Talk to my customers? Are you kidding?

Strangely, many marketers scoff at the prospect of actually rolling up their sleeves and talking to end consumers of their products or services. Marketing research seems to be synonymous with throwing together a survey or questionnaire and blasting it out to a selected sample of people. While this allows for convenience and breadth of coverage, it does not dig deep into what really makes consumers tick — and how products fit into their everyday lives.

Consumers are people first, and consumers second. Tapping into what makes them people provides valuable insight into not only current “usage scenarios” with your products and services, but potential situations for use, and thus opportunities. The argument for this deeper, richer level of research, often posited under the guise of ethnography, has been well documented elsewhere in books like Hidden in Plain Sight by Erich Joachimsthaler or How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman.

But the fact that marketers often avoid doing this nitty gritty heavy lifting is disturbing. Even worse, I’ve found that engineering and R&D types can be even more averse to the proposition of listening to the “voice(s) of the customer.” The (Veblenian) attitude seems to be that if customers raise concerns over the designers’ creations, the problem lies with the customer and not the design of the product. In the world of help desk support, this attitude can be heard in the saying “the problem lies between the seat and the keyboard.”

The paranoia surrounding relinquishment of brand ownership and product design to the “sweaty masses” or “hoi polloi” via social media is an extension of this aversion to actually listening to what customers have to say, warts and all, and embracing (as opposed to criticizing) their natural imperfections as part of usability design. New product development professionals and marketers can either run from or attempt to exert control over the conversations going on in social media about their products, or they can listen and probe and better understand the lives of their customers — and how their products fit in.

Social Media is About Connecting, Not “Marketing”

By connecting I mean engaging in conversation. That might lead to the marketer/PR rep’s holy grail of varying degrees of a “relationship” or it might simply remain conversational and relatively superficial. But the key is to approach social media as a tool for engagement, not an outlet for marketing.

The “traditional” media used for marketing (e.g. television, radio, newspaper, outdoor) are largely one-way venues of communication. The internet, web and “Web 2.0” are interactive media, thus two-way venues of communication. Marketing is all too often associated with one-way communication (note that “one-way communication” is a bit of an oxymoron since the root word of communication is communicatis, or an act of sharing — think “commune”). But anyone involved in the discipline of marketing knows that it is just as much about listening as it is broadcasting. The diagram below is my attempt to present the two-way function(s).

In the center of the diagram, marketers act as “boundary spanners” and engage with consumers. The “market” is represented by consumers on the left and the “company/organization” is represented by the building on the right. Marketing actually involves three levels of interaction:

1. The blue arrows represent research-oriented interaction between marketers and consumers. Inquiring and listening to what consumers do, what they want, what they don’t want, what they like and what they don’t like.
2. The yellow arrows represent the new product development (NPD) interaction with the organization/company that marketers work for. Marketers should be advocates for the consumers that they engaged with during the research interaction.
3. The red arrows represent a return to consumers to “communicate value” through marketing communications such as sales and advertising. This what most people think marketers do all day. But importantly, the red arrows “close” by coming back to marketers with responses from consumers — and this is the important part. The first leg of the loop is about broadcasting. The closure of the loop is about listening and conversation. It really represents a continuation of the first “blue” cycle of research-oriented interaction.

All of these activities can be greatly facilitated by social media. Social media creates “touch points” with consumers that generate many opportunities for the three levels of interaction represented in the diagram:

• research by engaging with and understanding consumers
• customer “advocacy” through support/problem resolution
• new product introduction and education
• co-creation/co-production with consumers
• and last (and probably least), a potential channel for “pure-play” traditional marketing communications

One could argue that in the “yellow interaction” of new product development, social media can be leveraged to put consumers directly in touch with new product developers, alleviating marketers as intermediaries. I think this is useful if new product developers (e.g. engineers, designers) are willing to listen. But I still think marketers play a role in guiding and aggregating the conversations with consumers.

The key for all of these opportunities is addressing the new shift in balance of power. Consumers are no longer passive recipients of information. They engage in it, they are savvy about and even averse to pure-play marketing, and they will become engaged with your product/company/brand if you display sincerity in listening, not just broadcasting.