Voices: the CMB Blog

In less than 15 years, your car will drive itself, and education and learning as we now know them will be as unrecognizable as the cassette tapes of old. Look out, because nothing is safe. It will happen in healthcare, in manufacturing, in entertainment, and even in your job.  Everything is becoming more focused on true value creation.  If you want to be ready for what’s ahead, here are the people and companies to follow on Twitter.  If you can’t already see the future, they can help you put it into focus.

• We’re heading to a “trillion sensor world”—a world filled with smart objects constantly interacting over a network to improve user experiences. For example, Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity University, predicts today's 2-year-olds will probably never drive a car thanks to the dawn of self-driving cars. If you think your industry isn’t being disrupted by the Internet of Things…think again.

  Twitter:  @PeterDiamandis. Hashtags: Internet of Everything, Internet of Things (#IoE or #IoT)

• Have you thought about how manufacturing can now happen in your own home?  Bre Pettis of MakerBot, heads up a company that’s already bringing 3D printing to us. An awesome example? A group of 12-year-olds in a Massachusetts town made their friend a prosthetic arm on one of these 3D printers.  

  Twitter:  @bre from @makerbot Hashtag:  #3DPrinting

• There are a billion doctors’ office visits each year, and 80% of those visits do not require physical contact.  Dr. Rafael J. Grossman, surgeon and mHealth innovator, is a vanguard of this emerging medical model. Why not use FaceTime, Skype, and other online platforms that solve the need for medical consults in a less expensive and more accessible way?

  Twitter: @zgjr  Watch his TED talks

• According to Pepsi’s Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, we can’t innovate in just one dimension.  Today, Pepsi competes with Nike and Apple for emotional relevance. Porcini says that there are three separate dimensions of interaction. The first experience with a brand is visceral—like glimpsing a beautiful woman or man.  The other two steps involve repurchase (which is an interaction that comes from your emotional love of a product or a brand) and recommending (which is the self-expression of a brand through word of mouth). You can’t create breakthrough innovation by addressing just one of these dimensions. You have to address all of them.

   Twitter:  @mauroporcini

• Kids just hanging out after school are going to discover a cure for cancer, solve world hunger, and create sensors that help previously marginalized and unprofitable subgroups get what they need to live productive lives.  How? Through having fun.  Harvard professor Michael Tushman says corporations have culture and power systems geared perfectly to their existing strategies but that these corporations often aren’t agile enough to shift.  We need to set up creative time to work on the things we want to work on.  Intuit, for example, allows employees to spend 10% of their time on projects they’re interested in, and those hours often yield the innovations of tomorrow.

  Twitter:  @Michaeltushman

• Those kids I mentioned above are only part of the solution.  According to Kate Ertmann of Animation Dynamics, we need pan-generational partnering to pull it together. Millennials, Generation X, Gen Y, and Baby Boomers all have something valid to contribute, but each generation talks a different language and has different self-motivators (hint: money for the elders and time off for the young’uns). This means each of us needs to learn to be a teammate and learn the language of partnering.

  Twitter:  @GOK8

• Carlos Dominguez, technology evangelist and SVP at CISCO, says that everything is rebooting.  Business models are totally changing.  Retail stores are no longer mission critical. Distance is dead and consumers are active participants. Now the crowd can conduct piecework for a common goal— the seemingly daunting 100 million hours of development time it took to create Wikipedia equates to what Americans collectively spend each weekend watching TV ads.   

  Twitter:  @carlosdominguez

• Mike Nelson, Principal Technology Policy Strategist at Microsoft, is a guy whose job is to avoid tomorrow’s policy fights by focusing on global internet governance.  He speaks on behalf of transparency and the need to enlist “teamers” from within and beyond corporate and national walls to solve common challenges.  These sought-after people will have varied skills, learn from their customers, and be led by an executive who supports, rather than manages, them. 

  Twitter:  @mikenelson

• Even though most things can now be found online, some things remain in the physical world. Let’s face it: we do need to leave our houses sometimes. So follow Johnny Cupcakes—this guy could sell us dirt in the form of a cupcake for $40 and what he’d really be selling us is sustainability, community, and self-love. He consistently delivers “WOW” in the form of customer experience. In a time when retail shops are largely believed to be dying, he’s patented a retail store concept of selling clothes and accessories from bakery shelves. And his fans line up outside his store for hours. Of course he doesn’t ignore online shoppers; he translates this unique experience to his online store too. His products ship in distinctive and delightful packaging.  That packaging costs Johnny extra but those details…well, Johnny knows, just like when it comes to Tiffany’s, we’re buying everything the box represents. 

  Twitter:  @johnnycupcakes

Julie is an Account Executive, she just flew in from the Future of Consumer Intelligence conference where she was in her element connecting with innovative big thinkers on topics ranging from emotion to mobile and complex choice modelling. Follow her @julie1research using hashtag #MRX.

At the IIR #TotalCEL conference this week in Miami, behavioral motivations fueled the majority of presentations. In 2014, the economics of behaviors are getting quantified. Marketers and their peers in Operations are gently guiding their companies to a deeper understanding of the emotional drivers behind their problems. 

7 of the Emotional States Presented at #TotalCEL: 

1. Neutral: “People prefer to be at a neutral state emotionally,” says Daryl Travis, the CEO of BrandTrust and author of Emotional Branding – How Successful Brands Gain the Irrational Edge.  However, the customer journey is far from neutral. For example, customers who go to a department store might have emotional peaks (e.g. found a product on sale) and emotional valleys (e.g. had to wait in a long line). No matter the actual journey, Travis states that the customer’s end state and how problems are resolved are the two aspects of the journey that matter most. 

2. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): Kassandra Barnes of CareerBuilder noted that Millennials are seeking promotion, advancement, training, and mentorship opportunities when searching for a job and are less concerned about benefits. Unlike their older counterparts, Millennials are casually, but continuously, looking for another job due to this primary emotional motivation: FOMO. In fact, 83% of full time Millennials are actively looking for new job opportunities, and 49% of Millennials search for new jobs while at work.

3. Let’s Bond: Moms today experience the lofty emotional attachment of bonding when they pick up the bottle with the orange ribbed cap, pristine curves, and the chalkboard image on the package of the glue that cements a relationship during play. Elmer’s Michelle Manning elaborated on parents, emotions, and the perfect packaging.

4. Forgiveness: According to Dr. Mark Ingwer, author of Empathetic Marketing, leveraging empathetic emotions is “the buried treasure of customer service.” The question he says is where to drop anchor? After working with Allstate, Ingwer conducted the fuzzy front end discovery research he calls “psych ethnographies” and this research yielded the insight about creating empathy in the product, hence Allstate’s Accident Forgiveness and Your Choice Auto. Both products have appealed to the audience and have dramatically ramped up revenues, increased customer satisfaction and staved the churn rate.

5. Eliminate Worry: Emotional and behavioral goals vary widely, depending upon the degree of trust each consumer has. One critical consumer obsession is to eliminate worry. You can see companies responding to that obsession in the mobile payment space, where we found security is a primary concern. While it’s still unclear which companies will win over the consumer mobile payment market, it will be interesting to see how and when these competitors adequately address the primary emotional and functional needs of the mobile payment user—worry free transactions. CMB’s Brian Jones presented the Future of the Mobile Wallet where he shared which industry (and which companies) may be best positioned to eliminate worry. Will it be a bank, a credit card company, an internet service provider, a technology company, or a retail store like Starbucks?

6. Belonging: Every time I hear Keith Ferrazzi speak, he’s written a new book, and I learn something new. He says that people don’t want to change so we should focus on which of the fewest people can change which narrowest set of practices and behaviors that can accelerate our results.  The key is to dig deep into the willingness to change.  Change is an emotional journey, and the highest order of the emotional food chain is “belonging.”  From childhood (“I said so”) to reason (“that makes sense”) to being "mission driven" and then focusing on “your stuff” we end up with belonging—our  basic need to relate to other people.

7. Look at me: What does your brand offer that your customers need?  The key thing that a lifestyle brand like Starwood gives is experiential currency for their social life.  The affiliation—you’re in their physical world gaining experiences—creates that sharable moment that is currency for us all. In contrast, other hotel properties don’t make it easy for you to take that perfect picture of yourself and your loved ones from a design standpoint.  When I go to an Aloft or a Westin, I have that very cool picture in their design inspired context. Starwood’s Stephen Gates, VP and Creative Director for Global Brand Design, talked about all of their brands, about the rain room at the MoMa, Starwood’s presence on stage at 3 of the last 5 Apple keynotes and their being featured in Apple’s advertising as well as “on the phone.” He says the work is king. The work dictates everything. The work runs his department. The work sells the brands and hotels. The work is what matters. His design thinking begins with some basic tenets—keep it simple, sweat the details, build a lifestyle or a visual personality that reflects the consumer, be relevant and authentic, break new ground, push innovation, think globally and go with swagger.

What are you doing with respect to emotional or behavioral economics? Continue the dialogue on Twitter with @julie1research using hashtag #MRX.

Julie is an Account Executive, she loves to connect with innovative big thinkers on topics ranging from emotion to complex choice modelling.

Last week’s Chief Strategy Officer Summit in NYC (#CSONY) was an electric example of brand strategy in action. If you didn’t get a chance to attend this year I highly recommend making the trip in 2014. In the meantime, I want to share some of the big questions we marketers and strategists need to ask ourselves and our organizations this coming year...and beyond:

• Are you continuously focusing and refreshing your brand?  If your customer can’t rattle off what your brand is about, chances are your messaging isn’t streamlined enough. Jennifer Dorian, Chief Strategy Officer for Turner Entertainment Networks, passionately described the big decisions they make as they 1) keep their brand properties crystal clear and 2) continue to evolve their brands. Dorian argues that brands need an “essence;” some of Turner’s brand essences: TNT=Drama, TBS=Funny, TCM=Classic Movies. TNT, anchored by Law & Order, embodies drama with programming that focuses on the line between good and evil, passion, and the willingness to take a risk—they’re the stories that make life interesting. TNT is continuously developing original compelling programming that makes drama come alive for viewers (their new show Mob City is a great example). The outcome of their efforts, to focus and clarify their brands? 25 consecutive periods of growth. What are you doing to keep your brand focused and fresh?

• Which target audiences will you “double down” on? OK, you’re a successful brand with a devout following and yet you know you need to make calculated big bets to claim your unique positioning. South Street Strategy’s Mark Carr was on hand to talk about thinking deeply about your target audience, and your brand’s playbook for actively engaging them. South Street Strategy and CMB, helped the Tauck travel company go from business decisions to successful new product launch with a focused innovation approach. Hypotheses abounded for how to grow and refresh the nine decade old company—intergenerational travel, kid focused, teen trips? CMB and South Street partnered with Tauck to explore people’s life goals for relaxation and for travel. The tram then used a quantitative approach to prioritize areas with greatest appeal. They unearthed the “engaged traveler”—those interested in cultural immersion, moderately active, and seeking adventure. Based on this, Tauck launched and optimized the Culturious brand, a highly successful set of tours geared to active Baby Boomers. You can learn more about our approach here.

• Are you engaged deeply and passionately enough? Let’s be honest with ourselves, that 30 year old degree from a pedigreed school is looking pretty stale. Digital natives (yup, kids) are supplementing their education with experiences and experiments that are really immersive, both in and out of school. Tanya Van Court, Discovery Communications’ SVP of Partner Marketing, spoke about how the number one non-fiction media company in the world’s Discovery Education brand is re-purposing its content for the classroom.  Discovery is inspiring curiosity and critical thinking with exceptional content delivered in classroom length snippets. When I was a kid we took a bus to the next town to visit the library and scour microfiche for an article from the decade before. Now, these digital natives are actually interacting with materials from the bottom of the ocean to the furthest reaches of our galaxy, all before breakfast, and often just for fun. They interact with content differently, they expect access to current and relevant info and they crave personalized experiences. As Discovery Education disrupts the business of textbooks, watch out world, these digital natives are going to be out in the workforce soon and they combine a lot of passion and outrageous curiosity. Is it time to examine your company and your personal brand through their lens?

• Is your brand under Caesar’s control or is it spawning fleets of scientists?  Intuit’s Bennett Blank shared his view that “designing for delight” is everyone’s job.  We all need to have deep customer empathy to uncover unsolved customer problems and to think flexibly so we can build durable competitive advantage for our companies. Intuit’s goal is to improve their customers’ financial lives so profoundly that customers can’t imagine going back to the old way they did things. Of course, the makers of TurboTax, Quicken and Mint.com know a lot about making exceptional products and continuously innovating.  Blank contrasts two types of leaders—the” Caesar” and the “Scientist.”  The Caesar’s goal is to win (and not to lose), and to be right. The scientist however, bases her ideas on evidence, has a “do it now” style, and a willingness to be enlightened through trial and error, experimentation, and data. Scientists get results that can be characterized as “discoveries,” while the Caesar sits around worrying that he might get stabbed.  Intuit is frequently and rapidly experimenting so it can deliver “more better ideas” into the earlier part of the innovation funnel that can actually delight the customer. 

• What’s “long-term” mean for your brand? Quite possibly the conference planners most intriguing decision (or lucky collision?) was pairing Rebecca Keiser, Strategy Administrator for NASA, with Gary Liu, Global Ad/Product Strategy for Spotify. Gary talked about how Spotify’s strategy needs to expand to address the “further future,” and when he talks about the further future for Spotify he’s talking about 6 months away.  NASA, on the other hand, is thinking about the year 2030. Spotify uses word like “throwing together” and NASA word choice like “forging.” It was a great reminder to think about what long-term means for your brand and the decisions you need to make.

So, what questions will you ask yourself, your team, and your organization, as you look to 2014 and beyond?

Julie is an Account Executive at CMB, she's definitely a "Scientist" not a "Caesar;" you can follow her on Twitter @Julie1research.

Yesterday, I shared 6 of the questions that stood out from last week's TMRE conference. Here are 4 more that had me thinking:

4.  Are you developing for mobile first (yet)?  6 out of 10 people LOVE their mobile device (for real!) says Tony Marlow at Yahoo! In fact, he says that 3 out of 5 would rather give up chocolate for a year than give up their tablet and 1 in 4 women would give up sex before they’d surrender their tablet—yikes! With the insane growth in internet usage, thanks to portable devices (smartphones and tablets), why are so many companies putting mobile development on the back burner? Yahoo’s development teams are developing for mobile first, is it time for you to do the same?  
 
3.  Does your company understand how consumers actually use your products?  I’d just got done hearing why my clients need to put mobile first, when CMB’s very own Chris Neal and the Council for Research Excellence’s Joanne Burns revealed that by volume, mobile  TV viewing isn’t quite so big……yet. 89% of total TV viewing is still done on a TV set, while 7% is watched on a mobile device. Interestingly, quite a bit of this mobile viewing is done in the home—sometimes it’s more convenient to stay right where you are than go to the TV room, and make no mistake convenience matters a lot. So, a lot of mobile TV viewers aren’t mobile when they’re watching. Is your company paying attention to shifts in the way people are actually consuming or being exposed to your product?

2.  Is the “hero” generation engaged with your brand? Jake Katz of YPulse shed a little more light on the Millennials (born between 1982-2004) in our midst. This is a generation that’s come of age during the instability of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and a difficult job market. He calls this generation the “hero” archetype. Their core traits:  special, sheltered, confident, conventional, pressured, achieving, and team and family oriented.  Millennials seesaw between optimism and insecurity but have been raised to speak up and ask questions. That’s a tough nut to crack for many marketers, is it worth it for your brand?

1.  Are you digging in the right places? One of my favorite moments was when Malcolm Gladwell spoke about his latest book David and Goliath, and the power of the inverted U (or the straightened bell curve)—at first more is better but then marginal utility diminishes and goes negative. Examples are drinking is healthy (left side of curve at 1-2 drinks a week) and drinking is unhealthy (right side of inverted U curve at 30+ drinks a week). Is your company overly focused on the left or right side of the full picture?

Julie is an Account Executive at CMB, she's very excited about all the new books she has to read, and of course her signed copy of David and Goliath. You can follow her on Twitter @Julie1research.

TMRE is always a whirlwind of meeting new people, catching up with clients and industry colleagues, and of course getting some time to reflect on the questions and challenges facing the Market Research industry and our clients. This weekend I took some time to round up 10 of the questions we heard asked, and sometimes even answered, at this year’s conference:10. What if gaming isn’t a waste of time?  Is it possible playing Angry Birds could be a good thing? Author Jane McGonigal makes the case that gaming can bring us joy, relief, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, awe and wonder. OK, I’ll buy that. But gaming used for the greater good?  McGonigal shared how developers are creating games with missions that amount to more than just racking up points: Community gardening in real local gardens with a Farmville style interface, or Re-Mission, a game geared to young cancer patients, with the aim of increasing patient regimen adherence. My takeaway? Things are moving way too fast to get stuck in outdated notions of what has value and what doesn’t.

9. Have you experimented with maximums?  Here’s a fun fact: shoppers who buy soup purchase 1-4 cans per trip. Professor Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, an expert on behavioral economics, found when shoppers were presented with a promotional offer for a maximum purchase of 4 cans of soups; they purchased those 4 cans, even if they had only intended to buy 1 or 2. Does anybody else think this has applications way beyond the grocery aisle?

8. Do you research with passion and openness to creative and custom methodologies?  Best job title award to Janu Lakshmanan who is Global Vodka Consumer Insights for Beam.  She used her budget to nurture trend spotting among employees of Beam to “go try stuff.”  As they harnessed the diversity of their employees, they uncovered insights from “interactivity” (watching a screening of Life of Pi in small boats wearing a life vest) to “collaborative lifestyle” (Mud jeans in the Netherlands…ask you to rent jeans for a year and then send them back to be recycled so you can try something new) .   If you have a few seconds, check out Salta Beer Vending Machine or Coke Zero’s 007 Skyfall.

7. Are you who you say you are?  If not, you may get outed by your customers and employees. Like it or not, all roles require time, energy, commitment, confidence, and the zeal that drives sales. Daniel Pink, author of To Sell is Human describes the shift from the olden days, when sellers had a lot of knowledge and buyers were their hostages.  It’s not surprising that the top words used to describe sales include “pushy, yuck, ugh, hard, difficult, annoying, sleazy, manipulative.”  But nowadays, the buyer has the power.  For example, if you are unhappy with a product, you as a buyer have a lot of power to make choices, because a lot of information is readily available. You (and your organization) need to know your ABC’s:  be Attuned (listen, find common ground, and persuade others) Buoyant (stay afloat in that ocean of rejection by re-contextualizing the failure) and Clear (curate information and re-staking the tent from problem solving to problem finding).

6. Do you have a relatable mission?   First do you even have one? And second is it relevant to your target market?  I loved Leslie Mottla of ZipCar’s description of the company’s human centered mission: enabling simple and responsible urban living. She also shared their six steps to success: be with customers; imagine the ideal; design the experience, humanize the details, envision service recovery as an opportunity and measure, measure, measure.

5. Have you glanced at your back seat drivers?  No longer “seen but not heard,” kids play a big role in influencing more than a trillion dollars in US household family purchases these days, says Marc Normand of Disney Media. The Plurals, kids ages 0-14, are being raised in families that look a little different from when Walt was running the show—they’re growing up in families with one mom, two moms, one grandparent, a mom and dad, etc. Parenting styles and ethnic and cultural composition (checking multiple boxes when asked their origin) have also evolved. Technologically, 80% of all US households with children own an app enabled device. Half of all kids 6-14 actually use an app enabled device and 40% of 2 year olds are fluent in “the swipe “and other functions. Are you connecting to these little back seat drivers?  They are a secret back door into a parents’ wallet. Is your programming, product, or service maintaining relevancy as these tectonic shifts are taking place?

Stay tuned for numbers 4 through 1 of my TMRE round-up and tell us what's on your list of takeaways from the conference?

Julie is an Account Executive at CMB. She loved Nashville but is glad to be home with her own little back seat drivers. You can follow her on Twitter @Julie1research.