All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
Pomegranates and empathy
Lynda Resnick is the billionaire marketer who brought us Pom (the pomegranate juice in the strangely shaped bottle), Fiji bottled water, and other well-known brands. In the recent New Yorker article "Pomegranate Princess," she reveals her "secret" for consistently delivering products that customers want:
People say, 'She's a marketing genius, she just gets it' ... I really don't. I came up with this epiphany the other day: being a great marketer is synonymous with being a great friend. In other words, you have to listen. ... You don't have to be a genius. ... you have to see what people are watching. You have to listen to conversations. You have to pay attention.
You have to listen. You have to pay attention. That's pretty low-tech advice for high-tech marketers and product managers. And yet I can't think of a better foundation for customer-centered work. LISTEN.
Echoing this theme is another recent New Yorker piece, on sleight-of-hand magicians and their craft. One well-known practitioner, Jamy Ian Swiss, wrote that
magic was, in his words, "an experiment in empathy" - a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way the minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets outreasoned. ......the magician [must] imagine an audience to experience his effects: "From the very start, the moment a magician looks into his practice mirror, he is envisioning an alien awareness - a mind other than his own, perceiving an illusion that he is creating but cannot actually experience for himself." Only by a command of intellectual empathy can the magician lead the viewer down an explanatory highway ...
Empathy - the driving force behind good listening - is the number one requirement for anyone who wants to create a good experience. Not a long list of methods, not a scholarly knowledge of one's niche field - but empathy. Anyone can learn a method; but people who can listen, can pay attention, can see the experience from someone else's perspective, are rare and valuable.
Writing a book, for example, requires the author to constantly read and re-read the text from the perspective of the readers: will this make sense to them? Not to me, the author, but to someone who's coming at this fresh?
Creating a website, or application, or any sort of product, requires the developer to consider: what will the user think of this? Not me, the developer, but someone who's not me.
It's a difficult skill, and some people are better than others, but it can be developed. Listen. Pay attention. Think about the experience from someone else's perspective. That's the basis of creating good experience.
- - -
References:
• "Pomegranate Princess: Lynda Resnick's eye for a product," by Amanda Fortini, New Yorker, March 31, 2008.
• The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life, by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, March 17, 2008.
6 Comments:
1 TrackBack:
Deceptions considered helpful
Good Experience — Jun 5, '08 – 5:02 PM
I often think of "good experience" as being straightforward, honest,......
When I saw pomegranates in the teaser, I thought maybe you were talking about "200 Pomegranates," an unpublished book that's already creating some buzz. It has a nice website-- www.200pomegranates.com
Right on, Mark. I've been reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind where he similarly argues the business case for empathy and design. It's so simple the high-tech meme misses it.
Listen to your customer. Good advice - but I think the devil is in the details. HOW do you listen? In the software world, your customers usually tell you they want x,y,z features and you end up with feature bloated products. Therein lies the craft of listening and figuring out what people's underlying problems are. There is an interesting Harvard Business Review article that addresses this. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2815.html Interestingly, their tagline of "focus on outcomes" is really similar to the Cooper methodology of "goal based design". Interesting to read this from a business perspective (rather than a design perspective).
I am very much in agreement that empathy is a key marketing skill and a vital tool in creating great user experiences. However, I would suggest Fiji Water is an example where customer demand has not actually resulted in the 'right' solution. Customers may indeed like the idea of drinking water associated with the Fiji brand and be willing to pay a premium for it, but does this really make it 'right' to ship water halfway around the world, put it in plastic bottles and then charge extra?
I am aware of Fiji's carbon off-set programmes and their 'Green' campaign, both of which are encouraging. However, it occurs to me that none of this would be necessary if they hadn't come up with the crazy notion of transporting water over an ocean already full of water to countries where water can be readily obtained from local sources.
Is this an example of where we need to look at the longer term return on user experience investment? Yes, the Fiji customer likes the brand and the product, but will they like the long-term results of encouraging container ships full of water to criss-cross the oceans, burning fossil fuels and consuming natural resources? Sometimes a satisfied customer does not equate to a good user experience.
Marek - good point - considering the difference between short-term and long-term customer needs is one of the most important things experience practitioners can do.
This ties in to a larger theme I'm really excited about... customer-centric marketing. marketing execs need to listen more, yes. And they need to think of their brands less like an object, and more like real people: http://tinyurl.com/62ev5e