A conversation
I’m sure you’ve all seen a conversation like this at least once:
Management: “People aren’t using our customer support app. The few ones who do, give it a negative NPS. And that thing costs us a lot of money.”
Product Manager: “Well, we do have a list of improvements and new initiatives that we’d like to go over and prioritize. Mind you, it’s a long list, and not of all the ideas are worth pursuing”.
The list the product manager shows contains things like:
Improve payment methods [category: payment integration]
Include native ads from content partners [category: revenue]
Decrease loading times [category: technical]
Management: “How much does the payment thing cost?”
Product Manager: “The current payment partner’s library can’t keep up with changes, so some customers can’t use their preferred way of paying. Sometimes these customers encounter errors too”.
Manager: “How much does it cost to fix it?”
Product Manager: “A lot. We’d have to switch to another technology partner and go for a more expensive one with better support and a better library”.
Manager: “What’s that native ads thing?”
Product Manager: “Something that came up during our free-for-all brainstorm. We were looking for ways to increase the working budget for our support app, and one of the ideas was this adding ads disguised as content. It’s not something we…”
Manager: “What’s it pay? How much are these publishers prepared to pay us?”
Product Manager: “About €.02 per click. We have 3 million customers, so theoretically, if these customers use the app twice a month, and 10% is interested in the content we show them, that’d make us about €12.000 a month”.
Manager: “I like it! Make it happen!”
Product Manager: “Yes, but…”
The manager has hung up.
2 weeks later
Two weeks later, the support app has a new section called “sustainability”:
I mean, look at this. I encountered this in an app I (have to) use, and I’m still fuming when I think of it.
What in the world were these people thinking? This is wrong on so many levels, I can’t even begin listing them all. But what is certain is that this “engaging content” is one of the thousand cuts that will make me move away from this telco as soon as I can.
I’m sure you’ll agree that no, you don’t always need a Kano survey to test whether something is a good idea. We all know that “I can see sustainability content in the app when I’m checking my data usage” would definitely turn out to be an “Indifferent” or even a “Reverse” category feature.
However…
Measuring aversion
Sometimes in conversations like the one above, you can bring up as many arguments as you want for or against a certain feature and still the decision maker won’t budge. “That’s what you think”, the manager might say.
That’s when you should pull out your secret weapon: the Kano model. One of the powers of the Kano model is that it measures aversion.
Management loves numbers. How the Kano model turns something as elusive as perception of quality into a quantitative analysis makes it a perfect tool to influence decisions made higher up the chain.
If the product manager had been able to tell the manager that of 1.000 customers surveyed, half of them hated the “inclusion of sustainability content” and the other half were indifferent about it, chances are the conversation would have gone in another direction. Is €12.000/month worth angering half of your customer base?
Aversion as a metric
Marketing people can be pretty myopic. They only see what they want to see and optimize for what they want to measure1. I’m sure there’s a PowerPoint doing the rounds at the telco boasting that tripling the amount of ads has increased revenue. I'm also sure there's no PowerPoint mailed around that shows these ads are angering customers.
“Are our native ads doing well?” is not the question that should guide the telco’s product marketeers’ thinking. Their first concern should be whether customers perceive these ads as valuable. As Levitt says in “The Marketing Imagination”:
“The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.”
The telco’s question should therefore be: “are we getting and keeping customers with these native ads?” If not, the product marketeers should dump the idea. It does not contribute to getting new customers and it does not contribute to keeping customers. No-one is attracted to a telco because they have native ads for sustainable living in their support app. The marketeers should definitely not spend their efforts on optimizing native ad engagement.
Because the product marketeers are not measuring aversion, they are unaware of the true impact of these ads. I’ve been telling people about these ads. I’ve ridiculed these ads. I’m writing this article. All of that takes quite a bit of effort, and it’s all fueled by my aversion.
No-one at the telco will link customer churn to these ads, or more generally, to the short-sightedness of how the product marketeers measure success. They’ll blame customer churn on external factors (competition, spoiled customers, the energy crisis, whatever), but they won’t question themselves. Instead of trying to prevent aversion, they pour millions into advertising to try and make up for lost customers. Because they were blind to the first principles of a business — getting and keeping customers — they are wasting money.
A company that cares about its customers (and therefore about itself) tries to get a feel for what might cause aversion. Such a company is able to keep customers at a fraction of the cost of bringing back customers or attracting new customers.
This lack of perspective leads to disasters.