Marc Sands on customer experience (abridged)

 By Clare Mitchell Crow

The article below is an abridged version of an interview with Marc Sands, Director of Marketing for the Guardian News and Media, conducted by Foviance lead consultant Clare Mitchell Crow on 13th November 2008. It is now available for download uncut as Foviance’s first Customer Experience Podcast. The Customer Experience podcast series will form a set of regular interviews with senior figures from some of the world’s most respected businesses, focusing on some of the ways organisations manage the customer experience.

Perhaps you could tell us a little more about your role at The Guardian?

As marketing director, I run all the research of the organisation, all the promotional stuff, all the data marketing and also sponsorship and events. So it’s quite a broad remit. Customer Experience is an interesting subject for us because as a news organisation, we don’t do everything with our customer first in mind. We have a foot in two camps I suppose: our customer experience and also our requirement to the product.

And what brands are you responsible for within Guardian News and Media?

Anything with the Guardian or Observer name on it, whether it is the paper, mobile or online. We’re here to ensure that liberal journalism exists in perpetuity. As an organisation we’re obsessed with trying out new things and rarely do what everyone else has done. That was typified by our transformation from a broadsheet newspaper to Berliner in 2005 with the Guardian, and in 2006 for the Observer.

Rival newspapers then opted for a format closer to tabloid. How would you rate your comparative success?

From a commercial point of view, the Independent is fairing a lot worse now than it was then, the Telegraph is having a torrid time, the Times is not, and we are not. With regard to the type of journalism that we do, the Times is unrecognisable now from when it was a broadsheet. It is not the same paper. Stories are shorter, headlines are ‘shoutier’, and it’s a totally different customer experience. If you look at the Guardian, you would argue it’s exactly the same customer experience but in a format that’s more appropriate for the present day.

Did the change come as a result of customer research?

I would love to say that there was no research and it was just gut, but that’s not true. You don’t make a decision of such huge financial implication on the basis of a hunch. We did tonnes of research, both qualitative and quantitative. We didn’t have to talk to that many people to realise that there was an issue, but the degree of that issue was validated by talking to hundreds of thousands. By talking to customers, we found the best solution for our brand – and that was different to that adopted by others.

Did you disenfranchise any of your audience through that decision?

We were obsessed with not upsetting the central base of Guardian readership because they are, frankly, the most important people to us – the bull’s eye audience which absolutely does not want a tabloid newspaper.

What other innovations do you see in your industry that will change the user experience? For 180 years or so, it was all about paper ink; it isn’t anymore. With the exponential growth of broadband, we find that the written word is fine, but actually people want the spoken word and visual stuff. There is a huge transition to be made between where we’re at now and the delivery of news online. How do you represent the Guardian aurally? How do you represent it visually? If you go to our website now, we’re podcasting on every conceivable subject – second only to the BBC in the UK for oral content online. We also now have a division called Guardian Films which is essentially a moving image news division.

How do you understand how people are consuming your content today?

We’ve developed ‘Navigator’, a panel of 36,000 Guardian and Observer readers who we’ve started talking to a lot, and it’s fantastic. It takes away some of the prejudices, the guesswork inside the organisation, and validates and questions it.

How do you manage the translation of brand into user experience across evolving channels?

A media brand is different to other brands, in that it should always be more interesting than its own marketing. Once you know that, you shouldn’t try to create vehicles to carry you. We don’t need little furry animals or funny commercials. We need to be governed by content and by principals. Most brands don’t mean anything, and the skill of marketing then is to pour meaning into them. We don’t have to do that because the meaning is all there.

Download Foviance’s first Customer Experience Podcast today, and hear more from Marc Sands. Find out what brands he believes offer the best customer experience, and discover his opinions on the impact of monthly digests, media players, eReaders, mobile content and even podcasts like this one, on the modern newspaper industry.