Tim O’Connor

Tim O'Connor

CMO - PCDI/Ashworth

Tim is CMO of PCDI/Ashworth, a Sterling Partners backed company, and a worldwide leader in Web 2.0 delivered online high school, career, associates, bachelors and master degree education to more than 50,000 students annually. Formerly he was a Managing Principal at Zyman Group (the firm started by Sergio Zyman), the SVP of Marketing for Unisource a $5B in sales Bain Capital backed company, and the VP Global Marketing and board member of Siemens AG's worldwide CIO organization. Currently he also is on the board of directors of the World Business Academy, and EthicMark®.

@AshworthCMO · facebook.com/ashworthcmo · tim_oconnor [at] me [dot] com

Using Tag Clouds for Market Research

September 4th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

In the movie Enemy of the State, Will Smith plays a lawyer who is tracked by the National Security Agency, as they believe Will’s character has a copy of a video of an assassination performed by a rogue group of NSA agents who kill a Congressman in a political-related murder. The movie is the typical spy thriller, and one of the most intriguing aspects of the film is how Hollywood attempts to showcase the NSA’s capabilities, including how it performs “research”. But first some background on the NSA.

The NSA (according to the PBS documentary The Spy Factory) is the largest, most secret and most technologically advanced intelligence agency in the world. Its mission: making and breaking codes; tapping into foreign signals, sifting through the international phone calls, emails, text and instant messages that blanket the modern world. Every day, more than 20,000 people flood into the NSA’s headquarters between Washington DC and Baltimore. Unlike undercover CIA operatives, spying in hostile territory, NSA’s spies use technology in what is believed to be the largest collection of mathematicians, linguists and computer scientists on the planet. Here’s a clip from the film.

While none of us mere mortals know what the NSA’s “research” capabilities are, it’s reasonable to assume the NSA uses advanced algorithms, super computers, and sophisticated software to help them sift through the enormous volume of analog data that goes through their systems each day. I say analog in the sense that a telephone call is linguistically analog, much like an open text field question in market research is analog.

But I don’t have 20,000 researchers on my staff and I doubt you do either. There is however, a fast, efficient and cheep way to perform analysis on analog research techniques such as open text fields, interviews and focus groups, and quickly gather a sense of the voice of the customer, without requiring an army of 20,000 researchers.

Use tag clouds; which is sort of like NSA-lite.

Just put the whole database of open text answers into one of the many tag cloud generators and see what interesting nuggets you find. My personal favorite tag cloud generator is Wordle.net, a freely available service. This approach doesn’t replace further analysis, just like I’m sure the NSA digs deeper into interesting nuggets it finds. But it will help you quickly identify themes which you can explore in your follow on research.

And a tag cloud can also help you do internal testing on marketing communications, print broadcast and web copy, investor and press releases, and speeches before they are launched. The cloud will show you if your MarCom is “on message” and help avoid communications that may mistakenly prime your audience the wrong way and plant an unconscious thought that you aren’t wanting to convey. And the cloud can be used to assess how well a message may support positive priming and reinforcement.

So let’s have some fun.

Here are three real examples where a tag cloud could have been used to avoid poor messaging. Each cloud used unedited text from the sited communications, the wordle.net engine, and the words were set up in alphabetical order.

This is a tag cloud from the opening section in GM’s 10-K as it emerges from bankruptcy. In the 10-K, GM attempts to distance itself from the old GM. However the tag cloud shows just the opposite happens. OLD GM and Bankruptcy are the center of attention. Perhaps “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Here’s a recent speech by Bob Dudley, Managing Director of BP to the Southern Governors Association, entitled “BP is in the Gulf to Stay.” Using the entire speech, the tag cloud emphasizes a different message…”make many million oil spill.” Yikes! I doubt that was the message BP wanted to leave with their audience.

And finally here’s a tag cloud of President Obama’s official White House biography.

The tag cloud emphasizes…Help. HELP? I hope that is not the message they are wanting to convey. I admit if you read his bio carefully, you will see help is put into a different context. However rare is the person who remembers context, especially in our always-on modern day filled with sound bites, text messaging and tweets. Repeated use of words in communications leave unconscious messages regardless of the context they are used in. That’s what priming, good and bad, is all about. For all the hype about Team Obama being Web2.0 savvy, I think his communications staff shows it doesn’t know what a tag cloud is; and that’s basic web functionality. Come on Team Obama, you can do better then HELP.

OMG, I sure hope they don’t sic the NSA on me now!

About Tim O'Connor - Tim is CMO of PCDI/Ashworth, a Sterling Partners backed company, and a worldwide leader in Web 2.0 delivered online high school, career, associates, bachelors and master degree education to more than 50,000 students annually. Formerly he was a Managing Principal at Zyman Group (the firm started by Sergio Zyman), the SVP of Marketing for Unisource a $5B in sales Bain Capital backed company, and the VP Global Marketing and board member of Siemens AG's worldwide CIO organization. Currently he also is on the board of directors of the World Business Academy, and EthicMark®.

→ No CommentsTags: CMO·Interactive Research·Market Research·Marketing·Marketing Measurement·Research·tag cloud·Tag Clouds

Neuromarketing Ethics: Why is it OK to rip off dumb people?

July 31st, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

In 1957 Andy Griffith played the role of a lifetime and it wasn’t Sheriff Andy Taylor. It was Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes and the film was A Face in the Crowd. The film makes me think about neuromarketing ethics and why marketers think it’s OK to rip off dumb people. Rhodes, while coarse and abusive in private, possesses a charm that quickly endears him to rural listeners after a small-town radio personality discovers him in the county jail of a small town in northeast Arkansas and lands him a radio show.

Before long, he begins to realize the power of his personality and how radio can magnify it, first to a Memphis TV station and then ultimately to New York where he stars in his own national television program and becomes the national TV spokesman for Vitajex, an innocuous dietary supplement made from just aspirin, caffeine, and sugar and more than 90% filler (hum sounds like modern day energy drinks to me).

Rhodes cynically convinces the sponsor to change the dull white tablets to yellow — “the color of sunshine!” — and on the spot crafts a dumbed-down but immensely effective positioning of the product that he instinctively knows will penetrate the minds of a mass-audience. A frenetic montage of Rhodes’s hyperbolic ads is one of the film’s most memorable sequences, highlighting the presumed gullibility of the American public to a persuasive con-artist through the power of mass media. Here’s this legendary scene. I won’t tell you more, other than to say at the end of the film he has the typical tragic fall, all the way to the bottom.

So what’s this have to do with neuromarketing ethics? The other day I heard a story on NPR about impulsive buying being tied to high levels of dopamine production. The story started this way; “It’s late at night and you’re watching TV when an infomercial comes on. You don’t need a food dehydrator, but there’s a part of you that wants it anyway. You look at your phone…”.

As the NPR story pointed out, impulsive people are vulnerable to substance abuse, some forms of mental illness, and of course impulse shopping like the audience which Rhodes courted. So how did the Vanderbilt scientists figure out the connection between dopamine and impulsiveness?

They looked at the midbrain which is where dopamine is created and piped out to other regions. They scanned their test subjects brains and found that impulsive people release more dopamine than less impulsive people. It doesn’t appear that the research had anything to do with marketing or market research. But the findings do run the risk of being used unethically by marketers. How so?

Remember, neuromarketing is all about using MRIs and brain scans to read the unconscious mind and find out what is going on in the consumer’s head that they themselves don’t know; and then take advantage of that knowledge and of course the consumer. If there is significant evidence that dopamine output is a causality of impulsiveness and impulsiveness leads to impulse purchasing of products that aren’t needed, well you can be sure some marketers and researchers are going to attempt to find a way to produce commercials and advertisements that increase dopamine output. And if someone figures it out, you can be sure they’ll just increase ripping off dump people. You can be sure Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes and Vitajex would have, as they had no ethics.

But what about you?

As a professional marketer or researcher you need to decide where your ethics rest on the use of these brain scans, MRIs and such for research. When a client comes to you and asks about your use of neuromarketing within research and what your position is, how do you answer?

Do you answer with the sleaze of Lonesome Rhodes selling “yellow sunshine”, or do you answer with the integrity of Sheriff Andy Taylor?

For more on Neuromarketing Ethics check out these related postings:

Neuromarketing Ethics: Inception, Deception and Priming = Poor Research Design
Neuromarketing Ethics: reading a lovers mind sound romantic but in market research we ought to be alarmed
Neuromarketing Ethics, Minority Report, and The Dark Side of Market Research

→ 5 CommentsTags: Advertising·CMO·Internet·Market Research·Marketer·Marketing·Marketing Measurement·Neuromarketing·Neuromarketing Ethics·Research

Neuromarketing Ethics: Inception, Deception and Priming = Poor Research Design

July 20th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

If you haven’t seen the new Leonardo DiCarpio thiller “Inception”, then you need to. And when you watch it, watch it through the eyes of a marketer or researcher. The film centers on Dom Cobb, a thief who enters the dreams of others to obtain information that is otherwise inaccessible. His abilities have cost him coveted things, but a second chance allows the situation to be turned around. However, when an unforeseen enemy predicts Cobb’s every move, Cobb and his team of specialists are forced to plant an idea in a target’s subconscious. The film’s title refers to the task of planting an idea rather than stealing one, a concept that Cobb is less acquainted with. Here’s a link to the trailer.

Cobb must not be a marketer or researcher, for as an industry we tend to do a brilliant job planting ideas in the markets’ mind; it’s called priming. No communications can ever get avoid priming. It’s part of basic persuasion. But sometimes it can be used unethically via Neuromarketing. For more on Neuromarketing Ethics check out another recent blog on the topic.

And when it comes to research, priming also produces flawed results.

Let me highlight an example from the movie and translate it to the accuracy issues in research. Without giving away much about the plot, one of Cobb’s colleagues Arthur, or The Point Man, is challenged by another character Saito, that you can’t plant an idea in someone’s brain. Arthur says to Saito, “Elephants” and then asks him what he imagines. Saito says “Elephants”. I don’t want to reveal more, but I think you get the point. Arthur was demonstrating to Saito the technique of priming.

So let’s translate this to research. Here’s a question I saw on a recent survey. “Is it important for your online school to have its administrative offices in the same state you live in?” I’ll guarantee you YES will come up more often then the true belief.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a test you can perform. Ask half of the respondents that question, and ask the other half, “Is it not important for your online school to have its administrative offices in the state you live in?” I’ll bet you there is a noticeable difference between the percentage who answered YES in the first question and NO in the second question, even though those choices are technically the same.

What’s going on here? It’s priming at work. And in research it’s just plan stupid and sloppy. The first question as written subconsciously adds a bit of implied importance to answering YES to the first question. When you ask, “Is it important…” you actually get a bit of biased toward YES. It’s priming at work.

Mostly it’s due to poor question design and not purposeful manipulation. The good news is, poor design is fixed easily. Here’s how. Simply reword the question to the inverse of the question and ask yourself, do you think there is the possibility that the results from the two sets of question could possibly be different? If yes, well you have a priming problem on your hand and you need to reword your questionnaire. You can also test the questionnaire doing an A/B split with the question. If you find the questions produce substantially different results, then kill the question as priming is an affect.

You might be able to plant an elephant in someone’s mind, even a pink one. But when you do, the answers they give you will likely be flawed. So be careful with question design.

So what color is the elephant?

→ 2 CommentsTags: CMO·Interactive Marketing·Interactive Research·Market Research·Marketing·Neuromarketing·Neuromarketing Ethics·Priming·Research

Neuromarketing Ethics: reading a lovers mind sound romantic but in market research we ought to be alarmed

July 4th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

There’s a schmaltzy scene in the movie Superman, between Superman (Christopher Reeve) and Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) called The Flying Scene. Superman takes Lois on a nighttime flight above Metropolis. The John Williams song Can You Read My Mind plays in the background with full orchestration as Lois falls into a trance memorized by the super hero. As the romantic evening ends, a bedazzled Lois mutters to herself: “What a super man,” and thus is inspired to dub him “Superman” in her next newspaper story. Here’s the clip from the movie.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece on neuroscience within marketing and research. In other words, reading someone’s mind. The question was, is it ethical? I’m amazed at the number of people who wrote me, or posted on my TruthOut.org piece saying they think neuromarketing is totally ethical or think it’s much a do about nothing; that researches can’t accurately read our minds with any accuracy.

Well this past week National Public Radio ran a series on neuroscience. The focus was on the research that is taking place to identify if someone is telling the truth or lying, and if a person is predisposed to certain psychological pathologies. There was also a troubling story about a convicted rapist and murderer from Chicago who is using neuroresearch to attempt to avoid the death penalty, by claiming he couldn’t help himself; that his brain is wired a certain way and he can’t resist his criminal behavior.

And then there was a story about James Fallon, a neuroscientist from the University of California-Irvine who has studied the brains of psychopaths for nearly 20 years trying to figure out how a killer’s brain differs from yours and mine. Fallon claims there are patters which can be identified via brain scans which identify higher or lower predisposition to pathological behaviors. He even claims he himself has that predisposition and found out he comes from a lineage of criminals, including Lizzie Broden Now that doesn’t mean he’s about to take an axe and give his mother 40 whacks. But it does raise ethical issues. So what does this have to do with marketing and market research?

A great deal.

Think about this. If we can figure out the likelihood of being a criminal, then figuring out if a red box or blue box will cause a preference or not for sugared water, malt beverages or junk food is a chip shot. Remember, in research we’re looking for tendencies and preferences.

Supposed you showed 100 people a red box and blue box and asked them which product they would buy and there was a preference for the red box. I think we’d all say that is OK. But let’s say you put the same 100 people through an MRI and found there is actually a greater preference, not for the red box, but for the blue box since certain parts of the brain light up, and that the panel of people themselves didn’t even realize this unconscious preference. Is that ethical usage of research?

What if you were in Las Vegas and the house knew through neuromarketing research, that gamblers had a preference for machines that went bing versus bong and they gambled more. Yet you did not know about this general preference that people, perhaps even you, were unconsciously influenced by this. Would you be comfortable with that? Would you think that was ethical?

Oh, and by the way, if you found out during the MRIs that a few of the panel members brains resembled a criminal, would you tell the person or tell the police?

Reading someone’s mind sounds interesting in a romantic setting on the silver screen. But in real life it’s more so something Lex Luthor would do and not Superman.

→ No CommentsTags: Market Research·Marketing·Neuromarketing·Neuromarketing Ethics·New Product Research·Research

What is Interactive Dry Testing? Please Sir, I want some more!

June 30th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

In Oliver Twist, the orphans toil in the workhouse with very little food, until the desperately hungry boys decide to draw lots; the loser must ask for another portion of gruel. The task falls to Oliver, who at the next meal tremblingly comes forward, bowl in hand, and makes his famous request: “Please sir, I want some more.” A great uproar ensues. Check out this famous scene with the master saying Mooooore!

We’ll I too have received several requests to provide more, but in my case, more information about Interactive Dry Testing. As a reminder, you might want to first read my earlier Interactive Dry Testing blog…Field of Dreams or Field of Morons? Using Interactive Dry Testing to avoid loser products.

So, what is Interactive Dry Testing? It’s a market test to discover whether a product or service is worth pursuing. It’s inexpensive – actually cheap. It can be done fast – like today if you want to. And it’s interactive – it’s only done digitially on the internet. If Interactive Dry Testing is done properly, a marketer can get a very good “read” on whether a product will or will not be profitable and how profitable (or non-profitable!) it might be. It’s related to Dry Testing, however Interactive Dry Testing is more contemporary than the old school Dry Testing due to it’s focus on cheap, fast and interactive.

First some ethical guidelines are in order. While this type of testing is perfectly legal, marketers should engage in Interactive Dry Testing only when the special nature of the offer is made clear at some point in the promotion. It is OK to “test the waters” for interest in a new product, i.e., one that does not yet exist. However, consumers should not be misled and should be informed, for example, by stating something like this somewhere during the test process: “This new product is being planned; we will let you know if it will be created, and of course, if it is not, we will promptly credit your account by (date).”

The Federal Trade Commission is normally OK with tests like this, so long as four conditions are met:

No representation is made that the product definitely will be produced.
There must be adequate notice of the conditional nature of the offer.
Those who order are promptly informed if it is not produced.
There can be no substitution of another product.

So what exactly do you do. Here’s the typical high level three-step approach using Google:

Set up a Google AdWords test for the potential new product. This will allow you to test cost, impressions, page ranking, clicks, click through rates… for various ad groupings and keywords. You’ll need to come up with a bid strategy. My suggestion is you set an initial bid to get 1st placement, and then manage the campaign daily just like any other SEM campaign.
Create special internet landing pages simulating and describing the product or service, price, terms, etc… You are in essence actually setting up web pages, copy, photo’s etc… offering/selling the proposed product or service. You’ll need to decide to either set it up as a facade company or promote your actual company in the test. If you set up a facade company your AdWords quality score will likely be low for a few days, maybe even a few weeks. So keep this in mind when setting the test time frame.
Create and link a research survey to the landing pages, where you ask questions to the consumers who were actively in the purchase process at that moment. This allows you to ask questions where recollection has the potential to be more accurate since it is more recent; such as what other products did you look at and why are you currently doing this search. You can also invite a person into a live chat interview.

What is great about Interactive Dry Testing versus say surveying people about a proposed product or service, is that a questionnaire is still not a real sales situation, no matter how much care is taken in its construction. Any questionnaire makes the prospect into an expert rather than a potential buyer. Interactive Dry Testing is real simulation of the selling situation. And here’s a twist which violates the laws of social media. DON’T include any links to social sites whereby the person can “like”, “Digg”, “retweet”, etc… the survey. To have a solid test you ONLY want people participating in any survey process tied to the test, who were actively in the buying process of looking, researching, evaluating, and so on.

In future blogs I’ll go deeper into each phase of Interactive Dry Testing, and other options beyond Google. Yes, you can have Mooooore!

→ No CommentsTags: Dry Testing·Google·Innovation·Interactive Dry Testing·Interactive Marketing·Interactive Research·Market Research·Marketing·New Product Research·Research

When starting research…If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there

June 29th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

In Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Cheshire Cat cleverly, and a bit sarcastically, illustrates why it’s important to know where you are headed when starting something; including marketing and research projects.

Alice is lost and asks the cat, “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”, says the cat. Alice responds, “I don’t much care where.”

And The Cheshire Cat famously responds, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”, or as I like to say … if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. (Click here to see this scene from the original Disney animated version of the story).

Funny then, that most people would agree you should know what you are trying to achieve before starting out. Yet there’s cognitive dissidence aplenty in marketing, product management and market research as too often people begin a project without real clarity to outcome.

Let me give an example. Supposed you had not done customer satisfaction surveys and someone from marketing has a brain fart and says “let’s do them.” Is that a good end outcome?

On the surface, I say no! The question I’d want to know in that situation is, what are you going to do with the data once you get it? Without knowing that, the idea of gathering customer satisfaction may be flawed and a big waste of time. What’s missing is a deeper discussion on the end outcome.

A great way to guide you in finding out the deeper needs is via the 5 whys, where you ask why (or some sort of a probing question) five times to the person you are doing the assignment for when they provide the initial answer to each of your questions. Here’s an example:

Marketing: “I want to find out my customer satisfaction rating and who’s satisfied.”

Research: “Why do you want to know that?”

Marketing: “I think happy customers stay.”

Research: “And if they do stay more often, what does that mean to your business?”

Marketing: “I guess more profit, but I’d need to find that out.”

Research: “And if that was true, what would you do different in your business if we confirmed this?”

Marketing: “Well I guess I don’t know. I’d need to know what causes customer satisfaction and what has the greatest correlation to profitability.”

Research: “And what do you think causes satisfaction?”

Marketing: “I don’t know.”

Research: “Well if you did know, what profitability information do you have by customer so that we can correlate it to satisfaction?”

Marketing: “Oh, I don’t have any of that. I guess I better get it up front.”

Research: “OK, so one of the outcomes of our research will need to be a list of factors that have a high correlation to satisfaction in your company, and these factors have to be things which you can measure, take improvement action on if need be, and monitor ongoing.” And on and on…

Using the 5 whys uncovered a richness of information that was missing from the initial concept of identifying customer satisfaction. True success requires from the beginning, a deep dive into the roots of what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it. Otherwise you might complete the task, in this case research, and find out what you learned is not actionable or doesn’t give you answers to what you really need to know.

So next time you are about to start a research or marketing project, do the 5 whys. You’ll find the right road which will get you to success and avoid falling into a rabbit hole!

→ No CommentsTags: CMO·Innovation·Market Research·Marketer·Marketing·Marketing Measurement·New Product Research·Research

CMO: Are you full of Social, or full of S**t

June 26th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

In the movie Liar Liar, Jim Carrey plays Fletcher Reed a fast talking attorney, habitual liar, and divorced father who has built his career by lying. He even lies to his son, or doesn’t keep his promises. Fletcher is in other words… full of s**t.

Ultimately, Fletcher misses his son Max’s birthday party because he is having sex with his partner Miranda. The fun begins when Max wishes while blowing out his cake candles that his father couldn’t tell a lie for an entire day, a wish that immediately becomes true. (Click here to watch some outtakes from the movie).

So what does this have to do with CMOs? Well actually, a lot.

Over the last months, I’ve been in conversations with some CMO’s about social media and candidly most of them are full of s**t too. They will give long winded comments about social being strategically important and critical for success. They talk about making big investments in social. They talk about customer engagement.

But then, when I ask them things like…

Do you consider yourself an active participant in social media like Facebook or LinkedIn? Have you ever blogged, and so on?
When’s the last time you read the postings on your company’s Facebook page wall or private social media site (as a CMO this is great unfiltered market research), and actually posted a comment to a fan or posted your own comment; and not a comment written by a staffer, but actually by YOU?
When’s the last time you read the postings on your competition’s Facebook wall or their own social media site? Where else can you get free access to competitor intelligence and research!
Does your LinkedIn profile look very basic, or is it robust with plenty of information about who you are, do you post updates/LinkedIn version of tweets, do you communicate with your community, does your profile look like you GET IT with social and on and on? Interestingly with this I often hear, “I’m not looking for a job.” Whereas I respond “Geez, you don’t get it. LinkedIn isn’t just about getting a job!”

Well if the CMO is older than 45 (for disclosure I am 50) I normally get a look that resembles a deer in headlights. That’s when I tell them, “You’re full of s**t when it comes to social, and I hope you’re savings are large because you soon will be out of a job.”

CMOs, if you don’t do social, you’ll never understand how to do social! That is apply it to your company to create business value. It’s like someone who has never played baseball trying to teach someone how to throw a ball or hit a pitch. You don’t have to be an expert in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Four-Square, WordPress, yada, yada, yada… But you do need to know this world and you can’t by being a casual player.

So grey haired CMOs, wake up and get social; every day. Otherwise don’t be surprised if you hear your colleagues saying “Liar Liar pants on fire”, and then give you a pink slip.

→ 2 CommentsTags: CMO·Competitor Intelligence·Facebook·LinkedIn·Market Research·Research·Social·social marketing·Social Media·Social Networking

Measure marketing, or you’re committing suicide

June 23rd, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

The theme song from the hit movie and TV show M*A*S*H, goes like this… Suicide is painless, It brings on many changes, And I can take or leave it if I please. (Click here to watch and listen to the song) Well today I read something from CMO.com which got me thinking about how many CMO’s commit professional suicide each year by failing to perform one of the most fundamental functions of our profession: MEASUREMENT.

The email I received from CMO.com clearly illustrated the failure… “…it’s time for the second of our “What’s Hot This Summer” newsletters. In this edition we take a look at “Analysis & Measurement,” which is becoming more important every day…” No S**t and WTF!

How weak the state of marketing really is in our profession, when something as fundamental as analysis and measurement is considered “Hot”. No wonder the average tenure of a CMO is only 12, 18, 24 months tops, and that 50% to 80% of new product rollouts fail. CMOs after CMOs don’t get it that marketing must prescribe to what Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.”

And if you can’t measure it you ought to ask yourself the question, “Why are you doing it?” And don’t con yourself by saying you’re building “Brand Equity”. EVERYTHING can be measured, and if it can’t, it can’t be very important.

So this is what I tell my friends who are marketing professions. If you don’t “get it” with analytics, and apply it to everything you do, you will become irrelevant. If you don’t get six sigma, statistical analysis, love numbers, and measure, measure, measure… you will be replaced by someone who does “get it”. And don’t be surprised if that person is 10 – 15 years younger.

Wake up CMOs. And if you aren’t a quant, you ought to do as Steven Covey said in his 7 Habits. “Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw”. Become a master at analysis or sadly fade away from the profession. If you think that’s bunk, well feel free to go find out how painless suicide really is.

→ 1 CommentTags: Advertising Measurement·Brand Measurement·Marketing Analysis·Marketing Measurement·Marketing Scorecard·Marketing Stats·Measure Advertising·Measure Brand·Measure Marketing·Quantitative Marketing

Do you Kano Survey, or just Fiddle on the Roof when gathering requirements?

June 20th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

There is a scene in the movie Fiddler on the Roof, when the Rabbi is asked who’s right about an argument between two villagers. One of the villagers states their case, and the Rabbi says “He’s right.” Then the other villager makes their point, and the Rabbi says “He’s right.” Finally a third villager says, “He’s right, and he’s right? They can’t both be right”, and Reb Tevye responds, “You know…you are also right!”

Traditionally (pun intended so click here to watch Tradition from the movie) market research for product requirements, is a lot like that, in that when you ask what’s most important using say the typical 5 or 10 point Likert scale, all you get is a big glob of goo where everything is important, everything seems right. So how do you determine which requirements are essential, which are optional, and which would delight the customer, and how do you prioritize among customer requirements?

Can you Kano? No that’s not some sort of eastern spiritual trend hot in Hollywood right now. A Kano survey is one of the easiest and in my opinion, most powerful and reliable ways to help figure out product requirements.

This questionnaire approach asks pairs of multiple-choice questions about potential product capabilities. Half of each pair of questions asks how you would feel if the product included a particular capability; the other half of each pair asks how you would feel if the capability was not provided.

For example, let’s say you run a restaurant and want to figure out if you need to serve your eggs hot (yea I know that sounds goofy, but it’s a good way to explain how a Kano survey works). So first you ask, “how would you feel if your eggs are served hot”; and you have five choices: 1) I would be delighted to find it that way, 2) I expect it to be that way, 3) I’m neutral, 4) I would not like it that way but I can live with it that way, and 5) It must not be that way.

Then you ask how the customer would feel if that capability, requirement, feature, etc… is somehow limited or absent; in this case you ask “If the eggs are not served hot, how do you feel?” You give them the same 5 choices to pick from.

Another way to ask the questions is ask how the customer would feel if there is a variety of cooking options for the eggs, say hard boiled, scrambled, fried, etc…, and then ask how the customer would feel if the options are limited, say only offering scrambled and fried. In both examples you give them the 5 choices previously mentioned.

Through a series of mathematical calculations you’re able to identify:

Must-Be features: which are items where customer satisfaction does not move above neutral, lesser or greater functionality does not influence customers, and lack of the feature quickly dissatisfies the customer. These features are expected to be present. e.g., good brakes or windshield wipers in a car. In other words, you’re toast if you don’t include them.

One-Dimensional features: which are items where customer satisfaction increases as the feature’s functionality increases, customer satisfaction falls in proportion to decreased product functionality, e.g., gas mileage—the higher the gas mileage, the happier the customer is. These are things you do, if your competition does.

Attractive/Excitement features: which are the items where the customer is satisfied when the feature is present, satisfaction is greater as functionality increases, and the customer is NOT dissatisfied when feature is less functional or not present. e.g., if it included a car button to open window, when pressed, lowers window all the way. These are the things you do to add excitement to your product which will differentiate you and normally give you higher margin advantage.

Excitement features are for the most part unforeseen by the company but may yield paramount satisfaction. They are also the hardest ones to prioritize including. Variety is nice, but you don’t have to be Baskin-Robbins and include every possible exciter. Having excitement attributes can only help you, so in some scenarios it is ok to not have them included. The Kano survey will help you figure out which ones to include, and which ones to leave for another day or revision.

So next time you want to figure out what your customers really want and value, try a Kano survey, and maybe you’ll be right too!

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Runaway Brides, Satisfied Customers and other Heart Breakers

June 14th, 2010 by Tim O'Connor · essay

In the movie Runaway Bride, Julia Roberts plays a spirited and attractive young woman who’s afraid of being married, and has left a trail of boyfriends whom she says she loves. Indeed, she’s left three men waiting for her in church on their wedding day (all of which are caught on tape), receiving tabloid fame and the dubious nickname “Runaway Bride”. (Click here to watch the trailer for the movie)

Satisfied Customers are like Runaway Brides. Many say they love you, yet time and time again, they fire you. This all proves the worthlessness of Customer Satisfaction Surveys, or more precisely asking the customer how “satisfied” they are. So what do you do? Several years back Bain & Company introduced the Net Promoter Score, asking: ”How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Despite its popularity among business executives, there is no scientific evidence that the “likelihood to recommend” question is any better a predictor of business growth compared to other customer loyalty questions (e.g., overall satisfaction, likelihood to purchase again). There has got to be a better way and there is.

It’s the Net Best Value ™ score. I created and refined this approach while at Siemens AG, and then at Unisource (ironically a Bain Capital company), and then finalized it while at Zyman Group. I point this out since Net Best Value ™ is something with real field application behind it, versus something cooked up by a think tank. I’ve used it at small and large companies including 4 different billion dollar businesses, and each time the results produced the highest correlation to actual net change in customer purchases when tracked over a 6-month period of time (and in business today looking at the next quarter or two is critical).

The approach is simple. On a 5 point scale (1 being Highly Agree and 5 being Highly Disagree) you ask for the customer’s agreement with the following statement: “X company offers the best value (what you get minus what you pay) in the industry”. You then add up the percentage of 1′s, ignore the 2′s, subtract the percentage of the 3′s, subtract 2 times the percentage of 4′s, and subtract 4 times the percentage of 5′s. The 4′s and 5′s are weighted more heavily since these customers are more likely to bolt to another supplier.

Net Best Value ™ score works for two reasons. First it’s related to the fundamental reason why someone buys a product, that is its net value delivered to the purchaser; whereas you can be satisfied with a product but not think it offers the best value so next time you may buy elsewhere. And second it is a real time, now question; where as “likely” questions such as Net Promoter are asking the customer to predict future intent and we all know the huge flaw in that type of questioning.

So next time you’re wondering if your Bride, Groom or Customer, will be leaving you high and dry at the alter, ask them how much they agree that “I offer the best value in the (fill in the blank)?” And word to the wise. If your future spouse doesn’t say they Highly Agree…well runaway before it’s too late!

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