B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

It’s interesting reading about large consumer brands and their various methodologies for consumer research as it relates to new product development. In the consumables business, P&G is the heavyweight and is the pinnacle of research with their expertise in identifying the products that resonate with consumers. They also have manufacturing and distribution dialed in which makes them the “ideal” that many manufacturing-driven organizations aspire to be like.

Then there’s Apple. Their products are generally always innovative and meet some consumer unmet need so well that people literally fall in love with their brand and products they pump out each and every year. Yes, there have been some duds (the Cube is one that comes to mind), but it doesn’t happen often.

To research or not to research?
In a recent article from Fortune, Steve Jobs is quoted:

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

I found this to be fascinating. How can one of the most popular and successful consumer brands not perform any consumer research? Then I read the following quote:

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ “

Keep it simple, stupid
When one sits back and thinks about it, Apple really makes products people want. There’s no real convincing that needs to happen as to why they they need an iPhone or iPod — people just get it. The features offered on Apple’s products are such “no brainers” that it’s an obvious purchase the consumer wants…or rather, needs to make.

All Apple really needs to do with virtually any of its products is build awareness (which they are excellent at doing) and let the product do the work. They don’t have ads or commercials explaining why a “touch screen” iPhone is better than a standard cell phone. They simply show the sexy design, a few things that it can do, and people are hooked — they just get it.

What if you can’t keep it simple?
When your product can’t do this and you find yourself listing feature/benefit statements in every piece of marketing collateral, you know you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you. Find that one thing that if a consumer sees it, they’ll just get it and be sold on your product.

So, let’s go out and quit doing research, right?
Apple’s product portfolio is about 30 products (which is incredible for a $30 billion company), so they can be very focused on things they are good at. Other companies do not have such luxuries and simply do not have the bandwidth to be consumer experts in every single product line.

Usability studies for your website
The same can be said for websites, too. Sometimes, while online marketers and designers have the best intentions for site design, it does need to be tested and researched outside “the four walls” of the company to get real-world feedback. As sites scale, it’s hard to keep your head wrapped around every single page, link, and graphic on the site. This is where usability studies come into play.

Usability studies are great for two reasons:

1. They expose the huge gaps or even little intricacies that you may have overseen during the development stages. Better to capture these gaps now and fix them before rolling out features on a wide scale.
2. Sometimes you need the validation from consumers about satisfaction ratings on the site — often a point that needs to be used in a supporting argument for convincing upper management or potential customers that the site design, user interface, and/or information architecture is favored by consumers.

Sometimes you need consumer insights and market research to “sell” your ideas internally
Apple has the luxury of a CEO that understands the art behind product development and views things from a consumer standpoint. But it looks like he can also squash a project in its tracks without any consumer insights — making a new product launch vulnerable to his own opinions. For the most part, Apple has been very successful with this model.

In other businesses, this is often not the case, and a website can be driven in a direction that can be misguided by upper management who may not “get” web design, navigation, and information architecture. Usability studies and consumer insights can be a powerful tool for not only consumers, but for you when “selling” the site internally.

I’m happy to announce that Levolor.com has finally left the realm of being in “beta.” We ran the site in its beta form for a little over 6 months and just rolled the first round of updates and fixes (since leaving beta) to the site last week. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

New Products Added:

As we begin to expand our web presence, we are also beginning to add our full line of products to the website (though only custom blinds & shades may be purchased online). “Blinds, Shades, & Drapery Hardware” is the tagline under the logo on the website and you can now find all of this product information under the “products” tab on the website.

New Product Page Layouts:

We’ve also updated our product pages to reflect the content and end-user experience found in our in-store sample books. This combines beautiful room scene photography with nice, large pictures of product options, and best of all, videos to help describe product options.

Online Store

Our online store now features all of our custom blinds and shades. During our beta period, we only offered a limited selection of products.

What was learned during the beta period
I’m normally opposed to plastering “BETA” across the heading of a website because it’s become more a buzz word than anything in the online industry. Everything seems to be launched in Beta and because it’s in Beta, it gets more hype from online bugs for one reason or another. That being said, I’m glad we did it because end-users were more understanding if something went wrong on the website during the beta period. I was actually surprised to see how many consumers shopping for our products mention the “Beta” moniker in their comments.

Consumers are browsing online first
What we didn’t expect was a backlash from consumers who couldn’t find all of our product information online. Even though we don’t sell a large portion of our products on our website, it didn’t seem to matter — consumers wanted the information on the site. This is not necessarily specific to us but is really a trend in consumer shopping habits across the board. Not everyone goes online to purchase, they are going online to research so they can be educated before they purchase.

Consumers are arming themselves with information (because the store associate doesn’t have the knowledge)
In our retail channels (big box stores), store associates are hard to come by and they are not always experts in the area of the store you happen to flag them down in (ever grabbed the “electrical guy” at Home Depot who happened to be passing through the patio furniture display?). Being armed with full product information and narrowing down your options between one or two final products that you’d like to take a look at in store before purchasing seems to be the trend these days.

This really comes as no surprise as my wife and I do the same thing. Recently we purchased a Dyson vacuum, researched it on the Dyson website, and went to Best Buy (retail store) to close the purchase after we compared two models in the store. Naturally, the “car audio manager” helped us and did nothing more than read the description of the product off of the box as we asked questions about the two models we were interested in. About all he was good for was helping with the honoring of the online price from bestbuy.com (which was cheaper than the in-store price).

Beta launches are a Good Thing
Despite my reservations about jumping on the Beta bandwagon, the Beta period helped us understand more of what consumers were looking for on our website and this has fueled the online effort. I would recommend releasing a site in “Beta” if it encompasses major changes for consumers — they’ll be understanding and will be a bit more candid if they run across a problem or frustration. The general public is becoming more familiar with what “Beta” means.

Next steps for Levolor.com
While I won’t outline the roadmap for Levolor.com, I’ll continue to post updates as we make major updates to the site. For now, we’ll just focus on incremental improvements now that all of our custom blinds and shades are available online for sale.

Being very heavily involved in consumer insights, online surveys, and consumer opinions, I take interest in seeing how other companies are performing their data collection to improve their websites. We’ve recently launched the OpinionLab service. Mens’Health is partnering with Keynote to facilitate their online evaluation of the menshealth.com website.

What I found disappointing with the opening e-mail is the following message: “Study will work best if you…use IE Web browser (Firefox has unpredictable results).” See the image below for reference:

Naturally, I have several opinions about this e-mail:

1. Consumers don’t associate IE with Internet Explorer. This is web developer or web marketing speak. The average consumer will have no idea what #1 means in the above e-mail.
2. “Firefox has unpredictable results” is not what I would lead with in any e-mail. If the application in which you want consumers to evaluate your site does not even work in their browser, then partner with another vendor who can provide a tool that is compatible with your audience’s preferred web browsers.
3. The assumption that visitors ALL use Windows and can readily access Internet Explorer (oh I’m sorry, “IE”) is another bad assumption. I am a Mac user and always hated these types of assumptions because it directly affects my ability to participate in a site/survey. I want my opinion heard, but if you don’t provide me with an alternate means to submit my feedback, then you’re not doing your customers any favors.

I clicked on the “click here to start” link and instead of being presented with “unpredictable results,” they flat-out deny access to the survey if Firefox is detected:

So basically, Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher and Windows 98 through Windows XP are compatible. IE 5 and Win98? No Firefox or Safari support? “Windows Vista support is on the way?”

Use Web Analytics to Justify Limiting the Compatibility of Your Web Applications
Use your web analytics packages to determine what the share of your visitors is in terms of the operating systems and web browsers they use. Make sure your online survey application works with your demographic. Firefox and Safari users account for 23% of visitors to SuperMotors.net. On Levolor.com they account for 16%. Those are very large percentages to be simply disregarding because you’ve partnered with the wrong vendor.

Moral of the Story
Browser and operating system specific websites are a product of the 1990’s. It’s 2007. Time to build web applications or partner with vendors who understand today’s web user by accommodating multiple browser types and not alienating them for choices they make. Additionally, with the way the user is instructed to use IE instead of Firefox makes it sound like it’s the user’s fault for choosing an unpredictable browsing platform. You should never speak to your customers like this — don’t imply fault or incompatibility in decisions your customer has made. You must adapt to them, they should not have to adapt to you!

Last week we implemented the OpinionLab real-time feedback/rating tool on Levolor.com. I can’t tell you how helpful it’s been in just 1 week of usage.

OpinionLab hosts a real-time survey/feedback tool which most of us recognize as the little spinning icon in the lower right-hand corner of some websites:

When the above icon is clicked on our site, it spawns a new window with a comment card like this:

This is simply a generic comment card that we have running site-wide. The consumer can optionally fill out as much or as little information as possible and even provide open-ended feedback in the comments field. OpinionLabs then stores this data on their server, logs the consumer’s web browser, operating system, browser resolution, their responses, and the specific URL the comment was submitted on.

Keep your finger on the pulse of visitor satisfaction with your website
Over time, this information can be tabulated to gauge the satisfaction from a site-wide perspective, section perspective, or individual page perspective. At first, I was skeptical that consumers would actually use this feature, but they have been, and the feedback is outstanding. There is nothing quite like getting real-time feedback from consumers about all aspects of your website.

Accessibility and ease of use are critical
When feedback/comment cards are easily accessible, website visitors are much more inclined to use them. This is an important takeaway that I think web marketers often forget. Accessibility and ease-of-use are important factors for anything, not just comment cards: think e-mail marketing (being able to forward a newsletter to a friend), photos and videos (making it easy to send the photo/video to a friend), and sharing articles (again, being able to send a note to a friend quickly from the webpage, and not just copying and pasting the URL in an e-mail).

Real-time feedback is where it’s at.
I’m convinced that this is where all websites need to be at if they want to continue to improve and offer any value to their consumers. Instead of sending out a survey once or twice per year and making huge, sweeping changes, real-time feedback allows you to test incremental changes and get feedback instantly from site visitors. CNN.com has released a beta of their website which contains rather drastic changes, but they’ve also implemented the OpinionLab tool to be able to collect all feedback regarding the beta:

This post over at Brand Story got me thinking about how similar this topic is to strategic inflection points (from Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove). I work in an industry where competition from product imports (from China) are a serious threat to our business. The discounts at which their products are sold are very challenging to compete with. Fortunately, we think we have disruptive innovations in the works, but reading the post at Brand Story really got me excited — primarily because what we’ve got coming up over the next couple years is really exciting, and we’re doing it right. There are however, downsides to new innovations that must be taken into consideration, namely tunnel vision.

Fortunately for our industry, competing profitably at much lower costs is not the end-all, be-all of business strategy. Driving costs down is certainly always top-of-mind when competing with imports and when dealing with retailers who private-label imported products to directly compete with your brand-name products. At the end of the day however, and this may be the case for several other industries, you’ve got an industry with a plethora of products and brands, all similarly priced, but giving the consumer serious information overload and confusion (ever tried shopping for blinds and shades in a retail store? ).

Avoiding tunnel vision: Consumer insights are your friend!
Disruptive Innovations, while game-changers, cannot get away from the fact that consumers still need to understand how to shop your category and ultimately make a decision to buy. A lot of new product development may lead to tunnel vision — being so focused on that great new feature, huge cost savings, adopting a “me too” product (playing “catch-up” to other competitor innovations), or a new type of product altogether, that sometimes the “big picture” is lost for consumers.

Tunnel vision is really hard to see while you’re in development mode. You may begin to see it after the product is ready for consumer testing and you are able to take a moment and step back from the nitty-gritty and see just how consumers respond to what you think is an innovation. From a web development standpoint, it’s very easy to get lost in the cool, new features of a website and completely forget that the consumer must actually find their way to your site at first, be aware of the new technology, and know how to navigate to this area of your site.

Don’t forget the marketing
Worse yet, consumers may respond quite well to the innovation itself during the consumer insights session, giving you the reinforcement you’d be hoping for — but your innovation may tank in the marketplace. The branding, marketing, advertising, and/or overall awareness will help bring your disruptive innovation to its full potential.

Sometimes, this is the most critical component. You may have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, or it’s buried in an aisle of other similarly confusing products, then you’re back to square one. Don’t forget to think “big picture” when it comes to consumers — it’s very easy to get lost in the industry competitiveness. Consumers insights and evaluating all aspects of the innovation are critical to success. This applies to many businesses, not just manufacturing companies — web companies are just as guilty (Google is a major offender: I just discovered Google Browser Sync, nearly a 1-year old product and I love it! But where’s the marketing for it?).