Posts from — January 2008

What does consumer-centric new product development look like?

I can think of no better example than this one from Seth Godin:

“Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe.”

The tribe he is referring to is an interconnected, homogeneous group that a brand or a company can help foster.

By forming a community and then developing products just for them, a brand can ensure a core consumer base, a word of mouth launchpad, and a feedback network to tell you what you did right and what you need to fix.

Rather than fight the tide of social networking, companies should flow with it and see where it takes them. As Godin writes:

“People form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better.”

From this January 18th article in Businessweek, a quote from a recent McKinsey Consulting report gave me a significant pause:

“Traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective in 2010 as it was in 1990.”

I had to read that again.

Then I Googled the entire quote, and pulled up some more conclusions from the same study, this time from Marketing Vox:

“According to McKinsey, real ad spending on prime-time broadcast TV has increased over last decade by about 40 percent even as viewers have dropped almost 50 percent.

The Businessweek article goes on to show how just about everything that today’s CPG marketers have learned in their careers to effectively market their brands is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Media fragmentation, the rise of web based entertainment, and the drastically different media consumption patterns of young consumers are all significant factors.

Most traditional marketers have heard that the future of advertising is a two-way conversation, versus talking at consumers one-way. Most have also heard about the growing importance of word-of-mouth, engagement and viral advertising.

But if McKinsey is right in their forecast, these “emerging” techniques and forms of advertising will be anything but emerging in a couple of years.

In fact, they may be the only things that work.

In my previous post on search visualization, I cited a couple examples of search engines that examine link knots, or clusters of sites and pages organized around a similar theme.

I’d like to go into more detail on each of the three, since they each approach search visualization slightly differently.

The first site I’ll look into is TouchGraph. The site has Java applets for mapping link knots on either Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Using the Google applet, I typed in one of my favorite topics “crowdsourcing” (see a previous post on crowdsourcing here) and hit the Graph It! button.

What you get back are groupings of visual clusters, with each cluster representing groups of links that are related to a particular aspect of crowdsourcing. There are blog sites, articles, companies who specialize in crowdsourcing applications, etc.

I then click on the + symbol that was around a blog post on ReadWriteWeb that provided an overview of crowdsourcing. Another group of links popped up that were directly related to that particular post, one of which was a post that appeared in Mashable about Cambrian House, a software developer with a “crowd-sourced” based development strategy .

By expanding again on the Cambrian House post, I can see another cluster of related links, this time focused on Cambrian House itself. So you can see how this can go on and on and on….

TouchGraph as a research tool not only shows you relevant links to a particular topic, it does it in a very visually appealing way.

The interface is a little slow and take some getting used to, but the reward is that you can visualize information in a much broader context than you currently can do with Google today.

The Mastercard “Priceless” campaign has been running successfully since 1997, and has been shown in over 100 countries and in over 50 languages.

The insight that the Mastercard “Priceless” campaign levers is that life isn’t about what you buy, but about the relationships you have with the people you care about, and the special moments that you can share with them.

Rather than exclusivity, or status, or the accumulation of stuff, this insight positions Mastercard as more an enabler to the more important things in life.

What I find interesting is that this isn’t particularly ownable, since any card can claim this; but by putting a stake in the ground with this insight, they have claimed it for their own.

It also doesn’t hurt the longevity of this McCann-Erickson campaign that it has struck the right balance of emotional heart tugs, humor, and pop culture references across its almost 400 spots.

Additionally, with imitation being the most sincere form of advertising relevance, this campaign probably has the most parodies, spoofs, and user generated originals of any ad campaign on the web.

The example below is one of my favorite real spots.

“When your neighbor loses his job, it’s a recession. When you lose your job, it’s a depression.” – Harry S. Truman

As the US economy looks to be sliding towards recession, if it isn’t already there now, consumers will start to alter certain behaviors in reaction to economic realities. And not all areas of spending are reduced; in fact, some increase at the expense of others.

Here are some more general ones that marketers need to be cognizant of:

Not surprisingly, consumers reexamine their regular spending habits

• Restaurant and take out meals decline, and in home meals increase.
• Coupon usage increases, and they become more aware of in store sales and price reductions.
• Entertainment has some interesting shifts, as movie ticket sales tend to increase during recessions, but spending $250+ on Hannah Montana concert tickets for the kids is certainly over with.

A counterpoint is that sometimes consumers will maintain their “little luxuries”

• These may be simple things, like a Starbucks latte in the mornings, since it can be an inexpensive mood lifter during stressful times.
• However, they will probably focus on just one “little luxury”, and try to pare down the rest.

Big expenses like home remodels and extravagant vacations are postponed.

• If consumers do work around the home, it is probably DIY, and even then to help boost the saleability of a home in a poor housing market.
• Traditionally, consumers used to cancel their foreign travels and focus on places they could reach by car. However, with gas prices as high as they are, even this behavior is in jeopardy.

Consumers try to get a better handle on their credit card balances and monthly budgets.

• This means consumers finding out that cash still works to pay for groceries and the sales of personal finance books take off.
• However, consumers who lose their jobs tend to fall on back on credit, which then leads to a personal finance doom loop.

Hang on tight, we are all in for a rough ride.

I’ve read several interesting posts by Rachel Clarke at BehindtheBuzz.com on the merging of games and puzzles with advertising, and how they can provide brand immersion and can foster consumer engagement.

These range from simple viral games like this one she writes about for Lufthansa, to massive Alternate Reality Games like the one she mentions for Guinness.

Of these, Alternate Reality Games are the most interesting to me. With their deep complexity and their extended timelines, they can be tailor made for generating viral buzz behind brands or new product launches. To get more in depth background on ARGs and their promotional power, this article from Wired Magazine provides a lot of great background.

Also, there are more examples on the 42 Entertainment site, which is an agency specializing in ARGs. They were the agency that developed the “I Love Bees” ARG that supported the 2004 launch of Microsoft’s Halo 2 game.

While Google is really good at answering facts by pointing you in the direction of the best authority sites, it can be fairly time consuming to do marketing research on broader themes like “Banner Advertising” or “Retail Shopping Trends” and quickly assemble and visualize groups of links from a wide range of sources on your topic.

If your topic is broad and popular enough, something like Yahoo’s directory can help, but many times it can become too focused on one or two static authority sites.

Del.icio.us can also help, but you need to learn to use it less like a bookmark repository and more like a social link referral service. Additionally, in its current state, it is just as “lines of text” driven as Google.

In this recent post at Social Media and Green Horses, robojiannis provides an interesting overview of the attributes of Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web and where it could go. He also asks what else we would want on the wish list for its future development.

For me, a better way to visualize search results would be the most useful development in the Web 3.0 future. Rather than focus on lists of single links and pages, I want to see clusters of links, or something I call link knots, that not only show you authority sites with relevant info, but how they are clustered with many other relevant sites on your main topic and side topics.

A couple of examples that hint at what I mean by this concept of link knots are attached below. As I work through this in more detail, I’ll post more.

TouchGraph, KartOO, and Quintura are all good starts at hinting at link knots, but they are all lacking some of the fluidity and scale I’m looking for from the future of visual search.

This example of Microsoft’s Seadragon technology is more related to a way to show visual relationships between photos and images on the web versus search results, but the fluidity of the technology demonstrated in this clip is truly stunning. Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ discussion of the most relevant application to something like link knotting is about 5:30 minutes into the clip.

Any other examples that people could share in this area would be appreciated.

Just when I write a post about how engagement represents the new, higher order of advertising (as seen with Nike+), Apple runs this headline takeover ad today on the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

All I can say is …. brilliant.

One of the biggest buzzwords in advertising over the past year or so is engagement, and this is especially true for digital advertising. Engagement in advertising relates to an ads ability to foster some form of interaction with a consumer, either with the ad itself or with other consumers in a branded environment.

The theory being that if a brand engages with a consumer in a meaningful way, they are more likely to develop strong emotional bonds with the product or service, which is something that doesn’t happen when a consumer mutely watches or reads a traditional form of advertising.

One of the best examples of engagement advertising today is what Nike is doing with Nike+ and social networking. Nike+ is a small sensor in running shoes that connects to an Apple iPod. After a run, the runner docks his iPod into his computer and uploads details about his run to a social networking site run by Nike, where the runner can then interact with other runners, get encouragement, and provide advice to others.
All of this in a Nike branded environment.

This program has been such a success for Nike, that it is shifting its media weight from traditional, non-engaging forms of media such as TV, to programs such as Nike+. In this article from the New York Times, Nike marketing VP Trevor Edwards bluntly states:

”We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Mr. Edwards says he tells many media executives. ”We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”

And Nike+ seems to be a very effective way to do just that.

In the mind of most sports fans, ESPN is sports. And Sportscenter defines ESPN.

What is insightful on the part of ESPN is rather than positioning themselves as a top sports news network, coming across like the CNN of sports, ESPN instead positions themselves as the world’s biggest sports fan.

This allows them to match the seriousness that fans have about sports and their teams and players, while at the same time recognizing that sports at their essence are still just a bunch of people playing games. So while they take their reporting and analysis seriously, they don’t necessarily take themselves too seriously.

All of this is why their ongoing, “This is Sportscenter” campaign has had such a successful run since it first started airing in 1995. The spots use dry humor to show top athletes together with ESPN anchors into mini-mockumentaries of everyday office situations at Sportscenter. This campaign developed by Wieden+Kennedy recently ran its 300th spot in late 2007.

Below is a great example from the campaign, which has Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers helping out during an ESPN office fire drill.