Javier von Westphalen, Author at EMERGENT ELEMENT

Who is your future customer?

We experience disruption with new technology and industry changes. However, demographic and customer expectations are fundamental driving forces in challenging how things are done.

Demographic change is a good indicator of who your future customer could be. You can look at age composition, income, education. However, the ethnic composition of the future population is one factor that sometimes becomes an afterthought.

What makes demographic shifts so rewarding is that it brings innovation and growth opportunities that will impact society and the economy.

For instance, the US Census has projected that Latinos will reach 111 million by 2060, becoming 28% of the population. That means that soon it will be one in three people who could be a future customer. However, 70% of Latinos say brands don’t understand their culture, a 59% increase from a year ago, according to H Code.

Why does understanding their culture matter?

Because culture matters to tell authentic stories and to create remarkable experiences. People don’t care about you unless you care about them. They look at content through their personal lens of values, knowledge, experiences, attitudes, and beliefs. And if you cannot meet them where they are, cannot see their worldview, and provide a solution that fits them, you run the chance to become irrelevant.

The implication is that addressing a new population segment rarely fits the way you currently do things. It will require you to see things differently, look at your current capabilities, identify your key and future customers’ challenges, and deciding what you need to do to serve them.

Make Your Customers’ Story your Story

Make your customers your story is the story of how you help them achieve their dreams and desires. We sometimes forget that their world view and experience are different from ours. We push for the outcome we want to see, get the flu vaccine, use a net to avoid malaria, and exercise or diet to mitigate diabetes risk.

But are these the jobs they want to get done? And are these important to them?

The products provide a functional aspect of a job, but how about the emotional and social aspects of them.

In a way, the product, the vaccine, the net, the diet is a means to an end. And we might assume they want to do these for health reasons. However, when we look deeper and see with their eyes, health concerns might be on the priority list.

For instance, when working on the Zika virus campaign in Puerto Rico, preventing behaviors were the least of their concerns; moms were more concerned about stigma and economic issues. And in South Africa, many people were more concerned about sleeping well without bugs and that the net look good than preventing mosquito bites.

As marketers and innovators, we need to make our customers’ stories our stories. If we can help lower the stigma and design a beautiful net, making the people feel better and helping them achieve their goals would help us achieve our objectives?

Making your customer’s stories your story requires empathy to understand their aspirations and what jobs they want to get done, so we can design a strategy to help them solve those challenges.

It's not how to get attention but how to get noticed is that matters.

It’s Not How to Get Attention but How to Get Noticed that Matters.

We live in a crowded and noisy world. Daily social media, texts, apps, streaming media, traditional media, etc., calls our attention.

Getting attention is easy. You can buy eyes to get attention. And if you are not getting it, you can raise the volume and get loud enough for someone to turn and see you, but are you getting noticed?

On the other hand, getting noticed requires the ability to see and listen with your eyes to the worldview of the people you serve. Learning to see what they are hoping to do, what is stopping them from achieving it, and the story they are telling themselves.

And then design a cultural experience that solves that desire. Design products, services, or programs that speak to who they are, what they believe, what they value, social expectations, aspirations, and how that experience makes them feel.

To be able to see means going beyond demographics because demographic alone fails to discover intent.

If we look a the Latino population, we have first, second, third generation, and multigenerational households. Each of them brings a distinct set of experiences, knowledge, believes, desires, and barriers. Thus, confusing Latinos as one audience will guide you on a one-size-fits-none strategy.

That’s why you need to design and build with the people you want to serve in mind to get you noticed. Otherwise, you will end up with a great product, service, or marketing campaign that no one wants and noticed.

Show Your Gratitude

When I came to the United States, Thanksgiving was a new holiday for me. Although I could not identify with the history, the essence of the celebration resonated with me. Every year we got together with family and friends to prepare a mix of Mexican, Peruvian, and American dishes. A time to relax, eat, joke, drink, and be grateful for what we have.

Like many holidays, we tend to highlight one day to express it and celebrate. And then we go with our daily life and miss many opportunities to be grateful. A recent survey of the John Temple Foundation found that we are not very good at expressing gratitude and that America’s gratitude is declining.

Showing gratitude is an act of generosity. And one day a year, we get together to celebrate and show our appreciation to others. I invite you to celebrate it fifty-two times a year, one day per week.

Sharing is Caring

One day per week, share your gratitude to people who have to help you on your journey. Reach out and let them know how they have influenced you, help you grow, get unstuck, and or supported you.

Seven Ways to Show Gratitude

There are many ways to show you care. Here are seven ways to get you going.

Act without rewards
Give something to someone for no reason at all.
Be present
Show them they are in your mind.
Be generous with your knowledge, time, and experience.
Use your power

A Thought About Power

Power isn’t a function of status or hierarchy. Power isn’t a tool for self-enhancement or for forcing compliance. Power is how you show up and how you play in someone else’s story.

Be grateful for what you have. And generous enough to use your power to help others.

May the goods in life be yours in abundance that stays with you year long.

Do You Have The Courage to Make Things Simple?

The other day I got frustrated with the process of an online conference with a new platform. It required many steps to access the online presentation. First, it required me to sign in to the conference platform. Then look for the room and topic I wanted to attend. After that, sign in again as an attendee to the presentation, go Zoom platform, sign in, and access the webinar. In all the processes, I have forgotten my password and email I have used to registered, which require me to ask for it, wait and start the process. So, it took an extra effort to access the already running presentation, which added to my frustration.

I’m sure the organizers were well-intended. And I assume part of the registration process focused on capturing the number of attendees to the conference and how many participants each topic attracted. All valid measures; however, they forgot the customer experience in their planning. And I wonder how many people quit based on time and frustration. By the time I listened to the speakers, my mood had changed from positive to negative.

People’s needs are not so complicated, but we tend to make simple things more complex. And the more complicated things are, the less likely they are to going to act. Make things simple.

Good enough can be scary. But quality is relative.

We strive to produce a great experience, a high-quality product, or service. These are ideal performance measures, and most likely, their definition is based on our own point of view. However, your opinion of performance rarely matches the people you serve view of performance. In fact, it is most likely that you overshoot when you project your own idea of performance.

Three basic performance lenses people use to choose between products or services.

Functional refers to performance and reliability. How does it work as I expected? Did it take me too long to sing in?

Emotional is about how people feel. What is the story they tell themselves about the product or service? I only buy the best. How does it make me feel? I got a good value.

Social focus on the tribe, how they perceive others feel about them, and their signals to the group. What will they tell others? She is environmentally conscious; this reflects who I am.

Simplicity is the key to brilliance.

Bruce Lee

What would happen if you intentionally lowered the performance in one area and increased to good enough in another in the name of simplicity?

Three ways to make the complex more simple:

Focus on the human experience. Understand which performance is more important to the people you serve and what tradeoff they are willing to make.

Eliminate the non-essential. Do less, but better. Focus on what matters most, and decrease performance where it does not.

Make the complex more simple. Look through the peoples’ eyes. Create experiences that require less time, physical or mental effort.

Simplicity is key. Make things easy to do.

Innovate, Don’t Force

Trying to force people to consume when they don’t want to is not a good growth strategy. Instead, innovate to remove the barriers to action.

Be wary of the mantra: If we build it, they will come.

Have you ever felt pushed or trying to be influenced to do something, and the more they insist, the more you resist or entirely ignore it? Your reaction could be for many reasons. Maybe you are not interested because you had more pressing problems, you are solving the issue in another way, or because it is not that important to you. Are you being seen?

As marketers, strategies, and designers, we have to learn to see. Learning to see involves empathy and respect for the people we seek to serve. Learn to see their dreams, desires, and the culture they belong to or want to be part of.

Our job is to help them get where they want to go next.

In our eagerness to solve a problem and go to market, we tend to ignore two crucial assumptions and four barriers that can derail us from helping the people we seek to serve.

The first mistake is to assume that someone that does not consume wants to consume. Maybe the people you are serving are not interested, or your offer does apply to them in their current circumstances. It is a nice have but not a priority for them.
The second mistake is assuming that people that don’t consume our product are not consuming any products. Maybe they have found a way to work around what they want to get done. Have you ever used a knife as a screwdriver?

Innovate and Remove Four barriers to Action:

A third mistake is not understanding the barriers to consumption. If they are interested in the offer and are using a way to a surrogate to help them, then the question is, why are they not consuming?

Skills:

Do they have the ability to do so?

Recently I was working with a non-profit organization that serves first-generation Latino parents. LEAF helps them understand how to navigate the US school system. Coaching and workshops were in-person meetings. And then, Covid changed everything. And we had to pivot to an online session. The interest was still there, but no one was signing up and showing up. Although parents knew how to use their smartphones, they didn’t know how to subscribe and access the online meeting platform. So, LEAF focused on educating parents on registering for workshops, seminars, and using the online meeting platform.

Access:

They have the desire, but is the product or service accessible?

In 1993, I was working in a startup marketing agency. Little Caesars Pizza was losing market share to its competitors. The franchisee group approached us to help them with the Hispanic consumer. Hispanics love to eat pizza, and first-generation Latinos ate pizza as a celebration and a get-together party. But the celebratory occasion needed to happen at a seating down restaurant. And Little Caesars has no chairs or tables. It is a food pick up parlor. We needed to help Latinos change their perspective that a celebration could take place anywhere, and Littel Ceasar could be with them.

Wealth:

Do people have the financial assets to be able to afford the services?

Part of Latino students learning to navigate the US school system is taking the SAT and ACT, but how can they do that when parents have limited resources and are concern about more pressing things? LEAF partnered with the SAT Board to provide vouchers to low-income Latino parents enabling young students to take the test.

Time:

Is it too cumbersome or time-consuming?

During the H1N1 crisis, we worked to increase vaccination among Latinos and African Americans. The population at risk was ambivalent about getting vaccinated and didn’t have the time to go to a determined place when they work two jobs and needed to take care of the family. Thus, we brought the vaccine to them. We set at a tent in a convenient community location and partnered with a pharmacy to provide the vaccines.

If the people you serve have a desire for your offering and are non-consuming, don’t try to persuade them. Work on removing the consumption barriers. Don’t force, innovate.

How Design Thinking Makes You a Better Leader

Growing up my leadership image was a charismatic, extroverted, and in control person. One who was having all the answers, always telling people what to do, and in charge. And it made sense, after all the Latino culture at the time valued hierarchy.

Later on, I learned that different leadership styles vary from command and control to servant leadership and a mix in between. And after reading and being in the workforce for a while, my leadership is definition changed. Her is my definition:

Leadership is the art of facilitation and collaboration to achieve objectives by solving problems, setting direction, and give team ownership.

However, when I looked at how to improve my skills, I found that most of the literature focuses on the leadership definition, looking at what made past leaders successful and improving essential leadership skills such as interpersonal, communication, and management. These are crucial skills to develop and master; however, I found four gaps.

It focused on the end goal, personal objectives, and not much on who was doing the work.
Improving skills focus mostly on managing the individual and not working with the team.
It lacked how to foster collaboration and working as a team.
Lack of a framework to put different skills to work together

Leadership is human-centered at its core

These points sound self-serving. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have anything against improving personal performance and skills. After all, as an athlete, I know how important it is to improve on a technique. Leadership is s human-centered at its core. And in a rush to get things done, sometimes we tend to forget this.

Problem Solving is key to Leadership

A strategy is deciding what to do and not to do. And a critical part of the process is identifying what problems are worth the effort.

“The ability to identify critical problems is the most underrated skill in management.” The MIT Leadership Center

If the ability to identify problems is the most underrated skill, then traditional leadership styles need to adapt to a new mindset and a new way of working.

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process. It provides a framework for listening, learning, and then leading in today’s environment—a way of thinking and method to improve our leadership skills.

How does Design Thinking make you a better leader?

Let’s look at the process:

Empathize: Set aside your assumptions and understand the people you seek to serve and their challenges. As a manager, team leader, or team member, the people you want to help are the people who are working with you. Seeking to understand the problems people face, seeing things from their perspective before attempting to come up with ideas and create solutions will help fine-tune their real challenges.

Define: Clearly define the problem worth solving. Once you understand the many barriers that are stopping him/her from moving forward, working together, you choose one to three issues that have a high impact and low implantation effort to focus.

Ideate: Brainstorm to generate ideas and select one to three to prototype. After you had agreed on crucial problems to solve, you generate ideas that can provide potential solutions as a team.

Prototype: Create a model or a simple version of the final product (or process). This step could be as simple as working together to create a plan with three action tasks on what to do next.

Test: Test to learn. Here as a team, you define how you will know that things are working, agreeing on the implementation for some time, and observing what is working, what is not working, and if the assumptions made were right or not?

Iterate to fine-tune a solution. The last part is checking back on lessons learned and brainstorming to improve the areas that are not working or new challenges that arose from the test period.

Tackling risk and uncertainty is the new norm.

Businesses face many challenges from demographic shifts, diverse workforce, employee, and customer expectations. Add to this rapid industry, market, and technology disruption, and you are continually navigating white rapids.

Design Thinking provides a leadership framework to listen, identify problems worth solving, work as a team to bring solutions, and testing to learn what works and does not work.

You Can’t Change Minds Without Winning Hearts

Will pushing harder do the trick?

As a kid, I hated eating meat. The harder my mother pushed me to eat, the harder I resisted. As a result, I stayed seating at the table for two to three hours after everyone was gone. I couldn’t stand up until I finished my plate. Luckily, I had a German Sheppard that will save me from the pain of chewing one more bite.

The assumption is that pushing harder will do the trick. However, the approach often backfires. When someone pushes, the other person pushes back. They push back to keep doing what they are doing, in my case, avoiding chewing meat.

My mom’s objective to influence, convince, and reason with me had a good intention – eat your food to stay healthy. However, it mostly focused on her desired outcome, finish your food. She was so focused on her own goals that she pushes and pushed, forgetting to understand why I was not eating.

Seek to understand to create a meaningful connection

Inciting action and changing minds starts with empathy. Understand the fears, uncertainties, and desires are (FUD) of the people you want to serve. In other words, learn what drives them and what is blocking them. The insight will help lower the barriers to action and build trust.

79% of consumers said that brands have to demonstrate that ‘they understand and care about me’ before they are going to consider purchasing.’ – Wunderman study

I didn’t eat meat because it was difficult to cut and chew. It was a fight between me and the stake. Besides, I was a slow eater, and that made me feel worst. All my family had to wait for me to end eating before they could get up. That usually took about fifteen minutes, except the days we had a stake in the menu. Those days, they will get up ten minutes after they finished. I stayed until my plate was empty.

It wasn’t until she understood this that she changed how the steak was cooked and served. Maybe that’s why I love “Lomo Saltado” so much. After the change, I enjoyed dinner and finished with the rest of the family, which made me feel great.

Help them advance where they want to go.

People like to be in control of their choice and actions. Telling people what to do does not help. On the contrary, it falls with resistance and deaf ears. That’s what happened when we worked on the Zika campaign in Puerto Rico.

The Zika virus was an emergency campaign and an immediate threat to unborn babies. We hit the ground running, telling pregnant mothers and their partners what to do. However, we had not considered that Puerto Rico is an island, that living with mosquitos is part of everyday life, and mosquito-borne disease was nothing new to them. Our audience knew what to do. They have heard the same preventing behavior campaign since they were kids. They received the message with hesitation and anger. Thus, they were tuning out.

Moms and pregnant women wanted a healthy baby. However, they were overwhelmed with all that was going in Puerto Rico and how that affected their lives. What moms need to hear was a reminder to do these activities and not feel like a “bad” person for not doing them. We learned that two out of the four preventing behaviors were not doable.

With these insights, we designed social and traditional media stories that reminded them about two preventing behaviors they can do each day, like brushing your teeth each morning. We placed ads on venues that will trigger reminders such as on top of mosquito repellent shelves, cinema, and restaurant bathrooms. Results were outstanding, intent to “Use Insect Repellant” increased 39%, and repellent sales increased 15% from the previous year.

You can’t change minds without winning hearts. Winning hearts requires listening, building trust, and creating a meaningful connection. Understand the people you want to serve, gain insight that helps lower the barriers to action and, helps them get where they want to go.

Cultural Marketing is understanding the tribe

All Marketing is Cultural

All marketing is cultural. People you want to serve belongs to a community and a tribe or tribes. A tribe that reflect who they are or aspire to be. The story they tell themselves.

Culture is what people do, what they believe, what they value, and how they conform to a peer’s group, which informs their worldview. And in turn influences the behavior they choose, the status they seek, and how their actions fit the tribe. What they do is influenced more by who they are than what you say. People like us do things like this.

People don’t know what you know, don’t care what you care for, and don’t seek what you seek. Their experiences are not your experiences. And that is ok because it is not about you, it is about them.

All marketing is cultural. Cultural marketing is understanding the human connection; it is finding out how the people you want to serve to see their world; it is creating a story that resonates, fits into it, and helps them move forward.

Can I Have Your Attention?

Can I have your attention is something I used to hear a lot growing up. My mother will say these words with a stern look. Her frustration was palpable and the tension so dense that a little more will make the room explode. I knew I was in trouble when she used my first and middle name.

Not paying attention made it worst. I would not hear her voice until the third or fourth time she called me, each time one or two notches louder.

Attention-deficit is the norm these days. People are easily distracted. They have more options to choose where to divide and spend their time on. Eight-seconds is all you get to pick interest before people move to another activity.

If you are like me, you would probably have to pay attention if something your mom said interested you. And it could have been with a whisper, not a megaphone. The same is true for the people you want to reach.

One way to call for attention is by using a megaphone, increasing the volume of ads. The idea is that the louder you speak, the more they will hear you. But, if the message does not resonate; it is not welcome. So, it doesn’t matter how loud you get. The message will become background noise and not heard.

Another way is to focus on earning attention. Earned attention builds on relationships and trust. It is welcome and gives you permission to engage.

Relationship and trust are based on your customers’ understanding. However, when the understanding is superficial, mundane, or based on limited experience, it will undermine the impact you want to have. Allow yourself to get insightful understanding and let go of preconceived assumptions. Customer insight is the bridge connects hears and minds. And since it is centered on human needs and desires, it leads to create value in people’s lives.

Show some brand love. Provide content and experiences that help reinforce who your customers are and reflected who they want to be. Especially if you are marketing to Hispanics and other multicultural audiences.

Appealing to their personal identity and motivations is more successful in creating impactful communications, experiences, and motivation that inspire action.