What Most Brands Miss With User Testing (That Costs Them Conversions)

Andi Jarvis:
So, right. Look. Marketers let let’s just take a step back first before we go forward
because the clue of marketing is hiding right there in plain sight in the name, market. It’s it’s right
there as part of marketing.
So I don’t understand how we, as a d
iscipline, can operate unless we are close to the market.
Because then if we’re not doing something for the market, it can’t by definition be marketing.
But when you start to dig into this, once you get out of a kind of maybe the top 100, 200 companies
in
in in your sector not in your sector, in your country, a lot of companies just don’t do any real
research or talking to customers at all.
Maybe if they’ve got a physical store, yep, maybe they do that then, and you can listen and interact
with customers
there.
But certainly with the push into e
–
commerce and the push to move a lot of services online, even
businesses that aren’t necessarily online. In the UK, certainly, so many businesses, like, you try and
get in touch with them and, like, oh, use our chat
bot.
Use our live chat function. It’s like, yeah. But I want I want to talk to a person. And they make it
impossible for you to do. Why? Because the gods of efficiency have won over and say that it’s not
efficient to have people talking to customers.
But
we’re losing so much because data and reports and everything you get from running your
Facebook ads campaign, your Google campaigns, the surveys that you run, really super useful, but
it doesn’t tell you everything.
And until you talk to customers and hea
r what they have to say, you miss out on so much rich texted
information. And that I think it’s part of it is that we’re kind of losing the efficiency battle, so we don’t
do it.
The other part of it is we don’t train marketers to do it. So there’s
actually a whole generation of
marketers who are actually scared of talking to customers. They don’t know what to do.
They’re worried about saying the wrong thing, or they say things like, well, what’s the point now?
Because if you only talk to 5 people, a
ll your decisions are gonna be biased around what they want.
You say that’s not what you do.
You’re talking to them to get an idea. You’re not talking to them to say this is research. It it’s very
different. So we have a lack of skill. We have a lack of u
nderstanding, and we have a lack of being
able to make the case of why it’s important.
So what that leads to is most companies
don’t do it, or they do it
.
Once a year or once every couple of years in this grand piece of research. And everything e
lse is
do
ne by intuition.
I think we’ve got to be better than that.
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Sonia:
We do. So my my background is health care marketing. I spent
several
years at j and j, and
I remember that every year our
goal
as marketers was to go out and spend time in the field, ri
ght,
talking to the doctors and health care providers.
And every year, it never failed. We might have gone once or twice. Right? And we spent that time
talking to
healthcare
providers. And you’re right. Like, it was one of those things.
We might have been
out in the field, but a lot of times, we were, of course, with our sales reps. But
we were just kind of, like, tagging along.
We weren’t having conversations either, because I think a lot of people were like, I don’t wanna say
the wrong thing. I don’t wa
nna mess up. Up.
And it just kinda goes into that thing of, like, we’re making we’re spending all this time because we’re
too busy doing whatever it is we were doing in the office to talk to our customers.
And whenever we were in front of them, we had no
idea what to say. So it just kind of felt like this
bumbling sort of thing where
Andi Jarvis:
I would guess as well that when you were doing those
ride
–
alongs
, you saw them as
an annoyance rather than part of your job.
So
you’re
going out with a sales rep for a day or 2 days out of your diary, and that’s a day or 2 days
that you’re not doing work.
And I was like, flip it around. This is the most important 2 days in your year. And
there are
companies
McDonald’s McDonald’s do a lo
t wrong, but hats off to them.
Everyone who works at McDonald’s in marketing and senior positions spends 1 week a year in a
restaurant. Now
Sonia:
Nice.
Andi Jarvis:
I think the word restaurant works very hard for McDonald’s. Right? It’s not a restaurant,
but they work in there. They serve customers.
They sweep floors. I mean, you’ve got, like, the most senior marketing person in McDonald’s. Once
a year, you can see that person sweeping a floor in a restaurant somewhere near them, flipping
burgers one day
, doing the fries the next day, on the
drive
–
through
window.
That keeps you close to the customer. You see what people do when they’re in
the
store.
You understand the questions they ask. You understand when people stand there and go, can I
have does ther
e is there a pickle in that? And Yeah.
Can you super all those questions you get because you’re there, I think it’s wonderful that they do
that.
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Sonia:
Yeah. I think
it goes
deeper to having these conversations.
So there’s a couple of things. Talking to customers, spending time with them, building relationships
with them, not only does it help you understand kind of just what’s on their mind, what they’re thinking
about, but it helps you get a better understanding
of really what is the journey and the customer
experience.
Because there’s a big difference the way with the way that you think something’s gonna work in
theory, the way you might have designed it, and the way it works, and the way it plays out. So that’
s
another benefit. It’s like you just actually see, does this work or not? And is this something that they
even need?
Andi Jarvis:
Absolutely. You know, that whether you call it market testing or whatever. But once
you get out into the wild you see how the
decisions people make.
So if you’re a a retailer or if you’re a product that sits in a retailer, just watching how people navigate
the shelves of a supermarket or a store, where they stop, where they spend time, how many
products they pick up
,
and put do
wn.
So I worked with a a fake tanning brand. This
was
7 or 8 years ago. And look. Anybody watching
the video will be looking at the 2 of us and going.
So I have absolutely no idea of what the customer goes through when they go into a fake tan brand
becaus
e I have an inbuilt tan, so I don’t need this is something I’ve never had to worry about. So I
went and stood in the pharmacy.
It’s, over here. It was a company called Boots, which is a bit like CVS in the States. So I went and
stood in the British equiva
lent of CVS for 3 afternoons as part of this and just watched. You know, I
probably looked a little bit creepy, but I
kind
of
just stood and watched.
It was a brand that was aimed at kind of younger end of the market, women under the age of 21. It
was a c
ompany that had lots of products
for
different age ranges, but this was a cheaper product
for
the younger end.
And just watching how girls would come up, pick it up, show it to their friends, talk to each other, put
it down, see what the price is, look for
promotions, and just really get under the skin of how people
buy this product. Now I had to do that because I had no background in it before.
But it’s really difficult when you are in an industry and a product, you have 15 years
of
experience.
You just t
hink you know the product or you know the customer.
And I think we just need to be a little bit more humble than that and say, do you know what? Every
year, I have to go out. Every quarter, I have to go out and check this and try this and understand
again
Sonia:
Yeah.
Because things change.
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Andi Jarvis:
Yeah. I think the biggest takeaway for me that I’m getting from one of what you’re
saying in this whole concept is talking to your customers is not the same as doing market research.
Because I think as marketers, by default, we spend a lot of time, oh, let me look at the research if
I’m gonna get
this insight
based upon what this research report is telling me, and that isn’t the same.
It reminds me of, like, whenever I was learning Sp
anish and whenever, like, I would learn it from the
applications. But, like, when I tried to use that same kind of Spanish, when I was actually out trying
to talk to people, What they were saying was
not what I was learning. Right?
Like, this isn’t being
in Duolingo.
So
nia:
Yeah. Yeah. It was not the same. So you have to there’s a difference between that theory
and that practice. Right? So
Andi Jarvis:
Absolutely. And I think one of the key things, and hopefully, this is a lesson I can give
to people and they can take away from this, is that you use the information that you get from these
conversations or from observing people or watching them.
You use
that information to format what you’re gonna do. If you are gonna
research
if you’ve got the
budget and the capacity to do research, use this information to create that study.
So if you are it we talk about McDonald’s and we talk about, you know, Johnson
and Johnson J and
J letting you do
ride
–
alongs
and things like that, but smaller businesses can do this too.
If you are listening to customers, you’re talking to them, and you keep hearing maybe 4 or 5 things,
I use you guys because, you deliver faster, o
r I use you guys because the service is brilliant, or I
use you guys because, you know, you have a wider range of products, so your store is better.
Whatever these 4 or 5 things people keep telling you are, it’s good, but you are still talking to a really
small group of customers.
If you’re gonna run a survey, this is where you put those in and you let and then you say to a bigger
group, order these things in order of preference.
Sonia:
You know,
you don’t say how important is price to you because everybod
y will tell you that
price is really important.
Andi Jarvis:
Yeah. You give them a list of 5 or 10 things and say, put these in order of importance
to you. And when you ask the question that way, y
ou get a very different answer.
And one example of that is
whenever you do that with, people buying based on ethical values, if you
ask the question, do you want to buy from a brand that has great ethical values? Everybody says
yes.
When you ask people to put it in order of preference, it always comes about 7th
or 8th behind things
like delivery time, price, quality of product,
and
returns policy. And that makes sense, but you’ve got
to ask the question the right way. So you said,
here are
the things we’re hearing in these discussions.
Let’s put it out to the market and say, right, now tell us the rest. So if you’ve got
a
budget to do
surveys, use the talking to customers to inform that.
Use it to start to have those wider discussions. Don’t make you know, don’t launch your new product
on the fact that y
ou’ve spoken to 7 people.
But use it to start building into what you’re doing next.
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Sonia:
Yeah.
All right
. So I’m curious from your point of view. Let’s do a little bit of a true or false
type of thing.
I’m gonna give you a statement.
I wanna see, like, if you have a what your thought is on the
statement.
Underrepresented and underserved communities, people who’ve got differences, people who are
often ignored by brands based upon their identity, They probably wouldn’t be so underrepres
ented
and underserved if more marketers talk to people from these communities. What’s your thought on
that? True or false?
Andi Jarvis:
Hard degree. Hard degree. True. True. True. Look. We all have
biases
. Everybody
everybody has a bias in some way or
another.
And I think what happens in marketers, there’s
an
I could only talk from a UK perspective. So all the
research I’ve seen is very
UK
–
centric
.
Sonia:
Okay.
Andi Jarvis:
But you look at marketing agencies, I think it’s 84% of marketing agency staff a
re under
the age of 40. Wow. That makes us very strange I’m I’m over 40. But that makes marketing agencies
a very, very strange place full of young people, mainly
university
–
educated
, very middle class. That’s
a very narrow subset of society.
And if you o
nly have those people making decisions about what the rest of society is and they
haven’t spoken to them, you start to have problems and things like Kendall Jenner saving racism
with Pepsi. You’re like, that just smacks me of a campaign developed by
univer
sity
–
educated
marketers who’ve never actually spoken to anyone who’s not Kendall Jenner or her agent.
Sonia:
Right.
Andi Jarvis:
I do some teaching,
and
some lecturing at Liverpool University.
Just
the other week, I
gave the students a challenge, and 20 to 23 maybe these students are. And somebody said,
pensioners or or seniors, as you’d probably say in the US, seniors
,
and people over 40 don’t know
how to use cell phones.
Sonia:
Okay.
Andi Jarvis:
I’m like, right. Okay. Well, I’m marking your final assignment, your final paper, and I
can tell you now you fa
iled already.
I mean that hurt. So that cut me deep.
Real deep. But from the perception of 5 20 somethings sat around in a circle, once you’re ov
er 40,
you are a pensioner. You know, And they think that people over 40 must have Zimmer frames and,
you know, don’t use old mobile phones, cell phones.
They don’t know how to use them. This is their perception of what happens when
you get old.
And the o
nly way around that is to go out and meet people who are over 40, over 60, over 70, or
better still, bring them in to be part of your team.
And then you go, oh, you know, you still like to go to a club, and you’re 44. Yeah. Yes. I do like to
go to a club,
but I’m 44. You know, all these things. So the more you talk to people, the more you
realize that, okay. This is what this group looks like.
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So I think underrepresented, underserved communities would 100% be better served by marketers
and the marketing c
ommunity if we got off the chair, got out from behind the screen, and went to
speak to them.
Sonia:
Yeah. I think that you know, I’m somebody with a lot of differences. So I’m, like, been on the
receiving end of, like, this underrepresented and underserved
thing.
One of the things I talk about a lot is, like, the
gluten
–
free
diet that I follow. And people who don’t
have to follow this diet, they don’t never thought crosses their mind, they don’t think about it.
But once you have somebody in your inner circle who is and you talk to them, you observe them,
you see, like, the thought process that they go through, it changes the way you kind of think about
going about, you know, whenever you’re gonna eat together.
W
e’re planning my mom’s 70th birthday and she just sent a note to me and my sister and she’s like,
could you all pick the restaurant, You know, a restaurant that’s gonna work for you all
?
But how
does that happen? She’s talked to us.
She’s spent time with u
s. She knows that it’s important that we have something to eat too. But you
only get that from talking. Right? And so I think that once you have that awareness, you can make
those adjustments in your marketing.
Andi Jarvis:
Absolutely. And I think I unders
tand the challenge sometimes when underserved
communities feel like they’re being brought in, not as guinea pigs, but, you know, it’s like almost like
sort of caged animals.
Like, we need to ask you some questions because we wanna make sure that we get th
is right. And
I understand the pushback that some people have that says, look. Hold on. Come on. No. I’m not
here just to help you learn.
But generally speaking, I would say most people from whatever community it is, whether it is
gluten
–
free
, whether it i
s black, whether it is a minority in whatever way, once or twice, we’ll be happy to
share their experiences with you to stop you making a mistake.
Now if you keep making that mistake and keep do
ing it over and over again
. Sorry. You
know, you’re
not learn
ing.
You’re not listening. You’re not learning. That’s your stupid fault.
But, like, generally, if you go with an open heart and you’re inquisitive and you ask the right
questions, most people would be happy to at least say, look. This is my experience her
e, and I think
you need to, you know, be aware of that.
Sonia:
Yeah.
All right
. So earlier, you mentioned that people often don’t know how to talk to
customers, and I wanna layer on that with something that I’ve observed.
I don’t know if this exists in th
e UK, but I feel like whenever people have to engage or they know
they have to engage with people who are different
from
them, it’s kind of like suddenly they forget
how to build relationships with people.
I think they’re so concerned about saying the wro
ng thing or offending that they forget that the other
person is just another person. Right?
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And so have you, how do you, like, coach people through and gate like, having conversations with
customers,
particularly
people who are different from them, in a
manner that feels very human?
Andi Jarvis:
So I’ve had long discussions with myself and with a friend and kind of friends of the
business about should I be saying talk to your customers, or should I say listen to your customers?
Now I’m I went for talk to your customers because I feel it means more active for the marketer to get
up and go and do it. Yeah. But the key point is listening.
And I think, yes, you know, you’re like, what am I gonna say to this person? I mean, the key
part of
that sentence is
a
person.
You know, that person, no matter what they have, will still probably have a sports team they follow
or, you know, things in common with you somewhere along the way.
But the the important thing is is they’re a person, an
d the questions you want to ask them are just
open questions.
Because you’re not gonna learn anything if you are taking 80% of the conversation and they’re giving
20%.
This needs to be you doing 10% of the talking and them doing 90%. So as long as you’re
asking
open questions which are about the problem that your product solves remember, it’s all very
product
–
specific
.
So when you’re doing tanning products, you’re asking very different questions
as
to if you’re working
with a building supplier. You’re ask
ing very different questions if you’re working with car sales.
But what you’re looking to do is just ask open questions about that product. Are you going out this
weekend? Is that why no. That’s not even an open question.
Sorry. But, you know, questions a
bout why are you buying the product? How are you going to use
a product, do you usually buy the product, those sorts of things that just get people talking
?
Just ask them about it. One of the things that we discovered, back to that tanning example, is tha
t
Thursday is
the
tanning day.
Because if you’re gonna go out the weekend, you don’t tan on a Friday. You don’t wanna tan on a
Tuesday or a Wednesday because then your tan might wear off. So Thursday is
the
tanning day.
So sales go up on a Thursday.
Women
would leave the office on a Thursday, go to their local CVS, buy the tanning product, go
home
,
and tan Thursday night. We found that out by talking to people who bought the product and,
like, you know, how do you use it? When do you use it? And just askin
g the question.
And then once somebody starts talking about that, everybody starts talking, oh, I do Thursday
tanning too. And everybody didn’t know everyone else tanned on a Thursday. But they did. Yeah.
And you’re, oh, okay.
Now that was only a small gr
oup of people. But when we tested that further and further, we were
like, oh, this is what everybody does. This is how people tan.
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You know, you girls tan on Thursday to go out Friday So you know, you find that out by asking a
question and shutting up
and letting them come back with see you with the answer
Sonia:
Yeah. And I think that once you’re doing like, having those conversations and you’re looking
for patterns, as you include more people who are from identities that are generally underrepresented
and underserved, you’ll probably start to even learn and pick up patterns in what they say in terms
of, like, how their experiences might be slightly different or if they’re different at all. Right? So, but
you don’t know if you don’t have those conversat
ions and include them.
Andi Jarvis:
Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s a guy called Matthew Said who wrote a book called
Rebel Ideas. He’s a British guy. He was a former Olympic table tennis player of all things. Right?
But, really fascinating, great writer.
I
n
Rebel Ideas, he talks about a visual representation of how underserved communities and diverse
thinking
work
. And if you think of it as a box, and if all you do is talk to
university
–
educated
,
under
–
40
marketers, right, you talk to 10 of them.
They’re th
ey’re 10 little dots in one corner of this square. If the problem that you’re trying to solve is
in the middle, everybody’s perception of that problem is the same.
But if you start talking to people who haven’t had a university education, there may be dot
s in a
different corner. You talk to people who, maybe did have a university education but came from an
ethnic minority, they’re with dots in a different con.
And all of a sudden, you’re all looking at the same problem. Yeah. And the
perception is
very
di
fferent.
And I’ve found I’ve used that diagram and I’ve used that example with so many clients. Some clients
like, why do we need to do this? There
are
still, sadly, a lot of people asking that question. When
you visualize it in a very different way, rathe
r than me shouting at them and going, you’re just an
idiot. Of course, we need to do this.
You show them a visual representation like that, and they’re like, oh, we’re gonna get better things,
aren’t we, out of this by doing this because we’ve got differe
nt
perspectives
on the problem. Amen.
Let’s do it.
You know? So Yeah. It’s, it’s good to get that perspective from different communities at all times.
It’s not an
add
–
on
. It’s not a let’s do a diversity thing. It’s how you do better marketing by talking to
more diverse people.
Sonia:
Yeah. How do you recommend that brand teams incorporate what they’re learning from
talking to people in their plans? Because I know a lot of times people like, oh, this is our 2024 plan
that
we
created 6 months ago, and then we’re gonna like, how do you how do you adjust and adapt
if you need to?
Andi Jarvis:
It’s it’s tough. I mean, this is a market research problem. I know we’re confusing the 2
things, but on a big level, you’ve probably seen
this and I’ve seen it loads where companies have
spent tens of 1,000 of dollars on market research reports.
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10
And you’re like, oh, where’s that report that was done before? And it it’s this and it’s holding up
somebody’s desk. You know? Oh, yeah. We don’t really and you’re I know how much you paid for
that, and you don’t use it.
So the thing for me is a little bi
t little and often is bring those in those insights and the things you
learn into those team meetings and talk about them. And I love asking people, almost not putting
people on the spot.
You could put it on the agenda if you want. But say, right, You tell
us one thing, Sonia, that you
learned from talking
to a customer this month.
And if it’s on the agenda now it’s sometimes these
are just little things, and sometimes these are things that might have you going, yeah.
Maybe we should start maybe we could t
alk to operations about that, or should we consider
not
. At
no point should you completely change all your processes on one bit of feedback from one customer.
Sonia:
Which happens all the time, by the way. Gosh. It happens all the time.
Andi Jarvis:
I call it handbrake marketing. You know, when you see, like, Fast and the Furious
where they pull a handbrake up and spin the wheel and go off in a different
direction
? It’s like that.
You’re like, what are you doing? You know, have a strategy.
You’ll kee
p going towards those goals. But I think the key thing is you either start seeing the patterns
or you ask the question and you say you know, maybe if you’re in a bigger organization, you’ve got
customer services is a different division to here and sales is
over there.
That means you have to go and have a conversation with them. Are you hearing this? And then,
yeah. We do, but we don’t know what to do about it.
Oh, ar
e you hearing this?
We he
ar it all the time. Right?
We have a problem. May
be we should loo
k
at this.
It doesn’t mean you change it.
And if you’re in a smaller organization, my only bit of advice is so one of my key things for small
organizations is if you’re struggling to talk to customers, look at customer reviews and Yeah.
Either read them o
r try and get in touch with them or reply and say, look. We’d love to talk to you
about this experience. Can we arrange a call? The key thing to do with that is don’t just talk to the
negative customers.
There’s a natural focus to say, let’s talk to the p
eople who’ve left a negative review. Let’s ring up the
complaint and understand what the complaint was.
Do
that. But if you only do that, you start to see
the world in this myopic view of everything must be terrible because everyone I speak to tells me
bad
things.
You also need to ring the
5
–
star
reviews as well and say, can we have a call? I would I’d love to
understand a little bit more about why your experience was 5 stars.
Speak
to that person as well
because you need to get that balance so you don’t ju
st run off making decisions.
Like, we have to change everything based on talking to 4 customers who’ve had a terrible
experience. You might only need to change one thing, and that might just be the person who
answers the phone or the person who takes thei
r order.
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You might just need they just need a bit more training because this always happens on a Monday
at 8 PM. Yeah. You kn
ow? So don’t change everything.
You have to get that balance.
Sonia:
Yeah. I love the part about asking in a meeting because it creates a culture of talking to your
customers and feedback.
And it’s sort of sort of the expectation, and it’s an evolving thing versus, like, that what you do once
or twice a year. Right? So, an
d then you have that that handbrake reaction that you mentioned.
Andi Jarv
is
:
Yeah. And I think, you know, like you you said, that that whole day out of the diary to
go on and ride along, to go on tour, it just feels like but if you’re constantly just tryi
ng to stay on top
of that or, you know, just reading some reviews, then that that’s it’s not as good as talking to
customers, but I understand real life in real businesses.
You’re not gonna be able to spend a day a week out talking t
o customers. I know th
at.
But you can
read reviews once a week. You can spend 20 minutes reading every review that’s coming that week.
Yeah.
And then once a quarter, get out and talk to some customers and go, we’re seeing a lot of complaints
about x and y. What’s your take on t
hat?
Sonia:
Mhmm. It makes a big difference.
All right
. One thing I wanna switch gears slightly because
I wanna get your experiences as a consumer. Can you tell me about a time
when
a brand made you
feel like you belonged?
Andi Jarvis:
No. I love this question, and I have a really obvious answer, and I don’t wanna give it
because it’s a company that’s hard to replicate.
So if you are on the other side of this podcast, you’re listening going, yeah. That’s great. But how
are we ever gonna
do that? So I’m gonna give you a big example and a little example. Okay. We
met at Disney. Now I’m British.
I am completely
anti
–
American
, you’ve gotta say have a nice day
,
people. It’s like, I’ll decide if I’m
having a nice day. I’m having a bad day. My
car just broke down. I’m skinned, so I have no money.
You’ve just charged me $8 for a coffee. Stop telling me to have a nice day. Leave me alone.
I’m quite cynical in that sort of way. I go to Disney, and everyone’s like, have a nice day. It was my
birthday when I got there, and they gave me a birthday button. And you’ve never I was 12 feet tall
walking down the corridor with my Disney birthday butt
on on.
And I was so impressed with how they just walked the line, in my eyes, perfectly between
personalizing saying hello to me, chatting to me when it was obvious that I wanted to engage with
somebody maybe while
I was
waiting for a coffee or a meal, bu
t also just like when I’m in a rush
going between 2 events, people would walk past you and kind of leave you alone.
I thought they had it well nailed down and kind of made me feel in a sea of 100 thousands of people,
no doubt, made me feel like my experie
nce at Disney meant something to them, which I thought
was really, really nice to do and very difficult to do at scale.
But on the other side of that, I have a little coffee shop that I go to. There’s 3 staff work there, And
every one of those staff and I
go fairly regularly, but every one of those staff knows me by name.
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12
They know the 2 drinks that I order depending on what date. You know, they’ll be like, oh, is it this
day or that day? But it’s not just
that
we’re not friends. Right? We’re not best mat
es or anything like
that, but they have a nice line between engaging with you, delivering your drink, taking the money,
and it’s just all very on the money. You know?
They know that if I go in on a Saturday, I’m coming in to eat, and it’s like, oh, there’
s a table here. I’ll
bring the menus up. I feel like I matter to them, and I think that’s important in a small business, which
is relatively easy to do if you just have the right stuff and the right training.
Sonia:
Yeah. I love that you gave both of those
examples. In particular, the Disney one is I take
great interest in it because it just shows that you can bottle that thing that exists.
I think a lot of times people feel like once you grow bigger, you can’t you will lose that thing naturally.
But what
I love about Disney is they have systematized it so that they don’t. I went a couple of years
ago to the Disney Institute where they’ve taught this exact thing, like, how to do this, and how they
do it on scale.
And it was
an
amazing
4
–
day
training just t
o kinda go behind the curtain and see, like, how they do
it and then see it in the parks and the way it’s relevant and think about how we apply it to our
businesses.
An
di Jarvis:
My takeaway was the training and I didn’t know there was a Disney Institute,
but my
takeaway from the day was that th
e training was fantastic.
And it felt like everybody was trained.
That was the other thing. I was
They are.
Like, I was out, I was up running quite early one morning, and the the the grounds staff were out,
like,
put
ting
plants out and watering areas and things like that. Now most businesses I know in
Britain wouldn’t even bother training them in in customer service and hospitality.
They train them in how to dig holes,
and
how to put plants in the ground. The
main
gu
ys doing that
job were and I’m running laps around the lake. We’re all trained to the same level of customer service
as the person who checked me in.
And I knew that when I stopped to stretch and they were talking, and I and it was just lovely. I was
like
, they’ve had the customer service training too. Yep.
Yeah. The security you know, they have security at Disney to stop you taking guns into certain parts
of the park. I get hassled by security in lots of places.
I’m it’s a terrible symptom of being a bla
ck guy and quite a tall and fairly broad one. The Disney
security guys made sure I didn’t have a gun going in a part of the park, and I never once felt hassled.
It was the nicest security experience I’ve ever had. Compare and contrast that with TSA when y
ou’re
flying in and out of the
States
.
Sonia:
Yeah. Yeah.
Andi Jarvis
:
Oh, man. It’s like, put Disney in charge of TSA. Fantastic.
Sonia:
It would be completely a different experience. I feel ashamed whenever I encounter TSA
whenever I am coming back
to
th
e US. It’s always a different kind of experience.
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Andi Jarvis:
Welcome to America. And you’re like, oh, thanks. I mean, I’m here for a vacation.
Leave me alone.
Sonia
:
Yeah. Yeah. Andy, I feel like we could just keep going for such a long
period
, but we
gotta
wrap it up. Where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you and your work?
Andi Jarvis:
So, my company website is eximomarketingstrategy.com. Eximo is spelled e x I m o.
But the easiest way I spell Andy
is
with an I rather than a y.
So
generally speaking, if you just search for Andy Jarvis on any platform, you’ll find me there.
LinkedIn and Instagram
are
where I’m, mostly show up. But, yeah, just search for Andy Jarvis.
Put it into Google, and I just appear magically, because there
are
only there is 2 Andy
Jarvis
. One
of them is
a
softball player somewhere, but she doesn’t seem to have as many
links and as great
SEO as I am.
So you see, you find me more than her.
Sonia:
Nice. I’ll put all that in the show notes. And you have a podcast t
oo. Right?
Andi Jarvis:
I do. Yes.
I called
the Strategy Sessions. So that is it’s kind of a well, the clue’s in the
name. Right? So it’s a strategy podcast.
We talk about kind of broad marketing issues and, you know, how do we set the direction for
companies. But it’s an
hour
–
long
discussion format. So we tend to talk about strategy for 25,
to
30
minutes, and then we meander into other topics.
And we’ve covere
d all sorts of amazing what you get into when you just let people talk, and I love it.
So the strategy sessions, you will find on the Exmo website or via all the good podcast places.
Sonia:
Nice. So I’ll put all that in the show notes for you, and it sound
s very
on
–
brand
. Whenever
you what happens whenever you just let people talk
?
Right? And you’re listening.
Andi Jarvis:
The problem with me is getting me to shut up. Sorry about that.
Sonia:
Any parting words of wisdom for marketers and business leaders
who do want to do a better
job of talking to their customers, particularly those from underrepresented and underserved
communities?
I think my one bit of passing wisdom would be just start. Start where you are, to quote Arthur Ashe.
Use what you have. Do w
hat you can. Small businesses listen like, oh, we don’t have the resources.
Everyone can talk to a customer. It doesn’t matter whether you are the biggest company in the world
or the smallest company that’s just started. Everyone can have a conversation w
ith a customer in
one way or another.
Andi Jarvis:
Start having a conversation and then build another one, build another one, and find a
way to feed that back. But just get started. It will put you miles in front of 98% of the competition by
talking to cus
tomers and understanding their problems.
Sonia:
I will.
Thank you so much, Andy, for stopping by.
Andi Jarv
is:
Thank you for having me.
I
had a great time.
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14
I hope you enjoyed that chat with Andy as much as I did. And more importantly, I hope you’ve got
some great ideas on how to move forward
in
developing a deeper degree of intimacy with the people
you want to serve. It is worth your effort.
That’s it for to
day’s show. If you liked it, I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with a friend, a colleague,
and or your network, and leave a rating and review for it in your podcast player of choice. All these
efforts go a long way toward helping more people discover the
show, and I like to think that helps
more people and brands be more inclusive. Also, are you getting the inclusion and marketing
newsletter? Each week, I send news, stories, insights, and other goodies to help you build an
inclusive brand that attracts an
d retains a bigger, more diverse, and fiercely loyal customer base.
Go to inclusion and marketing.com/newsletter to get signed up.
I’ll also drop a link to it in the show notes so you can access it easily.
Until next time, r
emember, everyone deserves to h
ave a place where they belong.
Let’s use our individual and collective power to ensure more people feel like they do.
Thanks
so much for listening.
Talk to
you soon.