In my last column, I discussed how Always-On can now be seen for what it is: a potential biological addiction. In a world where we are never far away from an electronic, online screen, we increasingly feel an inner urge to check our emails, social media pages and IM in every circumstance, despite how inappropriate that situation may be.
The internal impulse to check our messages at such challenging times is fostered by the brain. By checking our messages in such circumstances, the brain rewards our apparent furtiveness with a minute release of dopamine. Dopamine is a hormone and neurotransmitter related to the pleasure system of the brain. In large doses, it can provide a real high.
Intrigued by this phenomenon, we approached UM’s standing panel of academic psychologists about the concept of Always-On. These psychologists are typically U.S. professors and other leading practitioners in their field. We wanted to solve the following riddle: How do we break through the obstacles created by Always-On and reach consumers in the most compelling and convincing way?
Our expert panel brainstormed the issue of Always-On and its implications for both brands and media marketing. Overall, we identified ten key areas essential to overcoming the barriers of Always-On which in summary are:
- Celebrate the brand’s excellence. As one psychologist astutely noted, in a world of Always-On, it is easier for the digitally savvy to find strong brands. Once found, it is cognitively easier to stick with a winning brand that puts consumers first. As Robert Passikoff’s noted in his book, Predicting Market Success, “Brands are competing to meet or exceed customer values first, and against each other second.”
- Tap into the key emotional needs the product satisfies. In other words, “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle” or as Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt once famously exclaimed, “People don’t want quarter-inch drills, they want quarter-inch holes.”
- Ask not what your consumer can do for you, ask what you can do for your consumer. Build the brand and its inherent consumer rewards for the longer term. Over time, consumers will immediately associate the brand with this powerful value that will break through many Always-On issues.
- Ensure message simplicity. Make the consumer’s decision process of getting to ‘yes’ easy, and the emotional benefit clear.
- Assess reward and loyalty systems. Added-value offers and promotions are very seductive to consumers in the short-term and can help marketers achieve break through when and where they need it most.
- Consider personal, human icons. e.g. Kim Kardashian or Dr Oz. Here the idea is to humanize the communication by appointing a well-known personality as a focal point. Anthropomorphization of the brand communication helps provide personal relevance.
- Request user feedback and respond back directly to the consumer. Social media fits this solution like a tailored-made glove. It provides scale and an immediate platform for consumer interaction. Apple has also shown an alternative approach by having Apple stores which offer advice as well as sell their product. iTunes will genuinely answer any account question within 24 hours.
- Be Green or consider a cause that is close to the brand’s heart. Besides classic brands, cause marketing can work for brands which are less conventional but still evoke high consumer interest.
- Pursue word of mouth and event marketing. Face-to-face marketing is the natural antidote to ‘Always-On.’ This type of marketing not only allows a deeper, personal connection with consumers, but it can also be readily harnessed by brands driven by short-term demands such as movies and music.
- Engineer 360⁰ media communications. Custom-constructed, cross-platform activities provide opportunities to break through the morass of more standard media offerings.
Of all media-related opportunities outlined above, the last two can be especially powerful. In particular, UM has seen word of mouth trust levels double those for TV advertising. Moreover, our detailed custom research programs reveal that customized media solutions can often help boost ROI by +600%.
So where will Always-On take us next? Paradoxically, social TV, i.e. commenting on TV programs in real or near-real time via social media, also appears to be driving the totally unexpected revival of live TV! According to a study by TVGuide.com among its panel of 10,000 consumers, the number of people claiming to watch live TV in order to avoid social media spoilers has grown from 20% to 27% in the last two years. It’s an ironic twist of fate that the internet appears to be helping to rebuild TV, the very media channel it has competed with for viewers over the last ten years.
Facebook’s shopping spree – remembering YouTube
We’ve all been culpable at one time or another. We have glanced at our smartphone in a business meeting, or other sensitive occasion, to check our emails or social media when we know we shouldn’t have. But why do we do it? Why do we feel compelled to sneak a peek at our phone even when we know it’s rude while in the presence of others or it may cause us to lose our concentration in a critical meeting. This is the world of “Always On”. “Always On” is the concept of our being in constant proximity to our smartphone, computer, or tablet where we feel a frequent inner urge to look and check in with that technological device which is always close to hand.
Intrigued by this phenomenon, we sought some insights from UM’s panel of preselected, academic psychologists about “Always On.” These psychologists come mainly from U.S. universities and similar institutions, and are typically leading professors and thinkers in their field. The panel pointed to academic findings that emerged last year – the culprit is dopamine.
In responding to calls, emails, texts, social media, etc., our electronic devices play to a primitive impulse to react to immediate threats and dangers. Our responding to that call, email or social media post provokes excitement and stimulates the release of dopamine to the brain. Little by little, we become addicted to its small kick in regular, minute doses. In its absence, people feel bored.
Dopamine is a hormone, a neurotransmitter, associated with the pleasure system of the brain. It reinforces certain activities and habits, which in turn creates habituation. Drugs such as cocaine, nicotine and crystal meth induce exceptionally large releases of dopamine, which is a testament to the addictive powers of the hormone.
This led us to ask the burning question: Is being “Always On” bad for us? To this, the panel of psychologists cited Sigmund Freud’s book, Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud contends that since the dawn of man every technological advance has been met with a level of resistance and skepticism. For example, the ancient Greek scholar, Socrates, riled against the idea of writing because he argued it could destroy our motivation and need to memorize.
Nevertheless, “Always On” does cause unwanted modern-day anxieties. For example:
- It creates loss aversion when we are deprived of access to our smartphone.
- There is the stress of connecting with friends via social networks which is especially true for younger individuals where it may fire up:
- Jealously, e.g. a teenage girl’s boyfriend may “friend” another girl she doesn’t like, or
- Ostracism, e.g. a teen boy may see his friends organizing an event where he’s inadvertently not invited.
- Sexting, where even senior public figures who really should know better get caught.
We then probed further: is “Always On” bad for brands? Intriguingly, the psychologists on the panel said that the distractions created by “Always On” should not have to adversely impact strong brands. “Always On” increases on the simplicity for (younger) consumers to compare brands, making the best decision with regard to price, features, etc. They elaborated further and explained that “sticking with one good brand is cognitively easier than switching from brand to brand.”
Equally, mediocre brands and bland marketing communications may flounder in the new media ecology. Brand loyalty takes on a completely new perspective for many brands: “It’s less about driving customer loyalty to a brand and more about a brand being loyal to customer.” How many brands can rise to the marketing challenge of proving to consumers they are in it for the long-haul?
For brand communication, it’s about ensuring decision making is easy, pleasurable and emotionally rewarding. By emotionally rewarding, we mean it is essential to follow the most fundamental messaging ethos: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!” Or as Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt famously noted, “People don’t want quarter inch drills, they want quarter inch holes.”
So “Always On” doesn’t have to be a quagmire for brand communications, but brand managers do need a powerful internal gyroscope to ensure a brand’s enduring qualities are clearly visible to uphold the brand’s abilities and to exceed consumer expectations over the savageries of time.
Maximizing a Super Bowl Ad’s Word of Mouth
Have you ever wondered how to maximize the word of mouth from your Super Bowl ad? The Super Bowl remains the most watched annual TV event in the United States – an average of 44% of all homes watched last year. It’s not so much a TV show as a major cultural phenomenon. Its ability to boost a brand’s word of mouth has reached almost mythical proportions ever since Apple’s 1984 commercial heralded the launch of the Macintosh computer.
Let’s assume for one moment that we have a great ad, a creative asset that resonates well with the consumer. Is that enough? Our initial regression modeling suggests that besides a great ad, just maximizing the audience rating may not be enough. Critically, the quarter of the game that the ad appears in and securing the first position in the pod also count. In addition, :5 billboards, those announcements often seen at the beginning or end of an ad pod, may be an unnecessary luxury and, from the perspective of WOM value, possibly not worth the additional investment.
In 2010, UM won the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s (WOMMY) Gold Award for Research for its paper quantifying how Sony Electronics’ media advertising helped boost its word of mouth. Through a multivariate analysis, we determined two key insights that had never been publicly demonstrated before:
1. Brand advertising has a direct effect on the effectiveness of word of mouth. In this instance, 14% of all Sony Electronics’ WOM was attributable to its own media activity.
2. A brand’s word of mouth is not just affected by its own ad activity. Competitive share of voice is also a critical factor. In the Sony Electronics model, 23% of Sony’s potential WOM was eroded by the impact of competitors’ advertising activity.
If we apply this type of modeling approach to ads in the Super Bowl, what can it reveal? To determine this, we analyzed the reported word of mouth from Keller Fay’s Talk Track Super Bowl study conducted in 2011. Keller Fay takes a unique approach in the world of buzz trackers in that it captures both online and offline word of mouth. Keller Fay was the data source fuelling the award winning WOMMY study. For the Super Bowl, Keller Fay specifically tracked 42 ads in the game with sample of 3000 individuals boosted during the week after the game with a custom survey.
It is well-known that word of mouth levels vary substantially by market category. Additionally, since several advertisers had multiple placements and various commercial time-lengths in the Super Bowl, we decided to focus on one category where these variables would be minimized. We chose to probe the movie sector since not only did this eliminate any cross-category effects, we were able to substantially reduce the variations from ad to ad. For example, there was only one ad for each film title and 30 seconds was the only commercial time-length utilized by all movie marketers. This enabled us to isolate the core media drivers of movie mentions as a direct result of their Super Bowl advertising.
To analyze the effects of the Super Bowl, we built a database of factors such as 18-54 TV rating, the game quarter in which the ad appeared, ad position in pod, use of billboards plus the word of mouth for each movie in the week after the Super Bowl that we applied to each ad. Interrogating this database via regression analysis, this is what the model revealed:
The model’s projection is very encouraging with a 99% fit between predicted and actual word of mouth. While one core factor was audience rating, it was also bolstered by the quarter in which the ad appeared – the earlier the better. We also saw that being first in pod provided great impetus to an ad’s WOM. By contrast, the often highly prized position of last in pod did not materially help WOM; indeed it actually reduced the ad’s effectiveness!
The jury remains out on billboards. In our best model, displayed in this column, billboards did not help word of mouth reach, i.e. the net number of people discussing the ad, but in other models, the gross volume or frequency of conversations were helped by billboards.
For UM, the surprising reveal of this analysis is the low value of word of mouth derived from being placed last in pod – a media position which, otherwise, can often be highly regarded. We hope to build and share on this analysis in future years. 2012 should be another great year for Super Bowl advertising and its legend ability to motivate consumers to talk about brands.
UM and Yahoo: The Long and Winding Road
The Long and Winding Road – Gamesmanship of Shopping – Snapshot
In the past few years, new digital tools have led to a renewed energy about shopping that ultimately benefits consumers and brands. The growth of online tools like social networks, the mobile web and coupon sites have transformed shoppers from passive recipients of information — merely taking in communication from marketers — to active creators and distributors of product information and opinions.
Consumers have become an integral part of the process and are having fun with it. This has led to a new shopping mindset that is analogous to playing a game. The result for advertisers is a shopping landscape that is more complicated but provides a wealth of opportunities. How can marketers influence purchase behavior in this new shopping paradigm and where in the purchase path they can leverage new tools?
Yahoo! and Universal McCann partnered to help marketers understand the new dynamics in the path to purchase so they can use digital media more efficiently to engage shoppers.
Click the link above to download.
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UM
Graeme Hutton
Kasha Cacy
Karen Hunt
Matt Kasindorf
David Cohen
Mitchell Weinstein
Jim Elms
Yean Cheong
