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If You Want People to Fill Out Surveys, Make Them Beautiful

Two true things about decision-making in business:

1) You should collect information from all the key stakeholders regarding their thoughts, feelings, hopes, and expectations.

2) People hate filling out surveys about their thoughts, feelings, hopes, and expectations.

In an ideal world, there would always be enough time to conduct qualitative data in-person through one-on-one interviews or focus groups. Everyone would feel heard and everyone would have a voice at the table, which would be perfectly reflected in the end product.

Unfortunately, we live in this world; the one where you’re already behind schedule, you’re speed-reading a few interviews from an outsourced transcription service, and none of the data is laddering up to something coherent. Especially for companies with thousands of employees, there needs to be a better way to design surveys that actually work to drive meaningful outcomes for your business.

Surveys Don’t Have to be Ugly

Last month, a small phenomenon took over our Slack channel: everyone started voluntarily posting their results from “Creative Types,” an interactive personality test designed by Adobe Create. The test’s goal is to “shine a light on the inner workings of different creative personality types in a way that might help us better understand ourselves, our creative process, and our potential.”

The setup is deceivingly simple. You’re asked a binary question such as, “When traveling, you always need a destination or direction.” Whichever option you choose, you’re rewarded with a corresponding animation that symbolically enacts your answer. If you respond that your creativity is more madness than method, you’ll see a bowling ball delightfully plow through a perfect field of dominos. The animations are gorgeous, the sound design is perfect, the questions are grounded enough to be applicable to work, and before you know it, you’ve finished the survey and are assigned one of eight personas: artist, thinker, adventurer, maker, producer, dreamer, innovator, or visionary. You get insight into yourself and, perhaps most importantly, Adobe gets insight into the types of people using their products.

This doesn’t feel like taking a survey, it feels like playing a game. And I think that’s the real key. Gathering data doesn’t have to be like taking the SATs – it can engage our sense of curiosity, our sense of humor, and our child-like sense of wanting to take things apart to see how they’re made.

Edward Tufte, famed statistician and author of books like “Envisioning Information” and “Beautiful Evidence” once said, “The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly – to develop strategies of seeing and showing.”

The answers we provide to the quiz are important, but the interstitial animations give us a new window for seeing that response. That moment of surprise fuels us to answer the next question. In the standard survey setup – answering a straight-forward question on a sliding scale of 1 to 5 – there is hardly any motivation to keep going. It feels more like homework, as opposed to truly reflecting on how and why we work the way we do.

Reality check: does every company have the time and resources necessary to turn their surveys into interactive multimedia experiences? Of course not. But there are a few lessons we can glean from Adobe Creative to make surveying your employees or customers much more fruitful.

Questions that balance the abstract with the actionable. Yes, you need to ask questions about roadmaps, product-market fit, and user experience. But sometimes, engaging someone’s curiosity with a slightly off-kilter question will get you a more honest answer. For instance, when updates are ready to install, do you hit restart now or remind me tomorrow?

A gorgeous, smooth interface that keeps people interested. Companies like Typeform and SurveyMonkey are building beautiful polls that combine the right mix of aesthetics and insights. If you don’t give people a little spark to keep them interested, they are not going to engage with your questions. As architect Buckminster Fuller said, “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

An end result that drives engagement. Whether it’s an illustrated avatar that people can’t help but share or an employee platform for driving behavior change like Culture Amp, the end of the quiz shouldn’t be the end of the journey for either party. The survey-taker should gain insight into themselves and the survey-giver should have easy tools for acting on those insights.

From Myers Briggs to Buzzfeed quizzes, there are thousands of ways of gathering information. Regardless of your method, make it memorable, make it beautiful, and make it easy to drive growth for your business.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

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Customer Journey Mapping: The Key to Delivering on the Experience You Promise Customers

Everyone’s Offering ‘A Great Experience’

Today, brands that aren’t focused on the entire customer experience simply can’t compete. Every touch point counts. Every interaction matters. Brands are expected to live up to their promise at every moment. And to do so, everyone within a business must behave in ways that help make this promise ring true authentically.

We see a lot of brands today differentiate themselves on “great experience” or “unparalleled service.” But in order for businesses to truly commit to creating unrivaled customer experiences, they have to fully align their value with what people truly care about and need – at every brand moment. This requires getting to the heart of what these pains and gains are and when and why they are happening. How? Customer journey mapping.

Customer Journey Mapping, A Different Type of Research

When conducting consumer research, the mistake a lot of businesses make is framing themselves as the stars and consumers as the extras – how can consumers fit into our story? Customer journey mapping, on the other hand, flips the script. It asks: how do we fit into consumers’ lives? Their cognitions? Emotions? Social realities? Priorities? What’s going on in peoples’ lives and how can we better fit into them? How can we shift and adapt to consumers’ needs and desires?

Through this approach, customer journey mapping can uncover what role the brand plays in peoples’ lives and optimize the whole customer experience to a certain set of emotional and situational circumstances. 

Customer journey analysis examines the entire journey people go through with your brand – even before they make any kind of contact with you. It’s an approach that yields a full understanding of what your business does, and doesn’t, fulfill for people. It offers a more sophisticated way of looking at how connections are built with your customers.

Customer journey mapping can help your brand connect more meaningfully with people. Here’s how:

1. Alignment

Journey mapping fosters alignment by bringing organizations into sync with the people they are looking to serve. By analyzing the physical maps, businesses gain a holistic picture of how their purpose, intention, and investment can be positioned to be the most powerfully differentiated from their competition. By uncovering what moments really matter in a customer’s entire experience, the whole team can get aligned around how to connect, behave in line with the brand purpose, and evoke the right emotional impact at every moment during a customer’s journey.

By getting to the heart of what customers are thinking, feeling, and perceiving along their whole journey, your organization can better align the way it does business with customer needs.

2. Respect

Customer journey mapping looks at the entire customer experience: every interaction and every moment of contact. For a lot of employees who may struggle to see the ways in which their role matters, seeing this kind of map can be an a-ha moment. The importance of their work really sets in.

Seeing the journey from start to finish, people discover that everyone is a key player. Everyone within the organization contributes to the way customers perceive their experience. As such, people start to recognize the roles of those that are less visible in a customer’s experience. They recognize that everyone (receptionist, project manager, sales person…) contributes in essential ways.

Because it reveals the contributions of teams and individuals, it can help people celebrate what they are doing well. People across the board feel more valued and more important. They feel more empowered to contribute and shape the way people experience the brand.

3. The Whole Picture:

Some research can be confusing or misleading because it only offers a single segment or chunk of data or meaning – a piece of the puzzle. However, customer journey analysis is unique because it provides the whole picture, even before the brand enters the scene. By unveiling the shape of the entire overall experience, journey mapping gives a unique view of what you do and why you matter – from the outside in, not inside out.

The maps themselves offer helpful mental models for everyone across the organization – helping people to understand what they are trying to accomplish with every interaction and at every brand moment. With this whole picture view, interdependences are more easily seen, and you can be more strategic about your areas of focus, as well as figure out where the real opportunities lay.

This kind of shared visualization can also be of great value for businesses today who may be stuck in a siloed way of thinking. People can contribute their own insights to it and the maps can shift and flex as business does. Embracing the whole picture is the way to create a compelling, consistent, meaningful, and differentiated customer experience today.

Qualitative Data, Back it Up

At Emotive Brand, when we do customer journey mapping it means in-depth interviews that help people bring us into their world. We take the time to build rapport and spend an extended period of time with the people we are interviewing. This kind of qualitative data gets to the what, why, and the how.

However, qualitative data always needs to be validated. That’s why we always back up our findings with quantitative data – often in survey form. This quantitative data helps answer the question: to what extent are our findings valid and true? The combination of quant and qual is key and helps ensure the usability of the maps.

That being said, customer journey mapping is meant to be a living tool. It should be updated and used as something you can measure against. It’s important that people don’t just see it, but that they use it too. Keeping it up-to-date can help ensure that it is being used in the most powerful, impactful ways.

If you want to enhance the power of your customer experience, look to customer journey mapping. Investing in this kind of mapping and strategy will ensure you deliver on the great experience you promise and connect more meaningfully with the people who matter to your business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

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The Power of Good Research for B2C Businesses: Interview with Emotive Brand Strategy Director

As Strategy Director, Taylor Standlee is an expert at identifying business challenges, creating strategic solutions, and driving business growth. Taylor offers thoughts on the changing landscape of good research for B2C businesses today.

How is consumer research evolving?

Businesses are constantly looking for new ways of understanding, reaching, and connecting with the people important to their success. This includes customers, consumers, investors, and employees. And we’ve never had so many tools or so much data at our fingertips. The challenge, as always, is to be smart about how we go about gaining the information that will help a business make better data-informed decisions.

Data is an essential requirement for successful business today – but not all data is created equal. It’s about getting research right.

So how do you get it right?

Getting research right means meeting the research objectives in the most efficient and effective manner available.  This begins with clear, focused research objectives.  The objectives dictate the methods, not the other way around.

There’s a tendency to obsess over the growing streams of real-time data – coming from sales, CRM, social listening, and customer satisfaction surveys – that help businesses identify patterns indicating what’s happening. However, these largely quantitative streams of data are just not as good at answering the critical question of “why”. In the famous words of sociologist William Bruce Cameron:

“Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”

Smart businesses are coming to understand the strengths and limitations of these quantitative tools and we’re seeing a revival of interest in modern qualitative methods as a result.

Can you talk more about the resurgence of qualitative measures happening in research today?

I think we are in a classic ‘lurch and learn’ moment. We see a resurgence of interest among our clients in qualitative methods that are designed to get at the ‘why’. This means depth interviews, ethnographies, and even focus groups that capture rich data on people’s behaviors and emotional needs. These methods help us come to terms with the ‘why’ – generating an understanding of the emotional and rational drivers of engagement, connection, and the behaviors those quantitative measures are so good at tracking.  Since people now demand brands to act more humanly and authentically, while seamlessly integrating into their lives, qualitative research holds profound value today. This is why there’s increased interest in taking new-school informed approaches to old-school methods like ethnographies, focus groups, shop-alongs, and IDI’s.

So what we advocate for is approaching research holistically.  Using all available methods in order to achieve your specific objectives in a way that empowers decision making and coordination with the organization.

What are some best practices for good research?

1) Use research to help align your organization.

Make the findings accessible to non-research experts. When only specialists see it and understand it, you undercut the value of the research. By being transparent and open, findings can help create a shared understanding of the situation. They can also fuel both creativity and collaboration.

2) Socialize the findings in an immersive way.  

Research is most valuable when businesses build a living way for people to interact with the data. The experience has to be authentic and as real as possible. At Emotive Brand, we are creating highly immersive environments for presenting research findings. These environments allow people to interact with those findings in meaningful ways.  Decks and reports just don’t cut it. By allowing people to really immerse themselves in the data, they are better able to embrace the findings and apply them to their own work. They can grasp brand moments, and get into the hearts and minds of the consumers they are building and designing for, marketing towards, or working to connect with and reach. This means higher functioning marketing materials, better designed products, and a business and brand tailored for growth.

What’s the overall payoff of good research for B2C companies?

Good research is efficient, accurate, and acts as an aid to decision making.  It captures the essence of both what’s happening in the market and, critically, why it’s happening.  Success hinges on a rich understanding of people’s lives and decisions. You can’t get around that. Smart businesses are constantly thinking about how and why they matter to the people who matter to their business, specifically consumers. Businesses need to embrace a holistic approach to research that includes qualitative measures and a heightened emphasis on how they present and share findings in order to find success today.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.