Voices: the CMB Blog

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Tech Tuesday… the offers keep rolling in, and this year, I cracked.  Yes, I still love you LL Bean, Lands’ End, Williams Sonoma, and Wal-mart.  But I can’t take your daily barrage anymore; it’s time to purge.Despite my innate skepticism—no matter what you do or say, you can’t get off a mailing list–I forged ahead to try to staunch some of the flow.  I mean, if I am spending even 10 seconds on each of the 100-odd commercial emails I get a day, couldn’t I find a better use of my time, like baking cookies?  Not to mention, I remember reading somewhere about how much energy an email takes to generate, send and store, etc.  So really this was a green effort on my part. 

But I digress.   As I got rolling, I noticed several unsubscribe methods.  And it got me thinking about how they—the marketers, should keep contact with me—the consumer, while not annoying me (yes, me over here with the credit card at the ready!). Because, as I mentioned, I still love those guys for the most part. 

And so here’s how the world of unsubs breaks down in my recent experience:

The Clean Cut and Run: This is the one I wonder about the outcome of most.  While everyone pretty much has to offer the unsubscribe option when they email you, my suspicious side makes me think they are actually validating my email when I click through and unsubscribe.  I am, after all, confirming my existence with a live email address.  Sometimes you hear back that, “yes, you are off the list now,” while at other times it feels like you’re shouting into the void.  The latter situation leaves me with a less than positive feeling.

The Good Bye and Good Luck: This is when they say something like, “Aw shucks!  We’ll miss you.”  And you feel a moment’s regret, but know in your heart of hearts they will be back someday… well maybe.  At least you parted on good terms.

The Really?  Good-bye?: They will let you go, but not without a last ditch effort to ask, “Why?  How could you do this to me?  You’re really are breaking up with me?”  And you might, if not doggedly persistent, find yourself caving and not following through on the unsub.

The But wait, there’s more: Here’s where the real genius starts to kick in (or is it just common sense).  I click the unsubscribe link, get to a page that says something to the effect of:  “OK so how often would you like to get emails from us?  Is once a week too much, how about once every two weeks or once a month? Would you be willing to get a quarterly update?  You don’t want to never get them, right?” And chances are I don’t want to cut them off completely, but I sincerely do want to de-clutter.  So I end up saying, sure, you can keep sending me something once in a great while.  

Then there was one with the option to choose a contact timeframe, and the options were:

Multiple times a day
Once a day
2-3 times a week
Once a week
Never

Umm.  I have to say “never” wins here.  Who is clicking an unsubscribe link only to say, “Yes, please send me emails several times a day?”  Fact is, and this is undoubtedly personality driven, if I am going to shop, chances are I already know what I am looking for and I start from Amazon or the retailer’s page directly, not from an advermail.  They probably have some offer right there on their home page after all.  It’s not as if I truly believe they are only sending me the alert that they have a 10% off + free shipping deal underway… plus there’s always RetailMeNot for a coupon code!

But I think my favorite unsub result may be when you get an email confirming you just said you didn’t want any more emails.  Granted, I really DID need to purge that pizza joint from a trip 2 years ago to DC.  I live in Boston and good as it may be, their pizza won’t be delivered all the way up north. 

So at the risk of dismaying some email marketers with my Scrooge-like email purge, just know I feel fresh and invigorated again now in the anticipation of a clean start to the New Year.  Some of you marketers made me feel listened to and heard.  And I am grateful for it.  Maybe even grateful in a way that reminds me to check you out next time I need a new blender, or a pair of fingerless gloves.

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.

Learn more about why people subscribe to emails (or don't) with our Consumer Pulse: 10 Quick Facts about How and Why Consumers "Like" and Subscribe.

I start to fantasize about Thanksgiving Day as soon as I’ve finished the last of the Halloween candy.  From getting up at the crack of dawn, to saying grace, right up until the end of the fourth quarter of the last football game, Thanksgiving is filled with all kinds of wonderful rituals and traditions I look forward to every year.  But things DO change –just as our forefathers never could have dreamt of the magnificent poultry innovation we call Turducken—few would have guessed how Black Friday’s evolved in just the last decade.  Certainly the fact that many retailers will be starting their “Black Fridays” ON Thanksgiving has gotten no shortage of press. But it’s mobile’s impact on the shopping season that will likely decide the financial winners and losers.

This year, instead of grandma telling the kids (okay, me) to get my elbows off the table, she is going to start telling us all to get that “little computer” off the table. Instead of watching my wife and her sisters retire to the kitchen table with an armload of Black Friday circulars, I now expect them to form an Arthurian-style tablet round table, each sharing best-of links, Likes, and Tweets. Don’t get me wrong; in general, progress is good.  It is just going to change my ritual—instead of getting up ridiculously early to execute the extremely detailed list my wife has put together at retail, I’ll be staying up late with her to nail as many online deals as possible.

Welcome to the world of post-pie commerce, where you’ll barely have to shuffle from the dining room table to the sofa to start getting holiday deals—no more sneaking away to get your laptop (how 2008). The good news is, a lot of retailers are getting wise to some of the nuances of mobile technology’s impact on consumer habits. A recent survey from eBay found two thirds of holiday shoppers wanted the sales to begin after dinner, and that dinner usually ends a bit before 5:30. So eBay’s mobile app will be releasing out mobile only deals right after dinner on the east and west coasts. Smart.

So we know what 2012 will bring, but I’m willing to put my neck on the line (subtle turkey humor) to make a few more predictions for Thanksgiving 2013:

1. Checking in at Black Friday (Small Business Saturday, et al) with location-based deals/ coupons sent real time to mobile devices

2. Black Friday Gamified with manufacturers offering big sweepstakes prizes for those who buy their products at multiple retailers (e.g., win a chance at $10 million if you buy a Pepsi product from WalMart, Target and Lowes all between the hours of 4:00 AM and 8:00 AM)

3. Big data used agilely by retailers to adjust inventory and react to competition by surfing all of the Black Friday chatter sights to see what people are most excited about.

4. Someone trying to brand Sunday.  Maybe “ROBO (Research Online, Buy Offline) Sunday” so the shopping could be done efficiently while out attending church and visiting relatives.   

5. While parents retire to football watching and tablet tripping, the new kids ritual will be starting their holiday wish list via Amazon’s Santa App (or one like it) that will eventually be cleverly linked to parents’ accounts real time. 

And one more for good luck: some clever retailer(s) will seize the opportunity to brand the day before as "eWallet Wednesday" thereby taking advantage of early dismissals from schools and some jobs. The necessary investment in POS technology will pave the way for eWallets to surpass plastic as the tender of choice for Millennials by 2014.

In closing, despite the addition of more microprocessors and silicon chips, for me Thanksgiving will happily continue to be a day filled with thankful reflection, tryptophan-induced sleepiness, and a bottle of antacid  How will your Thanksgiving be changing, or not?

Brant Cruz is our resident segmentation guru and the Vice President of CMB’s eCommerce and Retail Practice.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at CMB!

 

 

This summer, a Harvard Business Review case study presented the dilemma of a modern dance  company caught between their mission to grow and enter new markets, and their mandate to remain creative and groundbreaking. The arguments on both sides are pretty compelling.  A new employee pleads her case that the dance company needs to know who their customers are and what they want, while the Company’s founder argues this information would be detrimental to creating challenging dance performances— “if we ask them what they want, we’ll end up doing Swan Lake every time.”Conversations like these aren’t just happening in the halls of fictional dance companies, they’ve been challenging companies for at least a century. Take this quote from Steve Jobs, founder of what is arguably the most consistently innovative company today:

We figure out what we want.  And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it too.  That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing]?  There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ [2008 Interview with Fortune magazine]

In the past several years, I’ve sat in on talks, read articles, and spoken to lots of product developers who now feel that research and talking with customers provides little, if any, value.  They invariably point to Apple or that ubiquitous Ford-ism, but it seems to me that those who are dead set against customer research are missing the point.  It’s not the customers’ job to develop the solution, it’s simply the customers’ job to tell you about their experiences and what they’re trying to accomplish.  In the famous quote by Henry Ford, the takeaway isn’t that they should develop a faster horse.  Instead, it’s that people want to travel faster, and Ford came up with a better solution.

Let’s look at Apple, for example, if you take the latest version of the iPad, you’ll see they haven’t ignored customers at all.  People are more connected today than at any other point in history; our desire to connect with people and share, access, purchase, and manage media/content from anywhere at any time has only grown stronger with time.  Recognizing these trends, Apple made an incremental shift in current tablet technology and created a game-changing product.  The iPad might not be the perfect device for every user, but it performs great on attributes that allow us to connect with one another and consume content. 

What makes Apple special is their ability to anticipate needs becoming more important and that's what they did in the case of the iPad. But they don't just understand the customer needs from a macro level, they have a complete and nuanced understanding of the detailed needs that make up the entire customer experience.  So when it came time to build the next generation of tablets, they made the right decisions about screen size, processing speed, connectivity options, virtual keyboard size, touch screen sensitivity, gestures, etc., because they knew what mattered to customers.  The customers’ experience was the driving force behind those decisions.  This vision allows Apple to consistently churn out game-changers.

But donning a black turtleneck and taking the buttons off of your products won’t get you the next iPad.  While Apple may not engage in typical customer experience research, they have a culture that is customer focused from top to bottom. Their product development process is motivated, from concept to implementation, by the goal of providing seamless, user experience. Apple’s greatest innovations—the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—embrace simplicity and usability. Uncovering customer needs and creating products and services to meet them doesn’t require one of the greatest visionaries of all time, it can come through comprehensive customer experience research.

So we’re back to our dance company. How can they maintain their desire to grow with their commitment to boundary breaking dance?  The answer is customer research that identifies all of the customer wants and needs for a given product/service, and then tells you which ones matter the most.  Show goers may say they want to see Swan Lake, but do they really mean they want to recreate a powerful experience they had the first time they saw dance? Customer research that focuses on needs is a powerful tool, and critical to innovation whether developing a dance program or building a new processor. By knowing what matters to customers, organizations can discover unmet needs, find opportunities for disruptive innovation, know where to focus resources, and set the foundation for developing game-changing products and services

Needs based customer research is not about asking the customer to dream up the next new product, feature, or technology.  Nor is it about learning new ways to sell customers products they don’t really want.  It’s a proven method to help organizations connect with their customers and focus on what matters to them.  Apple’s success is based on a fundamental and detailed understanding of their customers.  Do you understand your customers in that way—or are you giving them Swan Lake?

Posted by Andrew Wilson, Andrew is an Account Director at CMB, he isn't sure about modern dance but awaits the iPad Mini with baited breath.

Headed to TMRE in November? Enter our code at registration and take 25% off the conference pass: CMB2012

 

As a market researcher, a big part of my job consists of designing questionnaires and figuring out what is the best way to ask a particular question. This is not always easy. The discussions of whether or not to use an open ended question, a scale, a yes/no, or a multiple response can take a long time, and elicit a lot of debate… we’re research nerds, after all!

One trick that I’ve learned over time is, whenever I get stuck with these types of issues, I just make up hypothetical results for the different types of questions I am considering, and then I assess whether or not the data would answer my client’s business objective.

Hard to visualize? Let me give you a fun example: A couple of months ago, @CrumbsBakeShop opened a few blocks away from our office. After repeated visits, I decided I needed to keep track of the different ones I tried so I’d be able to recommend to friends and coworkers which ones to try first (talk about brand advocacy!).  Before I knew it, the Crumbs Cupcake Rating Spreadsheet was born.  

Here’s how it went down:  

1.     The Design

Because my mantra is simplicity, my first reaction was to create a simple “Diego approved” ranking: A thumbs up or thumbs down whether or not I liked a cupcake:

Attempt #1: Good/Bad rating:

 

 

 

 

But thinking of the end results, I could picture a chart where all of the cupcakes are “Diego approved” (these are really good cupcakes!!!!)

 

 

 

 

So that would not be helpful to achieve my objective of being able to help others pick the best cupcake(s) of the bunch.  

Then I went on with attempt #2: Rankings.

 

 

 

 

This method also had (fatal) flaws. First, rankings do not allow for ties (what if two cupcakes  are equally kickass?) and more importantly, rankings do not show the relative distance between places. So let’s say Vanilla is first and Pistachio is second… how much MORE delicious is vanilla?

 

Finally, there were also limitations with data collection: I would not be tasting the 30+ cupcakes all on the same day (I am not THAT big of a pig), so it would be difficult to place a cupcake in a ranking system after testing 20+  others (e.g., Is this “Artie Lange” better or worse than #19? Or is it an 18^th place?).

Attempt #3 led me to a 0-10 rating scale:

 

 

 

Which seemed pretty reasonable… until I visualized the results:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again, all of my cupcakes would be in the 8-10 scale, since crumbs is so much better than any other cupcake bakery in town. So… how to make it more useful? Change the frame of reference! 

 

 

 

Sweet! A scale that should work:

 

 

 

 

2.     Data collection

Now came the fun part… cupcake tasting! As I went on my quest to taste every crumbs cupcake, I realized I needed to solve (new) data collection issues:

 

1)      Taste bias: As much as I consider myself a cupcake expert (over 10 years of enthusiastic experience), I realized my opinion is not the ONLY one that matters. So I enrolled three other friends (#team crumbs: @jenisgolden, @skearney21, @caitdailey), so we could all provide rankings and “correct” for outliers.

• However, to avoid sampling bias (e.g., the oven was not working well that day) we ALL have to try the same cupcake on the same day (we split it in 4). This also has the added benefit that we can taste 2 different flavors per day (and aren’t we all looking for shorter data collection times?)

2)     Time of day bias: We decided to try the cupcakes at the same time of the day (late afternoon) to avoid misrepresentation (e.g., a blueberry cupcake would be much better rated in the morning than in the afternoon).

3)     Group think bias: Nobody is supposed to share their opinion until everyone has tasted and made up their minds about the cupcake (although I’ll admit I am known for premature disapproval gestures…) 

3.     Data Reporting

For analyzing and sharing the results, my first thought was to show rating averages:  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I quickly realized this was not enough: Averages hide the data distribution. So for example: Is “Blackout” a 0 because 2 people LOVED it (gave 5s) and 2 people hated it (gave -5s?)… Or was it just an average cupcake for everyone (all 0s) […the latter is actually true]. So, to complement my average rankings, we reported average AND top 3 scores.

 

Ta-da!  

As a final touch, team crumbs members were encouraged to add a comment to explain their rankings, which adds a qualitative measure to our system. Here are some of our favorite quotes:

“As a chocolate lover, there wasn't much more to ask from a cupcake. The vanilla custard in the filling and cheesecake frosting helped avoid a chocolate overload.” –@skearney21 on ‘blackout’.  

“Elvis would be proud.” –@dejota3 on ‘Elvis’.

“The combo of coconut and pineapple goes great in an adult beverage and holds true with cupcakes as well.” @caitdailey on ‘Pineapple Coconut’  

“It's a vanilla cupcake with a bad looking, jolly rancher tasting frosting.” --@dejota3 on ‘Watermelon’

“This was very costco muffin-ish. That being said I did enjoy the coffee cake-esque topping.” -@jenisgolden on ‘Peach Cobbler’  

“Liked the consistency of the blueberry but could have used a little more. I think Diego's cutting ruined it for me…” @caitdailey on ‘Blueberry swirl’   

So what do you think? Do you see any more flaws with my system? (despite the fact that apparently I have too much time in my hands and an unhealthy obsession with cupcakes). Let me know!  

Happy tasting!  

@dejota3 is Diego Jimenez, Diego is a senior project manager for the tech and telecom practice and still has a long way to go before he tries all of the cupcakes.  

@andresita is a creative genius and designed the illustrations for this blog post. She thinks she would be a terrible #teamcrumbs judge due to her obsession with—and bias towards—chocolate.

           

The day that we all become as tech-savvy and suave as Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible is fast approaching.  How do I know?  A few years after a Cruise movie is on the big screen, his cool gadgets are for sale in a store near you.  Don’t believe me?  Just watch any 24-hour cable news show and you will see that they are all using the same multi-touch wall display that Tom Cruise first popularized in the movie, Minority Report.

Now, Google is saying that we can be just like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible with the release of his iconic sunglasses that project information onto the lens.  Can you imagine it? You could be walking around New York City with turn by turn navigation, getting information on local restaurants, activities, even places your friends have recently checked in on Foursquare or Facebook, all while strolling along, looking up instead of down at a phone (or a map… remember those?!).

The fervor and excitement this device is creating has endless potential. I think a product like this will influence how retailers reach out to shoppers.  For example, in the future, the customer won’t be sitting at home, miles away from a store location…they will be right outside your door searching for products on their sleek Mission-Impossible-sunglasses.  As a result of this change, more focused local or location-based advertising will begin to replace the need for expansive mass media campaigns.

The shift to more personalized advertising is already taking place with the rapid popularization of the smartphone.  According to our Consumer Pulse report: How Smartphones are Changing the Retail Shopping Experience, released last year, over half of all smartphone owners use their device when shopping in a retail store. Currently, retailers are wary of these customers as “show roomers” who will go in store to browse, but who make their purchases online to find a better price. 

Instead of worrying, retailers need to take action and realize that these tech advancements in shopping can be used to their advantage to create a personalized shopping experience.  Leveraging data already collected from loyalty programs or Point of Sale can provide shoppers with a compelling reason to make their purchases in a retail store, creating and providing a seamless and elevated experience for the buyer.  The resources to make this experience a reality are available; retailers have the data, it is just a matter of learning how to use it effectively.

Someday, when we are all like Tom Cruise and wearing spy-like glasses, advertising will need to be personalized and relevant to the individual.  Such a marketing technique will draw people in, breaking through the mass noise and bombardment of content available all around you.  No longer will accurate advertising and recommendation-engine results be relegated to online sites alone—it will be a part of your everyday life, maybe even programmed into your sunglasses.

What do you think?  Will mobile technology transform the retail shopping experience?

Posted by Kirsten Rasmuson, Kirsten is a Senior Project Manager on CMB’s Retail practice. She’s looking forward to welcoming our new robot overlords.