Chapter 8
Practical Application of Laddering
Knowledge without application is like a book that is never read.
—Christopher Crawford, Hemel Hempstead
I HAVE ALWAYS been curious about collectors—people who go around buying things that will never be used. I will be honest; I don’t entirely understand them, or why they engage in this hobby. I’ve always wondered things like, “What good is a Barbie doll that stays in its box and never fulfills its greater purpose of having a young girl dress it up and play with it?” and “Why bother owning a set of china (or multiple sets, for that matter) that stays on a shelf and is never used to serve a meal?”
I feel the same way about the knowledge we gain about our consumers when we do rich-quality work to understand who they are and then never bother to use it or update it, instead choosing to generally ignore it. Many organizations that commission consumer discovery projects still work in an older model where they merely talk to consumers for the sole purpose of being able to claim that they’ve conducted consumer research. Or, they authorize a deep understanding of their consumers only to do nothing in terms of acting upon the results. They fail to realize that information like this can be your strongest asset in today’s changed environment, just as important as the facilities you build, the employees you hire, and the technology you purchase.
Back in the days of VHS tapes and limited bandwidth, we used to deliver research to our customers in a physical box. Just like the Barbie doll, it was put on a shelf, never to be used again.
The recent rise of the individual has brought with it the complexity of new ways to market to consumers. Specifically, it added complexity to our ability to establish and maintain authentic relationships. The good news is that once you have completed the process of laddering, latticing, and lensing your consumers, you will have a strong understanding of how to move forward in many areas that have been a struggle for companies in recent years.
One of the most successful ways to make this work for your organization is to bring the knowledge you have gained to life, to take the information off of the shelf and actually use it. The following are some steps that can help you bring your consumers to life for your organization.
Bringing the Consumer DNA to Life
This presents the opportunity for your team members to experience a compelling result: they may begin sorting themselves into clusters. Self-identification is a very powerful way to bring the clusters to life. Another interesting phenomenon that can happen is encountering a naysayer or challenger in the audience. When given the opportunity to talk with those types of people about their concerns, I usually find they don’t like the cluster to which they most closely belong.
Give each cluster a catchy name, and make sure it includes two elements: a word that describes a primary driver for the cluster and an easy-to-remember personal name that starts with the same letter. You might recall Relaxer Ronald as one of the travel clusters from Chapter 6’s case study. You immediately know that Ronald likes to relax, and that fact remains in the forefront of your mind as you think about him and think from his perspective.
My TV has to be live, so that I can put in my two cents. I’m opinionated and love discussing my favorite shows. I don’t like being left out of the conversation. I watch TV every evening and always have my phone, tablet, or laptop nearby because I love to text, tweet, or even chat while I am watching. I definitely keep up with who is watching what and the newest updates. I am on Facebook and Twitter all the time. I check in to locations, post updates, make comments, and tweet throughout the day. I love keeping up with Twitter during events like the Grammys; everyone is online, and my friends and I can comment on fashion, performances, and commercials. This is a great time to find new people to follow—and, of course, to pick up new followers of my own.
I have even seen companies build life-sized images of the clusters and place them around the office to help everyone remember who their consumers are. Alternatively, they kick off a product brief with the picture of the clusters at the top of the page and as either a letter to the cluster or a letter from the cluster’s perspective. You want to use whatever unique techniques and methods you can come up with to keep these clusters top of mind and driving the organization’s daily decisions.
Practical Applications of Laddering Knowledge
The next part of this chapter will cover some unique ways to approach your consumer groups, methods that support their growing desire for authenticity and move your company from one that is merely transactional to one that fosters understanding and relationship. The good news is that once you have done the work to understand your user groups, you will know what methods make the most sense, as well as which messages and modes to use for distribution.
You won’t be guessing; you will have proof that supports the best approaches. Furthermore, you’ll be aware of what you need to track on the back end to see if your actions are working. You will track more than the number of downloads or hits; you will also be able to know when that information is important (and when it’s not).
Content Is King
Since the dawn of the Internet, online pioneers have been shouting “Content is king” from the rooftops. They’ve done it so much that marketers have become numb to the message.
However, I am here to tell you that in today’s consumer-driven economy, content truly is king.
What you say, how you say it, the tone in which you say it, and where you say it make a huge difference to your message. And the amount of time you have to capture a consumer with a given message is so finite that you better be taking advantage of every opportunity. You aren’t usually risking alienating your consumers; what you risk is being completely and deftly ignored with no understanding of why. Words matter. Images matter. Content matters.
As you have probably surmised based on the different types of consumer DNA I have shared, you can’t use the same words (or images) for all of your user clusters. Recall the cruise line example discussed in Chapter 3. You would utilize the content about the brand to start funneling cruisers toward the elements they really care about. Specifically, you would do so by presenting equal amounts of content for all three drivers on the site’s main page or in the cruise line’s marketing materials: destinations, leisure, or the on-board party.
As each cluster self-selects into the content that matters most to them, you can begin to understand what they really care about. This understanding allows you to provide enhanced content about their main driver. Make sure to give them some hooks back to other content in case they end up in an area accidentally or from a badly returned web search.
In Chapter 4, we focused on some different social TV clusters. Here, your application needs to quickly highlight what each cluster ultimately cares about. How does the application support Chatty Cathy’s ability to find others to talk about the show and meet new friends? What extra special information are you providing to Passionate Penny that she cannot get anywhere else? How are you getting her closer to the characters and actors she loves and wishes to understand more?
You may need to vary the tone of your words for different groups. Vice Vicky is fine with and actually prefers the use of negative language and crass humor. She doesn’t have the time or the patience to tolerate complex or confusing language. You must therefore read her sentiment about a product or service through this lens. Although Vice Vicky may appear to be incredibly confident, she actually suffers from a high level of insecurity and wants nothing more than to fit in and prove her worth. Using her language and understanding what she really needs is the way to talk to her core DNA.
You may find within the consumer DNA that certain clusters want to:
- Hear about other people’s previous experiences.
- Know what’s happening now.
- See what’s going to happen in the future.
Considering these three content approaches within your clusters or looking for patterns in what each one prefers while you perform laddering is the best way to ensure you’ve covered all of your bases.
Social Media Usage Is a Manifestation of Our Core
Social media has allowed us to do something that we haven’t been able to do for the first time in over a century: connect with each other like we used to when society was built around small villages or communal groups. But today, instead of meeting around the local well or market to discuss the news of the day, we build our own network of like-minded people. We share what we find by knowing what is important to our network and based on what we know about one another. We don’t rely on a larger organization to tell us what is important to us; we make that decision on our own. We’ve concluded that mass media has failed us too many times, and we seek confirmation from people that we trust. We listen to those with whom we’ve established relationships, people who we know are giving us important and true information.
Social media allows us to manifest who we are at our core. It’s truly a forum where the way we speak and the information we post (pictures, blogs, comments, and so forth) is very similar to the way we would present ourselves in public.
Therefore, brands need to evaluate social media information from the user’s perspective. We can’t merely base our understanding on what’s being said; we must understand who is saying it and what kind of impact that person really has on those in shared circles. Just because a brand is mentioned negatively doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing—if the cluster it attracts is a negative cluster. It is far more important to understand who made the comment and what prompted that person to do so. Is it within that individual’s profile to use negative words or maybe no words at all? If you work for an edgy brand, using the filter of negative sentiment about what people are saying may not be the right way to view the context of a social media message. Understand that self-promoting clusters like Chatty Cathy may skew the interest in your content, message, or product because this group is entirely focused on self-promotion.
Importance of Engagement
The way forward is in the area of engagement. You want to provide valuable content and interesting information to tell your story to your consumer groups in a way that allows them to see your brand, service, company, or experience; instinctively understand it’s identity; and see how it fits into their world.
This doesn’t mean asking your consumers to like your page or retweet your post. It also means you must go beyond simply sending out e-mail blasts with information about your latest and greatest sale. When you spend time with friends, your goal is to come away a little better, a little more informed. What can your brand, company, or service to do in the same way to surprise, delight, educate, or inform your loyal consumers?
Laddering shows you how and when to speak to each of your consumer clusters, making the mystery of engagement less mysterious. It’s the same as it is with any other friendship or relationship; once you’ve laid the groundwork, you naturally know what to do. And although this isn’t difficult, it does require that you take a step back to define your own reasons why. Why are we sending out this message? What is the purpose of the campaign? What does it do for our consumer groups? If you find that the results of asking that question are all self-serving, that they merely push your agenda or ask the consumer to do something for you, then you need step back and rethink your strategy. One bad campaign or message can create an unexpected backlash.
Take fast food chain McDonald’s, for example, which launched a social media campaign in January 2012 with the hashtag #McDStories. They were looking for responses that spread the good news of McDonald’s, specifically to promote the creation of new jobs at their restaurant locations. But the hashtag was promptly hijacked by unhappy diners, who used it to tell horror stories about eating at the restaurant and getting sick and to perpetuate rumors about how McDonald’s food was sourced and produced. It became a public relations nightmare for McDonald’s and put the company on the defensive on many fronts.
McDonald’s made two mistakes in this campaign:
Beware the Sequel
One approach that simply no longer works is the formulaic approach to the world of marketing. That is, just because a campaign or method worked with one cluster of consumers or one brand doesn’t automatically mean it will work again with the same group. I see marketers make this mistake often; they’re looking for the easy solution and hit the rinse and repeat button. You need to understand why that blogger picked up your story or helped you spread your message the first time before you decide that person is your go-to guy or gal for the next iteration. You must analyze the scenario from every angle of your next endeavor’s potential results and proceed accordingly.
Ask yourself, Did the blogger tell the story because it was original? If that’s the case, then simply adding onto the story no longer hits the blogger’s core driver. Did the blogger help you spread a message because there was some type of self-promotion in it for him or her? Did you provide exclusive content that made the blogger feel special and informed?
If you have done the proper work to understand your consumers, then undertaking a lensing exercise will help you vet the idea quickly and determine how to make it work. You will enjoy the payoff of the work you did unlocking your consumer’s behavior into defined clusters.
There have been countless instances where I’ve met with clients in cross-functional teams, and because we already have a good understanding of their consumer clusters, we have been able to use a lensing exercise to kill an idea in a matter of 15 minutes. Many of these were concepts that would have traditionally gone forward. They sounded good on the surface and probably worked before for a similar brand. However, we knew that they wouldn’t hold up once we viewed them from the intended consumer’s perspective. And undergoing a lensing exercise to determine this early on is a far cheaper proposition than launching a campaign that ultimately fails.
Always remain focused on the why. Why did the campaign work? Why didn’t it resonate with and among the consumer clusters? What you did and what happened as a result is great, but the why behind it is golden.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
We may not remember the last advertisement we heard; however, we will talk about a story around a product or company for decades. As we move into a world of mass customization that is based on authentic relationships, storytelling is becoming a more important aspect to reaching the hearts and minds of consumers. These stories need to show up in consumers’ daily lives and are the best way to reach some of the consumer clusters who do not actively participate in technology-based conversations—people like Everyday Eddie and Showless Joe, for example.
Nordstrom is famous for the story of the woman who returned a set of tires without question, even though Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires. This story is repeated and repeated, yet very few people can tell you the contents of the last Nordstrom print ad or TV commercial they saw.
Word-of-mouth marketing involves storytelling. It requires that we look beyond what the product does to how it affects and improves the end consumer’s life. The story has to be authentic and meaningful to those who are going to participate. It can’t be an advertisement you force on consumers. Rather, it should be something you would tell at a dinner table or when you are out at brunch with friends, a story that would make those attending feel like they learned something new and interesting, not as though that they just had breakfast with a salesperson for the company.
Once you’ve established your lattice construct and know which ecosystems your clusters live in, you’ll be able to identify how the stories will spread. Lensing provides the clues and components of a good story that is worth sharing. A story that doesn’t seem like marketing and isn’t self-serving.
The problem with word-of-mouth marketing and a relationship-based society in general is that they require marketers to have patience. It is not the same as launching a campaign, changing a price, adjusting a tagline, or creating a new version that focuses on value. In the past, these approaches might immediately create an uptick in the number of units sold or consumers participating in an experience. Relationships are developed over time, not in an instant. For something to be interesting and authentic, it can’t be forced. A company needs to be willing to allow the time for the program to work over many months. This is especially true if the campaign’s goal is to alter the public’s perception of a brand or product from one they’ve held in the past.
By using the techniques I have outlined in this book, you’ll be able to truly understand your consumers. You will be able to naturally identify and vet the stories that will resonate with your targeted clusters. You’ll also gain insight into measuring early success with this type of approach, because you can listen to which clusters pick up the story and naturally share it for you. It even allows you the added breathing room of adjusting the approach or the story if it isn’t hitting your consumer groups exactly right.
Unlocking Big Data for Smarter Conversations and Better Products
One final point: it doesn’t matter how much big data companies collect on their customers. Collecting numbers is a desperate attempt to return to times gone by—a time when the mere collection of data and comparison of data to data led to a revelation that magically presented itself. This simply doesn’t happen without a deeper understanding of the consumer. It’s very likely that a company will take action on a false-positive or miss out on additional opportunity by making assumptions based only on data it’s collecting.
Companies that fail to use a lens or key of consumer behavior to go beyond what big data alone indicate as a pattern will continue to build products and messages that miss the mark. Big data tells you only what; it’s not until you know why that you’re in the much stronger position of knowing what truly matters and what to do about it. Your consumer understanding needs to extend beyond preferences in color, previous buying behaviors, and brand affinity for the sake of brand.
As an example, many of our studies uncover consumer clusters that prefer to receive company-branded content, because they trust the company to provide the information. On the other hand, there will be clusters that prefer to resolve an issue or learn about new things by finding content provided from third parties. For some clusters, a third party could be an expert, Consumer Reports, or a movie critic, for example. For others, it’s another like-minded person—not a company representative or a so-called expert, but someone who they relate to and trust.
When we run tests with the same exact content but brand one to the company and have a third party provide the other, the content tests more or less favorably depending on the group that we’re querying.
This means that marketing needs to distribute content in many different ways—whether it’s via the organization’s traditional channels and/or through third-party resources that have the opportunity to tell the story. The company needs to support the clusters’ core desire and allow the consumers to share the information the way they wish.
This is equally important for providing support to your consumers. A consumer who doesn’t trust the company entirely will spend time on third-party sites trying to resolve an issue before reaching out to a support channel. Meanwhile, a more trusting consumer may spend substantial time on company-sponsored properties trying to find the answer independently.
If the company providing support to the end consumer can identify these consumer patterns in its big data, then it immediately knows how to speak to the end consumer in a way that fits that person’s core behavior or desire. But if a brand fails to consider this possibility, it runs the risk of making assumptions about the consumer and infuriating that person during the support process, despite the company’s best attempts in trying to resolve the problem. The company may end up recommending content that a consumer cluster will immediately discount and ignore because of the source.
Foursquare is a location-based social networking application first introduced in 2009 that allows users to use a mobile website to check in to various places they visit. The brand’s creators discussed some patterns they noticed early on in a recent Inc. magazine interview. When they viewed the initial big data that their system generated, they noticed that many of the users saw a use for the application not as they had originally intended (checking into locations and collecting badges) but rather as a great way to get reviews and recommendations for locations around them. So instead of fighting this cluster’s natural behavior, the creators embraced and celebrated it. After all, people were using their product; did it matter that it wasn’t in the way they had initially envisioned?
Foursquare is one of my favorite examples of an application that has embraced the fact that different consumers use the application for different reasons. In addition to their flexible approach to supporting consumers’ preferences, they also know how to use a single application to message and provide functionality that hits four core consumer behaviors: the desire to (1) become the “mayor” of a given location, an honor you receive from having checked in to a location more than anyone else, (2) receive unexpected rewards or discounts, (3) find out what other people might be at places near you, and (4) discover new and interesting places around your current location.
Many companies are following a somewhat disingenuous trend by trying to become more to the consumer than they really are, and they’re doing so in an effort to collect more big data on their consumer clusters. For instance, they attempt to become a destination spot for their consumers for shopping and for information or services that are outside of their primary business focus. But these initiatives’ ultimate goal isn’t to know their customers better; rather, it’s to sell the information they gain to other companies or data aggregators. Trying to be more to consumers than they need or want you to be is a tricky balance to strike. More often than not, your customers will quickly recognize this inauthentic attempt and thwart your efforts. One example of this is Facebook’s attempt at building stores into the platform. We found in our studies that very few consumer clusters would consider shopping at a Facebook store. In addition, the clusters that would shop there are not the ones most brands are attempting to target, nor do they have the influence to drive other clusters to this type of adoption.
Following laddering techniques will put your company in a stronger position moving forward in the big data conversation. By taking the time to truly understand your consumer clusters—their desires, needs, and the elements that comprise their core DNA—you can better predict how to support them as technology and the marketplace grow and shift.
In the next chapter, I will discuss some emerging trends and how they will affect the changing relationship with consumers.
- For your laddering work to have the greatest impact on your organization, you need to bring the consumer clusters to life for your company. Tell stories about clusters you met while performing the research, give the cluster an easy-to-remember name, create visuals that can be placed prominently throughout your organization, and give the clusters a voice.
- Apply your understanding of your consumers to every part of your organization.
- Keep in mind that as consumers seek more authentic relationships and understanding, content is more important than ever.
- Social media provides an unfiltered peek into many of your consumer cluster’s core. You can therefore identify your consumer’s DNA based on what they say and how they present themselves in their profiles.
- You absolutely must engage your consumers within their ecosystem and in the way they expect from your brand or company. Make sure that your engagement is focused on what you can do for the consumer, not just an attempt at getting the consumer to do something for you.
- The approach for acquisition, staying top of mind, and providing support is very different. You must deploy different lensing approaches and establish various measurements of success.
- Just because a program or campaign worked before doesn’t mean it will again. You need to understand why it worked in order to determine potential future success.
- The rise of authenticity brings with it an appreciation of storytelling. Use stories to connect with your consumers and let them share your message for you.
- Collecting big data on your consumers just for the sake of collecting big data is a mistake. Use an understanding of your consumers to decide what to collect and how to analyze it.
- LEGO Pieces: The conversation around these PITA pieces was so widely known there is even an homage to stepping on a LEGO in the middle of the night at the LEGOLAND in California.
- Pine Needles: The number one reason many people need to buy new vacuum cleaners in January is because they spend December picking up pine needles, which secrete tiny amounts of sap, literally gumming up the internal works.
- Cat Litter: Cat lovers wanted to use something other than the main vacuum cleaner to clean up litter before their cats tracked it all over their house. After all, who wants to use the same vacuum cleaner to clean their carpets as they do for picking up urine- and feces-caked cat litter?