There Is No Deep Down
One of the best revelations I’ve had about product and service design came from a woman having a heart-to-heart with a talking horse.
For those who haven’t seen it, Bojack Horseman is a deceptively poignant show that often slips in surprising moments of depth and humanity under the guise of talking animals in Hollywood. The titular character, Bojack, is having a reckoning over years of poor decisions and wasted relationships. At the breaking point, he appeals with his biographer, who knows the full catalogue of his misdeeds, to tell him that he’s still a good person, deep down. That in spite of everything he’s done, there’s a deeper and truer part of him that’s better than his actions reveal. And after ducking the question, her reply is simple:
“Do you? Think I’m a good person? Deep down?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t think I believe in deep down. I kinda think that all you are is just the things that you do.”
It’s tempting to believe that as people, and as businesses, we have a separate, better, nobler part of ourselves hidden just beneath the surface. If only people got to know that deeper part, they’d see how great we are, how worthwhile, and how a relationship with us as a company is perfectly aligned with their own interests. We espouse values on About Us pages. Talk in glowing terms about what we stand for. We really are wonderful, deep down, beneath all the messy and awkward transactional mechanism.
But of course, most customers never get to know that deeper self because those transactional moments are what the relationship is built on. It’s not because they don’t have time, or there’s too much distraction. It’s because that deeper self doesn’t exist. Ultimately, customers only know who an organisation is by what they do: what’s tangible, what they interact with, what directly interacts with their lives, because that’s all there is to who anyone, or any business, is: the things that they do.
Making values and policy real for customers, and not just a set of vapid mission statements, comes down to crystallising them into tangible mechanics and interactions that customers can feel. They must become things a company does, not says, and they have to be lived by both the company and customer at the same time. If it’s deep down, it’s not real. It has to live right on the surface.
Manifesting them, making them ‘done things’, requires three key steps:
1.A value must have an effect to be meaningful. A client I recently worked with, let’s call it ‘Bojack,’ for the sake of confidentiality, couldn’t figure out why they weren’t reaching a wider customer base than just the customers they already had a personal relationship with. They had marketing, promotion, a web presence — surely that was enough? They even had publications on their environmental and diversity credentials, which were vitally important to their intended audience. But nothing changed. Where had Bojack gone so wrong?
“That’s nice,” our customer research team heard, “But what do we get out of that?”
None of those policies or publication actually had any effect on their service offering or who Bojack chose to work with. Many potential customers seemed to feel it was little more than window dressing, and that, when it came right down to it, Bojack didn’t really mean any of it. No policy has any meaning to customers unless there’s a tangible effect, a so-what, for them.
For Bojack, we began rebuilding their entire product offering from the ground up around the very values they held so closely. And it wasn’t easy picking the ones to focus on, and culling the ones we had to leave behind. But when we were done, we designed and built services designed for environmentally conscious customers, included real benefits for customers who traded ethically, and made those values something customers experienced at every stage.
2. Behaviour isn’t changed overnight, but it’s the only change that matters. Change is hard, especially when it comes to what you do. Bojack’s second issue came down to keeping the customers it brought in with those exciting new products — many of them started with a lot of fanfare and excitement, but the inertia to sustain offering them proved much harder to overcome.
While many at Bojack felt they believed in their values, that belief took a lot of effort to translate into how they measured success. Many wanted to keep the old performance metrics as they were, and values-based change meant not just saying they believed in those values, but changing behaviour to live them. It wasn’t long before many parts of Bojack relapsed into their old ways, and customers felt nothing had really changed.
In the end, we found that while there was high level enthusiasm for grand change with lots of ambition, we had to start small. A simple and concrete set of metrics and product offerings with a squad of motivated innovators got much farther than any top-down approach we tried.
3. Real change is only realised at scale. In the show, Bojack could be kind and amicable with people he was close to, but a nightmare for those he didn’t stop to know well. The Bojack here was no different — close ties to those they had a long relationship with, but utterly alien to the new customers they sought.
Those chummy relationships with existing customers didn’t have any coherent theme or quality — they were simply customers they’d know and traded with for years, but they had no coherency, no scalable policy on why those were their customers or how they should interact with them. And it was obvious to any other potential customers that they were not part of the ‘in crowd.’
To address those new potential customers, we had to translate the values-led services into scalable mechanics: a set of rules, policies, and conditions that meant anyone could be a new customer if they matched all the criteria. We gutted all the “you have to know the right person” and “you have to say the magic word” barriers that had lingered for years, and set out clear and transparent standards that allowed any customer to experience the same level of attention and service, regardless of who they knew. That built scalability in from the start.
Bojack had a hard road to actually starting to do good, rather than just believing good was there, deep down. It didn’t always work, and it forced some hard reckonings between who he thought he was, and what his actions revealed about who he truly was. But ultimately, as is true for businesses, real growth only comes from taking that hard look, and actually doing.
Even if you’re a talking horse.
By Alexander Cole — Senior Consultant, Market Gravity
