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“Toto, are we still in Kansas?” If you’re like me, you wondered this aloud to yourself last week when McKinsey published a study declaring that a new consumer decision journey has replaced the traditional purchase funnel. I honestly thought I was opening a McKinsey Quarterly e-mail from my Outlook archive and not 2009. OK, so that’s not exactly going back to the birth of technicolor. But the purchase funnel as we know it was detonated years ago by experts too many to list and that new phoenix, the dynamic consumer decision making journey, has risen from its ashes in more articles than I can count.
But I’m glad I looked twice. Not because the report provides yet another way to model what the consumer decision making journey looks like now in four stages (though I think it’s fair to say it’s a pretty good one). But because it includes what looks like some new research backing it up. Research that was conducted among 20,000 consumers on three different continents in several kinds of categories. OK, now you’ve got my attention.
One important finding from the report (perhaps more of a confirmation really) is the degree to which brand awareness continues to matter, and the role advertising and other company-controlled marketing and communications play in this regard. That’s because, according to the authors, brands in the “initial-consideration” set–the first stage of their consumer journey–can be up to three times more likely to be purchased eventually than brands that aren’t in it. That’s a big deal. Especially when you consider that media fragmentation and product proliferation mean that people consider fewer brands today. And they don’t miss to point that out.
Another is how the number of brands under consideration during their second phase of the consumer journey, what they call “active-evaluation,” may actually expand instead of narrow as consumers seek out advice and information. That’s not insignificant either as it means you can get beaten to the cash register if a competitor has its integrated marketing act together, and you are just relying on what used to work. Phase three, by the way, is “closure” or the moment of purchase, and phase four they call the “ongoing purchase experience,” where loyalty can take an active or passive form.
But the bigger deal, and it’s just my view, is how powerful the McKinsey report shows advocacy has become. It labels this “consumer-driven marketing” but best I can tell it includes the impact of what is traditionally thought of as influentials or opinion leaders or expert third-parties, too. What’s nice is that they go beyond the nostrum that the things a brand can’t control are increasingly more influential in how consumers make purchase decisions and actually measure the degree to which advocacy and other groups of touch points– including a consumer’s own experience, what happens in-store and company-controlled communications like advertising and direct marketing–are effective at each stage of the journey.
Now, it wouldn’t be very sporting to divulge McKinsey’s numbers here (and a full subscription to the MQ can easily be had). What can be said is that their research ranks advocacy as the #1 or #2 most influential group of touch points in 2 out of the 3 phases of consumer decision-making they provide numbers for (note: they don’t provide them for the fourth phase). Of note, advocacy is the dominant influence during the active-evaluation second phase.
It would have been nice if the report had also provided data on the fourth phase of the consumer journey, where the loyalty loop occurs. But such a strong body of research on loyalty, such as the Net Promoter Score, already exists that it’s not such a shortcoming. So taken together, we now have a much fuller and robust picture of just how “over the rainbow” effective advocacy has become. Not just at a single stage of the consumer decision making journey. But throughout the entire dynamic cycle, and particularly in all the phases after initial consideration. Thanks to the new research from the wizards from McKinsey, that’s now much less a bunch of Oz.
They just buried the lead, that’s all. Nobody’s perfect. Or at least so I’ve seen in the movies…
“Obama showed that, with the right message, a candidate with no money or machine behind him can build his own.” The Economist
10.17.08 is the Day the Page Stood Still.
At least that’s what may be in store for Facebook, if the site’s protest group 1,000,000 Against the New Facebook Layout! has its way. The group, which already boasts 2,769,709 members as of the writing of this post, is asking members to tune in, stand up, and log out of Facebook (as it were) over the weekend of October 17-21 to protest the social neworking site’s new makeover.
“We are just beginning the process of moving people over to the new Facebook and saying goodbye to the old Facebook,” wrote Mark Slee, product manager for Facebook, in a September 10 blog post on the site. “We set out to make Facebook simpler, cleaner, more relevant, and easier to control. With your feedback and participation … we believe we’ve gotten to the best Facebook yet.”
A few million users don’t quite agree.
Will the online backlash succeed in restoring the beloved old layout? We’ll soon find out. Let’s just hope they don’t unleash the social networking equivalent of Gort, the giant indestructible robot (pictured above) from the 1951 classic sci-fi film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” That movie was about an alien visitor and his giant robot counterpart who visit Earth to warn us of our imminent doom if we do not stop our warring and destructive ways. Not so far off the mark, actually, to the current online situation. Facebook beware.
Film studies side-bar: I could be wrong (and often am on these things)… but I believe Gort is actually supposed to symbolize the fearsome, uncontrollable power of technology to destroy mankind. The case of Facebook potentially destroying itself? Or, thinking of the current financial meltdown, unfettered capitalism destroying our economic system? Gort-on Gecko?
Either way, we’ll all have a chance to see a new and improved ominpotent robot this December when a remake starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly and Mad Men’s John Hamm hits the theaters. None, unfortunately, in the scene-stealing role of the big bad machine.
OK. You’re driving down the road. The conditions are treacherous. But not enough to slow you down yet. Suddenly, something causes you to swerve. You fight for purchase but the wheels don’t hold. And you find yourself careening out of control in a white knuckle skid.
Are you heading into a ditch? Is a crash inevitable? Not if you do what’s counterintuitive. You heard right. You’ve got to go against your natural tendencies and instincts. And follow this one fundamental rule:
Accelerate and steer into the skid.
The reason why has everything to do with physics. And the explanation is pretty cool. As long as your front wheels are skidding, you have no directional control of the car. So turning your wheels in the direction of the skid allows the wheels to actually start rolling in the direction of motion again. Only once the wheels are rolling can turning them affect the direction of the car. Note to you wonks out there: this situation is technically known as “oversteer.”
You can learn more about it from the Ask a Scientist feature on the University of Chicago’s Newton BBS site (where I got this explanation from) or from driving sites like edmunds.com. Or you can give it a whirl yourself. Please just not in midtown Manhattan where we work. Or anywhere near our clients. Or anyone else for that matter…
So where are we going with all this “don’t drive like my brother” car talk? It just so happens to be a fitting aphorism for marketing when the road gets rough and rocky. And it’s safe to say we’re experiencing economic hardscrabble the likes of which we’ve never seen in our lifetimes.
Sergio Zyman once remarked that “marketing money is like fuel in the car.” Take the fuel out, he said, and the car skids to a stop. Even more apropos, research on past recessions–and we’ve had seven of them since the Great Depression–shows that businesses that maintain aggressive marketing programs in a downturn outperform companies relying on cost-cutting measures. In fact, history also shows that retrenching and divesting slows momentum and leaves room for competitors to grow. So there’s a relationship between recessionary marketing spending and long-term growth.
Said another way, businesses and brands would do well to “steer into the skid” during the hard times like today. Just ask Jack Neff from AdAge, who wrote a great piece in May highlighting how previous downturns provided big upsides–and some big category-changing, margin-improving innovations. Like airline loyalty programs, fast-food value meals, the IBM personal computer, Crest Whitestrips and Axe Body Spray. All born during economic set-backs, Neff points out.
This even goes for the mighty iPod, too. Date of introduction: just over a month after September 11.
So what can marketers do? What’s the GPS equivalent of steering into the skid and staying the course when we’re clearly off-roading? Or feel like we’re driving blind?
My colleague Cathy Calhoun, consumer marketer extraordinaire, recently put her sage and savvy mind to this task in a speech to a group of CMOs. And I promise to see if she will share her insights with us. That is, once I can break out of the heart stopping, skidding paralysis of watching the markets crash further and further each day. Parenthetically, the tips section on edmunds.com says that driving experts call this “target fixation.” That is: focusing on your impending doom instead of taking proper evasive action. They say this will result in a crash. OK, I got that now. Just might need some more practice…
In the meantime, we welcome your thoughts and experiences about how marketers can steer into the skid to not only avoid this economic crash but gain real advantage for their businesses and brands.
Special thanks to Cathy Calhoun, Co-Head of Weber Shandwick Consumer Marketing, Isabelle Papoulias of McCann Erickson New York, and Alan Kercinik of Weber Shandwick Chicago for sharing their research, thinking and insights on this topic.
In 1999, M. Night Shyamalan gave us the movie “The Sixth Sense,” where Haley Joel Osment delivered the now famous line I see dead people…
In 2008, the good people at Twitter have now given us Election2008, which filters “hundreds of Twitter updates per minute to create a new source for gathering public opinion about the presidential election and a new way for you to share your thoughts.” You should check it out.
Watching the non-stop feed of 140 character-or-less musings, utterances, egads, and harrumphs. The good, bad, and the way off-color. The hysterically funny and frightening. Scrolling by side-by-side…
I can’t help but feel a bit like Haley Joel. Sometimes laughing out loud. Other times watching in disbelief and horror at this Sixth Sense-like experience of seeing what’s on the minds–at that very instant–of people across the country.
And all the while thinking: I see voters…
And that I am just like them.
Can Twitter’s Bailout2008 be far behind?
Image credit
Ever wonder how the polls and mainstream news coverage of the US presidential race stack up against the social media conversation? Then you’ll want to check out this ingenious dashboard (pictured above in the highest res I can muster right now).
Its charts showcase side-by-side comparisons of news, blogosphere and Twitter mentions of the candidates and more, providing an interesting mash up of perspectives–from the mainstream media down to to the individual opinions of lifestreaming micromedia. The up-to-the-minute Twitter and blog feeds of all things mentioning the candidates give you an unvarnished (and, caution, un-edited) taste of what people are talking about and linking to in the dynamic world of social media. Where do they find all that spare time?!? There’s even a Widget!
This is truly America’s first Web 2.0 powered presidential election (in terms of everything from fundraising to announcing a Vice Presidential pick via text message). So tools like this dashboard are a useful way for voters to take the pulse of the conversation themselves. Don’t know how long this one will remain up for. Let us know if you have found others. Maybe someone has created one for the iPhone already, available in an app store near you…
Special thanks: to Guy Kawasaki for tweeting this our way (along with the 18,000 plus other people who follow him on Twitter)
Image credit: perspctv
One is dark the other golden. One falls from the sky the other knifes through water. One is brought to you from a Hollywood studio. The other by way of a newcomer on the world pop culture stage, the Chinese politburo.
But, perhaps in a way, the differences stop there. Because the world can’t get enough of them. These two masked, high-tech superheroes of summer. And neither can the organizations and brands that placed such big bets on their muscular shoulders in hopes of that rarest of phenomena: the blockbuster summer success.
As given away up front by the pics, I’m of course talking about the latest Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in his final completed performance. And American Olympic-swimming wunderkind, Michael Phelps. Who today impossibly won his sixth gold medal and set his sixth world record in the Beijing games. His 12th career gold overall. More than any Olympic athlete in any sport. Ever.
When International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge was talking to reporters yesterday about Phelps’ impact, he could just as well have been talking about Hollywood:
“The Olympic Games live around superheroes. You had Jesse Owens, you had Paavo Nurmi, Carl Lewis and now you have Phelps. And that’s what we need to have.”
Batman, Spiderman, Ironman… Phelps, Lewis, Retton… or how about iPhone, iPod, Google to throw some phenom brands into the mix (oh just go with it, it’s summer). All are Supermen–some literally. All are icons. Heroes that defy the impossible. And break through the quotidian clutter to inspire outsized imagination and advocacy.
And it’s not just their feats that are heroic. It’s how they are saving business (and rescuing the rest of us in the US from the wasteland of reality TV and campaign coverage). Just look at Batman. According to boxofficemojo.com, the US Domestic box office total for “The Dark Night” as of August 13 was, as Robin Leach of “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” used to say, a hefty little $451 million. That’s nothing compared to the worldwide box office. It now stands at $715 million! Can you say ka-ching?
Back in Beijing, polls estimated that the opening ceremonies were viewed by 1 billion worldwide. That’s 15% of tout le monde. In the US, the broadcast averaged 34.2 million viewers and received an 18.6 national household rating, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Impressive to be sure.
But Phelps himself is drawing a tidal wave of eyeballs. According to the International Herald Tribune, he’s shattering Web traffic records just on NBCOlympics.com alone:
More than 2 million people have clicked on NBCOlympics.com to watch a video replay of the thrilling men’s 4×100 swimming relay, where the Americans scored a come-from-behind victory over the French… That race alone accounts for more than 40 percent of the nearly 5 million video on demand orders from the Web site, NBC Universal said on Thursday… Three of the next four most-ordered clips were also Phelps gold medal races, with his 400-meter victory called up 492,000 times. The only non-Phelps video in the top five was a collection of highlights from last Friday’s opening ceremony… Web site users have also called up Phelps’ profile 3.7 million times, far and away the most of any other athlete.
Fortunately, this is one story it won’t be difficult to find great stats on, as it will be endlessly written about, talked about, and analyzed. Which after all is the point. An astonishing aside, in what has otherwise been an impressive use of digital media by both the producers of Batman and the Olympics broadcast to engage vast audiences, was the whack-a-mole-like efforts of the latter to keep images of the tape-delayed opening ceremonies from leaking out in the age of broadband. Check please.
Even as we all marvel at and enjoy the great success of these Summer Knights, Batman and Phelps, we’d do well to remember that every Superman has his kryptonite. As observed by the New York Times today, that might simply come down to what home team you root for. Phelps it appears is not quite yet a universal hero. He’s ours here in America, splashed everywhere across our screens and imaginations. But virtually unknown and relegated to the back of the local media coverage in China!
That’s just the way it works with heroes. Or villains for the matter. After all, it was the Joker who stole the spotlight in “The Dark Knight!”
Image credits: FilmSchoolRejects and Telegraph.co.uk
Move over Queen bee. That consumer who expressed her status through the clothes, homes, and cars she purchased. Even through career and family. A new force for the new media age has arrived: the Gamma woman, or girl as the case may be.
Who is she? Using Hollywood as a guidepost (with all the caveats that apply), forget Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”– major Alpha. Think the hip and tech-savvy Ellen Page in “Juno.”
The new hero/archetype on the silver screen may also be the new prize for marketers. At least that’s one of the implications of the latest news from media powerhouse Meredith, publisher of such established and far-reaching women’s titles as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, MORE, Parents, Fitness, and American Baby.
A Gamma, the company reports on its new microsite, is one of 55 million American women whose “choices are about expressing their creativity and personal style… and doing their part to preserve the environment.” She is guided by her “internal beliefs, passions, and priorities… [and] motivated by the desire to interact, rather than to impress.” Take that alphas.
Now if Juno is not who leaps to mind when you read about Gammas (especially in light of that, um, teen pregnancy thing), that’s OK. What stands out for me is the emphasis on expression of creativity and personal style. As it apparently does for the ever increasing number of women and moms publishing blogs and Twitter tweets. In this sense, the difference between Alpha and Gamma does feel a lot like the difference between Anna Wintour’s Vogue and, say, a Heather Armstrong of dooce.com. (see previous post Mom as the Truman Show for more about dooce)
Gammas are “creating a groundswell in today’s new media and marketing landscape,” says Meredith on its microsite and materials. “Using multiple media—both online and off—to share ideas, information, and recommendations with her vast network.”
Perhaps not totally new news to some consumer marketers who’ve followed this emerging discussion over the past years. But the deeper dive they provide gives shape to what looks like a trend–if not a conversational or a cultural shift–that’s worth a harder look at. Particularly the social networking virtues Gamma women possess.
Sounds like another part of the new wave of advocacy to me. And whether it’s a Greek letter like Gamma that helps define your audience mindset or something else, the key is to understand the conversation that engages them. And if your audience is anything like Juno, what she’ll tell you is that: “I could so go for like a huge cookie right now like with a lamb kabob simultaneously.” I’m hungry how about you?
Image: Sheryl Nields
