On the reading list: "Tuned In"

I’ve had the book for a while, and read it eagerly when it first arrived, but for whatever reason, I hadn’t gotten around to writing about Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs, by Craig Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott.

Well, now I have.

Forget that the title is a mouthful - and that it includes a couple of words that have been overused in virtually every bad ‘we must change what we’re doing right now’ off-site I was ever subjected to, namely “extraordinary” and “breakthrough.”

This is an excellent and light-bulb-goes-off-in-head book for product managers and product marketers.

Today, I’ll give a general run down on what’s in the book; over time,I’ll likely delve more deeply into different ideas raised in it.

With ample illustrations from the “real world” - including a personal favorite, ZipCar (of which I am a proud member) - Stull, Myers and Scott lay out the six steps that will turn your organization into one that is “tuned in” to what the market really wants and needs.

First they lay their groundwork by helping you determine whether you’re tuned in or tuned out. They do this by asking some key questions about how you behave as an organization - and by “debunking the myths” that - gulp - are ones that most of us have no doubt bought into over the years: innovation is everything; revenue cures all; customers know best. They contend that, even if a combo of these approaches manages to result in some level of market success, it will be short lived - and will require you to engage in that nightmare of all nightmares: the missionary sale.

The guts of the book covers their six steps for creating products and services that will resonate with the market.

The foundation of their six step approach is finding problems that are unresolved. A prime example is Intuit’s Quicken, which solved the problem of how to easily manage personal finances - with an emphasis on the word easily. Yes, one can manage one’s personal finances on paper - or in a spreadsheet - but Intuit’s goal was to make Quicken so easy to use that someone could figure out how to write a check within 15 minutes of opening the box.

An important element of step one places great emphasis on not just looking to your customers, or the prospects who evaluated your products (the ones that got away). No, they correctly point out that potential customers are typically the largest part of your market, and you need to tap into their hearts and minds if you want to figure out how to move them from potential to customer. This is one of the most important points in Tuned In. Most of us are smart enough to talk with our customers. Most of us are even smart enough to talk with our Losses. But I have to say that, until, I read this book, I hadn’t given all that much thought to tapping into the community of non-buyers. Even if they’re more or less happily using a competitor’s product, they are likely to still have unresolved problems. And creating a product that moves beyond the needs of your own customer base will help you with competitive displacements and reaching those who aren’t yet served.

Their second step will be familiar to anyone who knows Pragmatic Marketing: it’s all about the importance of “understanding buyer personas.” This calls for not lumping all your buyers into one segment, but instead refining your audience so that you have a deep and detailed awareness of how the different subsets operate. Oh, I suppose you could have a product that has a singular, distinct, uniform persona - but this is highly unlikely. My world is B2B technology, and most tech products that come to my mind have multiple communities who use the products for variation-on-a-theme purposes. Homing in on those variation-on-a-theme purposes will enable you to hone your message so that it speaks loudly and clearly to your prospective buyer, without them having to filter through generic messages or messages for “the other guy.”

Once you’ve figure out a product you want to build, and know who its for, the Tuned In guys suggest you “quantify the impact.”

What does that mean?

Only that you figure out what it’s worth to your customers to solve the problem, which will let you determine whether its worth your while to actually go ahead and build it.

This may seem like a “duh” point, but I’ve worked on a number of products that solved a problem for real people, but did so at a cost that was well beyond the value that the product provided.

Talk about “duh”.

I can just about guarantee that you will find a few customers to buy your product at a way over-the-value price. But there won’t be many of them - and you will likely go broke trying to find enough of them to keep you in business.

The next step up in Tuned In is that you build your competitive advantage, which they couch as “create a breakthrough experience.” While my gag reflex usually starts up when I see the word “breakthrough”, there are some excellent points in this chapter about making sure you have (and use) your distinctive competence, and about keeping you eye on the overall buyer experience (from first awareness, through purchase, use, and ongoing support).

Step five, “articulate powerful ideas,” focuses on creating the elevator pitch, and their checklist for the pitch covers the point that it needs to actually tell us what the product does. Too often, the received wisdom that “people buy benefits, not features” translates into elevator pitches and other forms of communication that are so devoid of content that you have no idea whether the company sells pressure cookers or trip cancellation insurance. Stull, Myers, and Scott also spend time on some “powerful idea” tag lines that they find really resonate with the audience. Their examples of good tag lines are largely for consumer products that do heavy advertising - I’d liked to have seen a few B2B ones drawn out.

And there’s one really fun example of magician Steve Cohen who promotes himself as the Millionaires’ Magician. When his marketing consultant, Mark Levy, came up with this brand, it was reality based: Cohen had substantial and substantiated experience entertaining rich folks. But the new positioning enabling Cohen to really focus his business, raise his prices, and get rid of the pesky prospects who wanted him to make balloon animals for a couple of hundred bucks a party. (Is it too late for me to become the Millionaires’ Product Marketer?)

The authors’ final point is that you need to “establish authentic connections” with the people you’re trying to reach. They propose one way: create approaches that are tuned to the buyer personas, rather than rely on generic messages.

All in all, Tuned In is a sharp and useful book that should be on the reading list - and on the taking it to heart list - for product marketers and product managers.

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