Build Excerpts: Customer Journeys, an Activation Matrix, and Nest’s Marketing Investment

The Customer Journey List all the different ways people can discover the product or brand: advertising, word of mouth, social media, reviews, interviews, in-store displays, and launch events. The next planning step is to identify the channels through which people can encounter and learn about the product, such as brochures, our website, and packaging. Build a messaging activation matrix. When deciding what to put where, you need to know which parts of the story customers encounter at different points in their journey. This is the key to turning messaging into marketing. Now turn the facts people should know into advertisements, videos, and tweets. The creative team’s job is to be creative: distill the most elegant, compelling truths and tell your story brilliantly. But unchecked creativity can get you sued. Many small startups skip this step. They think they can exaggerate without anyone noticing. If you succeed, people will notice—especially class-action lawyers. Even the exposure of a harmless lie in your marketing will taint everything you do. You may lose customers’ trust immediately. Even if something is true, that does not mean you can simply say it. Gather as much data as possible to support every statement you make. --- The only way to master marketing is to immerse yourself in it: walk the customer journey yourself and experience every touchpoint. Everything presented should therefore have its relevant context. Know what happened before and what comes next. You need to understand the story being told, whom you are telling it to, and where that person is in the customer journey. An ad without a clear placement and destination will not make sense to customers. A webpage will not win approval if it does not know who its users are, what they need and want to accomplish, and where its calls to action will take them. Everything is connected, so we have to consider it all together. ---- This is not micromanagement. It is paying attention. We invested as much time and energy at the beginning of the customer journey as at the end. To people unaccustomed to this, it felt stressful and unjustified. But this is the work that needs doing. You want the words and images describing your product to be as good as the product itself. I wanted the entire experience to shine. I wanted the marketing team to hold itself to the same standards as engineering and manufacturing. I wanted that rigor to teach them to push themselves as hard as I pushed them, or harder. I knew marketing had to be one of our differentiators, something that could carry us beyond any other thermostat maker’s ambitions. That meant giving it time and attention—and, of course, money. Money matters. We were a small company with limited resources, but we chose to invest in marketing. We invested in making beautiful things because we knew the return could be enormous. We used photographs in thousands of places, each expensive and gorgeous. We used high-quality video wherever possible. The team selected the most powerful elements we could reuse for years and invested heavily to get them right. Ten years later, Google Nest still uses some of the photographs and assets we created before the company was founded. That is because marketing was part of the process from the start. Nobody ignored it or forgot about it. We knew it was useful, so we put it to work. This perspective and focus enabled something distinctive at Nest: while the product was being developed, marketing was also prototyping its narrative. The clearest expression was the “Why We Made It” page on nest.com. “Why we made it” connected clearly to “why people should buy it.” We had to make the product good, both for customers and for ourselves. Designing that page took weeks. As the product evolved, the page kept evolving. Marketing stayed involved to ensure that, as engineering and product management adjusted the product, we could still give a compelling answer to “why we made it.” This gave marketing a valuable voice in product development, because any major product change would force a change in the story. Marketers had to determine whether it would break the packaging, the website, or any of our product-narrative prototypes. If a problem arose, they needed to speak up, talk with product management and engineering, and determine whether marketing could still work and whether particular changes made sense. “Why We Made It” was only one part of the marketing-narrative prototype. It supplied the rational case for why everyone should buy a Nest smart thermostat: conventional thermostats waste energy, which is bad for both you and the planet. We also needed to prototype the emotional case. The creative team made a video and a “Living with Nest” webpage. We used them to celebrate the product’s beauty and simplicity, making it an object of desire—a piece of wall art that would make your home more beautiful and welcoming. Each part of the website highlighted a different part of the product story. That forced us to understand it in our bones, to feel and experience it ourselves, so we could communicate it as clearly and honestly as possible. Finding the best, most honest expression of a product or feature is difficult. That is why a whole team works on it. Product management can establish messaging, list the most important features, and state the problems. But finding the best way to tell customers the story is an art. It is both art and science. That is marketing. Of course, this does not mean we always got it right. How do you sell a thermostat—something people do not actively think about even after using it a million times? There was no successful model to copy. We did not know what would resonate with customers and what would not. Would people scoff at a thermostat that cost $250 and required them to install it themselves, or would they fall in love with it? So we tried many things and failed many times. I made countless mistakes. We launched expensive, purely brand-focused ads before people knew our product. We made webpages so information-dense that hardly anyone wanted to read them. Our imagined customers were not our actual buyers. They were diverse, with different needs and expectations. They would not spend half a second on copy we had labored over, yet would investigate things we had never anticipated. Making mistakes was how we improved and learned. Brand ads fed our vanity but did not drive sales. Unless a product is excellent and has been marketed for years, customers will not buy it for the brand alone. The website needed to be simple and welcoming, placing the product in the context of everyday life. Our support site needed to be easier to find through search, because people did not follow the path we had laid out for them. By accumulating lessons from each campaign, we gradually understood marketing better. I understood it better. The entire company became better at it. The messaging architecture and activation matrix turned a soft art into a hard science everyone could understand. When everyone understood marketing, its importance gained greater recognition.