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.
2010年2月26日 星期五
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!
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