Robin Landa

Steve Pappas [00:00:02]:

You're listening to the science of CX, a podcast that hopes to inspire business owners and leaders to learn new techniques and turn prospects into customers and turn customers into raving fans. My name is Steve Pappas. I'm known for my relentless pursuit of all things customer. Across my career And also in my 6 startups, I've had to learn how to make decisions in business that customers really respond to. Let's spend some time together and help your business soar, grow, and accelerate. Well, welcome everybody to another episode of The Science of CX. I'm Steve Pappas, your host. There's a lot of things in CX that really need to be brought to the forefront.

Steve Pappas [00:00:53]:

I was thinking about some things, like what's missing today in CX? Where are all the gaps? And one of the things that came to mind as I was doing my typical brainstorming session was how to develop ideas, how to look at creativity, both in the branding, the design, How to generate ideas. How do you think about these things? Because as we learn more about the customer experience as well as the employee experience. We start to think about the things we need to do. We start to think about the things that we have to change in the business, and there goes that word change again. And the problem is there are gaps. We may be looking at how to change something, but we may not know how to develop the ideas to change something. We may not have that creativity gene in us to say, we've got to look at this from many different aspects. One of the things we thought about was how do we find the right guest to come on and talk to us around creativity, generating new ideas, how to brainstorm, etcetera.

Steve Pappas [00:02:12]:

So we went searching, and we found Robin Landa. And Robin is, I would have to say, the expert in this area. She's got 26 books under her belt, and It seems like you blink and another book is coming out. She is that smart when it comes to developing some of these ideas into book form so that the rest of us can learn from. So let me bring her in, and then we'll talk about her bio. And we're gonna jump into some of these areas that we've noticed our gaps that people write in and talk to us about, and we found the person to help us deal with it and solve them. In so, Robin, thanks for joining us today on the show.

Robin Landa [00:03:00]:

I'm delighted to be with you, Steve, and you are just so kind and generous. Thank you for that wonderful introduction.

Steve Pappas [00:03:07]:

Ins My pleasure. And if we look at our show, every single season, we try to make it like a mini MBA for someone. Let's cover all the areas that we can in a season around customer experience, but we're not the typical customer experience show. We're not just about the voice of the customer and all the technology that's being used for customer experience, etcetera. We're not the surveys, and just those things. We try to dig in and say, where are people having issues? Where do people end up with problems? Because creativity, developing ideas, that's not limited to the customer experience, but it will help our audience frame it up in their minds as to, okay, how do we put this into the customer experience perspective? And then we go beyond that. So let me give folks your bio because that'll get us started, and then we'll figure out from there where we go. But I know there's a lot we wanna cover, and we don't have a lot of time, so we'll get started.

Steve Pappas [00:04:14]:

So Robin Landa holds the title of distinguished professor in the Michael Graves College at Kean University. She's won numerous awards for her design, writing, and research, including awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters and the National League of Penn Women. She received the 2015 human rights educator award, in 2013 keen teacher of the year award and the Carnegie Foundation lists her among the great teachers of our time. In fact, Fast Company and the Harvard Business Review, among many other publications, have published her articles. She is a CEO world columnist. She was a cochair of Design Incubation, a communication design research organization. She's also the author of was 25, now 26 published nonfiction books including The New Art of Ideas, Unlock Your Creative Potential, strategic creativity, a field guide to advertising, branding, and design, nimble thinking creatively in the digital age, in graphic design solutions. Rutledge will publish Landa's forthcoming book, A Career is a Promise, Finding Purpose, Success, in fulfillment in 2023.

Steve Pappas [00:05:35]:

That is some bio. But I also have to tell our folks, You know me, I love to find little known facts about our guests. She was also Miss Teenage New York, and ins She is a dancer. She is a mambo champion, folks. So someone with that kind of a background as well as those other little known facts you know is someone we want to talk to. So where should we begin? How did all of this start, especially on the creativity and the ideas that how do you approach these things so our audience could kind of get a little bit of that knowledge too.

Robin Landa [00:06:18]:

My whole life is about Thinking creatively. Everything that I do, everything that I look at, I ask questions such as what if, and this kind of little hack that everybody can use. What if we could be a fly on the wall? What if we could Zoom with each other and see each other rather than be in the same physical space? What if we had a clone who could do all our chores for us so that we could go and do all the fun or scholarly stuff. So what if is a fantastic question, and I'm always Asking that in my own head, and I teach my students and my clients to ask what if.

Steve Pappas [00:06:52]:

That's an interesting approach to everything because I don't think people stop and take the time to think creatively. They're usually just reacting to what happens in the day, what they're hit with. And after we complain a little bit about what hit us, and we deal with it, we are done. That's it. We move on. So how do we take that moment and stop and say, how can we turn this into something else? How can we turn this into a different idea? How can we see more potential from this? And realize at that moment, because it's almost like something that has to become a habit. How do we stop at that moment and force ourselves to think about it differently?

Robin Landa [00:07:38]:

Very insightful, Steve. Yes. I mean, you have to form habits. And some of them are really easy because the main one I think, and other experts agree with me, is Curiosity. So if you're curious about things, it really, really helps if you ask a lot of questions. If you go back to Being a child and when we were children, we would ask our parents, why is the sky blue? Why is the water move like that? But that kind of melts away, as you said, With the everydayness of life and having a job and having to be in the moment in that and pay attention to that or raising children or whatever we do. But if we are deeply curious, that really does foster creative thinking, and it can be as simple as Listening to a podcast you wouldn't normally listen to or go to a museum, go to a different exhibit than the one that you normally go see. If you always Watch a science fiction film, try a rom com.

Robin Landa [00:08:35]:

I try different things. It really does boost creative thinking.

Steve Pappas [00:08:40]:

Would you find that the psychology part of this is that most people stay within their comfort zones, and they don't venture out to say, today, I'm gonna challenge myself a little bit, and I'm gonna do something different.

Robin Landa [00:08:55]:

You're good. That's absolutely right. Most of us stay in our comfort zones. I mean, even I have to when I drive from my home to work, I was listening to NPR and something came out about I think it was the French horn, and I was like, well, I'm not really interested in that. I was about to change the channel. And I thought, why am I not interested in that? Why don't I listen and see what I can learn? And it was actually illuminating. I did listen. And the same thing.

Robin Landa [00:09:23]:

When I go to the museum with friends, they know that I'm an art expert and they say, will you take me to see what you think we should see? And I say, you know what? You take me To see something. And that always works out really well because I learned something.

Steve Pappas [00:09:37]:

Maybe that's it. Maybe when you're with friends or family, Instead of doing something the same, say, let's do what you wanna do. Because if we think about it, we're all different. We all like something different. We'll like different shows, different concerts, different plays, different art exhibits. Let's do what you wanna do. Show me something different. That's an interesting approach.

Steve Pappas [00:09:58]:

So let's get in a little more of the strategic creativity. Let's talk about that. So the 2 books that really stood out to me that I thought might be beneficial to our audience was the new order of ideas and the strategic creativity. Can we concentrate on the creativity part? Because I wanna see whether or not we could take this into how can we be more creative for our customers' sakes.

Robin Landa [00:10:24]:

Well, the reason that I called strategic creativity is that it's about Branding, advertising, and design. And unlike fine art, where you can do your own thing and you're probably communicating with a very narrow audience, a small audience here, advertising graphic design and branding communicate with mass audiences. So you have to be strategic in your creativity. It can't just be about self expression. And that means that you have to have the power to conceive something That solves a problem, which anybody in the field understands, but that also is incredibly compassionate, respectful, appropriate of the target audience. You have to have some kind of multicultural intelligence, and I believe that, and this is where I think it really hits your listeners. It really has to benefit people. It has to benefit the customers or the consumers so that they'll become ins If there's no benefit, what's in it for them?

Steve Pappas [00:11:23]:

If we're in business, obviously, we're thinking about how to appeal to prospects before they become customers, try to get them to purchase, and then try to keep them for a long time so that there's a realized customer lifetime value. Which means there's probably multiple phases of our creativity that have to come into play. So if we think about the presales phase, before we go dating, we wanna get them to commit, and then we want them to stay. How do we think about those different phases, if you will?

Robin Landa [00:12:03]:

Well, you have to know your audience. Absolutely. You have to have research on your audience. You have to know which media channels they hang out at. They have to know what they're looking for, what they're aspiring to be. Here's it in a nutshell. There is an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. I don't know if you're familiar with Calvin.

Steve Pappas [00:12:21]:

I remember reading it to my kids.

Robin Landa [00:12:24]:

And Calvin is a little boy who has an imaginary friend, a tiger, and the phone rings and Calvin answers it. And he's a little boy. And the caller says, may I speak to your father, please? And Calvin says, he's not home. And the caller says, would you please take a message? And Calvin says, well, what's in it for me? And that's exactly what any potential customer is thinking. What's in it for me or my aunt Maria or my daughter? Or what are you gonna do for me? What's The either the functional or the emotional benefit. Empathy is the word everybody uses in design, but I think it's even bigger than that. I think it needs to be compassionate, And it has to be appropriate, and you have to be respectful. And if you're talking to different groups of people, you have to have Multicultural intelligence to do that.

Robin Landa [00:13:11]:

So it really starts, as you said, that predating with knowing your audience and understanding what they want and what they desire and even anticipating what they might want. So if you think about Apple and the iPhone, that was anticipating what people might desire and want.

Steve Pappas [00:13:28]:

Yeah. And that worked out pretty well.

Robin Landa [00:13:30]:

In Worked out pretty well. And then when you're talking to them, you have to be respectful. You have to know who they are and where they hang out. So if you Think about buying your media before you create your ad campaign or your branding campaign. That's backwards because You don't know where it fits. You don't know where it should sit. It should be media agnostic. The idea should come first.

Robin Landa [00:13:51]:

The knowledge of the audience should come first. And then once you're there, You have to create something that people will want to share, something that resonates with them. Well, it starts with being relevant to them. Right? It can't be irrelevant. It has to be relevant to their lives so that it resonates and so that it becomes share worthy. People will want to share it with their friends or their family. And then you have to have a conversation because it's now two way, And the audience absolutely owns the brand. You don't own it.

Robin Landa [00:14:22]:

It's theirs. And they really can take ownership and run with it and can do you in or do you good.

Steve Pappas [00:14:29]:

I mean, these days, we're seeing that happening too quite frequently, as a matter of fact, that some companies might make a misstep, and It's the customers in the audience that are basically voting their approval or disapproval with their dollars.

Robin Landa [00:14:46]:

But also in real time. So they'll just tell you exactly what they think on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or wherever they're hanging out. And it's really critical that you have a respectful conversation with people. Gen z, And I know them very well, not only from research, but because I teach them. You better keep your brand promise, and it better be authentic, and you better walk the talk or walk the walk. You better your money where your mouth is, and you can't just do performative social good. It has to really be that you're actually doing it, and they are Crap detectors. They won't put up with anything that past generations put up with.

Steve Pappas [00:15:26]:

It's an interesting approach that I don't think anybody on the show has ever said the audience owns the brand. It's always that the company owns and decides what brand they wanna be versus the audience molding, shaping, sculpting the brand to what they need it to be.

Robin Landa [00:15:45]:

And it's their perception of it. And now that media is two way, it's not back in the day when you're right. The company owned the brand TV commercials. It was just pushed at you. There was no pull and there was no two way conversation. But now I'll give you just a really fun example on Jeopardy, like a 7 day champion or something. This wonderful Fellow answered the the title of a Shakespearean play, and the word Benedict, he spelled wrong, and he lost. It was like a really difficult question, and people on Instagram went crazy.

Robin Landa [00:16:22]:

Why did you do that? This guy was a great champion. That's a ridiculous Reason to disqualify, and it was covered in all the news outlets that the viewers were going crazy over this.

Steve Pappas [00:16:33]:

Strange world today. Ideas. I really want us to get to how do we generate ideas, a brainstorming method that maybe we could talk about

Robin Landa [00:16:44]:

to. Actually, brainstorming came out in the mid 20th century. Alex Osborne created the technique, and he was an advertising guy, he was an executive in an ad agency, and he created it originally as a group tool where everybody would sit around the table and contribute Their thoughts, their ideas. The issue with brainstorming as he created it is that you have to throw out either partially formed ideas or fully formed ideas. And that's very challenging. And, also, when it's a group, people are self conscious. They are afraid to appear foolish or stupid, so they're And when I used brainstorming with my students, they found it very, very frustrating. And so I thought, well, how can I create a new method, which is what I did a Brand new ideation framework? It's the first one since the mid 20th century, and it's called the three g's goal gap and gain.

Robin Landa [00:17:47]:

So we're going to go back to the word you used at the beginning of this session gap. So the goal is what you hope to achieve. The gap is really interesting. The gap can be almost anything that is an unmet need. So if your business people are listening, what's the unmet need for your customers or for an audience? What's the missing piece? Is there a crack in research? Is there an area that's not yet been explored? Is there an underserved audience or an unconsidered audience? Is there a new method of delivery, a new class of drugs, a new operating system, a new process, a new system, a more sustainable method, a way to merge 2 different systems to create a new consequential system, a way to address the world's chronic issues Like poverty or people without homes or water that's not clean. And then finally, the last g is the gain. And going back to what I said earlier, that's the benefit. So once you have your goal and you figure out the gap, there has to be a benefit of What you hope to achieve.

Robin Landa [00:18:58]:

Otherwise, why do it?

Steve Pappas [00:19:00]:

Interesting. So in the gap section, which it seems like that's where a lot of either research or information gathering or data analysis needs to happen. Definitely different than brainstorm. And I have to agree with you on the brainstorming because every time I've been in a session like that, Even on Zoom, I could see people turn their microphones off. They turn their cameras off, and immediately half the audience insp is not participating. The other thing too is that nobody's willing to be controversial and put an idea out there that's just so far fetched. When it has happened, it's as if their guard is down and everybody contributes. Somebody has to throw out the crazy ideas.

Steve Pappas [00:19:53]:

And even when you tell people no ideas are too crazy, they still clam up. The human nature is to do that. But if somebody's willing to come up and do that, and accept the ridicule if necessary, Others do start to come out of the woodwork a little bit. But I think your framework in starting at the end, what's the end goal we're trying to achieve here. And you're working your way backwards into the goal with filling in the gaps, the universe of possibilities, and then what's the benefit there too. I love it. So what else can we say? How do we organize this? Because it sounds like On the surface, that could be a very big, long, and drawn out process that could get chaotic at times. How do we organize it and manage it?

Robin Landa [00:20:44]:

Well, you can come at it at any point. So you can start with a goal, or you can start with the gap. And the gap For business, I think is often a pain point. What is bothering people? What's keeping them up at night? What can you do that will help them solve a problem? And it can be something that you've noticed with a pain point. So the inventor of Spanx, the undergarments that slim us down, She was going out and was going to wear white pants and felt that she needed something to even the look underneath the pants, and she took a pair of pantyhose and cut the feet off and put it on under the pants. And the pants just looked better. There it was. There was a solution to a problem.

Robin Landa [00:21:28]:

So problem solution is a kind of an easy way in. Then, of course, you have to say, well, how am I gonna manufacture this? Who's gonna buy it? And then that's where business acumen and tenacity comes in, and she had both. But I think pain points are kinda easy way to start. And then for other people, you know, science, if you're thinking about How do we deliver an inoculation? How do we deliver medicine? Is there another way other than what we've been using for all these in tears, and that's how they came up with messenger RNA. It really is, can we find a better system? Can we address a pain point? Is there a way to print paper in a more sustainable way or a toxic freeway? And so if you just Address it from a problem solution point of view. It's not so messy.

Steve Pappas [00:22:18]:

Let me ask you this. I would say if you asked a 100 people, more than half would probably say, I'm not the idea person. That's someone else. I'm the execution person. When the idea is decided on, then I make it happen. I bring it to life and stuff like that. So let me ask you this. Are all people capable of being idea people?

Robin Landa [00:22:39]:

I think so. But I do think it takes teams sometimes. So if you think about The Apple iPhone or you think about a Nike ad campaign, there are a lot of people on those teams, and they're all working together. And so you do need different people with different expertise. But if you can't generate an idea, it's not you. It's the framework you're using because the Frameworks that are out there are very frustrating. Another good one besides my own is when you combine 2 different things to create a new thing. And that is something that Steve Jobs did, Mark Twain did, Einstein did.

Robin Landa [00:23:17]:

I teach that too. That's a great way to create a new in form or new object by combining 2 existing things. But other than that, the other frameworks are really very challenging. Question storming works well where you ask a ton of questions rather than trying to come up with a ton of answers. We ask questions like what if or If only we could do x, y, z. If we did x, would that lead to y or to z? But it's the framework. People rely way too much on brainstorming, which I find very difficult.

Steve Pappas [00:23:53]:

Well, if everyone can be idea people and we can figure out how to make it easier for people to contribute. I think the problem is when we spring things on them. Last week, I was on a meeting, and nobody had any idea what was coming. And it was kind of sprung on everybody. You have 3 minutes to tell us what your new idea about x is. It ended up turning into technical problems. Here are the things that aren't working, and those all got illustrated very quickly, rather than Here's where I think it should go. Here's what we could be thinking about for next year.

Steve Pappas [00:24:36]:

It ended up being, well, if I'm under the gun, I've gotta give something, so this doesn't work well. Maybe we could do something with that. So I think your approach just makes a lot of sense for people to have a framework to do this. Because these days, we're all on Zoom calls and there's 20 people on a Zoom call, which does not necessarily make it conducive to real creative flow or new idea generation. And that's why those are the 2 areas that are really suffering today, because it's so easy for people to just turn their camera off and mute themselves. And I find that nobody gets called on when their camera's off. And I think people have figured that out too.

Robin Landa [00:25:23]:

I think you're right. That's a very difficult thing, and I think people don't realize how important research is and knowing your audience and having facts and figures and data and being able to really look at the landscape of the ask. And ideas don't necessarily flow like that. And as you said, people become intimidated. In advertising and in graphic design, when you work on teams, we're trained almost like improvisational comedians, where if you say something, I say yes, and I don't shut you down. I keep it going so we can find and explore. And so we're trained very differently, and it becomes more fruitful. But I totally agree with you.

Steve Pappas [00:26:05]:

Interesting. Well, I was wondering, is there an exercise we could give our audience to maybe bring any of this content to life. Something if they are on that next Zoom call, That they might be able to share with their team to either help them be more creative, help them generate additional ideas, or something we could leave them with as far as an exercise.

Robin Landa [00:26:27]:

I'll give you 2 if you have time.

Steve Pappas [00:26:29]:

Absolutely.

Robin Landa [00:26:30]:

1 that people don't ins do, which I think everybody should do, is ask, what could we do wrong that would get rid of our customers? What's everything that we could do wrong that people would leave us? So if you're let's say you're a delivery service, Bringing food that's cold, bringing a pizza where the cheese has fallen to the side because it's not stable, rude delivery people. What could we do wrong? And then that kind of makes you realize what people don't want, and it can lead you to what people do want. So That's a really fun and fruitful exercise. The other in terms of research, and this is a way to get free research, which is always good, is to go into social media and hashtag either a brand or a product category or a service category or a word that's related to your business and see what people are saying. And that's what we call social listening. Since my students don't have any budgets, we do almost all of our research using social listening on social media, And then also reading the comments on product pages or anywhere, people's reviews to see what their pain points are and what their complaints are. And so that's a Free way to do research.

Steve Pappas [00:27:48]:

Really great tips. Alright. Well, Robin, I can't begin to tell you how much I've enjoyed this ins little peek into how can we be more creative, and how can we generate better ideas, and how we relate it back to our businesses. So let me give folks a way that they can find your books. They can go to your website, Robin Landa, r o b I n landa.comforward/books. That's on our website, or you can find her books on Amazon, I imagine.

Robin Landa [00:28:20]:

Absolutely.

Steve Pappas [00:28:21]:

Good. Is there any other ways that they can kind of follow you, your writing, and other things, articles, etcetera?

Robin Landa [00:28:30]:

Happy to link in with people on LinkedIn and on Instagram and on Twitter. So I'm on every Social media platform except for BeReal. Haven't gotten there yet.

Steve Pappas [00:28:40]:

Alright, Robin. Thank you very much for joining us today. This has been a real joy for me, And I'm sure our audience has really appreciated the content you've brought to us.

Robin Landa [00:28:49]:

Thank you, Steve. It's been a joy for me as well. Thanks.

Steve Pappas [00:28:53]:

Well, everyone, that is another episode of the Science of CX. I'm Steve Pappas, your host. And I hope that you enjoy the content that we're bringing you and we're filling in the gaps. We're trying to really fill in the gaps of how strategies can be better developed when you have all the gaps filled too. So if you like the content that we bring to you. Feel free to drop us a review wherever you get your podcasts. And until we meet again, please stay safe, stay healthy and do take care everyone. Bye bye.

Steve Pappas [00:29:29]:

You've been listening to the science of CX. My name is Steve Pappas. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode. And if you have, the highest compliment that you can give us is to subscribe, rate, and review The Science of CX. Thanks, and we'll see you in the next episode. Experience related tools and technology has been difficult until now. We just built it. Get ready for a science of CX original.

Steve Pappas [00:30:15]:

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