Monthly Archives: July 2011

The ZMOT Continued: More from Jim Lecinski

First published July 28, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I started my conversation with Jim Lecinski, author of the new ebook from Google: “ZMOT, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth.”  Yesterday, Fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman gave us his take on ZMOT. Today, I’ll wrap up by exploring with Jim the challenge that the ZMOT presents to organizations and some of the tips for success he covers in the book.

First of all, if we’re talking about what happens between stimulus and transaction, search has to play a big part in the activities of the consumer. Lecinski agreed, but was quick to point out that the online ZMOT extends well beyond search.

Jim Lecinski: Yes, Google or a search engine is a good place to look. But sometimes it’s a video, because I want to see [something] in use…Then [there’s] your social network. I might say, “Saw an ad for Bobby Flay’s new restaurant in Las Vegas. Anybody tried it?” That’s in between seeing the stimulus, but before… making a reservation or walking in the door.

We see consumers using… a broad set of things. In fact, 10.7 sources on average are what people are using to make these decisions between stimulus and shelf.

A few columns back, I shared the pinball model of marketing, where marketers have to be aware of the multiple touchpoints a buyer can pass through, potentially heading off in a new and unexpected direction at each point. This muddies the marketing waters to a significant degree, but it really lies at the heart of the ZMOT concept:

Lecinski: It is not intended to say, “Here’s how you can take control,” but you need to know what those touch points are. We quote the great marketer Woody Allen: “‘Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.”

So if you’re in the makeup business, people are still seeing your ads in Cosmo and Modern Bride and Elle magazine, and they know where to buy your makeup. But if Makeupalley is now that place between stimulus and shelf where people are researching, learning, reading, reviewing, making decisions about your $5 makeup, you need to show up there.

Herein lies an inherent challenge for the organization looking to win the ZMOT: whose job is that? Our corporate org chart reflects marketplace realities that are at least a generation out of date. The ZMOT is virgin territory, which typically means it lies outside of one person’s job description. Even more challenging, it typically cuts across several departments.

Lecinski: We offer seven recommendations in the book, and the first one is “Who’s in charge?” If you and I were to go ask our marketer clients, “Okay, stimulus — the ad campaigns. Who’s in charge of that? Give me a name,” they could do that, right? “Here’s our VP of National Advertising.”

Shelf — if I say, “Who’s in charge of winning at the shelf?” “Oh. Well, that’s our VP of Sales” or “Shopper Marketing.” And if I say, “Product delivery,” – “well that’s our VP of Product Development” or “R&D” or whatever. So there’s someone in charge of those classic three moments. Obviously the brand manager’s job is to coordinate those. But when I say, “Who’s in charge of winning the ZMOT?” Well, usually I get blank stares back.

If you’re intent on winning the ZMOT, the first thing you have to do is make it somebody’s job. But you can’t stop there. Here are Jim’s other suggestions:

The second thing is, you need to identify what are those zero moments of truth in your category… Start to catalogue what those are and then you can start to say, “Alright. This is a place where we need to start to show up.”

The next is to ask, “Do we show up and answer the questions that people are asking?”

Then we talk about being fast and being alert, because up to now, stimulus has been characterized as an ad you control. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s a study that’s released by an interest group. Sometimes it’s a product recall that you don’t control. Sometimes it’s a competitor’s move. Sometimes it’s Colbert on his show poking a little fun at Miracle Whip from Kraft. That wasn’t in your annual plan, but now there’s a ZMOT because, guess what happens — everybody types in “Colbert Miracle Whip video.” Are you there, and what do people see? Because that’s how they’re going to start making up their mind before they get to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up their Miracle Whip.

Winning the ZMOT is not a cakewalk. But it lies at the crux of the new marketing reality. We’ve begun to incorporate the ZMOT into the analysis we do for clients. If you don’t, you’re leaving a huge gap between the stimulus and shelf — and literally anything could happen in that gap.

Marketing in the ZMOT: An Interview with Jim Lecinski

First published July 21, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A few columns back, I mentioned the new book from Google, “ZMOT, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth.” But, in true Google fashion, it isn’t really a book, at least, not in the traditional sense. It’s all digital, it’s free, and there’s even a multimedia app (a Vook) for the iPad.

Regardless of the “book” ‘s format, I recently caught up with its author, Jim Lecinski, and we had a chance to chat about the ZMOT concept. Jim started by explaining what the ZMOT is: “The traditional model of marketing is stimulus – you put out a great ad campaign to make people aware of your product, then you win the FMOT (a label coined by Procter and Gamble) — the moment of truth, the purchase point, the shelf. Then the target takes home the product and hopefully it will live up to its promises. It makes whites whiter, brights brighter, the package actually gets there by 10:30 the next morning.

What we came out with here in the book is this notion that there’s actually a fourth node in the model  of equal importance.  We gave the umbrella name to that new fourth moment that happens in between stimulus and shelf: if it’s prior to FMOT, one minus F is zero, ‘Zero Moment of Truth.'”

Google didn’t invent the ZMOT, just as Procter & Gamble didn’t invent the FMOT. These are just labels applied to consumer behaviours. But Google, and online in general, have had a profound effect on a consumer’s ability to interact in the Zero Moment of Truth.

Lecinski: “There were always elements of a zero moment of truth. It could happen via word of mouth. And in certain categories, of course  — washing machines, automotive, certain consumer electronics — the zero moment of truth was won or lost in print publications like Consumer Reports or Zagat restaurant guide or Mobil Travel Guide.

But those things had obvious limitations. One: there was friction — you had to actually get in the car and go to the library. The second is timeliness  — the last time they reviewed wash machines might have been nine months ago. And then the third is accuracy: ‘Well, the model that they reviewed nine months ago isn’t exactly the one I saw on the commercial last night that’s on sale this holiday weekend at Sears.'”

The friction, the timeliness and the simple lack of information all lead to an imbalance in the market place that was identified by economist George Akerlof in 1970 as information asymmetry. In most cases, the seller knew more about the product than the buyer. But the Web has driven out this imbalance in many product categories.

Lecinski: “The means are available to everybody to remove that sort of information asymmetry and move us into a post-Akerlof world of information symmetry. I was on the ad agency side for a long time, and we made the TV commercial assuming information asymmetry. We would say, ‘Ask your dealer to explain more about X, Y, and Z.’

Well, now that kind of a call to action in a TV commercial sounds almost silly, because you go into the dealer and there’s people with all the printouts and their smartphones and everything… So in many ways we are in a post-Akerlof world. Even his classic example of lemons for cars, well, I can be standing on the lot and pull up the CARFAX history report off my iPhone right there in the car lot.”

Lecinski also believes that our current cash flow issues drive more intense consumer research.  “Forty seven percent of U.S. households say that they cannot come up with $2,000 in a 30-day period without having to sell some possessions,” he says. “This is how paycheck to paycheck life is.”

When money is tight, we’re more careful with how we part with it. That means we spend more time in the ZMOT.

Next week, I’ll continue my conversation with Jim, touching on what the online ZMOT landscape looks like, the challenge ZMOT presents marketers and the seven suggestions Jim offers about how to win the Zero Moment of Truth.

The “Mikey” Mobile Adoption Test

First published July 14, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The time to get serious about mobile is here. I say that not based on any analyst’s report, industry intelligence or pronouncement from any of the companies who have billions riding on it, but rather due to the “Mikey” test.

What, you ask, is the “Mikey” test? I thought you’d never ask.

My friend Mikey (and, yes, he lets me call him that and yet we’re still friends) is a building contractor. Recently, he oversaw the renovations on our home. We were a little concerned by the fact that in the middle of renovations, during a critical period when kitchen cabinets would be installed, old walls would be ripped down, new ones put up and our bathroom floor would be retiled, we would be 3,000 miles away on the most remote land mass in the world, Hawaii.

“It’s all good!” said Mikey (he says that a lot, which is another reason why we’re friends), “I’ll keep you up to date with this!” From his pocket, Mikey pulled out a brand-new iPhone. “I’ll just take pictures and send them to you!”

I was shocked. Mikey and I have a lot of things in common: love of family, appreciation for a good hand-crafted beer, dedication to a job well done, becoming reluctantly middle-aged — but technology is not on the list. His wife, Rosie, does his emailing for him. He was the last guy I expected to get an iPhone, let alone use it to send pictures via email. But sure enough, each day we’d get an update from Mikey, complete with fresh pictures of the progress.

But my biggest shock was still to come. When we returned, Mikey asked us to go to the Lennox website and print off the installation instructions for our gas fireplace insert. As I dropped by after work to drop off the print-outs, Mikey cornered me and said, “Tell me, if I had an iPad, could I look up this type of stuff online?” I would have been less surprised if the neighbor’s cat made me a martini. Mikey is a smart guy, but an early tech adopter he’s not.

For those of us in the biz, the benefits of mobile are obvious. We’ve been crowing about mobile being a game-changer for almost a decade now, but those messages never seemed to move beyond our little circle. But some time in the last year, something fundamental switched. During that time, the Mikeys of the world have suddenly become aware of how mobile might be applicable to them.

Just this past week I did a workshop for a company that makes sandpaper. Mikey is a customer of theirs. Keeping in mind the Mikey test, I decided to check and see what percentage of search queries for their key terms came from mobile devices. Obviously Mikey isn’t the only one who got himself an iPhone. Over 20% of searches for sandpaper and other terms came from mobile devices. And that percentage has more than doubled in the past year. These are numbers you have to pay attention to.

Why is the Mikey test important? There are a number of reasons why this marks a sea change in digital marketing. First of all, Mikey is only interested in mobile because it lets him do things that are important in his job. This isn’t about checking restaurant reviews, looking up show times or updating your Facebook status; this is about getting the job done. That sets a pretty stringent bar for user experience, one that most industrial marketers haven’t even considered. They’re still struggling to make their website a place that doesn’t cause mass user suicide.

Secondly, If Mikey is looking at mobile, we’ve already moved into the steepest part of the adoption curve. That means things are going to move very quickly. Moving quickly is not something that industrial marketers are very comfortable with. If we’re already at 20%, with a doubling in the past year, expect next year to be at 40 or 50%. That is a pace of change that is going to leave a lot of marketers behind.

It’s time to think seriously about mobile — but don’t do it because I told you to.

Do it because Mikey likes it.

What’s So Interesting about Google, Anyway

First published July 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I just received my review copy of “I’m Feeling Lucky, The Confessions of Google Employee # 59” by Douglas Edwards. That brings to six the number of Google themed books that are sitting on my bookshelf (including one by fellow Insider Aaron Goldman).

That got me to thinking. Are six books a lot to be written about one company?

Well, it turns out that there are more than six. A quick check on Amazon turned up no less than 11 books on Google, the company. That doesn’t include the gazillions of Google-inspired how-to books. So, to return to my original question, are 11 a lot? And if they are, why do authors write about Google? What does Google have that other companies don’t? And how does the Google story stack up against other corporate sagas?

It seems Google actually heads the high-tech pack when it comes to attracting ink. Again checking Amazon, I only found one book on Yahoo and two on Facebook. There were four on Microsoft and seven books on Apple. Of all the tech companies I checked, only IBM equaled Google’s tally, at 11. Of course, IBM has been around for over 100 years, compared to less than two decades for Google.

Google even beats corporate stalwarts like GE (seven), Proctor & Gamble (three) and HP (seven).

In looking at the list, a few things immediately came to mind. First of all, many of the books written about a company are actually written about a founder or chef executive of the company. Half the books written about Microsoft are actually biographies of Bill Gates. The same is true for Apple (Steve Jobs), GE (Jack Welch) and IBM (Lou Gerstner). But none of the Google books I’ve ready are about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They’re about the company. Certainly, Larry and Sergey have starring roles, but they don’t overshadow the company itself. Google is always front and center.

Secondly, many of the other companies that are the subject of books have gone through massive restructurings or turnarounds, which formed the central theme of the respective books. Google hasn’t hit a slump yet. There isn’t even a lot of conflict in Google’s history to chronicle. Unlike Facebook, Aaron Sorkin (who adapted Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires” for the movie “The Social Network”) would have a difficult time creating a juicy script out of the Google story.  It’s not nearly as “Hollywood” as Facebook’s rise to glory. And Google doesn’t generate near the animosity of a Wal-Mart (20-plus books, most of them about how the retail giant is destroying America) or Enron (the grand Champion of corporate story telling, with over 30 books, all about its ignoble collapse). So, what is it about Google that fascinates us, if it isn’t a rags to riches to rags to riches saga, an inside glimpse at an evil empire, or a superstar CEO?

All the books written about Google are generally complimentary, respectful and, in some cases, even a touch obsequious and over-enthralled. Those who choose to write about Google generally fawn all over the company, the brilliance of the co-founders, the velocity of its growth and the vibrancy of its culture. If there is muck to rake here, potential authors have yet to uncover it. The only other company I’ve found that even comes close to inspiring the sycophantic awe of Google is Disney, with over 20 titles, the majority of them complimentary.

I think the Google story has appeal because Google is something we all use. In many ways, the story of Google is the story of Web search (John Battelle’s approach) — and that has changed our lives in some pretty fundamental ways. It’s Google’s role as a catalyst of change — in how we think about information, in marketing, in how companies conduct themselves, and in a number of yet-to-be determined ways — that compel us to keep turning the pages. This isn’t a story about a company, or a brilliant founder. It’s a story about a society balanced on the cusp of dramatic and massive change.  Google is just the narrative framework many have chosen as the vehicle for their social parable.

Really, if you were going to write a book about search and how it’s changing our world, whom else would you write about?