Posts
Please see this post from 24/7 Wall Street. As shown by the brands that have fallen hardest in the past decade, there are two ways that brands die:
1) They fail to compete (Kodak, Sony Ericsson). This isn't just a tech phenomenon (see: Kleenex), but in tech you can see Darwin at work. Generally, they lost ground on innovation more than price competition; an interesting point to consider when you consider how much you should be spending on market research.
2) They make their customers mad. The pharma and financial services brands on this list burned their customers and earned their fates. For example, I remember how arrogant Citi's senior execs were back in the late eighties--also crude and rude to work with, by the way.
You can get away with those mistakes for short periods of time, but not forever. Me too marketing strategies, blindness to consumer perception, and an arrogant approach to your market are all signs that you're in trouble.
Ideally, it's the job of everyone who works at a company to seek and nurture insight about customers and markets. Why? Insight has two roles: to help you understand the people you are serving with your products, and to help you know when you need to change your approach to your marketplace. Your culture will remain attuned to your market only if you make customer insight a basic skill.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Back to the Future, Part II
I went to Cattaraugus County partly to find out what might happen to American attitudes about brands and buying if the recession doesn’t lift any time soon. You can’t generalize from one region to the entire country, but I did find trends that are supported by other studies.
Cattaraugus County has been in economic decline for decades, so much so that the current recession isn’t all that noticeable for them. One woman we interviewed told us, “Some people here have suffered because of this recession. But most of us haven’t really noticed it. We’ve been there for a long time.”
As the boom and bust cycle of more urbanized areas passed them by, the people of rural New York State learned to live by tapping into the resilience and values of the past. As I discussed above, they do things for themselves, buy less, keep fit, and focus on family. In talking to them, I discovered that hard work done well is not just something you have to do, it’s something to be proud of.
We stopped by the side of the road to interview one man who was cutting cords of timber alongside his home, and he happily gave up half an hour to talk to us about what he’s done, how he’s coped with challenges. He told us that he cares for his mother and his sick brother, and recently had to sell his truck when his mother got sick as well; the financial and health stresses are significant and scary. At the same time, he’s proud that he’s found a way to expand his business, despite everything. He’s proud to display his skill, explaining about different types of timber, showing us how he cuts logs into size by hand before he puts them in the splitter, a skill he learned from his father. As we spoke with him, three separate times people driving by shouted hello to him. He has very little; certainly nothing extra, but he deserves and has respect in his world.
Of course, the Cattaraugus example only goes so far: we can’t all magically become rural farmers or woodcutters and live the simple life. Yet, according to a MetLife study, we collectively are shifting priorities in the direction of family, community, and frugality. Helping and receiving help from family members; saving more when you can; and above all making do with less are present realities for a majority of Americans. Community comes into the mix, perhaps because selfishness is understood to be bad math: 68% of respondents said that they’d take a 10% pay cut if it would prevent layoffs, which is sensible if you could be one of those who loses a job.
That sounds more like the Depression-era America my parents grew up in, where neighbors knocked on your front door and asked if you could spare a cup of sugar, or lend them your lawn mower. Helping your neighbors was natural, and you felt free to ask for help in return. Then, being successful was less about being sold to, and more about the life you had built for yourself; you might buy just one house and one car in your entire life. The dream, if it was a dream, was to succeed based on hard work and ingenuity, and the benefits that can bring to your family. It sounds corny, but it’s simply true.
If you’re busy building a life for yourself and your children, why spend energy choosing among hundreds of brands that all basically do the same thing? One example: our hotel room in Salamanca had samples of Breck shampoo. When I was a kid, we always used it, along with almost everyone else who was too old for Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. Their ads showed a mother with a little girl, with the implication that if you used Breck, you could have hair as soft as a child’s. Using it again forty-odd years later, I found it simply clean-smelling, compared with the silk-infused natural plant oil mink fat protein cornsilk dead sea salt stuff they peddle today.
I am a typical consumer, so mea culpa. I try a new shampoo brand every few months, just because I can. It’s kind of nuts, actually. It wouldn’t kill me to just keep on buying Breck my whole life, would it?
The proliferation of products is on one hand a sign of entrepreneurial energy, on the other a sign of market decadence, with products sustained by advertising, not true demand. I also work in advertising, so mea maxima culpa. In my own defense, I have always tried to live by the principle that if a product doesn’t meet a real human need, it isn’t worth selling. Yet I have been as seduced by the power to seduce as anyone in my industry.
This is not the time, fellow marketers. As it turned out, people buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have was not healthy, and right now the wounds are fresh. If the economy continues to lag, here are four trends to keep in mind:
• Pseudo-luxury (i.e., over-priced) brands are already on the consumer’s must-to-avoid list, but growing suspicion will also be directed at brands and stores that sell on price. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you can only afford to buy one of something you can’t afford to buy something that’s going to break or wear out too soon. Quality will matter more, not less.
• A return to “buy American” is in the cards, with a tip of the hat to the quality of American products. Partly this is anxiety: most people understand that when a neighbor loses a job, they suffer too, with lower home prices and shuttered local businesses. But it’s also a realistic attempt to reassert control over quality given bad news about imported products.
• Servicing cottage businesses that help people to make a little extra money—for example by sewing, making repairs, or going back to the land in some small way--will feed the growth of companies that are smart enough to support and enable small-time entrepreneurs.
• An emphasis on heritage as a value in itself will emerge, as a firm foundation when so many institutions and brands that embodied prosperity let you down. Heritage is a vague concept, sometimes rooted in family, sometimes in institutions or companies; look for it to wear many different masks. In its simplest form, though, it’s about our own past; most of us had grandparents who got their hands dirty. The heritage that matters is the one that’s embodied in real memories.
Some American advertisers are already detecting a swing in these directions, responding to it with varying levels of insight:
Worker-Centered Americana. The POET campaign, which promotes ethanol, has two characteristics that set it apart from what you might expect in the energy category:
• It stars the workers. In general, energy companies use high-gloss campaigns that lecture you from a place of authority (what I call “shouting from the mountain top”). By contrast, POET shows you ethanol industry workers making personal statements on a busy street, among the rest of us small people. They are presented as proud, strong, and perceptive; the way we feel about ourselves when we’re feeling good about ourselves.
• It is brazenly pro-American, with one scientist proclaiming that she wants to let you “tell those middle eastern nations where they can put their tankers.” Indeed.
Home Comforts Americana. The Kraft Foods campaign for its American cheese (sorry, couldn’t find a video) is pure, pandering Americana, with a shot of a very cute kid looking supremely confident in a home-made Superman costume, as well as other scenes of ordinary people doing ordinary things and looking happy about it. They claim that their cheese could only be made in America, making the most of the fact that it would probably be banned in many countries. But in times like these, eating the pasteurized, processed, individually saran-wrapped food of your childhood is comforting. And it does contain at least some milk, very possibly from American cows.
Inspirational Americana. “The things we make, make us.” The best I’ve seen of this trend is the 2011 Jeep Cherokee ad, which has shown in movie theaters. The spot shows old footage of people building railroads and skyscrapers, gravely voiced over by a man touting American values such as craftsmanship and hard work to a sound track of hammers pounding on steel. In this America we go back to making things; there’s no more room for silly celebrities or dysfunctional elites. At the end of the one-minute ad we are told that the whole Jeep Cherokee was thought up and made here in America, where we still make beautiful things. Out of metal.
I have a simple piece of advice for you: think about what makes your customers strong in the face of adversity and fear. If you work for a heritage brand like Jeep or Kraft, rediscover your own roots and talk from there. It’s fine to make ’em laugh, but don’t sell fluff. If you don’t work for a heritage brand, I suggest that you think about what values and concerns your workers have in common with American workers and start from there, like the POET campaign did. What are they, and your business, doing to work through your own struggles? Working longer hours? Trying to make a better product?
These messages resonate now, and they may become a permanent feature of our collective understanding of brands. From what I saw in Cattaraugus County, if we Americans can make things and fix things on our own, we are several miles out from Helplessville.
And that’s a great message to be able to deliver to a stressed-out America.
Cattaraugus County has been in economic decline for decades, so much so that the current recession isn’t all that noticeable for them. One woman we interviewed told us, “Some people here have suffered because of this recession. But most of us haven’t really noticed it. We’ve been there for a long time.”
As the boom and bust cycle of more urbanized areas passed them by, the people of rural New York State learned to live by tapping into the resilience and values of the past. As I discussed above, they do things for themselves, buy less, keep fit, and focus on family. In talking to them, I discovered that hard work done well is not just something you have to do, it’s something to be proud of.
We stopped by the side of the road to interview one man who was cutting cords of timber alongside his home, and he happily gave up half an hour to talk to us about what he’s done, how he’s coped with challenges. He told us that he cares for his mother and his sick brother, and recently had to sell his truck when his mother got sick as well; the financial and health stresses are significant and scary. At the same time, he’s proud that he’s found a way to expand his business, despite everything. He’s proud to display his skill, explaining about different types of timber, showing us how he cuts logs into size by hand before he puts them in the splitter, a skill he learned from his father. As we spoke with him, three separate times people driving by shouted hello to him. He has very little; certainly nothing extra, but he deserves and has respect in his world.
Of course, the Cattaraugus example only goes so far: we can’t all magically become rural farmers or woodcutters and live the simple life. Yet, according to a MetLife study, we collectively are shifting priorities in the direction of family, community, and frugality. Helping and receiving help from family members; saving more when you can; and above all making do with less are present realities for a majority of Americans. Community comes into the mix, perhaps because selfishness is understood to be bad math: 68% of respondents said that they’d take a 10% pay cut if it would prevent layoffs, which is sensible if you could be one of those who loses a job.
That sounds more like the Depression-era America my parents grew up in, where neighbors knocked on your front door and asked if you could spare a cup of sugar, or lend them your lawn mower. Helping your neighbors was natural, and you felt free to ask for help in return. Then, being successful was less about being sold to, and more about the life you had built for yourself; you might buy just one house and one car in your entire life. The dream, if it was a dream, was to succeed based on hard work and ingenuity, and the benefits that can bring to your family. It sounds corny, but it’s simply true.
If you’re busy building a life for yourself and your children, why spend energy choosing among hundreds of brands that all basically do the same thing? One example: our hotel room in Salamanca had samples of Breck shampoo. When I was a kid, we always used it, along with almost everyone else who was too old for Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. Their ads showed a mother with a little girl, with the implication that if you used Breck, you could have hair as soft as a child’s. Using it again forty-odd years later, I found it simply clean-smelling, compared with the silk-infused natural plant oil mink fat protein cornsilk dead sea salt stuff they peddle today.
I am a typical consumer, so mea culpa. I try a new shampoo brand every few months, just because I can. It’s kind of nuts, actually. It wouldn’t kill me to just keep on buying Breck my whole life, would it?
The proliferation of products is on one hand a sign of entrepreneurial energy, on the other a sign of market decadence, with products sustained by advertising, not true demand. I also work in advertising, so mea maxima culpa. In my own defense, I have always tried to live by the principle that if a product doesn’t meet a real human need, it isn’t worth selling. Yet I have been as seduced by the power to seduce as anyone in my industry.
This is not the time, fellow marketers. As it turned out, people buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have was not healthy, and right now the wounds are fresh. If the economy continues to lag, here are four trends to keep in mind:
• Pseudo-luxury (i.e., over-priced) brands are already on the consumer’s must-to-avoid list, but growing suspicion will also be directed at brands and stores that sell on price. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you can only afford to buy one of something you can’t afford to buy something that’s going to break or wear out too soon. Quality will matter more, not less.
• A return to “buy American” is in the cards, with a tip of the hat to the quality of American products. Partly this is anxiety: most people understand that when a neighbor loses a job, they suffer too, with lower home prices and shuttered local businesses. But it’s also a realistic attempt to reassert control over quality given bad news about imported products.
• Servicing cottage businesses that help people to make a little extra money—for example by sewing, making repairs, or going back to the land in some small way--will feed the growth of companies that are smart enough to support and enable small-time entrepreneurs.
• An emphasis on heritage as a value in itself will emerge, as a firm foundation when so many institutions and brands that embodied prosperity let you down. Heritage is a vague concept, sometimes rooted in family, sometimes in institutions or companies; look for it to wear many different masks. In its simplest form, though, it’s about our own past; most of us had grandparents who got their hands dirty. The heritage that matters is the one that’s embodied in real memories.
Some American advertisers are already detecting a swing in these directions, responding to it with varying levels of insight:
Worker-Centered Americana. The POET campaign, which promotes ethanol, has two characteristics that set it apart from what you might expect in the energy category:
• It stars the workers. In general, energy companies use high-gloss campaigns that lecture you from a place of authority (what I call “shouting from the mountain top”). By contrast, POET shows you ethanol industry workers making personal statements on a busy street, among the rest of us small people. They are presented as proud, strong, and perceptive; the way we feel about ourselves when we’re feeling good about ourselves.
• It is brazenly pro-American, with one scientist proclaiming that she wants to let you “tell those middle eastern nations where they can put their tankers.” Indeed.
Home Comforts Americana. The Kraft Foods campaign for its American cheese (sorry, couldn’t find a video) is pure, pandering Americana, with a shot of a very cute kid looking supremely confident in a home-made Superman costume, as well as other scenes of ordinary people doing ordinary things and looking happy about it. They claim that their cheese could only be made in America, making the most of the fact that it would probably be banned in many countries. But in times like these, eating the pasteurized, processed, individually saran-wrapped food of your childhood is comforting. And it does contain at least some milk, very possibly from American cows.
Inspirational Americana. “The things we make, make us.” The best I’ve seen of this trend is the 2011 Jeep Cherokee ad, which has shown in movie theaters. The spot shows old footage of people building railroads and skyscrapers, gravely voiced over by a man touting American values such as craftsmanship and hard work to a sound track of hammers pounding on steel. In this America we go back to making things; there’s no more room for silly celebrities or dysfunctional elites. At the end of the one-minute ad we are told that the whole Jeep Cherokee was thought up and made here in America, where we still make beautiful things. Out of metal.
I have a simple piece of advice for you: think about what makes your customers strong in the face of adversity and fear. If you work for a heritage brand like Jeep or Kraft, rediscover your own roots and talk from there. It’s fine to make ’em laugh, but don’t sell fluff. If you don’t work for a heritage brand, I suggest that you think about what values and concerns your workers have in common with American workers and start from there, like the POET campaign did. What are they, and your business, doing to work through your own struggles? Working longer hours? Trying to make a better product?
These messages resonate now, and they may become a permanent feature of our collective understanding of brands. From what I saw in Cattaraugus County, if we Americans can make things and fix things on our own, we are several miles out from Helplessville.
And that’s a great message to be able to deliver to a stressed-out America.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Back to the Future, Part I
I took an unusual vacation this year: to Western New York, specifically Cattaraugus County and the town of Salamanca. I chose this area because (as you'll see below) it is the polar opposite of a consumerist community. Though it was economically and industrially dynamic for the first half of the twentieth century, upon the decline of the great railroads it became a stable, primarily rural economy.
Why is that interesting? As the downturn lingers and people start cutting up credit cards and re-learning grandparent skills like canning and sewing, the halls of economic power are quietly facing a serious issue: what if we go the way of Japan? In Japan, where the recession lingered for more than ten years, consumer spending has simply never returned to prior levels, leading to a very slow-growth economy and persistent deflation.
That could be bad news, it's true. On the other hand, when you think of your customers as human beings (or yourself for that matter), is it really so terrible to hop off the consumer roller coaster? That's what I went to Cattaraugus County to find out.
One of the first things you notice as you drive along the Southern Tier Parkway is how rich the land is. Lush fields; grazing cows; hearty plantings of corn, soybeans, vegetables; broad streams flowing down to wide brown rivers filled with life-giving mineral silt... Agriculturally and aesthetically, this is paradise, with prime bottomlands folded among low green hills of Appalachian hardwoods, nurtured by wide, generous creeks and winding rivers.
Soon, though, you also notice how poor many of the people are. In grandly-named Salamanca, once a busy railroad hub, a burned-out furniture factory towers behind houses with badly weathered paint, mossy roofs. Still, the homes are large and welcoming, the yards neatly-mowed with small but thriving vegetable gardens and bright flower patches, the front porches furnished with comfortable chairs.
Drive into town, or walk—it isn’t far. Main Street features lovely warm brick buildings named for their builders and proudly labeled 1808 or 1857; it’s unblemished by the tinted glass of modern architecture. (Though it is blemished; when you look closer, you see that a once-staid bank houses a tattoo shop, or is discretely boarded up.)
All of the Main Street clothes shops are consignment stores.
Wow. Where I come from, it can take you ten minutes to find a good space in a mall parking lot, and buses top things off by streaming the auto-deficient in from outlying areas.
Here? The nearest Wal-Mart is in Olean, the largest town in the county (with all of 15,000 people), and that’s probably a pretty good hike from where you are. Of course, if you need something, you can go to Family Dollar or Dollar General, which are proud to offer “basic goods”(1). Or, if you want to throw your cash around, you can go to an antiques store; there are lots of those and the prices for some genuinely nice collectibles and old farm implements look like bargains to my jaded eyes. Beyond that, you’re on your own.
One last oddity for a spoiled urbanite: there is take-out Chinese food, but it can be hard to find a restaurant that serves breakfast. In one small city, we asked a young woman if there was a coffee shop nearby. She looked at us with an are-you-lost expression and said, “No, there’s nothing like that here.” Apparently unless you’re a tourist, the question of where to get your morning eggs and coffee seems kind of… clueless.
That’s the tourist’s take. What’s it like to live here? So far we’ve determined that those who live here don’t shop for sport. Even those who lack the wherewithal to paint their houses keep their lawns mowed and gardens thriving. Some of them must have tattoos, though I didn’t notice any serious piercing or Goth action. They make their own breakfast. What else do they do?
One obvious answer is that they stay fit. You see plenty of healthy young people in fields playing soccer, lacrosse, football, baseball, softball, and so on. Their elders, too, are slim; they may take good advantage of the ability to walk to the store and eat fresh vegetables from their back yards, or they may do physical kinds of work. Whichever or both, they do not confirm the cliché image of obese poverty.
They have Friday Fish Fries. With a tip of the hat to Catholicism, on a Friday we got a huge piece of very fresh halibut battered and deep fried to perfection for $9.95, with fresh rolls, French fries, a cup of clam chowder, salad, and coleslaw(2). (One place we drove by offered “Friday Fish Fries Every Day”.) They also have a sandwich called “Beef on Weck”, named after the roll it’s served on. They have awesome pies. With fresh, local fruit, such as raspberries, in them. For lunch, if you want it. Trust me, you want it.
They work. Unemployment is the New York State average (8.2% in May, up from 6.2% in 2008), which is very good considering how many empty storefronts and abandoned old brick factories you see. They work part-time or seasonally in the tourism industry, or commute the 40 miles to Buffalo if they have to. Out in the countryside, everybody seems to have a cottage business, such as keeping bees, fixing farm equipment, or cutting wood. Incomes are low by Northeastern standards; the median is about $41,000 per year, which means that half of households make less. Clearly it’s not because people don’t work—it’s because work doesn’t pay all that well.
And they are law-abiding. Check this chart out; statistics are for Olean, NY, Cattaraugus County’s biggest city (the one with the Wal-Mart, and also beautiful St. Bonaventure University). That is a very safe place to live.
One possible reason for the low crime rate is that the countywide cost of living is low: it indexes about 80, where 100 is the U.S. average. Though the household size is above average, households here spend less than average on absolutely everything.
- They spend less for food at home as well as out of home. There’s not much taste for the exotic and expensive here, and in any case there’s local milk, local vegetables, and local meat.
- They spend way less on apparel. (Note to self: jeans, sweatshirts, and comfortable shoes can be worn a long time before they need to be replaced.)
- They spend less on entertainment too. Hell, if you want entertainment, just go outside. It’s beautiful and it’s an outdoorsman’s heaven.
- Computers and software? Well, if you’re looking for someone who’s still running Windows 3...
- And they index abysmally (or gloriously) low on telephone expenditures, so they also save a fortune on counseling for Blackberry addiction.
The list goes on and on. Medicine (even though lots of them are older), housing, insurance, transportation, investments (they don’t), travel… it’s all really, really low (3).
But another, very important reason that there’s not much crime must be that social cohesion is high. They know their neighbors, look after aging parents, carry on small businesses they learned from their fathers. Or they moved here believing that there was something especially worthwhile about this life.
They have a proud, sad eye on their heritage. The 150 year-old insignias on the old brick buildings are freshly painted. There are volunteer-run American Legion Halls, VFW posts, historical societies, and local museums (open 3 days a week) filled with high school yearbooks, old World War I or Civil War uniforms and lacy wedding dresses; a shared attic. Memory and tradition are everywhere you go, as well cared for as those tidy yards.
And therein lies the heart of my tale, which will unfold in Part II, next week.
(1) I didn’t make that up. The Google result for Dollar General matter-of-factly states: “Owns and operates retail stores selling basic goods.”
(2) At the Hotel Dudley in Salamanca, NY, built in 1868. Link to Hotel Dudley site.
(3) Cattaraugus County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan, Appendix A. See it for yourself here.
Friday, June 4, 2010
When is it okay to take shortcuts?
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
--Beverly Sills
Normally I'd agree, but I'm no longer really sure about that. I've recently been working on a project that is one of the most creative and rewarding I've ever been involved with. In working together so creatively, we have compressed some strategic planning steps, especially research. We're collaborating very closely with our client, and relying on our collective sense of what "feels right".
Normally I'm a stickler for rigorous research, but in this case I'm cobbling together webpage intercepts and fast ad hoc interviews just to reassure the higher-ups that we're not being collectively delusional. Is ad hoc and opportunistic a good process in this case? If I had insisted on the long path process, would the work have been improved?
(I want to emphasize that we had some strong quantitative input going in that ensures that we are well grounded in our target's needs. In addition, our target is in fact part of the marketing industry, and most of us have worked with them in the course of our careers. We're trusting that shared knowledge to let our strategies emerge intuitively.)
To be technical for a moment, our team and our clients are operating in a fully experiential mode-- intuitive, interactive, playful--less rational than usual. Because we're collaborating, ideas and feedback are compressed into very short timeframes. This means that there is an unusually fertile interaction going on that is itself providing a strong strategic framework--just not in a rational format.
Somehow, I am trusting my instincts. What might seem like scary shortcuts to the rational side of me looks like imaginitive leaps to the experiential side of me. It helps that the casual research we have done has strongly confirmed that our intuitions are connecting with the audience--that increases my confidence that we are justified in taking big leaps instead of small, processy steps.
Being grounded in an understanding of the target created an empathic framework that in this case is replacing an analytic framework. Collaborating closely with our client is letting a strategic framework evolve, rather than be "architected." The research we are doing is being used as a tuning fork, not sheet music.
Wow! This is fun. I may never have this line-up of circumstances again, but in this case, I think being experiential is going to result in really powerful work.
--Beverly Sills
Normally I'd agree, but I'm no longer really sure about that. I've recently been working on a project that is one of the most creative and rewarding I've ever been involved with. In working together so creatively, we have compressed some strategic planning steps, especially research. We're collaborating very closely with our client, and relying on our collective sense of what "feels right".
Normally I'm a stickler for rigorous research, but in this case I'm cobbling together webpage intercepts and fast ad hoc interviews just to reassure the higher-ups that we're not being collectively delusional. Is ad hoc and opportunistic a good process in this case? If I had insisted on the long path process, would the work have been improved?
(I want to emphasize that we had some strong quantitative input going in that ensures that we are well grounded in our target's needs. In addition, our target is in fact part of the marketing industry, and most of us have worked with them in the course of our careers. We're trusting that shared knowledge to let our strategies emerge intuitively.)
To be technical for a moment, our team and our clients are operating in a fully experiential mode-- intuitive, interactive, playful--less rational than usual. Because we're collaborating, ideas and feedback are compressed into very short timeframes. This means that there is an unusually fertile interaction going on that is itself providing a strong strategic framework--just not in a rational format.
Somehow, I am trusting my instincts. What might seem like scary shortcuts to the rational side of me looks like imaginitive leaps to the experiential side of me. It helps that the casual research we have done has strongly confirmed that our intuitions are connecting with the audience--that increases my confidence that we are justified in taking big leaps instead of small, processy steps.
Being grounded in an understanding of the target created an empathic framework that in this case is replacing an analytic framework. Collaborating closely with our client is letting a strategic framework evolve, rather than be "architected." The research we are doing is being used as a tuning fork, not sheet music.
Wow! This is fun. I may never have this line-up of circumstances again, but in this case, I think being experiential is going to result in really powerful work.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Do brands weave or tear our social fabric?
"Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household." --Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
When we read headlines about greedy bankers destroying the lives of ordinary Americans, what we're learning is that greed makes some people indifferent to the suffering of others. Lo and behold, this extreme indifference is actually a sin! Apparently there used to be eight deadly sins, but along the line we forgot all about one: acedia. Literally, it's "an ancient term signifying profound indifference and inability to care about things that matter, even to the extent that you no longer care that you can't care."
The reason this matters to our social fabric is that acedia is contagious; as we experience indifference from others we become indifferent to others, and it spreads outward from each of us in concentric circles of alienation. After all, if materially successful people are indifferent, shouldn't we all imitate them?
Kathleen Norris, author of Acedia and Me, would like to counteract this trend by bringing the concept itself back to life. She sees acedia in "the plagues of contemporary society -- a toxic, nearly unbearable mix of boredom and restlessness, frantic escapism (including that of workaholism), commitment-phobia and enervating despair."
Even if you don't think it's as bad as all that, she's onto something. Though we didn't have a word for it, many of us have felt acedia's impacts acutely, and it seems particularly modern. During the worst days of the Great Depression, my mother tells me, people reached out to their neighbors to help out. In Haiti, today, I am astonished by the caring and resilience of a devastated people. Yet, we very well-off modern Americans complain of isolation and emptiness. How many of us really know what our neighbors are going through? Do we even want to care?
It's just possible that material success is one cause of our modern indifference. If so, my own field--advertising--may be partly to blame. By interspersing bright, funny ads with anxiety-provoking news and dramas, we may be driving people to use consumption to create a shell of indifference in response to a scary world.
Certainly, wealth doesn't have a great reputation--it's quite literally associated with selfish indifference in popular culture. In movies and on TV, big companies are just bad; cold-hearted, scheming, and brutal. Is this just the tendency to project evil onto outsiders? Or are large corporations actually in some way bad for social bonds? Perhaps in the past, knowing the craftsman or woman who made your product helped to cement the sense that society mattered. Perhaps the anonymity of the large corporation devalues society itself.
Thinking back to research I've done, I'm not really sure. In research settings I encounter some cynicism, but actually more anger or frustration. The desire to be treated as if you matter, as if a company cares about you, is potent. In fact, mattering to others is necessary to survival as well as emotional well-being, so we shouldn't be surprised that people are angry when companies emphasize profit over people.
People do believe that corporations can care, or they wouldn't be angry when they don't. That may be why cause-related marketing is so successful; it helps us to believe that the people who sell us products are more like us, able to feel concern and warmth for others.
At the same time, maintaining a sense of human connection with a company is a real stretch, on both sides of the relationship. We humans seem to be developmentally designed to respond to people we recognize better than those we don't. The larger the corporation, and especially the more isolated from its customers, the more vigilant it needs to be to avoid brand-killing mis-steps (like those of Toyota, or the large consumer banks).
Brands help because they transfer the relationship to the product, which is real and present in the customer's life--so, for example, a can of Coke can be likeable, even if there is no human face to put on it. But again, this can fall apart very quickly if the veil of the brand is pierced by bad news about the manufacturer.
I believe the key is humanizing your brand--literally. Giving it a face or faces will be a great help when things go wrong. A car brand I have worked with, following safety and performance issues, has painstakingly rebuilt customer trust by inviting customers to experience content on everything from new model development to their passion for the vehicles of the past. They make a big point of being accessible, and our research shows that doing so makes them easier to trust.
So I think the answer to the question in the title is, it's up to the brand to prioritize human trust and be creative about building it. Social media may be the silver bullet platform, but the content will be make or break. How open, human, and concerned are you? Because that's the question your customers want you to answer.
When we read headlines about greedy bankers destroying the lives of ordinary Americans, what we're learning is that greed makes some people indifferent to the suffering of others. Lo and behold, this extreme indifference is actually a sin! Apparently there used to be eight deadly sins, but along the line we forgot all about one: acedia. Literally, it's "an ancient term signifying profound indifference and inability to care about things that matter, even to the extent that you no longer care that you can't care."
The reason this matters to our social fabric is that acedia is contagious; as we experience indifference from others we become indifferent to others, and it spreads outward from each of us in concentric circles of alienation. After all, if materially successful people are indifferent, shouldn't we all imitate them?
Kathleen Norris, author of Acedia and Me, would like to counteract this trend by bringing the concept itself back to life. She sees acedia in "the plagues of contemporary society -- a toxic, nearly unbearable mix of boredom and restlessness, frantic escapism (including that of workaholism), commitment-phobia and enervating despair."
Even if you don't think it's as bad as all that, she's onto something. Though we didn't have a word for it, many of us have felt acedia's impacts acutely, and it seems particularly modern. During the worst days of the Great Depression, my mother tells me, people reached out to their neighbors to help out. In Haiti, today, I am astonished by the caring and resilience of a devastated people. Yet, we very well-off modern Americans complain of isolation and emptiness. How many of us really know what our neighbors are going through? Do we even want to care?
It's just possible that material success is one cause of our modern indifference. If so, my own field--advertising--may be partly to blame. By interspersing bright, funny ads with anxiety-provoking news and dramas, we may be driving people to use consumption to create a shell of indifference in response to a scary world.
Certainly, wealth doesn't have a great reputation--it's quite literally associated with selfish indifference in popular culture. In movies and on TV, big companies are just bad; cold-hearted, scheming, and brutal. Is this just the tendency to project evil onto outsiders? Or are large corporations actually in some way bad for social bonds? Perhaps in the past, knowing the craftsman or woman who made your product helped to cement the sense that society mattered. Perhaps the anonymity of the large corporation devalues society itself.
Thinking back to research I've done, I'm not really sure. In research settings I encounter some cynicism, but actually more anger or frustration. The desire to be treated as if you matter, as if a company cares about you, is potent. In fact, mattering to others is necessary to survival as well as emotional well-being, so we shouldn't be surprised that people are angry when companies emphasize profit over people.
People do believe that corporations can care, or they wouldn't be angry when they don't. That may be why cause-related marketing is so successful; it helps us to believe that the people who sell us products are more like us, able to feel concern and warmth for others.
At the same time, maintaining a sense of human connection with a company is a real stretch, on both sides of the relationship. We humans seem to be developmentally designed to respond to people we recognize better than those we don't. The larger the corporation, and especially the more isolated from its customers, the more vigilant it needs to be to avoid brand-killing mis-steps (like those of Toyota, or the large consumer banks).
Brands help because they transfer the relationship to the product, which is real and present in the customer's life--so, for example, a can of Coke can be likeable, even if there is no human face to put on it. But again, this can fall apart very quickly if the veil of the brand is pierced by bad news about the manufacturer.
I believe the key is humanizing your brand--literally. Giving it a face or faces will be a great help when things go wrong. A car brand I have worked with, following safety and performance issues, has painstakingly rebuilt customer trust by inviting customers to experience content on everything from new model development to their passion for the vehicles of the past. They make a big point of being accessible, and our research shows that doing so makes them easier to trust.
So I think the answer to the question in the title is, it's up to the brand to prioritize human trust and be creative about building it. Social media may be the silver bullet platform, but the content will be make or break. How open, human, and concerned are you? Because that's the question your customers want you to answer.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
A dangerous form of group-think
You probably know the old fable about the three blind men asked to describe an elephant. The first, stationed near a leg, concludes, "The elephant is round like a tree." The second, who happens to feel the trunk, exclaims, "No! The elephant is long and thin like a snake!" The third, with his hands placed on the side of the elephant, scoffs, "You two are nuts. The elephant is large and flat like a house." The implication of the fable is that each of us has a limited perspective and we should learn from one another before forming conclusions.
Not so for marketing researchers. We want to understand what people think and do as individuals in the marketplace. Our approach is that despite the disagreement, each blind man is 100% right. For us, consensus generates error. You say snake, I say tree, it's all good.
But, well-known fact, people in focus groups tend to try to form a consensus. A typical solution is to ensure that each of the group participants has a chance to form an individual opinion before the group discusses it; for example, they may read quietly to themselves and jot down a few notes before the discussion, or fill out a rating form. I've found that to be helpful, but a recent blog post (about the financial crisis, as it happens) makes me wonder if it's really enough.
Naked Capitalism cited a story about "social validation". Apparently, people in group settings will hesitate to assess the nature of what they perceive until they have checked in with those around them. The story concerns a lifeguard who nearly let someone drown because the the other lifeguards seemed unconcerned. What's disturbing is that he was unable to perceive that the swimmer was struggling because nobody else perceived it. This phenomenon has also been cited in the infamous 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese, in which 38 people witnessed the murder and did nothing to stop it, each concluding that because of a seeming lack of concern on the part of the other 37, the situation must somehow be OK!
I have always assumed that group-think was a kind of self-censorship due to social pressures. But in fact, people in group settings may postpone forming any perceptions until they check in with the group. No self-censorship is needed. Even disagreement with the group may just mean that a participant has an oppositional bias, and is reacting to the social consensus. It's still an artifact of group-think.
At long last, this explains a result I once saw in groups of technologically-sophisticated business people. They were asked to develop categories for a set of product claims. They could come up with any categories they chose, but "service", "reliability" and so on would be obvious ones.
The exercise turned out to be largely pointless. Groups assigned claims to categories very idiosyncratically; there was little inter-group consensus. Frequently it seemed that as soon as any member of a group "perceived" a connection between ideas, the rest of the group also perceived it. ("Yep!" "Yes!" "That makes sense." Even if it obviously didn't.) We in the back room alternated between humor and frustration.
I think on that occasion someone cited the old joke: the IQ of a group is the IQ of its stupidest member divided by the total number of members. That's harsh, but we need to at least keep in mind the possibility that participating in a group dulls the perceptual abilities of its members. Ouch.
What's a researcher to do? Groups will always have social validation issues, no matter how they are managed. Even if you make them take notes prior to discussion, participants are exposed to facial expressions, body language, and so on, which may influence their perceptions. There's no way out.
One solution? Think small. It may seem paradoxical, but in my experience, the opinions generated by smaller groups (three or four) are more diverse than those of larger groups (six or more). It may be that the smaller the group, the easier it is for the individual to feel that his or her perceptions are "equal" to everyone else's. (Would Kitty Genovese have been saved if there had been just a couple of neighbors looking out their windows that night?)
We probably should also address social validation issues more agressively in our research approach. Thoughts:
1) Spend less energy on generating gut-level perceptions, which are questionable, and more time on the internal experience of perceiving. You may even want to avoid having the group articulate base perceptions because once these are formed, they're hard to change. Focus instead on the components of the decision-making process; e.g., emotions, thoughts, what other people say, what you say.
2) Role play. Create scenarios where group members act out operating as individuals, for example, telling a sales person what they want or need.
3) An experiment I'd like to try: instead of the moderator playing "devil's advocate" to a consensus position, challenge group think by asking a group member to take this role. When the moderator does this, the group tends to close ranks around the consensus. It might encourage the group to reconsider consensus perceptions if a group member is the challenger.
You may have better ideas, and I'd love to hear them!
Not so for marketing researchers. We want to understand what people think and do as individuals in the marketplace. Our approach is that despite the disagreement, each blind man is 100% right. For us, consensus generates error. You say snake, I say tree, it's all good.
But, well-known fact, people in focus groups tend to try to form a consensus. A typical solution is to ensure that each of the group participants has a chance to form an individual opinion before the group discusses it; for example, they may read quietly to themselves and jot down a few notes before the discussion, or fill out a rating form. I've found that to be helpful, but a recent blog post (about the financial crisis, as it happens) makes me wonder if it's really enough.
Naked Capitalism cited a story about "social validation". Apparently, people in group settings will hesitate to assess the nature of what they perceive until they have checked in with those around them. The story concerns a lifeguard who nearly let someone drown because the the other lifeguards seemed unconcerned. What's disturbing is that he was unable to perceive that the swimmer was struggling because nobody else perceived it. This phenomenon has also been cited in the infamous 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese, in which 38 people witnessed the murder and did nothing to stop it, each concluding that because of a seeming lack of concern on the part of the other 37, the situation must somehow be OK!
I have always assumed that group-think was a kind of self-censorship due to social pressures. But in fact, people in group settings may postpone forming any perceptions until they check in with the group. No self-censorship is needed. Even disagreement with the group may just mean that a participant has an oppositional bias, and is reacting to the social consensus. It's still an artifact of group-think.
At long last, this explains a result I once saw in groups of technologically-sophisticated business people. They were asked to develop categories for a set of product claims. They could come up with any categories they chose, but "service", "reliability" and so on would be obvious ones.
The exercise turned out to be largely pointless. Groups assigned claims to categories very idiosyncratically; there was little inter-group consensus. Frequently it seemed that as soon as any member of a group "perceived" a connection between ideas, the rest of the group also perceived it. ("Yep!" "Yes!" "That makes sense." Even if it obviously didn't.) We in the back room alternated between humor and frustration.
I think on that occasion someone cited the old joke: the IQ of a group is the IQ of its stupidest member divided by the total number of members. That's harsh, but we need to at least keep in mind the possibility that participating in a group dulls the perceptual abilities of its members. Ouch.
What's a researcher to do? Groups will always have social validation issues, no matter how they are managed. Even if you make them take notes prior to discussion, participants are exposed to facial expressions, body language, and so on, which may influence their perceptions. There's no way out.
One solution? Think small. It may seem paradoxical, but in my experience, the opinions generated by smaller groups (three or four) are more diverse than those of larger groups (six or more). It may be that the smaller the group, the easier it is for the individual to feel that his or her perceptions are "equal" to everyone else's. (Would Kitty Genovese have been saved if there had been just a couple of neighbors looking out their windows that night?)
We probably should also address social validation issues more agressively in our research approach. Thoughts:
1) Spend less energy on generating gut-level perceptions, which are questionable, and more time on the internal experience of perceiving. You may even want to avoid having the group articulate base perceptions because once these are formed, they're hard to change. Focus instead on the components of the decision-making process; e.g., emotions, thoughts, what other people say, what you say.
2) Role play. Create scenarios where group members act out operating as individuals, for example, telling a sales person what they want or need.
3) An experiment I'd like to try: instead of the moderator playing "devil's advocate" to a consensus position, challenge group think by asking a group member to take this role. When the moderator does this, the group tends to close ranks around the consensus. It might encourage the group to reconsider consensus perceptions if a group member is the challenger.
You may have better ideas, and I'd love to hear them!
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The mirage of quantitative messaging
I have been reading a wonderful bestseller which you have probably already read: The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (If you haven't read it, please be warned that I am thinking of becoming Queen of the World so that I can require everyone who has a bank account or casts a vote to pass a test on its contents.)
Taleb is a "skeptical empiricist" philosopher who participates (profitably) in the financial sector. He explains that in our species' drive to predict what will happen, we fall into a number of potentially destructive information-processing traps, because we fail to understand much about the nature of information, or even much about how our minds actually work. Worse, according to studies he cites, experts are blinded by too much information and are even worse at prediction than ordinary people.
Oops. What is it that I do for a living, again? I extrapolate recommendations from data about how people think and feel. In doing that, I must presume that the data has some predictive value and that I am expert enough to interpret it correctly.
Not likely, according to Taleb, unless I am a physical scientist. Human behavior is just too unpredictable--prone to outlier events that he calls black swans. The type of research I do stumbles into two of Taleb's traps: the tendency to attribute doubtful cause and effect relationships between data points (the narrative fallacy), and the tendency to assume that because something has happened over and over again for a while, it will continue to happen indefinitely (the confirmation fallacy).
Narratives are cherished by marketers, because they reinforce our illusion that the data we are able to afford to collect must mean something important. Piles of data are much easier to digest when they are marinated in emotional oomph and salted with just enough cause-effect to be plausible.
For example, if I "know" from a research study that people with less than a college education are more dependent on their doctors for their medication decisions, I am likely to construct the following narrative: "less educated people feel that they don't understand things as well as the more educated doctor, which makes them deferential."
But of course I don't know that at all, I have merely noticed a statistical correlation, and one that is probably not much better than 80%, if even that good. What percentage of the highly educated portion of my customers are dependent on their doctors? Is it 20%? 40%? And what about the 20% of the less educated people who are not dependent on their doctors? If I had constructed my analysis differently, I might find that the correlation with education masks some other factor, such as cultural background or type of profession. Or the correlation may not mean anything at all, in narrative terms. Who knows?
What Taleb would probably point out is that it doesn't matter, anyway, because of my confirmation fallacy. My use of data to predict the future assumes that there are no outlier events lurking over the horizon. In other words, I am assuming that because in a single segmentation study, education level turned out to be correlated with dependency on doctors, that this will continue to be true for some meaningful period of time.
Yet, at this moment in 2009, that is actually unlikely. Right now, our government is investing in medical technology that will help doctors to do a better job of determining which treatments will work best for which patients based on empirical data. I have reason to at least suspect that the publicity about this new technology will change how even our most educated patients view their doctors' expertise, and therefore undermine both my mental and quantitative models of how people behave.
And that's just one example.
So here's my plea. First, if you haven't already, read The Black Swan; it's both necessary and delightful. Second, ask yourself some serious questions about quantitative research. It may be--heresy though this is--that qualitative is nearly always a much better basis for the development of marketing messages.
I am not completely anti-quant. Segmentation and behavioral models can lift your results if they are narrative-free (i.e., reflect no assumptions), easy to validate in real-time, and frequently refreshed. However, quantitative messaging studies over-complicate and even distort our understanding of human attitudes and behaviors.
There, I said it.
Why? Qualitative research, done properly (which means more interviews and fewer groups), forces you to deal with the complexity of human reactions in a way that humans are reasonably good at--face to face. In the qualitative setting:
1) You seek the simplest important conclusions. You look for a simple preponderance of evidence that seems consistent or reliable, not "data" connections between human attitudes that are either statistical phantoms or too complex to be replicated in the actual marketplace.
2) You treat the result as temporary. In interviewing actual people, you are confronted with the fact that they are responding to specific stimulus at a specific point in time, and that as the marketplace or external factors change, their responses would probably change.
3) You are somewhat less likely to end up focused on the wrong data or ignoring surprising data. When people are able to speak at length, relevant facts emerge that you would never have considered incorporating in a quantitative study. (That's also why interviews are better than groups.)
To corroborate this, by the way, I have been told that in the case of branding research, decisions made based on twelve in-depth interviews can produce better in-market results than a quantitative study. (I would infinitely prefer to write a creative brief based on twelve in-depth interviews than on a quantitative study, that's for sure.)
Allow me to repeat that segmentation and modeling can definitely lift your results. I have seen some excellent models lift results for my clients. However, the excellent models were refreshed frequently, sometimes based on real-time behavioral data, using actual data from actual marketing activities. They avoided making long-term predictions based on data collected at a single point in time. Also, being purely statistical creatures, they contained no narratives; no assumptions of cause and effect, just correlations. That approach, I think, minimizes both the confirmation and narrative errors Taleb refers to.
You and I could take some comfort in the thought that we marketers might find it easier to correct our bad habits than the academic economists Taleb takes on. After all, we have to get real people to engage with our products over very short timeframes, so we are able to learn from our mistakes. Surely we are more practical and effective than university professors!
However, Taleb points out that everyone believes him or herself to be the exception to statistical rules. So humility is the best policy. I will gently push my clients to rely more on qualitative findings as bases for messaging decisions. And from now on, I pledge to assume that there is something potentially important missing from my analysis: I will recommend that my clients prepare for the possibility that I am wrong. For example, I will strongly recommend that we be rigorous about benchmark and tracking disciplines, and refresh our insights more regularly.
Hold me to it.
Taleb is a "skeptical empiricist" philosopher who participates (profitably) in the financial sector. He explains that in our species' drive to predict what will happen, we fall into a number of potentially destructive information-processing traps, because we fail to understand much about the nature of information, or even much about how our minds actually work. Worse, according to studies he cites, experts are blinded by too much information and are even worse at prediction than ordinary people.
Oops. What is it that I do for a living, again? I extrapolate recommendations from data about how people think and feel. In doing that, I must presume that the data has some predictive value and that I am expert enough to interpret it correctly.
Not likely, according to Taleb, unless I am a physical scientist. Human behavior is just too unpredictable--prone to outlier events that he calls black swans. The type of research I do stumbles into two of Taleb's traps: the tendency to attribute doubtful cause and effect relationships between data points (the narrative fallacy), and the tendency to assume that because something has happened over and over again for a while, it will continue to happen indefinitely (the confirmation fallacy).
Narratives are cherished by marketers, because they reinforce our illusion that the data we are able to afford to collect must mean something important. Piles of data are much easier to digest when they are marinated in emotional oomph and salted with just enough cause-effect to be plausible.
For example, if I "know" from a research study that people with less than a college education are more dependent on their doctors for their medication decisions, I am likely to construct the following narrative: "less educated people feel that they don't understand things as well as the more educated doctor, which makes them deferential."
But of course I don't know that at all, I have merely noticed a statistical correlation, and one that is probably not much better than 80%, if even that good. What percentage of the highly educated portion of my customers are dependent on their doctors? Is it 20%? 40%? And what about the 20% of the less educated people who are not dependent on their doctors? If I had constructed my analysis differently, I might find that the correlation with education masks some other factor, such as cultural background or type of profession. Or the correlation may not mean anything at all, in narrative terms. Who knows?
What Taleb would probably point out is that it doesn't matter, anyway, because of my confirmation fallacy. My use of data to predict the future assumes that there are no outlier events lurking over the horizon. In other words, I am assuming that because in a single segmentation study, education level turned out to be correlated with dependency on doctors, that this will continue to be true for some meaningful period of time.
Yet, at this moment in 2009, that is actually unlikely. Right now, our government is investing in medical technology that will help doctors to do a better job of determining which treatments will work best for which patients based on empirical data. I have reason to at least suspect that the publicity about this new technology will change how even our most educated patients view their doctors' expertise, and therefore undermine both my mental and quantitative models of how people behave.
And that's just one example.
So here's my plea. First, if you haven't already, read The Black Swan; it's both necessary and delightful. Second, ask yourself some serious questions about quantitative research. It may be--heresy though this is--that qualitative is nearly always a much better basis for the development of marketing messages.
I am not completely anti-quant. Segmentation and behavioral models can lift your results if they are narrative-free (i.e., reflect no assumptions), easy to validate in real-time, and frequently refreshed. However, quantitative messaging studies over-complicate and even distort our understanding of human attitudes and behaviors.
There, I said it.
Why? Qualitative research, done properly (which means more interviews and fewer groups), forces you to deal with the complexity of human reactions in a way that humans are reasonably good at--face to face. In the qualitative setting:
1) You seek the simplest important conclusions. You look for a simple preponderance of evidence that seems consistent or reliable, not "data" connections between human attitudes that are either statistical phantoms or too complex to be replicated in the actual marketplace.
2) You treat the result as temporary. In interviewing actual people, you are confronted with the fact that they are responding to specific stimulus at a specific point in time, and that as the marketplace or external factors change, their responses would probably change.
3) You are somewhat less likely to end up focused on the wrong data or ignoring surprising data. When people are able to speak at length, relevant facts emerge that you would never have considered incorporating in a quantitative study. (That's also why interviews are better than groups.)
To corroborate this, by the way, I have been told that in the case of branding research, decisions made based on twelve in-depth interviews can produce better in-market results than a quantitative study. (I would infinitely prefer to write a creative brief based on twelve in-depth interviews than on a quantitative study, that's for sure.)
Allow me to repeat that segmentation and modeling can definitely lift your results. I have seen some excellent models lift results for my clients. However, the excellent models were refreshed frequently, sometimes based on real-time behavioral data, using actual data from actual marketing activities. They avoided making long-term predictions based on data collected at a single point in time. Also, being purely statistical creatures, they contained no narratives; no assumptions of cause and effect, just correlations. That approach, I think, minimizes both the confirmation and narrative errors Taleb refers to.
You and I could take some comfort in the thought that we marketers might find it easier to correct our bad habits than the academic economists Taleb takes on. After all, we have to get real people to engage with our products over very short timeframes, so we are able to learn from our mistakes. Surely we are more practical and effective than university professors!
However, Taleb points out that everyone believes him or herself to be the exception to statistical rules. So humility is the best policy. I will gently push my clients to rely more on qualitative findings as bases for messaging decisions. And from now on, I pledge to assume that there is something potentially important missing from my analysis: I will recommend that my clients prepare for the possibility that I am wrong. For example, I will strongly recommend that we be rigorous about benchmark and tracking disciplines, and refresh our insights more regularly.
Hold me to it.
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