The Marketing Gateway starts today! Our host Sean in St. Louis (Sean Jordan) takes us through why it’s important to listen to customers… and how you can do so with confidence!
Here’s our first episode via Youtube:
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TRANSCRIPT
So tell me if you’ve ever had this experience. You’ve spent weeks and weeks working on this exciting new idea you have and you’re finally putting it in front of other people. And you’ve poured your heart and soul into this thing, but as soon as you start showing it off, you can see from the looks on their faces, they’re just not liking it. And so you try to explain it to them, hoping that maybe if you just help them to see what you see, they’ll come around. But they don’t. And now you’re in this terrible situation where you have to figure out what went wrong.
So a thought occurs to you. Maybe I can get them to tell me how to fix it. And so you try to pivot, arguing that the idea is good, but maybe the execution needs some work and you ask for feedback. You get a lot of critical response, but the ideas people are suggesting aren’t really helpful. And now you’re annoyed. It’s easy for them to sit and criticize. They didn’t spend weeks of their lives working on this thing. You’re not even sure that they’re right. Maybe they’re wrong.
Maybe you’ll go forward with this idea and you’ll show them. Yeah, that’s the ticket. But when that anger subsides, all you’re left with is doubt. Maybe this really was a dumb idea and you just couldn’t see it. Maybe you really did waste your time. And do you want to risk wasting anymore? Well, it’s at this point that you might come to someone like me and ask me for help. I’m an insights researcher. My job is to ask people about their opinions on things and yeah.
I’m going to try to help you, but I’m also going to be straight with you and tell you, you know, the mistake you made was in waiting to get feedback until the end. If you want to do this right, you got to listen from the start. So I’m Sean and St. Louis. This is the Marketing Gateway. And today I’m going to tell you why the secret to being a great marketer is being a great listener.
So I teach a marketing strategy class to MBA students and we do this little exercise every week where I give them some business scenarios and ask them how they can improve that business with better marketing. And I’ll have them advise make believe fruit stands and pizza parlors and dry cleaners and janitorial services and IT contractors on how to take something that’s working and make it more successful. And one of the questions that comes up almost immediately in every case is what sorts of research is this business done for its customers?
And since I’m playing the role of the fake business, I get to laugh every time and say, none, because that is my experience. These businesses are small or mid-sized and they feel really close to their customers. They don’t think they need to do research because they feel like they’re able to hear and respond to what their customers want already. But my MBA students can almost always poke a hole in that.
because they recognize that there’s usually something in these make-believe scenarios that the business owner would benefit from learning more about. So let me use the example of the produce stand where this guy is selling fruits and vegetables out of his garden. One student raised her hand and said, would the customers buy anything else? Well, like what? I asked. Well, what about preserves? She said he could make jams and jellies and pickles out of the things that he can’t sell. And then he’d have those out to sell and
They’re shelf stable. They wouldn’t rot like the produce would and he could charge more for them. Hmm. What if the customers don’t want those things? I countered. You know, he could waste a lot of time making preserves that nobody wants. Maybe they just want fresh produce. Well, he can ask them. The student shrugged. What’s he got to lose? He’s trying to grow his business, right? And that right there is a tremendous insight. He could
Ask them! That is research! That’s taking the initiative to ask a customer their opinions about things. And you don’t even need to hire a specialist like myself to come in and do that. The produce stand owner could literally just ask every customer one day, hey, if I was going to offer a sample of some homemade strawberry jam next week, would you be willing to try it? What about fresh pickles? Is that something you’d buy from my stand if they were any good?
Maybe people like the idea and he can give it a try by doing small batch trial run and see how well it goes over. Maybe he’s going to need to try a few recipes to find the ones his customers really like. And he’ll need to have some taste tests to get them to tell him what they really prefer and would come to a stand to buy. Maybe he even needs to ask them about, I don’t know, the type of container they’d like or what size it should be or how many they want to buy at a time or how they use these new products at home. And if you’re a marketer,
I’m sure you recognize these are exactly the sorts of questions we ask all the time when we’re developing a product. We’re looking for that need that customers have that we can fill and that desire we can spark inside them to come and buy a product or service from our business instead of from someone else. And we don’t get to those things by accident, we learn them by listening. So how should we listen? Well, this is where I bet you’re expecting me.
to give you a sales pitch because this is the sort of business that I’m in, but no, no, no, no, no, Save me for those special occasions where the answers aren’t as easy to get. You don’t need to hire a specialist like me to be a good listener. You just need to learn how to listen. So let me offer three tips on how you as a marketer can be a better listener. The first tip is to put yourself in situations where you actually can listen. If you work for a
product company, go to the places where people are buying products like yours and just talk to them. Ask them questions, write down the things they say that really grab your attention. Try to learn what really matters to them. And if that’s not feasible, there’s probably an online community out there on Amazon or Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or wherever, where you can listen to the reviews and read the comments to get some ideas about what people really think and feel. The second tip is to stay in questions only mode as often as possible.
When you start talking to people, most of them are just waiting their turn to say something anyway, so give them the chance as often as possible. When I’m working as a professional researcher interviewing people or doing focus groups, I try not to answer questions. I want to be the one asking them. And so if somebody asks me a question that isn’t about a simple clarification, I’ll turn it back on them and I’ll say, well, why don’t you tell me what you think about that? The third tip is that when you do want to get someone’s honest reaction to something you’re working on,
Think about when and how that feedback would be most useful to you and show them at that stage. You know, when the Wright brothers were working on their flying machine, there was no value in showing other people their plans because so many flying machines that looked good on paper and then failed in execution, they actually needed a proof of concept that really worked. But you know, there’s other times when you really ought to be getting feedback from multiple internal and external sources before you make a big decision.
look at Cracker Barrel’s recent disaster with their attempt to change their logo, whatever research they were doing clearly wasn’t warning them that they were going to face an immediate public backlash that would force them to backpedal. The question of whether or not they even needed to rebrand seems like it was big opportunity to listen to consumers and if they were, wow, did they talk to the wrong people at the wrong stage. By the way, speaking of listening, thank-
You for listening to this inaugural episode of the Marketing Gateway. We’ve got so much more for you in the weeks to come, including some interviews with some really amazing people. If it has to do with marketing, we’re going to cover it. I’m Sean in St. Louis, and I’m always here to help you with more insights and ideas. See you next time.
So today’s plug is for kindness. No, not a company or a brand of any sort, just basic, decent kindness to other people. I try to devote some of my time each week to doing things like sending encouraging notes to people or giving time to mentor and counsel them. And I wanna encourage you to do the same. No matter how bad things may feel, we’re all in this together. And the way to get through it is by being kind to others at least once a day. It really will make you feel better. If you don’t believe me, consider this.
There was a recent randomized control study done in China, published in the journal Psychological Science, where participants suffering from depression were asked to donate at least one Chinese penny through an online charity platform to anyone that they wanted once a day. And by the way, it would take seven Chinese pennies to equal one US penny, so this is a very small gift to give. But after two months, the group making these donations showed a significantly greater increase in depressive symptoms and emotional positivity than the control group. In other words,
By doing the very least that they could do for someone else every day, they were feeling better about it. So, you know what? Be kind to someone else. Make it a daily habit. You’ll be glad you did.
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