Chapter 7
What Could Be More Inspiring Than Being Your Own Customer?

One solution—although it’s not available to everyone—is to become a customer yourself so that you’re looking out instead of in. When a marketer identifies with customers’ lives and expectations, perceptions often coincide and new products succeed.

One of the best examples I know of this kind of engagement—certainly the most touching—is the story of Two Little Hands Productions, a mixed-media company that turns the sign language of the deaf into a language that all children and their families can delight in. Two entrepreneurial sisters, both mothers, created the company by sharing their own experiences with other mothers, some who have hearing-impaired children and others who simply believe that signing benefits all children. For Two Little Hands Productions, the engagement with its customers is so natural and so profound that it erases any division between marketers and customers: It’s just mothers helping mothers, building a nationwide business in the process.

The story begins with Rachel Coleman, then a musician and member of a folk rock band, and her husband, Aaron. In 1996, the Colemans fell deeply in love with their smiling new baby, Leah; they simply couldn’t get enough of her. Often they took her to noisy concerts and let her sleep while Rachel performed. They never needed a babysitter because she slept peacefully through screeching, stomping, thumping, and twanging loud enough to wake the next county.

The work of Two Little Hands Productions responds to the deep and compelling needs of its customers. When you go to its Website, www.signingtime.com, you will been gagedas if you were a member of the family.

The baby’s ability to sleep through any kind of racket seemed odd, but she was more than a year old before the Colemans finally got it: Leah was profoundly deaf; she couldn’t hear anything, not even her mother’s singing.

The Colemans were not remotely defeated, but their lives instantly took a very different turn. “My priorities changed,” Rachel told me. As the daughter of a composer father who had worked with clients ranging from Sonny and Cher to The Jackson Five, music had been a part of Rachel’s life since childhood. But now there would be no room for it; if Leah couldn’t hear, Rachel would give up singing, performing, and songwriting. “I put down my guitar and picked up sign language,” she says.

Well-meaning friends warned that children who sign might never learn to talk, but Rachel and Aaron were intent on communicating with their child as quickly as possible and in whatever form worked. Their daughter had already lost a year’s worth of normal development, so they had no time to lose.

The Colemans began with a system that translates English words directly into signs. It worked for them, but it obviously meant nothing to Leah. “She didn’t understand it,” Rachel said. “She didn’t know English.” That became clear when Rachel signed, “Leah, look at the red car.” The sign for “look” includes pointing in the required direction, so as soon as Leah saw it, she looked toward the red car. But when Rachel signed “Leah, red car, look,” the message got through. So Rachel switched to American Sign Language (ASL), which uses a sophisticated interior logic and grammar to fit the world of the deaf. With tutoring help from a deaf adult friend, both Rachel and Aaron soon mastered ASL.

At 15 months, an age when typical toddlers are pointing and whimpering to signal their wants, Leah could sign, “Mom, I want a grilled cheese sandwich and chocolate milk. Thanks. I love you.” When Leah was two, she and her parents were chattering away so easily with their hands that her vocabulary soared and she began reading written words—long before others her age were even close to reading.

Rachel’s sister, Emilie Brown, was so touched by Leah’s progress that she and her husband, Derek, began teaching sign language to their own infant son, Alex, so that he could eventually converse with his cousin. Emilie began with simple words—milk, more, mom, dad, sleep. Alex started signing back when he was nine months old. It was wonderful, Emilie remembers: More than a year before she expected him to communicate clearly, he was emerging as a true person in his own world. “You discover who your child is and what matters to him. You find out that his favorite thing to drink is actually orange juice, not milk.” Studies show that signing can boost a child’s IQ and speed development, she says, “but the real impact comes in everyday life. You have a child that can communicate, and you are sure he has learned something.” For a parent, that’s pure joy.

With challenges enough to overwhelm many parents, the Colemans were about to be handed still more. Leah was three years old when her mother became pregnant again. An ultrasound test showed that the baby had spina bifida, a cleft in the spine that typically causes paralysis. Rachel had intrauterine surgery, and 10 weeks later baby Lucy was born. She appeared to be a normally child with only a slight numbness in her legs.–Nine months later she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. It was a devastating blow, but Rachel characteristically refused to give up hope. She kept talking, singing, and reading to the unresponsive child. “She was locked in her body,” Rachel said, “but I knew Lucy was in there.”

The next leap forward came when Leah was four years old. The sisters and their families were now living next door to one another in Los Angeles, and three-year-old Alex often went to preschool for the deaf with Leah. But apart from close relatives, Rachel told me, “very few people in our lives were learning sign language. Most people around us felt intimidated by Leah, even the adults.” She wasn’t invited to birthday parties because parents were afraid they wouldn’t know when she was hungry or had to use the bathroom. Children were reluctant to play with Leah because she couldn’t hear them and they didn’t understand her signs. One boy requested that the soccer coach not pair him with Leah at practice, explaining that “she can’t hear me, and she can’t even talk.” Although Leah was sweetly oblivious, Rachel was standing right there, absorbing those hurtful words about her daughter.

Pragmatic as always, Rachel said she “wasn’t mad at anyone,” but four-year-old Leah was getting left out of life. The situation would only worsen as she got older. “What can I do to change this?” Rachel asked herself. She started volunteering at a preschool for hearing kids in her neighborhood, conducting weekly story times that included simple signs in ASL. Within weeks, children who previously had merely stared at Leah’s signing were including her in their games. “Two signs, ‘play’ and ‘friend,’ completely changed their world,” Rachel remembers. “When I saw that, I got excited.”

But there was a catch: What would happen when Rachel wasn’t right beside Leah to intervene? “I can’t do this all her life,” Rachel admitted to herself, “just follow her around and teach all the kids she gets involved with.”

At this point, Emilie and her family had moved to Virginia, so the sisters had to be content with long, daily phone calls to stay in touch. One day Emilie had an idea: Why not use their shared musical background and savvy to make a video for kids? They would use music to educate children. Better yet, it would give the sisters a reason to get together.

That’s when Rachel had her eureka moment: “Great idea, but first we need to do sign language.”

“You get chills,” Emilie told me, “then you say , ‘Yeah!’” Emilie knew of young mothers in many communities who had begun signing with their perfectly normal babies or toddlers before the kids could speak actual words. The trend was sparked by studies that show children can use their hands and fingers to communicate long before they can speak; it’s natural and fun just liken when parents and children play hand games.

Emilie immediately latched onto Rachel’s video idea as a potentially powerful way to, as she put it, “make a difference in Leah’s world.” The video could teach signing to parents of hearing children, while vastly expanding the range of communication for deaf children such as Leah.

It took a year to produce Signing Time—My First Signs. Originally, the sisters planned to have the two children teach the signs as the word being taught was spoken aloud and spelled out on the screen to reinforce the message. The demonstration would be followed by animated pictures of the word in question and images of other children repeatedly signing it. But at the first editing session, it was clear that Alex and Leah, then just three and four, were too young to clearly demonstrate the signs from a teaching position for the 30-minute show. So Rachel, with her performer’s voice and larger-than-life smile, stepped in as the central figure who introduced each new sign and anchored the video.

A former colleague of Emilie’s who ran a production company was enlisted to produce the video. The first video was just about wrapped up when Emilie prodded Rachel into reconsidering her decision to leave music behind. “I know you say you’re not a singer or a performer or a songwriter any more,” she said, “but you’re the closest thing we’ve got. So go write us a theme song.” Bowing to the inevitable, Rachel borrowed a guitar and took Lucy and the guitar into a nearby room. Just 25 minutes later, she emerged with two tunes—the first a theme song with the same title as the video, and the second an almost prayerful expression called Show Me a Sign. “Show me you’re in there,” was the message, “prove your doctors wrong; tell me you’re okay.” “Tell me that you love me. Tell me that you’re thinking of me. Tell me all about the things you are thinking day and night. Tell me that you’re happy, and you love it when we’re laughing. Tell me more,” it pleaded. “Oh tell me more. Show me a sign. Show me a sign.” The theme song drew instant applause, and Show Me a Sign had everyone in tears. The sisters decided to play Show Me a Sign during the credits at the video’s end. Their keen instinct for authenticity, a powerful tool for engaging with customers, was on display.

In April 2002, a month before the first video was released, Rachel was playing it at home with Lucy in her arms. When the video ended, Lucy knocked one fist against the other. Rachel watched in awe as her daughter signed “more.” “She willed her hands to open, and she started signing,” Rachel recalled. “Then she started talking.” A mother’s wish had been granted, but Rachel also recognized that Lucy’s accomplishment pointed to a whole new market for signing videos: Children with delayed development, Down’s syndrome, and other special needs could clearly benefit from signing instruction. (Today eight-year-old Lucy, although in a wheelchair, is fluent in both ASL and English and is a fully engaged and happy member of the Coleman family.)

At the beginning of this adventure, Rachel told me, she would have been content just to make 100 copies of the video and give them to people who knew Leah, thus changing her daughter’s immediate world. But Emilie, who always had an entrepreneurial streak, had other ideas, including a well-thought-out concept of Signing Time’s premise: “You and your child will watch this video together. We don’t have to promise that your child will be smarter. You’ll see it, just as we have with our own children.” So the sisters incorporated as Two Little Hands Productions and set up a Web site, Signingtime.com, which was followed by an association with Amazon.com to sell the Two Little Hands videos.

Before long, Amazon customers were raving about the video, and Aaron Coleman had given up his job as a parks supervisor to help with the company and later joined the production team to film and edit more offerings. But without start-up capital, the first year of filming was quite a scramble. “We got by on credit cards and favors from friends and family,” Emilie says.

The big break came in February 2003, when NBC’s Today show did a segment on Rachel and Signing Time. Fortunately, the sisters had known for about six months that the segment was in the works, and the company had geared up for a surge in production and shipping. Still, they were surprised and gratified by the volume of orders that poured in after the show aired. Signing Time became the top-selling video on Amazon.com that day pushing My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Harry Potter from the top spots. Rachel was interviewed in Ladies Home Journal, which unleashed a steady stream of stories and media interviews about the company, its founders and their families, and the videos that introduced them to a broader audience.

Two Little Hands had become a real business, one whose 2006 sales reached $3.1 million, which translated into nearly 500 percent growth in just three years. Rachel and Emilie turned what many misunderstood as a crutch for the handicapped into a tool that helps all children to share a language that opens life and learning to everyone. And at every step of the way, they have done it by remaining true to their own experience, convictions, and instincts. They profit from who they are and the authenticity that cements their engagement with customers. The marketing strategy, Rachel told me, is simply this: What do I wish there was to fill a need for Leah or to change the world to suit her better? “It’s not just for Leah; it’s for so many other families,” Rachel says, “but it meets our needs as well.”

Looking back at their media debut in 2003, when NBC’s admiring Today show turned the sisters’ story into a public relations dream, Emilie put her finger on the Two Little Hands’ appeal: It is the singular aspect of its engagement with customers and the consequent trust it engenders. In effect, the customers perceived the owners as customers themselves. “We were our own demographic,” Emilie says. “What made a huge difference was the organic nature of the product coming from Rachel’s life. It wasn’t the usual case of, ‘Hey, let’s make something the market wants.’ Our real success came from making something that matters to us—really, really matters—and that we can share with thousands of other parents in the same boat.”

What’s ahead for Two Little Hands Productions? The sisters aren’t sure. “How long it makes sense for Alex and Leah to do this, how many original episodes need to be produced to satisfy the market, those are questions we don’t know for a fact,” says Emilie.

Whatever the sisters decide to do, they are determined that it will be something that comes from their own authentic experience. “We just made what we needed and it worked, because we know what we need, and we are no different from every mom out there,” Emilie reflects. Of course, in developing TV shows, they consult a panel of experts and advisors. “We have to play that game now because of what’s at stake,” Emilie told me. “But just because some researcher says you should do it this way—if it’s not entertaining, if it doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t have heart, if it doesn’t work for our kids, we are going to try something else.” In the end, she says, “I don’t need a researcher to tell me that it works. I know it works.”

Rules of Engagement

• Remember that empathy pays. The great advantage of being a customer of your own product or service is that you automatically have empathy for other customers. You understand what they are going through. You understand their needs. You are extremely sensitized to how various offerings can fulfill those needs (or not). It’s an important principle for all product and service developers, regardless of your engagement strategy.

I’ve actually seen companies treat their customers with hostility. They see their customers as too demanding, wanting too much, and willing to pay too little. It is an unfortunate and unprofitable condition in many business-to-business relationships. A classic example is the relationship, or lack thereof, between automobile manufacturers and their component suppliers. The contentious relationship between these parties keeps both from being as profitable as they could. They have little empathy for each other’s situation—just a push to get the most that each can wring out of the other, even if one of the parties fails.

Could a hard-headed executive from Detroit learn anything about empathy from Two Little Hands? Try this: Never regard customers as aliens from another class or culture, never unfairly take advantage of your customers or suppliers, identify and respect everyone’s values and expectations, and treat everyone as friends and pilgrims in an increasingly complex world.

• Keep a little distance if you do get inside your customer’s head. Being too close to a customer need might cause you to lose perspective. Rachel and Emilie have been successful because they intimately understand the needs of hearing-impaired children and their playmates. But they also stood back from their venture to get a sense of what would work in their markets; they were not driven only by their needs. They were also able to put themselves in the shoes of others.

• Trust your intuition when you are inside your customer’s head. That’s the way Rachel and Emilie operate. Plenty of experts are always ready to provide you with advice. Just remember that they’ve formed their opinions based on what they know; you might know more or know something readily applicable to the business you are trying to build, and the experts’ knowledge might not fit your situation. It’s especially true if, like Rachel and Emilie, you are venturing into new territory.

But never stop weighing the advice of experts against your own experience and intuition. If you disagree with what they are telling you, don’t stay silent; argue with the advice giver. The truth might lie somewhere in between what you and others think. For your business to remain successful, you must stay as close as possible to the truth about your customers.

• You can commercialize an idea even if it emerges from a high sense of purpose. Commercialization might seem to violate the grand purpose that spawned a great idea. But unless you get a product or service into the marketplace and sustain its supporting business, the idea won’t benefit anyone but you. There is nothing wrong with making a profit, even when you started your company to bring about some greater good. In fact, you need profits to invest in the growth of your business, and you are always free to decide what to do with any excess profits. A moral or social purpose can coexist with commercialization.