Best
Business Books 2016: Marketing
The last 15 years have been expansive ones for marketers.
Digital media has exploded what used to be a rather static business, ushering
in the era of big data, discovering mother lodes of customer insights, and
offering an ever-increasing number of platforms, devices, and media channels
where marketers can reach their customers.
So it’s a bit unexpected that, to quote a
1960s ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, this year’s best business books on
marketing tend to “think small.” True, these three books do so in wildly
different ways. But they all seem to argue that even with the buckets of data
now sitting on servers at the world’s biggest corporations, we also need to
understand and relate to consumers at the micro level. This can mean examining
teenagers’ closets for clues to who they really are, responding personally to
each and every customer complaint, or looking at how that most personal device
— the smartphone — is changing what it means to be a person and a marketer in
2016 and beyond.
Small
Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends, by
Martin Lindstrom, is the year’s best business book on marketing for two
reasons. It’s a potent, example-filled counterbalance to marketing’s current
love affair with big data, and it’s such an entertaining read that even people
who aren’t in marketing should consider picking up a copy.
If big
data — by its name alone — implies that it holds the answer to everything,
Lindstrom, who over the years has worked with Disney, McDonald’s, Lego, Nestlé,
and Pepsi (to name a few), dispels that belief when he says, frankly, it ain’t
all that. “For all the valuable insights big data provides,” he notes, “the Web
remains a curated, idealized version of who we really are. Most illuminating to
me is combining small data with big data by spending time in
homes watching, listening, noticing and teasing out clues to what consumers
really want.”
Part
detective story, part anthropological study, and part travelogue, Small
Data follows Lindstrom to Russia, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia,
Austria, and other locales as he tries to answer questions including: Why don’t
the Chinese use bedspreads? What is the significance of Russians’ love of
refrigerator magnets? And just what are teenage girls in Europe doing between
6:00 and 6:30 every morning? Lindstrom refers to what he does as “subtext
research,” seeking clues to people’s lives that usually go unarticulated in
pools suffused with big data, and everywhere else.
In answering each of the above questions,
Lindstrom is striving to solve a marketing problem. And it is a thrill for
readers to follow him from initial research to solution. In the case of the
teenage girls, Lindstrom had been hired to help the European clothing retailer
Tally Weijl, which was having difficulty identifying trends and making shopping
in its stores enjoyable. What he eventually discovered — by poring through
phone records — is that teenage girls were texting each other pictures of
potential outfits to wear to school in the early hours of the morning, and that
finding created a strategy for Tally.
The route to this insight relied on much more
detective work than trying to find patterns in phone bills. The girls had told
Lindstrom only that early in the morning they were “getting ready for school.”
But he observed other behaviors that pointed him to a deeper understanding of
what they meant. He noticed that girls of that age no longer seemed to use
oil-based hand creams. Was it because such creams made messes of smartphone
screens?
Then there was the matter of the size of the
holes in the shampoo bottles. Previous work for a European shampoo manufacturer
had taught him there was a correlation between the size of the holes in shampoo
bottles and the length of people’s showers. Smaller holes, shorter showers. And
the teenage girls’ shampoo bottles fit the “small hole” pattern. They weren’t
spending early mornings taking long showers.
Cue the phone bills — and the answer to the
mystery.
Lindstrom then recommended that Tally Weijl
simulate girls’ early morning rituals at its stores by creating “click and
mortar” dressing rooms. Each dressing room comes with an Internet-connected
full-length mirror; girls can log in to Facebook, take selfies in the clothes
they are trying on, and set up a voting session with their friends to figure
out what they should buy.
Given
the author’s extreme facility with picking up on details that most of us would
miss, Small Data leaves the reader with the nagging feeling
that the bar is too high for most of us to become superior miners.
Fortunately, Lindstrom closes the book by
revealing his process, seven steps that can lead marketers all the way from
data collection to marketing concept. Although there’s no guarantee that
marketing practitioners who embrace Lindstrom’s method will become as facile at
it as he is, letting readers in on his technique was crucial. If, as Lindstrom
says, “big data and small data are partners in a dance,” it’s best not to leave
those searching for clues in small data completely flat-footed.
Haters
Gonna Love
By
contrast, Jay Baer’s Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and
Keep Your Customers may not startle readers with its confounding
ability to make two plus two equal five. At times, in fact, the book seems
prosaic in comparison with Small Data. But simplicity can be a
virtue. This book is one of 2016’s best precisely because it’s a
straightforward, pragmatic look at how to engage with angry customers.
As he
did in his previous book, 2013’s Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is
About Help Not Hype — which I also picked as a best business book on
marketing for strategy+business — Baer is looking to be
practical. He often uses a playbook-style approach to help marketers learn how
to reach out to aggrieved customers, no matter what channel they are using to
voice their problems. In so doing, he codifies not only how to handle customers
through one-on-one channels, but how to navigate the Wild West of angry tweets,
whiny Facebook posts, and irate Yelp reviews that have made many a marketer wonder
how, and even whether, they should engage.
Baer’s major organizational insight is that
there are essentially two types of haters: onstage haters, who use social media
as their primary complaint venue, and offstage haters, who prefer more private
channels, like email or phone. (He concedes there is a third type — crazies —
and, yes, he outlines a strategy for dealing with them too.)
However, as Baer points out, what
differentiates the two major hater groups isn’t just the channel they choose.
They are actually motivated by somewhat different impulses and are looking for
different outcomes. In a helpful pullout in the middle of the book, a chart
that Baer calls the Hatrix, he teases out some of their differences. Onstage
haters complain somewhat more than offstage haters, and tend to be younger and
more social media savvy; however, they also have a lower expectation than
offstage haters of actually receiving a reply. Although 91 percent of offstage
haters expect a reply to an email complaint, only 42 percent of onstage haters
think a company will respond to a complaint they make on social media.
Some of this data seems obvious. As the book
points out, “In the same way that bumper stickers are the most shallow form of
political expression, social media grousing is the thinnest form of
customer complaints.”
But therein lies opportunity. Baer’s
strongest suggestion is that companies take advantage of moments to engage with
customers that are hidden in plain sight. When companies respond to onstage
haters in channels where a reply isn’t expected, it can create advocacy — i.e.,
situations in which customers help promote the company and its services to
their peers and the public. For example, companies that adopt a strategy of
responding to customers on boards and forums can see a 25 percent boost in
advocacy; the figure is 20 percent for social media. Offstage haters will
advocate too, but the bump is much smaller.
As Hug
Your Haters points out again and again, “customer service is now a
spectator sport,” so responding in onstage venues produces a hugely positive
impact — by solving one person’s problem in front of an audience.
Much of the book is painted in broad strokes,
but its examples provide nuance. Baer serves up truly creative ways that
companies large and small have embraced their customers.
Restaurant chain Le Pain Quotidien gives its
haters a restaurant gift card, and asks them to visit another of its
restaurants in the area and tell the company how it’s doing. The Dutch airline
KLM, when barraged with customer queries during mass flight cancellations
stemming from the 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland, answered every single one
of them. It has kept its strategy of replying to every customer up to this day.
Online photo company Shutterstock employed a similar strategy during a 2015
service outage, and saw its users openly advocate for the company because of
how it handled the situation.
Most
companies spend the majority of their marketing efforts on customer
acquisition, i.e., gaining new customers. As Hug Your Haters emphasizes,
working on customer retention may be a more profitable strategy. “Hugging your
haters gives you the chance to turn lemons into lemonade, morph bad news into
good, and keep the customers you already have,” the book says — one customer at
a time.
Text
Me Maybe
Yes,
the book TXT ME (646) 759-1837: Your Phone Has Changed Your Life. Let’s
Talk About It. is audacious, as almost any book that puts a real phone
number on the front cover would be. It’s the number of the book’s author, B.
Bonin Bough, whom I texted at that number to get an advance copy of his book.
The
brashness of the title threw me off at first. Wouldn’t it follow that the book
itself is a little loud and obnoxious? So imagine my surprise in discovering
that TXT ME is actually an engrossing meditation on how the
mobile phone has altered us. If that sounds like hyperbole, try to think of how
you navigated your life before you got your smartphone. It’s hard to remember,
isn’t it? (Disclosure: I do some work for the Mobile Marketing Association, of
which Mondelez, mentioned below, is a member.)
TXT ME isn’t a marketing book per se, but more of an
insider’s tour of the smartphone revolution. It may seem unlikely for a guy who
markets Ritz crackers and Trident gum for a living — Bough is the former chief
media and e-commerce officer at Mondelez International who now hosts the CNBC
show Cleveland Hustles — to be described as a smartphone
insider. But Bough has made his name from his ability to merge marketing and
technology for conventional brands in some truly extraordinary ways. One
example: Mondelez’s Trending Vending machine at 2014’s SXSW Interactive, in
which attendees could get a customized, 3D-printed Oreo cookie whose “recipe”
came from that moment’s trending Twitter topics.
TXT ME is less about mobile technology than about people’s
relationship with it — and Bough knows how to describe that relationship with a
depth of understanding that even most of his fellow tech-heads probably can’t.
Take this summation of the “language” particular to Facebook: “Over time we’ve
learned to read between spaces, to interpret the presence or absence of a
‘like,’ to exhume hidden meanings in photos and videos — in short, to decipher
the site’s contemporary cave drawings while hoping we have enough
self-awareness to be more genuine about the way we present ourselves on our own
home pages.”
Marketers may flip directly to the chapters
that have to do with business, and that’s OK. They alone are worth the price of
admission. In the chapter dealing with retail, which begins with the hard truth
that gum sales have dropped because people standing in the checkout line are
looking at their phones, Bough outlines a future scenario. He imagines a time
when online and offline retail experiences are not segregated “in an either/or
way” but rather flow into one another. His dreamscape, in which grocery store
shoppers dock their phones in their shopping cart, which then loads with
information on store promotions or recipes attuned to their interests, is
futuristic — but it also sounds like something that will be realistic in a few
years’ time.
Bough’s extended riff on how mobile might
change the experience of attending a sports event is another highlight. He
pictures a sequence in which a few days before game time, our phones
automatically populate with background stats and point us to team merchandise.
On game day, our devices send alerts about seat upgrades and tell us about
friends who are also in attendance. And those ideas are just for starters. It’s
a peek inside another mind brimming with clear-eyed possibilities.
In
short, TXT ME will make readers look at smartphones
differently, and have them contemplating just how profoundly a little device
has changed things.
It’s worth highlighting that each of the
approaches in these books involves going small, or narrowcasting in some way.
The conversation in these three books about marketing is largely about what
happens on handheld screens. They barely mention the larger screen that has
been — and will continue to be — vital to marketing: television. The broadcast
television commercial isn’t dead by any means. Billions of dollars will be
spent this year on network and cable advertising. In many ways, however, the
focus has shifted. For major brands, TV is still a way to lay the foundation
for a brand. But, as these books point out, true differentiation comes not from
pitching a single message to the masses but from sweating the small stuff and
dealing with customers as individuals.
by Catharine P.
Taylor
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/Best-Business-Books-2016-Marketing?gko=1cb2f&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20161103&utm_campaign=respB
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