Useful brands: Purpose, Customer Journeys and APIs

Editor's Notes

• #2: John creative director and co-founder at 383 get to talk this morning about brand utility and how we believe Useful Brands are shaping new customer experiences.
• #3: Brand utility isn’t our idea. In fact it’s been around for years; Examples; • The Michelin guide started in 1902. Useful tool to get people out and using the roads. • ANWB > dutch equivalent of the RAC. Pre-digital version of google maps snow alerts! • Card phones, personal favourite. Based on customer insight that people didn’t want to carry cash.
• #4: Utility in economics isn’t new either We didn’t invent it…some 1.25m entries at last count Utility affects willingness to pay higher amounts, determines choice, drives loyalty
• #5: So what is new? what is new is that digital has enabled a new era of brand utility, delivered through rich product and service ecosystems. digital services replacing physical ones (netflix) physical objects being improved with digital (withings) specific sectors like automotive being disrupted with new customer utility delivered through new types of infrastructures (tesla) And more useful business models emerging (dollar shave)
• #6: this is what interests us, so much so we’ve been writing a book on it
• #7: so, the first play is all around brands ensuring they have a well defined purpose
• #8: purpose is not about sustainability or charity stengel 50 > fast growth companies > found that all have a clear purpose that’s understood through the organisation mission or values that go beyond profit goals
• #9: So, What makes a great purpose> distilled down in to 4 key attributes 1) Breadth - lots of jumping off points 2) Catalyst for change - helps imaging new futures 3 & 4) Both actionable & inspirational - needs to drag you to tomorrow, but making it clear what you need to do today
• #10: Google are a good example of a purpose driven organisation. All 4 attributes emerge
• #11: When purpose which is rooted in these characteristics it’s leading to broader product and service ecosystems, but with a clear purpose from each touchpoint
• #12: Patagonia, really interesting company - How does their mission play out?
• #13: Purpose + breadth across BOTH marketing actions, and organisational actions Guides through organisational change (setting up new ventures, that didn’t exist when the purpose was drafted).
• #14: tesla - another great example
• #15: - an actionable and aspirational purpose open sourced their technology meets the goal to accelerate the change they want to see Time will tell if it works
• #16: Tasks This task is about quick validation What does the organisation think the brand purpose actually is?
• #17: this task is about testing the strength of your purpose as a catalyst for new products and cX ideas. Interrogate: Imagine that overnight the market for your brands current products is eroded. Does your existing brand purpose provide enough scope to add new products or services to the ecosystem?
• #18: play 2 Utility at the edges of the customer journey this is a play is specifically about the experiences and products that a brand offers it’s customers.
• #19: again, we looked for key themes that emerged from research and interviews. What are the common things we’re seeing at Useful Brands? 1) CX at the centre > place CX at the centre and it finds more ways out 2) New tools. Better customer view > new utility 3) Upshot of this. Experiences before technology
• #20: organisations are now much better at using customer journey mapping to identify quality of experience and empathy. here’s an example from lego
• #21: at 383, we use similar tools a lot to interrogate customer journeys and figure out where they are broken, or could be improved. lots of different ways of doing this
• #22: Example from audi of a new car share scheme they’re testing. You can imagine the conversation here > Map the customer journey to buy a car. > Customers are getting lost to car share schemes. > Develop car share scheme with audi cars.
• #23: - Getting journeys in to moveable pieces helps discover new ideas. - Use one set of cards for utility, services and features. - Use the other for channels, physical touchpoints and places where customers are found.
• #24: - Sky moving record to twitter. (a good example)
• #25: TASKS find ways to log areas of customer fiction to see if they’re places you could affect. Ask several people from different areas of your organisation to begin to note down unmet needs or friction points they believe exist for customers. After a few weeks of information gathering, narrow the list by identifying which needs specially intersect with the areas your brand purpose says you should offer utility. What new things could be introduced by your brand to affect the customer journey in these areas?
• #26: Identify where competitors are intercepting through utility: List your competitors products and services. Where along the customer journey are users being offered differentiating experiences? How would you define the purpose behind the way they are looking to build customer utility? What threat does this represent to customer interactions with your products?
• #27: A quick aside.
• #28: ads disguised as products -no one want’s the weather from their shampoo company, they want it from the met office. - Please don’t disguise ads as products.
• #29: Amazon Dash. Meet real needs. Why is this hardware when every person has a phone?
• #30: play 3
• #31: not average price index > Application programming interface! when it comes to utility, APIs can be incredibly powerful innovation tools
• #32: - this emerged in our research too
• #33: So, what the key areas where our research and interviews showed brands were driving utility through APIs? 1) Firstly, becoming API centric internally can give you a huge re-use and extensibility advantage 2) Secondly, Useful brands are really starting to realise value from finding smart ways to bring APIs in 3) And last, Useful brands also have strategies for releasing APIs out. (Netflix defined strategies for Large set of unknown vs Small set of known).
• #34: Importance of internal APIs Great leaked email from a now Google employee about Amazon’s militant transition to becoming API centric Bezos basically said ‘all teams must provide their functionality as an API to all other teams’ Service oriented architecture. Literally any internal system or communication has to be built as if someone externally was going to consume it. WHY? reusability and extensibility. Everything talks to everything. Technology can be reused and repurposed. New things can be easily plugged in. Basically very smart. Netflix do the same. Entire infrastructure split in to APIs And to make sure the service architecture is good, they have another tool (they call chaos monkey) specifically designed to try and get the systems to fail.
• #35: Bringing APIs in Utility people carry with them Starbucks mobile card accounts for 16% of all transactions
• #36: another quick example Some of the most useful parts of the airbnb experience are delivered on top of other people’s APIs (twillio)
• #37: Lastly, releasing APIs out Facebook connect and Google Products … incredibly successful way of getting traction in thousands of other places around the web - Nike example… allowing select partners to do interesting things with your data but in a controlled way.
• #38: Identify the internal hurdles and think about what data points or services might be improved by an API. Hotel examples - Tackle the cheap cost and high gain opportunities first.
• #39: The last API task, is about imagining what you could pull in. what are people hacking together already (ifft example) what APIs are customers carrying with them? what other APIs carry data on your customers?
• #40: So, that’s a whirlwind tour of three of the plays in the book, as mentioned there are 10 in total. If you’re interested in driving customer utility we think that the tools and tasks we’ve developed for each are a great start.
• #41: so if you want a copy, you can email Jake at jacob@383project.com
• #42: @383project / www.383project.com