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The Name Game

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This week father-in-waiting Matthew Harrison reflects on the imminent addition to his family, and what this tells us about industrial branding.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that buying a house and getting divorced are the 2 most stressful experiences in life. Frankly this is a statement I find it difficult to agree with, and not only because my in-laws are coming to stay next week. Looking for and buying a house is one of life’s pleasures, bringing with it the opportunity to tread mud through strangers’ houses and chuckle at their patterned carpets. As for getting divorced, so long as I resist insulting my wife’s family on my company’s blog I am optimistic that this won’t happen.

No, by far the most stressful experience of my life has come these past 8 months – the duration so far of my wife’s pregnancy. The sources of my angst are too numerous to mention. Is the baby healthy? How is my wife feeling? Am I capable of looking after another human being when I can’t even look after my household’s Christmas card list? Will I find my way to the hospital without getting lost? What the hell is a BabyBjorn? And how will I know when I start dilating?

Even these worries pale into insignificance, however, next to the decision that will affect the success or failure of our future child’s life: what shall we call our future offspring? Of our two current labels, ‘it’ is frankly derogatory and ‘Bump’ would most likely result in playground bullying. These may be adequate descriptions for a child we are yet to meet and who – despite my rapidly expanding wife – remains abstract to us, but a more personal name will be required once the baby enters the big wide world.

Naming a baby, it seems to me, is rather like choosing a brand name for an industrial product. A brand is something that is asked for and referred to by name. It is, however, far more than a mere descriptor. A brand name must reflect the product it refers to both in its personality and in its aspirations. It should be individual enough to be memorable, but not so individual as to invite ridicule. A successful brand name is backed up by closely aligned brand values. These values, in turn, should inspire. Everyone working on behalf of a brand lives up (or down) to the expectations set by that brand (what would be the implications of calling a product or indeed a child ‘garbage’, for example?). It is clear that the choice of my baby’s name is of the utmost importance.

In-depth market research maximizes the chances of getting a brand name correct, exploring issues such as the target audience’s likely reaction and whether there any other companies with a similar brand name. Having trawled through a number of baby-naming books and websites, my wife and I conducted desk research, Googling potential names and seeing what the world’s leading search engine churned out. ‘Audley’ was crossed off the list when we were reminded of Audley Harrison, the erstwhile Olympic boxer (a glance of my physique would tell you why). ‘Tina Catherine’ is also out of the question when you learn that TC Harrison is a second-hand car-dealer in Leicestershire. And how could we realistically call our child George?

The target audience’s reaction was judged scientifically, through a series of informal interviews with friends and family. This research was aimed at drilling down into the darkest recesses of the audience’s imaginations and prejudices. “Sounds like a 13th century poet” guffawed my Dad as we broached the name ‘Theodore’. “Is that an industrial lubricant?’ harrumphed my drunken friend as we debated the name ‘Alexa’ late one Friday evening.

Some people name their children after themselves, which strikes me as either egotistical, unimaginative or both. More importantly, a brand that is not clearly distinguished from the competition – like a son who shares his father’s first name – is by definition consigned to a life of anonymity. My father (Martin) only shares an initial with me, but it didn’t stop him opening my post for 18 years.

So, where did this research take us and what does this tell us about industrial branding? Well, my wife and I eventually agreed on male and female names that we both liked, resisting the temptation to analyze them too deeply or seek the views of anyone outside our own front room. I also thought of some of the world’s most successful brand names and it struck me that most of these are based on relatively mundane criteria such as the original geographical location of the company, the founders’ name or the initials of companies that have merged into the corporation over time. Most successful brand names have no intrinsic meaning beyond the superficial, and only gain real meaning through their activities and interactions over the years.

Building a business-to-business brand, like bringing up a child, is a task that requires continuous investment. The name itself is rather like the wallpaper in a maternity ward – so long as it isn’t offensive, no-one is likely to notice. The final proof of this came when I Googled ‘Matthew Harrison’ and was left agog at the wide range of activities undertaken by my namesakes. A Las Vegas musician, a Rastafarian spokesperson, a Missouri Lutheran Church president and – horrifyingly – director of the film ‘Kicked in the head’ were amongst those conspiring to keep yours truly out of the top 10 pages of the search. I am hoping that, like the best industrial brands, I eventually grow into my name and make it my own.

Posted in Branding, Matt Harrison, Thursday Night Insight |
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The Importance of Voice

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In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Paul Hague considers the importance of “voice” and how it can be your most important asset…

“Good morning from the flight deck. This is your captain speaking.” I can’t help looking up from my John Grisham novel and admiring the dulcet tones of Capt. Bill Jones. I am on a Continental flight from Newark to Manchester although it could be from anywhere to anywhere. All captains sound different but they all sound the same. They seem to exude the same confidence and assurance that we passengers are looking for on a flight and yet the only thing they manage to tell us is what time we will arrive and that it will be raining in Manchester when we get there.

It got me thinking. Is it genuine confidence that is being communicated by Bill Jones’ voice or am I being influenced by his seniority and his position? He sounds more authoritative than the chief steward but maybe that’s because I know that he is the captain and have conferred status and authority to him.

Now the point of my introduction is not to be obsequious to airline captains but to get us thinking about something that is crucially important in shaping our view of people. In fact, a search on the Internet suggests that the voice, its intonation and its delivery accounts for 40% of the impression that we make on someone we meet for the first time. If this is true, it is massively important. Forget worrying about your height, the size of your nose, your sticking-out ears and your hairdo. What matters is what you say and how you say it.

When you think about it, there must be some truth in this. Obama has a wonderful speaking voice. So had Churchill and, God forbid, so did Mister Hitler. And what does a wonderful voice mean? It means (I think) that it communicates your strength of personality, your enthusiasm and your authority. It gives a clue as to your upbringing through your accent, to your confidence as a person, and to your intelligence. Forget being six feet tall with dark wavy hair and a dimple in your chin (and that’s only the females) – you could be let down immediately you open your mouth if you sound like Kenneth Williams.

All very interesting you might think but what has this got to do with a business blog? I was reading in the Financial Times today about one of Italy’s richest entrepreneurs – Enrico Preziosi. My interest was aroused when I read the story of his transformation from a street hawker of toys bought from China to a €1 billion turnover, fully integrated business, which is now the fifth largest toy company in the world. Apparently his success is all down to his voice.

To be more precise it is down to his company’s voice. A few years ago, when he ran a fledgling company, he learned that Mattel and Hasbro, the two leading toy companies, spent all their advertising money in October and November, just prior to the Christmas buying season. Preziosi used his relatively small advertising budget to run a television campaign in every month outside this period. In other words, he bought “share of voice” and achieved it by choosing months when he would be heard and not swamped by those who could shout louder.

Of course, voice is not just about being loud and being heard; it is also about communicating the right message. Preziosi knows a thing or two about this. “About every five years toys change completely,” he says. “If you want to stay stable in the market you have to be trendy. In 1978, girls still played with dolls when they were aged 14. Now if I gave my daughter, aged 11, a doll, she would throw it out of the window.” You have to be right on message to resonate with your fickle and ever demanding audience.

Working out the importance of voice to a customer or potential customer is not easy. I said earlier that 40% of the impression we make on people when we first meet them is due to our voice rather than our appearance. Let us assume that this figure is roughly right for business introductions. What if the impression we make for our companies is achieved in a similar way, as with Preziosi’s company, by our voice – as measured by the impression left by our sales people, our signage, our logos, our adverts, websites and the like. I leave you with a very important question – are you getting your share?

Posted in Branding, Business, Communication, Paul Hague, Thursday Night Insight |
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SegMENtational Analysis

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Cristin Malone, looking to help a friend, this week discovered how market research can help find Mr. Right.

So the other night I was on the phone with a good friend of mine and of course the discussion topic was about men. Well, more specifically, it was about all her failed relationships with men. In agony, I listened for two hours as she re-visited every single relationship she had. She started from the very beginning of her romantic history and continued until she finished talking about the current guy she is dating (who is a very attractive, rude, and not very good for her, “bad” guy). For two hours I waited, itching to share my wisdom on love, patience, and being optimistic and just when the conversation was turning to my favor, she had to go. Why? Because her current “bad” guy was calling her on the other line; figures as such. Before switching over to the other line she asked me, “how come I always get stuck in bad relationships?”

As torturous as the conversation was, I felt terrible for my friend and wanted to help her. So for a few days, I pondered and thought deeply about her dilemma. Then the market researcher in me shined through. Eureka! The solution is segmentation analysis. Immediately, I called my friend and told her my bright idea, listed as follows:

 
Even though we considered our sample fairly representative in size, it is important to note how biased our data was. Well for one thing she was providing the information on these men, and even though I asked her to be as unbiased as possible, the information was still coming from her.

So after all our hard work and two large wine bottles later, we determined that the men she dated fell into four segments (which I think may be true for most women):

 
Now with our segments complete, we turned to creating the best questions my friend could ask on her next date to identify the type of guy she was meeting. With a few more looks over the data, we came up with these five questions:

 
In the chart above you will realize we did not mention the “ummmmmm what was his name again” guy. It’s not because we forgot about him, but mostly because we figured if she is on a date and isn’t even interested in asking these questions or if she is more interested in watching the ice cubes melt in her glass of water, that mostly likely he is an “ummmmmm what was his name again” guy.

Even in its simpler form, segmentation analysis is an amazing tool! In this case it was used to weed out the guys my friend was not interested in and to identify the type of guy she wanted: a good guy. However, in most cases, we as market researchers use this tool not to get rid of the bad relationships our clients have with their customers, but to help them improve or build stronger, quality relationships with their customers. Through segmentation analysis, we as market researchers can provide deep insights to our clients on the type of customers they have and who their customers are, including each customer segment’s behavior, needs, demands, and expectations. As a result of segmentation analysis, we help clients develop effective ways to communicate to their specific customer segments as well as better ways to serve their customer base. Helping our client better serve their customers leads to higher satisfaction and loyalty towards our client from their customer base.

While segmentation analysis works wonders for our clients, I have yet to determine whether my experimental, segmentation analysis has worked for my friend. We have completed steps 1-9, but still have to test our survey. Luckily, my friend has a date coming up this weekend. Stay tuned for my Next Thursday Night Insight for the results!

Posted in Cristin Malone, Thursday Night Insight |
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Buying a House

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Mark Hedley this week realises that listening to and understanding customers’ needs is always key to making a successful sale.

The last few weeks of my life have been dominated by what has to be one of the most stress-inducing experiences one can have in life – buying a house. Having lived in rented accommodation for more than a decade, I had always dreamed of escaping my world of cheap decoration, shoddy furniture, broken boilers and dodgy landlords, and to finally have a place of my own to call home. Not only that, but with the housing market still in the doldrums, what better time for the astute first-time buyer to pick up a great house at a bargain basement price!

 
Little did I know what lay ahead of me as my wife and I drove to our first viewing on one sunny Saturday morning back in May. Having made half a dozen appointments with eager estate agents the previous day, I was sure that we’d have found the house of our dreams that very afternoon and be home in time for Final Score. With so many properties on the market, I was convinced that we’d find a fantastic property in no time and that the vendors would all be on their knees begging us to take it off their hands.

The first house we went to visit set the tone for the day. On entering the house I was overcome by a strange and powerful smell emanating from the kitchen that I couldn’t quite place. When we entered the kitchen all became clear as we saw the dripping ceiling and column of mould running from the ceiling down to the sink below. The polite gentleman showing us round the house assured us that, although the house ‘needed a bit of work’, it had ‘real potential’. Suddenly, I had entered a world of oblique euphemisms that would need decoding to know what a house was really like. Over the next few weeks I would quickly learn that houses advertised using certain phrases were best avoided, such as:

 
The next four viewings that day were almost as disheartening. Even when the house was relatively well furnished, there was usually something that let it down in our eyes. Either the rooms were too small, the location was wrong, there was no garden or the ‘newly fitted’ kitchen seemed to have been teleported from the mid 70s.

Our disappointment that day was to be repeated several times over the next few weeks, as we traipsed around weekend after weekend searching for properties that met our needs and budget limitations. By the time we finally decided on a house, we must have already viewed at least 30 or 40 different properties and inched that little bit closer to that mid-life nervous collapse. Having said that, the tedious process of house-hunting undoubtedly helped us to better refine and crystallise what type of house we were looking for, and forced us to think more carefully about what our real underlying needs were. For example, before starting hunting I had no idea that the thing I most desperately lacked in life was a fitted dishwasher rather than a slimline, and that I may well contemplate suicide if I am to go another day without a chrome-effect heated towel rail.

The whole experience also caused me to realise that fully understanding customers’ underlying needs is critical to success in any market, and especially one that is crowded with competitors and very little differentiation between suppliers. The estate agents that had now taken to harassing me on a daily basis to go and view this or that ‘fantastic little property’ seemed completely indistinguishable from one another, and despite their hard efforts none of them seemed to have properly grasped the type of property that we were looking for.

In markets where brand awareness is low and competition is fierce, fully understanding and meeting customer needs is paramount to success. In the case of buying a house, buyers do not particularly care about brand and are purely motivated by a house’s specific features and its price. Most estate agents had failed to properly appreciate our underlying requirements and had simply shown us around the houses that fell into the price range we had mentioned to begin with. Had these agents focused more on their level of service (i.e. in terms of fully understanding our needs), this would have distinguished them from the competition and would have been more likely to lead to a sale.

The house we finally decided to buy was well above our initial budget. The estate agent that eventually got the sale had only introduced us to a total of two properties. By listening to our comments when we looked around this first house and by asking the right questions, he had realised that our true needs did not revolve solely around price, and that we might be prepared to pay a slight premium for a property that satisfied our principle underlying needs. The agent had also shrewdly realised which property features we would be willing to sacrifice and what were the ‘must haves’. For example, while we were happy to forgo a garage or an open fireplace, the agent had picked up on the fact that modern decoration, proximity to public transport and a private garden were features that we couldn’t go without.

The need to properly assess and satisfy underlying customer needs runs strong in all markets, and companies should always beware of assuming that price is the only factor informing purchasing behaviour. In fact, consumer decision-making often relies on a myriad of different considerations, from product features, speed of delivery and return-on-investment through to after-sales support and customer service. For myself, although price had acted as the starting point, in the end it was the specific features of the house (such as decoration and location) that proved to be more important when making the final decision. Well, those things and that chrome-effect heated towel rail.

Posted in Mark Hedley, Thursday Night Insight |
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Spelling It Out For You

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David Ward’s Thursday Night Insight this week reminds us all about the importance of making the right impression in front of our prospective customers.

Last weekend my family and I took a short trip to Sandbach, Cheshire. My wife’s hairdresser has taken a new job at a salon there and, since it’s only a short hop over the M6 motorway, she has decided to start to frequent that salon instead of her usual haunt. Sandbach is only 10 miles from home and I felt somewhat embarrassed about the fact that, in what will soon be six years in this area, I have never visited it. On Saturday I put that right.

We arrived in Sandbach with a feeling of anticipation and interest as to what this little town had to offer. My wife and daughter attended their appointments and afterwards we (my wife, not my daughter) decided a nice cold beer in the sunshine was just what the doctor ordered, so we settled down for a refreshing drink at a very nice looking pub established in the 1600s.

With its ageing façade adorned with enormous planters festooned with colourful flowers, it really did look a picture. This was a place full of character in the heart of all that was happening in the town that day, including a bustling farmers’ market. It was also a place that was home to a simple slice of marketing. A sign by the door hoped to entice passersby into the pub by declaring that they should “Come and relax in our beautifull secret garden.” Now call me an old-fashioned chap but unless the spelling of “beautiful” that was used dates back to the 1600s and the original owner is still running the place, I find this kind of simple error unacceptable. Did the owner not read the sign before it was displayed? Doesn’t he care? If he doesn’t care about what is presented outside his pub, what else doesn’t he care about?

Sometime later on that same day…

Just by chance (and I’ll explain the link to my initial ramblings shortly), my daughter attended a local carnival with my wife and, with pocket money burning a hole in (not surprisingly) her pocket, she (my daughter, not my wife) set about spending it. At six, she’s not quite a shopaholic yet but she did seem to enjoy the experience. This is what she bought:

1. 3 rides on a bouncy slide (likely to cause burnt flesh unless properly covered)
2. 1 imitation snake on a stick
3. 1 plastic hairdresser toy pack brought to our fair isle by a Chinese company
4. 1 large bag of sweets

Item number 3 is where this becomes relevant. On the front of the packet we were informed that the toy was “design for Childrenall. Are fangled and in the high quality welcome you use our product.”

“Huh?” I hear you ask.

Well, that was my initial thought too. On two separate occasions on the same day I had my Thursday Night (or should that be Saturday afternoon?) Insight sewn up. And here’s the punch line, so to speak…

Sometimes there is very little to distinguish between products, companies or services. One simple thing that can be done is to avoid making your offering stand out for the wrong reason. It can be the small things that make the difference between success and failure. Don’t let something as simple as poor presentation of messages, communications, or an eye for the finer details be one of them.

Think about what sort of impression you leave with your prospective customer. If you don’t care about the details of spelling and grammar, what else don’t you care about? Potential customers will ask themselves whether their needs will be treated in the same lackadaisical way. I’m sure most businesses do care about this kind of detail but I’m convinced that over time it’s gradually getting worse and worse. Don’t fall into the same trap and don’t underestimate the impression given through a lazy use of language.

Posted in David Ward, Thursday Night Insight |
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