What Body Swapping Tells Us About Ecommerce
I seem to really like body swap movies. You know those movies like Tom Hanks ‘Big’, ‘Vice Versa’ or more recently ‘The Change Up’, ‘Jumanji’ etc. where they use a genie or magic to accidentally to swap bodies.
Comedy ensues – perhaps we all hanker a desire to try out someone else’s life if only just briefly.
It’s not just me, if you Google ‘Body Swap Movies’ there have been many movies like this.
Hollywood knows that we like to see different people experience other people’s lives.
Of course, these movies always end with a cheesy part where people agree to understand each other more and have a better relationship.
But that’s just the narrative.
What interests us is the experience of jumping into someone else’s shoes.
Marketers like me always say things like ‘jump into the customers shoes’
Or
‘think like the customer’
And whilst this is true, it’s very hard to get out of our own head and truly see what a prospect sees.
Quite often we are in a completely different physical and environmental place.
There was a program running recently called ‘undercover boss’ where the boss put on a disguise and went into the workplace. No matter which company did this there were always fundamental problems raised at each location – stuff that you would have thought would have been obvious – but it took a silly wig and some false teeth to ‘see’ the real picture.
With ecommerce we can’t go and work on the cash register and pretend to be a shop assistant.
So, what do we do to get into the customers mindset?
Here are some suggestions
1. Use a service like ‘whatusersdo’ and pick typical customer demographics and ask them to make a purchase on your store. Listen to what they struggle with.
2. Listen to customer service calls or sales calls. Start your day listening to two or three of these and you will pick up at least one or two gems a week.
3. Read your reviews, especially your middle reviews.
Pay attention to when you feel emotion about what customers are saying or writing. Often the places where we have the most self-deception are the areas where we feel emotion.
You can also pay for ‘whatusersdo’ to visit your competitors sites to see how their experience is on those sites to see what stands out. This is especially good to do if you know the competitor is crushing it on AdWords.
If you want to know how much more juice there is in your adwords account from really understanding your customers watch our case study video here http://go.markhammersley.co/get-started/#go-go
Thanks
Mark (Genie) Hammersley
