Brave & Curious: How Hard Questions and Honest Answers Drive Innovation
In 2017, I was two years into my role as the chief marketing and communications officer at the American Dental Association. It was my first foray into the non-profit/association world, and I was bringing with me a wealth of experiences from my previous work in consumer packaged goods.
Certainly, the ADA had been a household name all its own — being name-checked in the classic film “Home Alone” remains a point of pride more than 30 years after the movie’s release. But after spending most of my career marketing products that were actually in people’s households (like the Chef Boyardee in the pantry, the Healthy Choice in the freezer, even the Jim Beam in the liquor cabinet), I wanted to elevate the ADA’s brand and bring it to life for its more than 160,000 members.
Dentists couldn’t exactly pull the ADA out of the cupboard, but the vision was to have members feel like their Association was a personal concierge of sorts — call us when you need us, and we’ll help you every time. Or as one of my colleagues puts it: The ADA is like a staff member in a dental office — lending tangible support, fulfilling needs, and doing the real work to help a practice succeed.
In the 160 years since it was founded, the ADA had earned its reputation as an trusted leader in health care. The Association was (and continues to be) a well-oiled brain trust providing useful guidance in the scientific, clinical, advocacy, and public health spaces. We’d pitched ourselves as a one-stop authority. But times were changing fast, and the twenty-first-century dentist now sought a facilitator to help them solve their own challenges. What had been often been one-way communication from the Association needed to be an ongoing dialogue that put members in the driver’s seat of their careers.
Curious, I asked myself:
- Members may find our offerings useful, but what’s really on their minds about how the ADA can best serve them?
- How much farther could we go if we served the members not just in the broad big-picture ways but also in their daily work?
- How could we anticipate the members’ real-world needs if we didn’t know exactly what they were?
If we were going to innovate on member value and create marketing campaigns that spoke directly to everyday dentists, we needed to hear from them. I took a page from my B2C marketing playbook. Similar to the consumer focus groups that yielded insights earlier in my career, the ADA’s integrated marketing and communications team hit the road for its first-ever listening tour.
It seems obvious: Ask the customer what they want and apply their answers to how we develop and market our products. Even so, both individuals and companies often fall into the trap of never asking the big, bold questions that lead to innovative results. There are many reasons for this:
- We’re in a hurry and don’t have time to dig deep.
- We conflate innovation and ingenuity with speed.
- We already think we know the answers based on beliefs, past experiences, and the information we already have.
I suspect that at the heart of our reluctance to asking brave questions is my least favorite four-letter word: FEAR. We don’t want to look ignorant, weak, or unsure.
On top of that, we’re often afraid of the answers. We might wonder what it says about us that we didn’t get it right the first time or ever. That the thing we’re proud of may be a little off base or just plain wrong. Why would we even give someone else the chance to dress us down in the name of honesty — brutal honesty, but honesty nonetheless? And what if we can’t handle honesty?
It seems our ultimate fear may be that our questions, others’ answers, and our inability to handle the truth might reveal us to be wimps whose time it is to get out of the game altogether.
Moving past the irrational fear is critical. And once we do, our brave questions can lead to breathtaking results.
There’s one company who showed us just how essential curiosity can be to turning a business around. In 2009, Domino’s Pizza asked brave questions about their products, shared customers’ harsh answers publicly, then launched a campaign to show the world just how they were using the difficult feedback to make better pizzas.
The criticism was harsh: “Boring, bland pizza,” “Pizza was cardboard,” “Sauce tastes like ketchup,” and “Worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever had” among other slights. By 2019, after reconfiguring their recipe and later enhancing their customer-facing technologies, Domino’s was the top pizza chain in the United States. Brave questions, honest answers, and bold curiosity led them here.
The ADA’s member listening tour consisted of two- to four-hour office visits with dentists of all backgrounds. The benefit of going to our members’ offices was seeing the realities of their work, hearing from them in a setting where they were most comfortable, and gaining the ability to walk in their shoes.
The team followed up with second interviews with a member-comprised panel where we were able to test our ideas and eventually turn them into actionable products and programs. The conversations continue today — a continuous loop of feedback is vital to our research efforts.
The last four years have been transformative for the ADA. We’ve logged record results with gains in our membership and tremendous engagement with products based on what dentists told us were their two biggest concerns — dental benefits and student loan debt.
The rapport we built with our members in just a few short years encouraged them to lean on the ADA for dentistry-specific guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic. All told, member satisfaction, likelihood to recommend the ADA, and loyalty are at a ten-year high.
I’ve learned the simple act of asking brave questions leads to more than research; it fosters a relationship — one of trust, honesty, and collaboration that drives measurable future success, both for the company and the people it serves.
A Takeaway…
Consider these steps for when you want to take your brand and relationships to the next level.
- Ask Questions to Clarify the Problem You’re Trying to Solve
Some good starters:
- What business are we really in?
- What are the biggest challenges and concerns?
- What is everyone thinking that no one is saying?
- What are the alternatives?
- If you were our competitor, what would you do?
2. Listen to the Answers. Don’t take them personally. Take your ego out of it; our egos often lead to us edging goodness out.
3. Act on what you’ve learned. Formulate your customer- or member-centric ideas and go back to members to test them. Create and recreate with a continuous curiosity loop — always seek feedback from those you serve.
…and two questions, of course.
What questions would you ask if you had no fear? Where do you think curiosity will lead you?
