"Facts" & Focus Groups 2
There are few situations where focus groups provide a good return on investment for small or medium-sized businesses. In the past I’ve held this was due to some combination of the Hawthorne, Pygmalion, and placebo effect — people tend to give the sort of answers that they believe are expected, especially in formal settings, where their beliefs about what answers are expected often change.
Malcolm Gladwell recently reviewed Charles Tilly’s book “Why” in the New Yorker. “Why” provides some interesting ideas about how we present reasons and why we present the ones we do. This review sparked a great comment from one of Gladwell’s readers on the how Tilly’s ideas in “Why” may apply to market research.
Read the review here and the comment here.
The essence is this: There are four categories of reasons that we give: Conventions, which are “conventionally accepted explanations” (Accidents happen), Stories, a re-telling of the cause and effect from your unique perspective, Codes, or high-level institutionalized conventions & procedural rules, and Technical Accounts, or expertise-driven explanations.
The insightful commenter notices that the nature of market research compels people to move answers that sound like conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories.
Which kind of reason do you prefer to hear in feedback given to you? Why?
Create more results from less energy: fine tuning your ratio of process to results.
When you hone a knife, you’re sharpening it by inflicting friction on the dull edges.
I’ve been honing my process for delivering branding and marketing work for almost ten years. It’s never been as complex as the first day I used it. The process has been honed into a smarter, simpler tool.
When we’re operating from a fearful mindset, we often judge something’s effectiveness by its “weight”. While in this mindset, effectiveness is confused with our ability to safely hide behind it.
I realize now that when I struck out to develop my own business, the process was something I wanted to hide behind. In Michael Gerber’s excellent book The E-Myth, Gerber urges entrepreneurs to create processes. I warped that concept to develop of my process into something formal enough to offset the risk of working with a new company. In reality, I was placing formalities in between myself and the successful track record I wanted to establish.
Writers understand this. If you can’t write a good book, you can at least write a long one. But they have editors. Unfortunately, many of our business processes will forever be a first draft: too many words, a lack of focus, and after some time even the authors have difficulty understanding the meaning.
Massive functional specs fall prey to change and misunderstandings. I’ve found since I began my business that my process has evolved from trying to understand everything before beginning work to having a general idea and iterating solutions. This delivers better results because:
- It’s more collaborative.
- It forces you to overcome a fear of criticism.
- People are better at defining things by what they’re not than by answering questions about what they are.
There are two added benefits. The first is flexibility. Instead of trying to impose my systematic theory of design on a 2 week project, I can keep sane and work within parameters. The second is happiness. I’m assuming you’re happier being authentic. As you cut away formality, you find what falls on the floor doesn’t justify the time is sucks from doing what you’re good at.
Design: All possibilities rush to one point. 1
Catching up on PJ Brunet’s blog, I read an interesting quote, from Cartographic Principles (it’s the third):
3. SIMPLICITY FROM SACRIFICE Great design tends towards simplicity. (Bertin) Its not what you put in that makes a great map but what you take out. The map design stage is complete when you can take nothing else out. Running the film of an explosion backwards, all possibilities rush to one point. They become the right point. This is the designers skill. Content may determine scale or scale may determine content, and each determines the level of generalisation (sacrifice).
Interesting way of putting it.
Simplicity for gains in marketing
Boost marketing success: Targeting your product/service let’s you provide less bulk with more meaning.
Think the last marketing message aimed at you that “broke through”. Here’s what got it that far: Targeting. The message tapped into your circumstance, interests, sense of humor, or style (probably in that order).
From a marketing perspective, a specialized product or service is key to success. But why not pursue the widest appeal possible? People’s minds have become so good at filtering out things they’re not interested in. We’ve adapted to cope with chaotic sensory input (or crappy advertising).
We’re naturally interested in things concerning us. Something targeted to a “Seattle-based business owner with clients scattered all over and slightly tech-geek inclination” is much more likely to get my attention than something targeted to “any business owner, anywhere, with any interests”.
There are many ways to narrow your target audience. A few of them are:
- By geographic region
- By industry
- By organization size/individual income
- By organization style/individual personality
- To be compatible with another product/service
- By acceptable risk level
When the “cult of simplicity” talks about making your product or service leaner, understand you can market to a smaller group and get more from it. By increasing your ratio of user success to features (specializing your product/service), you’re gaining benefits: more targeted marketing, a differentiator (or unique selling proposition, etc), more successful (happy, loyal) users, and the repeat business and buzz that brings. And you don’t have to play “feature cold-war” with the competition.
Remember: An object trying to move in all directions equally does not move.
Simplicity to improve product/service quality
Your users will accomplish more, faster, with a product/service tailored specifically to them than if they struggle to apply an overly-generic product to their needs.
Many consultants, developers, and marketers compete to have largest quantity of features instead of competing to be most useful. Don’t believe me? Take a look at software marketing material: all features, rarely translated to benefits. Marketing firms and consultants do the same thing in their own way and call them capabilities lists. Where are the human benefits? That’s the tone of most markets.
“But features are by definition useful!” That’s true insofar as features are functions of a program, or more raw power. But you can hand your users as much raw power as possible and it doesn’t guarantee their ability to use it. Features are useless if they diminish user understanding or success. Does each feature justify the clutter it adds? Does it justify the complexity that compounds across the whole program/package/service? Does it really help your customers accomplish more with the epicenter of your product/service?
We all have our weak moments and throw a little more in for a sake of bulk. But the additional complexity can offset the balance of features to usefulness in a way that is a detriment to our products/services. Even if its just hidden away in your marketing, website, or interface: you’re making navigation/comprehension more complicated at best and you’re steepen-ing the learning curve at worst. Either way you’re presenting a barrier to customer success.
Jason Fried from 37signals explains less as a competitive advantage in software:
“Less Software allows you to distribute your time and energy across less features. More attention to less stuff will make that less stuff better. 100% of your time across 20 things via 100% of your time across 10 things will result in a very strong 10 things. And that’s the kind of software that is satisfying to build, and satisfying to use: simple, focused, useful software that’s really polished. And that’s how you win these days.”
The wise Kathy Sierra calls this “featuritis” and what she writes about it is true (great visual on the post). Featuritis will discourage your users and give your competition an easy way to one-up you.
This isn’t just for software firms. All kinds of products suffer, and all kinds of service business fall in this hole. So why do we get sucked in?
As you specialize your product/service (or change the feature to usefulness ratio), sometimes you are creating a tool that’s increasingly useful to a decreasing number of people (unless you’re specializing to the masses, covered elsewhere). For many entrepreneurs and small/mid-sized businesses, that’s a scary thought—we think about customers in quantity. When you feel the fear creeping in, ask yourself:
- But what about the happier users and the buzz they’ll create?
- What about the people who will pay a premium for the increased quality of your product/service?
- What about the marketing gains that comes from specializing?
- What about the business flexibility from specialization?
- What about the guarantees you can provide to a more specific market and how that persuades risk-averse prospects?
More on less is more: Improve development, marketing, and process with simplicity.
“Less is more” has become a catchy rallying cry for the simplicity in software movement. Critics have been quick to contend that, in fact, “more is more” in the way of features.
The advocates of “less is more” are not petulantly arguing for Zen-like non-dualism. Less becomes more with an ideal ratio of user success to complexity. Any product/service or marketing strategy can benefit from improving that balance and cutting away features that diminish returns.
This debate is primarily focused on software. I think your industry can benefit from some of the same ideas too. I’ll try to abstract the discussions about programming to developing and designing your product/service.
I’ll blog some more on this and update this post as a jumping off point.
Has the cult of simplicity got it wrong?
Paul Kedrosky thinks so. He makes the case in this month’s Business 2.0 that “the cult of simplicity” is based on what he feels is a false premise: “less is more”.
He’s correct many designers/builders of web applications are touting simplicity as the answer to many project management and usability problems, but I’m not buying Kedrosky’s arguments that they’re crazy for it. If you’re new to the discussion, take a look at 37signal’s post on the subject.
The crux of Kedrosky’s argument is this:
Consider airbags. Most people will drive cars their entire lives and never once have an airbag inflate. Most reasonable people would concede that that’s just fine and the only bad thing would be if the bag did not inflate in an accident. Otherwise, who cares? The airbag is insurance for the unusual event, so all that matters is that it’s there. But it’s superfluous, so why aren’t the simplicity goons arguing to eliminate the airbag from cars? The answer, of course, is that airbags are too important to be left out of cars, even if they aren’t used as often as coffee-cup holders. So long as they don’t get in the way of normal day-to-day driving, few car owners would have the airbags uninstalled. [...]
What we learn from airbags, then, is that the solution isn’t to eliminate features from products or to reduce the amount of information we receive. The solution is to have more features and more information in ways that are less intrusive and more carefully prioritized.
I would consider airbags a feature that falls under the category “contingency design”. In a perfect world, they’d be unesscessary. In fact, airbags are critical.
Simple isn’t about eliminating all the features a only small number of your customers use. Simplifying is finding the best feature to succcess ratio. Cut the fat, not the muscle.
I think its same to argue that many software makers compete on the basis of features, not on the success of their users. This is where the counter intuitive idea of less is more can come into play. Focus.