It’s about the Engagement, Stupid!

It may be almost two decades since the original President Clinton’s campaign slogan, but I think it’s appropriate for today’s emphasis on engaging users.  The typical talk today is on how to engage through social media, but my take is really about engaging prospects with products directly, rather than the brand as a whole.

I was reading a post from the beginning of the year by Devin Day (I had linked to previously), Authentic Product Engagement, and the message really resonated with me: if you provide users with an authentic interaction (his emphasis) with the brand’s actual products, it will help improve sales in a way (what he says, “drive purchase intent”) conducive for dissemination through social media, rather than trying to hit people over the head with a message or try to sneak something by.  With the app his company developed, he found

To encourage users to interact with multiple styles, we gave each shoe different abilities and incorporated many of the benefits from the real shoes into the game.

This echoes my observation that the more you focus on the benefits of the product, the more effective the engagement will be.  I would also add, place the product in the right context that accentuates those benefits, or reveals shortcomings of competitor products.  I think it’s great to incorporate the brand’s products into games, but when the goal of the prospect is to learn about the product, you likely don’t need the extra, ‘fun’ elements, you should focus on the right interactions with the product.

How might you frame the right context for presenting product interactions?

You can start by compiling a list of problem situations that the product is going to solve (thinking like a prospect: how is this product going to solve my problems?), perhaps prioritizing them with respect to key differentiators and how your product addresses these situations.  Your product likely has several types of prospects, like what David Scott Meerman talks about as ‘buyer personas’, each with a set of problems from your general collection.  It may be easier to think about the universe of problems that your product solves by thinking first about the types of people (prospects) who will use or evaluate your product.  Therefore, the process may be iterative, in that you think of a general class of problems, think about dividing that set by prospects, then thinking about other problems you can come up with for those prospects, then think of more prospects, and so on.

When you have settled on a set of prospects and defined a basic set of their problems, you can then create your scenarios that let prospects solve the problem with your product.

Again, in the end, it is about providing authentic product engagement (thought I’m not sure what inauthentic would be, outright lying?), which is about giving your prospects realistic and meaningful interactions with your product solving real-world problems that are important to them.

Essential Marketing Questions for Developing Product Simulations

As I was preparing for a conference call with a prospective client, I tried to boil down the kind of information I look for into a few questions.  Here it goes:

1. Why do you think prospects buy your product?
2. Why do you think prospects buy your competitors’ products?
3. What are the risk(s) your prospects face by not purchasing your product or that of a competitor?
4. What do prospects have to know that they may not know already about your product?

These are fairly general questions aimed at getting insight into what a manufacturer believes is central to why people buy their product.  I believe I use the answers to help formulate situations or scenarios which evoke the distinctive or compelling product features.

Good product simulation marketing is about providing the right context in which the product is used, not just a faithful reproduction of the device (in the appropriate detail).  The goal is to evoke in prospects what it is like to use the product to solve a real-world problem, and hence determining the right set of context(s), based on marketing objectives, is essential.

Settling in on ‘Product Simulation Marketing’

Coming up with the correct wording is essential for any task.  I have been uncomfortable with the terms “simulation-based marketing” and “simulation-based advertising”, because they sound like one is simulating the marketing or simulating the advertising.  However, I have liked those terms because they can get meaning from analogy to “simulation-based training.”

I have come to a new term which I believe is descriptive yet distinctive: product simulation marketing.  Now all that is left to do is fill out what this means!

Digging into Simulation Research for Sim-Based Marketing

I am still pretty consumed with thoughts of fleshing out simulation-based marketing, or perhaps it is more appropriate as ‘simulation-based advertising.’   Of course part of the process in thinking out this area is to dig into research about what makes simulations effective for training.

Ever since I met Will Thalheimer of Work-Learning.com several years ago, and since then, following his blog and research, I knew he’d be a great person to turn to in thinking some of this out.  Around the turn of the century (neat to be able to use that phrase, though of course I mean the 21st century), he identified five key aspects of simulations that make them particularly effective for practicing real-world skills: Context Alignment, Retrieval, Repetition, Feedback, and Spacing (apologies to Will if I misquoted any of these–I can’t seem to find the article on his web site).

In any event, I spoke briefly with Will recently and he felt that clearly Retrieval, Alignment, and possibly Repetition would be at play in these contexts.  As in training, marketing and advertising activities have their own goals to achieve.  We talked about the idea of coming up with a good diagram to illustrate the process, perhaps a funnel or maze (possibly with multiple entry points and multiple end points–I can see the relevance of David Scott Meerman’s “buyer personas” here).

Another interesting point he made was that for most any significant purchase, say over $100, people don’t decide to buy at once.  Ideally, you want not only to recognize when those people to return, but also trigger the information you have already conveyed about the product.

In all, it is clear that many aspects of simulation-based training have parallels/counterparts in sim-based advertising (or marketing), but potentially at different priorities, due to the overall goal (skill transfer/building, for training, vs. awareness/sales/product research for marketing).  Since simulation-based training has been explored much more fully, it would be wise to use that experience in hypothesizing potential parallels to advertising/marketing.

Great insights by David Meerman Scott at BtoBOnline’s Digital Edge

This past Thursday, B-to-B Online hosted a virtual trade show with ON24 called “Digital Edge“.  I assume it will be up in archive form shortly (and you can download his slides, or watch the talk again), but as of today it is not there yet.

I toured the exhibit hall a bit but I was certainly glad to catch the keynote address by David Meerman Scott.  A number of his points really resonated with the approaches I’ve been thinking about and trying to put into practice around online simulations, to give viewers a more engaging view of products and product lines.

He described how he would like to see the shift away from ‘product-oriented web sites’ (and materials, presumably), to what he called “buyer persona” focused approaches.  Rather than sticking a company’s products or brand in front of web site visitors and treating them as a faceless mass, he advocates trying to focus on, and relate to the different types of people who are visiting the site, and what problems your company is solving for that/those personae.  In that vein, he offered the following questions/insights (that I can remember!):

• What does your product/business look like for that person?
• Who are they and what information can you provide for them that they need/want?
• Name him or her, and develop a strategy for each persona
• What are their problems, likes, etc.

From an engineering perspective, I feel strains of a ‘use case’ approach — identifying who is coming to the site, for what reason(s), and trying to orient the materials to accomodate these personalities.

He followed the overall description of persona with a few questions we need to be asking when we develop our sites (and by extension, most types of distributed materials):

1. What do you want your buyer persona’s to believe about your business or product?
2. How are you generating attention?  He spent a lot of time talking about “earning” or “publishing” your way in with great content, blogs, videos, white papers, etc., instead of or in addition to traditional means to get attention (advertising, media contacts, etc.).
3. What vocabulary is your buyer persona using?  It is critical to speak to them in their own vocabulary (it seems from his blog that he is on the war path against gobbledygook [I never thought I'd actually have to spell out that word!], which is very refreshing)
4. No coercion, just meaningful content.

A lot of these points go directly to the message I want to craft with the term “simulation-based product marketing” (though I am still developing the ideas to an extent, and thinking about how they all fit together, for an upcoming white paper).

Going back to the bulleted list on top, for I would massage the question a bit ”what does your product/business look like for that person?” into “what does your product look like in the hands of, or typical situations, faced by that person?”  This blends into point #1, which is using virtual product demos (a.k.a. simulations) to demonstrate to your visitors what they should believe about your product.

For example, I was looking for a smart phone recently.  When I looked at RIM’s web site, I saw some beautiful graphics and videos about the latest BlackBerry and their product line, but what was remarkably absent was what I really wanted to find out–what does it look like when I receive or send emails, how easy is it to navigate the screens, etc., thing I wanted to do, not hope they’ve filmed someone else (who I don’t really relate to–another great point by David, using real people, customers, etc. instead of the typical models shots we see) do it.

I believe that using simulations in advertising/marketing is an extremely strong way to influence what the buyer persona believes about your product. This is what I have advocated in the many years developing marketing materials to manufacturers.  Create scenarios that involve the visitor to demonstrate the unique and/or compelling features of the product–show that the user ‘saves the day’ because he or she has the XYZ, implying (or letting visitors infer) thank goodness they didn’t buy the competitor’s ABC because then they’d really be up the creek.

In my domain, equipment simulation, the last point (point #4) about ‘no coercion’ really struck home with me because of my frustration when I hear manufacturers asking ‘how about we create a game to get peoples’ attention?’  I argue that people who are looking for information about products, or are looking to engage with products, or need to develop a concrete set of skills, do not need to be entertained to be engaged, rather, one should create compelling interactive content around the product (my tie-in with the “simulation-based product marketing” I have been consumed with for the past several months).

A bit out of order, but it emphasizes his point about point #3, creating great content.  Essentially, if you create great content, content that is relevant to what the visitors want to do, you’ve earned your way to attention, and people will want to come back.  We created training scenarios for Fire Engineering’s web site, the premier training producers in the Fire Service.  They’re not video games, rather, they are instructional materials that have animated graphics, simulating emergency incidents, but under an instructor’s control.  Not only they receive a significant number of visits per month, but they have an astounding return rate.

It’s no surprise that we’ve also been taking these concepts and applying them to marketing products, under the umbrella of “simulation-based product marketing”, and “virtual product marketing”–with astonishing results.

Thank you, David, for an insightful and meaningful talk!