For a complete running commentary, see Dr. Dann’s twitter stream, or run a search for mktsci2011. A few points you might care about. The problem with communication flow between academia and industry is not an academic problem. They’re doing just fine, and it certainly appears as though the money is flowing. The problem is on the practitioner side, and our ability to understand, interpret, and attempt to derive some value from their efforts. It would be great if bigger and more meaningful bridges could be build between industry associations and their associations. There would be benefits on both sides for a subset of both. So long as each side understand the terms of the relationship, very, very good things would[…]
Category: Marketing Science
The INFORMS Marketing Science Conference is like woodstock for us people. I took in the second half of the MSI anniversary track. The MSI, or Marketing Science Institute, is a 50 year old institution. It’s at the nexus between business and marketing science academia. As a result, it has money and databases. Because it has both, it gets to set research priorities that are influential. The 90 minute track I took in had to do with page 8 of their list, “Managing Brands in a Transformed Marketplace”. I can’t resist. Branding is a problem for Marketing Scientists for many reasons. It is not transactional, it may be measured in many ways, it manifests itself in many ways, and it subject[…]
ExactTarget reported in their paper, “Subscribers, Fans, and Followers: The Social Break-Up”, Feb 1, 2011, that a top reason (44% of respondants) for unliking a Facebook Brand was “The Company posted too frequently”. Among other reasons: 43% said “My wall was becoming way too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to get rid of some of them”. 38% said “The content became repetitive or boring over time”. 19% said “The content wasn’t relevant to me from the start”, 17% “The company’s posts were too chit-chatty – not focused on real value”. All of these reasons cited go directly to the concept of relevancy. When does content become too much? When it ceases to be relevant. When do you want[…]
Communities create their own jargon because they need brevity in their conversation. The price of that brevity is abstraction. Jargon unites people in as much as it alienates them from each other. I’ve experienced this first hand – visiting data miners, market researchers, marketing scientists, entrepreneurial developers, and brand managers. It becomes very easy for people to dismiss entire modes of thought purely because the jargon doesn’t resonate. Deep within abstraction are generally understood understandings. For instance, the term ‘qualified traffic’ means something very fundamental to a search marketer. The same term, ‘traffic’, is perceived a fair bit differently among web analysts. And in terms of CRM people – well – they don’t view ‘response’ as a form of traffic.
The Panda Cheese commercials are brilliant, and I’d like to believe, a product of scientific advertising. I have no basis for that, but I’m heaping praise on the creative and the analyst who worked on it. You can see the series of commercials here. Specific elements: Divergent use of a violent panda. Repetitious use of a song across all five ads. Consistent direction (ie. over the head reaction shots from Panda POV). Desired behavior demonstrated (“Get another one…”). Divergent tag line, phrased in the negative. “Never Say No To Panda”, which contradicts the affirmative bias we’ve had for years. Brilliant – check it out.
I cut the cable tomorrow. For specific firm, I will go from being worth a stable $170/month subscriber, complete with PVR, to being worth nothing. I’m switching my Internet to a non-UBB restricted wholesaler. I will continue to spend $10/month for Netflix. I will get my live TV with the “free”, Over-The-Air broadcast signal from CN tower, which I have a clear view from. Dedicated ad impressions will take a pretty big hit, as the number of must-see, full attention shows are less than 5. I can’t anticipate myself suffering through TV without a PVR. I can’t imagine deliberately exposing myself to an abusive medium any longer. That attitude ought to concern broadcasters and marketers alike. I’m not alone in[…]
The goal of a forecast is to make an accurate prediction about the future state of a system based on the best available evidence. The goal of target setting is to make a statement about a desired future state – with or without a forecast. Targets are political artifacts. You can read all about such dynamics in public policy here. Forecasts, ideally, are scientific artifacts. The interplay between forecasts and targets is particularly interesting. Those who produce sophisticated forecasts should understand that the motivation of those probing models is to assess whether or not a future state is possible, or, in certain situations, just how probable a given scenario could be. Don’t become trapped into the mindset that a trend[…]
An insight is: New information Executable Causes action Profitable Or, more detailed, an insight is: A piece of information that you didn’t know before, which – Can feasibly executed, culturally acceptable and of a scale relevant to the firm, and – Causes a decision to be made that wouldn’t have been made otherwise, and – Results in profit or a sustainable competitive advantage I’m finally happy with this definition. It aligns with the best innovation rhetoric very nicely and is generalizable to both design thinking and analytics communities.
It’s surprising how little time I’ve spent analyzing PowerPoint with the same rigor as social and the web. It’s amazing how that dissociation happens. There’s a set of methods that apply to these mediums over here, and a set of methods that apply to this set over here. And you can go along not even being aware of it. On Thursday, Nadia, Heather and I were remarking how a specific POV looked after Paul gotten his hands on it. The content was all there. The content was actually the same. It just looked more persuasive. Naturally, writing persuasive content is a cornerstone of marketing – so suddenly – powerpoint becomes an object of curiosity. We enumerated all the things that[…]
One of the most instructive papers on serial innovation comes out of left field from Griffin, Hoffmann, Price and Vojak – the latter three out of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. (Which will bring a smile to regular readers of this space.) Their paper doesn’t reference Roger Martin, but it confirms much of what he’s described about the saliency phase of opposable thinking. The best piece that I’ve taken away from the paper is the definition of an Interesting Problem. A problem is deemed interesting only if: The firm can actually solve it and management accept the solution. (Feasibility) Customers will pay to have that problem solved. (Marketability) Will it be a big deal for the firm. (Impact) Prepare to[…]