The marketer's challenge: how to teach customers new behaviours

Ivey Business Journal Online, Sept-Oct, 2008 by Ian Gordon

New products are proliferating, and research shows that the most successful among them have clearly benefited from customers' ease in learning the benefits and applications of those products quickly, in finding out how the devices actually work, and in sharing their knowledge with friends. In fact the very success of a tiny percentage of new products (more than 95 per cent do not succeed) underlines the reality that marketers need to teach customers and find ways to advance their learning. If not, these marketers risk having their products languish.

In successful innovation after successful innovation, consumers have learned what the manufacturer wanted them to know, left their investments in old products and knowledge behind, and embraced the new alternative. By not effectively teaching customers, manufacturers are letting them learn on their own, at their own pace and with uncertain learning - and purchase - outcomes. This article suggests that consumers can and must be taught and offers a method of teaching that is thorough, fast and effective.

Innovation depends on customers learning

Dynamic, relatively new products such as the iPod and digital cameras share a number of characteristics:

* They did not exist a few years ago.

* Without new technology these innovations would not have occurred.

* The benefits of the technology-enabled products, services and processes were apparent to customers and sufficient for them to abandon previous behaviours and learn new ones.

* Companies paid attention to customer engagement in their innovation but few actively taught customers to innovate their behaviours. Consumers did this on their own.

In the last century, product, service and process innovation was a fairly slow- moving affair. Customers had time to adjust their attitudes to incorporate the changes companies initiated, an easy-enough thing to do because the changes were often not transformative. For example, a new 1957 Chevrolet might have a larger motor, two-tone paint and vestigial fins, but the vehicle itself was essentially the same model the customer already had in the garage. There was no new technology. That the old one nevertheless would be traded in was testimony to the marketer's considerable skill in equating "new" with "socially desirable" and "old" with the reverse.

Companies today can no longer rely on a small percentage of early adopters to create a market and future success by opening the minds of the next cohort of customers. With short, competitive windows and technology cycles, a high percentage of customers must embrace the technology quickly or the innovation will languish and soon be forgotten and disappear. Customer behaviours should change in concert with product, service or process innovation. Thus, companies need to master managing customers' behaviours if the uptake of an innovation is to be accelerated and revenue objectives met.

Technology has changed not just the pace of innovation but its very nature. New cars do not simply have style differences. There are material changes in the technologies that make cars work, that make them safe and economical, and that connect them to the stationary world. Today's innovative solutions usually provide similar benefits to existing offerings but in non-traditional ways, leading to the replacement of something that works well but is just not good enough anymore. Out goes the CRT television to be replaced by the oh-so-lifelike LCD or plasma flat panel. Now, unlike times past, companies find that modest change and competitive emulation are risky business. As a result, they seek to become prime movers in revolutionary change. Companies pay much attention to consumers when they innovate, but it is less common for marketers to help consumers learn and initiate their own behavioural change. A manual might accompany the OnStar satellite communication system common in many GM cars, but the new consumer still responds to non-intuitive interfaces and presses buttons in vain attempts to connect and sustain conversations. Consumers might buy the new version of Microsoft Word and still not be able to use much or most of the functional improvements. Shifting blame, the marketer might say "I provided a manual and the consumer did not read it!"

In a world where change is always accelerating, consumers must become actively engaged with innovation rather than remain passive users. They need to learn not just why it is in their interest to embrace the new and abandon the old, but how to do so successfully. If consumers' behaviours do not change, no amount of marketing will make an innovation succeed. Marketers who yell louder into the already deaf ears of consumers will achieve results that are no better than those of that ineffective teacher we all remember from junior school. Adoption of innovation depends on the ability of marketers to change customers' behaviour. This, in turn, depends on customers learning, and learning quickly. Marketers must act as customers' teachers if the latter are to behave as though they are essentially inter-dependent with the innovators, as indeed they are.