Here are a few things that I believe are worth focusing upon. Whether your business serves up a service or a product. Whether your customer is the end-consumer or another business. 

Before I continue on, I am going to mainly use the words product and user. Replace product with service, if that’ what your company serves up. Replace the word user with customer, consumer, vendor, purchasing company, enterprise…whoever ends up paying your bills by buying what you sell.

I suggest we need to consider two major elements to focus on when it comes to creating successful businesses

Context and the User. This month’ article will focus on context. We will move our attention to the user in next month’ article.

Context.

How and where will it your product be important to your user?

When will it be used? Studying the context of your product’ usage can bring back some unexpected gems. Someone recognized that this was a problem: Every time someone uses a spoon to stir pasta sauce they are making, they end up making a mess when they put their spoon down. The folks over at http://www.woodspoon.com/ improved upon the existing experience.The lazy spoon, has been celebrated on the Oprah show and raved on and on by famed cook Rachael Ray.

So what do you need to learn from messy/clean sauce spoons? It’ all about context? You need to know the environment that surrounds your relationship with your customer. Some examples of why studying up on context is good:

1. Context highlights the little things

   How is your product used? Where is it used? What are the key benefits associated with your service? Software that is used in noisy environments should probably not rely on audio cues. Daycare facilities should hire people who genuinely like kids (even the Janitor). Dental receptionists should have nice teeth and bank tellers should not tell you how bad they are at math (I have actually had that happen). Consider the wide circular halo that surrounds each of the perceived benefits that your product aims to offers your users. Even the smallest omission within this circle can spell death for your business or at the very least reduce some of that magic brand glow you were aiming to spread. Provide your product’ benefits everywhere. If you offer a service that relies on speed as one of its key benefits, it is probably crucial that your website servers never fail and have high bandwidth to serve pages at blazing fast speed even though your business is not directly web related. If you provide software product that features ease of use, your office layout should feature that same attention to ergonomics.

2. The Market has answers (some you don’t want to hear)

   What makes your user’ mouth water?

   What are some of the other products your customer will probably want to use? Doing a moodboard research about what turns your user’s crank could lead to some interesting alliances. The Four Seasons hotel in Vancouver lets its preferred guests park their cars in front of the hotel, bypassing the need to use the valet, a much cherished benefit for their customer. What does the hotel get out of this? Chances are that their prominent clients drive high-end luxury cars. Having passerbys and other guests see the high-end cars parked right in front of the hotel adds to the brand promise of the otherwise aging hotel building.

   Drink in your competition’ Kool Aid and then spit it out.

   Don’t make your own website, your browser’ home page. Instead try and focus in on your competition. Where is their message clear and where are the opportunities for you to make that message clearer on your own marketing and technical material? The better you know about them, the more authority you have in your voice when you clarify why you are better.

   Help your users do their market research.

   Your customer will shop around. Don’t pretend that your competition does not exist. SurveyMonkey is lists their competitors Urls right on their pricing page and tells you why SurveyMonkey is better. Easy projects™ provides their potential customers with a form they can use to compare performance of other project management tools. The Pricing page on most product and service selling websites is a top exit page. People come to do the research and leave if they don’t find a compelling reason to stay. What are you doing to help them research and in turn make up their mind to use you over your competition?

3. Street Cred & New Marketing Channels

   What are your user’ watering holes for information?

   Stop thinking narrowly in terms of traditional methods of banners and print ads to reach out to your potential users. Find places that they still believe in. Using trusted sources where people turn to find information leads to focused marketing efforts such as tryvertising. Consider what P&G is doing with the ‘mum’ market. It is giving mothers free products so they will refer other mums to try it themselves. It makes their marketing channel authentic and believable for that target user. A marketing channel inner circle if you will. The Ya-Ya is telling the sisterhood what to buy.

   What are they saying that you aren’t telling them?

   Besides the marketing message that you put out, how does your customer find out about you? In other words, what is the word on the street about you and your product, outside of your direct marketing efforts? Check out news groups and bulletin boards. Also be ready to find out things you didn’t want to know. People can use public forums to rant or to express love, but it’ the ranters that are more vocal. We found that out when researching VFS’ street cred in newsgroups. Smart companies from Adobe to the many 2 person tech companies in Vancouver have paid employees and well-wishers (read volunteers) troll news groups and quell negative talk by stating facts and solving problems.

   Some like it hot. Some like it cold.

   How do you serve up information? What information is best served cold? If your user is busy and multi-tasking when they come across your site, for example, they might be looking for snapshot information (hot information). More detailed information such as technical specs may be best served as downloadable PDFs to be referred to later (cold information)?

   The importance of consistency and inconsistency.

   What is the user going to be feeling when they call your sales hotline? What will they feel when they call the support hotline? What are commonalities and differences required in how you serve that customer, in those two instances? I would suggest a wait period in answering either of those calls is not going to help matters. Your website should be a good place to provide both pre-sales and after-sales support. Your brand should stand for something. And that message should be reinforced, no matter why your customer is reaching out to talk to you.

Recognising that people don’t access products in a vacuum and actually finding out the true context of how your product is used, helps make them more meaningful to your user. If you fit in well into people’ lives, they will thank you for it, by telling their friends about you.

technorati tags: business, ux, branding