How to be the perfect Singapore Santa for customers

Christmas is less than four weeks away. Marketing teams in Singapore have met with their elves to thrash out budgets, plans and KPIs. In all likelihood they’ve gone through the obligatory whining about smaller budgets and bigger asks.

In all this frenzy, has anyone spent the time and energy to understand – and I mean really understand - what the customer wants?

I don’t mean cursory focus groups or surveys. I mean a deep, down to the reptilian brain understanding of what product our customer wants, what drives him to take action, make a decision, change a belief, or otherwise help you, the marketer, strengthen your company’s bottom line.

It’s time that we marketers dug deeper and took the time to understand the psychological triggers of our consumers.

While deep research takes more time and resource, it is also more effective in eliciting and analysing the underlying ‘tensions’, ‘triggers’ and common threads that drive consumers. Organisations then use these insights to refine or create new products or strategies.

An example: working with Singapore’s Health Promotion Board, we used techniques from Morphological Psychology to better understand smokers. This methodology entails deep, 90-minute ‘mini-counselling sessions’ with subjects to get at underlying psychological needs and triggers that in turn drive behaviour. M

ost of us aren’t aware of what really drives us, let alone have the ability to articulate why we do the things we do or buy what we buy. That’s why these sessions are a necessary investment.

Through this research, we discovered that all smokers/ wannabe quitters already knew the dangers of smoking and did not want to hear more – so guilt trips, browbeating and scare tactics weren’t going to work.

We found there were essentially two groups of would-be quitters. One group wanted to quit but - later. Rather like St Augustine saying “Make me a better man Lord, but not just yet.”

The second group had a much stronger desire to stop smoking but needed encouragement and support from people close to them – their spouses, family and friends. We called them ‘Mature Contemplators’.

With this insight, we worked with HPB on its iQuit campaign, which showcased the journeys of smokers who quit successfully and the people who supported them along the way. The campaign also engaged the support of friends and family. The iQuit campaign moved nearly 50% of all smokers in our target group a step closer to quitting.

Our insights enabled HPB to work with smokers on a positive, pro-quitting campaign. iQuit not only worked, it also clinched the prestigious the UK IPA advertising effectiveness awards in October - the first Singapore ad campaign to win this prize.

Beyond marketing campaigns, this methodology also allows us to develop our business offerings with consumers rather than at them.

In 2010 Celcom piloted Kolony, a web and SMS-based social networking platform for Malaysian youths. Following a successful small-scale pilot, we dug deep into why Kolony was so popular.

Critical insights emerged: Malaysian youths made “crowd decisions”; they wanted do things as a group – part of a kampong mentality. More Social functions and offerings were built into the network.

And why SMS? Because outside of key cities, many in Malaysia still have limited smart phone and web access.

With this insight, Celcom launched Kolony across Malaysia in 2011 and attracted more than 3 million youthful “frens” within 12 months. Today, that network is upwards of 4.3 million. Celcom recouped its investment in Kolony in less than six months.

Celcom then went a step further. The company made the techniques from Morphological Psychology an integrated part of their product development and launch processes. No product is launched without first going through this process.

This research also applies to broad sectors and trends. Ahead of the recent Web in Travel conference, we looked into why the Travel and Hospitality industry was having so much trouble attracting Millennials. The study found that as a group, Millennials are all about a sense of progress and momentum.

Young workers perceived that sector had no momentum, no growth/ promotional prospects, no opportunities. They felt the industry wouldn’t give them the creativity to use their skills and smarts, and that since the pay was so low, it wasn’t even interested in hiring people with intelligence.

Perception or reality? Either way, these findings give the Travel and Hospitality industry a framework to improve their branding and better engage young workers.

Will your business be the next insights-based success story? Or will you and your team be complaining about over-demanding KPIs and under-responsive customers and employees? I’ll let you chew on this. I’m off to speak to my elves about what consumers want for Christmas.