3ngage

Deepening Customer Learning

Suunto Mock-up

Greetings Thomas, I hope you had a great week skiing.

This video seemed the best way to send you some initial ideas after our recent discussion.

I want to show how we at Dare2Know can embed deeper customer-learning into the offer 3ngage makes to it’s clients.

When we think of product marketing, we certainly consider customer communication. However, we do not always consider the contextual learning needed in order to fully appreciate and value the product.

As products become increasingly complex, driven by AI, I think we both agree this form of customer learning becomes increasingly important.

In 5 minutes, I want to show you how we can help customer relate to the product on offer, connect with the brand values, and understand the product’s impact on their lives.

As you can see already, using synthetic avatars can enable personalisation of the key messages.

And, the capacity to edit and tailor each video to a very specific market

This allows for testing and iteration, with life-like videos, that would simply be impractical with in vivo actors.

I’m an avatar that presents as a professional German foreign national. I can work in some markets, and certain customer segments, but not in others. I can also speak in various native languages. So, finding the best fit will be part of the design process.

 We know from cognitive science that humans respond to faces.Yet, advertising bombards consumers with de-personalised texts and images.

So, matching the right face, and voice, with the right spoken language, can help businesses make their products stand out from the cognitive overload.

When seeing and listening to human faces, customers pay more attention and learn more deeply, when compared to reading text or looking at an image.

We also know that people have different learning styles. So, some will like active experimentation, and like controls and play. While other will adopt a more abstract or reflective style of learning, and will only adopt a product once they know something about it.

This aspect of learning design therefore needs to be informed by customer insights and understanding the social psychology of the target audience.

We bring our expertise in learning design. This typically involves the following four stages in any assignment:

Firstly, Clarify client goals and brand values

Secondly, researching the customer segments and the social psychology of the target customers from a learning perspective.

For example, what are they likely to know already? What do they need to “unlearn” in order to be open to new products?

Thirdly, we can work with you to design a learning structure for the product. This might involve a video short micro-bite, accompanying the 3D graphic, or inviting them to complete a short course curriculum on how to understand and use the product. We can integrate progression, game ification and certification if needed.

We can also consider versions designed specifically for partners, vendors, and resellers.

Lastly, production and iterative testing, getting the learning component right and integrated with the overall product marketin

 If we take the example of the Suunto divers watch, we might use a relatable avatar to establish a connection. This might be someone who looks and sounds like the user, or perhaps someone the user aspires to be.

The language early on can establish the relevance of the product to the target user, using framing and staging techniques.

We can then provide a walk-through, highlighting the different branching options and reinforcing to the user what to see or notice as they progress.

The avatar can then guide the user towards closure, finishing with a call to action. This might be to sign up to a short course, or progress to more detailed information, sharing their contact and demographic details as they go.

It is worth stressing that while product marketing can be impactful on its own, people often need time to embrace new things.

Customer learning moves beyond the focus on a one-off event and takes them on a journey, showing them the landscape in which the product is situated.

Good learning design can address many of the psychological and emotional needs customers have, which can remain unaddressed if the appeal is purely visual.

So Thomas, I hope we’ve given you some useful ideas that you can share with your clients. It would be good to work through these ideas in a pilot project. The key point is that there seems opportunities to incorporate learning science into product marketing, so that customers can deepen their association with the product early on.

We look forward to working with you on this