Preface

The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

—Isaac Asimov

I LOVE TO travel. It’s the ultimate way to support my underlying need and desire for change—a new location every day, a new city to experience, new cuisine to try. My future self has no permanent address or day-to-day responsibilities. The world is a huge, ever-changing place that’s just too enticing for me to refuse. I absolutely must explore it, understand it, and consume it.

Until I can afford to hang it all up and travel the world endlessly, I have built a career that has supported my core need for something new, something different. The companies I have built or helped build have covered a wide range of industries and products. This experience has granted me a unique perspective and made me an expert witness to the dramatic and disruptive changes technology has had on how individuals work, live, play, and interact.

Unlike the typical stereotype of technically oriented people—who desire only to work heads down on coding or building something cool or new—I view technology as an enabler, a way to make life better and more efficient. I knew very early in my career that I wanted to understand both the technology as well as how its use affected or changed the world. But even with this slightly more open attitude toward technology, I still had a blind spot.

I thought I knew what my consumers needed. After all, I had been trained and educated on how to implement technology to meet a problem; they hadn’t. I was surrounded by other smart individuals who had equal or better experience deploying technology to consumers. What could we possibly be missing?

My passion for seeing technology from the users’ perspective was solidified in 1995. It was the first time I was ever in a lab like the one at User Insight. I was working for a company called Information America, a division of West Publishing. We were a skunkworks who’d been commissioned to take an outdated mainframe system that allowed electronic access to public record information to the Internet. (I kiddingly say it was the first nonporn website on the Internet that was actually making money.)

We were about a week from launch when the marketing manager suggested we take the product through something she called usability testing. As a computer science geek at heart, I thought she was crazy. What could the user know about a system that our incredibly intelligent team didn’t? I believed that the organizations supporting or selling the product needed to understand the technology, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how the user could provide any meaningful direction.

I went along with this idea because I honestly thought it would help the marketing manager out more than me. She was interested in understanding what most marketers would care about with this type of product:

• What messages would resonate with consumers to make them use this new service?
• How much were they willing to pay to search for or retrieve a record?
• What concerns would they have about providing their financial or personal information?

So I begrudgingly agreed to play along in order to help her out—but threatened that it better not impact my precious timeline. As someone who always makes the dates in my project plans, I was concerned this distraction might derail our launch date.

The experience was very much like what you see on a television show when detectives interrogate a suspect and try to get them to admit to committing whatever crime is being investigated. My team sat huddled in a dark room behind one-way glass and watched a moderator take a consumer through a set of predefined tasks. They ranged from activities as simple as reviewing the site to understand what purpose it might serve to those that were a bit more complicated, allowing users to actually register and submit a search to see how they interpreted the results returned.

Fifteen minutes into the first user session, I was hooked—and my world had been changed forever.

The poor user couldn’t even figure out how to enter his registration information. He failed at understanding how to submit payment information, he didn’t know how to execute a search or interpret the results when they came back, and he wasn’t even sure how to start over when he made it down a path that didn’t meet his expectations.

In other words, it was a fantastic, beautiful failure.

The failure continued throughout the day as one consumer after another suffered through the same issues that the first had. My team started to desperately plea with them through the glass to “click that button” or “just scroll down.” At one point, I was trying to send telepathic messages to the individual to help end his suffering in trying to properly enter his credit card information. I remember saying out loud (and being reprimanded by the facilitator because he was afraid the consumer would hear me), “Just look at the example; it’s showing you that you need to break it up into sections. Why can’t you see it?”

We had made the classic mistake of placing the submit button just below the fold. As a result, the primary designer kept repeating, almost as if she had lost her mind, “Just scroll down; just scroll down.”

But no matter how much we tried to will the users from our darkened control center, they never learned. Each new user confirmed the system’s overarching issues—and often pointed out something new that we didn’t expect but needed to know.

My team walked out of that dark, cold room on a sugar high after consuming way too many M&M’s, gummy bears, and salty snacks. We were not in a state of despair, as you might expect; rather, we had a developed sense of humility and a renewed passion for fixing this product. We wanted our consumers to understand what we were trying to provide and wanted to remove the barriers that were getting in their way. An unintended but positive consequence of every experience we had in lab was a renewed team spirit.

This evaluation was one of the best team-building experiences I have ever taken a team through. For the companies who come through our process and take it seriously, I see it bond them in a way no corporate retreat or motivational speaker could ever accomplish. It’s especially amazing and fulfilling to watch individuals—many who have never met in person but work on the same product—introduce themselves in the lab and view what they have built through the eyes of a completely unbiased judge, a judge who can make or break the success of their efforts.

This initial experience did something incredibly crucial for me and my career. It opened my eyes to how important it was to look at whatever I was building from the perspective of the person who is intended to use the product. I immediately knew that if I was ever given the opportunity to create a company that worked in this area, I would jump at the chance. Eventually, it did lead me—along with my two cofounders—to build a company that became one of the fastest, highest-quality research companies in the world. We shepherded some of the largest companies and leading brands through the process of looking at their marketing and product development problems through their consumers’ lens.

The company that spawned from this early experience is User Insight, which conducts 150 research projects a year across 30 different industries and works with some of the world’s leading brands to understand why the products, services, and experiences they build work or don’t work. It is the ultimate laboratory for exploring the intersection of the human with technology. As cliché as it sounds, the world has changed, and I have had the chance to watch this change happen from the consumer’s perspective.

Over the course of just one decade, the world’s focus shifted, from selling what could be produced (mass production) to asking the people consuming the product, technology, and marketing message (mass customization) what they want.

The changes have happened so quickly, dramatically, and permanently that few people with whom I talk truly understand the impact. We are essentially numb to advances in technology. We have gone from being excited by the newest technological advance to expecting and quickly absorbing the “next big thing” into our ecosystem. And we give very little thought to how far-reaching the implications these new advances will have on the world in which we live.

I remember signing up for one of the first bill paying services in the mid-1990s. It took forever to get the bill set up in the first place, not to mention that the company was still cutting a check and actually sending it to the biller. I can remember telling my friends and family excitedly about this new way to pay bills. I knew that this was a significant transformation in the way financial services and end consumers would interact with one another moving forward, a noticeable and understood disruption. I was willing to overlook the inefficiency of this new system in order to participate.

If it takes longer than a few seconds to pay a bill nowadays, we are annoyed. The conversations and presentations at a recent payment conference I attended centered on how consumers would soon be able to pay for items without even taking their phone out of their pocket at a local coffee shop or restaurant. This is the new norm; it’s not considered earth-shattering, even if it is a dramatic departure from how commerce has been transacted in person to date.

An amazing amount of disruptive technology has been introduced over the past 20 years. I have had the unique opportunity to participate as an observer to and an agent of this disruption—a witness to how it has been implemented, why it’s important, and what the impact has been on the average consumer.

Personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, MP3 players, smartphones, apps, and social media are just a few of the more memorable advances that have become commonplace. And with each new advancement and related disruption, the environment has changed forever. Humans are resilient; they accept these changes and move on. This is one of our greatest assets—and the reason we sit at the top of the evolutionary pyramid. But as a result, we rarely stop to take an audit of what these changes mean; how they have, in turn, changed us; and how they influence the way we interact with the world around us.

The recent disruption that all of this technology has caused at such an amazing pace—as well as their reduced costs—have forever changed the development of all products, services, and experiences. As a result, product development and marketing must also make a substantial modification to the way they approach their jobs.

This most recent set of disruptions and advances has led to the long prophesied “rise of the individual.”

The point of this book is to synthesize conversations I’ve had and have overheard over the past few years into a sense of awareness, awakening and a change of focus to what’s really important. Marketing and product development teams need the same wake-up call I received on that first day of usability testing in the mid-1990s. They must focus on their consumer and see their marketing messages and products through the consumers’ eyes. Only then will relational marketing work and be implemented correctly.

The norms, and even industries, that we held true just a few short years ago no longer exist. This fallout is the direct result of focusing too much on what has worked in the past and not enough on what we need to do in the future. We must take a look at how we are building products, creating marketing messages, and determining the way forward differently than before.

The world is no longer operating according to business as usual. And without a realization of this change and a different approach moving forward, many more companies and industries are going to go the way of CDs, Blockbuster video stores, and Borders bookstores. Consumers are choosing the brands that understand and support them on an individual level, engage them through an authentic relationship, and give them what they want in the form that they want it.

The goal of the techniques I propose in this book—and practice in my work—is to accept and understand people for who they are, at whatever stage, personal or professional, they happen to be. I aim to understand how to talk to them at this core level to create a brand, experience, or service that meets their unique needs. And you should, too.

Companies need to learn how to thrive and accept the fragmentation that has occurred, not resist it. It’s not about one message or product; it’s about the right message or product. Companies must learn to support the individual as an individual and stop treating all customers like everyone else or treating them like they’re part of a group into which they may not self-select.

The big secret is that the core of a consumer rarely changes; it takes a life event, not a life stage to dramatically affect the consumer’s basic drivers. They simply manifest their core differently in different contexts or suppress it based on other influencers. Companies that expend the time and effort to truly understand this core instead of guessing or assuming are the ones who win. They become the brands everyone envies in our new relationship-driven, many-to-many economy.

And once you understand the core, the technology no longer matters. It becomes secondary. You view every product, marketing, or experience decision from the point of view of the constant: the consumer’s DNA.

As a practitioner of laddering, it’s important to me to explain how we got to where we are today. The first part of this book explains the rules we as marketers and product developers followed until just recently, why we followed them, and why, until just recently, they worked.

We are currently experiencing one of the most life- and industry-transforming periods of technology to date. You will find as you read through this book that each time a new disruption occurs, you must take time to review how it has affected the end consumer you are targeting or learn that the consumer you are targeting is no longer appropriate to your brand.

For those people who like change like I do, it’s one of the coolest times to be in the marketing and product development space. It’s time to create new rules, new ways of doing business and measuring success. And the very cool thing is that the secret to being successful in this endeavor is to do something that’s so basic to each of us as human beings that we have forgotten how to do it: we need to understand one another.

Laddering will teach you how to do just that.