Think Product Experience-Led Growth (part 1)
The Growth Brand Framework Series | Experience Strategy
Everybody’s talking about product-led growth right now. And for good reason, with analysts reporting faster revenue growth, market share gains, and higher valuations.
It’s asking a lot of your product, though, to:
- Guide customers toward the full value of your product
- Convert them from trial in short order
- Turn them into enthusiastic purchasers of additional products and services
- And recruit them as advocates of your brand.
It makes me think that we should all be talking about product EXPERIENCE-led growth. And for this, we need to raise the bar for Experience Design. You need to raise the bar in your organization, or with your design partners.
Over the next four installments of the Growth Brand Framework series, a series within a series,* I’m going to tell you why we need to push the Experience aspect more, and show you how.
If you’re in senior leadership and this sounds like I’m going to get into the design weeds too much — Wait, don’t touch that dial!
By the time we’re done with these four installments it’s my hope that you’ll feel like you’re going to be a much more effective leader of a brand, not just a business — and can be a better guide to your creative teams to ensure their work is supporting the business and your winning strategy.
And even if you’re not so much into Product Led Growth in your particular category, I’m getting into Product Design by drawing on a mix of strategy, innovation, and experience design that you might not have considered before.
Let’s grow your brand!
Your product has to provide more than functionality, but …
Recommendations about how to achieve a successful transition to product-led growth tend to focus on packaging, discovery, self-guided education and support — and, yes, product design.
But Product Design that satisfies the business side of the equation: design that upsells, cross sells, nudges, and generally drives users to see value ASAP. All fine, but … this is pulling Product into Sales and Marketing, and the most credible marketing research such as that by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Binet & Fields tells us :
- Customers actually don’t care much about most brands
- Loyalty doesn’t vary a whole lot between brands
- You’re usually better off going after new customers than retaining old ones
- Most people don’t perceive a significant difference in competitive products and brands
- Emotion-based marketing is twice as likely to be profitable as rational campaigns; it’s more than twice as efficient at driving market share, and works really well over the long-term
- Just because customers use one of your products doesn’t necessarily give you a leg up on getting them to purchase more of your product, and growing cross-selling other than through market penetration can be difficult and expensive to try
To truly build a product experience that achieves the goals of Sales and Marketing, I believe you also need to adopt some of the learnings from Sales and Marketing.
Most importantly, building what others have called a “consumer-grade experience.” In the consumer experiences world, that’s generally described as a “meaningful experience that builds an emotional connection with users,” which sounds pretty woo-woo but doesn’t have to be, when further defined and when approached with the goals of supporting your winning business strategy, achieving your sales and marketing objectives, and generally bringing your brand to life.
Defining Meaningfulness
We’re wading into a subject that academics in all manner of fields are still debating. In my experience a good working definition for strategic brand and design work is that meaningful experiences reinforce or challenge who we think we are now and/or who we think we want to be in the future.
We’re looking for the connection between their hopes and dreams concerning their best selves and the problem space — whatever your product or service is, there is almost always something there if you dig hard enough and long enough.
But digging takes work, and consumer research seems to rarely go here, as fundamental as this question is connecting with customers as people first.
Defining Experience
Experience was defined for our purposes at least a quarter century ago by the Harvard Business Review when it introduced us to the “Experience Economy.”
To paraphrase — well add to a lot to, honestly — an experience is a staged interaction that brings greater value to a transaction by incorporating narrative and world building, and reframes the transaction-focused roles of provider and customer — into entertainer and audience, for example, or event producer and participant, or, as in the case with Disney, as cast and guest.
The goals are to exceed expectations and cause positive emotions, which create a memorable event.
Don’t confuse Usability with Experience. While good usability — too much of a rarity itself — can ensure value is created, it’s table stakes to your customer. We all expect things should work, and work well. And any advances you make in the design of interactions will eventually be mimicked by competitors — mimicking an Experience, however, makes a competitor as copycat.
Behavioral and attitudinal KPIs can help you improve Usability, but their use is limited in creating a distinctive Experience that reflects your brand.
Defining Connection
I like the way Amy Bucher in her excellent book “Engaged, Designing for Behavior Change” defines connection: The way we can feel engaged in an ongoing, two-way relationship with an entity that understands something important about us. And, I would add, continues to evolve in that understanding and adapt to your needs and desires.
I don’t believe the end goal is the user will necessarily “love” your product, or “love” your brand — that’s a high bar. I believe the goal is that the value you provide as a product or business is apparent, and because of the consistency of experience people have with your organization, that perception of your value is widespread
And, maybe just maybe, you become one of the relatively few brands customers will act as advocates for — and they’ll even look forward to your future offerings.
Insights to action — in the emotional dimension
These fundamentals we’ve discussed tell you what you need to understand— which can seem pretty daunting:
- You need to understand who your customers aspire to be, and/or how they want to live or work — as relevant to the problem space you’re solving for.
- You need to understand and address this through an experience that is more than a transaction, and not only conveys your brand but your distinct value through the product.
If it’s helpful, you can look at this as an insights-to-action framework, much as you’d employ on the functional side of product design.
- What emotional as well as functional challenges are people experiencing in your problem space?
- What would your product experience include to help people meet those challenges?
- How would you approach creating these features and interactions — through the way your brand participates meaningfully in your customers’ lives?
To answer these questions, you can’t be satisfied with the usual user research and analytics, and the way most use common tools like Experience Mapping. You need to push harder. And that’s our next installment: We’re raising the bar on Experience Design. See you there!
*These articles are based on my ongoing Growth Brand Framework video series, found at www.daleconour.com
