Being the Best at Both Worlds

Two potential customers in the same day – try to make sense of this:

Customer #1: “I don’t really care how much tuition you save people.  What do you save me?  How much cheaper are you compared to a freelancer?”

Customer #2: “Why did you wait this long to tell me about student debt?  That’s a terrific cause, and I would want to be a part of it if I knew that’s where you were going.”

Normally this would be a simply case of “different strokes for different folks; the profit-seeker wants to know about his bottom line, and the feel-gooder wants to hear about a double bottom line.  I can cater to both at any given time.

Or so I thought.  A few issues with offering a specialized pitch:

1) Oftentimes you are pitching to a diverse room with diverse interests.  Which value proposition do you focus on?

2) When customers relay the information back to their companies, they may not effective communicate the appropriate value proposition to that group of people.

3) Our online platform must somehow reflect both value propositions effectively.  The messages need to be integrated across our media platforms and outreach yet targeted to people who expect to see certain calculated impacts.

So what to do?  How does one go about personalizing the message but instilling a sense of cohesion in the brand and the social mission?  After speaking with some folks far more qualified than I on this topic, here are some good suggestions I received:

1) Have printed materials that clearly state both bottom lines.  That way you can distribute information without giving far more weight to one or the other.

2) Have separate media strategies for both student customers and company customers.  Students and higher education will likely want to hear far more about the social mission (because they are living it every day) and companies will want to hear about cost savings, work products and testing new talent. 

3) When speaking to a diverse crowd, come right out and identify that two types of impact exist, and that they are viewed with equal weight to my company.  “Of course every person in this room will be attracted to one value proposition over another, and that’s perfectly fine.”

I felt a good bit of anxiety when first confronted with this issue.  They say you either hook or fail to hook a consumer within the first minute, so hitting the right note with the right people is a concern.  These tips neutralize some of that risk by offering more information than less while still specializing the message to groups who operate with one bottom line (on either side).

How can you tailor your company’s message to the specialized needs of consumers?

Sources:

Measuring Social Value (Mulgan, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer ‘10)

Calculated Impact (Brest, Harvey, and Low, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2009)