Last week I was part of an Ideation session in which an insurance company needed some new thinking about how to best serve customers with their website. As one part of the client deliverable, the ad agency brought together a team to come up with new possibilities and ideas.
What an amazing experience. The agency set up some extremely creative exercises and group planning that allowed creative ideas to flow and soar between the categories of thinkers they put together: creative types, insurance types, consumer types, innovators.
Everyone worked well together, thought and created ideas off of each other, added and massaged ideas together. People gave their best, served the client and each other, with great respect and passion. Fun, creative, and successful. Or so I thought.
Toward the end of the second day, when the ultimate ideas were being presented, I leaned over to one of the clients and asked if he liked the ideas coming forth. He said he did, thought they were great, and wondered which ones they'd be able to implement given their budget to create the underlying technology that would be necessary. That, plus he wasn't sure when it could happen as there were other things they needed to do also. "Probably use some of this in the future."
What?? I got very curious. If the buyer didn't know how to use the ideas they apparently paid a lot of money to get, what else didn't they know? Were they unprepared for change? Was the agency less than upfront helping manage expectations? Was there an initial set of assumptions that were incorrect? Were we all creating something the client wouldn't use?
I went around and asked several of the others in the client group how they would know that their current customers would use the new site options we were coming up with. They all said the same thing: When new site options are available, people will know how to use them, want to use them, be drawn to using them. Ah. Build it and they will come! Sales folks can offer some advise as to how well that works!
In my mind, this is specious. Just because we know there is a great gym around the corner doesn't mean we'll use it. Just because we know there is a great product available doesn't know we'll buy it. The base-line assumption that so often gets made is that when there is great data available, it will be used or purchased.
As sellers, we know this isn't true. We know what buyers need, we gather appropriate data, we pitch glorious solutions that fit - they really really fit. But the buyer doesn't buy. Why? Because understanding need and creating solution doesn't actually teach the buyers how to bring something new into their 'system' and manage the new choices.
We forget that the current system people live in and make decisions in is 'fine, thank you.' Systems don't change behavior just because new data is available.
We all know we're supposed to exercise, floss, give up soda and processed foods and french fries. We all know that the new software or new computer will work better. But change isn't so easy as having great data: the system we're in must be willing to do something different. That's the hard part. And information doesn't cause a new decision to be made until/unless the system is already seeking to change, has already developed a new pathway to change, and has gotten buy-in from the internal elements.
So how should the agency have addressed their client? The structure should have been created with the baseline belief that until or unless the customers were willing to use the site, having a great site might be wasted. As ideators, we would then be equally focused on discovering ways to reach out to the customers to help them decide to sign on. As it was, our great ideas might have been under-utilized, and the client would have blamed the ad agency
1.everyone needed to know why the customers weren't using their current site
2.and helped them figure out what they would need to know or believe differently to be willing to act in a way they had never acted before (i.e. use the website). Facilitative Questions are great for this because they actually bring together different unconscious choices and add new possibilities so the decisioner can see the situation in a new way and possibly come up with an additional set of choices.
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