Marketing and Research Consulting for a Brave New World
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Having started my blog over 5 years ago when I was Chief Research Officer at the ARF, I’ve now written about 100 blog posts. I was surprised and gratified to see that the most popular blog post has been shared over 800 times and the top 10 blogs have been shared collectively about 6,000 times by all of you!

My blogs describing new fact-based insights, new ideas about digital, shopper, media strategies, discussing behavioral economics, and offering advice about marketing research methods are most shared.

This list is as much your creation as it is mine. You are the ones who find the best blog posts to share, often with your own interpretations and summary.  Cool…teamwork!

So here they are in reverse order…OUR top ten most shared blog posts. You can click the title to read any full blog post of interest.

If you would like an attractive ebook compilation of these blogs, please e-mail me at joel@rubinsonpartners.com

#10: Hit or Myth? Which marketing beliefs are true? 279 shares

Much of the narrative you read in Ad Age, MediaPost, eMarketer, or digital or social media companies is based on partial facts or faulty research and is simply not true.

Marketers are compelled to learn the facts.  BTW, no industry leaders actually scored 100 on the quiz contained in this blog! Give it a try!

#9: How to make people curious about your brand 355 shares

…gets at the essence of the web experience that encourages users to instantly satisfy their curiosity by clicking a link and exploring something new.  It is human nature to be curious and this blog suggests how marketers can make that work for their brands in a digital age going beyond TV-centric thinking brought over to digital.

#8: Surprising Math of Advertising Waste 380 shares

Building a simple mathematical model, I demonstrate that it takes only 1% of impressions to have a sales effect to create a campaign that pays out, or 99% waste sounds bad but is actually a good thing! Of course, reducing waste to 98% would be better as it would double ad response and some of the following blogs offer advice as to how to do this.

#7: Eight Brand Building ideas in a digital age 422 shares

…offers ideas that could never be implemented before digital that cut to the heart of why content marketing is so important.

The key thought here is to realize your brand/consumer relationships need to go way beyond functional purpose and that you must compete for thought leadership with functionally unrelated products regarding a lifestyle, a health concern, etc.

#6: When are brand extensions a good idea? 477 shares

Most of new product launches are really brand extensions so it is important to understand that the rules are different than for launching new brands.  I have a lot of experience here from creating the first line extension forecasting model in the industry and share my knowledge in this blog.

#5: Surprising new study on Facebook marketing effectiveness 517 shares

Clearly understanding the value of a Facebook fan is at or near the top of the list for marketers.  I was honored to work with Compete to conduct one of the most comprehensive studies of this, across nearly 70 brands.  The results were surprising …yes, Facebook fans are quite valuable but only if you get them to revisit your Facebook page!

#4: Shopper path to purchase: a new approach to media planning 690 shares

Understanding “Path to Purchase” will change marketing and media priorities.  It will increase emphasis on both paid and organic search, display advertising on sites that are visited when researching a purchase in that category, behaviorally targeted digital advertising when someone is tagged as shopping for a certain type of product/service and particularly in-store shopper marketing. This is the one most important considerations to add to media planning that will turbocharge the ROI of marketing spend.

#3: What marketing research needs to learn from Behavioral Economics 694 shares

I’ve written two blogs on this.  Behavioral economics, the study of how people make decisions, is a hot area and I apply it to marketing research practice as survey-taking is chock full of decision-making.  Should I join this panel?  Even answering survey questions involves decision-making because people are not opening “a container” and just letting truthful answers pour out of their heads.  They are reconstructing memories and opinions in the context of their current mental state, how the question is framed and asked, and how the preceding parts of the survey have brought a respondent to the next question.  By becoming better choice architects, we can address habitual biases such as understatement of buying store brands.

#2: Four New approaches to consumer segmentation 733 shares

Segmentation is at the heart of marketing, yet we rarely create segments that are actionable. The digital age can change all that. Here are four approaches that produce media targeting strategies, guaranteed to be actionable based on segmenting moments (hyper relevance), segmenting loyalties (switchables),  segmenting shopping patterns (shopper marketing), and segmenting lifestyles (social and publisher targeting).


#1: Two big marketing research mistakes 833 shares

Pundits compete in the echo chamber for thought leadership, often fueled by bad marketing research designed to feed a false narrative. The two classes of marketing research mistakes I focus on here are:

  1. Confusing incidence with market share
  2. Asking questions that people cannot answer

For example, the percent of those who fast forward through commercials on their DVRs is huge.  The percent of TV viewing minutes is much smaller. The percent who have ever checked a price on their smartphone while standing in a store (showrooming) is high; the percent of transactions affected is low single digits. Compound this with a survey question about how likely you would be to buy via your smartphone while standing in a store by 2020 (yes, someone did this) and you have a myth.

If you would like an attractive ebook compilation of these blogs, please e-mail me at joel@rubinsonpartners.com

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