Dancing with the Eight Ball

Good morning, all. I’m Misia Tramp, a global Insights & Innovation Practitioner. You could say that in my 15+ years in the insights business, I’ve worked on a few projects and observed people all over the world doing a whole range of things from eating and drinking, managing their information using technology through to exploring drivers of radicalism….(and some other things which I won’t go into in polite company!) From direct to digital to advertising and customer experience design, I began to see a need. A need for purposeful, brand building customer experiences. Experiences that resonate across product innovation, delivery, and all levels of customer and brand engagement. It’s been my pleasure to imagine what is possible and make it real for some of the most innovative companies in the world.

The financial follies of 2008 put the entire business community behind the eight ball. Every data set changed - from what constituted credit-worthiness to the number of people shifting their home garden from English Country to vegetable plots.

The traditional research community found themselves the curators of data artifacts from the 80s and 90s - with little to no relevance to today’s new world.

Today we’ll be discussing how the internet can serve as your more reliable form of big data when designing products and communications for this new world.

How do you learn to dance with the eight ball vs living frozen in its shadow.

Principle One: Shift from a Win/Lose to Learn Approach

Much of the quantifiable research that informed new development in the past was win/lose validation – how did this innovation perform vs last year’s results?

But that is if last year looked anything like this year…which it doesn’t. First we have to change our mindset to be far more about re-learning our categories, targets, messages, mediums and forms. Which means opening ourselves to the opportunity of change vs simply being frustrated by its ambiguity.

And there is one vital data set that actually is still living, breathing, evolving and singularly significant. The internet.

Principle Two: Partner with Translators vs Reporters

the right people to extrapolate insights from it.

recognize significant differences,

be able to distill millions of discussions into meaningful clusters

define their drivers

and be able to project scenarios that may evolve with time.

Critically, you need linguists pulling your data, ethnographers reviewing and reporting on it and powerful predictive analytics to understand potential scenarios and their impact. The people who can identify not just the “what” but the priceless “why”. Whose insights are timely and actionable.

And finally you need the designers, craftsmen and engineers who will take those insights and transform them into customer experiences that often include product, service, partner and engagement innovation.

Principle Three: Define Your Target by Engagement vs Demographic

Challenging it can be to map findings back to their pre-existing demographic-based target profiles. Target profiles are very often limited by the confines of that client’s media buying division.

targets primarily defined by shared passion but also by their shared networking behaviours. So the optimal way to identify targets is through their level of engagement with your category.

WOMMA defines influence/r as:The ability to cause or contribute to a change in opinion or behavior.

Key influencers interact with others, and those they influence are Influencees:A person or group of people who change their opinion or behavior as the result of exposure to new information.

Identifying these self-defined roles and how they interact within your brand’s organic online community can help define:

topics relevant to each unique group; the most engaging ways to interact; the different roles of the different online media; leveraging their influence

This is critical to the way your brand seeds and maintains a dialogue with them.

Principle Four: Listen to the silences/Explore the unexpected

Greatest flaws in much quantitative work is that the:

researcher defines the questions. researcher determines what is important and how

important it is based on informed guesswork. The customer/respondent then simply maps themselves on this manufactured scale.

With online observational research, the customer’s organic conversation should drive insight exploration. Beware of brand monitoring. In the food category only 5% of all the conversations mention a brand. If you are only looking for brand conversations you are missing 95% of what matters. Only high involvement categories like automotive see even 50% of the dialogue being brand specific.

You’ll also miss the true scale of conversation in your category. For example, during the wireless map wars and then app wars

The next three cases will demonstrate these key principles:1. Shift from a Win/Lose to Learn Approach2. Partner with Translators vs Reporters3. Define Your Target by Engagement vs Demographics4. Listen to the silences/Explore the unexpected

LEGAL: As you can imagine, many of these projects are in progress. This makes the data especially timely to today’s chat, but it also requires that I describe these cases “blind” to protect my clients. I do hope you all understand. CASES

What if your customers already redefined your industry?

Understanding the rapidly changing high tech B2B market

My client’s company had been in a state of stasis in the wake of the recession. A hard merger, talk of a potential acquisition, competitors spending 4x their weight in media and Apple driving new momentum in their space.

Transformative work with them on the consumer side through online observational work. Identifying not only what drove people to switch high tech providers but also what made them stay.

The priorities led to advancements in their service offering as well as the way they packaged and promoted their product.

We saw immediate impact on the bottom-line with a decline in customer attrition and a spike in new acquisitions.

The results of these insights made it all the way to the board level because for the first time they had texture behind the flat results or implications they’d seen in quantitative reports. Now they saw the equation of what people considered to be of “value” and what they dreamed of from “service” in a category devoid of it.

Their next question became – could this method work for B2B? Would we be able to isolate discussions that discrete? Would we be able to examine the entirety of business from large enterprise to medium and small?

Their first attempt failed. The method they used was too broad and automated. They were getting consumer chatter. Not the real tech decision makers. That partner agreed their method was not optimal. So that’s where my team became involved.

What evolved was a very effective and lean approach:

aligning all of the critical stakeholders multiple divisions of their business units and reviewed the consolidated results back to the senior business managers prior to going into field.

decision making team discussing their selection process from identification of need, examination of options, gathering of endorsements, shortlisting of

options all the way to the final selection and on-going relationship management.

The observational online ethnographies quantified what we had identified in the groups through hundreds to thousands of discussions. They also allowed us to map the consumer decision-making journey across a variety of different online media types.

Although we could map small and medium business behaviours, large enterprise was silent to us.

Our findings were fascinating:

The category and the business’ decision making o least influential member on the team

responsible primarily for the ongoing maintenance of the account. Additionally, the pragmatic/transactional way our client had been approaching selling their products undermined their credibility with the more executive level of clients. Our client had to build a relationship with a new set of customers and create a compelling story that they were actually a business solution provider and not simply a utility.

We identified a new set of decision makers and influencers; their differing uses of online and the resources they tapped. We saw how each interacted with the other and the differing content requirements each level required for the project to move on to its next stage.

We mapped out the enterprise decision-making journey from beginning to end, identifying what our customers needed from us at each step to remain in the running – tools, content, endorsements, demos, proposals, one-on-one meetings, special financing/invoicing.

We identified through the online ethnos where we had equity/strength or gaps/need for credibility. These helped us focus and balance the priorities of our efforts and messages.

We additionally shed light on a need for educating the enterprises tech users on how to best leverage our products while they were at work or at home – opening opportunities to blend our client’s business and consumer products.

Additionally there was a sense from many that this category of high tech was clueless about their industry and customer service. They felt fleeced, underserved and pretty under-inspired. A huge

opportunity just waiting to be tapped by the first company to identify it. Which they were.

LISTEN & RE-LEARN: A new definition of our client’s industry.

PARTNER: Unearthing niche B2B dialogue; greater understanding of information needs & customer journey; experience strategy for new B2B set.

ENGAGE: Identified new set of influencers & decision makers

Identified their preferred ways of using and dispersing information

EXPLORE UNKNOWN: Separating the irrelevant from the significant issues. Identifying unmet service/expertise need that differentiated us against competition.

What doors open when margins shrink?

Identifying new opportunities and unmet needs in value CPG

grocers extremely risk adverse - cutting back their SKUs by up to 15%.

OR

introduce their next generation of own-brand value options that never before existed and that customers are universally embracing – from organic to exotic.

Our client had realized that the majority of their flagship product was consistently selling at discount. They wanted to understand value areas where they could grow. Opportunities where they could break new ground and maintain their margin.

What equities (both negative and positive) did their core ingredient have overall? How did customers discuss it – treat, healthful, familiar, flavourful? How did their criteria change based on selection/competition? Were certain lower cost, yet still flavourful, varieties part of the dialogue in any significant way? What are the core topic areas and unmet needs/whitespace for us to explore?

Oh, and did I mention our budget was as slim as their margin?

We started with our internal ethnographers interviewing a small set of value conscious mums. What we uncovered were resourceful women who navigating a sea of yellow tags at which they are surgical experts.

Their team had originally considered sending a survey out to a panel. Their concern – the researcher defining what is important. So, they asked me and my team what they could turn around in a week for less than $%,000. Could online ethnographies be a cost effective validator/optimizer of our initial insights from the original ethnographies?

The team did an EXTREMELY fast analysis and sent all the materials in less than 10 days.

Learn: The social research confirmed what we had learned in our ethnographies and expanded beyond;

Our client didn’t need to focus on their core ingredient. Their brand is considered a trusted expert so their brand power extends to category and not just our core ingredient.

Our category was one that value conscious mum leverages everyday to ensure the whole family is

happy. Her priority is to feed them the best quality she can within her means. And just because she’s on a budget doesn’t mean she doesn’t know quality. Her family only care that it features flavours they love.

The new definition of value quality offering in this space is one of limited artificial flavours & colours, % real recognizable ingredients and avoidance of being too sweet. Avoid at all costs a mouth signature that felt like high fructose corn syrup. This is highly different to what we’ve seen in this category in the past

Their success is dependent on family-friendly flavours being at the forefront with their specific ingredient more as a secondary natural note.

Lead with everyday all-family flavor favourites, use your brand as a trust mark, formulate to new value quality palate, make your core ingredient a sidekick/secondary message

It’s a little gem of a case identifying how we can use social as supplementary research to confirm and further enforce traditional observational research.

LISTEN & RE-LEARN: A new definition of value opportunity.

PARTNER: Understanding hierarchy of flavor/trust/quality

ENGAGE: We are an everyday treat for the entire family.

Mum is a tiger yellow tag shopper who demands the best quality her dollar can buy.

EXPLORE UNKNOWN: Our client had permission to shift from ingredient expert to trusted category expert.

What if we built for the next generation of customers now?

Designing new products/services for the next gen of luxury travelers.

Our client is an expert in luxury travel. Inside and out. They know what is interesting to this man. (picture boomer) What they told us they didn’t know anything about is the next generation of travelers. The emerging affluent. We all agreed it would be imperative to build our new offering and brand so that it could scale to this traveler.

Once again, we started with baseline interviews. This time with travel specialists – classically trained agents, experts who had owned their own companies, museum exploration leaders and of course bloggers.

Excited about our learning we turned to social data to explore the findings in more detail…..

Nothing. Crickets. And that’s why it’s so important to understand the customer context….rather than thinking ‘the data isn’t there’ was asked ourselves the question…, “Maybe they’re speaking another language…” Which is exactly what happened.

As often is the case with affluents, we found them rarely writing about their vacation experiences via social media. When they do chat, they are obtuse or keep their pages highly private. So, how to get around it?

We’ve talked a lot in the past about monitoring facebook/twitter and the problems inherent in that. This is an interesting case of how Facebook can actually help us find people:o First, the team targeted Facebook and Twitter

followers of extreme luxury travel brands (for example, the Elite Traveler Magazine’s social sites)

o Then, they conducted personal profile analysis and hash tag identification on thousands of profiles

o They manually combed major picture sites – namely Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr Blogs. This audience is HIGHLY involved – taking brag-worthy experiences to the next level – by actually showing everyone in pictures what they are missing. By manually searching for relevant hashtags we could zoom in on the correct audience and get into the topic in great depth.

#exotic#bejealous#grateful#livingthedream

o And the answers began to stream in

So, what did we learn once we’d found them?

We’ve all talked about the recession generated currency of experience but this category really brings that to life. And both boomers and millennials learned one key thing from the recession - material goods can be gone in a flash. But what you experience in life is priceless.

o Our boomers are the wealthiest, most well-travelled, fittest generation of this demographic in the history of the world. And they’ve completely transformed the travel industry from rest and relaxation to active exploration.

o Our next generation always lived in an open world. They hunger for the most remote, authentic, untouched areas of the globe. They’ve travelled with their parents most of their lives so they actually have some of the highest expectations of any generation re: what they want from an experience.

o Once we were able to identify the chatter, we were able to identify their main areas of discussion.

o We discovered 3 distinct types of ultra-luxury trip across our targets. Some that were discrete to our individual groups and some shared. This helped us clarify what journeys would be applicable to all and which would polarize.

o We then explored what ingredients made up a buzz worthy journey. This gave us focus and a baseline for developing our new brand & its offering.

LISTEN & RE-LEARN: What luxury means to the next generation of affluent traveller.

PARTNER: Uncovering the exclusive silent dialogue of the elite through imagery sourcing.

ENGAGE: Identified shared and discrete travel destinations

Gained clarity on what travel ingredients needed to make a buzz-worthy luxury journey

EXPLORE UNKNOWN: Understand how we can differentiate & service a new generation of traveler while not neglecting our legacy customers.

That’s my show for today. I’m Misia Tramp, Global Insights & Innovation Practitioner. I hope this presentation has given you a modicum of confidence to use social data as a means by which to get in front of the 8 ball of recessionary indecision so that you can tap this as a time of opportunity, innovation and growth. Please don’t hesitate to phone me if you would like to talk about how this could work for your business. I’ll be around all conference. Love cocktails – text me, email or tweet; we’ll do some!