What happens when that is wrong?  What does marketing do when it STARTS with the purchase?

This is an extreme version of what Procter calls “store back”.  However, based on shopper insights research I have conducted, I believe that, for grocery products, over half of first-time purchases are unplanned; in fact, the shopper might not even have been aware of the product before buying it.  In those cases, it all STARTS with the purchase and ENDS with awareness.  The purchase funnel is totally flipped.

When it all starts with the purchase, the role of marketing communications changes.  Now marketing must get the product noticed at shelf and impart meaning to it instantaneously for the shopper.  Packaging, shelf placement, thematic displays, signage, mobile messages that are location-aware, shopper offers based on that shopper’s history, and master brand familiarity become the main vectors for creating meaning.  In this communications model, when someone encounters a product they were unfamiliar with they should be able make sense of it instantly; to tell YOU (the marketer) what the product is about, rather than you having to tell them in a concept statement.  After the product is bought and being used, there is more sense-making that occurs.  If the consumer is really into the product as they are using it, now you have an opportunity to build engagement:  they might join a community, become a fan in Facebook, share comments, start seeking out advertising and recalling it, seek out the brand’s “creation story”, etc.  In this scenario, the impact of brand narrative, brand values, social media engagement, etc. come AFTER the purchase, so they solidify rather than precondition the brand-customer relationship. 

Could it really be that it all starts with the purchase?  Well, for certain types of products and retailing situations, I believe it does.  Consider this:

• Conduct a study to measure the percent of products bought for the first time that are discovered in-store (I got 50%+)
• Do you think the products bought for the first time on impulse in a Kroger’s, Trader Joes, Costco, Target, etc. are all the same and were previously known? If not, then you believe that brand adoption can START via the shopping experience.
• Consider shopping styles that people have, reflecting their relationship with a product category.  Can you imagine categories (e.g. artisan cheeses) where shoppers like to explore and find new interesting products to buy?

This last point is perhaps the most important.  People have different shopping styles for different product categories which means that the heuristics they use to make decisions are systematic.  You might not ever buy carbonated soft drinks the way you buy interesting dips that you just tried at a tasting station.  This is where behavioral economics intersects marketing; the study of how people decide is often more interesting than theoretical purchase intentions.  Hence, some products will predominantly be bought via a process that starts in-store.  Others will be bought based more on the traditional marketing model requiring awareness built via mass media. You need to study HOW people decide in order to understand when to start from the traditional end of the funnel and when you start from the other end of the funnel.

When it all STARTS with the purchase, everything that you thought was upstream becomes downstream and the thing that was the most downstream of all, the purchase, becomes the most upstream event. 

This is “store back” on steroids.

Now, the researcher in me has to ask the rhetorical question, “Does the marketing community have the research tools to act on this new way of thinking?”  Rhetorical because, I don’t think we do.

While last year the story was about the specific media (Twitter came out of nowhere, Facebook eclipsed My Space), this year, it’s a story about marketers getting real about social media.

Now we have great case histories that demonstrate the power of social media from a marketing, innovation, and insights perspective.  We also have a reaffirmed understanding of the power that social media places in the hands of consumers (ask Toyota).

Last year, social media was still a little theoretical.  Now it’s real.  The advertising models are starting to emerge, consumer-created beverages (e.g. Vitamin Water Connect) via Facebook and proprietary environments have gotten launched, and listening is now being used a source of shopper insights that manufacturers are sharing with retail partners.  Yes, even the most primal of marketers…retail merchants…are listening!

I believe that the principles of brand management are changing in our digital age (I’ll actually be teaching an MBA course at NYU on this).  Marketing teams guide the meaning of brands but no longer control it.  You have to let consumers into your brand.  There are only two possibilities—either consumers don’t care about your brand, or they DO care and if they do, they want to be heard.  If you are not encouraging conversation, you will risk turning ambassadors into angry activists.

In the new digital age, creating this access and authenticity means you start with listening (how are conversations starting, where do they take place, what is the language?) and then evolves into you becoming a welcomed part of a community.  In this world, research and insights lead to marketing, rather than insisting on their separation (the language of surveys always begins, “we are conducting a marketing research study and won’t sell you anything”). 

In a world where you have put the human at the center of marketing thinking, listening is critical and social media is a huge conversation catalyst. 

To move the industry forward, the ARF is conducting its “Social Media Bootcamp” for the second year.  This year, there is a greater emphasis on case histories (Facebook, Kraft, and Vitamin Water who gave fans the tools to create a new flavor that was launched in March) because that is the stage we are at.  BIG marketers, are now taking social media seriously, not just those who couldn’t afford TV.

Social media is getting real and marketers and marketing researchers need to understand what this means for their business and how to set up effective social media strategies.

I will then moderate a panel of other leaders, Gayle Fuguitt Vice President, Consumer Insights, General Mills;  John Forsyth Principal, McKinsey & Company, Inc.; and Susan Wagner VP, Strategy & Insights, Johnson & Johnson who will demonstrate that Stan is not alone; other leaders also believe the time is now.

Research transformation isn’t just about changing a department; it’s about being an agent of change for the culture and beliefs of the whole marketing organization:

1. Stop thinking of people as consumers and start thinking of them as humans.  The word “consumer” is marketing-ese for slicing off that part of daily living that relates to what you can sell someone and throwing away the rest.  That keeps you thinking in the box.  Stan from Coke says, “When you study consumers you get incremental ideas; when you study humans you get breakthroughs”.
2. Move from a control mentality to an influence approach.   Brand teams no longer control brand messaging thanks to the web-based social media infrastructure. Ask Motrin, or now Toyota.  Research departments no longer control the flow of information about consumers.  Marketing teams can search Twitter, or go to digital analytics, or…  Are you ready to do what Vitamin Water did, where they let their fan base in Facebook design the next new flavor?  Are you ready to let go?
3. Think of research as a source of anticipatory insights rather than just testing and measuring.  The risk reduction and measurement parts of what research does are important but those are downstream activities. The insights team needs to be thought of as an insights engine that builds strong brands and durable customer relationships.  We do more than quantify the expected; we also listen for the unexpected, bringing breakthrough ideas that inform strategy.  If the insights team is thought of this way it will be brought into to business issues at the start and regarded as an investment in the future of the business, rather than just an expense to be managed down over time.

What a different corporate environment!  Creating a fast learning organization where ideas can come from anywhere and where every test has a learning objective not just an action standard!  A way of working together where the insights team is integrated into business leadership teams, where we are part of and potentially lead the social media cross-functional teams, and where the voice of the human is brought by research into every marketing decision.

We are not just being quixotic about this.  The ARF is launching a Research Transformation Super-Council and along with those speaking on March 23^rd, we have leaders from great organizations like Unilever, Kraft, MTV, Cambridge, Cambiar, Colgate-Palmolive.  The super-council will have working committees to map out the transformation blueprint for organizational impact, creating insights-led strategies, and a working committee that will tackle engagement/talent/process.

This is our time, but with it comes the responsibility to up our game, to become leaders rather than just technicians and analysts, and to leverage what we know about humans (cognitive science, behavioral economics, anthropology) to bring insights that shape the strategic glide-path of the organization.

I hope to see you on March 23^rd at the ARF annual Re:Think conference, Succeeding in the New Normal for the start of this phase of our journey together.

In a UK McCann-Erickson study, 67% of marketers admitted they don’t know as much about social media as they should.  In fact, 14% of marketers don’t even think social media is here to stay.  Do you think all of the other 33% “savvy marketers” really do know as much as they should?  Are they all on twitter?  Probably not—it’s just a theory for many of them.

#1 The first thing that Social Media and California raisins have in common; they are both here to stay!

Social media is not just a “thing”; it will be integrated into EVERYTHING.  That makes it both more and less important than you think.  Facebook and twitter apps and web access are now fairly common in cell phones.  If teens are averaging 80 text messages a day (a form of social media), does that make it their dominant form of communication?  Quite possibly.  Verizon Fios is integrating social media (Facebook, Twitter) into TV.  Of course, that has been there for a while via multitasking while watching TV (check out tweets with  #worldseries).  Like the internet was a thing (an entertainment media tied to a desktop computer that required making a phone call to initiate a session) but now is “built in” everywhere, so is (or will be) social media. That makes it ubiquitous and bigger than you think.  On the other hand, it is important to realize that social media is part of mobile life, not the other way around (hence, the comment about it being less important than you think).

#2 Which brings me to the second thing Social Media and California raisins have in common: they are ingredients built into something bigger.

I think this point…that social media is an ingredient, rather than a replacement… is the part that Bob Garfield misses in his Chaos theory.

Now, what conversations occur in social media?  Only those that people WANT to have.  It’s their space, not the marketers’ space.  Are brands there?  Some brands are, and for some it works and for some it lays an egg.  Some brands are defined by their social media presence like Zappos and some (like most packaged goods) are better built on traditional media and in-store (we think the ARF is more like Zappos BTW).  A brand like candidate Obama needed both.

#3 The third thing that social media and California raisins have in common:  they don’t go with everything.

If people are talking about what they want to talk about, that makes social media a great source for market research insights into people’s daily lives via something we refer to as “listening”.  People are expressing themselves in an unfiltered way, as opposed to using a researcher’s vocabulary.  That makes listening a great source for hearing the unexpected which is the starting point for innovation.  As such social media might be the next big thing for the consumer insights teams at marketing organizations.

#4 Which brings me to the fourth and final thing that social media and California raisins have in common; being able to say, “I heard it through the grapevine”.

The metaphor to marketing is bone-rattling.

1970s-1990s marketing was about playing.  Marketing research tools reinforced this.  We would find what attributes were important, what the perceptual map looked like, and then strategy was formed.  “Gee, our brand needs to shore up its attribute rating here, or we need to move to a different place on the map”—these were the kinds of growth ideas we looked for.  No great gamer would stop there, but we did.

Someone who hacks a game finds a different way.  Let’s hack marketing.

Make something important that wasn’t important before to consumers.  Traditional research tools would not report on the importance of adding calcium to orange juice until someone (Minute Maid, I believe) thought of it.  Procter is trying to hack the game by working the purchase funnel back from the store rather than forward from the awareness generation stage.  Bravo!  Follow the path to purchase! Create apps for the iPhone (as Kraft did) that bring the connection between brand and customer into the store in a novel way; it almost disintermediates the retailer as the controller of purchase choices.  I thank Herb Sorensen from TNS for sharing this powerful idea at our last shopper insights council.

A reprogrammer will go even further; they will invent a new game.  They will change culture (as Crispin, Porter+Bogusky suggested at our last annual conference), or find a blue ocean strategy.

Social media offers the ability to hack and even reprogram the marketing game…for both the marketer and the consumer. Britain’s Got Talent did not create Susan Boyle; people enabled by social media did. Ford is reintroducing the Fiesta via giving cars to influential bloggers so they can talk about and video their experiences. Procter is launching a new beauty magazine called “Rouge” by working closely with mommy bloggers.  In both of these cases, the marketing (and marketing research) game is hacked:

• The marketer is sharing control
• The brand communication is self-perpetuating if people CHOOSE to make it so
• While performance metrics might still come from traditional research, the real insights are more likely to come from LISTENING to the conversations and signals about these products in social media.

Use social media to hack marketing.

Use social media to hack marketing research by making LISTENING a big part of your insights generation program.

If these ideas ring true to you, I urge you to join us on November 3^rd, to hear Chris in his own words, to learn from the ARF about the full range of listening tools and to hear how leading marketers, agencies, and researchers are using them.