Voices: the CMB Blog

A few weeks ago, I found myself seated at a trendy Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis, an eager participant at one of the more enjoyable business lunches I’ve encountered lately. As you might expect, the topic quickly turned from the vagaries of the marketing life to the weather, summer vacation stories, the gym, far-too-early holiday planning (I’m looking at you, Target), and then, unexpectedly, to dieting. It was there where I learned Jim Garrity, SVP and head of CMB’s Financial Services, Insurance & Healthcare Practice, was quite a fan of Weight Watchers, one of the few truly successfully long-term dieting options out there – it earned Consumer Report’s highest mark for nutrition analysis.Jim had become a devotee of the Weight Watchers PointsPlus® plan, which, for someone I’d fancied a meat-and-potatoes man like me, came as a bit of a surprise. But as Jim continued to discuss the program and what he enjoyed about it, I realized that PointsPlus® was nothing more than another example of CMB’s brand and product development bread-and-butter: the tradeoff exercise. 

For those not familiar with how it works, PointsPlus® assigns a numeric point-value to each meal/snack/dessert/shake/whatever you can buy through the program, based on protein, carbohydrates, fat and fiber content. The system will then give you a daily points target, taking into account your height, weight, age and gender; read more about it here. Simply stay at or under your target, and…well, that’s it. 

This, as you might expect, presents our would-be dieter with a daily flurry of choices.  Do you have the bagel with cream cheese or the fresh fruit for breakfast? Go with a savory salad or a slim sandwich for lunch? And how do these choices affect what you have “left” at dinner?  Sorry to burst your bubble, eager reader, but if you want that red velvet cake, you’re going to have to pass on the cream cheese.

Built on the economic principle of opportunity cost (the idea that to buy a product or undertake an activity, that product/activity must necessarily replace something else you might have bought or engaged in), these sorts of tradeoffs are exactly what we seek to model when researchers help develop brands, products, messaging campaigns, or basically anything else with a give-and-take.  You can’t be the industry leader and try harder. If you want to offer premium customer service, you’re going to have to charge a bit more. Anyone who’s ever made a budget, whether on a ledger or www.Mint.com, understands that if you go to the concert, you might have to skip the movies this week.

Our job, then, is to master the usage of methodological techniques which replicate these real-world tradeoffs within a research setting. Almost all of my clients take advantage of Maximum-Difference Scaling, an exercise where participants select which items/features/messages/etc. they like most and least, four options at a time. By forcing this tradeoff, we can accurately prioritize huge lists of information in short order, not only rank-ordering but also sizing the distance between items. Many also use allocations, which allow participants to assign different values to a set of given options, but knowing there are only so many points to go around (often 100). My brand and product development engagements often utilize Discrete Choice (or Conjoint) Modeling, an extremely powerful form of tradeoff exercise where participants must choose between holistic brand positionings or fully-configured products. We can then deconstruct their decisions, analyze the tradeoffs, and find those pesky drivers of decision-making that are the foundation of marketing as we know it.

Think about it this way: if you’re still with me, you’ve traded off the time you could’ve spent watching E!, playing Candy Crush, or checking Facebook in favor of a little lesson in economics and research. So what’ll it be, then–the pasta or the seafood?

Nick is a Project Manager within CMB’s Financial Services, Insurance & Healthcare Practice, as well as a poker-playing behavioral economics and game theory nerd. You can follow him on Twitter @NAPangallo. He would always choose the pasta.

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.

Originally posted on the South Street Strategy Group Blog

Kristin Vincent, VP, Product at Marvel Entertainment, has been helping the 70-year old company re-define itself in the digital age. Not knowing much about comics when she joined the company in 2011, she quickly gained credibility and influence with her fresh perspective, insights and actions related to the company’s “Re-Evolution” digital strategy, which officially launched in March 2012.At a recent conference, she shared the principles Marvel has used to evolve its comics business so that fans continue to love their experience with comics, while traditional print and new digital formats and channels co-exist and thrive at the same time:

1. Proclaim your intentions – Declare what you want to do and communicate this publicly. This not only creates anticipation and excitement, but it builds internal commitment and accountability.

2. Develop new products with connections to existing products – This approach helps to minimize cannibalization, reassures existing customers and channel partners, and adds excitement to established products. Marvel gave everyone who bought a print comic a free digital version, and created an augmented reality application to be used with the print version to get additional behind-the-scenes information.

3. Challenge the most basic assumptions you have about your products – For Marvel, this meant re-thinking what a comic is, beyond traditional attributes such as paper booklets, panels, and pages, to seeing it as serialized graphic storytelling with excellent graphics, opening up new “Infinite” comic possibilities that rethink what a comic page means

4. Partner with users – Marvel used listening labs and usability testing to understand how fans experience comics. It brought fans in and used flip video cameras to record them in real world scenarios using comics and computers to understand pain points. Marvel also got fans to register to become Marvel Advisors to test products and provide input to their development pre-launch. Kristin says that as soon as the executive team watched a one-hour video highlighting all of the user issues and opportunities, it made a huge difference in helping to change the culture and continuing the effort to innovate

5. Develop a roadmap that starts small and builds – Marvel started with one comic in a plastic polybag with a code inside for the digital download. Now users get a free digital download with all $3.99 comics in print

6. Balance user requests with bold new ideas – Marvel re-launched Marvel Unlimited (a subscription program that gives users unlimited access to over 13,000 digital comics) but also sourced and introduced “Project Gamma,” an innovative new adaptive audio technology. It will be a cool new way to experience digital comics where the sound will change as you move through the story.

7. Fail fast and pivot – Marvel had to take a promotion down on the first day when demand for free downloads was so great that the third-party servers it was using crashed and fans couldn’t buy digital versions for two days. They corrected course and used this failure as an opportunity to show customers they cared by being honest and transparent.

8. Re-evolve –Marvel enhanced its print products with digital, and is using new formats.

In 2012, the innovations helped Marvel achieve triple digit growth in its digital business while keeping its core B2B brick-and-mortar store channel partners happy. The digital and print products complement each other, satisfying existing fans while opening up a whole new fan and user base.

Jennifer is a Director at  South Street Strategy Group. She recently received the 2013 “Member of the Year” award by the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP), the preeminent professional association for those engaged in strategic thinking, planning and action.

South Street Strategy Group, an independent sister company of Chadwick Martin Bailey, integrates the best of strategy consulting and marketing science to develop better growth and value delivery strategies. Read South Street's Strategy Group's blog here.

By Tara Lasker

Like a lot of people, I rely on user reviews for virtually all of my purchase decisions. For example, in the last week I’ve read reviews on:

• Yelp for restaurants (and even which dishes to order from said restaurants)

• Overstock.com to give me a better idea on the quality/color of a mirror I was about to purchase

• Airbnb to decide whether the location and appearance of a vacation rental was all it was cracked up to be

While I’ve come to depend on these reviews—I’d be hesitant to buy something that didn’t have some kind of rating— this mountain of data can be paralyzing. My husband and I are notoriously slow decision makers, and the cartoon below (from the always spot on xkcd.com) pretty much sums up how relying on user reviews has lengthened our purchase process. At one point we found ourselves wondering: who are these people anyway? 

What kind of person has the time to deconstruct and rate every detail of a lamp? I mean, you can find user reviews on anything—it’s remarkable.  Can these people even be trusted? And whose businesses are they hurting, or helping in the process?

As a market researcher, I think a lot about these people and the information they’re providing.  Sampling is such a critical part of research design but it’s often overlooked by data users. Here are some questions we should be asking about the people we entrust our hard-earned money to:

• Representativeness: This is a pretty simple concept, we need to ask: does this data represent the population it’s intended to?  Are Yelpers different than the average person? Do they care about the same things as me?

• Authenticity: Are the responses real or are people gaming the system? If authenticity weren’t a real concern before, the recent government crackdown on consumer review fraud should make us wonder who is actually writing some of these reviews. Even if nothing illegal is going on, it makes sense to ask whether there are incentives or disincentives for a sincere evaluation.

• Disposition: Are we only hearing from those who need a platform to vent or conversely those who are thrilled? Will reviews skew negative because consumers are much more likely to share a negative experience than a positive one? It's an important question and for Yelp's part, they share the breakdown of reviews by number of stars. In the chart below we find more positive reviews on Yelp than negative. 

User reviews have changed the path to purchase for many industries, some are slower to adopt (e.g., health care) but even the stragglers will have no choice but to accept that these strangers are influencing their brand perceptions and purchase likelihood. It's worth our time to ask just who these influencers are.

Tara is Research Director at CMB, she's also an avid user review reader who doesn’t have the time to write her own reviews.