WHAT'S GAFOGRAPHY?
One of the most important elements of marketing is understanding ‘audience’. Who are we talking to? What do they like? What do we want them to think, feel or do?
Luckily we have stacks of tools to go digging for customer gold. We’ve got demographics, psychographics, data analytics and a stack of two-letter-acronyms that end in X.
But in among the science, there’s one question that can get overlooked. ‘Will anyone actually care?’ We think this is important. So here’s a great new tool to bring customer care factor to the heart of your marketing dashboard. We call it GAFographics.
WHat’s GAFographics?
GAFographics is an easy way to better assess how much people will care. In case you’re wondering, GAF is an acronym - the first two words are “Give a…”.
While it’s a genuinely simple tool, we’ve wrapped it up in acronyms and fake math to make it seem smarter than it is. Here’s the algorithm:
How DOes THE MATH WORK?
To work out your GAFographic score, simply establish how much your thing matters to people, how easy it is to buy it or do it and how likely they are to get the fuzzies from their friends if they do. Here’s how.
First, establish your CQ (Care quotient)
Simply work out how much your product, service or general announcement is likely to matter in the daily lives of the people you’re talking to. The secret here is to imagine someone with a hundred different priorities and choose where your thing might sit on that list. Then divide your answer by three.
This gives you a CQ score. If it’s higher than 20, it may be useful to re-run the assessment while imagining that you don’t currently work for the people selling the thing you’re selling.
Next, assess your SQ (Simplicity quotient)
To do this, consider how easy you think you’ve made it for people to do the thing you’re asking them to do. Give yourself a score out of 10. Then remove a friction point for anything they have to do on the way. Friction points include website forms, phone calls, trips to the shops and any communication over 50 words.
This will give you an SQ score. If this score is negative, it’s useful to take another look at your CX, UX or both before inviting any customers to come to the party.
Finally, decide your PQ (Popularity quotient)
This is the easy bit. It talks to the fundamental human desire to feel accepted and liked. So the question here is what emotional difference your product, service or announcement will make to your customer. It’s a simple 1-3 rating based on the following:
1 – Nobody will notice or care.
2 – I’ll feel good about it.
3 – My friends might be jealous.
The PQ amplifier highlights the challenge in building brand in low visibility categories like telecommunications, energy and finance. The best you can get is a score of two. Fashion brands with fancy shoes or sexy mobile phones will often score a three on this scale.
HOW TO USE GAFOGRAPHY
The GAFographic algorithm is best employed as a diagnostic tool before committing any advertising spend. If you turn up a low score, it may be that people don’t really care about your thing or that you’ve made it kinda hard for them. In either case, this could impact the effectiveness of your advertising. If your score is less than one, your customer care factor is dangerously low and can be coded from a customer perspective as DILIGAF.
Remember, there is always value in wrapping your story in something that makes people feel good about themselves. This will amplify your GAF score, but without reasonable scores in the first two variables you may be applying makeup to a farm animal.
ENJOY YOUR GAFOGRAPHY
So that’s GAFography. It’s designed to be simple, helpful and insightful. If you’re not into math, you can easily apply the theory in a more subjective fashion with just two simple questions. Do we really think anyone will care about this? And did we genuinely make it easy for them? The secret, like always, is to ask and answer those questions while thinking like a human. But that’s easy too - because you are one.
That’s what I reckon, what do you think?
LIKING WHAT WE LIKE?
Get more stuff like this, monthly with Hunchmail.