| thepowerofpain.com :: the pain papers :: newsletter #9 |
THE PAIN PAPERS:
|
|
——————————————————————————————————- Learn How to Use Pain to Drive Innovation ——————————————————————————————————- The Pain Papers ——————————————————————————————————- FORWARDING THIS NEWSLETTER IS MANDATORY. Any other unauthorized publication, excerpting, or duplication of the contents without the permission of Christopher K. O'Leary is a violation of copyright law. For past issues of The Pain Papers, see... To subscribe to The Pain Papers, please send a message
to... To unsubscribe from The Pain Papers, please send a
message to... ...or see the instructions at the bottom of this message. ——————————————————————————————————- - Help Wanted ——————————————————————————————————- The book is progressing well. However, I need your help. I am looking for people who can help me generate ideas for the book, provide examples for the book, and review the ideas that I am considering for the book. I am looking to put together a group of people similar to the one that Guy Kawasaki used to write RFR. Also, I anticipate that this will be a higher-volume list, since it will be a conversation and not just a monologue. However, flames and off-topic discussions will not be allowed. If you want to help, then you can subscribe to this discussion list by sending a message to... thepowerofpain-subscribe@topica.com ——————————————————————————————————- ADVERTISING AS PRESENTING Last week I talked about advertising as teaching. This week I am back with a new analogy. Another way to think about advertising is to compare it to making a presentation. The goal is the same - to leave the audience with a message. If that is the case, then the rules of making a good presentation apply... - Tell them what you are going to tell them. That means that your ad should... - State the problem that you solve or the pain that
you alleviate Of course, this limits the amount of "creativity" that you can use. However, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Isn't effectiveness more important than creativity? I think so. I would also suggest that you keep the three questions in mind when you are crafting your advertising piece. - What pain do you alleviate? ——————————————————————————————————- THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SELLING One of the things that I do for a living is help companies solve their sales and marketing problems. Very often people talk to me because they are seeing flat or declining sales. When I try to help them, I always look first at root cause of the problems that they are facing. Generally, these fall into two categories. The first problem is one of communication. The company has a good product or service but is having a hard time crafting a message that will resonate with the target audience. They may also have the right message but are saying it to the wrong audience. Those problems are easy to solve with the standard sales and marketing toolkit. The second problem is more fundamental. It is also the reason why I am writing this book. In many cases people come to me with problems that are fundamental to the conception of their business. No amount of marketing will help these companies. They do not know what makes their product great - or even necessary. They do not know what pain they alleviate or what problem they solve. They do not know why their company deserves to succeed. When I ask them why they started their company, they often cite personal reasons. They started the business because they wanted to work for themselves. They were laid off. They had just received an inheritance. They came up with what they thought was a great idea. Of course, the reasons behind their sales problems are obvious - the market is simply rejecting their product. They are not succeeding because the market has judged that they do not add value to the world. While in some cases I can help these people, getting from failure to success is often very expensive, takes a great deal of time, and has a low probability of success. The problem is that none of the conventional tools will work because there is nothing to leverage. Generally, to save a company or product with this kind of problem, you have to literally reinvent it. You have to build into it a reason for it to exist. Only then will you have something to leverage in your sales and marketing efforts. Of course, this often means that you basically have to start over from scratch. My goal is to reduce the number of companies that I see that need to be reinvented in order to succeed. To do this, I need to get people to think about the three questions before they begin their business and when making changes is cheap and easy. After they are up and running change is expensive and not always possible. ——————————————————————————————————- FLASH AND THE WEB Can I just take a moment and ask those of you who are using Flash to deliver your Web content or are thinking about using Flash on your Web site to reconsider. The reason that I say this is that over the past few days I have had a number of horrible experiences with Flash-based Web sites. Here's an example... https://www.creativeworks.com/ For one thing, a Flash-based site may work well over a T-1 line, but it is often very slow over a dial-up line. For another, using Flash on your home page often means that that your site will look good at first but will get annoying over time. I only have one first visit to your site. After that, I want to get stuff done, and I have found that Flash sites often get in the way of getting things done. For example, on the link that I give above, look at how long it takes to get to the point where you can navigate off of the home page. It takes about 5 seconds for everything to render, including the navigation bar. ——————————————————————————————————- FOCUS AND PAIN As part of my research, I have been buying a large number of books lately. One of my preferred sources for book is amazon.com. However, as my volume of book purchases has increased, I have grown more and more annoyed with Amazon. The problem is that I view and use Amazon.com as a bookstore, but they want to convince me that they sell more than just books. The problem is that I don't care about those other products and wouldn't buy them over the Web. That said, every time that I visit the site they force me to select "books" whenever I want to search the site. They also force me to close all of the windows that they pop up trying to sell me toys and electronics. As a result of this harassment, I have begun to shop at barnesandnoble.com and have just bought my first book from them. All of this points out the power of focus. If you are focused, then you can make a number of assumptions about what your customers want to buy. These assumptions will allow you to improve the experience of your customers and will improve their overall level of satisfaction. The opposite point is also true. As you get less and less focused, you will be able to make fewer assumptions about your customers and their experience will become more generic and more cumbersome. All of that increases their level of pain and dissatisfaction and gives them a reason to start looking around - which is not what you want in this day and age. ——————————————————————————————————- MATERNITY CLOTHES My wife has a problem. She is pregnant with our fourth (and final) child, but is having a hard time finding clothes that are contemporary in their styling, durable, and affordable. The way the market is right now, it seems that you can satisfy one or two of these requirements, but not all three at once. Well-styled clothes tend to be stylish but are neither durable nor affordable. Quite often they shrink after you wash them. Affordable clothes are often durable but are stretchy rather than stylish. They work at home but aren't suitable for going out. It would seem that this would present a tremendous opportunity. Surely my wife is not the only woman who is having this problem? A ready way to evangelize this line of products would be to use Internet expecting clubs. These are large concentrations of pregnant women who tell others about products they love or hate. Finally, this problem points out a strategy that many companies have used to drive innovation - eliminate the tradeoffs. In too many cases, people are forced to trade off one desired feature for another. They are forced to pick the two features that they like the most out of the three that are possible. Many people and companies have made a tremendous amount of money by questioning the conventional wisdom and removing the need to make these tradeoffs. ——————————————————————————————————- BOB LUTZ AND GM I came across a very interesting column the other day at forbes.com. The column (https://www.forbes.com/2001/10/03/1003flint.html) was written on 10/3/01 by Jerry Flint and talks about a memo that Bob Lutz sent out to some folks at GM. Here are a few excerpts... "I well remember a key GM executive assuring me several years ago that product ideas would no longer come from anyone's inspiration, from 'eureka in a bathtub' or 'I've got an idea' in the shower. Product would come from studies, research, focus groups and market analysis. It was stupid, but that was the policy of Roger Smith, who was GM chairman in the 1980s, and intensified under the reign of John Smith (now chairman) and present chief executive Rick Wagoner. What does Lutz think about GM's well-documented efforts to design vehicles around a long list of consumer needs? 'There are no significant unfilled 'Consumer Needs' in the U.S. car and truck market (except in the commercial arena),' writes Lutz. 'What there are are 'consumer turn-ons' that research alone won't find.' GM's new product czar also has no use for gimmick engineering: 'The thought that huge advances in voice-recognition, or screen-technology, or multi-function displays or ever-trickier consoles, or embroidered floormats, etc., etc. will somehow override other deficiencies (or, worse yet, 'averageness') is wrong.' Lutz doesn't have kind words for GM's favorite tool, the focus group: 'What focus groups say they would 'really like in their next car' is not reliable, because they are, in the research, not really paying for it. ('Talking car' and all-digital instrument panels received high 'want' ratings in their day.) The vehicles that are succeeding today (Honda, Toyota, Audi, VW) are not highly contented, or if they are, they charge for the option packs.' Lutz gets to the heart of the problem with GM's current design process: 'Design is being 'corporate-criteria-ed' to death...,' he warns. The basic problem identified by Lutz is that GM's new product specifications are so detailed and specific that all the edge is taken out of the vehicle. 'A salesman cannot say to the customer, 'It takes a bit of getting used to, I admit, but did you know that it satisfies 100% of GM's internal criteria?...,'' says Lutz. 'A vehicle with a single-minded focus on 'absence of things-gone-wrong' will fail miserably if it is dull, unexciting, a dog to drive, and ugly. Even if it's the best ever found by J. D. Power!' Robert Lutz tells his team at General Motors: 'Taking no risk is to accept the certainty of long-term failure.'" I have a few comments about this piece. First of all, you only have to look at the Pontiac Aztec and the Chevrolet Avalanche to see just how bad things are at GM. When I saw the Aztec, I thought I would never see an uglier car. Then I parked next to an Avalanche. All I can say about the Avalanche is that I can't tell when I look at it whether it is coming or going. It's the "Push me pull you" of cars. Second, this article points out how you can find pain and how you cannot. Pain generally cannot be found by conducting focus groups because their participants are notorious for saying one thing and doing another. The only way to find pain is to watch people use a product. I have seen this in my professional life many times. In many cases people will look at a user interface mockup and say that they love it but then hate it when the product is actually built. People are terrible at estimating usability without actually using the product. ——————————————————————————————————- Please send all comments or feedback to chris@thepowerofpain.com FORWARDING THIS NEWSLETTER IS MANDATORY. Any other unauthorized publication, excerpting, or duplication of the contents without the permission of Christopher K. O'Leary is a violation of copyright law. To subscribe to The Pain Papers, please send a message
to... To unsubscribe from The Pain Papers, please send a
message to... Any e-mail sent regarding The Pain Papers may be published and commented upon unless the email explicitly states that it's not for publication. For past issues of The Pain Papers, see... For more information about this distribution list, go
to... This document is produced by... ——————————————————————————————————- |
| All contents © Copyright 1998-2001, Chris O'Leary. The Power of Pain, What a Pain in the Ass, and whatapita are Service Marks of Chris O'Leary. All rights reserved. This material is for personal use only. Republication and redissemination, including posting to news groups, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Chris O'Leary. |