Author Archive

Newer Entries »

Be Careful Which Crowd You Ask

Monday, July 14th, 2008

James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds is brilliant. The concept is that groups are often smarter than any individual in the group. He makes the point with amazing examples - my favorite is the case of the missing US submarine Scorpion in 1968. The sub disappeared off the eastern coast after a tour of duty. The navy knew its last reported location, but had no idea how far it travelled after last contact. The search area was impossibly large and a rescue mission seemingly hopeless. All the same, a naval officer named John Craven asked a group of mathematicians, submarine specialists and salvage experts to individually estimate why the sub came into trouble and what its speed and heading were at the time it did. Craven then combined the predictions from each expert and came up with a collective estimate of where the sub was. That collective estimate was, in fact, 220 yards off from the actual location. Now that’s wisdom - and a powerful case of how many minds are better than one.

Which brings me to the idea of individually polling people to get a sense of where a market is going. I was just reading a back issue of Canadian Business that had a CEO Poll on rising gas prices (Cdn Bus, April 14). As of the poll date, the price of oil was $109 a barrel and the 133 Canadian CEOS who participated in the poll thought prices wouldn’t rise above $113.

It’s $135 now. Apparently CEOs are good at running companies, but don’t know much about the market for oil.

There’s an important point here: polls and surveys are only as good as the people who participate in them. When we’re formulating research for clients, they often focus on the sample size - and yes, there needs to be a representative sample. But just as important is the ‘who’ in the research. Make sure the people in your research are experts in the field, or the decision makers you’re trying to reach. Otherwise your results are about as good as asking your barber what’s going to happen with the exchange rate.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Market Intelligence | 1 Comment »

Trapping Customers with a Unique Experience

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

The best businesses are the ones that completely rethink what an industry provides and how it provides it. Fortune just ran a story on two brothers in Maine who came up with a new way to market their business. They’re lobster wholesalers who established a company called Catch a Piece of Maine. The business sells the rights to a specific lobster trap and everything that stumbles into it. Customers get online updates on their fortunes and have their haul FedEx’d to them. The traps cost $2995 each and guarantee 40 lobsters.

That’s $75 a lobster - more than triple the price for lobster at a regular seafood store! But the business has sold over 200 traps so far to customers all across the US. Why? Because it provides an experience, not just a product. How much more fun to tell guests they’re dining on lobsters picked from your very own trap off the coast of Maine than from the local fish market? Far better bragging rights.

The brothers have figured out how to provide that elusive engaging experience that customers seek.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

Tags: ,
Posted in Marketing Strategy | 1 Comment »

Why an Economic Slowdown is Great News for Marketing ROI

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

At the start of every year we get a deluge of new projects. It’s usually because marketers are working on growth initiatives and they need market intelligence to build their plans. This year that influx didn’t happen until late into February. At first we didn’t know why – we’ve learned it was because many people were looking at the US economy, unsure of how things would play out, and were holding onto or tweaking their budgets.

That was our first clue that this year was different than the past 3 or 4.

But then the projects started to roll in, and we started to see another difference. The theme of projects was changing. ‘Marketing ROI’ was on everyone’s mind. Marketing ROI has been a topic for years – stronger in some camps than others – but in general it’s been a, ‘Hmmm, what do we do about this’ topic rather than a ‘Let’s do something about this’ topic.

This year that seems to be changing. Marketing ROI, aka Return on Marketing Investment - ROMI, is getting more attention and more budget than we’ve ever seen. There are two good reasons for it, and it’s great news for marketing.

The first reason is that the economy is tight – the rising dollar, rising gas prices and declining consumer confidence mean that companies are focusing on costs. We know that successful companies are the ones who increase or maintain their marketing spending in downturns, not decrease it. Despite that, cuts will come – the question is where. And while it feels like short term pain, it’s a great thing for every company to be looking carefully at the results they get for the marketing dollars they spend.

The other big reason for the rising interest in Marketing ROI is that it’s more achievable than ever before. Everything in digital marketing is measurable – and increasingly what we’re doing in marketing is digital. That means we now have more measurability. And we can’t talk seriously about ROMI without measurability.

That old saying “I waste half of my marketing budget , I just don’t know which half” is officially dead. Now let’s see how companies respond to the new landscape.