The surprising finding, as shown in the first chart below: Not the importance of reviews or the popularity of social media–Facebook, Twitter, and the like–but the very low use of the old fashioned suggestion box.  Of those companies surveyed, only 1 in 5 has a way for people to directly make suggestions and fully 1 in 3 have no plans to add this capability in the future.  By contrast, more than 8 out of 10 have a Facebook fan page.

Now compare the expected or perceived impact on sales of social media tools with the impact of a suggestion box.  As the second chart shows, after product reviews (ranked first by 78% of respondents), the ability to supply product suggestions is thought to make a much larger contribution to sales than any of the social media tools: 41% versus 26% for Facebook Connect, 13% for a Facebook fan page, and 7% for Twitter.

Chart: Current and planned use of social media and other tools.

Chart: Social media's expected impact on sales.

What’s going on here?

Three things:

1. Keeping up: Social media is all the rage and has made the leap from tech-centric early adopters to broad adoption in society. And if the marketing folks haven’t already set something up, they’re prodded by executives who ask, “Do we have a Facebook for our company?”  (Yes, that’s the way they talk.)  Setting something up on Facebook is simple and fast, so in no time their company is using social media.  Voila!  Transformation!
2. Linking tactics to sales: In most organizations, there is no comprehensive way to link sales to marketing tactics.  (Web-based businesses have a much easier time of this than those companies sell through multiple channels.)
3. Really listening: Customers want to connect directly in meaningful ways with a company in order to get products and services that better meet their needs.

It’s this last driver that ties all of this together.

• Customer reviews: “Here’s what I think of the product/service I just bought from your company.”  And often, “I wish it . . . “
• Suggestion box: “Please make or change or do this . . .”

Facebook, Twitter, viral videos, forums, and blogs are vehicles for expressing those views.

Implications

Marketing is too often the implementation of tactics.  These survey results are a reminder that it’s the content of the communications and the intent of the parties involved that really matters.

Even marketers, in their heart of hearts, understand that customers want companies to listen to their concerns.

The never-ending challenge for marketers is getting their company to listen, and for senior executives, getting their company to respond.

…

Survey details: The e-tailing group/PowerReviews 1st Annual Community and Social Media Survey, September 2009.  (The slides are here, and oddly not on Slideshare, the social media site that has great tools for displaying, discussing, and embedding notable presentations.)

The home page of Organize.com, with selected types of navigation highlighted

Much has been written about designing website navigation, but Organize.com does an especially good job of showing the kind of helpful navigation that results when you think like your customers.

By understanding that there are different types of customers that will be looking for things in different ways, the designers have created navigation that gives buyers many ways to find what they’re looking for—in spite of the fact that the navigation groupings fly in the face of the some of the traditional ways that people have thought about navigation.

Three very different approaches (also highlighted in yellow in the screenshot):

• As seen in . . . — Navigation by magazine cover (with date).  The screenshot shows the expanded view that appears when you click on the link in the main nav.
• Organized by color
• Shop by brand

In addition, the designers have included a variety of other content categories, including . . .

• What’s New—By date, making it easy for frequent shoppers to zero in on the items recently added to the site.
• Video Library—By content format; a different way to engage buyers and stimulate interest in featured products.
• Eco-Friendly—By item material and construction, though more likely this works as a psychographic profile of a buyer segment.
• Clearance—By price (i.e., lowered); attracting the segment of shoppers interested in “a deal.”
• Mrs. Organized—By application, with a blog written by in-house and guest experts.

Along with As seen in . . . , these are all in the same navigation area, the brown tabs shown in the screenshot.  What’s the common element that would cause one to group these together?  None whatsoever, other than that these work in helping the many different types of buyers.

Other main navigation items include . . .

• Gifts and Occasions
• She—A category that includes The Career Girl, The Hostess, The Mommy, and others
• College
• Kitchen, Closet, Bath, Storage, Shelving, and other locations and applications

As above, there is no logical reason that these would be grouped together.

In other words, if a person were to go through the exercise of thinking, “What goes together?” you would never end up with these navigation groupings.  On the other hand, if you were to think, “Why might someone be coming to the site?” and “What are they trying to accomplish?” and “What factors are most important to them?” one might easily end up with top level navigation that includes As seen in . . . , Kitchen, and Eco-Friendly and Shop by Color.

It all comes down to thinking like a customer rather than as an information architect, or at least the way many information architects have approached this problem.

And what brought me to Organize.com?  Trying to match a tall white plastic bin purchased several years ago at The Container Store, earlier today I stopped into one of their stores and walked down every aisle looking for the item.  I didn’t see it, and asked a clerk.  She summoned other clerks, I described to them the size, shape, style, material, and color of the item—I hadn’t brought it with me—and they said that they didn’t think they carried it anymore.

At home, I looked at the bottom of the bin and saw the name of the manufacturer molded into the bottom.  A quick Google search brought me to Organize.com, where I clicked on Shop by Brand.  I selected the manufacturer and clicked on “View all” when I got to the manufacturer’s page, and then quickly scrolled through what would have otherwise been 46 pages of items and found that they do make the same bin, though in a slightly different shade of white.  Total elapsed time from the Google search?  About three minutes, thanks to the site’s helpful navigation.

(The Container Store’s site doesn’t include the shopping brand as a navigation choice; entering the name of the manufacturer in the search box on the site returns no results.)

A note about the IDEA Process

In work for Nokia, GameStop, and other clients we developed the IDEA process: Iterative Development, Evaluation, and Analysis, which is a process for creating site blueprints (including navigation and information architecture) based on in-depth sessions with users interacting with current and development sites to complete tasks.

In food and now fiber, some growers have approached this problem by creating a brand for their products that consumers are willing to pay more for, and then limiting the ability of other growers to claim that their product is the same.  In many cases, the brand has evolved organically, with the name often initially associated with a geographic region and later codified into law through law or regulation.  Ultimately, by reducing supply and the threat of new entrants, these growers are able to earn a higher margin than they otherwise would.

Examples include . . .

• Vidalia onions—Defined in 1986 by the Georgia state  legislature as coming from a specific 20-county region; in 1989 the USDA extended this protection to the Federal level.

• Champagne—Only applies to what is produced in the Champagne region of France.  In addition to various international treaties, this designation is protected by the EU as a Protected Designation of Origin.  PDOs and related protections have been applied within the EU to several food products.

• Sea Island Cotton—This was the surprise, but as shown by the holographic label complete with registration number (pictured below), an association has been formed to certify the use of this cotton.  In fact, the West Indian Sea Island Cotton Association has, at times, gone to court to protect the geographic exclusivity of their brand.

The West Indian Sea Island Cotton Association holographic label on socks made in Germany.

There is a related approach: Forming a cooperative or marketing organization whose members pay a fee to market their commodity.  One example of a cooperative is . . .

• Ocean Spray cranberries—The organization is a cooperative owned by 600 cranberry growers and 50 grapefruit growers in North America an Canada.  In this case, the growers, by banding together, have created a brand for their product, which is a similar role to the one usually played by a traditional packaged goods company.

Some marketing organizations have been the closed due to the efforts of larger producers, which is what happened in the case of the state-chartered California Pistachio Commission.  Growers later formed the California Pistachio Board, which administers a voluntary program drawn up by the state department of agriculture and codified in the California Pistachio Marketing Agreement.

Elsewhere, some efforts to require all growers pay into a fund to support marketing of their commodity have been met with lawsuits.

In every downturn there are a few, however, with smart, committed teams that have found a niche and have an up-close, living, breathing understanding of the critical needs of their target customers. They’re working night and day to address those needs, and are ruthless in sizing up how they’re doing and adjusting their plans.

The recession may also help wash out some of the soft thinking in marketing, though here I’m less optimistic. For all of the analytics that the web provides, we still see the mad rush from popular tactic to popular tactic, with sometimes the most tenuous connection with the underlying business. It’s marketing plan by marketing tactic, following the dictates of Sales, or the overbearing direction of a founder CEO, or the crowd, doing what everyone else seems to be doing. (“We need a Facebook page!” Really? “Follow us on Twitter!” Why? . . .) In the echo chamber that is the web, a reassuring voice is never far away.

What’s missing? A strategy that links these tactics to a business objective. Without one, these activities merely drain resources–budgets, staff time, management attention–from what may be far more critical efforts.

One of the defining characteristics of those start-ups that will succeed is that everyone is pulling in the same direction, with the same vision and commitment. It comes in part by staying focused on the long-term while at the same time getting the execs and key members of their groups out into the field meeting with customers and potential customers, hearing from them directly and taking the responsibility to make sure that the company responds.

It’s both challenging and rewarding, and it’s the best way to make it through the downturn and come out stronger on the other side.

“I sympathize with your situation, and it’s one that’s all too common: Lack of clear thinking and objective facts leads to decision-making based on power, position, and experience, with conflicts resolved along these lines.

“As is so often the case with start-ups, it appears that the hard conversations around just who the customers are and the fundamental nature of the business were never conducted, or at least never resolved clearly or correctly. And in the middle of this the CMO was brought in and charged with, among other things, redoing the website. ‘We signed a term sheet! Quick, get me marketing! We need Marketing!’

“In the minds of the leaders of many technology-centric companies, marketing = ‘Explaining to the world why I, the inventor, am a genius—using my words, of course.’

“This turns into directives to the new CMO, such as, ‘Re-do the website!’

“The superior approach, proven time and again, is to get objective information straight from the market—customers and potential customers—and then use that to make recommendations to the management team. The goal is to drive fact-based decision making, which is resolved through the creation of a simple document that would contain the elements of a creative brief. In the case of a site or other marketing material, the work product would be judged based on the implementation of the document.

“If this would have been done, the project’s goals would have probably been different.

“And in the absence of this approach, each viewer judges the site by comparing it to what’s in his mind. Of course everyone’s a critic of marketing materials (advertising, PR, websites) because the general perception is that anyone can do the work, and without objective measures of success, or the ability to clearly tie effort to results, every viewpoint seems equally valid.

“Because the basic issues about the company appear not to have been resolved or the wrong decisions made and wrong project goals selected, viewers are judging both the muddled thinking about the company (and the target customers) and the explanation of those ideas.

“Topline comments about the new [company name withheld] website (and the project goals you listed):

(1) Your company’s target customer is the owner of the site that will use your services. There is no need to introduce a brand that competes with your customer’s brand. In addition, with limited resources and a lot of noise in the marketplace, you need to focus your resources on the one brand that matters: The name of the company.

“Product- or service-specific names can be added on to the company name. . . . You could also use a ‘Powered by’ ingredient brand, which is the approach I implemented at CoreStreet, and which you appear to use in your fashion example. However, [your company] should be the focus; the ingredient brand is designed solely as a means to get other potential target customers to know that you’re out there and to make an inquiry.

(2) The site should speak to your target customers and should deliver this simple value proposition:

• Signing up for [company's] service is the easy, low risk way to boost your site’s ROI.
• You will make more money using our service than you will with any other solution
• You don’t have to believe us or trust us because . . .
  • You don’t have to invest any significant time or money to get started.
  • If you ever want to leave, we make that easy, too. (We’d hate to see you go, but staying is your choice, not your contractual obligation.)

• How can you be certain that your current solution is the best one? After all, other companies you trust have made the decision to use usor are us right now. And as more people—possibly your boss or his boss or your peers—learn about us, you need to defend your current choice, and that means at least meeting with us and taking a close look.

“One wouldn’t use those exact words, but would choose language that conveys that sense.

(3) There need not be anything flashy about delivering this message. And given the froth in the market, and since flash is often used when there is no content, erring on the side of straightforward and clear—dry, even—will make it easier for prospective customers to understand what you do and help convince themselves that they should invest the time to make an inquiry.

Along these lines, the customer quotes are critical, but they’re too over-the-top. (The CEO of [client company], probably your most important endorser, sounds almost breathless.)

Recognizing the fact that your customers don’t want to have their details revealed for all to see, these still need to be case studies, objective and believable.

There is some cognitive dissonance around this in two regards, since if you’re so great . . .

• Why are these companies so willing to endorse you publicly?
• Why is [client company] the only well-known company?

Also, why bury the fact that do you do business with [large number of] companies?

(4) Analysts may be interested in the creation of a new category and the intellectual pursuit of the distinctions [between established categories]. However, this distinction is really a distraction that is not meaningful for your customers. Their language (and that of their bosses and the owners of their companies) is revenue, profit, ROI, and the like. Win them over by talking to them in the language that matters to them. Save the rest for a white paper and an analyst presentation.

“If the company becomes very successful, then you’ll look smart at a conference in six months to a year by describing the theoretical underpinnings of the firm. Until then, get the company, including the sales and marketing effort, focused on what it takes to be successful: Making a difference in the lives of your customers by helping them increase the ROI of their sites.

“There’s a long list of specific items that should be changed, including simplifying the offering and creating useful category-specific examples and case studies, but they all flow from the basic points above, which should remain the focus of discussion until they’re resolved.”

Good luck–

Lee