Category Archives: Customer Relationships

An Eulogy for “Kathy” – The First Persona

My column last week on the death of the persona seemed to find a generally agreeable audience. But prior to tossing our cardboard cutouts of “Sally the Soccer Mom” in the trash bin, let’s just take a few minutes to remind ourselves why personas were created in the first place.

Alan Cooper – the father of usability personas – had no particular methodology in mind when he created “Kathy,” his first persona. Kathy was based on a real person that Cooper had talked to during his research for a new project management program. Cooper found himself with a few hours on his hands every day when his early 80’s computer chugged away, compiling the latest version of his program. He would use the time to walk around a golf course close to his office and run through the design in his head. One day, he engaged himself in an imaginary dialogue with “Kathy,” a potential customer who was requesting features based on her needs. Soon, he was deep in his internal discussion with Kathy. His first persona was a way to get away from the computer and cubicle and get into the skin of a customer.

There are a few points here that important to note. “Kathy” was based on input from a real person. The creation of “Kathy” had no particular goal, other than to give Cooper a way to imagine how a customer might use his program. It was a way to make the abstract real, and to imagine that reality through the eyes of another person. At the end we realize that the biggest goal of a persona is just that – to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes.

As we transition from personas to data modeling, it’s essential to keep that aspect alive. We have to learn how to live in someone else’s skin. We have to somehow take on the context of their world and be aware of their beliefs, biases and emotions. Until we do this, the holy grail of the “Market of One” is just more marketing hyperbole.

I think the persona started its long decline towards death when it transitioned from a usability tool to a marketing one. Personas were never intended to be a slide deck or a segmentation tool. They were just supposed to be a little mental trick to allow designers to become more empathetic – to slip out of their own reality and into that of a customer. But when marketers got their hands on personas, they do what marketers tend to do. They added the gloss and gutted the authenticity. At that moment, personas started to die.

So, for all the reasons I stated last week, I think personas should be allowed to slip away into oblivion. But if we do so, we have to find a way to understand the reality of our customers on a one to one basis. We have to find a better way to accomplish what personas were originally intended to do. We have to be more empathetic.

Because humans are humans, and not spreadsheets, I’m not sure we can get all the way there with data alone. Data analysis forces us to put on another set of lenses – ones that analyze – not empathize. Those lenses help us to see the “what” but not the “why.” It’s the view of the world that Alan Cooper would have had if he never left his cubicle to walk around the Old Del Monte golf course, waving his arms and carrying on his internal dialogue with “Kathy.” The way to empathize is to make connections with our customers – in the real world – where they live and play.  It’s using qualitative methods like ethnographic research to gain insights that can then be verified with data. Personas may be dead, but qualitative research is more important than ever.

Deconstructing the Market of One

“So, what are you doing now?” My old college friend asked, right after he finished swearing at me because of my early retirement. He assumed I’d be doing something related to marketing.

“I’m starting a cycling tourism business.”

“A what…?”

“Cycling tours.”

“Do you know anything about cycling tours?”

“Not really.”

“Hmmm. Okay. Well, that’s good. It is good, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We’ll see.”

Truth be told, I’m probably getting too much pleasure from these little flashes of cognitive dissonance that happen when I tell people about my current project. I like watching as they struggle to connect the dots. Maybe it’s because it gives me some comic relief from my own struggles to connect the dots. But I’m beginning to suspect there may by a silver lining in my ignorance. Because I know so little about this business, I’m also taking a different approach to the one aspect I should know something about – the marketing of it.

Connected People in NetworkI could have jumped in and started lining up search campaigns, digging into social media targeting and setting up email campaigns. But instead, I took a step back and looked at the most successful cycling tourism operation I know – the Hotel Belvedere in Riccione, Italy. It’s become a mecca for road cyclists. This year, TripAdvisor rated it as one of the top 20 hotels in the world, based on the rave reviews of it’s cycling clientele. If you’re a road cyclist, chances are pretty good that you’ve heard of the Hotel Belvedere. And if you have heard of it, chances are extremely good that you heard about it from a friend who also cycles. The Belvedere has built its substantial business largely on word of mouth.

We all know word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising. But why is it so effective? We typically assume it’s because the message is coming from an objective source that we trust. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I think it’s because word of mouth is almost always delivered from one person to another. Word of mouth is messaging to a market of one.

There are some fundamental aspects of this that bear closer examination. Word of mouth usually occurs between friends, or, at the least, acquaintances. That means both parties have at least a passing understanding of each other. They know of common interests and personal likes and dislikes. This allows the message to be tailored for optimal reception. The most effective points of persuasion can be embellished and the least effective ones can be skimmed over. Messages are pre-filtered based on an implicit understanding of the audience.

Secondly, word of mouth advertising is based on a two-way conversation. The message evolves according to that conversation. Questions can be asked. Areas of interest can be explored more deeply. Concerns can be addressed. And, all along the way, both parties learn more about what a future engagement between the prospect and the product in question would look like.

I suspect the power of Word of Mouth comes not just in the objectivity of the sender of the message, but also in the medium in which the message is delivered (thank you Mr. McLuhan). And, if this is the case, then we should see how the strengths of that medium could be extended to other marketing efforts. We should deconstruct the advantages of targeting a Market of One.

The biggest hurdle seems to be the lack of mass normally associated with marketing. In my case, I’m actually planning for a slower approach to marketing, building allowances into the business plan for a marketing plan based on building engagements one at a time. If you’ve ever read Eric Ries’s excellent book, The Lean Start Up, you already know such things are possible. The advantage of the Market of One approach is that each encounter also provides invaluable market feedback, allowing to you to continually evolve your offering. You focus on going deep, rather than going wide. Each encounter gives you the opportunity to create a friendship.

The Messy Part of Marketing

messymarketingMarketing is hard. It’s hard because marketing reflects real life. And real life is hard. But here’s the thing – it’s just going to get harder. It’s messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been filing things away as possible topics for this column. For instance, I’ve got a pretty big file of contradicting research on what works in B2B marketing. Videos work. They don’t work. Referrals are the bomb. No, it’s content. Okay, maybe it’s both. Hmmm..pretty sure it’s not Facebook though.

The integration of marketing technology was another promising avenue. Companies are struggling with data. They’re drowning in data. They have no idea what to do with all the data that’s pouring in from smart watches and smart phones and smart bracelets and smart bangles and smart suppositories and – okay, maybe not suppositories, but that’s just because no one thought of it till I just mentioned it.

Then there’s the new Google tool that predicts the path to purchase. That sounds pretty cool. Marketers love things that predict things. That would make life easier. But life isn’t easy. So marketing isn’t easy. Marketing is all about trying to decipher the mangled mess of living just long enough to shoehorn in a message that maybe, just maybe that will catch the right person at the right time. And that mangled mess is just getting messier.

Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness. I love organic, gritty problems with no clear-cut solutions. Scientists call these ill-defined problems. And that’s why marketing is hard. It’s an ill-defined problem. It defies programmatic solutions. You can’t write an algorithm that will spit out perfect marketing. You can attack little slivers of marketing that lend themselves to clearer solutions, which is why you have the current explosion of ad-tech tools. But the challenge is trying to bring all these solutions together into some type of cohesive package that actually helps you relate to a living, breathing human.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how blissfully ignorant most marketers are about concepts that I think should be fundamental to understanding customer behaviors: things like bounded rationality, cognitive biases, decision theory and sense-making. Mention any of these things in a conference room full of marketers and watch eyes glaze over as fingers nervously thumb through the conference program, looking for any session that has “Top Ten” or “Surefire” in it’s title.

Take Information Foraging Theory, for instance. Anytime I speak about a topic that touches on how humans find information (which is almost always), I ask my audience of marketers if they’ve ever heard of I.F.T. Generally, not one hand goes up. Sometimes I think Jakob Nielsen and I are the only two people in the world that recognize I.F.T. for what it is: “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.” (Jakob’s words). If you take the time to understand this one concept I promise it will fundamentally and forever change how you look at web design, search marketing, creative and ad placement. Web marketers should be building a shrine to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. Their names should be on the tips of every marketer’s tongue. But I venture to guess that most of you reading this column never heard of them until today.

None of these fundamental concepts about human behavior are easy to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are simple to state but difficult to understand. They cover a lot of territory – much of it ill defined. I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to spread awareness of things like Information Foraging Theory. Can I always predict human behavior? Not by a long shot. But I hope that by taking the time to learn more about the classic theories of how we humans tick, I have also learned a little more about marketing. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot like being human. But I’ve always believed that to be an effective marketer, you first need to understand humans.

Can A Public Company Keep a Start Up Attitude?

google-glass1

Google is possibly the most interesting company in the world right now. But being interesting does not necessarily equate with being successful. And therein lies the rub.

Case in point. Google is taking another crack at Google Glass. Glass has the potential to be a disruptive technology. And the way Google approached it was very much in the Google way of doing things. They put a beta version out there and asked for feedback from the public. Some of that feedback was positive, but much of it was negative. That is natural. It’s the negative feedback you’re looking for, because it shows what has to be changed. The problem is that Glass V 0.9 is now pegged as a failure. So as Laurie Sullivan reported, Google is trying a different approach, which appears to be taken from Apple’s playbook. They’re developing under wraps, with a new product lead, and you probably won’t see another version of Glass until it’s ready to ship as a viable market-ready product.

The problem here is that Google may have lost too much time. As Sullivan points out, Intel, Epson and Microsoft are all working on consumer versions of wearable visual interfaces. And they’re not alone. A handful of aggressive start-ups are also going after Glass, including Meta, Vuzix, Optinvent, Glassup and Recon. And none of them will attract the attention of Google, simply because they’re not Google.

Did Google screw up with the first release of Google Glass? Probably not. In fact, if you read Eric Ries’s The Lean Start Up, they did a lot of things right. They got a minimally viable product in front of a market to test it and see what to improve. No, Google’s problem wasn’t with their strategy; it was with their speed. As Ries states,

“The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.”

Google didn’t move fast enough with Glass. And I suspect it was because Google isn’t a start up, so it can’t act like one. Again, from Ries,

“The problem isn’t with the teams or the entrepreneurs. They love the chance to quickly get their baby out into the market. They love the chance to have the customer vote instead of the suits voting. The real issue is with the leaders and the middle managers.”

Google isn’t the only company to feel the constricting bonds of being a public company. There is a long list of world changing technologies that were pioneered at places like Xerox and Microsoft and were tagged as corporate failures, only to eventually change the world in someone else’s hands.

I suspect the days are many when Larry Page and Sergey Brin are sorry they ever decided to take Google public. Back then, they probably thought that the vast economic resources that would become available, combined with their vision, would make an unbeatable combination. But in the process of going public, they were forced to compromise on the very spirit that was defined by that vision. They want to do great things, but they still need to hit their quarterly targets and keep shareholders happy. The two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but sadly they almost always are.

It’s probably no accident that Apple does their development in stealth mode. Apple has much more experience than Google in being a public company. They have probably realized that it’s not the buying public that you keep in the dark, it’s the analysts and shareholders. Otherwise, they’ll look at the early betas, an essential step in the development process, and pass judgment, tagging them as failures long before such judgments are justified. It would be like condemning a newborn baby as hopeless because they can’t drive a car yet.

Google is dreaming big dreams. I admire that. I just worry that the structure of Google might not be the right vehicle in which to pursue those dreams.

The Virtuous Cycle and the End of Arm’s Length Marketing

brandstewardshipLast week I wrote what should have been an open and shut column – looking at why SEO never really lived up to the potential of the business opportunity. Then my friend Scott Brinker had to respond with this comment:

“Seems like Google has long been focused on making SEO a “result” of companies doing good things, rather than a search-specific optimization “cause” to generate good rankings. They seem to have gotten what they wanted. Now as Google starts to do that with paid search, the world gets interesting for those agencies too..”

Steven Aresenault jumped on the bandwagon with this:

“Companies are going to wake up to the reality that part of their marketing is really about creating content. Content is everywhere and everything. Reality is I believe that it is a new way of thinking.”

As they both point out, SEO should be a natural result of a company doing good things, not the outcome of artificial manipulations practiced by a third party. It has to be baked into and permeate through the operating DNA of a company. But, as I started this column, I realized that this doesn’t stop at SEO. This is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Marketing, at least the way it’s been done up to now, is fundamentally broken. And it’s because many companies still rely on what I would call “Arm’s Length Marketing.”

Brand Stewardship = B.S.

Here is a quote lifted directly from the Ogilvy Mather website:

We believe our role as 360 Degree Brand Stewards is this: Creating attention-getting messages that make a promise consistent and true to the brand’s image and identity. And guiding actions, both big and small, that deliver on that brand promise. To every audience that brand has. At every brand intersection point. At all times.

Now, Ogilvy is very good at crafting messages and this one is no exception. Who could possibly argue with their view of brand stewardship? The problem comes when you look at what “stewardship” means. Here’s the Merriam Webster definition:

the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially :  the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care

The last five words are the key – “something entrusted to one’s care”. This implies that the agency has functional control of the brand, and with due apologies to David Ogilvy and his cultural legacy, that is simply bullshit.

Brands = Experience

Hmmm - coincidence?

Hmmm – coincidence?

Maybe Arm’s Length Brand Stewardship was possible in the era of David Ogilvy, Don Draper and Darrin Stephens (now, there’s a pop culture trifecta for you) – where brand messaging defined the brand, but that era is long gone. Brands used to be crafted from exposure, but now they’re created through experience, amplified through the resonant network of the online community. And an arm’s length third party cannot, nor should they, control that experience. It has to live at the heart of the company. For decades, companies abdicated the responsibility of brand stewardship to the communication experts – or, to do a little word crafting – they “entrusted (it) to (their) care.” That has to change. Marketing has to come back home.

The Virtuous Marketing Cycle

Scott talked about the SEO rewards that come from doing good things. Steven talked about authentic content creation being one of those good things. But this is a much bigger deal. This is about forcefully moving marketing’s place in the strategic chain. Currently, the order is this: Management > Strategy > Marketing > Revenue. Marketing’s current job is to execute on strategy, which comes from management. And, in that scenario, it’s plausible to execute at arm’s length. Also, things like SEO and content management fall well down the chain, typically beneath the threshold of senior management awareness. By the way, usability and other user-centric practices typically suffer the same fate.

But what if we moved our thinking from a chain to a cycle: Marketing > Management > Strategy > Marketing > Revenue > Marketing (and repeat)? Let me explain. To begin with, Marketing is perfectly situated to become the “sensemaking” interface with the market. This goes beyond market research, which very seldom truly informs strategy. Market research in its current form is typically intended to optimize the marketing program.

I’m talking about a much bigger role – Marketing would define the “outside in” view of the company which would form the context within which strategy would be determined by Management. Sensemaking as it applies to corporate strategy is a huge topic, but for brevity’s sake, let’s suppose that Marketing fills the role of the corporation’s five senses, defining what reality looks (and smells and sounds and tastes and feels) like . Then, when strategy is defined within that context, Marketing is well positioned to execute on it. Finally, execution is not the end – it is the beginning of another cycle. Sense making is an iterative process. Marketing then redefines what reality looks like and the cycle starts over again.

Bringing stewardship of marketing back to the very heart of the organization fundamentally changes things like arm’s length agency partnerships. It creates a virtuous cycle that runs through length and breadth of a company’s activities. Things like SEO, content creation and usability naturally fall into place.

A Prospect Ignored isn’t Really a Prospect

asleep at work / schoolI’ve ranted about this before and – oh yes – I shall rant again!

But first – the back-story.

I needed some work done at a property I own. I found three contractors online and reached out to each of them to get a quote.

Cue crickets.

No response. Nothing! So a few days later I politely followed up with each to prod the process along. Again, nothing. Finally, after 4 weeks of repeated e-nagging, one finally coughed up a quote. Most of the details were wrong, but at least someone at the other end was responding with minimal signs of consciousness.

Fast-forward 2 months. The work is still not done. At this point, I’m still trying to convey the specifics of the job and to get an estimated timeline. If I had an option, I’d take it. But the sad fact is, as spotty as the communication is with my contractor of choice, it’s still better than his competitors. One never did respond, even after a number of emails and voicemails. One finally sent a quote, but it was obvious he didn’t want the work. Fair enough. If the laws of supply and demand are imbalanced this much in their favor, who am I to fight it?

But here’s the thing. Market balances can change on a dime. Someday I’ll be in the driver’s seat and they’ll be scrambling to line up work to stay in business. And when they reach out to their contact list, a lot of those contacts will respond with an incredulous WTF. If you didn’t want my business when I needed you, why would you think I would give you it when you need me? A prospect spurned has a long memory for the specifics of said spurning. So, Mr. (or Ms.) Contractor, you can go take a flying leap.

If you’re going to use online channels to build your business, don’t treat it like a tap you can turn on and off at your discretion. Your online prospects have to be nurtured. If you can’t take any new business on, that’s fine. But at least have enough respect for them to send a polite response explaining the reason you can’t do the work. As long as we prospects are treated with respect, you’d be amazed at how reasonable we can be. Perhaps we can schedule the job for when you do have time. At the very least, we won’t walk away from the interaction with a bitter taste that will linger for years to come.

In 2005, Benchmark Portal did a study to compare response rates for email requests. The results were discouraging. Over 50% of SMB’s never responded at all. Only a small fraction actually managed to respond within 24 hours of the request.

I would encourage you to do a little surreptitious checking on your own response rates. Prospects contacting you need your help, and none of us like to hear our pleas for help go unanswered. 24 hours may seem like a reasonable time frame to you, but if you’re on the other end, it’s more than enough time to see your enthusiasm cool dramatically. Make it someone’s job to field online requests and set a 4-hour response time limit. I’m not talking about an auto-generated generic email here. I’m talking about a personalized response that makes it clear that someone has taken the time to read your request and is working on it. Also give a clear indication of how long it will take to follow up with the required information.

Why are these initial responses so critical? It’s not just to keep your field of potential prospects green and growing. It’s also because we prospects are using something called “signaling” to judge future interactions with a business. When we reach out to a new business we find online, we have no idea what it will be like to be their customer. We don’t have access to that information. So, we use things we do know as a proxy for that information. These things provide “signals” to help us fill in the blanks in our available information. An example would be hiring new employees. We don’t know how the person we’re interviewing will perform as an employee, so we look for certain things in a resume or an interview to act as signals that would indicate that the candidate will perform well on the job if hired.

If I’m a prospect looking for a business – especially one providing a service that will require an extended relationship between the business and myself – I need signals to show me how reliable the business will be if I chose them. Will they get the work done in a timely manner? Will the quality of the work be acceptable? Will they be responsive and accommodating to my requirements? If problems arise, will they be willing to work through those problems? Those are all questions I don’t have the answer to. All I have are indications based on my current interactions with the business. And if those interactions have required my constant nagging and clarification to avoid incorrect responses, guess what my level of confidence might be with said business?

Will Women Make More Empathetic Marketers?

First published Feb 27, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

empathyAt the risk of sounding sexist, I wonder if women might make better marketers then men?

If you’ll remember, I proposed a new way of defining the job description of a marketer in last week’s column: to understand the customer’s reality, focusing on those areas where we can solve their problems and improve that reality.

If we’re painting with incredibly broad strokes here – which we are – and we had to attach that description to one gender, which gender would you pick?

I know I’m dancing on shaky ground here – or, in my case – thin ice, but I think we all agree that while equal, men and women are different. Men are better at some things. Women are better at others. Yes, there’s a normal distribution curve in both cases, but for some things, the female curve is going to be further to the right. When I look at the qualities that might make an awesome marketer in the new world order, I have to say it seems better suited to the natural strengths of women. That’s why I don’t believe it was coincidence that more women showed a positive response to my column last week then men.

Let me give you an example of a sex based difference we found in our own research that will help explain my reasoning. We looked at how men and women navigate websites using an eye tracking station. When we looked at aggregate heat maps, which showed all activity, there was little difference. But when we sliced the activity into half-second by half-second increments, there was a significantly different scan pattern between men and women. Men went right to the navigation bar and starting mapping out the architecture of the site. They made a mental wireframe to help them get around. Their first priority was how they were going to get things done. Women, however, first looked at images, especially people and the main content on the homepage. Their first priority was whom they were dealing with and what the site was about.

That, in a nutshell, sums up a crucial difference between men and women. Men are driven by tasks – they work to get stuff done. Women are empathizers – they work with people.  In the end, both often get to the same place. But they may take very different paths to get there.

The new world of marketing I’m proposing is all about nurturing relationships – true one-to-one relationships. It’s much more about “who” and “why”, and less about “what”.  It’s about sensing what the world looks like from the prospect’s perspective and moving an organization’s internal strategy closer to that perspective. I’m not saying men can’t do that, but I am saying that women can do it at least as well as men. And perhaps that can help bring more balance to the world of marketing. While total head counts of men and women in marketing are roughly equal (with some reports giving women a slight edge) the same cannot be said of pay scales. According to the latest Marketing Rewards Survey, published by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the gap between men’s and women’s salaries has widened by 10% since 2012. This gap shows up most noticeably at the highest levels of the industry, where twice as many men (18%) reach director level as women (7%). This also holds true for marketing heads, with men almost doubling women again – 22% vs 12%. These numbers are out of the UK, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics has similar numbers for the US.  They’ve lumped in Marketing and Sales Managers, but the stats show that women earn about 67.7% of what men earn.

There are going to be some massive shifts in marketing in the coming decades. One of them might be between the genders in who holds the top marketing roles.

 

Now, That’s a Job Description I Could Get Behind!

First published February 20, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I couldn’t help but notice that last week’s column, where I railed against the marketer’s obsession with tricks, loopholes and pat sound bites got a fair number of retweets. The irony? At least a third of those retweets twisted my whole point – that six seconds (or any arbitrary length of message) isn’t the secret to getting a prospect engaged. The secret is giving them something they want to engage with.

tweet ss

As anyone who has been unfortunate to spend some time with me when I’m in particularly cynical mood about marketing can attest to, I go a little nuts with this “Top Ten Tricks” or “The Secret to…” mentality that seems pervasive in marketing. I’m pretty sure that anyone who retweeted last week’s column with a preface like “Does your advertising engage your consumer in 6 seconds or less? If not, you’re likely losing customers” didn’t bother to actually read past the first paragraph. Maybe not even the first line.

And that’s the whole problem. How can we expect marketers to build empathy, usefulness and relevance into their strategy when many of them have the attention span of a small gnat? As my friend Scott Brinker likes to say when it comes to marketer’s misbehaving, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Marketing – good marketing – is not easy but it’s also not a black box. It’s not about secrets or tricks or one-off tactics. It’s about really understanding your customers at an incredibly deep level and then working your ass off to create a meaningful engagement with them. Trying to reduce marketing to anything less than that is like trying to breeze your way through 50 years of marriage by following the Top 3 Tricks to get lucky this Friday night.

Again, this is about meaningful engagements. And when I say meaningful, it’s the customer that gets to decide what’s meaningful. That’s what’s potentially so exciting about breakthroughs like the Oreo Super Bowl campaign. It’s the opportunity to learn what’s meaningful to prospects and then to shift and tailor our responses in real time. Until now, marketing has been “Plan, Push and Pray.” We plan our attack, we push out our message and we pray it finds it’s target and that they respond by buying stuff. If they don’t buy stuff, something went wrong, probably in the planning stage. But that is an awfully long feedback loop.

You’ll notice something about this approach to marketing. The only role for the prospect is as a consumer. If they don’t buy, they don’t participate.  This comes as a direct result of the current job description of a marketer: Someone who gets someone else to buy stuff. But what if we rethink that description? Technology that enables real time feedback is allowing us to create an entirely new relationship with customers. What would happen if we redefined marketing along these lines: To understand the customer’s reality, focusing on those areas where we can solve their problems and improve that reality?

And as much as that sounds like a pat sound bite, if you really dig into it, it’s far from a quick fix. This is a way to make a radically different organization. And it moves marketing into a fundamentally different role. Previously, marketing got its marching orders from the CEO and CFO. Essentially, they were responsible for moving the top line ever northward. It was an internally generated mandate – to increase sales.

But what if we rethink this? What if the entire organization’s role is to constantly adapt to a dynamic environment, looking for advantageous opportunities to improve that environment? And, in this redefined vision, what if marketing’s role was to become the sense-making interface of the company? What if it was the CMO’s job was to consistently monitor the environment, create hypotheses about how to best create adaptive opportunities and then test those hypotheses in a scientific manner?

In this redefinition of the job, Big Data and Real Time Marketing take on significantly new qualities, first as a rich vein of timely information about the marketplace and secondly as a never ending series of instant field experiments to provide empirical backing to strategy.

Now, marketing’s job isn’t to sell stuff, it’s to make sense of the market and, in doing so, help define the overall strategic direction of the company. There are no short cuts, no top ten tricks, but isn’t that one hell of a job description?

The Psychology of Usefulness: The Acceptance of Technology – Part Three

In Part Two of this series, I looked at Davis and Bagozzi’s Technology Acceptance Model, first proposed in 1989.

Technology_Acceptance_Model

As I said, while the model was elegant and parsimonious, it seems to simplify the realities of technology acceptance decisions too much. In 2000, Venkatesh and Davis tried to deal with this in TAM 2 – the second version of the Technology Acceptance Model.

TAM2

In this version, they added several determinants of Perceived Usefulness and demoted Perceived Ease of Use to being just one of the factors that impacted Perceived Usefulness.  Impacting this mental calculation were two mediating factors: Experience and Voluntariness. This rebalancing of factors provides some interesting insights into the mental process we go through when making a decision whether we’ll accept a new technology or not.

Let’s begin with the determinants of Perceived Usefulness in the order they appear in Venkatesh and Davis’s model:

Subjective Norm: TAM 2 resurrects one of the key components of the original Theory of Reasoned Action model – the opinions of others in your social environment.

Image: Venkatesh and Davis also included another social factor in their list of determinants – how would the acceptance of this technology impact your status in your social network? Notice that our calculation of the image enhancement potential has the Subjective Norm as an input. It’s a Bayesian prediction – we start with our perceived social image status (the prior) and adjust it based on new information, in this case the acceptance of a new technology.

Job Relevance: How applicable is the technology to the job you have to do?

Output Quality: How will this technology impact your ability to perform your job well?

Result Demonstrability: How easy is it to show the benefits of accepting the technology?

It’s interesting to note how these factors split: the first two (subjective norm and image) being related to social networks, the next two (Job Relevance and Output Quality) being part of a mental calculation of benefit and the last one, Demonstrability, bridging the two categories: How easy will it be to show others that I made the right decision?

According to the TAM 2 model, we use these factors, which combine practical task performance considerations and social status aspirations, into a rough calculation of the perceived usefulness of a technology. After this is done, we start balancing that with how easy we perceive the new technology to be to use. Venkatesh and Davis commented on this and felt that Perceived Ease of Use has a variable influence in two areas, the forming of an attitude towards the technology and a behavioral intention to use the technology. The first is pretty straight forward. Our attitude is our mental frame regarding the technology. Again, to use a Bayesian term, it’s our prior. If the attitude is positive, it’s very probably that we’ll form a behavioral intention to use the technology. But there are a few mediating factors at this point, so let’s take a closer look at the creation of Behavioral Intention..

In forming our intention, Perceived Ease of Use is just one of the determinants we use in our “Usefulness” calculation, according to the model. And it depends on a few things. It depends on efficacy – how comfortable we judge ourselves to be with the technology in question. It also depends on what resources we feel we will have access to to help us up the learning curve. But, in the forming of our attitude (and thereby our intention), Venkatesh and Davis felt that Perceived Usefulness will typically be more important than Perceived Ease of Use. If we feel a technology will bring a big enough reward, we will be willing to put up with a significant degree of pain. At least, we will in what we intend to do. It’s like making a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. At the time we form the intention, the pain involved is sometime in the future, so we go forward with the best of intentions.

As we move forward from Attitude to Intention, this transition if further mediated in the model by our subjective norm – the cognitive context we place the decision in. Into this subjective norm falls our experience (our own evaluation of our efficacy), the attitudes of others towards the technology and also the “Voluntariness” of the acceptance. Obviously, our intention to use will be stronger if it’s a non-negotiable corporate mandate, as opposed to a low priority choice we have the latitude to make.

What is missing from the TAM 2 model is the link between Perceived Ease of Use and actual Usage. Just like a New Year’s Resolution, intentions don’t always become actions. Venkatesh and Davis said Perceived Ease of Use is a moving, iteratively updated calculation. As we gain hands-on experience, we update our original estimate of Ease of Use, either positively or negatively. If it’s positive, it’s more likely that Intention will become Usage. If negatively, the technology may fail to become accepted. In fact, I would say this feedback loop is an ongoing process that may repeat several times in the space between Intention and Usage. The model, with a single arrow going in one direction from Intention to Usage, belies the complexity of what is happening here.

Venkatesh and Davis wanted to create a more realistic model, expanding the front end of the model to account for determinants going into the creation of Intention. They also wanted to provide a model of the decision process that better represented how we balance Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. I think they made some significant gains here. But the model is still a linear one – going in one direction only. What they missed is the iterative nature of acceptance decisions, especially in the gap between Intention and Behavior.

In Part Four, we’ll look at TAM 3 and see how Venkatesh further modified his model to bring it closer to the real world.

So, Six Seconds is the Secret, Huh?

First published February 13, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

oreo-superbowl-blackout-adApparently, the new official time limit for customer engagement is 6 seconds, according to a recent post on Real Time Marketing. How did we come up with 6? Well, in the world of social media engagement it seemed like a good number and no one has called bull shit on it yet, so 6 it is

Marketers love to talk about time – just in time, real time, right time. At the root of all this “time talk” is the realization that customers really don’t have any time for us, so we have to somehow jam our messages into the tiny little cracks that may appear in the wall of willful ignorance they carefully build against marketing. The marketer’s goal is to erode their defenses by looking for any weakness that may appear.

Look at the supposed poster child for Real Time Marketing – the Oreo coup staged during the black out in the 2013 Super Bowl. Because the messaging was surprising and clever, and because, let’s face it, we weren’t doing much of anything else anyway, Oreo managed to gain a foothold in our collective consciousness for a few precious seconds. So, marketers being marketers, we all stumbled over ourselves to proclaim a new channel and launch a series of new micro-attacks on consumers. That’s where the 6 seconds came from. Apparently, that’s the secret to storming the walls. Five seconds and you’re golden. Seven seconds and you’re dead.

Oreo surprised us, and it wasn’t because the message was 6 seconds long. It was because we weren’t expecting a highly relevant, highly timely message. Humans are built to respond to things that don’t fit within our expected patterns. The whole approach of marketing is to constantly blanket us with untimely, irrelevant messages. Marketers, to be fair, try to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person, but it’s really hard to do that. So, we overcompensate by delivering lots of messages all the time to everyone, hoping to get lucky. Not to take anything away from the cleverness and nimbleness of the Oreo campaign, but they got lucky. We were surprised and we let our defenses down long enough to be amused and entertained. Real time marketing wasn’t a brilliant new channel; it was a shot in the dark – literally.

And there’s no six-second gold standard of engagement. If you can deliver the right message at the right time to the right person, you can spend hours talking to your prospective customer.  It’s only when you’re trying to interrupt someone with something irrelevant that you have to hopefully shoehorn it into their consciousness. Think of it like a Maslow’s hierarchy of advertising effectiveness.  At it’s best advertising should be useful. This sits at the top of the pyramid. After usefulness comes relevance – even if I don’t find the ad useful to me right now, at least you’re talking to the right person. After relevance comes entertainment – I’ll willingly give you a few seconds of my time if I find your message amusing or emotionally engaging.  I may not buy, but I’ll spend some time with you. After entertainment comes the category the majority of advertising falls into – a total waste of my time.  Not useful, irrelevant, not emotionally engaging. And making an ad that falls into this category 5 seconds long, no matter what channel it’s delivered through, won’t change that. You may fool me once, but next time, I’m still going to ignore you.

There was something important happening during the Oreo campaign at the 2013 Super Bowl, but it had nothing to do with some new magic formula, some recently discovered loophole in our cognitive defenses. It was a sign of what may, hopefully, emerge as trend in advertising – nimble, responsive marketing that establishes a true feedback loop with prospects. What may have happened when the lights went out in New Orleans is that we may have found a new, very potent way to make sense of our market and establish a truly interactive, responsive dialogue with them. If this is the case, we may have just found a way climb a rung or two on the Advertising Effectiveness Hierarchy.