Chapter 7

Understanding Need

There are only three things women need in life: food, water, and compliments.

—Chris Rock

Well, life may not be as simple for women as Chris Rock says, but he actually reveals something critical about us all—we have needs. Sometimes they are essential, like love and food (and compliments, if you ask Chris). Sometimes they are materialistic like that shiny new car. And, sometimes, they are situational like health care or parts to fix the kitchen sink.

Most business organizations live in the world of situational and materialistic needs, and those same needs drive us to interact with businesses. We have a problem, which might be as simple as Mrs. Appleyard’s need for a lightbulb, and we are compelled to solve it.

But buying is more than just money, goods, and services changing hands. Transactions create a connection between people and organizations from which we buy. As we discovered in Chapter 3, people want to form relationships. Buying things is one way we connect to each other, to all the other people that have purchased a similar good, and to the company that sells the product that has been purchased.

Need and the Relationship Cycle

Need typically begins the relationship cycle that we dug into in Chapter 4. It provides an opportunity for people to spend their attention. Of course, in the real world, that may be done through traditional advertising, word of mouth, or even a sign on the street. In the digital world, the development of our relationship occurs through our interaction with content.

What Really Drives Us to Need Something?
It ultimately comes down to duress. We get anxious. We feel lacking somehow. There is something in our brains that triggers a need to solve the problem. According to Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Redirect, it’s all about our internal stories. We write a “story” about ourselves that represents our identities. That feeling of distress (which is actually the release of a neurotransmitter called cortisol) is a result of our “rewriting” our internal stories to represent an identity that is somehow lacking. So we “see” ourselves as missing something or facing a challenge that can be solved by purchasing the product. This is a similar process that many hoarders go through, but on a constant and often obsessive rate.1

Need only offers an opportunity for engagement. How can we capture the sentiment, so that the person buying from us wants to stay connected with our business?

Sometimes the Need to Connect Is Greater than the Need to Buy
What if consumer need was driven by something more than the end product? What if, in acknowledging their own needs, people were secretly exposing another, more fundamental need—like the need to connect and belong. When we buy a product (or join a service), we become part of a “tribe.” We have unspoken relationships with thousands of others who have also purchased. Look at cult-like services and brands such as Apple, Evernote, and Nike. Perhaps that also accounts for the sometimes reckless behavior we have online—our need to connect outweighs common sense about privacy.2 Think about all the personal information we share (through Facebook, directly with organizations, etc.), all in the name of “being part of the tribe.”

Acknowledge That Not Everyone Wants the Same Relationship

The first step in forming relationships online like we do offline is to acknowledge that not everyone wants the same kind of relationship in the digital world. Back in Chapter 4, we identified four types of digital relationships. Below we’ve provided a quick recap:

1. You don’t see me. This person just wants to help him or herself.
2. Acknowledgment. This person wants to be noticed, but they may not necessarily want to engage. They want engagement only on their own terms.
3. Attention hound. This person always has something to say. We all know the attention hound in school who shot his hand up first to answer the teacher’s question.
4. BFF. This person is connected with your organization at a deeply emotional level. He or she has drunk your Kool-Aid and proudly wears your brand tattooed on his or her arm.

Recognizing that not everyone wants the same kind of relationship, we see that the digital experience we offer must be personalized and sensitive to our audience’s relationship goals.

Does Sharing Personal Content Get You Closer To Your Users?
Again, it all depends upon the relationship type. According to HubSpot,3 “sharing personal content makes your fan base feel connected to your brand it makes you more human. People respond to that.” But even more than getting people to respond (and, as we talk about in the next section, developing history), sharing personal content can help you identify those people that want a more personal relationship (i.e., a level higher up on the digital relationship pyramid, like confidante). Rightly so. HubSpot encourages trying to get “personal sharing from your fans too. Ask people to share something about themselves in response to one of your posts.”

So, let’s look at these four relationship types in the real world, like at Ogilvie & Sons. How easy is it for them to identify the kind of relationship a consumer wants?

  • You don’t see me: They avoid eye contact, or head off down an aisle just to avoid a salesperson.
  • Acknowledgment: When these folks walk into the store, they may intentionally move a little slower just to make sure you see them. Maybe there is a tilt of the head or a wave. They might even wait for you to ask them, “Is there anything I can help you with?” However, their response may be, “No thanks, just looking.”
  • Attention hounds: Actively seek out help in the store (or gladly accept assistance to find what they are looking for). When they find help, getting what they need is only half their reason for being there. The other half is their need to have conversations about all the different ways to change that lightbulb, and the technology inside it, and how it was invented and, and, and. . . . Of course they are also the first people to jump into a conversation between an associate and another customer they overheard.
  • BFF: Our best customers, like Mrs. Appleyard, have frequented the store for longer than most of the staff can remember. Sometimes we know what they want even before they ask, and often we complete their sentences for them, anticipating even their unspoken needs.
Why Do People Change Relationships?
This relates back to the idea of our internal “story.” When the duress isn’t that high, we may believe that we can solve the problem ourselves. So, our relationship type is focused on self-service. It’s the “you don’t see me” state. But if the duress increases such that we feel we need to solve whatever challenge we have rewritten our internal stories to reflect, we may change to a different relationship type, such as “attention hound.” Based on this theory that we change relationship types to reflect the duress level associated to our internal story, it’s not that far-fetched to recognize why people become BFFs—they feel beholden in a sense to the organization that created the product that solved their problem (and allowed them to rewrite that story once again with their challenge solved).4
Surprisingly enough, it is not that difficult to identify these traits in the digital world either. All you need is a little context.

Context and Your Website

Context is powerful. But how do we enable it? What technologies integrate with our website in order to “identify” and categorize visitors into different relationship types?

There are two primary technologies—analyzing customer behavior in real time, and dynamically modifying content on the fly.

Real-Time Customer Behavior

We need technology that analyzes what visitors are doing, what buttons they click, which pages they visit and in what order, how long they spend engaging with content, and where they navigate to on your website. Fortunately, the market has already responded. A number of companies offer website visitor interaction technology.

Gravity5 and Outbrain6 are two such companies. Gravity is working with publishers and advertisers to build interest graphs of its readers. Its technology runs semantic analysis on the articles that users read across sites on its network. It does this in order to recommend content that fits with their interests. Outbrain provides personalized content recommendations, basing its suggestions on a combination of factors such as popularity, contextual, behavioral, and personal. So, imagine having multiple sites (all working together to develop relationships by providing helpful and useful content) that work in concert to help categorize visitors (long- and short-term) into their respective relationship types.

Dynamic Web Pages

What do you do when you understand what a customer wants? You personalize their experience. In the real world, that’s somewhat challenging. Kevin Whittemore can’t run around the store changing products and end-caps. Yet our digital interactions cannot lower their voice, smile, wave, or change body language on the fly. We need to do something that will express our understanding of the kind of relationship they prefer with us.

To do that, we need a responsive digital presence that enables us to act on the analysis of the real-time customer behavior technologies. For example:

  • We know that 73 percent of our website visitors hit the homepage and click on three links to get to specifications about our products.
  • Those self-service visitors most likely want a “you don’t see me” relationship. They are just looking for information.
  • Instead of requiring them to click three times, we can put a large call to action on the homepage that enables them to get product details in one click.
  • But, if we notice that some of those 73 percent also go to our blog, we may assume they are looking for something more, our opinion, or some advice perhaps.
  • Some may even leave comments, or offer some advice of their own.

Combining the ability to modify web pages quickly (i.e., through a content management system) with real-time customer behavior analysis gives us an automated system that can provide the right content (over time) to the right persona. Our website can start to take on the role of relationship manager.

It’s Not Just About Your Website

It is necessary to understand that digital interaction does not happen only on the website. We need to take this approach in all of our channels—how people interact with our content, and our overall digital presence, reveals the kind of relationship they want. We need to watch carefully, just like Kevin Whittemore sitting at his desk above the sales floor, and we need to respond proactively.

Digital enables us to change the objective of our relationship. This makes understanding exactly what our visitors are doing, and tailoring the digital experience to them, even more important.

Digital enables us to change the very experience, to personalize it based on need, at scale.

Back to the hardware store—before digital, it was impossible to scale this kind of personalization. Imagine trying to address the needs of 100, 1,000, even 10,000 people all at the same time! Whittemore could keep adding salespeople, but eventually there’d be no room for customers in the store!

Summing it Up

We do not have the problem of limited floor space in the digital world, as we can add an infinite number of “salespeople.” With the right technology and processes integrated into our digital presence, we can acquire and store knowledge about visitors, watch for changing patterns of need, and respond to the desires people have for different kinds of relationships. In short:

  • Context enables us to understand what visitors want, and to tailor our digital presence accordingly. Behavior analysis technology can help tell us what they want by analyzing what they do. It’s like an invisible “eye in the sky.”
  • Context then leads to personalization. Technology integrated into your website, for example, can dynamically shift and change what people see based on the behavior analysis.

Helpful Takeaways

It all starts here. You have to be able to identify the need. Here are some helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and things you can do today. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.

  • Don’t rely on just surveys. People lie when they are surveyed. You are better off trying to engage with people in a help-ful manner, one-on-one, rather than blanketing a bunch and asking, “How can we better help you?” Of course, this is more labor intensive, but it will also get you closer to your audience as a whole. Surveys can help to validate what you are discovering in individual conversations.
  • Get your website into a CMS. If you are doing your website by yourself (i.e., programming individual pages), it’s time to get into the game with a CMS. That may be something as simple and easy as Wordpress (which has a host of powerful plugins to do things like personalization) or something more complicated like a managed service. Regardless, trying to do it yourself and create an interactive digital experience (i.e., integrating social networking, folding in a community, etc.) can take you away from what’s important—engaging with your audience.
  • Install behavior analysis and personalization technologies. Whether you are delivering your website yourself or are using a managed provider, you need technology that enables you to analyze what people are doing on the site and personalizes the experience dynamically. Without that, the experience will never tap into the different relationship types, and providing people what they really want, a pleasant experience that matches their relationship needs, will be hit and miss.
  • Build personas and profiles. Yes, everyone is an individual, but at some point you need to do some of this needs analysis at scale. Let’s say you generate some Relawatt values and then reach out to those people about understanding their needs, analyzing their decision-making, the buyer’s journey, etc. You really connect with them individually. Based on that, you can build profiles around the scores that make up their Relawatt and apply those profiles to other people in your relationship network. This gives you at least a sense of what those other people might want (to whom you didn’t reach out directly . . . yet) out of engagement with your organization.

Notes

1. When reading numerous accounts of hoarding (which is really a highly acute, habitual feeling of need), it appears that the behavior stems from feelings of duress. One example of this is perfectionism, in which the person is never satisfied that their collection is “complete.” This creates a feeling of distress that drives additional purchases. For more information, you can read the review of Randy O. Frost’s book, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, available at www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/books/review/Kramer-t.html?_r=0.

2. J. Grimmleman, “Saving Facebook,” Iowa Law Review 94 (2009), 1139–1205.

3. HubSpot, “How to Engage Fans on Facebook,” 2013.

4. Timothy Wilson does a great job of explaining and exploring this “internal story” (and our ability to rewrite it constantly) in his book, Redirect (New York: Little, Brown, 2011).

5. www.gravity.com.

6. www.outbrain.com.

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