It has been a great year of learning and accomplishment for Rubinson Partners and I wanted to thank my clients, academic sponsors at NYU, network of resources and thought partners such as Judah Phillips web analytics guru at Monster, Erwin Ephron, Dave Lundahl founder at InsightsNow, Pat Hanlon (author of Primal Branding), and Frank Cotignola at Kraft. I hope it has been a fabulous year for you and a prelude to being “touched by” an even better 2012. That’s a pun, because what has had more of an effect on daily living than touch screens on our phones, tablets, in the car or cab, ATM, etc.? And it is just starting…apps have not yet hit the tipping point.

I wanted to give something to all of you as a gift (other than a fruitcake!). Thanks to your sharing behavior (as high as 600 shares), page views (over 6,000 for one presentation), and search terms that refer traffic (“path to purchase” is the biggie), I am able to see which of my blogs or presentations generate the most interest, obviously addressing what keeps you up at night or stimulating your thinking by challenging mythology with evidence.
The leaderboard:

#1—How do people spend time with your brand? Owned media usually dominates Facebook and Twitter regarding the engagement power of “time with brand” as few go back to the fan page or spend time with updates. 600 or so shares suggest that others must have discovered this…in conversations, I know they have.

#2—Shopper path to purchase; a new approach to media planning? This blog keeps getting page views because it is found via organic search. A shopper perspective is an action perspective and increasingly, media is becoming an action environment

#3—Sharing is more than fans, friends, and followers. The truth about sharing behavior analyzed from ShareThis data across hundreds of millions of users in partnership with SMG. The truth? The way people share depends on content. E-mail and bookmarking are still powerful for certain content types. More truth? There is little multigenerational virality. For marketers, sharing is more about scale so put sharing into everything you do.

#4—Effectiveness of TV advertising over time. Turns out as of 2009, when I analyzed 388 cases over time, TV advertising effectiveness had actually increased contrary to what I was hearing in the echo chamber. Poltrack (CBS Chief Research Officer) publicly called a leading analysts’ statements BS (Ad Age captured the audio) about the impending decline of TV based on this analysis.

#5—How to increase marketing ROI in a digital age. Based on conversations with Erwin Ephron, we realized that digital is inherently a recency medium. It delivers messages when it counts based on self-directed consumer action.

#6—What marketing research needs to learn from behavioral economics. Another term that refers a lot of traffic via search is behavioral economics…the “predicably irrational” stuff. Research needs to start studying how consumers decide, and align the survey to these processes, not just conducting purchase intentions in some monadic concept test tube environment

#7—It’s about mobile! Three key documents here: Tablets, Rise of the Planet of the Apps, The US App-Economy 2011-2015 (conducted on behalf of Appnation)
Thank you for allowing me to have a transformational impact on the industry this year.

Thank you for allowing me to have a transformational impact on the industry this year and I hope to serve you next year as well!

Happy holidays,

Joel

Consider search engines.  How many of you actively decide which search engine to use for a given search you have in mind vs. just using the one that is habitual for you (Google for 2/3rds of us)?  “I don’t even think about it” is often the predominant factor in behavior yet we don’t really study this.

Do you think it’s easier to get someone to try a new restaurant in their neighborhood or to switch search engines?  In one case we are actively seeking, and in the other case, we are sensing…responding to cues in an automated and unconscious way as Dave Lundahl, founder of InsightsNow, Inc. might say.  The ability to gain trial for something new is clearly easier when someone is already “seeking” so the degree to which habits drive pre-existing behaviors is key to understanding the potential for a new offering.

Even in your business life, you are governed by habits and rituals.  Think about how you check e-mail in the morning and how you get your daily briefing.

Now, consider how most concept testing and choice experiments work.  We throw all of that insight about habit out the window.  We put people into choice and decision-making mode whether they are ever there in real life or not.  We force people to tell us if they are interested in a particular new product idea without measuring if they are interested in any new product idea at all for a given situation.  Yet, the key for new product adoption is disruption of existing habits and rituals.

We need to  break the concept testing habit and start researching new product adoption in ways that are closer to how people really decide.

Behavioral economists like Dan Ariely understand this.  They understand that people have heuristics, “little tricks”, that allow them to decide in non-fully compensatory ways…basically, the reality is exactly the opposite from how choice experiments and traditional concept testing work!

Traditional concept testing does not study how people decide, it merely gets at purchase interest IF they were deciding.  Usually less than half of those who say “definitely would buy” ever buy for this reason; we are forcing people into active decision-making mode when many are not there in real life.  This unnatural situation is what creates such poor individual-level predictive validity for purchase intent.

First and foremost, a new product must disrupt existing behaviors or leverage behaviors that are already disrupted to be “seen” by the consumer.

In real life, disruption is all around us in an age where digital technology is producing bone-rattling change in everyday life.  Imagine location-aware offers, brand stories, and payment all converging at point of purchase via your smart phone; this is already happening in parts of Asia.  As touchpoints emerge (weekly it seems), marketing and research approaches need to constantly evolve.

We need to start studying how people decide and how to break habits. I have developed a strategic partnership with InsightsNow to create a next generation of innovation development and testing methods that will get at this concept of disruption. Hopefully, we can induce marketers to align lean forward research methods with contemporary marketing thinking and break the traditional concept testing habit.  Maybe then, finally, CPG will do better than the 80% new product failure rate.

Please attend the webinar on this subject on May 25^th, at 2PM Eastern time.

So, which is it?  Are consumers creatures of habit or active decision-makers? And why does this matter to marketers?  Let’s dig deeper…

The definition of “habits” from Wikipedia:

Habits are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously.^[1][2][3] Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. .. Features of an automatic behavior are all or some of: efficiency, lack of awareness, unintentionality, uncontrollability.

Makes sense: habits are about behavior, going unnoticed, and gives the reward of efficiency.

The efficiency of forming habits might be the most important point. Habits simplify our lives that would otherwise be incredibly complex.  As Gregory Berns, author of Iconoclast says, “the brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat”.

Deciding how we will decide. So, our habits might not refer to always making the same choice in a given situation, but to making choices the same way.  The way we decide what to have for breakfast could be habitual, even if we eat different things some mornings.  I might have a different brand of coffee some mornings but there is no thought…I must have coffee! The decision about how you will shop a product category is critical for marketers of branded goods who are fighting commoditization. Will a shopper buy a brand they perceive as right for them or will they continue to adopt a more functional “fit for purpose” approach and increasingly gravitate towards store brands? Marketers need to learn about the opportunities inherent in influencing what Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, calls second-order decision strategies (or deciding how we are going to decide.)

InsightsNow President Dave Lundahl refers to the behaviors of sensing vs. seeking.  If people are sensing, they are responding in a semi-conscious way to cues and not really thinking much about their behaviors.  There is little room for getting a new product into the mix if there are no new behaviors…if people are sensing. Adoption of new choice-making requires breaking habits and getting consumers into seeking mode. In this way, marketing is fundamentally about disruption.  When you launch a new product, you must disrupt either the choices that a consumer perceives or the very way in which they make those decisions.

Disrupting habits. Why would someone give up their habits regarding a given behavior when they need to simplify decisions for their lazy piece of meat?  Again, let’s go to Wikipedia…

The habit–goal interface is…characterized by the slow, incremental accrual of information over time in procedural memory. Habits can either benefit or hurt the goals a person sets for themselves. Goals guide habits most fundamentally by providing the initial outcome-oriented impetus for response repetition. In this sense, habits often are a vestige of past goal pursuit.

So, here’s where all this takes me.  Five guidelines for disruption marketing:

1. Consumers are creatures of habit
2. Habits are more often about being on auto-pilot regarding how we make shopping and consumption decisions than the specific choices we make
3. Marketing is about finding ways of disrupting those habits
4. The potential for disruption is greatest when the habits are out of synch with consumers’ contemporary goals or when the cueing system is disrupted.
5. Traditional new product research methods are not useful for disruption marketing and must change as they bypass the study of how we decide, and force respondents into choices assuming they are already in seeking mode.

These ideas will be discussed at an upcoming webinar on May 25^th that I will participate in.  Check this blog or here for details.

Marketers should want their bought, owned, and earned media to do four things:

1. create brand led shopping so you are not only in the consideration set, you start in the pole position
2. guide people through the pre-shopping process to reinforce your pole position as they  move from pre-shopping to shopping
3. seal the deal through smart shopper marketing (which now includes mobile) because most shoppers are still considering options at point of purchase
4. Reinforce and help shape brand experience

Here is a personal example of how advertising can create brand-led shopping that will illustrate the concept.  I don’t NEED a new car.  My BMW X5, which I got new in 2003, still has low mileage and works fine.  But then I started seeing ads for the Lincoln MKX and MyFord Touch technology and, well, I got the itch.  So what did I do next?  In yesteryear, I might have bought an auto magazine.  Today, I googled Lincoln to go to their website, and then I went to MSN.com to compare Lincoln MKX to Cadillac and, of course, BMW, since I still love my X5.  Behavioral Economists will be happy to note that I did NOT bother to check out the other 10 or so brands that MSN told me were comparable.  I have yet to test drive, but those are the three showrooms…Lincoln, Caddy, BMW…I plan to go to.

Lincoln’s advertising got me started in my shopping process, and put their brand in the pole position of consideration.  It is Lincoln’s game to lose at this point. However, the advertising did not make this a done deal.  If I don’t like the driving experience, or if it just doesn’t feel like me as much as one of the others, or if the dealership is rude, I will probably buy something else.

This view of media gives advertising an integrate shopper and consumer purpose.  Touchpoints must be used strategically as they are unlikely to be interchangeable. The special contribution of a mass medium like TV is probably to create brand led shopping while digital display, search, and owned media probably influence the pre-shopping stage more.  Shopper marketing, including mobile, becomes essential to win the purchase irrespective of how the shopping process got initiated.  Social media create a post-purchase community.

Finally, the measurement guy inside me notes that I didn’t use the word “awareness” once in creating a shopper-based view of how advertising works.  It really is time for a new set of shopper-based brand metrics.

Look at this table of data of aided awareness vs. brand shares from a household products category and you’ll see little relationship.

Aided awareness is what we measure but it isn’t really what we want to know.  In an era of shopper marketing and Procter’s call for store-back thinking, CPG Marketers want to know how to get their brands noticed at retail.  That means the brand broke through the clutter and became relevant to that shopper at that moment; it got in the game.  It could even mean that a shopper became instantly aware of your brand and bought it. THAT is shelf-back thinking!

Getting noticed at retail is NOT a no-brainer; it is hard and requires great marketing. There are 40,000 SKUs in a typical supermarket and a shopper buys 1% of them over the course of a year.  John Dranow from Smart Revenue says the first thing a shopper does on a given trip is deselect 90% of what’s in the store. The 90% of products that are deselected are like the gorilla in the video with kids bouncing basketballs.  You are so intent on counting the number of passes by those kids in white shirts amidst the chaos, you don’t see the person in the gorilla suit.  “Inattentional blindness” is the name of the phenomenon and it happens to shoppers on every shopping trip.

What a marketer should want from their communications efforts is to make their brand relevant to break through the chaos.  Create anticipation, curiosity, meaning, and desire pursuant to actions like getting people talking, searching, visiting your owned media sites, and looking for your brand at retail and ultimately buying it.  Post-purchase, media can help guide the experience consumers are having with the product to get them to want to replenish as they run out.  Yes, media is about post-purchase influence; can you say “below the funnel”?

The ability for a marketer to get their brand noticed on the shelf and then instantly have people make meaning or mentally retrieve information about it is critical. Even better, is if it gets noticed first, which, any behavioral economist will tell you, is a really good advantage to have.  The best thing for a marketer is if the shopper puts THEIR brand on the shopping list by name and then every other brand becomes the gorilla. The best marketing and media strategies for accomplishing this will vary, depending on how people shop for that type of product so shopper insights must inform media strategy.

Literally, awareness is a survey construct that measures the ability of a respondent to retrieve a brand memory during survey questioning regardless of whether or not the product category was relevant to their lives at the moment they clicked the link.  In contrast, what CPG marketers really want to know is how to make the retail experience evoke a brand memory and create meaning while someone is shopping and what communications approaches best accomplish that given the path to purchase for their product.

If marketing research wants greater impact on marketing decision-making, if it is to get that seat at the table, it has to start measuring what the business really needs to know.

Postscript: if you still think awareness is a prerequisite to purchasing, come back tomorrow where I will post a picture of my shopping cart at mid-trip from yesterday with commentary.