Ready. Fire. Aim.

Pagogh Cho at UXDX Community: UX Research - Facts & Feelings. Video: https://youtu.be/GxrJBFvuWjA

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Ready, fire, aim, and a story about your teeth

[00:00:00] Pagogh: All right, thanks everybody for listening in. This is going to be an interesting conversation, primarily because all the stuff that we just talked about is not the stuff that I'm focused on. I'm coming at this from a marketing perspective, or a launch perspective. Obviously the notion of "ready, fire, aim" is wrong. That's out of sequence. The question that we get a lot of times, or some of the challenges that I see along the way, is that we're launching before we're really ready, or before we're aiming at anything. So the one thing that I want to focus on today, and hopefully this benefits some folks on the conversation, is really positioning what it is that you're about to build. But we're going to start off with a story, and we're going to be talking about your teeth.

[00:00:44] All right, stick with me. There's a reason behind this. This icebreaker is courtesy of The Power of Habit. This is an amazing book. I can't talk enough about it. Go get it for yourself. I'm not going to plug the book here overall, but take a look at it.

[00:00:59] In the early 1900s, I have no idea why, in America nobody was brushing their teeth, even though toothpaste had been around for quite some time, even dating back to the BC time frame. I think we like our teeth, and I guess it wasn't cool or something; for some reason people weren't picking up on it. A new toothpaste brand came onto the market called Pepsodent. It was introduced in about 1915, and, traditionally for our space from an advertising and marketing perspective, these guys hired Claude C. Hopkins, probably one of the most famous ad executives at the time, maybe really of all time, and they engaged him to promote their product.

[00:01:40] He dug into the research, and dug into the product, and of course he dug into the user experience, and he stumbled upon a medical insight that positioned toothpaste in a way no one else had done before. Which makes perfect sense, because he was a smart guy who wrote a book about a scientific approach to advertising. Perhaps it was something remarkably different for them. What he did was introduce an idea for a campaign that was just: run your tongue across your teeth.

[00:02:11] Literally. The campaign said, just run your tongue across your teeth and you will feel this film. What he'd studied was this bacterial film that caused teeth to look a little off color, and of course the brand, Pepsodent, removes the film. Obviously, success story: three weeks after the first Pepsodent ad campaign, demand for the toothpaste exploded. And lo and behold, about a decade later, more than half of the country was brushing daily, and Pepsodent of course was one of the most successful brands in the world. This one campaign by itself is credited with creating a habit from our country's perspective, a national toothbrushing perspective. Something us marketing nerds call category lift: rising tides and all that.

Even needed products need the right story

[00:03:00] What's the big deal about this? Why is this story something that I want to talk about? Even products that are needed, that hopefully solve a really basic problem, that are seemingly really easy to adopt, need the right story. They need the hook. They need the marketing conditioning to really get things going. I think each of us is probably here for a multitude of reasons. Maybe we are the creator, we're a founder. Maybe some other genius started something with an amazing idea one late night in a pub with a bunch of friends. Regardless of what our role is today (a developer, a designer, a strategist, a marketer, a founder, or whatever), our singular goal is the customer. We should always have our customer in mind. We should always get that idea to the customer, whoever they may be.

[00:04:00] This journey, of course, is pretty difficult, and I'm going to assume that most of the folks today are here from a product development perspective, or an NPD perspective for short. I wanted to share a bit of the full life cycle, so that you can understand how much we count on you to develop adoption by the customer, and why we care so much about the customer journey and empathy and the "so what" about the product. I know the journey is absolutely nuts. It is complicated, it's long, it's sprinty, it's hurry up and wait, it's overly sophisticated. It's underfunded, sometimes it's overfunded, but it requires consistency and patience along the way.

[00:04:42] Most importantly, it can start with positioning. Your positioning, not the ad guy uncovering some bacteria killing on your teeth. If you have the positioning for a product or feature, obviously it influences how you categorize that product within the portfolio of things, like full-size toothbrushes or travel toothbrushes or electric toothbrushes. But in the end, they're all toothbrushes as a category. Once you identify where or how it fits in as a category, you can line it up against other similar or different products in their categories, like floss or pastes or tongue scrapers or mouthwashes, to create a roadmap to tell a broader story. Obviously you see where I'm going with this, about dental products.

[00:05:25] Once we have all that together, we can get going, because it doesn't really make sense for your team, especially your lead salesperson, to go out there and promote one brush, but rather a galactic assortment of dental hygiene goodness. We all want to do that in the end. Okay, that's a little silly analogy, and I was told we were going to talk about teeth at the beginning.

Your positioning is your North Star

[00:05:46] I want to share six things with you today that hopefully provide you some insights, from an NPD perspective or from a marketing perspective, into why it is so important for the developers, the producers, the builders, the dreamers, to share your journey along the way, especially how you position your ideas. It's your responsibility. This is no naggy "it's your responsibility, better go do it" statement. It's your responsibility because one of the most powerful things, from a sales force perspective, I always love saying, is that a company's employees are the ambassadors of a brand. Maybe it's not your core responsibility, but you have the power to influence audiences more than you think.

[00:06:28] Your positioning becomes your proverbial North Star. Every step along the journey requires a constant reminder of what we're doing for the customer. Don't lose sight of that, no matter how long you've been doing this, no matter how much it's changed. Maybe you've lost sight of it; maybe it doesn't really matter to you anymore. It's all about customer centricity in the end. And even if you didn't start the process, or maybe you were drawn in late, the team or the person before or after or above or sideways or next to you can always benefit from your alignment. It's always good to share the commonalities of the vision and the positioning that we have, because at the end of the day we have to constantly reinforce why we got started on this process all along.

Description versus positioning

[00:07:15] The second thing I want to share with you is the difference between description and positioning. It's red, and it's a bit sour. So I'm either talking about a cherry sour chewy candy, or wine. That's a description. It pairs well with the scallops and roasted beets and a dollop of ketchup, with the aromatic note that you get: you know what I mean. There's a difference with positioning and how we do that overall, and this is what I'm building towards in terms of how you're positioning your story.

[00:07:49] Am I going to tell you what I want to tell you about my product, or am I going to tell you that I built a product for what you wanted, and I built this specifically for you? There are different approaches; we call that inside-out or outside-in positioning. But most importantly: be special. Make it unique, make it memorable, make it exclusive. Be exciting, be relevant, and be compelling above all.

Product development and product marketing

[00:08:15] The third thing we'll share with you today is about development and marketing. Put the word product before them, product development and product marketing, and there are some significant differences. The first thing I want to talk about is your career path, your job or your profession overall. I'm sure that today there's a whole spectrum of experience and expertise here. Where do you want to go? Are you somebody that wants to be an evangelist, to tell the story about the product to help guide your journey? Do you want to be the most significant support maven, to drive success for repeat visits and loyalty for the product as a whole? As a developer, how do you become a marketer? Or maybe, as a marketer, it's about understanding how development impacts the back end of what I'm developing overall.

[00:09:05] Most importantly, you're closest to it. Some of the most powerful and compelling presenters I've ever seen have been the builders, because you're so close to it. I'll never forget riding in an elevator with the chief executive of a Fortune 100 company. I was 25 at the time, and the guy asked me, "Do you know what my job is?" Of course, immediately I thought this was the end of me. I had no idea what was going on. He said, "I'm the number one salesperson in this company." Not in terms of sales, but he had to represent the company, the people, the brand, the offer, the opportunity, across all spectrums.

[00:09:47] It makes sense: he grew through the role, and he'd been there his entire career. This was his only job. Of course he knew his origins; I knew his origin story as an engineer in a foundry in Syracuse. But I never forgot that conversation, because there was nobody more compelling or passionate about this brand or this product than the people that are closest to it, without a shadow of a doubt.

[00:10:11] The thing that I've found, more so than anything else, is that as the builder, the maker, the dreamer, or, if you're like me, the nerds of the world, your story will be correct, because you've done the hard work: developing, planning, researching, ideating, iterating, failing, succeeding again. And this intelligent, divergent thinking, if packaged in an amazing, straightforward and clear narrative, can be delivered so everybody can understand what the offer is, or what the solution is, or where your focus is, across the board.

Audience and persona

[00:10:42] The fourth thing to talk about is the audience, or in this case the persona. We've all seen giant stacks of research. There's demographics, there's psychographics, there's geographics, and there are differences between each of these. Chances are, if you don't know what you need to say about a product, or how to position a product, or how to articulate a statement, there's something that you can probably extract from a demographic, whether it's something oriented to age or income or gender. Or perhaps from a psychographic, where you understand attitudes and personality and interests. Or maybe even geographics, because it's significantly different to sell or promote and discuss a product between regions and languages and even climate. Trying to sell warm winter jackets to somebody in the desert really doesn't make any sense, unless it's a cold desert. And then of course there's behaviors: interactions and patterns and transactions, how the individuals operate across the board.

[00:11:39] Most importantly, from an audience perspective: who is going to create the most positive forward movement? I like to break this down into three audience types. You have influencers, you have buyers, and you have users. If you have the ability to position whatever it is that you want to do to the right person, that can make the most positive evangelistic movement from an influencer perspective, or the best product review from a user perspective, or the most compelling proposition for a life cycle, for example, from a buyer perspective. You have to understand that each one of these influences the others, and coming at them with a succinct message for what it is that you're offering can do amazing work.

[00:12:24] And keep this in mind. Just because you like the product, because you're working on a product, or you're developing it, you're positioning, you're talking about things: you're talking to a person, not a brand. Because who you are between the working hours of eight to five, or midnight, however long you work, is significantly different from who you are from five to eight. There's the professional side and there's the personal side, and how you position and talk about things across each can and should be significantly different.

TAM and SAM, and brand, marketing and sales

[00:12:56] The second last thing we'll share is going to be about TAM and SAM. Obviously there's all the analytics that you can get into from a research perspective, and I know what they stand for, and there are all kinds of permutations of who you sell into and who you position against. But you've got to know where you're going to find success. Whether it's in the total addressable market, which is the largest of the large possibilities for sales to sell into or for the product to have influence in, or the serviceable addressable market, which is probably the focal point, the target that you have.

[00:13:32] Because at the end of the day, what you're building, or why you're doing it, or what you're most passionate about, you probably want to relate to it a little bit. Are you just making shoes in general, or are you making lightweight, high-performance running shoes for ultramarathoners? What do you have the most familiarity and experience with, to connect with the audience and position your product or your offer or your conversation in a way that makes them turn their head, stand up and pay attention to what it is that you have to offer?

[00:13:57] I know it's probably contra-academic, because academically they say to promote at the larger scale. You have to understand your stage and phase of where you are in your life cycle, because you don't want to overextend your reach. I always suggest smaller at the start and broader at the big [?]. I've seen and heard from too many brands that launch stuff seeking world domination when they could have succeeded amazingly with a very narrow, tight focus in terms of what they were doing from a launch perspective.

[00:14:28] And then one of my favorites, BMS. It stands for brand, marketing and sales, and it depends in terms of the order that they have. Foundationally, the power of the brand is one of the most important things, and the way you position it, the way you talk about it, when you talk about your employee base, your ambassadors, so to speak, you want to get that message correct. Because ultimately what you need at each phase is going to be triggered based upon what that message influences at the marketing phase, or ultimately at the close phase. And there is not one size fits all. Whether you're developing a core product, whether it's software, whether it's a piece of hardware, whether it is a service, at the end of the day building a product requires simplicity and consistency and repeating some core messages across the board.

Closing: MP3 players and an introduction

[00:15:20] I'll leave you with these six overarching topics, if you will. There are dozens more that you could take away. Hopefully one or two of these points is something relevant to you that you can take forward, or just do some additional research on. These are all public information that you have access to, that can broaden your knowledge base.

[00:15:44] One thing I'll leave you with, just as an FYI, is this world of MP3 players. I've been on this planet for a while, and I remember seeing my fair share of digital media players back in the day. This all started before 2001. There were dozens of them, and they were amazing. They stored and they played and they menued and they advanced and they playlisted. But then suddenly something happened where one brand came out and positioned itself above all the others. We all know who that is, and we all know that this brand consistently does this specific task of positioning. It was introduced in 2001, when there was a sea of MP3 players beforehand. This is just another example of amazing messaging across the board.

[00:16:35] I know people will regularly introduce themselves up front. I thought I'd introduce myself at the back. I'm Pagogh, and it's a pleasure talking with you today. I like to think of myself as a 50-50 kind of guy: half of my time I've spent on the client side, half of my time I've spent on the agency side. I do consider myself a builder. I cut my teeth on code and some of the early site development in '92, but ultimately had to force myself into becoming a promoter of that, so maybe I found my narrative, my voice. I've been a digital native since '87: building computers, pioneering the web, a lifetime geek, and always curious about things going forward. Please feel free to reach out to me, hit me up on chat or Slack or whatever, to follow up if there are any questions that you have, or any topics that you'd like to find more information on. And go brush your teeth. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:17:32] Host: Excellent, thank you very much. I didn't know I was going to get so much insight into brushing teeth and its history. Thank you for sharing. Just a reminder to everybody out there: if you have any questions from the talk (I can see Kasim [?] has made a comment about a thousand songs in your pocket), if anybody has any questions that they would like to put to Pagogh, please do write them in on whichever platform you're watching this on, and I'll put those questions through.

[00:18:04] One thing I wanted to start with is the positioning you were talking about. You could have toothbrush, you could have mouthwash, you could have maybe chewing gum. There's lots of these things that are all trying to tackle the same problem of "I don't like that feeling of roughness on my teeth." When I was listening to that, I was thinking that in product management there's a lot of talk about the Jobs to be Done framework, and that Netflix isn't necessarily competing with Disney; they're competing with somebody going to the movies, somebody doing something else with their evenings other than watching TV. So my question is: do you see a large overlap between product management and marketing, and where do you see the actual boundary in who defines the positioning and the messaging around a product?

[00:19:00] Pagogh: I always think that should start with the product management side of things, especially from the ideator. That proverbial cocktail napkin generally starts the build cycle, the ideation for what it is that we have. You'll see brands where it comes in at the tail end, where the marketing drives the product. That's not incorrect. I just think that, from a marketer's perspective, and obviously I've spent my time, like I said, halfway as a builder and halfway as a marketer, there's something to be learned by both. From the product development side and the product management side, the insights about the market research and positioning, the why you're building this, all the focus group testing that you might do, all the intent-based work that you do, has to be played forward into what you're communicating outbound.

[00:19:55] Frequently, it's difficult to articulate what you want to do as the product manager, at the end of the day, and you have to translate that. I use physicians as an example. I love physicians, smartest people in the world, doctors, but they are not maybe the best marketers themselves. But holy mackerel, they can actually do all the work: surgery, diagnosis, et cetera. So you'll have to take them with a little grain of salt from a messaging perspective to bring that forward. Software, hardware, whatever kind of platforms you talk about, it varies significantly. But I think that's a management responsibility overall.

[00:20:37] Host: You touched on a point there that I really like, about at what point marketing comes in. There's a big push to move towards product teams that are cross-functional, instead of throwing something over the wall, or product just throwing over "here's some research and here's a product, now you go sell it to people and make sure they buy it." Do you see marketing coming in a bit more early and really working and collaborating with the team before that launch?

[00:21:09] Pagogh: Yes, the earlier the better. This is where operational diagrams or structures or workflows, like RACIs or responsibility matrices, work out. From a marketer's perspective, it is about understanding what I'm doing to push this forward. We have to learn more about the "so what" before we get into developing the asset going forward. I don't like the silos. I don't like the hard walls where it's like, "Okay, I've hit my design objective," or "I've hit my MVP," or "I've hit some kind of milestone along the way." Because there might be some market insights that you're gathering from the sell side, or from a customer insights perspective, that could directly influence what product is being developed on the back end. That could be much more symbiotic in terms of how they improve.

[00:22:06] Short answer: yeah, marketing should be pulled in earlier. We also need to learn to be quiet and listen to the product, to understand the "so what" behind the vision and the idea, rather than coming over with "I've heard this from the sales team, I've heard this from customers, I've heard this from the industry, blah blah blah, my opinion." Let the product be the product. Let the product really take it forward, and then build the story and the narrative, what we like to call air cover. I'm going to go in there and promote something specifically, but I need to provide the air cover from a marketing perspective. But it's got to be based on the brilliance of what sparked the innovation to begin with.

[00:22:45] Host: Right. That's very much my opinion on things as well. I hate seeing the throw over the wall, and then the marketing message and the product don't fully line up.

[00:22:57] Pagogh: Right, right. All those problems.

[00:22:59] Host: Yeah. One thing, and it's slightly left field (if anybody else has questions, please do type them in): with your example, the iPad, and a story that I always remember because I thought it was quite interesting. Apple, when they saw that there was a little bit of traction with the iPad, decided to take all of their Mac advertising budget and put it all into the iPad, so everything went into one. And the net result, because the iPod was so popular, was that it actually resulted in an increase in Mac sales. So moving their budget over was a good strategy. How do you think teams can work like that in an ecosystem where you have multiple products? If you're building a product, you're very much focused on yours. How do you help people see those ecosystem synergies?

[00:23:56] Pagogh: Oh, bottoms up or tops down, it's going to be interesting. For teams to do that unilaterally is going to take a very brave and unique team, to really be able to think from an unbiased perspective. Bias is horrible from a research perspective, especially when we do focus groups or UX or some of those components. We want to leave our biases aside and truly evaluate what our peers have to offer. That's where not all teams are created equally, and that's not a criticism or an indictment. If you don't have the ability to tell your story, your positioning, your value prop, all your stuff, even before it gets into the marketing hierarchy, how can you let your own development teams peer review and do it bottoms up?

[00:24:46] From an Apple perspective, that was going all in on a product, and you're absolutely right, it lifted the entire brand right up. We all know what happened after that. It reinforced the cult of Mac and expanded it beyond. Very few companies are willing to (it's a horrible phrase) sacrifice their young [?] to really play to the greater good. And that's part of it: my responsibility as a builder or an engineer is to get something from sprint to sprint, from milestone to milestone, whatever it is, and I don't pick my head up and ask what else is going on.

[00:25:27] I think it's the collaboration, and the ability for people to actually understand where software within an organization works with the piece of hardware that might be built right next door, and can commingle to create, I don't know, something called iTunes and a piece of hardware. I think it's just having visibility of what your overall portfolio is, and hopefully having the visibility and the empathy to actually identify those and say, "Don't promote me. I'm going to promote you this time," or maybe rally folks to promote them. It's a different behavior, especially in a credit-driven world.

[00:26:08] Host: Yeah, I can imagine some internal politics at play in one of those decisions.

[00:26:12] Pagogh: Right, right. Steve Jobs was able to make those unilateral choices.

[00:26:18] Host: I think that brings us to time. Thank you very much, Pagogh. I really enjoyed that, and thank you for sharing.