#9 UNCX NEWSLETTER | Capture The World With Your Boring Product | Build On Your Weaknesses | Don't Solve The Wrong CX Problem
Toilet paper can't be a rich-storied, high-minded, product.
Capture The World With Your Boring Product
Like me, are you fed up with the PowerPoint ‘CX’ experts? You know the ones - they dress in their very now black code, carry glossy slides, have their morning latte clutched in one hand, carry that business school look?
The ones who’ve never ‘done it’ for real - unlike me (although I was one of them 3 decades ago).
And they’re encouraging you to be the next Apple, Ritz-Carlton, Tesla or Spotify. Telling you these brands are great because they did something great, and it’s something you can copy?
It’s BS.
Because they didn’t start with greatness - they started out with a product or service as an idea - a ‘something’ that captured our imagination.
Tesla, Apple, Ritz and Spotify had an idea to change the world for something different or better.
Unlike mouthwash. Nobody makes it with the idea they are changing the world to be different or better.
The truth is, most people don’t care about most brands most of the time.
That’s because most brands are of low interest to us - we give little thought to them. We think about them only when we need them, and most of us are in this category, unluckily.
Categories like pencil sharpeners. Or kitchen-towel. Or large-sized bin bags. Soap. Tippex. Toilet-paper. Shipping containers. (Shipping container?!).
We can’t get that excited about pencil sharpeners. It’s hardly a rich-storied, high-minded, product.
If consumers don’t care about your category, you can’t make them care. But you can make them take notice. You can stand out.
Instead of trying to channel Apple, Nike or Tesla, channel your strategy into the boringness of your category.
And become distinctive.
By Stopping Focusing on Your Product and Evolving an Experience.
How You Can Create Experiences.
When you are selling a boring product, don’t focus on just the product. Pivot to making it an experience. Focus on selling the experience of owning your “boring product”.
Tell a story.
A good story is an effective way to sell a boring product. If the story is compelling people will want to buy it. The best way to do this is to pair your product with an experience that makes it interesting/driven/remembered.
Take the skincare company, Dove. Dove is another beauty brand among the scores of others that exist. Except it isn’t. When customers think of Dove, they have a clear image of what the brand experience is thanks to its unique storytelling.
What’s the difference between selling Soap A and selling Soap B, if both soaps have basically the same properties and are essentially the same product? Providing something the other doesn’t.
You make your product the hero, the star.
Dove doesn’t talk product. It sells an experience of authenticity and connection, participation in social networks and debates around what real beauty is in response to low female self-esteem caused by society and the media. With lots of similar products out there, yours has got to provide more than the others by bringing something more to the table. Consumers then can identify with the values of your brand and everything your product represents. And good brands are capable of having one foot in their identity and one foot in the lives of their audience.
If you think your product is boring, then David Ogilvy has some news for you: ‘There are no dull products, only dull writers.’
Ogilvy also wrote:
‘I never assign a product to a writer unless I know that he is personally interested in it. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it has been because the product did not interest me.’
Change The Game
What can be more boring and humdrum than the vacuum cleaner?
James Dyson revolutionized the vacuum cleaner market by shifting the consumer perception of cleaning from a chore tied to the female domain to something sophisticated, high-tech and high-performance - even desirable amongst men - and introducing bagless cleaners and playing to the rules of high technology.
As a formerly boring product, Dyson put itself in a category of its own. They bent the will of the market by creating a new context around the meaning of a vacuum cleaner.
Marketing a boring product can be a challenge, but no matter how mundane the product may be, it is important you believe in its value and potential.
As per Salesforce,
‘There are no boring products. There are just bored marketers.’
Talk toilet paper.
Andrex makes toilet paper – the epitome of a low-interest category. They don’t seek to offer purpose or other grand values. Instead, they grab one of the most basic territories you can imagine: softness. They respect consumers’ lack of product-type interest by getting the idea across with puppies. Puppies = softness.
Fun.
One of the other keys to getting engagement for a boring product is to find a way to get attention through fun. Take Beldent chewing gum.
How To Use This Thinking.
Don’t pretend you’re something you’re not. Consumers aren’t stupid. If you’re a mouthwash you won’t change the world. You’re not going to make it as the Tesla of, say, bin bags. Be in a different game. Tell a powerful story, interest the consumer through humour, or show them a purpose (if it’s real).
Don’t go for the linear story. Go for the exponential story that pulls the market toward you and away from others.
Then get out of their way.
Question the question. Better Framing and Challenging Assumptions.
Put yourself in the shoes of T-Mobile, back in 2010.
You’ve slavishly followed your industry's ‘best practices’ for years. You do everything your bigger rivals do, and become a copy of them. But they’ve been around longer than you and persuading consumers out of their lethargy to switch to you without price cutting is hard (and a race to your bottom).
So you languish at 4th in the market. Still declining in share. You’re failing and you need a way out.
Yet the regulators won’t allow your competitors to buy you.
Any big companies from other sectors aren’t interested.
There is no way out. No Plan B, let alone a C.
What Would You Do?
This Is What T-Mobile Did.
They changed the question they were asking themself.
‘How can we salvage the assets before things get even worse?’ wasn’t the question anymore.
Since there was no alternative, the new question became:
‘How can we turn the tables and start beating our competition?’
They had to do something, and that something had to be radical.
And they decided to take everything customers hate about carriers and do the opposite.
No service contracts, free-roaming, flexible data limits, and family bundles.
Simple, yet genius.
They positioned themselves as the good guy against the big and bad (and unlikable) bad guys like Verizon and AT&T.
And became clearly distinctive.
This radical campaign had to have a special name.
They chose a good one: The Uncarrier.
The result?
Consumers loved it.
The Uncarrier changed the trajectory of T-Mobile.
It became a long-term campaign (and their motto).
Thanks to it, T-Mobile took its market share from 10 per cent to around 30 per cent.
And achieved a market cap bigger than both AT&T and Verizon.
It’s amazing how reframing thinking can change everything.
Don’t try to solve the wrong problem
T-Mobile had been trying to solve the wrong problems.
They thought they could beat the competition by being more like them and working harder and better. Sometimes it works, but many times it needs us to unthink.
Unthink to find the right problem.
Question the question
People face a problem and immediately start working on possible solutions.
This is quite common.
One example.
Let’s say the obvious problem is ‘How can we improve customer satisfaction levels to match our competition?’
This may lead you to think about solutions - more call centre agents, more training, more tech, more speed, and more other solutions to get improvements.
All great.
But if you reframe the problem, you may discover better problems to work on:
‘How can we be distinctive?’
‘How can we do things differently for our consumers?’
‘How can we find out our customers’ pain points?’
‘How can we create a connection with our customers beyond faster, optimised, and automated?’
‘How can we lead, not follow?’
See how these different problems can lead to different, often better, results?
So it isn’t about jumping on solutions, it’s about looking for new ways to frame the problem.
There’s an urban legend about how NASA used a lot of money to create a pen that can work in zero gravity. Whilst the Soviet Union spent nothing, and simply used a pencil in space.
This is what problem framing does - it establishes whether you even have a problem to begin with, whether it may or may not be worth solving for your business, and the entire process clears your mind and allows your teams to have important discussions earlier before everybody plods along the wrong path.
There will be moments where you’ll wonder, ‘Why didn’t we ask or consider this before?’. But it will rarely happen if you’re disciplined about problem framing. And sometimes, you’ll realise that the problem you’re facing is a small part of a bigger blunder in the past. Use methods like lateral thinking and this problem framing canvas may help your framing.
Better framing will bring you better answers.
PS:
Remember that Dove campaign (above).
The more biases, sameness and assumptions you can break, the more remarkable results you’ll get.
What I’m reading
This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends by Nicole Rerlroth
A masterful inside look at a highly profitable industry that was supposed to make us safer, but has ended up bringing us to the brink of the next world war.
Takes a complex subject that has been cloaked in techspeak and makes it dead real for the rest of us.
Build On Your Weakness
I’ve never flown Ryanair and don’t want to. Yet I stand them up as an excellent example of experience strategy.
They do things no other brand would even think of.
Why?
Because Ryanair has all the downsides of a low-cost airline.
No free food or drinks.
Uncomfortable seats.
Tiny legroom.
And random seat allocation or you pay more for sitting together with family.
And everyone else complains or mocks them.
Whilst customers propelled them to become the largest airline in Europe.
Not only are they unapologetic, they even make fun of consumers who mock their service.
They embrace what some see as their weaknesses, even joking about charging extra to use the toilet.
Because they know people are not stupid.
The result? We see a reason to believe their promise. We believe Ryanair is the cheapest airline in Europe without worrying about whether they’re cutting safety corners rather than comfort corners. We believe that they are obsessed with cheap prices and will do anything and everything to keep them cheap.
They’ve architected a customer experience that screams price, reliability and realistic expectations. (Cannily, they also make sure they score best in on-time departure/arrival and score lowest lost luggage claims).
Unlike a lot of brands that claim to be the best in everything.
And guess what? They aren’t, and customers know that.
It kills the believability.
About 50 years ago Avis made a remarkable ad.
In it, they admitted they were 2nd in the market behind Hertz.
And they claimed: “We are only number 2, so we try harder.”
The result?
Avis made its first profit after 13 years and gained 7 per cent more market share. “We try harder” became the company’s tagline for 50+ years. Avis took a weakness and used it to increase the believability of their promise — to provide the best service.
And it worked.
Most brands try to hide their weaknesses or deny they have any, making space for you to think about the opposite. Embrace your weaknesses.
Back to Ryanair. Do you think the passengers who demand a pleasant and comfortable flight experience fly with them? No, they don’t. And yes, Ryanair will always be annoying a certain group of customers. Do you think those who demand low-cost tickets and reliability fly with them? Yes, they do. In their millions.
And that’s what a good CX strategy can do for you. because good CX is product, price and experience. Get it together and you’ll increase your perceived value for your target audience.
Smart Thinking
"If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like.
But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have no idea whatsoever what those shoes would be like.
That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate."
— Seth Godin
NOTE: I disagree with the Hyatt comparison. One of my favourite hotel chains, I believe the Hyatt brand is distinctive. But the point behind Godin’s thinking is spot on.