Product content: in a sea of standardization and recognized best practices, it remains the great variable. That is to say, some companies do it well, while others treat it as an absolute afterthought.
In Part One of our interview, Lisa Ekstrom–Tweddle Group’s Director of Marketing and Design–talked about her experience developing branded product content. In this installment, Lisa explains the different types of product content and the impact that content can have on the end-user.
Service and owner information: isn’t it all just product content?
Your company really creates two basic types of solutions—you’ve got end-user product content—you know, owner information. And then you’ve got service content, which is designed for technicians.
Which side of the equation do the creative teams support, end-user content or service-side content?
In our perspective, you know, ultimately, it’s all end-user content. Right?
Let’s say you work in field service. You go out to handle a repair. You’re at the job site and you refer to our technical documentation, or you boot up one of our diagnostic tools. In that moment, you are the end-user. It doesn’t matter that you don’t own that product—in that moment you’re the one using our deliverable and the buck stops with you.
So, when you create any support content, you try to address the need in that moment as clearly and efficiently as possible. The distinction between “service” and “owner” becomes secondary.
Don’t get me wrong. The distinction is still relevant. It plays a role when you structure product content for different audiences. You have to ask, Who’s using the product in this moment? How knowledgeable are they, technically? What challenges are they facing? That’s why persona development matters.
Short answer, we produce both owner and technical content, even if the lines between them often blur.
How does the line between owner content and service content become blurred?
A consumer might be technically oriented. They might do some of their own service and maintenance. In doing that, they might reach for service content. So, now is that still service content, or has it suddenly become owner information?
On the flipside, let’s say a technician is troubleshooting the tire pressure monitoring system. Maybe they don’t know how it’s supposed to work on that particular product, so they bust out the owner information video to verify normal operation. That’s technically owner content, but it’s being used in a service context.
You always want to remember you’re supporting a human being. That human being is trying to achieve an objective with minimal friction.
But, at the end of the day, it’s all end-user content. It’s all just information.
So, if an OEM needs Tweddle Group to create some kind of customer care solution—whether that’s technical documentation, or instructional video, or maybe I want to reduce call center volumes and I believe a field diagnostic tool would get us there—what sort of workflow takes place?
The workflow starts with data from the client. It might be very raw engineering data, it might be an existing diagnostic tree, it might be 5,000 words of instructional product content they need distilled down to a brief video, it could be a 500-page book that needs to become a 90-page user guide. Whatever the case, there’s some level of input.
How does the Creative Team impact the development process?
The Creative Team may or may not be involved in the development at all—it depends how much transformation is needed on the initial input. What are we starting from and what’s our final output?
For a user guide, our content authors generally start with that raw OEM technical data. They’ll work with the OEM to develop the product content. Once that’s done, Creative will collaborate with them to create a final output and bring the result into the OEM marketing and branding ecosystem.
For an owner instructional video, that initial input could very well be the owner manual. If we produced the manual then, again, we’ll reach out to our technical authors, and they’ll collaborate with Creative’s Copywriting team to develop a video script. A script is very different than a 500-page book, you know? The demands placed on each are very different. So, there’s a specific craft involved in scriptwriting, where visuals will do a lot of the communication, right?
Our Video Production team will produce the video itself, with Design possibly getting involved to ensure brand fidelity for the OEM.
Our CGI area jumps in, too, we need photorealistic 3D images, or a line drawing, anything image-related that might emerge from the OEM’s CAD data.
"You always want to remember you’re supporting a human being. That human being is trying to achieve an objective with minimal friction."
Protecting the Brand: Creative’s Role in Client Product Content
And where in that workflow would the Creative Team get involved?
It could be right up front to help determine the client needs. The important thing is to determine what serves the customer best versus just trying to push a solution onto them.
Once you take a beat, understand the problem, and define a solution, then the production workflow gets underway.
There will always be different stages, different milestones, but our content development team—a separate entity from Creative—really is the driving force behind so many of the things we do as a company. Our authoring teams produce our long-form technical documentation.
Shave the technical bulk off those, put a more conversational spin on it, and now you have the quick guides.
You pass that style of authoring over to the Video and Copywriting teams, and now you have video scripts, which naturally become product content video.
Or send it to the Design team when you need to roll it into some graphic material.
Content development and authoring really weaves itself in and out of the whole process.
In the end, you know, there’s a client who in walked with this engineering data which was complex and very technical and at the end, we’ve organized it in such a way that people can look at it and know what they need to know. They can understand what they’re reading. It’s not overly technical and it’s no longer intimidating.
So, if you’re looking for the overarching mission for all our teams, that’s probably it—we’re here to make it easy for the end user to interact with a product. And Creative is here to support that and make sure it happens in a branded way.
The Ghost Town Effect
So even if Design isn’t directly involved in a project—let’s say, for example, a video—the team still supports on the branding side.
Yes. The brand shouldn’t vanish when a person buys a new car.
Speaking for myself, you know, I spend all this time researching companies to pick my next car. By the time I settle on a particular OEM it’s because I’ve bought into—for lack of a better word—their product philosophy, their message, their vibe. I don’t think I’m alone in this—a product has to resonate with me before I’ll invest time, research, and ultimately money and go out and make the purchase.
So, when I open the glove box or I first launch the owner app, I want to experience an extension of that same brand philosophy. When I reach out for help with the product—whether I’m searching for video, or some other reference material—I want to see a reflection of the product personality.
I mean, what happens in the opposite scenario?
[Laughs] Well, in the opposite scenario you sort of buy into an idea and then you look around and it’s a ghost town. Maybe there’s product content but it bears no relationship to the brand itself. That’s not good. [Laughs]
A related scenario would be finding the product you’ve purchased is too complicated to use, but you can’t get support. Or you can get support but it’s not what you were promised or what you expected.
Isn’t that a tall order, though? Or at least tricky? An OEM might hire out an agency for marketing and then select a completely different supplier to produce the product support. How can you expect these two separate elements to synchronize?
Those two elements can totally synchronize!
[Laughs] I’m probably biased because that’s part of what we do, but I don’t think it’s especially difficult.
It’s a matter of care, and it’s in everybody’s best interest to make sure those subtleties carry through. Product content should reflect the brand voice. It should speak to the brand’s typical user. Video content should feel like an extension of the ad spots. The supporting graphic material, the interface design—it should all look like OEM product.
"The user doesn’t care that a marketing agency did the ads while an entirely different company created the product content. They only care about their experience. And it should all just be 'The Brand'. When we say ‘brand integrity’, that’s what we mean."
The user doesn’t know—or care, at all—that advertising agencies did the pre-sale ads while a separate supplier did the after-sales product content.
It should all just be, you know, ‘The Brand’. When we say ‘brand integrity’, that’s what we mean.
Conscientious suppliers know how to get a brand guideline and follow it, and they should care enough to do that.
It makes sense. Marketing is slick and emotionally compelling. We’re drawn in by polished images and resonant messages. When you get the product home and the support is just 4 pieces of mimeographed paper, with crude drawings, stapled together…
It’s like, ‘Where did everybody go?’ [Laughs]
Right. Exactly. The company name is on the cover in plain type.
Right, right. You feel kind of abandoned. I’ve seen technology products with zero physical support material, which is fine—if you’ve got a killer digital support presence. Otherwise… it’s, like, ‘What’s going on here?’
Right. And it’s one thing if it’s a bed frame. In that case, a couple of mimeographed pages might be fine. It’s what you expect. But I’ve encountered one, ah, reasonably high-end recording gear company—I don’t want to say their name and jeopardize any potential sponsorship [laughs]—but all they provide is a user-maintained support forum.
Wow.
These products are esoteric and complex, lots of features, and sometimes you’ll find the answer to your question but—more often than not—you can’t. You might have a basic operational question and now you’re calling people you know or emailing a friend of a friend. It’s frustrating.
‘I gave them my money, and now they don’t care.’
[Laughs] Pretty much.
That’s exactly it. There’s a feeling of having been duped.
From a business perspective, it’s about brand longevity. If someone feels duped, will they buy from you again? Is that customer going to come back?
That’s huge if someone leased a vehicle from you. That’s huge if they’re on a cycle of purchasing a new product every 3, 5 or 7 years.
If that experience was frustrating, underwhelming or unsupportive, the research is pretty unanimous. They’ll switch to a different manufacturer next time.
That’s a thing that happens.
It’s a thing that happens. So, the post-sale material becomes more than technical information to the side of the product experience. It’s an active part of brand perception.
I think the smartest brands—the ones that just crush it year after year, decade after decade—are the brands who understand that and actively use the after-sale period to shore up the customer relationship.
In the last part of our discussion, we take a look at the role content creation plays in customer support.
Special thanks to The Cranbrook Institute of Science for hosting our interview and photoshoot.
Original photography by Matt Wong.
