Is your website tuned in?

Many thanks to Douglas Karr of the Marketing Technology Blog for creating the Tuned In Calculator.  Doug took the concept of getting tuned in right into action by measuring how tuned in his website was. His calculator looks at the number of times you reference 'you and your products' vs. 'your customers and their problems' and comes up with a simple 1 to 10 scale to rate how tuned in you are.  Doug scored a 9 out of 10 which is 'awesome' (I can attest to this as I've been a fan and follower of his blog). We rated our three sites and only 1 of them came up this high so we've got some work to do. Doug also warns us to beware of the Narcissists (those with a score of 0).  They're the guys at your party who always seem to respond with ... "that's very interesting; now let me tell you about me."

We think this kind of measurement is a perfect place to start for your initial assessment of where you (or your business) are currently in terms of being tuned in. In our work, we measure lots of underlying factors like how good a company is at market sensing, how well they know their buyers and their own distinctive competence, what kind of solution experiences they develop and monitor and what kind of market positioning tactics they use. Taken together, these form a foundation for how likely it is that your business will create a resonator. 

But, this is all inside the company and largely invisible to the marketplace. The two things that are visible are your product and the central communication you have with the outside world ... your website.  By starting here as Doug has, you'll get a very up-front view of what kind of image you are projecting, how authentic it is and how likely it is to be received by buyers as thought leading and valuable.  Check it out and see how you rate. We'll have more coming in our world at www.gettunedin.com down the road.

Why we Tune Out

Three of the icons we talked about in the book exhibited some significant signs of tuning out over the past 30 days. All three of them are resonators who got to a position of leadership (admiration even) by following the process we talk about in Tuned In. Yet, they each somehow found a compelling way to connect with the market in ways that tarnished their brands. Why would anyone do this? 

In less than a year, Barack Obama has gone from an unknown junior senator from Illinois to break from the pack of more than 21 candidates for President of the United States into a leadership position. Obama's campaign has been brilliantly tuned in because he spoke to problems that people had in new ways, connected authentically with a new class of voters and spread a message of hope and change that identified him as unique. Then he started to focus on what he didn't have and try to fix it. Obama's weakness is widely assumed to be his lack of experience, particularly in the area of foreign policy. He'd never really travelled abroad in a leadership position and with the war in Iraq being a major campaign issue, it made sense for him to visit both Iraq and Afghanistan to assess progress and deal with his stateside impressions that the United States should withdraw and that the 'surge' was a bad strategy. All well and good until he tacked on a trip across Europe that had the look and feel of a victory tour. In Berlin, he passed on an opportunity to meet with injured troops to instead prepare for a Kennedy/Reagan-esque opportunity to speak in front a large crowd at the site of the Berlin Wall. The reception back home was largely incredulous from both those who support him and those who don't. What problems was he trying to connect to ... Europeans, Americans or his own?   

Apple lost a lot of credibility this past week as well. Seems for the second time in less than a year they've introduced a product with limited battery life (the other being their MacBook Air). In the case of the iPhone 3G, the life is five hours. Now, what part of 'mobile device' are we missing here?  A phone is something we charge at night and carry around all day isn't it? But, if that wasn't bad enough, the company also introduced a series of tips and techniques to extend battery life. On their support pages you'll find all sorts of valuable ideas like what temperature to keep your iPhone in, how to turn off applications that chew up processing power like Maps, and my favorite, turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. This is not good folks. I've also heard anecdotal evidence about problems with Outlook e-mail as well all of which goes to once again prove the point that it takes three generations to produce a business-critical solution. 

Then there's my friends at Starbucks. I don't know what's up with them anymore. The thinking was that when Howard Schulz came back in to run the place that the core mission of great coffee at your third stop would be revitalized. Far from it. There was a good start with their community idea buttons, a new Pikes Place offering and retraining all barista's in the Starbucks Way. Today though when I go into a store, or look at their website for that matter, all I see are advertisements for things I don't want from Starbucks (like the Vivano) and promotions to 'come back in the afternoon' or try our new breakfast meals (which smell up the place by the way and don't taste very good). Their numbers are terrible right now and the latest investor view has them closing more stores than they are opening. 

If these three icons can tune out, is it any surprise that 90% of the companies we studied do as well?  That is, they are tuned out more than tuned in. The real question is ... why?  How can a company (or person) get started by so completely tuning in to a market problem that they create a breakout and then lose it over time?  The answer is simpler than you think.  We see it in athletics all the time when a player or a team starts out well and then fades. The issue:

When you starting thinking more about you, your needs and the outcomes you desire vs. what value you are providing to your customers and what problems need to be solved for them, you're tuning out. This month, a few of the mighty fell.       

Video Game Becomes a "Billion Dollar Hero"

Note: This is the first post from the newest member of the Tuned In team, Mark Allen Roberts. Mark is Managing Director of Tuned In Businesses for Pragmatic Marketing.

The video game Guitar Hero has become a breakthrough success. Sales were estimated to be $1 billion in 2007, and growing in 2008. The inventors of this game, Activision, saw an unmet need in the market centered on family or group entertainment that everyone who ever wanted to be a rock star would enjoy. And now throughout the world, households are rallying around the TV playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, having hours of fun. How did they do that?

When a product or service so perfectly connects to an unmet need there should be no surprises when sales numbers break records, and for the company’s shareholders, value increases.

I was intrigued by this Guitar Hero phenomenon when my son and daughter, and all their friends would want to play the game and interrupt my TV viewing. Admittedly, I was also humbled when I tried it and was  “booed” into moving to an easier level!

What was Activision thinking when they said lets launch a video game that makes kids play musical instruments; a game their parents would willingly spend double the price of a regular video game? It is unlikely the average 14 year-old Activision users who were playing Spiderman said “my unresolved problem is I want a new video game in which I play an instrument like a famous rock star.”

So, if their buyers and users did not state the problem, how did they come up with such a hit? They were tuned in to their market.

Much to my surprise, (and that of my son when I shared it with him) 85% of games purchased are in the ”E “ (for everyone) category. Only 15% are ”M” (for mature). I would have bet money the opposite to be true but that is my “gut” and, since I am not tuned in to this market, I would have been “assuming.” Further research helped me understand.

Who buys the most games?

Kids right? Wrong! The mean age for consumers who buy games is just over 35 years old with close to 49% of games bought by the 18-49 age group and those over 50 buying 26% of games.

Okay, but that has to be Dad’s wanting to play some sports game with their son right? Wrong again. Over 40% of games are bought by women.

I look at my children’s collection of games and most were holiday or birthday presents my wife or one their grandmothers bought them, and none fell into the 15% category. Activision did a fantastic job of connecting to the economic buyer of most games…Mom, and their unmet needs. They must have created a video game buyer persona for Mom.

What are some unresolved problems this buyer persona might have? I asked my wife…

• I want more time with my kids
• I want to have fun with my kids like we used to when they were little… now they just run off to their rooms and play video games or go on the internet… I feel like I am losing them
• I like playing video games, I wish there were more out there I could enjoy
• We need more family time
• I wish my kids would play games that do not reinforce things contrary to my family values

So how did she do?

The Entertainment Software Association conducted research and found the following reasons parents play games:

• Fun for the entire family: 72%
• We were asked to play: 71%
• Socialize with our children: 66%
• Monitor game content: 50%

Activision also connected with users of games and gave them an experience they would enjoy. Of the top 20 games sold in 2007, Guitar Hero held 5 positions in the ranking.

What if one unresolved problem is a deep desire to be a rock star, to make music without having to learn to play an instrument or know how to read music?  This destroys the musician’s paradigm of taking lessons, learning chords and notes…at first, but arguably this could cause a number of consumers to be exposed to music in a fun way and ultimately buy a real instrument and learn more.

Breakthrough products connect.

Whether you are playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, you are having fun with others and spending more money to do so. When you play the game, it provides you a breakthrough experience. You can choose what you look like, the type of instrument you want to play, and which song. Retailers now sell products so you can decorate your guitar and clothing, and a large variety of other accessories. When you play the game you tell your friends and word of mouth makes cash registers sing!

Two questions come from this success story… How many “hero” products are waiting to be found in your market? And, why didn’t Fender, Gibson or PRS develop this billion dollar hero?

Why do CEO's hate marketing?

If there was a univeral truth in the research we did with business leaders it was their extreme distaste and frustration with marketing.

It seemed that the initial first reaction to the question about 'what role marketing played in the success or failure of their business' was almost always a shake of the head, a look up to the sky and then some statement of how the organization was pouring money down a rathole ... usually followed by a specific example of something that happened recently that had a horrible result.

The thing that surprised us was that no other part of the organization was really hit as hard with the disdain that leaders felt towards marketing. So, we of course wondered why and investigated a bit deeper down the food chain, interviewing teams of marketers and others that aligned with the organization. What we found was a full litany of challenges:

• Marketing teams working tactically to 'dream up' campaigns to support sales of lagging products.
• Confusion of when to apply the new rules vs. the old rules.
• Pockets of teams embracing all aspects of social media and viral marketing working in isolation from the rest of the organization. 
• Teams focused on brand and awareness programs separated from the rest of the business. 
• Product marketers working on persona profiles for new groups of buyers that were different than who they were calling on today. 
• Web marketing teams working tactically to update sites that noone visited and not spending any time on identifying which keyword searches their buyers valued. 
• Customer and solution marketing teams coming up with new presentations and programs that sold thought leading concepts that only they understood and the company couldn't really support with either a product or sales execution. 

In short, a mess. Sometimes all of these problems existed in the same business. And when they did, or even a healthy percentage of them existed, the company's marketing was full of one-off communications with their buyers that served only to confuse the marketplace and the business at the same time.  Time consuming, expensive and ultimately fruitless in execution. 

The funny thing was that in a majority of the cases, the company culture was really the culprit. Too many marketing organizations were chartered with the mission of either serving sales, building a breakthrough brand or pushing product into the marketplace (and sometimes doing it with these new rules techniques that someone heard about at a conference). The roadmap to failure was baked in from the start!

There's an old statement from David Packard that's often repeated that 'marketing is too important to leave it to just the marketing department'.  People laugh at because it seems to put the rest of us on a higher pedestal to ensure that the role of marketing is managed by the experts in the business, not marketing. Well, then step up and smell the roses on your marketing problem because the place to start more often than not is with 'how tuned in is your business'. 

• Are you building products that you could, not should?
• Do your buyers like them and talk about them?
• Do people know why they should do business with you vs. your competitors?
• Are you solving a problem that people care about deeply?
• Is your leadership team active in thought leading communities that are relevant strategically?

Marketing teams have their faults to be sure. Trying to be too clever and hit home runs all the time vs. listening closely to their markets is probably at the top of our list. But, when companies, departments, leadership teams or even CEO's start down the path of blame on their marketing departments, we now feel compelled to stop the conversation and ask:

We'll get to that but let me ask you a deeper question ... how tuned in is your business?   

Does 'what you do' really matter?

One of the statistics I share with audiences when talking about Tuned In is really starting to get them to sit up in the chairs. Turns out, more than 95% of small businesses fail within five years and more than 91% of new products are withdrawn from the market within 18 months. Nice batting average huh? 

In baseball parlance, this is significantly below what has become known as the 'Mendoza Line'. Mario Mendozoa was a professional player for the Pirates in the 70's who famously lasted about 10 years in the big leagues with a career batting average around .200 and actually hit .198 in 1979. It pops up on ESPN every now and then to bring a little laughter into the conversation about someone who is in a slump ... 'Chris Young is in a deep slump and is getting dangerously close to the Mendoza Line'.  Not something you want to hear your name associated with. 

So how does it feel to live in a world where our averages are below 1 in 10?  And that's just for survival because there's another similar small percentage that acutally go on from there to achieve some amount of success or maybe even become hits. Yet, the fundamental reason why this occurs is so basic that it's downright shocking that most of us miss it. Before you even start, did you ever ask the question:

Does anyone care about what it is we do and do we do it better than anyone else? 

Seth Godin recently posted on the misperceptions most of us have when we are developing and launching products to market. He says we aim for the 'hit' thinking there is always a fallback to build a successful niche solution if that doesn't work or maybe even drop our offering in with an aggregator who is making money in Chris Anderson 'Long Tail'.  We found this in spades in our research. People want to hit home runs by guessing and coming up with something that noone else has ever thought of. Then they introduce it and when noone cares, they start spending more money pushing it into a variety of niches to see if it will stick. Then when noone cares, they try to sell it or abandon the opportunity completely. 

How sad really. It's all backwards and it's a lot of hard work to achieve nothing. Why not start with a problem that people care about solving and build a product or service that completely solves it. Here's the really interesting thing we found when we talked to leaders who created breakout successes ... they weren't even trying to hit a home run!  Instead, they just focused all of their time and energy on a problem they found that needed to be solved and eventually came up with a solution so compelling that their business took off. It's the opposite of what most of us have been trained to think. 

If you want to avoid the pitfalls that 90% of us fall into, start with making sure what you do really matters to someone and that you really, really care about solving a problem for them. If you do, you'll be in the minority of people who enjoy what they do and make a lot of money doing it.