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Bringing back the EDGE in marketing (research)
This document discusses how marketing research needs to evolve to better understand consumers. It argues that research has become too reactive and fails to provide a long-term strategic view. It advocates developing an insight capability that connects different data sources on consumer behavior, physiology, and feedback to gain a holistic understanding. Research also needs to present findings in a digestible, bite-sized format. By giving consumers a voice and choice in the research process, and ensuring they have a positive experience, research can strengthen brand relationships while learning how to improve. The goal is to unite interested consumers and employees on a collaborative platform that facilitates bottom-up listening, exploration of insights, and agile decision-making.
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Bringing back the EDGE in marketing (research)
- 1. BRINGING BACK THE IN MARKETING (RESEARCH) TOM DERUYCK, Managing Partner
- 5. WORLD OF AVERAGEHAS served us well
- 6. WPP IS LOWERINGgrowth expectations
- 7. CONSUMERS DON’T CAREif brands disappear
- 8. MARKETING GIANTS ARElosing territory
- 23. HAS MARKET RESEARCHlost its edge?
- 24. Discussion Topic HOW TOENVISION THE LONG TERM? RESEARCH IS REACTIVE. WE LOSE SIGHT OF THE BIGGER PICTURE AND DO NOT CREATE A LONG LASTING IMPACT!
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- 26. “IN AN AGEOF ACCELERATION, NOTHING CAN BE MORE EXHILARATING THAN GOING SLOW.”
- 28. Discussion Topic HOW TOMAKE INSIGHTS DIGESTIBLE? AGILE RESEARCH IS AN OVERRATED BUZZ WORD!
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- 30. FROM ‘FAST’ RESEARCH TO‘PACED’ RESEARCH
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- 33. 33INSITES CONSULTING –SKYTEAM || ESOMAR CONGRESS 2016 – NEW ORLEANS Premium CUSTOMER SERVICE 20 airlines +1.000 airports +50M passengers
- 34. Discussion Topic HOW TOGLUE THINGS TOGETHER? WE HAVE SO MUCH DATA THAT THE ANSWERS WE’RE LOOKING FOR MUST BE IN THERE ALREADY!
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- 38. Discussion Topic HOW CANWE LEARN TO EARN? WE’RE SO FOCUSED ON GETTING ALL THE DATA WE NEED THAT WE FORGET TO THINK ABOUT ‘RESPONDENTS’ AS ‘HUMANS’!
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- 42. THIS IS WHEREWE DRAW THE LINE
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- 45. 88% SATISFACTION BE IN THE KNOW Trailers POSITIVE EXPERIENCE Short& snappy LEARNING Peer to peer recommendations
- 46. We empower consumersto shape the future of brands by uniting interesting and interested consumers on a closed collaboration platform allowing bottom-up listening, deep exploration and agile business decision making. We empower employees to shape the future of brands by enabling them to easily absorb relevant consumer insights and to better act upon and collaborate through these insights, offering a creative & social ‘workplace’ that extends your current business processes. consumers employees insight impact
- 47. THANK YOU! May theforce be with you Download the full paper on www.insites-consulting.com/EDGE
Editor's Notes
- #2 Like so many people in this room, I grew up in the age of average. With average I mean the fact that most of the time we were copying the behavior of most of our peers and simply following the herd.
- #3 In these old days of marketing, linking the present with the past was a winning trick. When growing up, you could simply look in the rear-view mirror and copy-paste what your parents had done before you. If your father was a doctor, there was a fair chance you would follow in his footsteps. People copy-pasted what was done before them, even in business, and with success. Marketing plans of year X were often simply a copy of marketing plans of the year X-1 with some minor adjustments.
- #4 In these Mad Men times, advertising and marketing was all about creativity and craftmanship, where developing a creative campaign corresponded with a bunch of men brainstorming with a bourbon in their hands.
- #5 Also resources were scarce – the wild Madison Avenue days are characterized by the limited products, communication channels and information. People would gain power by owning and growing scarce resources such as knowledge and information. Those that stood out were the ones having access to the right data, information and insight.
- #6 For a long time, this world of average has served the marketing community quite well. We were defining consumer segments representing the average consumer. We were targeting those segments with messages of average relevance. We were positioning our brands through creative work of average quality. And still we were doing fine! But we all sense, even the most traditional business leaders among us, that something isn’t quite right and that things have changed.
- #7 WPP, the world’s biggest advertising company, continues lowering its quarterly growth expectations due to significant drops in client spending.
- #8 According to Havas Media Group, most consumers would not care if three quarters of all brands disappeared tomorrow. With research by Havas Media stating that most people would not care if 74% of the brands they use every day ceased to exist.
- #9 And over the last 5 years, traditionally admired marketing giants like Unilever & P&G lost 3% market share or $22 billion in sales to smaller and more nimble competitors according to Boston Consulting Group
- #10 Let’s face it, it seems marketing has lost its edge. The rules of average don’t seem to work that well anymore …
- #11 One of the key drivers behind this is our illusion that the Mad Men days are still here. We still apply old-school and average marketing thinking to deal with an ever more complex and demanding context. We are ignorant because we pay more attention to facts supporting the old world than we do to facts supporting the new world.
- #12 And that is a big problem. A big problem because new world is very different from the old one. In fact, it is completely opposite to the one we grew up in. 1. From Linearity to Acceleration While evolution used to be linear for a long time, it is now exponential. It means we cannot predict the future based on the past. Today, copy-pasting from the past is no longer an option. We live in exponential times. The speed of transformation is at its ultimate high, with change no longer being linear nor predictable Research by adobe showed that 76% of marketing professionals believe marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the previous 50. New entrants are disrupting the market and chasing the rules of the game in many industries (e.g Airbnb, Google). But the shift away from linearity is also visible at the consumer side, where consumers have moved away from the once linear consumption track. Where the notion of loyaty is being challenged with consumers mixing brands to feed their continuously changing needs, resulting in a true ‘catch me if you can’ story for brands to stay relevant. 2. From Craftmanship to Automation While people made a living by practicing specific skills, these skills are increasingly being outsourced to smart machines. These days, partly driven by our need to speed up, marketing is driven more and more by technology. Think off, programmatic advertising where smart algorithms automatically create the best communication plan. A marketer’s job is shifting more and more from marketing strategy to operations. And the rise of automation is expected to further change a marketer’s role, with a study by Oxford University stating that there is a 61% chance that marketers will be replaced by robots in the next 20 years . It means we are need of a new kind of human creativity. 3. From Scarcity to Abundance While the old world used to be scarce, it now seems everything is available in abundance. Over the past years, information has transformed from being a scarce good to a commodity to even an abundance. It means we need to rethink how we create value when everything becomes available for everyone.
- #13 So it is high time to bring back the edge marketing really deserves. I’ll touch upon 4 different ways to get there. Let’s start with the first one.
- #14 With so much change around us, it is tempting to continuously move from left to right and apply a ‘if it moves, shoot’ aporoach. Still remember how Pokémon Go would change the face of marketing and communication forever? Since its peak in July 2016 when more than 28 million people were playing the game together, more than 4 out of 5 users have since then dropped out. We need to think back of the wise words Bill Bernbach, one of the 3 founders of DDB in 1949. He said we are too concerned about the changing man, while we should pay more attention to the unchanging man. He said human nature has not changed over the last million years and will not change over the next, only the superficial things have changed such as technology, media and channels. Just think of the Maslow (50’s) needs – although are surroundings have changed, the needs (safety, self actualization, belonging) still are omni present in today’s society.
- #15 But envisioning the future is far from an easy task. In fact, most of us suffer from the syndrome of Alice in Wonderland. This syndrome is a neuropsychological condition that leads people to distorted perceptions of size. We either extrapolate ourselves into stupidity signifcantly perceiving the future bigger than it is. Let me give a funny example to illustrate. When Elvis died in 1977, there were 170 impersonators. In the year 2000, there were already 85,000. If we extrapolate this in an exponential way, everyone in the world is an impersonator (or 8 billion people) in 2031, which is obviously rather ridiculous. The other side of the coin is that we can also seriously underestimate the size of what is about to come. I still vividly remember the days when people declared us crazy to start a market research agency only focusing on digital methods just 20 years ago. Today, online is the most adopted method for quantitative research and the second most adopted for qualitative research.
- #16 How can we escape the Alice in Wonderland syndrome? The solution resides in bypassing our temptation to jump from one trend bandwagon to another. We need to go back to the deeper human truths and insights that are more eternal and bigger than superficial everyday changes. Taking a longer term perspective does however not contradict with being flexible and agile. While Facebook has a clear vision on what it wants to achieve in the next 10 years, it revisits and adjusts its 10-year plan every 6 months.
- #17 If Jack Welch, former CEO and chairman of General Electric, is right, the end is near for all of us. With the speed of change on the outside accelerating, it is absolutely essential to boost the internal clock speed of companies.
- #18 The key to better, faster and continuous learning will be to make things smaller. We are all familiar with the 10,000 hour rule: anyone can learn anything after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Instead applying a 10,000 hour rule, today’s successful businesses rather adopt a 10,000-experiment rule. Jeff Bezos says success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments they do per year, per month, per week, per day. Today, Amazon runs 2,000 experiments per year, Google 7,000 Facebook even more than 100,000 per year. Ask yourself the question how many experiments are you running or would need to run on a weekly basis.
- #19 Who remembers Steve Job’s mythical words at the iPhone launch about a decade ago? “An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.” With more than 1.2 billion iPhones having been sold since then, Apple is now the most valuable brand in the world with an estimated market value of 170 billion dollars. In the future, brands will need to embrace more of this kind of and-thinking rather than or-thinking. Companies like WeChat are typical examples of this one-stop-shop principle. They radically raise the bar when it comes to delivering extreme customer convenience by bundling assets in one single place, just like a Swiss army knife.
- #20 A big part of the future will be about gluing things and people together. After all, most distinctions have lost their meaning and relevance anyway. Think about the word digital. We are witnessing digital outdoor billboards, digital first companies like Amazon opening classic bookstores , people listening to digital radio. Whether something is digital or non-digital is hard to tell and has become meaningless. We are too obsessed with separating the old and the new. We think too fast that the new is going to kill the old. The simple reality is that over time new mixes are created with a different balance of the ingredients. The great thing about it is that in many cases adding more ingredients to the mix creates more value. Analytic Partners analyzed more than 3,000 campaigns between 2010 and 2015. The results clearly show that, by adding a new platform to the media mix every time, ROI kept going up time after time.
- #21 There is no better way to put it into words than the way David Jones, former CEO of Havas has formulated it. We need to move from marketing to consumers and instead focus on mattering to people. In other words, brands need to let go of their egocentric perspective on the world and think of consumer relevance as their absolute priority number one.
- #22 We all like to think that our advertising messages are timely, relevant and welcome to consumers. But deep inside most of us will readily admit we are just annoying people. Even worse: we’re scaring consumers by giving them the impression that we know too much about them. 28% of the US Internet users now blocks ads according to Adobe. GDPR will put a stop to unrequested messaging. Traditional media are increasingly experiencing drops in effectiveness with media on demand such as Netflix redefining the media landscape. All of this shows that we are in the middle of a Copernican marketing revolution, with consumers rather than brands are at the center of the marketing universe.
- #23 I am not saying it is going to be easy. But I dare you to get behind the steering wheel even though your feet might not yet reach the pedals and you can’t fully see through the front window. We all need to shift gears up as in a world of acceleration, automation and abundance, and radically say goodbye to the age of average.
- #24 What about Marketing Research? While the world has shifted to this opposite, marketing research seems to be still holding on to the same old principles and values as if nothing has changed. We are fooling ourselves in thinking we are part of this transformation. Instead we are characterized by ignorance, where we keep on chasing the same practices and repeating what we have always done. Although its origins lie in feeding the (Mad Men) creatives with insights to back up their campaign stories, the sole shift characterizing the research industry was the shift from offline to online. We still wrongly assume that people are sitting in front of their computer filling out surveys (in total isolation). The long research cycles not providing the speed and flexibility for fast decision-making We keep on bombarding consumers with questions, squeezing them like lemons, rather than to focus on smart data integration We know we need to connect the dots but often we often are lost in translation. So it even in the EDGE acronym still holds…
- #25 Many studies serve only one single purpose and we move from project to project, they stand alone and are not structural. Research is reactive. We lose sight of the bigger picture (foundational, proactive) and do not create a long lasting impact! How do we build A versatile long term consumer insights capability supporting a brand’s bigger purpose?
- #26 While fluctuating times drive instant decision-making and take the short term before the longer term, we should never stop focusing on building solid insights that can drive the business for long. In many research departments there is this pressure “on the now” leading to an ad-hoc research focus – all short term and driven by daily needs. Research often falls in the trap of time, delivering on short-term needs, leaving out any long-term-perspective thinking. Yet it is essential to envision what your research should add up to, in line with a brand’s bigger purpose and think in ‘programs’ rather than ‘single projects’.
- #27 For example, in the TV industry, content development takes around two years, yet at the same time it requires continuous sensing to be able to pick up on emerging insights. One of the studies that ran on the Sony Square was an immersive ethnographic diary focussed at engaging consumers in storytelling over what entertained them over time. For example, over the last years, dark drama like game of thrones for example became very popular. However in the turbulent times with populism reigning, e.g. Brexit, trump and so on, SONY Pictures Television got signals that television plays a double role to help people dealing with these darker times. A polarization (pendulum) is appearing where people are entertained by both very dark content but also want very light and fluffy content that is more emotional and makes people feeling good again, escaping their daily worries and to unwind the in comfort of their home.
- #28 By building these structural connections, brands, marketers and other stakeholders get a closer feel of the reality beyond the company walls, allowing decision-making to be fed by the consumers’ voice whilst keeping track and envisioning the greater need and purpose it serves.
- #29 Executive decision making has changed. Environments have accelerated and became more complex. Brand owners and marketers need rapid, iterative and easy to understand insights for their daily decision making, so they can be adaptive. But agile & digestible research is overrated! e.g. because (or other reasons) Budgets do not allow continuous research at every step of the way Need for speed is unrealistic Iterations slow down or hinder daily work or hard to keep pace Foundational just have more impact than short interventions What are ways to make research and insights digestible? In sync with daily decision making Still offering more than data, allowing for a big bet if needed …
- #30 Agile in this sense is buzzing, with words like scrum, backlogs and sprints increasingly being part of a marketer’s and even a marketing researcher’s glossary. However being agile goes beyond adopting a scrum approach or speedy research. In order to embrace agile and hence digestible thinking, we should be ‘Kaizen’. Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy and originates from the words ‘kai’ meaning ‘change’ and ‘zen’ which is ‘good’, literally meaning ‘change for the better’ or ‘continuous improvement’. Basically, it means moving away from longer and more heavy research studies and to go for a more ongoing do-learn mentality, Rather than defining a whole research track upfront, you work iteratively, where you start a project with a few questions and move towards the next loop based on learnings or additional questions from the previous loop. In doing so, you focus on learning.
- #31 Next it provided the opportunity to fulfil the increased need for speedy of insight delivery by ‘surfing on this river of tiny insights’.
- #32 But this iterative and experimental thinking should also be adopted when feeding the organization with learnings, by moving away from large reports where piles of data end up on company servers never to be touched, and instead adopting short snackable formats that can instantly be taken further and turned into action. For research results, this implies feeding back bite-size consumer insights to the organization, allowing stakeholders to digest and interpret the results and enrich them with insights from previous work or their own experiences.
- #33 This can be done through the use of power slides (i.e. short, snappy and visual one-sliders) or infographic or dynamic post-it reporting (i.e. visually stick results on meeting room walls using post-its) which capture the core research results and trigger the hearts, minds and actions of stakeholders.
- #34 CASE: How SkyPriority goes Gemba As an association of twenty airlines, SkyTeam’s mission is to create a seamless travel experience through operational excellence while maintaining a customer focus. To become truly customer-centric, a network of high-value customers provides real-time feedback across touchpoints via a proprietary mobile application. Using geo-location technology, feedback is prompted at relevant occasions (e.g. when customers enter an airport), allowing passengers to review each journey touchpoint (e.g. check-in, boarding…). Next to completing these short surveys, passengers can report their experience through pictures and bottom-up comments, ensuring feedback is always embedded in a real-life context. Rather than the traditional feedback loop of days, weeks or months, all SkyPriority managers can access a customized online dashboard with real-time response data - survey figures, stories and photos - allowing them to continuously have a finger on the pulse. Back-end system triggers notify relevant stakeholders of critical incidents, allowing them to address these immediately. By embedding these continuous feedback loops, SkyTeam moved from a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ approach, with 83% of the SkyTeam managers stating the program allows them to better understand their customers’ needs.
- #35 Marketers are data drunk. What they need is business critical insights, not more data. As they are exposed to different data, there is a need to connect the dots and get a holistic understanding. But sometimes the available data are not fit for purpose, are incomplete, lack context, do not provide a “why” … how do we triangulate to create better insights?
- #36 It’s about gluing people – On one hand consumers, this to get an ongoing finger on the pulse on what is going on. Yet, instead of relying on input coming directly from consumers, marketers tend to primarily depend on their own gut feeling, talks with colleagues or advice from experts on the matter. A CEB study with nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies shows that the customer’s voice is only incorporated in 11% of marketing decisions. Truth is, if brands wish to grasp changing consumer and market dynamics, they need to invest in an ongoing structural consumer connection. Installing a structural consumer connection can be done in several ways, from launching a Facebook page where you exchange thoughts with your target audience, to engaging interesting and interested consumers in structural research projects. Interesting refers to those that can bring relevant and valuable input to your organization. In marketing research, we tend to focus on ‘national representativity’ as a key criterion for research validity. Instead of focusing on having a mirrored distribution on age, gender or product usage, it might be more interesting to learn from those not using or heavily using your brand and product or from those having a certain affinity with the category. Interested refers to those wanting to share their opinion, those that want to help a brand further, help it grow.
- #37 But also research methods, tools and techniques. Just like Steve jobs mentioned, we should consider research as a Swiss army knive. Traditionally, research focusses on a single-method approach to gain consumer understanding. Yet this method focus often results in a unified, often depthless, perspective. Thinking in terms of activities and experiences we take our participations through activities rather than methods and adopting a solution focus, is key. It is about mixing listen and observer consumers, to generate insights, to co-create solutions with these consumers, to validate insights or solutions and even track success over time. Moreover it is not only about mixing methods. It is also about connecting data. Primary research formed the core source of consumer and market insights, yet today it is just the tip of the iceberg and a minor part of the data mix surrounding us. Only by connecting the dots between the diverse streams of data can marketing (research) reach the augmented view essential for future-proof decision-making.
- #38 Case: How Philips uncovered the digital footprint of online shopping Philips Lighting is a global market leader with recognized expertise in the development, manufacturing and application of innovative (LED) lighting solutions. Philips Lighting aspires to optimize their online sales of lighting bulbs, luminaires and connected lights by improving traffic to and conversion on Philips-branded webpages on e-tailer properties. This is typically done through customer journey mapping and touchpoint analysis. Yet what people say they do is often not in line with their actual behavior. Hence, to identify and map the consumer journey in all its aspects, a multiple-data approach was used. A usage and attitude survey mapped ‘what people think they do’, while a shopper mission revealed ‘what people really do’, using passive metering technology. The latter yielded in a full digital footprint of the online purchase behavior (e.g. websites visits, search terms used and app usage). Combining these different perspectives allowed to reveal discrepancies between stated and actual behavior, ultimately leading to a more profound understanding of the shopper mission. The research revealed for example that although 44% of shoppers claim reviews are their main driver for purchase, only 7% actually read them; it also uncovered that reviews rather serve as a driver for where to shop rather than the purchase itself.
- #39 People perceive research as boring and tedious. We want a lot of data and all at once. We loose sight of creating a positive touchpoint. This may result in long surveys, complex tools or just getting a response. We’re so focused on getting all the data we need (AND MORE) that we forget to think about ‘respondents’ as ‘humans’! Should we just get the data and accept that research How can we earn human engagement and set people first?
- #40 As mentioned before, the customer’ voice is only incorporated in 11% of marketing decisions. Yet the thing is, if we want consumers to collaborate with us – we need to earn their attention. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming in place in May 2018, the doors to consumers will be locked for good, acces is driven by consent. Making it more important than ever to earn their attention and engagement. Because ultimately, if you earn the consumers, you earn the data and if you earn the data, you earn the future. And this also for researchers, we must all (re)consider the lifetime value of consumers. We need to earn their attention. Throughout the years, the research industry, just like the marketing world, has taken this for granted, with disastrous consequences. We continue to approach consumers with long and boring questionnaires, causing not only drop-out and low survey quality but also the risk to dry out consumer panels in the long run. Instead, we should invest in engagement in the long term, for example by adapting our research formats to the snappy reality.
- #41 It all starts with developing a real conversation with your consumer. It is not only about asking questions to people, it is as important to also give back. Therefore we make sure that we provide a variety of activities including both activities that are really needed with also engagement activities. The engagement question have two main reasons, one of them is variation in the topic, besides that it provides us with a chance to share results back (as many research results on core topics are too sensitive to share)
- #42 Being short is also something that was put in practice in qualitative assignments. Chat is a great example that fits people modern communication patterns. We experimented with chat for live events as well as other tasks and found the engagement to be higher due to the joint experience and also that it provides a lot more contextual, real-life or in the moment feedback.
- #43 We know already for years that long and boring research tasks is one of the main reasons why people do not take part in research or drop out. So, it’s time to walk to talk and draw a clear line: that activities – qual or quant – could not take longer than 7 minutes.
- #44 But reality often implies we have a lot of information needs or things to test! What to do in case one has a lot of questions left? Well there a couple of things you can do, and the first thing is to give people options or a choice. We found in research on research that if you first engage people in short and snappy survey for example and you subsequently ask them at the end of that survey if they are willing to continue, that they generally do. In this case for example with Sony, we applied this technique and found that between 76% and 83% continues after the 7 minutes survey if they were provided the option to complete additional parts (e.g. extra stimuli to test).
- #45 But earning through engagement also involves adopting more contemporary research formats. An example is real-time chat, this is in line with how consumers communicate in real-life settings where platforms like whatsapp are dominating all interaction. Another example is the use of chat bots in qual moderation. We found that in general people like bots. Next to that bots generate similar results, help moderators focus on value added probing and analyses on the go (which allows to detect patterns live during the field more easily).
- #46 Let’s have a look at what people in research think We evaluated the experience of members on the square and we found out that 88% indicated to have had a very satisfying (top 2) experience on the square. The core principles we had installed under “earning’ paid off. The main reasons where all related to intrinsic drivers as to why people participated. People really felt they got something back because of the peer to peer recommendations in the topics but also because of the trailers we shared with them in the research. Also the short and snappy context was a man driver of satisfaction
- #48 If you want to read more on this, check out our recently released full paper. May the force be with you and thank you for your attention!