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Let’s start with a physical product and work backwards on how we would research our user.

Consider that we have an add-on product for people who use leather writing journals like Moleskine. This product slips on the cover and allows a user an easy way to transport everything they need for being productive in a coffee shop. It acts almost like a mini-backpack in that it can carry a smartphone, keys, wallet, post-it notes, etc.

As silly as it can sound, the first step is to come up with a name for our user. This simple fact helps humanize our “subject”.

Let’s say we do some preliminary market research and discover that males ages 26 – 45 are most apt to purchase a high-end branded product like those made by Moleskine. Digging around, we see that Moleskine is experiencing tremendous growth and has sales in excess of hundreds of millions worldwide on an annual basis.

Very good signs that there is a market opportunity here on a macro scale.

A weak persona may look like this initially:

Name: Chris Sankowski

Age: 28

Nothing too fancy right?

But let’s scratch deeper and really get at what Chris’s life is like.

Name: Chris Sankowski

Age: 28

Occupation: Financial advisor

Yearly Income:$110K

Education:Undergraduate degree in Finance from UC Berkeley.

Marital status: Single but dating. Would like to get married possibly and raise a family someday. Would like to teach his kids about outdoor pursuits and find a spouse who enjoys these same activities.

Resides: Studio apartment in San Francisco in the high-end Marina district with rent of $3,500/month but he likes the proximity to great bars and restaurants and other people his age.

Goals: Would like to open his own financial boutique firm by age 35. Currently considering pursuing his MBA to position himself better at work and for running his own business. He knows the clients will evaluate him based on whether he has achieved this education level and his drive to succeed.

Hobbies: Plays in an ultimate Frisbee league on the weekends. Mountain bikes and spends weekends skiing in Tahoe.

Work/Life Balance: Spends many weekends working and reading in a local coffee shop. Reads voraciously and is very driven to move up at work. 60+ hour weeks are common and he often spends part of Saturday at the office. His office can be anywhere via the web though.

Brand Affinity: While reading ebooks on his Kindle app and financial blogs via his iPad, he tends to make notes in his leather journal, which is always a Moleskine. Chris is highly brand conscious and insists on brand-name products. These notes are usually in relation to current projects he’s working on for specific clients or for content creation on blogs. This helps him demonstrate his knowledge of current financial trends and informs much of his investment strategy.

Tastes: Chris tends to shop at high-end boutique clothing stores. Part of it is for his work attire, as the firm requires suit and tie every day. Weekends he can be found sporting jeans and a t-shirt from either J.Crew or Banana Republic.
He enjoys eating great food and wine and is not afraid to drop $200 on a great meal with good friends. He has a humidor at home and is a cigar aficionado.

Online Outlets: Chris checks Facebook multiple times a day on his phone and his laptop at night. He’s active on Twitter and follows various career management and financial thought leaders. Maintains a profile on LinkedIn and uses it to maintain his professional contacts. Also, writes guest posts for various financial blogs. Checks RSS feeds on his phone from websites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, MotleyFool, Wall Street Journal, and Lifehacker. Prior to purchasing any product he thoroughly researches its story and reads reviews on sites like Amazon.

We now know Chris a bit better.

By now, you should have a healthy appreciation for the enormous stakes at play with brands online. It is much easier to trip up and disappoint than it is to exceed expectations. Consumers stand ready to pounce with social media tools if you slip up and don’t understand or listen to their needs.To get this intimate understanding of what our customers fears, aspirations, problems, goals, joys, (insert desired emotion), we can turn to the field of Design Thinking.

As a style of thinking, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context.

The key part in that definition is empathy.

We have to strip away what we think our customers want and instead adopt a mindset of being in service to their needs. Marketing is often been viewed by outsiders as slimy or even evil – somehow able to invisibly exploit people’s insecurities and fears in the pursuit of profits.But today with the web, customers will voice that perception loud and clear. Consumers online are always quicker to criticize than to applaud. We have to surprise and delight through remarkable experiences.Stealing some approaches from design thinking provides us a road map by stepping back and really thinking through all the touchpoints a customer might have with a brand. It forces us to deal with the human experience of trying to gather information and solve a problem.As we saw with Rogers’ five-step adoption process and especially with Google’s Zero Moment of Truth research, customers are constantly researching whether they have a good fit for their needs.

One of the best ways to get close to our customer is start with a tool called a user persona. This simple aid has been used in product design for years. It basically forces us to think about “a day in the life” of our customers and removes the layer of abstraction that can occur when focused on quantitative topics like market size, price points, and demographic data.

User persona: A short narrative of who we are marketing our product to based on a blend of demographic and psychographic data, as well as a photograph. Hopes, dreams, and fears should be flushed out as well for sparking ideas on how the brand can better connect emotionally with this customer.

The user persona dates back to the mid-90s and was later adopted by the ad firm OgilvyOne as “CustomerPrints”. The book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by software visionary Alan Cooper, helped make the case that software should be designed with a specific user in mind. .

Why use one?
Using this approach engineers and designers have been able to better articulate and filter the specifications needed and ultimately design solutions that lead to successful adoptions of software products.
People in marketing have started to take notice. This empathy thing might actually make marketing easier and drastically cut advertising costs by having a better product/market fit.

Image Source: Tim Hughes

Dishonest? Clueless? Rude? Deaf to your customers’ needs?

Crowds love to assemble on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and tear your brand down in real-time. Users now have tools to give them a voice and assemble a movement. They seem to relish in rising up against the perceived tyranny of a large company.

The power started to shift to customers with the rise of blogging in the late 1990s. As technology made it easy to publish web content (and Moore’s Law made it free with services like Blogger), people flocked to platforms to get their thoughts out into the ether.

Dell Computers initially did not understand this shift. A journalist named Jeff Jarvis started a blog called Dell Hell. In it, he painstakingly documented his ongoing customer service troubles with a lemon laptop he had purchased from the company.

It turns out at the time that Dell had serious customer support issues. But being a global business, it simply was not tuned into customer needs or rather have the processes in place to truly empathize and act on what it was putting its customers through.

Jarvis, using his blog, did not just attract a few angry fans. Instead, he ignited a movement in June 2005 with its cross-hairs squarely on Dell. Tired of being ignored, brushed off, or feeling helpless in the cycle of overseas customer support call centers, embittered Dell customers cheered for Jarvis.

And the New York Times picked up the story. Then Business Week. Dell suddenly did not just have an angry customer on their hands. They almost overnight had a huge public relations firestorm to put out.

For good or bad, nothing tears down or builds up a brand than a press story. (To learn more about “Dell Hell”, this case study outlines the entire scenario.)

Dell eventually caught on. They put a 14 year veteran, Lionel Menchaca of the company in charge of their blog. They started a dialogue.

In blogs, Jarvis related, Menchaca “admitted the company’s problems. But he also answered back … . He immediately earned the respect of me and many other bloggers. According to Jarvis, Manchaca gave the company “a human voice.” In return, Jarvis said, Manchaca gave customer respect and “got respect in return. It works.” .

Dell’s story is not unique. Witness the video below called “United Breaks Guitars” from 2008 – how many negative brand impressions did this garner?

This offers some clues on what the interaction with a brand should be. We want to influence our users and provide a way for them to gain knowledge.

Every brand has this education opportunity – if they stop and consider what users are after when they come to their website or social media feed. We may not articulate it, but above our heads as we hang over our laptops we are subconsciously emitting little thought bubbles like:

• “Make me smarter.”
• “Help be me more interesting.”
• “Entertain me on a subject I’m passionate about.”
• “Teach me something of value for my job.”
• “Assist me in achieving my creative goals.”
• “Show me how to wow my boss.”

And in exchange for providing this value, the customer will give us a tremendously precious commodity – their time.

When we lead our marketing efforts with this good intention it delivers an unexpected return. Gratitude is a fundamental human emotion (and that’s what great marketing is all about – brands connecting with people on an emotional level. Witness Nike and Apple). Gratitude is the sort of social lubrication that allows societies and villages to grow and prosper. If you provide value for me at no upfront cost, I in turn feel grateful and feel a desire to reciprocate this good will.

But this is not some lofty Utopian ideal.There is real evidence to support this and it comes from the growing field of study called Relationship Marketing. Researchers at the University of Washington published a study in the Journal of Marketing linking gratitude as a drive of sales growth.

The online world is indeed a strange place. As we’ve seen, Moore’s Law eliminates us from having to worry about space and cost (for the most part), as the expense to host content essentially falls to zero over time. With the cross over to the digital world we get away from limiting factors like physical space.Which means this explosion of content provides infinite amounts of choices online and the cost to produce this content continually falls by the relentless forces of technology advancement. Witness how Moore’s Law has made smartphones and high-end video cameras affordable to the masses.

Our users, customers, or fans now have an infinite amount of choices online on where to spend their time. They can be endlessly entertained on YouTube or conversing with family on Skype or checking out Facebook.

In Chapter 1, we saw how the rise of traditional mass media was built on the broadcast method. In exchange for consuming content for free, customers were bludgeoned with advertisements. They would endure interruptions if the content was great but also in part because they had so few options on where to invest their time. Basically, it was a few radio stations or three major television networks up until 1970s. Cable television fractured this for television in the 1980s but with more choices came more targeted ads. People could tune into what they were interested in (i.e. ESPN for sports fanatics) but it still came at a cost for their time.

Today, that is no longer the case.

As an empowered consumer, we can now create our own custom broadcast channels. The following tools are tearing down the big three of broadcast media.

• Television – DVR, Hulu, Netflix streaming
• Radio – Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody
• Newspaper – RSS, Blogs, Tablets

While not all these services are free (many are ad supported), Moore’s Law and the mass scale of the web permits a consumer to pay a very small fee to completely tune out all advertisements. For many, the cost of a few bucks a month is worth it to be free of all such interruptions when they sit down to consume content.

All this has resulted in the fact that we are increasingly getting spoiled and no longer will tolerate getting interrupted by companies pushing a message. In a sense technology has given us back our freedom of choice as consumers. We decide when, where, and how we will interact with a brand – if we choose to interact at all. This rapid change has caught industries entirely off guard. The advertising model worked for decades and hummed along just fine. Until it didn’t. So, as digital marketers we have to be fully aware of this competition for attention. We have to deliver not great but remarkable experiences. We can no longer focus on competing on price. The Internet has stripped away this as a competitive advantage. Amazon is only a click away with its massive economies of scale to deliver a product at a price that make it nearly impossible to compete. No. We must sit back and ponder designing the experience of interacting with a brand or product. When we fail to think on this, the user is gone back to the search results page, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or StumbleUpon and we are left scratching our heads on why our brand is failing to grow. In short, brands have not been in control going back to the early 2000s.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” – Simon Sinek

The above TED video goes over why some win and some don’t with a nod to Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations starting at 11:08 (the entire video is fantastic though).

How Do I Apply This Stuff?
The reason we spend so much time on Rogers’ research is that it offers tremendously powerful clues on introducing a big innovation and the life that it will lead in the marketplace. For over 40 years, Rogers researched and tested his theories around the world and found the following frameworks to hold true in large part across cultures and time. You should take tremendous comfort in his work by knowing you have solid scientific data to help guide your research and strategy phases.

Many digital marketers may not be aware of some of these historical foundations as the surrounding business press tends to hype the newest social trend or tech company with skyrocketing growth (but not necessarily profit).

We’d all like to have the growth rate of companies like GroupOn or Facebook and to that point many novice marketers think by simply being online their entitled to experience a similar ride. Often times they spend years being disappointed as their startup or service does not gain traction with innovators or early adopters. Finally, they crash and burn on the front end of Metcalfe’s Law in an exhausted, smoking heap and bitterly curse the web for its false promises.

Yet, we can avoid all this teeth gnashing by having a healthy respect and critical eye for things like what affects adoption, market size based on these adoption groups, and the psychographics of each group. Knowing the opportunity and hard work ahead, you can start to make some smart assumptions as you lay out your goals for building out your online brand.

Chapter Summary
In this chapter we went over two fundamental laws of the online world. We saw that networks increase exponentially in value over time as the number of connections are made due to Metcalfe’s Law. As consumers, we already know this law intuitively when we debate whether we should join Google Plus or stick with Facebook. If many of our friends and family are already on a network, chances are we will join as well because the connection represents a value to us. If there are no potential connections, there is no value and we’ll most likely pass until the network grows in size and offers more value.

Next, we covered how Moore’s Law will continue to guarantee that the rate of change we see in technology and society will not lessen but rather increase into the foreseeable future as the limits of material science are pushed at the atomic level. Moore tells us that technology gets exponentially better in performance and cheaper every two years. As consumers we reap the benefits with cheaper iPods that have greater storage capacity or Facebook accounts that can store ever expanding massive amounts of photos, videos and status updates for free. As a digital marketer knowing this law, you’ll want to think big and look forward with plenty of “what if” ideas. As with every exponential law, you cannot look backwards for clues to the future as many try to do with linear change.

Extrapolating out, we see that Metcalfe’s Law shows us the the real challenge is getting early people to use a network, as Moore assures us the technology will be there to support our growth. We saw how these two laws play together in an example like Craig’s List. More people join and post content for free which in turn snowballs over time as the value for checking Craig’s List classifieds grows. Infrastructure explodes exponentially to support such growth and in the end we’re left with a free classified ads website that is partly responsible for the demise of the daily newspaper business across America. This is Metcalf’s and Moore’s Laws in action and further example of their ability to catch industries entirely off guard. The classic book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, does a wonderful job showing how big incumbents miss disruptive innovations much to their peril.

Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations gives us over 40 years of research on how people view disruptive change. We can build on his work as a guide and look to companies like Apple that deftly manage the adoption decision making process for inspiration. We also see how Twitter can enjoy amazing brand awareness but still struggle to get users to adopt their platform. As smart digital marketers, we have a laser focus on adoption (and engagement) as important metrics because they help drive the economic engine of a business.

We now have a solid foundation for thinking about digital marketing initiatives. Growth is hard and we are constantly having to compete for a customer’s attention. All of which underscores the importance of designing great digital experiences that represent real value to our users.

We’ll use these tenets to begin intelligently researching and thinking through strategies for our online marketing initiatives.