Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Leo Burnett Chief Innovation Officer Mark Renshaw - proponent of the virtues of game theory in marketing strategies - would love this one. Game theory didn’t just crack that really tough marketing brief, no, it cracked and AIDS enzyme puzzle research had been struggling with for years with the help with some online gamers, using the “Fun-for-purpose” platform Foldit.

Hats off not only to the gamers, but also the research group for thinking outside the box and sharing the credit in “Nature Structural & Molecular Biology” with the gamers.

Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab is quoted as saying

“The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

Indeed.

Read the news article here

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Leo Burnett Worldwide CCO Mark Tutssel sent us this inspiring video today. Jay Denhart also blogged about this from a semantic point of view here a few weeks ago, but I felt like talking about its relevance to the study of human behavior and brand management.

In this TED talk, research Deb Roy talks about an amazing project in which he recorded every word and image in his house, as his newborn son grew to learn how to talk and walk. Every bit of human behavior recorded, tracked. He has also found ways of visualizing this data in interesting new ways, unveiling patterns that may not have been apparent before.

Taking this approach the connected mass media world, he has used the tools available to him to show how people, mass media, content and contexts can be interlinked in 3D models, so that we can observe human behavior in the form of new social and interaction structures.

As a creative agency that has declared people and their behavior as the starting point of all our work (and with it behavioral planning), the sheer amount of MIT Media Lab computing power, long-term research vision and prowess to study human behavior makes me drool in envy. But also, as we move away from the brand era of mass media messaging to the people era of connected experiences, the work of Deb Roy reconfirms that continuous and deep study of human behavior - and the endeavor to create tools that help us understand it - is a worthwhile cause. Simply finding out about people’s attitudes and values, and inferring their preferences, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Rather, not only does behavioral planning unveil new patterns and types of insights that we wouldn’t have seen before, it also inspires us in ways to help brands make a qualitative difference in people’s lives that the tools of the TV and Brand era could never have.

While unfathomably complex to unravel and to look at, behavioral insights are much more substantive than traditional “consumer” insights, as they do not express an inferred interpretation about what people think or say about a brand (and how we then may be able to manipulate their perception) but rather, behavioral insights are building blocks to people’s journey through different product categories that paint a much more complete picture of how they actually live, and what they actually do. In other words, finding out what people say or think isn’t nearly as interesting or inspiring as what they do. Not only because those two things are rarely the same, but, more importantly, because today brand management and creating brand engagement isn’t so much about saying something to people but doing something with or for people along their whole customer life cycle. Observing behavior and understanding the drivers of behavior (as beautifully visualized by Deb Roy) therefore leads to not only to a completely different way of creating communications, but also to more purposeful interactions and experiences that allow brands to play a meaningful role in people’s lives.

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I reported on our tool development for our HumanKind Approach once in a while here and also about the development of a lexicon of human behavior that we call Behavioral Archtypes. I am glad to report the US press has picked up on it and given Carol Foley a nice write up for it.

As Leo Burnett moved from considering itself a “brand-centric” agency to one focused on “HumanKind,” it decided that it should spend some time researching just what humans do. Carol Foley, exec VP-director of research services, and her team set out on a quest to define types of human behavior. After months of digging through academic literature, they realized there really wasn’t a good model. One problem was that a lot of psychological research is focused on abnormal behaviors. That’s not what drives purchasing decisions. “Most of what we’re dealing with is just pretty normal behavior,” she said. So they created their own framework.

Read the whole thing here.

For more info on how it was done, read my original post from 7  months ago here.

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SUMMARY: Beware of software tools promising quick answers.

There are lots of companies popping up, claiming that their tool is be able to sift through the sea of internet chatter and bring marketing insights front and center in a beautiful chart or dashboard.

The only trouble is, they’re mostly full of it.

Analysis of online conversations is a complex business, not only because of the sheer volume of posts to analyze, but also because of the over-simplified way that some of the most popular tools present the data returned.  And both these issues make people to want to accept the ‘figures’ provided them - after all, the data _looks_ authoritative, right?

Over on Bloomberg Business Week, there is an article about a social media analytics company that mines millions of postings on social media sites to provide ‘insights’ back to advertisers.  But they tellingly tout their speed - software that reads and analyzes thousands of sentences per minute - finding “77,000 mentions of stubble online in less than six seconds.”  This is tech window dressing - Google is faster.  So what is being returned that is so smart?  The article goes on to mention that the company’s researchers isolated all the positive comments, categorized them into themes, and built a chart for the client ‘in less than an hour’ ranking the topics of conversation and motivation for the posters.

There are a few key things to watch out for in this story:

1.  You’re never going to be able to isolate _all_ the comments on any tool.  Not all conversations are public, and not all conversations are online.  Period.  Remember that you are only going to be able to analyze what someone decided to put online.

2. The people who buy your products are not necessarily the same people as those who tend to post a lot.  People who post a lot tend to want to talk (surprise), not necessarily listen or engage.  Always pay attention if a company says that they can being you the voice of your user - more likely than not they want to bring you the voice of a user, but not necessarily your user.

3. If the researchers took the time to go through any of the 77,000 mentions, they would probably find that well over half the returned posts are spam, and half of those remaining are not relevant.  Even with spam filters in place, it is amazing how few posts returned by the major tools are on-topic and usable.

4. Automated sentiment is notoriously inaccurate - with the vast majority of tools returning 80% of posts with no sentiment applied whatsoever, and often incorrect flagging of the balance.

5. They try to talk about the tool doing the heavy-lifting, but if you read carefully it’s clear that the research team had to synthesize the actual results.  Software stinks at thinking like a human, and so it was really the research team that pulled the insight together.  And pulling an insight together in an hour is not my idea of a powerful selling point.  I’d rather the team spend the time to come up with an answer that changes my thinking, or changes behavior, or changes the world.

Simply put - tools and companies that tout both speed and correct answers are pulling your leg.  There is no Google for insights where you just plug your question in and get a smart answer popped back to you.  It takes hard work, manual review and critical thinking.  Add smart tools to this kind of a mix, and you start really being able to change the world and turn the industry on its head.

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Within the pursuit of being students of human behavior, Leo Burnett researcher Carol Foley is developing a typology of human behavior, called Behavioral Archetypes (SM).

The Tool allows the classification of human behavior and the brands response behavior.
Our starting point for all explorations of behavior must be to identify and understand what people are doing right now with regard to our brand or product.

The psychological literature is full of references to specific types of behavior.

• Risk-taking
• Habit
• Altruism
• Status seeking.

Yet no one has sorted out all of these various types of behavior, nor created a schema of their relationships to one another.

Were we to be able to do this, we could begin with the behavior itself, rather than with a psychological perspective, and then allow the relevant perspectives to inform that behavior further.

Through over 10,000 interviews in multiple studies, we’ve been able to quantitatively map all of the major types of behavior into a paradigm.

• We gave people life situations as stimuli
• Asked them to rate how likely they would be to engage in a list of behaviors
• Factor analyzed the behaviors to establish archetypes
• Used correspondence analysis to map them, so as to understand dimensionality
• There are over 100 archetypes in the paradigm which collapse into 8 major groupings.

What is important about Behavioral Archetypes(SM), and what substantially validates it, is the degree to which it mirrors models of human motives and values. The model allows for spotting adjacent behaviors (e.g. the freedom behavior’s neighbours are self-interest and change) as well as opposite behaviors (e.g. the the change behavior’s opposite is preservation) as well as 40-50 sub-behaviors per behavior category. See below.

Further investigation into human behavior with this model also leads to insights (behavior tensions) regarding

1. the effects of exaggerating a behavior (e.g. an exaggerated behavior of self-interest leads to narcissism)
2. Resolving behaviors, i.e. which behaviors pop-up in situations where things don’t go as people had planned. E.g. (when exhibiting a Preservation behavior and things do not go as planned, preservation behaviors such as “Security Seeking” are replaced by opposite preservation behaviors, such as “Minimizing Impact”.
3. Defining Themes. i.e. we believe between in the tension within 2 behaviors often lie defining themes in peoples lives, i.e. the personal decision and influence over our own competing behaviors lead to defining themes, such as between Freedom and Conformity behaviors, we always seem to get the question “Who decides?”. When I am exhibiting Freedom behavior it is my will to decide by myself and reject all heteronymy. Therefore, I always battle external forces making the decisions for me.

The tool lends itself to a more structured approach to behavior investigation, spotting behavioral tensions within the people that are most important to a brand and to formulate a brand behavior response.

If you are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us.

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A colleague just forwarded me a great online tool from Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford about the different ways that behavior can change - expressing the subtle but important ways that change is approached - whether it is new behavior, the duration of a familiar behavior or the cessation of a behavior.

Interesting stuff, and useful for building strategies that can affect behavior through the understanding of exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.  We typically include lots of information about the behaviors we are trying to impact, but this grid assists in clarifying the comparison of the change in context of other behaviors.

Via Kristin A. Hayward

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We recently completed a multi-market user experience / usability test for one of our clients. Many hours of planning and organization, as well a design and prototype developments went into this, as this was a test for a major european roll-out, and a lot of design assumptions had to be verified.

However, there are so many smaller projects in which, due to timing and budget, usability is never really tested. Sure, for a lot of things you can rely on the empirical knowledge of a senior user experience planner, but really observing people and their behavior with your end product, always shows that you can optimize the experience. Sometimes, you even find critical issues, no matter how well you thought it through.

Therefore, the question for anyone charged with the planning of experiences always is: how do we get user experience testing set up without being on the client’s agenda or in his budget? We usually fall back onto informal testing rounds and rapid prototype development with the designers making changes as planners generate insights and recommendations. We also developed small modules on how accomplish quick turnarounds on such issues as screening and recruiting and developed special agreements with our testing partners. However, we never formalized it as a process.

Today, I came across a great article by Paul Nuschke of Boxes and Arrows and his approach to the problem. Definitely a good read for all the Experience Planners out there.

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C. G. Jung used association tests to identify so called complexes, which are located in the unconscious of psyche. The brandtags site doesn’t necessarily get in touch with the unconscious areas of people’s minds, but it provides quite nice brand insights. Everyone can take part and type in own associations of prompted brands. What you get is a survey of all brand associations - ranked by frequency. Check out the results for brands you love, hate, or whatever… Or you can do the quiz by guessing to what brand the shown words are relating.

The bottom line is: This experiment doesn’t fulfill the quality criteria for empirical studies, of course. Anyway, one might possibly get some funky brand insights.

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It seems that most video-gamers react positively to in-game ads: 82 percent say the games are just as enjoyable with such ads as without them, according to a study by Nielsen BASES and Nielsen Games on behalf of in-game advertising network IGA Worldwide, writes MarketingCharts.

Moreover, integrating dynamic advertisements into videogame environments gives brands a measured lift in consumer awareness and opinion of the products players see during gameplay, the study found (via Wired).

Post-play, there was a 61 percent increase on average in consumers’ favorable opinions of products advertised in-game, according to the “Consumers’ Experience with In-Game Content & Brand Impact of In-Game Advertising Study.”

“With young adults now spending on average six hours a week gaming, advertisers should be excited at how well their messages were embraced and the brands positively perceived,” said Justin Townsend, CEO of IGA Worldwide.

Read more select findings from the study.

Source: http://www.marketingvox.com/82-of-gamers-dont-mind-contextual-in-game-ads-039331/

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