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The Marketing Detective Workshop – The Case for Breakthrough Customer Insights

When is the last time you or your team spent a full day entirely focused on your customers? Wouldn’t it be highly beneficial to devote a block of time for the most important people to your business—your customers?

Shining a spotlight on your customers in a structured, engaging way, is exactly what The Marketing Detective Workshop delivers. Breaking free from the daily administration of your business, you’ll instead participate in a refreshing, energizing approach to understanding your customers.

Based on his speaking engagements and his book, “The Marketing Detective: Discovering the Secrets of Small Data to Fulfill Customer Needs,” Habegger leads teams through a full-day workshop that delivers a laser focus on customers. The workshop teaches how to achieve Breakthrough Customer Insights by having a marketing detective mindset, by gathering customer clues your competition is missing, and most importantly, by uniquely interpreting those clues to turn them into desirable products.

In this workshop insights aren’t obtained by looking through endless PowerPoint charts and graphs, or by digging through stacks of big data. Instead, the focus is on the power of small data, the more personal, often one-on-one interactions with customers that can uncover breakthrough insights.

This more personal approach is becoming a lost art. With incredible technical advances enabling customer tracking, customer surveys, and interacting through bots and automated machines, face-to-face interactions are on the decline. Assumptions derived from big data can lead companies to falsely believe they have a deep customer understanding, when in fact that bond is superficial. Big data are often binary and antiseptic.

The hands-on workshop teaches how to become a Marketing Detective, solving the mysteries of understanding customers and their needs. With this deeper understanding, you will be prepared to create new products that your customers will love.

The Complete Customer Experience – The Case for a Fresh Set of Eyes

Sometimes, even the most effective business professionals grow numb to their customers’ experiences. Through habit and repetition, professionals miss clues that are hiding in plain sight. Marketers can become so entrenched in their product and their industry that it can be difficult for them to pull back and see their business as a novice customer would.

Such as an “introduction to RVing” seminar where the terminology used is not understood by first-time RV shoppers. Or a paint store whose facility is in dire need of repainting. Or the kitchen appliance company whose supposedly easy-to-use appliance has an overly confusing owner’s manual. Or the furniture upholstery company whose own office furniture has old, brown, hardened foam bursting from numerous rips and tears. Or the motorcycle company who doesn’t realize its outdated toolkit is no longer compatible with its new motorcycles (Habegger has personal experience with this one!).

In these cases, a fresh set of eyes can see the clues that others who are too close to them have become numb to. Scott Habegger, in considering the entire customer experience, is the fresh set of eyes you need to see the things you’re missing. His marketing detective approach is to put himself in your customers’ shoes—shopping for your product like a customer would, learning how to use the product, and then actually using the product (if applicable).

Through observation and personal interaction, Habegger assesses the customer experience. His uncanny knack of uncovering opportunities to improve the customer experience will help you build better products and services to fulfill your customers’ needs.

If you want a quick method of understanding the experience/interactions customers have with your product, retail experience, and related activities, consider Habegger to be your personal mystery shopper.

Portfolio Management – The Case for Choice Management

Today’s competitive landscape is moving at a blistering pace. New technologies and efficiencies are enabling companies to deliver more new products at a faster rate than ever before. Many of these products have multiple options, thus empowering customers to design their own personalized product. With so many choices available to them, it is assumed consumers can find the optimal product; but that’s not often the case. With so many choices and a torrent of data coming at them, consumers can feel a sense of feature fatigue, and at some point, the reward for finding the optimal product just isn’t worth the time and effort to find it. In such cases they may “satisfice,” meaning they’ll just pick the first product that’s acceptable rather than find the optimal product; or they may walk away from the purchase altogether.

This challenge provides an opportunity for savvy marketers to gain a competitive advantage by offering clearly differentiated products and focusing communications on the highest customer-valued features. The goal is to help customers navigate their choices, and in doing so to become their trusted source of information.

Fortunately, there are numerous tools available to help seize this opportunity. Having led a portfolio of over 10,000 Harley-Davidson accessories, Scott Habegger has first-hand experience in cutting product clutter, reducing product complexity, building customer confidence, and simplifying the shopping experience. One such example is the design of a new backrest system for motorcycle passengers that created a significantly improved customer experience, yet reduced complexity and choice from 27 options down to 2.

If you want to confirm the value of each product in your portfolio, create the correct number of choices for your customers, and build a simplified, engaging shopping experience, consider Habegger to be your customer choice architect. Through his robust approach to understanding consumer decision-making and various tools to improve the customer experience, he can help customers navigate your product choices, ultimately choosing your products over competitive products.

Voice of Customer – The Case for Customer-focused Product Planning

Every day, consumers are confronted with problems and opportunities. They seek products that will resolve their problems or enable them to seize their opportunities. They need solutions! Thankfully for them, your company is in the business of offering those solutions. But with customer needs ever-changing and the competition continually on the move, your products must evolve to stay relevant, competitive, and preferred by your customers. That’s why it’s imperative to have robust product planning (choosing the right products, at the right time, with the right customer benefits).

Ideally, and most effectively, your product plan is driven by opportunities you’ve recognized for fulfilling customer needs. Becoming a Marketing Detective is a huge step in understanding those needs. Once you’ve created your product plan by prioritizing your new product projects, it’s imperative that you keep the customer at the forefront along every step of product development. There is a five-step process to do just that, with the first two steps typically being the role of product management.

Step 1: write benefit-rich voice of customer statements. These statements guide the product development team. Voice of customer (VOC for short) is perhaps an overused or misused term, but it’s highly relevant and effective when implemented the correct way. Scott Habegger offers training on the art of writing effective VOC statements.

Step 2: create metrics for each voice of customer statement. This is an often-missed step. Without metrics, how will you know if your product solution truly fulfills your customers’ needs? Habegger offers training on developing metrics that ensure your product fulfills the voice of customer need.

Step 3: self-assess your current products against the VOC metrics

Step 4: benchmark competitive products against the VOC metrics

Step 5: set targets. Based on customer needs and the competitive landscape, set targets for delivering the VOC. Is this feature so critical that you need to be best-in-class? Or, is it acceptable to deliver an equivalent experience to what your competitors offer?

If you want to a strong customer focus to your product planning and a process to ensure the customer is at the forefront of product development, consider Habegger as your customer advocate.