All posts filed under: Consumers

Not a problem: success pivots on what you solve, not just what you know

By Mark Di Somma

If you’re not a fan yet of the Scattershot blog, then I’d like to suggest you should be. In a post published earlier this week, Rajant discusses the concept of “ground truth”. Ground truth, as its name suggests, is the view on the ground that verifies and informs the satellite view. It’s a great way to separate a problem from a truth. What’s interesting about this is that the perspective that brands have of situations gained from afar can be very different from the reality closer to home. In fact, those on the ground may not see that they have an issue at all. That’s a significant hurdle when your cue for action is something your audience doesn’t recognise. Rajant gives the telling example of P&G’s launch of Febreze, which initially failed. The reason? You only need an air freshener if you understand that you are surrounded by bad smells. The problem with that: “even the strongest odours fade with continual exposure … And Febreze’s reward (an odourless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t …

Affirmation: how to make a brand experience really count

By Mark Di Somma

Everybody wants to feel they got value for money. Sure – but when exactly does something feel like it was “worth it”? For example, Lady Gaga’s just wound up a three concert stint in Auckland. When does a concert experience feel like it’s worth it? Is it when you finally see the star in person as they step onstage days, weeks, months after you bought the tickets? Is it at the end of the opening number as the crowd erupts? Is it at the end of the show as you fight your way home through the traffic, images of the last couple of hours running through your head? Is it during your favourite song? Or is the value for money moment when you’re telling friends your “I was there” story via Facebook or, days or months later, over dinner? When does a film feel worth it? How about the experience of buying a dress? When do you think the keynote speaker at a conference has delivered or is delivering value for money? At what points …

Retail brands: price always has a context

By Mark Di Somma

Marianne Bickle takes JC Penney’s to task over their pricing strategy in this pithy and thought-provoking post in Forbes. In it, she argues that the retailing icon misread the market in key ways and compromised its value proposition when it replaced its famous coupon and discounts pricing strategy with a policy that stressed continuity, consistency and predictability. People buy emotionally, argues Bickle, and that emotion extends beyond the shop doors. It reaches all the way to the macro-environment that influences their wallets. It’s critical therefore that brands understand how their consumers feel about the economy. If things feel uncertain – and nearly two-thirds of JC Penney customers were saying they didn’t feel the economy was strong – don’t change what they know. It not only makes a new pricing strategy undesirable, it’s also destabilising. And people are much less prone to buy when things don’t feel as they have. It’s also vital, Bickle points out, that brands understand how people buy, not just what they buy. In the case of JC Penney, over 60% of …

Is the digital economy actually an economy (yet)?

By Mark Di Somma

Some years ago, I wrote a post that took Chris Anderson’s “freemium” model to task. In it I argued that once you had provided services and information freely, the conversion to payment was going to be a lot tougher. Free, I suggested, would become an implicit entitlement. Last week, in a withering attack in the New York Times, Ross Douthat lashed out at what he called “The Facebook Illusion”. Comparing Web 2.0 to the home ownership bubble, he took particular aim at the world’s biggest social networking site. The relative disappointment of its IPO should be read, he maintains, not as an indication that Facebook doesn’t make money, but rather that “it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because … it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users … This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole.” It’s probably a little early to call Facebook. Whether the IPO misfired or …

Brand dynamics: the shapeshifting of brand likeability

By Mark Di Somma

Our traditional view of product preference has for many years mirrored our view of markets. A bell curve, where products rise in popularity over time, sustain leadership through a period of maturity and then decline or are overtaken by another bell-curve driven by product development that supersedes the declining model and looks to take it to new heights. That model’s driving dynamic is demand. Its chief metric is volume. And its key pressure is time. The longer you can draw out that curve, and the more you can slow down the roll at the peak of the curve the more likely you are to make money. Recently, two separate pieces of thinking have caused me to believe that this likeability model is now as good as dead. Firstly, two thoughts from a really fantastic guest post by J Walker Smith at the ever-inspiring Brand Strategy Insider: “With social engagement more prevalent and more powerful, every marketing message is now subject to vetting by a crowd. No message finds its way to consumers absent the influence …

Is your brand ready for the experience war?

By Mark Di Somma

Thanks to Cato who once again this year kindly invited me to the Wellington simulcast of the AG Ideas Business Breakfast held in Melbourne yesterday. The theme for the AG Ideas 2012 Business Breakfast was how companies could use design and innovation to compete effectively in high-cost economies. Technical issues prevented those of us on this side of the Tasman getting the video feed, but there was plenty to listen to, as Dana Arnett, Dale Herigstad, Mauro Porcini and MC Göran Roos steered us through the morning. Today, I want to touch on a couple of points raised by Göran Roos in his opening statements and one or two takes on an interesting, point-packed address from Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, 3M. Porcini pitched a new social scenario; one where consumers are not just savvy, expert and demanding, but also difficult to categorise and understand because of four overlapping generations (boomers, X, Y and Z) and different geographies and cultures (which themselves were in different states of market maturity). The emergence of this social scenario, …

Is behavioural change in a corporate culture all about timing?

By Mark Di Somma

“Is this the right time to change?” may not be the delaying question I often dismiss it as. To see why, read Caroline’s post at the Optimal Usability blog (subscribed to, not surprisingly, by the ever vigilant Alex). Caroline quotes from this very astute man – BJ Fogg – who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. Behavioural change, Fogg says, is what happens when Trigger, Ability and Motivation align. When there is a trigger for change, when people can change and when they are motivated to do so, then changes in behaviour can and will occur. Otherwise, pretty much, forget it. But each element must be of sufficient strength for the proposed change to succeed. In order for a trigger to be powerful enough to overcome existing habit or inertia, Fogg believes it must be noticeable, associated directly with the required behavioural shift and timely (it must occur whilst we are motivated and at a time when we can still change). Ability requires both capability and capacity to make the change required at …

Brands shouldn’t try to make sense

By Mark Di Somma

The flipside of a marketplace where brands encourage people to buy for emotive reasons is that brands also need to counter consumers’ personal reasons not to buy. Some of these reasons may be legacy. Some may seem to be convenient self-interest. Others may look like they’re based on ignorance, bias, selfishness. They probably don’t make sense to you. That’s important because … actually, it’s not. It’s not important at all The problem that matters is not your opinion of why your buyer won’t buy – it’s the fact that they have this opinion, that it’s rational to them and they have every reason to keep thinking it until they don’t want to anymore. Chances are you won’t talk people into liking your brand. The most effective way to deal with an “unreasonable” objection is to counter with a riveting motive. Most people think that means price. But simply dropping your price is no silver bullet. It doesn’t make you a more likeable brand. It may make you a more attractive brand – in the short …

Out of the blue moments

By Mark Di Somma

As marketers, we’re taught to look for patterns. Research, we are told, will give us the insights we need to predict how whole swathes of our society will react. Brands are looking to predict how buyers will act or react so that they know what to expect. Consumers themselves of course operate under no such constraints. They happily accept their own behaviours as making sense to them. One of the great challenges we face as branders is appealing to the mercurial side of consumers. Getting to grips with the fact that they won’t always behave the way we think they should, that they will do the unexpected, the illogical, the unprecedented and the unresearchable – and that they are all the more exciting and interesting as people because of that. Across your business, across your channels – where could you promote/allow/celebrate  impulsive moments? How could you be a platform for what consumers themselves just feel like doing, and how can you improve loyalty and profitability by doing that? A simple way to start may be …

Customer service is worthless

By Mark Di Somma

We shouldn’t even think of “customer service” as being about something that is valuable to customers. The reasons are simple. We live in a service-focused age, and the people who buy from your brand know they’re customers. So “customer service” does not describe anything customers don’t expect and it certainly doesn’t envelope anything of particular value to them. Every brand is a service business at some level these days. In reality, customer service is the means to the real goal: sustained and profitable relationships forged between customers and a brand. Until you achieve that, you haven’t added any sense of worth for either party. You’ve just done what was expected. Success is not about achieving world-class customer service or carrier-level or benchmarks or any of the other abstract customer service qualitatives that are freely bandied about. Success pivots on whether your brand delivers experiences that your customers continue to be enchanted by. People don’t come back to a brand because they got good metrics. It’s sad then that some companies still think their job is …