RedSwan5

And the winner is…

And the winner is… 550 462 Kim Donlan

WinnerGraphic

The 2017 Interactive Media Awards recently announced (much to our pleasure) that we are the winner of two outstanding achievement awards — one in the science/technology category and the other for a lifestyle site.

 

Dream Big Award Winning

Dream Big – Science and Technology
The science/technology category is for our work on the educational site to support the IMAX film Dream Big. Dream Big is focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and is meant to motivate kids of diverse backgrounds to become the innovators the world needs. The film has an ongoing educational, museum and community effort to expose young people to engineering.

Our awesome client, DiscoverE, a global leader in supporting engineering for K-12 by uniting, mobilizing and supporting volunteer communities, made this project possible for us. Our team also got to work directly with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and MacGillivray Freeman.

 

CBC Award Winning (1)

 

Cambridge Boat Club – Lifestyle
And yes, there’s more. We also were tapped for our work with Cambridge Boat Club, a 100-year-old boathouse on the banks of the Charles River in Boston. (The original site might have been 100 years old.) The beauty is in what you can’t see – an operational database that connects finance, events, membership and rowing data into a single location. We also introduced online payments — which improved the invoicing process and saved the club both time and money.

Ultimately, our work is always judged by the site users and not award committees. For both these projects, our team and clients collaborated to create a brand experience that makes people’s lives better. For a young digital agency, however, the awards help on two fronts. The judges’ feedback, which put us just a few points away from “best in class,” provides a great educational opportunity to embrace what we know is working and push a little harder in other areas.

We would like to thank the academy…(applause)

To Be Relevant, You Don’t Soothe a Consumer’s Pain. You Eliminate It.

To Be Relevant, You Don’t Soothe a Consumer’s Pain. You Eliminate It. 650 650 Kim Donlan

We recently helped one of our start-up clients prepare for Unpitch and discovered working with founders at the early stage has a lot of similarities to working with larger brands on building a great story and position. Unpitch is a terrific event that provides opportunities and connections for founders who are closer to the idea stage than the “spit and polish” newbies fresh out of accelerators. Startups attack problems with fresh ideas on how to solve them in much the same way that the very best, most trusted brands do.  

Founders and CMOs face the exact same dilemma — deciding how to compete.

  • Is the idea a shinier version of what already exists?
  • Will the idea disrupt an existing market?
  • Will it create a new category or sub-category?

The answers will determine whether you have a relevant brand strategy.  

Embracing brand relevance requires creating a product or service that changes the way consumers think. Relevance is where customers don’t need to compare your brand with others. There’s just you and your brand. A simple decision. You are relevant to their lives. You contribute to who they are.

The 3 lessons CMOs can learn from the start-ups are:

#1 — SEEK THE FRUSTRATION AROUND “What Is…”

If you look deeply at your existing customer experience and landscape, you will find gaps and opportunities. They will be disguised as annoyances, frustrations, little moments that piss people off though it seems as if there is no other choice but to suck it up.

A good place to look is market and field research. What does a customer’s life really look like in those micro-moments? How is the customer’s behavior impacted mentally, emotionally, psychologically, physically, culturally, socially and intellectually? Often, you are looking for the accepted frustration of “what is.”

During a class I teach at Bentley, students were working with Misha & Puff, a maker of knitted children’s wear. During the survey and market research, students kept hearing “Paying lots of money for babies clothes is a waste because they grow out of them so quickly.” Students then looked at how children’s clothes used to be made and found they were often knitted because the fabrics could stretch and accommodate children as they grew. An expensive sweater could be used for a longer time and then passed down to another child. 

reframe the pain

#2 FIND INNOVATION IN THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE

To uncover the innovation in front of you, look for what is taking too long to do or is incredibly inconvenient. What system or process just doesn’t make sense any longer? Or, how can you use what you already have in a new way?

In a recent project for the IMAX film, Dream Big, we realized that a film screening during a field trip stood a small chance of inspiring students to consider engineering as a career. We needed to change how an IMAX film was marketed. The film became the centerpiece of a larger collective movement that provided teachers, parents, museums and volunteer engineers with events, resources and curriculum to incorporate engineering concepts into the classroom. Inspired students will be able to experiment with the engineering principles that have led to great achievements.

#3 AND HAVE THE GUTS TO CREATE A NEW MARKET 

Carving out a large group of customers is what startups are doing every day as they pitch their ideas to investors. They point to lost opportunities and make a compelling case that shows they really, truly empathize with the people they are trying to help.

Identifying a new market, sub-category or segment is the only way to deliver a product that has any chance of being relevant. It is a bold act.it takes bravery

For CMOs currently in the brand preference cycle, switching to brand relevance requires:

  • Seeking true innovation
  • Reframing the problem in a way that makes you relevant
  • Building it
  • Committing to the long view

Startup founders must defend their newness, their novel approach and their deep, personal understanding of what customers are facing every day. We can all learn a lot from them.

Winning with a Continuous Planning Mindset

Winning with a Continuous Planning Mindset 650 650 Kim Donlan

You need to be able to respond to the unhappy customer experience in front of you and let go of the ideal customer you dreamed of.

When you start out, you plan for the perfect customer. You hone your product to their every need and know that you will do everything you can to make them happy. And then they aren’t. They ignore you. They complain. They don’t want what you give them. No matter what you try, it doesn’t work. Despite how much you love them, you don’t make them happy.

Predicting what customers want is more difficult than ever. Especially in this unpredictable, consumer-controlled, environment where customers continuously cry for a customized brand experience. Developing a rock-solid plan that has little flexibility is setting you and your brand up for failure. As the boxer Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

According to research from Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh, 75% of start-ups fail. This is often the result of an unexpected setback that they didn’t plan for. If you stay on plan or don’t respond fast enough, it can lead to disaster. You need to be able to respond to the unhappy customer experience in front of you and let go of the ideal customer you dreamed of.  

CONTINUOUS PLANNING

A better approach is to adopt a continuous planning mindset. You’ll still be tied to sales goals — but exactly how you are going to get there is less rigid. Think of continuous planning as a new and improved version of the lean start-up model. The lean start-up model is all about listening and responding: using the customer feedback to develop the next step. Exactly what the next step should be — a marketing campaign, a fix for the onboarding process or an investment into a business intelligence tool that will provide the customer insight you need — all depends on what you are up against and what makes the most sense. You need to be willing to test alternative tweaks to the experience, product or messaging on the fly and watch very carefully for a positive response.

Continuous planning requires alignment and strong relationships across the organization. Whether it’s just two of you or an organization of thousands, the ability to pivot — to try something new is critical. Responding to customers, even imperfectly, demonstrates you care. And customers know you care even if they can’t express it at the time.

SCHEDULE INNOVATION (into your planning)

A big problem with planning is the pesky goals and milestones that need to be established. Exactly how or what will make your company stronger is different for everyone. Do you need more users, higher sales or a chance to just start anew? Whatever goals you establish will quickly be something from which you will be judged or worse, you will use to judge yourself. Who among us has not downgraded the goals and milestones to what is “achievable? “

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

What makes better sense is creating time to innovate. A consistent time dedicated to a mindset of what can we do differently. The focus is to evaluate, brainstorm, design and implement a new response to the customer feedback and behavior. It’s about building innovation into your work so that you and your organization have an opportunity to see things differently.

At RedSwan5, founders come to us stuck. Despite everything they have tried, their customers are unhappy and they are exhausted. Their messaging isn’t working. Sales aren’t closing fast enough or the digital strategy and onboarding process is disconnected. Through innovative workshops, creative and digital strategy, and UX design, we address what keeps you up at night.

To learn more about how we can help you, contact Kim Donlan at KDonlan@RedSwan5.com

Holistic Marketing in Chaos

Holistic Marketing in Chaos 650 650 Kim Donlan

create

A New Perspective on Holistic Marketing: Your Customer’s

Holistic marketing is based on a strong belief that all aspects of marketing and the customer experience are interrelated. Makes sense, right? Yet, marketers are failing to grasp exactly how to develop a truly holistic approach because it is so incredibly hard for brands to think like their customers.

“86% of brand marketers admit that a holistic marketing approach is a top priority, yet few feel prepared to execute one.”

Problem 1: Company mindset

Up until now, holistic marketing has been viewed from a company-centric mindset.  When building a corporate process designed to provide a seamless brand experience, very smart, experienced marketers are spending (lots of) time and money trying to align around the idea of the most perfect customer behavior that leads to the highest profit. With a company-centric mindset, brand strategies and decisions are one-sided — only viewed from the internal perspective. If everyone who is part of determining the brand experience is sitting on the brand’s bench, it is impossible to see the issues from perspective of the customer.  

The efforts to align and collect data from everywhere — marketing, sales, and customer service —  lead to the consideration of technology and systems that promise a 360-degree view of customers. However, the 360-degree view puts the brand in the middle looking out at their potential and existing customers’ behavior. Several problems arise from this approach:

  • Customers only care about their view
  • Every customer has a unique view

A company-centric approach makes it difficult to organize and operationalize around the countless ways with which potential customers interact across touchpoints. To make this more manageable, buyer and customer journeys are developed that streamline a set of interactions that lead (hopefully) to a consistent experience. The customer journey — while a good starting point — can only manage the optimal behavior of a limited number of people. Customers don’t follow a single journey. And a customer journey cannot be personalized to the level customers demand.

Thinking about all the customer interactions and experiences is overwhelming. Trying to anticipate all the paths that may (or may not) quickly lead to loyal customers is like trying to imagine chaos. Your version of chaos might be different from mine, but it is still overwhelming and leaves you wanting to run screaming for the hills. To make a difficult situation worse, online behavior is evolving. For those operating within a company-centric mindset, this leads to continuous failure to deliver a seamless brand experience across all channels. To avoid this, three things must change. You should:

  • Embrace a holistic approach that is truly customer-centric
  • Support multiple customer paths and strategies
  • Treat prospects and customers as your marketing department

Holistic marketing must be customer-centric and responsive to multiple customers’ perspectives. Honing a holistic mindset and operational approach will need to support the ability to respond to the chaos of customers who interact with brands in any way they see fit.

At RedSwan5, we believe in the co-evolution of marketing and helping brands prepare to respond more successfully to the chaos of engagement. We are working with customers to perfect a better approach. It involves building a holistic marketing approach that is customer-centric and able to manage multiple strategies that are often led by the customers themselves.

We intend to share case studies and research on this new approach.