Cycle of Change: Creating Value beyond the immediate market

Consumers are moving outside the marketing funnel by changing the way they The decision-making process is now a circular journey with four phases: initial As with most kinds of products, the consumer will immediately be able to name an This change in behavior creates opportunities for marketers by adding touch.
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Gather your organization leaders and stakeholders and convince them of the need to change. This step is pretty straightforward, but you should make sure that you have a good span of people from various experience levels, skill sets, and so on. Be sure to specifically ask them for a commitment to these changes too, since you will need a strong core of promoters who can reach every employee in your business. Write down what values your changes work towards achieving, what the changes are, and what the predicted outcome will be.

Keep the summary to one or two sentences, and in simple enough language that everyone in your core group step understands exactly what you mean.


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Although part of this will be having regular meetings to discuss the vision and changes with your teams, you also need to be promoting these elements outside of meetings too. Remove barriers and reduce friction If all has gone well then your employees should be eager to get started with your changes. For example, an employee might not have the skill to use a new piece of technology or a team might not have the manpower to spare for implementing a new task.

You can do this by analyzing your structure and processes to see if they are holding your changes back, and by tackling problems both human and technical as soon as possible after they show up. Instead, you need to make sure that there are short-term wins associated with your changes that you can present and praise employees for. This both gives your team a sense of accomplishment and shows them the process working in action, making them more likely to keep up with the changes. Sustain acceleration This stage is all about sustaining the momentum that you generated for your changes. Take stock of any successes or failures your team has, looking at what happened and what could be improved next time.

Creating customer value starts with knowing the customer

Beyond that, be sure to set new goals whenever one of your current ones is reached to let your team have something to work towards. Set your changes in stone Finally, you need to make sure that your changes have been set in stone, both in your documentation and company culture. Aside from updating any formal processes you have to reflect the new change, you also need to promote the success of your changes and help them to endure going forwards.

For example, one great way to cement a change is to announce and recognize the original coalition and their contributions to the final product. This highlights their interaction in the change, your willingness to hear feedback, and the change as a whole as a good thing. This gives your team the drive they need to enact the change, with enough people working on deploying it that it should quickly become standard practice. For anything other than a large corporation, having some kind of back-and-forth is vital for giving context on changes from varying points of view and skill sets, and for having employees adapt to the change at all.

That way they will be more likely to adopt your changes, as they will at least have some say and direct connection to the changes. Smaller companies depend much more on cementing every employee as a champion of each change, meaning that you need to pay more attention to their feedback. So, instead of telling your employees what to do and how to change, you pave the way for them to choose to do so by themselves. The trick is knowing how to present these nudges. Businessballs highlights some of the core aspects of nudges as being indirect, subtle, open-ended, educational, backed up with evidence, optional, and open to discussion.

For example, if you want to create a set editing checklist to follow for your marketing team, you could say how such as process would be a great way to make editing easier, quicker, and more consistent. Instead, you need to gather information about their current performance and structure, and then compare that with the predicted effects of the change.

This will breed resentment to both the change and you, since no-one else had a say in the matter. Instead, the change should be presented in a way that the team will understand and respond well to, with evidence to back it up, and above all else as a choice. Listen to feedback Whether your changes were rejected or not, you need to be open to whatever feedback your team may have. This, in turn, will make them more willing to give your changes a shot. If your team uses your new process and immediately hits a roadblock, their enthusiasm for the whole thing is going to plummet.

Instead, make the transition to the new way of doing things as easy as possible by assessing what might get in the way of the change and tackling that issue as soon as possible. Again, talking to your team to help identify these obstacles is a great way to identify ones you would have otherwise missed. Keep momentum up with short-term wins Once some progress has been made on deploying your change you need to make sure that it is maintained. Helping the employee realize the importance of the issue and letting them choose the solution makes them more motivated to see it through.

Giving them that choice also promotes a stronger bond with yourself and your business, which can extend into greater loyalty and a lower employee turnover rate. This makes nudge at least a great supplement to more formal approaches. Also, because of having to be used alongside another method, the extra time and effort involved in providing attractive choices for your employees can be staggering and impractical for larger companies.

Nudge also suffers a little in terms of its predictability. While you can improve the landscape for your changes all you want, the choice or a variation thereof ultimately has to lie with your employees, which can make the outcome uncertain. Nudge theory is an odd concept, but with careful planning you can turn the people] your changes most depend on your employees into its biggest champions.

That way you can have a specific action plan while getting a large amount of support from your team. Created by Jeffery Hiatt founder of Prosci , the ADKAR change management model is a bottom-up method which focuses on the individuals behind the change. By focusing on achieving the following five goals, the ADKAR model can be used to effectively plan out change on both an individual and organizational level:.

Awareness The awareness stage is all about making sure that your employees understand the need for change. Instead, you need to justify those changes by using hard evidence to really drive the point home. Give real-world examples of what will happen after the change and compare it to their current position.

Listen to their feedback and implement any useful advice to share the responsibility if creating the change. Knowledge The knowledge goal in ADKAR is to make sure that everyone knows how the change will be carried out and how to fulfill their specific part in that process. So, here you need to break down the change into steps and analyze what various employees will need to know in order to complete them all. Once you know this, the team s need to be taught how the change will be completed and what their part in the process is.

Ability While it might seem like knowledge and ability are the same thing, the time it takes to go from knowing how to complete a task to being able to actually carry it out can be immense. As such, you need to check the ability of each employee and assess whether they need extra experience or knowledge in order to reliably complete their tasks.

The required knowledge and ability to achieve your change can also be limited by creating a documented process which anyone can follow, no matter their skill set or experience. This will make your changes more consistent and measurable, since most variables can be locked in a constant state. Reinforcement Reinforcement here means implementing incentives and rewards to make sure that the change is maintained until it becomes the new norm.

ADKAR is a bottom-up approach which focuses greatly on employees, in turn speeding up the rate at which changes can be reliably deployed. By giving you set goals to meet without a specific method, ADKAR provides a flexible framework which you can go on to apply to almost any situation. This flexibility also makes ADKAR great for deploying incremental changes, since small frequent changes are less disruptive, and can be planned out to achieve a larger shift over several ADKAR cycles. The added focus on the people and their needs rather than just the technical aspects also results in a higher success rate for changes you make.

This is largely down to the style of ADKAR being bottom-up, since any macro management is either ignored or taken for granted. Remember, however, that this is severely lacking in terms of a high-level plan. Created in by William Bridges, this model focuses on transition rather than change. While that might seem like a needless difference, this small factor alters the entire way that change management is approached. Put simply, change happens to people and can be considered intrusive. Meanwhile, a transition is more of a journey over time than an abrupt alien shift.

It does this by detailing three stages of transition, each of which the employee must be guided through for the change to be successful:. Here you need to focus on listening and communicating, as employees may feel fear, anger, denial, uncertainty, and a host of other negative emotions which serve as a roadblock in the transition. Combat fear by helping them to understand the change and the positive outcome that it will eventually bring. Make sure that anyone who needs to can reach out to a support channel through a knowledge base, mentor, etc.

Listen to what your employees have to say on the subject and take on board whatever feedback they may have. The neutral zone The neutral zone is the bridge between the old and the new. It is likely to be the time when productivity is at its lowest and your employees most tempted to give up and revert. When the changes are first deployed people will resist it, potentially have a higher workload, and may be less productive while they adapt.

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The new beginning The new beginning is when the changes have been accepted and energy is high. Here the main aim is to reinforce the changes, keep objectives clear, and to keep up the pace while you can. Again, rewarding your team members especially those who championed the changes is a great way to reinforce that your goals were both handled well and were the right thing to do in the first place. It takes a very personal approach to helping everyone adapt to changes by considering their emotions and reactions, which is rare at least to this degree in most management models.

Delivering value to customers

The consideration for your team as people will also inherently encourage loyalty and better performance, making them feel a stronger bond with their work. Unfortunately, this leaves it lacking the heavy management aspect that a large-scale change or company requires. Your employees are ultimately entirely responsible for carrying out your changes after all. Guide them through denial Denial is usually short-lived and involves team members dismissing that the change needs to happen, why it will happen, what will happen if it occurs, and even that it will happen at all.

Employees, therefore, need to be allowed to take things gradually and not be swamped with too much information or too severe a change — if you change too much at once then they will naturally rebel against the thought. If your employee is going through denial about your changes, you need to focus on open communication and taking the transition slowly in order to bring them around. Prepare in advance for anger Denial can often pave the way for fear to settle in, which in turn can lead to anger.

This could be anger at the changes, anger at your decision to make the change, anger at their colleagues for accepting it, and so on. Anger can also manifest either as general curtness towards the rest of the team or full-on outbursts at the slightest provocation. While awkward and destructive, their anger is understandable. Change takes people out of their comfort zone, and doing so puts them on the defensive often making us lash out in the process.

The key here is to realize that this is natural and to plan in advance for it. If you know that a particular employee is more likely to get angry either by having the brunt of the changes or because of their nature , take extra care to provide communication and support so as to limit their anger. Be firm, but listen to bargaining Bargaining may show in the form of the employee trying to alter the change so that most things remain the same. This could be through feedback and conversations with you directly or even by convincing themselves that parts of the change are unnecessary and trying to spread that belief to their team.

If you have up-to-date processes for your changes then make sure they are being followed fully, since any shortcuts taken now can lead to long-term inaccuracy. Upon reaching the depression stage, productivity will take a dive while the changes are prepared for and adjusted to. The best you can do is to limit the friction in their activities and try to make the new process rewarding or interesting in some way.

Celebrate acceptance Once changes are accepted then people can start building new goals around it. If they fully subscribe to and understand the change itself they might even experience a boost in productivity when it comes to this stage, since they might be able to build ambitious new goals with the new changes in action. The best way to promote this productivity burst is to celebrate once the changes have been successfully upheld for a while, whether that means messaging your core promoters or rewarding particularly helpful team members.

In turn, knowing how employees react to similar situations will let you limit the damage they do if they take their frustration out on their team or a part of your business. The unpredictable nature of emotions means that not everyone will fit this model, and your team may jump between completely different steps at any given time, making it hard to manage your approach for each individual. Some employees may not even fit the model at all and react completely differently to your changes — such is the human mind.

However, even if you tried to create a universal actionable checklist for this model, the best approach for each employee will vary drastically, making your attempts next to impossible to succeed. As such, a solid framework needs to be paired with this model to effectively manage your changes. Also, before diving into the final change management model, note that the Satir model focuses on tracking rather than affecting performance. Performance should be reasonably consistent, and your team should be pretty comfortable where they are.

They know what to expect, and have plenty of experience doing the exact same thing before, so significant challenges should be minimal.

Aligning marketing with the consumer decision journey

Resistance Resistance is encountered when a new element or change is introduced. This could be encountered at any level from CEOs to front-line employees and is usually accompanied by denial or dismissal. To limit this where possible, you need to help everyone to overcome that resistance by reaffirming the need to change and getting them to commit to it.

Unfortunately, other than the fact that it will happen after a change is introduced, very little about this step is set in stone. Positive experiences with Asian vehicles have made purchasers loyal to them, and that in turn generates positive word-of-mouth that increases the likelihood of their making it into the initial-consideration set. Not even constant sales incentives by US manufacturers can overcome this virtuous cycle.

More than 60 percent of consumers of facial skin care products, for example, go online to conduct further research after the purchase—a touch point unimaginable when the funnel was conceived. Of consumers who profess loyalty to a brand, some are active loyalists, who not only stick with it but also recommend it. Others are passive loyalists who, whether from laziness or confusion caused by the dizzying array of choices, stay with a brand without being committed to it.


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Despite their claims of allegiance, passive consumers are open to messages from competitors who give them a reason to switch. Take the automotive-insurance industry, in which most companies have a large base of seemingly loyal customers who renew every year. Our research found as much as a sixfold difference in the ratio of active to passive loyalists among major brands, so companies have opportunities to interrupt the loyalty loop. The US insurers GEICO and Progressive are doing just that, snaring the passively loyal customers of other companies by making comparison shopping and switching easy.

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They are giving consumers reasons to leave, not excuses to stay. All marketers should make expanding the base of active loyalists a priority, and to do so they must focus their spending on the new touch points. That will require entirely new marketing efforts, not just investments in Internet sites and efforts to drive word-of-mouth or a renewed commitment to customer satisfaction. Developing a deep knowledge of how consumers make decisions is the first step. For most marketers, the difficult part is focusing strategies and spending on the most influential touch points.

Other marketers may need to retool their loyalty programs by focusing on active rather than passive loyalists or to spend money on in-store activities or word-of-mouth programs. The increasing complexity of the consumer decision journey will force virtually all companies to adopt new ways of measuring consumer attitudes, brand performance, and the effectiveness of marketing expenditures across the whole process. Without such a realignment of spending, marketers face two risks. First, they could waste money: Second, marketers could seem out of touch—for instance, by trying to push products on customers rather than providing them with the information, support, and experience they want to reach decisions themselves.

Four kinds of activities can help marketers address the new realities of the consumer decision journey. In the past, most marketers consciously chose to focus on either end of the marketing funnel—building awareness or generating loyalty among current customers. Our research reveals a need to be much more specific about the touch points used to influence consumers as they move through initial consideration to active evaluation to closure.

In the skin care industry, for example, we found that some brands are much stronger in the initial-consideration phase than in active evaluation or closure. For them, our research suggests a need to shift focus from overall brand positioning—already powerful enough to ensure that they get considered—to efforts that make consumers act or to investments in packaging and in-store activities targeted at the moment of purchase. For some companies, new messaging is required to win in whatever part of the consumer journey offers the greatest revenue opportunity.

A general message cutting across all stages may have to be replaced by one addressing weaknesses at a specific point, such as initial consideration or active evaluation. Take the automotive industry. A number of brands in it could grow if consumers took them into consideration. Hyundai, the South Korean car manufacturer, tackled precisely this problem by adopting a marketing campaign built around protecting consumers financially by allowing them to return their vehicles if they lose their jobs.

This provocative message, tied to something very real for Americans, became a major factor in helping Hyundai break into the initial-consideration set of many new consumers. To look beyond funnel-inspired push marketing, companies must invest in vehicles that let marketers interact with consumers as they learn about brands. The epicenter of consumer-driven marketing is the Internet, crucial during the active-evaluation phase as consumers seek information, reviews, and recommendations. Strong performance at this point in the decision journey requires a mind-set shift from buying media to developing properties that attract consumers: Broadband connectivity, for example, lets marketers provide rich applications to consumers learning about products.

Simple, dynamic tools that help consumers decide which products make sense for them are now essential elements of an online arsenal. Finally, content-management systems and online targeting engines let marketers create hundreds of variations on an advertisement, taking into account the context where it appears, the past behavior of viewers, and a real-time inventory of what an organization needs to promote. For instance, many airlines manage and relentlessly optimize thousands of combinations of offers, prices, creative content, and formats to ensure that potential travelers see the most relevant opportunities.

Digital marketing has long promised this kind of targeting. Now we finally have the tools to make it more accurate and to manage it cost effectively. Consumers want to look at a product in action and are highly influenced by the visual dimension: Such elements have now become essential selling tools because consumers of these products are still in play when they enter a store.

Sometimes it takes a combination of approaches—great packaging, a favorable shelf position, forceful fixtures, informative signage—to attract consumers who enter a store with a strong attachment to their initial-consideration set. Our research shows that in-store touch points provide a significant opportunity for other brands. In many companies, different parts of the organization undertake specific customer-facing activities—including informational Web sites, PR, and loyalty programs.

These activities must be integrated and given appropriate leadership. The necessary changes are profound. A comprehensive view of all customer-facing activities is as important for business unit heads as for CEOs and chief marketing officers. But the full scope of the consumer decision journey goes beyond the traditional role of CMOs, who in many companies focus on brand building, advertisements, and perhaps market research.

Consider the range of skills needed to manage the customer experience in the automotive-insurance industry, in which some companies have many passive loyalists who can be pried away by rivals. Increasing the percentage of active loyalists requires not only integrating customer-facing activities into the marketing organization but also more subtle forms of organizational cooperation.

These include identifying active loyalists through customer research, as well as understanding what drives that loyalty and how to harness it with word-of-mouth programs. Marketers have long been aware of profound changes in the way consumers research and buy products. Yet a failure to change the focus of marketing to match that evolution has undermined the core goal of reaching customers at the moments that most influence their purchases.

The shift in consumer decision making means that marketers need to adjust their spending and to view the change not as a loss of power over consumers but as an opportunity to be in the right place at the right time, giving them the information and support they need to make the right decisions. McKinsey uses cookies to improve site functionality, provide you with a better browsing experience, and to enable our partners to advertise to you.

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