How do you remake your organizational culture to “do it wrong quickly”? You know that you need to change to a more adaptive, experimental approach, but how do you pull it off? Hear from marketing leaders in several companies that have already walked down that road in this month’s Biznology newsletter A Do It Wrong Quickly Culture.
Longtime readers know what I mean when I say “do it wrong quickly“—it’s a marketing approach where you try things and do more of what works, instead of obsessing over doing everything perfectly the first time. The basic idea behind “do it wrong quickly” is that if customers are not responding to your marketing, you should do something different. (Deep, huh?) That kind of flexibility requires a special kind of corporate culture, however. (And “corporate” culture is not just for large businesses—every business has some kind of culture, even if it is merely driven by the personality of the owner.)
There’s no universal name for the kind of culture that adjusts its marketing based on what customers say and do. Some call it a “feedback” culture, others a “responsive” or “open” culture. Several marketers referred to a “metrics-driven” culture. Whatever the name, successful marketers know it when they see it.
Some of these marketers were starting from scratch. Listen to Curt Sasaki, Vice President of Sun Microsystems’ Web site: “Sun was not at all a metrics-driven culture when I arrived. When I took over, the Web was an information resource. I began to ask folks, ‘What are our customers doing?’ And they didn’t have the answers. I noticed that the first thing people did at our Web site was to leave. [Now] every single week, we measure everything. We look at the funnels of promotions to clickthroughs to sales.” Sun’s culture of “openness” is a clear contributor to the marketing transformation they’ve made—people must listen to be persuaded.
Some companies have always had a “numbers” culture, but needed to learn to apply it to online marketing. Joel Reimer, Director of Interactive Marketing at ScottsMiracle-Gro, explained, “Scotts is a very data-driven. Consumer research drives everything we do. But we’ve always struggled with justifying this internally because we have had a hard time isolating the impact because we don’t sell direct. With online, we’re trying to foster a relationship approach.”
Michael Petillo, e-business Leader at manufacturer W.L. Gore describes their transition. “Gore is very much a metrics-driven company—it’s an engineering company. We’re educating marketing in the power of Web metrics. We’ve seen an amazing revolution—there’s so much passion.”
Devashish Saxena, Texas Instruments’ Manager of Worldwide Internet Marketing, tells a similar story. “We have a culture where numbers talk. I’ve always found that if I can back up my story with the right data, people who were dead set against it are willing to change. It’s not just the culture of the company, but the openness of the leadership team. We’ve been able to educate them on Web metrics. One approach is to tie back to customers: ‘Hey look, here is what customers are telling us.’ Anytime you can bring that customer perspective and customer insight, that’s very helpful.”
CompUSA’s Al Hurlebaus noted that “Numbers play an important part of convincing anyone around here. We look at bottom-line gross margin and profit.” Still, when he proposed adding customer reviews to the Web site to raise conversion rates, “I don’t think one executive thought there’d be any change.” So they experimented—trying it on one product segment to see if conversion rates increased. (They did, markedly.) In a company without a feedback culture, Al’s bosses might have said “no” instead of “give it a try.”
Successful online marketers almost universally agree that the way to persuade companies to experiment is to emphasize listening to customer feedback. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik summed it up. “Most people don’t care what I think—my opinion, my analysis—they think I don’t understand their business problem, which may be true. They will be doubtful of my analysis as long as they think it is mine. But when I manage to clearly articulate the customer voice shining through, that is when they seem to accept the data.”
The thread that runs through each of these stories is the need for a change and the need for someone to persuade people to make that change. In your company, will that someone be you?
