The Case of the Misunderstood MarTech - Concept of “Power Users”
There was once a bakery who was trying to get better at creating more pastries for their increasing customer base at a more efficient manner, including pastries on demand and that can accommodate different dietary preferences. They had a head baker who is also the owner of the bakery, 2 baking assistants, a cashier, 2 servers and 1 marketing person who also oversees pop-ups at designated customer events.
One day, a baking supplier introduced them to this state of the art baking oven that seemed to be everything they have ever wanted; customized settings allowing for tailored dietary needs, self regulating temperature control to avoid burnt pastries, pre-set recipe function so they can just choose any setting easily, pop in the ingredients and get their key pastries all done without having to keep referencing the recipe list each time they bake.
The supplier said the best part of this new oven is that anyone can be a baker and everyone should learn to be a baker using this oven. However, the training comes at an additional cost though they will be accredited as professional xx oven practitioner after that, which apparently is a very prominent accolade to have in the industry.
The head baker was over the moon at this prospect that she can get everyone to chip in and bake even more pastries in a shorter time that way since they can just use the preset functions moving forward. She insisted that everyone needs to be trained, pass the test and get certified, else they will get penalized in their performance review.
However, many of them soon realized that it wasn’t that easy to be certified as it does require some baking knowledge, experience and even appreciation. This resulted in a few of them having to take up certain baking modules that were added as part of the entire “package” sold to the baker by the vendor. That’s not all, if they fail the test, they need to pay and retake the test again. The entire training, test preparation and certification took each of them 4 to 6 months at varying speed, depending on their appetite and aptitude to really learn all the modules and be able to pass the test.
During this time, things started to fall into pieces.
The head baker managed to pass the certification herself. So did her baking assistants. The cashier, servers and marketing person however struggled to cope while trying to do their current jobs as efficiently as possible.
As the baking assistants became very good with using the oven to churn out pastries, they also ran out of ingredients faster than usual but as they were so obsessed with using this new technology, they then asked the head baker to help with getting the ingredients faster so they can be loaded into the oven. Initially the head baker thought why not but soon she realizes it’s not practical as she, herself can also use the oven and she wants to be the chief designer to design new baking recipes to fully maximize the oven. Thus, she then delegated this task to the cashier, servers and marketing person to help instead, adding to their level of stress in trying to cope with yet another additional ask.
Eventually, it led to chaos as everyone was in the kitchen trying to prepare ingredients, use the oven and essentially be a baker, which was the vision sold by the supplier; no one was serving, taking orders, getting payment or promoting the bakery. Customers started complaining about this lack of attention as queues started forming not for pastries to be ready as they were all piling up in the kitchen but for them to be ready, packaged, displayed, served and to even make payment. Some of the bakes also became quite inconsistent in taste as it depended on the non bakers to prepare the original ingredient list when the assistant bakers were too held up baking. This led to bad reviews of the bakery for its service, poor maintenance of the shop front and inconsistent quality.
Yet, the head baker was still trying to recover the cost of investment on the oven and training modules as well as test modules to be able to hire more people to help. Worse, business became impacted and sales were dipping, which then led to unconsumed ingredients and pastries going bad. Frustrated, the bakery owner blamed the oven and decided to sell it; the supplier agreed but persuaded her to go for another newer model that has an added function of doing ingredient quantity forecasting to solve her problems instead. She was tempted yet again as she thought that was the cause of her problems.
This is not a piece about ovens, the baking industry or even pastries. It essentially is an observation I made while helping companies to review their MarTech stacks and/or implement their MarTech adoption process.
Just as not everyone is a Baker and should be a Baker in that story, not everyone should be required to use the tool in the exact same manner and level. There are job roles and expertise for a reason and a good one. Whoever is designated to maximize the use of it to benefit the rest of the company, should be your power users, your expert users and your most certified users. There should be different levels of users who should then be trained to use the tool differently so they can reap the most benefit out of the tool to in turn, benefit the rest of the company and your customers.
Remember, before you blame the tool, look instead at your original purpose, objectives and what you were trying to solve for with the tool.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally or Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
