Ask & Deliver: Discover the Heart of Your Business by Listening to the Voice of Your Customers

By Mary Ann O'Brien

Mary Ann O’Brien, Founder and CEO of award-winning marketing firm OBI, and the brains behind the revolutionary O’Brien Voice of Customer (O.VoC) survey, has been called “The Mother of Modern Marketing.” Now she’s sharing her unique, highly-successful approach to helping clients attract and retain customers in Ask and Deliver: Discover the Heart of Your Business by Listening to the Voice of Your Customers. In the book, O’Brien demonstrates how directly asking the people who buy from you what they want from your business, listening to what they say, and then designing your customer experience accordingly has the power to transform your brand and spark exponential growth.

The book follows the evolution of both OBI and the O.VoC through several iterations, beginning when O’Brien first developed the survey for Gateway Computers, in hopes of pinpointing where the once-beloved company had gone wrong with its customers. O’Brien quickly learned that the insights gleaned from the survey data—customer data—were like gold, providing a roadmap to bring Gateway back from the brink by putting the customer at the center of everything they did. It explains how O’Brien refined and added to the survey as she worked with clients across different sectors, growing her business while helping them achieve their dreams. And finally, it explores what happened when O’Brien subjected her own company to her methodology, and the unexpected changes that followed. It’s a fascinating education in a new and exciting marketing methodology, as well as an exploration of how one woman guided her business through the Great Recession and the Covid crisis in order to change the way marketing is done.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forbes Books
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887500218

Mary Ann O'Brien

A nationally-recognized branding and marketing thought leader, OBI founder and CEO MARY ANN O’BRIEN has been entrusted by brands including Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Stericycle, Viewsonic, Delta Dental, and dozens more to help steer their strategic marketing and communication direction. She is the author of the O’Brien Voice of the Customer™ and Voice of the Employee™ studies, which have served as the foundation for numerous business success stories by helping clients implement customer-centric practices. Her business acumen, marketing expertise, and ability to deliver results gives clients the confidence they need to make the strategic decisions required to grow. Passionate about the power of businesses to do good, O'Brien champions ethical growth and is a proud recipient of an Integrity Award from the Better Business Bureau. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Iowa

Growing up in the Midwest, I always felt like a square peg in a round hole. All I wanted was out of there. To the point where, when I was in the third grade, I started signing my name, Mary Ann O’Brien, CEO O’Brien Industries, New York, New York 10069.

My goal in college was to be an international lawyer. I wanted to travel the world. But the classes I had to take to get there felt more like geography, and that wasn’t what I signed up for at all. I thought business was a promising alternative, so I switched to marketing. It wasn’t like I felt some great attraction to the field. It was more like, Well, I’m not good at accounting. I don’t really understand finance. So, I guess I’ll do this other business thing. As long as it was a career that could get me out of the Midwest, I was game.

And we all know how that worked out …

However, in retrospect, landing at Gateway was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at that point in my career. Because Gateway was different. Long before Apple, Gateway was the customer-led, brand-forward technology company—and not just because of those cow-print boxes. Because they were completely, totally focused on their customers. Before there was ever a Genius Bar or a Geek Squad, we had a team of computer experts that could address a customer’s questions about their machine right in our store, directly through our 1-800-Gateway line or through the internet. We figured out that customers want to engage on their preferred channels—not ours—so whether they wanted to call, click, or come in, we built a company that met them where they were and wanted to be, not where we hoped we could lead them.

Unlike the computers from other manufacturers, Gateways machines were actually designed with the customer in mind. Most tech companies worked with manufacturers who built computers based on what they thought people would want and then sold them. Gateway had a different business model. They were one of the first direct to consumer D2C companies focused on their customers. All a customer had to do was call 1-800-Gateway, and somebody on the other end would help them design a computer that was perfect for their needs. And yes, I really mean their needs, not what the hyper-smart product engineer with a pocket protector on thought the customer needed, but what the customer actually told them they needed.

Because, unlike any other company at the time, Gateway bothered to ask.

Marketing was linked to Gateway’s customers in unique and effective ways. We had special 800 vanity numbers attached to each ad campaign, so we could track results in real time, as soon as we launched. And in addition to being well trained in how to service, support, and guide even technology virgins through the process of using their computer, our service reps were also trained to share whatever information they got from our customers back to our product marketing team. We were able to make constant and almost just-in-time improvements, all for the good of our customers.

Since we were constantly asking our customers if what we were doing was working, and listening to what they told us, we knew where to pour more money into the business, as well as where, and when, to pivot.

It was an ideology of operational excellence driven by our customers. It was brilliant.

The result was a user experience unlike anything else in the technology space at the time. Our customer base knew us, knew they could count on us, and appreciated the fact that we made this new and expensive technology simple and easy to understand.

But even beneath the nuts and bolts, Gateway’s brand was more than whimsical patterns, well-designed out-of-box experiences, funky and inviting cow-spotted storefronts, and helpful advice. It was a promise to the customer that we’d treat them like family. Like your tech-obsessed older brother, we wanted to help the folks who came to us understand the world of our product and know that we cared for them on a personal level. No matter who you were, whether you were buying your first Gateway computer or were the CEO of the company, you were a part of the Gateway family. That sentiment was expressed through all of our material, whether it was directed at our customers or our employees.

Gateway was one of the first companies that lived their values and their brand, before worrying about values and mission statements became a thing. The company tagline was, You’ve got a friend in the business, and we really were committed to walking our talk. We were taught to be honest, compassionate, and trustworthy. We were empowered to be a trusted guide to those customers that gave us the opportunities we valued so much. Those were our brand values, and we knew that as long as we acted like a friend to every vendor, every partner, every colleague, and every customer we worked with, we were living those values and we expected the same in return. If that meant a salesperson had to take two hours to help an older person who didn’t understand technology configure a computer, that was totally fine. The company really leaned in to making it easy and convenient for our customers to interact with us (our brand), and modeled those values to our employees, who then in turn mirrored that to the customer. And that drove a lot of loyalty. A ton of advocacy. And a lot of room and runway to always keep learning.

You might be reading this and thinking this all might sound cool, but it happened at a moment in time when tech was exploding, and the field was wide open, and everyone was trying crazy things. You may not think this is the kind of approach that could ever apply to you or your company. I want to tell you, I wholeheartedly disagree. The ideology and approach I learned at Gateway can work in any company. I know, because I have been a part of it—you’ll read more stories of how later on in this book. Leading with the customer in mind can be adopted by all of us and applied to any business or relationship. And, in my opinion, if you want to be successful, really successful, should.

When I joined Gateway, the company wasn’t just growing, but it was exploding.

Despite all that excitement, I very quickly realized that my job in marketing was not quite as exciting. I had been attracted to the position because it involved going to trade shows—which, to a person who wanted nothing more than to get out of Iowa, sounded like a dream job. But the job wasn’t about travel so much as it was about schlepping boxes from city to city. Which was not the kind of glamorous, jet-setting work I had envisioned for myself.

However, Gateway had a big marketing team, and the tradeshow team was a part of it, and the company was growing like crazy, so there had to be a way I could take advantage of my position. I just had to figure out what it was. I knew I was good at cobbling things together and making value out of it. And I also remembered that one of my biggest achievements in college, which earned me some accolades, was a study I did with a sports marketing company. It was for a quant class. I conducted a survey for some sports marketing clients and wrote an article about the findings, and the article wound up getting published in a sports marketing magazine. And even though the CEO of the company I did the survey for put her name on the article and took credit for it (I digress …), which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, the experience was transformative, because it showed me that (a) data had value in marketing, and (b) I could be successful using it.

Data, I learned, works like Red Bull. Customer data is what gives marketing plans wings. And from that day forward, I relied on data whenever I could. Because, unlike the soft skills of creative, data was concrete. It was black and white. So whenever my insecurities took over and I felt like I don’t know what I’m doing, I looked to data to help me make decisions. Eventually, I also discovered that customer data was really the hook that could get internal teams to rally around an initiative.

Data, I learned, works like Red Bull. Customer data is what gives marketing plans wings.

My big opportunity came when one of my good friends at Gateway, who worked in media, came to me with a proposition. He said, Hey, O’Brien. (Everyone called me O’Brien back then.) I just bought $20 million worth of ABC network TV, and they threw me a Disney sponsorship. You want to do something with it?

Hell yeah, I did!

Of course, my trade show (and favorite all-time) boss, Rick, had to be OK with me taking on the extra work. I was so inexpensive and so hungry—why not? Gateway was growing, opportunities were everywhere, and he wanted to take advantage and expand his role too. So he told me to go for it, and I was able to build my own little area within the marketing department called Integrated Marketing Programs. And, because I was running this in addition to doing the trade show gig, I started working eighteen hours a day.

But hey … anything to get out of North Sioux City.

That project with Disney, which also involved ABC, because they owned Disney so it was a bunch of media value-add from all of ABC’s properties, was the first time I ever spent a million dollars. And frankly, that stressed me out. It was a huge opportunity, but it was also a million dollars and the biggest names in entertainment. I was actually working directly with the team at Disney, the Imagineers, to come up with a solution around their Innovation Center at Epcot. And when you’re innovating or building or imagining a product that doesn’t exist yet, the only way to make a case that proves it will work is with data. So that was where I focused.

Another one of my first big projects was working on something called the Gateway Destination PC TV. I somehow got invited to be a part of the team that helped to launch the Destination PC. It was like a smart TV, but twenty-five years before smart TVs existed, making us one of the first companies to ever create and market one. I was part of the pilot team launching it—almost a kind of strike force that was tasked with figuring out every aspect of the product from the ground up. This included identifying the