Experts to follow: Avinash Kaushik

We’ve followed Avinash Kaushik and his web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, for almost a decade now and have yet to find anyone who comes close to him on the subject. Every web analytics professional we’ve talked with knows him, and most read him religiously. 

Avinash cuts through the hype and noise around analytics with the clarity of a mechanical engineer, the practicality of an MBA, and the verve of a Google digital marketing evangelist—all of which he is. Here’s Avinash on web metrics:

Avinash Kaushik (see credits, below)

“Like good little Reporting Squirrels we collect and stack metrics as if preparing for an imminent ice age. Rather than being a blessing that stack becomes a burden because we live in times of bright lovely spring and nothing succeeds like being agile and nimble about what we collect, what we give up, and what we deliberately choose to ignore.

“The key to true glory is making the right choices.”

The best place to start on Occam’s Razor is the Knowledge page, where his posts are categorized by subject matter. As with all great specialist blogs, the comments are often as good as the posts. If you have even a smidgen of analytics geekiness, you are going to love Avinash.

Photo by Thos Ballantyne, Creative Commons 2.0

What makes remote creative teams work

Since March, and until further notice, creative teams are being forced to work remotely. 

But is creativity even possible for remote teams? Or was Steve Jobs right when he said that “creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions” that are only possible face-to-face?

Actually, remote teams can be creative and innovative—as many virtual marketing firms (including ours) know well. But they require a particular environment.

That environment was spelled out in a study by Dr. Jill Nemiro, a professor of organizational psychology at Cal Poly Pomona who had a prior career as a film editor in Hollywood. It’s one of the first robust studies of what makes virtual creative teams successful (and jibes with our 17-year experience in leading virtual creative teams).

Dr. Nemiro identified 11 environmental factors that influence remote creativity: 

Senecio (Head of a Man), 1922, Paul Klee

The one must-have for creativity: Trust

Do team members trust each other in all aspects of their collaboration—including follow-up, on-time delivery, honesty, effectiveness, discretion?

Trust was by far the most important factor among the study’s respondents. Trust is difficult to establish, develops slowly, and depends on follow-through.

To drive home just how tough it is to gain trust, another creativity expert—Glenn Dutcher, professor of economics at Ohio University—found that even experienced remote workers do not trust other remote workers, at least at first. In the work environment, it appears that we are predisposed to distrust.

Crucial to creativity

Acceptance of ideas and constructive tension

Are ideas encouraged, valued, and accepted without undue criticism? Is there a healthy sense of constructive tension that comes from a diversity of views and opinions?

For some respondents, the virtual environment actually made it easier to share ideas. They felt more comfortable and less threatened both in sharing and in receiving feedback. 

Freedom

Do team members feel free—to decide how and when to work? From micro-management? From outside constraints they feel are unnecessary? 

As you’d expect, respondents felt freer simply because they were alone, unsupervised, or in comfortable surroundings. But there was also something about the online experience that eases the pressure of “having to be creative” that respondents experienced when face-to-face.

Challenge

Is there a sense of challenge, whether from the task itself, its urgency, or a desire to go beyond the status quo?

The intrinsic motivation that arises from working against the odds, a challenging timeframe, or a difficult creative problem was just as achievable remotely as it was in person.

Important to creativity

Goal clarity

Are the project’s goals clearly defined, continually clarified, and adopted by the entire team?

Goal clarity is tough enough with in-person teams. Members may think they heard the goals, leaders may think they’ve communicated them clearly, only to find later that the goals are still vague. In-person teams can solve this with a walk down the hall. For virtual teams, goals need to be confirmed and continually repeated.

Collaboration 

Is the team able to work well together on an interdependent task, a mutual interest, or a mutually intriguing idea?

There seemed to be no obstacle to the respondents’s ability to pull together, cooperate, and get in tune with each other.

Sufficient resources and time 

Does the team feel it has enough information, people, and technology? And enough time to be creative and experiment?

Much more so than with face-to-face teams, virtual teams can be quickly brought down by weak links. Just one member’s technological or other difficulty can affect the entire team.

Moving too fast, as virtual projects sometimes do, can slow projects down. When teams are rushed to the point where goals are unclear, the creative process becomes longer, as any veteran creative director can ruefully confirm. 

Facilitating creativity

Management encouragement

Is leadership encouraging, enthusiastic, and supportive of new ideas and methods? 

When management resorted to the status quo because it seemed more convenient or efficient, respondents felt it undermined creativity and innovation. 

Information sharing

Does the team regularly communicate, share results, provide information, and update findings?

Information is creativity’s raw material. But both too little and too much information can hinder creativity. Respondents wanted regular, consistent communications. 

Dedication and commitment

Is the team dedicated, intensely involved, and committed to the work? Can it work hard and persevere on tough tasks and problems?

A lack of commitment from any team member can wreck a project. And remote team members are just as sensitive to commitment as those working in person.

Personal bond 

Are there personal connections among team members? Is there a “family-like” feeling or sense of connection that goes beyond their work? 

Dr. Nemiro was surprised and fascinated at how strongly members could form personal bonds, which she feels are critical for virtual creative teams—even where there was no face-to-face contact among the subjects.

Although the study was published in 2000, when there were fewer digital collaboration tools, we believe the human factors it uncovered make the study as relevant today as it was then.

Contact us if you’d like to read the full study. It includes a lot of great insight we haven’t shared on what makes creative teams successful in any environment. 

Podcasts: alive and well

Have podcasts fallen off a cliff? 

The perception—at least among the financial services marketers we’ve spoken to in the last few weeks—is that podcasts have suffered a big hit since work-from-home policies began in earnest the week of March 9. 

Not quite.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Nicholas Quah, who has covered the podcast industry since 2014 and writes Hot Pod, the podcast industry’s leading trade newsletter, thinks we’re now in a “new normal” that will define podcast listenership until we enter the post-pandemic period (whenever that is). 

And podcasts are actually doing pretty well:

• After falling 20% by late March consistently across all genres, podcast downloads by mid-April were flat versus February.  

• “Flat versus February” isn’t bad, since February downloads were at historical highs. Unlike the stock market, podcasts have largely recovered.

• People are listening to podcasts more evenly throughout the day and the week. And the weekday surge in listening has moved from early morning to late afternoon.

Should marketers rethink podcasting? Probably not. Quah thinks smaller podcasts may be suffering, but that’s not such a concern for self-funded podcasts that have a long view. 

In fact, engagement is up. Listen-through rates “are sky high,” says Chartable, a podcast measurement company, with listeners equally or more engaged than before the pandemic. It’s “a big opportunity… to reach deeply engaged listeners.”

Meanwhile, podcast downloads for our clients have spiked by as much as 200% in March, and are still above their February levels. 

Marketing in a crisis: Gramercy FOCUS Boston

Faced with a market dive, a world pandemic, and a few last-minute cancellations, Gramercy Institute CEO Bill Wreaks cleverly tweaked today’s Gramercy FORUM panels into a series of discussions touching on crisis marketing.

Despite all the travel bans going down this week, over 50 Boston-area client-side and agency marketing practitioners showed up. One senior marketer from a large index/active manager later said to me it was one of the best events of its kind she’d ever been to. 

I’ve provided the more interesting quotations from all the panel discussions except the one I participated in. They’ve been edited, reworded, and combined, for easier reading.

Group discussion: Marketing during a crisis

“Listen, and make a human connection with your audience.”

“Don’t talk product.” [Most agreed, although a few think product conversations can make sense if you’re solving a pressing current need.]

“Watch the conversation (media, social, internal interactions) and adapt your sensibility and tone to that conversation.”

[CMO at a $40bn+ shop] “I recommend three things:

 1)    Have a rapid response system in place, including an arsenal of content at the ready  

2)    Don’t go silent—and be authentic

3)    Have a process for pulling down content made inappropriate/irrelevant by the crisis.”

“This is a chance to reset with sales, who are now largely grounded and can’t make face-to-face visits. Marketing can do a lot to fill the gap.” 

“Good approach: ‘This is a humanitarian crisis first and foremost. We have been expecting a downturn, so let’s look at this as an opportunity. We’re here for you.’ Balanced, respectful. 

Not-so-good approach: ‘Coronavirus! Conference call at 11!’”

“Be patient, share your knowledge, arm advisors with marketing content that helps them address client concerns.”

Panel: The financial brand: Why it matters in 2020—and beyond

“It’s time for marketing to step up. We had a beige brand when I first started at [$400bn+ firm]—and that was OK. Now, your strategy has to be differentiated. You need to stand for something.”

“We aim for a clear, actionable brand that’s easy to for advisors, investors, and employees to understand.” [~$1tn shop]

“Today it’s about finding a balance between technology and what’s human. Not holding back from embracing technology, but also not losing your humanity.”

“Yes, transparency is critical, in a crisis and in normal times. But it’s no longer a differentiator—it’s expected.”

“Competing messages create brand confusion. We focus our brand communications efforts on the people who do the communicating: all employees, including the sales teams, to make sure they’re clear and communicating it correctly.”  

“Brand and culture shape each other—one doesn’t come before the other. Brands have to reflect the culture to be authentic. They’ll have an aspirational component, but you’re not making a wholesale change to the culture—you’re shaping it at the margins.”

“’Brand’ is what we’re hearing across all clients today. It’s top of mind for everyone. Even hedge funds that had almost a disgust for marketing are now asking us about branding.”

On measuring the brand

“Our formal metric is an annual employee survey: how much do they play back what we want them to say? How do new products, our diversity push, campaigns align with the brand, in their eyes? We look sporadically at external research that we can get for free.”

“I take external surveys with a large grain of salt—the big names are always there because they allocate more dollars. We also use internal surveys, plus ad/web metrics, client feedback at tier one events. And we measure the U.S. and Europe separately.”

Advice for brands in crisis times:

“Pre-crisis, sales would sort of brush us off. Now they’re asking us what they should do. So we’re giving them guidance. For example, instead of sending product emails, send a relationship email.”

“Crises are another opportunity to demonstrate your brand. It’s a great time to talk about why they’ve chosen you.”

“This is why brands matter. You can’t assume current relationships, business models, or markets will last indefinitely. The brand is what will last.”

Panel: Making the case: Return on investment in financial marketing

“We’ve come a long way at [large bank/advisor] in three years. It’s really important at the start to define the KPIs and be very clear on what you can and can’t measure.” 

“We’ve done a lot of educating within the firm about what can and can’t be done with data. It’s working—senior people are now asking me about what parts of paid digital, social, and search are making a difference to our key metrics of reach, cost, and quality.”

“We have 30 clients, all at different stages of data acceptance and integration. There’s a massive gap in education on what to do with data. There’s a ton of data available but not much knowledge of how to use it, analyze it, interpret it.”

“Our clients have the best intentions, but it’s a lift for them. They need someone internally to champion the metrics. And some companies just don’t have that focus now. It really depends on what they’re satisfied with—from hard, qualified leads to just clicks.”

“I used to show management the strategy, the creative, and how they match up. Now I show those elements, plus a detailed measurement plan (including what can and can’t be measured) and a paid media plan—and how it all ties in. We have a much more compressed timeline. And we’re constantly driving data results to strategy.”

“Does data give us a seat at the table? It helps—if you can tie all of the elements together (creative, strategy, measurement plan) and have the numbers to support it.” 

Attract, engage: Research-based content marketing

Thought leadership is a marketing mainstay in financial services—and remains an excellent way to engage with advisors and institutional investors. But the content explosion over the last decade has made it much harder to develop thought leadership that gets noticed and gets audiences engaged.

One approach that’s working: campaigns built on the unique insights of quantitative research.

For a closer look, we spoke with Jim Neuwirth, founder and President of 8 Acre Perspective, a NYC-based research consultancy that has helped create successful research-based thought leadership programs for such firms as Grayscale Investments, Janus Henderson, Incapital, and Calvert.

How effective is thought leadership based on quantitative research?

Jim Neuwirth, 8 Acre Perspective

In our experience, research-based thought leadership can be very powerful for an organization. To maximize the value, though, you need a plan and a process, from idea generation up front through execution and public rollout. One critical piece is ensuring all the right players are involved from the start, including your marketing communications and PR personnel, both internally as well as any external partners who will play a role in promoting the insights from the thought leadership research.

Tell us about some of your recent work.

An asset manager client was looking to create proprietary content it could leverage to build brand awareness and enhance its position as a leader in fixed-income solutions. In collaboration with this firm’s PR agency, we developed a research program that determined how financial advisors are incorporating fixed income into client portfolios today, uncovered motivators and barriers to using individual bonds, identified key sources of information for fixed income decision-making, and explored the advisor outlook for fixed income.

We conducted an online survey with 200 financial advisors across channels (wirehouse, regional, IBD and RIA). Many great storylines emerged.

How did this asset manager leverage the research?

They issued a press release that got picked up by a wide range of publications. They also created a whitepaper that was downloadable from their website, had executives interviewed by the media about the research, and presented their research findings at conferences.

Beyond PR and marketing, this research was very important and insightful from a business standpoint, as they were able to leverage the insights in their own product development and business planning efforts.

How do you choose a thought leadership topic—one that’s on your audience’s mind, that you can own, that somehow speaks to your brand, and that you can research quantitatively?

First, you need a topic that connects to the firm’s brand and the goals that the firm has for the thought leadership study. Second, it must be relevant and of interest to your target audience. Third, it needs to be unique. For any potential topic, we always do a search of what has been done already. If the topic has been covered, we will either pick a different focus area or modify our angle on it so that it becomes unique.

What preparation is involved?

We typically start the process with an informal brainstorm to discuss why our client wants to consider thought leadership research. What are the goals? In this initial meeting we also will discuss potential topics and areas of exploration, and who we want to survey (for example, financial advisors, end investors, or both).

From this meeting, we will put together a project brief, outlining the goals, survey audience, and potential topic areas. The next meeting is more formal, where we work together to identify survey topics that everyone is excited about.

Who’s in the room? What happens?

In this meeting, it’s good to have not just the executive stakeholders but also the PR team and anyone else who will be involved in the marketing of the study results. This meeting is always led and facilitated by our team. Sometimes it’s a 90-minute telephone or video conference meeting, other times it’s an in-person three-hour workshop. Each situation is different, and we work with our client to determine the ideal approach.

How do you ensure the issues are all audience-driven, and not just things the sales team wants to talk about?

At the start of the meeting, everyone needs to be aligned on the premise that any topics/approaches map to these questions:

1. Does it fit with our brand and the messages we want to promote?

2. Is it relevant? Will our target audiences find it of interest?

3. Is it unique and differentiated from what’s already out there?

4. Will the news media care?

If you can’t answer yes to all of these questions, you have to question whether it is the best possible topic to explore.

Do you help the firm decide on the topic?

Yes, absolutely. We are not just facilitating and guiding the process, but also active participants in the ideation.

How long does this phase take?

It really varies but it tends to be pretty quick. As you know, speed to market is critical, so we work with our clients to accelerate things as much as possible. Having all the right players in these upfront meetings definitely helps keep things moving at a good pace.

OK, you’ve chosen a topic. Now it’s time to conduct the quantitative research. Take us through that.

Once everyone is aligned on the topics and issues to explore, the 8 Acre project team will brainstorm on what questions to ask in the survey. We create a first draft and then work iteratively with our client to finalize it.

One thing we try to do in all of our studies is to develop media hooks. Sometimes it’s incorporating questions on a hot topic, such as how financial advisors feel about discussing cannabis investing with clients. Other times it’s cutting the data in interesting ways; for example, looking at gender or generational differences.

Do you ever recommend qualitative research for thought leadership? When is that appropriate?

We have found that thought leadership research is most effective when there are statistics involved, so quantitative research is always part of the process. We do, however, sometimes incorporate qualitative research. Usually it’s as a first step to inform the design of the quantitative survey. Information from the qualitative can also be incorporated into the final report and marketing materials—for example, verbatim quotes or even video clips.

What’s in the final report?

We will put together a strategic report of findings and insights from the research. The marketing teams will then leverage this to create the press release and other content for pubic release.

Importantly, our role does not end after delivering the final report. We review all publicly released materials for accuracy, including the data itself and how the findings are presented. We actually require this. While our clients would never intentionally publish incorrect findings, it’s very easy to inadvertently misreport survey data, so we play a vital role ensuring data and reporting accuracy.

Is there any value in repeating the research?

It depends on the topic and the goals for the research, but we typically recommend conducting research that can be repeated.

Doing multiple studies on the same topic has several benefits. First, you start building trend data and that makes the research even more valuable. Second, your firm begins to get recognized as the de facto expert and go-to resource on this topic.

As far as frequency, it depends on the topic, but typically it is an annual study. It’s important to note that future versions of the study don’t have to be identical. There can be certain questions that remain and are trended, while others can be removed and replaced with fresher, more timely questions.

Making room for PR in thought leadership marketing

Thought leadership has long been a go-to tactic for asset managers seeking to grow relationships and foster trust with prospective investors. But developing thought leadership that people want to read is getting harder, even as they remain hungry for it. 

To better understand how to connect with audiences, we spoke with Frank Sommerfield of Sommerfield Communications, a NYC-based PR firm specializing in establishing businesses and individuals as thought leaders. 

We’re seeing more financial services firms engaging in thought leadership by commissioning original research. Is this effective?

Yes. Thought leadership based on quantitative research is one of the best ways for investment managers to maintain a consistent presence, convey a clear message, and differentiate themselves. It’s not the only way to accomplish these goals. But if you can commission research, it could be the cornerstone of a communications strategy.

One of the challenges for investment managers in particular is avoiding their tendency to talk about performance and product all the time. They need to talk about investors’ concerns, their pain points, their aspirations. And the best way to do that authoritatively is with insights that have data behind them.

In this way, investors are like any consumer—you engage with them through education, guidance, and, most important, an empathetic message. By tapping into what they’re concerned about and bringing it to life. Doing that with survey-driven data is a highly credible approach. 

Is that expecting too much of investment managers? Are there really that many things they can talk about?

There's very little original news or insight out there. You become compelling to people when you make your themes and insights seem new, and newsy, and talk about them in a new way. 

Frank Sommerfield

You don't have to always talk about investing per se. Instead, explore generational attitudes, views on legacy, nonmonetary assets, lifestyle in retirement. There is a whole range of things you can ask people about and bring to life in stories and articles that are indirectly related to investing. 

It's a great way to relate to people and say something interesting. Many people are more likely to read something on educating children about money than they are about whether you should be investing in a passive or active strategy. 

And for asset managers who want to get the attention of institutional audiences?

The same holds true. There are tons of things institutional investors think about other than their investment strategy. 

For example, you could uncover some really interesting attitudes with an anonymous survey of CIOs at endowments on their concerns and insights on trustees, and how well they’re running the endowment, whether they’re forward thinking enough, how they’re managing the competing needs of making enough money to fund their spending requirements, of growing the corpus over time, of anticipating the changing needs of the institution the endowment supports.

Or the whole question of active versus passive. Institutions will be interested in whether their peers are looking more intently at active, given the economy. Or their thoughts on economic conditions and whether the business and investment environment is offering more or fewer opportunities. 

There's an endless range of interesting topics. And if you explore them in the context of what real people think, with data behind it, then you’re seen as authoritative. And your audience knows that you really care about them and issues they face.

What is PR’s goal in all of this?

Our objective is to get you endorsement as a pure thought leader. That endorsement comes mainly through unpaid channels (for example, coverage in media or in an owned article that people actually read). Your “payment” for being featured in unpaid media is to say something interesting and credible and not self-serving, or not self-serving-sounding. So the findings and insights of your research need to lend themselves to that kind of communication. 

That’s why it's important to bring in the PR mindset early on. Because when it's mainly a marketing driven project, there's a selling dimension to it, there's a market research dimension (which is really important), but there's not a broader “what this means for the world” dimension. And that last dimension is what's really interesting to the media. 

When the PR team is brought in later in the process, we have to make do with the insights and data and mold it into a newsy framework. But if you bring us in early, we can contribute to the questionnaire, to the design of the survey, to how you get the survey population and whether it's projectable for the population as a whole, so the survey serves your selling purposes, research purposes, and thought leadership purposes. 

What PR wants from the quantitative research is the basis for our outreach to journalists, through articles, press releases, blogs, interviews, and so on. For our work to be effective, we need to do the media's work for them. That includes writing the articles and fashioning the message. So in addition to everything that marketing is producing for the thought leadership campaign, we need to create the PR materials—the stories. 

It’s a whole set of complementary but separate materials. The core research report might be the same, or there might be a media version, but other items need to be produced: pitches to journalists, press releases, LinkedIn articles for senior leaders at investment management firms, bylined articles for outlets like Barron's, soundbites for CNBC interviews. 

From a PR perspective, what are the top three things asset managers should do in developing thought leadership campaigns? 

First, bring PR in early. Get their input on the questionnaire. Let them look at it through a PR/media lens and develop headlines that the responses might support. Get the full benefit of the momentum effect from a bringing the PR team in early.

Second, give the PR team runway to create their own set of materials and tools that will leverage the research and the report. Recognize that PR needs to do the media’s work and create the story. That's critical in today’s media environment. 

Third, and most important, make sure the subject matter of the research goes beyond product, price, and performance, and gets at the more emotionally charged topics that are important to individuals and institutions, that relate to things that are going on in the world.

What’s getting traction in today’s marketplace of ideas?

An evergreen topic is what's going on with the economy and the markets. That usually gets traction, if it's credible. Another is spotlighting the investment-related mistakes of institutions and individuals.

The media is always very interested in workplace issues—how people deal with their jobs and, by extension, their money. The most popular business stories, even in The Wall Street Journal, are personal business stories, workplace stories, about people's aspirations and how they achieve or fail to achieve them. 

Other topics getting traction these days are diversity at investment firms. Institutions are very keenly aware of that. More thought leadership on that would have a great audience, if your story is real. 

There’s ESG and the whole question of whether ESG investments perform better than non-ESG investments. That's a huge topic. Still another is private investments versus public markets. 

All of these topics deserve good research. The thought leadership created from that research will be eaten up by your audience and appreciated by the media, by influencers, and others. 

So an example of workplace issues might be the concerns of endowment or foundation trustees, who have a tough job, have several fiduciary obligations, are often unpaid, and face a lot of work when, for instance, they need to make a manager change—something along those lines?

Exactly. Those are real workplace issues. What is it about their work that's keeping them up at night? Is it hiring the right managers? Dealing with trustees? Whether to go active or passive? 

These topics are like the meat of the peach around the pit of what you want to say. To use another metaphor, they're a Trojan horse that gets you into the fortress of your audience’s minds. Weave those human elements into your thought leadership and you’ll radically improve your chances of accessing people's minds.

Rethink that redesign

Before you consider a wholesale site redesign, think again. 

Most visitors to your site want to get things done. Because change makes that harder, they strongly dislike change. 

On the other hand, the most popular sites (e.g., Google, Amazon) make few radical changes but lots of small improvements over time, based on constant user testing. 

Sometimes a radical redesign is your only alternative. Most of the time, a continual incremental approach is best, based on testing and audience purpose.

Rule of thumb: redesign decisions based on aesthetics tend to be poorly grounded; those based on your audience's business purpose are usually well-grounded.   

Check out this and other common web misconceptions at UXMyths—34 of the most commonly-held misconceptions about web design succinctly debunked, with supporting evidence and links to further reading.    

Seeing this OK, Boomer?

Without intending to, you may be alienating your online audience.

If it includes people in middle age or older, you’re putting them off if you’re not delivering information they way they prefer it. 

And that, according to Smashing Magazine, is with:

• Text. People over 40 spent half or more of their lives getting their information by reading. So their information uptake is faster with text than it is with video. So most of them prefer text. 

  Make that well-crafted, well-edited text. Poor grammar and misspellings tend to turn them off, and make your content less credible.

  And text should be no smaller than 16 pixels.

• Contrast. Gray text can be esthetically pleasing. But for text legibility online, older readers need a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 or higher between text and background. On a white background, that’s #959595 or darker for larger fonts and #767676 for smaller fonts. 

copyright www.Colorbook.io

“This is not about who’s right or wrong; it’s about creating web content that everyone can use.”

Barry Rueger, Smashing Magazine

When storytelling works

Storytelling is effective—so effective, actually, that if you want your audience to pay attention to your facts, you shouldn’t tell stories.  

That’s the conclusion of a study by the Kellogg School of Management released in August. The study’s authors sought to discover why the evidence on storytelling effectiveness was mixed. It worked well in some cases, not so well in others. 

They found that arguments with weak factual support are more persuasive when told as stories. And that arguments with strong facts behind them are less persuasive when told as stories. 

Why? Stories work to “reduce message processing.” That is, stories keep us from paying full attention to the facts. Instead, we pay attention to the story. 

“Stories appeared to shut people down from scrutinizing the information carefully. So when people saw a really impressive product within a compelling story, the story backfired; they failed to appreciate just how great the product was.”

Rebecca Krause, PhD student, Kellogg School of Management

So think of storytelling less as an all-weather marketing approach, more as a tool with its own strengths, weaknesses, and suitability.

Getting surveys right

To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. Research surveys are in their own category of sensitivity. One wrong word or unclear phrase can throw the whole thing off.  

In a recent blogpost, UX research and consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group provides a thoughtful, detailed account of how it arrived at the right survey wording.  

It’s a neat case study on making surveys more specific and useful. It also includes advice on survey design: 

• Make sure your research questions can be investigated with your chosen survey methodology.

• Avoid priming or asking leading questions.

• Run pilot studies. Test several versions at the same time.

• Be aware of survey timing, which affects response.

“Poor phrasing, ambiguity, or the wrong sequence of questions can easily result in skewed survey results. Iron out any such issues before you spend the money to collect your data. Like user-interface designs, surveys need to be tested. In fact, a survey instrument is a design, so treat it as such.” 

Feifei Liu, Nielsen Norman Group

How Brands Are Built (Season 3)

No surprise—season three of How Brands Are Built, on brand experience, has been excellent so far. As with past seasons of Rob Meyerson’s podcast, we recommend listening to every episode. But we’d like to call out one here—an interview with branding expert Ken Pasternak of Two by Four.

Ken discusses:

• His definition of branding: “the intersection of promise and perception.”

• Some refreshingly simple branding tools, including a three-question brand platform and a simple matrix for constructing the brand experience. 

• Case studies from UC Berkeley (a client of Ken’s) and Virgin Airlines (recently purchased by Air Alaska). 

“[There are] so many opportunities for brands to make a promise, either real or virtually felt, in ways that haven’t been done before. If they aren’t orchestrated or coordinated, then there is no experience because it’s fragmented and chaotic. But if they are orchestrated and coordinated, that experience can be very deep, very real, very memorable, and completely ownable.”

Ken Pasternak on How Brands Are Built

The company soul

As a management consultant, Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati was hearing two related questions. Older startups wanted help in getting back their original spark—the corporate equivalent of youthful energy, passion, and purpose. And large corporations wanted help getting that spark that all startups seem to have. 

It led to an idea: the company soul. You can read Gulati’s Harvard Business Review article, but he nicely summarizes it on HBR IdeaCast. 

The company soul is related to the company brand, but aspires to be bigger, incorporating strategic and existential elements, customers and employees. You can get to these dimensions with a solid brand position, but the company soul incorporates them from the beginning. It’s more holistic, with three “pillars:”

• Business intent. Why do you exist? What are you trying to do?

• Customer success. How do you make customers successful?

• Employee success. What’s in place that makes your employees successful?

Gulati includes mini-case studies of brands that regained their souls (Apple, Warby Parker) and one brand that looked within its soul, so to speak, to make good long-term strategic decisions (BlackRock). 

The company soul may not be replacing the brand anytime soon. But it’s a helpful construct for any branding or marketing professional.

When to talk to customers

When it comes to getting deep strategic insights about customers, what’s more effective—quantitative or qualitative research? Forget the long questionnaire and large survey samples, says strategic planning consultant Graham Kenny in Harvard Business Review. In-depth interviews with a small set of people, often as few as a dozen, will give you more insight.

Customer conversations are better at obtaining what he calls strategic factors for any business: the key criteria customers use to choose you over a competitor. Open-ended conversations provide:

• Higher-quality information

• Access to the customer’s mind—how they think and make decisions

• Deeper understanding of the customer’s needs, wants, pain

Kenny’s talks with customers center on one key question: “What criteria do you weigh in deciding to engage us versus our competitors?”

He’s tested this approach, asking management teams what they believe their strategic factors are. Management doesn’t provide as “crisp” an answer as do customers, and they often include factors that don’t matter to customers.

“When it comes to obtaining customer input, executives often think a multiple-choice survey will be the most cost-effective option. They have their place... [but] don’t let them become an excuse for not talking to the customer.”

Graham Kenny, Harvard Business Review

Talking to one customer never yields all the strategic factors. Every customer’s experience is different. But in Kenny’s experience, talking to several—often as few as 12—always results in the complete set.

As for how many interviews you’ll need to conduct, you’ll know you’ve collected all the factors when you no longer hear anything new. This “saturation point” seems to naturally occur at 12 people.

Getting better work from designers (pt. 1)

Practically every marketer will work with designers at some point. Marketers often have the idea or concept to convey, but designers must execute. It’s a tricky hand-off that can go much more smoothly if you understand design principles.

CXL’s Peep Laja boils it down to eight principles, with excellent visual examples:

(C) CXL

As Laja says, “Design is marketing. The more I’ve learned about the principles of web design, the better results I’ve gotten.”

Creativity, explained

How does creativity happen?

The best explanation is in a 46-page book given to me years ago by a boss who read it years before that as an account manager at Leo Burnett in Chicago.

For the non- or un-creative, creativity is a mysterious process involving steps that don’t look like anything you’d recognize as “work.” If you’re that person but you value ideas and creativity, then you’ll want to understand the creative process and the people who engage in it.

What’s creativity?

First, some background. Creativity is the act of producing new ideas. A new idea is a fresh combination of old elements. Making new combinations requires you to see relationships between facts or information.

Creative people, or idea producers, are unusual in how they relate to information. We tend to have very broad interests—the kind of person who can get interested in almost anything for its own sake. It’s such an uncommon tendency that we’re often self-effacing about it. You may have heard us say “I know a lot of useless information.”

We also tend to search for relationships between facts. And we tend to see relationships between facts or information that others don’t see.

So much for the creative mind. How do our minds produce ideas? Young sees five steps.

1) Gather the raw material

There are two kinds of raw material:

Specific information—on the product, the service, or problem; the audience; market dynamics, and so on. All things the creative person may not have known before the assignment and needs to research. Go deep, says Young. Get as much specific information as possible.

General information—practical and theoretical; on life and how the world works; on history, science, philosophy. Things that have no obvious connection to the problem at hand. Creative people are constantly collecting this information, which turns out to be not so useless.

2) Digest the material

We examine the material and start bring facts together. Young advises writing these relationships or combinations down, ordering and structuring the ideas. (This sounds very much like a combination of the madman and architect phases of the four personas of writing.)

This thinking stage of creativity is awkward and difficult. Awkward because the ideas will be half-formed at best and unresolved. The human brain doesn’t like this—we prefer resolution. It’s the cerebral equivalent of a pebble in your shoe.

And difficult because it’s all cognitive work. As Daniel Kahneman tells us, cognitive (System 2) thinking is difficult, tiring, and something we’d prefer not to do for any length of time.

3) Step away

When we can’t push our brains any further, we take a break. In this incubation period, we let our thinking continue in our subconscious while we engage in something that stimulates us.

It might be listening to music, reading a novel or thriller, or going to the theater or movies. Even a 20-minute break can suffice. Young says it must be something emotional. We think incubation can happen during rote or mindless activities (shaving, showering) or repetitive physical activities (gardening, running/walking, rowing). Find your thing.

This step will completely baffle non-creative people. (“You call that work?!”). And even creatives may not always trust it, at least early in the careers.

But if you’ve had a great idea in the shower, while driving, or on a run, or if you’ve put the crossword puzzle down for an hour, come back to it, and experienced a flush of progress, then you’ve experienced the incubation effect.

(Still unconvinced? New research from McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign not only confirms it, but even borrows Young’s term “incubating stage.”)

4) The light bulb moment

This is the idea in the shower, the aha on the running trail, the insight that appears while you’re making dinner. It’s the birth stage of creativity.

It will happen. The key, says Young, is to be ready for it. Because it can happen anywhere (even in the middle of the night). Creatives will have the pen and paper ready, or the smartphone with the note or voice recording app, ready to record it.

5) The morning after

This is the essential step, as Young says, of “making your idea fit the exact conditions in which it must work.” It’s the shaping/developing stage of creativity.

Because most creative ideas are not born whole and complete. They are like human babies—beautiful to their originators but not fully-formed, not ready for prime time.

Most creative ideas must be refined, edited, re-worked, adjusted. There’s a certain ruthless survival of the fittest (best) ideas. Good ones, says Young, will expand with criticism, evaluation, retooling. Not-so-good ones will shrivel up.

This is what writers mean by “be willing to kill your darlings.” If the idea pales in the cold gray of the morning after, then do the merciful thing and file it away. If the idea gets better, that’s a good sign you’re onto the real solution.

A gatekeeper speaks on marketing

Several years ago, we spoke at length with a gatekeeper at a state pension fund on a range of marketing topics.

He was a prototypical gatekeeper—the people who can give or deny asset managers the opportunity to pitch their institution. He was in his 30s and planned to be in his position for three to five years, after which he’d advance to a more senior institutional role or move to the investment management side.

Gatekeepers tend to be young-ish, smart, ambitious, overworked, and over-pitched. Their profile hasn’t changed much since then. So while the details below may be slightly dated, the message is as valid as ever.

On pitching, decks, and introductions:

We’re inundated with decks from managers wanting us to see their process. They face an uphill battle. Put yourself in our shoes: most pension funds have one person in the gatekeeping role who’ll spend five to ten minutes thumbing through your deck. If you give us one reason to say “no”—for example, an unclear value proposition—we’ll move on.

Photo by KML from Pexels

Crisp, short decks of ten to 20 pages are easier for us to digest. We’re not going to go into that much detail on a first look. We’re all understaffed. If you don’t make your case in the first few pages, we won’t spend any more time flipping through the rest.

We don’t need so much detail. We don’t care what you look like, so skip the photos. One page on your team, one-line bios. Anywhere you can save paper or space, I’d encourage it. Conceptual graphics and charts will suffice.

The reaction you want from us is, “I’d like to hear more about this.” Just enough to spur a personal conversation of five to ten minutes, which is all you can ask for. That will lead to a longer conversation in a visit or phone call. At that point, we may want an educational session to evaluate it.

Their expectations of value-added services:

We expect to get more than just asset management from the firms we have strong relationships with. Our asset management partners are very proactive in pushing out their intellectual capital. Many managers can do that—they have the resume and the credibility out of the box, and can do that in a creative, constructive fashion for their clients.

For example, Bridgewater sends us its daily observations, emerging market currencies to pension underfunding status to what are rates doing in Spain. They take what they’re already doing anyway and put it in a professional format.

If we have a special request—like, do you have any thoughts on this space in the markets, do you have any insights on this market strategy—they’ll have a person work on it, send us a spreadsheet, and take us through it.

Other shops may provide a monthly commentary. For example, some firms have experience in emerging markets. We’re not in the weeds there, so their update will help us.

These are all relatively straightforward, natural things managers can do, driven off their day-to-day portfolio management.

On filling gaps in their expertise:

Every institution has areas of weakness that managers can help them with.

For example, we don’t have expertise on tactical, dynamic asset allocation, or the tools for it. We’re looking for an advanced approach, not just an efficient frontier model but risk premia, and then helping us apply it to our portfolios. I have yet to see a good offering from any firm that would help us with this, but I believe it’s out there.

For carve-outs and other small managers:

Some managers—especially new, smaller firms—could be more sophisticated in their selling and retention efforts. We have turnover on a regular basis, and when we do, you’ll have to resell yourself. To come back a year from now, after I’m gone, and tell the new gatekeeper that I was the reason we’re doing business with you.

It’s hard, but that’s how it’s done. Relationship managers call, introduce themselves, and tactfully say, “we’re adding value for you—please don’t terminate us just because you don’t know who we are.” The good asset managers are very skilled at this.

Words are power tools. Handle with care.

Metaphor, analogy, and simplification are powerful tools. Maybe more powerful than even we professional wielders of words—including marketers—are aware.

Writing in Scientific American, science communicator Amanda Baker tells two quick stories of communications failure and one of turnaround success, all hinging on these power tools of language.

When we think we’re simplifying, we’re often creating more misunderstanding. A strong analogy seems perfect until we say it—then realize it’s too strong and has derailed the conversation.

What can be done? Message (and visual) testing by research professionals can really help, but it’s expensive. Informal testing may provide guidance, but you may not have access to the target audience. And honest feedback is hard to get if you have a relationship with your test respondent. Try anyway.

It comes down to respecting these power tools for what they are—hugely effective when used correctly, capable of damage when not. Be aware, sensitive, and empathetic. And use them with skill.

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Photo by Bidvine

How to design anything

You might be hip to the great care and thought that go into the design of consumer products. Even so, the customer focus that has gone into Smart Design’s re-imagining of New York City’s trash cans—barely changed since the 1930s—may make you rethink your marketing approach, even if you market intangibles like financial services.

Because designing a campaign, even designing something as tactical as a landing page, is like designing a product.

The right target

Above all, make it useful to the person your targeting. It may seem obvious who that person is, but it’s often not that straightforward. Turns out the intended audience for the NYC trash can isn’t sidewalk pedestrians. It’s New York City sanitation workers.

Likewise, the primary audience for your campaign isn’t necessarily the people who will engage with it—it’s the people you’re asking to promote the campaign: your salespeople. Are you making it useful for them?

The true goal

To be useful, the thing you’re designing must help the person accomplish a goal. This is not the same as its use. It’s often bigger than its use. It’s how that use contributes to a larger objective.

For NYC sanitation, the goal isn’t to eliminate trash or give New Yorkers a convenience. It’s to make being a sanitation worker easier and safer. Once the goal is defined, other objectives often can be rolled into the design.

Discovery

You arrive at these answers the same way Smart Design did:

• Understand the history. The designers didn’t start designing at a white board. They approached the project with great tact and respect for what had gone into the original design and how that design fit into the daily experience of users.

• Observe and listen. Smart Design’s biggest insights came from observing trash collectors on their daily rounds and asking questions. When was the last time you accompanied a salesperson in the field? Watched an end customer use your services? Listened in on a call with internal wholesalers?

Create your next campaign or communication with a clear goal in mind. Make it useful to the right person. To get better, get curious. Get better answers.

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Photo by RockyJenny is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

The one reason they buy

What if we took the sales funnel we’re all familiar with—awareness, interest, decision, action, all based on what we think is the customer’s psychology—and redrew it based on what actually matters to the customer?

Would we think differently, maybe even more effectively, about why people buy our stuff? Would it be a more useful marketing tool?

A recent conversation with the CMO of a highly-regarded investment manager suggests an answer.

This firm is the IBM of its space—a pioneer that is off the charts in respect and trust. In terms of winning new business, however, it isn’t living up to its potential. It has no trouble getting meetings, and it’s included in most if not all RFPs. It makes the finals round an exceptional 50% of the time. And yet it has difficulty closing sales. It wins far fewer mandates than its success further back in the sales process would suggest.

It’s taken the firm a while to figure out why. At first, they asked directly why they hadn’t won the business. Getting honest feedback was difficult. It’s always hard to get people to tell you the real reason they’ve rejected you. When you have industry clout and are generally well-liked, it’s even harder to get honest feedback. Most people would rather keep the relationship than risk it by delivering bad news.

So the firm hired a third party to find out. The true reasons were revealing. Despite their high regard for the brand, most decision makers felt the firm wasn’t a leading investment manager. Everyone liked the firm’s thinking, thought their people were brilliant, and loved their analytical services. These attributes are what prospects love about the firm. And they’re exactly what the firm focused on in finals presentations.

Wrong. Because in the end, these attributes are not what mattered to buyers. At the point of sale, buyers cared only about one thing: investment management. Show me that you’ll be the best manager of my organization’s money.

Consider where this particular buyer is at the point of sale. They’re often volunteers who have put in a ton of time, work, and perhaps consulting fees identifying potential managers. They don’t want to put themselves or their organization through this process again. They’re also fiduciaries, which means among other things that they could be personally liable for their choice. There’s great reputational, legal, and institutional risk to this decision.

The winning firms didn’t necessarily have all the side attributes of the CMO’s firm. But they are known for their investment management excellence. And at the point of sale, that’s all that mattered.

Lots of great takeaways here, but let’s point out two in particular:

• What’s the one reason people buy from you? Not why they agree to meet with you as prospects, not why they love you as clients, but why they agree to buy? It’s very likely just one key reason. This is closely related to Clayton Christensen’s Theory of Jobs To Be Done.

• Whose job is it to know the one reason? It’s not necessarily surprising or their fault that the firm’s salespeople couldn’t produce this insight. Sales is properly focused on sales. It’s marketing’s job to understand the customer.

And this is one CMO we’ve run into who is really taking ownership of the customer.

What’s your founder’s story?

Our intuition tells us that an authentic story about a company’s beginnings—its founder’s story—is compelling to customers. Researchers are beginning to find truth in this hunch.

yvon chouinard circa 1972

In a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, professors at University of Mississippi and Olin Business School at Washington University found that “information about a founder's motivation for creating a company has a powerful effect on whether consumers deem a brand authentic, which in turn influences judgments about the quality of the product.”

It’s what Patagonia, Vanguard Funds, and Chobani yogurt all have in common: they’re strong brands grounded in a powerful story about the founders’ original purpose.

To those of us who are familiar with the stories of Yvon Chouinard, John Bogle, and Hamdi Ulukaya, these brands are inseparable from their founders’ initial motivations. For the many more who buy their products without knowing these stories, those motivations are still very clear because they’re so strongly imbued in their products.

Patagonia’s superior, “clean,” durable outdoor merchandise. Vanguard’s “new and better way of running a mutual fund company… directly benefitting shareholders.” The kind of yogurt that Chobani wanted to bring to the world, by the kind of caring company its founder wanted to see in the world.

The founder’s story doesn’t necessarily need to be true, but it must add up. Most people still don’t know that “Häagen-Dasz” means nothing, was for years made in the South Bronx, and was once called Senator Frozen Foods. It’s a premium brand many still believe comes from somewhere in Denmark. Its reputation for high-quality ingredients, including lots of butterfat, fortifies the story because it’s in tune with the story.

We’ve found that many companies are sitting on the outlines of great founders’ stories that they aren’t using, haven’t explored, or haven’t adequately articulated. That story is often a key to the brand. And reconnecting with it can add vitality to the expression of that brand.

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Photo by Tom Frost is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported