Well, basically … not really.

We believe that authenticity is more important than a false sense of perfection.

Our interviews are the heart of our work. They reveal not just the way that our subjects think and feel about our clients, but they reveal the most powerful connector in the world: a real human being with a personality.

What we do is take all of the stories, insights and personality that comes from our interviews and edit what could be an hour long conversation with a customer down to the 2-3 minutes of the experience story that we end up showing to the public. It’s what they said, and how they said it but distilled down to the essence of them and their relationship with our client.

While we can write a script based on the insights and speech patterns of our subjects and client, they are not able to perform that scrip as naturally as they speak.

Simply put, they are not actors and we won’t treat them as such. While there are a few rare times where building a script that is in the clients voice is truly necessary, we prefer not to.

The problem that typical market or client research falls into is that they are not so much learning as trying to validate existing positions either of the client or worse, that the agency has taken.

The classic focus group gathers people to get their opinions of pre-established ideas: the slogan, new product or whatever. It’s a multiple choice test at best. “Which of these three options to you prefer?” doesn’t teach you much.

An interview, however, is open ended. It’s a conversation between two people and is designed for exploration. It’s the follow-up question to the follow-up question that reveals the unexpected and produces true insights into the thoughts and experiences that drive customers to our clients.

We embrace being able to have one-on-one conversations with customers and delve into why our client means so much to them. Put us in front of a half dozen or more of your best customers like this and we learn more about your business than you could imagine.

Powerful stuff.

The Kano Model of product development and customer satisfaction illustrates five different categories of customer experiences and what they do or do not want.

The most powerful is what is called “Delight” wherein something about the product or experience is beyond specifications, and more than “quality”. It’s a something that is hard to design, often more of an emotional response than a singular thing. When a “Delight” is found then that has profound effects on the customer.

In our interviews we look for the Delight Factor that is hidden in the business. Our position is that every successful company has a Delight hidden in plain sight and that we uncover that through our research and then use that as a focus of the company’s messaging.

We find that the Delight is usually:

• The experiences clients talk about most are rarely transactional

• They're moments where someone solved a problem, made a connection, anticipated a need, or exceeded expectations

• Often the Delight is a human element to the business and can be, if not duplicated, can be systematized to expand its impact on future customers

In short, taking about Delight creates advocates who will “want what they are having”.

Much of marketing, like business itself, is tied up in metrics. But the difference between improving one metric and having additional revenue isn’t always the same thing.

Many marketing firms will use “vanity metrics” to validate their work as a success. Social media is filled with numbers that rarely matter in the long run. Getting likes, clicks, or even web hits doesn’t matter if people are not buying what you are selling at a rate consistent with that metric. What most marketing firms sell is not value but measurability.

The numbers that matter to us are:

• Dwell time (how long they stay on the website)

• Bounce rate (how often the viewer leaves the site without any interaction)

• Conversion rate (does the potential customer actually make a purchase)

By having a unified language and experience set that comes from our interview research we help our clients not only attract more people to their websites, where greater than 80% of their customers go do validate them, but we can say the things that those ideal customers want to know.

Saying the right things in the right way increases the customers interest in not only what our clients do but importantly how they do it which leads to greater dwell, lower bounce and importantly, greater sales.

Because if our clients aren’t making more sales, no other metric really matters.

Sales and marketing is usually focused on creating and then pursuing an “Ideal Client Profile” which is an avatar of who you think is most likely to become a customer.

We believe that if you have been in business for five or more years, you already work for clients who are ideal. Somewhere in your roster are clients who are truly aligned with your culture and mission. We call those the “True Believers”

We focus our attention to the True Believers because they see what you do as not a good or service but as something that they are personally, and thus, emotionally connected to.

By building our messaging framework around the True Believers, your message will attract more customers who want that kind of business relationship.

They also help us unlock your actual point of distinction in the marketplace: your “Unfair Advantage” against your competition.