These days the way media organisations cover international events can have an effect on the outcome of the situation. After all, for them it’s less about communicating what’s happening and more about keeping us engaged with the anticipation of what might happen next. With so many millions of us following things real time, the way we react to information can actually influence what’s going on. What we buy (and choose not to), who we vote for, who we trust, who we share information with e.t.c. can all make a difference. But who’s to say the info we’re digesting and basing our decisions on is real or in our best interests? Sensationalising things might keep us all aimed at the telly and the net, but also increases the odds of us going off half-cocked and armed with less than the facts. Is this trend towards news as entertainment a reflection of people power on a massive scale or the biggest mass abdication of responsibility ever seen to date? The same is true in business and technology. Just because “they” say “it’s the way things are headed” don’t take it as gospel. Often great opportunities require fresh thinking, a new approach or a determination to find another way. More
Service Design
Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean
Increasingly we are seeing clients purporting to be this, that, and the other; all entwined in highly crafted/litigated value and corporate mission statements. The reality of gaining consensus from the populous for such things means ending up with generic statements that can be applied the world over: like ‘People focussed…’ or ‘Trusted…’ or ‘Integrity…’. Excuse me, but aren’t these baseline requirements of doing business today? Worse still are those that are bandying around words like ‘innovative…’, ‘responsive…’ or ‘genuine…’. By golly, you start putting these up, you’d better be prepared to be that. So, the danger is in being too vanilla in one sense, or over-promising in another. Finding an organisation’s true character, one that is expressed uniquely with a healthy dose of reality is a much harder game. You can run all the group sessions you want, but you’ve got to dig deep for the golden grains; the nuggets of irrefutable truth. They generally won’t come from the mouth of the CEO (or his wife), but from someone who’s doing the hard yards, like the call centre operator doing the graveyard shift. Time to tune into a bit of old-fashioned, fine-tuned listening. More
New ways of buying
Making sense of money
Money is an enigma. Despite being integral to our day-to- day lives, our money and how it works remains much of a mystery. We know what it is, we may have an idea about for how much of it we need, many of us worry about how fast it runs through our bank accounts - but many of us don’t understand what it truly means to us. As many banks have found out, a high number of transactions does not translate into high engagement – with money or with your bank. In a world awash with cashless transactions, going into the branch needs to offer new ways to engage with money and bank staff or they’ll be a redundant part of the offer. As relationships with banks change, and the power in that relationship shifts to the customer, as mobile and out of branch service and access grow – we can’t help but wonder how different the future will look like for an organisation that helps consumers get closer to their money. Is it going to be the bank as we know it today – or someone else entirely?
More
Convergence
Is convergence always an unholy marriage?
We often look at where digital and retail worlds collide, and sadly, where they often miss each other completely. When it works well customers have a seamless experience. When it misses the mark its an ugly experience for customers, uncomfortable and unnerving for staff and costly for a business. Customers are pretty smart – they know exactly what they want – you just don’t always offer it. They are focused – they do know how they want to get things and what makes sense to them. They are astute – they do know how to value what things cost them, versus what they cost you. They also have a value to be placed on their time – so if you are to offer an integrated service experience – it better be time and cost positive for your customers. More
New ways of buying
How open are we to new ways of buying?
We’ve all seen great examples of whole new sectors morphing out of latent needs. We’ve seen businesses adapting to and leveraging changing consumer patterns and behaviours. Innovation abounds, as new businesses appear and old ones evolve to survive. Often, ideas that looked odd (or even crazy) before their time, seem beautifully obvious when they take hold - yeah, read iPod if you must. But also think fast food, ballpoint pens, mobile phones, wine coolers, internet banking or budget air travel. Once things are adopted and in use, how they are packaged, sold and used can evolve – sometimes radically. More
Brand Experience
First impressions count, but then, they all do don't they?
I recently bought a big ticket item, a leather lounge suite. It was a great sales process, got a good price too. But recently a Fair Go programme called the genuineness of said leather into question. Upon my query to the ‘contact us’ email link on the manufacturers website I was assured from the owner himself (in the space of 12 hours) of the suite’s composition. I was reassured and my purchase felt vindicated all at once.
It gave me reason to ponder on what the critical success factors in managing customers post sales would be. I think getting the most senior person to respond is critical; it shows you take them seriously. Do it quickly, within 24 hours; this shows willing and that you’re treating them with respect. Be honest, be transparent; customers smell bullshit a mile off. As a result you might just end up with the most convincing marketing possible; word of mouth. I’ve told everyone in a mile radius of my positive experience, and that’s marketing money can’t buy. More
New ways of buying
Crystal ball or balls of steel?
If everyone’s doing things the same way, is it a risk to do things differently? Depends on what you’ve got to lose and what your motivation is. Looking back through history, we usually categorise and refer to milestones. The details of cumulative successes, failures, risks, rewards and wrong turns slip away and only eureka moments and the end results are remembered by the masses. When looking forward and trying to predict the future though, unless you’re gambling, the details are very much top of mind – especially if you’ve got a lot to lose. Many who have put a lot on the line and really changed the way we do things followed the course they did because they truly believed in what they were doing, absolutely understood the details and had the tenacity to keep on keeping on when things got tough. So when is a pilot a success? When history says so. More
Commercial Intimacy
Commercial intimacy and Trade Me
I think Trade Me is real live, real life proof of the business potency of commercial intimacy
Very soon you will be able to buy shares in Trade Me on the New Zealand stock exchange. Four years after buying Trade Me for $700m, Fairfax are floating 34% of the company at a price which values the Trade Me business at just over $1 billion.
Four years ago, many wondered if Fairfax had paid way too much for Trade Me and doubted it could grow enough to repay their investment. The price of the new float and the enthusiasm with which it’s being greeted by prospective buyers suggests otherwise.
Trade Me’s on-going growth and success is down to one thing, and I suspect it’s a thing it has always known is the key to its business. Let’s face it, the Trade Me brand wouldn’t win any design awards, but most well-polished brands would gladly trade their gorgeous collateral and clever campaigns for what Trade Me has – a deep, enduring and mutually profitable relationship with its vast community.
Connecting in meaningful ways with each individual in your community, and backing those relationships with performance that does what those individuals want and need, is more important than anything else in your business. More
Commercial Intimacy
Close to me?
Let’s get one thing straight – the closer you are to your customers, the better your chances of meeting their changing needs and building a positive and enduring relationship. Our existence as a species relies on interaction, so it’s no surprise that when you improve the inputs and grow intimacy, you also improve the output and results. Traditional approaches to marketing are no longer completely effective, and why would we expect them to be when so much has changed? The new reality is that organisations have to engage with their communities on a virtually personal basis. That’s tough – increasingly tailored offers, the tapping of social networks, self service and transparency are becoming the new norm. If I was a betting man (and I am), I’d wager that organisations who really understand and respect their communities and service them accordingly will be more successful. More
Brand Experience
Out of the cave or the mob will get you!
I can't believe that I still hear people say, "All press is good press." There was a time when this statement was true – however at that same time the ‘brand’ authority within an organisation had the power, influence and impact of a highly trained 'operative' to create an often elegant and always heavily orchestrated reality. Today this statement is anachronistic, as the ‘brand’ authority has little control over issues. The influence of the 'operative' has been relegated to the status of rent-a-cop. More
Brand Experience
Oooh, shiny thing!
Everyone likes shiny new toys, especially marketers, and the new toys keep rolling in thick and fast... mobile marketing, SM channels, social vending, location-based marketing, NFC...
Choosing whether to play with these new toys is surely the most critical part of a marketer’s job today. Does your marketing team have the know-how to make these decisions? Does your agency have the expertise and impartiality to help?
There are the obvious questions to ask before you look into using one of the new toys – do our customers understand / want this thing, do we have the ability to leverage it and will we see a ROI? But what other questions are there to ask and have you worked out who you can ask them of? More
New ways of buying
On your bike
When self-confessed 'bike nut' Tim White came back from a couple of years in Canada he had a dream of setting up a different kind of bike shop. Over the last recession-hit year he’s done just that, creating T. White's Bikes, a success story (just voted Metro Magazine’s best Bike Shop in Auckland 2009) that has bike addicts and casual riders flocking to his Symonds Street store. Some even come for a haircut.
A lot of T. White’s Bikes success is down to Tim’s total understanding of his target market and his focus on the current fixed gear/single speed trend. But he’s also applied several important strategies (read beliefs). More
Convergence
Now is good for me
Leaping in early is not seen as a great way to do things – but then coming last when your competitors have set the benchmark in customer service seems a bit lame. When it comes to planning how to integrate various customer channels many New Zealand businesses seem a little stuck. There’s no debate about the business benefit of having highly-engaged customers, or how providing integrated experiences help that happen. Is the internal structure of our companies the real problem? Maybe the idea of arranging channels and touch points around customers is just too hard to get our heads around? The reality is that there’s never been a better time for you and your businesses to get into the business of meeting customer needs properly. More
Commercial Intimacy
Not that long ago this was an oxymoron
To be commercial and also to build intimacy – a rich experience, a trusting relationship, one that is always on and always with you – yeah right. A nice notion but for most businesses this was a pipedream, and the cost didn’t really seem that easy to justify the effort. Alongside that, for most customers it was too suffocating – and required a commitment many were less than keen to sign up to. Now – most of that has changed. We believe that commercial intimacy – the approach to serving the viable niche of one – is the context within which we all need to operate in from here on out. We believe the foundation for that will be understanding the trends in economic, societal and demographic change that when married with technology and a consumer power shift define a new way of doing business and providing value to customers. More
Service Design
Not all services are designed equal
Every service experience you love or loathe has been designed – maybe in bits, sometimes as a whole. And that includes even the really, really bad ones. Lately we have been 'talking' Service Design with a few of our clients and 'doing' Service Design with others. What we have observed is that Service Design can be both a big, scary spectre and a liberating and transformative opportunity for businesses. People have described it as either small, iterative and manageable or all- encompassing and holistic – but, simply put, Service Design is the practice of delivering great on-brand customer experiences using optimised and efficient business systems and operations.
The thing we've noticed is that many businesses look to improve customer experience, and many also look to streamline processes, improve their offers, migrate to the channels and Touchpoints their customers most use, cut costs and so on. Service Design is the practice of doing both in unison. More
New ways of buying
Keeping ahead of the pack
When Mike MacKenzie bought into an established family shoe business, he and his business partners wanted to create a new kind of specialist sports shoe store, and “set new standards in sports shoe retailing”. Almost 20 years later this vision and some good old fashioned business nous have seen Smith’s Shoe Store achieve double digit, month-on-month, sales growth during the recession. More
Making ideas work
The world is awash with money – and false hope.
There are plenty of supposedly “successful” business’s that go bust. In Auckland the Ponsonby Road restaurant with the million-dollar fit-out that gets featured in all the social pages, is the place to be and is packed to the gunnels for three months — and then the doors close. How about the leading fashion publication that is the indicator of style and can do no wrong, but who pulls the pin because they couldn’t pay the printer. And then there’s the fast food chain run by the really “zany” ex ad guys. It’s the talk of the town but goes tits up when they get bored and it all gets a bit hard.
Just because the cash registers are ringing, doesn’t mean there’s money in the bank. So what’s the difference between a great idea and a successful business with staying power? If finding theMaking answer was easy everyone would be doing it, but that doesn’t mean you stop asking the question. It’s also about defining what to invest in — no matter what the short term cost may be. More
Convergence
How long will the store be open?
With rents high, staff costs significant and a plethora of digital offers open and accessible from anywhere in the world, I do wonder what the physical experience of retail can do to stay relevant. OK so there is still the communal activity of ‘shopping’ to contend with, and still the tactility of seeing, smelling or sitting in what you may want to buy - its not all about getting products fast and cheap online. But you have to ask - as new worlds open up, what do old worlds need to change to keep up? If you can buy what you want any time of the day or night online, is the role of the physical environment in the future facing extinction. Will the High Street’s of New Zealand only be the domain of a few assisted sales offerings, and the old way of shopping die out completely - or will we see an emergence of a service experience that can’t be replicated online. More
Self-service
Help yourself, we’ve earned it
I can turn things on and off, I can opt in and out, and increasingly, I can serve myself - and personalise that service. Whether it’s banking, travel bookings or tax returns - more and more things can be done by users. By steadfastly refusing all special mail offers, my own product or service experience is affected by only the directly relevant information I have provided. So what’s next? Customisation is the future most pundits identify - where the offer, product or service is made more relevant to my particular needs on the basis of my activity, location and so on. We assume that this customisation will be more potent when more relevant personal information is accessed or made available (by us) to brands, service providers and suppliers. The real question though is not so much what this customisation will look like but what businesses would you currently trust with that sort of information? What will they have to do to earn that level of intimacy? More
International
Gaining Insight far from home
Gaining customer insights across ‘foreign’ markets is hard – true. There are certain factors such as language, values, cultural nuances and distance that need to be addressed, but often it’s as much about your own orientation – if they are ‘over there’ the ‘differences’ can seem massive. Maybe a simple orientation change will let you look at customers as customers, and focus on meeting their needs rather than seeing them as a set of ‘differences’ to deal with. We agree you can never underestimate differences in culture and location, but if you focus on this without balancing the commonalities to customers you may have closer to home, you’ll tie yourself in knots. More
Brand Experience
Dropping the price or dropping the ball
OK, so in New Zealand the Adidas brand seems to have taken a bit of a kicking for not addressing a raft of public sledging and much media handwringing over the domestic price of replica All Blacks jerseys' – compared the the price in other countries. Their key partner the NZRU also did not seemingly fare so well as they battled to contain the issue only weeks out from the start of the New Zealand hosting of the Rugby World Cup (RWC).
A few things spring to mind, namely that markets and prices are fair game where seasonal or event based demand makes a difference and that the loyalty of All Blacks fans is being severely tested, as is brand loyalty to Adidas – but the bigger picture for both parties may have been lost. As I see it, the NZRU, kiwi fans and Adidas all need to acknowledge market forces, and as the saying goes you live by them and you die by them.
Adidas found out how quickly an issue can gain momentum – when the furore over their pricing of the jerseys blew up the Adidas line of response was flawed, it was defensive, it was inconsistent. Add to that the lack of unison they showed with the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) and the argument they needed to convey ‘together’ all got lost in the fray. It is an issue more about the cost and opportunity – it was an argument lost solely on price.
The debate should have covered: More
Convergence
Disintermediation: no longer reserved for plonkers
In the past only a plonker would use such a word, but alas the word has come of age and has evolved beyond hoity-toity consultant speak. Disintermediation i.e. death of the middleman. Back in the day the middleman was the indispensable deal broker, justifiably charging fat margins. But with the internets’ role in shrinking and flattening the world and that world being one where transparency is becoming the norm in today’s online conversation — consumers are engaging directly with the brand (manufacturer). Our business clients are beginning to leverage the power of digital channels and they are gaining new efficiencies. In the age of disintermediation, the real winners are consumers and only the ‘best’ product/service offerings out there. The real challenge for brands is to build direct relationships with their customers in ways that are more intimate than ever before. More
Mobility
Designing for mobile: A golden rule
Designing any kind of interface, but particularly mobile, is brokering a little deal between your business and your customers.
Essentially you are saying to customers 'You give me this much time, space and attention, and we’ll give you x in return'.
You are giving your customer some sort of value with your mobile app. Whether the app itself is your product, or you’re using it to sell something else, or helping them achieve something like checking their bank balance, getting a deal or even just finding your store – you are giving them something of value.
It’s important to realise that your customer is actually giving you something in exchange for that every time they use your app. They’re giving you time, space, and attention. Those are precious in the desktop environment, and more so in the mobile context.
When you balance the deal right, you’ll make your customers lives’ that much easier and they’ll love you for it. More
Customer Interface
Content Matters
It may seem obvious that content is one of the most important components to a website, but so often website redevelopment projects focus primarily on improving the user experience through better IA, design and functional features. When it comes to the content it's usually a once over lightly migration approach with little time dedicated to fully analysing the content and ensuring it’s still relevant, up to date, on ‘on tone’ and at the right level for the sites audience(s).
There are many reasons for this oversight, most valid and understandable, but what’s the point of a beautiful new site if what lies beneath is of little or no real benefit to the user. It’s like false advertising, setting expectations high with a great customer journey only to disappoint with a lack of substance. Failing to deliver the goods frequently results in a lack of trust that radiates out from the website, impacting a customer’s impression of an organisation and their willingness to engage further. Content matters more than we often acknowledge. More
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Who Is DNA?
DNA is 55+ people, 4 disciplines, 2 locations, 21 years old and always curious.
We are insight-led, we question and challenge until we get to the heart of what will deliver the most intimate experiences for your customers in the most valuable and sustainable way for your business.
We have expertise in research, strategy, digital, retail, brand, product development, integrated marketing and internal and external communications. We design great brands; create innovative digital and interactive solutions, retail experiences to take customer intimacy and engagement to new levels – all of which we view within the context of Commercial intimacy.
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