A basic approach to Growth Marketing (Part 2): Customer Centricity (notes from Amazon and Superhuman)
In the digital era, personalization holds the key to conversion.
4.5 billion internet users, 5.5 billion web pages, the math is fairly straightforward. There’s a ton of “stuff” out there competing for screen space and attention. And only 24 hours in a day. And if you are in the marketing function with any business, you’re competing for some share of that every day.
Creativity, which as I shared in Part 1, used to be an undefinable quality led by content (copy and visuals) and has now expanded beyond this to also encompass delivery.
The customer journey has evolved from a linear narrative controlled by businesses to the non-linear version we are now becoming more familiar with, and the narrative is multi-sourced. It has become more important than ever before to build out advocates for the brand and product. Referrals and testimonials are sought after both in the B2B and B2C spaces.
By the time a customer interacts with your brand on a purchase journey, there is a pretty high chance that they have heard about or interacted with your brand on some channel. And if they discovered you through search, they have also checked out every competitor in your space from across the world.
The response to your brand message is also immediate — which is why “storytelling” is so important today. Whether it is the boos or the kudos, the feedback is immediate. Unlike earlier, today, your brand, by virtue of its digital presence, is interactive.
Let’s look at what that means.
The Amazon Example
There’s an oft-quoted example of how Jeff Bezos brings an empty chair into the room for every meeting. The chair represents the “ever-present customer” — a reminder to the team that whatever they do, the customer needs to be at the center of it.
In an interesting piece of research published on HBR, Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg analysed Bezos’ letters to shareholders over the years to evaluate whether Amazon was really as customer-centric as analysts thought.
I decided to dig a little deeper into how Amazon is framing customer-centricity in 2020.
This note on the Amazon blog from Jeff Wilke as he “hangs up his flannel” reiterates the customer-centricity. As does Bezos’ introductory note naming his successor Dave Clark. 👇🏽
Looking at their latest news reports around products that are hitting the market all point to the focus that Amazon has on its growing customer base.
- Amazon Go uses sensors to directly charge customer accounts.
- Amazon Wardrobe allows customers to try before they buy from the comfort of their homes.
- Alexa targets helping people discover the music they love (with Amazon Music of course) even when they have only a vague sense of what they want to hear.
- Amazon is expecting to use knowledge of customer preferences gleaned from Alexa to refill orders/ send products that customers use regularly, without a formal order process.
As outlined in this report on Inside.com, Amazon’s conservative acquisition policy is also structured around its customer obsessive culture.
On the retail side, Amazon’s content engine and recommendation widgets power the customer journey based on purchase history combined with their recommendation algorithms and powered by AI+ML. More in this article from Dynamic Yield.
What sets this apart is that given the scale and the amount of learning data available, experiments are underway with each and every transaction on Amazon. And the learning from the experiment is systemic. And, all this dates back to a patent filed in 2003 around “Item to Item Collaborative filtering”.
The key aspect of Amazon’s customer-centricity on the retail side has been the focus on reducing friction. The no-questions-asked frictionless returns policy ensures Amazon outperforms its competitors in several markets. Innovations related to delivering the experience of in-store shopping in the comfort of your home, the use of technology to power easy-to-use features in standard products like the Fire Stick or Alexa ensure ubiquity.
On the ML adoption side, Amazon has gone a step ahead and opened up access to Amazon’s Machine Learning University courses to the public as of August 2020. With this, it possibly has redefined a participative model for discovering both talent and problem statements.
So what is this customer-centricity all about? And is this purely for businesses that leverage B2C/ D2C?
At the end of the day, B2B is still the same customers, in a different context. While marketing to a business may differ in that there are several stakeholders and influencers (and perhaps some detractors) that need to be convinced for a sale, the basic marketing principles of user-centricity/ customer-centricity still apply.
What is important in the data-rich era is to understand the “why” — why the customer needs your solution or what pain of his will you address/ solve. This needs to go beyond the traditional buyer personas to an understanding of the customer journey and establish an empathy map.
Here’s one by Paul Boag as part of the CXL Institute course material.
Being customer-centric requires involving the customer and incorporating their inputs and their feedback — through surveys, user tests, and usability tests, primary and secondary research, inputs from customer-facing teams including support and sales, using available tools — to understand the jobs to be done (more in Part 1 of my series) by the customer and prioritizing your product development as well as all your communications accordingly.
The Superhuman Example
One company that seems to really keep the customer in mind while designing its experiences is Superhuman (link to Superhuman).
I loved their onboarding experience, to start with, and stayed out to see their acquisition strategy.
I am yet to use the product, but I’ve heard some fantastic reports from people using the product in terms of ease of use and features.
One thing that stands out even as you answer the unusually lengthy survey as a part of the onboarding process, is the focus on who you are and your usage scenarios.
While the promise is right up front, “the fastest email experience ever made”, the subsequent screens establish your fit as a user while also providing the team with insights on interest and intent form their yet-to-be-addressed target segments.
Some screens from their onboarding flow, which does a fantastic job of giving them insights into me as a customer and allows them to target their nurture campaign and other communications for me. 👇🏽
Superhuman has captured all of my responses on how I access and handle my emails as part of the onboarding process. Customer testimonials are streamed on their website, so I don’t need to look for them.
The image below is an overview of product features during their development phase that were prioritized based on user surveys — after segmenting the users based on their satisfaction/ delight with the Superhuman experience.
The basic survey question — meant for them to establish product-market fit in their early days asked users how they would feel if they could no longer use Superhuman. And this word cloud was sifted down to responses from those who indicated that they would be severely disappointed.
One critical thought to keep in mind when designing surveys and questions is that there is no formula. The questions need to be tailored around the problem you are trying to solve — the JTBD, and the customers’ expectations.
There is a science to asking/ framing the right questions. If you ask a customer direct questions regarding their preferences or choices, you are likely to get a biased or quick answer that may be misleading. Again, it is critical to understand the statistical significance of your research sample and tailor your expectations around it. Both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of research need to be attuned to your problem statement and your hypothesis.
Usability testing and consumer reactions through experiments are the cornerstones for a growth strategy. No amount of hypothesizing and research can replace the actual process of experimentation and real feedback.
It is also important to keep in mind that consumers make decisions based on both conscious and unconscious choices. (More on this in a later post.)
An interesting insight here is from Derek Thompson, author of the book “Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction”. Addressing the question “Why do we like what we like?” he quotes a theory from Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design, that Loewy termed “MAYA” an abbreviation for “most advanced yet acceptable”. According to Loewy, humans are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a love of new things; and neophobia; a fear of anything that’s too new. Hits, he said, live at the perfect intersection of novelty and familiarity. They are familiar surprises.
Keeping customer expectations (including research insights and feedback as well as the analytics on actual adoption and usage) in mind as you design experiences and map customer journeys and touchpoints with your product/ service ensures that you deliver a flow that has the least friction. ergo, the highest possibility for conversion.
