The Super Bowl of Research

January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

SuperBowl46LogoThe Super Bowl is huge in every way, even when it comes to market research.

It is by far the biggest sporting event in the U.S.  Perhaps more significantly, it is annually the highest rated television program.

The contest is preceded by two weeks of sheer, unadulterated hype.  It’s not just the sports networks and websites making hay.  Other media outlets capitalize on Super Bowl hype in the weeks before the game.  Every commercial is dissected six ways to Sunday.  Even the halftime musical performance gets a huge amount of attention (this year it’s by Madonna).

This hype may excite you or disgust you, but you can’t ignore it.

As a researcher and a marketer, I find the hype surrounding the Super Bowl endlessly fascinating.

This has been true even in years where my team is not in the game.  My beloved New England Patriots are going up against a very worthy opponent, the New York Giants.

This year’s contest, as a rematch of a hotly contested (and wildly disappointing to Patriots fans) game from four years ago, looks to be bigger and badder than ever.  Add in the growth of social media, and you have the makings of a true marketing spectacle.

Awesome!

As a market researcher, I’ve heard endless talk over the past few years about how the poor economy has had a negative effect on our industry.

Well, I say we should be thankful as market researchers that the Super Bowl gives us so many things to measure, analyze and interpret.

The Super Bowl is a great thing for anyone involved in marketing.  Market researchers should be thankful for this bonanza.

Here are some of the many places I can only imagine extensive research has occurred connected to the Super Bowl.

-       Of course, at the National Football League, by widely respected Director of Research Alicia Rankin.
-       At ESPN and other sports media entities
-       At NBC, the television network broadcasting the event
-       By the city of Indianapolis, hosting the event for the first time
-       By the dozens of television advertisers for this year’s game

This list just scratches the surface.  Literally thousands of businesses run Super Bowl related promotions, creating numerous business opportunities for the market research industry.

Yes, it’s a hype-filled marketing event, a spectacle of capitalism that gives a major boost to our economy.

Only in America!

Please share your thoughts on Super Bowl market research in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Essay, Market Research, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

New Data on QR Code Adoption

January 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

QR Code Baby BuggyWe at Research Access are fascinated by QR codes, and thus we are always on the lookout for new data on those little guys. As luck would have it, our friends at market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey just conducted a really interesting investigation of consumer knowledge of and attitudes toward QR codes.

I had a chance to speak with CMB Senior Consultant Jeff McKenna about the study.

Dana Stanley: Why did you decide to do a study about QR codes?

Jeff McKenna: Each quarter we conduct a CMB Consumer Pulse study so we can stay up-to-date with trends and issues we see going on that may be affecting our clients. Last year, for instance, we conducted a study on the growing use of smartphones in retail stores, foretelling the rise of mobile apps to make comparison shopping easier, such as Amazon’s Price Check App. The next technology we wanted to understand is the QR code. We’ve started to see those little boxes everywhere and often wondered if people actually use them, and for what reason they do. They also strike us as an ideal way to engage with consumers, giving marketers a direct line to communicate and deliver useful information.

Dana Stanley: Tell us about how the study was conducted.

Jeff McKenna: We conducted an online interview among nearly 1,500 US adults at the end of October. The series of questions about QR codes were part of a broader set of questions we ask in our quarterly Consumer Pulse, exploring topics from healthcare and financial services to technology and entertainment. And since this research cuts across many topic areas, we balance the sample to be representative of the US population in terms of age, gender and income. We also worked with iModerate Research Technologies to conduct 20 one-on-one conversations which adds color to the quantitative.

Dana Stanley: As much as I love QR codes, it seems to me they are still something that mostly marketers and researchers know about, but John and Jane Q. Public might find them confusing. What did your study show?

Jeff McKenna: That’s a great point. We find the general public to be less knowledgeable about them. In fact, only 21 percent of adults know the term “Quick Response code” or “QR code” (when asked if they’ve heard the term). On the other hand, 81 percent of adults recognize them by sight; so they are not unnoticed. Additionally, half of smartphone owners tell us that they have scanned a QR code. This tells us that a thorough understanding of QR codes is not a prerequisite for usage and application. This is often the case when it comes to new technology, and although QR codes themselves have been around for nearly two decades, it’s still very early for American consumers.

Dana Stanley: What were some of the findings that surprised you?

Jeff McKenna: Building on the previous point, we expected confusion to be more common. In that regard, the fact that half of smartphone owners told us they have scanned a QR code was a surprise. Even more surprising, 70 percent of the people who scanned a QR code found it to be easy to do. This tells us that wider acceptance of the technology is not hindered by complexity or poor functionality.

Instead, we find a sizeable share of people using QR codes for a specific need. On the one hand, 46 percent said they scanned a QR code because they were “curious”; but that still leaves a majority of consumers scanning with a clear purpose in mind. The reasons ranged from getting more information and access to exclusive content to receiving a discount and making a purchase.

Dana Stanley: What were some of the top take-aways for marketers?

Jeff McKenna: Clearly, marketers should remember the point that nearly one-in-five of people who scanned a QR code ended up making a purchase based on the information they received. A sizable (and we expect growing) share of consumers are relying on QR code scanning to assist and improve the purchase process.

As I mentioned earlier, the curiosity factor wears off, marketers need to focus on the specific purpose people have when scanning a QR code. Of greatest interest in our research, was the opportunity to receive discounts, coupons, or free items; therefore, crafting the right offer for the situation will be important for marketers. Next on the list of needs is “gaining information” – and again, marketers must be aware of the situation where consumers will be engaging through QR codes. On this point, we find that 35 percent of people scanned a QR code from a magazine or newspaper. The next most common source is produce packaging (18 percent scanned in this manner). Marketers need to tailor the information and offers to each of these unique situations.

Dana Stanley: How can people get a copy of your study?

Jeff McKenna: They can check out a short video here (Editor’s Note: the video is embedded in this post).

Scan the QR code or click on the link to download the report. Or go directly to the report here.

Dana Stanley: Great stuff, Jeff. Thanks for your time, and thanks for conducting this study.

Be sure to check out Research Access’ new QR Code Gallery, and have a look at some of our other articles on QR codes.

Photo Credit

Filed Under: Featured, Market Research, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Don’t Be a Misfit – Game Your Marketing

January 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Editor's Note:  This post originally appeared on our sister site, GameAccess]

Misfits is a hugely popular TV show here in the UK hosted by Channel 4′s cool, younger channel, E4.

It’s about four young people who have to take part in Community Service (which is reserved as a punishment for young petty criminals here in the UK) and through a stormy night, found themselves in posession of amazing super-powers. Although they still take part in Community Service in London, they find that their new super powers have got them in or out of trouble. The programme has been a massive hit here in the UK and now has a Comic book and action figures it can assign to its marketing.

Misfits has its own page on the E4 website which lets you understand the storyline of each character more, find them on Twitter (yes, the characters are STILL in character on Twitter!), look at pictures, videos, and, of course, catch up on older episodes you may have missed.

Misfits, however, take the marketing and brand engagement to the next level. By including the ‘Community Service’ game and their game app for smartphones, they have secured brand engagement and loyalty which other ‘one way’ marketing cannot achieve.

They also include the ‘Smart Arses’ quiz, which questions viewers onhow much they know about storylines and characters. Together with their intelligent use of language, they have created a gamified experience which goes perfectly with the brand image, persona of the characters in the programme and the ‘Londoner way of life’.

With a large library of 11 online games for the Misfits, it means audiences stay on their website for longer and get ‘inside information’ on what’s going to happen next through the games themselves. With game names like ‘Do a Runner’, ‘Spot the Shapeshifter’ and ‘Cheese Fondoom’ (which plays on one of the characters’ dairy intolerance) E4 has not only established that games are a brilliant marketing avenue for them, but THE marketing avenue for the E4 brand and Misfits TV show.

Go to http://www.e4.com/misfits/ and download the Misfits app now to play.

Misfits2Gaming your Marketing doesn’t have to be on the scale here that E4 have performed. Your game doesn’t even need to be that expensive to create. I strongly feel that as long as the language used is the same ‘voice’ as that of your brand and the aesthetic can be linked to the brand as well, you have a game which can hook your audience in.

There is a great conference called Games for Brands, which I unfortunately missed this year, but if the Misfits wasn’t mentioned, then they’ve missed out! Check out the Games for Brands on LinkedIn or online.

 

Author’s note: I have not been paid to promote Misfits! It really is just such a useful case-study when talking about brand engagement through games!

Filed Under: Gamification, Marketing Tagged With: ,

The Nerd with the Dragon Tattoo

January 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

Dragon TattooThis weekend I watched the new American movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first book of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy.

I’ll try not to reveal too much of the plot, in case you haven’t seen it, or the original Swedish movie, or read the book. Though, if you haven’t by now – really?

I’ve read all three books and seen the Swedish movies, which were very well done, and I was looking forward to the American version. Director David Fincher did the story justice and created a beautiful-looking film. I felt Rooney Mara‘s performance as Lisbeth Salander was Oscar-worthy, and Daniel Craig did a very fine job portraying Mikael Blomkvist.

As I was watching the protagonists search frantically, it occurred to me that they had something in common with any good researcher and any good marketer. They were trying to find the right data!

Lisbeth Salander is a hacker who specializes in getting information by any means necessary. Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist who can dig deeper than any other.

They had an important question that needed to be solved. They had an overwhelming amount of information to sift through. And they had very little time in which to find the answers.

That sounds like just about every research and marketing project with which I’ve been involved!

Most importantly, they were super-motivated to scour their environment for the right information. Granted, the stakes were much higher in the movie than they are in our daily lives, but I do feel the most important quality for any researcher and any marketer is a strong sense of curiosity.

The best of us become slightly obsessed with our task and will overturn any stone to find the truth. Kind of like our movie heroes.

So when you watch or read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, feel proud that in your own small way, you’re a badass too.

Photo Credit

Filed Under: Essay, Market Research, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Cool is for Fools

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The Burger King

The "Burger King"

[Editor's Note:  This post originally appeared on our sister site, Marketing Access]

I read recently that the creepy-assed “Burger King” mascot has been taken off his throne and sent to the rubbish bin. I was thrilled because I found the ads with that particular “being” crude and frankly, as a father of two young kids, scary. Further, I thought it was a bad piece of Marketing that too many otherwise sane folks extolled as creative and, well, “cool.”

Yep, there we go. Taking out the soapbox now – here goes:

Cool is a stupid word. Trying to be cool is a stupid aspiration.

Let me at this point say that I’m as guilty as everyone else in the sheer overuse of the word. In a funny way, the word is democratic- it’s used by everyone for everything but it unites grungy California ne’er do wells with titans of the tech industry. But that’s where it’s “coolness” ends.

If I wanted to give a benign and thoughtful criticism I’d say that the main problem with the word is that its meaning has been dulled to the point of nothingness by constant use. But that’s not really my point.

My point is that the desire to be cool makes people do silly (and at times bad) things.

Take what the desire to create cool work has done to Marketing.

It’s instructive to look at Burger King because they went the “cool” route. But for the past decade, their business has sucked while McDonald’s is kicking ass. The latter did simple things like, well, introduce coffee and salads. And they advertised them in, well, fairly normal ways. So while cool might have won Crispin, Porter, and Bogusky a ton of awards and got them a bunch of brainless small-dollar acolytes, it didn’t do much for the Whopper boys who, incidentally, pay their bills.

The desire to be cool makes you derivative and a follower. Cool is for charlatans without substance.

Do something real ladies and gentlemen. Please.

Filed Under: Advertising, Essay, Innovation, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Cosmo-Style Quiz: How Does Your Internet Marketing Stack Up?

December 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Cosmopolitan Cover November 2011Cosmopolitan Magazine has been in the survey business as long as any organization I know. For as long as I’ve been standing in supermarket checkout lines they’ve been posing, er, interesting questions on their cover.

Sure, these quizzes are not actual surveys; in fact, to the best of my knowledge the results are never even compiled. They’re in actuality a clever format for dispensing advice.

The biggest testament to the success of this tactic is that many other publications, including those targeting a wholly different demographic, have followed Cosmo’s successful formula of posing quiz questions to passersby.  Something tells me it’s been working.

So I thought I’d take a page from their book (or magazine, as it were) and pose some self-help quiz questions.

I’m going on memory as to style and format, but here goes:

INTERNET MARKETING QUIZ

Answer “yes,” “no,” or “don’t know” to each of the following questions:

1. Is it obvious to your website visitors why they should do business with you?
2. It it easy for your website visitors to find what they are seeking?
3. Have you defined your target audience in writing?
4. Have you optimized your website to make it easily discoverable by your target audience?
5. Do you offer anything of value on your website to visitors (free consultations, e-books, etc.)?
6. Do you have a regularly updated blog?
7. Does your website help build your email subscriber list?
8. Do you send out regular email updates?
9. Do you regularly add new content to your website?
10. Do you participate actively in social media?

SCORING:

Add up all your “yes” answers, then look at the key below to see how you did!

If you had:

10 yeses: Great job! Others can learn from you.
7 to 9 yeses: Very good. Keep doing what you’re doing.
4 to 6 yeses: A good start, but you have room for improvement.
1 to 3 yeses: Ouch!

Note: This is a satire with, perhaps, a few real lessons mixed in.  Tongue implanted firmly into cheek.

Photo Credit:  Cover of Cosmopolitian Magazine, November 2011.

Filed Under: Essay, Marketing Tagged With:

Mad As A Bear

December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Grizzly Bear[Editor's Note:  This post originally appeared on our sister site, Marketing Access]

Children really test Marketers’ will. If you are a Marketer and a parent you know exactly what I mean- you end up buying a bunch of over-priced, disposable, and soon-forgotten crap because your kids’ desire-du-jour is more powerful than your will (and ability) to resist.

I’ve done it all. Dora stuff, Diego stuff, Little Pet Shop, and Transformers. And I’ve chased down Elmos when they were scarce and plied my kids with sugar (and high fructose corn syrup) when my love for Michael Pollan dimmed in comparison to the nirvana-light of peace.

I’ve done bad things to them. I feel worse now than when I was the only dad in swimming class who didn’t know the words to “The Wheels on the Bus.”

And somehow they must sense it because two days ago, they got their revenge on me. In a BIG WAY. Like young Napoleons they picked
the field of battle well; in this case not Austerlitz but Build-a-Bear Workshop (BABW) in Bellevue Square Mall.

Let’s pause for a moment so I can describe how BABW works. The process is something like this:

1. Kids and parents walk in.

2. Kids pick hollowed-out carcasses of “animals” to later be stuffed and adorned.

3. Kids wait in line with parents.

4. Fake-nice BABW worker injects a large metal tube in an orifice of the unstuffed carcass and allows kids to “step on the pedal,” filling the animal with some substance (cotton maybe) and thereby re-animating said animal.

Oh hold on.

3.5 Before the colonoscopy, BABW worker asks the kid in a sweet voice “now sweetie would you like a ‘sound’ in your {monkey, polar bear, dog, etc.) ?

3.6 Kid says “yes.” The better ones say “yes please.”

3.7. BABW worker asks hapless parent “Is that okay w/you?” Harassed parent, having no clue what just went down, agrees.

Okay back to the progression.

5. Animal is now stuffed and kid is asked to “pick a heart” and then to “hug” the animal. Kid complies.

6. BABW worker then directs parents and kid to the accessories/clothes/other stuff area of the store so that kid can “dress up”
the animal.

7. Kid picks up enough stuff to bankrupt an already soon-to-be-weenie-night-thinking parent.

8. Kid and parents then collaborate on creating a “birth certificate” for newly-christened Freddy the monkey.

9. Parents and kid then stand in line for a LONG time.

10. Clerk then rings up the purchase.

11. Parents notice that each item costs a lot and that they’ve been had. The “sound” costs $4 or $5 bucks. That sly question to the kid at the beginning was an upsell. Who TF knew.

12. Parent then pays while Clerk contributes to the denuding of the Amazon rain forest by packing Freddy the monkey in a huge cardboard box.

13. Bank account is diminished by around $35 per kid.

14. Parents then indulge in self-loathing; being a sucker is hard to take.

I love my kids, but for now I’m mad as a bear. At myself.

Photo Credit: Spontaneous Chaos

Filed Under: Essay, Featured, Marketing Tagged With:

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Blog

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

After you’ve been blogging for a few months, it’s a good idea to take a step back, examine what’s worked, and refine your blogging strategy. Especially if you have only recently begun blogging, it’s important to frequently review your strategy and successes, to make sure that you are progressing toward your goals. This can be hard to do if you aren’t sure how to go about measuring your blog accurately, or how to draw the correct judgement out of your information. Let’s examine one methodology to review your blog’s analytics and determine successes. To get started, log into whatever analytics platform that you prefer for your blog, be it Google Analytics, HubSpot, or whatever else is available to you.

Once you’ve signed into your blog, gather all of your blog’s data and export it to a spreadsheet so that you can slice it up and look at it from different angles. Your blog software can usually provide you with this general data, including the author name for each of your posts. If not, you may need to combine data from different systems. This way, you can easily build averages for each of your blog authors for how many views their posts get, or other criteria that you’re interested in. Depending on what data your blog can export, you have many options here – If it exports the tags for each post for example, you could also cut across the tags and see which of your blog’s tags generates the most views, tweets, or conversions on a regular basis.

Break Down Your Post Success By Author

Begin reviewing your blog’s performance by looking at clear breakdowns of your posts, such as by the author. This is an easy to access piece of data, and can show you who your real star authors are. Here is a Google Doc that can help you visualize how to break down your blog analytics by author. If you’d like to use it to get started, you should download it or save it on your own.

While the left contains the raw data from some sample blog analytics, the right hand side breaks down blog post performance by author. In this example, you can see that the average post by Kurt just isn’t performing as well as the other authors. This sheet can’t divine why Kurt’s posts aren’t performing as well, but it can point out the trends that you need to make your own observations. You can take this spreadsheet with you for your analysis – Just paste in your own blog’s data for post title, date, views, and authors into the left, and then fill in the right with the name of each blogger who writes for you regularly.

Look At Other Variables

This process works just as well if if you replace the content of Column D with another attribute that you know – For example, the post category, time of day, or other information. For example, you can do some surface-level research very easily into what times of day are most successful for your blog if you’ve previously tried out publishing posts at different times of the day. Go through your last two months of blog posts and categorize them into rough times of day, like “Morning”, “Afternoon”, “Evening” and “Weekend”. That way, you can break down the post averages by when you post them and see if different times of day lead to more successful posts for you. If you haven’t tried this out yet, spend a month varying up your posting times for your posts, and then check out if there are any consistent patterns.

Consider Your Business Goals

Finally, consider the business goals for your blog. Are you trying to generate conversions or leads? Or establish a presence as an authority on a subject? Review what metric you are trying to change by having a blog, and then look at how you can bring this into the analysis. Remember that the most important part of blogging is how it plays into moving your goals as a business organization. Do not just blog for the sake of doing it; if something is not working in your strategy, or if your marketing analytics show that your hard work is not translating into success, change things up until you find something that makes you successful.

Filed Under: Featured, How-To, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Reasons So Many Market Research Pros Suck at Marketing Themselves

December 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

nerds

[Editor's Note: this post originally appeared on my personal blog, DanaStanley.com.]

It’s ironic, isn’t it? We’re advising others on marketing strategy and tactics; our advice is used to formulate email campaigns, website copy, online and offline advertisements and more.  Yet our own marketing is often no better, and in some cases is even worse, than that of many other industries.  I’ve discussed this observation with many others in market research, and I’m far from the only one with this opinion.

As marketing advisors, shouldn’t we be leading most, if not all, other business categories when it comes to marketing our businesses?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do have a few thoughts about why many market researchers aren’t particularly good at marketing their businesses.  Here are the top reasons I came up with.  I invite you to comment on these ideas and suggest others as well.

1) We are not comfortable with self-promotion.  

Most of us did not grow up dreaming of being business moguls.  We tended to be good in school and nearly all of us went to college.  We “fell into” the research field because we were good with numbers and interested in social science.  Marketing doesn’t feel comfortable; it feels too close to its dreaded cousin, sales.

2) We don’t practice what we preach

We spend our time evaluating our clients’ marketing, but for one reason or another, we don’t spend time evaluating our own.  On any given day we may be conducting a website visitor survey for a client.  How many of us invest the same time and effort in ourselves?  Very few, it seems.

3) Our products and services, especially our new ones, are so awesome they will market themselves

This one is simply self-delusional.  If you’re thinking this way, snap out of it.

4) We are wary of new methods

Twitter? Facebook? Blogging? Email marketing? Those take effort to learn and can seem scary at first.  Also, ROI can be challenging to measure, and if there’s anything we love, it’s numbers.

5) We think we don’t have time.

This one is a doozy.

We don’t have time to find more customers? We don’t have time to demonstrate value? We don’t have time to promote our industry?

Please.

What do you think?

Am I wrong on some or all of these?  Did I miss anything?

Filed Under: Essay, Market Research, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Focus Groups are Dead: An Interview with Mike Volpe, HubSpot CMO

November 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot

Editor’s Note:  I recently attended the Social Media FTW (For the Win) conference where HubSpot‘s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Volpe was a keynote speaker.  During his talk, Mike contrasted the analytics HubSpot gives marketers with traditional feedback, using focus groups as an example.  I caught up with Mike afterward to get his further perspectives on market research and marketing. 

Dana Stanley: For those who don’t know, could you please give a quick overview of what HubSpot does for marketers? In particular, how does it help with marketing analytics?

Mike Volpe: HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software platform. Rather than using one tool for blogging, another tool for social media marketing, a different tool for landing pages, yet another tool for email marketing, some other tool for marketing automation and yet an additional system for marketing analytics, HubSpot combines all of that into one.

This is powerful for marketers for two reasons: first, you have one hub to manage all of your marketing which is faster and easier, and second, you can easily measure and analyze things across all these different marketing tools. For instance, HubSpot gives you closed loop marketing analytics, so you can link it to your CRM system and know not only how many web visitors you got from social media, but also how many of them became a lead and how many of those leads converted into customers. Or, you could measure how many of your leads that became customers visited a specific web page on your website or used certain functionality in your mobile app, etc.

DS: In your recent keynote at Social Media FTW, you said, “Focus groups are dead.” Can you tell me what you meant by that?

MV: Of course “dead” is strong language meant to invite a response and dialog. Focus groups still have their place, however they are much less useful or attractive today for two reasons.

First, the low cost availability of other ways of gathering information about your market and customers. You can listen to what they say in social media, you can read the reviews they write. You can analyze how they actually use your website. You can see the videos and blogs they post about your products.

Second, I think the information you can get today is a more accurate view into your customers, because it is based on their actual behavior, not how they answer questions in an unfamiliar room with 5 strangers. I’ll take the status update that someone wrote from the couch in the comfort of their own home as more accurate than the comment they made in a focus group room when they are given a $100 gift card to show up.

DS: Your company has been on an impressive growth path. How does HubSpot take stock of and incorporate feedback from customers and prospects?

MV: We get feedback in a number of different ways. We conduct usability sessions where we have someone use the product online while we watch and they talk us through what they are doing, we have discussion forums for customers that we monitor, we get feedback from the sales team on what people say when they they demo the product, we have usage monitoring built into the product that gives us reports about what customers do and don’t do in the product, we have ideas.hubspot.com where customers can submit ideas to make the product better, we visit HUG (HubSpot User Group) meetings and we regularly survey the customers as well.

DS: What do you envision market research will be like in the future?

I think it will allow for faster and cheaper insights and more witnessing of actual real life activity, not simulated activity.

Filed Under: Digital, Featured, Market Research, Marketing, Planning, Social Media Tagged With: , ,
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