Why Is This Important?   Marketers play a central role in the success of modern companies. They're tasked with multiple business priorities including improving brand reputation, increasing customer loyalty, generating demand, driving revenue, and much more. And the scope of responsibilities marketers face has only expanded as organizations attempt to keep up with the ever‐evolving needs of the customer.

This leaves marketers little time to dig deep into user testing and human insight, which can lead to tone‐deaf campaigns, ads that fall flat, and messaging that doesn't speak to potential customers. We can't emphasize this enough: Marketers who perform user tests to deeply understand customer needs, pain points, and perspectives have a much better chance of creating messaging and positioning that resonates, promoting the messages and offers using channels that your customers use, and doing it in a compelling way that quickly converts prospects into customers.

Case Study: Thomas Cook Group   The Thomas Cook Group has been a household name in Europe for nearly 200 years, trusted across the continent for arranging and booking holiday travel. When the company was forced to liquidate in September 2019, it sent shockwaves through the entire travel industry and many people assumed it would never return.

Within weeks, a small group of spirited former colleagues had developed a business plan, secured investment from a major Chinese leisure groups, and set to work building a new digital‐only Thomas Cook that was worthy of the original name. COVID‐19 swept across the world as this plan was being enacted, but a determined leadership knew that Thomas Cook would be a trusted name once the damage caused by COVID‐19 had eased. And by September of 2020, the new Thomas Cook website was live and open to customers both new and old.

Jo Migom, chief digital and marketing officer for Thomas Cook, says that human insight was instrumental to the relaunch. Even shortly after the liquidation, she and her team quickly discovered that customer sentiment was overwhelmingly positive. The nostalgia and emotional connections people had with the brand were strong and pervasive, since so many had fond memories of envisioning and booking wonderful vacations with Thomas Cook.

“We kept monitoring customer sentiment which was imperative because the brand had been affected,” she explains. “That is something we absolutely acknowledged. But when speaking to customers about it, we could feel that there was such passion for this brand as well as great sadness that it was no longer. That was a key driver for us to keep our motivation high as we began to bring it back.”

Once the frameworks were in place, Migom and her team ran user tests on the website without telling people it was Thomas Cook. When people were finally told they were reviewing the proposed new site for the travel company, they were overjoyed to learn they'd be able to plan vacations through this trusted brand again. In fact, the team shared these reactions with executives, and those authentic, emotional reactions helped them gain a higher level of support for launching the digital experience. As Jo describes the power of having executives see customer emotions firsthand, she says, “It's about winning hearts and minds, not just minds.”

Now Thomas Cook is a fully digital brand and continues to gather customer input from multiple places to create a holistic view of the customer. Through big data and human insight, the company continually tracks customer needs and incorporates their suggestions. Thomas Cook measures customer satisfaction before booking, after booking, and after travel, and that information is incorporated into every team member's objectives. This effort to understand customers continually and intimately is paying off: Migom reports that customer satisfaction ratings are four times those of the old business and the website now ranks among the best of its peers on Trustpilot.

Why Is This Important?   Taglines, advertising copy, scripts, and just about any verbiage you plan to use to describe your company or offering will influence whether or not people can find you in a noisy marketplace and see immediate value. How you express your mission, describe your offerings, and speak about your company absolutely must line up with how people outside the company think and talk about those things. Otherwise, you won't reach them or win them over.

Few marketing teams have the time or money to get feedback on every piece of copy, so they often just hope their messages will resonate with customers. Instead of taking shots in the dark, we recommend user testing high‐level messaging and positioning before creating any deliverables. This allows you to capture compelling customer reactions, which you can share within your organization to explain decisions, educate people, and settle disputes.

Word choice is especially critical if your company has a global footprint or if you're hoping to enter new markets in different locales. A word or phrase that has one meaning in Dallas may mean something entirely different in Prague. Even within your own country and culture, you may find that some colloquialisms or single words vary in meaning. Vocabulary is cultural, and most places are a hodgepodge of cultures, so user testing your copy and headlines before releasing them will help you nip miscommunication in the bud.

Case Study: Media and Entertainment Company   A US‐based media & entertainment company was introducing a new feature, and the internal teams weren't sure what to name it. Some teams wanted the name to be aligned to the brand, and others wanted it to be a more recognizable term. To understand what would work best for customers, the team put the two options in front of their subscribers for their reactions.

The team learned that the branded term was considered “cute,” but people didn't immediately understand what it meant or why it was relevant to them. However, the more recognizable term was quickly and easily understood by subscribers. The team moved forward with the more recognizable term as the new feature name. Human insight not only solved an internal debate, but it also led to a better customer experience.

Why Is This Important?   Launching compelling creative content and campaigns that build excitement and demand is a part of the job of a marketing team. This can take the form of landing pages, print ads, billboards, audio commercials, TV and OTT commercials, social media and email campaigns, and more. Gathering human insight will help you vet your ads and campaigns to ensure they will captivate instead of confuse or alienate potential buyers.

To give you a sense of the potential impact of poor creative content in the form of package design, consider this: Tropicana invested $35 million to change the packaging of their orange juice back in 2009. Within two months of releasing the new packaging, their sales dropped by 20 percent and they lost significant market share. The failed package redesign cost them over $50 million. Imagine if they could have vetted this design with customers before launch? Perhaps they would have avoided this costly misstep.³

It can be challenging to receive honest feedback on a campaign you've crafted over many months and realize you need to make substantial changes, but listening to your customers pays off. They know how they want to be spoken to, they know what resonates and what irritates, and quite often they provide perspective that will make your ads and billboards appeal to thousands of people just like them.

Case Study: UserTesting   We do this ourselves inside of UserTesting. We had designed a series of commercials around the concept of unexpected ways that consumers use the products they buy, and it included a scene showing someone using a Bluetooth speaker in the shower. Nothing shocking was shown, but we still wondered if the implication of nudity might concern viewers. So we gathered feedback to ensure we had a relevant concept that resonated and communicated our message, while also delighting our target audience and elevating our brand appeal.

Human insight gleaned from user testing helped inform everything from concepts to scripts. And since the feedback came quickly in the form of videos of people watching the ad and reacting to it, we could give thoughtful direction to our ad agency in a timely manner. Incorporating feedback into these new commercials led to increased confidence, 10,000 new site visitors over five months, and a six‐times higher conversion rate for clicks to our site (0.31 percent vs avg 0.05 percent.)

Why Is This Important?   You'll always have creative and innovative people inside the company walls contributing a steady stream of ideas, but if you don't ask for outside input, your offerings may not be optimal. Pull in the customer perspective when you are vetting a few ideas or concepts to make sure you go down the right path.

Additionally, comparing your own offerings to your competitors' offerings allows you to see where you diverge, where you beat them out, and where they outperform you. And simply user testing your competitors' products, services, websites, ads, and other parts of their business to gauge customer opinions can give you a sense of your place in the market and ideas around where you can improve.

The learnings you get from comparing potential solutions and exploring competitive offerings is priceless both for improving existing offerings and going to market with the best and highest performing new option.

Case Study: CaringBridge   CaringBridge, a global, nonprofit social network dedicated to helping family and friends communicate with and support loved ones during a health journey, wanted to launch a major ad campaign. In order to ensure the campaign resonated with people, CaringBridge user tested multiple options and iterations of the campaign approach and messaging, gathering feedback that helped further refine the positioning.

Since CaringBridge was able to pre‐screen a variety of ad iterations before the official release, CaringBridge was confident that the final product would resonate with users. The ability to test ads for emotional impact and iterate messaging before the final ads were released contributed to a strong campaign.

Why Is This Important?   Here's a marketer's worst nightmare: You've gotten a user to the point where they're interested enough in your company to offer up their contact information. They're on the brink of signing up to get emails or committing to hearing from you regularly, but they can't muddle their way through the registration process. Or the sign‐up form kicks them out on the second page. One confusing set of directions or glitchy interface, and your chance to capture them vanishes.

This is an aspect of marketing that has nothing to do with messaging or positioning, but still contributes to your overall success. It's a part of the customer journey where ease and comprehension rule all. No money is changing hands at these key conversion points, but if the user can't join your email list quickly and easily or download that whitepaper in an instant, they never will. You've got their attention, but these people are still deciding if they want to do business with you. Remove the friction points so they'll get to “yes” quicker.

Many marketers run A/B tests, but the problems we're discussing in this section should be fixed before these optimization tests begin. We're looking at glaring errors and deal‐breaking issues that turn warm prospects cold in a few frustrating clicks.

Case Study: T. Rowe Price   We worked with investment management firm T. Rowe Price on a thorny question about site visitors. They'd redesigned their online application process to be more streamlined, but after launch they saw that 37 percent of people who initiated the process of opening an account dropped off on the very first page.

The team was baffled since they'd done loads of prototype testing to make sure that first page was clean and hiccup‐free. They knew that when it comes to forms, people balk at being asked for any information that seems arbitrary, so they slimmed down the initial input to five form fields. That's about as slim as it gets. So why would applicants abandon the process?

Based on the high abandonment rate, the T. Rowe Price team assumed the page was still too complex and daunting, and that they'd have to simplify it even more. But when T. Rowe Price gathered input from actual people, the team discovered it wasn't a simplicity issue at all. Just the opposite, in fact. People wanted to see more information about the account and product before they felt comfortable offering any information about themselves. So the firm added descriptive detail and saw the dropoff rate shrink significantly.