Voices: the CMB Blog

This weekend, my 10 year old Jack sat on our comfy couch with a big screen TV just feet way, but he chose to curl up with the iPad to watch his episode of Star Wars.  In just a few clicks of the remote he could have watched it in HD on a beautiful big screen. I found myself wondering why. Was it a few clicks too many to reach On Demand?  Was it just more convenient to pick up the iPad and watch his show in a few taps? There’s no doubt consumer behavior is changing when it comes to how we watch TV and the big screen doesn’t always win.

This week the Council for Research Excellence (CRE) released a study they commissioned Chadwick Martin Bailey to run to understand the impact of mobile media devices on overall TV viewing behavior. Next week Chris Neal, leader of CMB’s Technology and Telecom practice will be joining Laura Cowan, research director at LIN Media and co-chair of the CRE’s Media Consumption and Engagement Committee at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Audience Measurement 8.0 conference to present the results. The conference takes place June 10-11, 2013 in New York City.

This study indicates that Jack is not alone in choosing the iPad over the big screen. In fact the study found the majority of “mobile” TV viewing occasions happen at home—82%  of tablet TV viewing occasions happen in-home and even 64% of smartphone viewing occasions happen here.  One of the key drivers of that choice is simply convenience:  it’s easy, the television set might be in use by someone else, and/or some consumers don’t have the same online streaming capabilities to their TV that they have on mobile devices. Check out more results of the study here.

“Much of the TV being watched on mobile devices is currently being distributed by online subscription services (e.g., Netflix, Hulu),” according to Neal. “There are opportunities for networks, pay TV providers (e.g., cable, satellite, fiber) and content owners to boost their libraries available via mobile devices and make their mobile apps more compelling so they don’t lose audience share as consumer viewing habits change.”

Interested in learning more? Check out the ARF Audience Measurement conference next week in New York and download CMB’s self-funded research on this New Age of Television

Kristen is CMB's VP of Marketing, a mom of two, and enjoys streaming content through Amazon Prime on the rare occasion she can get her iPad from Jack. Follow her on Twitter: @KristenGarvey

Today most companies are watching their expenditures closely and are challenged with how to effectively get the word out to prospective customers, but on a limited budget. The key to this is focus, across three different dimensions that we call AMP:

• Audience. It’s tempting to think that “marketing” doesn’t happen until after a product is finished and ready to sell. However, efficient and effective marketing is tailored to specific segments. This requires a company to have a firm focus on what it’s selling and to whom – early on in product development.

• Message. In today’s media environment, generic messages are worthless. With a specific, well-researched target market in mind, companies can craft tailored marketing messages that speak specifically to that target’s needs and goals.

• Promotion. There are some core tactics that every marketer has in his or her arsenal of tools: advertising, PR, conferences, social media, among others. Focus on key tactics and related outlets that you know your target market will look to for the needs you’ve identified.

Blanketing the entire marketplace with broad messaging is expensive, and typically ineffectual for anyone other than big brands who have to maintain broad-based awareness. Doing less in a deliberate way can make your money stretch farther and deliver more tangible results in terms of new, worthwhile prospects. Following the above guidelines, in this specific order, can help you focus your marketing activities.

Do you already have a segment you can hone in on to AMP up your marketing?

Rachel Corn is a Director at  South Street Strategy Group, she specializes in finding growth opportunities in new market segments, new products and businesses and innovative business models.

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. 

If you're over the age of 25, are childless, and have any idea of what Snapchat is, kudos on your tech hipster status. For those with tweens or teens, you may have been allowed to see a brief glimpse of this world, and maybe some of you have even heard it called a “sexting” app.Don’t we love our flow of both successful and flash-in-the-pan communication tools!  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…and now there’s Snapchat. Will it have the longevity of these household names?  It’s hard to say. But there’s been phenomenal adoption for this app that allows instant communication gratification. One of the key selling points of Snapchat appears to be its “self-destruct” feature.  That is, when you take a picture and send it via Snapchat the recipient has, say, 10 seconds to view it once opened before it, poof, vanishes. The idea is that the communication happens but there’s no record—incriminating or otherwise.

Now, a recipient can take a screen shot of the image (the sender is notified in this case), or if they were so inclined could use another device to take a picture of the image showing on the phone… Whew, that’s a lot of work with 50 million snaps a day already flying around as of last December (for reference, 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook a day).  

So with Snapchat, users take pictures or videos of themselves or their surroundings and send them (with a message if desired) to a contact. Once viewed, the recipient’s device in theory no longer retains the image.  This purports to alleviate concerns over the public trail left on Twitter or Facebook, and it has already been used for branding. 

A frozen yogurt shop in NYC, 16 Handles, was reportedly the first to use it for an instant couponing program—if a customer was in the right store and the right time they could get an instant coupon to flash to the salesperson for a discount. It was essentially gamification of the mobile social local aspect of the app – adding something fun and interactive. Early this month, Taco Bell joined the action, urging their fans to add them on Snapchat and reintroducing the Beefy Crunch Taco via the app.

How can other brands use this app to help manage and measure customer experiences? Much like Google Surveys says you can ask a whole survey worth of questions, pieced together one question per respondent at a time, to make the whole picture, instant messaging apps could be used to piece together a more holistic picture of how customers experience and interact with a brand.

Or, shh, what about Whisper—another app phenomenon that recently got $3m in start-up funding. This one allows anonymous posting of secrets. It’s not the first idea of its kind, but it is apparently heavily moderated—good. And here’s where the generation gap really kicks in. Whisper users need this app on a psychosocial level because they have pressure to live such curated lives on Facebook. Living up to the self-brand they create is too much. Whisper is supposedly an outlet for being “real.”

That sounds even more like something that could be a source plumbed for customer experience insights, although their terms and conditions currently say clearly that you may not use the site to mine data. What about a Whisper business account that asked consumers what they secretly do, or wish they could do, with their next vacation, car rental, computer purchase, etc.?

It’s conceivable that the future could be mapped through compiling many blips of information into a coherent story. It is big data of a whole different kind. Yet, a word to the wise: there will always be newer and cleverer platforms, apps, or gadgets to let you connect with customers, but you still need to know your audience’s wants and needs—that’s been the same for centuries!

Kate is a Project Director, working with clients across many industries at CMB. She has been known to perform in local musical theater here and there, speaks three languages well and a few others passably, and loves coincidence.

Click here to read our 2013 Consumer Pulse-The Mobile Moment: Barriers and Opportunities for Mobile Wallet

At any point in the innovation process, businesses can come across new information, trends or practical issues that challenge thinking about what the end result of an innovation should look like. Maybe a new technology can’t scale or the application doesn’t have a big enough market. Or perhaps competitive analysis reveals that a new service or business model isn’t as unique as once thought. There are examples that many of us could on draw from our own experiences. Challenges like these can be frustrating and force businesses to think differently—creatively—about how to move forward. They actually provide the constraints within which an innovation project must operate.

At the FEI conference in Boston, there was a lot of talk about the role of constraints in creativity. Pasquale Cetera, VP of Portfolio Management and Strategy at Merck, brought this into focus during his presentation on R&D decision-making. Pharma is clearly a very developed industry, and this is a key challenge in innovation. The low-hanging fruit has already been developed and is on the market, so to bring new products to market requires more time and investment than ever before. This, along with the fact that regulations are ever-more stringent, means that the average length of drug development is rising, and pharma companies find themselves under pressure to focus and improve success rates at each stage of the development process.

It’s a big challenge with a significant bottom line attached to it. The necessity to maintain the business in spite of this has given rise to innovations that simply were not needed to make a profit until recently. Some of the innovations that Pasquale highlighted include:

• New lead optimization approaches in the Discovery stage, so that suboptimal leads are let go early-on

• Use of biomarkers to improve the probability of success in Phase 2 (Efficacy & Proof of Concept)

• Business model innovation: from fully integrated pharma companies (FIPCOS) to fully integrated pharma networks (FIPNETS)

• Collaboration with health payers to solve problems vs. traditional antagonistic relationships

Innovating within these kinds of big-picture constraints isn’t just a big-industry phenomenon. There are impressive innovations coming out of emerging markets, be it in the form of new agricultural models that support small farmers, mobile computing in Africa, or new type of distribution system for a CPG in India—as a few examples.

So, the next time you come across a challenge that alters the reality of your business, I encourage you to approach it not as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate and push innovation farther than it would have gone otherwise.

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. 

See how CMB and the South Street Strategy Group helped SunTrust use a customer-centric approach to inform brand strategy, improve marketing tactics, and drive organizational  transformation. Read the case study.

Originally published in Loyalty360

Most travel and hospitality brands are laser-focused on engaging guests while they’re on-property.  And it makes sense, doesn't it? Guests are right there, in reach, interacting in-person with the brand and staff. But the customer’s experience doesn’t begin and end at the door, so how else can travel and hospitality companies engage their leisure customers?  

One idea is to better leverage mobile technology to engage guests, pre-trip. Today, more than half of Americans over 18 own a smartphone, one-in-four own a tablet, and seven-in-ten access social media sites on their mobile device daily.  How do you leverage this platform from the first moment your future guests dream of a trip to when they show up at your front desk?  Here are some ideas to drive engagement in those all-important early stages of the customer journey:Dreaming

The first stage of the travel process involves planting a seed about a travel occasion or destination and encouraging potential travelers to begin daydreaming: get them to think about their upcoming 10^th wedding anniversary, remind them they need to plan a summer vacation or encourage them to check an item off their “bucket list.” 

Learn what inspires your guests and then get to work encouraging them to daydream. The greater understanding you have of your customers and the reasons they stay with you for their leisure trips, the more you can do to motivate them to travel –and stay with you instead of someone else.

Here are a couple of ideas:

• Watch the weather: If you’re selling tropical vacations and you see a blizzard hitting the Midwest, create a contest and ask people to upload photos of themselves (using the camera of their smartphone) wearing a sun hat or drinking a tropical drink to your Facebook page.

• Pin it: Ensure your destination is building traction on global sites (e.g., Pinterest, Wanderfly) where travelers are creating dreams for future trips– and ensure they include your pictures in their dreams. 

• Drive the next trip: Hotels, tour companies, and cruise lines can create a shopping cart like "wishlist" on their site. Knowing where someone wants to travel, companies can send fun trivia, photos, tips and offers targeted to that person.

Planning

So, now that the traveler is dreaming about taking a vacation, you’ve got to make sure that your mobile strategies help them cut through the clutter and connect with your property.  

Mobile devices are portable, “pocket travel agents,” offering instant access to airfare prices, contact information, flight schedules, and bookings. According to comScore, 37% of US consumers accessed travel sites or apps from their smartphone in July 2012. Activities for the mobile traveler include reading reviews, comparing prices, and booking rooms but there are lots of ways to think about supporting your guest’s planning activities. 

Here are a couple of ideas:

• It’s always a huge bummer to find out that a must-see restaurant is closed for renovations. When you’re travelling, up to the minute information is one of the most vital things a traveler can have. Help future guests identify activities of interest by encouraging them to download the Mobile City Guide from Trip Advisor. They’re convenient, easily accessible, and most importantly updated in real time. They include reviews, suggested itineraries, and tips all synched with the site’s content. An added bonus? The downloadable walking tours that don’t require an internet connection, because despite the wonders of mobile, we could all do without the roaming charges! 

• Smartphones and tablets make it a lot easier for travelers to find and plan their trips, but the flip side is that a website not designed for smartphones and tablets, looks out of touch, and more importantly it’s not convenient OR useful. Take a look at Jet Blue’s awesome mobile app. From mobile booking, mobile boarding passes, terminal maps, to a really easy to use interface —Jet Blue’s app doesn’t just meet customers planning needs, it offers flyers things features clients didn’t even know they could live without. 

Booking

So we know connected travelers are using their smartphone to gather travel-related information, and the trends are on the rise for bookings by mobile device. While today, mobile booking might fall behind other activities, you can bet it won’t for long. This is especially true for last-minute bookers—according to a Business Insider report, more 70% of mobile reservations are done within 24 hours of the planned stay.

Here are a couple of ideas:

• There’s a reason Hilton Hotels is one of the most popular hotels for booking on a tablet. Hilton has had a mobile booking app since 2009. One of the reasons it’s so popular? It loads quickly, it’s easily searchable, and it links to their HHonors rewards program. As busy travelers, looking to book a room in a hurry, synching to rewards reduces a ton of hassle. DoubleTree, a member of the Hilton family, does a terrific job of with their pre-stay out-reach, and it looks great on the phone of course—reminding travelers of the hotel’s address, that they can pre-order amenities, and that a warm chocolate cookie awaits—delightful!

• If you’ve ever looked on Fab.com, or any of the other dozens (hundreds) of flash-sale sites, you know their appeal—a major discount available for often just a few minutes. Turns out that kind of deal appeals to the spontaneous traveler as well. For example Priceline’s Tonight-Only Deals feature spurred last minute bookings(made after 5pm), for hotels where many rooms might have gone unfilled.

Mobile technology is a revolutionary tool for inspiring, transacting with, and above all engaging your guests with your brand – all before they come through the front door. There are plenty of tools available today – and more coming down the pike – to help you help your guests to have a memorable experience at your property – one they’ll want to rave about to family and friends.

The first steps? Reach out to your customers to find out what inspires them to visit your property – what goals they are trying to achieve. Then find some mobile tools that you can offer to help them achieve their goals when they visit. Don’t wait to build strong engagement with your future guest!

Judy is VP of CMB's Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC

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