Can you be too easy?

The famous Staples 'Easy Button'

Can you be too easy? Well, your mother might disagree but the answer is an emphatic NO – you can never be too easy.

It’s all too easy to forget, but making things easy should be at the core of everything we do: easy for consumers to understand why they need our products; easy for customers/retailers to place orders and sell heaps of product; easy for consumers to buy what they want when they want it. All it takes is approaching every task you do by asking the bold yet simple question: “what can I do to make this easier”.

A great example is from author Jenny Blake and her recently launched book ‘Life After College’, introduced via the always interesting TheDominoProject. Jenny’s book is positioned as “an essential manual for every graduating student and young professional. It features practical, actionable advice that helps people focus on the BIG picture of their lives, not just the details”.

Getting great reviews and recommendations is key to a successful launch of any book (or product!) and it seems so often that brand custodians just cross their fingers that bloggers or other reviewers will take it upon themselves to spread the word. Jenny is doing it differently, by creating a resource on her website full of all the information that any blogger, reviewer or salesperson could need: check it out here.

She goes beyond the standard bio details, expanding to including sample tweets, emails and varying length synopses to promote the book, which can be easily copied and published in any medium. There are links to the book trailer on YouTube and links to the facebook page, as well as more formal and also quirky information about Jenny and links to previous interviews. Jenny is acknowledging that her supporters are busy and even with the best intentions getting time to create a mention promoting her book is tricky. Some will take up her suggestions verbatim, while others will edit a little to personalise: we all know that it is much quicker to edit an already prepared document than to start from scratch.

There are two key benefits here: firstly, the easier (and quicker) you can make it for people to spread the word, the more people will take up the opportunity. Secondly, through giving suggestions of how to word the comments, Jenny begins to create a consistent theme in how people talk about her book, resulting in a clearer, more focused message. Jenny’s approach recognises what we already know from our own lives: we are busy and the easier it is to get a job done the more likely we are to do it and do it well.

Making things easier can apply to absolutely everything we do, big or small:

• Is it easy to go through the checkout process on your site- do you force endless data entry and password setting up, or do you give shoppers the opportunity to buy quickly when they want to?
• When you submit your expenses to your boss do you write her name and the date in the approval box, so all she has to do is sign it?
• Is it easy to get into your shop? If the door is super heavy get it fixed, or if you cater to mums make sure a pram can navigate inside easily.
• When you get into work do you make sure the photocopier is stocked with paper so it doesn’t run out in the middle of a rush later in the day?

I love this statement from Eric Schmidt, EC of Google, (who interestingly Jenny Blake used to work for) describing their approach to employee benefits (note my bolding): “The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees’ way. We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses – just about anything a hardworking employee might want. Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.”

Just taking those few seconds to ask the simple yet revolutionary question of “how can I make this easier” can change your world. So who do you know who’s making things easy? What have you done to make your world easier?

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Are you brave enough to bare your brand’s soul?

WhenIGrowUpCoach.com

Have you ever tried to talk with someone who is formal and stiff? It’s hard work and not very entertaining. When people relax and their quirky, unique natures are revealed, they are much more interesting – it’s those odd bits that make us intriguing.

In the business world too often “professional” gets translated as formal, and that can very soon become boring. As few businesses these days can claim a monopoly on what they deliver, they need their branding to stand out and safe and boring can quickly become undifferentiated.

Let’s have a look at a great example of allowing your brand to really have a personality.

Michelle Ward is the “When I grow up” coach. A life-coach, but one who focuses on “help(ing) creative people devise the career they think they can’t have – or discover it to begin with!” Michelle explains in more detail here, and also has a great explanation here of what coaching is.

There are a couple of things that Michelle is doing brilliantly. Firstly, she is very clear about who she targets. Being clear about your target market is one of the biggest challenges for any brand or business: I think it’s so hard because by choosing to define your target it can feel like you are turning other consumers away. Of course when you get it right what it means is that you are more effective at making conversions to purchase.

Secondly, her brand and business is distinctive. There have got to be a million life-coaches out there (it looks like a massive growth area on the internet) but Michelle really stands out as she is unabashedly putting herself and her personality into her work. Now the concern here is that a potential customer might look at her site and think, “that’s not going to suit me”, and the ‘sale’ will be lost. And that might be so, but it looks like there have been many more people who find that she stands out and they are really able to connect with her style. And for those it doesn’t appeal to? Well, it’s better to find out early that it is not a good match, and it just means that there is space out there for another type of coach who is different in their approach. The most important thing is to be authentic: Michelle’s branding works because it is true to her.

As an interesting comparison have a look at Marcus Buckingham’s site. He is an amazing writer and presenter who focuses on helping people identify their strengths, and as a result work more successfully and smarter: he explains it himself here and if you haven’t come across his books I recommend them. For such an inspiring man, his web site feels very formal and old-school corporate, and as a result, a bit ‘flat’. Now obviously the targets of these businesses are different: Marcus clearly is targeting big corporate business, whilst Michelle is focused on creative individuals who are wanting to move away from corporate life, yet there is no reason why both can’t bring their brands to life in an engaging, inspiring way that is still relevant to their target.

Another fascinating business which puts its personality out there ‘loud and proud’ is Photojojo, an online store & blog about all things photographic. Have a look at this job spec for a role they are recruiting for: the energy of the company just leaps out, and it feels like it would be a dynamic place to work.

So the point here is not to imitate Michelle or Photojojo, but to be inspired to dig into your own brand and business, identify what makes you unique, and then be proud to put it out there.

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Does your brand know how to say ‘Hello’?

Today let’s have a look at the amazing Etsy, and two things they are doing fabulously. Firstly, customising the consumers’ experience through serving a different home page specifically for new visitors, and secondly, how they are communicating that change to their current users.

Etsy have done some exceptional work in creating a highly engaged online community, and once again they are raising the bar. To quote Wikipedia, “Etsy is a social commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies.” Whilst certainly a commerce site, the focus is definitely on the social, with an emphasis on highlighting the uniquely individual nature of the products, and importantly, their sellers: shopping and selling on Etsy is a very personal experience. Esty does some great work in creating online and offline communities which in turn create amazing engagement with the site. If you haven’t come across Etsy before have a look here for an intro.

Our focus today is on a new initiative they are trialling for their homepage. The insight is that a new visitor to a site has different needs to a regular visitor: more focus on ‘what is it?’, ‘how does it work?’, and ‘give me a connection quickly’ (a reason to dig more deeply, or to come back) before I click onto my next search: sounds pretty basic really. Clearly many brand owners try to cater to this with varying degrees of success by incorporating elements which talk to the new and repeat consumer throughout the site, but how many brands really live this by presenting a customised experience to a new visitor?

Etsy are in the process of trialling a completely different homepage for a new visitor. The details of the change are discussed here. I love the ‘Taste Test’ tool they are featuring on it: reminds me of a more PC version of the “which girl is better looking” game from “The Social Network”. It’s worth a go and interesting how a spin of this revealed a whole new world of objects I wouldn’t even have thought to look for.

Etsy’s approach to executing this change is interesting too: in their announcement they are sharing the change, the reason why, and how they are going to trial it: letting seasoned (and highly engaged !) users be part of the process. It would have been so easy for the Etsy team to have just made the change and got on with it, but they recognise that if they take their community along with them they will ultimately get a better result: building higher engagement with current users and more effective conversion from new visitors.

So how do you customise your consumers’ experiences with your brand? Offline and on, show me who you think is doing a great job of this.

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