Social Hallucinations

Brain and Marketing

Link to min article in Market Magazine (in Danish) about brain, neuromarketing as the urge to find the tangible and fast answers to the world of unpredictable human behavior.

brain, neuromarketing, marketing, Untitled

What Lies Behind Facebook Popularity?

There are 700.000 Facebook users in Denmark. That's pretty impressive if you take into consideration the fact that there are barely 5 million people in Denmark and that last July, there were only 9.000 users.

Such a rapid growth makes researches to wonder what drives Facebook popularity. While one group talk about socializing aspect, others seek answers in science. The latter one are two researches from IT University and Center for Design Research in Denmark developed model that explains Facebook popularity. Model focuses on understanding how we experience the websites and what are factors that attract people. It analyzes not only content, services and applications but the quality of design, layout and user-friendliness.

When applying model to Facebook, the researches have found out that the popularity of the site is largely due to Facebook's visual expresson - it is design and layout are very discreet in the form and colors, and it may be the adult generation like. It signals the seriousness and credibility, just like banking sites. Researches compared Facebook with Danish bank site Danske Bank.

At the same time the system is extremely easy to use - it is very intuitive, and it does not require a lot of experience to create a profile. Researchers believe those are the factors that made Facebook popular not only amongst the younger audiences but also attracted adults, who weren't familiar with social networks or never used them before.

Interesting point of view, proving that user driven design is very important and together with understanding the drivers and motivations that trigger human behavior are powerful tools in creating community.

Denmark, Facebook, research, community

Internet is The Most Influential Medium

Digital Influence Index study from PR firm Fleishman-Hillard and research firm Harris Interactive covering the impact of the internet on consumer behavior (UK, France and Germany), suggests that the internet is twice as influential as television and eight times as influential as print media.

The internet is the most important medium in the lives of Europeans, they use it to seek information and product reviews that are to some extent a base for their decisions. In the UK, for example, 66% declared that the internet helps them to make better decisions, only 28% said that they trust the information companies provide on the web. They visit the corporate sites when they are ready to buy or interact with company. Internet behavior is driven by trust to other people that makes this medium so different and more powerful than traditional media. The latter one suffer from the scarcity of trust and authority. This takes us back to people trust people model as the most powerful communication tool.

Internet is definitely the most underinvested media group. Marketers underestimate its power and aren't keen to try the new ways to communication. We stick to what we know. The key fact is the you can influence your audience by creating smart connections with your consumers and by adding value to their life.

The fact of Internet being eight times as influential as print requires at least giving a thought to your budget split and taking a step forward by exploring how Internet can be used within your business. And I am not talking about banner advertising.

You can download the whole report here.

Found at Matt Dickman blog

internet, influence, Fleishman-Hillard, Harris Interactive, media spend, people trust people

iPhone

Interesting chart from eMarketer about mobile content used by mobile phone types. We've been hearing for so long about mobile break through to come. Mobile advertising and content has been about to rock the world and change advertising for the last 8 years a least. The new technologies came but people habits never changed. People keep on using their mobiles for voice calls and text messaging. Technology changes, people don't. Some prophets believed however that technology will change people. It ain't happen as technology missed one important asset: Utility. Until iPhone came along and it wasn't about technology but about user experience. This is what gets people into mobile evolution.

iphone, emarketer, mobile internet

Search Meets Impatience

According to web usability guru J. Nielsen people are increasingly impatient and expect sites to delivery exactly what they are looking for. It is more about optimizing experiences to meet people's needs, instead of creating cool experiences that are just time wasters and don't give people what they were looking for.

People don't get to the information they need through webpage, today "only 25% of people travel via a homepage". The rest uses search and get directly to what they are interested in.

Search definitely rules and it is hard to expect today's consumer waste their time to find you. You must fear those who outsmart you on search. This is where the war for attention takes place.

marketing

Ad Skipping Have Influence on Sales

I've found very interesting artickle on a research on DVR owners. We already know that DVR owners watch fewer TV ads and the latest research by Information Resources Inc. showed that buying of new packaged products in households owning DVR was 5% lower han in non - DVR households. About 20% of all brands in the study lost statistically significant volume in DVR households.

Reality can't be ignored. Reality strikes back. It can't be your ad isn't seen anymore.

Read more here in Marketing mag.

    Technorati : DVR, advertising, marketing, sales, tivo 

Apple Makes You More Creative

This is probably something that guides most of Apple products buyers, we hope for the magic and difficult to express in words aura to fall upon us and makes us more special and more creative. In fact this is not far away from the truth.

Gavan Fitzsimmons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University conducted a research together with his two colleagues where test subjects were shown Apple and Disney logo for 30 milliseconds - a subliminal flash that was not actually "seen" and they were respectively more likely to be creative and candid.

"Brands are almost human in representation in people's minds," said Gavan Fitzsimmons.

It means brands can also be the driver of the social influence. What does it mean for marketers, apart from the possibilities subliminal messaging brings. It means that branding and brand personality are very important as they are driving social influence and make a difference.

Read the whole article here

Photo by Miguel Ramirez

Successful Facebook Applications Drive Socializing

Shelly D. Farnham researched Facebook applications and what determines their success. It is very interesting what he found out - applications that become successful help its users to achieve social goals:

"In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain."




Read / buy the full report here,

Tags: facebook, applications, Shelly D. Farnham

Researcher - Be Wakeful!

Interesting post from Neuromarketing blog about the danger of asking people what they did, why they did it. Brain isn't straightforward and linear as we would like to believe. Brain likes being mischievous.So researchers should be suspicious of answers given by people asked to explain their behavior or recall the past behavior - are we hearing the truth, or The Interpreter?









Tags: neuroscience, brain, research

Billion Here, Billion There, Billion Everywhere...And What?

Actually nothing as things are getting worse and we aren't becoming wiser with age and experience. Lord Leverhulme was aware already in 19th century that half of his marketing budget was wasted as he expressed it:

“I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half”

Over 100 years later, things haven't improved at all. According to The Global Marketing Effectiveness Report that surveyed 3,000 marketing professionals across the globe,  65% of marketing spend had no effect on consumers in 2007.
The report's findings should be wake up call for all involved in marketing and advertising:
- 65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumers.
- Estimated wastage rates varied from 45% for business-to-business marketers, through to 65% for business-to-consumer
- Just one in ten of respondents have automated systems in place to track the effectiveness of their spend
- Of the 55% of marketers who do track the results of their spending, 80% do so manually, spending hours capturing, compiling and analyzing data.

- Questioned on strategy, 70% of marketers believe that short-term revenue-boosting and lead-generation campaigns are more important than long-term intangible brand building (15%). A clear indication that marketers are under pressure more than ever before to generate results
- Tracking marketing effectiveness topped the 2008 wish lists of 35% of marketers, and made the top three for 70%.
We have reached the point of very huge wastage of the billions dollars invested in marketing. Those money bring no effect due to old-fashioned methods and stereotypes used. Times has changed, people haven't changed as such but we've gained very valuable knowledge about people and their behavior which we choose to oversee and keep on pouring money down the drain stuck to routines and fearing to challenge the way we think. After all "no one has ever been fired for using TV"

It is time we get it and stop just talking about it but do something to improve the results and reduce wastage. 65% doesn't sound to scary but when you translate it into advertising dollars spend each year across the globe to sell the products people don't need in a way people don't want, you get scared and makes you believe even stronger that

"If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising,” he said, “then they wouldn't have to advertise them.”

found at  WARC

Picture by Joshua Davis

Tags: marketing, advertising, WARC

Cirlce? Do You have it in Square?

No words needed. Just watch where your focus group can take you



Tags: focus group, draft fcb

Pre-Testing of Ads and Their Effectviness

Advertisers love to test advertising. Just to minimize the risk and ask so called consumers about branding, logo, music, etc. so they can afterwards ad advertising agency to add more packshots and increase logo 25%, so the branding is more clear. It seems like doing so, advertising not only waste money but increase the risk for advertising to ineffective. According to Les Binet and Peter Field data, published in Market Leader, ads that have not been quantitatively pre-tested have a 71% chance of being effective and ads that have been pre-tested have only a 44% chance of success.


It can be the lower chance of success for the pre-tested ads is the result of listening to consumers post-rationalization that has not too much to do with reality - "most of we know, we don't know we know", so we try to sound clever and evaluate advertising which isn't always mirror reality.

via Serendipity Book

Tags: advertising, testing, research, effectiveness

Price Influences Wine Taste

I love this story. I have told it to all people I know and who believe that humans are very rational. Hell, no! We are far from being rational and this research is a good example of our irrationality. Brain can work very mysterious ways. Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found out that people’s brains experience more pleasure when they think they are drinking a $45 wine instead of a $5 bottle when in fact it the same wine.  People actually experience wine to taste better, they don't rationalize that the better taste is connected with the higher price.

"What we document is that price is not just about inferences of quality, but it can actually affect real quality," said Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing who co-authored a paper titled "Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness," published online Jan. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "So, in essence, [price] is changing people's experiences with a product and, therefore, the outcomes from consuming this product."

There are a lot of available studies showing that people value and enjoy product more, the higher the price. Of course the line is thin here and one can risk that too high price levels actually scares people instead of attracting them to buy product.

Cheers! And keep on hallucinating. Expensive wine is tasting delicious.


Via Stanford News Service

Picture by Jeff Kubina

Tags: research, neuromarketing, wine, price

This Ad Got a Flip

I have been sitting at focus groups with teenagers yesterday and I was pretty surprised with their advertising awareness. It was pretty exciting to hear them talking about ads and what is catching their attention. Today, I've got from my friend at Dist the link to great videos with girls explaining while ads got a flip.

I am pretty reserved to hearing people's rational analysis of ads, but those girls had very insightful comments. The whole series of videos just showed how detached from their customers advertisers are. Behind some rational words, real gems were hidden - precious insights like those two:

Videos are done by 3iying, which is an all Girl Creative agency, based in New York City, a think tank working to make better ads, products and media for other girls. Good intiative and we should watch and listen very carefully what they have to say.

You can watch all videos here

Tags: 3ying, advertising, print, girls, insights

Ask or not to Ask?

I've just found on YouTube a great example presenting how dangerous asking people to express their opinions about advertising can be. Participants of the focus group were asked to judge the famous Apple commercial "1984", that by the way was called to be one of the best ads ever. There was shown animated version. What was result? They were pretty dissatisfied with the ad and came up with a couple of improvements and incredible comments presenting the complete lack of understanding of the concept. The video shows the risk of asking people to evaluate whether the commercials are good or not. We ask people to be experts and they want to live up to our expectations. They do their best to rationalize, have meaning on every aspect of ad and sound professional - they want to help us from the depth of their hearts. However, it is not exactly what we want out of focus group. We don't need people expertise, we need to gain knowledge of what people feel when seeing ad, how deep it touches them and which effect it has on their emotions.

 

Here is the original version of Apple ad.

So don't ask your focus group for advice how to change the ad or your product. Talk to them about their feelings, associations advertising / products evoke in them - it gives you a lot of insights to work with. The better you understand the people, the better ads / products you can make. And never forget your gut feeling, that can often guide you to the right solutions.

Tags: research, ad testing, Apple, focus group