7: How to Become (and Stay) Relevant
Relevance is often considered in the content of marketing messages - and too often considered only in that regard, as if using the right words will change people's minds about whether your firm is relevant to their interests. On rare occasions, they are right: a customer finds their product extremely relevant, but merely was not aware of its existence. In other instances, it is not right, and advertising cannot fix problems such as outdated or overpriced merchandise.
Becoming relevant has to do with having something of genuine value to offer to another person - whether you are offering them a way to achieve something that was not possible before, or is merely easier than the method they currently use to achieve it. You can determine whether your product is relevant merely by monitoring their conversations about it (in social media) or if your product is not yet on the market, ask people who are like those you wish to purchase it for their opinion about it.
Many obstacles to becoming relevant are internal - the firm does not see the need to make its products relevant because it feels confident that they already are. Or they are clinging to relevance that was true in the past, before things changed, and it was lost. Or they think they understand what ought to be relevant to the customer, without really knowing the customer. Or the delude themselves into thinking that the customer should consider their product relevant. Or they assume the customer will find them.
Market research can be helpful, but is not always accurate. She mentions the research done by accompany to determine why its tools were not of interest to craftsmen, and who got the response "I just don't like it" from customers who didn't know, couldn't articulate, or didn't want to admit the reason.
Look at the Data
Coville suggests one of the most significant problems about business decisions is that they simply do not pay attention to the data. People can be very emphatic about "knowing" the things they assume to be true without ever having done any valid research into the problems. She presents a few surprising statistics from research studies that are contrary to popular conceptions as proof that what we think we know simply isn't so, and doing research is the only way to get an accurate picture.
(EN: This is rather more serious than she thinks, as few people seem to want to do their homework and some have even stubbornly clung to their assumptions in the face of evidence to the contrary. This can be very difficult to overcome.)
The Goals of Relevance
Ideally, an initiative should begin and end with the customer: to research the needs and interests of the customer in an objective manner, determine what is wanted, and then find a way to provide it to them. This occurs when a company is looking to develop a new product, or is open to making significant modifications
However, this is seldom the case, and marketers are often seeking to find a market for which a product can be declared relevant, when the product is existing and the firm is unwilling to make significant changes. That is also a valid goal for relevance - though instead of changing the product to suit a desired market, you're finding a market who will desire the product in its present form.
Other "goals" have little to do with relevance. In fact, when a firm attempts to deceive a customer into regarding the product as being relevant in a way that it is not, this is where persuasion turns into manipulation - and in the present age, that is untenable (the first customer to discover the deception will call it to the attention of the entire world via the internet).