Voices: the CMB Blog

Earlier this month I had the chance to present at the Market Research Technology Event in Las Vegas. Beyond the fact I just could not get accustomed to watching people walk by conference rooms swigging beer and wearing in flip flops; for me the event raised more questions than provided answers.

During the conference, one of the most quoted reports was McKinsey’s: Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.  For me, one of the most striking takeaways from the report was a prediction that by 2018, the US will have a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data—the US alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis to make effective decisions.

After we market researchers take a moment to celebrate our job security, we should consider that skilled market researchers will be asked to fill the space by taking on more tasks and working longer hours.  As the gap widens between the influx of data and the analysts we need to make sense of it, are 80 hour weeks inevitable? Certainly workforce globalization will be a key to filling “big data” needs, but I was very surprised to hear little discussion of how technology will help us deal with this shortage.

I left the conference with the theory that the “new technology” we need is the yet-to-be-realized application of a tool to change a process to yield a quicker, lower cost, or better quality outcome.  I think market researchers have yet to focus on how technology can act as a surrogate for the role they play within their organizations

So what might the future hold? I expect technology will allow market researchers to develop “analytical bots” to make sense of the vast ocean of data to answer specific business questions raised by internal clients. Watching Watson and Siri answer questions of fact with extremely high accuracy makes me wonder what our role will be.  If these machines “have all the answers” then what purpose do we have?  I don’t believe technology will replace market researchers; their skillset and output are still critical for companies to be competitive.  The purpose is to create the rules and algorithms that convert the facts into relevant information.  This is where market research skills will combine with technology to fill the resource gap.

We’ve heard a lot about expert systems—computer systems that emulate human decision-making. It’s my view that the market researchers who will lead in the next 5 to 7 years will be those who are setting up and managing expert systems, that take all of the facts and computations within large sets of data and apply what is relevant, to make decisions quickly, anywhere, and at any time.

Did you miss us at TDMRE? We'll be at the Audience Measurement Event in Chicago from May 21st to the 23rd. Register for a 25% discount by entering CMB2012 here.

Posted by Jeff McKenna, Jeff is a senior consultant at CMB and team leader for Pinpoint Suite-our innovative Customer Experience Management software. Want to learn more about how Pinpoint Suite can help you make sense of your "Big Data," schedule a demo here.

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

Last week, 14 CMBers headed down to sunny Orlando for The Market Research Event (TMRE). Back in the office, I asked my fellow attendees which parts of the conference stood out to them. As expected, Jim’s presentation with GE Care Credit, and Rich’s session with Aflac were fan favorites (and these were votes from people other than Jim and Rich!). But over and over again the same talk was highlighted—Sheena Iyengar’s keynote on the nature of choice based on her 2010 book The Art of Choosing. Dr. Iyengar’s presentation was my favorite as well; so much so, that I bought the book, guarded it from jealous colleagues, and read it in two days.

Iyengar, a psychology professor at Columbia, explores the nature of choice through a social-psychological lens, and by conducting rigorous and thoughtful academic research— refreshing in a time when fluffy pop-sociology books rule the book lists. She contends choice is at once  central to self-identity, and capable of overwhelming us when they we are unable to effectively process them.

Though we live in an age where abundance is worshipped, and Target and Costco thrive, those of us who’ve found ourselves staring open mouthed at the cereal aisle for too long understand the paralysis that can accompany too much choice. In particular, it can be debilitating to be faced with an array of choices we are not readily able to distinguish from one another. Iyengar, who is blind, told a great story about asking two women in a nail salon to help her choose a color by describing the difference between the virtually indistinguishable Adore-a-ball and Ballet Slippers light pink nail polish. Her point is we’re often drawn to the places that offer us the greatest choice  (would you go to a salon that only offered 5 colors?), but if we’re not experts, we don’t know how to choose without a way to articulate what makes one product different from another.

Iyengar’s famous ”jam experiment” (you may have heard about it, even if you don’t know her name) illustrates this point nicely. In the mid-90’s as a Stanford grad student she set up two tables with samples of jam at a California supermarket. One table featured just six choices, while the other offered nearly 30. She found that shoppers who visited the table with fewer samples were significantly more likely to buy the jam, as compared with those who’d sample the greater selection. What was more striking was that those who were offered fewer choices also reported greater satisfaction with their purchase as well.

What does this mean for market researchers, for companies, and for those of us standing around perplexed in the grocery store? Iyengar does propose “7” as the optimal number of choices a person can handle, but concedes choosing is more complicated than a “magical” number — it’s informed by context and culture. Perfect number or not, she argues that limiting choices to what can truly be differentiated will make for more satisfied and effective choosers. Iyengar makes a good case that focusing on improving the process of choosing is far more effective tool than just increasing the number of options.

Posted by Megan McManaman. Megan is CMB's Content Marketing Manager and would happily go to a nail salon with just 5 nail polish colors. Follow her on Twitter at @Megz79.

Join us at the 2011 Market Research Event in sunny Orlando November 7^th to the 9^th. Lots of CMBers will be in attendance and presenting, including Jim Garrity who will be discussing increasing customer loyalty with GE CareCredit’s Sheila Dreyer. And  Rich Schreuer will be presenting: Unleashing the Power of Discrete Choice, with Kelly Servedio and Missy Wood from Aflac.  Still need a ticket to the event? Enter the code: TMRE11CMB when you register for 25% off the ticket price.

Don't miss these presentations:

Turning Customers into Advocates: GE CareCredit Increases Customer Loyalty with their Advisory Panel

Date and Time: 8:45 Monday, November 7, 2011

Speakers: Jim Garrity, Vice President of Financial Services, Chadwick Martin Bailey; Sheila Dreyer, Consumer VOC Leader, GE CareCredit

Summary: Learn how GE CareCredit redesigned their online customer advocacy panel, creating a community with high engagement and even greater value. This online community of cardholders has become a group of trusted advisors and strong advocates for the brand. Learn how:

•GE CareCredit uses their community to enhance the customer profile for future segmentation

•GE CareCredit is using their online panel for a multitude of business decisions throughout their organization

• Engaging with their advisory panel breeds loyalty and greater returns

Aflac Unleashes the Power of Discrete Choice, Positioning their Brand for the Future

Date and Time: 10:30 Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Speakers: Rich Schreuer, Senior Vice President, Chadwick Martin Bailey and Kelly Servedio, Manager of Market Research Insights & Missy Wood, 2nd Vice President, Market Research Insights, Aflac

Summary: Learn how Aflac and Chadwick Martin Bailey took an innovative approach using discrete choice to help Aflac focus and enhance their brand for the future. A technique typically reserved for product development, discrete choice overcame many of the obstacles associated with brand positioning studies delivering Aflac a roadmap to increase demand and educate consumers on all "The Duck” has to offer. See how this brand used research to prepare for the future:

• A new approach to an age old technique, using discrete choice for brand development

• How the teams crafted a design that yielded precise recommendations for multiple dimensions of the brand

• Moving from results to action, see how Aflac used this research to drive their marketing communications and messaging to better connect to its value proposition

And stop by our booth #406 to say hello, and for a chance to win a New England Clambake for two.

Posted by Megan McManaman, Megan is CMB's Content Marketing Manager. She is headed straight to TMRE from her honeymoon, she wouldn't miss Jim Garrity's presentation for the world.

Last week, the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit occurred in Glendale Arizona. The Institute for International Research (IIR) hosted the event, and it featured three full days of presentations about measuring customer feedback, operationalizing it, and optimizing programs to maintain business success.  I was fortunate to chair the Action Planning track, so I enjoyed unique one-on-one discussions with the presenters in my track as I prepared to introduce and lead discussion for each of the presentations. 

One of the biggest topics at the conference was social media.  Whether it was the Social Media CRM symposium, which led off with a presentation on “Linking Social Media to Consumer Behavior” by Becky Carroll from Petra Consulting Group, the keynote speech by Jeanne Bliss from CustomerBliss, or the several presentations showing how companies have applied information captured through social media to make decisions, folks are still trying to wrap their arms around it.

My take on it: Most companies are dipping their toes in the “deep pool” of social media, and the continued interest reflects a need to assess their experience relative to other companies.  In the end, market research vendors and clients are looking to establish the process for integrating this new data and communications channel…

Two presentations from Maritz Research stood out in this regard.  Randy Brandt presented findings from recently completed research comparing Consumer Generated Media (CGM) guest ratings for a luxury hotel chain via TripAdvisor to guest ratings with ratings from a traditional direct brand solicitation for that same chain.  The results identified strong differences in data between the two channels.  It’s not a surprise, as the sample of guests providing their input via CGM is a small subset of guests (even smaller than the 15-20% who might typically respond to a brand solicitation) with a different set of motivations for sharing their opinions.  This unique apples-to-apple comparison truly demonstrates the challenges we face – as researchers - when we are asked to bring together two very different evaluation samples.

This fed nicely into the presentation by David Ensing (also from Maritz), who spoke about integrating data from multiple Voice of the Customer sources, including social media.  As David noted, research managers are now dealing with lots of information and trying to make sense of it all; and with research budgets constrained, researchers are looking at (relatively inexpensive) social media information and trying to figure out if it is useful and if so, how it is useful.  We are seeing a shift from solely one-off/ad hoc research studies to a combination of ad hoc with continuous listening, and this may strike researchers as a threat to their role.  However, it shouldn’t be that way.

David summed up his presentation with a clear opportunity for market researchers to take the lead: “We believe that the future of marketing research is not just in collecting customer feedback through surveys, but also in integrating multiple sources of company-controlled information both with each other and with new information streams, such as consumer-generated media.”

Personally, I believe the market researchers who have been successful at applying research outcomes to business decisions will find this skill to be vital in maintaining leadership and effectivenes in this new landscape.  Market researchers really need to think of themselves as people who inform internal clients who strive to make decisions to improve their business.

I find the current mass of data at everyone’s disposal can be daunting and confusing, in large part because the technologies that pull and deliver the data do a great job at just that – pulling and delivering.  Heck, most companies in the data delivery business would consider shock, awe, and confusion from massive data to be a “good thing."  To a point that's true, but they fail to translate and inform. 

This is where market researchers need to take a lead role.  As the stewards of applying research outcomes to business decisions, the skills that allow them to translate and inform will be vital in maintaining a lead role in this new landscape.  Market researchers really need to think of themselves as people who organize and give structure to all data – and then deliver information in a precise manner that informs internal clients who need the information to make business decisions. 

Posted by Jeff McKenna. Jeff is a senior consultant at CMB and a lover of the mid-west, beer, and customer satisfaction data.

You'll also find CMB'ers at The Market Research Event (TMRE). Are you planning on going to TMRE? CMB is an event sponsor and presenter at the conference. Feel free to use the code: TMRE11CMB when you register for a discounted price. We hope to see you there. Learn more about the conference here.

Did you attend the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit? What did you think?