Voices: the CMB Blog

Many of us aren't just researchers or marketers, we're parents too, which is why this blog from CMB Alum, Josh Mendelsohn really struck a chord. You can check out more of Josh's musings in his blog: Marketing in Real Life.

As a parent of a toddler boy, I've often found myself getting so frustrated, to a place I don't like, that I started doing some real self hard thinking about the causes (it’s the research background!). One of the major realizations I've had is that the frustration is in part because "working" with a toddler goes completely against how I spend most of my day as a marketer. And I know I'm not alone. In fact, I've seen lots of friends and colleagues who work with data struggle with toddler thinking.Don't get me wrong, parenting is obviously hard for everyone, but I wonder if it feels even harder for the modern marketer (or researcher) because of the way we are trained. We take pride in using data to identify what works and modifying what doesn’t.

Unfortunately, my little dude seems to fall outside the realm of data integrity.

Below are four things that are particularly confounding in our dual roles as parent and professional.

1) It's the journey, not the destination. At work we are taught that the outcome is what matters most. We look at the data and decide if something has worked or not, rarely taking joy in the process itself. Unfortunately, toddlers don't give a crap about the quality of the end result.  

Their goal isn't to make the best dinner, it's to make something together, spill ingredients all over the table, and potentially eat something completely different for their meal. And frankly, their version of quality is suspect at best. I mean, when I look at a drawing and say "that looks great buddy," I'm just thinking "I'm not sure that looks like a house with a dog and a monster. People will never get what you're trying to say!"

2) Total disregard for longitudinal data.  As marketers we love longitudinal data.  After all, history generally repeats itself and seasonality is essential to effective planning, right?  Sadly, toddlers can't even put together two weeks of data that makes sense. The journey from "I only want chicken nuggets for lunch" to "I don't want to ever eat chicken nuggets again" is extremely short lived.  When people ask me "what is he into to?" I just chuckle.  This week it's Yo Gabba Gabba, next week could be anything.  Not sure I have chartable trend line there!

3) Rules?  What rules.  Our boy loves playing board games. He just doesn't like playing them the way they were intended. He doesn't see chutes in Chutes and Ladders.  He doesn't believe in only flipping two cards in memory. And he certainly doesn't understand that you take turns in Connect Four.  

While I appreciate that he is figuring out how the world works, his inability to listen to the rules has me taking notes for his next performance review (when do we get to have those?).

4) Efficiency is frowned upon. As modern professionals (or at least hard-driving ones) we all want to get through as many tasks as well as possible every single day. High output = high value.  Dealing with a toddler is the complete opposite. I'd pay good money for an activity that lasted longer than 20 minutes so we're only doing three things on a Saturday instead of 23.   

So what am I doing about it? Other than going even more bald than before, I've been trying really really hard to slow down and leave my work brain at the office. I've found that there's really no fire to run to or from most of the time and that taking a few extra minutes here and there actually makes the day run smoother. (Note: Trying!!)

I was inspired by this blog post - and even attempting to live this way has dropped my stress level considerably. 

I'm not one to give unwelcome parenting advice to people outside of out family, but as they say on my boy's very temporary favorite show "try it, you might like it."

Josh is the VP of Marketing at DreamFund, Inc. You can find more of his commentary on the "world of marketing, market research, small business strategies, and social media based on real life experiences, not stuff you'd get in an MBA class" at his blog Marketing in Real Life.

Join CMB's Amy Modini on February 20th, at 12:30 pm ET, to learn how we use discrete choice to better position your brand in a complex changing market. Register here.

It was a recent Saturday afternoon, and I had a laundry list of errands to complete. My last stop was the liquor store where I immediately found myself stalled in the vodka aisle. My list simply read “vodka,” but the vodka market is saturated with diverse options, so which one should I choose? Just a few of the attributes where options vary widely include: reputation (“Hello, Grey Goose”), quality (“Hello again, Grey Goose”), name (“Good evening, Little Black Dress”), packaging (“Hey, Crystal Head”), flavor (“Hi, Van Gogh PB&J”), and price (“Sup, Aristocrat?”). Pinnacle Vodka alone boasts 30 different flavors in their Cocktail Catalog.

Having all these choices is great, right?  I thought so too at first, but then I spent five minutes pacing that same 20 foot stretch, and then ten minutes (my palms sweaty), and, oh please don’t let me have just spent 15 minutes in the vodka aisle. The diagnosis was clear; I was exhibiting all the symptoms of the choice overload blues.

Choice overload occurs when the addition of more choices becomes overwhelming and actually starts to have adverse effects (authors Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd provide a robust description in their 2010 meta-analysis “Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload”).In my case, I was having trouble committing to a choice, which resulted in a longer-than-expected errand. Scheibehenne et al. also describe other effects like a decrease in satisfaction with the final choice and an increased likelihood in not making any choice at all.

Is there a cure?

Recent research by Townsend and Khan suggests that a verbal depiction of information—text— can decrease choice overload when there are a large number of choices because verbal information requires more deliberate processing. Perhaps, with an inventory list of vodka SKUs, I would have more quickly eliminated Naked Jay Vodka’s Big Dill Pickle flavor.

Of course, the impact of choice overload goes well beyond the vodka aisle; think about choosing investments, a tablet for your child, or a loyalty program. It’s especially relevant for those of us who design questionnaires to be rigorous and yield insights, without drowning our respondents. One of the best known researchers of choice overload, Dr. Sheena Iyengar, offers these 4Cs  to consider when you’re charged with designing and presenting options:

1. Cut: very simply, if possible, consider reducing the number of options

2. Concretize:  help people understand the consequences between the choices they make in a vivid way—make the benefits real to your prospective customer

3. Categorize: categories help people tell choices apart, and the categories need to make sense to the customer, not just to you, the provider

4. Condition for complexity: Ask the questions with the fewest choices first and the questions with most choices last

So what happened next on my liquor store errand? Lucky for the vodka market, I don’t like to leave anything unchecked on my errand list. I ended up with a bottle of Van Gogh Vodka Dutch Caramel.

Kyle is a recent transplant to Boston and to CMB. He enjoys long runs along the Charles, the freedom of choice, and vodka cocktails.

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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.

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.