I once had a co-worker recount the tale of her junior account position at a 4A's agency. Her account was for a well known brand of– well–tampons. Evidently, the team brainstorming sessions (comprised largely of men), yielded many unfortunate and hysterical marketing and product development ideas .... most of which I can't recount here.


Needless to say, they made me (and would make most women) shudder.
Perhaps the most memorable one was the group's enthusiastic vote to place of "audio alert" capabilities inside each product. The idea is that the product would beep when it was time to ... um– well, need I say more?
Fortunately for the agency, my female co-worker threw herself in front of the conference room door and would not move until they promised not to take the "beep alert" idea back to the brand.
The point is this: these guys were positive they knew the customer. Unfortunately, all the brand and product training in the world didn't take away personal bias that led to some really misguided ideas.
The truth is, it's very easy to fall in love with our own ideas and perceptions of things - and settle into mediocrity or even craziness (see last post) when it comes to customer experience.
In my work I spend a lot of time with "experience agents" - or the corporate executives, brand managers, product developers, designers, customer service managers, etc... who actually touch the customer and craft experiences for them. My job is to get them to think actively and differently about the customer, to open their eyes to experience opportunities and pitfalls, and help them resolve experience issues to drive loyalty and revenue.
One really good question I have my clients ask themselves is how truly close to understanding their customers they really are -- versus how close they think they are. The problem is - the answer tends to be subjective. So, in addition to conducting context-rich research, we often try to answer this by putting ourselves in the customer's shoes as an honest way to answer the question.
Case in Point: In addition to being an experience architect, I am the mother of a seven month old who has been incredibly sick for nine days now. As a result, my focus has not been on writing, tweeting or working– but on changing, bathing and hydrating a restless baby. In the course of doing so, I had a myriad of bad product experiences this week. This prompted me to ask:

• How many Huggies and Pampers brand or product managers have had to work in a daycare for a week?


• How many babies have the Aveeno Baby or other product managers at Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson actually had to wash using their product(s)?


• How many purple-stained onesies have the makers of Pedialyte had to clean?

And I wonder, if these individuals actually got these assignments, if they'd actually design:

• Diapers that don't readily encourage leaks up the back of baby


• Easy-grip, non-tip containers designed for one-hand use, which naturally force baby wash to the bottom of the bottle so that it's easy to access and dispense with an easy-open lid and a no-leak dispenser.


• Non-staining flavored electrolyte formula for babies

This type of research would seem intuitive - but evidently it is not. Now, it certainly wouldn't be expensive to conduct such research, and the outcomes could drive a windfall of innovative ideas that would improve brand and product experience and generate more loyal customers.
If this formula is true:
BRAND = CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE / TIME
...then how important is it that we experience our products as our customers would - rather than going from third-party research, our gut, or just plain ignorance. This would seem the only way to ensure the "aspirational brands" (brands we want to create) match up with our actual brand recognition.
The experts tell me that, when it's time to baby-proof your house, my husband and I should get down on our hands and knees and crawl through our house at "baby height" to find any risks that may be present for our child.
Perhaps we should all be doing the same with our customers.
This is about more than research. We can conduct customer surveys and learn. We can test products and watch videos of our customers talking and learn. We can go out and talk to our customers and learn. But Getting back to basics, however, we can also put on our customer's shoes and walk a mile. We can roll up our sleeves and act as they would... and it's not that hard or expensive to do so.
Maybe it's time for us all to get down and start crawling a bit more. What do you think?