The bracing sting of honest customer insight
May 14th, 2010 by Hugh Kennedy
After an hour and then some of a client team going into elaborate detail on why their brand is still so respected and how mystified they are that market share is dropping away, there’s nothing like getting it with both barrels from an actual user, one with 15 years of experience speaking to you in confidence:
“I still feel bitter based on what happened to them. They used to have a ton of different products, then they got acquired and they couldn’t make them anymore and don’t make half of them now. It used to be you’d get any product you ever wanted. Then it became very difficult and that other company got rid of half of the product list. They also used to be only place you could get these products, then other companies came up. We buy all our products from one of those companies now. It’s just as good and cheaper.”
So let’s review. In one 30-second aside we’ve got:
* A customer who is not only not a net promoter, but an actively unhappy one. For reference, the acquisition referenced here happened six years ago, but based on the emotion I heard it could have been last week. Note the word “bitter,” which suggests something smoldering. Like a bad break-up. The negative feeling is still there, right on the surface. And I wasn’t even interviewing the person about this brand. So call this phenomenon Unprompted Brand Bitterness.
* Evidence of a bungled acquisition. So many public affairs departments, so many press releases about “sustainable long-term value,” so many customers abandoning the very same brands in droves. One wonders, did this acquiring company consult their customers before cutting 50% of the product line? Or did they figure no one would notice?
* Disruptive innovation. Note that the brand in question clearly took its eye off the ball while lower-priced vendors, often disparagingly referred to as ‘ankle-biters’ by leading brands (I don’t know about you, but I find it incredibly distracting when someone starts biting my ankles), swooped in and took customers just like this one. If memory serves me, the company this person works for just got an eight-figure injection of money from a collaboration partner, so it’s not like they’re hurting for resources. They just found exactly what they needed for less.
This customer doesn’t come from the web ether, but from one of PJA’s online focus groups. Part of the fun of assembling your own online focus group (at PJA we have one for life science and one for technology) is that you get reminded over and over again how the customer completes the brand, not the company. The customer is in charge, not the marketing team. The ability to tap into this energy is why we call these sets of content experts and practitioners PJA OpinionPulse Groups. If you consider that, according to the latest research from Gerson Lehrman Group, 79% of CMOs decide against hiring an agency because they sense weakness in how well the agency understands their business, market, or potential value, fresh insight becomes just as important to agencies as it does brands. Everyone has a blind spot.
And given how little some brands really listen to what their customers want, they do a lot of damage barreling right into those blind spots.
May 4th, 2011 at 6:06 pm
You?re a real deep thinker. Tkhnas for sharing.