Monthly Archives: February 2009
A while back, I wrote a white paper called “The Collective Is The Focus Group”. A version of it was printed in BusinessWeek as well. The general point? Consumers can get feedback to any brand in real time—networks amplify what they have to say and sentiment spreads at light speed. Companies need now have to listen, learn, and adapt at all phases of an initiative.
So today as I’m flipping through the New York Times, I come a across an article describing how a micro-groundswell began against Tropicana’s package re-design. As it turns out, Tropicana consumers not only care about it—their most loyal consumers do.
“It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate
change of heart, Mr. Campbell said, because “it was a fraction of a
percent of the people who buy the product.”
Rather,
the criticism is being heeded because it came, Mr. Campbell said in a
telephone interview on Friday, from some of “our most loyal consumers.”
The article spcifies that most feedback came in through fairly traditional means including e-mail and phonecalls—but one specific thought in the article caught my attention:
“Twitter is the ultimate focus group,” Mr. Shankman said. “I can post
something and in a minute get feedback from 700 people around the
world, giving me their real opinions.”
Progressive marketers are far beyond the point of realizing their foothold in the space of consumer communication is slipping. Every day, the role of creating, distributing, and learning falls more under the control of the consumer, which also means the tools for which they choose to take these actions are being created to cater to them, and not to us (marketers). Because of this reality, the task that marketers are now facing is finding the root of consumer behavior. A task which is very necessary in order to be able to reintegrate themselves into forums which not only were they not intended to be in, but in many cases, purposely pushed out of.
“Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking apart and analyzing its workings in detail to be used in maintenance or to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without copying anything from the original. (Wikipedia)”
In other words, when an engineer is asked to dissect a new technology in order to rebuild it (without any instructions) they are doing so because the end goal is to be able to recreate a product or experience that they were not originally intended to be a part of.
Applying this to the current digital landscape, we are seeing the same needs from marketers. Most of those tools were never built with the role of the advertiser in mind and this presents a great challenge to that group. How does a brand balance the original function of a communication tool while trying to become an active member of it? This is where the concept of “reverse engineering” can come into play.
Dissect a group of people’s core need for participating in a certain experience (digital or otherwise) and you’ll have a clearer understanding of (and yes, sometimes IF) you can become a part of it.
Quick Links
- The State of Customer Experience
- How Science Can Help Form a Theory of Design
- Video Gaming Trends
- Ideo’s David Kelley on “Design Thinking”
- Innovate Like Chris Rock
- Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction
- Innovating in the Great Disruption
- Overcoming our Empathy Deficit
- Barry Schwartz: Our Real Loss? We Stopped Being Wise [TED Talks]
Post 2 of 3. The Present, The Future, and How do We Get There? This part of my OMMA Social experience links trends that were talked about at the conference to my opinion and, in come cases criticism.
The Future: As a whole, there’s a whole lot of talk and not a lot of real action. What a shame. Lots of testing without calculated risk in 2008. For the record, I’m not angry at those early adopter efforts. I, for one, wish our own agency did more testing last year. As the industry eases their way into influential marketing, which is a combination of both earned and paid media; we’ll stumble over things like planning and measurement. Once we evolve those pieces, I think we’ll begin to see changes in 2 areas of our digital marketing approach:
#1. Lead with CRM, not basic marketing strategies around product awareness. We currently talk about finding evangelists and getting them to bring more people into the fold –influence their consideration set and purchases. But, in the future, (when most brands realize that they are chasing their tails) we’ll look at our current databases of consumers and crawl 
The tag line of the 2010 Mercedes-Benz GLK is “Great engineering is great engineering at any size.” With the goal of capturing this concept and providing the audience with information relevant to their lifestyle, the “GLK Live-Well Dashboard” was born.
Critical Mass partnered with Conde Nast Digital to create an experience that leveraged the power of 18 trusted magazine properties and fused then with the matching attributes of the 2010 GLK. The Dashboard, a first of its kind roll-over rich-media unit within Conde Nast, mashes-up Video, Editorial, Voting, Sharing, and of course, Mercedes-Benz content into one centralized location that follows Conde Nast readers across their network. Every week for the next 10 weeks, new content will be added to the unit to keep each of the lifestyle pillars (Personal Style, Wellness, etc) fresh for readers who frequent the various Conde Nast properties. For those interested in returning to the GLK experience, the banner can be bookmarked and reopened as a standalone page.
When we were pitching the adidas business as Riot, a part of our vision was the ability to create content that could live anywhere tapping multiple networks as they are designed for the distribution of media. Another part of our strategy was creating spaces where that media could be aggregated. So as the NBA Allstar weekend approaches, it’s great to see some of that vision coming to fruition.
If you are a fan of Dwight Howard, you should really check out this site we’ve designed specifically for the event. We’ll be updating it with photos, videos and even Tweets from Dwight himself. Media will be uploaded to destinations such as Flickr and YouTube and the site simply sucks it all into one place and allows you to see it at a glance while giving you the option to go directly to the source on their respective networks. And yes, the page even scrolls. A sight for sore eyes.
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