We Love WeHateYour.com
Check out this great video about online behavior - pointing out the silly groupthink that dominates far too much internal conversations about digital marketing, social media and brand .com sites.
Via: @KevinKruse
Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Deep thought in the land of shortcuts
Scanning the headlines of any marketing industry publication and you’re guaranteed to see at least 5 articles with the title following this format:
5 tips to get more site traffic!
10 mess-ups that make people unsubscribe!
6 things top Brands do to get better creative!
OK - You get the pattern… And it’s worse on Twitter. 10 tips for this. 20 must-see those. Waaaay too many simplifications of search engine optimization, design, social media, organizational design and - worst of all - leadership (”4 habits that make for bad leaders” - ugh).
It seems like a lot of coverage for marketing wants to prove that key marketing disciplines are super easy, and can be boiled down into easy to digest soundbites and lists you could just tack on the wall and call yourself an expert (and full disclosure - we’ve even done posts with lists in them on Cultural Fuel before, but we did include a caveat).
What is dangerous about the Cult Of The Short & Snappy List is the idea that you can take something complex, like say ‘What Moms Do Online’, and reduce it to a bulleted list, ready to be included on a Powerpoint slide, when the reality is much richer, and therefore the opportunity for real engagement is much richer as well. People in our industry are often pushed to simplify to the point of abstraction, creating short-cuts by the use of simple language and a big graphic in the middle of the slide. But I tend to side more with Edward Tufte - who famously said “to clarify, add detail” (although he was talking about the design of the iPhone at the time). Our clients and creative professionals are just that - professionals. And if data is required to get at the insight - then you should show the data. If a short-cut will lose the richness of the interaction - then avoid the short-cut. Don’t be afraid to have your audience think. And don’t avoid the work of thinking deeply yourself.
Daniel Sharkov wrote a good piece on his blog about why he prefers and recommends an infrequent posting schedule and in my opinion it comes down to deep thinking. Rather than finding 10 examples of a trend, a marketer should examine why there is a trend. I like the fact that when Gini Dietrich put together a set of articles about Social Media Trends that she spent at least some time talking about why she believes they are important and what drives them. But no one would ever assert or imagine that trend reporting is comprehensive. Its very nature is synthesis of observation - not inclusive of all aspects of culture by design.
What’s critical to our industry is continuing our focus on the underlying reasons for why people behave as they do - and it’s rarely a simple endeavor. To have a list of what those behaviors can be grouped into is still just a list, but digging underneath the surface is required to get at real insight.
Ultimately, lists are not insight because they focus solely on simplicity. Insights are true whether they are complex or not.
18
10 2010
‘Surf and Win’ launches today
Stretching the idea that your average person is gunning for an endorsement deal from their products and services - Shortbord launches today!
It has good integration with Twitter and Facebook (but who doesn’t?) but I’m not sure that the people who do these kinds of things for money are really the right people to represent brands. How many times would you read the status updates of someone who was more interested in getting paid for their endorsement than connecting with you? For how long would they remain your friend?
For Cause Marketing, I think it has potential, simply because the updates are less annoying and interruptive, but Brands should remember that in order to get good ‘friends’ online you have to _act_ like a good friend.
via Thrillist
11
05 2010
iPad: Our first first hand impressions
So, thanks to our colleague Karen Green in Chicago, we received an iPad today in the office mail.
After finding a workaround for the fact the the German Appstore doesn’t work for the iPad yet, we started playing around a bit. Apart of noticing how crappy iPhone apps look on the iPad, there are some first observations.
First off, the device is pretty amazing and we can see how it has the power to alter a lot of human behavior. But in the first moments, it’s not changing behaviors radically, it’s augmenting them. Funnily, when you use it to read magazines and newspaper apps, you revert to analog user behavior. The interesting thing is that it becomes a combination of your analog user behavior with digital interaction expectations. What this means is that User Experience professional are designing for both kinds of worlds when it comes to magazine apps. Seems pretty obvious, but when you start playing around with it you also notice a lot of gaps between those two different ways of usage. So it will be a matter of how well XPs and Designers fill that gap. You no longer do print layout or interaction design. You will have to know how to both without compromises for the print type medium and the weblike medium.
Case in point: we feel the NYT App works with much more expectation conformity than the Popular Science App. It works like a newspaper except it has some interactive elements. Even the contained advertising isn’t at all surprising or weird to the user. It’s what you would expect from a newspaper with the cachet of NYT. Like any good user experience, you don’t notice how great the usability is. It however needs a little more interactive stuff at the right place.
The popular science application however, doesn’t really quite seem what it is yet. It looks amazing, but it has an odd usage paradigm that is neither analog nor interactive nor an easy to use amalgam of both. From navigating to flipping pages and a lack of real interactivity to not being able to differentiate the advertising, it just doesn’t feel there yet.
So, I am sure web User Experience heuristics will apply for the iPad as well, but they will also radically alter. Maybe heuristics will be created for types of magazines in similar ways that different heuristics have been developed for differing types of sites, i.e. e-commerce sites vs news portals vs social networks. Finding that right user experience will probably go a long way in terms of really working for a unique brand experience that helps position the brand.
Second, apart from the obvious changes need to develop applications for private end users, when you look at this through the lens of the brand or marketing person, you get tons of ideas instantly on how to make brands relevant in this context. The long touted “brand user experience” can really happen here with the best of all media channel worlds. Also an interesting thought might be on whether the user experience paradigm of whatever eMagazine you advertise in influences your ad experience. Since ads can be interactive, their interactivity might have to embedded into the magazine’s usage paradigm to really work. Spinning cars in automobile ads are nice, but there’s probably more. Or, of course it will need to be so special that you want to interact with it regardless. The potential of print ads with stopping power: it might be back.
Third, not just that, while we believe private end users will probably keep the iPad at home (because, let’s be honest: it is NOT a working tool for the types of thing we need to do at the office, barring some exceptions), the possibilities for specific industries literally lie in your hand. Really anyone who could directly profit from bridging a analog-digital gap or augmenting existing processes and information flows will have a field day with this: car dealers, retailers, logistics, restaurants, you name it. Not just for marketing, but also internal processes. And, of course marketing departments of all types of industries will not pass this up to do their name generation, promos, etc with it.
So, while it might take some time to become mainstream, it looks like exciting times for everyone. Designers get to design in a new way, marketers to market in a new way and newspapers can survive with a new type of advertising again. Almost to good to be true.
We will do some user testing on it and report back.
12
04 2010
Marketing to Women
How many times has this topic been discussed? Possibly more than any other. But reading the Seven Principles for Marketing to Women on the Retail Customer Experience.com site, I was struck by how important it is to heed ‘the basics’ in our work with this half of the population.
I think the article is worth a read - and not just for retail insight. Even in the realms of interaction design and channel strategy, we have to take the time to make sure we are viewing the decisions that women make through a lens of their priorities and values.
Or - do you think this model is outdated? Are we seeing behaviors that are not always really there, and looking to evolutionary evidence to confirm our preconceptions? (The author is a cognitive anthropologist but that doesn’t make him infallible!)
via: RetailCustomerExperience.com
Plus - it looks like there is a page takeover ad running today on the site (and probably for the next few days) of Microsoft’s Embedded Retail Device technology that is super-cool. Check that out as well!
20
03 2010
“Hacking” Google Street View for Buzz Marketing a band
In an attempt to find yet another way to create buzz, the band “Editors” present themselves and their new album in the context of Google Street View. Of course, it is not a real hack but more an overlay (or mash-up) of their own content in the context of their website. Still, even it is a novelty one-off, it is a great idea to use technology like this, and it is well executed. User can use well-known google maps and street view navigation to listen to the album’s songs and see the band members hiding in the streets of London.
02
11 2009
People are not the problem, marketing warfare is.
What’s been frying my goat for a while lately (like 10 years or so) is looking at how we conduct our business in the agency landscape. We use military words like Briefing, Strategy, Tactics, Campaign, Target, Territory, Launch and Positioning everyday. I am wondering what good it does using this language of war. Everyone says that marketing is war. Is it? War against what?
Let’s ask Billy Bob, a traditional, gun-toting marketer who believes marketing is war:
Billy Bob: I tell you who we’re fightin’, buddy. It’s them dang evil-doer consumers. These folks are conspirin’ against us, leadin’ a lawless digital lifestyle, creat’n’ all this brand brouhaha for us marketers, destroying our brand values and shooting web2.0 flak right down from the blogosphere and what have you. If we don’t strike them with a big nice nuclear promotion, we be fixin’ to go down with our brand reputation. So, I am asking you: are you with us or with the consumers?
Personally, Billy Bob, I believe war is not an answer. We’ve been seeing this for a long time and we’ve been turning our faces away, hoping this Internet thing would just go away. Fact is, we’ve just made it a war because we see human behavior as something we need to manipulate and change, and we made it marketing’s job to manipulate that human behavior. Also of course, it is our job to build a ridgid brand fortress, that can defend itself against its enemies, the competition. Now that digital technologies have empowered people and changed the rules of the game, it isn’t as easy to manipulate people, and advertising just doesn’t seem to work anymore. And, for lack of a better idea, what’s our response? More troops for the trenches, bigger defense budgets, more artillery.
Because the Billy Bob Marketing budget for ineffective advertising, whether in “traditional” or “digital” channels, is steadily rising, no matter how inefficient. As a result, to stay within the militaristic metaphor we seem so used to, “consumers” soon become “casualties of war.” Well, I guess, you know, such is war. I mean, we tried to use our smart micro-segmentation bombs and even put 10% of our budget into our magic digital targeted media bullet, but you’re always gonna get some collateral damage, right? After all, this is why we call those casualties consumers: this way they remain abstract and we don’t have to connect with their actual life.
Seriously, this terminology, and more importantly, the warped thinking behind it isn’t appropriate anymore, and maybe never was. So if you’re asked by Billy Bob to support the troops in advertising and marketing , it’s just not black and white anymore. All I know is: I don’t wanna support the troops and their strategic goals of “increasing brand awareness” or “building brand preference” or “driving brand consideration” if all I get is an unhuman, purposeless advertising carpet bombing campaign. This marketing warfare myth has to go. The point is, you can’t work like that anymore.
Ok, sure. Let’s say we all agree. How would we go about everything if we stripped out all this militaristic lingo and the thinking behind it?
- Don’t just think about positioning in “what is…”, think about “what if?”
- Don’t start with the category, the product or the brand. Because, guess what, you will end up where you left off.
- Instead, start with a purpose. A purpose, mind you, not a promise. A purpose needs a conviction, a reason for being and a fuel that amplifies it. Fuel comes from a human behavior that we want to enable.
- Based on this purpose, think of acts that a brand can create to enable that human behavior in positive ways, instead of just cranking out ads.
- Don’t think of creativity as idea generation for campaigns, think of creativity as ideas for experiences and valuable exchanges.
- Don’t message at people, message for something they believe in.
- Don’t call them consumers, call them people.
Peace out, y’all.
12
11 2008
Peer relations
eMarketer newsletter brought fresh data on the relation of social media usage and shopping behavior - esp. among the so-called “Generation Y” demographic:
- 85% of Gen Y and 39.3% auf US “retail respondents” are social networkers
- The most relevant social networking sites (for the US) are, still, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.
- Search engines, online rating systems, discussion forums and blogs are perceived as the most relevant sources for product information that influences purchase decisions. These media rank above company websites, even.
eMarketer: “Consumers’ use of social media is altering the way they make purchase decisions. To stay relevant, retailers must determine how to incorporate social media, such as social networks and blogs, into their marketing strategies.”
And that’s exactly the point: Companies must find ways to engage with people who have increasingly learnt to come to the internet for peer produced information. Simply advertising in social networks may be a start - at least there is reach. But the real challange is for brands to raise to peer-level in terms of trust, authenticity - and relevance.
02
10 2008
The Microsite is dead. Long live the microsite!
At the risk of overquoting David Armano these days, when I read his blog entry on Microsites, I could literally hear the chords being struck for me there. And, of course, I was mad I didn’t write about Microsites before he did. 
Currently, we get to do quite a number of microsites for our clients, as they are part of their “mix” now. Generally, I don’t have a problem with microsites: they can be quite engaging and also deliver on some key metrics. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, they even get viral and create the extra boon of awareness.
However, I think there are a number of other things as well that you can do to achieve communication objectives, and more imporantly, user objectives. When Microsites are briefed automatically and as an after-thought, as part of a larger “big idea” ad campaign, it makes sense to step back and first assess what the objectives were and then choose the correct tactic. The fact is, a microsite isn’t always the right tactic in the digital toolkit, or sometimes, it can only be a good tactic if you do a number of other things as well.
In order to do this assessment you need to really look at how people behave in regards to level of awareness they already have, where they go to get the kind of information you are talking about, where they would expect this information to be if they didn’t already know where to look, and also, if whatever context you embed your microsite in can ever be a credible one. This, unfortunately, takes time to find out; time you don’t always get at the tail-end of an already established “above-the-line” campaign. Also, it requires redefining the true and tried marketing KPI of reach and impressions. If you keep gauging digital experience with those, you will never be quite happy with what you did.
That’s why, in my experience, the most effective campaigns in which microsites played a vital role were those, where the campaign idea wasn’t created in a vacuum of creating a big idea TV spot, but rather when a team of multi-channel creatives, planners and designers got together simultaneously to come up with ideas based on existing human behavior and to create ideas for experiences, not just messages.
In effect, how I would like to think of as the microsite is that it is a great tool, when you don’t see it as something you have to produce just because it is part of the marketing toolkit. What it should rather be is a reason to look at what people do and to influence the purpose of the whole campaign, including your “ATL” .
Hint: if you can’t make a microsite that achieves objectives, it’s not always because the people who make it are out of ideas, or because there is a problem with making digital work for your brand. Sometimes, it’s because you should ask your digital people to help you create the overall campaign to carry a bigger purpose than just a message.
