Innovation Archives - EMERGENT ELEMENT

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.

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.

Strategy: Uncover Inspiration

Thanksgiving reminds to be grateful for all the good things we have and the abundance in our lives. It also reminds us about 3 reflecting questions for 2019.

After the dinner is over and guests are leaving, we start planning what to do with the leftovers – preparing guests’ take home plates, what to keep, what to throwaway, and different dishes for the coming days.

In a similar manner, we can ask 3 strategic questions to prepare for 2019:

What to keep or what to continue doing
What to get rid off or what to stop doing
What to do different

As important as feeling grateful, it is also important to lay out the groundwork to fuel opportunities in 2019. Take December to reflect on this past year and think how you will make 2019 a remarkable and impactful one.