Improving Lives

Improving lives, a lesson from medical research

One of the core elements of any medical research study – which I think could be useful for many businesses to think about – is to look at the impact on people of your product or service.

To what extent has your product or service not just satisfied someone or made them want to repeat purchase, pay more for it or recommend you – but has it actually improved the person’s life, or quality of life in some way?

To see an example of some published medical research, here’s a client-published summary of a study we’ve recently done. http://www.chiptech.co.nz/news.html

The core measures in this piece of work are whether the new technology and service helps people take their medicines correctly (a major health issue globally), how well it helps elderly people to live independently (as opposed to in care), and how well it improves people’s health-related quality of life.

Pick up any good medical research, whether testing a new medicine, technology, product or service, and you’ll find these kinds of tests. They are the hurdle that must be leapt for the new thing to be commercialized through doctors or other health professionals. Does it improve a person’s life in some way? Is it something better than was there before? How much better? Is it safe?

In business, to a large degree, the marketing and branding approach which has been prevalent in the last three decades can often overshadow this important issue.

Branding is all about attaching a set of positive associations to your product or service. So when people see the brand that’s what comes to mind, and attracts people to purchase.

In practice, however, what often happens is the positive associations created don’t fit the reality of the products or services. In the worst cases, some products and services, with great branding work, not only may not do people any good, but long-term can actually harm them (without naming names).

This is, I think, one of the less talked about roots of the current financial crisis, and the resultant anti-business protests sprouting up all over the world. Products and services that were made to look positive, hadn't been adequately thought through in terms of the consequences they would have on people and society.

Apart from being more ethically sound, what you find if a connection can be made to improving lives, is this approach can significantly enhance long-term business performance.

In the bestselling Collins and Porras book, Built to Last, they looked at the best performing companies in the world over a long period of time and analysed why they performed better than their industry peers.

What they found was a strange irony. The best performed companies, first and foremost, had a positive vision for the business (to help people or make the world better in some way). Those with profitability as the overriding goal did well for a while then ran out of steam and fell behind in profitability.

In my experience, a couple of decades in business now, I see this play out with clients. Those that not just institute mechanisms to be profitable or brand better for profitability, but actually care about the end results for their customers lives and make changes to that effect, tend to do better over the long term.

There are a couple of reasons for this I think. It energizes people to work in such an environment. Most people, including those who work for your organisation, want to have a positive impact on other people or the world (as well as earn a living). If it is clearer to them how their work contributes to doing that, then it makes it very motivating. Your people will find that they feel their work fits their personal values more and they’re happy to do what they do.

Another thing this kind of attitude engenders is greater empathy for customers. It allows people to more easily understand their customer. They think through how the product or service fits into the life of people that consume it. This enables them to come up with better ideas, to create more powerful innovations that are more likely to work when commercialised.

The main thing however, is it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. If customers’ lives are improved by consuming the product or service, they’ll naturally consume it. On the other hand if it doesn’t, consumption has to be more heavily stimulated, by advertising, reminding customers to consumer it more.

This is where marketing and branding will need to head, and perhaps be one of the longer term outcomes of the current crisis. Rather than simply concentrating on creating positive associations in the mind, or even having a positive but ethereal vision for the business – also focus on positive realities, real positive differences and ensure we measure that as we go.

To help, to create a business that does improve people’s lives, we absolutely do need to think about the best measures for how customers think and feel about our product or service, how they enjoy it, whether they'll re-buy, how we'll get a good margin or be recommended by consumers. But it may be useful to close the circle and look at what impact the product or service has on people. Take a lesson from the medical researchers – ethics and integrity – and make this a hurdle that has to be leapt. As a result, we’re all likely to be better off.

Roger Parker is a director of New River Ltd.