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HIRING A \"PRODUCT\" TO DO A JOB<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Organizations pursue data and analytics for a range of reasons, most often to build competitive advantage or to improve the customer experience.<\/p>\r\n Despite the motivation, 86% of executives say their organizations have only been somewhat effective at meeting the primary objective of their data and analytics programs, including more than one-quarter who say they’ve been ineffective. --McKinsey<\/em> 2016.<\/p>\r\n What is the core problem? Correlations do not equal causation.<\/p>\r\n “Companies know a lot about the characteristics and attributes of their customers, but they don’t know why customers buy their products and services…without grasping causation, they can’t be sure whether their R&D spending will yield a winning ticket,” says Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall.<\/p>\r\n Theodore Levitt, legendary Marketing Professor at Harvard Business School,<\/em> <\/em>argued that customers want to \"hire\" a product to do a job. \"A marketer's task is to understand the job the customer wants to get done, and design products and brands that fill that need. With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension,\" says Clayton Christensen.<\/p>\r\n Recently, at a LinkedIn After Work Networking Event<\/em>, I spoke with Vayoola’<\/em>s Chief Technology Officer and became interested in the company’s business model: Providing full service data-driven marketing to startups and entrepreneurs in the crowd funding space. We spoke about one of their clients, ActiCool<\/em> <\/em>that manufactures shirts, originally engineered to keep military and law enforcement personnel cool, now being introduced with a crowd funding campaign to the general public.<\/p>\r\n “After years of working in visibility and head protection, we saw a huge gap in heat stress awareness and prevention...I am on a mission to bring ActiCool<\/em> to the general public so that everyone can experience the benefits of the cooling shirt that works,” says CEO and Founder, ActiCool<\/em>, Benjamin Brook.<\/p>\r\n NASA'<\/em>s heat stress report CR-1205 (1) found that temperatures over 80°F have a marked negative effect on both the productivity and accuracy of work. At 95° F, the report showed that study participants were found to make sixty mistakes per hour. ActiCool<\/em> is the Winner of the Industrial Safety & Hygiene News (ISHN) 2016 <\/em>ReadersChoice<\/em> <\/em>Award in the Heat Stress Category<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n Despite the fact that businesses must be customer-focused, only 29% of B2B customers are fully engaged, and their remaining customers are either indifferent (60%) or actively disengaged (11%) --Gallup<\/em>, August 2016.<\/p>\r\n Brands that make a personal connection with their customers drive engagement, profitability and revenue.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t