Tuned In: Uncover the extraordinary opportunities that lead to business breakthroughs.

Canada Post and eBay Canada co-branded Flat Rate Box

Since we started researching and writing about Tuned In organizations, we frequently heard how government agencies and postal services are particularly tuned out.

So it is with some excitement that we share with you a product offered by Canada Post, an organization that tuned into two particular personas – eBay sellers and eBay buyers.

The eBay and Canada Post co-branded Flat Rate Box, introduced in mid-2008, is available exclusively through eBay and allows people to send items at three convenient flat rates: Regional at C$9.99 and National at C$12.99 (for shipments within Canada), and to the USA at C$17.99 (for shipments to the United States). The shipping boxes are supplied for free.

"Canadian eBay users ship millions of parcels through Canada Post each year," says John Swettenham, general manager of parcel strategy at Canada Post. "That makes the eBay community an extremely important customer base. Canada Post saw an opportunity to improve our service offering for eBay Canada's users, adding to our role in the growth of e-commerce in Canada."

Interestingly, the Flat Rate Box will also benefit buyers as well as sellers because eBay listings may include exact shipping costs, making it more likely that a potential buyer will bid.

Canadians spent more than $1 billion (US) on eBay in a recent 12-month period and eBay is the number-one visited retail site in Canada, visited by almost one out of every two Canadians online. 

So there you have it. Not all postal services around the world are tuned out.

Winning in a Down Economy (Step 2 of 10)

On October 11th, we introduced the idea that Winning in a Down Economy does not start with blindly cutting costs. Instead we outlined a strategy for tuning in that market leaders have adopted. In ten weeks that follow, we're going to cover the ten steps to getting your organization aligned quickly to a new market reality. This post is the second of ten. Steps 1-3 address the areas of assessment and increasing the reliability of your decision making. A key starting point is to accept that no matter what you've done or not done in the past, today you are tuned out.    

Step 2: Understand the New Buying Environment
"Only buy something you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years." - Warren Buffet

If you don't believe in trickle down economics, you'll have to at least acknowledge trickle down fear. The fear that permeates Wall Street is trickling down to your buyers ... faster than we'd all like. The conversations that you will have with them in the coming months and years will almost certainly have a new beginning, middle and end that can only be described as vastly different from the ones you've had in the past. In this environment, it would be foolish to assume that past techniques, messages and perhaps even your products work anymore. 

When Geoff Moore published Crossing the Chasm in 1991, he talked about a phenomenon that he saw in technology companies that caused them to fail in the mid-adolescence stage. He found that start-ups were wonderful at explaining breakthrough technology to visionary buyers and getting them to pay a lot of money to be the 'first to market' with a new innovation. But, as the companies scaled and their markets matured, they began to encounter more and more mainstream buyers who were 'pragmatic'.  They didn't care about innovation, they just wanted to know how you solved problems they had and who else you had served successfully so they could reference them. Many start-ups failed at this stage because they were unable to adapt. 

The environment we are in today has another similar chasm. It's crossing from speculators (those who purchased based on hope) to conservatives (those who validate everything before they buy). These buyers are not interested in improving productivity and growth anymore as much as they are focused on survival. Their mantra's.  Safety first. Proven results. Show me how I'm not going to get fired for taking this risk. Interestingly, you will likely be isolated from all of this because it NEVER comes up in direct conversation. Buyers now being the sophisticated consumers that they are have already researched online and talked to third parties before they engage with you. They're loaded for bear when they do.  

Does this sound like your market right now? 

If you are like most, you probably would agree to some degree but also have to admit that you don't know what you don't know. Which is why you need to find out right now. Don't waste another day sending a selling team out into the market unarmed using poor techniques, wasting your buyer's time and your money. Take action immediately to:

1. Analyze the decisions made in your market in the last 30 days and conduct direct interviews with the decision makers to find out why you won or why you lost. Was there some new threshold that your buyer encountered in justifying what was urgent, pervasive and willing to pay? Did your sales team create unwanted barriers in the decision? For the no decisions, did the problem go away? Ask 15 of them and record what you hear. 
2. Contact executives that are running the businesses in your target market and conduct an open-ended interview about how they are running their companies today. Tell them you are trying to determine what products and services to offer that would be more suited to today's economic environment and you'd like their perspectives. Ask 10-12 of them and write down everything they tell you about the culture, systems and buying process. 
3. Analyze the moves of your competitors and try to predict the likely outcomes of the strategies they are launching (or legacy approaches they continue to use).  What made them strong (and you strong) last month may be different when mapped to how buyers purchase today. Identify any openings to increase your share of the market that IS buying. 
4. Rate your portfolio of offerings for how well they produce Quick Wins and quantifiable ROI. All buyers will be looking for these things whether they express it or not as they add safety to a new purchase decision. Are you making it harder or easier for them to validate a purchase from you?
5. Open up the lines of communication. Ensure that your communications to your channel are positive and demand the same from them to their buyers. No one will buy from a desperate sales representative in this market. They'll be seeking assistance from a trusted advisor. 

When you've completed this process and charted all the results, you'll begin to see a new picture of your business. One that probably has some baggage to shed but also some real opportunities to pursue. You will only know that when you stop looking at the market from your perspective and start filtering your thoughts, strategies and action plans based on what the buyer thinks. 

Understanding the buying environment will arm you with the data you need to not only decide what adjustments to make but communicate them with enough authority to make them stick. 

Winning in a Down Economy (Step 1 of 10)

On October 11th, we introduced the idea that Winning in a Down Economy does not start with blindly cutting costs. Instead we outlined a strategy for tuning in that market leaders have adopted. In the next ten weeks, we're going to cover the ten steps to getting your organization aligned quickly to a new market reality. This post is the first of 10. Steps 1-3 address the areas of assessment and increasing the reliability of your decision making. A key starting point is to accept that no matter what you've done or not done in the past, today you are tuned out.    

Step 1: Embrace the new Reality
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees an opportunity in every difficulty."   - Winston Churchill

Your business is a different one today than it was 30 days ago. What should you do about it?  Interestingly, most will do nothing. It seems we're trained to think only in one dimension ... our plans for what we want to accomplish. We've seen this before. In less than two years after the stock market devalued .com businesses, a high percentage of them went out of business. Did they fail because their stock price went down?  Or was it when their buyers realized they had nothing of value to offer? And unfortunately, the root cause of this wasn't that they were a .com business (many did survive and thrive mind you). Rather, it was something much more sinister. 

Their leaders tuned out to a fundamental change in the market. 

Far too many .com organizations maintained exactly the same culture, perspectives on work style and outdated belief systems that traditional mechanisms of doing business would be 'disintermediated'. They failed because they never changed their perspective from inside-out ambitions about what they would accomplish to outside-in realities about how to align to their market. 

How do you accelerate this perspective shift?  Get passionate about embracing the new reality. One of my colleagues at Pragmatic Marketing, Jim Foxworthy, offers this simple suggestion ... go discover what it really is by getting out of the office and talking to some of your buyers.  In a recent post to his clients, he emphasized that it's more important now than ever. 

The Most Valuable Person in the Organization

The nightly news is obsessed with the downturn in financial markets. Pundits talk about a financial “nuclear winter” and advise business leaders to pack away a year’s worth of cash – perhaps in a mattress.

With all this negative news, it occurred to me that many of you will be thinking about your role in the organization, and worrying about the stability of that role. Should you lay awake at night and wonder if you will lose your job? Will “they” cut your pay? Maybe YOU are “they”, and you are wondering how to lead in such difficult times.

How do you know what creates the most value for you and your organization? How do you play a role to ensure the future of your organization?

Like many difficult questions, the answers are simple. Not easy – simple. Because the most valuable person in the organization is the one who represents the voice of the market.

Let me repeat that: the most valuable person in the organization is the one who is in touch with the market. The one who leaves the building and listens to your buyers, then brings that critical information back inside so others can make better decisions.

The most valuable person in the organization is not defined by title, but by task. And the single most valuable task in times like these is to re-establish your intimate understanding of your buyers and their problems.

At Pragmatic Marketing, we often echo the words of Peter Drucker, who wrote: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product fits him and sells itself.”

Folks we talk to sometimes scoff at this quotation, telling us that “marketing” doesn’t do that in their organization. “Marketing” is the department that builds the web site or produces the collateral.

But Drucker is not talking about a title. He is talking about a task. Who in your organization is seen as the one who “knows and understands the customer”?

THAT person is the most valuable asset in troubled times. As money flows tighten, and credit becomes less available, each and every expense decision will become more critical to your organization. Which means that each and every expense decision must be grounded in data not opinions.

Who is the most valuable person in the organization? In times like today, it is the messenger of the market.

Are you that person? Would you like to know how to become that person?

Jim is spot on here. Discovering and embracing reality is Step 1 and it's not just the job of the leader. It's the first action all of us should take to develop a plan that will work. Without an accurate assessment of where your business is perceived right now, you are out of date and potentially out of touch. The data you have now is highly suspect because it's based on the past. The data your organization craves is a real-time assessment of what the changes in the market really mean and what leading indicators they should follow.

Will there be bad news in what you find out?  Sure. But there will also likely be some new opportunities that will emerge that you'll find your organization can uniquely solve. They may just be the ones to get you through this downturn. Or, they might even be your resonator.

Go find out what they are!

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?

Please… Eliminate gobbledygook!

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, mission-critical, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke!

Just like with a teenager's use of catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again - so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don’t communicate very well, you know?

Most of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook phrases.

To create effective marketing, Web content that people want to share, you must eliminate gobbledygook.

Whenever you set out to create something to reach people, you should be developing content specifically for one or more of the buyers that you want to reach.  You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are over-used in your industry. In the technology business, words like "mission-critical," "industry-standard," and "cutting-edge" are what I call gobbledygook. And the worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies.

For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems. Because these marketers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, or are too lazy to write for buyers, they cover by explaining myriad nuances of how the product works and pepper this blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive.

If you want to be successful online, eliminate the gobbledygook and speak like a real person. Use the words and phrases that your buyer personas use.

If you want to learn more, consider reading my (free) Gobbledygook Manifesto published by ChangeThis.

Addressing needs outside your expertise.

As a helicopter pilot, I have been amazed with the success of Robinson Helicopters over the last ten years.  While most helicopter manufacturers produce dozens of aircraft each year, Robinson set a world record by producing 831 helicopters in 2007.  That broke the previous record, set by Robinson, of 806 units in a single year.

Robinson has tuned into their market and is reaping the dividends.  One approach they take is to solve all of their clients problems.  As a helicopter manufacturer, you might think that means that you should focus on the aircraft but Robinson also detected that potential clients need to deal with establishing a landing pad.  In Aviation Week clink last month, Frank Robinson was quoted as saying "If helicopters have more places to land, we will sell more helicopters."  So he offers helipad kits. Robinson Helipads

A tuned out company might say, "We are in the helicopter business not the helipad business."  But Robinson knows that buyers are looking for a vendor that can provide a complete solution and has accepted the responsibility of solving the problem via buy/build/partnering. 

Instead of being in the helicopter business, Frank is in the business of continuous problem solving for his customers.

Photo copyright Robinson Helicopter Company

Search Engine Marketing: focus on buyers, not keywords

Whenever I begin a speech, I pose four questions to the audience and ask them to raise their hands if the answer to a question is "yes." How would you answer?

In your personal or professional life in the past two months, when trying to fix a problem or to research or buy a product, have you
(1) responded to a direct mail advertisement?
(2) consulted magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio?
(3) used Google or another search engine?
(4) electronically (email, Skype, Facebook, etc) contacted a friend, colleague, or family member who responded with a Web URL that you then visited?

Over the course of a year, in front of over ten thousand people from many dozens of groups including college students, marketing professionals, and executives at Fortune 500 companies, the answers were surprisingly consistent. Between 5 and 20 percent of people answer each of the first two questions affirmatively. These answers mean that the ways most companies have historically reached people—advertising, direct mail, and pleas to the mainstream media for coverage—are only effective in reaching a small portion of potential customers. However, between 80 and 100 percent of people raise their hands to indicate that they have used a search engine to find a solution to a problem or to research a product or that they have checked out a Web site suggested by a friend, colleague, or family member. Clearly, creating effective Web sites that are indexed by search engines is critical for any business.

Unlike non-targeted, in-your-face, interruption-based advertising, search engine results are content that people actually want to see. How cool is that? Rather than forcing you to convince people to pay attention to your products and services by dreaming up messages and ad campaigns, search engines deliver interested buyers right to your company’s virtual doorstep. This is a marketer's dream-come-true.

However, most marketers don't know how to harness this exciting form of marketing. Their most common mistake is to spend way too much time worrying about the keywords and phrases they want to optimize for and not enough time creating great content on their site–content that search engines will reward with lots of traffic and that visitors will find useful.

And nearly all organizations are terrible at building an effective landing page, the place people end up when they click on a search hit. Too often, buyers arrive at a site only to wonder what they're supposed to do now. It's like the outdoor part of a Hollywood movie set. Sure it's a beautiful facade, but if you actually went through the front door, you'd find nothing there.

OK, so that’s the bad news. The good news is that these common problems are easily solved… If you're Tuned In.

Smart companies create web content that actually meets the needs of your potential customers (instead of search engines). The information that people see when they link to your site is meant to be the beginning of a relationship. Here's the rule: When you write, start with your buyers in mind, not with search engines.

It doesn't play games, take pictures, or give you the weather

We're always fascinated with products and services designed for one particular buyer persona. Rather than one-size-fits-all, tuned in companies solve market problems for specific buyers.

The Jitterbug cell phone is just such a product, designed for people who don't want all kinds of features. The vast majority are older people who are scared of a regular cell phone.

Here is how the company Establishes authentic connections with its buyer persona using language that resonates.

Over the years, cell phones have gotten smaller and smaller and loaded with complicated features and gadgets. They've become harder to program and even harder to use. The screens are so tiny you can't read them anymore. The buttons are so small you can barely find them, and must use a pencil to dial them. To make matters worse, you end up paying for all these features and gadgets you'll probably never use.

With easy to use phones and service plans that provide unprecedented simplicity, Jitterbug makes a perfect gift for that special someone who is looking to stay connected with friends and family -- but without all the unnecessary complexity and expense.

Jitterbug Dial
Ideal for those who find today's cell phones just too small and complicated
Easier to use than any other cell phone
Extra-large buttons and text on the screen
Full 12-button keypad
So convenient: just dial the Jitterbug operator by pressing "0"

Here is one of the advertisements for Jitterbug Cell Phone service. Click the image to see it full size.

Papa John's connects to college crowd

I'm amazed at how my son and daughter communicate with their friends. Between Facebook and texting it's almost as if they have found a way to interact without ever having to make a direct connection. It's definately a new language and for better or worse, a new style of building relationships. 

When I saw last week that Papa John's had introduced a new service to take pizza orders by text, I knew exactly why and marveled at how tuned in they were. There are few audiences for pizza's that are better at any time of the day than college students. Certainly they've never had trouble figuring out how to get one in the past. But, by being able to text for one guess what happens? 

Papa John's has built an authentic connection to a core buyer persona.

People love it when companies act in ways that show they 'understand me'. And today that means communicating through mediums and styles that your target buyers use. By adding a simple distribution option like texting, Papa John's will no doubt resonate more with the college crowd. Imagine the scenarios that will get created.  "Hey, anybody want a pizza?  Watch this!"  The first in class to find this out will proudly whip out their cool new iPhone and text an order in. Congratulations all around when it shows up in 30 minutes. Most importantly, word of mouth is started and Papa John's has an in. We found in our research that a real key to a tuned in company was that they had a high percentage of their business coming through referrals (some as high as 80%). What a great way to start that process. Building authentic connections like this is one of the most powerful things you can do to grow your business faster.   

I wonder when a beer distributor will catch on to this?    

Treat every patient as if they were the President of the United States

Dr. Connie Mariano wonders everyday what our health care system would look like if doctors treated every patient like they were the President of the United States. She tuned in to the quality-of-care differences between presidential care and the average person’s care and setup a service to bridge the gap.  In the process, she created a simple but powerful idea in which to center her practice. 

 

Mariano knows first hand about caring for US Presidents. While serving as a general internist in the United States Navy, she was selected to serve as the head of the White House medical unit, a position she held through three administrations. As the primary care physician for presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, Mariano oversaw all aspects of the president’s care. This included everything from yearly physicals (and the briefing of the world press on their results) to routine check-ins and check-ups to the mobilization of specialists as needed (such as those she assembled on 24 hours notice to travel with then President Bill Clinton to Helsinki for a summit with Boris Yeltsin less than two weeks after an operation to repair damage to his knee). 

After leaving the White House for the Mayo Clinic, Mariano experienced a small dose of the other side of patient care.  Despite working at one of the best facilities in the country, she found herself administering medical services as part of a machine that had standardized care.  Doctors like Mariano could see dozens of patients a day but the interactions were brief, impersonal and largely limited to packaged set of services that delivered the bell curve of care.  While at Mayo, she began a study of physician practices, meeting with hundreds of patients to tune in to their needs and preferences.  Four and a half years later, she broke away from the Mayo Clinic to create her own practice around the premise of providing the same kind of care the President receives using the same kind of resources that a clinic like Mayo can mobilize. Some key aspects that she built into her practice include:

·                          No waiting – the president’s time is valuable and he/she never waits.  Walk into Dr. Mariano’s Center for Executive Medicine, patients are greeted at the door, offered a cup of coffee and escorted immediately to the doctor who is waiting for the patient.

·                          No paperwork – the president doesn’t have time for it and certainly shouldn’t have to go through the excruciating re-entry of data for each visit.  Mariano’s practice is fully automated and paperless.  Patients never have to stop for payment nor have to provide written updates. Their credit cards are retained on file and charged for services provided at the time of the visit.

·                          Always respectful – the president expects to be treated as important and Mariano ensures that she and her staff are always on and always attentive to their patients.  They know them by name, they know their histories, and their families.

·                          Pleasant experience – the president can pick any doctor he or she elects. Mariano knows the quality of the experience is a key determining factor. She mixes diagnostic questions with questions like ‘what would make your life better’ and ‘how can we help you achieve that goal’.   

·                          Flexible service – when the president wants a doctor they are on call 24x7.  Dr. Mariano is as well, only a cell phone call away whether you are local, on the road or overseas.

·                          Establish a relationship – the president expects to talk to one and only one person on their issues.  Mariano enables the same for her patients, working as the quarterback of a distributed medical team that might include hospitals, specialists and even pharmacies. Patients make one call, Mariano takes care of the rest.

Mariano's practice is now one of 250 in the United States offering a concierge service where patients pay as little as $5-$10 a day to have a doctor on call to support their needs. With more than 310 patients, she has built one of the fastest growing, most profitable practices in the Phoenix metropolitan area.