Trends for 2013: Evolution of cross channel marketing

In 2013 we’re seeing the maturation and evolution of new forms of communication: the integration of three trends, to create a richer, differentiating, relationship with brands.

1. Gamification – encouraging a closer relationship with customers by providing rewards for interaction with the Brand.
2. Content marketing – providing additional material with the goal of building interest, affiliation, trust and purchase. 
3. Leveraging the second screen –  people are interacting with their smartphones, tablets, etc. while watching TV; advertisers and content providers are feverishly seeking ways to build the brand relationship by engaging multiple screens for a deeper experience.

Here’s a nice example of a content provider doing all three of these, from today’s LA Times, about the new show, Banshee.  Viewers who enter a code that is provided in the opening credits of each show are able to access on their second screens material about the characters and storyline, enriching their Banshee brand experience. This is a tight linkage, goes beyond simply having a multi-channel platform with a twitter feed, a website, etc. 

Caution: In order for this integrated approach to be productive in building your Brand, there has to be compelling reason for your targeted consumers to move across channels, and the experience has to be easy and rewarding for them.  This is where it gets exciting for me – marketing research (UX/SUS, for example) can play a crucial role in optimizing that cross – channel experience. Contact me to continue the conversation!

Ideas on Fostering Creativity

These tips might help you the next time you are seeking a creative solution to an issue. Psychology Today cites 4 steps, proven by research – see the full article for the references and a little more detail.  One of these studies is from the Journal of Consumer Research, and actually says that providing the right level of ambient noise can spur consumers to consider buying more innovative products, presumably opening them up to purchase decisions they might otherwise not even consider. 

Here are the four bits of advice:   

1. Tired is ok! For cracking straightforward problems, or linear thinking, being at your most alert is useful.  But for creative, abstract, thinking, being a little less focused can be good. The mind wanders, and it lets connections come to the fore that it would otherwise ruthlessly pare away or dismiss.  Those unusual connections may be just what the problem needs.
2. Silence isn’t golden. Turns out, just the right level of ambient noise and hubbub “induces processing disfluency”, meaning, makes it harder to process information, just a bit.  That jars your mind out of its usual ways of thinking, stimulating abstract thinking and open the door for creativity. 
3. Embrace the conflict.  Accept the paradox that you are trying to address without stress and anxiety, see it as more of an interesting puzzle, and you may be better able to make sense of the contradictions you are seeing, come up with some creative resolution.
4. Give yourself time and space.   Carve out a specific time to mull over whatever the issue is, creativity needs that time set apart.  We are not likely to be hit by inspiration while the mind is totally engaged and focused on other tasks. 

Why do these work? Another Psych Today article, Unlocking the Mystery of Creativity: Why Great Artists Steal, adds some light – to be creative, we are using disparate parts of our brain, making novel connections across neurons that don’t often “talk” to each other, and these 4 steps may help free us up to do that.  

 

Quick Helpful Ways to Remember

The UCLA magazine has an interesting quick read on how to learn better, covering work by the Psychology Department’s R Bjork.  Yes, this is a shameless plug for the Psych department where I earned my Ph.D. In a nutshell (or cranium as the case may be):

1. Space the learning.  Don’t try to cram it in the night before, look at the material a couple of times, maybe a few days apart. 
2. Work it.  The harder the brain has to work at something, the more likely we are to remember it, so try to recall, don’t just immediately look it up online.  Push yourself.
3. Recast it.  Summarize what you’ve heard or seen in your own words, ideally just after.  This is more effective than just transcribing what you’ve seen (see #2!)
4. Move around. If you usually read/study in one place, move to another from time to time.  The very experience of a change of scene can aid learning. 
5. Switch it up. If you are studying something complex, it is useful to move across concepts rather than studying straight through on one and then moving on to another.  Making the brain do those mental jigs and jags stimulates it and embeds the learning.  For example: don’t study just the next set of verbs in a language then later the next set of nouns, mix back and forth. 
6. Test yourself.  Sorry but it appears to be true: being put to the test galvanizes the brain. Dr. Bjork:  “When you’re tested, you do more than just reveal what you know; you make that information more recallable in the future”. So there is a strong benefit of testing.  

Since I’ve recently taken up golf and studying Italian, I can vouch for the efficacy of these tools.  Ciao, baby. 

Changes in Grocery Shopping Patterns Driven by Demo’s and Technology

There’s a dramatic shift underway in the way we buy groceries, driven by the shift in dominance from Baby Boomers to Millenials, and the upsurge in mobile technology.  Implications for the grocery industry: expect even less loyalty to channels and brands than we have today.

Shifting demographics:

Progressive Grocer cites the shift from Baby Boomers to Millennials as a key driver of changes in shopping patterns. 

There will be lots of Millenials.  By 2020, Millennials over the age of 25 will make up 19% of the population (they are only 5% in 2010).  By that time the Baby Boomers will finally fall to below 20%.  

They have money to spend.  Unlike retired Baby Boomers, on fixed incomes, these Millenials will be entering the time of life associated with high spending as careers progress,  households form,  and children are born. 

Millenials are less loyal to channels and brands. 

Millenials: 47% rate brand name “extremely” or “somewhat” important in driving grocery choices, vs. 61% of Boomers.  They may also be more open to trading down to private-label products (require less of a discount to trade down).

Millenials: 41% of total food $ are spent at traditional grocers, vs. 50% for Boomers.

MIllennials spend differently. 

They are more price sensitive than Boomers, willing to shop for deals,

They are also more willing to pay more for natural/organic foods (58% would pay more, vs. only 43% of Boomers).  

Shifting channel use, increased role for digital media:

We are increasingly fragmented in our channel use, and we are using technology to facilitate our grocery shopping and food decisions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean buying groceries online, that’s still a tiny business (but growing robustly).  It does mean using smart phones and other technology to expand and express our engagement with food.    In just one year, 2011, the penetration of smart phones has skyrocketed, from 27% to 42% (ComScore, 2012 Mobile Future in Focus, February 2012­).  In a recent article The Hartman Group  reviews results of proprietary research on the role of the Internet in driving grocery purchasing patterns.   Some trends they call out:

Online purchasing of CPG  “works”only in some cases.Those most like to be satisfied with buying consumer packaged goods online: dual income, harried households – they pay more for online goods, but the convenience is worth it. 

The weak spots for online buying are opps for bricks & mortar. Fresh foods just don’t work well online, still.  Successfully engaging consumers around perishables will be a differentiator for retailers. 

Social media can be used to engage consumers – and support retailer loyalty.  The Hartmann article cites some great examples, such as Whole Foods, of retailers that are successfully engaging their customers around the food experience, both digitally and in the store.  Building that strong engagement ties their target consumer to the WF brand.    

Who knew? Exercise improves mental functioning and mood in young people

A review of 14 studies by a Dutch team of researchers confirms: kids who get more exercise get better grades and test scores on a wide array of measures of cognitive performance: general thinking and memory, but also specifically on math and language.  The reason why isn’t clear, but might be because physical activity stimulates greater blood flow to the brain, may help them concentrate better.  For more on this, see the synopsis in the Monitor on Psychology.

Another study cites the emotional benefits of physical activity – college kids who are more active reported higher levels of enthusiasm and excitement than the couch potatoes. 

Implications: We tend to focus on the weight – regulation benefits of physical activity, but these analyses provide other meaningful benefits to cite for products that foster physical activity.  The key is to tie these benefits to activity.  Impacts on mood and mental sharpness might be faster to experience than weight loss, and if they are called out, associated with the physical activity, they might offset negatives (tired, sweaty, achy) that could sabotage any efforts to be more active.  In our own lives – if we are mindful of these benefits, and attribute them to the exercise, it can help support our efforts to stay active and to cultivate an active lifestyle for our families.

BREAKING NEWS!

We’ve been busy and we would like to share the good news!

We are always seeking better ways to provide excellent service to our clients through our continuous improvement process, and here’s our latest accomplishment:

Nufer Marketing Research, Inc. has been named 1 of 52 companies to be certified as a Platinum Woman-owned business, based on completion of a 5-week business development program.

         

Back to the Lab: Neurosciences’ Contribution to Evaluating Ads and Programming

Last week I attended the SoCal MRA Entertainment Research Forum titled Product Placement, Sponsorship Integration, and Advertising Effectiveness.  The 4 speakers represented various facets of the entertainment and research industries.  What was particularly interesting is the continued investment in a neuroscientific approach to understanding advertising and programming effectiveness.  This is captivating to me, since my Ph.D. dissertation was conducted in UCLA’s Medical School, studying the anatomical and physiological differences between male and female brains, and I started my grad work in a lab that used EEGs as part of biofeedback training to help pilots maintain alertness.

In a nutshell (or skull, sometimes one and the same): neuroscientific approaches use one of a few technologies to assess our physical responses to visual stimuli such as ads or brief snippets of programming.  There’s an informative blogger, Roger Dooley, who tracks this developing industry.  There are two basic approaches in use these days:

1. EEG – this involves a cap placed on the respondent’s head with lots of small sensitive devices that read changes in brain wave activity that manage to be read through the skull.  Pair it with an eye tracking device, and you can track changes in brain wave activity moment by moment in response to particular parts of the visual stimuli.  Add devices to read other physical measures (galvanic skin response, heart rate, etc.) and you can tie this to other measures of engagement with what is seen on screen.  Downside: rather gross measures.
2. fMRI – this provides the deepest read of what is going on in the brain in response to stimuli.  We can see different parts of the brain “light up” as the brain processes various visuals.  Neuroscientists apply their knowledge of the function of specific areas of the brain to interpret these patterns.  Downside: very costly; respondent has to be inside an fMRI machine, that’s a very unnatural setting.

In last week’s forum, Bruce Rosenblum, EVP Warner Brothers Media Research & Insights, presented a compelling case history of their experimentation with the EEG method at their state of the art media lab.  He was quite effective in setting this new neuroscience tool in context, as just one of the tools researchers can deploy. The case history demo’d WB’s evaluations of engagement with not just 30 second ads, but entire 3.5 minute programming segments.  In this case, the segments were Brand Integration segments, a 3.5 min piece showcasing a sponsor’s (Walgreen’s) product (mobile health van), integrated into a talk show.   The moment by moment analysis enabled his team to determine what aspects of a segment were particularly engaging.  They can use this type of information to fine tune the scripting, the visuals, and the flow of these costly segments. Some general rules are emerging from the WB work, and they are quite consistent with tenets developed without this hi tech approach.  The neuroscience data may not only validate these tenets, but also refine our measurements, making them more actionable.

• arouse curiosity, but not confusion
• speak to the benefits not the features
• use natural conversations, humor, and narratives – not technical lingo, and definitely not marketing sales-y lingo
• interesting …don’t showcase Brand logos at the start, that triggers “ad alert!” and people disengage

This is an exciting new world for marketers and consumer insights, a field that is very much in its infancy, as the panelists acknowledged.  The links between brain waves or “lit up” brain areas and behavior or attitudes have yet to be mapped in any depth.  This is just a quick synopsis of a very interesting forum topic.   If you would like to discuss this in more depth, please contact me at 805 497 9090.