did you know | what i learned wednesday

Mar 24 2013

Billions and Billions Served

We really are influenced when we know others have acted similarly, especially when we believe those “others” are just like us.

Imagine this: you’re a manager who needs to move people over from BlackBerrys to iPhones. You may or may not find that to be a challenging situation, but also imagine the department you are “selling” this change to was actually the department that had been in favor of using BlackBerrys to begin with years ago!

You’d be savvy if you had the insight to use social proof to show that other people within the company, and outside the company, were already adopting and feeling positive about the switch-over.

But also imagine there are still two employees in this department who are not in support of you or the initiative. You know for a fact they are not on board with the changeover, and since they are in an operations/IT capacity, you know how much you need them on board for this to be a success!

You have two choices of people who you feel can aid you as you sell the idea to them:

Tanya, who is not in an IT role, but as a rising star in the company, she has a lot of support within the operations/IT division. In fact, she’s a trusted source throughout the company. You know they–and others across the company–see her as a leader, which isn’t surprising, since she is strategic, succinct and direct as a manager.
Ben, a quiet, “B player” type who was also on the same team that made the initial recommendation to choose BlackBerrys when the company first gave its employees cell phones. He has been in his operations/IT role for the same amount of time as the two people who are reluctant, and almost unwilling, to make this change.

Ben would be a far better person for you to use to give a testimonial about how and why he’s supportive of the move. Why? Because even though he doesn’t hold as much clout in the organization, he’s in a likeminded role as the two people who don’t agree with the change.

He’s an example of how social proof is truly activated by the idea of similarity. This is why many times the most effective testimonials on TV are the ones that feature people we feel are “just like us,” or those that show symptoms or problems that we can directly relate with.

We tend to discount how much influence other people have on our day-to-day decisions, but when we see ourselves in someone else, and they show or act in a way in support of a product or service, it’s extremely influential on us.

The other activators of social proof that can push us to follow others include:

A situation that could end in shame, so we act in ways to “save face,” many times in a defensive manner;
When there is a great deal of uncertainty around how we should act;
A behavior that’s made more available to us, thus making it seem more common.

Not all of these situations are necessarily negative–maybe you spoke with a friend who was “ahead” of you when it came to their personal finances/savings, or maybe it was a family member who you saw making lifestyle changes to lose weight. In turn, seeing these situations could have motivated you to start reflecting or to even make improvements to your personal life.

Can you think of situations where you were motivated when you saw a close friend or a family member take on a certain behavior?

Tagged ad-dict, adland, advertising agency influence, ambiguity and influence, ambiguity and persuasion, billions and billions served at mcdonalds, cialdini, creative, did you know, influence, influence at work, marketing execution, marketing land, marketing strategy, media publicize and influence, MS Marketing, persuasion tactic 101, persuasion techniques, persuasion techniques 101, power of influence, power of similarity in persuasion, power of social proof, psychology of testimonials, Robert Cialdini, save face, self-management, shaming, social proof activators, what i learned, whatilearnedwednesday persuasion

Aug 22 2012

1 Comment

Marketing Insights, On Learning, Self Management

Decision Making for Dummies

Investors and marketers are keenly aware of sandbagging: setting certain expectations at a low point, yet anticipating the ability to beat or exceed those expectations.

Why manage the expectations of consumers? Besides for obvious reasons, it is also because consumers are constantly evaluating their decisions post-purchase, in fact more often than we may realize.

The decision making process can be broken down into the following steps:

We have an initial perception of that (desired) product’s market.
We form a narrow subset of brands in that market to be considered is determined. Typically, a consideration set may be around 7 brands.
We make an actual selection of a brand from that consideration set.
We make an adjustment of our perceptions based on our experience with the product.

What’s an example of how customers analyze their purchase post-decision? When a brand meets our expectations, we as consumers are satisfied. But when that brand has exceeded our initial expectation of that performance, we are delighted…

An important part of the reason we evaluate our decisions and choices on an ongoing basis after we make a purchase: because we favor minimal cognitive dissonance.

There are four ways we do this as consumers:

We will increase how attractive the brand we purchased is in our minds.
We will decrease how attractive the rejected brands were in our minds.
We will increase the perceived similarity between the other alternatives.
We altogether reverse the choice.

In Jack Brehm’s study titled “Postdecision Changes in the Desirability of Alternatives,” he examines some of the consequences we face after we make a choice. In the study, consumers were asked to rate the attractiveness of a variety of products. Participants were told at the end of the study, they would receive one of those products as a gift.

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Tagged ad-dict, adland, advertising, adworld, Cincinnati, consumer behavior, consumer decision making, consumer decisions, did you know, economics, Facebook, in the consumer's head, investment, marketing tactics, MBA, MS Marketing, perception, sandbag, sandbagging, self-management, what i learned, zappos

Aug 17 2012

How Much Will It Cost?

Pricing happens to be one of the easiest marketing factors to change.

It also happens to be one of the easiest ways to kill trust and ruin relationships with your customers.

In other words, it may be easy, but that’s not to say that pricing-related decisions are uncomplicated. Pricing, and price promotions, have the ability to do the most damage to a brand, in the least amount of time.

Having a deep understanding of the multifaceted factors that all fall under “pricing” (e.g. how will the sales team execute on this strategy?) is one of the most underrated skills in a marketer, or any business person, for that matter.

When it comes to pricing strategy, as marketers we must be aware of whether we are acquiring or retaining customers. If we are acquiring them, we in turn must know where this source of volume is coming from. These customers are either new to the entire category itself (or we are creating a “new category”), or we are earning share from our competition.

It would make sense that that any pricing tactics, therefore, encourage trial in some way to acquire this kind of new customer. In this case, you’d want to clearly define how you interpret a current customer, and you’d have to clearly define who you are “stealing” share from. If it’s vague, then you might just be setting yourself up for an undisciplined approach, and if it doesn’t work, you’ll have to guess at why.

If marketers are in a position of retaining our current customers, pricing and marketing tactics must be aligned with our other brand objectives: delivering the product or service performance, and maintaining and building customer loyalty. Like maintaining anything, maintenance of brand inertia takes consistent work. Steep price change s that happen overnight are a sure way to threaten that loyalty.

For a store like Kroger, it would make sense that a pricing strategy would have a continuity objective. What else might you see under this strategy? Tactics may include product improvements or product line extensions (which would then be advertised), a strong customer relations team and/or loyalty programs, and promotions aimed to get more “share of wallet.”

And, in the case of Kroger, sending out coupons to the “most loyal” to get them to come to Kroger more often is exactly what we see in the marketplace right now.

Pricing and pricing strategy not only acts as a strong signal to customers, but it should also be important to your shareholders. After all, savvy, long-term investors know that companies that do have the power to increase prices and keep their customers, are the strongest of companies.

But note that these companies — such as Starbucks, for example — do not increase their prices too sharply at once. Instead, they demonstrate their ability to raise prices slowly over time. This pricing strategy not only demonstrates a powerful business model, it also shows disciplined and highly strategic leadership guiding the brand.

Tagged advertising, creative, did you know, in the consumer's head, influence, Kroger, marketing, marketing execution, marketing strategy, MS Marketing, Ohio, price, pricing, product development, Starbucks, what i learned

Jul 26 2012

The Big Picture

As a consumer, one of the great things about our current reality is how many choices we have available to us (even though we don’t actually consider as many as we might think we do).

As marketers, this puts even more importance on strategy — one that’s in alignment with our execution.

But when is it time to adjust strategy?

There are really only two cases:

When your strategy has not been successful.
When your strategy has been successful.

The first sounds obvious enough. But the problem occurs when execution doesn’t completely align with strategy. By execution, it could be chosen positioning and creative developed around it, price and/or price promotions, a variety of distribution issues, to name a few.

When marketing execution is off-strategy, or is haphazard and non-selective, you’ll never be able to tell why you are failing (or why you are succeeding!)

I’m not sure which is worse: to not know why you’re failing or why you’ve succeeded.

On the other hand, it takes a disciplined and forward-looking company to know when to change strategy after success.

Especially continued success.

It takes looking back, observing, and listening. It takes a re-examination and analysis of how you’re identifying yourself and customers, knowing what business you are in and agreeing on how you will define that category, having a clear sense of your core competency in relation to your competitive advantage and competitors, and lastly, where you are going.

Take Kodak, a company that had some of the most capable brand and product managers around. Yes, they had a great brand, and yes, they had a deep knowledge about photography and they excelled at creating design that made their products unique.

While they actually were strong in innovation, they began to be overly focused on photography alone. How they defined themselves became too narrow. In other words, despite their successful position at the time, a strategy that worked for more than 100 years needed to be adjusted and redefined.

Sound like any other companies?

Tagged marketing land, advertising, marketing, what i learned, marketing execution, creative, consumer behavior, did you know

what i learned wednesday

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Decision Making for Dummies

How Much Will It Cost?

The Big Picture

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