Two-hundred forty wallets were planted by University of Hertfordshire psychologists in Edinburgh, Scotland because they wanted to understand if the contents made people return a wallet.
Brilliant and so intriguing.
So, the psychologists planted wallets including pictures of either a baby, a family, an elderly couple, or a dog throughout their city.
In total, 42% of the wallets were returned. But what is intriguing is that based on the contents, the rate of return varied:
- 88% of wallets with baby photos were returned.
- 54% of wallets with dog photos were returned.
- 48% of family photo portraits were returned.
So, what does this have to do with business? Well, here it is: It’s about being human and knowing your customers and their lives. What we can surmise from this experiment is that somehow the baby photos emotionally connect with people who stumble upon these wallets to return them to their owners. Maybe they imagine the baby or think about their own kids.
We need to figure out a way to get this same type of emotional reaction with our company executives and middle of the organization about our customers and their lives. The rub is that we talk about customers as though they are widgets on a spreadsheet.
What about if instead, we identify 10-20 (it really doesn’t take a ton of profiles to do this) customers who leave our company every month. Then create a profile on them. What’s important to them? What did they buy? What kind of business do they own or belong to? Call them up and find out why they left, what they need, and what they wish they had gotten from you. If you can, record those calls. Then play them back. Have their voices or the transcript of their calls scroll across your company computer screens. In short, humanize customers. Make people feel a connection to who they are as people.
Every month, do your own version of revealing the baby picture in the wallet. Except reveal the lives of 10-20 customers your company drove out the door.
The companies that are beloved are passionately in pain about the fact that some of their actions are driving customers away. They take the fact that customers leave them personally. I’m convinced it’s that passionate inconsolable sense of loss that keeps these companies working so hard that they keep getting better and better … and more beloved and prosperous.
Let me know what you think, will you? Does it make sense that we need to stop thinking of customers as “retention rates” and “churn” and start knowing about the people’s lives we disrupted and drove away with our lousy experiences? Moving folks from talk to action, that’s the name of the game.
Let me know if you think this might help you.
Jeanne
Tags: Marketing, Strategy and Tactics
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Couldn’t agree more strongly. There is a lot of chatter these days about what marketing is and what it isn’t. This is it. Make that emotional connection and you are on your way. Fail to do so and you fail, no matter what statistics you put against it. That’s what makes this business so invigorating. It’s up to you to make that connection. Not the cubicle next to you. Not the committee. You have to make it personal. Absolutely. That’s why I particularly like your approach of broadcasting former customer profiles to your internal audience. I’d do the same with focus groups and interviews with those individuals that represent that ideal customer you want to win over next. In this age of overwhelming political correctness, so many of us get hung up on offending someone, or worse yet excluding someone, that there is a tendency to create communications that are so anemic that they fail to connect with anyone. As Bill Cosby once said, “I don’t know the secret to success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everyone.”
Wayne,
Yes, yes, yes!
It’s always so frustrating when the “strategic” customer conversations occur and they are completely devoid of emotion, passion and pain (yes, pain) for knowing and then compelling actions to make things right!
One of the things we do with clients to take this notion further is to create a “customer room” where we relive the customer experience with execs on a monthly or quarterly basis. Across the touchpoints, we play back calls, show the collateral, and basically get folks to walk in their customers’ shoes. (I have tons of info on this on my website).
You need to understand your customers’ lives to support their lives. Our crusade is to get people aware and appreciative of those lives so that we make that emotional connection that connects employees and customers to us.
Jeanne
Completely agree
Wish the podcast on the top of this article was a human voice speaking rather than a TTS engine.Would have made a better emotional connect.
Ahmed,
What a perfect point you make! We need to sound human when we talking about making a human, emotional connection! Ironic. Thank you.
Jeanne
Love it, terrific column!
The challenge on the B2C side is to stop treating customers as a transaction. The technology exists TODAY to allow companies to capture customer details (purchases, preferences, intents etc…), build profiles, and understand customers better than ever before. Then take that information and use it–democratize it– get it out to front line workers –a la the Ritz Carlton (as an example) to create special moments and improve the overall customer experience. Just because you’re in a transactional business, doesn’t mean that customers need to be treated as “transactions”.
Paul,
So glad you brought this up. The silos kind of force us into executing actions that line up with transactions. Yuck.
As you call out so importantly, companies who think about customers’ lives organize around and are deliberate about knowing the most important moments in customers lives. Then by connecting the silo data, beloved companies give everyone the opportunity to be “Memory Creators.” This takes being deliberate, specific actions to line all of this up.
As you know, so many companies are quarterly inclined and look at the sales numbers, rather than the living breathing customers coming into and out of their book of business. Good we’re here to keep that crusade going, eh Paul!
Jeanne
A wonderful and truly inspiring column! Thanks a lot!
“Call them up and find out why they left, what they need, and what they wish they had gotten from you.”
I am not sure whether can really find out why a customer left you, what they really need and so on by calling these customers and asking such questions. – It is perhaps the old problem: do we really, i.e. consciously, know what we want, need, do not want,…? Of course you can examine some aspects, which are most likely to be `true`. Yet there are still some aspects, which won´t (or better: couldn´t?) be verbalized by the customers in an interview, especially, if such aspects are on an emotional level.
Don´t get me wrong: I totally agree with you that it is very important to change the thinking about customers. But we will probably never know everything about them, so we won´t never know every reasons for their decisions.
Above all it is a question of how we see the customer, i.e.: Does he decide completely on his own? Or are there any `outside influences` having an impact on his decisions? To put it on a more abstract level: Do we see the customer as a totally self-governed person, that acts only according to his reason? Whether yes or no, we must accept that our current times support the `rational choice personality`- and this takes full circle to the beginning (yes, I will finally find an end!):
Even if we cannot be sure that the answers of customers are really identical to their needs,…, we can be sure that it is a big point to communicate these persons that we consider them as individuals, as important for us and – yes, even this – as unique by calling them.
Towards my opinion this `byproduct` is important, too.
Maximilian,
You’re so right…it’s not always clear cut even with a customer conversation…why they left. However, that aside, what we find is so powerful, is getting the voice of the customer – in the ear of folks who impact operations and decisions.
We often call these “culture boost” calls – because they accomplish what a hundred survey result reports often can’t do —- incite passion and action!
I agree with you completely! This byproduct of the call is, well, priceless! Thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback.
J
What a thought-provoking post! The study in particular has me thinking I should tuck some pictures of babies into my wallet, taking into account how often I lose things…
I liked this article because of its relevance in today’s increasingly crowded market. Too easy for organisations these days to fall in love with their products and forgetting at the same time what made consumers fall in love with their products in the first place. The point about humanising our approach in profiling, communicating, engaging our consumers – whether they be our champions or detractors, constantly is never easy. But I guess that’s where a more engaged touch-point strategy comes into play – with social media, with customer care, with retail etc working in tandem for our consumers?