Author: Min Tang

Categories
Social Marketing

The Psychology Of Colors In Marketing

Do you feel serenely calm when surrounded by green fields and blue skies? Have you ever wondered what the color red represents and why you feel slightly alarmed when staring at a stop sign? Those are just two of the many effects color has on the human psyche. It’s all part of a study referred to as the psychology of color.

What is the Psychology of Color?

Color psychology studies how different colors determine human behavior. The psychology of color is used in advertising and marketing to evoke emotional reactions. That sounds simple at first blush, but there’s a lot to unpack in that statement.

Before we look at how color meaning affects human behavior (and how certain colors elicit different reactions), let’s take a quick journey through the history of color.

In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton observed sunlight passing through a glass prism and how the light was reflected into various colors. He identified initially six wavelength shades: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. He later added indigo, according to Wikipedia.

But color psychology predates Newton’s time by thousands of years going back to the Egyptians. They studied color’s effect on mood and used color to accomplish holistic benefits.

More recently, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called color the “mother tongue of the subconscious.” His psychological studies led him to develop art therapy. He believed that self-expression through images and colors could help patients recover from trauma or distress.

Have you noticed how colors go in and out of style? In the 1970s, earth tones were popular but gave way in the 80s to turquoise and mauve. Later, pinks and blue-grays came on the scene.

For example, look at the TV series Mad Men, which ran from 2007 to 2015, but whose fictional time frame ran from March 1960 to November 1970. Viewers may recall how color palettes changed over the years. The muted browns and grays of the Eisenhower era succumbed to the bold shades of chartreuse, persimmon, and banana yellow of the late 60s.

How Do Colors in Marketing Influence People?

Color meaning and the psychology of colors can powerfully impact people’s behavior and decision-making. People make subconscious judgments about a person, environment, or product within a few seconds or minutes. Color plays into this initial impression.

That fact is not lost on brands and advertisers. They know certain colors, tints, hues, and shades evoke emotion and move people to action. This effect is both subtle and powerful.

Through their choice of color in logos, packaging, signage, and advertising, brands can influence consumers to buy on impulse, or choose their product or service over a competitor’s.

Think about your favorite brands and how certain colors predominate. Do their logos sport bright red like Target or Netflix? Or are you a person who likes the colors black and white like Nike? Perhaps you prefer yellow and are drawn to Best Buy or Subway.

Color can often be the sole reason someone purchases a product. Research conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo found that 93 percent of buyers focus on visual appearance. And close to 85 percent claim color is a primary reason when they make a purchase!

Let’s take a look at color meaning as it applies to marketing, including the best colors to use. We will also evaluate meaning of colors and examples of branding colors.

Red Color Psychology

The color red creates a sense of urgency, suitable for clearance sales. It also encourages appetite. Thus it is frequently used by fast-food chains. The color physically stimulates the body, raising blood pressure and heart rate. It is associated with movement, excitement, and passion. It gets people to act and is important for call-to-action buttons, for example, on a website.

McDonald’s chooses the high-energy color red (combined with yellow), which appeals to children, kindles appetites, and creates a sense of urgency. This tactic has been great for Micky D’s. It might not have been the same ridiculously big chain it is today without using the color so effectively. Red is all about emotions and passion, which is how McDonald’s wants you to feel about its products. Remember the McDonald’s advertising campaign, “Loving it.”

Target provides another example of the use of the color. Its logo, one of the most widely recognized symbols in North America, grabs customers’ attention. It creates the idea of excitement in shopping there, and the urgency to purchase the brand’s great deals or latest, trendiest merchandise.

Green Color Psychology

This color is associated with health, tranquility, power and nature. It is used in stores to relax customers and promote environmental issues. It stimulates harmony in your brain and encourages a balance leading to decisiveness.

Starbucks is a major global brand that uses this color scheme. Green shows that Starbucks hopes to promote a sense of relaxation in its cafes, inviting customers to come in for a coffee break during a stressful day.

John Deere is another company that uses the color in its branding. This makes sense because the brand is associated with farming and agriculture. John Deere’s color branding is immediately recognizable on its machine in a field or back yard.

Whole Foods also incorporates the color in its logo. The brand is associated with health and nature and prides itself on high-quality, natural, and organic products. In fact, wholesomeness is the very essence of what the company stands for.

Interestingly, BP also uses the color, whether intentionally or not, associating it with the environment.

How to Use the Psychology of Colors When Marketing [SmallBizTrends]

Categories
Human Resource

Rethinking The On-Demand Workforce

In this era of chronic skills shortages, rapid automation, and digital transformation, companies are confronting a growing talent problem, one that has the potential to become a strategic bottleneck. How can they find people with the right skills to do the right work at just the right time? The half-life of skills is shrinking fast, and many jobs now come and go in a matter of years. Not only that, but major demographic changes are under way: Boomers are aging out of the workforce, and Millennials and Gen Z are taking over, bringing with them very different priorities about who should do what work—and where, when, and how it should get done.

To help companies address these challenges, a new generation of talent platforms—such as Catalant, InnoCentive, Kaggle, Toptal, and Upwork—has emerged. In contrast to Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and TaskRabbit, these platforms offer on-demand access to highly skilledworkers, and our research shows that their number has risen substantially since 2009, from roughly 80 to more than 330. Much of that growth took place during the past five years alone. Today almost all Fortune 500 companies use one or more of them.

Platforms that provide workers who have four-year college degrees or advanced degrees represent an increasingly important but understudied element of the emerging gig economy. To better understand this phenomenon, we undertook a survey of nearly 700 U.S. businesses that use them. We then conducted in-depth interviews with many corporate leaders whose companies are relying on the platforms and with platform founders and executives.

That companies are leveraging high-skills platforms in large numbers came as no surprise to us, because in recent years we’ve seen how they can increase labor force flexibility, accelerate time to market, and enable innovation. We were impressed, however, by the variety of engagements that companies are making with the platforms. They’re seeking help with projects that are short- and long-term, tactical and strategic, specialized and general. What’s more, 90% of the leaders we surveyed—C-suite and frontline—believe these platforms will be core to their ability to compete in the future.

But here’s what did surprise us: Despite the extent to which companies are now turning to such platforms, very few firms have developed a cohesive organization-wide approach to their use. Instead, operational frontline leaders who are desperate to get things done have been reaching out to them on an ad hoc basis, often without any central guidance. This approach is costly, inefficient, and opaque.

To compete in the years ahead, companies must do better. They’ll have to acknowledge and embrace the full potential of digital talent platforms—which is to say, figure out how to engage strategically with what you might call the on-demand workforce.

Though millions of workers were laid off this past spring, in the coming months employers will begin to rehire—and when they do, they’ll need to be more purposeful about their approach to talent. How can they access hard-to-find expertise? Which positions or roles have changed, and what new capabilities are required? What work can be done more successfully and efficiently by skilled freelancers? In an environment of ongoing uncertainty, employers will be even more attracted to the freelance route for a variety of reasons: It makes hiring easier for hard-to-fill jobs, offers access to a wider set of skills, reduces head count, and allows more flexibility during times of change.

In this article we’ll take stock of where most companies now stand on this front. We’ll show how some pioneers are speeding ahead to take advantage of what the new talent platforms have to offer, and we’ll explain how you and your management team can do the same.

The Maturing Gig Ecosystem

As the gig economy has grown, three kinds of platforms have emerged:

Marketplaces for premium talent.

These platforms, which include Toptal and Catalant, allow companies to easily source high-end niche experts—anybody from big-data scientists to strategic project managers and even interim CEOs and CFOs. Toptal, for example, claims it culls the “top 3%” of freelancers from across the globe. Experts might be hired for strategic initiatives or embedded in teams, and the projects they’re assigned to can range in length from a few hours to more than a year. The Covid-19 crisis is increasingly turning companies toward this kind of platform: Consider that this past spring Catalant reported a 250% increase in demand for supply chain expertise. (Full disclosure: Coauthor Joseph Fuller is an adviser to Catalant’s board of directors.)

Marketplaces for freelance workers.

These platforms, which include Upwork, Freelancer, and 99designs, match individuals with companies for discrete task-oriented projects—designing a logo, say, or translating a legal document. For example, when Amazon wanted to explore creating custom social-media content for its new TV shows, it tested the waters with Tongal, which connects companies to individuals with media know-how. Many freelance platforms offer access to workers from around the world with a wide variety of skills, and payment is often per completed task. Covid-19 is accelerating the move toward these platforms, too: As large swaths of society began working remotely, Upwork saw a spike in demand for digital marketing expertise from companies trying to reach consumers in their homes.

Platforms for crowdsourcing innovation.

These platforms, which include InnoCentive and Kaggle, allow companies to post problems among large communities of technically sophisticated users—and reach a far broader base of them than could ever be found or developed in-house. The challenges run the gamut from simple coding projects to complex engineering dilemmas. Working with the platforms, companies often create competitions and offer prizes for the best solutions. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration, for example, ran a $1.5 million competition on Kaggle to help improve the algorithms that predict threats using images from airport scanning equipment. Enel, the Italian multinational energy company, uses multiple crowdsourcing platforms to generate ideas for a host of issues: how to improve recruiting, how to mitigate cybersecurity risks, and even what to do with defunct thermal plants. And the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has turned to InnoCentive’s “solvers” to develop molecules used in genetic research and testing.

The Growing Supply

Millions of well-qualified Americans today are attracted to contract work. Freelancers are now estimated to make up roughly a third of the U.S. workforce, and those who are highly skilled represent a small but growing slice of it. And for the first time since 2014, the number of freelancers who say they consider gig work to be a long-term career choice is the same as the number who consider it a temporary way to make money. Early signs suggest that Covid-19 will also speed up this shift.

Much of the shift is the result of demographic changes that have been under way for four or five decades but that traditional organizations have done little to recognize or address. There are at least four key trends:

Care responsibilities.

Single-parent and sandwich-generation families are on the rise. Burdened with childcare and eldercare, many employees are dropping out of the workforce or struggling to manage full-time jobs. Gigs allow them the flexibility to handle their family obligations while delivering quality work.

Female employment.

Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force has been declining steadily since 2000. Highly skilled, experienced women who take time off to have children and for other life events are finding it difficult to restart their careers or are seeing themselves get sidetracked in traditional organizations. According to a 2009 Center for Work-Life Policy survey, more than two-thirds of “highly qualified” women—that is, those with advanced degrees or high-honors BAs—who drop out of the workforce would not have done so if they’d had access to more-flexible job arrangements. Online talent platforms allow them to more smoothly reenter the workforce and advance their careers.

The aging of America.

Workers who are laid off or edged out of traditional firms once they hit their fifties often find that talent platforms offer them a way to continue to use their skills and experience—while maintaining satisfying work/life balance. Given that by 2030 one in five Americans will be older than 65, talent platforms expect that experienced workers with hard-to-find skills will flock to their fold.

The Millennial ascendancy.

Millennials, who are already the largest generational cohort in the workforce, tend to be tech-savvy and to prefer to work for themselves rather than for traditional organizations. They want more autonomy and control over their job security than previous generations had.

Early Lessons

In studying how talent platforms are being used, we’ve identified three areas where companies have consistently found platforms most useful:

Labor force flexibility.

When the head of technology at the PGA, Kevin Scott, found himself frustrated by the need to constantly improve and upgrade the organization’s digital capabilities and offerings despite a lack of in-house digital talent, he partnered with Upwork to quickly engage software engineers to generate and develop promising ideas. Using Upwork, the PGA was able to get projects started and finished considerably faster than before.

Time to market.

Many managers have turned to talent platforms to fast-track processes, meet deliverables, and ensure outcomes. When Anheuser-Busch InBev wanted to quickly expand into new, disruptive products, it realized that despite having a workforce of 150,000, it needed outside help. By tapping into Catalant, the company was able to rapidly get consumer data analyzed and find experts to help roll out products like kombucha tea and spiked seltzer. Similarly, when Matt Collier, a senior director at Prudential PLC, was on a tight deadline to overhaul the training given to insurance agents in Singapore, he turned to Toptal to find designers and other talent that could help him create course materials quickly—and ended up getting the job done for less than it would have cost with traditional vendors.

Business model innovation.

Digital talent platforms can also help companies reinvent the way they deliver value. In 2015, when Enel made the strategic choice to embrace the United Nations’ 2030 sustainable development goals and build new businesses around them, it engaged the services of several crowdsourcing platforms, among them InnoCentive, which alone gave Enel access to more than 400,000 of its highly skilled problem-solvers worldwide.

Overcoming Resistance

In our survey, C-suite executives in particular seemed to envision a future reliance on talent platforms: Half thought it “highly possible” that their core workforce (permanent full-time employees) would be much smaller in the years to come, and two-thirds told us they expected to increasingly “rent,” “borrow,” or “share” talent to meet specialized needs.

Why, then, have so few companies designed strategic approaches to working with talent platforms? Because the structures and processes that most organizations have in place have been designed expressly to protect them from external vendors, much as white blood cells protect our bodies from pathogens. If companies want to work successfully with digital platforms, they need new structures and processes that function as immunosuppressants.

That’s a major change, and many vice presidents and directors are worried about the practical implications of embracing it. Integrating an on-demand workforce into a firm’s strategic core, they recognize, means questioning and redesigning every aspect of the organization. For managers already in the throes of a digital transformation, the prospect of taking on another massive project is hardly appealing.

To get the most out of talent platforms, companies need to break work down into rigorously defined components that can be easily handed over to outsiders. Managers can’t be vague.

But a digital transformation requires a talent transformation. The two go hand in hand. Company leaders understand this. Nearly two-thirds of our survey respondents reported that “understanding the digital skills needed for the future” had been a top priority for them in the previous three years. The very nature of work changes with more technology and automation, as does a company’s ability to find the skills needed to do that work. Online talent platforms provide a way to develop that ability rapidly and with much less effort.

Engineering the Talent Transformation

To engage with the on-demand workforce at a strategic level, companies will need to focus on five main challenges:

Reshaping the culture.

When a company decides to turn core functions over to freelance workers, permanent employees often feel threatened. They struggle with sharing information, raise doubts about the values and work habits of outsiders, and assume the worst. That’s what happened when NASA began using crowdsourcing platforms to generate innovative ideas: The organization’s engineers began to worry about their job security and question their professional identities. As one employee put it, his colleagues were not used to saying, “Hey, we have a problem and we don’t know how to solve it. Can you help?”

Often, the strongest opposition comes from employees who have the least exposure to high-skills talent platforms. The members of Enel’s leadership team saw this when they decided to seek external innovation help. Pushback came not just from the rank and file but also from senior leaders who were nervous about the message this approach would send. Was turning to freelancers a sign of weakness? Did it signal that the leadership team lacked confidence in the permanent staff? But with some careful attention to cultural change, the company managed to overcome that resistance. Instead of allowing employees to fear the unknown, Enel focused on educating employees about how they could benefit from an on-demand workforce. According to Ernesto Ciorra, the company’s chief “innovability” officer, the first step was to help all full-timers understand that they could use talent platforms to tap a powerful new source of strength. (“Innovability” is Enel’s term for innovation plus sustainability.) “We had to become humbler,” Ciorra told us, noting how important it was to recognize that at times “the best ideas lay outside the company.”

Rethinking the employee value proposition.

Companies need to get employees to see how they personally can benefit from talent platforms. That’s what one private equity firm did when it rolled out plans to collaborate with Upwork. According to Hayden Brown, Upwork’s CEO, the message the firm sent its employees was “This is a way to help you. There are a lot of things that you may be doing in your day-to-day work that you can offload so that you can do even higher-order work or free yourself up to do more strategic thinking.”

However, as more teams include full-time and gig employees, working norms will have to change. Full-time employees will often need to step into coach and “connector” roles—asking questions of outside colleagues, identifying discrete pieces of work for external partners, and making it possible for gig workers to tap institutional knowledge. Full-time and gig employees will also have to learn how to work productively across dispersed, often remote teams. They’ll have to become adept at collaborating with a revolving set of teammates, articulating previously tacit team norms, and making progress easy for everybody to track. Companies will have to base promotion incentives for managers on outcomes attained rather than full-time employees overseen. Some talent platforms have already created tools—available through their enterprise agreements—that can help companies with these sorts of transitions.

Reorganizing work into components.

One of the biggest predictors of whether a company will get the most out of a talent-platform partnership is how well it can break work down into rigorously defined components that can be easily handed over to outsiders. Most companies haven’t focused on this, because in traditional workplaces, managers can afford to be vague when making assignments. They know that everybody on the project team will be interacting so frequently that they’ll be able to clarify goals and make course corrections over time. But when companies use talent platforms, they have to provide much more up-front definition. Enel learned this lesson quickly when it adopted its open-innovation approach. As Ciorra told us, “You can’t just say, ‘I need something useful for my renewable-energy problem.’ Instead, you have to be specific: ‘I need to reduce the usage of X when I do Y in Z context.’” Only after employees started providing this kind of clarity in crowdsourcing appeals did the company begin getting the help it needed.

Reassessing capabilities.

To engage strategically with talent platforms, companies need to develop a portfolio approach to skills. The first step is to understand which capabilities they have in-house, of course. Unilever uses the services of a company called Degreed, which allows employees to develop and certify their expertise in specific areas with so-called microcredentials. The employees get recognition for their know-how and understand exactly which skills they need to acquire to advance; the company benefits because it can now identify which skills the organization already has and who possesses them.

Once the company has mapped internal capabilities, it can prepare for step two: striking the right balance when dividing work up internally and externally. That’s something Royal Dutch Shell tackled after identifying an urgent need to generate new revenue through digital and services growth. Using a cloud-based platform called Opportunity Hub that it already had in place, Shell was quickly able to assess the areas where it had the talent to speed toward its strategic goals and where it lacked the right skills. Soon it realized that it had shortfalls in key areas such as digitization and the internet of things—and that it didn’t have the time to find and hire the right people. To get working immediately on projects in these areas, Shell partnered with Catalant.

Rewiring organizational policies and processes.

This can be surprisingly difficult, as Collier discovered when he tried to bring in Toptal to help Prudential revamp thousands of training slides. A new mindset and a different way of working were necessary. “To adapt our initial contract for freelancers,” Collier told us, “we had to navigate a number of necessary processes, including due diligence, intellectual property, technology risk, antibribery, even anti-money-laundering.” To get the talent he urgently needed, Collier positioned working with Toptal as an experiment and persuaded stakeholders to give it a try. That paid off. Today, Prudential has a standard service agreement with the platform, and Collier readily leverages it for design and other types of skilled work.

A major challenge for companies that want to harness the on-demand workforce is that they’re still subject to regulations and practices that evolved in the predigital era. At Unilever, for example, one struggle was figuring out how to pay freelancers from digital platforms. According to Adfer Muzaffar, a former Unilever senior manager for talent and learning, “Freelancers are accustomed to immediate payment on the platforms via a credit card. But we had longer payment terms, and credit card payment was not an option. We wanted to be able to track who we paid, what we were paying for, what was the quality of work, whether the rates offered were competitive compared to our local costs. So we had to find solutions so that our internal mechanisms and processes could support this new way of working.”

Talent transformations are often easier than they might seem. That’s because many companies have people on staff who already have a wealth of experience with talent platforms—the managers who have used them on an ad hoc basis. These people can provide valuable guidance.

Ultimately, however, to bring about change on the scale needed to innovate new business models, companies will have to appoint a leader to explore how online workforce platforms can unlock new sources of value. This has to be somebody from the C-suite. It might be the CTO, the CMO, the CFO, or the CHRO—we’ve seen successful examples of each.

In the end, of course, it’s not titles that matter. It’s finding leaders who understand their companies’ strategic positioning, who recognize the revolutionary potential of engaging with the on-demand workforce, and who can inspire a cultural shift in their organizations that will make a genuine transformation possible.

Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce [HarvardBusinessReview]

Categories
Business Trends

Paid Social Marketing For Small Businesses

There are two kinds of social marketing: organic and paid. With audience demographics and interests becoming more diverse than ever, paid social marketing is an efficient way to target customers with demographics and interests that align with your business. It’s considered best practice to invest in social marketing at least in the beginning stages of your business, because it helps get the ball rolling. Below are five action steps for a successful paid social marketing campaign.

Decide on a realistic budget

A good marketing campaign yields the highest possible Return On Investment (ROI) or, in marketing terms, Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS). Determine your monthly budget to go towards paid social marketing. How much should you spend on marketing? Generally speaking, small to medium-sized businesses put aside 10 to 15 percent of the earnings for marketing expenses.

The devil is in the details

You should be able to set detailed perimeters, especially if local targeting is integral to your business. How detailed is the audience demographic specifications on the ad platform of your choice? In terms of local targeting, is your ad range specific enough to target only the areas your business covers?

Find out whether you can narrow down the geographic location settings. For example, if you run a dry cleaning business in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it doesn’t really make sense to include people who live in the Upper East Side in your local targeting.

Similarly, interest targeting alone could lead to a meaningless campaign. For example, if you run a cafe in New York, it serves no purpose for someone who actively interacts with coffee contents but lives in Los Angeles to see your ad.

First determine whether local targeting is essential to your business. If it is, you should be able to specify the target to cover only your primary area of business. You might need granular targeting to make this possible.

Identify who contributes to actual sales

Which segment of your customer demographics contributes to sales the most? Is it men in their twenties or women in their thirties? Does your data show any correlation between sales and customers’ location–urban vs. rural? Demographic analysis is a must to understand the audience and launch a successful paid social campaign.

Choose the right space

Find the optimal advertising media for your business. Is your product or service most popular on Instagram? Instagram requires visual representation of your business, which means you need to have resources to design images. Choose the right media with your business’s appeal point and resource allocation in mind. For instance, Facebook and Instagram require a lot of graphic designing and occasional videoediting. If you’re unsure where to start, social listening tools like Hootsuite is a great place to get to know the different social networks.

Measure success with social media KPIs

This is especially relevant to Online to Offline (O2O) businesses. Even with high impressions, engagement and click-through rate of an ad, there’s no way to find out just how much the ad has contributed to actual store visits and sales. The only way to find out the efficiency of social ads is to ask the visitors how they heard about your business, especially whether they’ve heard from your paid advertising source. Identify the percentage of sales that comes from paid social marketing so that you can set your KPIs accordingly.

Paid Social Marketing: Pro Tips for Small Businesses [Entrepreneur]

Categories
Business Trends

Changing Customer Relations In A Post Covid World 

Undoubtedly, COVID-19 has rocked the economy. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) World Economic Outlookpredicts the cumulative loss to the world’s GDP from 2020 to 2021 will be approximately $9 trillion. That’s more than the combined economies of Germany and Japan.

But the crisis has disrupted more than global markets; it has changed peoples’ lives, needs, priorities and spending behaviors. Approximately 40 per cent of Australians are feeling financially insecure, and as a result, professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that household consumption will decline by $37.9 billion within the next year.

In harsh economic conditions, consumers become more discerning with where and how they spend their money—for businesses, this creates a new set of challenges.
Customer-centricity is a term that has been used since the 1960s, but it has never been more relevant than in today’s business landscape. In such extreme environments, customers want more than the best offering or the lowest price; they seek dependability, confidence and trust in the brands they choose to do business with.

The end goal for a customer-centric business is customer loyalty. A dedicated customer base is key to surviving disruption, as they will continue to depend on your services even in challenging climates. But true customer-centricity is no set-and-forget solution. Retaining loyalty is about adapting your offering depending on the changing needs of your customers, and in some instances, knowing what they want before they do. This is where the modern reality of customer-centricity starts to connect operations with experiences, creating new dimensions of customer excellence.

So how are businesses expected to predict or adjust to evolving customer expectations? It begins with understanding how your company operates and what you need to change to keep your loyal customer base as close as possible.

Here are three ways businesses can adapt to changing customer relationships, in light of COVID-19.

Let growth goals take a backseat

If growing your customer base is a priority for your business right now, take a moment to reflect on the long-term cost of that growth, both reputation-wise and financially, to determine whether it is a sustainable pathway.

Few businesses have been left untouched, if not unscathed, by COVID-19. Consequently, many companies have been forced to refocus their priorities, resources and goals to survive the crisis. If your business has not considered the immediate or future economic impact of the pandemic and how it could affect your organization, you need to start doing so now.

Part of evaluating this impact is looking at factors you can control, or at the very least maintain, to ensure you keep as close to ‘business as usual’ as possible. A central element of your survival strategy is maintaining your existing customer base.

Focusing on customer acquisition to the detriment of your existing ones can create a funnel effect, whereby a stream of new business comes in, while just as many customers go elsewhere. This can force companies into a spiral of deeper and deeper discounts to attract new consumers to their pool, which eventually runs dry along with their revenue streams.

Research by Forrester shows that new customers can cost five times more to convert than existing customers, indicating that it is much easier to expand and build-on existing loyalty than it is to tap into new client bases, especially during tough times.

Do not fear missing out on opportunities for growth; rather, consider this crisis a chance to cement the fundamental processes and market share that make your business scalable.

Always remember; there is no point investing in your business’ continuity if you have no customers on the other side.

Focus on operational excellence, but keep it customer-centric

Historically, a continuous improvement mindset revolved around things such as standardized costs, stable operations and meeting compliance expectations. While these are all critical elements of running a business, somewhere along the way, these companies lost their grip on the bigger picture and realized their product was no longer relevant to the customer.

Operational excellence is important, but carrying out a process 10 per cent better than the previous year does not matter if you miss the mark with your customer base.

More recently, businesses have started tapping into a different mindset that sees the customer experience translated throughout an end-to-end process. For truly customer-centric organizations, every decision and ambition has a customer-focused outcome in mind, be that improved experience or lasting sentiment.

Continuous improvement no longer exists in an echo-chamber; the convergence of process excellence and customer experience is the new north star, and this mindset is embedded into the very structure of a business and its team.

Data-driven for precision 

In a post-pandemic era, digital marketing and social communication channels are the name of the game, and when used correctly, can offer more specific insights into your customers’ behaviors.

Utilizing customer data can be as simple as surveying your existing customer base to gain actionable insights. The more data you have, the more accurate these insights will be.

Consider every digital touchpoint of your customers’ experiences as though they are leaving behind a fingerprint, containing a goldmine of DNA or data that helps you better understand their needs, expectations and concerns.

To develop a comprehensive customer excellence picture, it helps to combine each touchpoint into what is known as journey maps; a high-level, intuitively readable diagram that enables you to view the user experience from an outside-in perspective—across all your personas. The journey visualization will increasingly identify areas for persona-centric process improvement, while empowering business mapping, change, and operational transformation.

Keeping your finger on the customers’ pulse means you are on the front foot when it comes to evolving patterns of behavior. Immediate access to data-driven insights allow you to adapt your processes and keep customers’ satisfied, even in rapidly changing environments, boosting loyalty and retention rates.

Using these adaptations, businesses can come out of this crisis with the right fundamentals in place—rather than a set of lowest common denominators that damage your brand in the long term.

3 Ways Customer Relationships Will Change Forever In Light Of COVID-19 [Entreprenuer]

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Leadership Lessons From Steve Jobs

Everyone knows Steve Jobs ; or, at least, they know of its existence. Or, of the innovations he made in the world of technology.

Steve Paul Jobs, such his full name, perhaps never imagined the global impact generated by being a leading entrepreneur in the computer world: he was the creator of sophisticated and easy-to-use products, the founder of Apple, a world leader in its sector.

His different biographies emphasize the thick line on his character and the way of leading. Everyone recognizes him for having had visionary ideas, which made momentous contributions in the field of personal computers, cell phones and music in digital format.

Undoubtedly, like all great minds, it is loved and hated in equal measure. Bill Gates , his Microsoft competitor, once noted his admiration for the way of telling and creating empathy between the person (Jobs) and the products through their presentations; and many of those who worked alongside him at Apple in those years remember him as a true genius.

As a legacy, in addition to his products, he left 10 practical leadership lessons that emerge from his business experience:

  1. Focus: eliminate distractions. After he was fired from his own company, Steve Jobs returned and one of the first decisions he made was to cut projects and leave only the top four. He said “Let’s do four things and do them spectacularly well.”
  2. Simplify everything. In today’s world, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Optimize resources and value the essential; leave the superfluous.
  3. Take responsibility. If you lead, you are responsible for the entire process; so much so that Apple always created products that, in general, are not directly compatible with other brands; He argued that it was the only way to take full responsibility for the process, flow, operation, and experience of each user.  
  4. If you fall behind, take a leap forward. Mac computers didn’t come with CD recorders, which its Windows competitor Microsoft did. Jobs and team went ahead by creating iTunes, a multi-device storage system that changed the music industry.
  5. Think products first, before profit. The origin of every great idea is the idea itself, and the money will come in addition. Steve said, “Focus on creating a great product, the benefits will follow.”
  6. Focus group just there. At one point, Jobs claimed that he felt a bit enslaved by product review groups. And then his famous phrase emerged: “People don’t know what they want, until you show it to them.” The human mind tends to immediately associate with its previous experience. Without disregarding market research, if you just stick to that you will be doing more of the same, that is, what people know.
  7. Distort reality to tear down the impossible in your life. One time Jobs was with Woz ( Stephen Gary Wozniak ), Apple’s co-founder, who he forced to break with something that seemed impossible: “Do you need 6 months to develop that? You can do it in 4 days! ”. And Woz did it. This means that mental models and self-imposed limits are often the greatest impediments to leaders.
  8. It transmits permanently. Everything communicates and adds value, or not. In the case of Apple products, the experience is transmitted from the moment the consumer yearns to have your product; packaging – design pieces themselves – and even typefaces and graphic design – something Jobs discovered almost by chance when he dropped out of systems studies at Reeds University and took calligraphy classes, which ended up being Another hallmark of their products: thousands of different letters versus a few that Microsoft offered.
  9. Demand excellence as high as possible. Never less than that. While the concept of perfection that Jobs alluded to is not achieved on this physical plane, he made sure that products were not released until everything is checked and they have passed through all possible controls and tests.
  10. Hire the best for your team. He simply admitted that every project he undertook would not have been successful without the team he had in each case. The key to being a leader is knowing how to surround yourself with people who are better than you, with more experience in certain fields, and let them shine.

    And finally, one of his most famous phrases: “Stay hungry, stay foolish. Go for more. Question, Discover, Believe. ”, Excerpt from the famous speech he gave at Stanford University to the students who admired, perplexed, that thin man, weakened by his illness, and who transmitted to them what he did best: the passion for turn your dream into reality.

    10 practical leadership lessons from Steve Jobs [Entreprenuer]