Excerpt From Chapter 1: Why Didn't We Think of That?

The Book | Pragmatic Marketing | Authors | Excerpt | Reviews

Products and Services That Resonate

...How hard is it to get connected to a market and create a product or service that people want to buy? Based on our decades of experience working with thousands of companies, we’re here to tell you that getting tuned in is not difficult. But creating a resonator does require a new way of thinking about how you build products and services and how you introduce them to the marketplace. Most organizations are tuned out. In fact, we see all kinds of organizations make the same common mistakes again and again.

Here are a few common mistakes that cause products and services to fail:

Guessing—Assuming company insiders know more than buyers do about what they want to buy

Assuming—Basing products and services on what current customers request rather than on an understanding of unsolved problems that potential customers will pay money to fix

Telling—Trying to create a need in the market by relying on expensive advertising or an army of salespeople

We’ve developed the Tuned In Process to allow companies to create success again and again. We see these same principles at work in a wide range of successful product experiences, such as business-to-business technology products, fast food chains, and professional services firms. We know for certain that if you apply the six steps of the Tuned In Process to your own business (no matter what you sell), you will have a much better chance at success.

The Resonator

The process for replicating success starts with getting tuned in to potential customers. Understanding your market and your buyers through in-depth interviewing is by far the most effective way to discover unresolved market problems that people will pay money to solve. Meeting with potential buyers on their own turf (in their homes or workplaces or even on the street) is the starting point for identifying a resonator: a breakthrough product or service that buyers immediately understand has value to them, even if they have never heard of your company or its products before. The iPod is a resonator. When it launched, FedEx was a huge resonator, and it still is.

The Anatomy of a Resonator:

• The perfect solution to a specific problem
• A product or service that people want to buy without being coerced
• An offering that establishes a real and direct connection to what your market values most
• An idea that people immediately understand has value to them, even if they have never heard of your company or its products and services

When you see a powerful, smartly articulated idea for a product or service that solves a problem for you, such as the iPod (“1,000 Songs in Your Pocket”) or FedEx (“When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be There Overnight”), you immediately grasp its meaning. It resonates. These words aren’t mere taglines or slogans dreamed up by an agency and peddled with expensive advertising. You can learn to systematically develop powerful ideas like these by studying the Tuned In Process.

Tuned in organizations are much more likely to create resonators. The culture of tuned in companies incorporates focused, “outside-in” thinking, instead of the typical inside-out orientation. In other words, the tuned in company constantly listens to, observes, and understands the problems that buyers (“outsiders”) are willing to pay money to solve instead of holding endless meetings of company “insiders”—all trying to guess what people want. The tuned in organization is always looking for more opportunities to create resonators.

The tuned in organization

The most successful organizations are tuned in to their markets. Leaders at these companies largely ignore the competition. Instead, they focus their energies on the problems that buyers are willing to spend money to solve. The concept applies to any business, product, or service.

Tuned in companies—large and small, established and upstart—resonate when they create products people want to buy. Nintendo’s Wii revolutionized the gaming industry when it created a fun, simple, interactive experience that enabled groups of friends and families to play virtual sports, action, and war games without any previous experience with video games.

The tuned in entrepreneur solves real problems in the market rather than creating some widget because he or she thinks it’s cool. Richard Branson, a serial entrepreneur, has developed 350 companies over a 30-year career through his Virgin brands, each aligned to solve a discrete market problem that he and his team identified.

The tuned in professional services firm (lawyers, doctors, accountants) doesn’t just create a “me-too” practice and stick the same old advertisement in the Yellow Pages. Instead, these firms leverage the new rules of marketing to build an online audience. Search for anything related to Kansas and family law and you’ll find Grant D. Griffiths at the top of the list. Griffiths takes a thought-leadership approach to marketing his firm; and, consequently, he makes connections that bring him several new potential customers a week…free.

The tuned in nonprofit understands people’s motivation for contributing money and time to a cause. Habitat for Humanity has experienced more than a decade of consistent growth in donations of time and money, due in a large part to its creative strategies for partnering with local community, church, youth, and government organizations. Habitat for Humanity has built more than 200,000 homes.

The tuned in politician understands voter problems and the reasons why people vote for a particular candidate. Barack Obama’s campaign raised more than $31 million in its initial phases (top among all U.S. presidential candidates in the early part of 2007) with a platform centered on a powerful idea, “The Audacity of Hope.” At this writing, the election is still a long way off, and Obama is not the frontrunner. But his upstart candidacy clearly resonates with many voters.

The tuned in church connects to people’s spiritual and emotional needs with services that resonate across traditional and non-traditional mediums. Joel Osteen now counts more than 42,000 weekly attendees at his services, and millions more through his TV and online communications. His book, Your Best Life Now, has sold more than 2.5 million copies.

The tuned in entertainer, rock band, or motivational speaker understands the tastes or needs of his potential audience. Jon Stewart tuned in to young TV viewers and resurrected a fake news program that attracted a strong and committed daily audience on an obscure cable channel. His humor and creative representation of current events resonated across age groups, building a strong following in his time slot.

We’d argue that the tuned in job seeker creates a better picture of themselves as a candidate for employment when they talk about solving an employer’s problems rather than embellishing their own credentials.

Is Tuned In for you?

At this point, we suspect that you’re saying to yourself something such as “Hey, that’s obvious!” or “It sounds easy.” We frequently hear these sorts of reactions when we present these ideas live in our speeches and seminars. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re right! One of the beautiful things about getting tuned in is that it’s easy to understand how to do it. In fact, many successful business leaders had been applying these principles successfully long before we began teaching the process or writing it down in this book.

But hold on!

You’re probably also thinking: “If it’s so easy to understand and it makes so much sense, why don’t more companies get tuned in?” As it turns out, numerous organizational pitfalls can get in the way. We meet with companies all the time whose executives struggle to answer some very basic questions:

• What business are we in?
• What businesses are we not in?
• Who are our buyers?
• What’s unique about what we offer?
• What’s our positioning strategy?
• How can we compete?
• Why do the other guys seem to win more often?
• How can we turn a profit?

When we hit these walls with business leaders, we ask ourselves why. How could they not have any answers to these fundamental questions? What we’ve come to realize is that most business professionals just aren’t tuned in.

Rather than focusing on buyers and their problems, the organizations that struggle to resonate in their marketplace are the ones that develop offerings from the inside out.

Instead of going out into the marketplace to try to understand people’s problems and then bringing this information back to the company, tuned out companies try to develop products exclusively within their own walls, based solely on what they already know. Then they try all sorts of gimmicks and buy expensive advertising to take the dissonant ideas out into the market. This inside-out approach (what we call being tuned out) is much more likely to lead to failure—and to struggles with answering questions like those above.