What's the Emotional Impact of Your Ancillary Revenue Strategy?

Posted by Judy Melanson

Tue, Oct 13, 2015

The CarTrawler Yearbook of Ancillary Revenue reports that airlines generated $38 Billion in ancillary revenue in 2014, up 20% year over year. The report highlights the brands generating the most ancillary revenue–in terms of total revenue generated ($5.86 billion for United Airlines), the percent of revenue it represents (38.7% of Spirit Airline’s revenue) and discloses top revenue sources (e.g., frequent flier miles sold to partners, fees for checked bags, and commissions from car rentals).

Clearly, ancillary revenue is not confined solely to airlines; theme parks, cruises, car rentals, hotels all boost revenues from selling additional products, services and measure.jpgmerchandise. And it’s easy to see why. In addition to driving incremental revenue, ancillary products and services enable a supplier to (1) offer a competitive base price - essential (particularly in some segments like cruising) to enter into a traveler’s consideration set; and (2) meet the needs of their guests by merchandising – and conveniently delivering – what customers crave and where they’re willing to spend extra.

But there are potential costs as well. A quick read of the Cruise Critic blog points to ‘high-pressure’ sales tactics employed by ship employees and the negative impact it has on the guest experience. Eavesdrop on airline rent-a-car counters and you’ll hear the ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’ in the voice of infrequent car renters. And hop onto a Spirit airlines to get an earful of complaints (“$3 for a water bottle?!”). Suppliers—particularly in the Hospitality industry—need to think about their brand position and why their customers buy from them as they consider the revenue and cost of this incremental revenue stream.

Our recommendation: to develop a customer-centric ancillary revenue strategy you need to consider the ‘emotional impact’ it will have on your key customer segments and the emotional fingerprint your brand wants to leave on its customers. Is your brand in the business of making key customers feel delighted? Secure? Valued? If so, the Ancillary Revenue offers should avoid making customers feel angry and frustrated! First step is to identify the top emotional drivers of your brand and investigate whether the Ancillary Revenue products are aligned; consider whether the revenue strategy reinforces, or conflicts with, the desired emotional end-benefit. Watch our recent webinar to learn about our approach: EMPACT℠: Measuring Your Brand's Emotional Impact

There are plenty of positive examples of ancillary revenue opportunities aligned with the desired emotional impact. Here are a few:

Disney: There is no FastPass on rides for younger kids at Disney – and the wait time can easily surpass the patience of kids… and their parents. On a recent trip to Disneyworld, a colleague spent over $100 buying buzzing, spinning, bubble-blowing toys from push-carts surrounding the rides. The toys kept her son happy and occupied. She felt delighted; turning waiting in line into a fun instead of a frustrating experience.

Disney mastery in this area is evident. It successfully offers many products and services that drive ancillary revenue that reinforce the desired emotional outcomes – during and after the trip: the MemoryMaker photo package, the pins/guest books/signatures and stamped pennies, the character breakfasts.

Tigerair, serving Asia-Pacific destinations, offers a fee-based service to travelers waiting for a flight connection of at least eight hours where they can visit the city-center and go sightseeing. As a traveler, I’d feel productive, happy and secure (knowing that I’d be back in time for my flight!)

Hilton Worldwide: When traveling, for business and pleasure, most travelers describe Wi-Fi as an essential service. For years, most major full service hotel brands provided access for a daily fee. Slowly, but surely, major brands like Hilton Worldwide have moved to a position of providing basic access to all loyalty program members. Doing so removes a highly charged negative emotion and reinforces a feeling of ‘being valued.’ Ancillary revenue will be created through sales of the premium internet service with the negative emotional blowback of ‘nickel and diming’ for a basic requirement.

The key take-away: The quest for ancillary revenue will only heat up. Ensure your strategy aligns with – and supports – the reasons customers buy from you and the emotional benefit they’re looking to achieve.

Learn More About EMPACT℠

Topics: Travel & Hospitality Research, Emotional Measurement, Customer Experience & Loyalty, BrandFx

Modern Enigma: Deciphering the Language of Emojis

Posted by Blair Bailey

Wed, Sep 09, 2015

emojis, language, brandingParlez-vous emoji? Step aside, French – there’s a new language of the future. Well, maybe.

Since Apple’s release of the emoji keyboard in 2011, the use of emojis has grown exponentially. This past March, nearly half of Instagram comments and captions contained emoji characters. But this isn’t just the language of choice for consumers. Emojis are brands’ latest attempt to appeal to the younger, texting-heavy demographics of Millennials and Gen Z. Brands such as Coca-Cola and Bud Light are using emojis to create unique content to stand out with these younger demographics. Even though these tiny images can set a brand’s message apart, it’s also very easy for the message to fall flat with consumers.Even so, brands are venturing into the world of emojis to develop content as well as to investigate their audiences. Independent shop Big Spaceship is working on technology to develop definitions for brand tracking via emojis. This would be done similar to the measurement of brand sentiment using the occurrence of specific words on social media. The idea isn’t to look at emojis alone, but to examine them within the context of social content. Theoretically, this would allow brands to examine differences as seemingly miniscule as using a red heart instead of a blue heart in a social media comment.  

Instagram considered this very difference in their Emojineering blog, and found that, in fact, blue hearts and red hearts don’t mean the same thing. Instagram took a similar approach to Big Spaceship and studied the occurrence of specific emojis with specific words and hashtags. They examined the hashtags associated with certain color hearts in the absence of a red heart. A blue heart lead to Duke-related hashtags (#goblue, #letsgoduke, etc.) and Autism Awareness-related hashtags (#autismspeaks), while a yellow heart lead to spring-related and earth-related hashtags (#springhassprung, #hellospring, #happyearthday, etc.).

As a market researcher, this use of emojis is intriguing and problematic. I’d love to know the meaning and reasoning behind a consumer’s decision to post a cat emoji rather than the kitten face emoji, but playing Bletchley Park doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll find what I’m looking for. The texting-based language of emojis, while expressive, only brings us a little bit closer to the full picture. There is a much easier way to get an honest read of respondents’ emotions towards a brand—just ask them. At CMB, we use custom market research and our new survey-based approach to measuring the emotional impact of brands, EMPACT℠, to find out how your customers really feel about your brand. . .rather than spend time defining heart and cat emojis.

Blair Bailey is an Associate Researcher at CMB who language, branding, emojis.

Learn More About EMPACT℠

Topics: Social Media, Emotional Measurement, Brand Health & Positioning, BrandFx, Generational Research

CMB Conference Recap: MRA's ISC

Posted by Kirsten Clark

Mon, Jun 15, 2015

insights and strategies conference, cmb conference recapLast week, a few of my colleagues and I headed down to San Diego to soak up all the sun, insights, and networking opportunities we could from the Marketing Research Association’s Insights and Strategies Conference (ISC). Here are my top 4 takeaways:

1. Stop thinking like a farmer. In Jeremy Gutsche’s opening keynote, he stressed the importance of learning how to adapt. Companies are able to identify market opportunities, but they’re often unable to fully capitalize on those opportunities. Here’s an example: Blockbuster had multiple chances to buy Netflix, but declined each time because the board thought Blockbuster should focus on retail. Why do companies fall into this trap? Because we have farming instincts that make us complacent and repetitive. In order to successfully adapt, we need to tap into our hunting instincts and (1) dedicate resources to opportunities that might fail, (2) constantly search for new opportunities, and (3) seize those opportunities.

2. Emotions matter. The whole conference was abuzz about emotions. It’s important to fully appreciate just how much influence they have over our daily decisions. People do not think emotions. They feel them, and, amazingly, emotions are universal—they’re hardwired into each of us, regardless of culture, age, gender, etc. This makes understanding emotions critical to fully understanding your customers’ experience. It’s that understanding that allows brands to implement strategies that will spark more of the right emotions and fewer of the wrong ones. Make sure you check out our latest webinar on our decision-focused approach to emotional measurement!

3. Sear your brand into long term memory. How can a brand sear themselves into consumers’ long-term memories? Samantha Moore and Ralph Blessing from Ameritest suggested that brands have to tap into all three long-term memory banks: the procedural (do), the semantic (think), and the episodic (feel). As an example, they showed us a photo of two chairs on a beach and asked us what brand was being represented. The whole room simultaneously answered “Corona.” This is a brand that has successfully tapped into all three of those memory banks. There is a ritual associated with Corona (adding the lime), which taps into the procedural. When we think of Corona, we associate it with the beach, which taps into the semantic and makes us feel relaxed, which taps into the episodic.

4. Presentations should be clear, insightful, and beautiful. When you’re creating a presentation do you: include any and every data point you can on a slide? repeat the same stat over and over? rival a novel with the amount of text you have on any given slide? keep your audience guessing with unnecessary chart builds? These are the most common traps market researchers fall into when creating a presentation, according to Kory Grushka from Work Design Group and Andrea Blingen from PepsiCo. How can you avoid falling into these traps? Keep in mind that color should be used strategically, simplicity is often best, and consistency keeps the focus on the story you’re telling. Each presentation can be evaluated by asking yourself these three questions: is it clear? is it insightful? is it beautiful?

If you were at the conference and have anything to add, please feel free to share your insights below!

Kirsten Clark is a Marketing Associate at CMB. This was her first trip west of Texas, and it ultimately resulted in her first sunburn of the season. 

Put down the brain scans and learn how we use EMPACTour new decision-focused emotional measurement approach—to inform a range of business challenges—including marketing, customer experience, customer loyalty, and product development. 

WATCH HERE

Topics: Emotional Measurement, Brand Health & Positioning, Conference Insights

Superman, the Super Bass-o-Matic, and CMB's EMPACT℠

Posted by Dr. Erica Carranza

Mon, Jun 08, 2015

Introducing CMB's EMPACTSM: A practical approach to understanding the emotional impact of your brand.

Emotions matter in driving consumer choices. 

This is fast becoming a truism—thanks in part to behavioral economics making its way to the mainstream press.  For evidence from your own life, take a moment to think about your favorite brand.  What do you like about it?  What are the products or experiences it provides?  Now think about how those things make you feel.  Or think about the last time you swore off a brand.  Like the last time I bought something from Ikea.  They sold me an extra part they said I would need.  They didn’t deliver the part, then they told me I didn’t really need it.  But they charged me for it, and never credited me despite my investing 3 hours of time in calls with their customer service.  I felt so frustrated, and so angry, that I swore I’d never buy from Ikea again.  NEVER AGAIN!  [shakes fist at sky]  And, to date, I haven’t.  But I digress… The point is that scientific research, marketing research, and conventional wisdom all suggest that, if you’re trying to attract and engage consumers, emotions are an important piece of the puzzle.     

So what’s the best way to understand how your brand or product makes consumers feel, and what role those feelings play in shaping their choices?  Many marketers and market researchers have been wringing their hands over this question.  Which, in turn, has led research vendors to serve up an array of solutions—including some positioned as ways to get at “unconscious” emotions, or to tap into how people feel without having to ask them. I call these “Superman Methods.” 

CMB Empact, Emotional Impact AnalysisIf Superman wants to know what color your underwear is, he doesn’t need to ask.  He can see it without your saying a word.  He can see it even if you forgot which pair of underwear you chose this morning.  And if you don’t want Superman looking at your underwear, too bad!  HE CAN SEE IT ANYWAY. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had Superman-like methods that tapped consumers’ emotions directly, without ever having to ask them how they felt? 

I was witness to many a sales pitch for “Superman Methods” while I was on the client side.  It's hard not to be drawn in by their promise.  But ultimately I was bothered by a few key things:

  • Biometric measures (e.g., skin conductance, facial EMG, brain waves) are often positioned as Superman-style tools.  But even when they do a great job of measuring how good or bad someone feels (as with facial EMG), they don’t provide good measures of discrete emotions.  For example, they can’t tell you if negative feelings are driven by Anger vs. Anxiety, or if positive feelings reflect Amusement vs. Pride. 

  • Facial coding does measure some specific emotions.  But it only gets at the “basic” emotions, which are: Happiness, Surprise, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Contempt. 

    bass-o-matic, Empact, CMB, Emotional Impact AnalysisNotice anything about that list?  There is only one positive emotion.  The rest are all negative—except Surprise, which could swing either way.  So unless you’re trying to help Dan Aykroyd sell the Super Bass-o-Matic (for which disgust, anger and contempt could top the list of consumer reactions), understanding how your product makes people feel would ideally capture more granularity in terms of their positive emotions

    For example, what about feeling relaxed?  Proud?  Entertained?  Secure?  Indulged?  And even among negative emotions, there is more nuance.  What about feeling frustrated?  Bored?  Disappointed?  Or embarrassed? 

    Consumers’ emotional lives are more complex than what the “basic emotion” faces can reveal—and understanding that complexity can help you find a more direct (and competitively differentiated) route to capturing their hearts

  • While it’s true that people don’t always know why they do what they do, it doesn’t follow that they don’t know how they feel.  I might not know all the reasons why I choose Seventh Generation for my kids, but I know how its brand promise makes me feel.  And while we can’t always trust the reasons consumers give, isn’t that why we derive importance through experimental designs and predictive models? 

  • Furthermore, how much “Superman Methods” really tap the unconscious—or add value to self-report measures in consumer domains—is debatable.  For example, many scientists question whether the oft-cited Implicit Association Test (IAT) actually measures unconscious associations.  And meta-analyses (including one led by a creator of the IAT) have found that it doesn’t work as well as self-reports to predict consumer preferences. 

What measures like facial coding, EMG, and the IAT do do well is subvert socially sensitive situations—where people know how they feel, but don’t want to tell you.  (The IAT was first developed to study prejudice—a great use case, since people with racist attitudes usually try keep them on the DL).  But if you want to know how your brand, ad, or product makes people feel, in most cases you can trust what they tell you.  Especially in a context where they feel comfortable being honest, like an online/mobile survey.  In the hands of a skilled moderator, in-person discussions can also be a great way to uncover emotional reactions, but that method isn’t scalable to large samples. 

At CMB, we do a lot of research that calls for large samples, so we wanted to develop and validate a way to measure how brands/touchpoints make consumers feel that is: practical (e.g., scalable, fast, cost-effective, easy to combine with other measures such as brand perceptions); comprehensive (in terms of the range of emotions measured); robust (leveraging insights from the scientific study of emotion); and systematic (to enable brand comparisons, or track over time).  Oh yeah—and we also wanted results that are clear and compelling.  Because, if you can’t effectively communicate them to people who need to use them, what’s the point? 

Our solution is a survey-based approach to measuring the emotional impact of brands, communications, products and experiences called EMPACTSM. Curious? Watch our webinar!

WATCH HERE

Erica Carranza is a CMB Account Director with supplier- and client-side (American Express) experience. She is also our resident social psychologist; she earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University.

Topics: Chadwick Martin Bailey, Emotional Measurement, Webinar, BrandFx

Spring Cleaning Tips for Insights Professionals

Posted by Brant Cruz

Wed, May 27, 2015

spring cleaning, Brant CruzFor those of you living in Siberia, I have a news flash: Boston had a nasty winter. Fortunately, spring has sprung, which has put an extra pep in my step for the past few weeks. That glorious feeling, coupled with an engagement I’ve been working on for Electronic Arts (EA), has inspired this blog. Martha Stewart says that “there are few rites of spring more satisfying than the annual clean.” Well, I’m no Martha Stewart (and for those of you who know me, the comparison is downright comical), but I do appreciate the general sentiment. 

Martha’s extensive list of spring cleaning projects can be found here. But, instead of the proverbial laundry list, I’m going to focus on three of Martha’s tips that have implications in the world of insights, analytics, UXR, and consulting.

1. Organize files. Sure, there is also a tactical “file management” analogy here, but I’m talking about something more powerful and fundamental. I’m advocating that you step back and ask yourself whether you are appropriately allocating your resources to the right initiatives. Take a look back over the last year (or more) at all the work you have completed with a critical eye. Which projects have had true business impact? Which ones could have had impact, but weren’t adopted appropriately by your business partners? What types of work are you consistently conducting that either can’t or won’t have true business impact? Conversely, what could you be working on that would really move your business forward? When facilitated correctly, I bet that most of us would learn that we should shift at least some of our focus elsewhere. 

2. Swap out heavy curtains, throws, and rugs for lightweight ones. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but we live in a “Mobile First” world. A world where consumers have more choices and are harder to pin down and our business partners need fresh insights faster than ever just to keep up. This reality provides both challenges and opportunities when it comes to “old” methods of designing studies and collecting data. There’s still room for “heavy” (strategic/foundational) projects and amazing storytelling deliverables. However, we also need to make plenty of room for methods that provide insights quickly, utilize mobile data collection (with modules “stitched” together scientifically when longer questionnaires are required), and use workshops to get key results to business partners faster rather than waiting for a beautifully packaged final product. Innovative companies (many of whom will be attending the Insights and Strategies Conference in San Diego next week) continue to create exciting new tools. We’re excited to launch EMPACT℠: CMB’s Emotional Impact Analysis methodology next month—our solution to measuring the emotional payoffs consumers experience, want, and expect from a brand, product, or ad.

3. Ensure Fire Safety. Admittedly, this analogy is a bit of a leap, but I find that spending extra time to make sure that my family is in no danger from fire analogous to spending time with my team to ensure that we are all on the same page, working towards the same goals, and that I am providing the support I can to ensure their happiness, balance, and high performance. I was lucky enough to participate in EA’s Global Analytics and Insights Conference offsite last month, and these few days provided a great blueprint for doing this well. In a nutshell, Zack Anderson (EA’s VP of Marketing Science) leads a team of more than 60 Consumer Insights, Analytics, and UXR professionals. The 3-day agenda he developed included a mix of motivational speaking, priority setting, cross-team pollination, and good ole fashioned bonding activities. The theme of the conference was “Ideas. Relationships. Execution.”—and I think it delivered brilliantly on all three counts. 

I suggest you all spend time pondering these three tips and finding the right way to execute them in your professional life. While none of them are as fun as playing a round of golf, I bet they’re all more fun than some of Martha’s other tips, such as resealing grout lines and dusting refrigerator coils.  

Brant Cruz is our resident segmentation guru and the Vice President of CMB’s eCommerce and Digital Media Practice.

Want to learn more about EMPACT℠: CMB’s Emotional Impact Analysis? Watch our recent webinar as CMB's Brant Cruz and Dr. Erica Carranza share how we capture emotional payoffs to inform a range of business challenges, including marketing, customer experience, customer loyalty, and product development. 

WATCH HERE

 

Topics: Business Decisions, Consumer Insights, Emotional Measurement, BrandFx