Coupons, Analytics, and 4 Fun Ways to Understand Your Customers

Ever wonder why grocery stores push customers to use rewards cards?  I became fascinated with this question recently when I received a booklet of coupons in the mail from my local grocery store.  The coupons were tailored to my purchasing habits and even offered decent savings on items that I purchased only once or twice.  Seemed pretty amazing to me, but I wondered how and why they did it.

After doing some research, I realized that rewards cards serve two purposes (1) to drive customer loyalty by offering discounts and (2) to build customer profiles for the store and region.  It’s the second purpose that is the most intriguing.  Essentially grocery stores use purchase information to understand the preferences of their customers; this helps them estimate demand and ensure key products are stocked at each store.  In a way, they can use the data to custom tailor their services to unique demographic groups.

Grocery stores offer an exchange, in return for using your purchase information, they provide in-store discounts and personalized coupons.  Overall, it seems like a pretty fair trade and an excellent way for businesses to understand their customers.  While most grocery stores are part of national chains (which can afford large business intelligence departments), are there similar ways for small businesses (who often have constrained resources) to capture and analyze this information?

Here are four simple ways small businesses can use data to understand (and better serve) their customers.

  1. Leverage Web Analytics.  Website traffic is a great way to understand where viewers come from, how they found the website, and what content they are viewing.  This can help identify if there are key areas of interest (possibly a great article or blog post) and how to optimize content for your audience.
  2. Reach Out with Social Media.  Pretty much everyone has a social media strategy, but how much analysis is actually going on.  There are a number of platforms to look at trends, popular posts, “likes”, and “shares”.  While these are simple measures, they allow businesses to see what content is most popular.  Businesses can take this a step further with text and network mining to analyze the content, sentiment, influencers, and relationships between the viewers.
  3. Dig Deep into Current Clientele.  Examining sales for current clients is the best way to understand demographic trends, product preference, and customer “loyalty.”  For a small business like gothamCulture, this can be easy as looking at where clients come from, what market sector they are apart of, and what type of services they purchase.  By identifying links and connections, businesses can target marketing and project trends.
  4. Understand the Competition.  Understanding where the competition’s customers come from and how it uses social media can be a mirror to allow small businesses to differentiate their products and target new customer groups.

By leveraging current sales, potential sales (website traffic, social media, and the competition), and identifying trends and similarities between the two, small businesses can start piecing together profiles for different customer populations, the products and services they may be interested in, and anticipate future market trends.

Why Your Company Needs A Leadership Brand

What’s in a name? Your company’s reputation means far more than just free publicity — it’s the factor that sets you apart from the competition and defines you as an industry leader.

Most people think a company’s success depends on creating a unique product and generating lots of sales, but truly successful businesses develop their employees into their industry’s future leaders. By establishing a strong leadership brand, you can distinguish your company’s promise and work to fulfill that promise in every aspect of your business.

In this LinkedIn article, Chris Cancialosi describes what leadership branding is and gives tips on how to strengthen your company’s reputation.

An inside look at gC’s culture of Learning

Each quarter at gothamCulture we get together virtually and have a discussion about the “Book of the Quarter.” We find this to be a productive culture building practice that supports our desire to be a learning organization—an organization that is continually reflecting, sharing ideas and learning from best practices. 

Why do we do this?

  1. This ritual encourages us to discuss some of the more foundational works in the field as well as learn about new concepts in the organizational development world. We discuss how the concepts apply not only to our work with clients but also to our work within our own organization.
  2. Regularly engaging with new ideas in a structured way also supports our own professional development as individual practitioners. The fact that this time is put aside during a normal workday reinforces the organizational value that professional development is important.
  3. Our book discussions are a great opportunity to build relationships with colleaguesin a lower stress environment and learn from each other. This overall contributes to the sense of team within gC.

This quarter we read (and some of us re-read) Ed Schein’s classic Organizational Culture and Leadership. Despite its 450plus pages, it’s a quick read and organized in an accessible way if you want to focus in on a specific area of culture or leadership. It’s full of Schein’s tales from his real life experience with clients. His observations about these organizations invite readers to immediately make parallels with their own organization; His description of specific components of organizational culture is especially helpful when analyzing your own organizational culture.

I asked some of my colleagues to share their favorite key learnings from the book and here’s what they had to say:

  • “Culture is ultimately created, embedded, evolved, and ultimately manipulated by leaders.” – Chris Cancialosi, Managing Partner and Founder
  • I like what Schein says on defining strategies as opposed to goals: strategy concerns the evolution of an organization’s mission, whereas goals reflect the short-term tactical issues in order to ensure survival. –Dustin Schneider, Associate
  • “Organizations hold implicit assumptions about the role of space utilization in getting work accomplished. Where things are located, how they are built, the kind of architecture involved, the decorations encouraged, etc…reflect the deeper values and assumptions held in the larger culture and by the key leaders. …organizations attempt to symbolize important values and assumptions through the design. “ –Katie Papazian, Associate

If you’ve read this OD classic, let us know your biggest takeaway from this book by posting in the comments section!

Next quarter we plan to read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki so stay tuned.

The Improv Experience

I’ll have the opportunity on Monday to co-present Improv at one of the Mega Sessions of the 2014 SHRM Annual Conference. (That’s short for Society for Human Resources Management. And Mega, which is – ironically – short for Enormous.) If you are attending, here is the information on our session: http://annual.shrm.org/sessionplanner/session/6122

Improv is a powerful tool for organizational culture because of the skills focus around teamwork, listening, and being “in the moment”!! And as part of experiential learning through providing opportunities to get incredibly disruptive/creative – AND through participation in a transformational, shared experience. The reason this session (or, this type of session, if you are not at SHRM Monday) might be helpful to you as HR professionals? It provides great skill development for leaders…bringing out the best in employees, getting off “the script” and unlocking new perspectives!

As I was preparing for the session, I wanted to make sure I was armed with the best Improv references for attendees and other interested parties. (Say, for instance, I’m stopped on the street and asked for good Improv blog post references. It’s the nature of the business.) My mentor, the man commonly known as Improv Guru, Shawn Westfall, actually wrote one of the most helpful introductory pieces on disruptive improvisation I’ve come across. In it, he answers “Why Improv?” and how it can potentially help organizations. I look forward to sharing the stage with Shawn Monday at SHRM, as part of my close business relationship with BossaNova Consulting and The Get Real Project.

Another great reference I’ll be tuning people to comes from my colleague and the founder of The Get Real Project (hot link: http://www.thegetrealproject.com), Andrea Howe. Co-author of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, Andrea writes about improving business, gaining trust, client relationships and the like. One of her Improv posts gets right to the basic steps of our improv skill development.

We hope to deliver a thought-provoking and improvisation-inspiring session and look forward to questions. If you can’t make the session, but have an interest in learning more about the topic and how it can help your corporate culture, follow me on Twitter: @thecarypaul or, follow gothamCulture on LinkedIn.

Forbes: The Dark Side Of Bonus And Incentive Program

The VA debacle that’s dominating the news, unfortunately, highlights a disjointed and inefficient system meant to help our veterans. What caused such a divide between what the organization was intended to provide and what it actually offered?

Many signs point to unethical and disorganized bonus and incentive systems. Something that began as a way to encourage efficiency and customer service became corrupt, leading to many employees gaming the system.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi examines the VA scandal and explores the potentially dark implications of bonus and incentive programs for all businesses.

Forbes: Time to Break Business Tradition?

Tradition is safe, it’s easy, and it brought your business success in the first place. But the urge to uphold existing business methods can be detrimental to your company’s growth if you’re not mindful of changes in the industry.

For your company to pursue growth and innovation, you must be open to adopting new practices and be able to determine which methods are no longer valuable or need improvement.

In this Forbes article, Chris Cancialosi outlines how your company can break tradition and ultimately improve your bottom line.

Data + Culture = A New Approach for Safety

In my previous two posts (here and here), I talked about how the use of data enhances our ability to understand culture. In this post, I’d like to expand on that a bit further and provide some real world context.

gothamCulture is passionate about safety; in fact, we recently worked with several clients to address safety concerns within their organizations. There is evidence to suggest that workplace safety is not only essential to maintaining the health and wellbeing of employees but also can improve a business’s bottom line. For organizations with safety concerns, addressing these challenges often necessitates a change to the underlying culture.

In our work with clients, data often takes the form of text-based inputs from interviews, focus groups, and site observations. While text-based data provides a wealth of information, it can be challenging to extract the most important pieces. One widely used method is text mining, which can be used to identify major themes among the interviews. In the example text cloud above we used text mining to look at overall morale. A couple key words jump out such as “antagonistic”, “complacent”, “change”, and “unsafe”. This is supported by key ngrams such as “staff extremely difficult”, “tough change culture”, and “question unsafe bad”. These data points seem to suggest that while change is needed to improve overall safety there are underlying tensions within the organization that make it difficult to discuss and implement improved safety measures.

This data is useful in understanding broad issues and challenges in organizations; however, it does not show connections and correlations which are helpful in determining strategies best suited to address the issue. Correlations are a product of quantitative (numeric) data, to identify correlations we transform our text-based data into quantitative data. While there are a number of methods being pioneered, a simple method we have leveraged is using text clouds to identify themes and then determine which interviews, focus groups, and site observations include those themes. Interestingly, this method produces fairly reliable results.

The network diagram above shows a number of correlations that exist across the data. The size of the circle relates to the number of correlations the “theme” has, the size of the line relates to the strength of the correlation, and the color relates to different categories of themes (blue=training, green=morale/culture, yellow=safety). Here we get a better idea of the different dynamics within the organization. For instance, while there is a connection between training and safety, the elements connecting those two themes are a hierarchical culture and poor morale. In this case, it is not enough to update policies or develop new training opportunities, the organization must also address its hierarchical elements which seem to be linked to poor morale, inadequate communications, and a sense that the organization is uncaring.

Organizations are a lot more like ecosystems than they are machines. Addressing challenges (whether safety, mergers, or customer relations) requires a lot more than turning a wrench or drawing a schematic; it involves understanding relationships between the values, personalities, and perspectives that exist across the organization. Traditionally, most people have felt that data analysis is a little out of place when looking at culture, but, as we’ve shown, it is an effective tool that can save time and reveal compelling insights.

Could Your Culture be Killing Performance?

Successful operations, competitive drive, and groundbreaking innovation all depend on a positive and supportive company culture. While most executives have a clear vision for what their company should be like, they can’t steer the organization on their own. Developing a positive culture requires input and planning from every level of the company.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi explains the connections between your culture and your performance and gives strategies to fix your culture problems.

Training Isn’t Everything

I’ve worked in the OD field for long enough to know the true value of training. There are specific skills that must be demonstrated to succeed in any type of job, and more often than not employees need to be taught these skills. Sometimes they are technical in nature – think particular software training or “how to” sessions – and other times they are in the more nebulous realm of “professional development,” which includes leadership development. Although training can be invaluable, it is not the fix-all that it is sometimes mistaken to be, especially if not provided effectively. How do you provide the most valuable training possible? The checklist below can help:

Know if it’s a training issue – It is not unlikely for problems that occur within an organization to masquerade as training issues. It’s always easy to say “let’s give them training” and expect it to solve whatever issue is at hand, but sometimes there is more going on in a system than is acknowledged. In order to determine whether training is the right solution, a thorough needs assessment should be given. If training does turn out to be a necessity, the needs assessment will help to ensure the right skills are targeted.

Know when to walk away – As members of the consulting community, we have a responsibility to serve our clients to the best of our abilities, which means being honest about our findings even if the results are not ideal for us from a next-steps perspective (for example if a needs assessment yields that training isn’t the right solution). If you do not acknowledge the cultural realities that may be facing an organization, you could develop the best training in the world and still meet failure. If you sense that this is the case and you’re unable to help affect change at the system-wide level, you’re doing your client a disservice and should reconsider your value-add.

Know what you’re contending with – It is important to be holistic in your approach; be thoughtful about all that’s going on in the organization, what other initiatives a new training could potentially contend with, how people are held accountable, what people’s experiences have been with regard to training in the past, etc. Very often there is a lot that’s going on in an organizational that, if addressed, would solve the perceived “issue”. By being mindful in your assessment of the organization’s culture up front, you’ll be able to determine whether or not it will serve to support or block any new training initiatives that are rolled out.

Know what you’re impacting – While we know that not all training is effective, the only way that we know for sure if a given training initiative is having the intended impact is to measure results based on agreed-upon metrics laid out up front. By developing a robust measurement plan that holds the training accountable, you are much more likely to consider what design elements and content must be incorporated into the program to have the desired effect.

While I’d agree that training absolutely has its place in organizations, the system in which the training lives is paramount. In order for training to be the right solution, it is critically important that it be designed responsibility, and in concert with the organization’s existing realities.

Mining Text to Understand Your Culture Puzzle

It is estimated that 80% of data in the world exists in the form of documents, reviews, blog posts, emails, and articles. Unlike numeric data, text-based data is unstructured, making it more difficult to identify themes and trends across different media. However, in our work we found that text-based data conveys a number of attributes (such as values, beliefs, perceptions, needs, etc.), which cannot be expressed in traditional data sources. For organizations that want to understand their culture, text-based analysis is an often overlooked, but critical piece of the puzzle.

While traditional statistical methods are not as effective with text-based data, there are a number of methods to help us sift through this information. Furthermore, when we couple traditional and text-based analytical approaches, we have a bigger lens to understand our client’s organization.

To give an example, I used Glassdoor.com to understand employee attitudes at a large multinational airline. There were a total of 30 reviews, which were posted from 2008 to 2014. The reviews were from employees at 14 locations in 12 different countries. The reviews included numeric ratings of the overall organization, its culture, career opportunities, work-life balance, senior management, and compensation and benefits. In addition, the reviewers included a summary of the pros and cons of working at the organization.

Using text mining methods, we can sift through the unstructured data to understand overarching themes and attitudes. In the text cloud above, size corresponds to how frequently the word appeared across the reviews. Color corresponds to whether the word was positive (green) or negative (red). While this is one of the more basic approaches, a couple of key concepts emerge. We find words such as “flexible”, “friendly”, “security”, and “interesting” which may indicate that the airline has a friendly working environment and provides a certain degree of job security. On the other hand, there are other words such as “bureaucratic”, “cheap”, “worsening”, and “slow” which may indicate that there are some cumbersome processes within the organization.

This particular approach looks at words in isolation based on their frequency and sentiment; however, we can also look at clusters of words (ngrams) to clarify these themes. The most frequent word clusters include: “low salary”, “quality service”, “management good”, “learning opportunity”, and “great experience”. This may indicate that the overall management is received well, but the overall salary and compensation is low. This latter point might be why a number of reviewers indicated their experience was great but was more of a “learning opportunity,” indicating that they may have moved on to other opportunities. This text mining process saves us and our client’s time, provides an overview of the themes and attitudes, and point our culture overview toward key areas for further exploration.

On the other side of the spectrum, we can look at the scores and ratings to find patterns and themes. The map above shows ratings by location. Color corresponds to the airline’s overall rating, while the size of the dots corresponds to the employees’ attitudes toward the organization’s culture. One interesting pattern is how the ratings were higher in Eastern Europe and South Asia versus Germany, Switzerland, and New York. From one perspective this can be an important indicator of locations where issues might exist; however, for multinational companies it is also important to consider how values, attitudes, and assumptions about the work experience may change from country to country. Employees in Switzerland may have very different expectations than employees in Greece, Russia, or the Philippines. These are important factors to consider when bringing together different people (whether two offices down or two thousand miles away) to address common challenges.

Understanding culture is a lot like a puzzle. There are a lot of pieces. No one piece is exactly the same, and they all fit together in a unique way. Leveraging a variety of data types and data sources point leaders to key pieces that can make the picture come to life. In today’s competitive market, companies need to leverage the full range of tools at their disposal to orient their organizations for long-term success.