Voices: the CMB Blog

If you live in Eastern New England, I am willing to bet you’ve seen a Jordan’s Furniture ad. Like Giant Glass (1-800-54-Giant!) and Bernie and Phyll's (quality, comfort and price—that’s nice!), it’s a brand we New Englanders recognize instantly. For those of you outside the Northeast, Jordan’s is a 5 store chain in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.  And while they are known for their creative ads, the store's core message is always the same:

• We have a wide variety of products at low prices

• We’re local and we serve the locals

• We offer “shopper-tainment”—an experience above and beyond a typical store

Our work with brands at CMB tells us that defining the brand promise and how it matches up with a customer’s experience is more effective than measuring satisfaction in a vacuum. And when CMB works with clients to measure and understand customer experience we take the components of the brand’s value proposition and measure them for all the possible ways customers experience the brand—from how customers research products, to the promotions, to the in-store shopping experience. 

A recent trip to Jordan’s with my husband and 2 year-old, had me thinking about the multiple elements that make up the customer experience. I hadn’t been to Jordan’s in years, but I remembered a lot of activity, including a trapeze.  Back then, I walked right by and did what I needed to do.  But this time the “activity,” which was a bit distracting the first time around, was a welcome addition for entertaining my daughter. There’s an enormous Wally the Green Monster, mini-cars for the kids to drive, ice cream, and a ton of other fun stuff that allowed me to shop – dare I say—leisurely.  

My trip to Jordan’s highlighted how the different elements of shopping have changed for me over the past few years—I’ve gone from single girl to married with a 2 year old and another baby due any minute. Long gone are the days of casual shopping.  But now the experience is a greater consideration for where I will shop, and the shopping experience is something Jordan’s has mastered.

I can’t ignore the big question, did I buy anything? Not this time, but let’s just say that Jordan’s is high on my list the next time I need to shop for furniture. Would this type of experience deter the singletons who could do without the trapeze and fountain show? Maybe, but, Jordan’s knows their market, how to speak to them, and how to deliver. They kept their brand promise and have increased my likelihood to return. Well done.

Tara Lasker is Director of Project Operations at CMB, she welcomed a brand new baby boy on Monday, and will no doubt have many more opportunities for buying furniture in the future.

It’s not the size of the venue; it’s the quality of the content. That was the case for a local conference I attended last week at Babson College. Using Social Media to Redefine the Customer Value Proposition, was held by the Retail Supply Chain Institute in partnership with the Babson Alumni and Friends Network, and had an impressive lineup of speakers including executives from Google, Hubspot, Staples, Radian6, GaggleAMP, and EMC. The event was an opportunity for companies to share how they are leveraging advances in social media, mobile, and other online technologies to engage customers and increase loyalty. Here are a few of the highlights:

Dhruv Grewal, Toyota Chair of Commerce & Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at Babson College, moderated and kicked off the event with an overview of how social media helps companies redefine their customer value proposition, moving it from a static proposition to a dynamic value proposition that is able to respond quickly to market changes. According to Professor Grewal, companies need to utilize the 4 E’s of social media to:

• Excite customers with interesting offerings to align their needs with your company’s offerings

• Educate them with information about your product offerings to increase share-of-wallet

• Engage in a dialogue with them and their network to help differentiate your products from competitors’offerings

• Help them Experience how your company’s goods/services are better aligned with their needs

Mike Gottfried, Head of Industry, Retail at Google gave a great overview of the company’s vision for the future and debunked the idea that Google+ was developed to be in direct competition with Facebook. He talked about Google’s approach to mobile (predicting that soon more people will own smartphones than computers) and their commitment to launching new products and innovations, first on mobile and then on traditional platforms. He suggested that we not think of Google+ as a channel, but rather as a “common thread” for their product and services. Their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  According to Google, currently 1 in 5 desktop searches and 1 in 2 mobile searches are related to location. Information must be discoverable (meaning fast and relevant), local, mobile, social, and personal.

Mike Ewing, Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant, at Hubspot gave an overview of inbound commerce and how it is driven by three components: content, search, and social media. According to Mike, it starts with responding to how customers make decisions—when they show interest and a readiness to buy. He suggested that it is optimal for a company blog to be updated 2-3 times a week and create effective content by starting with the questions your customers are asking.

Kevin Biondi, Director of Digital and Technology Marketing, at Staples reviewed some of the elements of Staples’ successful approach to digital marketing. Specifically, Kevin discussed the tremendous growth and impact of daily deals. In an effort to optimize their deals, Staples continually uses experimentation. Kevin suggested that while most companies tend to be risk averse, when it comes to social media, experimentation is the key to success. 

Keith Paul, Chief Listener, at EMC, spoke about how they structure social media listening.   EMC has a “spoke wheel” structure—and he heads up a social media center of excellence and provides guidance to several internal groups that use social media data.  He spoke about ECN, a network that EMC created to connect 250k+ customers with product help. On the ECN site and YouTube, EMC has successfully utilized video to communicate their corporate social media policies in a highly engaging way. Another example Keith gave was EMC One, an internal network they use for collaboration. Keith shared that product launches are now announced online via social media and they “listen” to the market’s response and increasing interest.

Thanks to one of our methodologists, Scott Motyka, who served on the conference planning committee and kindly invited me to attend.

Click here to read about more of our upcoming conferences, webinars and events

Posted by Cathy Harrison, Cathy is CMB’s social media research maven. Follow her on Twitter at @VirtualMR

A recent report from Starwood Hotels made the provocative claim that: “73% of travelers would choose loyalty-program benefits over a spouse if they could take just one on the road.” It's a great headline, but speaking as a member of three airline loyalty programs, I would choose my husband over any benefits.

Travelling back and forth to Japan with my daughter since she was an infant has only reinforced this. For example, my loyalty program gives me the following benefits (this includes the family loyalty program benefits that I get from using my father’s points):

• Possible upgrade to business class (depending on dates and vacancy)

• Being able to bring more luggage

• Use of the airline lounges in Tokyo before boarding

• Priority boarding

• Connecting to an agent faster on the phone

• Earning of duty free “points and gift certificates” that can be used to buy duty free products, extra food, and alcohol on the plane

These loyalty benefits sounds pretty appealing, but of course they are not nearly as exciting when you are travelling alone with a small child, when there is absolutely no time to enjoy your extra benefits. I've had the following experiences more than once:

• When I go to the lounges I’m greeted with the why-are-you-bringing-a- screaming-toddler-in-here-face.

• I can get priority boarding having a toddler traveling with me anyways, so I don’t need the loyalty benefits to board earlier; I usually wait until the last moment to board anyway so my daughter uses up as much energy as possible before we board.

• I never have the time to flip through the duty free magazine to shop, and by the time my daughter is finally asleep, the on-board duty free service on board is over.

So, it seems I’m part of the 27%, according to this research. I would much rather bring my spouse on the long flight to Japan.  In fact, I would give up all of my loyalty benefits just so I can take some time to sleep, rest, go to the bathroom alone, not have to walk back and forth to walk my daughter on the plane, and not have to chase her all over the airport during transition.

The article also claims three-quarters of respondents would take extra trips to bump up their loyalty status.  I would definitely consider taking extra trips to bump up my status to get free daycare at transitioning airports, and maybe a nanny to watch over the kids and change diapers on the flight. But for now, I wouldn’t trade my husband for any of the loyalty rewards they could offer; especially since I'm taking my 5 year old and a newborn to Japan this summer.

So what do you think, what loyalty rewards matter to you?

Posted by Tomoko Shimizu-Brennan, Tomoko is a data manager at CMB; she welcomed an adorable baby boy on April 3rd. She is very excited about the new direct flight from Boston to Tokyo in April.

Remember the heyday of the music industry? Remember how the big music companies pulled off a nearly unthinkable feat—convincing consumers to re-buy previously purchased products (vinyl) on a new medium (CD)? That’s what can happen when you’re the only game in town.

In addition to generating “found” revenue, the move from vinyl (including vinyl 45s) to CD had another profound impact—it solidified the album as the industry's unit of purchase. Hear a song you like? Hand over ten or fifteen dollars and you can own it. We’ll of course throw in other songs; maybe you'll like them, maybe you won’t. But you really have no other choice.

Somewhere along the line, young consumers—college students especially—got it into their heads that they no longer wanted to pay for music. And, as hard as it is to believe, they were even less interested in paying for music they didn’t want in the first place. File-sharing sites like Napster were happy to oblige. Not only did consumers begin downloading music for free, but perhaps more significantly, they also embraced a new type of music business model—an à la carte, unbundled model, where they could choose only the music they wanted.  How quickly did the music industry adapt? Well, you know how that played out….

Young consumers appear to be at it again, poised to disrupt another industry that's built its fortunes on a bundled-service business model and on being the only game in town: the pay TV industry. The numbers aren't huge yet, but 5% of consumers in our recent New Age of Television study say they've never had a pay TV subscription. If you’re thinking that these are the folks with aluminum-foil rabbit ears on their TV sets, think again. Half of these "never had pay TV" household decisionmakers are 22-30 years old (more than double the percentage in the study’s total sample) and 63% have college degrees (also higher than the norm) Their income is lower than average, but they've chosen to spend their money on broadband service (they had to have broadband to be included in our study), and not on cable and satellite.

And yes, they are watching TV and movies. They're just accessing that content the same way they presumably learned to do so in college—on their laptops (72% watched on a computer in the week prior to the study), and finding content from aggregators like Hulu (43%), network TV sites (33%), and file-sharing sites (10%). They’re accessing the specific programs they want without paying for unwanted programs or networks in a bundle. They may have to wait a year to watch the first season of Homeland, but that may not be a huge deal, considering how much they'd need to pay for that privilege and how much other content is available online.

The multimillion-dollar question: Will these young consumers eventually get pay TV? The answer: unlikely, at least based on what they told us. Only 15% said that they would definitely or probably sign up within the next 3 years.

Three years is practically an eternity in today’s TV world; who knows what will happen between now and then? Once these consumers settle in to a more stable life, start a family, and make more money, they could decide that the convenience of picking up a single remote for access to a ton of content is too attractive to resist. But then again, by that time someone may come up with an online solution that's just as, or even more, convenient. And maybe it will be less expensive.

We're going to keep an eye on "never had pay TV” consumers in future waves of our study. And the industry will probably want to as well. After all, it’s not as if college graduates—looking for places to live, comfortable accessing content online, and with limited finances—are going to be in short supply any time soon.

Posted by Peter Fondulas. Peter is co-author of the New Age of TV study, a CMB consultant, and President of Fondulas Strategic Research.

Download the summary report The New Age of Television: How Consumers Make Choices in a New Era of Entertainment Options

 

As I prepare for my 14^th Boston Marathon, I find myself thinking about food a lot, and when you’re on training runs there is no shortage of candy to keep you fueled. I have come to find our candy stations reveal a little known fact about us runners— we DO NOT like green apple Jolly Ranchers.  How did I come to this revelation? I didn’t interview my teammates, convene a focus group, or field a questionnaire— it was obvious from seeing dish upon dish of lonely green candies.

This type of observation, also known as an unobtrusive measure, can be pretty handy.  Museums can look at wear patterns in the carpet, in front of exhibits, to see which are the most popular, and social media researchers can get a good understanding of what people think about a brand using social media listening.  I was comfortable concluding my group of runners does not like Jolly Ranchers. But when I took a look at CMB’s 5^th floor candy bowl—almost empty—except for five or six green Jolly Ranchers, I wondered, does NO ONE like these things?

I needed to investigate a little further. On Friday, I asked my fellow team members why the apple Jolly Ranchers were always the last to go, and I got some feedback that helps explain why that is.  One person cited that apple was actually her favorite “because they are the most tart” but that she didn’t know about the candy dish. I realized that she joined CMB after the advertising blitz that took place when I launched the dish.  Another team member said she found apple “a little bit too tangy” but that she liked them better than the cherry variety.  She explained that she loves fresh cherries, but hates the cherry flavor because it reminds her of the cough medicine she had to take as a kid.

While my unobtrusive observations accurately recognized that apple was definitely the last standing in the candy dish, the feedback I garnered from my colleagues not only helped me to identify an awareness issue but also highlighted a weakness of cherry Jolly Ranchers.  Even if my census of my 5^th floor colleagues didn’t provide too much insight into the whole Jolly Rancher market, it does remind me what unobtrusive measures can and can’t do and why asking questions can uncover things simple observation can’t.

Posted by Lynne Castronuovo, Lynne is a Senior Project Manager at CMB, guardian of the 5^th floor candy dish, and will run her  14^th Boston Marathon on Monday April, 16^th.

Interested in learning how quantitative data and online conversation can lead to richer insights? Watch our Tools and Tricks Webinar with CMB's Jeff McKenna and iModerate's Christine Tchoumba. Watch here.