Testing and optimization are a necessity in any marketing endeavor. I’ve gone deeper into the subject in several columns, such as “Conversion Folly Funnel” and “We Tried That Already.” Today, I want to focus on one aspect of optimization: customer insight.

Success in testing doesn’t necessarily indicate success in customer insight. For example, you can test landing pages, determine the best landing page, and enjoy an increase in conversion. But do you know why it converts better? Oftentimes marketers gain knowledge…

...continue to read "How to Gain and Act on Customer Insights"

Seems everywhere I look there are articles about Toyota’s rise from small Japanese company to the largest car manufacturer in the world. There are several theories for Toyota’s success, including their much touted use of Karzai Kaizen, or continuous improvement. But another practice is equally, if not more important, is genchi genbutsu.

In a recent American Marketing Association article (”How Toyota Got So Smart“), Travis Adkins explains genchi genbutsu:

One of the most religiously followed of these practices is something that Toyota…

...continue to read "The Difference Between Knowledge and Understanding"

Every company has to make choices when it comes to how it markets and sells and, in some cases, who it is and what it sells.

In an e-mail exchange, Tom Grimes, a great and brilliant friend, shared with me what he’s thinking about in terms of business choices. Based on his list, here’s my own list of many of the high-level choices businesses typically make every day. It may help you make some more conscience choices of your own:

...continue to read "A Half Dozen Business Choices"

Regular readers of GrokDotCom, or any of our best-selling books, heartily agree: people do things according to their own motivations. And in this unprecedented day of empowered consumers, “selling” to customers is 100% about facilitating their buying process. Any attempts to pitch (or push) products in ways that aren’t transparent, genuine, relevant or salient will be immediately blocked and discarded by our hyper-sensitive BS meters. Should you happen to try a high-pressure sales “trick” from yesteryear and succeed at fooling one…

...continue to read "2 Ways to Get Started With Personas (Part 2)"

In expanding the question about relational-transactional purchasing by asking the question of WHAT makes people buy, a fellow deep thinker from the Wizard Academy shared that we should also add in the essential “reporter” questions:

I’d lump them into four categories: Who … Why … What … When-Where-How. Who, Why & What are big driving issues, while you can lump the other three (When, Where, How) together as the sort of mechanics of purchasing.

WHO we are (or think we are and desire to be) deeply…

...continue to read "The 5 W’s of Purchase Behavior"

At Future Now, we focus on Grokking people to understand why they do the things they do. Grok roughly means “to understand completely,” or, more formally, “to achieve complete intuitive understanding.” It was invented by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Grok, we’re told, is a Martian verb, meaning to drink or absorb on a cellular level, that was introduced to today’s English speakers thanks to a man raised by Martians.

Roy Williams qualified shoppers…

...continue to read "What Makes People Buy"

We hear the questions businesses ask: How do I increase my sales or leads? How do I get more traffic to my site? How do I get better search engine rankings? How do I get fewer customers to abandon their shopping carts? What do I do with all this data I’m getting from my analytics software?

These are important questions.

What makes people buy? When you focus on this question, all the subsequent details fall much more easily…

...continue to read "7 BIG Questions for Online Marketers"

Kick the habit of assuming who your customers are, what they should want and how should deliver it.

Remember this classic scene from the Odd Couple?

Felix Unger: [to woman on witness stand] Ah … you assumed. My dear, you should never assume. You see, when you assume… [Felix writes the word "assume" on a blackboard] … you make an ass out of u and me.

Want to know what really gets in the way of better conversion rates? All too often it…

...continue to read "Unspoken Assumptions"

Unspoken assumptions in Apple’s conversion process undermine the online purchase of a 30GB iPod.

Poor Melissa. A dastardly somebody broke into my dear co-worker’s car and stole her video iPod!! *passes out tissues* This is a woman who lives the fully-integrated iPod life Apple imagines for its customers – podcasts, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, music. She was devastated. And she knew, without question, she had to replace her iPod immediately.

So she started her search for a replacement iPod the way many…

...continue to read "Unspoken Assumptions in Action"

In past columns, I’ve talked about creating personas and evaluating them. Today, I’ll explore how many personas are enough.

When clients ask us how many personas they should have, we typically tell them a handful — two to seven — is enough.

Not long ago, a client tried to identify its market segments and announced it would need 42 personas. After the uncovery process, we identified a need for 7 personas, not 42. The client was skeptical, believing we couldn’t address the needs of…

...continue to read "How Many Personas Do You Need?"