Category — Marketing Research

Versus visiting a mall or any other type of shopping center, many online retailers tends to be singularly focused on one aspect of shopping, the final purchase.

There is no sense of wandering through the aisles, watching others as they shop, or having someone with you to provide advice.

What is missing is the social aspect of buying something, which is one of the foundations of the Web 2.0 experience.  And for some online retailers who are not optimized to take advantage of this, this is a missed opportunity.

According to a recent Guidant\Synovate eNation study, more than 60% of respondents report being drawn to online retailers that employ Web 2.0 tools and techniques.

These social tools include soliciting feedback and providing recommendations on products and services, along with welcoming them and making them feel part of a community.

The reason why this is critical is that word of mouth is one of the primary influencers in having a consumer purchase one product over another.

According to this Nielsen Online Global Consumer study, recommendations from consumers are the most trusted form of advertising out there, along with consumer opinions posted online.

An enhanced online shopping experience isn’t necessarily fancier graphics or flash programs.

The best online retail experiences are the ones that lever one of the most important aspects of offline shopping, the social aspect and the opinions of others.

Lately, everyone associated with marketing or advertising is talking about creating “communities” and having “conversations” with their consumers through Social Media Marketing.

What is missing are good examples of how Social Media is being used effectively and, most importantly, how are they measuring that effectiveness to calculate ROI.

I’ve tracked down a couple of recent examples that I feel do a good job in both levering Social Media and tracking results from their efforts.

This case study of Sea World San Antonio (hat tip to Alex Nesbitt at Digital Podcast) shows how working with communities of roller coaster enthusiasts through YouTube videos and Flickr images the marketers at Sea World were able to create significant pre-launch buzz for a new water ride, Journey to Atlantis.

The best part of this example, as demonstrated in this video case study done by Shel Israel at FastCompany.tv, is how they were able to provide concrete measurement of results from the campaign through multiple sources, including use of custom surveys and online site statistics.

Through their research, they were able to clearly separate those visitors who came through their Social Media efforts, versus the rest of the people who visited the park on a daily basis.

Carnival Cruise Lines has had a track record of success in Social Media Marketing for some time now. Tameka Kee of Online Media daily shows how they built on that success through an online partnership with ScrapBlog.com (a community built around scrapbooking) that allows guests from their cruises to share snapshots and video clips with friends and family in a branded environment.

As Carlos Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Scrapblog says of the initiative:

“A Carnival cruiser comes back and has pics and video that are essentially already branded. When they share it with friends and family, they’re sharing the brand. Allowing them to create a scrapbook online increases the number of people that can interact with the brand exponentially.”

Additionally, like the Sea World Example, Carnival also was able to get a better understanding of their initiative through concrete performance metrics by tracking the number of scrapblogs created by their guests, visit stats to the created scrapblogs, and registered conversions at CarnivalConnections.com due to scrapblog visits.

Creating effective Social Media Marketing campaigns is good first step for brands. Measuring that effectiveness on the back end is the critical next step that all brands should be taking as well.

To paraphrase Bartles (or is it Jaymes?) I thank you for your support for Insight Buzz.

The latest rankings just came out from Junta 42, which ranks the top content marketing blogs on the Net, and Insight Buzz just joined the list at a very respectable #30.

If you get a chance, check out the community that Joe Pulizzi is building at Junta 42. He has assembled a great resource for those involved in content marketing, which is the art of communicating with customers and consumers in a way that goes beyond just simple selling, in order to provide useful information to a loyal base of current and prospective users.

To use a quote from the Junta 42 site:

“Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent.”

And by rewarding consumers with valuable and relevant information, marketers themselves are rewarded with a consumer’s business and subsequent loyalty.

All of which are best practices in a Web 2.0 world.

What happens when good data is used the wrong way? The data gets all the blame, as seen in the latest round of finger pointing about ComScore and their reporting of Google click growth.

In February, when ComScore, a market research firm that tracks online marketing and advertising, published findings that found growth in Google’s paid click traffic was down significantly versus the prior year, Google’s stock fell into a steady decline, retreating almost 45% from its 52 week high.

However, when Google announced recently that its 1st quarter profits were up 31% versus the prior year, Google’s stock shot up, while ComScore’s own stock was pummeled. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt even made a veiled reference to “third party” data missing the boat when it came to predicting Google’s performance.

The problem was that what ComScore was measuring (Google’s paid click growth in the US) wasn’t matching what Google was reporting (global and third party paid click growth). According to Andrew Lipsman at Comscore:

“The main difference between the paid clicks trends reported by Google and comScore can be traced to the fact that the comScore paid click data cited in financial analysts’ reports (and subsequently reported by the media) are U.S. data only.”

Additionally, when you do an apple to apples comparison, the trends between ComScore and what Google reports itself are directionally the same:

Not surprisingly, the nuance of research data can generally be lost on the investment community.

However, just because data is used in a wrong way, doesn’t make the data wrong itself.

While Social Media Marketing has seen explosive growth, the tools and metrics necessary to measure the effectiveness of this new medium haven’t seen quite as much innovation.

In fact, the tools I’ve seen discussed are a lot of the same tools that marketers in Search have had success with.

Unfortunately, these tools generally lack the ability to capture the viral nature of programs and campaigns in Social Media.

The chart below is from a study by the Society for New Communications, entitled “New Media, New Influencers, and Implications for the Public Relations Profession” which asked a couple hundred industry professionals a series of questions about Social Media.

This is in response to a question about what Social Media metrics they found most important:

What struck me is that things like search rankings and visitor tracking are the only tools that are seen as being very effective. And I don’t think it is because they truly reflect the nuances of Social Media, it’s just that they are what people are used to measuring when it comes to digital media.

Jeremiah Owyang pointed out a potential measure on his blog that may be more appropriate, something he calls Velocity.

“Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget, or other like media spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy.”

He also gives the following example of Velocity in use:

• Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.
• Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.
• You can then look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

While the measure itself is very interesting, the challenge for most market researchers trying to work with this new measure will be capturing all the data necessary for analysis in an automated way.

However, at least it is a step towards measuring the concept of relevancy with a measure that is itself relevant.

Sometimes the worst thing you can do in market research is to start asking someone questions.

This seems counterintuitive in a profession that seems based upon the asking of questions, but when you ask someone a question, you then get an answer. And once you have an answer, you then start making assumptions and developing hypotheses and asking more questions, all based upon that answer.

But what if that answer is unreliable?

This is exactly the issue that Roger Dooley at Neuromarketing addresses in his post entitled “How ‘The Interpeter’ Screws Up Market Research” . Quoting from a lecture by Michael Gazzaniga, a prominent Neuroscientist:

“The same split-brain research that exposed shocking differences between the two hemispheres also revealed that the human left hemisphere has the interpreter. The left brain interpreter’s job is to interpret our behavior and responses, whether cognitive or emotional, to environmental challenges. The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior seep into our awareness. “

The problem then for market researchers is that if I ask someone a question, particularly about subjects that they haven’t given much thought to or don’t particularly care about - such as why do they prefer Brand A over Brand B - their interpreter is more than happy to provide some answer from their narrative, rather than giving a “Don’t know” or a “I don’t particularly care”.

The result then of random questioning is that the quality of consumer research starts to slide downhill, as Frank Martin perfectly illustrates in this example of a very muddled use of qualitative research, which shows some poorly recruited consumers being asked poorly constructed questions about a story board advertising clip.

I believe the first step in dealing with “the interpreter” in consumer research is to acknowledge its existence. The second step is to then lead with research that is behaviorally based, in order to establish the context and rational reality of a particular business issue.

It’s when that context is established, then the researcher can then start asking questions. But they always need to be listening for the voice of “the interpreter”.

One consumer research technique that has been getting a lot of attention lately is deprivation research. It is a technique where something a consumer uses a lot is taken away, and then the researcher notes how they react both physically and emotionally to this deprivation over a period of time.

An example would be to recruit a Starbuck’s consumer and then take away their ritual morning latte for two weeks. Then you would record their behavior and their feelings over that time frame as their brand loyalty was being tested.

If done right, this type of research can really hone in on why people buy what they do and what can be done to enhance a specific product’s benefit delivery and/or marketing efforts.

What I find interesting is how this research technique has been used front and center recently in advertising campaigns to highlight consumer passions for products and brands.

The most widely known example is the Burger Kinger “Whopper Freakout” campaign. A recent Wall Street Journal article by Suzanne Vranica demonstrates how the technique was used to do both the research and then to form the centerpiece for the campaign.

My favorite line from this spot from the “Whopper Freakout” campaign is at the end, where a couple of interesting patrons suggest they may need to change the name to “Burger Queen”, now that the Whopper is no longer on the menu:

Thanks to Olivier de Gaudemar at Insights 2.0 for finding and posting this clip of John Stewart grilling John Zogby over the polling disaster from the New Hampshire primaries a couple of weeks ago.

I think this is probably a market researcher’s version of hell: having John Stewart publicly questioning your data and methodology live on TV in front of millions of viewers.

“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.

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.