisory boards.
- Cultivate relationships with key customers who are representative of your greater market.
- Perform in-person product testing.
- Give out samples or free trials, observe the behaviors of people who use them and talk to them about their experiences.
- Don’t forget to pick the brains of the subject matter experts in your own organization.
Nothing takes the place of in-person interactions, but as a matter of practicality, we can’t spend every day in the field. Keep up to date by leveraging the web to listen to the conversations in your market. Follow your market’s LinkedIn groups, newsletters, forums, blogs (including the replies!) and industry events.
Listen for the nuances in your buyers’ language and adjust your own to make sure you’re truly speaking to them. Be observant when their problems change and adjust your understanding of what your solution needs to provide. Do this often and make sure you’re feeding any updates back to the rest of your organization.
Soon, you’ll all be looking at your product through the eyes of the customer. The beauty of this approach is that making product decisions ultimately becomes easier. Once you know who you’re building for, you don’t need to guess.
Further reading:
3 steps to getting cheap, easy and relevant product feedback (Step 2: Share it)
In the start of this series, I laid out a framework for gathering and using relevant product feedback:
Gathering the information is the critical first step in the process and it can be very rewarding. It’s great when people validate our ideas and it’s even better when they improve on them.
Collecting this data is important, but it’s still just data. It only becomes valuable product feedback if you actually do something with it. And this brings us to…
Step 2: Share it with your entire organization.
You’ve collected the data, you have some product feedback and you think you know the right thing to do…but people around you aren’t listening. How do you overcome their resistance?
At Arena, everyone knows "Brad," the VP of operations.
The answer: Put it in the voice of the market. Share the information you gathered. Point out trends in the market. Relay the product feedback, highlighting the praises and the criticisms. One of the most effective ways to do this is to give a name and a face to each of the key buyers in your market. This is often referred to as “buyer profiling” or creating a buyer persona. (Note: This is different than creating a user persona.)
Here’s an example of buyer profiling. At Arena, everyone knows “Brad,” the VP of operations. Brad is 44 years old. Brad went to a state school. Brad gets frustrated with engineering. Brad gets fired if his product ships late.
Brad is not a real person.
Brad was created from the aggregation of dozens of conversations, hundreds of survey data points and a lot of product feedback. Through our analysis, we identified his top responsibilities and the main problems he encounters in trying to get his job done. We also gained insight into his personal and professional goals. Further, we learned where he gets his job-related information and what his preferred methods of communication are.
After we created Brad, we introduced him to everybody in our company through a series of presentations, conversations and printed materials. We made sure that each group had the information it needed to make the best decisions about how to serve this key buyer. For marketing, for instance, we made sure the team knew that Brad hates email but trusts his LinkedIn groups. For our developers, we described how Brad is a pretty savvy user (he’d be comfortable approving a change order from his Blackberry) but not a hardcore technophile. We went through our findings with sales, support, training and all of management.
The results have been great.
Now, everybody understands Brad and the problems that we solve for him. We hear it in meetings all the time: “Yes, but would Brad care?”
What happens when times change though? How do you keep up with product feedback in a moving economy?
The answer: Live it.
Listen up! The web is speaking. (Is it your product they’re discussing?)
Anyone building products for the public or handling product service should check out this blog post chronicling a woman’s battle for appropriate customer service with a washing machine company—and how her public complaints to social networking sites got results. Her story is both hilarious and a great object lesson about the power of social media in the marketplace.
Every day, thousands of bloggers post about the minutiae of their lives, including their interactions with the products that your company builds. Some bloggers have hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers, and their stories carry weight in a way that no advertising campaign can—they are the judgment of the masses for the masses. Twitter, Facebook and blogs give the market a new outlet for complaints, accolades and general product feedback. An influential blogger can make or break a product. Think Oprah’s Book Club, only on the internet—those books sell, baby!
If you’re not already monitoring what’s being said online about your product, service or company, you may wish to start. You can choose from a proliferation of free and paid tools that search social networks, groups, blogs, boards and other consumer-generated media (CGM) platforms for names or keywords associated with your product.
When you’re ready, you can start engaging in the conversation too. Participate in the networks and social media platforms relevant to your market or try a tool like GetSatisfaction.com, which provides a venue for dialogue between customers with questions or problems and other customers and company representatives.
At Arena, our marketing team monitors internet activity by setting Google and Twitter alerts and using web analytics tools. We also have discussion forums where customers can talk to each other and a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Feel free to check out what we’re doing as an example…just know that we’re still figuring it out too!
The product that I most want to run away with (or, the making of a product evangelist)
The BOB Revolution
Products that resonate with their users on an emotional level become ingrained in user’s lives and generate their own grassroots marketing buzz. These are the products that users rave about online, tell their friends about in great detail, and wax enthusiastic about to strangers in the grocery line. Building this kind of product takes in-depth knowledge of your user – what they want and need and how they will use your product. It is this knowledge that allows you to connect with your market in a deep way, turning your customers from casual users into true fans.
For example, let me tell you about my jogging stroller – The BOB Revolution. I use it almost every day and have become a BOB evangelist.
These strollers were developed with running parents like me in mind. Actually, what happened is that two guys who were building bike trailers had kids, and they needed to run themselves. They took their bike trailer chops, did a mess of machining and welding, and then tested out their stroller prototypes running with their own kids. I, like the guys from BOB, have lots of stroller needs, and BOB nailed them:
- I want a lightweight, fast-moving running stroller: The Single BOB weighs just 23 lbs. (the Duallie 32 lbs.) and has large, 16-inch wheels for low rolling resistance.
- I need good tracking for long straight runs and maneuverability for tight spots and rough terrain: The Revolution has a front wheel that can swivel or be fixed.
- I run in ALL kinds of weather: There is a built in canopy for sun and light rain and a full weather shield for running in truly inclement weather.
- I got out running soon after my children were born and needed to take them with me safely: There are hefty shock absorbers and a car seat adapter bar, so you can hit the trail with your little one in the Graco bucket as soon as 8 weeks after birth. And there is a 5-point harness for excellent safety as your child grows.
- I need water while running or the occasional coffee while out on the trail: BOB makes a cup holder accessory with space for drinks and a zipper pocket for keys and the like.
- I squeeze in my runs whenever I can – often while the kids are napping: The newest BOBs now recline to 70 degrees from vertical to encourage just this sort of behavior. (If you start running with your baby early, he or she will just assume that napping in the stroller instead of a quiet, dark crib is completely normal!)
- And most importantly, BOB strollers fold up in less than 5 seconds, so I can throw my stroller into the back of the Subaru before my toddlers dash into traffic.
BOB knows me – a running parent – inside and out. As a result, I have become a BOB evangelist. Take the BOB and add some coffee stains, some cracker crumbs, a bunch of mud, a few sunscreen smears, and two cute kids, and you just described my typical run.
All product companies should think about their users the way that BOB does. Ask yourself what your users REALLY care about. Who are they? What makes them tick? What will they do with your product? If you nail the answers to these questions and bake the results into your product design, you will build a base of customers who are more than just consumers – they will be outspoken fans. And that kind of publicity can’t be beat.
3 steps to getting cheap, easy and relevant product feedback (Step 1: Go get it)
More handles are better, right?
In my last post, I laid out three steps for gathering market data:
The idea, of course, is to collect information that helps you make a great product that the market wants. Nothing irks me more than when a “cool” feature finds its way into the products that I use – often at the cost of the usability of the product (and in my case, a cut finger and loss of temper).
Getting the right market information is one of the easiest things you can do. It’s also the hardest. It’s easy because your potential buyers are all around you – via phone, email, in person…and they’re probably all over your website. It’s hard because it takes time you don’t have.
My advice? Just do it.
Step 1. Go get it. Figure out what to ask — and ask it.
Before making any final decisions about what product to build or what new features to build in, ask yourself a number of questions: Is my idea valuable to the market? Does it appeal to the primary buyers and decision makers? Does it map to our company goals?
Then turn these into interview or survey questions and pick up the phone or build a web survey with a free service like SurveyMonkey or Survs. Here’s a sample of how those questions might look:
- How would you characterize the need for cup holders in your car?
- Absolutely necessary. The more the better.
- Useful, as long as they’re not in the way.
- I do not allow eating or drinking in my car.
- How useful would you find heated cup holders to be?
- Extremely useful
- Somewhat useful
- Not useful
- How willing would you be to pay for heated cup holders?
- I’d pay extra just for that feature
- Very likely, but only if it was part of a package (e.g. cold weather package)
- Somewhat likely
- I would not be willing to pay for heated cup holders
Once you know what to ask, find the right people and start asking. This is difficult. Nobody wants to get an unsolicited call from someone they don’t know. It’s hard to incentivize anybody to complete your survey. You don’t want to spam the members of your LinkedIn group. Yes, these are tough objections, but it’s even tougher to explain to management why you spent $1 million on product development and nobody bought your product.
How to find people to talk to:
- Leverage your network – you might be surprised who knows whom
- Dig into your CRM system
- Use LinkedIn (ask a contact to make an introduction)
- Advertise on the website of a relevant organization (I’ve used APICS in the past to advertise a survey)
- Post questions on your website (a simple yes/no may be all you need)
- Hire an army of cheap or free interns to do online research
- Go to where your market is—trade shows, conferences, etc… even if you are a lurker
- And if you have the budget—there are a number of excellent market research firms out there
Be relentless. Track down your buyers and decision makers, ask the questions and record their answers. After a time, you’ll be able to aggregate their responses and determine clear trends.
Great—now you know what your market wants. But what about everyone else in your company?
Step 2. Share it within your company.
Product design secrets: Don’t try to be perfect, just be good enough
Robert Capp’s article from Wired magazine last August, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine, offers a fantastic synthesis of what many product and services companies have been finding over the last decade: Less is more, especially when it comes to whistles and bells.
The Flip’s success stunned the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.
– Robert Capp, Wired
To be sure, no consumer wants to feel like they are settling for a product that was designed to be “just good enough.” Instead, people want a product that’s easy to use, does what it says it will do and does so reliably. The trick is identifying a market or market segment where a subset of the “conventional” feature set will work just fine. It’s what former design firm, now software company, 37Signals calls “underdoing the competition.” The team there chalks up the success of its suite of web-based small-business applications to having built less. The right less, mind you.
Exactly who said this was a good idea?
My Pragmatic Marketing mug stares at me every morning with the same stark reminder:
Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.
It’s a nice grounding statement, and more constructive than my Onion mug. But my mug delivers more than caffeinated goodness—it delivers a message that I need to step back whenever I get excited about a new idea, technology or cool feature and ask, “Does anybody else care?” Or, more specifically, “Will anyone pay money for this?”
After all, we don’t want to end up with the software equivalent of Smuckers Goober, Whizzers cordless power scissors, or the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Personal Tank. (Although I’ll admit that each of these products fascinates me in some way (cough, cough, Christmas present)….)
All product companies face the same challenge: coming up with what to build—which means figuring out which market problems to solve and for whom. Our product happens to be software, but the challenge is still there—and our approach to gathering and processing market intelligence is one that can be used by product companies of all types.
It’s a process that can be summed up in 3 steps:
I promise to expand on those steps in future posts [UPDATE: now available--use links above], but as long as we’re on the subject of Christmas presents for me, I’ve been wondering: How did the iPod Dock/Toilet Paper Holder make it off the sketchpad and into the market anyway?
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