This article originally appeared
in the June 1995 issue of PDBPR
GENERAL MOTORS JEFFREY HARTLEY:
ALIGNING CUSTOMER VOICE AND CORPORATE MIND
Dr. Jeffrey Hartley, a cognitive psychologist who manages research methodology
in General Motors' Strategic Decision Center, helps the auto giant's market research group
identify the best way to figure out what products to make. A big advocate of what might be
called the "customer empathy" school, Hartley thinks too many companies -- in
slavish pursuit of the Voice of the Customer -- make unwise strategic choices about the
kind of customer inputs they need, the method for gathering appropriate inputs, the role
those inputs ought to play in product development decisions, and the way the corporate
mind processes what it learns.
Says Hartley, "Our goal is to make
customer-inspired products, not customer-defined products. And to do this we must exploit
both the customer mind and the company mind. We do not want our focus on the customer to
suffocate our own creativity. Yet we also don't want our creativity to run wild. By
embedding a sincere understanding of the customer mind into the company mind, we are more
likely to generate products which will excite and entice customers."
Go for Insight Not Information
Way too much activity that claims to be getting
close to the customer misses the mark, says Hartley: it confuses data, numbers,
information, and reports with authentic understanding. All the information in the world
will not let you see the world as your customer sees the world. What you need, he says, is
a well-developed capacity for intuition and empathy with your customer. What you need is
not more information, per se, but true insight into how your customer's mind works.
But this is not enough, by itself, to lead to
great products. You also need something too many companies lack: an intuitive, empathic
understanding of how your company's mind works. How do the decision makers make their
decisions? What kind of information and insight do they need in making those decisions?
How can you align insights gleaned from customer contact with product decisions springing
from your company mind?
You can never get it perfect, says Hartley, but
you can -- and should -- strive to reduce the uncertainty about the rightness of your
development efforts on four key dimensions: the lack of precise fit that goes with mass
production, the abstract knowledge that replaces empathic understanding when you are
remote from your customer, the lack of robustness that follows when decision makers and
market researchers are siloed, and the inability of customers to anticipate their own
future needs.
Segment Your Benefits
Tom Peters and Regis McKenna to the contrary
notwithstanding, Hartley says it's not really a viable option for large manufacturers to
customize products the way, for example, the local carriage maker once did. It may sound
good from a speaker platform to yell, "Customize, customize, customize" but
that's impossible when you're making a million cars. The trick is to see how far you can
realistically go in that direction and away from Henry Ford's
any-color-you-want-as-long-as-it's-black philosophy.
Enter benefit segmentation. "This is not
your father's Oldsmobile" aims at a subset of the auto buying public willing to say
that one standardized model fits their self-image. Says Hartley, "The logic of
benefit segmentation is that by grouping together those people who want the same things --
the same benefits -- from their product, we can develop a product which meets the needs of
each group. This places a premium on understanding the benefits people need or want in
their product in such a way that people can be grouped."
Get to the Sticky Stuff
This is where you need to pick the right method
for getting qualitative information about your customers' needs. Traditional tools --
focus groups, longitudinal studies, surveys, interviews, product tests -- are no longer
adequate. The data they uncover is critical but insufficient for robust decision making.
Says Hartley, "Frequently the data we
acquire does not give us an intuitive feel for how the customer might react in a novel
situation. Today's large manufacturer typically has what might be called a dispassionate
remoteness from customers. We know a lot of facts about the aggregate target market at a
shallow level, but we have little deep understanding of the dynamic process of being an
individual customer."
To know that, says Hartley, calls for what Eric
Von Hippel calls "sticky information," hard to get at stuff like how people
think about your product category, what your product means to them in the context of their
lives, how they make their decisions, how they respond emotionally, what leads them to say
yes to one product and no to others.
Hartley identifies several insight-garnering
tools: from carefully-planned customer visits to diary studies, from eye movement
monitoring to projective techniques. Note that they are time-consuming to put into play.
And they pose a challenge to those accustomed to working with what many call
"hard" data but that Hartley calls "shallow" data. But they are
valuable tools to help you begin to close the loop of uncertainty stemming from your
geographic and psychological remoteness from your customer.
Used carefully in the early stages, going after
such qualitative, subjective stuff can guide you to customer-enticing products; at later
stages, shallow data, if good, can help you answer appropriate questions about such things
as market size, pricing, demographic spread, and the like.
Unshatter Your Corporate Mind
One of the frequently-uttered insights at the
APEX award ceremonies is that marketing is too important to leave to the marketers. To the
extent that your organization reflects a traditional structure, with marketing as the
gatekeeper of customer insights, and decision making housed elsewhere -- in strategic
planning, engineering, manufacturing, finance -- it is kind of shattered, says Hartley.
Too often, market researchers don't know what
information decision makers need in order to do their work, decision makers don't have
empathic understanding of customers, and decision makers from different functional areas
work at odds with one another. Notes Hartley, "It is all too easy for decision makers
to recede into a very cloistered world, disengaging not only from direct contact with
customers but from direct involvement in designing research. And market researchers can
fail to clearly understand the informational needs of the decision makers."
The solution: link the two. Get your corporate
mind aligned. This does not mean turning everyone who works for you into a customer
visitation expert. That path leads to bedlam, says Hartley. But it does mean getting your
decision makers, not just your market researchers, into direct, empathic relations with
customers.
Lead Your Customers
Hartley would agree with APEX keynoter Glen
Urban's assessment that the future belongs to the innovators. We think he would also give
the nod to APEX judge Terence Westmacott's distinction between opportunity- and
potentiality-driven development strategies, the former leveraging existing possibilities,
the latter creating new possibilities. Says Hartley, "If a company relies
entirely on today's customers describing today's needs with today's products, it begins to
think retroactively rather than proactively. Its creativity is suppressed and the odds of
it developing a surprising and new product are small."
The fact is, today's customers rarely know what
they will want in the future. They may or may not be close observers of trends. Few of
them are themselves early adopters or trend setters. And the odds are most of them know
very little if anything of the future implications of evolving technologies. These are
things the creative minds of your organization, sitting at their desks, are more likely to
know.
The challenge, says Hartley, coming full circle,
is to align your corporate mind with that of your customers so that they inspire your
product development, but don't define it: you lead, they follow. "The corporate
mind, if it merges its knowledge of the future world of products with the current mind of
the customer, is probably better equipped to guess about future customer reactions. The
people who make decisions for the company must be able to empathize with how the customer
thinks and makes decisions. They must also be aware of the future context and tradeoff
that might be presented to the customer, neither of which are known to today's
customers."
Quote:
"70 percent of lost customers hit the road
not because of price or quality issues but because they didn't like the human side of
doing business with the prior provider of the product or service."
--Tom Peters on recent Forum Corporation
research on why
major companies lose important commercial customers |
