Friendship and Personalized Engagement (or: I wish that Nike Swoosh would stop smiling at me)

Hello Friends

Since my articles are published quite intermittently and not so highly publicized, there's a good chance that you my dear reader are also my friend.  As your friend, I hope that I have been a good listener, that you find value in our friendship and that you feel I have delivered as much to you as I have expected in return.

Psychology Today has a nice article on friendship.  They describe 4 characteristics:

1. Common Interests
2. History
3. Common Values
4. Equality

What a nice goal for your brand and your customers, right?

Way too many Dead shows

I was at a conference a while back where the speaker started with an exercise for the audience.  He had everyone (quite a big group, a few hundred attendees) initially stand.  "If you have never been to a Grateful Dead concert, please have a seat".  Half-ish of the audience sits.  "If you have been to one and only one Grateful Dead concert, please have a seat".  Significant sitting.  This continued, the sitting audience now getting it and anxiously looking around as the standees thin....

"If you've been to more than fifty Grateful dead concerts, please remain standing and all others may sit".  The audience scans the room and gazes back and forth at the two remaining men--standing, smiling and waving at their unexpected recognition that morning.

(Those guys, by the way, weren't wearing tie-dyes, weren't from San Fran and didn't reek of pot.)

OK, this is a bit of an oversimplified example, since asking about an incrementing count of one audience attribute does not make for the best conversation starter.  But even this simplified example works in terms of audiences:  having been to zero Dead shows informs my conversation to some level (maybe it's too early to bring up music at all).  And having been to over 50 certainly gives me some ideas  (I could start the debate that the June 9, 1973 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C. was the greatest Dead show of all time and undoubtedly get a reaction).

In reality a human conversation balances the pace of question (how many shows) and answer (sitting or not) over a much longer period of time than the speaker's allotted five minutes to facilitate.  It involves a unique balance of recency and history that allows us to enjoy a weaving conversational journey with friends.

As brands we can't ask one question about one attribute and then immediately treat all respondents the same based on their one answer.  We should listen to the answer, decide whether that answer alone should spark a conversational response (or is the friend still trying to tell us more), add it to our ever-increasing historical appreciation of our customer and continue to provide value to that customer wherever the next conversation takes place.

I know Personalization when I don't see it

You watch for signals, you listen to tone.  The fact I wear a Boston Red Sox tee-shirt is a signal, the fact I'm considering a vacation has more behavioral aspects to it, more nuance, more tone.  My friend knows I'm considering a vacation (and knows that scheduling and budget might make things tough with everything else going on).  Lots of strangers on a busy New York street could identify me as the guy that wore the Boston Red Sox tee-shirt.  My friend sits next to me at the game and starts to understand more about my vacation plans and because of that conversation starts to understand the other things going on in my life--how my kids are doing in school, how busy work might be, my past vacations and the particular activities that made that vacation so special.  He listens and responds to tone.

Since this little story happens in New York, that guy behind me in the stands yells, "hey, Red Sox suck!".  He screams based on signal.  So New York.

A Smiling Swoosh Nightmare

I love Amazon as I know you do.  The convenience, research options, price comparing, unbelievable operational efficiency...all simply amazing.  But I have to admit I have an unhealthy fear of the stalking Nike running shoe.

While I prefer to buy my running shoes at a local Portsmouth, NH running store, I do always check Amazon to make sure the price difference doesn't finally push me over the edge and break my loyalty.   I'm a reluctant runner at best, so the mile count that drives a new purchase for me can take years.  So it's a pretty small window of conversational opportunity:  I do a bit of research, buy, then run sparingly.

In essence the next best conversation between Nike and me is very rarely a new pair of running shoes.  And this is especially true when I'm looking at my local New Hampshire news site.  I'm so over the novelty of being impressed that the same running shoe I was looking at is showing up at my news site at all.  Now as I read about the local goings on, it just feels that the swoosh is smiling at me in a really weird way, like it knows too much about me.  I've been awakened by slightly terrifying dreams where an oversized Nike running shoe is sitting in wait in the corner of my room, the bright white swoosh blinding in the darkness.  (Ok, this dream never happened but you get the belabored point).

The next best conversation for me takes into account a lot more than my most immediate last purchase.  It takes into account my stage in the journey for all the topics of conversation that brand could be talking to me about.  Nike has so many conversations that I'm interested in (now that the kids are older I'm thinking of taking up golf again) and so many places where I'd rather have a conversation with them.

If you had a friend that kept asking you the same question every day even though you answered "no" each time, how many days would it take before you decided that this friendship was the wrong decision or how long before you tried to get him some help?

When the Nike running shoe shows up on my news site, that's not in my interest...it's clearly in the brand's only.  They want my money (now, now, now) and I really just want to see what this weekend is going to be like outside.  Maybe I can go for a run in my new shoes.

Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub and Friendship

OK, here's the obvious pitch.  Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub is purpose-built for you to listen to your customers, your members, your fans.  It is built to grow that friendship based on the trust and equality and mutually beneficial value creation that true listening empowers.  ONE promotes your ability to appreciate the pace and nuance of human conversation, a pace of listening and responding that allows us to learn more about our friends over time, to broaden our common interests and to equally enjoy and appreciate our journey together. 

Thanks for listening my friend!

Mike

A common customer vocabulary with Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub

As this exciting ride with Thunderhead continues, I'm experiencing something with a thrilling new frequency:  I am in more and more meetings where someone looks across the table and says something like, "we've been trying to have this conversation forever, we just never had a focus for it."

We could label this conversation they've been trying to have in many ways--omni-channel engagement, customer centricity, customer experience, 360 degree view of the customer.  But if I were to really boil it down I'd describe it like this: "defining a common vocabulary of customer intent".

The reason I like this definition is that it rolls all those other (buzzword stained) terms into a concise reason for having the conversation in the first place.  If we're doing things right, we're:

1. Thinking about what the customer wants to accomplish, in their terms.
2. Realizing that the customer is going to accomplish those things where and when he wants to.
3. Appreciating that the customer isn't going to care about my internal systems or the challenges I have integrating things.

The ONE Engagement Hub provides the perfect canvas to facilitate this conversation.  Rather than coming from a particular perspective (campaign management, content strategy, mobile app development, CRM operations), ONE is built to appreciate the strengths and gaps in those existing systems and strategies.  Rather than insisting on a wholesale replacement of things we're working with today, it starts to raise them up, fill those gaps, uncover insights and opportunities locked therein.

Our conversation to evolve the common vocabulary is fundamental to this.  When we don't weight ourselves down with the specific capabilities and challenges of one system, we start to talk more clearly in the customer's voice, around her intent.  We discuss customer activities (not where or how they happen).  We talk about our banking customer who wants to open an account, and not the need to just optimize the form where she (might) want to open it.  We talk about the conversational opportunity around the opening of the account (wherever she decides to talk about it).

Yeah, it's freeing.

Probably my favorite thing about ONE in these conversations is that we can put it to work right away, visualizing REAL WORLD customer activity--happening today--against this shiny new common vocabulary we're starting to agree on.  And like any great project, this new vocabulary is flexible to changes in that real world, to the exciting follow up conversations that result from quickly gained initial insights and to the evolution of our customer conversations wherever the technology world takes us.

Looking forward to working with your team to create this new vocabulary.