Laddering

Unlocking the Potential of Consumer Behavior

Eric V. Holtzclaw

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118653579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Comportamento dei consumatori
• Index: Business

Marketing and product development best practices for a fragmented economy

The rules for marketing and product development have changed forever. You no longer control where and how consumers receive marketing messages. The consumer is in charge, with ever-growing choices and a shrinking decision window. Therefore, it is crucial to understand what drives customer behavior to design products, marketing, and experiences that will succeed. Laddering explains how to better understand your customers' core values. Learn to ask the right questions from your customers, use it to analyze your data, and unlock the true potential of your product or service.

Use Laddering techniques to map your customer's DNA and understand why consumers buy from you.

• Helps you look at your customers in a new way and as a result maximize your profits and reduce your support costs
• Provides a framework for evaluating what marketing messages, campaigns and experiences are appropriate
• Author Eric V. Holtzclaw is CEO and founder of User Insight, a user experience research firm and Laddering Works, a marketing strategy and consulting firm. His weekly radio show, The 'Better You' Project, shines a spotlight on entrepreneurs' business journeys, his column Lean Forward appears weekly on INC.com and he is regularly contributor to CMO.com.

You must understand what is truly important in order to build relationships with consumers and to market for success in the new many-to-many economy. Laddering offers the tools and knowledge you need to thrive.

Chapter 1
History

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.

—Tyler Durden, Fight Club, 1999

Edward Bernays

It’s a cold day in New York City in December 1918. World War I has just ended. Twenty-seven-year-old Edward Bernays ducks into a local drugstore to buy a Coca-Cola. As he sits at the pharmacy counter and enjoys his soft drink, he contemplates the new career he is about to begin. Edward is on the verge of a vocation that will impact the very product he’s enjoying—in addition to countless others that sit on the shelves of that drugstore and many other stores in the years to come.

Edward, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, has just completed an assignment working for the war effort as a part of the Committee on Public Information, a group that was instrumental in promoting the American dream of democracy across the world. After many failed attempts to enlist and help out with the war effort, flat-footed and nearsighted Edward finally landed a chance to serve. He managed to secure an interview after his dogged pursuit of Ernest Poole, the head of the Foreign Press Bureau of the US Committee on Public Information. During his tenure with the committee, Edward worked with companies such as Ford, International Harvester, and many other American firms to distribute literature on US war efforts to foreign contacts and by posting US propaganda in the windows of 650 American offices overseas.

Edward’s contributions to the Committee on Public Information helped make American citizen’s perception of what had been an unpopular war much more positive. He used techniques he had successfully mastered in prior endeavors, including promoting a play called Daddy Long Legs and working with a touring ballet called Ballets Russe.

As a result of his work, Edward was invited to travel with Woodrow Wilson and attend the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919. During his time abroad, Edward witnessed firsthand how powerful propaganda could be in influencing the general public’s belief systems. This experience further convinced him that one could indeed shape the behavior of the masses by understanding what instincts and symbols motivate individuals. Edward explained, “The impact words and pictures made on the minds of men throughout Europe made a deep impression on me. I recognized that they had been powerful factors in helping win the war. Paris became a training school without instructors, in the study of public opinion and people.”

And as it turned out, Edward’s schooling and realization couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

The Problems of Production

Although the United States had left the war in a state of euphoria—and with the status of being the most powerful, richest country in the world—the country was facing several problems. American companies had perfected the practice of mass production primarily out of necessity to keep up with the demands of the war effort. Now that the war was over, they needed a way to maintain their prominence with this new capability. As such, they needed to address two problems, the first of which was that these companies needed someone to buy their products.

Before the ability to create products in mass was perfected, purchasers of goods were not referred to as consumers. This word comes from the Latin term consumo and means to “eat up completely.” Prior to the war, people bought only what they needed, primarily locally. Only the very wealthy participated in conspicuous consumption. Therefore, the definition of what an individual needed had to change to support mass production.

Consumerism and the concept of a consumer were invented in part to support and perpetuate the mass production cycle. Richard Robbins, in his book Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, explained it this way¹:

[T]he consumer revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was caused in large part by a crisis in production; new technologies had resulted in production of more goods, but there were not enough people to buy them. Since production is such an essential part of the culture of capitalism, society quickly adapted to the crisis by convincing people to buy things, by altering basic institutions and even generating a new ideology of pleasure.

The second problem was that in order to mass produce something, choice must be limited. Henry Ford is famously quoted as saying the following when discussing the Model T in 1909: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.”

For mass production to work, a product had to be standardized; nothing could be handmade, and everything had to be manufactured via machines and molds. The product’s assembly must permit workers with low skill levels to operate assembly lines where each worker does one task over and over again. For instance, a Model T assembly worker might spend every day putting the same screws into the same part of the vehicle chassis.

The introduction of variety or choice would require time to retool a very expensive process, or even more daunting—to create a whole new assembly line to take on the new work. The technology at the time simply didn’t exist to support the concept of choice.

The Opportunity

Edward and others in his industry saw both of these problems as an opportunity to apply the principles of propaganda in a completely new way. They believed that propaganda could serve to move society from one of need to one of want. Furthermore, they believed that using the right symbols, words, and influences could convince consumers to buy the products that companies were creating.

Edward knew that he couldn’t use the word propaganda itself because it had been tainted by the Germans during the war. So he opened up a publicity direction office, which became what we now all know as public relations. This new office’s charter was to create demand for the products companies were already making—and to find ways to expand a product’s reach to new consumers.

Edward believed that if they approached customers the right way, those working in publicity direction could actually adjust the customers’ preferences—and get them to consume what an industry was already creating.

One example of this approach is the way in which Edward handled American brewers. The brewers hired him after prohibition was repealed in 1933 to put themselves in a stronger position than liquor makers.

To create demand for beer among those who usually indulged in alcoholic beverages, Edward touted beer as the “beverage of moderation.” It was an attempt to distance it from distilled liquor and set it apart as distinctive. He persuaded beer retailers to cooperate with law enforcement to ensure that their product was used responsibly, and he published evidence that beer was not fattening and had a caloric value equal to that of milk.

To expand the product’s reach to new consumers, Edward told homemakers that beer would make for richer chocolate cake. He told farmers that brewers were major buyers of their barley, corn, and rice and told laborers that beer was the one alcoholic beverage they could afford. In addition, he published booklets and wrote letters claiming that beer was the favorite drink of the ancient Babylonians and the monks of the Middle Ages, as well as of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and the Pilgrims.

Edward’s work affected products across the board, from hairnets to automobiles to cigarettes to even people. Politicians called on his services to help them move their campaigns forward. His approach was always similar: make people want to consume the product as it was presented or how it could be manufactured.

Edward primarily used the printed word to persuade individuals that they needed to buy a product. The advertisements were directive: they told the consumer what to buy.

• “Isn’t it time you gave yourself a Christmas Gift?” (advertisement for a Colt revolver)
• “Christmas morning she will be happier with a Hoover” (advertisement for Hoover vacuum)
• “How Television Benefits Your Children”; “Own a Motorola and You Know You Own the Best” (advertisement for Motorola television set as a advertorial)
• “For a better start in life, start cola early” (advertisement for the Soda Pop Board of America)

And the approach was very effective: companies did succeed in getting individuals to buy what the company could manufacture.

The Rise of Mass Media

Edward Bernays and his cohorts’ efforts received support from an invention whose advancement was just as important as mass production at the time: the rise of mass media.

Before the early 1900s, most people got their news and information via word of mouth. They heard about things when they visited the town square or from a sparsely distributed network of newspapers when they were out and about buying the things they needed. Technology to send messages cheaply wide and far didn’t exist.

But the introduction of new disruptive technology in the early 1900s—such as the telephone, radio, movies, and television—greatly enhanced people’s ability to send information, entertainment, and news directly into the household from a central location. Those who were able to afford to do this had a set number of channels, and these discrete channels allowed them to closely control what was said and how it was said.

However, not everyone had this luxury. Only large players with deep pockets could fund the entertainment and information to distribute across these channels. As a result, channel owners needed the advertiser to help support their endeavors. A symbiotic relationship developed—a long-standing institution of which we’ve begun to see fractures only recently.

The kind of control and distribution power that mass media held was perfect for sending the advertisers’ messages intended to drive consumer demand for a given product or service.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

The country that came out of World War II was one composed of citizens who were accustomed to skimping by to support the war effort. Once the war was over, people had the money to spend on things they wanted—and the freedom to do so. The economic and societal environment of that time helped move the consumerism trend forward. Creating consumer demand continued to evolve in a way that further bolstered the burgeoning industry of public relations and advertising and reinforced th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: History
• Chapter 2: The Need for Laddering
• Chapter 3: Laddering Defined
• Chapter 4: The Steps to Laddering
• Chapter 5: Confirming and Fine-Tuning Your Ladders
• Chapter 6: Latticing: Finding the Overlap in Ladders
• Chapter 7: Lensing
• Chapter 8: Practical Application of Laddering
• Chapter 9: The Way Forward
• Index
• End User License Agreement