CHAPTER SIX
Rethink Your Customer

You don’t sell a product. You sell a transformation, a journey from one point to another—a journey from having a problem to being free of it.

Rethinking your customer follows naturally. “Your customer” is not just the people who literally already have or use your product. Your customer is everyone who has the problem that your company exists to serve.

Understanding your customers’ journey, the problem, and their real-life experience trying to solve it—that’s what it takes to rethink your customer.

From: Your existing customer base, user base, or social media followers.

To: Everyone who has the human-scale, high-level Problem your company exists to solve.

We needed to rethink our customers. So we did. And what we found allowed us to transcend a strictly transactional relationship with our customers, driving a steep, sustained uptick in how often we engaged with our customers via product features and content, fast.

But first, we had to stop thinking of our customers as the people who were already using our product.

The critical group of people we needed to understand was everyone in the world who was trying to solve this problem.

Then, we had to get out of our office and into the real world, into our customers’ world—or, more accurately, their worlds, plural. We couldn’t just ask them a bunch of outright questions. We needed to see their actual behavior and actual surroundings.

We had to rethink what their journeys even meant. We needed to shift from focusing solely on their life cycle using our product to deeply understanding their real-life journeys of trying to change their behavior.

Ultimately, we kicked off a customer research project that spanned nearly two years and multiple continents before it was done. The insights we gleaned drove the growth of our engaged user base by over 200% just in the first year of the project.

One reason the insights were so powerful was that, early on, we invested a great deal of thought into how we defined the Problem. We decided to ask ourselves a much bigger, much more important question than “How do people experience the weight-loss journey?” We asked this question instead: “What does the journey from unhealthy to healthier look like?”

And we invested a great deal at the other end of the project, too. We carefully crafted outputs of the research and then indoctrinated the whole company in the results, intensively, for many months. This empowered every single team in the company to operate from this singular customer journey model.

It worked for us. And it continues to work for the brands the TCI team helps deconstruct, model, and immerse in their customers’ journeys. Here’s some insight into the power and process of customer journey mapping, the way we see it and run it.

How to Translate Your Customers’ Lives into a Usable Journey Map

The first thing we did, at MyFitnessPal, was get out of town. We put together a list of six cities that represented the various points of view and lifestyles other than the coastal, urban, techie, early adopter audience viewpoints we had already captured in San Francisco. We recruited an intentionally diverse assortment of research subjects in those towns from among a large set of people who said yes when we asked the qualifying question, “Are you trying to live a healthier life than you do now?”

Sometimes we asked people straightforward questions. But rule number one of humanity is that people don’t always even know the truth of why they do what they do, even if they think they do. So other times, we used methods from psychology and the other behavioral sciences to get into their deeper, less conscious emotions and thoughts about the subject matter.

Still other times, we observed people, naturalistically. We went out and met them, in their own homes and their own gyms. We went into their refrigerators, their pantries, their spreadsheets, and occasionally, their phones.

We spent hours with each of them, learning about what healthy meant to them and letting them brief us on every kind of tool, support, and strategy they were using to try to change their behavior and change their lives. We explored what got them started on the path to healthy living, what got them stuck along the way, and what circumstances and mindsets moved them forward. We learned about who and what influenced them, for the healthier and for the worse.

We met with churchgoing moms on Herbalife and Crossfitting Chicagoans and all sorts in between. We met with people struggling with obesity and with others who’d achieved what we came to call the “effortful ease” of living a lifestyle that was more healthy than not, on net. We met with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and way beyond, at all levels of self-described health.

We recorded these interviews and documented them extensively with photos and transcripts.

We slowly began to spot patterns across all of these prospective customers’ journeys from healthy to unhealthy, breaking them down into a series of stages that virtually everyone went through.

I can’t share all the specifics of the process, nor can I divulge the entire journey model map we created: it’s proprietary. The truth is that there’s no single, right way to do these projects—what will be of high value to a given company and its initiatives will vary.

But I can share some of the things we were looking for then and the things we almost always look for in our research work at TCI now. These are the six things to make sure you look for as you rethink your customers by understanding their journey:

1. Universal Stages in the Journey

In almost every case, you will find that there is a sequence of events, mindsets, and experiences that people tend to share in common as they go from having the problem that your company exists to solve to success with that particular behavior change, Personal Disruption Conundrum, or goal. A very important objective of rethinking your customer should be to identify the stages of that journey and create a clear, visual model or map of it.

To be clear, I am not talking about customer journeys the way many companies use them: as a chart of the various touch points that a paying customer or existing user will have with the brand as they use the product. You may need a model of your customer’s life cycle with your product in order to address disengagement and to reactivate your customers, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

When you’re building the kind of Transformational Consumer customer journey map that I’m talking about, the end goal is to transcend the transactional. So transcend the transactional. Zoom way out, to a level much higher than your customers’ experience with your product. Create a journey map that lays out their real-world, real-life experience of trying to go from unhealthy to healthy. Or from broke to debt-free. Or from stuck in a dead-end job to the next level of their career. Or from frustrated dreamer to successful small-business owner. Or from grappling with a certain set of physical symptoms to pain-free and in control of their bodies.

Zoom out. You can zoom back in later. The zoomed-in part—the life cycle with your product part—is much easier, more accessible, and probably more intuitive for your team to map out, if they haven’t already. That part will get done.

2. Feelings and Behaviors

How do people feel, and what do people do at the various stages of the journey?

Also, what behavior-change levers do they try to pull? In weight loss, for example, there are generally two levers people try to pull to control their behavior: food and exercise. Eat less (or eat better) and exercise more.

Within each of those, there is a core set of changes that people try to make in order to make this happen. They try to cook or eat at home more. They might try to eat less processed and more whole foods. They track their calories or their food more generally. They join a gym or sign up for group exercise classes like Zumba or Crossfit. Each of these can be drilled down even further: to get to class, they might pack their gym bag the night before. To cook, they might create a written meal plan for the week.

This is a tiny sampling of all the levers people try to pull to lose weight, which is itself just one lever/subset of the “live a healthier life” goal. But as you can see, doing an inventory of the levers your customers naturally try to pull, in their real-world lives, to create the behavior change they want and need empowers you and your teams to make smart, strategic decisions about how you can help them and how you can’t.

First, it helps to make it clear what levers don’t work or bear too little fruit for the trouble it takes to move them. Second, it may illuminate opportunities for you to help create content or product features that move the needle a lot on a lever that people are generally struggling with. Third, it segues you to the natural next question: where do people get stuck or get unstuck on pulling these levers? The answers reveal some of the most fertile ground for product and content that changes behavior and repositions your brand.

3. Progress Triggers

What are all the things, in the real world (not just in your product line), that help people move successfully from one stage of their transformational journey to the next? You need an inventory of these things, too. Trust me, if you sit down with real people who have legitimately been trying to deal with a well-defined behavior-change objective, they will delightedly share the things that have moved them forward on the path.

For example, we learned a few general things about people who had previously been relatively inert and uninterested in taking action on their health:

   They were galvanized when a friend or relative successfully lost a lot of weight.

   They were activated when they saw a picture of themselves or caught an unflattering glance in the mirror.

   They were inspired to get into shape for an upcoming wedding or reunion.

   They were prompted into action by having recently given birth or gotten divorced.

Another big progress trigger, when it comes to weight loss, turned out to be actual progress, or momentum—once people actually saw a little movement on the scale, they were much more likely to stay in motion.

Medical diagnoses turned out to be less common triggers than we thought. But the realization that you are huffing and puffing after running a block, playing with your kid, or climbing a flight of stairs? Much more common than we expected.

Remember, people are not always rational. Often things people think will change their own behavior don’t actually do so, which is part of why they are coming to brands and products for help. The power of customer research is that it reveals what organically causes change and what doesn’t. And once you know that, you’re in a position to double down on what works and stop investing in what doesn’t.

4. Resistance: Obstacles, Quit Points, Rules of Thumb, and Decision Traps

Where do people get hung up? What gets them stuck? What common circumstances lead people to quit even trying? Where do they make decision shortcuts? What rules of thumb do they use, for better or for worse? The answers to each of these questions will reveal a deep set of topics for your editorial calendar.

When I worked with HGTV, ING Direct, and ultimately, Trulia, we used insights from my time in the car with hundreds of home buyers to surface that people often started house hunting online using a price range to their budget maximum, without appreciating that homes were selling for quite a lot above their asking prices. Once they had loved—and lost—multiple properties, people were often willing to break the bank and throw money at the next listing they liked, overspending and taking on unsustainable mortgage arrangements to make it happen. (You might have heard something about how this whole thing turned out. They called it the “Great Recession.”) Here’s another example: during the MyFitnessPal ethnography, we flatout asked people what their biggest obstacle to living a healthy life was. I’m not suggesting that overtly asking people questions and taking their answers at face value is always the right strategy. Again, they don’t always actually even know the truth. But it can be very revealing, occasionally. And it was, on this occasion: almost to a person, our customers said their biggest obstacle to living a healthy life was budget. Healthy food costs a lot. What’s an app company supposed to do with that? Never in the history of the company had we heard that budget was a blocker to health. In San Francisco, it’s nothing to spend $25 on a salad at lunch, so our local users were probably just not experiencing budget as a blocker the way people were everywhere else. We hypothesized that maybe it was just a perception issue. Maybe people were assuming they had to pick between Cheetos and grass-fed bison. Or maybe people just perceived eating burgers are cheaper than cooking because they’d never actually done the math.

So we asked a lot of follow-up questions. And we kept hearing people talk about these fast-food dollar menus. To be totally honest, at the risk of giving away the food snobbery of our team, we had no idea that virtually every fast-food chain in the country actually has a one-dollar-an-item menu. McDonald’s has one—that, we knew. But so does Burger King, Taco Bell. The Fresco menu we kept hearing about was Taco Bell’s dollar menu.

Even der Weinerschnitzel! One woman told us how her husband put himself on a five-dollar dinner budget, which meant five chili cheese dogs. The math from there was simple: 320 calories and 16 grams of fat each equaled 1,600 calories and 80 grams of fat, more than he was supposed to eat in a day.

The even more stunning revelation, to us, was that a mother of four could feed her family 20 items of hot food for 20 dollars, without cooking— heck, without even getting out of the car.

We took a step back. This was a real issue. We took the view that everything that got between our customers and living a healthy lifestyle was potentially our competition. So we spent some time as a company exploring what we could possibly do to address this issue. The options were more numerous than you might think:

   We could help people find and fix food faster and cheaper, with recipe content that would be fast and inexpensive to cook.

   We could create content to help people budget and plan their meals in a way that helped level the playing field between healthy and unhealthy foods, from a cost and convenience perspective.

   We could seek out partnerships with healthy fastand convenience-food brands, to get discounts for our customers.

   We could even exert pressure on the many fast-food chains that wanted to be our promotional partners to make healthy menu options more available or affordable.

Ultimately, we did end up doing some of these things, on the basis of a wide array of strategic inputs. The point here is that the exercise of understanding and inventorying the places our customers get stuck allowed us to systematically innovate solutions and then pick those that aligned well with our business model, strategic priorities for that time frame, resources, and core competencies.

5. Micro-Moments

As you inventory the stages of the journey and the things that get people stuck or unstuck along the way, you’ll hear from the horses’ mouths exactly where your customers go at different spots along their journey. By “where,” I mean both physical and digital “locations.” Some might be obvious, others less so. The power of the micro-moment is not just in knowing where customers go when they need knowledge—it’s knowing where they go at specific moments in their journey. This is often much less obvious or intuitive and can reveal highly actionable insights, especially for your marketing efforts.

Originally, Google broke micro-moments down into the following buckets:

   I want-to-know moments

   I want-to-go moments

   I want-to-do moments

   I want-to-buy moments ¹

But as the framework has evolved, Google’s consumer insights team spotted some patterns I would deem transformational micro-moments. These are patterns in how consumers use their mobile devices to do research projects related to their HWW goals. Google breaks them down and labels them in accordance with the findings of its consumer research:

   Show-me-how moments. These moments allow for brands to connect with customers who have already bought their products but are looking to know how to use them, creating opportunities for engagement, love, and referrals.

   One-step-at-a-time moments. Google found that “90% of smartphone users have used their phone to make progress toward a long term goal or multi-step process [like home buying] while ‘out and about.’ ”

   Time-for-a-change moments. In introducing this transformational micro-moment category, the Google team profiled a young man whose bad day at work kicked off Internet research for graduate educational options and “snackable content” to “keep the dream alive.”

   New-day, new-me moments. The Google team’s conclusion that many “people try new things in routine moments” was based on its research finding that “91% of smartphone users turn to their phone for ideas while doing a given task.” ²

Pharma companies, for example, devote much of their marketing spending to physicians’ offices. By doing so, they miss the many billions of online “I want to know” micro-moments of Transformational Consumers who may spend many months searching the Internet trying to diagnose their symptoms and look for home remedies before they ever even think about emailing or calling their doctor.

Here are a few data points from Google’s micro-moments research:

   91% of people do research and look up information on their phones while they’re in the middle of another task.

   82% of people go to the store to buy something and then consult their phones while they’re trying to decide which thing to buy.

   10% of these so-called showroomers buy a different product than originally planned. ³

If you understand where along your customers’ journey they experience “I want to know,” “I want to go,” and “I want to do” moments relevant to the problem you exist to solve, you can be there. And you can be there with content that serves what they want to do then, positioning yourself as the transformational partner they will undoubtedly go to when they are ready to buy.

6. Natural Language and Mental Frames

The value of your customers’ natural language is threefold (at least):

   Your customers’ natural language reveals how they frame the problem your business exists to solve in their minds, which could be very different from how you’ve been thinking about it.

   Understanding their mental frames empowers you to phrase your marketing and communications in the same terms your customers already use. It allows you to create content that gets their attention because it uses words they’ve already flagged as “Things I Care About.”

This is what Stuart Butterfield meant when he told his team, “Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.” ⁴

   Content that addresses the obstacles and sticking points that your customers keep running into in their natural language builds credibility with your customers that you get them. That credibility boosts the chances that Transformational Consumers will give your product a try, too.

At MyFitnessPal, one of the most powerful outcomes of the customer research project was a set of message pillars we used to build a wildly popular content program. We got to ten million unique visitors monthly in about a nine-month period of time by strategically publishing content across our email newsletter, blog, social media, and in-app content program. All of the content solved customer problems that we spotted and promoted progress triggers from the journey map.

The content didn’t promote the product. The content became part of the product. And millions of people began connecting with the product, initially, just to get to the content.

Much of the highest performing content in health and fitness is that which is optimized around customers’ natural language. Titles like “What to Do When People Push Food on You” and “Home Workouts for Bad Knees” drive customer engagement by mirroring customers’ own words back to them, letting them know that we understood what they’re going through and slotting right into their preexisting mental categories for “Things I Already Care About.”

What Customer Research Looks Like in Real Life

At TCI, we have a very specific process for this sort of customer research, though it varies based on the company we’re working with, its needs, and the brief:

1. We metabolize existing customer data and work with the company to make sure we’re asking the right research question to get answers that will actually help the business.

2. We use behavioral and observational methods to recruit subjects and conduct the research.

3. We build a map and additional frameworks depicting the customer journey, segmenting the stages, and isolating any levers or phenomena we see as critical to understanding the customer.

4. We spot and document patterns in the things that help people make progress from stage to stage, get stuck, or even revert to earlier stages.

5. We validate our qualitative insights with market research, survey data, or product usage or other quantitative data.

6. We then apply a proprietary framework we call The Delta (after the Greek symbol for change) to each of these progress triggers, obstacles, quit points, rules of thumb, and decision traps. This step is critical. The gist is that we take what we know about the company, its pressing priorities and business challenges, and develop a set of strategic recommendations. Each recommendation is a specific, actionable opportunity for the company to use behavioral science, persuasive product and content design, or coaching/change management to (a) power tweak its existing offerings or (b) create new products or marketing campaigns that will create the behavior change that its customers seek.

7. We create a curriculum and multimedia assets, teaching teams their customer journey in a way that aligns with their everyday work and problem solving. In this step, we often program permanent elements into company culture, communications, and events.

That was a mouthful. And the truth is, a complete customer journey map is an eyeful. Download an example map of the customer journey from broke and in debt to being a good steward of their financial assets at, TransformationalConsumer.com/brokesamplejourney.

The One Rule of Customer Research

There’s no one single way to do customer research that will work perfectly for every company. But there is one singular rule for customer research I want you to leave with: do it.

Do it because there’s no way to transcend a transactional relationship with your customers, to focus on their problem the way we know is so essential, without understanding that customer and that problem.

Do it because it behavior change is illogical and hard, and if you’re relying on guesses about what does and doesn’t work, you will almost certainly guess wrong. People are not always rational.

Do it because, although data is one way to understand people, it is only one way. Same with demographics. Neither are enough. And relying on either, without talking to real-life human customers, is a dangerous path. The opposite is also true: the best case scenario is to develop a smart hybrid of quantitative and qualitative inputs to your new understanding of your customer.

Level Up Your Question

The fastest way to suck all the transcendence-empowering juice right out of customer research is to start that research with the wrong question and specifically with the wrong level of question. Internal research teams can find it very hard to resist this temptation, especially if the company has never done research before, if they are not skilled researchers or if the company is motivated to do research by a pressing business dilemma.

A skilled external research provider can help you level up your question, in terms of both granularity and how useful the output will be. Note that these levelings up are totally related. Usually, the first begets the second. The higher level the question, the more powerful it is.

The psychology professor turned customer-research guru Jerry Olson once told me a story about a project his team did with Cheerios some years back, illustrating the value of leveling up your research question. Originally, the Big Food empire General Mills presented to the team at Olson Zaltman asking a pretty tiny question: what was the best way to market Apple Cinnamon Cheerios?

Olson and team made the case that that wasn’t the right question to be asking. They felt it was too small a question to ask and would not likely generate very impactful results. After some back-and-forth, the wise folks at General Mills agreed, and the collective team arrived at a new, higher-level question: How do people experience breakfast?

I won’t go into the secret sauce of the Olson Zaltman process, except to say that it is elegant and thoughtful and goes deep. But in the course of the process, someone in a customer group pointed out that what General Mills calls “yellow box Cheerios” is generally the very first food children learn how to feed themselves.

Ah.

The Olson Zaltman team went down the research path around a particular category of transformations that show up in a family, often around breakfast: a series of first-time experiences that signal an evolution in the relationship between parent and child.

The research was so powerful in its revelations that General Mills built an iconic series of television ads around it. In one, the transformation showcased was the first time you notice your child displaying empathy, and in the ad, a very young child brings his dad a bowl of Cheerios because he’s worried about his father’s heart health.

Cheerios positioned itself indelibly in the minds of a whole generation of Americans by surfacing how elemental it already was to these precious, universal family moments and to customers’ Aspirations around healthy child development and parent-child relationships.

When you hit on the right level of question, the answers get very interesting, from the perspective of sparking new ideas for product, marketing, and service innovation. One resource I go to time and time again is Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas (2014). ⁷

The Importance of Thoughtful Outputs

It’s very common to see customer-research projects culminate in customer personas or profiles, sometimes with names and photos. It’s also common for our client companies to be seeking brand or product messaging, positioning, go-to-market strategy, and competitive depositioning deliverables.

These are natural outputs of customer journey research.

But the possible outputs and deliverables are vastly bigger and more impactful than even these important things. A thoughtful set of outputs and deliverables make the difference between a resource-sucking research boondoggle and a transformative experience that reinvents the company’s relationship with your customers.

Of course, there should be some sort of presentation that relates the results of your customer research and shares the map of your customer journey beautifully and powerfully. Multimedia content strategy and change management are just as core a part of what we do at TCI as the research itself.

It’s imperative to translate research outputs into the company’s terms, into your team’s natural language, into the challenges they face in operating their parts of the business.

As you conceptualize how to pull this off, here are some guideposts we generally follow.

Immersive, Interactive Content Strategy

Keep in mind that the goal is to create a lasting change in the way all the employees in your company understand the customer and in the perspective from which they begin their thinking about how to solve your customers’ problems.

Create time, space, and content for your teams to be immersed in your customer journey, research, and any resulting recommendations. The content itself must be engaging, galvanizing, narrative, and interactive. It should be presented in multiple media formats: experiential, print, audio, visual, digital, online, and off. The content should trigger your employees’ existing mental categories for the issues they care about. It should make clear which insights and recommendations map to the business objectives and key performance indicators, or KPIs, each team is responsible for.

Craft a Well-Designed Change-Management Process

To reorient your team around your customers and their journeys involves a long-term company-wide learning experience and transformation. It is not a one-off project. There is a deep body of knowledge about what works to create lasting company change—use it as a springboard for developing a process to deliver your research outputs in a way people can incorporate and mobilize around. Or engage someone who understands organizational change management and can help you create a process that doesn’t just deliver the content but ensures its uptake.

Many Teams, One Journey

Every team in your company must be immersed in the same customer journey and research content, from research and development to product and engineering, and even marketing and operations. Now, you may very well need versions of the journey line or research deliverables that target the specific challenges and opportunities of a given team. You may also want to zoom in on a particular stage of the journey or even a particular micro-moment for an individual division or team.

But you must also create a single, holistic experience of the customer journey that all teams engage with, together. One thing we do as a matter of practice is ensure that we incorporate members from all teams as we proceed through the research and journey-mapping process. At every stage, we share preliminary results and engage every team in a conversation about what we’re finding.

Doing so gets precious input and help resolving open questions from people who have likely been doing this work for a long time. It also communicates that this process is not necessarily intended to make people scrap everything they know but rather to shift perspective from product-first to Problem-First. More importantly, it organically creates a company-wide team of many change agents who have participated in the process and will become long-term advocates for bringing the research into their teams’ work long after the first version of the journey map is delivered.

What you don’t want is for your product and development teams to be working from a journey line that represents your customers’ life cycle with your product, while your marketing team is working from a journey line that involves the customers’ real lives in the real world. That’s exactly how companies that could be transformers end up health-washing a product that has no real transformational utility for customers. And that, in turn, is how Transformational Consumers end up calling foul on brands that claim they are healthy or wealthy or wise making but are in fact junk food or encourage late fees or promote bad decisions.

Institutionalize Your Customers, Their Journey, and Research into Your Recurring Cultural Events and Internal Communications

All sorts of brilliant, beautiful content and experiences work for different teams to understand their customer journeys. I know a pharmaceutical company that has created a hundred personas based on the real stories of people living with the disease its products treat. Every new employee is given a patient to “be” during the first week on the job, complete with content about that patient’s journey, including complications, symptoms, and medical decisions that must be made.

Pinterest does a masterful job of incorporating customers into its regular company communications. Every time a new feature is released, the product team presents that feature to the whole company from the vantage point of its impact on actual customers’ experience using the product and living their life.

Rethinking your customers involves understanding their journeys, deep diving into what gets them stuck and unstuck, and crafting a process that gets off to the right start but also closes with an immersive, experiential, ongoing “finish.” This internal shift has the potential power to ripple out into some massive repercussions for how you communicate with, reach, and engage customers, externally.

In keeping with the theme that what got you here won’t get you there, let’s explore the next natural shift along your company’s journey to transcendence: rethink your marketing.