Forrester CX: Tony Costa and Understanding Your Customer

We are live-blogging from Forrester’s CXNYC this week, the event for customer experience leaders, innovators, and practitioners.

GM is a great example of success and change:

• Alfred P Sloan devised a brilliant strategy to have a car for every single status.
• That status pushed GM to over 50% market share and they held that for well over a decade
• in the 1960’s customers moved away from identity based on social status and towards lifestyles
• In the 1970’s, there was a desire for smaller and fuel efficient cars.  Market share suffered until they are at 17% market share

What went wrong?

• They lost sight of their customers. Their key assumptions became unchallenged assumptions
• The assumptions became blind spots

Question: How do you expose blind spots and stay relevant as your customers evolve?

Answer: understand your customers. Not segments. Do deep research.  Not just thin data sets from a few surveys, segments, focus groups, and digital analytics. They are important yes but they don’t really tell you much about fundamental human behaviors

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It’s ethnographic research and diary studies.

Case Study: Adidas’ original assumption was that people wanted to buy gear based on competitive advantage.  But things changed. The point of Yoga wasn’t to out-Yoga the person next to you.  They did a lot of ethnographic research.  Of 30 women who took pictures in their study, 25 took pictures of a little black dress.

• Look good
• feel good about themselves

That caused Adidas to rethink their assumptions and thus launch new and more relevant products.  Aesthetics became a much larger consideration. They even partnered with Stella McCartney, a fashion deisgner

Case Study: Wells Fargo wanted to understand their customers better. The traditional ways they organized companies didn’t work.  For example, one type of customer in a small business was the people who were happily holding steady.  That segment wanted more personal investment services rather than small business services.   This led to cross-sell and key measurements.

Case Study: John Deer wanted a foothold in the Indian market.  They couldn’t win by better products or by price.  After ethnographic research, they discovered that in India a tractor isn’t just a tool but it’s also basic transportation.  John Deer tractors only had a single seat.  They added foot boards and sales took off.

Assumptions shape how we think about them.

Assumptions have half-lives and need to be challenged on a regular basis

Ethnographic research is a key to challenging and resetting assumptions

How To Get Started

1. Start with a crisis or a blank slate. Easier to justify at either of these events.
2. Reframe the problem.  Look at the context. Open the aperture and thus, expand the purview of insights
3. Go deep with customer and non-customers.  It’s more than just an hour
   1. and across different customer types
   2. Look at those who rejected you
4. Make it personal. Tell a story. You are trying to shift mind-sets.  People have to emotionally connect with customers.
   1. Include key execs so they can arrive at those epiphanies themselves.
   2. Dove is a great example on how they sold the real women campaign to the board……through the board members daughters.

Change how your company thinks about the customers.