Making Digital Experience Pay

Editor's Notes

• #2: SLIDE VISUAL NOTE: Perhaps photos of Greg and Glen with respective logos or brand names? GLEN This is a case study about a controlled quantitative experiment. The hypothesis in this experiment was as follows: “If we can create a customer experience through design that influences the meanings people associate with a brand, then we can change their behavior towards the brand.” Now that hypothesis does not sound particularly controversial to a room full of people invested in the topic of customer experience. On the other hand, let’s be honest – the people invested in the topic of customer experience still represent a minority within the typical corporate enterprise. And you have probably learned conversations about “brand meaning” should only be pursued after you have verified that you’re speaking to a colleague with an appreciation for marketing. If you happen to work in one of those typical corporate enterprises, where your voice is the minority voice – where “brand” is frequently misunderstood as a logo, and where you have a challenge of convincing people to invest in customer experience, then this case study offers you three interesting features: First – it comes from a credible, well-known brand. Symantec is the FOURTH largest software maker in the world. Second – the experiment produced not just qualitative evidence of success but quantitative data supporting the business case for customer experience investment. Third - because this was an experiment, rather than a mainstream corporate strategy, we have the opportunity to open up the creative strategy process a little more than usual, and share the logic path and the creative method that led to the experimental results. I think you’ll find it is a pretty useful story. And now it’s my pleasure to introduce the man at Symantec who led this initiative, fought for its funding, and championed the courageous creative choices that it involved. Greg Olson.
• #3: GREG Let’s now turn our attention to the business context for this case. Norton is a brand that was acquired by Symantec, and one that had enough presence in the consumer’s mind that Symantec decided to maintain Norton as a consumer brand while aiming Symantec at b2B customers. GO COMMENT – I’ll talk to the Norton brand as being pointed at the consumer and lower case ‘s’ of the small business segments. Many of you will be familiar with Norton’s products – a suite of anti-virus, internet security and back-up tools that protect consumers from a myriad of accidental or malicious threats to the preservation of their files, and the protection of their confidential data. Something that is interesting about this product line, is that while it is entirely software – in other words it contains no atoms, only bits, it weighs nothing, it takes up no physical space, it reflects no light and has no colour…you’d never know that from the way our product has historically been represented, even at our on-line store. GO COMMENT – the other key point to add here is that the product works in the background…there is no conscious or obvious customer engagement. It’s invisible in all behavioral respects too. What our challenge has been/continues to be…and was the point of this experiment…is to make the product more meaningful and provide a platform for customers to engage with the brand.
• #4: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES - Something that speaks to the combination implied in the thesis Greg wraps with “great marketing today - Data, and analytics sure - but courage and judgement perhaps more than ever” GREG I want to use this case as an opportunity to talk about a subject that I continue to think about and I expect you do too: What does it mean to be a modern Marketer.? To help you locate that discussion in the context of my background, let me tell you a little bit about how I came to be the person pushing this initiative in the halls of Symantec. (GREG – provide here some storytelling about your journey in the tech industry, perhaps an anecdote from your apple days, the career themes and strengths and areas of interest that put you in charge of this initiative. ) (From there – develop your thesis: great marketing today - Data, and analytics sure - but courage and judgment perhaps more than ever) GO COMMENT – PERFECT SET UP. WILL WORK ON THE STORYLINE/ANECDOTES AND CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME OF ART AND SCIENCE….TIED TO CREATING EXPERIENCES THAT MAKE BRANDS HUMAN AND EMOTIVE….AND MOTIVATING/INSPIRING.
• #5: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES: Instance of Norton advertising pressing emotional threat messaging GREG:The creative strategy for marketing these products for quite a long time has been based on what advertising people call the “halitosis” sell. (GREG – for fun and if time allows, we could insert here a clip or photo from the old Listerine commercials, or the Samsonite luggage gorilla ad to make the point : this is a product historically sold by triggering consumer fears and anxieties) This kind of advertising has had quite a long run of success but a question we began to ask ourselves - a question that led to the Norton Lounge Experiment – was whether that kind of brand message was in fact running out of steam among the customers abandoning the service. GO COMMENT – Perfect. The product commuication/messaging was always more focused on fear…and in some cases on visuals of actual bad guy hackers themselves. In fact…those visuals even used to be in the lobbies of Symantec’s World HQ buildings! Classic old school FUD sell. Can you dig up enough visual support to make the point here, Glen?
• #6: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES: Express the mathematical formula: a 1% increase in retention = an increase of $15 Million net profit compounding annually GREG: A beautiful thing about the software business is how well it scales. The incremental cost for one more version of software is quite modest. What makes the software business even more beautiful is the idea of subscription, allowing you to sell the software over and over to the same customer. Of course all this happiness hinges on one thing - that customers keep coming back for more. And that makes “customer retention” – or churn – depending on whether you’re a glass half full or glass half empty kind of marketer - a very salient metric in our operation of the Norton business. Oddly though - while we’ve tracked customer retention, and calculated its value to the business, it is relatively recently that we began to do anything in particular about it. We in fact had policy about not talking to our customers during certain stages of the renewal calendar. My role – in this case, was in fact to call out this point and to start challenging conventional wisdom – working with my team, and agency partner Quarry to help Norton make the transition from a product-focused to a customer-focused organization. GO COMMENT – I’ll DISTINGUISH OUR CHANGE IN APPROACH AS MOVING FROM A PRODUCT SUBSCRIPTION TO A CUSTOMER SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE…MUCH LIKE FOLKS VIEW THEIR CABLE/DISH PROVIDER SUBSCRIPTION VS A MORE TRADITIONAL / OLD-SCHOOL ‘ANNUAL RENEWAL’. The sub-set of customers that I was responsible for were that highly profitable group who elected not to opt-out of the annual auto-renew default on the billing page of their subscription. (might need to repeat that bit ;-) ) We really wanted to retain as many of these customers as possible because doing so creates a snowball of profits. We considered many ways to reinforce “customer loyalty” – including preferential pricing, exclusive access to new products, and various other “loyalty rewards.” For each one of these considered, there always appeared to be a good reason not to pursue these tactics. I’ll admit here that we were kind of backed into trying to achieve our goals through a digital customer experience - it was the option that remained open after perhaps more obvious “loyalty” program ideas were crossed off the list. GO COMMENT – WE HAD STRONG MOTIVATION TO DRIVE ONLINE VS RETAIL/MANUAL RENEWAL…IT WAS MORE PROFITABLE AND DROVE LONGER TENURE/RETENTION BENEFITS. HOW COULD WE ENGAGE WITH CUSTOMERS MORE RELEVANTLY, AND AUTHENTICALLY, ONLINE, WAS A KEY GOAL. Our conversations with Quarry led to the hypothesis that we tested in the marketing experiment we called the Norton Lounge. “By testing the value of acknowledging the status of our highest value customers - we could increase retention and business value through customer experience design.”
• #7: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES: An image of a Symantec slide with the study results on it (for example see the prezi) would be appropriate here. We can get a Symantec PPT template to reproduce this if this is helpful in making the information more visible. GO COMMENT – SYMANTEC CORPORATE SLIDE TEMPLATE ATTACHED GREG: I’m going to share the results of this experiment with you now – and then in a moment, I’m going to turn over the microphone to Glen to to give you a bit of insight into how these results were achieved. In a nutshell – we measured the effect of the Norton lounge by redirecting a randomized sample of existing auto-renew customers who were on our e-store website and in the process of dumping their Norton subscription. GO COMMENT – I’LL DEFINE ‘DUMPING’ AS OPTING OUT OF AUTO RENEWAL AND PUTTING OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THAT CUSTOMER AT RISK LONG TERM. For the experimental population, we intercepted their abandon path - and took them through a content experience called The Norton Lounge. GO COMMENT – I THINK IT MAKES MORE SENSE TO INTRODUCE THE NOTION OF THE NORTON LOUNGE FIRST…PRIOR TO THE PREVIOUS COMMENT. AND DESCRIBE IT IN THE CONTEXT OF THE AIRPORT METAPHOR AS A PLACE TO REFRESH/ENGAGE/RELAX MORE THAN AS A REWARD. LET ME KNOW IF YOU THINK THIS GETS IN THE WAY OF YOUR DESCRIPTION OF THE LOUNGE METAPHOR ON SLIDE 10. We compared abandonments of the control group and the experimental group, and found that the Lounge content experience, showing up while they were attempting to abandon their Norton service, influenced nearly 3% of the abandon path customers to stay with the good ship Norton. Note – the skeptics among you might say – was it the Lounge experience itself or a persuasive pitch to stick around, or merely the distraction of something getting in the path of the abandon process? Well – our experimental measurement approach controlled for all these possibilities, and the bottom line is that the Lounge was the deciding factor – and a factor that these experimental results would project to an additonal $1.5 million in incremental profit for the year, based on influencing just this sub-set of our customer base. Depending on how you roll, $1.5 million might look like a big number or a small number to you. But the important thing here is that we have an experimental finding with quantitative proof that experience matters – that investing in experience can improve the bottom line, and that it can keep on mattering all the way through the customer lifecycle – even at the point where customers have decided to abandon your service. Now I’d like to turn over the microphone to Glen to discuss the creative process and strategy that went into producing this effect.
• #8: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES: Include a rendition of Maslow’s hierarchy (see Prezi prototype of this presentation for context) GLEN: A clever chap I once had the pleasure to work with shared with me a saying that is etched in my mind: I like questions better than answers – they have a longer half-life. The Lounge strategy proved out quantitative results, but it began with a very qualitative kind of question: What if. “What if the motivations we need to tap into to promote customer retention go beyond “safety needs” ? In other words, is it possible that we could improve retention if we could engage Norton customers – especially those planning to abandon their subscription - on the basis of brand meanings that reside higher in a hiearchy of needs - self-actualization goals as opposed to safety goals.
• #9: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES: We want to depict the historical Norton buying narrative based on fear uncertainty and doubt - and then put it in some sort of brackets…. GLEN It’s one thing to ask a question like: What if we could connect with a different buying narrative than the one that has historically prevailed? But in a big corporation, it can be quite another thing to act on it. People familiar with the laddering of benefits might find this to be a perfectly natural question - however in large organizations with an entrenched idea about the brand narrative, there are many gate-keepers and barriers to anything that might touch the brand. This is where framing of the initiative came into play: Because this was a controlled experiment, restricted only to those people who had already decided to abandon the product – the organization had very little risk - no tangible downside to contemplate apart from the cost of creating the project. On the other hand, the upside was the ability to both achieve an economic gain, and also learn something important about customers and their relationship to the brand. I think this is the kind of framing that savvy customer experience innovators have learned to look for and apply – and it was certainly part of getting the Lounge intiative sold through and budgeted.
• #10: SLIDE VISUAL NOTES: (Not sure – for discussion & ideation – maybe just text?) GLEN The best marketing executions draw on a customer insight. Customer insights are often answers hiding in plain sight and here was one: We live our lives on-line. At least for many of us born before 1995 or so, the internet has been transformative in our experience, and mostly in a positive way. When we laddered Norton’s benefits up from “safety” by asking “why is that important” in the context of this insight, we zeroed in on a brand meaning that we wanted to get across in every facet of this digital experience - We phrased it this way: “Norton helps people live their on-line lives to the fullest, confident that with Norton products and services they are well equipped to do so.” This was the glass half full way of thinking about internet security – because we have great tools like Norton, we really can live lives that are enriched in many ways because of our access to the internet. From a creative strategy standpoint, we decided: Let’s attach Norton security to this positive narrative and see where that takes us.
• #23: Q&A
• #24: Contact info, etc.