Breaking Bad helps Intuit crank QuickBooks Online business
- Summary:
- In what is a first for this author, product placement planted the seed that eventually led to a buy decision. It's an interesting approach but one which conceals a different approach to buying that is refreshingly cogent.
A question I almost always ask customers is 'Why did you choose (name your product here)?' It helps to gain insights into the decision process. What I didn't expect when interviewing Gina Brar, founder and creative director of GinaBrar.com was how product placement worked for what is a foundational solution applied to any business. In this case accounting and QuickBooks Online. This from our conversation:
Basically, in Breaking Bad, the main character's wife works for this firm and she works as the accountant, and the guy that owns the company is being audited for tax fraud. He has defrauded the company and she knows, so she sort of goes into this meeting and says, "Oh, but I just put everything into Quicken." And this guy's like, "You're using Quicken for like a corporation of this size? What are you doing?"
And I was like, what is Quicken? Interesting. I looked it up and I was like, oh, okay. Came across QuickBooks and Intuit and everything, but it wasn't something that I needed at that time, so it was sort of, you know, it was there in my head, something that I knew about. Then one of my relatives started working at QuickBooks and I was like, oh okay, yeah, yeah, I remember.
The moment I heard this my mind exploded with possibilities. Could it truly be the case that the accountant - albeit in a wildly popular fictional TV series - represented a genuine influence? It's not quite that simple.
Ms Brar went on to add that she looked at other solutions but the fact Quicken was in her mind played a big part in the process. She also described how she was able to get the help needed to move from spreadsheets to an accounting solution with relative ease, incorporating Shopify for e-commerce.
Later in our conversation, I asked another of my stock questions: 'What are the top three things you'd advise anyone who is considering an investment in (name your product here?)'
Her answers make sense on the context of a relatively new business in the 21st century but which often get lost in the world of enterprise:
- Don't pay for anything you don't need but always look for a pathway to the future.
- Make sure the interface is something that is easy to use and is clear from the get go.
- Pay attention to the mobile experience because your phone is likely to be your access device of choice on a day to day basis.
My take
Speaking with a relatively new business took me back to my roots as a small business professional accountant more than 35 years ago. Back then, 'we' sat in our offices like knights in shining armor, carefully explaining to clients who were mystified by debit and credit what they'd made (or not) and how their taxes stacked up. It was rarely a pleasurable experience for either party and was always something that happened six to nine months after the event. As someone who was originally trained in management accounting it always seemed a waste of time and effort for everyone, yet a necessary and often costly evil. Times have changed dramatically but that change has only happened in the last 10 years.
Today's online and real time systems are a world apart from those days. The sadness is that even now and with hundreds of thousands of businesses in the UK alone using online systems, business schools are still teaching people to manage their affairs in spreadsheets. As Ms Brar pointed out, attempting to get that right is difficult and time consuming, whereas she can readily manage her business finances when much of the grunt work is automated and the information is available in a way she can understand. There is a golden opportunity for smart vendors to rectify this.
Around 10 years ago, I started to see how new vendors in the entry level back office were changing the perception of accounting away from an irksome task to one that could deliver meaningful value and control to the business owner. Much of that was based upon two important criteria: ease of use through as much automation as possible and presenting financial information as a set of graphics rather than row and column reports. I was convinced this is the way forward and sure enough, the world and his dog are moving in that direction. At least at the entry level. From my discussions with a variety of QuickBooks customers, Intuit has got this mix just about right.
Things are very different further up the food chain. Vendors have been slow to understand how the lessons from the masses of small business might be valid in much larger organizations, meaning that even today, there is much work to be done. The fact that visualization tools like Tableau and Qlik are still often scoffed at as functionally weak, represents a failure to understand that users must be the people who are put first in the decision cycle and not treated as an afterthought.
It would be easy to dismiss Ms Brar's decision as irrational but the fact she thought it through from the point of her business needs rather than worrying about the technology is revealing. When considering technology, we often start with the question: 'What problem are you trying to solve?' and work back from there. This is an approach that is forcing vendors to think much more carefully about how they differentiate in competitive markets. As an aside, not once did she mention the technology or the fact QuickBooks Online is a cloud based solution. I wonder how long it will be before that argument finally goes away in enterprise land?
Product placement can work - even for back office. Just be careful where it goes because some people might get the wrong idea.