Our friends Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg have released the paperback edition of "Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Success".
Per their blog in the new release they "..stripped out over 30,000 words and put back 11,000 new words." We can't wait to read them.
And the best part (not really): a new cover design!
One step in the Persuasion Architecture Uncovery process is to create a list of all the bits of information that someone may want to know (or come to find out) in the process of buying whatever it is that you are selling. Doing so defines the questions your selling process must answer, and the issues it must address.
Another thing this does is demonstrate how complex the actual buying process is, how much information is involved, how many different angles people will use to approach their purchase decision, and usually how woefully short and inadequate the typical website is in fully addressing the issues at hand. Suddenly it’s not so hard to see why so many people leave our sites after just a page or two – they’ve quickly come to find out that we probably aren’t going to answer their questions!
The list could be made simply enough, but Chapter 17 adds a twist – the Johari Window. This metaphorical tool is used to divide the available information based on who knows about it, and who doesn’t. The four segments (as used in PA) are:
* Open – Info known to you and your customers.
* Blind – Info known to your customers but not to you.
* Hidden – Info you know but your customers do not.
* Unknown – Info unknown to you or your customers.
It’s the hidden information the book warns us about the most. Marketers jump right back into the bottle when designing and writing marketing materials, including web sites, and pretend that their customers will live in their with them. In other words, it’s easier to believe you can actually hide something, so websites complete ignore ‘the tough questions’. But the hidden zone is getting smaller all the time; the world quickly discovers your secrets and shares them – and before you know it they’re at the top of the Google search results and cross-linked in reviews and discussions everywhere. In other words, at least in the commercial sphere, a secret is probably just a piece of information that you think other people don’t know.
Determining how to deal with issues and facts you’d rather not deal with isn’t easy or fun. (This could be another reason most web development projects skip this step.) But it is a reality that your prospects are likely going to have access to this information, so as the book suggests:
“..taking responsibility for presenting all information allows you to interact with your customers in a much larger open quadrant… you can provide the perspective that works in your favor and competes favorably with the angles other devise.”
When it comes time to define the content and organization of your website tackling these issues will require a lot of work. For now, Uncovery is helping get everything onto the table and giving us a much clearer view of the world in which our website and site visitors will exist.
In the next few chapters the book turns to another real-world consideration which is often ignored in terms of marketing and site design; our relationship to other businesses, products, economic issues, and other external influences.
"What I really don't understand is if you want self-help why would you read a book written by somebody else? That's not self-help, that's help!”
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here.
OK, it’s been a while. My original idea of reviewing a chapter-a-day from Waiting For Your Cat to Bark didn’t go so well in terms of timing, but the ideas in these chapters are still worth further consideration, so let’s get back to it.
Chapter 16 is a quick introduction to the Persuasion Architecture process known as “uncovery”. Uncovery is the R&D phase, where the “goal is to examine the topology, psychographics, and demographics as they pertain to the business in question. We’re also looking to understand the culture of the organization itself.”
In our own Persuasion Architecture practice, Uncovery is a one or two day exercise which seems designed to educate the Persuasion Architect and get them up-to-speed on the business - and it does do that – but it also allows management and other stakeholders to gain fresh and alternate perspectives on their business. And this turns out to be extremely valuable.
Management teams can easily slip ‘inside the bottle’ as discussed in Chapter 4, and taking a fresh look at the goals and issues and customers you serve can be a surprisingly enlightening effort. Uncovery forces questions to be answered, priorities to be set, and even agreement to be reached among team members. And most importantly the process and discussion puts the current selling process, online and sometimes offline, into a new and very unflattering light – leaving everyone eager to get into and through the process which will result in such dramatic improvements.
Tomorrow (really) I’ll get into Chapter 17 and the first steps of Uncovery.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here.
Visitors arrive at your website with a lot of baggage. They bring with them not only a mind focused on the very specific problem or goal that drove them to you in the first place, but also a whole lifetime of experiences, beliefs, communication styles and behavioral patterns.
How realistic is it to expect them to abandon all of that and instantly start doing things your way?
I say 'your way' because most web sites present information and options based on one view (the marketers') of what's important, how it should be expressed. And everything from bounce rates (the number of people who leave after looking at only one page) to conversion rates (the number of people who buy or achieve the primary goal) is screaming that 'your way' is not the right way.
I spent most of this past week with the minds behind Persuasion Architecture, including Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg as well as John Quarto-vonTividar and Holly Buchanan. The essence of Persuasion Architecture is the idea that your communications have to anticipate and then meet the needs (and personalities and communication preferences and even belief systems) of those you want to take specific actions (including purchasing something) on your website.
This isn't easy. In fact, it is quite difficult. It requires a tremendous amount of effort (and training and experience before the effort even begins) because it forces you to:
But is there really any alternative? About 2% of our visitors seem willing to perservere through processes not customized for them, but what about everyone else? Is there something we can do to get them to put their personalities and needs aside for just long enough to order or sign up or download (or whatever it is we're trying to get them to do?)
An interesting new Forbes article by Jack Trout suggests not. The article talks about the efforts of MTV, Dell, Xerox, and others to change market perceptions and then ends by saying:
So my advice to you marketing experts out there? If your assignment is to change people's minds, don't accept the assignment.
So it's time to embrace the baggage. Pretending it's not there isn't working, and it's never going to.
Enough of reading my thoughts on the Eisenbergs talking about Waiting for Your Cat to Bark. Through the magic of the internet, you can listen to Jeffrey Eisenberg present a 1-hr talk on the subject. Not to be missed.
Most web sites aren’t really designed for anybody. They’re built primarily to present the information the company (or marketing dept.) thinks is important to communicate. To the degree that users are considered at all, they’re all lumped into one mythical average user, who possesses a jumble of approximate desires. At design meeting you hear phrase like: “people are going to want…” and “we should give them…”.
:: Note: This post is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review or catch up on the last 13 chapter reviews ::
The other extreme is the idea of personalization, where a web site conforms to the individual needs of each user, as expressed in both past behaviors and explicit choices. The problem of course is that personalization is easy with things like online banking and nearly impossible in most other areas; take online travel reservations as one example. My travel habits could be very different between business and personal travel; the urgency of the trip might change my willingness to fly my not-favorite-airline; and the start-time for my morning meeting might decide how important a four-star-hotel is vis-à-vis the hotel’s location.
Plus, how many questions would I have to answer to provide a really complete picture of my travel preferences? And how granular would the sites data categorization have to be to really adjust for every possible personalization combination? The answer to both is “too many”.
Chapters 14 and 15 of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark introduce us to “Personas” as they are used in Persuasion Architecture. Personas are the alternative to the over-generalization of averages, and the impossibility of personalization. The book defines them in Chapter 14 as:“an archetype, a representative of a typical segment of your audience…. Each (sic) represents the different modes customers exhibit when they interact with you… Personas are standing for the various angles from which your customers view their problems and your solutions…Personas give you an in-depth, personal glimpse at your customers and their personal preferences without having to ask every customer to divulge that in-depth personal information.
Personas enable you to segment your audience, usually into a very manageable number of groups and yet still provide those groups with a vastly better experience than if you’d have averaged them all together with a fraction of the effort (and undoubtedly a lot more success) then if you’d gone for the utopian dream of full personalization.
Continue reading "Personas Introduced - Waiting for Your Cat to Bark Ch14-15" »
One of my favorite aphorisms is about the difference between doing the right thing, and doing things right. Sometimes doing the right thing is all the matters because there are huge benefits even if the quality of execution is (initially) low. Learning to swim, buying your spouse a birthday present, and starting a company to deliver a cool new software or service are three examples that come to mind.
But in other cases, if you don’t do things right you might as well not do them at all. In Chapter 13 in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, we’re shown that this can be the case when collecting and analyzing marketing data.
The simplest cases are where data is mis-read, mis-interpreted, or selectively applied. Even data-driven marketing is a mixture of science and art, and getting the mix wrong can result in some nasty concoctions.
What appears to be marketing data abounds. There is demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral data. We get it from surveys, research, focus groups, anecdotes, and experience. The problem is there are lots of ways to let the data fool you, especially when trying to use the past to predict the future.
The Chapter gives interesting examples of various types of mis-applied data, and offers suggestions on how to blend, or perhaps more accurately build, data types into “predictive models of scenarios that people will engage in.”
There’s a lot of power in that quote, let's parse it:
In just shy of 100 pages so far, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark has taken us on a journey through the marketing environment of mid-2006. The old ways of conditioned response don’t work. Customer experiences drive brand perceptions. Their options are plentiful and they know it. The marketers’ perspective is warped, and customer empathy becomes the new imperative. Their buying process used to have to find its way through our sales methods, but not any more. Marketers must anticipate and provide information and support in the ways shoppers want, in the places shoppers want, at the times shoppers want. And we can’t understand them based on isolated data points, but must instead develop a multi-dimensional view in order to meet their individual requirements for not only the goods or services we’re selling but also for the process they apply to the buying decision.
The list above also describes why most web sites have such abysmal conversion rates. Technology aside, most sites still communicate as if it were 1950 or even 1850. What we need is a way to take these changes into account in order to develop a website and communications plan that will be effective in this environment. The Eisenbrothers (my favorite nickname thus far) say they have one, and will introduce us to it over the next 100 pages or so. I hope you’re as eager for it as I am.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the full book review and/or all of the Chapter reviews.
Persuasive Momentum is the subject of Chapter 8 in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and I need a bit myself. So I’m going to include five chapters in this post so we can get into the meat of the Persuasion Architecture chapters of the book this coming week.
Since we now think of buying as a process, it makes sense to consider that each step in the process as a potential point of failure. The pages on our site, and the elements on these pages, are just links in a chain – and we need to find and replace the weak ones where visitors lose interest and abandon us. To do this, we’re told to consider who the visitor is, what we want them to do, and how they might gain the confidence necessary to take that action.
This is another of the ‘worth the price of admission’ moments in the book. Take the time to look at each page, and even each element on the pages of your site, and ask those questions. Pages and elements don’t belong there just because they’re part of some presentation you’re making. They only belong there if they help a visitor to move (or want to move) forward.
The most basic and common error in terms of maintaining momentum, are pages which lack any clear ‘next action’. Sites selling goods almost always move visitors from category groupings to item pages and then display a large ‘add to cart’ button to indicate the desired next step. But service firms often provide service descriptions, and then since there is no next online action, leave it entirely up to the visitor to navigate back to the home page, over to the ‘contact us’ page, or wherever in search of a next step. Think how more likely those actions are if the service description page instead clearly displays the phone number with an invitation to call, or provides a simple web-form to enable the visitor to request that a sales person contact them with a clear understanding of exactly which service they were interested in.
Consider the Dorney Park (an amusement and water park) website. If someone gets to their Admissions page you could assume they’re on the road to spending some money. Since the park offers online ticket purchases with ‘print at home’ tickets, you would think anyone looking at the price list would be clearly directed to take that next step and place an order. Once the money is spent and the tickets in hand, the chances of actually getting in the car and driving to the park are a lot higher than otherwise.
But the Admissions page makes no such effort, leaving the ‘buy tickets’ link only up in the main navigation bar where most people won’t be able to find it, or can easily ignore it. (click the image at left to enlarge it) How many more online orders do you think they’d get every day if ‘order now’ was a large attractive option near the bottom of the page?
This is the most obvious of examples, and one of the simplest of situations. Considering these questions (who are they, what do I want them to do, what do they need to do it) for each of your visitor types, across all of their buying scenarios, and at each step of the process is a large and difficult task. It’s becoming clear that we need a system to develop and structure our communications and provide a process that matches the buying process our visitors are going through. Chapter 9 and 10 make that point. Chapters 11 and 12 I’m going to just skip.
There, I’ve got MY momentum back.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.
Buying isn’t an event, it’s a process. This is what we learn in Chapter 7 of ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’. Yet another observation that can and should change the way you create a website and structure your marketing communications.
When we think of buying as an event, we attack ‘it’ from all angles at once – here’s some general info, here’s the details, here’s our competitive positioning, here’s the price and value proposition, etc. But thinking of it as a process, we can very easily start to imagine the frame of mind and likely questions someone might have, and thereby structure our site/communications to directly address these issues.
Imagine someone who first learns about a recreational activity like kite surfing, and decides to investigate it as part of a summer vacation. Whether looking at a resort or at gear, this person is in the process of defining the problem they need to solve. What this person is looking for is very different during this phase of their buying process than it will be at some later time when they understand how the sport works, what are the attributes to consider in selecting gear or a good location for beginners, etc.
A great many websites completely ignore this phase of the buying process. At best they offer a condescending or simple-minded ‘FAQ’ document. Supposed I decide to go buy a kite-surfing setup, and imagine the very real possibility that I don’t know too much about what features, model, or even price range I’m looking for. A quick search gets me to this page at bestkites.com, where I am immediately blasted with models, prices, and screen shots. All great information but since I lack the knowledge to interpret these facts (I don't know what is important or why, nor do I understand the implications of choosing one vs another), I’m typically left to go find the forums where I can read enough conversations to ‘become smart’.
There’s only one idea in Chapter Six of ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ but it’s a whopper: While you are busy ‘Selling’ your customers are busy ‘buying’. By taking the time to recognize the differences between these processes you can dramatically enhance your ability to provide these people with solutions – which will cause them to choose to stay longer and ultimately purchase more.
I’ve often said that websites need to serve three masters – customers, search engines, and the marketing dept that pays for them. It should be designed to serve them in that order, but that very rarely happens. Marketers generally dictate site content and design by applying their ideas of a web-based sales process or information system. But as the book points out:
Your sales process is about you and your goals. Customers will engage with your sales process only as long as it provides relevant answers to the questions they ask, and helps them accomplish their goals.
By default, your sales process probably does neither of these things. Like most PowerPoints it assumes you have someone strapped in a chair and they’re going to be forced to listen to your logical progression through the highlights and priorities as you see them. This is really just the other side of the ‘visitors arrive by choice and leave anytime they want to’ point made in Chapter 5. If they won’t stay just because you’re selling, the only option is to stop selling, or more specifically adjust your selling, so that it aides and aligns with their buying.
Forget the PowerPoint. Walk into the room and ask “what can I tell you?” Answer any question they have, in the order they ask them, in as much or as little detail as they require.
It isn’t obvious how to do this on a website. (Although interestingly that is almost exactly what the Google interface does, in theory anyway.) So instead you have to figure out what they want, and before that who they are, and then how different ones of them vary, and thousands of other things. It won’t be easy, but if you can do it you can ironically ‘sell’ a whole lot more stuff.
Turns out selling is just like Global Thermal Nuclear War – the only way to win is not to play.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are welcome.
But why is all of this effort necessary? In Chapter Five we get a concise answer: "Behavior, particularly in the self-service environment of the Internet, is voluntary, participatory, and goal-directed." In other words, everyone who visits your site can leave quickly, easily, and anonymously. This is speed dating without the obligatory 60-seconds. It's all about them, and the second you're not satisfying their needs, they're gone.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We've all heard about the milliseconds it takes to form an impression of a web page, the eight seconds we have to load the page into the browser window, and hopefully seen the stats on our own websites which clearly show that the majority of users just don't stay very long. Even more, our own behaviour usually proves the point - how long do you stay at a web site that doesn't immediately clearly address the reason for your visit?
Yet websites are still, by and large, designed from the inside out. The process generally starts with 'what do we want on our site?' and proceeds to 'how does that look?' and generally never get around to 'what are our visitors trying to do?'
I found myself in three different meetings regarding new website designs this past week - one as an observer, one as a reviewer, and one as a potential provider of Persuasion Architecture services. There were very top flight design firms involved in all three sessions, and while neither space nor confidentiality rules allow full descriptions, I can assure you that 'what would the customer do?' is not the question driving site design decisions today.
The fact that visitors are in control of their stay on your site is obvious and yet still largely ignored. But as the earlier part of the chapter describes, this isn't the only area where 'consumers' have taken grabbed of the joystick. In a reprint of an amazing blog post, the book points out that customers now control everything from price to brand to distribution methods and beyond. While this control is not literal, the dramatic changes in influence provided by the ability of consumers to more easily gather and share information is undeniable. The chapter goes on to illustrate all kinds of ways that this influence is being used and refined, even quoting the CEO of Procter & Gamble who admitted in a year 2000 speech that 'the consumer is boss".
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray takes Andie MacDowell out on a date. It doesn’t go very well. But he gets the chance to try again and again and again (without her knowing), and each time he learns something more and changes his actions so that the next time the date lasts a little longer. After many tries he makes it all the way to morning.
This is exactly how websites and online businesses should behave. Realize the customer is in charge. Take your best shot. Measure the results. Tweak, change, adapt. Listen very closely to learn what it is they really want. Try again. Measure again. Repeat until you get to see the morning light.
Of course, you can shorten the process and improve your odds by knowing something about your prospect/customer/date before you begin, and most people could improve their listening and analysis skills. As ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ continues, attention turns to improving those skills.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.
Do you ever get the idea that the marketing department in certain companies has no connection whatsoever with the development, sales, and customer service organizations. Airlines and phone companies spring quickly to mind as examples. They’re heavy advertisers (not so much anymore for the airlines) who work to build all kinds of images and associations that go immediately out the window the second you’re forced to talk to someone who actually works at the company.
That marketing (and selling) can only work if there is a connection (if not actual symmetry) between that which is promised and that which is delivered should be obvious. But it must not be or else why would so many companies do so many things to disappoint, and even enrage us, every day? The management of these companies is often accused of having their heads stuck somewhere, but it turns out it wasn’t the place we were all thinking.
According to the Eisenbergs, these people have their heads inside a bottle, and the thick colored glass from that bottle is warping their perspective beyond recognition. It’s a great metaphor and captures both the reasonable issues – that all kinds of competing issues and pressures impact decisions, and the unreasonable results – the penny saving decisions that infuriate mega-dollar customers.
We’re challenged to take the customers’ perspective when making decisions. They’re not thinking about your budget limits or staff shortages, they don’t know (or care) who screwed up the design or manufacturing. It’s an interesting simple test for corporate decision making: what would the customer do? (Bumper stickers anyone?)
Applied to website, forgetting to ask WWTCD (or WDTCW – what does the customer want) leads to low conversion rates. Low conversion rates lead, in most online marketing organizations, lead to a desire to drive more traffic. Huh?
Like the proverbial man who loses his keys in a dark closet but chooses to look for them in the living room because ‘the light is better’, almost all online businesses attempt to improve sales by getting more people to the site and not by converting a higher percentage of the people who are already coming. The reason is that it seems easier. There are known ways to drive more traffic: Optimize your pages! Buy more keywords! Create more partnerships! Until now, there wasn’t a known and reliable process to improve conversion rates, so most sites skipped it.
The math is relatively easy, as the book points out. Doubling revenue requires either doubling inbound traffic (at the same quality rate) which is difficult and expensive in almost every case, or improving conversion rates by a modest amount. Improving conversion rates has a cost, but it’s hard to imagine a case where it’s even a small fraction of the cost of doubling traffic – and of course the benefits of better conversion rates apply instantly to all the traffic you already have, so the payback should be very quick and the dividends will keep on coming for a very long time.
Given that it is the essential conversion point for this book, it would be easy to argue that the point here is dramatically understated. To me this is the jump-up-and-down-insight. IT MAKES NO SENSE TO SPEND 95% OF YOUR TIME AND 95% OF YOUR BUDGET DRIVING MORE AND MORE PEOPLE INTO A PROCESS WHICH (at best) IS 5% EFFICIENT. Of course, most online marketers don’t do this – they spend 100% of their time and budget driving more and more people to sites which are less than 2% efficient.
As a whole, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark explains a lot about how this became the norm, defines a process and method that can alleviate it, and highlights the many indirect benefits in terms of better customer experience. It’s an overwhelming presentation that will make those already inclined, and some of those with an open mind, completely change the way they look at the role and development process for web sites.
But in my experience the core economic benefit – that Persuasion Architecture is a method of dramatically increasing profits – is for some reason the hardest to convey (despite powerful and plentiful evidence), and often doesn’t seem to be the driving or even primary deciding factor in adoption. It sometimes seems like convincing people to give up smoking, when you have to point out, that in addition to avoiding death, you can also save some money and keep the brown spots off your fingers and teeth.
After making their economic case, the book points out that values which are ‘fuzzy but real’ are less valued than ‘cold hard facts’ and that is part of the problem. The benefits of PA can be measured on the whole over a long period of time, but even then it’s difficult to pinpoint which element and why the change occurred, and the environment is full of other influences that it could be argued, make precise credit hard to claim.
Perhaps that’s why the first half of the book comes at the idea of consumer experience from so many angles. If we can accept that our communications will be more effective if developed and delivered from an ‘empathy-based’ perspective (ie give the people what they want) then change can be motivated just on the basis of wanting to be heard.
Using ‘cold hard facts’ we’ve always found that bounce rates (the number of people who leave your web site after seeing just 1 page) and what I call failure rates (the people who leave after 3 or less pages) are always the most compelling. To definitively see that people are coming to your site and almost immediately leaving makes the stark point that something is very wrong with your site. Changing the site to address the needs the visitor brings entices them to stay. Marketers inherently want people to stay, to hear their stories and read their copy. I’m not sure I ever realized it before but I think they want that more than they want the revenue. In any case, this is where we’re leading – towards a process that ‘models interactivity through empathy’ and keeps people at our sites longer.
And oh ya. In marketing terms, you get to live a lot longer and die a lot less frequently.
em>:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.
The power of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ is the breadth of the information it synthesizes and the depth of the insights and observations it provides along the way. Chapter 3 is a showcase, running through the entire history of commerce (in just four page) and bookending it with insightful views on how consumers experiences shape their buying processes.
Experience is certainly a buzzword these days, but the concept often sounds empty or like just another hype-driven fad. Here its meaning is applied more literally with a breakdown of our total consumer experience as a combination of our product experience, our buying experience, and the 3rd party information we gather about our product along the way (to the degree these impact our perceptions). If I buy something and love it, but went through hell to get it, that weight remains. If I buy something great easily and along the way learned that most other people who have it really love it, that helps me feel even better about it and that impact lingers.
So if I’m selling something, I should really care about and manage all three aspects of the experience – product, process, word-of-mouth. How many manufacturers and retailers really consider and put time and energy into all three of these? How many measure and reflect on their impact on sales and lifetime value? Not many. What if they did? This isn’t an easy problem, many products have horrible sales channels and the manufacturers have seemingly given up on them. Frequently of course, the internet itself is the chance to change the buying experience, because it’s so much easier to have deep product information, allow users and experts to share data and support each other, etc. It’s also allows word-of-mouth to be tracked and measured, and to some degree influenced, much more easily than in the offline world. This topic should be a book in itself.
Another huge idea tossed off in just a sentence is that confidence is what really needs to be established in order to close a sale. Jeffrey once explained this to me suggesting that I think about something that I had initially shopped for and not purchased, but later decided to buy. What was the difference between the two efforts? In the latter I had achieved sufficient confidence – in all the aspects of the purchase which might include the item, the seller, the financial terms, the alternatives and required accessories, etc. This begs the question of what could the initial seller have done to provide me with the confidence that would have triggered the sale? The broad answer is that they could have thought about all the items a buyer like me would need to be confident about before committing and provided a deliberate effort to ‘get me there’ on all of those issues.
Once they show how friction has been removed in the buying process through the years, the current state of the ‘experience economy’ is revisited. The culmination of centuries of progress in selling is less selling friction, which leaves the buyer’s needs as paramount. The observation is made that ‘buyers crave information.. but sellers remain stingy’. Then comes another very important statement:
Publishing all the information the customer needs to feel confident presents unlimited opportunities for resolving the friction that prevents buying.
When working on some of the first online stores nearly a decade ago, our basic sales pitch was that the internet would free marketers from the picture-price-paragraph limitations of paper catalogs (and the know-nothing retail sales people of the world). But even today a great many online sellers offer exactly no more information than that, and very few really aggregate everything an information hungry buyer needs to get them comfortable (ie confident). Unlimited opportunities indeed.
The final point is one we’ve heard before but I personally lacked the confidence to buy before – that the whole experience bundle is what now dictates success or failure, not just the product or service itself. This chapter sold me by defining experience so clearly up front and then marching through the ways friction has been removed to leave buyer-side issues as the major remaining barriers in most purchase decisions.
Sellers who want to use this insight to restructure how they compete for customers - and hopefully that includes everyone reading the book - are reminded that experience is a subjective accomplishment. I take this to mean that this won’t necessarily be easy and that there won’t be a universal solution. It’s also a continuum, with ongoing improvement a much more realistic goal than perfection.
Three chapters in and we’ve been shown how and why the people, processes and goals of marketing have changed. OK, time to start thinking about how we need to change. That’s what’s next.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.
“Congratulations!” Elvis Costello famously wrote in the liner notes to the re-re-issue of Goodbye Cruel World. “You’ve just purchased our worst album.” Chapter Two of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark is a quick riff on branding then and now, and brought that quote to mind because I think it’s the weakest in the book, but as with Costello I’d say the weakest is still better than a lot of people’s best.
In this case, it’s just a bridge, establishing some foundation and a flow of ideas that later chapters are built on. It can be summed up in three quotes which offer possible or partial definitions of branding:
I've been of the opinion that brand is a synonym for reputation, and nothing here really changes my mind - although the discussion of how brands choose to play against Maslow's pyramid does begin to convince me that perhaps it's really a combination of image and reputation.
In any case ‘branding’ is changing, and for people who don’t read or think about this every day I’m sure the ideas are illuminating. Brands no longer have control because anyone with a keyboard and good writing and/or SEO skills can influence brand perceptions, and the sheer quantity and velocity of inputs is beyond just about anyone’s control. Those are radical changes from 10 let alone 20 or 30 years ago.
I think my beef with the chapter is that the case for the importance of branding to persuasion, or the significance of the impact of persuasion on branding, never seems to get made. So while the chapter helps paint the picture of the environment that we’re in, it’s one of the few threads the book creates that doesn’t seem to ever get tied off appropriately. (Someone please jump in and explain what I’m missing here.)
As a reader, however, these seven pages fly by, are filled with ideas and issues that set you into the frame of mind necessary for the rest of the book. And the book takes off fast from here, so buckle your seatbelts. This was the calm before the storm.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review, and the Chapter 1 review. Reader comments are highly desired.
The important idea delivered in the first chapter of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark is, as Bob Dylan so compellingly sang, ‘Things Have Changed’. [mp3]
[Note: This is the first of a chapter by chapter review - if you haven't read it yet, you may want to read our overall review of the book first.)
Using the famous Pavlov experiments in conditional reflexes and reinforcement as a simple metaphor for the rise and fall of traditional marketing, the argument is made that consumers no longer respond to stimuli in the same quantity and intensity as they once did, primarily because they’re now more savvy, have more access to information, experience and define brands differently, and now require more complex and personal interaction to motivate action.
The Pavlovian argument doesn’t last long, however, as the book title’s payoff comes quickly with the assertion that people are more like cats than dogs anyway, with the chief distinction being our desire to please ourselves rather than whomever is stimulating us.
And then comes the book’s thesis:
Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing. Marketers must now reach beyond their traditional roles of raising awareness and driving traffic, and extend themselves into the more intimate world of sales and customer relationships. They are now responsible for creating powerful ‘persuasive systems’ that anticipate and model customer needs, personalize information and process to meet those needs, and then measure the return on investment for every discrete process in that system.If you can fully grok that (a word I’ll admit to having first learned from Jeffrey about 9 months ago) then you just might not have to read this book. But for most of us it takes the rest of the book to expand on and surround this great paragraph to make it all start to sink in – let alone define the specific actions we need to take as a result.
So this is where we’re left after just one brief chapter. The theory that all we’ve got to do is let people know that our products exist (in some way that elicits fear or desire) and they’ll come running with wallets in hand is exposed as obsolete and/or fantasy. The former inmates are now in fact in charge, as our brands are ‘defined by their personal experiences’ and they’re ‘attentive only to information that matters to them’.
In just six pages the dogs have become cats and the control marketers had is gone. The stage has been set. Let’s see where it goes from here.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Next is Chapter Two. Reader comments are highly desired.
In 'Waiting for Your Cat to Bark', Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis have delivered the manifesto for the next 10 or 20 years of online marketing. In this brief yet sweeping book they convincingly argue that marketing success is now driven by how well you understand your customers and create a ‘persuasive system’ to scratch the very personal itch that each of them brings when they visit your website.
Their argument is built from the ground up, as they effortlessly march through the history of commerce, human psychology, the basic processes of buying and selling, the way brands interact with experiences, the role of data in all of this, comparative business models, and even a surprising argument against personalization.
Historically, the book argues, sales were lost due to the relationship between the friction of the buying process and the confidence (or lack thereof) of the buyer in the ability of the purchase to satisfy them. Since the most significant forms of friction are now virtually gone – we can easily discover, research, obtain, and transact – marketers now can gain the most leverage by working to increase the confidence of their prospects about their prospective purchase.
This is where Persuasion Architecture ™ comes in, and the final chapters of the book provide the most cohesive description yet its principles and methods, including the core concepts of personas, scenarios, and (their brand of) wire-framing. Many readers will find themselves torn between the feelings of exhilaration in finally having a logical framework on which to create effective websites, and the deep-in-the-stomach dread that comes from knowing that your current site is really a complete and utter piece of crap, entirely disconnected from its visitors and their goals.
I first read ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ on a cross-country airplane flight about two months ago. It was the first time I can recall wanting a flight to not end. There are so many important ideas and implications in this book that my head was spinning. Re-reading it to write this review did not diminish the impact. This is a huge work that demands further discussion and investigation.
As such, I’m going to dive deeper into each chapter and the many themes inside this book over the coming weeks. My idea is to write about one chapter a day, starting on Tuesday when the book is officially released. I hope the comment system here and the blogs of readers will serve to drive the discussion everywhere it deserves to go.
Further discussions notwithstanding, if your business has a website, I strongly recommend you click your way over to 'Amazon' to order your copy of "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark". This is an important book that should be read by anyone in the business of marketing.
UPDATE: To learn more, here's an interview by Mike Grehan with the Eisenbergs, both written and in 30-minute MP3. [Via SEObook]
Another podcast interview with Bryan Eisenberg from Duct Tape Marketing
:: Here are links to the Chapter specific review: One, Two, Three, Four, Five (more to come).
