Imagine you want to start a new church. What do you do? Well, you might look for (or commission) a building, buy some stained glass and an organ, and hire a pastor, right? Not necessarily. If you're tuned in, you'll realize that there are far different things you should be doing to establish a church that resonates with parishioners. In any marketplace (even a ministry) following the Tuned In Process is a proven way to create success. Start by understanding the problems that potential churchgoers have, the different types of people who might attend church, and the compelling reasons why people go to church to begin with.
Mark Batterson is the lead pastor of a hugely popular church in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. But his isn't a typical church, because he doesn't actually have a church building, or traditional services, or many of the other usual symbols of religious devotion. Instead Batterson tuned in to his market: the tens of thousands of twentysomethings who had largely ignored other churches in the area. Batterson learned that a church building can be an obstacle for many young people, so his National Community Church (also known as Theater-Church.com) conducts five services per week in three nontraditional locations—for example, movie theaters on Sunday mornings, when they aren't being used for movies.[31] And because most of his "buyers" don't drive, the locations are all near subway stops.
National Community Church makes extensive use of audiovisual and Internet technology to tell stories and build a spiritual community both on- and offline. At the National Community Church studio, Batterson and his staff develop video stories that add color and flavor to the live services. "I think that church should be the most creative place on the planet," Batterson says. "The medieval church had stained glass to tell the gospel story to the churchgoers, who were mostly illiterate. We use the movie studio to tell the story to people. We use video to add color and to add flavor to what we do. If Jesus had video in his day, it wouldn't surprise me if he made short films."
TheaterChurch.com includes a content-rich Web site, podcasts of the weekly services (audio content delivered by subscription to people's computers and iPods), and a motivational "Spirit Fuel" Webcast series. Each one of these initiatives is the result of understanding the needs of young people who want a church home that speaks directly to their needs and uses the technologies they're familiar with.
Batterson also writes an extremely popular blog and has used it to gain online fame well beyond the Washington, DC, area—his blog is followed by tens of thousands of readers all over the world, and the podcast is one of the fastest-growing church podcasts in America. The tuned in approach of understanding buyers (in this case, the people that Batterson wants to attract to church) has been wildly successful. Weekend attendance at National Community Church exceeds 1,000 adults in an average weekend; 70 percent of them are single people in their twenties. Clearly, National Community Church is a resonator.
As Batterson has shown, the best way to succeed in any market is by being tuned in. Even when developing a new church, the best approach is to understand market problems, identify buyer personas, and then build an experience that resonates. In this chapter, we'll talk about that last step.
As you develop product and service experiences, remember that word we keep using—experience. There is much more to your product or service than most companies realize. The most successful organizations understand that customers buy a total experience, and so they do their best to create one that resonates. There are five common parts of the buyer experience that people care about:
The discovery experience. Buyers need information to make rational and informed decisions about how to solve their problems. Tuned in organizations create marketing materials that people actually want to consume, while tuned out companies focus on hype and spin in a misguided attempt to manipulate minds. A tuned in company, for example, might run a blog where real people in the organization could let the public see how they went about problem solving. In the long run, leaders will benefit greatly when they integrate marketing experiences that are simple, nonthreatening, and—above all—useful.
The buying experience. What makes some products easy to buy while others are an uncomfortable hassle? The tuned out company just wants to make orders easy for the company to process, not easy or fun for buyers to place. Buyers want to feel important, and they want their needs to be met throughout the sales process. It doesn't matter if you're selling a five-dollar deli sandwich or a thirty-thousand-dollar boat, making the buying experience as simple and pleasurable as possible will lead to more sales.
The packaging experience. A very popular corporate gift in Japan is beautifully packaged fruit. The boxes are exquisite, with textured tissue papers cradling each perfectly ripe melon, apple, or pear (hand-selected, naturally, to be the perfect shape, size, and color). The fantastic packaging allows the fruit boxes to sell for sometimes more than ten times the price of the fruit itself. On the other hand, other buyer personas appreciate a minimalist approach to packaging and prefer to buy fruit in bulk to save money. Our colleague was in the grocery store recently as a man and his kindergarten-age daughter wheeled up alongside her in the produce department. As the dad bagged apples, the little girl reached for cleverly packaged cherry tomatoes (yellow-bottomed container with a domed lid). To a child, this does seem rather like a "toy." The little girl grabbed one and said, "Daddy, can we get these?" Wow. A kid wanted to buy cherry tomatoes! She was old enough to know what they were, but too young to realize that they are just the same old cherry tomatoes normally sold in pint containers.
The "using" experience. Breakthrough experiences are simple to understand and implement. They are intuitive and natural and help people engage with the product or service. For example, when one of us recently dropped our car off at the dealer for repair, we were given a loaner car. To our amazement, the dealership had tuned the radio station in the loaner to the same station we had on in the car we dropped off. Simple improvements such as this one, which probably takes less than a minute to implement, can make huge differences to people.
The service experience. Many products and services need to come with some form of after-sale customer care. Tuned out organizations outsource this function to uninformed third parties to save costs, or they might even eliminate the function entirely and leave customers on their own. But tuned in companies understand that happy customers will talk about their positive service experiences with friends and family (or on blogs and forums), and possibly purchase more of your products and services themselves. At the Pragmatic Marketing offices, we have a BUNN automatic coffee maker. We recently noticed that the coffee maker was dripping, so we called the 800 number for service and described the problem over the phone. Within an hour, the service person was onsite and fixed the problem. This remarkable experience had our office abuzz with amazement. Guess where we'll be buying our next coffeemaker?
Your breakthrough experience is likely to include each of these five areas, but you may end up focusing on several. Your choice of how to focus will be based on your distinctive competence.
As we discussed in Chapter 2, innovation based on raw creativity, whimsy, or guesswork is unlikely to create breakthrough experiences. While it is possible to create a (successful) innovative product or service in the vacuum of your insular company conference rooms, that process of guessing is much more risky than getting tuned in to your market. And as we discussed in Chapter 5, the best way to get tuned in to your market is to learn about your buyers' problems through in-depth interviews. Next, we'll discuss how to use that interview data to identify the attributes of a breakthrough product or service and create a resonator. First, let's look at an example.
For the past decade, Boeing and Airbus have been locked in a two-way battle in the large passenger-aircraft market. A $150 million manufactured product doesn't seem to fit the classic definition of a "commodity," but nevertheless the commercial aircraft market has essentially become a commodity market in recent years. The only real differentiation between products has been in price: what deal an airline could negotiate with the companies.
Executives at Boeing want to change those market dynamics. To create the new 250-passenger 787 Dreamliner, Boeing not only tuned in to the product's buyers (airlines), but also and especially the buyer's customers (millions of people who fly regularly).[32] Boeing created an executive-level position charged with leading the effort, naming Blake Emery the director of differentiation strategy for the company. Emery and his team met with members of several buyer personas, passengers as well as airline professionals—pilots, cabin crew, and mechanics. This approach (particularly the focus on passengers) was a radical departure from the typical focus of dealing with aircraft purchasing managers, who tend to care only about the bottom line and cutting the best deal. The research led to such innovations as the use of carbon fiber in the wings and fuselage, which, combined with more efficient engines, will cut fuel consumption. (Carbon fiber also requires less maintenance than aluminum.)
However, the biggest innovations came from detailed discussions the differentiation team had with multiple groups of airline passengers from different countries. The team wanted to find out what people from many different cultures really wanted from an airliner (besides the usual request for more legroom). A major finding of this buyer persona research was that passengers felt increasingly confined and restricted as they walked down the boarding bridge and into the airplane.
The Boeing team used the information from the passenger meetings to guide the design of a cabin interior that creates the sense of being in a much larger, more welcoming space. The ceiling lighting is washed with hidden lights that draw the eyes upward and create a sense of infinity (in sharp contrast to the cramped feeling generated by the fluorescent-tube lighting used in existing aircraft cabins). Flight attendants can change the brightness and color of the cabin lighting to create a sense of morning, dusk, and nighttime, minimizing the disorienting effects of life across time zones. Luggage bins in the Dreamliner aren't just larger than in other aircraft; they're also curved and placed flatter against the ceiling to keep from banging passengers' heads.
"Flying is a magical way to travel, says Emery. "What we're trying to do with the Dreamliner is bring back a little of that magic we lost along the way."
Boeing is taking these passenger-driven enhancements and using them to sell a new idea: that passengers will actually book with an airline that flies the new Dreamliner because they expect to have a better experience on that plane. As frequent travelers on the business speaking circuit, we can relate. We often shun small, commuterstyle aircraft because they are less comfortable. So far, airlines seem to agree. As of this writing, forty-seven customers worldwide have ordered 677 airplanes worth more than $110 billion at current list prices. The first 787 is scheduled to enter passenger service in 2009.
Let's revisit the idea of products and services that resonate. Think back on the ones we've discussed so far. The hotel at the end of the train line resonates with the sleepy Japanese salaryman who missed his stop. The GoPro camera resonates with surfers because they can carry it on their wrist. Zipcar resonates with people who occasionally need a set of wheels for a quick run to Costco. And National Community Church resonates with twentysomethings who want a spiritual home that fits their lifestyle. What do all of these ideas have in common? Each one is a breakthrough product or service that buyers immediately understand has value to them, even if they have never heard of the company or its products before. They're all resonators.
As we noted in Chapter 1, the Apple iPod is a great example of a resonator. The problem that the iPod solved was not simply the need for a better MP3 player, although that's the form the solution took. The real problem the iPod solved was that it used to be a pain to listen to digital music, especially on the go. But the iPod (with the help of iTunes) makes it easy to access songs and upload them to the device, and its elegant design emphasizes simplicity, so there is little need for instruction manuals and documentation. Most people who struggled through the awful rigmarole needed to get an oldergeneration MP3 player up and running heard about the iPod and immediately said, "Wow that sounds so much easier than all the work I had to do!" And millions more who had never gone through the trouble realized equally quickly that now they wouldn't have to.
The easiest way to create a breakthrough product or service is to follow the Tuned In Process; these steps will help you discover, create, and launch your own resonator.
Buyers choose to purchase your product or service based on their belief that you provide something that solves their problems better than anyone else can. What are your organization's unique abilities to deliver value to your customers? We call these abilities your distinctive competence. Without identifying your distinctive competence, you'll be unable to differentiate your products and services from the pack. Building products and services based on your distinctive competence allows you to win even against larger, better funded, and more entrenched competitors.
Don't confuse distinctive competence with "core competency," a term many business people are familiar with. Your core competency is simply what your organization is good at. Distinctive competence is what you excel at that your competitors do not. Your distinctive competence is a subset of your core competency. For example, FedEx has many core competencies, including deep understanding of distribution technologies, aircraft operations (they run an air force–sized fleet, one of the largest in the world), and Web site robustness (they are regularly one of the top thousand most trafficked sites on the Web). But with all those core competencies, the one thing FedEx focuses on as their distinctive competence is reliability. Every decision that the leaders at FedEx make supports the company's ability to provide and sustain a reliable package-delivery service.
What is your organization's distinctive competence?
Every company should be able to answer this question. If you can't yet, you should figure it out. Now. Before you get to work creating products and services.
The list here will give you an idea.[33] Your distinctive competence could be one of the following:
An important feature. Volvo has built a solid leadership position in a crowded automobile market by focusing on safety.
Another possibility is ergonomics. When we give presentations in front of large groups, we always use the Interlink RemotePoint Navigator because it has only four buttons—slide forward, slide back, slide hide, and a laser pointer. That's it. The other remotes cram in so many useless features that it's hard to avoid making mistakes—a serious problem when you're talking in front of five hundred people!
A distinctive business model. Perhaps your streamlined manufacturing and distribution capabilities allow you to sell products at a lower cost than any of your competitors can. Zipcar rents cars online, not in person like the other rental car companies do.
A deep understanding of one particular buyer persona. Cityside Garage in the Boston area only works on vintage Land Rovers and has a devoted following of enthusiasts who travel from all over New England to have their Land Rovers serviced.
These are just some examples of distinctive competence; the list certainly isn't comprehensive. In fact, your organization's distinctive competence could be virtually anything that helps you create breakthrough experiences. Your distinctive competence should dictate how you build products and services. Your product development department must build your distinctive competence into the product design. For example, if Volvo were to build a new sports car, the design team and R&D people would need to go about their work with the stated understanding that they were building "the safe sports car."
Highlighting your distinctive competence also helps describe your organization to buyers, so they are more likely to choose you instead of your competitor. Your distinctive competence drives your marketing communications initiatives because you use it to create connections with your buyers based on the products and services that your organization uniquely provides.
Mark Batterson at National Community Church has leveraged his distinctive competence by applying technology to church. Technology is so important to the church's activities that as of this writing, their leadership team includes a "media pastor" (Dave Clark), a "digital pastor" (David Russell), and a "buzz coordinator" (Juliet Main). Each of these professionals leverages his or her technological expertise to create a church experience that resonates with their market. Like Batterson, Clark and Russell also write blogs to stay connected to their audience. It may seem surprising (ironic even) for a church to have this particular distinctive competence, but that's exactly why National Community Church is so successful. How many churches in your neighborhood have a podcast? If one did, might you want to check it out? Might your college-age children want to check it out?
Understanding your own distinctive competence tells you what parts of your business to focus on—and what to outsource to others. Do you haul your own trash to the dump? Probably not, unless you're in the trash business. And why should you? It's better to focus on your distinctive competence and outsource much of the rest. Do you process your own payroll? Why? It's probably not your distinctive competence. But it is the distinctive competence of the payroll-processing companies; they're the ones with the skills and the experience. We encourage you to consider what parts of your business you're squandering management attention on. Can you free up valuable company time to better leverage your distinctive competence?
Make time to get together with your team and answer this important question: "What is our distinctive competence?" It will tell you what business functions to own and which to outsource, which meetings to attend and which to ignore, which products to build and which to buy.
When Doug Ducey took over as president of Cold Stone Creamery in 1995, he didn't worry about the 5,500 Dairy Queen or 4,400 Baskin-Robbins, or 3,300 TCBY franchises that many said were his biggest competition.[34] Nor did he obsess about the fact that 90 percent of ice cream sold in the United States was bought in retail grocery stores, where new entries had no access to shelf space. Instead, Ducey drew on his experience working as a brand manager for the Folgers product line at Procter & Gamble. He remembered how an upstart company from Seattle called Starbucks was able to create a breakthrough product experience in the coffee category. Now he saw a $21 billion ice cream industry that focused on producing tired, uninspired products—the Folgers coffee of desserts, essentially. He had ideas about how to change the game.
Instead of focusing, like other players in the market, on improving manufacturing or driving down costs, Cold Stone set out to improve customers' ice cream experience. By spending a great deal of time in Cold Stone stores watching how customers reacted to the variety of choices, and by starting every day listening and responding to customers on the company support line, Ducey identified a fundamental truth about going out for ice cream, one that the other guys were missing.
Ice cream makers are in the business of making people happy.
Going out for ice cream is an event. It's an indulgence that requires discretionary time and money. Most importantly, it's a group event, a shared experience between friends and family. Cold Stone developed an understanding of ice-cream buyer personas in order to identify and create what they call "the ultimate ice cream experience." Cold Stone ignored the competition and focused on what made people happy, including:
A clean, pleasant atmosphere with bright colors
Upbeat "crew members" who treat work as fun
Ice cream made fresh every day, with a wide variety to choose from
The ability to add "mix-ins" to customize the ice cream with multiple flavors and toppings
The chance to watch this personalized treat being prepared—mixed together on a cold granite stone
Cold Stone is built around the ice cream experience. If you walked into a Cold Stone store right now, you'd see siblings playfully arguing about the best combination of toppings. You'd see friends passing their creations around the table. You might even hear the employees behind the counter break out in song when they receive a tip. And you'd hear satisfied customers talking on their way out the door about what they want to try next time they go out for ice cream at Cold Stone.
Not surprisingly, this tuned in company is growing quickly. With almost 1,400 franchises now in operation, Cold Stone Creamery is the sixth best-selling brand of ice cream in the United States, and they operate stores in South Korea, Japan, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan.
Your organization's unique ability to offer superior value to your customers is called your distinctive competence.
Building products and services based on your distinctive competence allows you to win, even against larger, better funded, and more entrenched competitors.
Distinctive competence not only dictates how you build products and services, it also forms your marketing communications strategy and helps you describe your organization to buyers so they are more likely to choose you instead of your competitor.
Creating products and services based on your distinctive competence is the best way to develop a breakthrough experience.
The most successful organizations understand that people are buying a total experience, and they create one that resonates.
Five important parts of the buyer experience are the discovery experience, the buying experience, the packaging experience, the using experience, and the service experience.