Posts from — December 2007

In an era where U.S. heavy manufacturing is either outsourced or out of business, Harley Davidson is one of the few companies still left standing.

Their success can be attributed to several factors, including a focus on quality and continuous manufacturing improvement. Another area where they have shone is how well they lever a core emotional insight into their consumers and have built a community around it.

From this case study by Reginald Bruce at the University of Louisville:

“the common thread of a Harley rider is a desire to escape the routine and become anyone you like. While their competitors base their advertising on product technology and features, Harley promotes: a mystique appearance, individualism, the feeling of riding free, and the pride of owning a legend. With Harley, you can live out your fantasies, as well as experience camaraderie with fellow bikers.

He goes on to quote former Harley Davidson President and CEO, Richard Teerlink, that the motorcycle brand represents to America:

“the adventurous pioneer spirit, the wild west, having your own horse, and going where you want to go - the motorcycle takes on some attributes of the iron horse. It suggests personal freedom and independence”.

By associating their bikes with an All American insight based on freedom and individualism, the company has not only created a motorcycle, but an American icon and a devoted community of riders as well.

Since readership of Insight Buzz has grown over the past couple of months, I thought the end of 2007 would be a good time to bring back a couple of the most popular posts on marketing research.

My method for determining which ones to list was a combination of Feedburner stats, Google Analytics, and plain personal preference.

Certainly the top post by a wide margin was this one on the Top Ten Marketing Research Resources on the Web. I hope to add an addendum after the 1st of the year with several new resources I’ve discovered since first posting this list.

One of my initial posts focused on Search and its potential to provide consumer insights through a kind of digital ethnography. This is another area I’m planning to come back to in the near future.

Lastly, I don’t mean to pick on focus groups, since I continue to find them of value. However, there are instances when they simply aren’t appropriate, which is why I wrote up this list of 3 Reasons Why Not to Use a Focus Group.

Since 2007 is almost over, and I have yet to devote a blog post to any of Technorati’s hot topics, I might as well have a post about Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul and online polling.

This chart from an AOL online straw poll is a window into the problems with online surveys. According to most other nationwide polls, Ron Paul is a distant 6th. In fact his awareness among the broader electorate is fairly minimal.

However, on the web, he is a powerhouse to be reckoned with, mostly due to his supporters. And while I believe engaged web users may be more likely to aware of Dr. Paul, the numbers still look a little fishy.

Which brings me back to sampling and online surveys in general. While methods like random digit dialing were able to provide telephone polls with method of avoiding selection bias in sample bases in the past, as AOL is finding out the hard way, surveys on the web still need a bit more work.

Too much package copy these days is either lists of self-serious product benefits, or smarmy, emotional puffery.

Maybe by taking a brand a little less seriously, marketers can form an even stronger bond with consumers through entertaining packaging.

That is the basis of this interesting packaging graphics insight from David Meerman Scott at Web Ink Now. What he describes is how Glaceau Vitaminwater uses paragraphs of irreverent humor to describe the benefits of a particular flavor:

“Revive Fruit Punch
If you woke up tired, you probably need more sleep. If you woke up drooling at your desk, you probably need a new job. If you woke up with a headache, on a Ferris wheel at the Idaho state fair, wearing a toga, you probably need answers, not to mention this product. Its got potassium and B vitamins to help you recover and feel refreshed—kinda like in those old Irish Spring soap commercials. And if you’re like our boss, Mike, and woke up married to an Elvis impersonator, you probably need a lawyer.”

It’s a little bit of seriousness surrounded by a lot of exaggeration, and the effect is that his teenage daughter and her friends like reading the product’s labels. By not taking itself too seriously, Vitaminwater has developed a form of true consumer engagement.

In developing their breakthrough new product, the Swiffer, Proctor & Gamble and their design team did ethnographic research that observed consumers doing something they truly disliked, which was cleaning their floors.

The surface insight that wet mopping a floor was drudgery was obvious. What wasn’t as obvious was the fact that using water wasn’t really an efficient way to clean your floors, since most of the dirt on the floor was actually dust, which just clotted together in water and became a form of mud.

This insight led to the devlopment of the electrostatic Swiffer sheet, which did a much better job on floor dust and dirt than water, and was also much easier to use.

And from a business standpoint, having consumers come back to buy the proprietary Swiffer sheets, led to a sustainable, business hit that generated $200 million in sales in year one alone.

Below are some rough benchmarks for determining if your blog is delivering relevant and engaging content by measuring its bounce rate.

Bounce rate is a web metric that measures what percent of site visitors leave immediately after viewing your page. According to Google Analytics “a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors”.

Therefore, the more sticky and engaging your content is, the less bounce you’re likely to have. This works well at evaluating main pages; however I think it’s even more insightful when looking at individual blog posts.

Since pages tend to vary significantly, by things like length or if they include some form of multimedia, these benchmarks are rough, relative measures. You can use bounce rate in conjunction with other metrics to determine your most engaging posts. Additionally, bounce rate is specific to site traffic; other measures are needed to evaluate your feed traffic.

Bounce Rate Benchmarks:

0% to 40% - Your blog is sticky with engaging content that makes visitors stop and stay.

40% to 65% - You have something of interest in your blog for the reader, but not enough to have someone stay and explore your site extensively.

65% to 100% - Your blog is a rubber band. Visitors bounce in and bounce out. Your page is either not what they were looking for, or it holds minimal interest.

For more information on bounce rate as a web metric, make sure you visit Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. He delves extensively into bounce rate and other key web metrics through his excellent blog.

Whose opinion do you trust? The expert or the friend?

With the rise of many digital forums that allow experts, as well as individual consumers, to provide their POV on products and their quality, the question arises on who do you trust?

Guy Kawasaki takes a stand on the issue in this post, quoting reseach that “common word-of-mouth advertising by regular folks is more powerful than ‘key influencers.’”.

While I think that we may find word-of-mouth to be more credible, there is also a role for key influencers as well. I believe the differing forms of advice between experts and peers operate in two distinct parts of a consumer’s brain.

The expert lets them know that the product does what it is supposed to and that its technical abilities are strong, all reinforcing the rational reasons to buy a given product.

The peer advice works on a different level. It is a reassurance that the product in question is right for them; that people just like themselves had used it and found it useful. It’s almost a form of collective support for a particular buying decision.

A personal example I had was when I was buying a digital SLR camera several months ago. I consulted all the expert websites and reviews, who let me now the technical abilities of all the cameras I was looking at and how they, as experts, felt about the product.

I also trolled through the online camera forums for user experiences. Somehow having a more personal endorsement from someone who maybe wasn’t a camera pro cemented my choice in a way that the expert opinion did not.

In the end, by satisfying both the rational and emotional parts of my brain, both forms of buying advice helped me make a choice I don’t regret.

Who would have thought that the top news content producer in digital media is a publisher that started doing business in 1851 and is known as the “Gray Lady” for its staid reporting style and conservative temperament.

Thanks to some numbers on TechCrunch, we can see that the New York Times is the undisputed titan of internet readership by a wide margin, growing 64% from August through October, with 7.5 million readers added following its discontinuation of Times Select. However, even before that, it was clearly the leader in web news.

Consumers may like the “New Media”, but that doesn’t mean that the “Old Media”content providers are completely out of the picture.

When was the last time you heard a truly memorable advertising jingle? One that you simply couldn’t stop humming and that you heard repeated wherever you went, with even kids on the street singing it to each other.

One look at this list from the Branding Strategy Insider and the dates they were introduced and you can guess it was probably about the time ad agency types such as the fictional Darrin Stevens and the rest of the “Mad Men” retired to Florida in the early 80’s. Only two from the list were from the 1990’s, and one was the four note Intel Inside tones, which barely qualifies as a true jingle in my mind.

I do have a belief (which I’m open for a challenge) that as media moved from being auditory dominant (radio) to more visual dominant (TV), the skill sets of ad agency creative talent shifted as well. We got visually stunning commercials, but the auditory complement was usually a pop song. But using popular music is expensive and it generally has stronger links back to the original artist that the brand it is advertising (”Like a Rock” for Chevy being a notable exception).

When I think about the emerging discipline of neuromarketing, I can’t help but wonder why marketers and their ad agency partners walked away from jingles. Although the medium is dated, I can’t think of any other form of equity communication that did a better job of cementing a brand into one’s brain than jingles did.

Lost in all the blog coverage of Facebook’s Beacon saga, was how the whole series of events emphasized the speed at which a company in the digital space can make a mistake and then adjust course in the face of a blizzard of bad press.

If this had happened in traditional media, the timeline between the announcement, the groundswell of bad PR, Facebook’s realizing they had a problem, and action on their part to fix it, would have probably covered months. In this case, Beacon was announced and gone in less than 30 days.

• On November 6th, Facebook announces the Beacon system to the broader world.
• Within two weeks, Moveon.org launches a campaign against the new system, citing privacy concerns. Within another two weeks, over 50,000 people had joined the anti-Beacon Facebook group.
• On December 5th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes and announces substantial changes to the Beacon program, moving it from an opt out program to an opt in one, effectively killing it.

Flash on, Flash off.