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Attractive Thinking: The five questions that drive successful brand strategy and how to answer them
280Overview
Forget everything you’ve been told about maximizing Lifetime Customer Value.
To take your business to the next level, you need a brand strategy that’s focused on attracting new customers, not exploiting existing ones.
In this transparent digital age, smart businesses leaders know that profitable growth comes from helping customers, not exploiting them. Attractive Thinking sets out a ground-breaking methodology, developed during 30 years’ experience transforming brands for Pepsi, Mars, Miracle Gro and many high-end service businesses, to achieve exactly that.
Discover the five key questions you must answer to create a better brand strategy and the tools to deliver it: clarity on what matters to customers; products and services that customers love; marketing that attracts them; and a team that is committed to delivering it.
Attractive Thinking is a practical handbook for CEOs, managing directors and marketers who want to make the big-brand techniques work for them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781788601030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Alison Jones Business Services Ltd |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.59(d) |
About the Author
Chris is also a non-executive director and entrepreneur in the travel industry, and speaks and writes extensively about why businesses must focus on attracting new customers rather than extract more money from existing customers. He speaks regularly at industry conferences and run his own marketing and business events attracting important business decision makers and entrepreneurs.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Start with the customer
Something strange happens to people when they cross the doorway into their workplace. We all have this blind spot. We spend much of our non-work time acting as a customer and thinking like a customer. We see businesses through the viewpoint of the customer. But as soon as we enter our workplace, we lose that perspective and start thinking like a supplier. We all need to work hard to combat this and look at things from the customer's point of view. Great business leaders can do this persistently and with ease, but they are rare. The rest of us need to work at it. There are two aspects to this to look out for.
Understand what really matters to customers
The supplier (that is us, the marketers and creators) will often misjudge what is important to customers about the product or service. For example, when a hotel manager and conference organiser for a big conference are asked about how they organise the coffee breaks at a big event and what really matters to the conference guests, the manager comes up with a list like this:
• great tasting coffee;
• clean crockery;
• nice buns, snacks and biscuits;
• immaculate table linen;
• smiling helpful staff.
This list describes things that do matter. But when you ask the guests what matters to them, they have different priorities. Their list is like this:
• high-capacity washrooms so I don't have to queue;
• fast access to tea and coffee;
• drinks other than tea and coffee;
• lots of space to hang out with people;
• somewhere to make a quick phone call.
The customer list is not about the features of the coffee and catering service. It is about whether I can do what I want to do in the coffee break. We can have no doubt the items in the manager's list do matter to the conference guests. But the chances are they take these catering things for granted. The guest's list is about things that if they are not in place, then the experience is frustrating. The customer list shows us things where we could be exceptional.
The ability to focus on benefits that matter rather than features that don't
In my consulting business Differentiate, when we do the work in POSITION, we ask our clients to determine the features and benefits that will attract customers. They generate a list and a ranking. We then ask the customers to come up with their list and ranking. The management team usually get about an 80% match with the customer view. Most typically the difference is that the management are convinced that things that are difficult to do or expensive to produce are valuable for the customers. But the problem is the customer places no value on our investment and hard work. They only value things that help them achieve something or experience something that they desire and value.
Here is an example where we asked conveyancing lawyers what mattered to their customers in choosing a conveyancing firm to complete their house purchase or sale. Here are their top seven features and benefits of their service that matter to customers. The emphasis in this list is based on their competence and hard work:
Conveyancing lawyers' list of what is important (is what they do)
1 Service consistently good.
2 Will get deal done quickly.
3 Has good admin back-up.
4 Has experience and knowledge.
5 Works hard on my behalf.
6 Proficient at conveyancing.
7 Can rely on info they give.
These are all important and worthy attributes. But when we asked the customers, the emphasis was different. The customers are after getting the deal done, being updated and a proactive approach. What they care about is the outcome:
Conveyancing customer list of what is important (is the results they achieve and experience they have)
1 Will get deal done quickly.
2 Foresees and solves problems.
3 Keeps me updated.
4 Calls back quickly.
5 Answers phone quickly.
6 Takes responsibility and is proactive.
7 Service consistently good.
If we want to start with the customer, we must shake off the supplier's mindset and get a customer's mindset. We will look at how to do this in detail in PINPOINT and POSITION.
Now we will explore why starting with the customer is so fundamental to growing our brand, the four things all successful businesses have in place, some examples of successful businesses and the four insights about customers that we must understand.
High-growth businesses have four things in place
Have you noticed that when things are going well for a business everything seems to fall into place? Customers turn up, they buy the products, staff want to come and work for the firm, the business has spare cash, people are having fun at work. It feels like that growth will continue forever.
As an example, Daniel Priestley's Dent company runs a programme called Key Person of Influence for entrepreneurs who want to raise their profile and accelerate their growth. The way Dent runs their business makes it look easy. They promote their scorecard with advertising, they have a lot of free content, they run events which seem to fill up easily, people who come to the events sign up for their strategy sessions and their Key Person of Influence course programmes are full.
On a different scale, Google appears to effortlessly attract a higher share of advertising £s $s and â‚s each year. Google seems to find it easy to be the most popular search engine with the most users.
Big food brands such as Marmite, Kellogg's, Coca-Cola, Walkers, Danone and Wall's Ice Cream make it appear they don't have to sell their products, they just put their products on the supermarket shelf and people buy them, the brands seem to sell themselves.
To the outsider or the competitor, it seems these successful players have secured a position that gives them an unassailable advantage. Smaller competitors feel like they must work harder to get the same results. To some extent it is true that these successful businesses have secured an advantage. But what we can be sure of is that it did not and does not just fall into their laps. They may make it look easy but it is not easy; these businesses work relentlessly to ensure they have four things in place:
1 A value proposition for their customers that is relevant, distinctive and differentiated.
2 They communicate it with sufficient power.
3 They make sure they deliver it every time and every day.
4 The business has basic economics that work.
These four success factors for business were shown to me by Mike Harris during a training and mentoring session and when I saw them it was like a bolt from the blue. There is not really anything else that you need to do to create business success. High-growth businesses have all these four things working together. Businesses that struggle are missing one or two of them or are just a bit weak on one or two of them.
I can hear you thinking, there is another success factor Chris has not mentioned. What about people? A well-motivated, professionally managed and skilled workforce is perhaps the most important factor for success. This is true. Without a great team, we cannot create success. But what we are examining in this book is what the team is setting out to achieve. I will leave other books to examine the skills of leadership, recruitment and team motivation. Attractive Thinking is all about what our team needs to do to attract more customers. Let's examine each of these four success factors.
A value proposition for customers that is relevant, distinctive and differentiated
Our value proposition is what we do for or will offer to our customers that will make them willing to offer us a payment. If we are selling textiles to garment makers that might be some functional things such as the fabric, the quality, the colours, patterns, the quantity, the delivery timing. It might also be some emotional things such as the brand name, the presentation and logo, the sales relationship, the previous experience of our service.
If like Dent we are selling a training course, it could be the business results I could expect, the networking and people I will meet, the track record of the trainers, the number of hours of training, the training materials. It will certainly be some emotional stuff about how I feel towards the trainers and the people I meet and see around me.
If it is food brands then taste, quantity, packaging, convenience, availability when I need it, how well it fits with my needs or meal occasions. There are also important emotional responses to how the experience of the food and the brand makes us feel. Brand reputation, packaging style, brand name, logo, what my friends and family think, perceptions of quality and fitting in with my lifestyle all matter.
The things described so far make the value proposition relevant to the customer. They ensure we design a product or service that answers our customer's need. But relevance is only the base line for getting started. The successful business needs to go further and be distinctive and differentiated. By distinctive, I mean capable of being recognised and noticed and understood. So, for food brands that is usually a combination of great visibility and availability in lots of shops and sometimes topped up with TV or other media advertising and sponsorship. It also includes packaging, naming and descriptions that attract customers and make it clear what it is. By differentiated, I mean just how many other people offer the same as we do. In what way is our product different and distinctive?
So, for example, just how many people offer entrepreneur training targeting the same need to the same people that Dent do? What is it that makes the Dent offer stand out? In their case, it is a whole mix of things. The network their clients get to meet, the success track record of the trainers, the intellectual property (IP) in the way they explain their tools and methods, the way they run their workshops, the way they run their sales process.
In many markets the opportunity to differentiate is much harder. In food brands there are so many me too products and brands with marginal differences. Think about yoghurts, orange juice, biscuits, soft drinks, chocolate bars. The leading brands end up focusing on being available in more places and using their superior marketing budgets to create awareness and recognition in the customer's mind and invest in visibility in the shops.
We will explore the whole subject of creating value propositions that are relevant, distinctive and differentiated in PINPOINT and POSITION.
Communicate with sufficient power
As we get into the 'How to do it' section of this book in Part II, we will learn that the Attractive Thinking approach to brand strategy and business growth is simple. What we must do is to create a product or service that solves a customer's problem. Once we have done that, we need to let them know about it. When the customer discovers our offer, provided we have perfectly solved their problem, they will buy it. We do not need manipulative marketing methods and do not need to trap people into buying things they don't need. We just need to let them know about it and make it easy to buy.
When I worked in big food brands, I did not really understand how simple this is. We were always under pressure to shift more product. The factory was making it, we needed to sell it. Now this pressure to keep the factory busy and sell is real, essential and perfectly proper for a food- manufacturing business. But in the midst of this we would forget that it would be easier to sell what the customer wants than what we have already got.
This became much clearer to me when I started selling consulting services to marketing directors and CEOs. I tried all sorts of means to persuade them that they needed the Differentiate brand strategy process and this included all the usual techniques of advertising, direct mail, telephone sales, speaking at conferences, getting trade press coverage and writing articles. But one day it dawned on me that the only time we ever got any business was when a client prospect called us. It was never when we called them. When we called them, they were busy and preoccupied with other things. When they called us, they wanted to talk to us about a project where they needed some help. Their need had arisen, they had a problem they needed to solve and we could discuss it.
The clear lesson from this was that we had to concentrate on a process that led to them calling us when they needed us. What did that mean? It meant researching what the client's biggest problems were that we could help them with. Then designing a service that addressed these problems and then finding ways to let them know about it and keep reminding them that we existed so that when the time was right for them, they called us.
This is the Attractive Thinking approach to 'communicate with sufficient power'. For the Attractive Thinker, this just means let enough people know about what we offer as frequently as possible, so that when they need it, they remember we have the solution and are able to get hold of us or our product and then buy it.
Those successful businesses I mentioned earlier all have significant budgets attached to letting people know about it and making it easy to buy. Dent advertises and promotes its scorecard and brand accelerators as in-store 'product for prospects' and uses telephone sales to follow up leads. Food brands use advertising in TV, print, outdoor, digital and sponsored events to keep in the consumer's mind and use in-store merchandising and promotional activity to draw attention to their products in store or online. Litmans (a lace and fabric supplier to the garment trade) attends the major trade shows to get buyers' attention as well as some limited advertising. This is followed up by telephone sales and appointments.
In PROMOTE, we will explore how we come up with a budget and get this right for our businesses.
Making sure we deliver it every time and every day
This is a simple idea but hard to do. When we satisfy customers and make them happy, customers tell others about it and they come back and buy again. If we fail to deliver the quality or the service and the customer is frustrated, then we run the risk of losing them as they start to consider alternatives.
In food brands there can be a tussle between the commercial need to hit annual targets and the marketers' desire to protect the reputation and quality of the brand. Small 'adjustments' to product specification will improve profit margins and create an instant rise in profits. If we do this once no-one notices, but if we do this several times the reduction in quality starts to show. Version 2 may be similar to version 1, version 3 very similar to version 2, version 4 very similar to version 3, but version 4 ends up quite different from version 1. Some big food manufacturers have been doing these product tweaks or 'value engineering' for decades.
This has opened up the opportunity for niche quality food suppliers and new brands. The opening for these has often been created by quality reductions amongst the big brands. For example, Ben and Jerry's ice cream and more niche companies such as Purbeck Ice Cream have changed ice cream markets. The bread and baking business has enjoyed a resurgence away from the big bakeries of Hovis and Mother's Pride in favour of handmade artisanal and sourdough breads.
In contrast, Mars, who are the world's biggest private chocolate maker, have stuck to their guns on product quality. This is partly because they are a family-owned business and the family have chosen to protect product quality rather than inflate short-term profits. They continue to quietly grow sales even in their mature markets and consumers still regularly trust and buy their products. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some other chocolate manufacturers who have been financially engineering products and moving manufacturing to new locations (in food, location affects product quality). This has opened the door for quality providers such as Lindt to move in and pick up more of their customers.
Similar things happen in other industries. In service industries, we put in fewer hours or miss a deadline and the client notices, or we put on cheaper junior staff to support the project. In tech, the support for when things go wrong is not there; the customer cannot get an answer and drifts away.
In PERFECT, we will explore how we design products that work for customers.
The business has basic economics that work
Whether or not profit is the primary purpose of your business, if it does not make a profit (or persuade investors that its asset price will grow in the future e.g. Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Google, Facebook) then it will not survive. We need cash and profit to pay for the previous three success factors. This is the fourth success factor. It really boils down to two measures:
Profit — does it cost more or less than the customer is willing to pay to deliver the product and service the customer wants?
Cashflow — will the business have enough cash to do everything it needs to do, or will it run out of money? If the business cannot support its early cash requirements, then are there options to secure loans or investor equity capital to see it through the development period?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Attractive Thinking"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Chris Radford.
Excerpted by permission of Practical Inspiration Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword ......................................................................... vii
Preface and acknowledgements ......................................ix
Introduction: What is Attractive Thinking and why does it work? ........................................................1
Part I: Why does Attractive Thinking work?............... 17
1 Start with the customer ................................19
2 How to understand customers ....................59
3 Why is it so difficult to get it right? .............93
Part II: How to apply Attractive Thinking ..................113
4 The five questions and why........................115
5 PINPOINT: Who are our customers and what are their problems? ...........................119
6 POSITION: How can we solve the problem and stand out? .............................143
7 PERFECT: How do we create a product, service or message that delivers this? ........171
8 PROMOTE: How do customers find out about it and where do they buy it? ............201
9 PITCH: How do we engage our shareholders, board directors, colleagues and customers? ........................235
10 Conclusion: a brand strategy that everyone is convinced will work ................255
Further reading and useful websites ............................259