Try It. Tweak It. Use It. Share It. Volume 5
By Mary Aviles
I hope you're as delighted as I am about reacquainting with your fall wardrobe and sleeping with the windows open.
Try It.
In my ongoing quest to connect marketing strategy with the insights that make it matter, I'm forever seeking to improve my storytelling and presentation skills. Nancy Duarte is one of my Spirit Guides on this journey. Several years ago I began working with her Slidedocs. She offers some super applicable, hands-on suggestions here for how to appeal to our audience of humans through our own stories.
Reflect upon AND DOCUMENT nouns with some personal significance (e.g., your cowbell)
Illustrate your inner circle, your connection to various important humans in your life (e.g., your Village)
Recall and attach specifics to places of importance (e.g., I know you have your own Weiner's Circle)
Develop a Story Catalog (I love this suggestion SO much): "Instead of waiting until your hand is forced, take stock of the important stories in your life right now, and catalog them."
Tweak It.
If like me, you regularly need to check in with your customers and prospects, but you are not a professionally trained quantitative market researcher, this piece (and the accompanying video) may come in handy. I found the suggestions extremely helpful as a resource for future questionnaire development. Consider using these types of questions in day-to-day conversations with your customers.
To avoid CONFIRMATION BIAS, instead of asking, “How likely would you be to use (a solution)?”, ask, “Tell me about what you’re currently doing in (a situation).”
Root yourself in your research objective. Appreciative inquiry (speaking to positively-oriented participants) can be useful when you want to understand and amplify what's working. But, speaking to lost customers can help identify what needs to be fixed. In that case, try questions like, "If you had to change one thing…”, “Which tasks do you put off doing?”, or, “How have you done (a task) differently in the past?”
Put yourself in the participant's shoes. Instead of asking something like, “How hard was it to get started with (a solution)?”, try the explain-it-to-a-friend approach, "Suppose you had a new coworker join your team – what advice would you give them to get started?”
Use It.
I'm fascinated by the idea of a signature element as explained in this article from the Marketing News. Some examples of iconic brands and their elements include:
Nike Air Max - air bubble
Girl Scouts - girls (selling cookies)
Goat Hill Pizza - sourdough crust
The Amazon example is particularly compelling. Their signature element is 1-Click shopping. However, Amazon is a service provider and they employ a mental model that measures to what extent they are able to help their customers achieve their own goals. As a result, their signature element has evolved into owning the idea of "no patience required."
Especially for those service providers among you, what is your signature element?
Share It.
I don't think of myself as a creative person in the traditional sense of the word. I am handy with a stick figure. I rely heavily on meal kits in the kitchen. I am adept at appreciating other people's musical abilities. With that in mind, this blog post really struck a chord. It warms the cockles of my heart to think that,
"Creativity is a concept that is more about connection than creation...whilst I always strive to give credit for specific influences in all areas of my work, the collage that has emerged is my own unique synthesis of my own unique experience of the world. A scrapbook of things that already exist in some form that I have simply arranged and connected in a unique way. Your own synthesis of your own experiences would be totally unique to you, too. One’s synthesis is one’s creative fingerprint."
Enjoy these last vestiges of summer and thank you for reading. As ever, if you implement one of the ideas you found here, I'd be thrilled if you reported back your outcomes!