I would like to discuss Wal-Mart’s social media strategy (on blogs and facebook), the flaws of it and how do best practice companies do.
Stay objective
Facing the ever-demanding customers, Wal-Mart understands that it cannot only build its relationship passively with customers by simply offering the lowest prices. Instead, it should proactively reach out to customers, hear their voices, and actively build more emotional bonds with them by offering them additional values. Wal-Mart started to frame its social media strategy a few years ago and Elevenmoms Program is its first attempt.
Elevenmoms is a program which Wal-Mart actively reached out to famous mom bloggers through social media sites and invited them to share their tips for “Save Money, Live Better”. Through this program, Wal-Mart was trying to offer its customers more values through money-saving tips and to build a community with common interest. The community would enable Wal-Mart to identify its target customers (generally moms and that’s why it intentionally invited “mom” bloggers) quickly on social media sites and to participate in the conversations with them to eventually gain insights from them.
Even though the program successfully helped many customers improve their experiences, it had a major flaw. Some customers on the social media sites did not believe what those mom bloggers said and therefore were reluctant to browse the elevenmoms blogs. Those customers thought Wal-Mart offered those mom bloggers some monetary interests for writing those tips and therefore, the content of the blogs lost its objectivity. This indicates an important point mentioned in the article- one of the problems about blogs is that they are not regulated. For those bloggers who fail to disclose interests of conflict, they may not be considered trustworthy by the audience and therefore the content they generate is put in doubt.
It is therefore crucial for a company to maintain a good balance between actively engaging in the conversation with customers through social media and being objective in order to succeed in their social media strategy.
Close monitoring and quick reaction
Wal-Mart’s second attempt on social media is the revamp of its facebook fan page. Wal-Mart has set up its fan page for a while but it was not until the start of this year did it come up with a solid facebook strategy.
Before then, Wal-Mart’s facebook page was a mess. Wal-Mart did not even pay any attention to it and negative comments were everywhere on its wall. I remembered there’s only one post on the wall by Wal-Mart: “Wal-Mart, the best company in the world” and there were thousands of negative comments towards that posts and no one from Wal-Mart really came out to manage them. It was definitely a bad demonstration and failure on social media strategy. Wal-Mart’s image was not improved by the setup of its fan page but seriously deteriorated.
However, last year they did start to fix the problem by revamping its social media sites. I was honored to engage in the process. We have done much research on the best social media practice for Wal-Mart. For example, quick reaction to any customers’ inquiry could make tremendous impacts on a brand/company image and could also make customers become ambassadors for the company through word of mouth. For example, we found there was one customer posted an inquiry on jetblue’s fan page saying that “Jetblue, I need a wheelchair!” and this person was contacted by jetblue in 15 minutes after the post for the solution to his problem. The quick and professional reaction disseminated quickly and significantly reinforced the brand image.
Let customer know you hear their voices
Because one of the key objectives for Wal-Mart’s social media strategy is to gain more insights from customers, it is important that it hears customers’ voices, efficiently prioritizes them, and most importantly, lets customers know their feedbacks are put into consideration/execution so that they are more willing to share their ideas.
One of the best examples for hearing customers’ voices is Dell. Dell has launched a site that allows customers to leave their feedbacks. Dell then asked all customers to rate/vote for thousands of feedbacks and those highly rated feedbacks would be put into execution. The whole process does not only gain insights from the customers but also deeply engage them with the company.
Another example is Kate Spade. Kate Spade actively solicits new ideas from customers through its fan page and incorporates those insights into the new design. This not only helps its design more fit in customers’ needs but also successfully create a conversation with customers and make them feel to be part of the brand. The strategy skyrockets the sales of Kate Spade.
In sum, social media is a relatively inexpensive yet effective way to do marketing. To be successful, however, requires a solid and well-executed strategy. A poor-designed or badly-executed strategy could not only get a company nowhere but could possibly put the entire brand image at risk.
2010年4月17日 星期六
2010年4月11日 星期日
The Power of Data
After reading the article, I am truly amazed by the powerfulness of information. I think those data would definitely serve as a great competitive advantage to Walmart. None of any other retailers in the world is able to access to such big amount of customer base and large customer base means huge sample size, the most critical factor for accurate prediction/forecast.
However, it is because its database is huge, Walmart is facing a key challenge of how to make the full use of those data to its strongest advantage.
The article mentions several single strategies Walmart uses from the data. I would recommend it to combine those strategies into ONE integrated strategy. For example, while it uses data to predict what people buy in react to the upcoming hurricane and brings in the popular product mix accordingly, it can reinforce the business gain by applying another strategy mentioned at the same time: feature one specific product with the best price in the market while making profits from other items that customers would buy together. The one integrated strategy would allow it to further improve the overall profitability than if it focuses on any single strategy once a time.
In terms of privacy issues, I think Walmart does not do the right job since it does not make a full disclosure to its customers and make them aware of all the possible risks involved from those data application. It is certainly not enough for Walmart to just declare something about privacy protection on its website because the way it uses the data is far beyond the imagination of the customers and customers have the right to know. Someone may argue that if Walmart just uses the data to ensure sufficient stock on the shelves as it does currently, there’s no hurt to customers at all. However, there’s no abuse for now does not mean there will be no abuse forever- what if one day the profit incentives for the abuse of those information are so great that Walmart is willing to take risk on its reputation? In addition, though we have no idea about how many people have access to those data within Walmart and how Walmart regulate internally, it is a fair assumption that data leakage could be a potential risk for all the Walmart customers. With all that said, customers have the right to know what kind of information Walmart is able to access from them and for what purposes Walmart would use it for.
I personally do not trust Walmart not because that I assume it will abuse my personal data but because its failure to make all the information transparent to its customers to build sufficient foundation of trust. And such distrust will affect my willingness to shop at Walmart for sure.
Finally, I am actually worried about how this technology will hurt the suppliers of Walmart since it will definitely allow Walmart to drive them even harder and eventually reduce all suppliers’ profitability for the gain of Walmart itself. Here are my points.
First, with the data and the technology, Walmart is able to almost capture every movement on the shelves in real time or even before it happens (think about the hurricane case). Walmart therefore will exert its command power and ask suppliers to match up those movements accordingly. This may either increase the frequency of suppliers’ trucks to some stores or add extra routes to accommodate the additional requests. All these efforts, however, may not be cost-efficient from the suppliers’ stands point. For example, to accommodate a special need of a specific store, the truck may need to go replenish without having a full-truck load. Will such cost be compensated by the avoidance of the out of stock on the shelves? Maybe not, since customers could possibly try another Walmart to get the items they want if they cannot find it on the shelf in this particular store.
Second, while Walmart is able to leverage the data to know beforehand what customer may want before they even come to the stores under certain circumstances (think about the hurricane case again), is that possible that it would replenish the “hot” items more from its private labels instead of major manufacturers to make profits from the surge demands? For example, if the data tells that the oreo demand will surge by 7 times versus normal before a big snow storm, isn’t that possible that Walmart does not even inform Nabisco to replenish for the surge demand but simply stuff the shelves with the oreos from its own label since customers might not care too much on the brand under some unusual circumstances. ( ie: They don’t have too much time to visit other retailers for the Nabisco oreo before the storm comes).
In sum, I think it is a wise way to leverage the technology and huge database for business purposes and they will definitely be a competitive advantage to Walmart. However, I do think Walmart need to address more clearly on how it deals with privacy issues to maintain long-term trust from its customers. For suppliers, while they may not be able to afford the loss of not doing business with Walmart, it’s essential for them to come out with strategies on how to deal with this ever demanding retailer without undermining their profitability.
However, it is because its database is huge, Walmart is facing a key challenge of how to make the full use of those data to its strongest advantage.
The article mentions several single strategies Walmart uses from the data. I would recommend it to combine those strategies into ONE integrated strategy. For example, while it uses data to predict what people buy in react to the upcoming hurricane and brings in the popular product mix accordingly, it can reinforce the business gain by applying another strategy mentioned at the same time: feature one specific product with the best price in the market while making profits from other items that customers would buy together. The one integrated strategy would allow it to further improve the overall profitability than if it focuses on any single strategy once a time.
In terms of privacy issues, I think Walmart does not do the right job since it does not make a full disclosure to its customers and make them aware of all the possible risks involved from those data application. It is certainly not enough for Walmart to just declare something about privacy protection on its website because the way it uses the data is far beyond the imagination of the customers and customers have the right to know. Someone may argue that if Walmart just uses the data to ensure sufficient stock on the shelves as it does currently, there’s no hurt to customers at all. However, there’s no abuse for now does not mean there will be no abuse forever- what if one day the profit incentives for the abuse of those information are so great that Walmart is willing to take risk on its reputation? In addition, though we have no idea about how many people have access to those data within Walmart and how Walmart regulate internally, it is a fair assumption that data leakage could be a potential risk for all the Walmart customers. With all that said, customers have the right to know what kind of information Walmart is able to access from them and for what purposes Walmart would use it for.
I personally do not trust Walmart not because that I assume it will abuse my personal data but because its failure to make all the information transparent to its customers to build sufficient foundation of trust. And such distrust will affect my willingness to shop at Walmart for sure.
Finally, I am actually worried about how this technology will hurt the suppliers of Walmart since it will definitely allow Walmart to drive them even harder and eventually reduce all suppliers’ profitability for the gain of Walmart itself. Here are my points.
First, with the data and the technology, Walmart is able to almost capture every movement on the shelves in real time or even before it happens (think about the hurricane case). Walmart therefore will exert its command power and ask suppliers to match up those movements accordingly. This may either increase the frequency of suppliers’ trucks to some stores or add extra routes to accommodate the additional requests. All these efforts, however, may not be cost-efficient from the suppliers’ stands point. For example, to accommodate a special need of a specific store, the truck may need to go replenish without having a full-truck load. Will such cost be compensated by the avoidance of the out of stock on the shelves? Maybe not, since customers could possibly try another Walmart to get the items they want if they cannot find it on the shelf in this particular store.
Second, while Walmart is able to leverage the data to know beforehand what customer may want before they even come to the stores under certain circumstances (think about the hurricane case again), is that possible that it would replenish the “hot” items more from its private labels instead of major manufacturers to make profits from the surge demands? For example, if the data tells that the oreo demand will surge by 7 times versus normal before a big snow storm, isn’t that possible that Walmart does not even inform Nabisco to replenish for the surge demand but simply stuff the shelves with the oreos from its own label since customers might not care too much on the brand under some unusual circumstances. ( ie: They don’t have too much time to visit other retailers for the Nabisco oreo before the storm comes).
In sum, I think it is a wise way to leverage the technology and huge database for business purposes and they will definitely be a competitive advantage to Walmart. However, I do think Walmart need to address more clearly on how it deals with privacy issues to maintain long-term trust from its customers. For suppliers, while they may not be able to afford the loss of not doing business with Walmart, it’s essential for them to come out with strategies on how to deal with this ever demanding retailer without undermining their profitability.
2010年2月26日 星期五
Topics for Final Paper
My career of interest is brand marketing in industries like consumer goods (my first choice), luxury goods, or cosmetics. In my final paper, I would like to explore more about how to gain more customer insights through social media to identify possible business opportunities (either for new product development or for current product improvement) and how to create emotional bonds between the brand and the end consumers though social media to develop higher brand loyalty. Here are some thoughts about the topic in my mind.
Idea for the topic
1. The most prevailing/influential social media in the market place and their perspective characteristics (pros and cons).
2. How can we draw traffic (and maintain) to a newly-open social media sites. (for example, a new facebook fan page of our brand)
3. How do we maintain objectivity (therefore, make users feel the site is trustworthy place for them to freely express their true opinions/concerns and gain knowledge) but also deeply engaged with the users (not make them feel we just want to sell them something…etc)?
4. How do we manage negative posts well (both rational and irrational) and turn them into positive power for our brand?
5. What kind of extra resources may be needed to execute social media strategy effectively?
6. How do we leverage social media to create word-of-mouth? Who are the most influential users on social media, especially in terms of consumer goods brand?
7. How do we select among thousands of potential insights on social media and prioritize them for execution?
8. How do we build an emotional bond between a brand and end consumers through social media?
9. How do we measure our social media strategy?
Why is this topic interesting to you?
This topic is interesting to me for two reasons.
First, since social media becomes one of the main resources for people to connect and to share information, marketers cannot afford any loss by not using it. I worked for P&G Taiwan before joining McCombs in 2008. When I was there, we did not have social media strategies at all. But now, almost every brand has its fan page on facebook. Since CPG is the industry I want to work for again after my MBA, I would like to leverage the chances at school to explore more on how to develop effective social media strategy for a brand. I think CPG is definitely the industry that requires strong and intensive social media strategies since the market is so mature and highly-competitive. Consumers are overloaded by different kinds of commercials on TV which make it hard for them to filter our which information is trustworthy and which is not. Given the economic downturn, consumers cannot afford to make too many wrong choices. Therefore, word of mouth becomes one of the main resources for them to seek information for purchase decision and social media is indispensable for word of mouth.
Second, consumers become more and more demanding in the highly-competitive consumer goods market. It would be hard to keep loyal consumers by traditional offerings. So many companies are seeking out to build more emotional bond with the consumers to sustain their loyalty. One of the good examples is that Walmart is now trying every effort to build emotional bonds with its customers since it realize its relationships with customers which are built solely on low price are not sustainable. Social media is a great way to create two way communications and therefore increase the engagement of the company with consumers so that I am very interested in this tool.
What is the connection to the gathering and identification of customer insights and/or the design of valuable customer experiences?
1. From the users’ discussion/posts on social media, we may be able to identify unsatisfied needs. For example, on J. crew facebook fan page, the most frequent thing that is complained about is its unreasonably high shipping fee and high threshold for free shipping compared with its competitors (such as Banana Republic or Ann Taylor). If J. crew is able to take some actions to those complaints by offering flat rate shipping, then it may attract more customers. (or at least retain those unsatisfied customers to avoid their switch)
2. From gathering insights from social media, we marketers are able to validate if the message we are trying to convey to the customers is the same as what they capture/perceive. For example, in a website call fugal living, 49% of the people that are surveyed said they do not believe Walmart really save them money. This insight is so surprising since for a long time, Walmart has positioned itself as a budget keeper for all the US households. This insight would offer a good chance for Walmart to revisit its marketing message communication to regain trust/confidence from customers.
Cite and briefly describe at least one article that is related to your topic
eMarketer: Moms Online: more influential than ever (2009 June)
Since moms are the main purchaser of commodity and the main area of my social media research is targeting CPG firms, I think my focus will be more on moms than on the general public.
Idea for the topic
1. The most prevailing/influential social media in the market place and their perspective characteristics (pros and cons).
2. How can we draw traffic (and maintain) to a newly-open social media sites. (for example, a new facebook fan page of our brand)
3. How do we maintain objectivity (therefore, make users feel the site is trustworthy place for them to freely express their true opinions/concerns and gain knowledge) but also deeply engaged with the users (not make them feel we just want to sell them something…etc)?
4. How do we manage negative posts well (both rational and irrational) and turn them into positive power for our brand?
5. What kind of extra resources may be needed to execute social media strategy effectively?
6. How do we leverage social media to create word-of-mouth? Who are the most influential users on social media, especially in terms of consumer goods brand?
7. How do we select among thousands of potential insights on social media and prioritize them for execution?
8. How do we build an emotional bond between a brand and end consumers through social media?
9. How do we measure our social media strategy?
Why is this topic interesting to you?
This topic is interesting to me for two reasons.
First, since social media becomes one of the main resources for people to connect and to share information, marketers cannot afford any loss by not using it. I worked for P&G Taiwan before joining McCombs in 2008. When I was there, we did not have social media strategies at all. But now, almost every brand has its fan page on facebook. Since CPG is the industry I want to work for again after my MBA, I would like to leverage the chances at school to explore more on how to develop effective social media strategy for a brand. I think CPG is definitely the industry that requires strong and intensive social media strategies since the market is so mature and highly-competitive. Consumers are overloaded by different kinds of commercials on TV which make it hard for them to filter our which information is trustworthy and which is not. Given the economic downturn, consumers cannot afford to make too many wrong choices. Therefore, word of mouth becomes one of the main resources for them to seek information for purchase decision and social media is indispensable for word of mouth.
Second, consumers become more and more demanding in the highly-competitive consumer goods market. It would be hard to keep loyal consumers by traditional offerings. So many companies are seeking out to build more emotional bond with the consumers to sustain their loyalty. One of the good examples is that Walmart is now trying every effort to build emotional bonds with its customers since it realize its relationships with customers which are built solely on low price are not sustainable. Social media is a great way to create two way communications and therefore increase the engagement of the company with consumers so that I am very interested in this tool.
What is the connection to the gathering and identification of customer insights and/or the design of valuable customer experiences?
1. From the users’ discussion/posts on social media, we may be able to identify unsatisfied needs. For example, on J. crew facebook fan page, the most frequent thing that is complained about is its unreasonably high shipping fee and high threshold for free shipping compared with its competitors (such as Banana Republic or Ann Taylor). If J. crew is able to take some actions to those complaints by offering flat rate shipping, then it may attract more customers. (or at least retain those unsatisfied customers to avoid their switch)
2. From gathering insights from social media, we marketers are able to validate if the message we are trying to convey to the customers is the same as what they capture/perceive. For example, in a website call fugal living, 49% of the people that are surveyed said they do not believe Walmart really save them money. This insight is so surprising since for a long time, Walmart has positioned itself as a budget keeper for all the US households. This insight would offer a good chance for Walmart to revisit its marketing message communication to regain trust/confidence from customers.
Cite and briefly describe at least one article that is related to your topic
eMarketer: Moms Online: more influential than ever (2009 June)
Since moms are the main purchaser of commodity and the main area of my social media research is targeting CPG firms, I think my focus will be more on moms than on the general public.
2010年2月14日 星期日
Misinterpretation of Insights
After reading the three articles, I think the approaches and the questionable insights draw from the Pepsi Challenge mentioned in Kenna’s Dilemma particularly draw my attention.
I have been working for P&G as a demand forecaster for years before joining McCombs. CPG is an industry with intensive new initiative launch and rating research to judge the appeal of the ready-to-air TV commercials and focused group discussion are the two most prevailing techniques we have been using to gain customer insights. We forecasters generally put high weights on the results of these two techniques to generate the volume forecast for our initiatives given the lack of products’ historical performances to reference. Generally, the customer feedbacks and rating from the researches matches with the performances of the initiatives later on. However, they are totally far from linear related. For example, in the rating technique of judging the appeal of the new TV commercial, we asked the selected group of people to rate it and based on the results, we put the commercial’s quality under the scale of 5: Well-below-normal(WBN), Below-normal(BN), normal(N), Above normal(AN), Well-above Normal(WAN). For the category like skincare products (I was the forecaster for OLAY), we generally assumed 20% more sales from a WAN commercials than from an AN commercials. Yet, the assumption is not always true with variance sometimes as high as 10%. At that time, I thought the variances came from fewer ranking groups (two WAN commercials may have different appeals). Yet, after reading this article, I started to think that the variance could be attributed to the build-in outages of the rating techniques. For example, in the rating techniques, it seems we assumed all the participants could understand the messages that our commercials were trying to convey. Yet, we may not consider that it is possible that some of the ideas in the commercials were too new to be comprehensive or the way those ideas to be expressed were just way too innovative that were beyond the understanding of the participants if they just watched them for one time and then ranked them. In reality, consumers are able to watch them intensively in the product launching periods on TV and we failed to consider that the intensity of the commercial may increase its comprehensiveness and therefore make it better communicate with the customers.
In my opinion, all the tests, no matter how real it is, are the tests after all. It could never be exactly the same as the real market condition. Some of the purchasing decisions are totally beyond the scope that could be even be simulated in the test or gained thorough insights from the survey. We marketers really need to be careful about the limitations of those marketing research techniques and be as skeptical as possible when we make any crucial decisions based on those data.
For the second article about the ZMET techniques, I would like to share a personal example about applying this technique.
Last spring, I was working on a project about Coach and ZMET is one of the technique we applied to gather customer insights about this brand. We started by simply going out to have face to face interviews with people about their perception/association of this brand. The verbal feedbacks are generally “Classic American”, “high-end” and “middle aged white collar women”. Yet, when we used laddering approaches to dig more in details, the opinions started to diversify. Some people thought Coach is as the same level as Burberry, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel while others perceived that it fell into the same bucket as Kate Spade, Liz Claiborne, or Dooney & Bourke. We then started to use ZMET by giving interviewees (another group with similar demographics) with several magazines and asked them to match Coach with any of the images from them. The images they selected are mostly “young women from 20-30” and “colorful”. From the images they selected, we then asked them to name the competitors of Coach; it is surprising that none of them named brands like Burberry, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel.
The insights draw from the interviews pretty matches with the article that it is sometimes hard for people to use verbal forms to address their true feelings. In our case, most of the interviewers did not think Coach fell into the same rank as LV in the bottoms of their hearts. However, they did still consider Coach as “high-end”. When asked verbally, they sometimes cannot be clear about the fine lines between the different high-end brands within their hearts. Yet, while asked to select an image, they could generally pick the ones that most represented their true feelings and from there, they were more able to distinct different levels of those “high-end” brands. Also from the images they selected “young women between 20-30”, we can validate that they perceived Coach as a young brand targeting young women. Those insights are important for overall brand positioning and related marketing strategies such as pricing, merchandising…etc.
For the last article, it is mainly about that marketers should stop asking what does the customer needs. Instead, we should understand what customers want the product to do for them.
I have read a related article from my new product development class called “Finding the Right Job for Your Products” (from Study.Net). The article gives an example about the milkshake consumption. It is surprisingly to know that 40% of the milkshake is purchased in the early morning. Why? Two reasons: First, customers are about to face a long commute time to work and they want to keep extra hand busy (since the other hand is for driving). Second, they know they will be hungry before lunch even they are not hungry now. But why they pick milkshake? It is because milkshake is sticky which can make them sip slowly and therefore not finish it too quickly and because milkshake is neither like bagels that are too dry to eat alone nor like donuts which cannot carry them pass the hunger attack before lunch. Therefore, even they know milkshake is not a healthy choice, they still go for it. In other words, the reason they choose milkshake is not that they like or need it but because milkshake is the right product that can do the right job at that particular time frame. Any products that can do such work can easily become a substitute for the milkshake.
For new products, it is useless to ask for customer expectations since customer may not even be aware of what they want or how much they can expect. For example, none of the customers would expect that their cell phones’ screens could switch direction until I-phone came out. To make a new product a blockbuster, we marketers need to go beyond or even to create expectations. To do that, the first step is to stop asking what the customer needs!
I have been working for P&G as a demand forecaster for years before joining McCombs. CPG is an industry with intensive new initiative launch and rating research to judge the appeal of the ready-to-air TV commercials and focused group discussion are the two most prevailing techniques we have been using to gain customer insights. We forecasters generally put high weights on the results of these two techniques to generate the volume forecast for our initiatives given the lack of products’ historical performances to reference. Generally, the customer feedbacks and rating from the researches matches with the performances of the initiatives later on. However, they are totally far from linear related. For example, in the rating technique of judging the appeal of the new TV commercial, we asked the selected group of people to rate it and based on the results, we put the commercial’s quality under the scale of 5: Well-below-normal(WBN), Below-normal(BN), normal(N), Above normal(AN), Well-above Normal(WAN). For the category like skincare products (I was the forecaster for OLAY), we generally assumed 20% more sales from a WAN commercials than from an AN commercials. Yet, the assumption is not always true with variance sometimes as high as 10%. At that time, I thought the variances came from fewer ranking groups (two WAN commercials may have different appeals). Yet, after reading this article, I started to think that the variance could be attributed to the build-in outages of the rating techniques. For example, in the rating techniques, it seems we assumed all the participants could understand the messages that our commercials were trying to convey. Yet, we may not consider that it is possible that some of the ideas in the commercials were too new to be comprehensive or the way those ideas to be expressed were just way too innovative that were beyond the understanding of the participants if they just watched them for one time and then ranked them. In reality, consumers are able to watch them intensively in the product launching periods on TV and we failed to consider that the intensity of the commercial may increase its comprehensiveness and therefore make it better communicate with the customers.
In my opinion, all the tests, no matter how real it is, are the tests after all. It could never be exactly the same as the real market condition. Some of the purchasing decisions are totally beyond the scope that could be even be simulated in the test or gained thorough insights from the survey. We marketers really need to be careful about the limitations of those marketing research techniques and be as skeptical as possible when we make any crucial decisions based on those data.
For the second article about the ZMET techniques, I would like to share a personal example about applying this technique.
Last spring, I was working on a project about Coach and ZMET is one of the technique we applied to gather customer insights about this brand. We started by simply going out to have face to face interviews with people about their perception/association of this brand. The verbal feedbacks are generally “Classic American”, “high-end” and “middle aged white collar women”. Yet, when we used laddering approaches to dig more in details, the opinions started to diversify. Some people thought Coach is as the same level as Burberry, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel while others perceived that it fell into the same bucket as Kate Spade, Liz Claiborne, or Dooney & Bourke. We then started to use ZMET by giving interviewees (another group with similar demographics) with several magazines and asked them to match Coach with any of the images from them. The images they selected are mostly “young women from 20-30” and “colorful”. From the images they selected, we then asked them to name the competitors of Coach; it is surprising that none of them named brands like Burberry, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel.
The insights draw from the interviews pretty matches with the article that it is sometimes hard for people to use verbal forms to address their true feelings. In our case, most of the interviewers did not think Coach fell into the same rank as LV in the bottoms of their hearts. However, they did still consider Coach as “high-end”. When asked verbally, they sometimes cannot be clear about the fine lines between the different high-end brands within their hearts. Yet, while asked to select an image, they could generally pick the ones that most represented their true feelings and from there, they were more able to distinct different levels of those “high-end” brands. Also from the images they selected “young women between 20-30”, we can validate that they perceived Coach as a young brand targeting young women. Those insights are important for overall brand positioning and related marketing strategies such as pricing, merchandising…etc.
For the last article, it is mainly about that marketers should stop asking what does the customer needs. Instead, we should understand what customers want the product to do for them.
I have read a related article from my new product development class called “Finding the Right Job for Your Products” (from Study.Net). The article gives an example about the milkshake consumption. It is surprisingly to know that 40% of the milkshake is purchased in the early morning. Why? Two reasons: First, customers are about to face a long commute time to work and they want to keep extra hand busy (since the other hand is for driving). Second, they know they will be hungry before lunch even they are not hungry now. But why they pick milkshake? It is because milkshake is sticky which can make them sip slowly and therefore not finish it too quickly and because milkshake is neither like bagels that are too dry to eat alone nor like donuts which cannot carry them pass the hunger attack before lunch. Therefore, even they know milkshake is not a healthy choice, they still go for it. In other words, the reason they choose milkshake is not that they like or need it but because milkshake is the right product that can do the right job at that particular time frame. Any products that can do such work can easily become a substitute for the milkshake.
For new products, it is useless to ask for customer expectations since customer may not even be aware of what they want or how much they can expect. For example, none of the customers would expect that their cell phones’ screens could switch direction until I-phone came out. To make a new product a blockbuster, we marketers need to go beyond or even to create expectations. To do that, the first step is to stop asking what the customer needs!
2010年1月30日 星期六
My Persona
I think I am a pretty unique person so that I cannot find any type of cohorts to fit in.
Personality/Values:
Personality/Values:
- Introvert. Rather than making a lot of friends (such as meeting 3 Benjamins, 4 Marys, 5 Lauras per night), I prefer long and deep friendship. Networking is the thing I hate most as I feel I need to force a conversation every time, so I am completely not a good fit for business school.
- Family is everything for me. Even though I have staying here at Austin for 1.5 years, I still have home-sick! ( I am from Taiwan)
- Spending even 1 dollar on the thing I don’t need is a waste! I am willing to pay $100 for a T-shirt of my favorite brand because it brings me a lot of happiness and I know I will wear it a lot. However, I am unwilling to spend $5 for a jacket if I know I will never wear it.
- Neat freak. I clean my apartment three times a day (before going to school/work, going back from school/work, before going to bed).
- Disciplined. I am an extremely disciplined person. I have a journal that lists down everything about what I should do every day in an unbelievably detailed way. For example: eat pita for breakfast with 75grams of chicken breast, 3 slices of lettuce….etc. But when it comes to sweets, it is a different story.(will explain in “the thing I don’t like in the US most”)
Demographics
- Taiwanese
- Trilingual (Mandarin, Taiwanese, English)
- Single
- No pets. Never think about having a pet because again, I am a neat freak and cannot tolerate any hair being found on my curtain.
Habits/ Pastime
- Shopping, either in-store on-line. I received packages from what I shopped on line almost every day. One time I went back Taiwan for vacation and when I came back, I stopped by the leasing office to say hi, the lady told me “I know you are back, your packages told me so…”
- Musicals. I love all kinds of musicals so that NYC is my paradise.
Shopping Behavior
- Like fancy stuffs. Anything that looks fancy can easily get me, whether it is clothes, technology products or even a company. One of the true reasons I worked for P&G is because it looks “fancy” on my resume.
- Pink addict. Whenever I have a choice about the colors, I always go for pink. When I firstly came to Austin and wanted to get n bible, I chose not to pick a free one at a local church because I saw a bible with pink cover at Barnes & Noble, even though it cost me $10 dollars
The Thing I Don’t Like In the US Most
- Hard to find single-serving small size sweet for sale. I know there are many single packed sweets in HEB or other grocery stores. However, you need to buy 10 of those single packs one time. And here comes my problem, once I stock them in my apartment, I will eat them all in a very short time. So there’s really no difference between buying a large pack or 10 small packs. I am totally out of control when it comes to sweet so the best thing for me is that I can buy a single-serving small size (sometimes single serving is still too much here in the US) sweet once a time as I did in Asia.
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