Following up with my last post, after Prof. Christensen spoke, there was a Marketing Breakout Session to discuss his ideas. The focus – sometimes listening to your customers can lead you down the wrong path. The panelists all offered interesting anecdotes about their current and previous employers.
For instance, Chas Hermann of Commerce Bank discussed how Commerce reacted differently from its competitors. Rather than focus on online and atm banking, Commerce introduced the idea of banking at their offices on Sundays, an action that was unheard of – practically taboo – among other banks. They also introduced free coin counting through their Penny arcade and give out prizes for people that can guess how much money they have in coins. Their focus is to make banking personable – to get to know and understand their clients – rather than drive them online or to the atm.
Professor Tony Di Benedetto (who I took a class with when completing my MBA at Temple’s Fox School) clarified that there’s a misconception in marketing – that you shouldn’t blindly follow whatever whims and demands customers are making, but look at the opportunity and ask if you can do it profitably. In addition, customers may not know what they want. When they say “no” – that they aren’t interested in the idea of your product or service now – it doesn’t mean that it won’t appeal to them sometime in the future. Whenever you get such a response, you have to look at what “no” actually means.
Carolina Lobo of Aramark added that in her job, what the client wants vs. what the end user wants can be two separate things. Aramark provides food for school lunches, and she sees her main competitor as kids brown bagging it. So, you have parents who want their kids to eat well, and school administration chiming in about what kids should be eating, but ultimately, the kids decide what they are going to buy and eat – and it probably won’t be what mom hopes they’ll be eating.
In another instance, Ruby Tuesday heard from its customers that they wanted more nutritional information readily available. Initially, they put the info on the tables so if people were interested, they could check it out. However, once they stuck the nutritional info on the menus, the results were disastrous. Customers hated it – although they had previously mentioned this is what they’d like.
And, of course, there’s the biggest marketing failure of the 20th century: New Coke. Coca-Cola decided to revise its cola formula to compete with Pepsi, who in the late 70s proved that in blind taste tests, consumers preferred Pepsi to Coke. So Coke created its new formula that beat Pepsi hands down in blind taste tests, and within 3 months of launch, had to completely retract the product and go back to the old formula due to customer outrage.
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