It’s All About Context

We tell clients all the time, “we want to understand consumer behavior in context.” That’s why the bulk of our work is conducted in the actual retail environment where people make their decisions. We seek to decipher the parenthetical commentary, the behavior they exhibit AFTER the invisible comma in their statements.

For example, imagine all of the quantitative studies that report 79% of people prefer to patronize organizations that support causes that are important to them. Or how about the finding that 85% of people say they prefer to purchase sustainable products? Well, what about the conditions under which those things are true? The 79% PREFER it if they are familiar with the cause, believe it’s a good fit with the sponsoring organization, and the sponsoring brand is already in the consideration set. Preference doesn’t always translate into purchase. And people are predisposed to trying to answer “the right way,” the answer that they believe will have the highest acceptance by other people. So yes, they will purchase sustainable products if they don’t cost more and aren’t inconvenient to access.

So, once you understand people’s conditional behavior, you have a much better chance of inserting your product or service into it. Maybe that’s why this works so well. >> Click Here:  Food Calculator Turns Favorite Foods Into Donations

An Apple A Day

Gartner predicts worldwide smartphone sales will reach 468 million units in 2011 and Android will command 38.5% of the smartphone market. By 2012, that rate will increase to 49.9%, but it will drop slightly to 48.8% by 2015. What’s interesting about these predictions is that they seem to underestimate Apple’s ability to determine what consumers actually want and implement a superior design in which to deliver it.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Apple will miraculously secure a majority position in the smartphone market in the next two years. But, what am I am saying is that the most innovative company in the world is successful because they make things people want. Apple products are the only products that you don’t mind when they break. Instead, you’re like, “Awwww…..damn. I’ll have to go get the next awesome generation of this thing I love.”

It’s always fascinating to me when I hear people tell me about all the things Android can do because it’s open source code. The Android partners, the biggest and best vendors in the mobile world – Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG, Dell, and Sony-Ericsson – make devices in all shapes and sizes and in virtually every iteration you can imagine. That’s also part of the problem. People are like dogs. They like simple commands. Remember Wordstar? ^kd to bold a word?

Anyway, developers tell me, “you can do this, you can do this, and you can download this here and put music on this SD card and you can do this and copy this here and open it in this app.” But, I argue “just because I can doesn’t mean I want to.” Apple builds what people want: something they can personalize and change their wallpaper photo and put little pictures next to their contacts and upload photos to Facebook and search Twitter, and reserve a table at a restaurant and get directions. Consumers are simple, visual creatures with a need for the badge value the Apple logo delivers. The average consumer doesn’t view iTunes as an infringement on their civil liberties by restricting file sharing; he sees it as an organized format for downloading and listening to music that shows the album cover artwork.  iTunes just plays whatever the file is: .mov, .avi, .mp3,. .mp4., and I don’t have to speak another language to use it. But, if I did, I could just toggle between the foreign language keyboards on my iPhone. That’s something I actually want to do.

 

The Favorite Stall

Have you ever watched people walk into a bathroom over the course of a regular work day? I have. How about the recurring weekly staff meeting? Ever notice how people sit in their “assigned seats” every time?

Ovid and Aristotle were talking about “habits” long before behavioral psychology came to be. What’s interesting about their observations of human behavior is that not much has changed since 25 BC. I mean, yes, we have more sophisticated neuroscience to explain our behaviors, but at the core, our instinctive and habitual behaviors haven’t change a whole lot.

Habit drives a lot of consumer choice. We have consumers – lots of ‘em – on camera – in stores – telling us, “well, I always come here…it’s just a habit I guess.” They don’t even necessarily think about which store to go to. It’s an unconscious, habitual decision: I go here for groceries, here for napkins, here for appliances, and here for aspirin. So if we understand the habits, we can redirect the choices, and get your brand into the consideration set.

The process of finding and pressing the proper buttons to get into the consideration set is to understand “reasoned choice,” not the unconscious type above, but the subconscious influencers of how people think about things. The good news is, most reasoned choice behavior is the result of the importance of social acceptance to the individual’s emotional satisfaction. So, much of what we decide is the result of status seeking or managing our downside.

At heart, we’re all just status-ticians. Give me the most (+) with the least (-) and I’m in. Who says we’re not good at math?

Less Dogma, More Discovery

This was an exciting thing to read yesterday. If P&G, “the world’s biggest researcher,” understands the value of a heretical model for learning, then there’s hope for the rest of the corporate world. People are irrational, so culling information from them through purely dogmatic, rational means asking a series of objective questions with a finite answer set will deliver some good information on what people say they do. It won’t tell you why or under what conditions.

What we do is contextualize human behavior. We put all the rigor necessary into the quantitative design that ensures everyone has “numbers” to report, but we believe the real magic of consumer discovery happens in the conversation. Now, more than ever before, that conversation is online, so through a series of audits and harvesting tools, and proprietary technological engagements – in home, online, and in the retail environment – we can get the full picture of how people think, decide, and live. It takes both: the generalized, contextual learning of qualitative and the detailed, specific information of quantitative. When you put those together, that’s real cloud computing. You discover much, much more when you understand that behavior is conditional.

http://adage.com/article/news/p-g-surveys-fade-consumers-reach-brands-social-media/149509/

The Zoomerang Effect

As more and more apps for “do-it-yourself” research become available, more and more companies are, well, doing it themselves. While it’s great that, with the meteoric rise of consumer generated media companies are embracing the need to get feedback from customers, these DIY applications often have businesses talking to the same customers over and over.  Customers. People who already patronize their business. It’s important to speak to rejecters too – people who don’t come to you, but are also likely loyal to competitive brands. And what about those who used to love you but stopped coming and buying for some reason? That group may be the easiest to convert, yet, you know little about them and their behavior.

You need to know not just WHAT these different groups of consumers do, but WHY they behave the way they do. Otherwise, you only know half of the story, and that half is from people who already know your brand. So Zoomerang away people! But like the device for which it is named, your insights will only lead you right back to where you started.  That’s not really progress at all, is it?

Send in the clowns

Ahh, the angst of leaving the drive-thu only to discover that they got your order wrong. (Could be worse… you could be getting a delivery from the Chinese place when you open the bag to see that they forgot your soup). But we won’t ponder whether to get your money back or wait another ½ hour for the delivery to bring it. Instead, I’m thinking about today’s McDonalds drive-thru adventure. Like the Chinese restaurant proverb says, best to take it the ordering process slowly, i.e. order like you’re speaking to a first grader: One, that’s ONE… Egg role. Okay? TWO orders of spare ribs…. That’s two orders of spare ribs… etc. (And please read it back to me). But today at McDonalds (corner of Commercial Blvd. and Powerline Road in Ft. Lauderdale), an order of four coffees and one chicken sandwich turned into lesson in the theoretical viability of string theory for the woman behind the glass. Me: Two medium coffees with cream and sugar. Her: What size? Me: Medium… coffees. Her: Anything in them? Me: Yes, cream and sugar. Her: What size? Me: Let me start at the beginning. Her: One coffee? Me: Arrgghhh. Having done some extensive consulting in FFHR’s (Fast Food Hamburger Restaurants), I’m always intrigued not by these kinds of breakdowns in QSR, but more by the extremely rare sighting of stellar service. Which reminds me of the young man named Chet who once worked the Burger King drive-thru on Alton Road in Miami Beach. Working furiously without any help to keep the flow of cars and orders moving, I quickly asked him how hard under-staffed restaurants like his undermined his speed of service and accuracy. His answer… “Better when it’s just me… they get in my way.” Note to Oak Brook. Forget the warm body syndrome. Interview guides and PI’s, used for even non-exempt drive-thru positions can have a huge impact on revenue: One right hire equals two string theory experts.

Continental flight 1048: Service nightmare at 40,000 feet

The idea of a grumpy, “put-out”, “put-off” otherwise job-loathing employee is nothing new. The fact that this person is a flight attendant is especially no surprise. But when you run into three malcontents one flight, the entire flight crew basically, you’re in for more than a bumpy ride… you’re in for a nightmare at 40,000 feet. The star of this episode… the grim one… Lily.

“Excuse me Miss, can you take this empty cup?” Lily: “NO, I can’t right now. I’ll come back when I can.” One hour later. “Excuse me Miss, can you take this cup now?” Lily: “NO, not now.” Wow, is that Lily’s face next to the definition of curt in Webster’s. Actually no, that would be occupied by one of the other two flight attendants who also wouldn’t take an empty cup, smile, or even TRY to accommodate, and instead served the entire flight as if it was a burden, not an opportunity to build customer loyalty.

So clipped was Lily’s demeanor, almost shrewish, that even a cynical business traveler two seats over held up his hands as if to ask… “Does she know how dour she actually is?” When I asked Lily what her name was, her smile was so forced, so pained, that it was truly hard to watch.

I get that these sound like minor offenses and there are certainly FAA restrictions run amok. I also understand that flight attendants people are besieged with requests by dozens of passengers who seek ease and comfort in a steel tube where neither is of any abundance. But why am I seeing a pre-flight video from Continental CEO Jeffery Smisek gushing about how dedicated his people are to service, when they are clearly not on board. Or in this case, on board but not with the plan. No wonder the Wall Street Journal reported that less than 50% of service company employees understand what their company expects them to deliver.

Lily, you’re in the service business. Not to be confused with Joe Pines’ “experience economy” model – one that will never be attained by the Lily-fueled Continental’s of the world. And in the service business a smile costs you nothing but earns everything. Loyalty being the most tangible, but sending passengers on their way feeling a little better about their flight wouldn’t hurt either.

I bet Lily’s a good mother, perhaps a warn and caring grandmother as well. But not only is she clearly in the wrong job, this is a worker who absolutely does not understand exactly what her job is.

The bar is shockingly low in the airline industry Lily. Just try and jump over it once and a while and good things will happen.

outside the bun, on the edge of credibility

Chasing the healthy food trend, Taco Bell weighs in with the drive-thru diet. You would think that ensuring low fat options on anybody’s menu is a solid strategy, but how you market that strategy is what determines its success. First, for Taco Bell a low fat diet prompt is already living on the credulity fringe. Besides the obvious issue of healthy food and Taco Bell being used in the same sentence, if we want a light fare, we’ll have a spinach wrap, grilled chicken, veggie burger, whatever. But when we drive through a Taco Bell it’s for one reason and one reason only… to stuff pie hole with mass amounts of greasy QSR taste bombs. But beyond that, just look at the absurd media they’re choosing to deliver the message: As an example, internet media trackers report that before every single video on NBA.com, the same 30-second ad for the drive-through diet appears. Let me get this straight… an ad with a testimonial (Christine’s story) from a women talking about dieting on NBA.com? Christine is not Pam Oliver or Robin Roberts and instead comes across like a salon potato, not a sports fan. Who are they talking to? And do they know that viewers of such videos are likely to be watching more than one video clip, perhaps every day (they’re called fans : fanatics)? So Taco Bell is subjecting sports fans to a misguided low fat concept, with the same insipid testimonial over and over and over again – testimonial being default technique when you don’t have a real idea. We’ll accept brands that blatantly chase trends, but brands that chase without a marketing compass are indeed lost. The drive-through diet is not for Taco Bell, nor is their current CMO. Those who think outside the bun should know better

geaux-to brands

Nothing like a brand that you can scream your lungs out for. Rooting for a brand is one thing… we hope Zappos sells more shoes without selling out. We want upstarts like hhgregg to win to keep Best Buy honest. And we cling to Target’s aesthetic lest Walmart becomes more monolithic. But as we all became citizens of New York after 9/11 (apologies for this analogy), we will all become Saints in the next two weeks. The black and gold represent the best of America it seems: Ignored and insignificant season after season (remember the “Aints”), but now risen from the flood of Katrina. The New Orleans Saints play for a town that parties like no other… a unique culture of smoke’n hot Zydeco, beyond rich food, plenty of unspoken decadence and straight up resilience. Learn a powerful lesson in brand loyalty over the next 14 days as the Saint’s brand energy grows exponentially: A reflection of the power of the NFL, the Superbowl and its media machine sure, but really the best feel-good team ever to come marching into the game of all games. Even short-term brand loyalty can be a beautiful thing.

new coke, meet new pizza

First rule of advertising (and revolutionaries apparently) is learning how to actually break the rules. So just because quality is considered THE de-facto rule in any single category, it truly isn’t. Otherwise there would be no Payless Shoes, street vendors selling knock-offs, or the bridal registry at Walmart.

So if you’ve got a low-quality brand AND diminishing market share, don’t dare think the only option is overhaul when a less extreme solution may be what’s called for, i.e. the difference between Coke Zero’s successful caloric tweak v. New Coke’s catastrophic misstep. (And c’mon… there may be worse pizza and better pizza, but is there REALLY such a thing as bad pizza?)

Which brings us to Domino’s admission that for 49 years it has been selling you cardboard, an artificial wax-like substance that’s not entirely cheese, and meat-like substitutes. Or as Domino’s Marketing Director Karen “Boom Boom” Kaiser says (on camera) “worst excuse for a pizza I’ve ever had.” Yummy. But wait, this mea culpa is all in the name of being a trust-based brand: Having the conviction and credibility that comes with such a bold “my bad”. WRONG.

You’re looking at the New Coke, or new cardboard perhaps. I don’t know how much dough Domino’s spent on (once again) flawed consumer research to tell them that their pizza sucked and that their customers would respond to a completely new formula (Coke spent $4M and spoke to 200,000 consumers to get New Coke wrong), but these misguided Michigan marketers thoroughly missed the point.

Domino’s customers choose Domino’s pizza because it taste like it does, not in spite of it. If they wanted better ingredients and better pizza, they’d order Papa John’s. Or as Research guru Lori Masciovecchio says (speaking for the loyalist)… “Don’t fuck with my shit.” The fact is, you’re not going to out-quality Papa John’s. And you’re not going to out-taste the mom and pops OR Papa John’s. Instead, you’ve given away your differentiation in a category where the bar is set so low on yummy that millions will indeed eat cardboard, and in some cases eat it cold.

Domino’s needed a new brand strategy: Focused, singled minded, eliminating products that diffused the brand and instead a build-out from the core. They could have leveraged their perceived halo of faster delivery during a time when it matters more than when they actually introduced it. As Papa John went after experience and delivery (Papa’s in the HOWWWSE!), Domino’s could have brought it’s own personality to life. Something. Anything. But not destroy the core.

And so I say to the good people of Ann Arbor, as they sift through the avalanche of PR, learn from the marketing master William Shakespere who said, “To thine own self be true” and who also invented the term “method in the madness.” Or in this case, perhaps not.