There’s a in New York City covered in lost gloves: fingerless biker gloves, work gloves, winter mittens, rubber-tipped, fur-trimmed, leather, suede, knit. It reminds employees walking by that they’re designing products for all the different hands that would occupy these gloves.

is the 29-year-old brand that’s ubiquitous on wedding registries and in Bed, Bath & Beyond. The company is the poster child for universal design, the concept of creating products that are accessible to anyone, regardless of age, size or ability. Oxo’s origin story is steeped in empathy—the founder noticed his wife’s arthritic hands struggling to use a metal vegetable peeler—and the wall of gloves hearkens back to this founding principle. It urges you to have some perspective; put yourself in someone else’s … gloves.

Empathy has given the Oxo brand its edge, and there’s reason to believe that many marketers could benefit from stopping to ask, “How would this make the consumer feel?” Research shows that this simple action breeds increased creativity, which is a welcome addition to the relatively cold data collected on consumers.

“A large part of putting the customer at the center is remembering that they are a human being, and not just an end user of your products or services,” says Mary Beech, principal at MRB Brand Consulting and former CMO of Kate Spade. “What you are creating, marketing and ultimately selling is but one piece of your customer’s life as a human on Earth. One very small piece. And if we aren’t keeping in mind their full journey, including their emotional, mental, social and physical needs—as well as the challenges and joys they are facing—we cannot do our jobs well.”

But to truly benefit from empathetic thinking, marketers need to get out of their own way. It’s all too easy to think of yourself as the end user, which breeds bias. The best empathetic practices aren’t all that different from choosing the perfect birthday gift for a loved one: Think less about what you would want and more about how it would make the recipient feel.

Mental Agility

“There just wasn’t a great understanding of how to think about consumers,” says Kelly Herd, a professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut. Of course, the end user should be kept in mind when designing a product, but Herd wanted to determine whether thinking empathetically would produce unique results.

She and Ravi Mehta, a professor of business administration at the University of Illinois, ran five studies to test the effects of empathy on design, resulting in an article . The co-authors found that when study subjects were prompted to imagine a user’s feelings, they produced more creative and original—but still practical—ideas, compared with when subjects were simply asked to design something for a particular audience. Three of the studies included college undergraduates—Herd says that these participants were mostly business students—and two of the studies used Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing marketplace.

In one of the tests, participants were told that Frito-Lay was running a crowdsourcing campaign for new potato chip flavors for pregnant women. Half of the group was given the basic assignment in an objective way, but the other half was given an empathetic prompt to take a few minutes to imagine how the customer would feel while eating the chips. The latter group’s flavor ideas—sushi, margarita and pickles and ice cream—were deemed more creative than the former’s by a panel of mothers-to-be.

The other studies yielded similar results, suggesting that adopting a feelings-imagination approach, versus an objective-imagination approach, enhances cognitive flexibility in the participants and boosts originality. Herd and Mehta also controlled for whether the effect holds for positive or negative feelings. It does.

While they found that empathy breeds mental agility—sparking creativity and originality—the researchers also discovered that the effects can last.

“It would hold that if you prime people to think about how a child would feel when using a toy you create, and then you are asked to think of some other creative thing, it would transfer,” Herd says. “The reason it works is because thinking about others’ feelings makes you more cognitively flexible, it makes you more mentally agile, and so that mental agility transfers into other things that might happen.”

The studies were similar to work done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, where researchers designed the , which stands for Age Gain Now Empathy System. The suit is worn by product developers, designers, marketers and others to better understand the physical challenges related to aging. The wearer feels the estimated motor, visual clarity, flexibility, dexterity and strength of a person in their mid-70s. The intention is for the wearer to empathize with the struggles of an aging population, and thus design with the goal of easing the stressors.

Although she and Mehta’s study tested the effects of empathy on design, Herd maintains that marketers would see the same benefits. “My co-author and I have talked a lot about whether we wanted to test this with marketing professionals and see how it holds,” she says. “We’ve been very clear in the paper that we think this would hold for marketing professionals. It’s possible it could even help more for people who are experts and tend to be very fixated in their own thinking.”

There’s just one small thing that can get in the way of empathy: marketer bias.

An April 2015 paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research, “,” found that when marketing managers were prompted to think empathetically, they were more likely to say that customers’ preferences were the same as their own—even ignoring the provided market research on the customers.

But it’s not all bad news: The researchers were able to negate the egocentric effect when study participants were simply made aware of their bias.

“The job of a marketer isn’t to say, ‘Hey, what would I want if I were the customer?’ It’s knowing you have a bias,” says Brian Carroll, founder and CEO of Markempa, a consulting and training company for empathy-based marketing.

In the story of his own path to empathic marketing, Carroll likes to reference about collections agency CFS2. Owner Bill Bartmann (now deceased) told CBS he made about 200% more than his competitors by being empathetic: Instead of hiring debt collectors, he hired people with customer care experience. Employees were rewarded for how many free services they provided—even helping to fill out job applications and schedule interviews—with the goal of getting the debtors back on their feet.

In his own work, Carroll has tried to help marketers recognize their bias, employing systems such as empathy-mapping and customer story interviews. “I’m not just interviewing about what appeals to someone, I want to hear the story of their journey,” he says. “When you listen to someone share a story, they don’t [just] share the facts, they’re sharing emotional content and context.”

Marketers do try to capture consumers’ emotions, and sometimes it can work brilliantly—other times, it can backfire. It’s not dissimilar to the way an ad taking an insincere social stance can feel hollow. Belinda Parmar, CEO of The Empathy Business and the founder of The Truth ���������t Tech, calls this phenomenon “empathy-washing.” Parmar argues that empathy needs to start from the inside of an organization before consumers will feel it.

“The marketing cannot just change—the leadership style has to change, the way of working, the language of the business has to become more human,” she says. “Millennials are demanding empathy, as they will sacrifice meaning for money. To keep great talent, a business has to nurture empathy in the way they speak to each other, give each other feedback in an empathic way and have some of those honest conversations.”

A Good Grip on Empathy

It’s easy to forget about Oxo. Its products become part of the household, easy to use and unflashy. They don’t release major ad campaigns and mostly let the products speak for themselves. But the brand hasn’t forgotten about you. In fact, it’s all they think about: How does using this gadget make you feel?

Consider the measuring cup. The classic glass or plastic version requires users to pour in the ingredient, bend down to check the level, add more or remove, bend down, repeat. It’s not a terribly onerous exercise for many people, but designers at Oxo watched this stoop-and-repeat and saw a better way. Enter the , which allows users to check their measurement levels from above.

“You watch someone do something and you’re like, ‘Why did they keep doing that? Why do they have to tilt their arm that way? That looks uncomfortable,’” says Karen Schnelwar, VP of global brand strategy and marketing at Oxo. “Humans have an amazing ability to compensate for difficult situations subconsciously. …When that measuring cup comes into play and you get to retain your posture and your dignity and your composure, everything changes in a way that you never thought you were compensating for before.”

There’s empathy to the product design, and Schnelwar says the marketing team’s job is to communicate this empathy. Often, this simply means writing functional explanations of what the product does.

The company did release a a year ago. The almost two-minute spot features users of varying ages and abilities, and the voiceover says, “Love inspires everything that we do—how we work and what we create.” It covers Oxo’s origin story and design process, but it focuses mostly on its products in use. In fact, most of the company’s videos on YouTube are short, simple clips that highlight how an individual product works. No narration, just a little text and light-hearted music as video shows the product in use.

Schnelwar says that the Oxo marketing team does its job well when it’s able to communicate the craft and empathy of the products, of which there are approximately 2,500. They try to connect the dots across the brand portfolio to show how Oxo provides a consistent experience and what role the products play in users’ everyday lives.

“When you ask about how we get empathy into our communications, part of it is because we’re always communicating about our tools that have empathy baked into the inspiration and the design for the brand in general,” she says. “With all of the user testing and how the product teams observe people doing tasks—sometimes that becomes the inspiration for what we’re going to create next.”

Part of the brand’s empathetic communications strategy is being straightforward. In its product videos and on its packaging, Oxo gets to the point: You don’t have time to read a small novel about a whisk, do you? And in any case, you can physically feel the benefit in your hands. “We try to demonstrate that thoughtfulness without having to say we’re thoughtful,” Schnelwar says. “You want to demonstrate it so that people can internalize it and see how it would affect their everyday positively, rather than have to take up a layer of messaging by talking about how thoughtful we are, about how much better everyone’s life would be. We’d rather demonstrate it one campaign at a time, one piece of communication at a time. Let people discover it and fall in love with us on their own terms.”

But the reliance on letting the products tell the empathetic brand story presents a bit of a challenge for Oxo: You can’t touch its products on the web. Rather than be yet another thumbnail lost in a forest of products on Amazon, the brand took a step back and used its guiding brand principles to reach customers. It chose to name its products in a clear and concise manner, sometimes with a little wink. For example, Oxo’s : The name spells out exactly what it is, and that it’s better—with the added splash of wordplay.

Companies can’t maintain their brand font on Amazon’s search results pages, but Oxo saw an opportunity to provide some short, descriptive text on the thumbnails within product pages. “If you scroll down on Amazon—they call them A-plus pages where you can communicate with photography and with messages—we try to make those kind of an oasis of calm in a sea of e-commerce chaos,” Schnelwar says. If the products are intended to make every day better, why not have empathy for the shopping experience as well?

How to Become an Empathetic Marketer

There’s never a bad time to use empathy in the creative process, but Herd recommends using it as a problem-solving tool. For example, thinking empathetically can be an add-on to using AI, introducing a human component to what can otherwise feel like a very mechanic system. In addition to moving the brainstorming team out of fixation, it can also move ideation out of the funnel and into journey-mapping. As a professor, Herd tells her students to think about how a person may feel when they’re going through a particular experience: What would be some of the positives or negatives?

In Herd and Mehta’s study, the participants were asked to imagine how someone may feel when using the products, or to visualize a person interacting with the items. “It’s as simple as saying, ‘Think about how this person would use the product and then think about how this person would feel when using the product,” Herd says. To take from the Journal of Marketing Research, an additional prompt may be to remind the brainstorming team of their biases.

Mary Beech, who spoke about empathetic marketing in a , says that once this shift in mindset happens, it’s hard to look back. She says some of the most empathetic brands don’t simply consider the consumer when they engage with the brand, but the user is seen as a whole person.

“I am a long-distance runner, marathons specifically, and I routinely feel seen and treated with empathy by the brands I associate with in that aspect of my life,” Beech says. “Not all, but most. As a marathon runner, my needs and experiences are specific and shared by other marathon runners. But the best brands and companies acknowledge that most people who run marathons do not do this full time. It is an aspect of their life, not the aspect of their life. I feel the most empathy from brands who treat me as a full human who happens to run marathons.”

Marketing technology can make a consumer seem more like a dataset than an actual human, and Beech recommends that marketers remember that a consumer’s experience with your brand doesn’t happen in a vacuum. “My demographic and socioeconomic data combined with my search and purchase history on the web tells a story,” Beech says. “But it is not my full story. It is not the most compelling story of me, but it gives a direction. Data can and should be a tool in the toolbox of the storyteller, and it should be part of creating a great story. But it still needs the magic of the human touch.”

And to Parmar’s point, a company also can’t separate internal and external empathy. So in addition to practicing empathy in the ideation process, marketers need to practice empathy with their colleagues.

“Often, unempathic behaviors toward customers or unempathic language in marketing is as a result of poor internal culture and low engagement internally,” she says. When Parmar works as an “empathy-in-residence” at companies, she works to be part of the organization’s culture to nudge it to a more empathic state. “The best and fastest way to change the levels of empathy in a company is to change the meetings and make them more empathic to make everyone feel like they belong,” she says.

But like any feel-good practice (and plenty of marketers have cautioned that empathy can be more of a buzzword than a real strategy), measuring for whether it’s working can be tricky. Parmar says that the answer isn’t in traditional metrics, but suggests looking at the “empathy quotient,” or what Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma calls “.”

“We need to measure campaigns by how much they motivate and move people emotionally,” Parmar says. “How much a campaign helps people feel that they belong, and how much it helps people build identities.”

If that still feels a bit wishy-washy, Carroll has his own proud figures from taking a more empathetic approach. He trained his team at a previous job to understand people’s deeper motivations when they chose to download a report, rather than using that communication to convince the consumer to talk with a sales representative. After six months of focusing on answering questions, Carroll says that the team had 303% more sales opportunities.

The brands and marketers that engage empathetically with consumers are the unique and creative problem-solvers. Perhaps you never gave much thought to standing with a hot kettle, making your morning cup of coffee—at least until Oxo came up with its . Now you’re grateful for getting those three minutes back in your morning. An empathetic strategy isn’t always necessary—sometimes a customer simply wants to know when they can expect a package—but it can be wielded to overcome tricky brand and communication challenges.

“Empathy isn’t the only answer,” Carroll says. “I view it as a superpower to take what you do in marketing and make it way better because you’re actually orienting to what matters to your customer. … Empathy builds connection, connection can build trust and then trust ultimately is the precursor for what needs to exist for someone to say ‘yes’ or to ultimately buy.”

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Last year, the world’s leading consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, : “To put it bluntly, much of the $5.7 trillion global grocery industry is in trouble.”

The report, “Reviving grocery retail: Six imperatives,” continued just as pessimistically, despite the grocery sector’s top line of recent steady growth. “Although it has grown at about 4.5% annually over the past decade, that growth has been highly uneven—and has masked deeper problems. For grocers in developed markets, both growth and profitability have been on a downward trajectory due to higher costs, falling productivity, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. One result: a massive decline in publicly listed grocers’ economic value.”

McKinsey went on to predict a coming era in grocery marked by mergers and acquisitions. From a customer experience standpoint, many grocers are now indistinguishable from one another. Mandy Rassi, Kroger’s head of brand building, this “sea of sameness” in grocery retail advertising, the quickest escape from which starts and ends with rethinking customer experience.

Kroger’s new agency of record, , is its first in its 130-year history. The agency’s challenged with “developing a refreshed, stronger brand identity” for the supermarket and retailer giant. For clues as to the direction in which Kroger may be taking its advertising, check out the 12-minute “” comedy video released on Funny or Die that features actors Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard cooking a meal with ingredients purchased at the grocer.

In-store distinctions exist as well. In June, the latest version of the reports that just 13% of Americans limit their food shopping to a single retailer. A typical household makes 1.6 trips to a grocery store each week, spending a weekly average of $113.50. By the end of the month, an American shopper will visit an average of 4.4 different stores in one month, up from 4.1 in last year’s report. For millennials and Generation Z, that number is even higher, recording an average of five and 6.2 different retailers per month, respectively.

However, most shoppers (92%) say that they have a single favorite store where they do the bulk of their shopping. This is a place they know by name and where they spend the lion’s share of their grocery budget. For 49% of shoppers, this place will be a supermarket. But FMI researchers have identified four additional purchasing behaviors that cause all shoppers to look past their preferred store. These behaviors are informed by experience—people want different in-store experiences at different times.

First is the stock-up strategy, which FMI classifies as separate from regular bulk shopping. Rather, it denotes times when shoppers are looking to replenish household staples intended to last weeks or months. Shoppers will usually perform this type of strategy at warehouse, supercenter or discount stores.

Then there are specialty-item visits, undertaken when consumers are seeking unique items or brands that are specific to one location. Trader Joe’s is a cornerstone for these trips, offering an abundance of special products that its devotees cannot live without. Yet another type of visit is driven by the pursuit of quality, which can draw thrifty shoppers into more expensive environs to hunt for premium produce, meat or seafood. Finally, there is the need-it-now shopping behavior for harried households that need a basic item or two from the most convenient locations.

Shoppers may believe that warehouses are the best places to buy in bulk, but not if they need items in a hurry. For that, they choose the closest, most efficiently organized or most advanced self-checkout options. Pricy joints might scare away budget-conscious consumers, only to lure them back when they are shopping for a special occasion. For everything else, there’s the mainstay supermarket. The type of experience shoppers require determines where they will go.

Grocers need not become all things to all people. Struggling stores would be wise to concentrate on a single area, and all grocers should take care that they don’t fall too far behind in any single category. As Steve Markenson, FMI’s director of research, writes, “Perhaps the question retailers should ask themselves is, ‘How can I get a larger share of my grocery shopper’s spend?’” The operative word is “my”—grocers need to define what experience their core buyer needs and cater to it.

Another way to get a handle on customer experience divorced from shopper strategy is to view customer satisfaction scores, benchmark them by industry and break them down by company. This method, albeit indirect, reveals where customers do and don’t love to shop.

The has tracked consumer happiness by industry on a nationwide basis for the past quarter-century. Scores are issued on a 100-point scale and based on a proprietary calculation that factors in perceived quality, customer expectations, perceived value, customer complaints and customer loyalty. Data is collected annually in the form of 180,000 interviews. Separate studies in the Journal of Marketing have found that a portfolio of stocks chosen on high-ranking ACSI companies .

“Customer satisfaction is a leading indicator of company financial performance,” says David VanAmburg, managing director of the ACSI. “Companies with high ACSI scores tend to have better-performing stocks than those of companies with low scores. Additionally, changes in customer satisfaction impact the willingness to buy. The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they’ll become a repeat customer and thus help grow a business.”

In 2018, breweries were the most beloved industry with a score of 85, while cable companies garnered the least love of all with a score of 62. Supermarkets found themselves in the middle with a score of 78.

Looking within the supermarket sector, Trader Joe’s leads the pack with a score of 86. The brand goes all out with its experience, decorating stores with bright colors to fit its nautical theme, training Hawaiian-shirt-clad staff to engage and open any products customers may want to sample, and providing a cornucopia of goodies you can’t get anywhere else.

Wegmans clocks in at No. 2 with an overall score of 85. The northeastern luxury grocery has become the stuff of legend with its assortment of prepared foods, tech integration, locally sourced produce (some from its own farm) and happy workers.

Southeastern chain Publix places at No. 3. More of a conventional supermarket than the top two stores, employee-owned Publix nevertheless wins accolades for its helpful, knowledgeable, well-trained workforce; regionally attuned bakery and deli selections; and competitive prices.

Aldi, a no-frills hard discounter not known for providing an opulent shopping experience, is No. 4. This aligns with the theory that different purchase behaviors drive what makes a good customer experience. Shoppers who want unique, quirky products will find satisfaction in Trader Joe’s; those seeking a fast, affordable stop will be pleased with Aldi.

“Customer experience is the most important part of any campaign for a retailer’s execution,” says Karen Sales, an independent consultant and former Albertsons vice president of shopper marketing. “If you put the shopper first in all of your marketing, operations and merchandising efforts, you have the best chance of winning in today’s environment. Make it easy for the shopper. Make it friendly, local, personalized and at a good value. The grocery stores that can bring those four things together have the best chance of succeeding and winning more of each shopper’s dollar.”

The search for the right elixir has created some truly unique offerings. Giant Food Stores, a chain of 172 stores throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic, is unleashing googly-eyed helper robots to search for spills. The New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose in July, tweeting, “My grocery store got a robot that is supposed to monitor the aisles, but it can’t get to the aisles because people just stand around staring at it.”

My grocery store got a robot that is supposed to monitor the aisles, but it can’t get to the aisles because people just stand around staring at it.

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose)

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In the southwest, H-E-B—America’s 15th-largest privately held company—is equipped with various climate-controlled sections capable of storing frozen foods, produce and dry goods. Kroger is investing heavily in a subsidiary called that’s charged with developing next-gen tech for its own supermarkets and to license to other stores. Elsewhere, Pittsburgh-based Giant Eagle is experimenting with a , and Albertsons is adding an to boost purchase frequency.

Sales, who left Albertsons in May to launch her own consulting service after four and a half years with the supermarket, also gives praise to old-school promotions, such as games and loyalty programs. Albertsons has used a for 11 years, in which shoppers collect game pieces by making grocery purchases, then match the pieces with spaces on a Monopoly game board for a chance to win cash, grocery products and other prizes. This program has been updated to include an app.

Looking ahead, Sales points to digital shelf tags and displays as the new untapped frontier in grocery. Digital shelf displays rethink the shelf space between rows of products, typically filled in with physical price tags. They replace the analog tags with a digital display that flashes dynamic advertising and nutritional information to passersby and their smart phones.

“The technology, cost of equipment and Wi-Fi solutions are now at a point where scale is possible,” Sales says. “Along with e-commerce, this will be the biggest game-changer in grocery and mass retail over the next few years.”

Aldi’s aisles are wide, the assortment is well-placed, checkout moves swiftly and the prices are cheap. The small inconveniences customers endure would be unheard of at other stores. First, there’s the requirement of depositing a quarter in a shopping cart to unlock a basket (customers get the quarter back when they return the cart). Aldi’s product assortment is smaller and departments are limited to what gets delivered in trucks. There’s no bakery cranking out fresh pastries, no deli assembling sandwiches. Patrons are expected to do their own bagging with totes that they’ve brought, or else pay extra for in-store bags.

Once dismissed as the bottom-feeders of the grocery ecosystem, deep discounters such as Aldi have ramped up quality while proudly wearing their reputation for low prices as a badge of honor, refashioning themselves into formidable competition in the process. In Germany, Aldi enjoys a market share between 20% and 50%, according to McKinsey.

Closer to home, Aldi is angling to do something similar. The chain is amid an ambitious five-year plan to transform itself into one of America’s largest grocers. IBISWorld estimates that Aldi’s U.S. revenue totaled $13.5 billion in 2017, only about one-tenth of Kroger’s $97 billion. To close that gap, the company will open 800 new stores in the U.S. and remodel older ones while upgrading its assortment. By 2022, the company projects to reach a store count of 2,500 locations, more than any other grocer besides Kroger and Walmart.

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, was so impressed by the performance of hard discounters that he made them the subject of his fourth book, Retail Disruptors: The Spectacular Rise and Impact of the Hard Discounters. He sees Aldi and similar stores as the main disruptor in the grocery world at the moment, with an impact more outsized than that of online channels.

“There are very few national chains,” Steenkamp says of the U.S. market. “Most are regional. Many of those chains are not particularly strong, meaning that consumer satisfaction with them is low. Perceptions of key store attributes is low.”

Joining Aldi is Lidl, a German-based hard discounter. The chain first made waves in the U.S. four years ago when it announced that it would enter the American market. The first stores opened in 2017, and there were plans to launch 100 by the summer of 2018. However, only 68 U.S. locations are in operation as of the end of June. Steenkamp admits that Lidl’s American invasion was fraught with missteps—the director of Lidl’s parent company called the rollout a “catastrophe.” But where Lidl has taken hold, it’s had an impact. Steenkamp reports that retailers operating near Lidl stores must drop prices on their private labels by an average of 10% to remain competitive.

The discounters are adding pressure to what is already under siege. Supermarkets may never face existential obsolescence the way newspapers or coal mining might—we all need to eat—but the options for food shopping at non-traditional grocers have never been more numerous. If left unchecked, $200 billion to $700 billion could shift to discount, online and nongrocery channels by 2026, according to McKinsey industry analysis.

In the FMI report that outlines different experiences customers seek when grocery shopping, Aldi arguably makes a strong showing in three of the five categories: The chain has become the preferred bulk destination for many shoppers. Though it can’t offer the large quantities of a Costco or BJ’s Wholesale Club, it doesn’t charge an annual membership and its low prices encourage shoppers to stockpile nonperishables. Finally, its limited assortment and barebones checkout possess obvious appeal when shoppers shift into need-it-now mode.

“Sometimes, it’s nice to shop at a store and find some new things. There is some shopping experience there,” Steenkamp says. “But there is another type of shopping experience, which is also highly valuable: no hassle. Get in, get out.”

When it comes to quality or specialty items, Aldi will be never be considered the top of the line. But it has made strides with its private-label items, which now rival or surpass the competition, Steenkamp says. “The quality of the store-brand products offered by Aldi, Lidl and Trader Joe’s is better than what Walmart and Foodline offer,” he says. “They are not catching up—they are better.”

For years, industry-watchers have expected a great online shakeup to mark the next evolution of grocery shopping, but there’s little such evidence. The McKinsey report identified Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods to be a game-changer, but there is cause for moderation when assessing the immediate future of e-commerce. The U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report notes that while millennials make up the largest portion of online grocery shoppers, their numbers have remained flat for the past two years, suggesting that the growing acceptance of online grocery shopping in Gen X and Gen Z might plateau as well.

Steve Dennis, founder and president of SageBerry Consulting, sees a customer experience problem. Grocery is lumped in as part of retail, but food shopping is vastly different than buying clothes or hardware. This is apparent in online shopping: Traditional e-commerce design doesn’t lend itself to grocery shopping.

“In most parts of e-commerce, you’re usually going to buy an item or two,” Dennis says. “If you’re buying multiple items on Amazon, you’re usually on a mission. Grocery, to me, is not a search-driven business, it’s more of a browsing-driven business. … It’s a hassle to put together a shopping basket on most grocery websites.”

Delivery itself is also a hurdle. McKinsey points to the cost of delivery infrastructure as a thorny and expensive issue. If grocers aren’t willing to find partners or develop their own advanced analytics, warehouse relocation and automation system, online delivery will never reach the point of workability.

FMI reports that 17% of grocery deliveries are made through standard package-shipping services, while another 17% are set aside at kiosks for consumers to pick up themselves. Thirteen percent are delivered by a store’s specialized delivery service, and 8% of online grocery purchases are delivered as part of recurring subscriptions. The mishmash of last-mile solutions explains why center-store goods, such as salty snacks and other longer-shelf-life items, dominate online grocery purchases. Sixty-nine percent of consumers say regular supermarkets do a better job of preserving freshness than online delivery.

What’s a grocery store marketer to do? The first step is to embrace either end, or both, of a stratifying marketplace. Major middle-class grocers might be unique with their “sea of sameness” conundrum, but they are far from the only retail sector that is seeing the market gravitate away from the middle. Deloitte calls this phenomenon “the great bifurcation,” and Dennis has studied it extensively.

“You see this spilt between retailers. On the higher end, more experimental, unique product retailers are doing well,” Dennis says, adding that toward the bottom of the spectrum are the Aldis of the world. “But the folks that are in the middle that aren’t particularly convenient or low-cost—or they aren’t particularly high-interest or high-service—are sunk.”

Grocers looking to avoid the drain must decide if they want to go bougie or go budget. There are a few options in each playbook, which Steenkamp calls offensive or defensive.

“Defensive is touching the price of the shopping basket,” Steenkamp says, the most obvious tactic being to slash prices and bleed your competitors before they bleed you. Introducing a line of store-brand economy products is another lever to pull. The most well-heeled and far-reaching initiative is to spin off a separate brand of hard discounters. There’s no U.S. model for this route thus far, but iconic British grocer Tesco launched a cheaper version of itself last year called Jack’s, which advertises itself as “the cheapest in town.”

Marketers need not limit themselves to a smashmouth race to the bottom. They can go on the offensive by adding value to the shopping experience. In-store elements—such as a unique assortment, extra service, in-store experience and curbside pickup—are all proven options that attract most shoppers at least once or twice a month.

Above all, Dennis encourages experimentation. “Too many companies, not just the grocery industry, have been afraid to fail,” he says. “There’s a big process to decide what to invest in and things get averaged out and become not that interesting. If it turns out it doesn’t work, then you have to go back to the drawing board and you’ve lost a year and a half or two years.”

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Since 2017, my colleagues and I have conducted a large-scale survey of more than 7,900 B2B customers. B2B managers in our survey have rated more than 600 companies, including many Fortune 500 firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Dow, Caterpillar, UPS and 3M. The survey participants are B2B customers at all levels, including managers, directors, vice presidents and CEOs. In this benchmark survey, respondents rate their satisfaction with eight areas of their overall experience: sales and bidding, communication, pricing and billing, product or service quality, project management, safety, ongoing service and support, and sustainability and social responsibility. We can statistically ascertain the importance that customers put on each of the eight areas, but also various sub-components of each area. The results provide important insights for B2B companies to improve their pricing strategies.

B2B Customers See Price as a Small Component of the Total Value Proposition

Among the eight areas evaluated by B2B customers, pricing and billing accounted for 9% of customer value, with ongoing service and support (34%), product or service quality (17%) and communication (15%) representing two-thirds of value. Yet many sales executives believe that price accounts for most customer value that they provide. Nothing could be further from reality: Although pricing may be important for the procurement department, it may not hold the same importance for other stakeholders in a client organization.

The latter stakeholders may value communication, ongoing service and support, and the quality of the offering. When asked about price, savvy salespeople start by enumerating the total value that their offering provides and then end with the price. Inexperienced salespeople start and end with price, extolling how their price is lower than specific competitors.

B2B Customers Prefer a Fair Price Over Lowest Price

Technological innovation in the B2B sector is typically geared toward increasing product quality and lowering price. Companies lower price to gain market share with the goal of rationalizing their product costs over a larger customer base.

Our study results refute the logic of this approach. Customers in our survey rated their satisfaction with getting a fair price as well as the lowest price. Surprisingly, getting a fair price is three times more important to respondents than getting the lowest price. We have found this same result in many B2B companies involving software, parts distribution, oil field services, engineering and construction, and mobile-office units.

Fair price means that you are not priced at the extreme (highest or lowest), the pricing structure is easy to understand and the price is closer to industry-sector average (slightly higher is OK). For example, the price for property-management services for single-family homes in a Houston suburb ranges from 3-10% with an average of 5%. By offering a flexible pricing structure in the 4-6% range, a management company was able to increase the count of properties under management from 80 to almost 150 within the span of a few months.

B2B Customers Want Pricing and Billing to Be Managed as a Process

At retail stores, customers choose a product, make a payment, get a receipt and walk out. The receipt serves as a clear reminder of the price paid and makes the bottom-line price relevant to customers. B2B transactions are different: While pricing is relevant during the bidding and procurement stage, the billing process becomes important during the project execution phase. Over time, the customer expects the billing and invoicing to accurately and clearly document what part of the contract has been delivered, how it was priced, account for any variance from the original contract and so on. The billing statement becomes an ongoing communication tool for aligning customer and supplier expectations. Our study participants rated the clarity of billing statements, accuracy in pricing and ease of understanding pricing as some of the most important factors driving their satisfaction.

In one example, a waste-management company serving retailers and chain restaurants was losing clients despite low price and timely service. In-depth interviews with recently defected clients revealed dissatisfaction with the billing and invoicing process, not pricing. The billing statement did not clearly indicate what each charge on the invoice represented. Customers could not store and search invoices online or get charges broken down for each location. There was no easy way for customers to dispute charges. Once the billing process was overhauled, customer retention increased in a matter of months.

Manage Pricing Holistically for Customers

In a B2B context, price is part of an initial negotiation and purchase. It also provides a forum for managing the give and take between customers and suppliers during consumption. By pricing holistically—going beyond the bottom-line price—suppliers can add value for customers through flexible credit terms, cash discounts, volume discounts, rent-to-own terms and leasing options. Rather than manufacturing and selling multimillion-dollar planes to its clients, Boeing started a leasing company to help smaller airlines afford its aircraft. A valve manufacturer in Texas expanded its market to small- and medium-sized clients by maintaining its original price but supplementing it with a three-month extended payment option to qualified customers.

Suppliers can also extract value by pricing holistically. Frequently, many suppliers price the core product or service but give away many services for free. At the very least, you should price the entire offering to include any additional services and components. These can include service calls, on-site repairs or add-on consulting. Later, even if you decide to provide some of these for free, the client can quantify the value. As the relationship evolves, some or all of the additional components could be provided for an agreed-upon price.

What Now?

Pricing B2B offerings is a complex endeavor that should go beyond determining the bottom-line price. Fixating on the final price is a mistake in B2B contexts because customers view pricing as a broader concept. To meet customer expectations, you must realize that pricing is one component of a larger value proposition. You should manage your price holistically rather than striving to be the lowest-price provider. Incorporating the billing and invoicing process over time can be even more important to customers than getting the lowest price.

The billing and invoicing process can become a valuable tool to manage client expectations, build stronger relationships and even upsell to customers. Accomplishing these pricing objectives requires close collaboration among the sales, finance, accounting, customer service and commercial departments of any B2B company.

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I have always been curious about how people generate ideas for radical innovation. It’s why I have a wide variety of books on the topic on my shelf, from Melissa Schilling’s Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World to Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. I’m intrigued by the role of data in the innovation process— leading to another set of books in my collection, including Peter Verhoef and co-authors’ Creating Value with Big Data Analytics and Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz’s Winning with Data. In fact, I teach a course on this very topic in our business analytics master’s program at the University of Montana.

Certainly, marketing has excelled in developing sophisticated techniques to measure customer reaction to new concepts, whether new products or advertising messages. And now we have access to Big Data, characterized by the plethora of types (e.g., sentiment analysis, click streams, credit card usage) and sheer volume, real-time generation and analysis.

McKinsey’s Brian Gregg, Jason Heller, Jesko Perrey and Jenny Tsai in a 2018 post on the company’s website. The authors called it a myth that “‘ideas and numbers’ have always had an uneasy alliance in marketing. … Creativity is an instinctual process of building emotional bonds with consumers. Bring in too much quantitative analysis and the magic dies.” Even Marketoonist Tom Fishburne has captured the stereotype. , professionals—presumably marketers—quip to a painter, “Now let’s optimize the creative by adding puppies, emojis and an incentivized call-to-action.”

In contrast, McKinsey’s data offers a different perspective: Combining human ingenuity and insights from data analytics creates a power combination that drives value across the marketing value chain. Creative functions are becoming more data-driven, while data-driven functions are growing more creative.

Here are a few takeaways that I have gleaned from studying the mashup of these two domains over the past three years.

Temper Data-Driven Insights with Human Judgment

The need for intuition and experience doesn’t go away when data enters the picture, as Peter Horst and Robert Duboff write in a : “In a data-driven, automated world, the risk of unintended missteps grows significantly in the absence of an appropriate judgment screen.” This overreliance on data is a big part of the story that managing editor Sarah Steimer wrote about for Marketing News in January 2018: “How Airlines Get Customer Experience So Wrong with So Much Data.” Data analysis can make surprising connections and suggest non-intuitive marketing moves, but marketers must always ensure that these insights make logical, intuitive sense. This insight harkens back to an by Robert Blattberg and Stephen Hoch: “A 50/50 combination of database modeling and managerial intuition always outperforms either in isolation.”

Build a Team That Values Both Data and Creativity

It is well-known that a team tasked with generating radical innovation benefits from a diversity of skills and talents. This diversity is especially true when relying on a data-driven innovation strategy; a team with a tapestry of skills and roles—including skilled data scientists—can generate divergent ideas.

Horst and Duboff offer one reason to assemble a diverse team: “Just as the most creative marketers aren’t the best data people, analytic professionals usually lack the skills, the experience and perhaps even the ‘internal wiring’ to excel at brand, image and creativity.”

Although I don’t necessarily agree with their declarative statements—indeed, the McKinsey authors suggest that the best (e.g., not all) data engineers have incredible imagination and curiosity that help generate new insights—the important takeaway is to build a team of people nimble enough to work with colleagues with different skills and mindsets, including both younger and older team members.

(Note to young people: Be sure to generate data literacy. Not only will your older colleagues expect you to have it, you will also add great value by asking questions that demonstrate this proficiency.)

Clearly Articulate the Problem to Be Solved

Derek Thompson’s great article in The Atlantic from November 2017—“”—notes that “Moonshots don’t begin with brainstorming clever answers. They start with the hard work of finding the right questions.” This is echoed by Nelson Repenning, Don Kieffer and Todd Astor in the : “Clear problem statements can unlock the energy and innovation that lies within … your organization.” They also note the flipside: The lack of a clear problem formulation can prevent innovation and lead to wasted time and money.

The focus on identifying the right question is consistent with a marketer’s focus on understanding the customer’s pain points. Getting to the root cause of an issue is required for creative problem-solving, followed by enlightened experimentation to generate and evaluate ideas. Gary Pisano’s article in this year’s January/February Harvard Business Review, “,” acknowledges that, “Demanding data to confirm or kill a hypothesis too quickly can squash the intellectual play that is necessary for creativity.”

Can data play a role in driving radical innovation? Based on my experience and expert insights, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Certainly, other factors also play a role in the mashup of data and creativity—importantly, the role of organizational culture—but these three are central to unleashing the magic: balancing data-driven insights with judgment and intuition, developing seamless working relationships between data-savvy creative marketers and consumer-savvy data analysts and valuing the importance of asking the right questions.

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Imagine that you’re waiting in a doctor’s office. You may feel sick, worried or in pain, but you know that your medical information will be safe—the doctor is legally obligated to protect your data. You feel comfortable that your information won’t be used nefariously or even questionably.

The term “online privacy” means different things to different people, says Jenna Jacobson, assistant professor of retail management at Ryerson University. Jacobson—an author of a 2019 paper titled “” published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services—says that while it’s perfectly legal for marketers to collect, analyze and use publicly available data, brands don’t often consider whether they’re making consumers feel comfortable.

The information you provide at the doctor’s office is private, but what about that which you publicly post to social media? The premise changes: Most people openly post but aren’t sure how brands use their likes, statuses and photos. For such an opaque part of the marketing process, the stakes are high. A found that 65% of people don’t know which brands are using their data, while 65% said that they’d stop doing business with a brand that was dishonest about how it uses their data. This public data isn’t legally protected, so it’s up to brands to determine how they’ll collect, analyze and use it, often leaving consumers in the dark on their privacy rights.

“I think that there’s a lack of understanding about how social media data can actually be used,” Jacobson says, also noting a lack of professional and organizational norms in marketing and many other professions. “For us, it was important to acknowledge that just because social media data is publicly accessible doesn’t mean that individuals don’t have concerns and feel discomfort with third parties using their data.”

According to Jacobson’s research, the majority of consumers aren’t comfortable with how their data is used. The paper found that 53.1% of consumers are uncomfortable with their data being used for targeted ads, 42.3% are uncomfortable with it being used for opinion-mining and 41.9% are uncomfortable with it being used for customer relations.

This doesn’t mean that consumers want to hide. The paper found that consumers are constantly assessing the benefits and risks of sharing online and managing their data privacy boundaries by considering what they share. They continue sharing because they want the benefits of using social media, whether that benefit is communication with people or being shown something useful they didn’t know about through marketing.

Brands can collect data and use it in a way that helps consumers, but Jacobson says that they often don’t contemplate what consumers could find unsettling. Your doctor isn’t likely to go off on a negative rant about your health to a nurse in front of you—although it’d be legal—because it would likely make you feel terrible. Jacobson says that brands should consider what data practices would make consumers uncomfortable if they found out about them and brainstorm ways to change these practices. The goal should be to build consumer trust in the process and leave them without unpleasant surprises, perhaps by creating guidelines or practices on a business or industry level.

In Jacobson’s paper, she and her co-authors argue that marketing professionals have ethical responsibilities that extend beyond legal requirements. “For social media marketing to be executed effectively and ethically, the recipient of the marketing material—the consumer—needs to be comfortable with the practices,” they write. If consumers discover that a brand is using their data in a way that makes them uncomfortable, they may no longer buy from that brand.

People often think about data ethics in terms of politics. Much of the past few years has been spent debating what’s ethical and unethical when it comes to political data collection and targeted marketing.

Morten Bay, a research fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, had his interest in the topic piqued by observing how ISIS and Russia used social media as something of a virtual warzone. His interests extended into how social media was used during the 2016 presidential campaign, especially the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which President Donald Trump’s campaign leveraged third-party psychometric data—measures of a person’s knowledge, abilities, attitudes and traits—to target individual voters. Some compared this use of data to the microtargeting used by President Barack Obama’s campaigns, but the data procured by Cambridge Analytica was or knowledge that it’d be helping a political campaign, a far cry from collecting publicly available social media data.

Bay wrote a paper—titled “,” published in a special issue of ACM Transactions on Social Computing—arguing under a framework of philosopher John Rawls that using hypertargeting and psychometrics in politics was not ethical, as it blocked out the competing information necessary to a democratic society. In his paper, Bay writes that persuasion on social media is a zero-sum game: “Part of a persuader’s mission is to succeed in presenting information in a way that blocks out competing, contradictive information.”

But hypertargeting is different in commercial use, Bay says, and not exactly unethical. One can argue that people aren’t well-informed enough to know about data mining and targeting in marketing or advertising, he says, but that isn’t necessarily an ethical problem if they aren’t sold a certain product. The Rawlsian framework doesn’t see targeting used in marketing and advertising as unethical, so long as consumers have the chance to both opt in and out—in politics, users can’t opt out, as social media has become a central location for political news and debate.

“I’m not sure we can do anything about it in a commercial sense unless there’s an actual breach of contract,” Bay says. “But on a political level, the stakes are much higher.”

So how can a brand strike a balance between doing something that’s clearly legal and perhaps ethical, but makes consumers feel disconcerted?

Have Clear Policies, But Educate and Empower

Jacobson’s paper finds that it’s necessary to create a clear privacy policy, but that alone isn’t sufficient to make consumers comfortable. After all, .

Jacobson and her co-authors write that brands should “empower users with a higher level of control over what information they want to share, with whom and for what purpose.” Much of this will likely start with education on how brands use consumer data. Although most consumers are uncomfortable with targeting, people are more familiar with targeting than they are of opinion mining or customer relations, two tactics which are more masked and less apparent to the average user. This means that brands have an opportunity to educate consumers about these marketing practices, using education to build comfort.

“Digital literacy will continue to be crucial as technologies evolve and new ways to use individuals’ data emerge,” Jacobson and her co-authors write. “The onus does not only lie with individuals; rather, third parties that use the data need to be held to higher ethical standards.”

Be Transparent

Like Jacobson, Bay believes that it’s up to marketers and advertisers to figure out how they want to represent themselves ethically. Society may tacitly accept current data collection practices—most of society is blissfully ignorant, as Acquia found—but consumers may learn more about these practices and quickly sour on how their data is being used and their privacy invaded. What was once a benign practice could quickly turn cancerous for a brand.

To prevent being caught engaging in something consumers may one day see as unethical, Bay suggests that brands be transparent with how they collect, analyze and use consumer data.

“If you say to people, ‘We would like to give you X opportunity, but it requires us to get your data and perform this analysis on it,’ then people can make up their own minds,” he says. Companies often falter here by telling consumers what data they collect but not how they’ll analyze it, “but as long as they make sure [everything] is transparent and people are informed, [data practices] can never really be completely unethical,” he says.

Do You Need the Data?

Though it may sound counterintuitive for marketers who want to be on the cutting edge of data analysis, Bay says that brands should consider what kind of data they actually need to collect.

“What’s your benefit of actually starting to collect this data?” he says. “Can you actually use it for anything useful? … I would imagine that for 40% or 50% of companies going into this field right now, they’re just doing it because of the hype.”

Consider Becoming a Privacy Champion

Brands have an opportunity to become a champion of data privacy and perhaps win new business.

Jacobson says that she could envision a brand positioning itself as an ethical leader. This would be a challenge for most marketing departments, she says, as being a champion of data privacy would mean a high level of data literacy, something that doesn’t come easily and requires following industry changes. But brands that are outwardly ethical and put consumers’ comfort first could win their trust and increased sales.

Jacobson says that data privacy is constantly evolving­—and it may be the new frontier for ethical practitioners. She sums it up simply: “These ethical practices are good business practices.”

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In 1987, Braniff Airlines used radio ads to promote its planes’ new leather seats to the Spanish-speaking market in Florida. But the slogan, “Fly in leather,” failed to achieve its intended objective:

The direct Spanish translation of the phrase sounded like “Fly naked.”

After some speculation that the blunder may have been intentional as a result of the attention it brought the brand, it was confirmed to be a mistake by the executive who developed the campaign. Braniff not only failed to express its intended message, it failed to relay a commitment to its travelers.

In the U.S., more than 20% of the population speaks a language other than English at home, . Native English speakers make up only , according to July Statista data. And although 60% of the world’s population , research from Eurobarometer suggests that to messages they receive in their native language. When brands limit their marketing strategies to one language, both in domestic and foreign markets, they could be missing out on a significant opportunity to connect with potential customers.

But a direct translation of a marketing campaign from one language to another isn’t enough; brands must listen and speak authentically to their consumers if they want them to engage with the brand’s message.

Jill Kushner Bishop, founder and CEO of Illinois-based agency , finds that when brands fail to connect with consumers whose first language is not English, it’s a result of cutting corners in areas where more thorough work is required.

“Budgets are tight, people are busy and translation becomes an afterthought,” Bishop says. “People might say, ‘Well, these people speak English [well] enough, so we’ll just keep [our content] in English.’ … You could still get a good result out of that, but you’re very likely not going to. If you want your user to understand your message, you have to talk to them in the language that’s theirs.”

Here are some tips for brands to consider as they look to connect with a multilingual audience.

Look Beyond Translation

Bishop emphasizes the importance of understanding transcreation, the process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone and context. By viewing language through a lens of transcreation—versus basic translation—marketers can be sure their audiences can read a message and understand the meaning behind it. Humor remains humorous and professional messages remain professional.

“If you’re a marketer, you don’t want to lose the relevance or immediacy of something just by going with a translation where people will understand the words but not the feeling,” Bishop says. She offers sports metaphors as an example of a language device that can easily become lost in a direct translation: They’re prevalent in the English language, but a culture that doesn’t play baseball, for instance, won’t understand the reference in the context of your message.

In translating content, marketers should also give thought to the target audience’s dialect nuances. “If you’re [writing] something that’s very slang-heavy—where you’re trying to reach out to young people or a particular subsection of the community—you’re going to want to understand the way they talk among themselves and make sure you’re connecting with that,” Bishop says.

Consider Cultural Context

Marketers must identify and understand their audience to create relevant content for multilingual campaigns. After all, not every person who speaks a given language comes from the same cultural background. Marketers are often mistaken in believing that people who speak the same language think the same way, says Kelly Hewett, a professor of marketing at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “There are English speakers in South Africa, [in] the U.K.,” she says. “All these people have very different cultures, so the ability to immerse yourself in a culture is critical.”

Hewett leads a study abroad program for her marketing students that requires them to speak to locals in international markets and immerse themselves in different environments to observe the ways people consume. The goal is for students to gain the tools needed to understand what life is like for the people of a culture beyond the language they speak.

Understand Acculturation

In targeting a multilingual audience within a domestic market, Hewett also encourages marketers to consider acculturation, which refers to how a person has adapted to the dominant culture in which they’re living. She says this can be one factor in how the audience receives and understands messages.

“Let’s take children of immigrants,” Hewett says. “The parents might be less acculturated than the children who were born in the United States, raised in their households speaking two languages, but probably consider themselves more American than their parents. If they are the target audience, the marketer must figure out how to use the language and the culture that is more consistent with the market where they were born. If the parent is the target, that’s a whole different story.”

Invest in Connecting Authentically

Connecting with multilingual audiences in a meaningful way might require brands to invest in resources and tools to support their efforts. Bishop encourages brands looking to launch a multilingual campaign to do so with a growth mindset and a willingness to listen to their consumers. “If you really want to connect with [a multilingual audience], you have to trust in them and build a relationship,” Bishop says. “You must spend the time and the money to do that. When companies just put up a Google-translated version of their website, it’s as if they’re telling customers, ‘We care about you and we want your business, but not enough to really invest.’”

Getting a multilingual campaign right might take time, and marketers must be prepared to seek feedback, adapt their processes as new insights become available and be open to employing new strategies. “It’s important to educate our clients and it sometimes must be through error,” Bishop says. “They go out and they don’t do it right the first time, and that’s when they understand the value of spending time and money, talking to experts and using the approaches they would in English within those other languages.”

Seek Smart Partnerships

For brands that are working with agency partners to create multilingual marketing campaigns, Bishop suggests starting the process early. This way, organizations can take enough time to find a group that understands and supports their goals. Brands should provide translation agencies with as much context as possible and be prepared to answer questions, such as tone and style of messaging and if they are targeting a specific regional dialect in their language.

“The more background information you can share with an agency,” Bishop says, “the more likely it is that you’ll get it right the first time.”

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Goal

In 2016, Volkswagen was looking to bounce back after its corporate image took a heavy hit from a high-profile emissions scandal. To win back public support, it wasn’t enough for VW to tell the public how much it valued its customers’ experience and their continued loyalty; it needed to find a way to show them.

This led to the creation of the , an in-house journalism hub designed to help tell the story of the brand and create opportunities for earned media. It also involved collaboration with several teams across the organization.

“Something my team was heavily involved with was taking the story of the people that drive our cars and bringing them to life,” says Patrick Pho, senior video content producer at Volkswagen of America. “We think all our owners have a story to tell.”

During a media sweep, the VW Newsroom team came across a , a 72-year-old woman who had been driving the same 1967 Volkswagen Beetle for 50 years. The car, which she affectionally called “Annie” after its ruby-red coat, was in disrepair. The original news story featured shots of its faded paint job, broken hubcaps and pitted chrome bumpers.

The media relations team referred the story to Pho and his team, who were in the middle of working on developing a series called “Owner Spotlights.” After contacting and meeting with Brooks, it became clear that there was more to her story than her impressive relationship with her car. Her attachment was deep and grounded in memories of how, even during some of the most difficult times in her life—including marriage, divorce and three bouts of cancer—Annie always got her where she needed to go.

From there, VW’s media relations and marketing communications teams came up with a plan: Restore Annie back to roadworthy condition at VW’s factory in Puebla, Mexico, so Brooks could continue to drive her for years to come. They would document every step of the process on film, with the intention of capturing media attention that would emphasize the lasting significance of the brand to its customers.

Upon hearing about the plan, Pho and his team jumped into its implementation. “I was ecstatic,” he says. “What a way to really honor and recognize someone who has not only been a loyal customer but has gone through so much in her life.”

After Brooks agreed to the remodel, VW and its partners needed to find the best angle from which to capture the process. Brooks’s warm personality and her love for Annie would be central, but the longevity of the VW brand, and important technical elements of the car itself, would also need to be featured.

Action

Pho emphasizes the value his team placed on collaboration with their partners and other departments within the organization in developing and creating the campaign. One such partnership was with First & 42nd, Edelman’s corporate social responsibility unit, which assisted in facilitating contact with Brooks. Mike Million, director and producer at VW’s production partner , wanted the ad to resemble a documentary.

“A big challenge was to try to ground it and make it feel real, but not like a reality show where she was winning a prize—even though she was getting her car refurbished,” he says. “I wanted to keep it grounded in her emotions, which I think we were able to do.”

In October 2017, Third Story Films captured Annie’s emotional departure from Kathleen’s home. From the time the car arrived in Mexico, restorations would take 11 months. The project was led by Augusto Zamudio, an engineer in the mechatronics shop in Puebla.

The production team captured the mechanical process on film, including interviews with Zamudio. “We kept close tabs on the progress in Mexico,” Pho says. “It was so exciting to get updates from the plant and see the excitement our colleagues had.”

The project’s timeline presented an enormous logistical and creative challenge for the production team. “In traditional marketing, you develop a campaign and then you get the green light to execute,” Pho says. “We had to trust that this was a great story, and sometimes great stories take a while to simmer. This would be a project that would take a while but, in the end, it was going to be so satisfying.”

Annie’s restorations were completed in November 2018. According to the VW campaign, Zamudio’s team replaced 40% of the car’s parts and restored 357 other pieces.

In facilitating the reveal, the filmmakers were tasked with achieving a dual objective: Authentically display Brooks’s love for Annie and exhibit the striking results of the restoration. But they also had to contend with a series of logistical challenges, including preventing Brooks from seeing her car before the cameras were able to capture the moment.

“Planning the reveal was complicated,” Million says. “We had a small crew and not a lot of control over the area we were in. We sort of had one shot at it.”

When Brooks saw Annie for the first time, she quickly became emotional. The footage also succeeded in showing off the updates to the car as Zamudio and his colleague gave Brooks an overview of the restorations.

“They did such beautiful work on [Annie] and put such care into every bit of it, and I think that meant a lot to her,” Million says.

Results

Three days after Brooks and Annie were reunited in San Diego, VW released 40 photos and eight minutes of B-roll footage, with the goal of capturing earned media coverage. More than 100 stories appeared in media outlets and VW’s media content saw more than 1.3 billion media impressions. The B-roll cuts from Third Story hit 1.4 million views.

One week later, the VW Newsroom posted its own story and video across its social media channels. Video content posted on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter saw a combined 1.6 million views.

This year, the campaign and Million won an Emmy Award from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Pacific Southwest Chapter for .

Pho and his team recently created a broadcast ad for the FIFA Women’s World Cup and believes that the VW Newsroom’s recent accomplishments are testaments to the success of “Annie the Beetle,” since the campaign solidified their ability to collaborate with groups across the organization and with agency partners. His team is working on the “” campaign, which seeks to promote VW’s new electric vehicles while telling the story of the brand’s commitment to partner with social causes. “‘Annie the Beetle’ was a story that very much aligns up to that, so it could be seen as an early herald of that direction,” Pho says.

Pho also believes the campaign achieved his team’s intention to promote the values of Volkswagen. “‘Annie the Beetle’ has boosted the brand by presenting a real human story that encapsulates what Volkswagen stands for,” he says. “We’re here for you for the long ride. It’s a great example of showing, not telling, as well as standing by our products and our customers.”

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Superior design drives significant business growth opportunity, according to a report by McKinsey & Company titled, “.” The survey studied the design actions of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period, collecting more than 2 million pieces of financial data and recording more than 100,000 design elements. The four main themes that emerged formed the basis of the McKinsey Design Index (MDI), which exhibits the correlation between best design practices and business performance.

Unpacking the MDI

These four clusters of design actions showed the most correlation with improved financial performance:

1. Measuring and driving design performance with the same rigor as revenues and costs.
2. Breaking down internal walls between physical, digital and service design.
3. Making user-centric design everyone’s responsibility.
4. De-risking development by continually listening, testing and iterating with end users.

Investing in good design pays off. The top-quartile Mckinsey Design Index scorers in McKinsey’s report experienced 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders than their counterparts over the five-year period. In all three industries analyzed—medical technology, consumer goods and retail banking—those results held true. Good design matters whether companies offer services, physical goods or digital products.

Despite design’s clear impact on business performance, many companies are still slow on the draw. More than 40% of surveyed companies aren’t talking to their end users during development, and just over 50% admitted that they don’t possess an objective way to assess or set targets for their design teams’ output. With no discernible link to the health of a business, senior leaders are reluctant to provide resources to design teams.

Image courtesy of .

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Marketers across functions and industries are often charged with delivering events. These help to drive some combination of professional development, reputation, relationships, engagement, leads and revenue. Live events can also provide the forum for a unique customer experience.

According to a , customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020.

How do marketers design events to deliver authentic, relevant, positive and valuable experiences?

The following insights—which I’ve organized into 12 truths and one lie—are garnered from my own career, in which I’ve spent decades serving as organizer, exhibitor and attendee.

1. The Experience Window is Wide

Don’t box yourself into the time frame of the agenda. Expand your experience thinking to include a lead-in and follow-up. How do you seed and fuel a great experience in advance and reinforce it post-event? This creates opportunities for content, logistics and networking. But beware of overpromotion: Use this opportunity to make it easy for your attendees to prepare for, absorb and capitalize on the experience you are creating for them.

2. Everyone Counts

You’re creating the experience for attendees, but you can’t do this without your speakers, sponsors, staff, volunteers and vendors. They’re in the room experiencing the event from their unique and often expert perspectives, which can translate into testimonials, referrals, social media engagement and potential business. Don’t leave out these essential constituents but avoid diluting your message. You can deliver a great support-system experience without sacrificing your primary audience experience.

3. Turnkey is for Turkeys

Sometimes a template can impede continuous improvement and differentiation. People attend events to experience something new. Even if it’s a regular occurrence, your event and audience deserve positive change. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, but remember not to rest on your road-worn laurels.

4. Energy Powers Experiences

When it shines, the program moves. When it doesn’t, crank up the generator. Setting the tone from beginning to end is a must. Dynamic speakers, enthusiastic greeters, engaged staff and a lively environment—including energetic sights and sounds—can turn even a modest part of the program into a feel-good experience. Don’t go overboard, though. “Fake” is easy to spot and becomes a detractor.

5. Small Stuff is Worth Sweating

Mapping out every detail can seem tedious, but it pays off. Some of the greatest moments of truth in a live event are the in-between spaces that often get overlooked in the design—it’s where the most unexpected things go wrong. But beware of losing the forest in the trees; you don’t want to forget to experience your own event.

6. The Best-Laid Plans Change

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to be flexible in the moment. Watch for signs that you need to course-correct and be ready to adapt quickly. Don’t panic; it never helps the experience. Build some give-and-take into your design, be present and be decisive. Often you’re the only one who notices when something is amiss, so don’t make things worse by over-apologizing or explaining.

7. Gamification Plays Well

Knowledgeable, inspirational speakers and practical takeaways are table stakes. No one needs that tip. But delivering with flair is unfortunately still a bit of a unicorn. Sometimes you need something different to deliver a memorable experience. Interactive, competitive gamification can steal home. Make it uncomplicated, fun and relevant.

8. Automation and AI Cut to the Chase

Personalization, convenience and data are increasingly essential components of customer experience. AI-based technologies provide tremendous shortcuts and enhancements to deliver timely, tailored information and resources. But don’t lose the soul and potential of the interaction; enable the technology before it enables you.

9. Networking is Awkward

Small talk seems frivolous, and no one wants to get cornered into a sales pitch. But it’s also one of the main reasons people attend live events, and part of designing a great experience is to provide a forum for people to connect. Be overt; tell them it’s networking. Get creative, draw them in and facilitate. You’ll never get everyone talking, but if you focus on willing participants, they’ll love you for it.

10. You Can’t Fake the Feels

Visceral is memorable. Incorporate shared moments that get people out of their chairs and comfort zones. The best experiences I’ve had involved music, tears, laughter, dancing, inspiration and even puppies. But trying too hard or being too silly can make you lose authenticity or make people uncomfortable. Epic is possible, but not guaranteed.

11. FOMO Sells

We’ve focused on designing and delivering experience through events, but it’s a longer game than that. You’re not just aiming to make people happy in the moment, you want them to rave about it later and attend again. This list of tips—wrapped around your relevant, valuable content—can create FOMO (fear of missing out). When you deliver a truly differentiated experience, people will share it and others will wish they were there.

12. People Love to Give Advice

Seek feedback before, during and especially after the event, and make providing it easy. Don’t just rely on a survey, ask attendees in person. This gives your audience a sense of ownership and ultimately turns your event into a co-creation with your customer. The truth hurts sometimes, and although you can’t please everyone, it always makes you better. Remember that requesting feedback creates an expectation that you’ll use it, so be sure they know you listened.

The Lie: You Control the Event Experience

Experience design is all about caring, not control. If you care how people feel, why they show up, who they meet and what they take away, everybody wins.

Your audience knows that you’re human and that you don’t have to be perfect—you just have to care enough to try. Experience design for events sets the stage for exceptional delivery with real people in real time. Caring is the single most important thing you can do. Prepare to deliver, co-create and be present. In my experience, attendees will feel it.

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What is the mission of the ?

We are the most unique hall of fame institution in the country. Our mission is to honor mascot performers, performances and programs that have positively affected their communities in North America. We do that by embedding our mascot-themed with educational subjects focused on the K-8 student population. Not to mention, we are also teaching adults that it’s OK to be a kid for a couple hours!

Is there pressure that comes with being the mascot of all mascots?

There’s no real pressure on me, I just live here. The are the ones who have all the pressure. They are judged on delivering iconic performances, the number of community events they participate in and the value they bring to their communities and brands—not to mention how many schools and hospitals they visit. Although, I suppose there is pressure on me to keep the Mascot Hall of Fame looking spick-and-span for visitors.

What’s your favorite part about working at the Mascot Hall of Fame?

You call it work. I call it ridiculous—ridiculous fun, that is! My favorite time of year is every June, when I invite all the hall of famers back to the home of all mascots to celebrate the induction of a new class. It’s a ton of work and planning—and something called “logistics”—but it’s so much fun to host the best mascots in the business of mascotting.

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What goes into the for choosing your mascot hall of famers?

The best mascots in the business provide tremendous value to the teams and brands they represent. They bring together teams, players, communities and fans. Mascots must be at least 10 years old and provide their mascotting résumé, including any school programs they’ve developed, the number of times they’ve visited hospitals to cheer up patients going through a rough time and so much more. While we don’t include it, I’d like to personally know how many high-fives they’ve given and how many T-shirts they’ve tossed into the crowd at their games.

So far, your hall of famers all work in sports—will you feature those in other fields soon?

It’s more likely I’ll invite international sports mascots to show their stuff. Mascotting is such an important cultural phenomenon across the globe; it’s a near certainty that we’ll go international before we go corporate. That doesn’t mean I’m not inviting the Michelin Man, Cap’n Crunch, the Geico Gecko and so many others to stop by my crib to say hello!

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