Customer Crossroads

E-mail should be friendlier: email marketing crimes you should avoid

E-mail marketing is big, big stuff these days. Possibly bigger than ever, as it has become so difficult to reach overloaded people.

When people let you into their inbox, you really should treat them with a little respect.

Here are a few of the things I'm not liking right now, (and hoping to heck I am not guilty of the same.)

Auto-responders

When someone replies to your mass e-mail, it is really kind of rude to send them a note saying you can't be bothered to read your stuff. We read their stuff, didn't we? You were all charming and witty and talked like we're kind of buddies, because that's the tone people take now. But hey, you're busy over here, and won't be responding.

Well, at least it's honest, I'll say that for it. Except for the "thanks"part, which is clearly all liar-pants.

I got one of these today that had a list of alternative ways to contact. Not bad, but still not great. Especially the part that says "If you are a customer... " Hell, yes, I'm a customer. I thought you knew that? And this from a specialist in e-mail marketing, no less.

In today's charming incident, I got a SECOND auto-responder, with this charming message tacked on at the beginning. I'll let you decide how you feel about the tone here.

This was Lead-Pages, but honestly it could have been many others.

Unsubscribe Options

I have a couple of modest little email lists -- the biggest is only about 1,000 names. But I do try to respect the time of people who are on that list. And I've been working harder at giving them options of what they want to see and how much of it.

It's amazing to me how often we DON'T get options. You can either get all the repeated sales pitches, or get nothing at all, even if you are a customer.

Again, I'm picking on LeadPages because they are handy, but it's a big club. Here's what I found when I tried to cut back on the messaging.

First attempt was to unsubscribe, thinking I would get options. Here's where the unsubscribe link goes. All or nothing. Well, as a customer, I can't really choose nothing without missing some potentially important stuff. This is when I wrote them a letter and got the offending auto-responder.

I realized there was a second option in the e-mail, so went to have a look at it. It sends me to a leadpage option to choose how many blog posts I want to get. But I'm not subscribed to the blog. And this wasn't actually a blog post.

 

My take

This is certainly not the only example. Only yesterday, I received unsolicited email from the wealth management group at CIBC Wood Gundy, a rather biggish enterprise. When I unsubscribed, I got a second email from the sender asking for feedback, telling me he was only 25 years old and trying really hard, blah, blah, and would really like to know why I unsubscribed. [I am NOT making this up - who could make this stuff up??]

I like LeadPages services, and would recommend them. Heck, I HAVE recommended them. Their product is easy to use, and seems to work well.

But I think they could be a little more customer friendly. Not just sound all customer friendly.

What's your take? Who's doing a great job on e-mail that we should give a shout-out to?

Conversations become markets: The rise of online marketplaces and monetization of digital content

When Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger told us in The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) "Markets are conversations" we should have readily seen the corollary would not be far behind: Conversations become markets.

The first web marketplaces democratized the ability to sell physical goods, such as E-Bay  (founded 1995) and Etsy (founded 2005). 

Amazon, started in 1995, launched third-party selling as Zshops in 1999. That change, along with services to independent publishers, really made Amazon a marketplace rather than just a retailer.

Digital goods marketplaces got going with photography. The one that comes to mind (there were likely others) is iStockPhoto, started in 2000. Typography, icons, and other graphic elements are all now available in marketplaces such as Creative Market (founded 2011.)

New study confirms power of qualitative in public policy

Canada's national marketing research association, MRIA, has just released the report of a study on government use of public opinion research.

For the most part, the report confirms what a regular reader of a quality newspaper would already know -- that our federal government now uses research and data of all kinds to confirm, rather than inform, their thinking, when they use data at all. Less data is collected, and what is collected is often of lower quality. Notably, the abandonment of the census, replacing it with a costlier, less valid, and less useful household survey.

But the leaders were pretty smart about what makes for good research and what they would like more of.

Can you lock in your customers? A bitter after-taste at Keurig

Companies dream these days of locking up their customers somehow. They envision multiple ways to do this, but a popular one right now is to convert a one-time sale into a continuing stream of revenue.

The desktop printing business created this kind of revenue stream, with inkjet refills and laser cartridges. You make one low-cost printer purchase and spend the next several years buying expensive replacements. Software went from something you paid for once and used for years, to something you might pay for annually or even monthly.

Enter the coffee cartridge

The coffee cartridge looked ideal to create just this sort of steady stream of revenue. Instead of just selling a coffee-maker that uses generic filters, you can sell the cartridges that go in it.

Keurig had a great deal going on this for a while. In 2014, "K-Cups accounted for most of Keurig Green Mountain’s $4.7 billion in revenue—more than five times what the company made five years prior," according to The Atlantic.

The cartridge lost patent protection in 2012, opening the door to pod-sellers who were not paying anything to Keurig. This opened the door to a second act, called, appropriately enough, Keurig 2.0.

The new machine would only work when a scanner built into it could see special ink that was only available on coffee pods where Keurig had a relationship (licensed technology.)

This must have seemed like the perfect solution -- give people lots of choice in their coffee, and make money on every single cup consumed!

Are we asking too much of survey participants?

I've had a Vimeo Pro account for a few years, and have been really happy with them. I recently completed a survey for them. This was the last page.

I found this screen quite problematic for a few reasons:

[1] They didn't tell the truth about their intentions up front. The purpose of the survey was stated as (broadly) understanding our experience and improving the service.

[2] They want to impose a pretty high standard on the individual offering the testimonial. Contacting them if your opinion changes, for example. Can you imagine actually trying to do that, and how much aggravation you would encounter?

[3] Completely one sided. They get to choose what my testimonial is and how to use it, including my avatar, and I get ... umm, well, nothing.

Seeing this actually changed my impressions of the company. I found them to be less trustworthy than I had thought. They came across as grasping and unpleasant. Involvement in research generally leads people to form a better opinion of an organization. In this case, the reverse is true.

My final issue is this language: "Your testimonial is truthful..."  I am seeing this start to appear in other research documents, at the request of clients. I'm not sure how the lawyers got involved in research, but this feels like a really hideous trend, and one we should all endeavor to stop in its tracks.

 

The internet of things: will there be terms and conditions?

In the digital era, it is challenging to be a responsible consumer.

Pre-digital shopping was kind of simple. If I buy a toaster in a store and pay cash, there is a very limited exchange of information. We have added a few things to that transaction now that permit data gathering, like loyalty cards, electronic transactions that capture some information, and so on. But the toaster itself was pretty straightforward. Even though it probably has instructions, you probably threw them in the recycling without reading them.

Even relatively complex transactions, like buying a home or a car did not give the other participants in the transaction much ongoing right to information other than whether I made my payments on time. Okay, they got your credit bureau. But they didn't get your browsing history, did they? And these kinds of transactions have a LOT of consumer protection built into them.

Buying even a simple digital product has become an exercise in trust

Don't be evil with confusing instructions and other gotchas. I'm talking to you SaaS providers

We all want brand advocates, don't we? There's nothing better than word of mouth and personal recommendations to build loyal customers. Heck, the widely adopted Net Promoter Score measure is pretty much based on the idea that having more people advocating for your brand than dissing your brand is the core of building good business.

I want to put the spotlight on those monthly charges that come from Software As A Service (SaaS) organizations.

Like many micro-businesses, I run a networked operation with a lot of SaaS support. Instead of an IT department and a bunch of servers, I have multiple services I rent out on a monthly or annual basis. These have included a pretty wide variety of stuff:

• Web meeting software
• CRM software
• Hosted Outlook Exchange
• Marketing automation, including lead capture and e-mail
• Project management
• Secure file sharing
• Document search / desktop research
• Qualitative research platforms
• Premium use of free platforms, such as LinkedIn
• Web hosting for multiple sites, plus plug-ins, some of which are purchased and some rented
• Video hosting
• Licensed software

When I look at my annual costs for doing business, the cost of these services is quite significant. A larger enterprise would have many more such charges, for HR systems, operations systems, fulfillment systems -- you name it, it's available on a SaaS basis.

I love these services and the value they bring to my business and my clients. But I have a few issues.

The explainer, a new and valuable cultural role: but not well compensated

Ancient cultures may have their shamans, but modern culture has some unusual roles emerging as well. The cultural curator role has expanded enormously, with both professional and amateur versions. People with Pinterest boards, many blogs and blog-like content sites are not so much new content as they are curated content -- the curator shares their taste in something, sifting and sorting what they find into consumable information bits for others.

There are certainly paid cultural curators -- they hang out in journalism in the fashion pages, they may be professional speakers, or even celebrities in their own right. (An example isn't popping into mind right now, but perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow would be pretty close. Although she was a celebrity for skills other than her opinions about taste.)

A role that is not much talked about is the explainer. Explainers are not experts in the fields they explain, so much as they are interpreters of difficult material that the rest of us can then digest. Malcolm Gladwell is the standard carrier for this breed. I encountered a delightful example of explaining in James Gleick's blog, Around.com.

Better brainstorming: a new video series

I've been thinking a lot about brainstorming lately, and how much criticism is leveled at this simple, nice, productive tool.  And I think the basic problem is that there is a lot of really TERRIBLE brainstorming going on.

So I have set up a series of videos to talk about brainstorming.  Here's the first one, and it's all about why most brainstorming sessions are less productive than they could be, and how to fix it.  There's a nice (free) download too.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this -- does it make sense to you? What have your experiences with brainstorming been like?

Announcing - The Idea Studio Marketplace - Update

The hamsters have been furiously working that wheel to power some changes. We're almost ready to launch.

Launch what, you may well ask. [Okay, we're behind. We were eating the leftover Christmas shortbread and bon bons. But we're back in harness again.]

What's coming soon is this -- a marketplace for idea tools. These are the things that you use in facilitation and qualitative research work. And often in consulting work, interactive workshops, and other creative professions.

In the next week or so, we'll be uncoupling www.theideastudio.ca and it will have a new home as the marketplace. This site will still be hosted at www.customercrossroads.com.

 

If you want to hear about this new thing as it evolves, please subscribe to the *NEW* list here. Our other newsletter will NOT be going to this list. So you won't necessarily hear about the launch date, and whatnot.

Subscribe to The NEW list and stay connected!

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Changes coming to Customer Crossroads and The Idea Studio

This blog started in December 2004, when blogging was still sexy and new. Or newish, anyway.

In early 2012, I was feeling really restless about the content, as my professional interests were shifting more and more towards creativity and innovation. So the blog was renamed The Idea Studio, and took on a new domain, while still keeping the old one.

Well, more changes are coming soon. The Idea Studio is going to have its own home and its own new site, where it will become a marketplace for creativity tools. I'll be telling you lots more about that soon.

And this blog will carry on under its old banner of Customer Crossroads. I'll still post here from time to time about customer experience topics, and the related things that catch my interest. And the existing content, close to 1000 posts, will still be here of course.

Over the next few weeks I'll be cleaning things up here, and working on the new thing. I think it will be fun, and it's been such an honor to have readers. I've always tried to offer real value here, and will keep doing that.

And I will still be publishing the Insights Newsletter about every two months, at least in theory, maybe more in future. That content is always carefully curated and designed to bring you one thought-provoking idea at a time.

Thanks for visiting, and stay tuned for more changes!

Do you really see your customers? Or are stereotypes affecting your judgment?

I started volunteering with a group that hangs art in a hospital. About every 6 weeks we turn over a new show with about 80 paintings from local artists. It's a surprisingly large time commitment, much of it during the workday, so most of the volunteers are retired. (I'm the young blood - scary!)

I took some offense from remarks one of the older fellows made to me -- he was operating on a lot of sexist assumptions. Like ... my husband made the frames for my own paintings. (I paint as a hobby, and I build my own frames. I even have tools!) He assumed I was a lady of leisure, with lots of free time.  (Nope, I still run a business.)  There was something terribly patronizing about his whole attitude that I really took offense to. It was hard to put my finger on it. He was amazed that I took offense, genuinely surprised. I guess he doesn't encounter women like me very often in his world, or if he does, they suffer in silence.

He was operating from stereotypes. But I have to admit, I know almost nothing about this guy myself! I'm also operating on stereotypes based on his age and a few brief exchanges. Which may be why I took offense, instead of just laughing at his foolishness.

A three-part framework for creating breakthrough innovation

People talk about the high rate of new product failures (about 85%) as if there is no way to change it, and no way to understand the market. Like innovation is some kind of hit and miss affair, or magic. It's not.

Nielsen, a well known quant-focused research group, has been deconstructing and quantifying innovation successes for a few years now with the Breakthrough Innovation studies. I recently heard Lauren Galletta present at a professional meeting on this topic, and it was terrific stuff.

They have studied tens of thousands of product launches, and have strict criteria for being a winner -- there has to be something new happening (distinctiveness) not just a reformulation. The sales of the new thing need to be big enough to be relevant. And the sales have to continue at close to the launch levels for at least a second year.

Their framework for how to create these kinds of wins is this: Demand driven insight, demand driven development, and demand driven activation. Let's look at what they mean by this.

Behavioral Economics fun

Some professors from Ivey Business School have written a nice little PDF e-book about behavioral economics. Behavioral Economics for Kids 

As you read it, you may think that you have heard some of these things before, from sociology, from anthropology, from psychology. And indeed you have.

What you are hearing now are things about how humans behave that were figured out by economists.

Essentially where we are now with this stuff is that economists seem to have finally determined that rational theories of behavior are in fact not descriptive of reality. Other disciplines knew that, but we are finally getting some convergence of research. So this is a good thing. But it isn't all new.

My credit card just sold my so-called relationship

I've had a gold CIBC Aeroplan card for a number of years that I have used for business expenses. More than a decade. And charged a ton of business expenses, keeping a good credit record. I liked that card. I chose it from a bunch of other bachelors vying for my favors, and have felt proud to have it in my pocket. It has served me well.

But then the card portfolio got sold to TD, and I got sold along with it. Now, let me be clear, I know TD to be good organization, and I have other accounts with them. But this was not my decision.

This is not proving to be a great customer experience

First, the emotional hit. I was happy where I was, and it felt really odd to find out that they really didn't want a relationship, despite saying that for years. Me and my business could be sold, just like that. I seriously considered cancelling and moving on, and may still do that. The goodbye letter from the old bank did not communicate an essential message of thanks for business done in the past. Or communicate any empathy about the fact that they, not me, made this decision.

Then letters from the new guys started to arrive. And the hassle-factor set in.

New card. Several letters. New card number. New PIN number. Reminders that I need to change all the regular payments going through the card. (Guess what guys, it's a business card, and there are a TON of regular charges!)

Oh yeah. You can't do a thing before the big switchover date. You can't input the changes into all those other systems in advance -- they won't take the new card number. You can't change the PIN in advance. The letters have warned me that I should take BOTH the old and the new card, and the new secret PIN with me if I just happen to be traveling on that date. (Yes, I do just happen to be traveling on that date.)

My Director of Everything guy tells me that the entire online history of the account will disappear. You know how we keep getting told we should stop getting paper statements because we'll always be able to get the information online? That would be incorrect, I have now learned. (Sorry guy. Guess you'll be doing some downloading over the next few days prior to the switchover!)

I was a little concerned that I have booked travel on a card that will no longer be active. Travel companies have a way of not liking that. I asked the nice lady on the phone about that little problem. She seemed to think it was a highly unusual situation (uh, nope), and wanted to know when, exactly, I had booked the travel? (Huh? how is that relevant? Months ago.) No useful information to impart. Kind of suggested I should have called a different number. (You mean NOT the one printed on the back of the new card??)

I'm not giving them my heart this time

All the letters are filled with blah-blah-we're-wonderful-blah. It's all going to be great. I should be really happy. And please make sure I carefully read the many instructions and fine print. 

So far, it's been a ton of work and annoyance, and we're nowhere near done.

And the new card isn't pretty, either. I may have to put some Hello Kitty stickers on it. Cause right now, it looks like it's all about them, and I want it to be all about me.

But here's the crucial thing. The letters are just so much boilerplate marketing-speak. I'm not going to give them my heart this time. I'll collect the points for now. But at the first good offer from someone else, I'm moving. I would have done it this week if it weren't for the fact that -- yes -- I am traveling, and can't wait for a new card to show up from some new guy seeking my affections.

My take

We in the marketing corner talk a lot about relationships. But the truth is that this is really a one way street. I think consumers may be catching on. What do you think?

What's your take?

I'd love to hear your reaction. Am I just being silly? Should I be grateful I got sold?

Related articles

Is loyalty a one way street?

Should you turn simple transactions into sales opportunities? Yes, but there are rules.

Should you turn simple transactions into sales opportunities? Yes, but there are rules.

I got a new credit card in the mail, so had to call in and “activate” it. A simple security process, or it should be.

One of my banks has decided to make this a relationship building moment and to pick up sales of  credit card balance insurance in the process. It could have been any industry call centre, though.

It started simply enough, a friendly young man confirming this and that, asking me to wait while he did things.

Since this has to be a pretty simple transaction (confirm identity, tick a box), having to go on hold a couple of times made me speculate as to what was going on in the background. I’m guessing it was some kind of “sell this product next” algorithm. Who knows ... it seemed to take a lot more talk than necessary.

Why am I not interested, he wants to know?

When I thought the call was just about over, he asked me about balance insurance. Here’s where it gets weird.

“No thanks,” I said.

He proceeded to tell me a bit about the product.

“I’m familiar with the product,” I said, “and I’m not interested in it.”

Why am I not interested in it, he wants to know?

Silence on my side.

Then he says, “For customer feedback purposes, I have to have a reason you are not interested in the product.”

OK, this is starting to tick me off. Have to have??? Seriously?? I was tempted to hang up, but not sure my card had been activated. I was a hostage to the call.

Finally, “I don’t need it, I don’t carry a balance.”

Now he starts to explain about how the premiums work and it will only cost me blah, blah, blah.

“I’m not interested,” I indicate more firmly.

Now we’re into the “is there anything else I can help you with” spiel. Finally, confirmation that my card is activated. It has to be at least five minutes on this call, but it felt like 20.

Here’s the problem. If you engage in a sales discussion without getting permission to engage, you are being pushy.

Although this was a bank, the insurance industry was known for this for many years. It is commonly believed, and perhaps true, that insurance is sold, not bought. So a little pushiness is deemed OK.

Pushiness in some categories is so common, in fact, that there are consumer protection laws offering a cool-off period in many jurisdictions.

Pushiness is never OK.

Pushiness is never OK. It always causes some erosion of the relationship. No one wants to engage in being pushed. Our collective inclination is to avoid any encounter that MIGHT be pushy.

So now you, my banker, who wants my loyalty and trust, who puts tremendous investment into building brand equity, are acting like door-to-door soliciters for coupon books and eco-charities.

It’s a good idea to take the time to expand relationships with customers when there is an opportunity. But actual pitching should be preceded by permission.  If you don’t, the person on the other end is now just trying to terminate the interaction as fast as possible.

You have all the tools to be better than this. So just do it -- be better.

Mobilizing employees as part of the customer experience

Were Pine and Gilmour just restating Abraham Maslow? Kind of looks that way, according to Michael Mattalo of Fifth P, when talking about employees as part of the customer experience and the brand. [Still blogging live from CMA's Customer Experience conference]

Mr. Mattalo says we typically only look at the front line employees' connection to the brand, but should be looking at everyone.

He offers a great illustrative example -- corporate legal department that is responsible for the legal agreements which so commonly do not align with the brand at all. Policies, processes, systems and facilities are often not covered in the brand book.

[Why is this so hard? I feel like I have been talking about this stuff for more than a decade... wait, I have. Very tough to execute.]

WestJet's employee slogan, "owners care" is a nice example of how to activate company brand internally.

What is your employee experience? And does it have any relationship with your espoused brand values or the experience you want for your customers?

Top tips offered:

• make employees integral to your brand
• focus on the purpose employees serve
• create a branded employee journey

Good job @mmattalo!

 

We aren't doing a very good job at marketing to the brain

Here at the CMA Customer Experience conference #cmacx, the first presenter Dr. A.K.Pradeep is talking about what we know about the brain. And it is clear to me that we are violating a lot of these rules in many (most?) categories.

His initial statement is a grabber -- we need to consider a sequence like this: attention -- emotion -- memory retention.

He says that 95% of our thinking/decisions are non-conscious. Music is a driver -- emotion is an effect.

[I wish you could see his jacket, with sequin collar and cuffs.]

 

7 dimensions that are important to the brain

1 Do I have enough information to decide? A category-busting metric -- e.g. in cameras it is megapixels. In computers it is gigahertz. In colas, it is zero calories. Ask yourself what is the category-busting metric -- if you don't have one, the consumer will default to price. For the consumer, this gives emotional relief that you are doing the right thing

2 Interaction -- different than transaction. Ask yourself, for every product category, what kind of interaction will you enable your consumer to have at the point of purchase? More critical for female shoppers. Women shop, men buy.

3 As much as we want information, we want entertainment. Ask yourself, am I entertaining the consumer at the point of purchase, online? Don't get wrapped up in your brand, with the glorious things you are doing. Instead. show people a good time. You are not saving the planet.

4 Education -- brains crave one new fact. We can give people this every time they touch our product. A little squirt of dopamine, it's very powerful.

5 Simplicity -- making things simple through all aspects of the shopping experience. Rule of threes - use three image groups no more. The things that work well are aligned with rules of three, used to simplify.

Other simple neurological rules are often violated. For example, images on the left, words on the right. Around the world this is true. Anything in your left visual field is processed by the right brain. And vice versa. If there are words and numbers on the right, this is good. (Uh, oh -- I've been doing my presentations backwards! Yikes! However I see that Pradeep's slide do indeed follow this rule!) Brains do not want to work.

Brains like to look at faces, from the time we are babies. Faces looking directly at us are easier to process than faces looking into the distance.

To create a superior experience, obliterate these neuro-experience violations every step of the way.

When there is a human and an animal, the brain wants contact. Touch the animal, don't look at the animal. e.g. a puppy.

Women read more of the words than men do -- the female ability to process language is three times better than male ability to process language. If there is something to read, woman will read it. Men will tend to look at the pictures. Consider this when presenting to male and female executives. For men, use more pictures and a few words. For women, they will want to read all the words.

60% of the homunculus has representation of hands and lips. (Remember those exhibits at the science museum?). The homunculus is the brain's representation of the physical body. Ask yourself, why does Coke in a bottle taste better? It does, because there is better stimulation to the hands and lips. When looking at packages, we should be considering the feel of the box, the bottle.

Consider the experience of the plastic handle of a shopping cart -- unpleasant, not extraordinary.

We need to look at every experience through the lens of the brain. Painting a masterpiece.

6 Self-worth, self-esteem. How can you create this? Even when we know it isn't entirely true, we want it -- we want endorsement. ("That jacket looks amazing on you!") How have you made them feel better about themselves?

Some poor ways of doing it -- asking for a donation at the cashier. Instead -- offer to make a donation. Boost their self-esteem without causing them pain. All payment causes pain. If you can go even further using social currency (I helped save a child) this will create a superlative experience.

He now mentions the banking industry ... at the ATM you put in your bank card, they tell you there will be a charge. What if the bank had said, every time you pay an ATM charge, we will contribute 25 cents to a charity -- this would boost self-esteem.

A $1 trick that the consumer would enjoy -- in the retail aisle, put a mirror. We all like to look at ourselves. The love they feel for themselves spreads around to the products and services you arrange around the mirror. Surround the mirror with your new products and services!

If you have an argument with your significant other -- argue in front of the mirror. You can't be mad there, because you don't like the way your face looks when it is mad. Put mirrors in complaints/service areas, it will take the temperature down.

To improve perceptions of quality, increase the weight of the package, make it shiny. Premium wines are sold in a heavy bottle. Software looks more valuable when it is in a box than just sold as a disk

7 Community -- people have a desire to belong. If you can give them that sense of belonging, it is hugely powerful.

Pradeep says you need to do all of these things -- it is not an a la carte menu. You need to do well in all areas. This is true for real life experiences and for online experiences. "This is how the brain looks at stuff."

MUSIC

A discovery Pradeep made last year -- what are the precise emotions evoked by music in the brain? He created a company called Moodcast -- it is the non-conscious language of the brain.

Recovery rates from surgery are better when the patient hears music. Even when anaesthetized. There are neural mechanisms processing music even when we are unconsious. He found algorithms ... by geography/culture and can lay out what emotions are elicited by that music. What if you used the right music in your stores to elicit the emotions that the category wants to evoke?

"A fantastic voyage is about to begin, and I welcome you to be an amazing part of it."

 

 

How to say thank you to your customers

Recently, a package from Lands' End showed up at our house. Except it was not for us.Bit of a delivery error.

My spouse, a good guy if ever there was one, helped the package find it's way to the right destination, a couple of blocks from our home.

In order to do this, he had to contact Lands' End to get the correct address. Not only were they grateful, but they sent him a nice gift certificate for $25.00.

How do you say thank you?

 

Related articles

Is loyalty a one way street?

What The top 5 things that best drive a client/customer experience with your organization?

What are the top 5 things that best drive a client/customer experience with your organization?

I saw this question on Cinch, and answered it there, but thought, "Hey, maybe I should post this on the blog!" [Not for nothing that I have two degrees!]

What are the top 5 things that best drive a client/customer experience with your organization?

This will vary by industry and type of client -- business clients want different things than consumer clients do.

You need to distinguish what is called "hygiene factors" from things that drive satisfaction. Hygiene factors (think lack of clean silverware) are bad when the minimum standard is not met. Exceeding the minimum standard (even cleaner silverware) does not make people more satisfied. So you have to meet the minimum acceptable standards for the business FIRST. If you have glaring gaps in these standards, it should be your Number 1 priority to fix these gaps.

Having said all this, I think it is safe to say that people expect to be treated with (1) courtesy and respect; they expect you to (2) do what you say you are going to do, and they expect (3) transparency in pricing (no gotchas, the kind of thing telcos are most known for). (4) Being easy to do business with is also a big one. Of course this means different things in different environments, but a lack of irritating policies and paperwork is a good place to start. (5) And appreciating their business is important for all of us. There are so many ways to show this -- by saying thank you, by showing loyalty to your customers, by solving problems when they come up.

I do believe if you really work at these things, your business will do better than if you don't. So I need to go look after my own clients now :-)

Related articles

Is loyalty a one way street?

Are you credible and relevant? Getting behind your assumptions

Anne Crassweller + Frank Graves #NetGain8 - using IVR systems for research

I've been talking to Anne Crassweller of NADbank about research and the challenges faced by companies like hers, so I know this is going to be an interesting session.

NADbank collects the data about readership for the daily newspaper industry, how many people read a newspaper every day and throughout the week, and all the related data.

Frank Graves is a major figure in political polling, and has been a big advocate of IVR polling. This is where you pick up the phone, and get to respond to a very small number of polling questions through an interactive voice response. I kind of enjoy these, they are fast, and usually interesting. And faster than a real person, frankly.

Anne: It's all about the sample. But that doesn't mean we can do, or want to do things, the way we did them in the past. Consumers do not all use land lines, so land line methods are inherently biased now.

She says her stakeholders want the data really fast, overnight if possible. So they have been working with Frank Graves at Ekos to develop alternative approaches.

Frank Graves is now up.

[BTW - first presenters to use Prezi]

Online panels are not reflective of households, and have a gazillion other problems for sampling. Challenges for declining response rates, sampling, commercial pressures for faster and cheaper ... So, they have been playing around with IVR, "robo-calls."

They have been refining the methodology to get better and better samples.

Best lines of the day: "Now that's an exciting table!" "Prediction is really hard, particularly about the future."

Anne is back up, talking about how the HD-IVR delivers results for them.

• Gender results are a closer match to census than any of the other methods compared
• Age results are much closer to census than any of the other comparison methods. This is the only method to really get 18-24 people effectively
• Education is very close to the census, again much better than the other methods compared to.

Part of the challenge is that the CATI surveys are much longer, so they have been trying to figure out what questions to shift to IVR.

Cell-phone only households are the challenge, because so many people are getting rid of their landlines. The debate is, does cell-only define your media behaviour? Their tests have showed that, NO, your choice of being a cell-only household is not a major determiner of your media habits.

My quant buddies are probably following the stats quicker than me, but I think this is quite interesting from the standpoint of just getting good, real, data. There really is no substitute for actual facts, is there?

 

 

Caroline Fletcher on mobile self-ethnography at #NetGain8

I'm a big fan of having people take videos and pictures of events in their lives, whether that is using an ATM machine or walking their dog. And with smart phones, handhelds and tablets, all of this is just so much easier to do. So I'm of course interested to see what kinds of things Caroline Fletcher will be showing us.

Why use mobile video ethnography:

• genuine behavior
• creative expression
• cost effective
• pre-post task - review footage together

There are so many ways to approach qualitative research projects, when do these approaches make sense?

• when people would not want a researcher there. e.g. carving the Thanksgiving turkey, other private or special moments
• capturing pain points, like setting up HDTV, setting up home internet WiFi, IKEA furniture assembly

Saw a nice sample of some edited video.

 

#NetGain8 Tom deRuyck on Consumer Communities

I met Tom deRuyck at the speakers dinner last night. We had a lively discussion about what "community" means in the context of marketing research, and found that we largely agreed with each other!

He says his firm has done more than 500 communities in the last 8 years. Based on that, these are the things that companies need to survive:

• being open - embracing the empowered consumer
• being agile - moving quickly to respond to consumers

The average CEO finds this scary, and some bravery is needed to be open and agile. Most companies do not have two-way dialogues with consumers, even when they claim to. They are concerned about what will be said if they actually open up a dialogue.

deRuyck asserts that marketing (in campaigns) and research (ad hoc projects) are not responding to the continuous nature of experience. Silos in departments, and process-oriented marketing result in lack of agility. Projects are passed from silo to silo for each phase.

His recipe:

• work on project teams instead of departments
• stop working on ad hoc research
• stop working on ad hoc campaigns
• Bring consumers in to the business and put them at the heart of the business

Examples of companies that are doing this...

[1] His favorite cookie, PiM's, a Belgian cookie. He says he and other brand fans are more knowledgeable about the product than the brand manager who has been in the job a short period of time. "Your fans are emotional shareholders because they are emotionally connected to your brand."

[2] Ben and Jerry's wanted to develop a brand ambassador strategy. Found people who score 9 to 10 on a brand fan-ship scale. In a community, these people were the toughest audience. They became angry when a brand team did something wrong with "their brand." They truly want to help you out.

[Aside, @Tom de Ruyck has the best slides ever. Love the typographic design.]

A community - consumer consulting board - a closed online platform on which you bring together a larger group of people for a longer period of time. Closed = invitation only. closed = your secrets are safe. Efficiency of online. Most important charaacteristics - more people for more time. Allows for clashes of ideas, which can be very interesting. More time allows you to think along with consumers while you are developing a marketing campaign.

[3] Heineken - wanted to be known as a design brand. Did a year-long community. Did some mobile ethnography. Got immersed in the world of clubbing. This served as an immersion for a design team of 15 people. A year after the first day of the community, Heineken wanted to actually build the club of the future -- the ideal clubbing experience, as a pop up club in Milan.

After the first immersion, they started sketching. Then they got feedback on the concepts. They worked across silos, brought down the walls between different departments.

He suggests that communities be used to tackle all your qualitative questions. Use for all business objectives. Generating insights. Developing new concepts. Guiding marketers when they are launching a new product.

How to make it happen? Recipe for success:

• first element is getting the right people on board. the high performing community members are more into the brand OR more into the topic than other people are. It is NOT representative. Not a bad thing (this is qualitative). We work with people who are interested and interesting to listen to. You want people to inspire you!
• How many members? Bigger is not better. Their communities are small - they have studied this with Maastricht U. AFter 30 answers, you know what you need to know. In a short-term commuity, 50 people participating intensely will give you this. In a longer-term, more permanent community, you get 150 people. As you approach 150, it becomes more difficult for the moderator to interact and to probe.
• We brief people and create engagement. The incentive is not money -- it is recognition, feedback, and from time to time a small gift. e.g. from Heinz, every quarter they get a basket of products that they have worked on.
• Co-creation of the IKEA catalog around the world. People want to do this! Make it fun to engage people.
• Help keep people engaged. Gamification -- use the principles and psychology behind games to make a boring task more fun. At the question level, the individual level, and the community level. A question is turned into a challenge. e.g. have ten teams compete against one another, based on cities -- show us that your city is the coolest on Earth. (done for MTV globally) At the individual level, give people a status badge for quality and achievement. On a group level, organize battles of arguments -- create tensions, but do it in a game way. At the community level, you want to make the community act as a we, as a group. Set goals for whole community feedback

Chiquita smoothie example is kind of cool. They had regular fruit eaters and "unhealthy ones" switch their diets for a week. At the end of the week, they listed the benefits of healthy eating. Then they had to argue to convince people to change their diet.

Mobile tools are an obvious good fit for communities. But so is going into the social media where people already are. They created a Facebook page that only community members had access to, so they could do second screening during a TV program. So they could help people capture real time feedback (because they were going to be on FB anyway)

Interesting that they sought feedback on ther communities. Campbells' community had a professional moderator, and a participant co-moderator. this person helps to guide asking better questions. Co-moderated communities get 25% more on topic discussion.

Another thing they did was get analytical help from people to understand stories and other input that they don't understand. 20 to 40% additional insights, depending on the topic. Get more insights. The insights that they come up with, that you didn't find, those are the most interesting things.

Have also tried recruiting observers to just watch a community. Then they do first run of analysis, and run it by the observers. The observers provide feedback and correct the problems of the analysis. This freed the people from social pressure and cultural challenges. (This example was research done in China.)

He has a free book on the internet at www.consumerconsultingboard.com

 

 

Annie Pettit at #NetGain8 on Behavioral Economics

Love the title of this presentaiton - "Behavioral Economics: New, or just new to you?" You will be familiar with Annie Pettit from her @lovestats Twitter feed and terrific blog of the same name.

She thinks it's a whole lotta hooey. Interesting start! [Can't say I agree totally, but I am a little tired of people trying to explain all of human motivation through loss aversion tendencies.]

Definition: Behavioral economics is the application of insights and research from psychology to economics.

Basic tenet behind BE: humans are irrational. No surprise there.

Next up: she shows a number of historical figures dating from Adam Smith and covering the next 300 years. People who all documented how human behavior is not fully rational.

Her real argument here, I think, is that there is a lot of documented psychology (e.g. Asch conformity studies in the 50s, MIlgram obedience experiments, Zimbardo situational studies with randomly assigned guards and prisoners) that show how people do things that aren't fully rational, and the power of the pull to conformity. Situational ethics and norms.

She did a little experiment with us about the number of peanuts in a jar. We had to guess. But she planted the first dozen guesses, to show that we would tend to conform to the prior guesses.

Cognitive dissonance. Festinger and Carlsmith, also in the 50s, showed that we evaluate a task as boring or fun based on how much compensation we received. (If less compensation, evaluated as more fun)

Halo effect, Thorndike in the 20s. Our overall impression can be based on one trait. (This has been re-demonstrated in many fields thousands of times. e.g. effect of appearances on perceived intelligence of children, impact of name gender on resume, and many other approaches.)

Impact of all of this - her take:

• people want to give you the truth, but they can't always do that.
• they misunderstand their own behavior

So -- stop asking questions like:

• would you...
• why do you ...
• hypotheticals of any type

Instead, ask what I have done. Ask about past behavior. What did you buy, when, what coupons did you use, etc. THIS is GREAT ADVICE.

 Brian Singh, in his question, suggests that experimental design is something that is growing, because of wider acceptance of human irrationality.

 I think Annie's point is a good one overall -- that psychology wasn't just invented, and we need to pay more attention to the substantial actual science that exists, and has existed for years.

 

 

 

 

#NetGain8 - SAS's Chris Long

We're all fuelled up on chocolate-filled croissants and coffee, and ready to learn more. The gentleman beside me has an Elite luggage tag, which instantly made me wonder many things. Great badge value in those tags, isn't there? It says "I travel a lot," "My company pays for it" and "I always have lounge access." Such is the life of a qually, always observing and overanalyzing.

Next up, Chris Long from SAS, who is talking about marketing analytics and where that is going. Most of his slides are kind of complicated, and have a zillion logos on them, representing the MANY players in social media and marketing analytics.

I do like this graphic, a chart that explains social media.

• Twitter - I'm eating a donut
• Facebook - I like donuts
• YouTube - how to eat a donut
• Instagram - vintage-looking donut
• LinkedIn - my skills around donut eating
• Foursquare - where I eat donuts
• Pinterest - a donut recipe
• Last.fm - now listening to "donuts"
• G+ - I'm a google employee that eats donuts
• I might add, Quora - "how to build a donut business"

Mr. Long says Canada is 1.5 to 2 years behind the global technology curve on social media. From a business / marketing / analytics use perspective. Which suggests there will be more adoption of social media analytics by business, by mainstream media.

How companies will use social media: foresight, brand protection, marketing, sales.

He says we need to understand four dimensions of social media. Conversations, content, context, connections. For context, think Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message". Very true - seeing something on Facebook vs Twitter says something to you just because of the context.

My biggest takeaway from this presentation: the slide people will remember and talk about is the one I captured in the bullet points above. It's the one that tells a human story.

Questions on how to use social media data yield surprisingly obvious recommendations -- like monitoring and responding to what people say about your brand. It seems like you don't really need this kind of sophisticated tool to do something like this. My take: we are at the nascent stage in learning how to effectively use all this analytical horsepower.

 

#NetGain8 - Mark Michelson and mobile research

Mark is presenting virtually from Atlanta, which got snowed in yesterday. I know Mark as a fellow quallie, but he is current Exec Director of the Mobile MR Association. MMRA.

Smart phones are the big enabler of mobile MR, both surveys and qualitative. [I recently completed my first true mobile qual project, and it was great. Technology worked well, participants loved it, and we got a video diary of moments through a week in their life, plus Q+A discussion.]

Some other parts of the trend in mobile:

• voice possibilities, live video chats
• passive data collection possibilities
• location-based data
• app-centric communities
• QR and scanner codes to engage and classify
• real time and asynchronous
• Augmented reality - superimposed imagery in the real world (Vision Critical has done some of this apparently)
• gamification - survey questions inserted into the game in order to earn in-game rewards like lives

As wearable computing comes in, many more possibilities for data gathering will be possible, including biometrics.

The challenges now are actually in design, because you get a lot of data from studies of this type. Images, videos, etc.

Other challenges:

• responsive design to fit screen size
• user experience and on-boarding (training)
• keeping participants engaged - balance engagement with bothering people
• participant privacy
• validity of self-reported data, client trust in findings, and participant trust in using the apps
• device ID and interface optimization for specific devices -- there are so many different mobile devices

Relatively few companies are using mobile. General Mills is an industry leader.

MMRA has developed a new set of guidelines for privacy (full standards plus a short form that can be shared with participants in research). These integrate with existing ESOMAR standards, but expand them.

 Best practices:

• be transparent and respect respondents - share intent, expectations, in advance.
• avoid participant burn-out. Not too many questions. Respect time zone - don't send notices out in the middle of the night
• make the study appropriate for the screen size
• channel dictates question type (channel being native app, SMS, WAP, etc.)
• use micro-surveys, shorter length of questionnaires (e.g. 3 to 5 questions) Use data stitching techniques to bring these together.
• use mobile friendly tools - sliders, dials, graphic interface. Avoid typing where possible.

Clearly, the future of mobile research is great, and it will enable many more participants to engage than traditional online methods, especially when we consider global markets.

 

Mark's slides can be downloaded from mmra-global.org

 

 

NetGain8 - leading edge developments in Marketing Research

I'm at #NetGain8 today, and thought I would blog live. These may be fairly brief, but this conference is usually a great one. Plus, I have to moderate the final panel, so I do need to pay attention.

THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH - Jeffrey Henning

Jeffrey Henning from Researchscape International is talking about the future of the MR industry. bitly/NETGAIN8 has the slides, he says. He drew a beautiful metaphor about how roads and transportation have changed, but we still need to go from place to place faster than our feet will carry us. Methods change, fundamental needs do not.

Surveys are a victim of their own success. There is a lot of pressure on surveys, including length, badly written, too complex, declining response rates. And even more, behavioral economics has made it clear that direct questioning methods may not be very useful, because they rely on us being good observers of our own behavior and intentions.

However, some of the things driving growth are: mobile surveys, micro-surveys, DIY systems, automation, and cool features (think feature wars among software and solution providers) like the ability to capture emotions.

Proprietary analytics is one of the ways companies are competing in this environment. Better dashboards that reduce the need for human work to provide specific views, like single location results, for example. Automatic weighting, which is not very good now, is likely to become better as companies keep iterating. Automatic coding of open-end responses is getting better, especially where the answers are very short (e.g. what brand, what tv show). Statwing.com, for example, automatically applies the appropriate statistical method to the data, meaning someone without statistical knowledge can do good analysis. Crowd-shaped surveys change the questions based on early answers. Better weightings, text analytics of long verbatims, and a lot of aggressive innovation will characterize the supplier environment.

Things he thinks we should do to differentiate are interesting. Several of them are already being done by good qualitative people. e.g. infographic reports, posters, storytelling, running workshops to help internalize findings, and increased qualitative analysis. [Personally, I do a lot of these things, and many of my colleagues do as well. So my conclusion here is that the statistical part of the MR community is catching up to the qualitative side. Not sure if I like that trend, but it's still a good idea.]

 

Are you credible and relevant? Getting behind your assumptions

We see this question in surveys all the time. 

How important to you are ... followed by a list of items.

 

For example:

How important to you are the following?

• Networking opportunities with other professionals
• Professional development opportunities
• A free and democratic society
• Having clean socks in your drawer

[Okay, I admit it, I added the last two.]

Actually, all of these things are important to me. But I don't expect my professional associations to look after getting me clean socks. Or keeping my country free and democratic.

 

The challenge with this kind of thing is, the hidden assumption is that these are benefits that the questioner believes they are offering.

 

As marketers and business people, we are all trying to define a space, set priorities and get clarity. And there's not a thing wrong with that. But we also have to get beneath our assumptions.

 

It may be that some of the features and benefits you think are core to your offering are not core.

 

A free and democratic society is important to many people, but that does not mean they see your particular political party or lobby group as a credible or relevant standard-bearer in that mission. And even if you are, that does not mean they are willing to join, give money, provide volunteer service or anything else. 

 

To get behind these kinds of assumptions, we need deeper insights into the lives and concerns of our customers, and how else they meet those needs. If you are thinking that is not a simple question, I completely agree.

 

I'm picking on surveys again, because it is an easy way to illustrate the problem. It's not about how you ask the question. It's really about what questions you ask.

 

 

Related articles

Is loyalty a one way street?

Can you brainstorm over the phone? Yes!

Is loyalty a one way street?

We talk a lot about loyalty in marketing, and act like it means something to the organization. Like perhaps the organization should be loyal to customers, as well as customers being loyal to the organization. [Stop laughing, I'm being serious here!]

This seems often to be a missing ingredient to me.

Two recent cases in point illustrate, and they are related even.

The CIBC Aerogold credit card was long considered a leading credit card in Canada. For years, it was the card to beat. The insight that helped competitors turn the corner was this: people were frustrated with points programs where the points could not be used for much of anything.

So TD and RBC among others, launched credit cards that accumulated points that translated directly to dollars, and could be spent on pretty much any form of travel. Both now provide travel services as well, through partnerships with Expedia and Travelocity.

The latest development is that CIBC VISA has lost exclusivity with Aeroplan, and TD will now be offering this an Aeroplan card as well.

Here's where the loyalty issue gets interesting to me. They sold me.

The deal made provided for sale / transfer of a portion of the portfolio. My account was on the list. So how much loyalty does this show? I fully understand that this was legal, and always a possibility under the terms of the contract.

CIBC sent me a boilerplate letter that could have been written by a machine. TD has now sent me a welcome letter and a little treat -- a free lounge pass. The implicit assumption is that my loyalty for 10+ years was to the product and the points, not the organization or the brand.

That certainly got me thinking about whether or not this product will serve me well in the future.

It starts to get more interesting for me when I look at my current challenges in using the points. I'm heading to Budapest for the AQR-QRCA Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research in the spring. And tacking on a little vacation in London on the way home.

With all these Aeroplan points I've been accumulating, I thought I might be able to do something on this trip. Airfare was a non-starter, I'd need a ton more points to make this work. But I thought perhaps a hotel.

843 hotels! Woo-hoo!

 The Air Canada site lists 843 hotels in London that I can choose from if I want to spend real dollars. Wow, that's a lot of choice! That's when I thought of using my Aeroplan points to reserve with one of these. On the Aeroplan redemption site, I discovered to my horror and amazement that there are exactly 5 hotels available in London on points. (There was one in Budapest. ONE!)

Now for years, Aeroplan has been pushing the notion that a mile, or a point, is just like cash. Except it isn't. And for your loyalty to this program, you are rewarded by restrictions of all sorts. If you are paying cash, Aeroplan knows their customers have many different needs and price points. But if you are on points, it's all ha-ha, you lose.

Really, shouldn't I just buy a new iPad and forget the whole travel thing?

Well, that's a murky area too. If you are buying miles to make up a shortfall, I think you will be paying $.03 (3 cents) a mile.(Surprisingly hard to find this information on their site.) You are paying retail.

But if you are selling miles in exchange for goods like an iPad 2, for instance, you will be selling them at less than a penny a mile. You are selling wholesale.

A lot of this whole house of cards relies on a lack of transparency. Something we know people are deeply resentful about. It just feels kind of unfair, doesn't it. But that's the loyalty business today, it's anything but loyal if you are on the customer side of the equation.

I do wonder how long this approach is sustainable. It's all powered by the desire to get stuff for free, and I guess we are all guilty of that.

What do you think? Is the points game a house of cards? Or does no-one do the math?

Related articles

What happened to the telephone? permission media redefined

Can you brainstorm over the phone? Yes!

CIBC to help TD, Aimia ease transition of Aerogold customers by mid-2014

TD, CIBC complete Aerogold deal

Can marketing save the world?

A startling factoid has been circulating in social media: Did you know that the crowd scenes in top-grossing movies are more than 80% male? This came from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, launched out of concern over the impact of gender stereotypes on her children.

Perhaps these stereotypes are a by-product of the Hays code, enforced in Hollywood from 1934 to 1968. Based on a belief that film could be a powerful force for the “improvement of mankind”, the code prohibited, among other things, depictions of sexuality, childbirth and methods of smuggling.

Today, obesity, eating and food are major topics in public policy discussion. Food culture is diverse and fascinating. We have raw food advocates, gluten-free advocates, eat-for-your-blood-type advocates, and even food porn. We carry our coffee cups and water bottles around and snack freely anywhere – behaviors not tolerated in the past, when coffee breaks were scheduled. The type of coffee you drink, whether you make it yourself and with what device, all say something about you, your values, and your aspirations. Cooking advocates see home cooking as a path to family bonding and a better society, as well as healthier eating.

School boards are attempting to change dietary habits by controlling cafeteria menus. Without creating a compelling experience of healthy eating, these efforts have been relatively ineffective, a predictable result to any marketer or marketing researcher.

The public pays for poor health outcomes in many ways, so has a vested interest in good health outcomes. This territory is ripe for regulation, and we have already seen many signs of this, from labelling requirements to ingredient regulation.

If we want behavior change on a large scale, we have options:

• Forcing people to eat apples instead of pre-packaged apple products is one idea.
• Another is to deny processed apple products the right to market themselves, a strategy that proved very effective with tobacco.
• A more intriguing idea, to me, is to help the healthy food compete on a level playing field with better marketing resources.

Culture in our modern era is not monolithic, it is continually shifting around us. We engage in dozens of daily choices about the right way to be and to live, about achieving success, and what kind of success we should aspire to. We spend our lives in the creation of ourselves.

Learning how to influence our culture for the greater good without resorting to the Hays Code is one of the challenges of modern public policy.

More food for thought:

CBC Ideas program on this topic, in two parts, called Stuffed Part 1 and Stuffed Part 2.

Can you brainstorm over the phone? Yes!

When I was invited to a 90-minute brainstorming conference call for a not-for-profit organization I belong to, I confess I dreaded the meeting.

Until I learned that the brainy and skilled Laurie Tema-Lyn would be facilitating over the phone. (Laurie's book, Stir It Up!, is a great source of facilitation "recipes")

So of course it was a very productive session. Here's what I learned:

[1] Brief introductions are helpful so that we can all know the other voices who are speaking. In this case, there were 12 on the call, many of whom I knew already, but not all.

[2] Set up ground rules. Among the ground rules were to start with creative stems like "How could we" or "I wish we could," instead of rambling, apologetic time wasters like, "Well, this might not really be a very good idea..."

Another ground rule, mostly honored by breaking it, is to let other people know when you are finished speaking by saying "Done," so others can jump in.

[3] Get people off to the right start with a simple exercise to get them talking. In this case, Laurie asked us about creative fundraising approaches we had seen in other parts of our lives. There's really no wrong answer to a question like this, and it is so much better than saying, "Okay, who has an idea to share?"

[4] As the facilitator, acknowledge those using the right approach, provide lots of encouragement, and change the topic when the ideas start to dry up. (All things one does in face-to-face facilitation, of course.)

[5] Before the meeting, send out some helpful tips, and a 10 minute simple advance exercise. This was tremendously helpful, actually, as I knew what to expect, and had also mentally started brainstorming on the topic even before we started.

I personally would have liked having a shared screen showing all the ideas being typed up. Or having a chat window to use to add all the things rushing around in your head in between getting to talk. (But that may just be me... I have idea traffic jams pretty regularly.)

Think how much more productive your own office meetings and conference calls would be if a little active facilitation skill was used?  This point was beautifully made by Marc Solby in his article Facilitation First Aid.

What are your telephone brainstorming tips?

What happened to the telephone? permission media redefined

Something strange is going on with phone calls. It has become some kind of non-permissioned media.

The phone used to be a great tool for connection. And it still is, of course. We can talk, and be face to face if we want (Skype, etc.) across great distances and across time zones.

So why aren't we using it more?

Here's what I think is happening with communications media.

Point 1: We are all overloaded. Keeping up with communications is a major job. I've seen estimates that people working can spend a quarter of their day on e-mail. My take: they're showing a lot of discipline to keep it down to a quarter.

Point 2: The advent of social media meant that there are a bunch of new channels you are supposed to keep up with, either reading, or posting, or both.

Point 3: E-mail has turned out not to be a permission channel. People can get your address, and they do. Heck, we all do it. To the extent that having even a quarter of your recipients open your bulk e-mail is good. Just unsubscribing is a chore. Nope, it's not permission media. We sign up to get something, thinking to ourselves, "I'll unsub later", and then resenting having to unsub. And suspecting that half the unsolicited e-mail, the non-personal messages, were never requested or permitted at all.

Point 4: LinkedIn, and perhaps Facebook, are aiming to be the ultimate permission channel. You can't communicate if you aren't linked. Unless you pay for the privilege of course. Which could be their downfall if abused.

Point 5: Between the random digit dialing and the list selling and the sales calls, answering the phone has become something less than fun. Companies actively avoid releasing contact information. Not phone numbers. Not e-mails. Not even physical addresses! (I go through this challenge every year when I try to send physical holiday cards.) And who can blame them? Because we have created this monster called the script, and the sales call, and it's not the value-added message it's supposed to be.

Net result: Even though we want efficient communication (which the telephone certainly can be), we are collectively into the habit of walling ourselves off, of trying to shut down some of the communication. So we try to isolate and manage through e-mail, which initially seems faster. Of course it isn't, we all know that. You can spend a lot of time on e-mail resolving something easily resolved in a brief conversation.

A corollary to this little problem is voice-mail. How I used to love it, and how I hate it now. (Dear Skype, I don't want video voicemail. Seriously.)

We are all overloaded. So we are trying to isolate .... no buffer ... ourselves. And in the act of buffering, we have made things less efficient than they could be. Phone calls seem to be one of the casualties in this war for time and attention.

It all means ... that your well crafted marketing message, your amazing script ... is just ticking people off. We are all still working the sales funnel when we know the funnel is gone, gone, gone. It also means that we are all becoming seriously stressed out over the overload in communication. Or is it just the overload of messaging?

Where this could all be going ...

Have you read The Circle yet, by Dave Eggers? It's an interesting, rather creepy take on the end game of social media. A bit far-fetched, but also creepily and eerily familiar. I recognized my own obsessive checking of things. And the difficulty of getting productive work done when interrupted a gazillion times a day (by myself mostly) to check social media, e-mail, or something else.

What if we really had permission media?

If we really had permission media -- if you needed my consent to e-mail me -- what would that mean about the quality of the messages? What if the same thing were true of all communication channels? Interesting little thought experiment I invite you to try.

Personally, I'm resolving to try to make my communications more pertinent, more relevant, and shorter. And I swear I will try to pick up the phone more often.

How about you? What's your take on all of this?

Where can you look for customer innovation opportunities? The hack

One of my favorite places to look for innovation opportunities are the "hacker" sites.

No, I don't mean nasty people spreading computer viruses.

I mean people who have found a way to work around a problem. Or customize a thing to their own liking.

Places like Lifehacker are rife with this, but there are many other sites that have similar clever consumers showing you how they do [something] with a gizmo designed for [something else].

Here's a great example from Lifehacker of people using coffee pots to cook light meals.

Surely this is an opportunity for a simple cooking device -- something the size and power draw of a coffee pot, but with a bit more flexibility.

Cooking breakfast with a coffee maker and an iron

Oatmeal in a coffee maker

Poach chicken in a coffee maker

An entire meal! using a coffee maker and an iron

So ... maybe you aren't in the small appliance business. Nevertheless, looking for hack solutions is a good way to figure out what people need that they don't have.

Co-creation: sharing feedback, honest communication

It's my firm belief that co-creation is only happening when there is a genuine feedback loop, not one way communication. I'm seeing a lot more evidence of this lately.

B2B example of co-creation

I use a hosted Exchange service for my business offered by Sherweb.

Although I find their system baffling at times, it is a solid service for a very reasonable price.

I just got another survey from them, and here is what caught my attention:

1. they told me this is the third phase of their work to gather information from customers
2. they used the first page of the survey to tell users what actions they have taken to improve service since the prior survey

It is so startling to actually have a small business  tell you these things, that it is noteworthy!

Consumer goods

I've recently had similar experiences with other small organizations. AeroPress provided specific feedback via e-mail from a senior guy at the business! He told us what he had heard, and he told us that they were going to be proceeding with a new product, and when it would be available!

Listen, talk, listen again

It's crazy to think that our ideas about corporate communications are so stiff and fossilized that open communication is radical. But it is.

I love seeing smaller organizations really working at this. It shows that you do not need to be a global behemoth to do a great job on listening to your customers.

Getting defensive: something that doesn't work well with customers, or ideas

It seems that all of our news is dominated these days by partisan politics and scandal. For all of us students of human behavior, we're getting a real education!

[Let me just take a moment and apologize for my Mayor, who is not a good representative of either Toronto or Canada at the moment! At least I sure hope he is not representative!]

What I am noticing is -- the more pressure these folks are under, the worse their behavior becomes. The inclination is to stonewall, to defend, to deny, to attack the persecutors. The siege mentality starts to cause people to trust a smaller and smaller group of advisors, and to close ranks. Poorly thought out announcements are made. Those that disagree with managers/leaders are dismissed for their honesty and willingness to state truth to power.

The irony is, these behaviors are almost exactly the wrong thing.

When things are not going well, you need to rethink what you are doing, not double-down your efforts.

When things are not going well, that's a good time to consider fresh, objective advice.

Although hard to get honest feedback, when we do hear something we don't like, we need to give those opinions a genuine hearing. Just because we disagree.

Easy to say, of course. But we all fall prey to this kind of thinking, because our biological systems take over, and we go into defensive mode.

From a marketing perspective, this is not productive. Even in a crisis, we need clear thinking informed as much as possible by cold hard reality, and then filtered through intuition. It's a good time to consider alternatives that might initially seem really crazy, rather than just react.

Okay, so maybe you are not in crisis. But there are few organizations of any size today that are not experiencing tremendous stress because of rapid change and hyper-competition. None of us can afford to react without thinking.

Hard as it is to avoid a defensive posture in our thinking, we need to try if we are to survive. We need to listen to our customers, even when they are saying things we don't want to hear.

The power of small numbers: n=1 insights

I'm a big believer in the power of insights. Insights come from stories, anecdotes, observations. You might later need to verify or deepen that ah-ha moment. You might decide to look for supporting big data. All good. But the individual incident is still important.

When I managed sales people way back in the last century, there was a great saying I learned: "If you see it once, it's a pattern." I believe this is true, mostly. People are creatures of habit. It is challenging for us to change our behavior "just once" -- much more likely that you have actually stumbled into a pattern worth investigating.

Which is why I thought it was very interesting to find out that Jeff Bezos at Amazon reads a certain number of customer e-mails sent directly to him, and that he makes specific enquiry about some of these. One result is that entire teams drop what they are doing to respond. That might seem a bit extreme, but it's their way of keeping the focus on the customer experience.

So a company like Amazon listens to individual customer anecdotes. N=1. To keep focused on the customer.

It's a question we could all ask ourselves -- how do we keep the focus on the customer? How do we do it culturally, not just with processes, or slogans, but really constantly. How do we keep the focus on the customer.

 

Sequencing, another way to innovate the experience

Innovation in a single dimension of experience can be a great way to turn a challenge (aka problem) around and see it from a fresh angle.

Out of home dining is a great place to look at examples of this.

Traditional restaurant dining works along these lines: see a master server (maitre d'hotel), get seated, see menu, order food, food is delivered, eaten, bill presented, bill paid, exit restaurant

Quick service, like a McDonald's, tends to look like this: see menu, order, pay, get food, find a table, eat, leave

Then there are a range of other variants, where servers might bring things to your table after you order at a central station. Nando's chicken is one of these. You order at a central window, then pay, then find a table, then get your food.

There are also places that let you order remotely (hello pizza delivery!), or order remotely for pick up.

Another industry that did this was general insurance. It used to be that you had to have the adjuster deal with your claim before you got any money. Then some innovators decided to give you at least some of the money right away, before the adjudication process.

A lot of process innovation comes from adjusting the sequence of events.

Takeaway tip

Consider the sequence of delivery of the elements in your consumption chain. Write them on a piece of paper. Mix up the papers. Describe a sequence for each random mix you come up with. Try not to reject it out of hand ... see if you can think of a way to make it work.

 

 

Building the brand in the age of cutthroat changes

I'm doing one of those projects that involves knowing "what's going on" in some topic. The problem is, pretty much no one knows "what's going on" in any area anymore, without doing a ton of research to figure out what is actually current.

Crazy, huh?

One of the analysts wondered whether retail examples were relevant to the background work. Heck, yeah. Retail is cutthroat, and has been for years. Imagine trying to compete with Amazon, for example?

• First they compete by having no physical inventory.
• Then they compete by having no physical product.
• Then they compete by outdoing Walmart at supply chain management.

Scary stuff, man. So retail is a hotbed of innovation these days. Retail is a great place to look for innovation and ideas.

 

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Real facts on innovation

There is so much talk about innovation that it can be hard to separate the facts from the bs.

Booz and Company's global innovation 1000 study has some fascinating actual data to report.

The actual graphic is interactive.

One thing that stands out for me here is that these firms are getting feedback at EVERY STAGE of the innovation process. I believe this is a key to success, and am happy to see that the leaders are proving that.

"We are seeing the first signs of a digital revolution that will transform how innovation is done" - Booz + Co

Social media analytics

Customer sentiment analysis (using automated tools to analyze social media sentiment) is ranked among the least effective on the customer insight grouping (see lower left in the graphic).

There are now a couple of hundred social media analytics tools, ranging from the expensive enterprise quality stuff (e.g. Radian 6, Conversition) to the free ones (searching on Google, Facebook, Twitter), and a bunch you have probably never heard of.

The challenge is going from sentiment (I like Pizza Hut better than Pizza Pizza) to something that will help you with customer insight and innovation.

The thing is -- you CAN get a lot of good insights from social media IMHO. But automated tools are not yet at the place where they can replace the insights of a human brain. The tools are great for tracking (Are more people talking about Toyota or about Ford?) and they are great for ensuring a firm can respond quickly to problems on social media (think Yelp reviews, for example).

But you still need a person to actually dip into those samples and try to understand what is actually going on beyond "mentions".

On a more philosophical level, is it really a good thing to have managers so far removed from customer concerns that an analytics engine does their thinking for them? Not in my view.

R+D spending, and staying out in front

I also loved the charts that looked at R+D spending over a period of several years.

The companies on this list are fascinating -- most should make excellent investments over the long term, and all are known for innovation.

Booz + Co highlights the use of digital tools, such as Caterpillar's use of digital immersion labs, where users can interact with products not yet built. This makes a lot of sense for Caterpillar (who makes BIG stuff). But might not be as necessary if your product is a little more prosaic. You can certainly use the old fashioned face to face immersion labs for many categories with tremendous success.

The point, I think, is not so much the "digital", it is the "immersion" in the customer's world.

However, the study also highlights the use of digital tools to improve productivity. Using 3D printing, for example, makes a great deal of sense as a prototyping approach. 

Fascinating data.

 

How not to be boring: be creative with promotional items

I picked up a rubber bracelet at my biz school reunion. I thought it might be kind of fun. You'll recall these items became really hot in 2004 with the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong campaign. Once a promotional item reaches a conservative bastion like a business school, you can be sure that it is anything but trendy, right?

The bracelet says, "Ivey Business School 90th Anniversary."

[Truly, irredeemably boring. Why would I wear it? Why would I share it? Why would I even engage with it?] 

What a promotional item should do for you

Even something as small as a promotional item should have a genuine purpose. A promotional item like this can be used for a few purposes:

• Raise awareness of the brand -- simply show off your name
• Be a pass-along item
• Reinforce an emotional connection or association
• Reinforce existing positive brand associations
• Create new positive brand associations

I thought this could have been done a LOT better. So on the drive home, I tried to think of how to do it better, as an exercise in creative thinking. Then whiteboarded some stuff as seen in the photo above.

There were a few other things I thought the school might have done with this, to showcase the brand better. Some possible objectives that made sense to me were:

• Reinforce the sense of community that the school is always talking about.
• Say something brainy, or at least witty, in the message.
• Say something about the massive new building that was just unveiled.

Yes, your promo items should have objectives. If you are just buying something to give away, you are not making the expenditure work very hard. And in fact, it could be sending the wrong message (I.e. we're boring!)

Brainstorm it better

Here are the things I came up with during the drive home. If you are really doing an exercise like this, you should come up with at least 2 dozen ideas and then choose the best ones.

Ivey turns 90, gets a facelift    [witty reference to the new building]

22,930 graduates | 5,154 female grads | 98 countries    [select some interesting statistics.]

Campuses in London, Toronto, Hong Kong, Mumbai. Coming soon: Ubuntu    [global growth in campuses, and emerging efforts in Africa]

Kevin O'Brien, Sarah Morgenstern, Timothy Hodgson, and me    [Highlight current year alumni award winners, and suggest that the attendee could be among them in future]

Multiple bracelets could have been used to get people looking at each other's bracelets and talking, "which one did you get?"

Even small initiatives in your business can support your brand, if you give them a little creativity. Don't just put your logo on a pen. You can do better than that, right?

What have you seen that you thought was clever use of a promotional item? What made it work?

Closing the feedback loop on surveys: tell people what you learned

I get regular impassioned pleas to complete surveys for some product or group. Often multiple requests. I bet you do too.

But how often do you hear back from anyone about what they learned? Rarely, right?

A recent survey from AeroPress.com (sellers of the amazing human-powered espresso maker), had a surprising and engaging follow-up message: they shared results!

There are a few things I like about David's approach here.

He speaks in a human voice: "Such a ton of great feedback, thank you!"

He says thank you repeatedly.

He offers a download of the results.

He invites further feedback!! 

He goes on to tell the reader what they are going to do with the feedback they received -- launch a new product that responds to unmet needs. Now how cool is that?

In an age when every business is striving to engage customers, this approach really stands apart for actually BEING engaging.

Well done Aeropress.com.

What can you do with this idea?

How can you take this idea back into your own business? Are you doing surveys? (Silly me. Of course you are.) Do you ever go back to the surveyed people and provide them feedback?

For research with business people, it's often important to offer some feedback on what was learned in order to actually get participation in the research. They may like hearing what others said, or compare their own situation with the average situation, for example. So providing some feedback doesn't compromise anything secret, it just offers something of real value in exchange for their time and opinions. This is a recommendation I have made to many clients, and the smart ones follow through on it. (Hey, sometimes they even ask me to write the memo! Which is fine with me.)

If you used a panel to conduct the survey, you likely don't have permission to e-mail these folks directly. But you could still post something on your social media sites, liked Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or company blog. You could put something on your web site. You could issue a press release.

In your actual survey, you could ask people if they want a copy of the results, and to provide their e-mail address for that purpose. Then you could actually e-mail them a copy of the results, or even a subset of the results.

I'd love to hear from you if you like this idea (or don't like it!) or if you have ever tried it. What happened? Did your customers respond well? Was it hard to convince management to do this?

New newsletter, new chimp, a free t-shirt, and thoughts on loyalty

We've just moved our e-mail newsletter to Mail Chimp. Which is actually kind of a big job as we'd been with Constant Contact for a long time.

[If you didn't see the most recent newsletter, you can subscribe below, and you will have access to the archive. As a new subscriber, you will also get a free copy of our e-book, Painless Qualitative Planning, a very useful document in our humble opinion.]

But it seemed like there were upcharges for things we are getting free elsewhere (like image storage, archive hosting), the interface was complicated, the help files weren't helpful, and we had trouble making a decent PDF from the site. We wanted more than one autoresponder, and they just didn't have it.

From a loyalty perspective, my take is that none of us has time to waste, and when people are leaving, it is a good idea to figure out why they would put themselves through the time and headache to learn a new system.

When people leave, there's a reason. Because it's a lot easier to just keep doing what you are doing now than it is to figure out something new.

By the same token, you need to make learning any new system as simple as possible. Because even a simple system takes hours to learn to use.

The t-shirt that surprised and delighted

After sending my first campaign, I got a lovely note from the Chimps, offering me a free t-shirt. All I had to do was select my size.

Now this is not something that would work as an incentive -- "come work with us and we'll give you a free t-shirt." That would just be ridiculous on so many levels. (Do you agree?)

But arriving as a surprise in my in-box was a really pleasant surprise. It put a smile on my face. It made me feel connected to the Chimp, which I had thought was a pretty goofy name up till now.

What about you?

I have to admit, I'm not doing anything quite as wonderful, but perhaps I should be. When a new client initiates a project, perhaps I should be sending them something fun to celebrate the moment. [I do send something nice when you subscribe, by the way.]

What do you do for new clients? How do you reinforce the notion that using your service was a good idea?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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Live blogging from IIeX 2013

This morning we are hearing five-minute presentations from companies offering new solutions.

Here's what captured my interest:

Cognographics Xyte -- looks like a variation on MBTI -- interesting notion.

Emotive Analytics -- for sheer entertainment value, they did well. Not sure what they do though.

RJ Metrics -- SaaS that works with an organization's own data warehouse. $500 per month plus 7 day implementation caught my interest. Quirky, Shutterstock, Fab and ModCloth are using their metrics. This seems to offer real possibilities for smaller businesses to really do something with their data. Intriguing. RJMetrics.com. 30 day free trial. Robert J Moore.

Visual Cue -- I talked to this guy at a break yesterday, very interesting company. This tool takes large data sets and metrics and makes the data more usable by a human being through visualization in real time.

Chaordix -- they call it crowdsourcing, but it feels like a large community to me. I saw them at the MRIA conference a couple of weeks ago.

Mesh Planning -- no idea what they actually do, but apparently HBR has endorsed them as something genuinely new and useful. http://www.meshplanning.com/

Best quote: Jeremy Bullmore: "People build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon."

Ideas to Go -- Innovation Engineering. This feels like an agile approach to classic creative problem solving and innovation approaches. Break things down so that you can complete full cycles every 7 days. Nice idea, but feels like a really well-packaged approach to what lots of organizations (me too) are doing for clients. http://www.ideastogo.com/

Embee Mobile is an enterprise crowdsourcing applications -- sets people up with free mobile services in return for having them provide insights/do tasks. Device agnostic, meaning it is a better solution for emerging markets. Sounds like a really different approach to an access panel. Looks like it crosses over from insight gathering to creating viral marketing. http://www.embeemobile.com/

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Live blogging from IIeX - Day 3 - Rebirth of Marketing Research

Larry Friedman of TNS spoke on Big Data, Little Data, New Data and the Future of Market Research.

Marketing research came about because the data needed to make decisions were rare. So the expertise of the industry developed around creating that data. Now, it is more important to find the data that are already out there and learn to use it effectively, by linking it and analyzing it.

Kantar (parent company of TNS) has compared typical survey data measures (such as brand awareness, purchase intent, and purchase in the last three months) with actual retail scanner results. Turns out that the correlation between some of these measures is close to zero.

However, this company now has methods to measure ACTUAL ad exposure, ACTUAL purchase, and similar, by utilizing "tracking" capabilities with their panelists.

New realities:

• Assuming what people tell us is true, is often wrong
• Market Research's role in Marketing needs to be broader than it has ever been.
• Someone has to do something....it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. (Quoting Jerry Garcia)

Friedman has written a post on the Greenbook blog about this topic, which has a ton more information than I captured here.

 

 

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#IIeX live blogging - Qualitative Stream

Dana Slaughter is next up, presenting a number of mini-case studies of qualitative mobile around the world: In the Moment with Mobile. Case studies came from a dozen or so individual researchers who contributed cases.

Mobile is now typically an add-on to an online qualitative platform, although there are a few dedicated mobile-only platforms.

• For grocery shopping, participants were asked to use their smart phone for tasks related to grocery shopping, such as price comparisons, using bar codes.
• Capturing activity in context, such as drinking beer at Oktoberfest.
• Breakfast experience in limited service hotels, to understand the breakfast context for a waffle batter provider
• Seasonal merchandising in the retail environment. What do people notice in terms of assortment, items, signage, etc. What is adding or taking away from the shopping experience?
• Personal care occasions, such as leg care/hair removal for women
• Moments of connection for new parents -- an intimate moment that would be hard to capture through other approaches
• Employee communications over time -- multiple experiences captured in the moment
• Events - Superbowl-watching experience

Mobile can be used at the front end, at the back end, or as the major part of a study. Mobile offers potential for spontaneity, for insights captured in the moment of experience, and for insights captured right in the context of experience. More transparency and fewer boundaries.

An interesting audience question: can you do live mobile, with probing in the moment? According to Dana, not all platforms permit probing. Some of it can be pretty close to in the moment, but right now there is a lot of online followup.

Coffee-break conversation insight: You cannot define qualitative and quantatitve by the method of data collection. It is more useful to define them as methods of analysis.

Next up, a panel discussion with Susan Saurage-Altenloh (Saurage Research), Ben Smithee (Spych Research), and Kathy Doyle (Doyle Research Associates), all qualitative specialists with varying perspectives. One of the biggest changes is that there are so many choices in technology for study design, and a lot more data. Better access to respondents is possible.

In the consumer's quest to find information, they provide a lot of information to us. In that sense, consumers are driving the insights process more than ever before. Instead of asking questions, we are now listening more -- this is a huge shift, which is leading to more effective research.

The data collection piece is becoming easier, so as researchers we have to ask what value we add to the process. Methodology is not as important as insight -- how can you find out what we need to solve?

Lines are blurring, (between qual and quant) or are they? Quali-quant became multi-method begat hybrid. But the possibilities for hybrid methodologies are much greater today because of new methods and technologies. You can analyze social media qualitatively OR quantitatively. It may be that researchers are the ones holding on to these distinctions.

Communities designed for insight purposes are still building brand loyalty (if branded) or category loyalty (if unbranded) -- even if marketing advocacy is not the goal, it happens anyway.

Interesting quote: "If we want people to call us brand partners, we need to stop calling them clients."

Ricardo Lopez of HIspanic Research is going to show us The Tools of a Qualitative Research Techie

Evernote: Gives you access to all your information, everywhere. All information is indexed. Take a picture with your phone, and immediately put it on Evernote, and use this system to instantly capture project photos (e.g. flipcharts.) Evernote recognizes the names of photos, even in handwriting. E-mail forwarding lets you store and save mail that you might want to later reference. You can even assign it to a folder when you do this.

"If you were to go back to the 1970s and show someone one of these Star Trek communicators that we carry around, it would look like magic."

Zendone: A new company that has taken the GTD organizing approach and has applied it to Evernote. He uses it, along with Google calendar and Evernote to process his inbox and manage to-do lists.

Livescribe Echo pen works with desktop software. Livescribe Sky pen works with Evernote only, not via the desktop. It connects to the internet with no cable. This technology is very useful for conducting interviews. It also integrates with Evernote. You can take notes later when you are playing back, and those notes are also linked to the recording. This makes the tool very useful for the analysis.

Video for qualitative has always been extremely useful. With bulletin boards, Ricardo asks all his questions using video to increase participant engagement. He told a great story about recording a video introduction in his office, when his two-year-old walked into the room. Ricardo posted his son singing a Christmas song, and everyone responded by posting videos of their kids during the introduction. It completely changed the whole perspective and tone. So now he does this as a regular practice!

Depending on the platform, you can force respondents to respond in video.

It really pays to have a high-end webcam, for good quality video. Don't use the one that comes with your laptop. A cell phone is even superior, usually.

A challenge with respondent video is the number of different formats. The platform may capture in Flash, a difficult format to work with later. He typically asks them to send the video, and he will figure out what to do with it. Handbrake is software that will convert video formats, but it takes some learning.

He cautions that clients often have old versions of software, and to be cautious about embedding video into PowerPoint. Instead, he uses a Vimeo account, and puts the links into PowerPoint.

For basic video editing, he says your on-board editor is probably fine. To create a video report, he likes Power Director (Mac).

 

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#IIeX - Socially intelligent research, and crowdsourcing to diagnose disease

Philip McNaughton and Andrew Needham (both of Face), are talking about "From Socially Intelligent Businesses to Socially Intelligent Research"

Consumers are doing things that companies previously paid their employees to do. Value creation is moving outside the walls of the corporation. They have a cool hexagon graphic showing how technology platforms enable value creation.

What clients need: make more, better decisions faster, instead of trying to make perfect decisions. (Sounds like Agile to me)

So what is socially intelligent research? It seems to involve "sexy metadata" and "continuous, integrated, holistic view of the consumer." I'm a little unclear, actually, but I still like the concept (System 1 thinking at work!) There is a white paper on Slideshare.

Putting data in context -- look at social data not just in terms of what is being said, but who is saying it, and who they are saying it to. Move away from how many tweets, to what are foodies saying? Instead of how many negatives, ask what is the brand equity?

Question about how many people involved? They start with 50 people through screening and do some early work to get down to about 16. This is a very different approach than the 400, or 4,000 member insight communities we hear about.

My take: If we agree with the view that more value is being created outside the firm (and I do), then how to we actually start to think about adding value to our customers by shifting value creation outside our walls? Is this a strategy we can actually use to drive innovation, instead of a just a trend to observe? This has been done in the past.

Observation: The rooms were switched, but the online agenda is actually correct, so those of us who thought we needed to adjust went to the wrong place. Arggh.

Next up, John Barrett of CrowdMed is going to talk about using prediction markets in healthcare. I met John last night on the deck, and thought this would be fascinating. Stay tuned ...

The company founder wanted to help his sister with her depression problems. (So much innovation comes from this kind of motivation!) He considered The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, and the prediction markets that Infosurv had been doing in marketing applications, and in political prediction.

A new person is introduced -- Stacey, who had irregular periods and mild depression. Plus a bunch of other problems. Over 970 days a number of experts could not figure out what was going on. So, a crowd solution was sought. The group of people was given the same information and facts that the family and doctors all had. They were invited to use any resource at their disposal. Most of these people made their contribution within 12 to 15 minutes. They could earn additional rewards for being correct, or being closer to the result.

A number of ailments were offered up. Five were weighted. A second market was run, with the same background and information, and given the chance to invest in only these five opportunities.

The results of the crowdsourcing came up with FXPOI (an ovarian insufficiency), which Stacey took to her doc, who confirmed the crowd diagnosis, and was able to treat her.

This is a start-up situation for founder Jared Heyman, who is still running proof of concept cases, and hopes to take this to a different kind of market. They are not clear where the commercialization comes in this application.

What is important to make crowdsourcing work? A controlled panel produces much better quality information than a river sample.

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More live blogging: co-creation with Bacardi

OK, I got lost in the agenda changes, and found myself in the wrong room, having missed Nils Schillewaert. But now I'm back on track, with Kevin Lonnie of KL Communications talking about Co-Creation.

Kevin likens the setup for co-creation to setting up a party -- lots of detailed planning in advance is needed to create a really good party. The Bacardi community has about 400 people. They were asked to create and post ideas, then others vote up or down, and add their own refinements. They monitor whether the original challenge is being addressed, and refocus if needed. Top ideas are selected and further time is spent on these.

Interesting that Bacardi is running this through the sales arm of the company, so is looking to support the purchase channels, not just consumers. One example of a challenge was to create a better shelf design for the spirits section of a liquor store. Discoveries made as a result included in-store lighting displays, and rearranging shelves by flavour. (Good idea!) Bacardi is now testing this in 10 stores, a real market test.

Why the appeal of LED lighting? On the shelf, there is enough signage and clutter (e.g. price stickers) that you can't see the product as well as you might like. Consumers wanted the new products to be highlighted with lighting, so they notice it.

Another challenge was to create a VAP (Value Added Pack aka gift pack.) Members are asked to design the pack. It turns out that glassware is the key -- people collect them. They also liked having sampler bottles of other flavours.

The two challenges mentioned above took 3 to 4 weeks in total. (That makes sense to me -- you want real co-creation, it might take a bit longer than the 24 hours we were being told about yesterday.)

Key message: Insights come from "truly listening."

A questioner says that part of co-creation is to feedback to the consumer. (Yes! Totally agree!)

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Live blogging from IIeX 2013

OK, I confess that the session on Training the Next Generation of Research Pros by Lisa Courtade of Merck, was actually pretty good. I just don't have a lot of patience for that topic, so didn't take notes. My key takeaway: we need to be polymaths (think Leonardo DaVinci)

On to Imran Anwar, of Microsoft, who has included two whole slides on his bio and disclaimers. Quite witty, actually, but rather a profligate use of time when you only have 15 minutes? (Yes, that is a quallies' take -- we budget time like other people budget money.)

He summarizes five decades of technology: mainframe > PC + Apps > Client/Server > Internet > Cloud. The future: "It will all be wireless."

You will be competing with a lot of other things begging attention. We are beginning a new decade of disruption. It is scary and also exciting ...

He advises us not to be held back by what we think technology can do, or what we are told it can do, because it can probably do whatever we want/need.

Even the people who can't work in safe manufacturing facilities now have the resources to buy second phones because they like the color, for example. That is the change wrought by the price and penetration of technology -- a major democratization of access.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) will yield to BYOF (Bring Your Own Future). Love that. Whatever your view of the future is, you can come up with it.

He says micropayments will allow the monetization of almost anything. He sees this helping the #MRX industry. Are we doing surveys, or are we delivering valuable, actionable information that clients can immediately use? He urges us to seek insights into the insights process. To innovate in how we target, measure, manage, deliver, and adapt. To be decisions drivers and change agents -- to be the platform for business innovation.

(Side note: Why do hotels insist on having noisy doors in meeting rooms? Surely this is as important as serving Starbucks coffee? Get out the duct tape!)

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Live blogging from IIex 2013 - Three key areas of behavioural science

John Kearon of brainjuicer says he is going to distill Daniel Kahnemann's work on system 1 and system 2 thinking (Thinking Fast and Slow) and its application to #MRX.

"We think much less than we think we think."

We use our system 2 thinking mostly to rationalize the decisions made with system 1. Proof offered: more car advertising is read after the purchase. (Really?)

"Thinking is to humans what swimming is to cats. We can do it if we have to."

Three key areas to think about from behavioural science:

Environmental: how things are framed. The example used was estimating the age of Mahatma Ghandi's death. If you start from 66 and count up, you estimate lower than if you start from 90 and count down. Rolls Royce sells hardly any cars from their showroom. They sell more at boat shows. Because when you are looking at expensive luxury yachts, their cars seem cheap.

"The whole of quantitative marketing research is a system 2 edifice."

Social: We should be called homo mimicus, the copying one. He cites Crocs as sure evidence. Wisdom of crowds are better estimators of what other people will do than we are at predicting our own behaviour. Predictive markets in elections are more accurate than polls for predicting British elections.

Personal: How we feel dictates what we do. Feel nothing, do nothing. Feel lots, buy lots. Famous advertising that creates the biggest commercial return works ... by creating overwhelming emotion. Message triggers system 2, and it undermines system 1. We don't feel as much. The more we can make people feel, the bigger the commercial return.

According to John, no one has all the answers. But we are at a moment in market research history where we can try new things. His suggestion: run a deprivation study with your own tracking study for a year, and redeploy the money to try new things.

[Observation: We still need a better mic solution in large rooms. The football mic to toss during the Q+A period. Maybe the drop-down robotic mic hooked to the ceiling. Perhaps the drone mic, that will fly to the questioner. Because the current system clearly does not work.]

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#IIeX day 2 - Live blogging starting with Mark Earls

Mark Earls started the day with his topic, I'll have what she's having, and the observation that we are more like Capt Kirk than we are Spock (Behavioural Economics distilled to one slide.)

Social influence and social learning is the most important factor shaping human behaviour. The UK government is working with behavioural economics insights to shape policy (seriously, data and science? innovative idea. Note to self, find the study publication, also called "I'll have what she's having".)

Several categories are more influence by social than independent thinking: alcohol, music and voting, for example. Deodorant and insurance purchases are more independent.

Paul McDonald of Google Consumer Surveys, a very good speaker, is talking about the future of surveys. They'll be mobile. They'll be chunked up into small bits and then reassembled. (Think packet data applied to surveys.) They are talking about having a billion person panel. They want users to install the app on their phone, and then earn free music downloads and similar things as incentive to respond to surveys. (Kind of sounds like a panel that just has better validation via their background analytics. Oddly, the more familiar this becomes, the more familiar it seems.)

According to Paul, we should be asking ourselves, "How can I take advantage of Google's Technology?" So I did ask if they could help me out with Hangouts as a qualitative product. He says that's a different division of the company. Oh well.

They are about to announce a website satisfaction product. Their pitch, clearly, is to the DIY end user, but maybe also to smaller research firms that might want different tools. Certainly, Google is not going to be providing analysis of the data.

They are offering free samples. So sometimes, Google is a conventional marketer, just like the rest of us. Speaking at conferences, offering free samples.

 

 

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