I just bought a digital camera and here was my path to purchase.

1. On December 30^th, I realized I needed one for New Year’s Eve.
2. While in the car, I checked for deals on my foursquare and shopsavvy apps for electronics retailers near my location.
3. I chose a retailer to call and made sure they had cameras in the price range I was considering
4. I went to the store, chose a camera from an acceptable brand and got a memory card.
5. I then used Red Laser to image the UPC code of each and found lower prices at nearby stores
6. Rather than go to another store, I showed the results to the salesman who got manager approval to match both prices for a total savings of about $35.
7. I left the store feeling smart and successful and more likely to shop there again the next time as I know I will always get the best price there with the same shopping steps.

Marketers are training us to become system beaters. We all see a continuous flood of e-mails offering deep discounts and free shipping. Increasingly, marketers are making it easy for us by going paperless as we download the offers into our smart phones and loyalty cards.  Remember when we had to wait until Dec 26^th for big sales?  Now they start at midnight of Thanksgiving. And social media is a dream come true for system beaters; not only do we find the deals we want for ourselves but now we get to share them with all of our fans, friends, and followers.  We retweet the deals we find, and we like them via Facebook so all our friends see them too.  And by the way, looking for deals is a main motivator to like a brand page in Facebook in the first place.  Also, digital and mobile have compressed the timeline.  I now know I can wait until the last minute to start my research.

So, is this the end of branding? What should marketers and retailers do if shoppers are forever transformed into system beaters?  All is not lost as System beater behavior is itself habitual and selective in how a particular shopper goes about finding deals, just like we only use about 10% of the apps on our smart phones, and watch only 10% of the channels on our TV.  Study how consumers are seeking out deals…their system beating behavior…and then make sure you are ahead of competition at knowing how to use those promotional touchpoints to build habits.

Here are six marketing ideas to get loyalty lift from system beaters in return for hot deals:

1. Like-gate your promotion offers on Facebook
2. Use paid search to drive traffic to your owned media, where the landing page offers a relevant discount in exchange for some lasting marketing benefit;  people sign up for your e-mails, become members, download your app, or at the least, receive a cookie for subsequent promotional ad targeting
3. Make all of your offers shareable by including a sharing widget in the offer.  Reward the fan who shares the most.
4. For retailers, price matching should include matching Amazon online prices (as long as the item is new) so your store doesn’t become a showroom and you convert the trip into a sale.
5. Retailers should attach promotions to check-ins (like $5 off your purchase of $50 or more) to win the trip and build loyalty. (Check out Levelup which David Berkowitz from 360i made me aware of.)
6. Mastery of mobile is a must. Build apps that offer useful information as well as discounts so they turn your brand into a mobile portal. Also, please optimize your website for mobile.

Shopper behavior has forever changed and is forever changing and with it, the rules for branding.

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

If you could, you would drop impressions selectively for each consumer closer to the next purchase than the last one. Now in the digital age, you can do exactly that.

The principle of recency implies that the sales response to ad spending (called ad elasticity in economics-speak) can be thought of as an average of no effect from the ad that is unfortunate enough to air right after a given consumer’s purchase, averaged in with twice the effect for an ad that is lucky enough to air right BEFORE the next purchase.

Why does this math matter?  Because if you could find advertising vehicles that were “recency-tilted” by their nature, that is, they are more likely to deliver impressions closer to the purchase, you will get greater ad response…practically guaranteed.

“The acceptance of Recency, (or closeness to purchase), as a key variable in advertising inspired sales makes the point.  The digital…messages reach the ‘readier’ to purchase consumer.” Erwin Ephron, 2011

So how do we reach the “readier” to purchase consumer? How do we recency-tilt? Digital activities that are self-directed, e.g. search or visiting a brand’s website or a site like coupons.com are mostly done with shopping purpose in mind.  In other words, such digital brand communications give you recency because the consumer is controlling the timing of the impression not the marketer.

Digital display advertising can also be recency tilted if marketers change their prevailing approaches to display.  Remarketing has been proven to provide greater lift and that is certainly recency tilted.  Advertising served by ShareThis has been shown to provide greater conversion and it is also recency tilted because advertising is selectively served to people who share content that is relevant to them at the time, implying for many that they are about to make a purchase decision. Digital media’s ability to deliver recency will get magnified as smart mobility becomes a constant part of the shopping process.

But digital isn’t the only way to tilt the odds in your favor. Obviously, all shopper marketing is recency tilted. Another option for recency is special interest magazines in print or digital form.   Especially for magazines like Car and Driver, many are buying the magazine almost as much for the ads to help a purchasing process along.

Finally, let’s think about how media and marketers calculate reach.  Now, that should be adjusted also. If impressions unfortunate enough to be delivered right after the last purchase aren’t worth much, then their contribution to reach isn’t worth much either. Marketers should measure reach from those impressions delivered closer to the NEXT purchase than those closer to the LAST purchase. I want to know “recency reach”.  Once you start calculating recency reach, you will find that the touchpoints that deliver this are different and it will help to guide marketers’ strategic media investment decisions in ways that will improve sales response.

With some straightforward experimentation, I believe the logical conclusions here will be confirmed. And then, the way we plan media will be profoundly affected.

Have you studied this yet? Have you measured how people have formed their strategies to find you by their recurring experiences as they seek brands, advice and offers out on the web? From conversations I have with marketers, it does not seem like this is adequately researched.

For example, research shows that a main motivator for liking a brand on Facebook is to be made aware of deals.  Also, people will seek recommendations from friends. However, you can imagine that one would NOT turn first to Facebook for store hours and locations.

Consider a list of consumer tasks.  Isn’t it likely that consumers might have these tasks in mind and would first turn to different digital places depending on purpose?

• Deals and offers
• Store locations and hours
• Planning meals or parties
• Ratings
• Customer service questions
• Community connection
• Finding a mobile app to download
• Making purchases

When you start thinking about your digital strategy from a consumer perspective, you also realize that people turn to third party sites, not just your owned media site or Facebook page. This needs to be part of your strategy.

Let’s focus on one of these tasks; finding deals and offers. There are a variety of entry points that consumers use.  The obvious one is search and the trend in Google search shows an increase in searching for “coupons”.  But, many more people just go to coupons.com (about 10MM per month, according to Compete).  Furthermore, a number of women have created a presence across Twitter, Facebook, and their own website to become information and distribution centers regarding deals and coupons.

Moneysavingmom (Crystal Paine) has a big presence on Twitter, Facebook, and her own website.  On Twitter, she has over 80,000 followers, is on over 1,000 lists, and tweets deals about 15 times per day.  On Facebook, there are 143,000 who have liked her page.  According to Quantcast, she has about half a million visitors and over one million visits each month.  The deals that she lists on her website also serve as the content for her tweets and Facebook updates.  She juxtaposes the best deals from different retailers via a page with all of the logos for different retailers that are clickable, taking you to deals she finds from their websites.

By comparison, Couponmom (Stephanie Nelson) has an even bigger monthly traffic profile (over 1MM visitors) and has been featured on Oprah and CNN.  She has 147,000 people who have liked her on Facebook and 95,000 followers on Twitter.

Bottom line for retailers: these coupon-aggregating moms sites drive trips to stores!

With newspaper circulation declining, the future of promotional advertising will be shifting away from the printed page.  Sites like these might very well be a big part of the digital future of how people “circular shop”.

How people seek out a community connection is also an interesting question.  People seek out their friends on Facebook and “like” brands, but do they seek a community connection with brands there?  Mystarbucksidea, dellideastorm, and Harley-Davidson show the power of building community in owned media.

The most important point to remember about creating a digital brand strategy is that you are not in control of how people will seek out your brand, consumers are.  Consumers have been conditioned by all of the options that digital marketing provides and you can either make it easy for people to find your brand or hard.  Consumers will reward the access and simplicity offered by a brand with a properly aligned digital presence.

The first step in developing an effectively integrated digital strategy is to measure patterns of how consumers digitally seek out you and your competitors for each purpose.

There are three big points I want to make about the effective use of media in a digital age for brand building.

1. In our digital world, everything amplifies everything else.

Many shopper journeys now start with digital search.  However, the top 30 or so search terms are invariably versions of the trademark. In other words, search doesn’t come before brand; brand comes before search.  In many cases, mass advertising made the brand interesting in the first place. But ultimately, if your owned media doesn’t deliver, and is not mobile optimized, you wind up with, well…bad lasagna.

2. The focus of brand communications should be to amplify digital activities that lead to successful business outcomes

Here’s what a brand team should hope consumers do.  They want them to search for their brand, talk about it, like and follow it in social media, visit the owned media website, sign up for something, and download something (e.g. a coupon). To get geeky for a minute, you can think of a Bayesian net that graphically maps activities, facts, events based on conditional probabilities. Presumably, these activities all add strong conditional probability to something we want to move, such as sales. The purpose of push media, such as TV, or digital display can be thought as amplifying these self-directed activities that the Bayesian model shows are highly predictive of a successful outcome.  These activities form the basis for tracking what we can call brand conversions.  You want media to make these conversions go up consistently over time.

3. Marketing research needs to update its approach to digital measurement

Ironically, while digital media should be the most measurable of all media, we do the worst job of measuring it. I bet that few marketers who sell products in physical stores have a metrics system set up to measure digital brand conversion activities as described above.  If you aren’t tracking conversions, you can’t effectively track digital brand communication impact or determine its ROI. You simply are not positioned to succeed in a digital age.

Social media is particularly complicated.  People talk about brands that are interesting to them but the conversation itself then amplifies the brand as it helps to make the brand more available, even omnipresent, and hopefully drives traffic to the owned media properties.

It is an advertising input, a behavioral output, and a source of marketing insights via what is called “listening”.  Except for listening, we are really far behind when it comes to measuring social media as a source of (earned) impressions.

Suppliers who offer listening platforms tend to treat all comments as equal when that can’t be true. A tweet from someone with 100 followers or a  Facebook update that might or might not be seen could not be equal to a blog posting by an influential mommy blogger whose post might be read of hundreds of thousands.

And then, here comes mobile.  Parts of the world are way ahead of the US on adoption of mobile phones as the primary form factor for accessing the internet but it is coming here as well.  By 2015, mobile (smart phone and tablets) will pass the computer in the US as a means of accessing the internet but for a different purpose.  Smart mobility will revolutionize shopper marketing.  Are we really ready to measure this?

We need a new mental model for how media creates and nurtures relationships between brands and consumers.  Media is no longer a force exerted against a passive audience.  In a digital age, brand communication lives in an action environment and its purpose should be to amplify and shape consumer activities along the digital path to purchase.

Acknowledgment: My teaching fellow for my NYU course, Social Media for Brand Managers gave me the “lasagna” metaphor and I love it!  Thanks, Daniella!