I had a great conversation with a producer of Canadian film and television. Over the course of our discussion, which focused on the lack of money for the Canadian Film and Television Industry, I came to realize that there was a fundamental problem in monetization and a pretty hefty gap in motivators. Success for a director or an artist is if a large audience sees their art and appreciates it. They don’t want commercialism to get in the way of their art – for instance – the mere notion that perhaps the protagonist could be drinking a Diet Doctor Pepper causes the blood to boil. Naturally, history is littered with studio and network executives actively messing with the creative arc[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
At the Marketing Science Conference earlier in the summer, Shaina and I took in the Neuromarketing session. The session was very good, with 3 really great presenters out of the 4. I learned several important reasons why people make the choices they do. For instance, I saw it empirically proven that self-control is like a muscle: you can hold a certain pose for so long, and then that muscle gets fatiqued and weak. Then you can’t hold it for any longer and you break that pose. It’s a very attractive causal variable for periodic consumption and lapses in self-control. Prospection – the ability to think of the future – when combined with anchor-and-adjust tendencies, cause discount-rate curves to deviate from[…]
David Hamel wrote: The issue behind it all is that the web isn’t static, it is constently changing. Ever heard of AOL? Of course you have. Know anyone still using it? Probably not. What about MySpace? Also there is the inevitable the march of time. Your persona for Bob has his age at 52. In five years time, will Bob still be useful? Probably the difference between 52 and 57 isn’t that large. But what if your target demographic is 22? There is a much larger difference between the interestes of a 22 year old and a 27 year old…In conclusion, use personas but don’t let them get stagnate, your personas represent people and people change. Hamel rightly points[…]
There are major problems with the way that sentiment and intent is presently being measured and reported: you need only scratch the surface a little bit to uncover the grim truth. The business problem that sentiment analysis solves is informing a manager, at a glance, not of only of the tone and vibe that his own employees are sending out there, but also how the public is responding to the policies and practices of the company in question. Can’t you do this qualitatively? Well sure – if you didn’t have the anchor-and-adjust function in your head, it would be just fine. And ‘normally’ functioning humans all suffer from the curse of anchor-and-adjust. The second business problem that effective sentiment analysis[…]
Considerable effort is going into quantifying the degree of which people paying attention to a medium. This is a big deal. Consider how many screens your average Gen Y’er is engaged with, simultaneously, on a Monday night. They could be watching videos on YouTube while watching MTV while tweeting their friends on their iPhone. There are reinforcing mechanisms here. For instance, getting hit with Stella Artois The Life Legere commercials both on the Comedy Network during a commercial break while getting hit with it on a pre-roll from the Onion News Network. Lately those commercials have been appearing on the fourth screen – the movie theater – during the pre-roll. Seniors are up to it too: reading the newspaper while[…]
The purpose of personas (or Personae in the sarcastic English) is to impart empathy in design. The purpose of market segments vary depending on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a marketing science analyst, they should tell you that the purpose of a market segment is to use variations in self-referential communities to adjust the marketing message (positioning) so that it is more relevant to a particular audience, ultimately resulting in higher profits for the business. Put another way, a market segment should, ideally, impart empathy in quantitative marketing design. Personas are traditionally the product of qualitative insights. Market segments are traditionally the product of quantitative insights. Institutionally, neither side really wants to listen to each other. (In[…]
It’s summer event today at CM Toronto. It’s normally a very good day. As with anything, the 80/20 rule applies to it. We have a town hall, where a member of the executive comes and presents. It’s actually really good. When I started out as an analyst, the only time I was ever really fully brought up to speed (I felt) was during these presentations. Things have long since changed for Marketing Science folk. Then there’s some component of field trip or activity fun. Those are always fun. And then there’s an evening of more fun – typically featuring Captain Morgan. What I value most is getting to really talk to people from the other offices. So often, they’re voices[…]
You might recognize the chart below as the Technology Adoption Lifecycle – and it’s just great. The essential fact is that who you market to, over time, and how you market it, changes over time. I have many friends who are true “innovators” and I know a few people who are impostors. (They really don’t have a business problem to solve, but they would like to see a desired solution set be imposed on people, even if it doesn’t produce any value.) Innovators believe everything should be free, and rightfully so, since they’re working on improving the product. Many of my friends in this category behave more like actuarial industry insiders than anything else. There’s such a brutal rate of[…]
Malcolm Bastien was nice enough to lend me a book: The Laws of Simplictity by John Maeda. The Coles notes of that compact volume is: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful”. Wonderful. Thanks Malcolm!
Clusterfucks will happen, and nobody ever really walks away from one a winner. A clusterfuck can be turned around by either boosting trust, hitting ‘reset’ when it comes to definitions, deliberately seeking out extra understanding, or, if there’s a hollow core of authority – electing a leviathan to run the group. Clusterfuck avoidance is going to be a major social technology as knowledge worker teams become increasingly interdisciplinary. More problems are bound to happen because the complexity in terms of communication and the specifics of professional norms scales. Just as an example, if a chemist tells the engineer that temperatures from the mix could trough at -200 c, and asks the engineer if the structure could be designed to handle[…]