Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

The Psychology of Couponing: Where Agillitee Went Wrong

First published September 22, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Is a Groupon model the next big thing for B2B? Apparently not. Or, at least, not now, based on an early trial by a Chicago-based consulting firm, Ajillitee. The company used Groupon to offer $25,000 worth of consulting services at half price.

It was the biggest deal Groupon had ever offered. Hey, keeping $12,500 in your pocket is nothing to sneeze at. And, since buying consulting services is not exactly the same as snagging a half-off lunch coupon, the offer stayed open for three weeks, giving all potential takers plenty of time to act.

But, at the end of the three weeks, the offer disappeared. The result? Nary a sale — not even one. Ajillitee extended the offer on its own website, with the same result.

“We were really trying to test the market,” said Ajillitee CMO Diann Bilderback. “What we learned was that we were early to the game. Groupon’s platform is the platform for this (online coupons), but it’s very consumer-oriented. The rules didn’t align with our kind of sale. Groupon works on snap decisions, but business decisions typically take longer.”

Well, that’s true. But there’s another element at play here. It’s the psychology of the deal itself. Do you really want to buy thousands of dollars of consulting services with a coupon? Even one saving you 50%? Thought not. Pizza? Sure! A pedicure? Maybe.  Half-price yoga? Sign me up. But critical information systems for your company? No thank you!

Coupons work well in certain markets, and not so well in others. For example, would you use a coupon for a doctor or a lawyer?  Probably not, but why? Why a pizza, and not a heart surgeon?

The answer can be summed up in one word: risk. Coupons work extremely well in some well-understood circumstances — to save money on something you were going to buy anyway, or when you want to treat yourself. In a previous series of columns, I talked about how all buying decisions are predicated on a balance of risk and reward.  Reward is the gas pedal, and risk is the brake pedal. If risk is very low, coupons can serve to push you past the tipping point and get you to act immediately rather than “someday.”  They accelerate latent consumer demand.

Coupons can also sway a purchaser from one brand to another, but this typically only happens when risk is minimal. Coupons work in the world of the “pretty good problem,” where all the options are within a range acceptable to the buyer. Think of laundry detergent, cheese slices or hand soap.

Finally, coupons can reduce the barriers keeping you from an indulgent impulse purchase. Coupons play on short-term gratification, introducing the promise of reward, compounded by the dopamine rush that comes from snagging a great deal. It amps up the “reward” portion of buying motivation so that the “risk” limiter doesn’t stand a chance. Groupon, in particular, pulls out all the psychological stops by throwing in equally addictive elements of geographically targeted rewards, limited availability and elemental crowd psychology. If this is the mental landscape you’re playing in, online couponing can definitely stack the odds in your favor.

But alas, B2B purchasing, especially big-ticket items like consulting, meets none of the above criteria. B2B is all about risk avoidance, and there is little reward driving these types of purchases. This came through loud and clear when I was researching my book, “The BuyerSphere Project.” Not only will a coupon offer fail to eliminate risk in these circumstances, it will actually increase risk by raising questions about the credibility of the consulting firm offering the coupon. If the consulting is any good, why are you offering it at half price? Are you that desperate for business?

Apparently, companies like Ajillitee haven’t given up on the concept.  A new rash of B2B oriented online couponing companies like BizyDeal and RapidBuyr are jostling each other in a rush to jump on the Groupon bandwagon.  If the types of deals offered are targeted to low-risk scenarios (copy paper and toner cartridges), they’ll probably work. But don’t expect to get a rush on coupons for consulting services, enterprise-level solutions or other big-ticket, complex purchases. When the buyer (or buyers) is looking at all risk and no personal reward, using couponing is like bringing a knife (or, more appropriately, a spatula) to a gunfight. It’s absolutely the wrong tool for the job.

What’s in a Word?

First published September 8, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I served for six years as a director of the Search Engine Marketers Professional Organization. Every six months or so, we’d get together to talk about the future of the organization. As you can imagine, the future of an organization catering to industry professionals is inextricably linked to the future of the industry itself. So, our conversations weren’t so much about the future of SEMPO as they were about the future of search — and by extension, the future of search marketing.

Every time we embarked on this task of joint navel and crystal-ball gazing, we ran smack dab into the same dilemma: How do you define search? What is search? Should it even be called search any more? Esther Dyson, among others, thinks the term “search” may have outlived its usefulness. Perhaps “connection,” “fulfillment” or “action” has a better connotation. At least these words imply there’s something of substance on the other end of the search. They hint at successful outcomes. When Microsoft debuted Bing, the company sought to differentiate the product by calling it the “Decision” engine – “Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.”

For me, words are important, so in trying to define the future of our industry, the words we choose to represent the concept tell us something about our feelings towards it.

Let’s start with “search,” the generic label we currently use: to “search” is to attempt to discover something. We search for a needle in a haystack. We search for a missing child or a runaway fugitive. We search for the truth. All seem to indicate an expenditure of significant effort but no guarantee of success. Given the state of the Internet when search engines debuted, it was an apt moniker. But today, that’s no longer the case. Today, I suspect, we launch almost every search with a clear expectation that somewhere out there, the information we seek exists. All we need is the right connection to it.

Given that, perhaps a “connection” engine is a better choice. To “connect” is to link known entities. Unlike with “search,” when we use the term “connect” we know our objective exists and we’re just trying to find the shortest path between points A and B.  The word better captures the navigational usage of search, which accounts for a huge percentage of total queries. I’ve used the term myself in the past when I’ve said that search is the “connection” between intent and content.

But even “connection” implies a certain statelessness. While it better captures our intent than does the verb search, I don’t know if it adequately represents the dynamic and participatory nature of our online activities. Whereas the verbs we used to use to define what we did online implied passive observance — “look,” “browse” and “surf” (I never did get that one, but at one time using it made you sound uber-cool) —  we now “book,” “post,” “comment,” “”tweet,” “buy” and participate in dozens of much more active ways, using more active verbs. Where once we went online to seek and consume information, we now want to “do” things.  We expect to do things. And so we use Google or Bing to find the right tool to allow us to do those things. That’s the rationale behind suggestions like “fulfillment” (to carry out, to satisfy or to develop to full potential) and “action” (something done or performed). Certainly, for some search tasks, calling Google or Bing an “action” engine would be a more appropriate description.

For some tasks — but not all. And that’s the problem we kept running into when we tried to define what search is. It’s tough to keep in any one box. It tends to be squishy and amorphous. And it has the habit of expanding into the ever-developing niches and crevasses of the online landscape.

So, was Bing right to call itself a “decision” engine? Is that the missing label that encapsulates all we look for in an engine? Do we need something to help us make better decisions (to compare and choose between alternatives)? It’s at least as good as “search”, and probably better, because it takes it one step further. It makes the assumption that the information about the best alternatives will be served to us by the engine.

While you might think this is just a frivolous exercise in semantics, I disagree. I think this question speaks to something fundamental in the evolution of search. We use words to label concepts — and when the labels no longer fit, it’s because the concept itself has changed. If we have trouble applying a word to something, it’s probably because we think of it in a different way than we used to. I believe this is true of search. And if we think of “search” differently, it means we must also think of “search marketing” differently.

Until next week…

Is Google God?

First published August 11, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Seriously, there are “Googlists” behind www.thechurchofgoogle.org who offer incontrovertible proof that Google is God:

·     Google is the closest thing to an omniscient entity in existence, which can be scientifically verified
·     Google is everywhere at once
·     Google answers prayers
·     Google is potentially immortal
·     Google is infinite
·     Google remembers all
·     Google can “do no evil”
·     “Google” is searched for more than “God,” “Jesus,” “Allah,” “Buddha,” “Christianity,” Islam,” “Buddhism” and “Judaism” combined!
·     Evidence of Google’s existence is abundant.

Compelling evidence, and if you’ve read the many books on Google, it’s hard not to believe Larry and Sergey have just a touch of a Messiah Complex about them.

But is our faith in Google unshakable? A little while back I was talking to Jacqueline Krones, a senior product manager at Bing, who headed up a large-scale ethnographic study of search usage. Microsoft has repeated this study every three years, starting in 2004 and following up in 2007 and 2010. Over those three studies, Krones found an interesting shift in attitudes towards search in general, and, by extension, to Google specifically: “In 2004, people said that knowledge lives with experts and the experts help them make decisions. In 2007 people said that search engines actually had all of the knowledge in the world and it was just there for them to go out and pull it out. In 2010 people told us that they created their own knowledge – that even though the search engine never really had all the knowledge in the world, it was linked to information.”

That arc of our collective attitude adjustment toward search becomes interesting when you apply it to the parallel development of Google’s hubris. In 2004, Google filed for its IPO and was just getting used to being the world’s dominant search engine. The “start-up” glow was still very much alive,  and Google truly believed it could do no wrong.

In 2007 all indications were that Google really could do no wrong. While it wasn’t exactly the same collegial atmosphere of 2004, Google was rushing full speed ahead on multiple fronts.  Acquisitions were racking up at an impressive rate and it seemed that Google was assembling all the needed pieces for total online domination. In fact, it wasn’t only online that Google wanted to dominate. It was print, TV, radio, wireless, power, books, the earth and space. Corporate America was holding its collective breath, waiting to see which industry Google was going to set its attention-deficit sights on next.

By 2010, we had learned that Google was all too fallible, just like the rest of us.  Do you remember Google Catalog, Google Answers, Orkut or Google TV ? Well, with the exception of Google TV, where the wounds are still fresh and largely gouged on the back of Logitech, not many of us do. Many of the high-flying plans of 2007 had crashed back to earth.  Google retreated back to its core — making money in search.

If the trends in Krones’ research hold across the general population, it appears that while we once worshiped Google, we now regard it in a less remarkable light. It’s a search engine — a pretty good search engine — but hardly the answer to our loftier prayers.

I know this sounds sacrilegious to the ears of a Google-fearing Googlist. But guess when the Church of Google site was launched? That’s right, 2007. Given the euphoria of the time, perhaps you Googlists can be forgiven for your blind worship.

If it makes you feel better, click on the nearest Google ad and make a donation to Google on my behalf.

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.

The Vancouver Riot Social Media Backlash: Justice or Revenge?

First published June 23, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the 25 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never had to say this — indeed, I never believed I would ever say this — but last Wednesday, I was ashamed to say I live in British Columbia. I wasn’t the only one. I’m guessing the vast majority of the other 4.5 million people that call this Canadian province home felt the same way. In fact, the only people not feeling that way were the idiotic jerks that caused our collective shame. They were the ones using the Canuck’s loss to Boston in the Stanley Cup final as an excuse to wreak havoc on downtown Vancouver.

“You can’t cure stupid.”

We went into the night holding our collective breathe, hoping the sad scenario of the 1994 riot, after a similar Game 7 loss to the New York Rangers, would not repeat itself. The Olympics had given us hope that we could be placed on a world stage without burning it to the ground. But, as one police spokesperson said, “You can’t cure stupid!” Sadly, it proved to be true. B.C. is a breathtakingly beautiful corner of the world, but we definitely have our quota of stupid people, and last Wednesday, they all came onto the streets of Vancouver.

You’ve probably seen news footage of the riot and, if you were disgusted, I get it. I was too. But there’s another part of the story that also has to be told. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s a happy ending or an even sadder one. I’d like to hear what you think, but bear with me for another minute or so.

Throw the Face”Book” at them

Even though it appeared that we had learned nothing in the 17 years since the last riot, there was one significant difference between 1994 and last week’s debacle. This year, it went viral. Much of the mayhem was captured by photo or video. Soon, it was posted online. And that’s when something surprising happened. For most of our history as social animals, there is not much we can do when some of our herd runs amok. There are reams of research on the psychology of mobs, but one of the common themes is a feeling of invincibility that comes from being part of a faceless, mindless crowd bent on destruction. Most times, there is no response or retribution for individual perpetrators of mob violence. They get off scot free. But not this time. The mob that trashed Vancouver may have been mindless, but they certainly weren’t faceless.

The next morning, a Facebook page was started by the Vancouver police. They asked anyone with photos or videos of criminals to post them for identification. Within a few hours, the page had captured over 50,000 “likes.” Within a few days, the police had over a million pictures and 1000 hours of video uploaded. As people were recognized, they were tagged so police could follow up with charges. The Insurance Corporation of BC offered police use of their facial detection software and crooner Michael Buble, who also hails from Vancouver, even launched a newspaper campaign asking for people to turn the guilty in through social media.

Social Justice or Virtual Vigilantes?

On hearing that, I felt that finally, justice was being served. We, the often-voiceless majority of law-abiding citizens, could do our part to right the wrongs. But, were we really interested in justice, or did we just want revenge? Is there any difference between the two? One blogger, Dave.ca, said “report the rioters out of civic duty..or revenge..either is fine.” Is it? If we are holding onto moral high ground, should we rally and become a virtual “lynch” mob? It’s brand-new territory to chart, and I’m personally unsure about which is the right path to take.

Let me give you one example. One of the rioters is a provincial water polo athlete and he was soon identified online. His name was made public. His father is a doctor. Since his son’s crime was made public, the father has had to suspend his practice and the family has had to move out of their home. Other exposed rioters have been subjected to violent threats and the comment strings are riddled with utterings that are in contention with the riot itself for sheer stupidity.

When I started this column, I was convinced it was going to be a bad news, good news story, where social media would play the role of the redeemer. As I did further research on the aftermath, it seems that it’s a bad news, good news, possibly worse news story.

Much as I’d like to think differently, I’m not sure mob rule, whether it’s pursuing mindless violence, or mindless revenge, can ever be a good thing. Social media has a way of exposing all that is human, at scale, and at velocity — warts and all. How do we handle this new accountability, this new immediate transparency into the dark things we’ve always kept tucked away?

We’re Looking in the Wrong Place for our Attribution Models

First published June 16, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The online landscape is getting more complex. Speaking from a marketer’s perspective, there are more points of influence that can alter a buyer’s path. At the last Search Insider Summit, John Yi from Facebook introduced us to something he called Pinball Marketing. It’s an apt analogy for the new online reality.

Hoping for a Strike

In the past, marketing was like bowling. You would build a campaign with sufficient critical mass and aim it toward your target, hoping at the end of the campaign (or lane) your aim was good enough, and the ball/campaign had enough kinetic energy (measured in REACH X FREQUENCY X AD ENGAGEMENT) to knock down all the potential customers.  If you think about marketing in this perspective, it explains the massive amount of pain traditional marketers are feeling as they pull their bowling-shoe-clad feet from the old world and gingerly dip their toes in the new. The bowler was in control (theoretically) and the success or failure of the campaign lay in her hands alone. The paradigm was simple, clean and linear, just the way we marketers like it.

The new game of marketing is much more like pinball. The intersections between a buyer’s decision path and a product’s marketing presence are many, and each can send the buyer off in a different direction. Some of those intersection points are within the marketer’s control — and some aren’t. Marketers now have to try to understand engagement and buyer impact at each of these intersections and, in the process, try to piece together a map of the buyer’s journey, assigning value in the appropriate places.

Repealing Newton’s Law

But even though the frenetic path of a pinball gets us a little closer to today’s marketing reality, it still doesn’t get us all the way, because there’s one fundamental difference: pinballs don’t have brains. Nor do they have emotions, feelings, or needs. Pinballs are just little metal spheres that obey the laws of physics.

And therein lies the difference.  How much more challenging would pinball be if, rather than relying on Newtonian physics to set the path of a ball coming off a flipper, it could decide whether it wanted to go right, left or simply stop dead in its tracks, refusing to go one inch further until you showed it a little more respect.  As physicist Murray Gell-Mann once quipped, “Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think.”

As we try to understand what influences our buyers, we tend to apply something like the laws of physics to unraveling attribution. We apply formulas to various touchpoints, mathematically weighting their respective values. We can weight it to the first click, the last click, or divvy up the value based on some arbitrary calculation. But, in the end, as we try to figure out the new rules of marketing, we tend to forget that these balls have brains.

Go to the Source

If we want to understand what makes buyers buy, we should ask them. We should base attribution models on decision paths, not arbitrary formulas. We should walk through the buying landscape with our prospects, seeing how they respond at each intersection point. And when we build our attribution models, we should base them on psychology, not physics.

Is this approach harder than the holy grail of a universal attribution formula (or even multiple variations of said formula)? Absolutely. It’s fuzzy and sometimes messy. It tends to squirm around a lot. And unlike Newtonian physics, it depends on context. What I’m proposing is riddled with “ifs” and “maybes.” In short, it’s human in its ambiguity, and that’s really the whole point. I would much rather have ambiguity that’s somewhat right than clarity that’s completely wrong.

Different Platforms, Different Ads

First published June 9, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s little argument that mobile’s time has come. According to Google, mobile searches make up anywhere from 5% to 12% of the total query volume for many popular keywords. And for many categories (like searches for local businesses) the percentage is much higher. That officially qualifies as “something to consider” in most marketing strategies. For many marketers, though, the addition of mobile is a simple check box addition in planning a search campaign. In Google’s quest to make life simple for marketers, we’re missing some fundamental aspects of marketing to mobile prospects. Okay, we’re missing one fundamental aspect:  it’s different. Really different.

Last week, I talked about how my behaviors vary across multiple devices. But it’s not just me. It’s everyone. And those differences in behavior will continue to diverge as experiences become more customized. The mobile use case will look significantly different than the tablet use case. Desktops and smart entertainment devices will be completely different beasts. We’ll use them in different ways, with different intents, and in different contexts. We’d better make sure our marketing messages are different too.

Let’s go back to the Jacquelyn Krones research from Microsoft, which I talked about in the last column. If we divide search activity into three buckets: missions, excavations and explorations, we can also see that three different approaches to search ads should go along with those divergent intents.

Excavation search sessions, which still live primarily on the desktop, are all about information gathering. Success ads for these types of searches should offer rich access to relevant content. Learn to recognize the keywords in your campaigns that indicate excavation queries. They are typically more general in nature, and are often aligned with events that require extensive research: major purchases, planning vacations, researching life-altering events like health concerns, moving to a new community, starting college or planning a wedding. In our quest to squeeze conversions off a landing page, we often not only pare down content, but also on-page navigation pointing to more content. For an excavation-type search, this is exactly the wrong approach. Here, the John Caples approach to copy writing might be just the ticket: long, information rich content that allows the user to “create knowledge.”

Missions, especially on mobile devices, are just that. You get in and you get out, hopefully with something useful — that lets you do something else. Successful ads in this environment should do the same thing: take you one (or several) steps closer to a successful completion of the mission. Ad messaging should offer the promise of successful mission completion, and the post-click destination should deliver on that promise. Clean, hassle-free and exquisitely simple to use are the marching orders of mobile advertising.

Perhaps the most interesting search use case is that on a tablet device. I’ve chatted with Yahoo’s relatively new VP of search, Shashi Seth, about this. He believes tablets might open the door for the visually rich, interactive ads that brand marketers love. And Krones research seems to indicate that this might indeed be the case. Tablets are ideal for exploration searches, which tend to be meandering voyages through the online landscape with less specific agendas. The delight of serendipity is one big component in an expedition search. And it’s this that marks a significant departure for most search marketers.

Every search marketer learns the hard way that it’s incredibly difficult to lure search users away from the task they have in mind. When we do our keyword analysis, we’re usually disappointed to find that the list of highly relevant words is much smaller than we thought. So, we extend our campaign into keywords that, while not directly relevant, are at least adjacent to the user’s anticipated intent. If they’re looking for a jigsaw, we might try running an ad for free children’s furniture plans. Or, if they’re looking for a new car, we might try running an ad that reminds them that they can save 15% on their car insurance just by clicking on our ad.

We’ve all been here. In the mind of the marketer, it makes sense to buy these keywords. After all, the two worlds are not so far apart. A new owner of a jig saw might indeed be interested in building a set of bunk beds. And the new car owner will need car insurance. The problem is, neither of those things are relevant “in the moment,” and “in the moment” rules in most search interactions. So, after a few months of trying, we reluctantly remove these keywords from our campaign, or drop the bid price so low they’re buried 3 pages of results deep.

But perhaps tablet users are different. I’m certain the search experience on a tablet will soon look significantly different than it does on a PC. I would expect it to be more tactile and interactive – less rigidly ordered. And, in that environment, given the looser constraints of an expedition-type search, we might be more willing to explore a visually rich distraction. Shashi Seth thinks so. Krones’ research seems to also point in this direction. For this search marketer, that’s reason enough to test the hypothesis. Or, I will test it, as soon as Google, Yahoo and Bing make that possible.

The Segmentation of My Slime Trail

First published June 2, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My connected life is starting to drop into distinct buckets. Now that I have my choice of connecting through my smartphone (an iPhone), my tablet (an iPad), my work computer (a MacBook) and my home computer (a Windows box), not to mention the new Smart TVs we bought (Samsungs), I’m starting to see my digital footprints (or my digital slime trail, to use Esther Dyson’s term) diverge. And the nature of the divergence is interesting.

Take Netflix, for example. It’s finally come to Canada, although with a depressingly small number of movies to choose from. My Netflix account stretches across all my devices, but the things I watch on my iPad are quite a bit different than my choices on an iPhone. And there is yet another profile for the things I choose on my MacBook (mainly when I travel). On the iPad, it’s typically an episode of “Arrested Development,” “Fawlty Towers” or, if I have a little more time, “Mad Men,” (and yes, I realize those three choices create an interesting psychological profile of myself) that offers some respite when the women of my household commandeer all available TV sets. On the new Samsung, it’s usually a movie intended for viewing by myself and at least one other member of my family.

Kindle offers a similar divergence of reading patterns — again, one application that’s spread across multiple devices. And, like my movie watching, my reading habits vary significantly depending on what I’m doing the reading on. I almost never read on my laptop, but it’s my preferred platform for research and annotation. My favorite reading device is my iPad, but it’s primarily used at home. I only take it on the road for extended trips. My fall-back is the iPhone, which gets called into duty when I have time to kill when traveling or in between my kid’s volleyball games.

Jacquelyn Krones, from Microsoft, did a fascinating research project where she looked at search habits across multiple devices. She found that our searches could be grouped into three different categories: missions, excavations and explorations.

Mission is the typical task-based single interaction where we need to get something done. The nature of the mission can be significantly different on a mobile device, where the mission is usually related to our physical location. In this case, geo-location and alternative methods of input (i.e. taking a picture, recording a sound or scanning a bar code) can make completing the mission easier, because the outputs are more useful and relevant in the user’s current context. This is why app-based search is rapidly becoming the norm on mobile devices. Missions on the desktop tend to be more about seeking specific information when then allows us to complete a task beyond the scope of our search interaction.

Excavations are research projects that can extend over several sessions and are typically tied to an event of high interest to the user. Health issues, weddings, major travel, home purchases and choosing a college are a few examples. The desktop is the hands-down winner for this type of search engagement. It provides an environment where information can be consolidated and digested through the help of other applications. Krones calls this “making knowledge,” implying a longer and deeper commitment on the part of the user.

Finally, we have exploration. Explorations are more serendipitous in nature,  with  users setting some fairly broad and flexible boundaries for their online interactions. While excavation can become a part of exploration, the behaviors are usually distinct. Exploration tends to be a little more fluid and open to suggestion, with the user being open to persuasion, while excavation is more about assembling information to support an intent that is already decided upon. Tablets seem to be emerging as a strong contender in the exploration category. The relaxed nature of typical interaction with an iPad, for example, supports the open agenda of exploration.

What this means, of course, is that the trail I leave behind on my mobile device starts to look significantly different than the trail on my laptop or tablet. Each fits a different use case, as they start to become tools with distinct capabilities, over and above the fact that they’re all connected to the Internet.