Happy Monday morning!
Today’s Curio includes:
🧠 A smarter way to build customer profiles. [Consumer Insight]
🚀 A simple habit for improving the quality of your thinking. [Leadership]
🤖 What you need to know about Distributed Enterprise. [Digital Trend]
And new 👩🔬 market research and 💡 case studies, in case you missed.
🧠 A better way to build customer profiles.
You’ve probably seen some version of this going around:
Interest and demographics based profiles are in complete.
But this doesn’t mean we should stop using them altogether.
We need to build customer profiles around behaviour and consumption goals.
Life Themes and Projects are long-term.
Our life themes are driven by our sense of self, personal history, childhood, family relations, and education. Our values remain relatively stable throughout our lives and act as a yardstick for our goals and actions. Some do change, but only slowly and over time.
Our life projects are relatively long-term commitments driven by the different roles at different stages of our lives (e.g. being a good father, a responsible student, a loyal employee, or a good teacher). Our life projects change over time and have an essential role in our decisions and behaviours.
Current Concerns and Consumption Intentions are more urgent.
Our current concern is a to-do list of activities and everyday tasks that drive us forward in our lives. These everyday activities are ‘top of mind’, and completing them takes priority over everything else. Our current life projects drive this list of activities (e.g. getting a job or graduating from school)
Psychologists have successfully used interview probes. Asking questions like ‘tell me about the things you’re currently trying to do’ can help you explore peoples’ current concerns.
Our consumption intentions drive our decisions to consume products or experiences. If our current concerns is a list of activities, consumption intentions are the means with which we get them done. But more than features (which will come later), consumption intentions are Jobs-to-be-Done.
Benefits Sought and Features Preferences are immediate.
This is the first time a product comes into the picture.
The benefits sought are the satisfaction, enjoyment, comfort, convenience, profit, or gain we expect from consuming a product or an experience.
Finally, our feature preferences are specific product attributes like prices, weight, size, durability etc. While benefits sought are subjective to a person, feature preferences are concrete. Our feature preferences are the final piece in the puzzle influencing our decision to purchase one product over another.
That's why I think customer profiles based on demographics and interests alone are incomplete.
They can help us create cohorts, but lack the depth marketers need to understand what drives peooles' decisions and actions.
🚀 Making room for critical thinking every day.
Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day.
Albert Einstein owned different versions of the same grey suit, and Obama only wore grey or blue suits.
All because making fewer decisions reduces decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is a real thing
As John Tierney wrote in Willpower,
“Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue – you’re not consciously aware of being tired – but you’re low on mental energy.”
This is great news!
Because now you can improve the quality of your decisions by making fewer decisions in a day.
But most managers do the exact opposite.
They feel like they need to be involved in every decision and have an opinion on every issue.
Anytime they’re asked a question (and sometimes when they’re not), they jump into problem-solving mode.
I’m righteously sitting on my high horse today, but early in my career, I was one of those managers.
And back then, I wouldn’t have bought into any of this decision-fatigue non sense.
Perhaps you need a bit more to go on as well. So, let me share what critical thinking looks like.
The Paul-Elder Framework
Developed in the 90s, the Paul-Elder Framework is still one of the most advanced and widely recognised tools for critical thinking.
It’s a seven-step process:
Define the purpose or the outcome you want.
Define the problem without any ambiguity.
List your assumptions: Things you believe to be true may not be so.
Describe your Point of View to uncover your biases.
Gather data to challenge your assumptions and biases.
Formulate and analyse to improve your understanding.
Formulate a narrative that’s easily understandable by others.
Identify implications and consequences.
And the idea is to follow this process anytime you’re making an important decision.
That’s a lot of work.
And despite your conviction to be better than everyone else, no one can do this much thinking more than once a day. (If that)
Most thoughts swirling around in your head are incoherent and not critical.
But that’s never stopped anyone from jumping to conclusions.
And before you’re too hard on yourself, let me assure you that it’s not entirely your fault.
We’re hardwired to avoid indecision.
Add to that the cycle of feeling anxiety and finding relief after making a decision (any decision), and you end up with a habit of making poor decisions.
You can break the pattern.
Step 1: Limit the number of decisions you make in a day. Starting with deciding which issues require your input and which don’t. Focus only on those issues and delegate the rest to other people.
Step 2: Process your emotions during the day, don’t avoid them. Take a time out anytime you’re feeling anxious, tired, or angry. Step back to understand what’s bothering you and address it before moving on.
Step 3: Have a process to direct your thinking. You don’t need to break out the Paul-Elder framework every time, but teaching yourself to review a problem properly is essential.
I use these three questions I learnt from Ray Dalio’s book ‘Principles’:
What do I want?
What is real?
What am I going to do about it?
The first question will help you define the outcome you want to see, the second will help you test your assumptions versus reality, and the third will build personal accountability and a bias for action.
A decision made today is a commitment to a future reality. And a poor decision is just as likely to come true as a good one.
🤖 What you need to know about Distributed Enterprise. [Digital Trend]
According to Gartner:
“By 2023, 75% of organisations that exploit distributed enterprise benefits will realise revenue growth 25% faster than competitors.”
A distributed enterprise is a remote-first organisation. From the bottom up, everything is designed to be virtual, from how work gets done to customer touch points.
COVID-19 made the Distributed Enterprise a necessity. On the one hand, people working from home needed access to tools and flexibility for doing their jobs and on the other, many business operations had to be moved online.
Learn more:
Everything you need to know about a distributed enterprise. /Ashley Magtani on Medium.
The Enterprise Distributed Edge: The next wave of Digital Transformation. /Kris Beevers on Protocol.
Top 10 distributed tech companies and why they moved development to remote. /Andrew Burak on Relevant
In case you missed:
👩🔬 Insightful market research
YouTube shares insights into key areas of development, including shorts, NFTs and the Metaverse. /Social Media Today
Biggest business challenges for retailers. /Marketing Charts
If e-commerce keeps growing, what happens to malls and stores? /Forrester
Brand loyalty is down, here’s how to push it up. /Global Web Index
Most effective media types for reaching marketing KPIs. /Marketing Charts
💡 Inspiring thoughts and case studies
Is JD.com’s Ochama bringing new retail to Europe? /Econsultancy
How Currys achieved a 56% open rate increase by optimising email subject lines in real-time. /Econsultancy
What would it take for Peloton to keep being Peloton? /Wired
How DTC luggage brand Monos grew 400% despite pandemic travel restrictions. /Modern Retail
Inside B2B: Transforming the B2B buyer journey [Podcast]. /Econsultancy
Stay curious!
Aliyar