All right. So I want to begin with an observation that this discipline is composed of two different kinds of cognitive process. One is analysis, deduction, taking knowledge, applying processes to it, making good decisions. And the other is creativity, abduction, using our imagination to create something new that wasn′t there before that was transformative and changed things. And here we are, you know, in the very heart of the universe for the substitution of the first of those disciplines by machine knowledge, which means all of us over the course of our careers need to up our game on the second of those disciplines. The, you know, the leveraging of our imagination, of our creative capacities, because, you know, the bots are coming, right? And they're getting smarter and smarter. And a lot of that analytical work that we pride ourselves in is work that within a short period of time will be done so magnificently by machine learning and algorithms and so on. And it's taking place. We see the pace of it every day. And so that's a context. And, you know, this observation is one that Einstein predicted a long time ago. He said, you know, imagination is more important than knowledge. If that was true when he said it, it is getting to be a lot more important and a lot more interesting as an observation for this discipline. So that's the starting frame for this. Now, I'm using this water in a desert. Oops. How do I move this forward? This way. That's the button. Okay. So I'm using this metaphor of water in a desert. And I'm going to break this talk into three parts. The first is seeing commodification as an opportunity. The second, pursuing differentiation through experience. And then I'm going to talk about some insight techniques for experiential differentiation. And just to put some perspective around that, we've heard from, I think, every speaker today that product marketing hinges on understanding the customer, knowing the customer, right? We've heard everybody, right? And this theme has been a constant theme in marketing as long as the marketing discipline has existed. Theodore Levitt, 1959, marketing myopia, and every chapter since. What's interesting is how little progress we've actually made in this, right? It's still a persistent theme that we haven't quite got at. And one of the things we're going to get to at the back end of this presentation is recognizing that the understanding of the customer is a creative act that requires imagination. And I'm going to share some techniques that I think you might find quite useful in making progress on that. So seeing commodification as opportunity. Little thought experiment. I want you to observe your own physical state, your own well-being here. Okay? Very quick experiment. How many people felt a little depressed, a little down, a little blue, right? Okay. How many people felt really excited? Hair standing up in the back of your neck? Okay. So how many people would say this reflects their experience in their work today? Not so many as I would have expected. Obviously, you're in San Francisco if I was doing this in the Rust Belt or something, and maybe it would be different. So the, the idea of a commodified category is widespread. It's an anxiety for a lot of people. And over the course of my career, I used to react to this phrase thinking, you know, this doesn't sound like much fun. There's a death spiral here, right? Commodification leads to price battling, leads to fewer resources for marketing and better customer experience and, you know, product innovations and so on. And eventually, you know, there's an exit, people lose their jobs. It's a bad situation. But over time, what I've come to observe is that, you know, a commodified market could be compared to an ideas desert, right? It's like there was a pact signed by all the competitors to say, we agree, solemnly swear, that there are no new ideas, that our conception of the customer, you know, shall remain the same across all parties in the industry. That we will, we will agree not to do anything new and disruptive and different, and we will follow an inevitable slide to deterioration. Now, if, if you are in a, if you're in a desert, water is an awfully valuable thing. And if you're in an ideas desert, then ideas are an awfully valuable thing. And you, as product marketers, are in the ideas business, and certainly should be, certainly need to be, and increasingly in the future will have to be, to be successful. Now, back to Einstein, the difficulty in a commodified market is that the ideas that come easily to you have already been tried and they didn't work. And this observation is so true about positioning in a commodified market. The problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them. Which leads to the question, well, so, you know, how do we go about that? And this leads to the next section of this conversation, pursuing differentiation through experience. So, if you're in a desert, you could go digging for ideas, but you're likely to come up with a lot of dry holes. If you're in a commodified market, you could, you know, spend all day working on messaging, but you might not solve the commodification problem by coming up with a better way to put lipstick on that pig. You might actually have to change the experience somehow. So, the dosing rod there was just a little metaphor for that idea of a different way of thinking. Let me give you an example of a very commodified industry that was shaken up by a very different kind of experience. This is a story told in Neeraj Daurar's Tilt, which is a great marketing book. I recommend it to you. ICI makes ammonium nitrate, ammonium nitrate. First synthesized in Germany in the run-up to the First World War, patents are all gone. It's a bulk commodity product. Turns out to be very useful in blowing things up. Now, ICI, we're competing in a marketplace where, you know, this bulk commodity, its costs are driven by the cost of natural gas. Everybody's got all the scale they need to produce at an economically equal level. Where do you find differentiation there? They realized that, you know, selling explosives wasn't much fun, but selling rocks of a particular size was. And so, they shifted the business model from selling explosives by the time to contracting for rocks that would be exploded to a particular size, and they monetized the size. They had the knowledge from their experience on blast sites to be able to change the customer experience. And this externalized then for the customer a risk that had earlier been internalized by the customer of making the rocks too big, which meant they had to be reprocessed or making them too small so that they would be less valuable economically. This is an example of a certain kind of experience that I have continued to brush up against over the course of my career that seems to really unlock something in customers in marketplaces. And so, I'm offering you a kind of a heuristic to think about here in decommodifying a space, and that is to create an experience that restores agency. So, let's explore this a little bit by means of a couple more examples. But agency, just to set the context here, agency is the ability to exert choice. Now, there's a nuance here that simply giving customers more choice can be the basis for paralysis, right? Barry Schwartz has written a great book about the paradox of choice, Behavioral Economics, shows when we're presented too many choices, you know, we kind of freeze up and it actually suppresses sales. But there is a particular kind of choice that seems to change things in the way people regard a brand. So, my good friend Steve Riley is in the room, and Steve and I worked for different agencies, both serving FedEx during a period of time. And during that time, Steve's firm was designing experiences and we were evaluating them in a usability lab. And this was a fascinating time because what FedEx were doing was nothing short of miraculous. You know, you could, you know, ask them to pick up a package at your office and the next morning they could deliver it almost anywhere in the world with 99 and five dots of reliability, you know, that's astonishing, right? And the customers that we were talking to were so like, you know, UPS does that too, right? What excited the heck out of them was the fact that they could track their package online. And now, what's really interesting about this is that it actually saved money for FedEx to let them do that. But the brand impact of this choice was truly remarkable relative to the brand impact of all the physical things that were really hard things that FedEx was doing. So, we'll just tuck that example away and I'll give you another one. Sun Life is an insurance company in Canada, and in a project that was involved in rebuilding their digital experience to try and drive better traffic in terms of lead generation off the website. We did some research with the customer base and arrived at a solution that involved translating a process that was to, you know, give us your information and an advisor will be back in touch with you to parameterize your search for an advisor, pick out the advisor that suits you best, languages, education, where they like to meet a variety of different parameters. And what was fascinating was that not only did it drive the traffic as expected, but it changed people's understanding of the brand and Sun Life eventually translated this into a national branding campaign even though it was just, you know, it was a lead gen strategy originally, but it turned out to be just something that unlocked demand in the marketplace and changed things. So, why did these, why did these examples get assembled in a package in this conversation? I think they were all experiences that restored agency. The customer, whether the customer could acknowledge it or not, was forced to accept a certain lack of control and we're going back to the desert here of, you know, all the competitors have agreed a secret pact that they won't change anything, right? And here, each one of these cases, somebody changed something and it resulted in the customer having a greater sense of control, a choice they could make that put them in control of something, whether they acknowledged or knew it or felt it or not, it was something that they felt more in control over and it was important and it broke through. So, in the case of FedEx, you know, the control was being able to see this all the way through. In the case of the advisor, not being, you know, saddled with an advisor you didn't like just because you took this step. In the case of ICI, not, you know, making a mistake in the application of that product that ends up costing you money. All those were situations where the customer had more control. Now, what's really fascinating about this insight is that these were counterintuitive things. For anybody in a commodified space, you know, finding those choices that matter is difficult because everybody thinks everybody's tried everything. Not only that, there's a kind of a prohibition that goes with these ideas. If you take great pride in the reliability of your logistics, you know, would it come naturally to you to, you know, add the ability to track? It's like, who needs that tracking ability, right? It's going to be good. Trust us, folks. If you're, and the insurance one is really clear, if you're an insurance company, your business is composed of people who have been advisors. You're very proud of your advisors. You think your advisors are the bee's knees. And so, you know, is it intuitive to imagine that the consumer doesn't really agree and they want to really, you know, kind of preview, check it out? You know, these are uncomfortable ideas. They're ideas that do not come naturally. These are counterintuitive ideas that have to overcome certain barriers and resistances, even to be presented at a random kind of level of distribution. And so, what can we do to retune our imagination to have the kind of counterintuitive ideas that allow us to create choice that matters? And this comes then, to the question of some insight techniques for experiential differentiation. The first of these is to think about the problem space. We've been talking about competitive intelligence. We've been talking about buying journey and so on. And a pattern that we have seen repeatedly in our work is that the problem space is being conceived too narrowly when ideas aren't breaking through. And when we shift to say, okay, explosives are a subset of some larger field of experience, logistics, insurance, some larger field of experience, then you know, we can shift from thinking about competitive category to a field of experience and it's in that context that we can often find the insights that are meaningful and important to find differentiation. Now, the definition, I've put question marks at the bottom of these because this is not strategic interpretation of any of these situations. This is a question that people need to think hard about. This is the kind of question, what is the field of experience that, you know, if you're going to get people around a whiteboard, thinking about that problem is a very good use of that whiteboard and that interdisciplinary team. And, you know, one should not just jump at the first answer. Thinking about this hard and critically bears fruit. The second one has to do with the targeting lens. We've talked about segmentation earlier today. It's fairly typical in B2B circles to think about targeting in terms of firms and the firmographics and inside the firms, the roles, right? This is fairly traditional, conventional. I heard a chap from IBM speaking at the Yale Customer Insight Conference a year or two ago and he said, you know, we've really moved from the B2B world to the B2P world, the business to person world. And I think Michael's commentary earlier today, you know, dealing with, you know, that 6.8 environment, the different kinds of individuals and motives that are going on inside that buying group really underscore the idea that, you know, we need to think about people, we need to think about motivations. And this then gets to really the third shift. I'm going to introduce this one with a little bit of a personal story. I was coming across the border. I brought my wife with me on this trip. And so in some 30 years of crossing the border, I have never before this moment gotten a customs and immigration guy to crack a smile. But he said, well, what's the purpose of your visit? I said, well, I'm coming down to give a talk. And he said, business or pleasure. So I said, well, I'm business, she's pleasure. And then I looked at her and said, did that come out all right? Now, the humor in this anecdote, you know, really is a lovely illustration of a very important point. And that is that, you know, my wife's a two time candidate for federal public office. She's, you know, a mother. She's, you know, many things. She's not just that one dimension, which is immediately and apparently obvious. But isn't it interesting that in marketing segmentation, we are so quick to take a singular classification and then use that as a vehicle by means of which we understand identity. This is a CMO. This is a CFO. There is this deterministic logic that then applies to say, if this person is a CMO, then it must be that these are the motivations that prevail and so on. And what becomes important to recognize is that identity itself is plural and that identity is a matter of choice. And if we are going to market effectively the people, we have to understand that the negotiation of identity is choice driven. It's dynamic. And when we are asked by all these experts over and over and over again to understand customers, we have to recognize that, you know, doing that requires an upping of the game from some sort of simple deterministic classification by means of which we can, you know, predict deterministically how people are going to behave. Now I'm going to show you very briefly some casework that falls out of this kind of thinking. This is work that our firm did with John Deere. It started with deep qualitative research. Angela Quayle, who's here in the room, was one of our field researchers, traveled around Canada, the United States, Australia to do some of the research. And then we translated that into marketing strategies and some content I'm going to share with you. Now just before I share the marketing content, I'm going to show a picture that was on the front cover of a market research report for the customer cohort that we are appealing to in this content I'm going to share with you. And this was a quantitative market research house, well-regarded firm, did a traditional segmentation study of this population. This study was largely thrown away and replaced by something else, but this was the precursor of this work. And if you look at this photograph, you will get a sense of, you know, a particular set of circumstances, a particular set of motivations, you know, obviously hard times down on the farm. Now let me show you where this went. And there is some video content that travels along here. And if our AV team can hit the play on that, I'm not sure if I can. Oh, yeah. Does our AV team have the ability to run the video? I see it's frozen. It's frozen. It's frozen. Is there something that I need to do? Okay. Well, while he's working this out, let me tell you a little bit about the background. We got our client to, first we profiled who we wanted to get into this, and then we gave them two things. We gave them a John Deere tractor for a period of three months. We gave them an iPad 3G with a Wi-Fi network, and we asked them to curate their own lived experience with the tractor. Stuff went uploaded to the cloud at night. Our team then assembled it and translated it into content that went on the web as part of this program. And the content, you know, reveals, I think, very distinctively this duality of entity and identity and this choice-driven approach. Now do I do something or do you do something to make this play? Here we are. So far, the farm is my full-time job, and then Nathan also animates full-time, and then farms in every other spare minute of the day and night. Hey, I'm Tara Young. This is Nathan, and we run Green Being Farm. We have 50 acres here and we rent another 30, and we are producing vegetables and pasture pork and chicken and grass-fed lamb and beef. Well, I mean, if we got into farming for the environment, we are at a point where a lot of the jobs we do must be done with mechanization. Most of the tractors we've driven are from like the 50s, 60s or 70s. I think that a lot of old tractors are really atrocious polluters, and they don't burn diesel well, and you can just see the exhaust is not clean. Yeah, and like everything's loose and rattly, and it was nice to get on a tractor where like everything, like the steering was super tight and like responsive. All of a sudden we had a tool available to us that would do the job better. If it strengthens our business without causing, you know, some exorbitant amount of harm, then I would say that it's furthering our goals, which would be fostering, you know, our concern for the environment. You knew it was safe and it did the job just so much more efficiently than anything we've ever used. So it's that kind of tractor that if he could, he would always have one if he could. Now, what was the choice that mattered here? There were a couple of dimensions to this. First of all, there was a playing back of an idea about identity here that was so powerful. We had one dealer reported, a customer who was a chartered accountant got in touch through this program, bought a tractor, and she related to the dealer that she saw this material. There's a series of six or seven of these videos, different family stories, and first she cried, then she clicked on the try one button and then she bought a tractor. Chartered accountant, these people are not traditional farmers. In a previous segmentation model, they were seen as a lesser version of a farmer, but they're in fact, they're deliberately making choices about their own identity where they're an animator and a farmer, organic producer, whatever. That's the first aspect. The second is that they don't have the same resources in terms of an understanding of this equipment that a traditional farmer would have. So the idea of being able to click a button, have a dealer deliver a machine to your driveway and let you try it out for a few weeks in order to make a decision whether to sell it or not was completely novel in this space. It was a way of connecting with this group in a way that really overcame a significant commodification problem that deer was experiencing in this low end of the tractor market. So an example of finding differentiation in a commodified space by identifying choice that matters, by recognizing agency as a very important aspect of human experience. So what have we talked about here? We've talked about the idea that product marketers need to understand their customer. Everybody knows that. But we've also talked about the idea that in order to understand your customer, it's necessary to be creative about that understanding, to resist the mind-forged manacles of a classification that is deterministic and takes away choice. And it's important to think about your customer from the point of view of providing them choices that give them a greater sense of control as a way of creating experiences that then you can promote and talk about in the marketplace so that you're no longer talking about the product. You're talking about the experience and how you've differentiated that. That's the show. If you do that, I think you will be on your way to finding ideas in an ideas desert and on your way to creating your own oasis. Thank you. Thank you.