Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Just came across an article on the Washington Post’ Social Reader entitled “Why brainstorming doesn’t work”. I think most of us had the experience of failed or lackluster brainstorm sessions. In agency cultures, usually team-spirit and teamwork are often sought-for and proclaimed character traits that foster believe in a shared process of coming up with ideas. Territorial posturing aside, there are also some other issues at hand, that make brainstorming ineffective, as discovered by a recent study.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem may be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. Researchers asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

The cause might be due to “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise.

I am not sure the topic needed a study, because the insight is pretty common sense. However it reminds one to question the behavior to just pile a bunch of people in a room to create ideas.

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Garrett Ryan found an interesting article by Gregory Ferenstein giving some stats on some of the Facebook App tactics in use. The effectiveness of different Facebook strategies was determined by randomly giving users of Facebook apps different experiences and observing how activity spreads throughout the network.

If you ever wondered which ones work better, or needed some numbers, here you go: researchers found the winning strategy to be up to two times more effective than email, and 10 times more effective than banner ads.

Read the whole thing 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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We found an interesting, if not shocking statistic in on Upload Magazin, which quotes a Forrester statisitic, claiming that German users are the most passive Internet users in comparison to the US, UK, France, Korea.

Inactive users are classified as people who are not one of the following of Forrester’s categories: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners or Spectators.

In Germany 53% are inactive in comparison to the US with 25%, UK and France with 42%, and whopping 7% in South Korea.

The reasons for this human behavior is definitely worth researching. Is it German culture and history that keeps us from becoming active participants in social matters, or is it something more mundane?

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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.

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We stumbled upon an AdWeek article by Gregory Solman which talks about a study by Todd Turner, examining car sales number correlations to ad spend. The study finds out that there seems to be none.

Says the article:

Example: Despite healthy ad spending and incentives on the relatively new Chevrolet Silverado—marketed by Interpublic Group’s Campbell-Ewald in Warren, Mich.—the vehicle lost roughly 1 percent market share in the large-truck segment. General Motors spent $240 million on ads for that vehicle alone last year and $85 million through May, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

In contrast, sales of the barely marketed Ford Ranger—which gets perhaps $100,000 in annual ad support through WPP Group’s JWT—has made a 4 percent gain in its segment through June in the flat compact-pickup class.

Turners concludes: No amount of marketing can make up for product that isn’t competitive in its segment.”

I believe this to be true. Of course, even great advertising can’t always sell a bad product. But is the Ford Ranger really more competitive, or are there other (seemingly random) factors at play?

There is something to be said about how marketing budgets are actually spent. There is a prevalent automatism to open the marketing toolbox and spend your budget on purely ads and conventional incentive promotions or other things. Doing that, it gets harder and harder to make pure share of voice work for you these days. Nowadays, where there is no more market for messaging, and where people’s are bombarded with 3500 messages a day on average, an approach of couching your product and brand with in the context of peoples’ lives and their behavior is a much better choice.

However, such an approach requires looking at people not just as demographic and typological milieus, but their behavior and contexts across all phases of their automotive customer life cycle. The type of insights you glean can help you understand what the brand can do to be part of people’s lives, as opposed to making people buy your product by hitting them over the head with it. Also, once you realize that a brand can genuinely own a human pupose, it also requires the guts to leave behind the marketing toolbox thinking and rather start addressing pain points and joy points of people’s experiences.

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We recently did a global study on the relationship of money to happiness. It was international study in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, UAE, UK and the USA. Here is the press release for more information.

Findings from a global research project released reveal that despite a growing fixation with the rich and famous, people the world over associate the words ‘happiness’, ‘respect’ and ‘recognition’ with money far less than we might imagine.

‘Luxury’ in fact is the word most closely identified with money, with happiness coming far down on the list – suggesting that while we may chose to spend more in our quest for a high-end lifestyle, we know that money itself won’t bring us joy.

Further results from the 10-market study - carried out by advertising agency Leo Burnett and designed to capture insights into people’s evolving relationships with money - reveal a number of specific pointers worthy of note for global marketers: People in emerging markets are notably more financially confident about the next 12 months than those in the West.

It is not a given that the more money you have, the more comfortably-off you consider yourself – in fact respondents in China, for whom the average gross annual household income was less than 10,000 GBP, display the highest degree of comfort with their financial circumstances of respondents from any market.

Globally supermarkets are now more trusted than banks, insurers and credit card companies.

Although worldwide, “happiness” is only 10th out of 12 of the terms most closely associated with money, people in developing markets – with the exception of Russia – are more likely to associate money with happiness than Westerners. Three of the top four markets where people most frequently associate money with happiness are China, the UAE and Brazil. The same markets also associate money with “recognition.”

A meritocratic global economy is emerging as skills and intelligence are seen as the most important factors in determining how much money people will make in their lives, ahead of a person’s country of birth and family name

As with many areas of the survey, there are a number of market-specific differences in people’s feelings about credit. The Chinese view credit as a big help, and don’t worry about repayments. People in Brazil and Spain see it as a help, but do worry about it. Brits and Americans see credit as encouraging them to buy things they don’t need. Meanwhile, respondents from Germany and France are more likely than others to say that credit is dangerous and that they avoid using it whenever they can.

There seems to be a growing and shared recognition of “econology” – the close interrelationship between humanity, the economy and the environment. Respondents in eight out of the 10 markets surveyed consider climate change a threat to their personal financial security. Worldwide, climate change, on average, is considered a bigger threat to personal financial security than immigration, population growth or the growing influence of developing countries.

Tom Bernardin, Chairman and CEO of Leo Burnett Worldwide commented, “The findings are vital to marketers as it’s clear that whilst money may indeed make the world go around, the role of money in people’s lives is shifting over time and in significant ways. Money remains but an entity in which we store value, and it is understanding the value held therein that is critical if we’re to grasp people’s (consumer’s) aspirations and motivations correctly.”

Survey methodology: Close to 2000 people were interviewed in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, UAE, UK and the USA. Field work took place at the end of April 2008.

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