Calculating marketing's odds of success

Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something.  
-Wilson Mizner


We all play the odds. Sometimes the gamble is unconscious--as when we board an airplane, drive to work, or eat a Twinkie. We may recall fragments of statistics comparing the odds of death from eating dessert to being struck by lightning or meteors.

Ok, well, maybe we don't think about the odds of death by death-by-chocolate, but you get the idea: we understand that there are statistical risks to all of our actions...and mostly we ignore the cold, quantitative heart of risk assessment in day-to-day living: we have lives to live afterall!


But what about in our professional lives?  


What's so odd about risk?


No self-respecting executive invests  resources in pursuit of an objective without having considered the odds of success, right?  Shoot, even gamblers generally know the odds of success associated with the game they play...and then they play it anyway!


As planners, though, marketers are usually pretty good at identifying objectives and aligning appropriate measures. In some quarters, we even make regular eye contact with return-on-investment forecasts. But what about risk? 


Or put another way: how do we calculate the odds of success in our plans to pursue and deliver the perfect brand experience?


Here's one way for marketers to cut through unaccountable hyperbole and promises written in air: use a table of combined probabilities. 

What are the odds?


Combined probabilities is simple really. We've used this technique with clients to help identify program risks and to frame investments in new programs. It consists of 5 general steps:


1. Identify the individual critical events or activities that must take place to create the successful program or experience. These can include granular elements like advertising, sales, customer support and distribution or they can be higher level activities like Demand Generation and Fulfillment, Regulatory Approval or Research and Innovation.


2. Assign a best estimate of success for each event or activity. In other words, what do you believe to be the realistic odds of success. You can base this on prior, similar experiences, industry benchmarking data or the best instincts of your colleagues.


3. Repeat step 2, only this time be pessimistic. 


4. Repeat step 2, only this time be optimistic.


5. Multiply the odds of success (as a percentage) for all activities and events in each of your baseline, optimistic, and pessimistic scenarios to get your combined probability of success.


You'll quickly notice how quickly the odds move against you...even when you are 85% certain that each and every required activity will be successful.


So what?


The point of the exercise isn't to keep us from taking risk, it's to put the risk that exists into perspective. Some prefer to throw things on walls to see what sticks. That's an approach. This isn't for those situations.  


Combined probabilities are for marketers who want to understand risk in a broader context that helps focus investment decisions among competing areas.  In the process, activities whose success or failure might place an entire endeavour at unreasonable risk can be identified and supported in ways that increase the odds of success.

Like any quantitative tool, combined probabilities is no substitute for critical thinking. If marketing success were as easy as plugging numbers into a spreadsheet, then marketing wouldn't have a seat at the adult table. 


But when one sits at that table, knowing your odds of success can improve them.


To download a simple (i.e., five events or activities, no weighting) spreadsheet version for you own use, click here.

What marketers can learn from game design: The essential experience

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing
-Oscar Wilde

Games rule! We all play them. Some of us play Bridge, some of us play Call of Duty. Some, like Lindsay Vonn, ski down mountains at incredible speed. A few (?) of us can even make a game out of other people's confidence or a country's currency.

No matter what the game, there is something that speaks to just about every human when it comes to getting your game on.

Theories abound as to why we play games--from prime-evil competitive instincts to ego- or sensory gratification to a way to while away the time with friends--and everything in between. Beyond theory, one thing common in the practice of gaming is that game playing creates an experience.

Funny then, that gaming and marketing should have something so fundamental in common. And while great instances of marketing fun and games can be found, there's something more essential about the connection: designing a game has much in common with designing a brand.

personal branding

The Art of Game Brand Design


Books have been written. Quite a few even on game design! Beyond how-to's and theoreticals on flow, structure, narrative, action and scoring (including our own game example here ) a new book entitled The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell could just as easily be titled The Art of Brand Design.

The book takes a decidedly different approach to a discourse on games. It looks at what makes games worth playing by seeing game design through various lenses, including the lens of the designer; the lens of the team and the lens of the player among others. You could easily substitute 'brand' for 'game' and much would be equally applicable.

For instance: Just as gamers expect to unlock more value from a game as they develop skills, brands may have customers who have developed as much (or more) knowledge than the original product designers. Communicating with highly skilled users as if they were brand n00bs isn't likely to engender the loyalty or positive word of mouth one would want from these influencers.

Brands, like games, can design a pathway to increasingly robust experiences by balancing challenge and skill
(from Art of Game Design)

Essential skills

Schell lists the more than 15 skills game designers should have some experience with, from Anthropology to creative writing, mathematics to sound design and visual arts.

These skills should all look familiar to marketers: they are the broad skills required of the best marketers who operate in a complex, technology-enabled social marketplace firmly under consumer control.

But the most important skill according to Schell is listening: to clients, to oneself, but most importantly to the gamers themselves.  Focus groups, panel discussions and proxy surveys all hold value to marketers. But listening to customers, in all their variety, through direct channels like social media, customer service and sales is another skill the best marketers among us possess.

Essential questions

Other connections in the book that might just as easily address brands as games include the importance of iteration and testing, the interface, measuring interest, clients and users. But of all the lenses, there is none so relevant to marketers as the first: The lens of essential experience.

Brand designers--like game designers--do well when they remember that the brand is not the experience: it is a means to an experience. A very personal experience that resides in the mind of the customer.

Which brings us to the essential questions (not to be confused with these Three Questions Marketers Should Ask Themselves!) brand experience designers can take away from the Art of Game Design:

• What experience do you want the customer to have?
• What is essential to that experience?
• How can your brand capture that essence?

By constantly assessing the experience you want to create against the one you have created, brand designers stand a chance at being in the game. Confusing or unhelpful product support, interruptive or annoying attempts at building loyalty, inconsistent and insensitive pricing or quality...are all essential brand experiences that no marketer would intentionally design.

Foreseeable experiences, however, are not unintentional ones. By focussing on the essential experiences that can be foreseen, brand designers can ensure that customers find their game worth playing.

For a loosely related musical interlude on the games people play:

The Future of Marketing: Three Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Themselves

The condition of learning is most fully engaged when we undervalue that which we think we know and overvalue that which we think don't.
-Anonymous

Ken Fisher manages investments...a lot of them. As son and heir to one of the post- 1930's investment legends, he's had a first hand look at nearly a century's worth of market cycles, successes, and failures. You'd think someone like that could teach investors a thing or two...or three.

But marketers?

I think so. Fisher has written an entire book on the subject of three questions every investor should ask. I've seen the questions. They are not small. They don't ask you to consider whether Ben Bernanke is a hero or villian...nor do they ask you to contemplate the future social influence of generations of teens, tweens, X's and Yer's with vampire and zombie obsessions.

In spite of that, I think theses questions can do more than guide investors. They are useful inquiries for the larger lives we all lead, beyond investing...big picture life questions worthy of....marketing!

And so...The 3Q's

1. What do you believe that is actually false?
2. What can you fathom that others find unfathomable?
3. What the heck is my brain doing to blindside me now?

So what?

The obvious element of all three questions is that they ask one to self-reflect. And that's their power.

In a time where social media seems on the surface to be so chock full of ourselves as to provide all the insight into all of us that any of us might need, one senses there is often a very blurry line between indulgent navel gazing and meaningful self study.

These questions, on the other hand, ask us to challenge what we know, personally, and to know ourselves better in the process.

More than a handful of bloggers have asked what the future will hold for marketing, marketers, and the brands we serve. Many thousands have offered their answers with variations on wishful thinking themes or dramatic doomsaying.

But while facts certainly are not personal, truths often are. The personal truths about marketing's future will exist as thousands of variations in individual marketer's minds...some will be satisfied to co-opt the truths of others.

For the leaders, though, these three questions can help us discover our own truth about marketing...usually in the form of new questions. For example:

• If I believe that online display advertising is useful for branding, what if that is false?
• If I can fathom a world in which privacy is routinely exchanged for added service, what opportunity does that present my brands...and my customers?
• If I'm focussed on using social media for my PR, what larger societal trends might I be missing in my planning?

For marketers--just like investors, politicians, parents and every human ever born--the first step to understanding the truth in others often comes in the form of a question...of ourselves. Ken Fisher's three are a great start.

For a mysterious question mark with an answer of 96 tears, check it:

The customer satisfaction prison: When one becomes a five

I am not a number: I am a free man!
-The Prisoner

Back in the late 60's, British Television aired a series called The Prisoner. In it, a British Intelligence officer abruptly resigns, and finds himself kidnapped and held prisoner in an isolated, seaside location where he is known only as...Number 6.

He finds himself amongst hundreds of other nameless but numbered individuals living tranquilly in a surreal Orwellian resort village. The perpetually sunny space is outfitted with the dark shadows of surveillance, hypnosis, and mind control schemes, administered by a series of nameless Number 2's who want to know, on behalf of an unseen Number 1, but one thing: Why did he resign?

I bring this up as a loose link to a new number 1 in the quest to quantify customer satisfaction: Number 5.

Number 5 being the number expected when asked to rate our satisfaction with whatever customer experience we've had. It goes something generically like this:

'Hi, On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being completely satisfied, how would you rate the service you just received?'

The Likert-ization of customers serves a valuable data capture and analysis purpose. I've worked with clients using five-point thinking to:

• identify directional trends in collective pools of product feature and attribute feedback; 
• gather a point of objective reference in a world of subjective customer service nuance; 
• and occasionally, to provide actionable insight on pricing, promotion or positioning.

But, like the seemingly tranquil village in The Prisoner, a look below the surface of 5-point customer satisfaction surveys sometimes reveals a dark undercurrent: when the Number 5 becomes an end unto itself, we risk transforming people into numbers.

Turning constructive feedback into an unsatisfying feedback experience

Here's a story. I recently had my car serviced. I was handed a two-page survey to complete when I left. I set it aside...in the recycling pile.

Five days later the phone rang and, soon regretting my decision to answer the Toll Free number, I spent 5 minutes answering ten questions from a polite corporate representative about my local dealer service experience.

In the course of asking me 10 questions, I rated one area a 4, rather than a 5. I also mentioned that my service rep was helpful and professional. End of story. I had provided honest feedback on my mostly excellent experience. Or so I thought.

A day later, I got a call from my local dealer service rep. He seemed a bit nervous. My 'not 5' rating on 1 of the 10 questions the day before had already made it back to him. He implied that he needed 5's, even though the 4 I provided was in an area beyond his direct responsibility (scheduling).

It was very personal to him: Because, as I found out, his job performance was evaluated based on whether his customers all give all 5's.

He mentioned that the same corporate entity that called me, would be sending me a more detailed survey via the email address on file and hoped that if there was anything he could do to get all 5's he sure hoped I would tell him.

I spent 5 minutes on the phone telling him what I told the corporate surveyor. When I got the email survey it said it would take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Right.

So what?

The story I relay above is meant to illustrate, in real terms, how good intentions in seeking completely satisfied customers sometimes go awry. To borrow a phrase, let me be clear: I believe in research and I believe in customer survey data. The modern world is built, afterall, on that which can be quantified. But it's also built by that which, perhaps, ought not be quantified quite so easily.

Quantifying one's perceptions, for instance, doesn't magically make them anyone else's.

As marketers, we understand that a good customer experience can be undone pretty easily and a bad one can be hard to overcome. So why let the otherwise useful act of satisfaction surveys be a risk to the very satisfaction they survey?

Four principles for putting quality in the quantity

Here are four general principles--derived from being both purveyors and party to hundreds of customer survey initiatives--that I believe will help create a good feedback experience:

1. Align time + value: Ensure that the time requirement you ask of the customer is only a small fraction of the time invested in the actual experience being surveyed. In other words, a survey on a 2-minute transaction should probably take far less than 2 minutes. Likewise, align what you invest in measurement with the value of the customer.

2. Identify what's being evaluated: If you are asking about an overall experience, state that and mean it...and be comfortable with the limits of generalized conclusions. If you are asking about a specific aspect of the experience, then clearly state that. Knowing what you are asking requires a clear understanding of your satisfaction survey objectives. In other words, why ask? Broad based questions seldom result in specific feedback. Using general responses to draw specific conclusions is risky. Likewise, using specific feedback to draw generalizable satisfaction conclusions can easily eliminate any relationship between effect and cause.

3. Use data first to learn, then to confirm: Learning often comes from failure. If the point of a customer satisfaction survey is to confirm what you already believe or hope is true, save everyone their time and let it be true because the organization believes it is. If the point is to learn, then something that is not a '5' should be embraced as an opportunity to do good.

4. Keep it personal: Behind the numbers are real people...customers and associates...who defy descriptions in 5 shades of gray. Incorporating some facility for open-ended response helps keep people present in the analysis.  

Customer satisfaction surveys need not create a prison of numbers. Applying a few reasonable considerations helps ensure that people are Number 1 in the customer satisfaction show.

Wagging the dog: Using collaboration to shorten time-to-traction

One of our partners at the world's largest management consultancy used to channel William Gibson to remind us that 'The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed'.

Now, Bill Buxton, a researcher at Microsoft, describes The Long Nose of Innovation as the path that the real world of innovation takes in its journey out into the world. The path is largely through an interative process of idea refinement over time...usually much more time than we might think. Here's the chart he uses:

What's obvious, even if the words 'Long Nose' hadn't been used, is that it's the mirror image of Chris Anderson's popularization of statistical power laws, the Long Tail :

And while it might be tempting to relate these graphs as handing off to one another (ideas that enter through the nose exit through the, um, other graph), I believe it would be erroneous to do so.

Why? Because while Buxton's Nose describes an idea's 'time to traction', Anderson's Tail describes a distribution of the markets for an idea...and many ideas will stand tall only under a very short ceiling: Tongue piercing for example.

So what: Letting the tail wag the dog

The two views can be joined in the context of collaboration.

In the Long Nose, the time that an idea spends in the refinement and augmentation phase can determine market potential. For those companies whose business strategy is built on large-scale adoption of innovative products or services, shortening the time to traction would seem to present an opportunity for competitive advantage.

And what better way for product developers, researchers and marketers to move quickly through the iterative refinement and augmentation phase of complex products and services than by engaging the long-tail interests of collaborators?

How?

Something happening and something being made to happen are two different things. Aside from reading this rambling post (which might generously be characterized as part of the refinement and augmentation phase of Buxton's Long Nose idea!), marketers and their bosses can make reducing time-to-traction a planned process using cost-effective, long tail approaches to collaboration.

A post on creating  The Collaboratory back in May contains some details and further examples, but the gist is this:

1. Engage lead users first
These are the user scientists who have a need for something other than a homogenous service/product offering. They are recognizable because they already have adopted or modified a product/service to fit their needs. Most importantly, they have a bias for collaboration, experimentation and persistence...and they are already your customers.

2. Structure the participatory process:
Participatory design requires structure...how much or how little will depend on the expectations of the output and the size of the community. But in general the structure should focus on four stages...

• Identifying issues/opportunitities (in other words, the questions to explore)
• Prioritizing the issues/opportunities against criteria (what comes first--or last--based on what success criteria might look like. The hypotheses if you like)
• Ideation/Solution building (the actual design/create activities)
• Test-Modify-Retest (validating innovation against the outcome criteria)

3. Reward participation:
The reward can be monetary--or it can be the emotional notion of ownership and contribution to community. The expectations should be honest, transparent and upfront...which is to say, you'll have to work with a lawyer on issues of ownership and licensing, but tread lightly lest you trample the trust inherent in effective collaboration.

Personally, I find occasional comfort in the cultural myth of the lone visionary locked in the garage, only to emerge holding the revolutionary, next big new thing we all need. In the very complex real world, though, I know that a better mousetrap usually comes from refining the diverse collective experiences with the current mousetrap: the domicile in which it will be used, the disposal practices of the local environment, cultural beliefs about the sanctity of mouse life... 

Collaborating with niche groups of people who are highly engaged around the many contexts within which every product or service is used is one way to accelerate the learning required for real innovation to take hold ...and begin to embed itself in the collective imagination.

What's in your inbox? 10 questions on the difference between email + efail marketing

I checked one of my email accounts on New Year's day...late in the morning. In the account I set up for all manner of automatic notifications, I noticed five retail email offers, sent in the wee hours of the morning of January 1. And these weren't mainstream spam promising enhanced verility, hot dates, or internet riches.

 image source

No, these were offers for clothes, household goods, electronics and books from name-brand retailers: The same ones who'd been 'engaging' my inbox every other day for the 10 months leading up to--and flying through--Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every other special day in between.

I've worked with some great people on email and direct marketing campaigns...the best solutions were, of course, always about asking the right questions first. So, in that spirit, I have a few questions:

1. Was I seriously considered a prospect to purchase a sweater...or a kitchen appliance...on New Year's day?

2. Did the daily deployers figure that 60% of the email offers that are clicked are clicked in the first 24 hours and that failure to click meant I needed more frequency?

source

3. Was I really a target or was this mass media mail in disguise? I hadn't bought anything from two of the five retailers in more than 2 years; my total lifetime value at one of the five was less than $100. What made them think I would purchase a $1500 TV?

4. How did the 5th get my email? Do they know they got the one designed to collect trash?

5. If retail emailers see 'everyday' increasingly as the most popular day to send retail email, when will they ask me what day is the most popular day for me to actually receive it?

6.  If the going rate for spam distribution is $0.08 per thousand  [here], why do these retailers also spend on direct mail, newspapers and other vehicles to reach me when the cost is orders of magnitude more in CPM terms?

7. Does a consumer survey by the Chief Marketing Officer Council that found 22% of respondents saying they had decided to stop purchasing from a company because of too many or irrelevant e-mails, and that another 41% would consider doing the same, speak to a hidden cost of email marketing? 


8. Does the fact that "...only six percent of consumers feel that the promotions received through loyalty club communications are based on preferences or past purchasing behavior [here]"  say anything about the current state of integrating marketing, data, and customer loyalty communications for a majority of consumers?


9. Does the fact that the typical email user receives 12 promotional emails a day mean that email marketing  risks a run down a rabbit hole to irrelevance or, worse, to relevance only as spam?


10. Can retailers do better with analytics to know what works, and what doesn't, for which customers and prospects? Do they want to? 


I'd like to believe that the answer to this last question is 'Yes'.  Sometimes failure is an option, though.

Celebrating celebrity endorsements: whose personality is it?

Pop celeb marketing quiz (answers at bottom):

1. What was the make and model of the car Tiger Woods was driving when his wife-at-the-time smashed the back windows to 'save him'?
2. What soda pop does aging soccer star David Beckam drink?
3. What underwear brand does alleged domestic abuser Charlie Sheen wear?
4. What brand does punk-pop icon Iggy Pop use to insure his, um, car?

What's your brand's TMZ personality?

Where's the logic in employing celebrity endorsers? If you're Accenture or Gillette commenting on the unfortunate implications of your paid relationship with Tiger Woods, you've stated something like 'the original intent was to align with a person who embodied the personality attributes associated with our brand.' And like Nike, who made a cultural meme out of 'Be like Mike', it all made sense...until it didn't. And it usually doesn't at the point when the celebrity is aligned with all manner of human behaviors the brand would rather not embody.

Juiceman

What does LeBron James know about lawn tractors?

I've participated in a number of brand personality exercises. They always start with good intentions...and a list of synonyms and adjectives. Inevitably, though, the question gets put to the group by the moderator: so, if you had to pick some famous fictional character that embodies these attributes, who would it be?



Inevitably, the client says Chuck Norris or some other kick a$$ persona. The account executive, who sees the brand as nuturing, picks, well, Martha Stewart. And then the creative director says Steve Jobs. I'm joking, of course. The creative director knows that Steve Jobs isn't a fictional character. She actually picks Larry the Cable Guy, because her team already has a hilarious NASCAR-related theme in mind for the campaign.

The point is that, often, the 'celebrity persona' reflects more of what the marketing team aspires to than what a customer would ever realistically believe...market research 'affinity' scores notwithstanding.

Does a celebrity endorser ever make sense?

I'm no expert (no wait, this is the Internet. We're all experts!). But from my admittedly narrow point of view, here's three prerequisites for celebrity endorser sense:

1. The brand is aligned with what the endorser is known for: If you make soccer balls, get a soccer player. If you make razor blades, find a common man or woman...or find niche endorsers for those niche shaving fetishists audiences. 
2. The brand can tolerate 'sin' risk: if you're Las Vegas, vice in an endorser might be a virtue. If you have a brand (or customer base or corporate culture) that is utterly paralyzed by the moral failings of people, then a potentially flawed human may be more risk than reward. Pick an animal instead.
3. If you can't find a suitable celebrity, make one. The World's Most Interesting Man does exactly what Dos Equis wants him to...and only that.

But wait, there's more?

I actually think most celebrity endorsers are funny...in a good way. Peyton Manning makes me laugh. But entrusting a brand's equity, in part, to a celebrity endorser won't overcome a crappy customer experience. And celebrity endorsers can't magically create customers out of fictional customer segments.

An endorser  may buy a brand awareness or even an initial, fragile perception. Usually, the campaign ends up making the celebrity seem more human. For marketers who choose the celebrity route, the decision certainly needs to be aligned with a reasonable--and measurable--expectations and objectives. It probably also makes sense to have a crisis communication plan in place.

Is another definition of celebrity required?

The Real Celebrity Endorsers of Orange County, the ones worth entrusting a brand to, might just be the real people who have the attention and respect of much smaller audiences...primarily their families and friends.

These endorsers are the one's whose loyalty and passion--or disdain--for a brand are born out of the peer-to-peer relationship of buyer and seller in a free market. Engaging these microcelebrities as brand endorsers has always been part of the marketing mix...it's never been as easy as it is now using media in the networked, social way it enables.

Andy Warhol figured we each got 10 minutes...problem was, he figured our 600 seconds of celebrity required a mass audience. With an audience of a couple hundred Facebook friends, each of us has a lifetime of celebrity to celebrate.

For a look back at 10 historical oddities in celebrity endorsement, see here

Have examples of great celebrity endorsements? Feel free to share them in the comments...

Answers to pop quiz:

1. What was the make and model of the car Tiger Woods was driving when his wife-at-the-time smashed the back windows to 'save him'? [Cadillac Escalade...not Buick...or Nike!]
2. What soda pop does aging soccer star David Beckam drink? [I don't know. He endorsed Pepsi, but given his physique, I suspect he doesn't drink alot of soda.]
3. What underwear brand does alleged domestic abuser Charlie Sheen wear? [I don't know, but he endorses Hanes...or is he endorsing Michael Jordan as endorser of Hanes?]
4. What brand does punk-pop icon Iggy Pop use to insure his automobiles? [Swiftcover...hmm...weird]
   
   

2010: It was a new day yesterday

Now that 2010 is here, and everyone has their 2010 predictions out of the way, here's another 10 cents' worth of road ahead. Unlike predictions, which derive from gambler's instincts, forecasts are supposed to be based on probabilities. Probabilities are more formal versions of 'probably's', which in turn are closely related to the gambler's instinct.

Generally in scenario development, I try to assess the impacts of the probably's in four very human dimensions: technology, society, culture and government. And while big time, ongoing trends like privacy, dumb networks, cheap processors, and the singularity are covered ad nauseum elsewhere, here's a list of a few practical probablys from these dimensions.

Listed in no particular order then, with no particular certainty, I present a few of the probably's that, finally or surprisingly, will impact marketers for the next 359 sunrises...all in the form of questions I hope you will feel free to answer for yourself.

For a look at 2009 themes (and an assessment of their come-to-passedness), see here.

Location, location, location!
It still matters in real estate. Will it matter even more to marketers precisely because it matters less to customers and prospects, though? With the explosion in smart phone deployments, GPS-enabled and everything, people will expect--and have access to--rich information on product, pricing, promotion, and customer experiences wherever they are...including right there...in your store. Combined with realtime search, that low price guarantee may mean competitors can outbid you one customer at a time. Customer service and sales staff will need to be empowered as many customers may know more about what's right or wrong with a product right now than the company does.

Have you or have you not?
And what is it that you have, exactly? Two decades of conspicuous consumption are ingrained in many levels of US society. In 2010, will debt destruction, unemployment and a general trend to be more austere impact the perception of brands that appeal to 'staying ahead of the joneses'...especially if the joneses are recipients of taxpayer money? Will anyone have sympathy for the homeless housewives of Orange County? How closely will marketers tie their brand's personality to flawed (but wealthy!) celebs in the hope consumers will want to 'be like Mike...or Tiger...or Charlie...or Khloe Kardashian?'

Social media as plumbing?
Will the features + functions that tools like The Twitter and The YouTubes enable disappear into the background as utilities? Will feeds + streams continue to migrate behind the scenes of aggregator interfaces like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn? "Follow us on Twitter' might be replaced with facebook.com/OurCompany...which will end up in a Google search right below a customer discussion of your company. The plethora of icons attached to every item of content to digg this or favorite that will be flushed out...or built in. Plumbing isn't sexy...unless you are a plumber.

Timeliness is next to godliness
As Google (and Bing) incorporate realtime data into search results (and give added prominence to timely content), will SEO consultants and corporate communications departments be forced to engage the feed? Whither goes the investment in the staid, static corporate brochure website? Does analysis of the news have more value than timely delivery of headlines? And if it does, is it news? And if it doesn't will anyone pay to wait for it?

Deep diving in a sea of ambient intimacy
With nearly 17 million people not working in the US, there is a lot of time on alot of people's hands. For many, this time will present an opportunity to play Mafia Wars or Farmville. For others, it may present an opportunity to redefine the meaning of what constitutes a relationship. Marketers and PR professionals may need to define influence in more nuanced ways. How meaningful and influential is a relationship with 20,000 people you've never met? How much revenue potential is there in a single person without an income that exceeds their debt?

Mac vs. PC
Who cares? We're all Googlers now. This year, it's Google versus everyone...Apple, Microsoft, AT+T, NewsCorp, the FTC. Curiously, it's also Google with everyone...especially the user base.

Making an impression
Will impression-based marketing continue its deflationary spiral? Experiments in paywalls and increased licensing fees will continue to demonstrate that the value of an action is worth more than the promise of one. Marketers may decide once and for all that the pricing of a CPM is commensurate only with the value of awareness. Content providers may find that their content is a priceless commodity...with revenues to match.

Welcome to the Jungle

Will tribalism continue its rise? We all certainly belong to multiple tribes that defy simplistic black and white, red-blue comparisons. "If you aren't with me, you're against me" might be replaced by "hey, I know you" as a basis for trust.  Long tails aren't just for animal interests. In 2010, they may become THE market segments of first resort.

FAB: What's in it for me?
In a noisy sea of brand sameness surrounding green, smart, innovative, inspired, aspirational notions of consumption, will real features and benefits become the only differentiators anyone pays attention to?

What do you think?
Will "what do you think?" replace "Let me tell you something". Can an entire industry of communications, advertising, marketing and PR professionals built around telling evolve to a viable business built on listening in 2010? Should it?

Grading 2009 Marketing Forecasts

It's that time of the year...when the wonders of the world wide web and its infinite storage give us the chance to review what we said...as it was typed. Mostly for fun.


Back in January, I posted themes for marketing in 2009 [here]. Let's take a quick look, shall we?  Grading is, well, subjective. Your scores and comments--using whatever rubric you prefer--are welcome.

Theme 1: Wearing other people's shoes

The era of the simulacra in marketing--whereby we substitute a representation of what is real for what is real--will further resolve itself in 2009. Defining a customer's values by using a marketer's representation of those values will be discredited by...the customer. Unauthentic marketer monologues that rely on self-referencing notions or that characterize people as collectivist definitions based on gender, race, age, income, or as...consumers...will be cast aside. In their place, favor will rest with real conversations among real people that enable the real people in marketing to catch a glimpse of the real world as it exists where someone else stands.


Grade: B+
Certainly all manner of social media has enabled people to talk with or at one another. I'm not sure if Coke Zero's conversation with 2000 followers on Twitter [here] is a good example of authentic dialogue, but many marketers now seem to be seeking the real thing on social sites like Twitter + Facebook and on open forums like blogs. Even conservative industries like agriculture are taking the plunge to actually, you know, engage customers, critics and competitors...see Monsanto here and here. The conversation isn't always pretty. Unfortunately for some industries (notably ad and news), the point of recognition seems to have not yet arrived en masse.

Theme 2: Increasing the discomfort index

The tools and techniques that have gotten marketers where they are will be unable to sustain them going forward. In a year when many long held beliefs--from capitalism to consumption--are being questioned, people in marketing will need to question whatever makes them feel comfortable. If it's easy, if it's table stakes, it probably needs to be questioned.


Grade: B
With continued weakness in advertising spending, online even feeling the pinch, discomfort is high. In addition, the challenging economics of The Great Recession make Price and Promotion the predominant P's for many marketer's [here]. Clients are asking for more causation in marketing ROI discussions and this continues to challenge investment in the tools that are broad based and hard to measure in realtime. Volume and value in advertising would seem to have a new inverse relationship [here].


Theme 3: Testing the real world

Along the lines of themes 1 and 2, the idea of market-testing ideas will continue to evolve toward a ready, fire, reload approach. With one-size-fits-all focus group and field studies too slow, too expensive and too generalized, creative and product testing will take place in realtime using clickstream data to inform evolution and variation in low cost, perpetual prototypes...much as direct mailers have practiced in paper space for some time.

Grade: C

Examples of crowdsourcing like Netflix' prize demonstrate the concept of the collaboratory in high profile. But on a more granular level, the deployment rates of social media is a broader indication that marketers are testing their ideas in the real world [here] [here]. Whether they are finding that their ideas reasonate is a different question, but the trend would seem clear: everyone continues to know that they must pursue innovative ways of competing against ignorance, apathy and genuinely good competitors. Unfortunately, too many marketers still rely on the 'please let us know what you think by taking our survey' solicitation on receipts, web pages or followup phone calls.

Theme 4: Detailed online impressions

After years of ignoring the online space, many people in marketing have rushed in to fully embrace it...using the traditional models of impressions-based media, intrusion, and branding that they comfortably carried with them from meatspace. In 2009, impressions-based pricing online will continue its deflationary trend and be replaced by pricing models that pay only for performance. Intrusion-based ad units such as rich media and popovers will be ignored routinely. People in marketing roles will focus on the nuances of online brand experiences as defined by a long-tailed view of customer preferences and interactions with a brand. Usable, useful, and desirable will be the criteria against which meaningful brand experiences will be designed and delivered online--and off.

Grade: A

Annoyance with intrusive ad units online remains high. And though some predict huge gains in new video-based advertising online, the only continuous uptrend in online spending even during down times, is with search [here]. Performance measurement is still a way off for traditional TV models, but even Google is getting into the game using DVR data [here]. Customers are in control and if there isn't a clear reason to engage, people won't...no matter how intrusive you try to be. If impressions are paid for without follow through to engagement, then the price can only continue to deflate as value continues to align with what is directly measurable.


Theme 5: Time as a risk to manage

Time is the one commodity everyone has in equal portions each day. People in marketing will increasingly confront the reality that wasting a customer's time is a brand risk that must be actively managed. Engagement will be defined more precisely in terms of positive and negative engagements where efficient use of and respect for a person's time becomes the expectation. Whether it's call center catacombs, unusable information, spam like solicitations, or irrelevant pitches, marketers will find that a risk premium comes standard with every touchpoint.

Grade: A-

While time is a risk to manage for marketers, it would seem they are losing the battle in capturing it. With Facebook now occupying more time than any other online activity, and games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Sorority Life becoming major time sinks online, one wonders where marketers will find room to compete. That's why salaries are earned I guess. 


Regardless, marketers are confronted with the idea that even their products are, in fact, services [here]. And where there is service, there is a time risk to manage. The good news is that customer service options are now being deployed in online, call center, and in person channels that are more integrated and efficient for all involved. Usability and human factors are more broadly recognized as critical components of service design.


The bad news is that many marketers still seem to think that their customer's time isn't their concern. Whether it's once a day email promotions blasted to thousands of inboxes or 12-step phone menus just to talk to someone, their remains a great deal of customer time to stop wasting.

Volume vs. Value: The zettabyte generation

Say, 'Zettabyte'. Let it sink in for a second, then say it again. 'Zetta-byte'.

Like 'one trillion dollars', a zettabyte is  a really big number...and yet, it is the amount of data each of us average Americans consumes annually...3x!

Using the faded power of worn out analogies, if a zettabyte were printed on paper, it would bury the continental US AND Alaska in a layer of paper 7 feet deep...a number 9 zeroes more, even, than all the dollars in the national debt!

National debt: $7,938,000,000,000
One Zettabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

At least, that's the total information consumed according to three researchers at UC San Diego in their report 'How Much Information: 2009 Report on Consumers'

The report's headlines include a deluge of data on media consumption, broken out by bytes, hours, and format.

TV, for instance, occupies 41% of our daily hours, 44% of the daily words we encounter, but only 34% of the bytes we, um, consume. Perhaps hot selling HD video screens will boost our appetite for bytes?

Here's a just a bit (or rather 450,000 bytes) of some fun numbers from the report (click to enlarge):

But beyond the numbers showing:

• a +5% annual growth rate in the amount of data we consume, 
• the decades-long relative increase in the amount of reading by Americans (albeit not using the ungreen paper format,) and 
• the huge amount of data consumed playing video games vs. radio, phone, and print media, 

the report provides an important, mostly obvious, caveat: measures of quantity, whether in hours or bytes, are not measures of value.

Overfed and underread?

The report uses the example of Lincoln's Gettysburg address to show that volume (as in exposures, bytes or costs) does not equate to impact in the general human sense of more-is-more.

For instance, Lincoln's 2.5 minute speech, scrawled on paper, heard by few, but repeated repeatedly to schoolchildren throughout the years, turns out to have more impact--both quantitatively and subjectively--than the much more expensive, high-volume, TV series, 'Heroes'. And yet, looking at Heroes through the lenses of hours of content and bandwidth, one might (mistakenly) conclude the opposite.

Which brings us to a point in all this data masquerading as information...

So what?

For marketers, the message supported by the report would seem clear: as the volume of data consumed by modern Americans--measured by time, volume or format--continues to measurably increase, there is one clear means of breaking through the data noise in a way that leads to measurable informational value: interaction.

And while the move from passive to active engagement in marketing has been underway--at least rhetorically--for some time, it is surprising that so much of our media consumption is paid for based on volume-based models rather than action.

Increasingly, spending on pay-per-action models that support the business and marketing objectives would seem to be the demand of engagement marketers. Engaging one's attention in what marketers have to say comes with the demand that there be value to you. That's hard when you don't know someone by more than their zip code, demographic or gender.

The value of engagement is something that's been evident since before anyone knew what a kilobyte was. Somewhere along the way, we've started to re-discover that our tools alone are poor measures of the ends to which we apply them.

YouTube video showing one type of engagement with our tools (ads included)...for better or worse: