Receptive messages in receptive moments

In a market where scarcity of choice is extinct, a product (or service) gets little more than one chance to impress a customer. As I was browsing the back of my milk carton this morning, I read the following text:

Does that mean if I drink 52 cartons of this milk, I save only 4.8 lbs of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer from being used for the entire year? Or do I save 4.8 lbs of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer per week? What is synthetic nitrogen anyway? And what does it do to harm the environment? Why do I care?

As a new customer, who made this purchase decision based on a referral, I am still highly influential on my next purchase decision for organic versus non-organic milk. I’m not completely sold on the cost/benefit of organic products. So as I’m reading the back of the carton, I’m looking for incentives that will sway me one way or the other, especially my switching costs are higher (by a price factor of three) for this product.

A purchase decision based on trust (e.g., a referral) is the most powerful way to influence a new customer to try your product. But your product has got to be able to stand on its own and deliver an experience that will make the customer want to try you again. Your product gets once chance. And that one chance, that one experience determines whether or not your product becomes the customer’s new “must have” or “some product that I tried once”.

The devil is in the details. Every channel that you can use to influence your customers (advertising, promotion, price point, placement, packaging, delivery, product experience) should be directed towards the goal of retaining the customers who try your product. When I read the back of the box while eating cereal, the message didn’t compel me to go out and buy my next carton of Organic Farms milk. It made me think “so what?” and “why should I care”?

Also, if you’re going to use numbers to sell your product, put them in their proper context. Make your story believable.

When your product (or service) involves higher switching costs than the competition (whether it’s a higher price, longer learning curve, limited access, etc.) these marketing principles are even more important. Focus on receptive messages in receptive moments.

P.s. In case you’re wondering…the product experience (including taste) wasn’t enough to compel me to buy my next carton. My husband summed it up nicely: “it’s wet…that’s about all it has going for it in the milk category”.

Filed under: Marketing, Messaging

Using Wordles to Visualize

I was working on a survey today that had a lot of written comments from sales representatives around our company. The reps were asked: “what do you see as the company’s strengths”? In a quick attempt to summarize the responses in an impactful way, I decided against the traditional bar graph or pie chart and instead used a wordle.

A wordle is a word cloud that depicts frequency of text by size. So the bigger the word, the more frequently the word or phrase was used in the text. In less than five seconds after pasting all of the write in comments into the text box, I saw our company’s strengths through the eyes of the sales reps:

Clearly, the sales reps think our strength is our technology. They also think highly of the company’s employees, financial (strength) and heritage, among other areas.

Using a word cloud is a quick way to get an instant visualization of words based on their frequency. It can help you quickly take a jumble of words and see which ones are repeated over and over. This can help you:

• See what topics customers are talking about or asking you for (key in customer responses from surveys, comment cards, emails or  letters) and see what words jump out at you. There may be things you need to change that you didn’t even know about.
• See what your competitors are talking about (what words/topics stand out from their RSS feeds?). Should you be talking about that too?
• See what your employees are saying. Are you hearing everything they’re telling you?
• See which topics you are talking to your customers about most through your marketing channels. What you see may surprise you!

Try it out today: http://www.wordle.net

Filed under: Marketing