B2BMX2018

A brand transformation perspective Beyond the Pale Searching for strategically actionable insight 2 Picture a Viking. Seriously. Take your mind back to the dark ages of Northern Europe to, say, around 1000 AD. Imagine the Viking with all the vivid detail you can muster. Have you got that image solidly formed in your mind? Now, let's guess: did you picture a rugged, adult-male warrior? Was there a sword or spear or shield or helmet involved? Of course, you might have pictured an elderly woman or a young mother. You might have pictured a baby or a pre-teen. You might even have pictured a dairy farmer, a fisherman, a weaver or a merchant. But you probably didn't. What you've just revealed to yourself is what cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls a "prototype" effect. 1 Certainly, there were elderly women, infants, young mothers, pre-teens, dairy farmers etc. in Viking societies. But in the category we know as "Vikings," there is an idealized cognitive model or "prototype" that seems to us most representative of the category "Viking." 2 You might be asking yourself at this point, "What's this got to do with my business?" Well, the clear indication of contemporary cognitive science is that this phenomenon is not in any way restricted to the way we view Vikings. This cognitive process of categories and idealized cognitive models is apparently at work constantly, setting the context for our reasoning, our decisions and our actions. So, if "Viking" is a category with prototype effects, it follows logically that so is "customer," as is "customer segment." And that means the following: Everyday, in corporations all around the world, people are using idealized cognitive models to represent their customers to themselves and their colleagues. So how do you suppose this might affect decisions around branding? Around customer experience design? Around innovation? These questions should prompt business leaders to reflect on how customer knowledge is currently created, structured and shared. One outcome might be an evolution of methodology for strategic customer segmentation, something we'll address in a moment. But for now, let's look at one often-overlooked issue that might cause worry among thoughtful executives in market-leading firms. Shadow segments A new window on the innovator's dilemma As our thought experiment hints (and as cognitive scientists have gone to some lengths to verify), categories are not merely an outcome of perception or an unmediated response to an objective "reality." Rather, they are artifacts of imagination and culture that profoundly shape what we think about reality. From a strategic standpoint, we should suspect that if a particular prototype for "customer" is a strong exemplar of the category in our minds, then it is also casting a shadow, obscuring what cognition manages as weaker exemplars of the category. Those weaker exemplars—the dairy-farming female Viking, let's say—are hidden in the shadows of prototype effects. They are "shadow segments." 1 Lakoff's work on categories contradicts traditional notions of scientific classification: "People have many ways of making sense of things—and taxonomies of all sorts abound. Yet the idea that there is a single right taxonomy of natural things is remarkably persistent." (Lakoff, G. (2008-08-08). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (p. 119). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.) We observe that naïve practitioners and users of customer segmentation have assumed this traditional notion of classification and this unquestioned assumption is a root cause of segmentations that fail to support competitive differentiation. 2 Given the obvious hazards of being a seafaring warrior, objectively speaking a Viking of the dark ages would more likely have been a woman than a man. So our prototype is, statistically speaking, in the minority. But this prototype casts a shadow that obscures the fact. Is it any wonder business case projections are mostly wrong?

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