From entrepreneur media, this is problem solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like the isosceles. It was like we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. Do you ever look at two things that seem like they're exactly the same? Like, I don't know. Two colors of paint that my wife has hung up and swatches on our wall and says to me,
which one do you like more? And I look at them and I'm like, but they're the same, but they're not the same. Because if you were to paint a whole room with them, the room would feel totally different depending on which one you picked. That kind of thing where maybe a small word choice is different, an idea is just slightly different. And at first you think, these are the same, these are the same things, but no, they're not.
Because when you scale them out, it turns out they can make a really big difference like this. Being customer first and then being people centric. Customer first and people centric or customer first and people first. However you want to put it, I mean, it kind of sounds like the same thing, right? Isn't a customer a person? But there's another way of looking at it. And this, by the way, is raw. So Jason, my name is Rob Matani and I am the head of marketing in the US for Alibaba.com.
And I met Rob over the summer in a ball places last Vegas because Alibaba had put on a customer conference out there and they had hired me to come speak at it. It was a great event. And Rob and I were talking afterwards and he mentioned this distinction that he sees between customer first and people first. And I asked him to expand upon it and eventually I said, wait, we just have to talk about this on the podcast because it's so interesting.
And to really appreciate it, let's back up. We'll get to it. But first, here's where raw is coming from. So I spent most of my career, Jason, in the automotive world. And I actually started prior to getting into automotive marketing. I went to school to be a designer. My thing was I had to design sneakers or cars and I stumbled into the world of marketing. And I think through my career, I've been really lucky in that I've grown in the world of marketing. I've understood more and more.
But a lot of my foundation is trying to understand people where they come from, how they react to things and then building around that. Is that the bridge, would you say, between your background and automotive and Alibaba, which does many things, but making and selling cars is not one of them. That's a good question. I think the bridge between almost any world can be understanding people, right? There's a measure of understanding customers and then there's a measure of understanding people.
And when you think about the psychology of how people react to things, how they do things, what makes them tick, then you can bridge almost any world together. So now you see where we're going with this, what people first really is, it's not just about serving customers. It's about understanding the humanity of those customers because that is how you really connect to them.
That's the conversation that raw and I had for problem solvers. He has so many great examples really made me stop and think all coming up after the break. I lost my job in 2008, right before my wedding actually, getting let go would turn out to be my first step toward passive income, a fluid and dynamic way of earning income while changing lives at the same time. I found that online businesses are the best way to do that. It completely changed my life.
My name is Pat Flynn. I created the smart passive income podcast back in 2010 for anyone who's ever felt even a little bit like I did when I got let go. People who want to create and sustain a passive income stream online so they can spend more time with the ones they love, achieve the lifestyle they desire and turn their passion into a thriving business.
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All right, we're back. I'm talking with Ramitani of Alibaba and to start I told raw this I said, look, I hear the phrase customer first or customer obsession a lot. Amazon, for example, always presents itself as being a customer first company. I remember talking to the president of Reebok who talked about the customer obsession that infuses his company.
And I've always thought that that's a pretty good way of thinking about the business that you're in of being obsessed with your customers. So what does it mean to use the word people instead? Well, you've painted a nice picture here, right? A lot of companies center themselves around being customer first and being a customer obsessed something that we also do at Alibaba group as a whole is incredibly important.
I think the marriage between being customer first and then being people centric is the distinction in my mind that makes it truly important. So what do I mean by that? Well, short, kind of a customer first strategy is is either marketing or building products or creating experiences that are built around your buyers or your customer specific needs. Then as you transition into a people for a strategy, you really try and understand the human experience.
And then you build elements of my products or elements into my communication that makes people feel understood and seen when you do that. That's where the magic happens. Can you give a concrete example of that because that's a it's a really wonderful distinction, but it also feels a little abstract, right? Like what you're drawing out here is the difference between a customer and a person.
The customer, but a customer is a limited understanding of a person. So what does it mean to think more about the person first and then the customer as one representation of that person. But I would start one step back from that and say, hey, let's define a few really simple examples of what I view as a customer first strategy from a customer first perspective. I want to make sure that my buyer feels like or my customer feels like as they're browsing our site.
They have what they need or what they expect from our company. And sometimes you go above and beyond that you offer protections. You mentioned a couple great retail partners that offer you fantastic protections in your buying journey, a 30 day money back guarantee a free 30 day trial of our product. Those are customer centric or customer first ways to approach things. But maybe I'll give some some real world examples. Let's try three examples of people first ways to approach things great.
I start with Apple. I think Apple really masters this specifically from a product design perspective. So just think about the lid of your laptop. And as you try to open the lid of most laptops, they are often made out of plastic. The hinges are not weighted properly. So you need to use two hands or unclip a little latch to open that laptop.
But Apple thinking people first is saying, Hey, people are carrying things are on the go. They're going between meetings. You're a creative. You're sketching something. You want to be able to open that laptop with one finger. And Apple matched master that with the little notch where the screen meets the keyboard, but also the waiting of that hinge.
It's just a beautiful people first understanding, right? And you're not you're not necessarily winning customers in the near term by doing something like that. But then the beauty you experience in having that with you every single day and then trying a different product.
You lose something in there. That's part of the people first example before you move on to the next. Can I just I have literally never thought about that little design feature. But of course, as you're saying it, I am in front of my MacBook Pro right now and I'm looking at it and I'm thinking about how I use it every day.
That you couldn't really build a marketing campaign around it. That can't be a customer first thing in that I don't I would seem ridiculous. In fact, if that was on a billboard, but it is a hidden don't even think about it kind of feature that makes the product better for me as a person. So it's a really great thing to zoom in on.
Yeah, and as you say that it's really important to know that whether you have a customer first or a people first strategy or you marry them together in a really magnificent way without talking to your customers.
You're not going to be able to build those customer first components and then without digging deeper into it Jason, who are you as a person what's going on in your daily life outside of everything you do for work. You're not going to understand those people first components that build the magic. You know, in being at alibaba.com out of any role I've had in the past any company I've worked for we actually spend the most amount of time talking face to face with our buyers.
We want to understand them as people and then build our products around that. So let me actually give a few more examples before I get to the practice that we put it in today at alibaba.com. Great. So let's think about the touch screens that feel natural to us today right Jason you and I have talked about we both have kids and the very interesting thing is that kids can naturally master a touch screen they watch us using it.
So for our generation as we got introduced for touch screens I don't think we realize this but there's a people first reason that we can use them so seamlessly. It's because we were taught how to use them if you think about the original iPod it had a physical moving click wheel. And then that click wheel turned into a touch wheel and then that touch wheel turned into more touch elements embedded into a screen or portions like non physical buttons.
And then we got touch screens and Apple does a really good job of just teaching us how to get to where the end state is we might envision the end state but we have to know that people aren't ready to make a jump from a physical click wheel all the way to a touch screen in a single generation of a product.
So even if you know where you're going you have to walk people there reminds me of a line that I use a lot when I speak on stage which is people don't like new things what they like are better versions of old things. So you have to start with the thing that they're comfortable familiar with and then present them with something that feels like basically the same thing but a better version of it.
And instead of instead of replacing everything that they that they know and it's true I hadn't really again hadn't thought about this until you bring it up but I remember those intermediary steps and those intermediary steps felt totally natural to me at the time now they seem absurd and antiquated but we needed them.
And I suppose that was because the team there understood fundamentally what kind of what kind of creatures they were selling to and they were selling to human beings who have particular expectations and ways of adopting new behaviors. Yeah, yeah, you're spot on now I have another fun one in mind. Yeah, we both have kids.
And I've watched my son I have a 20 month old son I've watched my son interact with various objects very clumsily and I read an interesting design report that initially when toothbrushes were designed for children they were just shrunken versions of adult toothbrushes what what you picture in your mind as a typical toothbrush skin handle small head children.
Children's toothbrushes they just shrunk them down and gave them to kids but kids don't have that dexterity to be able to hold and utilize such a skinny small object. Yeah, so there's a design firm called ideal and they were hired to develop a toothbrush that fit for kids and they took that human understanding that people first understanding and said kids aren't prepared for this they're making messes they don't have the dexterity we need a wider handle.
A slightly larger head bright colors so they they're seeing the fun and are attracted to it and now you have the model for what all kids toothbrushes look like and feel like today there's texture in the grip there's the wide handle the larger head and that came from a people first understanding it's not just saying this works for adult people it's understanding the kids the smaller people and seeing how they interact with the world to develop a product.
And yet as you will learn as your 20 month old grows up shocking number of years will go by before your kid will just brush their damn teeth you have to every morning and every night doesn't matter how good the toothbrushes though I agree it's a lot better than what you're originally describing but.
This is interesting because the things that you're highlighting there they're they all work because they're intuitive to the user even though they weren't intuitive at the point of creation and I bet that as people listening to this they might think but what is the opposite of that like what's the customer first version of those examples that don't necessarily work is it right is it that when you lock yourself into the idea of thinking of people as a customer then.
What you end up doing is trying to think well how do I just sell as many of the thing that I made to them as possible instead of stepping back and saying what's the version of this that people already want like what's the what's the opposite of the stuff that you're presenting yeah it's a hard question but I think if we if we distill it down to like who failed at it without calling anybody out sure right we don't want to talk negatively about anybody but who who failed at it let's just use an example like.
I actually have a really good one for my everyday life a large transportation company used to have a bus that served my town and slowly but surely they reduce the number of routes that they had and there was little to no communication with people about it and then a couple months go by they remove all service from my town and people are left wondering like how am I.
I supposed to get into New York City to do my job now and for context I live really close to New York City so transportation from suburbs into Manhattan really really important right now for context a lot of people live in New Jersey specifically because there's some form of regular transportation into the city and that's where they work and then they go and enjoy the more space and higher property taxes in New Jersey yeah.
Exactly yeah the exact life that I enjoyed today so to me that's a failure to customers and to people right it's it's not communicating at all we have no understanding about why did this bus service leave something that some people relied upon so then how do you understand the failure in that well new bus service enters our community and they start communicating with the city.
So I started communicating with us via email in a way that I have seen almost no company do in the past and this is a very key example of people first first customer first on a weekly basis I would get an email from this bus company and they would say hey we are running this route it is an exact replica of the route of the bus company that left your area previously.
We are seeing this much ridership so our buses are X percent filled and we are losing this much money on every single route that we run because of the cost of gasoline cost driver costs and bus rentals great now I know exactly what's happening the next paragraph tells me hey we need this many more riders to break even at break even point we feel comfortable continuing to service you if you're loyalty continues we think we can turn it up.
In two quarters that is a people first way I want to be spoken to like one I'm an adult I don't need you to sugar code things I don't need you to tell me that you're making something up I don't want to feel like you're blind sighting me with fake information or something like that. So I think a really pointed example of how do you take another company's failure and flip it into your success by just understanding how people want to be communicated to.
So what's so interesting about that example is the great one is that both of these companies the one that left in the one that came in its place about these companies want customers they are oriented around customers people don't take the bus then there's no business.
The decision that seemed to be made from the first company we can only be left to assume because we don't know was that they looked around they said you know what our customers just aren't here I guess we'll go where our customers are. And presumably they didn't go out of business they just went somewhere else they went to towns that had more ridership this new company comes in with a different approach and that approach is.
Well you know I don't see customers but what I do see is a lot of people and maybe those people want to be customers but they don't know they don't know the situation they don't know what's going on and they like you said want to be spoken to like adults and so this new company just kind of starts a conversation with the people that they see and that conversation with people i'm going to guess created more customers exactly yeah that's exactly what happened and now their ridership is at.
A minimum of 100% capacity on on all their buses well minimum of 100% how can it be higher than that well yeah there's waiting lists that they have in place and they explain to us why so yeah they want they want the people for strategy that's incredible you said earlier in the conversation so you know you laid out a couple examples which I love you said earlier in the conversation that as you.
I think people first that you've had more interactions with customers than you have had previous roles you guys are always talking to people what comes out of that what's that process like for you so we make sure that we do physical events and then we do a lot of online communication with our customers now primarily through those physical events meaning we are present at a variety of offline trade shows or we host our own events where Jason you and I met yep we.
We spend a lot of time just going directly to those people introducing ourselves saying hey we're representative for all about calm we would love to know more about your business we start there it's always about what do you do how have we been valuable to you and how can we be more valuable to you and through those types of conversations you really start to understand there's some deficiencies that we can fit.
Or there's a better way to approach a certain tool and I actually have a really cool example for you with a very specific tool that we have that without customer conversation we wouldn't have been able to evolve it to where it sits today cool yeah what's that so that tool it's called RFQ it's request for quotation and if I take a step back from there you know our entire business is built around connecting buyers or small business.
Owners from around the world with the world's largest collection of global suppliers both the buyers and the suppliers are using our platform simultaneously they both want to reach other so there's a lot of mutual benefit.
However you go to a diner and you realize that you're overwhelmed by too many choices and the same thing happens the larger a company scale the more choice you offer consumers the more overwhelmed they can become yeah we quickly realized now customer first we quickly realized for our customers we needed to correct that and we introduced this tool called request for
quotation and essentially it boils down to we allow you to reach out to many of our suppliers at once with a singular set of requirements on what do you want to create what product you want to build allow multiple suppliers that fit that expertise to come back to you with that quotation now we iterate on that tool all the time and in my view very customer first way to do things.
What I mean by that we've introduced predictive sentence completion within that tool and that tool requires you to type in your product requirements every detail and spec that you expect out of it the because of our expertise in the industry we can predictably complete the sentences that you're filling in so you can just tell me I want to create a rolling suitcase with a leather handle and now Jason you don't have to type in all the detailed specs the size the materials.
The thickness shipping time we're going to predictably complete all of that for you interesting a couple human components of that that we quickly realized and one of the current sort of deficiencies with some AI tools is that it takes the human element out of creation so if you look at here's a little nested loop.
If you think about the Ikea effect I don't know have you ever heard of the Ikea effect I have but I can't I can't remember you're going to have to fill it in for me for me the Ikea effect is that I am reminded and do every time about how much I hate assembling things myself that's my Ikea effect but what is it.
And you have the I guess the opposite impression of what psychologists determined from Ikea products and similarly Lego but in short the effect is that the value of self made products is increased when you have to build it yourself.
Oh yeah that's right right which by the way you know this about the baking mix industry that they discovered decades earlier you know you buy a you buy a cake and you buy a cake you buy a cake mix and you take it home and it's a mix and it's basically a bunch of powder and a bag and you put it in a bowl and you got to add water and an egg and some other stuff and you whip and now you got a cake so they can make the egg baked into the powder is you don't need to add the fresh egg but they can make the egg.
Fresh egg but they found that people value to the cake more if they added the fresh egg themselves because it seemed like a more homemade thing and so basically making the thing a little more complicated to make and people actually valued it more so yes it is possible that I am just the outlier here but yeah that's really interesting so sorry continue.
Yeah I mean that's it that's the Ikea effect why the DIY industry is so great and yet to your point why should I buy refrigerated pre shaped cookie dough that's unbaked when I could just buy the ready made cookie but there's something about buying that it makes me happier yeah yeah and that's the the human element that we kind of latched on to with our RFQ tool as people are going in and we're auto populating these fields.
Well dammit they want that control back and they want to be able to edit portions of it so we allowed that but then we want to step further and we realize that as these people are creating these requests for quotations that go out to suppliers there's a bit of a difficulty that they have with the image generation so what did we do we actually enabled the ability to predictively create the image that they want to create based off of the same thing.
So we want to create based off of all of their inputs and this again comes back to right Jason we talk to our buyers we want to understand what they need and then we want to develop our tool based off of that right because ultimately your buyers are not people who it's like but they're not our machines that know that they're not like human machines who know how to develop product in a very technical specific way they're like humans who have an idea for a thing that they want to get made and those are those are somewhat different things I have certainly
I'm not in any kind of product development but I can think of for example times where I wanted to advertise something that I made a book or a podcast or something and I would go to some platform and it would require me to create this like hyper specific thing with these different pixels and this level of size and and I and I was so annoyed because I'm a person who just made a thing and I want to market it well I don't know how to make all this what I really want is for you to just make it for you to just make it for me.
And so that's the difference between being a customer customer is a person who wants to pay for this service I want to market my thing a buyer wants to make the suitcase versus a person who is just like a person who wants to do a thing and they want to use your tool to do that thing and any friction that you can reduce for the human being to accomplish what is functionally the human thing of creating a building bringing something into the world any friction that you can reduce gives them human power.
Human power back exactly we all love the element of human power and control so yeah just jumping off your example right if you want to create a book you can input some information we can generate the image of what I could look like but now you want to go in and say I don't like the binding I don't like the coding that you have on the paper or I don't like the colors that you've used well I'm going to give you that element of control to go in and make those subtle tweaks and I'm going to make that a little bit more.
And then I'll regenerate it for you and you are you are drawing these insights and iterating on the product through sounds like a whole bunch of means but I'd love for you to just lay that out again because you know I mean what you're describing here is the product of what sounds like very good audience insights research which is should be court any any business and so how are you doing that some of it's going to be anecdotal right some of it's going to be at these events that you that you host I assume some of it is going to be a little bit more.
You host I assume some of it's going to be more structured you're probably surveying people but take me into that a little bit how you're how you're getting into the minds and needs of your users is a great question and it it's the combination of to your point a whole bunch of inputs.
Now what I think makes a fantastic customer first strategy is leveraging all of that data if enough data comes back to you from multiple different sources that points to a certain need and you solve that you're bang on customer first what I think differentiates the people first approach is understanding the psychological elements the things that we don't get if I use a marketing example.
A marketer loves these demographics and putting people into these neat little boxes will guess what i'm a marketer and I could tell you for certain none of us fit into these neat little boxes as much as a marketer or a platform wants to put me in the same cluster as all other 18 to 34's might you I'm outside of that cluster but I wish I was in it.
I'm gone long gone we actually fit in tribes or you know I don't know a better word to use but we fit in groups that are more aligned to our philosophies and our interests that's the right way to approach these things so what do I do with that information I do my best to enter those areas whether it's having what's that conversations in specific groups that are created around in my world e-commerce.
But in any other world there could be conversations happening around the automotive world or fandom for like Comic Con and things like that tapping into those worlds and understanding what's happening already what's happening in forums what's happening on twitch this is where you're going to find those human insights because you're going to repeat the here the same thing and I think another fantastic source of inspiration is listen to what a stand up comedian has to say there's so many human insights and true.
They get brought in that you can easily leverage them to build your products around that's I've never heard anybody say that have you have you learned something from a stand up comedian that you've used in work not that I've used myself but let's let's pick a fun one.
Sure. I heard a stand up bit where and I'm not going to do it justice so nobody's going to laugh but I heard a stand up bit where somebody talked about going to the dentist office and when you're there they give you that tiny cup filled with its either water or mouthwash and between them going crazy on your mouth you gargle and as you go to spit it out into that tiny sink that they have there's always that little bit of like drool or saliva that's stuck to your lip.
Why has nobody solved that it's in the it's a stand up comedy truth we haven't solved it yet but that's a human problem that's a great point this is a song and I'm going to lay in this plane in just a second but I'm going to follow you down the comedy rabbit hole for just one more second which is which is that the the very premise of comedy is really pointing out something that everyone noticed but people aren't talking about that that's often what makes
something go viral on social media too I think right like it's one of my favorite things that I saw on tiktok which I at first I thought it was like a very clever person and then I realized it's just some meme and like a lot of people have done their own version of it but it was which is like everything on social media but it was it was a it was a video of a woman at an airport
who just kind of like walks up to her gate looks at it nods and then walks away and the caption is something like me making sure my gate exists before I go get food and I thought it was really funny because I've done that a million times why do we do that we just walked over to the gate just for why to realize that it exists before you go get food why do we do that and then
nothing is you know you can just see this it's like not even stand up comedians but also it's just the things that fly around on social media is something I sent to a friend recently because we do this was a is just some tweet that somebody had which says I like to have two conversations going with the same friend at the same time one on Instagram and one over text and they must be kept separate.
It's great right because it's like yeah I do do that why do I do that and and you know probably probably somewhere in there there's a product is a good product probably of both of those things and the starting point is somebody was successfully funny because they pointed out an action that we all take that we don't think about so I
that's a great human insight absolutely yeah and it's funny you bring those up because I also do that same thing and this is where as you're scrolling through say you're a marketer or a product developer or you're a storyteller at a publication you're looking for those insights to build off of so let's say you're a major
airline and you want to advertise well hey Jason you just give us a great insight about what people do at the airport and I would feel much more seen and heard and I get a little
chuckle out of it if I saw somebody do that and advertising yeah totally. This has been so great as a final way of thinking about this imagine someone's been listening to this and they've started to wonder to themselves well is my approach customer first or people first like I'm I tilting enough towards people what would you give them as just maybe a
starting point so they think about something to evaluate something to explore to shift themselves more towards the people they serve yeah I think at the end of the day when you use that people first approach you're opening that door for better collaboration and better relationship with your end
consumer whoever that may be what you want to do is take a step back and try and understand where are they what communities are they running in what groups are they interested in and embed yourself in that from there you'll start to see things really quickly and I think Jason you
point to them out so nicely because as you're scrolling through social media or you're scrolling through a private group somebody's going to share a comment or a meaning or a link to something that you feel like you totally relate to and as soon as that feels like a
Duh or like hyper relatable or funny moment to you you're probably on to something so chase that path down and then find a way to to incorporate it a people first strategy can manifest across a bunch of different things we talked a bit about product design we also talked about including it in digital tools but there's a whole world of including it in marketing messaging and advertising so consumers or buyers feel like they're
they're being heard they can relate better to that message so think about it through the line and find inspiration in places where your buyers or customers run rather so great thanks so much thank you Jason out of blast and that's our episode I would love to hear what you
think and maybe even about a problem that you solved you can find me at my website Jason Fyfer dot com J.A S.O.N F.E.I F.E.R dot com also I have some more useful stuff for you I write a newsletter about how to future proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic I would
love for you to sign up it is at Jason Fyfer dot bulletin dot com also check out my other podcast it's called build for tomorrow in each episode I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think problem solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode thanks to deepest shop for production my name is Jason Fyfer see you next week.