Phil's blog

21st century customers are contradictory. What they (we) say they want isn’t always what they (we) really want. Take choice. Customers say they want more choice and control. In reality, we are all overloaded with choices. So, offering your customers yet more choice won’t necessarily make them like you more. Confusing, isn’t it. Melinda Davis and her Human Desire Project have developed five insights to help you figure out what your customers really want:

1. EACH CUSTOMER IS MANY PEOPLE
What’s going on inside our heads keeps getting more complicated. People are dividing themselves into multiple, virtual identities as a way to handle an increasingly complex, chaotic world. Sony’s popular role-playing game EverQuest has nearly 400,000 registered users, who have created more than 7 million characters. At the 2002 World Economic Forum, one of the most popular seminars was called “How to Become Somebody Else.” The implication for you: Each of your customers is actually many customers (different people at different times)

2. THEY ARE HUNGRY FOR YOUR STORY
In a world where there are fewer hard truths and clear-cut answers, people seek meaning through narrative and archetype. Tell us a story, weave us a tale; we long to find instruction in the mysteries of our lives. BMW woos buyers through short movies. Bulgari commissions a novel by Fay Weldon titled ‘The Bulgari Connection’ . The long tale is the new sound bite. The truth of the story really doesn’t matter. Today, we see life as a choice of spins: It’s the journey that gives us pleasure. Purposeful deception will always spell disaster, but pleasurable spinning is a road to success.

3. YOU DON’T SELL PRODUCTS OR SERVICES
You sell peace of mind. Or even bliss. Consumers who once put houses, cars, and gizmos at the top of their aspirational lists now cite ‘a safe, happy home’ and ‘peace of mind’ as their number-one priorities. People are looking for an experience that goes by many names: the zone of the athlete, the inner bliss of a religious person…(an antidote to the stressed-out, complicated rest of their lives. And you thought Starbucks just sold coffee?)

4. MAKE ME A STAR
Besides peace of mind, everybody wants to matter. Our craving for a happy balance inside our heads is fuelling several big trends. Chief among them is ‘luxe populi’ , the quest to stay visible by becoming one of the ‘important people’. Luxe populi is a deeply held, even militant belief that we are all entitled to the finest, the best designed, the coolest. Luxury marketing is no longer about selling to the few but about selling to as many as possible. (In banking, they call this the death of the ‘richness vs reach’ equation: the idea that you offer a rich experience at a high charge to few people and a basic experience at low cost to the masses. The new expectation is a contradiction in terms: mass exclusivity).

5. TOO MUCH CHOICE? A YODA IT IS THAT YOU NEED
As life becomes even more complicated, the consumer will choose a chooser. By choosing a higher helper, a Yoda figure, you choose your own reality: your news, your information, your shopping choices.Oprah Winfrey is a perfect example of this metabrand. She tells us which issues we should be interested in. She tells us what to read.

Richard Branson is taking a shot at being a kind of Yoda of hip commercialism. Amazon.com clearly has its sights on creating the definitive online-shopping Yoda state. Wal-Mart is making an ambitious push to extend its private label – Sam Walton’s vision of middle-American values – across every category of product and service it sells. Where is the limit to THAT Yoda-like sphere of influence?

SOURCE:
Melinda Davis, talking to Bill Breen of Fast Company magazine. Elsewhere, she has expanded the ‘Yoda’ idea, suggesting that employees look for their leaders and managers to be Yoda-like figures. In 1996, Davis launched the Human Desire Project, a programme funded by some big consumer brands to figure out the major motivators of the 21st century, to glean what people want and why they want it, and to come up with insights that will let companies connect with consumers in deeper, more meaningful ways. Some of her main findings are captured in her book ‘The New Culture of Desire: 5 Radical New Strategies That Will Change Your Business and Your Life’.