Archives / June 2010

Speaking of how customer experience includes distribution... in a recent interview, chocolate maker John Scharffenberger says:

"When you're super-creative, you have a hard time focusing on product selection and making sure the product and the marketplace and the distribution system are all in balance so that you don't make too many interesting things and go out of business because you forget to sell them."

It's possible to make great stuff and still go out of business. You must have distribution.

(Thanks to Matt Haughey for the interview pointer. Matt gave a great talk at Gel 2010, by the way - here's the video.)

One of my favorite lessons in customer experience came via the Loch Ness Monster hunter. Back in 1995, in my last semester in grad school, I signed up for a class in patent law taught by the late Professor Robert Rines (see Wikipedia), an engaging, friendly lecturer who also happened to be a pre-eminent hunter of the Loch Ness Monster. (Professor Rines passed away a few months ago and the Economist wrote a respectful obituary that's well worth reading.)

As interesting as Professor Rines was, I learned a key lesson about customer experience from a guest speaker who told us about his experiences starting a small business. He was young, late 20s, I think a former student, who had invented a new type of helium balloon - I forget the details, but something that offered an improvement over the standard balloon that you'd see at parties.

Given that his innovation met the three key requirements of being new, useful, and nonobvious (hey, I guess I did pay attention!) he had acquired a patent and was building a business around producing and selling these balloons into the market.

Then he explained the steps he had gone through so far. He drew a block diagram on the blackboard, something like this:

[concept] -> [design] -> [prototype] -> [production] -> [distribution]

What was the most important step in the process, in his experience? Well, he said, the concept phase was definitely the most fun. Playing with ideas, thinking about problems to solve, dreaming about business models. That took a small amount of time and effort but was enjoyable. Now he had his concept: an idea for an improved helium balloon.

Next, the design phase. It took a little more time and effort, sketching out how he planned to create the balloon, but he worked it out fairly quickly.

Then he had to assemble some tools and make the design real, in the form of a physical prototype. This proved his concept and allowed him to show it to production facilities to see who could make the product - at scale, within a budget, adhering to quality standards, and so on. Suddenly he was spending a lot of time in meetings and evaluating partners. This took much more time and he was no longer innovating - he was concerned with details upon details about execution.

Finally he had his production lined up and he went to get the product into the market - into party stores, and supermarkets, and gift shops - via various distributors. Here he had to explain to mostly uninterested people why his product would sell, how they should display it, what his fulfillment terms were, and so on. It took forever - or I should say was taking forever, because he was still months into this step when he came to talk to the class. Long hours, tough work, all yielding slow, small steps forward.

And now, he said, you can probably guess what's the most important phase: distribution. Yes, dreaming up the concept and designing the invention was fun. Those probably took up 1% of my time so far. Creating the prototype took another 5%. Getting production going took another 20%. And getting distribution has taken up the rest of my time. It's the hardest and most important challenge.

As a 22-year-old grad student, I thought this was a strange outcome. With all the emphasis on big ideas, and elegant solutions, why was this guy spending almost 75% of his time on a decidedly low-tech, non-innovative problem space? Why was he saying this was the most important task in his entrepreneurial career?

I started my own business a couple of years later, and I've been experiencing ever since the truth of his lesson. For my consulting firm, Creative Good, the customer experience we create is for our clients - and fortunately our concept, design, prototype, and production are all excellent (if I do say so myself). But distribution has always been a challenge. Adhering to our own core principles and methods has often made it harder to fit the square peg into the round holes that the market is looking for. There can be a pressure, in other words, to compromise the concept in order to open up distribution. (View almost any well-distributed Hollywood blockbuster to see this in action.)

Then later I tried, with some success, to get my book Bit Literacy into bookstores, without signing a bad publishing contract - more on that in secrets of book publishing I wish I had known. Suffice to say that distribution is a major determinant of success in publishing, even in this shiny digital future we're entering.

But here's the thing: distribution is part of the customer experience. If the customer doesn't have any access to your brilliant idea, they can't ever experience it. Access itself is just as important - or perhaps, in the words of the balloon entrepreneur - more important - to the success of the idea than the idea itself.

For the customer experience you create, consider the stages your innovation goes through - from concept, to being experienced by the end user. What are the most fun points? What are the most time-consuming? And what, if you're being honest about the process, is the most important?

How's this for a change of perspective. A Good Experience reader recently wrote me: "I think we sometimes focus so much on getting people/customers to love our brand or product, when we should probably be focusing on loving them."

Provocative. And in the right direction. Companies should focus on their customers, rather than on shining the brand.

I would only suggest that, in many contexts, customers aren't looking for love. They don't want a "relationship." Painful as it might be for some executives to accept, the company's brand is not the center of the customer's universe. Think of customers in a retail bank. Most just want a simple, fast, straightforward transaction - with good opening hours and no hidden fees. No relationship needed - just a quick transaction.

Here's the ironic part. If the bank can provide that basic level of service, then the brand is stellar. It's a remarkably low bar in lots of industries.

The lesson for today is: hippos are important. You've heard about how hippos make decisions that affect the customer, right? When you walk into your next meeting, be prepared for the Highest Paid Person's Opinion to be implemented - over all other considerations, stakeholders, methods, data, and analysis.

Needless to say, the one person who is definitely not paid by the company is the customer. In hippo-driven environments, the customer doesn't stand a chance.

To learn why most websites and other services are difficult and time-consuming (and why a notable few are outstanding in their design), just look at the biggest hippo of all: the CEO. And this yields the real lesson for today.

Want to create a great website, app, or other service? Make sure the CEO is committed to customer experience. If the "head hippo" says that customers matter, and invests in the customer experience, the product will likely be great.

On the other hand, if the CEO doesn't "get it," and you still want to create great products, you have two options:

1. Find a business unit within the company where the unit leader does get it. Of course, for this to work, you have to be in a company large and sprawling enough to contain a few little pockets of enlightened practice.

2. Move on.

And speaking of hippos, I wonder if there are other corporate animals for the menagerie:

• Giraffe: Gleeful innovator raving about Facebook features, eternally

• Zebra: Zealous entrepreneur building rich applications

• Lion: Loud instigator of nonsense

...those are all just off the top of my head. You can post better ideas in the comments - you're all cobras! (Creative outliers boldly rethinking animals!)

(HIPPO reference courtesy Avinash Kaushik.)