“Well-reasoned and useful … for anyone who wants to shake the sleep out of an organization and renew a focus on creating the kind of value that customers are willing to pay for.”—Publishers Weekly
The iPod, Red Bull, Google—Why did these products become hits when most fail? Because the people who created them were tuned in. Unlike tuned out companies that start with their own big idea for a new product, tuned in companies first seek an overlooked market problem that needs to be solved.
TUNED IN: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs (July 7, 2008; Wiley; $27.95); explores how companies large and small create hits that resonate with the market by tuning in the right way and at the right time.
To identify a proven process for creating “resonators”, authors Craig Stull, Phil Myers and David Meerman Scott interviewed nearly one hundred CEOs and studied the introduction of thousands of products. In TUNED IN, they explore what went wrong with such tuned out products as TiVo, the Segway, and the LG Electronics Internet-enabled refrigerator; and what went right in developing such tuned-in hits as:
- Zipcar, a membership-based car-sharing company targeted at under-served city-dwellers and college students who drive infrequently but regularly
- Barack Obama, who emerged as frontrunner because his “Audacity of Hope” platform is tuned in to voter problems
- Magnavox, which studied TV viewers to develop a handy remote control locator
- Intuit, which interviewed hundreds of people about their personal finances to develop Quicken
- StubHub, an online marketplace for reselling and buying extra event tickets
- GoPro, which developed a camera for surfers that attaches to your wrist
- Boeing, which has just developed a 787 Dreamliner jet with market-driven enhancements that they expect customers will spend much more for
- Stardoll, a Web-based version of dress-up dolls that is ranked as the number 386 website in the world based on traffic and has more than double the daily pageviews of Barbie.com.
TUNED IN shows how to find market problems, determine which solutions customers will pay money for, cultivate an “outside-in” culture at your organization, find and interview people in your market face-to-face, and measure the potential impact of solving a problem. Once you create a resonator that buyers want, it will virtually sell itself and you can become and remain a market leader.
About the Author
Craig Stull, Founder and CEO of Pragmatic Marketing, started the company in 1993 to provide product marketing training and consulting services to technology companies. His methodologies have been taught to over 45,000 executives at 3,000 companies. Phil Myers, who has launched several market leading startups, brings over 25 years of software industry experience to his role as President of Pragmatic Marketing. David Meerman Scott is the author of the Web Ink Now blog and The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which won the 800-CEO-READ Author’s Choice Award in 2007. Find out more from the website and blog at: www.tunedinbook.com
A Conversation with the authors of Tuned In
Why do most companies struggle to create hit products or services? Companies usually try to create hits by guessing at what buyers need instead of finding real problems that they’ll pay money to solve. To use a sports analogy, they try to hit home runs instead of base hits. And just as rallies start with base hits, so too do hit products and services. You have to find an unsolved problem that is real, urgent and compelling BEFORE you try to create a hit, not after.
What are the most common mistakes that companies make? Too often, companies will spend lots of money developing a new idea, marketing it and then trying to sell it to what we call a ‘marketplace of one’ … themselves. It’s not until after its too late that someone realizes that they neglected to ask any potential buyers if they cared.
What is a resonator? A resonator is a hit product or service that, as soon as you see it, you say, “I gotta have that.” It so perfectly solves a market problem that customers feel compelled to buy it … without being coerced. The iPod is a resonator. Starbucks is a resonator. FedEx is a resonator. They ‘resonate’ because they completely and uniquely satisfied an urgent and compelling issue. Customers buy it willingly and most importantly talk about it and recommend it to others without any incentive to do so.
What do most companies need to change about their culture in order to develop resonators? Unfortunately, we find that most companies have employees spending 80% to 90% of their time in tasks that have NOTHING to do with what their buyers value most from them. They study financial measurements, sales forecasts, schedules, technology trends, operational efficiency, but don’t study what their customers need or want or even if they are satisfied with what they are getting. They follow business school fads. They just do what they get paid to do and report it. It’s only when you reverse the process and start spending quality time up-front identifying what problems are worth solving and what buyers want from you that you have the chance of creating a resonator.
Why shouldn’t you base your products or services on what your customers want? This is one of the great myths we find that is prevalent in companies today … become customer-focused and build what they ask you for. It sounds intuitive and of course it is a good thing to engage with your customers and find out what they want. But, the fundamental problem with this approach is that your customers typically represent only a small percentage of the total market. Unless you enjoy a monopoly market share, you’re listening to signals that may address only 10%-20% of your potential market share (or less). The other problem is that customers know you only for that one thing you did for them, nothing else. It’s analogous to asking your last boss about a new job opportunity. They frame everything in terms of what they know about you and think simple, incremental next steps. This is the wrong approach if you want to create a resonator.
Why is innovation or “changing the game”, the wrong place to focus your attention? Innovation isn’t a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be your starting point. When you try to ‘change the game’ by creating something different, unique or even what your designers/developers think is breakthrough, you’re swinging for the fences and most likely ‘guessing’ at what buyers will want. Its far better to focus your attention FIRST on finding a real unresolved need in the marketplace and then figuring out how to create an innovative solution to the problem you’ve found. Nearly every resonator we know of took the latter approach. Only a few ‘lucky’ ones connected after starting with an innovative idea … and those were often because the market started embracing a different application of the product or service than the company originally intended.
Why do you say that your opinion on what will sell is irrelevant? Because it’s a reality … you are not the market, your buyers are. Thinking that your opinion is the one that matters is the wrong perspective to have if you want to create a resonator. The world is littered with people who are very, very smart and failed. Their products and services end up in the scrap heap for a simple reason … they created something that made sense to them and only them. Why Starbucks and not Peets? Why Quicken and not Microsoft Money? What you find when you look into these kinds of things is that the difference is that one company was listening to the market, the other listening to itself.
Why did you choose to study the company Zipcar for the book? We found hundreds of stories of companies that were tuned in, but Zipcar is a perfect example. What we love about Zipcar is that it started in an industry everyone would immediately say is mature (rental cars) yet they were able to identify an urgent enough problem for a large constituency of buyers to build a $100 million business. They discovered that city dwellers and college students have a regular but infrequent need for driving. These people wanted to spare themselves the expense of owning a car as well as the hassle of frequent rentals. Here was an unresolved market problem that was easily quantifiable. From this knowledge the company developed their membership-based car-sharing concept and it turned out to be a huge hit. Zipcar customers love the experience so much that they talk about the company and refer them willingly. What Zipcar shows is that anyone in any industry can create a resonator if they just get tuned in.
What new products or companies are good examples of tuned in successes or tuned out flops? Apple’s iPod and iPhone are resonating like few products have before in the tech industry. In the financial services industry, BillMeLater has developed a $1 billion business in two years by providing a method for online purchasing that doesn’t require entering your credit card number. A startup we just ran across recently by the name of CallZingo provides a service for folks who’ve had a bit too much to drink that provides a driver to get them home with their car at a reasonable price. When the alternative might be jail time, we’d say that resonates.
Tuned out offerings are easy to spot. We’ve all seen them and wondered who hit the stupid button when they launched them. Microsoft Vista is tuned out. Every user we’ve talked to complains that the incremental costs of all the changes it imposes far exceed what little benefit the new system offers. Sony is one of our favorite targets. They launch tuned out products all the time … like their projection system with a remote control the size of laptop.
Isn’t the tuned in process the same as market research, which we’ve known about for ages? Research is certainly an important part of the equation but the real power of getting tuned in comes from connecting the dots you collect in research to ways that allow you to create resonators – products, ideas or services that so perfectly solve a specific market problem that your buyers feel compelled to buy from you. That requires a much deeper connection to unique customer groups and their problems than any outside research firm could have. We found plenty of examples of companies like TiVo, who had done the research and identified a real market need but ultimately failed to create a resonator because they didn’t address the other aspects of tuning in. They find out too late that it isn’t about being smart or first, it’s about creating sustained success as a problem solver in your market.
Who did you write this book for? We wrote it for anyone who creates or markets a product, service or idea. And we wrote it with the premise that we could provide the simple keys to success for people to follow that would improve their companies, their careers and their life. We focused it on organizational leaders but what we found as we researched this is that the principles work equally well for all types of individuals, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, ministers, even rock stars.
Why do you discuss Barack Obama in the book? Do Tuned In principles apply to politics and this year’s election? Absolutely it applies. In fact, we’d argue it’s the foundation. Out of curiosity we analyzed the political landscape over a year ago and one of the tuned in steps that we kept coming back to was ‘Establishing Authentic Connections’. The reason we wrote about Obama in the book – which seemed pretty risky at the time because he was then virtually unknown – was that the race began to start to shape up as an authenticity election. We thought Obama would do very well on that front. The fact that today he stands out as a leading candidate is because he was more than just authentic … he’s tuned in.
What are the first steps any of us can take to start benefiting from Tuned In principles right away? Get out of the office. Don’t do anything yourself before you observe, listen and ask questions to as many potential buyers as you can stand talking to: your customers and your noncustomers. Then find a problem that you have some passion for solving and probe deeper with the folks who seem to be most affected by it. We find that if you do this part really sincerely and really well … the rest of being tuned in just seems to follow naturally. If you skip this step, you are building your foundation in quicksand.
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The most common mistakes that cause tuned out products and services to fail:
- Guessing – Assuming company insiders know more than buyers about what they want to buy
- Assuming – Basing products and services on what current customers request rather than on an understanding of unsolved problems that other people will pay money to fix
- Telling – Trying to create a need in the market by relying on expensive advertising or an army of salespeople
The Six Step Process for Tuning In:
- Find unresolved market problems
- Understand buyer personas to identify your customer
- Quantify the potential impact of your solution
- Create breakthrough experiences around your product or service
- Articulate powerful ideas that speak to the problems of buyers
- Establish authentic connections so buyers understand how you’ve solved their problems
What is a resonator?
- The perfect solution to a specific problem
- A product or service that people want to buy without being coerced
- An offering that establishes a real and direct connection to what your market values most
- An idea that people immediately understand has value to them, even if they have never heard of your company or its products and services
(Adapted from TUNED IN: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities that Lead to Business Breakthroughs by Craig Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott)
| For more information, contact: Mark Fortier Fortier Public Relations 212-675-6460 mark@fortierpr.com |
Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs By Craig Stull, Phil Myers, David Meerman Scott Wiley; June 2008; $27.95 978-0-470-26036-4; Hardcover  |
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