Most B2B content is missing the mark, according to a . The study polled more than 150 B2B marketing professionals across various roles, industries and organization sizes.

Just one in four respondents believe that their content marketing strategy is effective. One in five reported feeling very or extremely confident that they’re creating relevant content. The report found a majority of B2B content isn’t driving results and marketers lack confidence in their ability to accurately measure their efforts.

Thirteen percent of respondents are highly confident in their ability to measure the impact of their content marketing in 2017, but that dropped to about 3% this year.

The downward trend in content marketing effectiveness extends to B2B marketers’ confidence in their ability to drive desired revenue results. Over 65% of marketing professionals claim to be somewhat confident or not confident at all in driving revenue.

The survey also measured the most important content engagement metrics, finding that lead conversion is the top choice at 39.5%, followed by sales opportunity and conversion (34%), sales contribution (6.8%), sales influence (6.1%), clicks (5.4%) and likes (2%).

Heinz and ON24’s qualitative research also revealed that marketers prioritize engagement, personalization, and successfully aligning and integrating marketing, sales and customer channels.

The post Relevant B2B Content on the Decline appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

In today’s network-based world, managers are discovering that two forms of thought are critical to decision-making. Design thinking and systems thinking are the twin engines that power critical thinking in the 21st century. Firms are recognizing that customer centricity must be understood in a market-oriented context, that challenges brands to win the consumer’s trust and orchestrate the ecosystems where they compete.

If you were to draw black dots on a sheet of paper to identify every knowledge-based discipline, the first place to look for answers is in the white space that separates them. Just as the problem-solving challenge facing modern enterprises requires an interdisciplinary view of the world, answers to marketing problems do not reside only in strategy, quantitative modeling or consumer behavior. The connections and integration of the three generate managerially relevant answers.

Although the concept of having a single view of the customer receives ample attention, the more fundamental question is: Do firms have a single view of the data? Structured data alone is too ham-fisted to pick up the nuances of consumer behavior. Conversely, unstructured data alone prevents us from seeing the forest through the trees.

The metamorphosis of data management is generating a pragmatic perspective that improves a manager’s prospects of becoming decision-ready in a world where decisiveness is as important as insight itself. Thanks to technology, once-risky decisions have been de-risked to create a marketplace where firms can learn by doing.

The answers drawn from an integrated view of structured and unstructured data will turn managers into doers. This elegant integration of facts and feelings finally unshackles enterprises from their heads-down plodding, giving them the freedom to run in an agile learning culture with their eyes fixed on answers.

The post Exploiting the White Space appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Don Longworth arrived in the West African nation of Benin in the 1990s. Deployed for missionary work in a remote, underdeveloped region, his needs outnumbered his limited resources. He prioritized transportation and pooled what money he had to purchase the first decent vehicle he spotted, a 1986 Peugeot 505. The car was “notoriously unreliable.”

Several years and one pregnant wife later, the Peugeot’s irksome flaws assumed a larger magnitude in the face of a medical emergency. Longworth’s wife Erin needed an emergency cesarean section nine weeks pre-term. The procedure could only be performed at a hospital reached by hours of travel on pockmarked roads—an impassible route for Longworth’s aging, mid-size car.

“I knew I couldn’t trust my car for the type of aggressive driving needed. If it broke down, I could lose my wife,” Longworth wrote in a blog post recounting the incident. The crisis passed only after a colleague volunteered to undertake the journey in his Toyota van. Erin survived, but that day will haunt Longworth forever, and not as a near miss. “What I didn’t tell in that story is that my infant son died,” Longworth writes in an e-mail.

Whatever allegiance Longworth held toward Peugeot was lost when his vehicle flunked the life-or-death test. He immediately began to search for a new car, eventually choosing a Toyota, the same brand he turned to with his wife’s life on the line. He would not be disappointed when, years later, another desperate trek was needed to save a different child who had contracted malaria. Toyota again transported Longworth and family safely to the hospital.

Longworth, now 38, has since moved to Canada with his family, taking his newfound appreciation for reliability with him. Now when he considers products, he prizes reliability. “I decided to incrementally improve the stability and efficiency of my life by strategically improving my purchasing decisions, even if it meant delayed gratification,” he says.

His focus reflects that of a growing swath of consumers unified under the mantle of buy it for life, or BIFL. The philosophy purports to strip products of sentimentality and measure the performance and durability of the underlying components. Instead of the best price, BIFLers emphasize the greatest value. The implied proposition is that upfront costs are higher than average, but the performance and lifetime of those products will exceed their cheaper counterparts, even with heavy use. “There are a lot of people out there who prefer high quality instead of pinching a penny,” Longworth says.

On one hand, this is nothing new. Consumers have bought pricey items for their supposed quality since time immemorial—and marketers have taken note. Some claim the word “dependability” was coined a century ago in a Dodge Brothers automobile print ad.

“At one time the word on the street was, ‘You can judge quality by price,’ and there was some merit in that,” says Ronald Savitt, a retired professor of business administration and co-founder of the Conference on Historical Analysis & Research in Marketing. “Consumers still have difficulty knowing what quality is and making judgements that reflect purchasing higher quality at higher prices.”

What is new is the level of identity and organization BIFLers have achieved using the internet to warehouse their gathered knowledge. The desire for high-quality, durable goods, whether borne out of painful memories of the Great Recession or the , have amplified what was a small and threadbare network of obsessives. People constantly search the web for insider recommendations for the “best” stuff—restaurants and travel destinations or consumer goods—as well as to brag about the deals they get.

Add to that the and electronics components, and you can understand the growing desire for durable goods among people like Longworth. Two years ago, he launched his own site, , to spread the gospel of risk-averse consumption and review consumer goods for reliability. “My main motivation to buying high-quality products grew out of a realization that I was unnecessarily sacrificing safety and a lot of stability in my life because of poorly chosen and unreliable products,” Longworth says.

Well Rigged is a small site. Longworth says that he’s hoping for 30,000 visitors by the end of the year, which he acknowledges is not many. But he says traffic has doubled in the past month and his potential audience is enormous and engaged. “The hub of the buy-it-for-life movement is Reddit,” he says. “To get an idea of how active the community is, Reddit ad stats project that one ad on the Buy It For Life subreddit can garner over 300,000 average daily impressions.”

Reddit is arguably the BIFL nerve center, spawning a cottage industry of linkback articles describing the movement’s organizing principles and promoting its most celebrated brands. As of May, the BIFL subreddit had almost 600,000 subscribers contributing product advice and consumer support tips, as well as fawning over pictures of well-made or strangely durable antiques. The site is a user-created extension of more formalized, hierarchical review shops such as Consumer Reports and Wirecutter.

The latter launched in 2011 as a tech-focused property belonging to news and culture site The Awl’s constellation of digital brands. Its first five years of existence generated more than $150 million in affiliate marketing revenue. The Awl itself died in January 2018, but Wirecutter lives on, having been acquired by The New York Times Co. in 2016.

Both Wirecutter and Consumer Reports placed in the top 1,000 most-visited websites, according to Alexa Internet. Wirecutter vaulted more than 1,000 positions from mid-March to mid-May to No. 912. Meanwhile, 83-year-old Consumer Reports sits at No. 691, while also mailing out 3.6 million print subscriptions of its magazine as of 2017. Consumer Reports is a nonprofit organization, and its most recent public filings show a revenue of about $250 million.

There’s a kernel of frustration within the BIFL movement that is important for marketers to hear.

“I began advocating for BIFL because I believe the wider market is drunk on cutting corners and compromising quality for an extra 1% profits,” Longworth says. “BIFL is a growing voice coming from consumers that’s saying, ‘Stop selling us junk.’ Cranking out low-quality products is short-sighted and leads to huge pollution problems.”

Savitt says that the consumer backlash is the result of decades of clashing consumption trends, namely the drive for better-quality goods and simply wanting more stuff. The conflict started in the aftermath of World War II when expanding product lines created an outlet for pent-up demand after years of war and economic depression.

“In the late 1950s, there was a general trading up to higher-price and -value goods, especially in automobiles and white-goods appliances,” Savitt says. “Much of this was a function of greater wealth and the desire to show an ability to purchase higher-order goods. This began to change with globalization and the availability of imported goods. … What happened was the frequency of buying new items became more important.”

BIFLers want to slow down the consumer buying cycle, embracing—if not exactly minimalism—a spend-more, buy-less mindset. This supposition plays into the hands of luxury brands that coat an exclusive image with a veneer of practicality. “[BIFL] goods are often luxury goods such as watches and jewelry,” Savitt says. “‘A Diamond is Forever,’ was the De Beers theme for years.”

Nowadays, these aspirational, reduced-consumption messages are delivered particularly well by lifestyle brands. Patagonia’s outdoor wear is priced at the top of the market, trading partly on eco-warrior imagery that purports to keep goods out of landfills. Competitor L.L.Bean makes a similar claim: The outfitter long justified its higher price point with a lifetime warranty that saw virtually any product replaced at any time (although such generosity ended with the introduction of a more limited lifetime warranty in 2018).

“Marketing to the BIFL crowd has the benefit of selling higher-ticket items,” Longworth says. “As an affiliate marketer, I’m making way more on my commissions because the vast majority of sales are higher-priced, quality items.” He also thinks that the majority of BIFL consumers are in the middle class, consumers who are methodical and well-researched. “They usually practice delayed gratification. They know what they want and wait to snipe top-quality products at big discounts once they have the means. I consider myself in this category and write for folks in this category.”

But not all BIFL brands are so exclusive. Take Lodge cast-iron cookware, for example. Its skillets are found in some of the most high-end kitchen stores in the world, but they’re also sold at Wal-Mart. Lodge Manufacturing was founded 123 years ago, making it only 23 years older than the expected lifespan of its skillets.

“If you take care of it, it will last forever,” says Mark Kelly, Lodge’s public relations manager. In most instances, buy it for life does not literally mean the rest of a consumer’s existence. BIFLers accept that there’s a certain amount of care required on the owner’s part for an item to attain its longest possible longevity. There’s also an acknowledgement that people will tire of some objects. “Who wants a pair of underwear to last a lifetime?” asks Longworth.

Cast iron is an exception. With proper maintenance, cast iron easily becomes an heirloom item. Lodge recognizes that status and promotes it. A few years ago, Lodge marketed the fact that George Washington’s mother willed cast-iron cookware to specific relatives when she died, . “We have had great success touting the multigenerational use of our products,” Kelly says. “When you use something as often as people use their cookware—you can use it for every meal of the day and desserts and everything in between—the cost is very low compared to other types of cookware. Consumers really connect with that. It’s a term we call pricing value and people, in kind, value you.”

It may not appear to make financial sense for a company to sell long-lasting products at a reasonable price, yet Lodge is bigger than ever. Kelly says that the company has grown steadily after introducing pre-seasoned pans in 2002 and witnessed a sales explosion in the fall of 2010 that fueled a factory expansion three years later.

“In a matter of three years, we increased our production capacity a matter of 125% and sales continue to go well in all categories,” Kelly says.

Additionally, Lodge has expanded its international presence from 60 countries to 80 in that same timeframe. Globally, the cast-iron cookware market is likely to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 3.4% from 2017 to 2025, becoming a $3.3 billion industry during that time, according to a report from Transparency Market Research.

Assuming customers aren’t replacing previously bought Lodge products, what’s fueling this insatiable demand for more cast iron? The answer is variety. Lodge now offers a greater assortment of products than at any other time in its history. According to Kelly, the company has the largest line of cast-iron cookware in the world.

“It’s like the old Lay’s potato chip commercial: ‘[Bet you can’t] eat just one,’” Kelly says. “Skillets will always be our best growth market. That’s way outside the parameters of the bell curve.”

The BIFL movement can be understood as a desire for quality and reliability, but there’s also an underlying current of paranoia. Encoded within the DNA of the movement are sneaking suspicions that some brands don’t care about their products after a sale is completed—or worse, that some companies are intentionally sabotaging products by designing them to break down after a predetermined period of time.

This concern has its roots in the concept of planned obsolescence, which describes a design and economics strategy with an artificially limited lifetime. The phrase was popularized in the 1950s by industrial designer Brooks Stevens, but the concept started a few decades earlier.

Savitt doesn’t think that executives are nefariously plotting to foist sub-par goods on the marketplace, but he does think “false” obsolescence is real, especially when consumers (and shareholders) are primed to expect new iterations of existing products rolled out every 12 to 24 months.

“[Planned obsolescence] has always been part of the automobile industry when each new car was slightly different, mostly in appearance, than the one before,” Savitt says. “P&G did the same with Tide. Blue chips one year, yellow the next. The cleaning power was basically the same, and (it caused) a lot of grief for women seen with the old Tide in the shopping cart.”

Apple is one recent example of a company that may be hitting a wall in its purported planned obsolescence strategy, he says, as the company has seen declining iPhone sales. “Why upgrade when the new product is not dramatically different than the current?” In 2014, claims of Apple’s planned obsolescence designs bubbled to the surface. Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan wrote a post for The New York Times Upshot blog, citing a graduate student’s experiment comparing Google search trends for “iPhone slow” with similar searches for Android. The student found people search more frequently for “iPhone slow” than anything Android-related, giving the impression that iPhones slow down faster than Android phones.

The slower phones were finally acknowledged by Apple in 2017, but the company denied engaging in any type of planned obsolescence. It said that older phones that updated to newer operating systems would inevitably work more slowly.

Whether this constitutes planned obsolescence is debatable, but even the perception of such corporate behavior can poison a brand’s fortunes. Apple’s acknowledgement of slower phones sparked a class action lawsuit at the end of 2017.

Governments are now intervening on behalf of customers. In 2015, France adopted a law criminalizing the manufacture of planned obsolescence goods. Last year, the country opened a criminal inquiry into Apple, following the company’s admission of iPhone slowdowns. French consumer activists are agitating for similar actions to be taken against printer manufacturers Canon, HP and Brother. As of last year, the country was debating a labeling system for electronics that state a product’s longevity rating.

Not all consumers are BIFLers. Many shoppers will prioritize frugality over longevity. And despite the recent emphasis on endurance, many consumers don’t want their possessions forever, according to Leighann Neilson, a marketing historian and professor at Carleton University. Much of Neilson’s work focuses on the disposal stage of consumption, or what happens to items when people are finished with them. From her home in Ottawa, Ontario, a city of about 1 million people with three full-time auction houses, Neilson witnesses aging baby boomers pawn their housewares collected over a lifetime as part of their downsizing efforts. Neilson says that supply far outstrips demand for these products, resulting in a flood of well-constructed furniture going unwanted because it’s out of style with modern tastes.

“The problem (is) that fashions change,” Neilson says. “I’ll give you an example that almost had my dad in tears: He was at the auction with me and there was a walnut king-size bedroom set. Headboard, footboard, two night tables, men’s dresser, women’s dresser and a mattress. The whole thing sold for 80 [Canadian] dollars. Dad says to me, ‘Oh my God, I wish I had a place to put that. That’s such a crime. Look at that.’ And I looked at it and said, ‘But it’s ugly.”

Neilson also doesn’t see a desire for making lifetime purchases among the generation of undergrads she teaches. Rather, she sees a cohort attached to brand names and cheap price tags.

“I talk to my students—who are considerably younger—they’re telling me they don’t want to make the investment [in furniture] because what if they get that great opportunity to work overseas,” Neilson says. “They’re going to just sell everything and go.”

Neilson’s exposure to these two distinct age groups gives her the impression that BIFL is only relevant to a certain segment of the population. This is confirmed in part with market research demographics for Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. In 2016, Consumer Reports reported the average age of print subscribers was 65, and the average age of an online subscriber was 56. The New York Times, meanwhile, claims the average Wirecutter user ranged in age between 41 to 53 in 2018.

Her examples also suggest that some items are poor ground for BIFL marketing—furniture and fashion in particular. But when it comes to items where function trumps form, BIFL will likely win the day, even if the customer hasn’t heard the term. Neilson herself admits that she uses the same cookware she’s owned since the 1980s.

If marketers whose products fit BIFL take the effort to engage and satisfy these consumers, they will win fiercely loyal advocates for their brand. Lodge presents a successful blueprint: Convert a few top influencers and get out of the way.

“Third-party endorsements are the best way to promote a company,” says Kelly. “It’s a slow build honestly, but once it gets rolling it just keeps on rolling.” It’s a process similar to getting a just-right seasoned cast-iron skillet.

Marketers looking to appeal directly to the BIFL crowd need to be honest about their product specs. Transparency is key. This is one type of marketing where it might be better to work more closely with designers and engineers than with sales and customer support.

“The thing that’s hard about marketing to people like this is you have to be ruthlessly honest and your content has to be deep and thorough,” Longworth says. “These people are hardcore researchers. They already know a lot of facts, so in many ways they can sniff insincere marketing or an uninformed opinion a mile away.”

The post Rise of the Buy-It-for-Lifers appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

How did you first get involved with Hotels.com?

ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍřt four years ago, I was honored with the official title of Captain Obvious. And let me give you a little advice from a superfan: Getting your foot in the door is not nearly as impressive as getting your whole body in the door.

What’s your preferred type of destination, a bustling metropolis or remote paradise?

They say it’s about the journey and not the destination, but without a destination you don’t have a journey so um, what was your question?

What makes the perfect hotel?

A perfect hotel has a lot of great walls, beds and floors. Floors are key, as is what you need to get into the room.

Why is giving out Hotels.com rewards so … rewarding?

The best part about free things is that you don’t have to pay for them.

Aside from grape-stomping and goat yoga, what are your other favorite vacation activities?

Line dancing. My dancing always crosses the line.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever given?

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a near-fatal injury.

How did you earn your rank of captain?

I climbed the ranks.

The post And Now a Word From … Captain Obvious appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Twice each year, Feng Li travels back home to China from the U.K., where he’s lived for three decades.

In the U.K., change comes slowly and cultural movements can linger for years, but Li notices new trends every time he visits China, especially as the country’s wealth has blossomed. “People want different things,” says Li, a professor and chair of information management at Cass Business School in London.

One of the country’s biggest changes came by phone. In 1996, there were 55 million landlines across urban China and 15 million across its rural areas—that’s one phone for every 6.5 urbanites and one for every 57.5 rural Chinese residents, , professor at the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute. The Chinese government tightly regulated the flow of information and communication by stanching telecommunication.

But in 2019, there are , according to Statista, more than one subscription per person. The government has moved from blocking the flow of information to censoring and regulating it through the country’s “Great Firewall of China,” which the Chinese government uses to control what its citizens can see online.

Mobile has been at the heart of many of the changes Li has seen in China. Five years ago, people in China still relied on cash, Li says, but everyone now pays with mobile devices, even at small markets. On another recent trip, Li saw that people made restaurant reservations, ordered their meals and paid entirely through mobile devices. “By the time they get there, the food will be waiting for them on the table,” Li says.

As Li has noticed these trends, he’s followed the Western brands trying to enter the Chinese market. China has slowly opened to Western business since its , which allowed foreign businesses to operate in the country. But most fail.

Western brands experience several problems in China, Li says. Fixing them all can feel akin to putting out a series of small fires that threaten to coalesce and engulf the entire business. In 2019, that examined why so many Western internet-based firms fail in China. Li interviewed more than 40 senior business executives from Western firms, including eBay and Google, and their Chinese competitors, such as Taobao (akin to eBay) and Baidu (akin to Google).

One reason Western brands fail, Li found, is competition. Brands are often initially successful after launching but are then swarmed by competitors. The clearest example came when eBay entered the Chinese market in 2003, buying EachNet for $180 million and launching as eBay EachNet. At the time, EachNet was China’s biggest online auction player, holding 80% of China’s small consumer e-commerce market—eBay executives were confident the dominance would continue.

Meg Whitman, then eBay’s CEO, , according to The New York Times. But Jack Ma—founder of Alibaba (akin to Amazon) and now one of the world’s richest people—had other ideas. He decided to go to war with eBay.

Porter Erisman, former Alibaba VP, writes in his book, , that Ma thought he could outmaneuver eBay in his home market. Ma started his own online auction platform called , which translates to “search for treasure.” Erisman writes that Ma told him, “The launch has to be a really big bomb to generate a lot of buzz in the media. I don’t want this to be a war between Taobao and EachNet. It has to be about Taobao versus eBay.”

Taobao announced to the press that it would invest $12 million in a consumer marketplace customized for China, one that would offer free transactions for its first three years—Taobao wouldn’t focus on revenue for now, Ma told reporters, but instead on helping Chinese sellers establish themselves. The Chinese press called eBay to see if they’d also offer free transactions; eBay PR reps said no, commissions were too important to the marketplace. Ma had won the first battle.

EBay tried counterattacking by signing exclusive internet advertising deals across China to prevent Taobao from advertising online, according to Li. “But in China at that time, the number of internet users were relatively small compared with other channels,” Li says. Then, more Chinese people watched TV than had the internet, so Ma advertised Taobao on TV.

TV proved to be far more effective than eBay’s online advertising. Slowly, eBay EachNet lost another battle, then the war; their market share was captured by Ma and Taobao. By 2005, Taobao owned 57.7% of the Chinese marketplace, while eBay EachNet’s shares diminished to 31.5%, according to Analysys International. The next year, . EBay scaled back its goals in China, shutting down eBay EachNet to form a different service with , a China-based mobile internet company.

“That’s one example [of] a Western company going into China and doing something that appears to be sensible but doesn’t really fit the cultural or the market setting,” Li says. EBay simply wasn’t ready for the level of competition. The competitiveness common in Silicon Valley is seen as very mild by Chinese competitors, Li says, something that Ma showed when confronting eBay in the auction-space battlefield.

Other brands are simply caught unawares by the changes Li sees every time he goes home. Chinese brands have home-field advantage; these brands see consumers using a new, popular technology in real time, watching how they use it and shifting their strategy to incorporate that new technology. Meanwhile, Western brands rarely have any idea how or where new technology is burgeoning in China and continue to use outdated methods to reach consumers.

But an overarching theme of why Western firms fail, Li finds, is that they enter the Chinese market and expect to be as big as they are back home. They attempt to make China’s giant market fit to their brand rather than making their brand fit into the Chinese market.

Chris Breikss, a founding partner of full-service agency , had no delusions of grandeur in 2014 when his company launched its Chinese marketing arm, . His company employed people who were born in China, but educated in the West, giving the North America-based marketing agency a unique set of knowledge and skills for entering China.

And the Chinese market was growing. The , an arm of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reports that the Chinese middle class was only 4% of the country in 2002, but by 2012, the middle class had become —more than 420 million people. And, as Breikss saw, China’s internet ad revenue was rising as more of the country gained internet access—Statista reports that internet ad revenue in China grew from to , while internet users in the country had risen from over the same period.

“We could see that the advertising revenue was growing by billions every year,” Breikss says. “And we thought that we would grow at the same rate and that brands would be ready to jump in and start advertising in China.”

Breikss assumed that a flood of Western brands would soon enter the market. But then 2015 came——and Breikss noticed that most brands and agencies still had no marketing strategy in China. By 2018, a report from China’s Interactive Advertising Marketing Lab found that Chinese internet ad revenue had reached $54.9 billion (Statista’s prediction of $71.46 billion was even more flattering), growing by 24.2% every year.

The Chinese market thrived, but few Western companies were succeeding—most never tried. There’s no official count of how many Western brands market in China, but Breikss predicts that the top 2-3% of Western brands have a China strategy, while one out of 100 middle-market brands and almost no small companies have a China strategy.

“What we didn’t anticipate was that [brands] weren’t really ready or prepared to invest what it takes,” Breikss says.

Sheng Li, which currently has a team of 10 people dedicated to 30 active clients marketing in China, works solely from its offices across North America, using marketing tactics built for China. But even with their presence in the West and knowledge of China, Breikss says that it’s often hard to convince Western brands to start campaigns in China. Before launch, many are scared away by the scale or budget they’d need to be successful.

Sometimes, even success after launch can be overwhelming: One of Sheng Li’s clients stopped its campaign in China after getting 160,000 visitors to its website in a two-week span, Breikss says. The campaign performed far better than the brand expected, but that was the problem: The company didn’t have the back-end infrastructure it needed to give customer service to the Chinese visitors.

“They abandoned that because they would have had to invest in more staff and more infrastructure,” Breikss says. “And they just weren’t ready to do that yet.

“When they win, sometimes they lose,” he says.

Sheng Li has had many successes, too, which Breikss credits to the relationships they’ve formed and access they’ve won within Chinese companies and the government, relationships that few other agencies have. This success, he believes, is also available to other patient, persistent brands and agencies.

“If you have a unique product or a unique service that works with the Chinese demographic and you can be the first one to market in your industry, you can own it,” Breikss says. “And by being first to market, you could take over that channel and no one else would be there.”

Dominate Niches and Fit the Culture

Amazon usually attempts to dominate every market it enters, but it couldn’t dominate China. This year, Amazon closed its Chinese e-commerce store after grasping . Now, Amazon has reportedly (owned by Chinese tech company NetEase) to help Chinese people buy from the West and Chinese sellers sell to the West.

“In that aspect, they’re actually doing better than most other companies,” Li says. “When we talk about failure, some of them are probably not a strict failure. … They just didn’t achieve the same level of success people would expect them to do in international markets.”

Instead, the brands that have been successful in China are those that have attacked market niches, Li says. By thinking of China in terms of niches, the bar for market share can be set lower than in other countries. For example, if a U.S. brand launched in the Netherlands and worked to dominate 50% of the country’s 17-million-person market, the brand would have 8.5 million customers. But in China, brands that capture even 1% of China’s 1.4 billion population would have 14 million customers. If Western brands started going after niches instead of attempting to dominate straightaway, Li says that they could gain a foothold in China’s market.

Although niches are powerful, Li agrees with Breikss that market dominance in China is possible. For example, most of the country’s auto market is owned by international brands, with German manufacturers dominating the luxury market. Car manufacturers succeed by making their brand fit the market, he says. to lengthen the back seat. Li says that this is because senior businessmen in China hire chauffeurs to drive them to work; BMW customized its car to fit that market trend.

“Those kinds of subtle differences will show,” Li says.

Jon Dupuis, global managing director of ad agency , has been working on launching the American Express brand in China and was recently impressed by a subtle change made by a Western brand. A competitor—the digital agency Isobar—runs KFC’s China campaign and found that there were language problems at KFC’s digital ordering kiosk. There are eight different languages and hundreds of dialects spoken across China, but the digital kiosk didn’t understand what many of the customers were saying. To improve the customer experience, that could learn and understand many more Chinese dialects.

“It’s a wonderful story of what agencies are doing these days,” Dupuis says. “It’s not a prescriptive campaign development for brands, it’s understanding what are the behaviors that we need to put into the market to make change.”

Dupuis, the global lead for the American Express campaign in China, agrees with Li that brands can’t “cast a shadow” over any market they’re entering, especially China. To avoid casting a shadow, he says that brands must research and map out the full customer experience of their Chinese audience before launching. Brands should look for potential issues, conflicts and problems to avoid or ways to fit their product into the Chinese market, as BMW did with the 300 Series. There’s a rise in nationalism everywhere, Dupuis says, so Western brands—especially brands with “American” in the brand name—can’t be cocky. Rather than assuming consumers will automatically be drawn to a Western product, brands must research the market from many angles.

Some unresearched problems could be fatal blows to a brand’s prospects in China. Ashley Galina Dudarenok, founder of Chinese social media agency and Chinese marketing training company , says that one Western brand launched a toothpaste in China for pregnant mothers—it supposedly made their teeth stronger, she says—but, according to traditional Chinese medicine, an ingredient in the toothpaste causes miscarriages. Western science, in this case, would be no match for belief in Eastern medicine. “There’s no way that people are going to be buying such a toothpaste,” Dudarenok says.

Aside from preventing such oversights, Dudarenok says that research allows brands to learn about the people to whom they’re selling in the Chinese audiences. There’s a bigger difference than simply Eastern versus Western sensibilities—China is like Europe, in that there are many different cultures. You wouldn’t market to Spaniards the same way you’d market to the French, she says. But China is also a larger culture with shared values that are in flux: There are divides between its generations, seven prefectures and multiple socioeconomic levels, but also differences in consumer philosophy and preference.

“They all have different buying preferences,” Dudarenok says. “Without knowing, it’ll be very tough. You could sell some, but then [the market will] be gone because you have no idea who you’re selling to, what their local problem is or why they bought it.”

Research gives brands the cultural awareness to know what the audience wants, but it can also allow brands to break cultural convention and go viral. Tony DeGennaro, director of marketing and business development at Chinese marketing agency , says that branding is less popular in China, while performance marketing dominates. But that doesn’t have to be the case in every campaign. DeGennaro points out a 2017 McDonald’s ad on WeChat that became wildly popular—before revealing itself as a McDonald’s ad.

“Nearly every person I’ve met who’s seen that ad has said they enjoyed it and reacted positively to it,” DeGennaro says, adding that Chinese ads are typically hard sells. He references an influencer on Weibo (akin to Twitter) , sans the getting-to-know-you posts of Western influencers. “There’s no subtlety at all. This [McDonald’s ad] was a welcome surprise for many Chinese netizens,” he says. “Any type of advertising campaign that bucks this trend and stands out from all these hard-selling advertisements has the potential to go viral and get recognized.”

But whether getting creative or maintaining the status quo, Western brands launching in China will likely have setbacks and need to make changes. Dupuis—who kept quiet on when and how American Express will launch in China—says that the Chinese financial market is still very restrictive. But some of the restrictions loosened last year when the Chinese government . With newly relaxed restrictions comes unchartered territory—Dupuis and the mcgarrybowen team will need to know how the market feels about the brand across the entire campaign, which will mean continuing to research and map out customer experience and perception.

“There’s just not that existing playbook,” he says. “You can’t open page three and say, ‘Here’s what we do.’ It just doesn’t work that way. I find it’s incredibly refreshing to go in there, [have] a blank canvas and allow the market to paint it. You’ve got to know the fundamentals of what you need to care about—that full customer journey and customer experience—but you can’t predetermine what you’re going to hear.”

How Can Brands Enter the Market?

There’s a perception among Westerners that doing business in China is inexpensive, even when the brands are marketing to affluent consumers. But entering the Chinese market is not only expensive, Sheng Li’s Breikss says, it also takes a lot of time, patience and access to connections in China’s government.

To launch in China, at minimum, Breikss says that brands must have a landing page on WeChat—a social media, payment and communications app with 1 billion users, akin to Facebook—and earmark $30,000 for their campaign. It’s a labor-intensive process: This amount would be enough for translating content, creating ads, designing graphics, building a Chinese microsite or landing page on WeChat and registering and hosting it on Chinese servers, as well as having discussions between the agency and Tencent, WeChat’s owner, and managing the WeChat account for the three months.

“WeChat is a social media channel that needs constant nurturing and content created,” Breikss says. “Ongoing community management is required to respond to inquiries and engage with the brand’s audience and build a relationship with the followers and fans. … If you’re not willing to invest $30,000, you’re probably not going to see the kind of success that’s going to justify the investment.”

WeChat has , according to Tencent. But even though WeChat is akin to Facebook, Breikss says that brands can forget about the five minutes it would take to make a programmatic media buy on Facebook. To start on WeChat, it takes anywhere from one to three months, Breikss says, depending on the industry.

Due to The Great Firewall of China, Western websites tend to load slowly for Chinese people, sometimes taking minutes—and some never load. A Western brand running a campaign in China without an established, local web presence—whether a WeChat page or a website carried on a Chinese server with a .cn domain address—will be trusted about as much as a Chinese brand in the U.S. that sends potential customers to a slow-loading website filled with Chinese characters.

And certain industries—healthcare, medical devices, cryptocurrency—aren’t allowed to advertise at all in China. Other industries take longer to be approved by the Chinese government—Breikss estimates that the government takes two to three months to approve education companies. Just last week, Breikss says that the government denied a Sheng Li education client the ability to advertise. Sometimes, approval depends on politics—the restrictions can become tighter based on relations between the U.S. and China, for example. He pauses, murmuring to himself that he must be careful with his words: “You don’t always get the same answer, depending on where you look or what your connections are,” he says of government approval.

Breikss says that Sheng Li has built up connections and partners across China to help navigate the sometimes-shaky ground, but the solutions go too far for some Western brand leaders. “For example, when you want to set up these social media or search accounts, you may need a copy of the business license,” he says. “And depending on the size of the brand, getting a copy of the business license can be difficult. Or getting the personal identification of the CEO may be required to get an account set up. Well, the CEO doesn’t necessarily want to provide scans of their passport. But sometimes that’s the requirement of the Chinese government for setting up an account.”

“So then I’d probably layer on a month of planning in advance of that,” Breikss says. “Three to six months is a good window for what companies can expect to have a basic presence set up where they’re able to target the Chinese demographic. It depends on how much content they have ready.”

But fitting that content to the market will take research and translation. One Sheng Li client had a great video, Breikss says, one the brand spent a lot of time and money producing. But the video was entirely in English, using English characters to explain features of the product, and was hosted on YouTube, a website that has been blocked by the Great Firewall of China for a decade. The brand wanted to put the video on their Chinese landing page—Breikss says that he explained to the brand that they’d need to dub the video or provide Chinese-language subtitles, move it to Tencent Video (akin to YouTube) and rework certain parts of the video. As it stands, Breikss told the brand, the video would be a clunky translation for the Chinese market.

“Ideally, it should be reshot with the ideal target Chinese customer in mind, not the Western customer,” Breikss says that he told the brand executives. “You’ve spent $50,000 producing this video, you have to spend another $75,000 or $90,000 doing the Chinese version—more than double because there’s more intricacies and it’s not in our backyard to go and shoot it again.

“Well, brands aren’t necessarily ready to hear that,” he says.

The video wasn’t reshot, but given subtitles for its Chinese audience. Breikss hopes that if this version is even somewhat successful, the brand will reshoot the video next year specifically for the Chinese audience. “We still want it to be a successful campaign,” he says.

Breikss ran into another issue with this brand’s campaign that Sheng Li often sees: cost. The brand translating the video had a budget of about $100,000, but Sheng Li would be taking 30% in service fees—the cost of launching in China is higher than the standard 15% agency fee for media buys because of the complexity. Brands often think that launching in China is simple, Breikss says, but are surprised when they must split their budget between advertising and creating infrastructure. In this brand’s case, Sheng Li had to set up the brand’s landing page, host the video on Tencent Video and translate the video’s English into Mandarin.

And it’s not just the language that has to be translated—the data does, too. Chinese channels such as WeChat and Tencent Video don’t have API interfaces like Facebook and Google that quickly populate data, so Sheng Li needs to manually pull the analytics from the brand’s account to measure the campaigns. Still, Breikss says that the brand was surprised by the higher-than-usual service costs.

“That’s actually the No. 1 problem that we run into,” Breikss says. “All other partner agencies, all other brands seem to think that it has to be under 15% for us to run campaigns into China, but because they don’t have the infrastructure in place, that formula doesn’t work yet.”

That formula doesn’t work because—as mcgarrybowen’s Dupuis noted—there’s no roadmap to success in China and a lot of unknowns. But Breikss believes that launching in China will become easier over the next few years. Lately, branding work and getting approval in China seems to be getting faster.

“Every year seems to be accelerating and there’s more agencies like ours providing these services—there’s more competition,” he says.

‘You Can Own It’

Every company entering the Chinese market takes a different approach. Li says that he’s spoken with companies who parachute experts into China—senior leaders from the U.S. or Europe—many of whom don’t speak Mandarin or any other Chinese language. There may be a room full of Chinese people with one Western executive, but the entire room tries to communicate in English, which Li doesn’t believe is effective.

Other companies empower local talent to run the show, but the head office often wants final say over big decisions. Since China is many hours ahead of both Europe and North America—and has a first-hand look at any budding trend—the decision-making process is neutered. Brands often fall behind on this alone, Li says.

“I have seen examples where approval was given to the local Chinese executives to do things to compete with local competitors,” Li says. “But then it’s probably too late [after] several weeks have gone. The competitors are already doing things. … How much autonomy do you give the local leadership? That’s a really critical issue.”

High-level autonomy is critical for those working in China for a brand, Li says, but often difficult for Western brands to accept. China is an ideas-based economy, one that moves rapidly—being quick and willing to experiment may mean more failures, but it will also likely mean more successes. Brands can put all the work they’d like into crafting their strategy, but it’s just as important to adapt your strategy as the market changes.

“When you don’t even know where your destination might be or what course you are going to take, execution becomes a very different ballgame,” Li says.

To be given autonomy, the agency must have the brand’s trust. Dragon Social’s DeGennaro says that they try to establish trust with clients early so they can quickly jump on new trends. But if a company can’t trust its marketing agency, they’ll likely not bother working together.

“Working with stubborn customers who think they know better than we do with close to zero experience can often be more of a headache to work with,” DeGennaro says.

Success in China takes a lot of research, money, patience, hard work and adjustments. Breikss says that brands should have one thing within the organization that will likely set them apart from their competition: a brand champion for the China market. The brand champion is someone who sees the potential in China campaigns and knows what their success could mean for the company. They’re someone who can bring excitement about the campaign’s potential to the C-suite. When the company has put in the work and sees the opportunity in China, Breikss says that the size and potential to fail may be scary, but it’s best to double- or even triple-down on the efforts. Having someone inside pushing for more effort and resources can make the difference between moving forward in China and stopping the campaign entirely.

The post The West’s Great Marketing Opportunity in China appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

As marketers, you know that data can be an incredibly valuable tool to guide new developments, hit new demographics and understand consumer needs. But as with the marketing team, insights teams have a huge amount of pressure to prove the ROI.

ESOMAR, the global association for data and insight, embarked on a study to explore return on research investment in customer insight. It conducted in-depth interviews with insight leaders in major organizations—including Diageo, eBay, Heineken, Microsoft, Pepsi and Nissan—and extensively researched existing literature.

ESOMAR found that in regard to assessing ROI, no organization feels that it has discovered the perfect solution, although many are comfortable with the approach they’re taking. Most organizations—whether they endeavor to attribute formal, precise ROI metrics to insight, use metrics selectively or are openly resistant to formal ROI assessment—feel that a silver-bullet solution is almost impossible.

But there is a universal agreement across global industry leaders that insights teams need to ensure a position within an organization that allows them to play a strategic role, not just a tactical one.

The success of the insights team in many organizations is symbiotic to that of the marketing team. ROI will be clearer and growth easier if you support your insights team and get the best out of it, tactically and strategically.

Pillar One

Focus on value creation. The core purpose of an internal customer insights team is to add value. Ensure that it constantly acts with intentionality to deliver this purpose.

The primary role of insight is to future-proof the organization, equipping it to deal with disruption and change. Make sure your insights team is the go-to team when it comes to identifying and outlining the implications of powerful strategic foresights. Insight should not be boxed into the corner of being perceived as a reactive, market-research, order-taking cost center.

• Strategic foresight: Insight should build a reputation for being able to quickly seize critical opportunities that lie at the heart of driving value and growth in the business.
• Proactive, not reactive: Rather than approach the insights team for reactive market research for business decisions, get the team involved straightaway and provide its members room to look for trends and developments that can grow the business.
• Commercial acumen: The insights team needs to demonstrate the business impact that customer insight is having on the business. By showcasing business acumen and commercial awareness, the insights team becomes a value creator. Clarify this expectation and provide the necessary support.

Pillar Two

Ensure the insights team has access to the C-suite and business strategy. This will allow it to deliver powerful customer insights.

It is important for insights to be connected with the C-suite. This keeps the team aware of the organization’s business vision and future strategy and will ensure customer insights inform business thinking. This positioning will also help customer insight professionals gain access to all sources of data we now use to derive a customer insight.

• Customer centricity: Insight should guide the business’s consumer behavior strategy. Make sure that when the data behind a decision is being presented to the C-suite, the insights team is involved, providing the opportunity to bring the voice of the consumer into the boardroom.
• Holistic analysis leadership: Has the insights team secured access to all customer insights data available within the business? Is it building a reputation as the expert of integrating the evidence into a holistic picture to tell the customer story?
• Being an insights champion: Use your position to build a reputation as being the insights champion. Insights teams should have the strategic vision and forensic energy to unearth powerful insights that tell us how best to change and influence customer behavior. By providing the space, resources and encouragement to the insights team, it can lead the way to use digital-, AI- and machine learning-generated insights.

Pillar Three

Show the value of insights through a mix of success criteria, not just ROI.

You should be confident that benchmarks and ROI-style metrics are not the only ways the insights team is being evaluated by senior stakeholders. These measures have a role to play, but they only provide a narrow assessment. The key is to use a mix of hard and soft measures. There was widespread concern that going down the ROI route would box customer insights into the corner as a cost center, rather than a value creator. Ask yourself these questions:

• Resisting the tyranny of metrics: How close are you to hitting the sweet spot between ROI metrics and using more qualitative measures to show the success and effectiveness of insight?
• Telling the insight story: Are you telling insight success stories, those that demonstrate the value of insight? Where are you in terms of deploying innovative communications techniques to demonstrate the way insight is setting the future direction of the business?
• Creating a learning organization: Is the team taking responsibility for creating a learning organization with insights at the center of an agile, customer-centric culture that is capable of continually adapting to change?

The insights team can be a powerful tool for any business, but many insights team are underused and underappreciated. These are teams fundamentally geared toward direction and growth. To get the most out of your insights team, you must collaborate with them. It’s important to provide support, but it’s equally vital to ensure that your expectations are clear. Transparent, collaborative work can transform a business.

The project was led by Smith and ESOMAR Director General Finn Raben. Their work also included Real Research Director Adam Phillips, ESOMAR North American Ambassador Reg Baker and Heart Data President Vanessa Oshima. In addition, Pradeep has been closely involved as the ESOMAR council member overseeing the project.

The post Help Your Insights Team Deliver appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Goal

In 2011, started airing the First Four games—those between the four lowest-ranked at-large teams—of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament (better known as March Madness). Basketball fans on social media seemed to ask one question in unison: What is truTV?

Until 2008, truTV was known as Court TV, airing reality shows and trial coverage—many viewers unfamiliar with truTV may have watched the O.J. Simpson murder trial unfold years prior under its previous name. When Time Warner changed the network’s name to truTV, its focus changed to reality TV before rebranding in 2014 as a comedy network. But no matter the network’s year-round content, each March brought a torrent of taunting basketball fans.

“See you in March 2015, @truTV. It’s been real,” at the network in March 2014.

See you in March 2015, . It’s been real.

— LG (@LGhail)

When truTV rebranded to comedy, the network hired Puja Vohra as its senior vice president of marketing and digital. [Ed. note: Vohra left the network in May.] Before her tenure, the network mostly ignored what Vohra called a “tsunami of hate” from social media users. But she didn’t want truTV’s social media team to simply wait for the storm to pass.

“We decided that we [wanted to] clap back and make a little bit more noise,” Vohra says.

She chose to use the attention to truTV’s benefit. Social media users don’t often fill a brand’s mentions without an invitation or a terrible misstep by the brand, so engaged users—especially those who aren’t yet fans—were a big opportunity for the network.

TruTV’s social media team started responding to hectoring users, often mocking them with barbs of their own. In 2016, for example, a Twitter user tweeted a chart showing that people only Googled truTV in March. In response, truTV tweeted back a made-up line chart, the line curling into an . “You’re good at interpreting charts! What do you make of this one?” the truTV account tweeted.

You’re good at interpreting charts! What do you make of this one?

— truTV (@truTV)

As truTV continued to respond to social media users each year, Vohra and her team noticed that the negativity was shifting into a fun back-and-forth between the network and those tweeting at them. For the 2018 NCAA tournament, the truTV team and social media marketing agency Movement Strategy decided to soften the communications with a public service announcement-style campaign called truTV Awareness Month. Instead of trading insults and middle fingers, the network chose to educate new viewers.

TruTV Awareness Month expanded beyond social media and included TV ads, free shows on the truTV app and videos starring the network’s talent talking directly to basketball fans. By this point, truTV had many well-regarded comedy shows—“Impractical Jokers” became so successful that it and “Billy on the Street” received a .

“We had this arsenal of assets, these custom spots, plus this huge library of great clips and GIFs from our shows,” says Dan Manu, vice president of social and digital at truTV. “We want people to know our brand voice, but also get to know our talent and shows and understand why you really should be aware of us.”

Although the tone changed, Vohra says that the plan for the campaign remained the same: Tell people what truTV is about. “The ultimate goal is for us to get people to check out truTV, to come and watch our shows, to become fans of our shows and then eventually become advocates.”

Action

TruTV Awareness Month started on March 1, 2018, with faux-dramatic public service announcement commercials—think “the classic with the slow music,” Manu says—airing amid new episodes and marathons of truTV shows. But the heart of the 2018 campaign, Manu says, was truTV’s social media war room.

The war room team consisted of writers, freelancers and social listeners sitting side by side from morning until midnight during the week truTV aired March Madness games. “Hoodies and beards,” Manu says, describing the war room. “A lot of hoodies and beards.”

The team searched through the thousands of tweets in truTV’s mentions and the hashtag. Manu says that they only wanted to respond to tweets related to confusion about March Madness airing on truTV, prioritizing accounts with a lot of followers or those saying something unique. Manu also wanted the team to have their own unique responses to showcase the network’s creator-driven voice.

Most of the network’s shows are driven by creators—for example, Amy Sedaris and Andrea Savage created, produce, write and star in their respective shows, “” and “”—so Manu had a unique voice in mind for the campaign. Those in the war room responded to thousands of posts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, shifting to a tone somewhere between pitying and educational.

“We wanted to show how we want to help these poor souls who don’t know truTV,” Manu says.

On the first day, the war room team came prepared with loose scripts for responses, but Manu wanted them to rely more on their in-the-moment creativity. Even if they created 100 brilliant responses, he says that they’d burn through them in the first two hours. Most people in the war room had comedy training, he says, so they were able to adlib a response, collaborate on edits and quickly respond to badgering social media users.

“We don’t want this to go through a five-layer approval process because by that point, it’s too late, it’s not that funny and we’ve missed the opportunity,” Vohra says.

Manu says that he knew the campaign would be successful as soon as he saw the PSA-style ads starring the network’s talent. The talent adlibbed, too—truTV’s creative team went into shoots with about 20 scripts and came back with about 100 pieces of content. When the games kicked off, the war room team simply had fun.

“This is the only time of year where I watch TruTV. #MarchMadness,” one user tweeted.

“This sad lack of truTV Awareness is heartbreaking,” came the response from truTV’s Twitter account, adding a . “NEVER make fun of people who suffer from this disorder. BELIEVE THEM. It’s the only sure step towards recovery. #truTVAwarenessMonth.”

This sad lack of truTV Awareness is heartbreaking.

NEVER make fun of people who suffer from this disorder.

BELIEVE THEM.

It’s the only sure step towards recovery.

Advertisement

— truTV (@truTV)

Results

By the end of March, truTV had published 1,418 #truTVAwarenessMonth posts, generating 132,584 social engagements. The network received 72 million impressions on social media and 34 million video views, representing a 42% increase in digital and social video views from the 2017 campaign.

There were more new viewers who then watched truTV’s primetime shows, converting 19% in 2018, compared with 6.3% in 2017, according to analysis from Nielsen NPower.

The campaign also won a and was a finalist for best integrated campaign.

Manu and Vohra noticed that people who responded to truTV now seemed to be in on the joke. When the network responded to a barb, Manu says that people would often respond back that they were already a fan. Other people were now advocating for truTV, recommending their favorite shows on the network to viewers who dared to ask, “What’s truTV?”

“The campaign has evolved,” Manu says. “We’ve gotten a fanbase for the campaign itself. Every year, people can’t wait to see how the truTV social team talks back to these people. We’ve moved from originally … a street fight where it’s us fighting these trolls to a boxing match where it’s a spectator sport and no one’s getting hurt and people are coming to watch.”

In 2019, truTV made the campaign even friendlier by branding it as, “Welcome to truTV.” Instead of lecturing or educating those who don’t know about truTV, the network welcomed them. Manu says they’ve gone from defensive to “killing them with kindness.”

Vohra says that each year, the network gets closer to its goal of winning more fans and seeing less negativity. She believes that there may be at least one more year of a similar campaign; it still works well, she says, especially for how little it costs. As long as truTV has thousands of people tweeting at and about it, Manu says that the network should take advantage. “No matter what, when people are talking,” he says, “it behooves you to talk back to them in one way or another.”

The post What’s truTV? Oh, You Poor Soul. appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Data and analytics are constantly evolving, whether through technology, new understandings of consumer psychology or regulations and legislation. With so much going on, it can be difficult for marketers to keep track of developments that may come to impact their work in the future. What do marketers need to know?

Artificial Intelligence is Maturing

The data and research sector is awash with buzzwords and phrases, one of which is artificial intelligence. In recent years, AI was used as a catch-all for various technological products and systems that used elements of machine learning and automation to streamline back-end processes and operations. However, true AI is now maturing in the industry and is likely to have a huge impact on data collection and analysis.

The value we now see in AI is in the adjustment of scale. In particular, it has game-changing applications in the field of qualitative research. Historically, focus groups—or newer online communities—have been constrained to participant sizes based on the logistics of moderation. Now, companies such as are using AI moderators to run online, real-time qualitative research with respondents numbering in the hundreds, rather than the tens.

AI also has significant applications in analyzing text analytics, whether through open-ended text responses in quant surveys, social media listening or examining responses from computer-assisted telephone interviewing techniques. AI revitalizes data that was sometimes discarded because it was not recorded by phone interviewers; would cause challenges in manually coding answers; or was believed to be too vast, fast and variable. Research agencies will be able to provide additional qualitative context from quantitative surveys, creating richer insights for their clients.

We’re also seeing AI applied to social prediction. Brands such as PepsiCo are using AI to track and analyze social media conversations and sentiment, as well as to combine that information with weather, search and government data to recognize potential trends ahead of the pack and inform new product lines.

AI was billed for many years as a game-changer in data analytics and market research. We’re now seeing that promise fulfilled.

System 3 Thinking

The market research industry has long been the bridge between academic consumer psychology and commercial application.

You’re probably aware of implications of System 1 and System 2 decision-making. These systems were developed by psychologist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman. System 1 decisions are the fast, instinctive and emotional decisions our unconscious brain makes when first encountering a stimulus. System 2 decisions are the conscious brain’s slower, more deliberative and logical rationalization of a choice. When you see a product on the shelf in a supermarket, your System 1 self decides which product is more desirable, based on the immediate emotional reaction to the packaging or brand. Your System 2 brain then rationalizes that decision based on factors such as cost.

System 1 decision-making is a core element of behavioral economics and is a key way we make purchase decisions. However, new work in neuroscience and psychology has uncovered another way of making choices: with imagination. Leigh Caldwell, a behavioral economist at the , has termed this kind of decision-making as System 3 choices.

System 3 uses a different part of the brain than Systems 1 and 2. It applies to how you imagine a product or service may make you feel after purchase. When you buy clothes, for example, you’ll imagine not only what you look like in them, but how they might make you feel and how they might make others feel to see you in them. You’re most likely to choose the clothes you imagine you’ll feel best wearing. System 3 imagination combines past and present experience with possible futures and works out which it enjoys most.

Systems 1 and 2 decision-making still has its place in how we make consumer choices. But we may find that System 3 completes the decision paradigm, certainly until further breakthroughs in consumer psychology.

Data Legislation on the Fast Track to Change

International marketers working in Europe will understand some of the disruption caused by the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation last May. Whatever your thoughts on GDPR and data legislation—and regardless of whether you work internationally—it’s worth getting organized as soon as possible.

The European Union designed the GDPR legislation to be a framework for facilitating the development of the global digital economy. After one year, we’re already seeing similar legislation in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. There is no single U.S. law that governs all data processing, but most states have adopted one or more privacy laws.

However, we’re seeing a significant increase in the number of changes and conversations around data protection in the U.S. Much has been said about the California Consumer Privacy Act, which will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, and there are numerous privacy bills being proposed at both state and federal levels. It is safe to assume that the already complex landscape will be increasingly difficult to navigate.

There is also the , a piece of legislation that—if left unchecked—would have meant that anyone conducting social media listening and text analysis would have had to pay each author an amount for using their text. Thankfully, ESOMAR’s efforts with EU lawmakers have ensured an industry-wide exemption for market research.

It’s difficult to say what legislative changes might be in the pipeline, but what can be said for certain is that change is coming. Take this opportunity to assess your data practices and future-proof your organization.

The post What Marketers Need to Know ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍřt Innovations in Data appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Think back to the last thing your brand published. Did it get much traffic?

Some people may have read it, but others scrolled past. Either found in their inbox or social stream, whether they clicked was determined by the headline.

As you read this, your target audience is scanning through headlines on websites and in apps. For each headline they see, they’re doing a split-second cost-benefit calculation. They’re deciding whether a headline is worth clicking and if the content is worth their time.

We need to ask if our headlines are doing everything possible to help readers choose our content. The headline needs to make the benefit specific and valuable, and the cost to the reader small. If not, we won’t win that visit in the ultra-competitive context of content.

Here are five ways we can drive up perceived benefits and reduce the perceived costs in every headline.

Make a Promise

“The pulling power of a magnetic headline traces to its promise,” says Barry Feldman, blogging expert and headline-writing master. “Simply stated, it’s a benefit.”

When the headline makes a specific promise, the reader can see the value. We need to give up the clever but vague headlines and make clear the benefits of clicking. The reader is asking, “What’s in it for me?” and the headline must answer. The answer must be specific. We should be able to place the words “This article will show you” before the headline and form a complete sentence.

When the headline is a focused spotlight on the most compelling, surprising or useful part of the article, the reader has a better reason to invest their time. If there’s an “aha” moment inside, the headline should serve as a preview.

Write Long Headlines

found that long headlines drive engagement, at least when they appear in social posts. The headlines with the most Facebook engagement (likes, comments and shares) were 15 words on average.

This makes sense when you think about the psychology of the reader. More words mean more opportunities to indicate a benefit. It’s a chance to add another phrase in parentheses or after a colon. It’s enough room to write a second headline right after the first one, indicating more value.

Push the Value to the Front of the Headlines

Length can be an issue. In mobile inboxes, the reader may see just 45 characters. In search results, title tags get cut off after about 60 characters. That’s why the most impactful words of the headline, and the gist of the benefits, should often appear at the beginning.

Even when truncation isn’t an issue, readers will scan your headline from the beginning. Placing eye-stopping words toward the beginning makes them more likely to be seen and clicked.

Use Numbers

LinkedIn found that headlines with numbers have 37% higher clickthrough rates. That data confirmed what many marketers have known for years.

Numbers tell the reader the content can be easily scanned. If the article includes seven ways they can work with influencers, it will be easy to find one or two that are useful to them. This lessens the cost of the click.

Numerals, not just numbers, are part of the magic. In a line of letters, numerals stand out. A headline written as “eight things” instead of “8 things” is a missed opportunity to make the headline more visible. Spelled out numbers also eat up your character count, which is important when the headline can be cut short in a mobile inbox.

Write Many, Choose One

Professionals aren’t writing a single headline, but many. For any article, you should write a dozen or more. Write several options for each posting location: title tags, headers and subject lines.

Once you have at least a dozen, pick the best few and try them on social media. Whichever has the best engagement is the winner and can be used as your next email subject line.

The battle for attention online is intense. Winning that click depends on the headline. It’s impossible to overstate their importance. We are all judged instantly and ruthlessly by this short set of words. Work hard on your next headline—your reader’s attention is worth fighting for.

The post Write Headlines That Win Clicks and Drive Traffic appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Whistleblowers from Boeing’s South Carolina factory claimed this spring that . Metal slivers hung over wiring, or tools and other debris littered the jets’ interiors. In some cases, the whistleblowers said that their bosses knew of quality violations but incentivized them to focus on speed.

Boeing is the latest company to unintentionally incentivize bad behavior by focusing on a particular metric, rather than how it could ethically reach its overarching goals. Wells Fargo is another well-known example. A found that , the result of workers being evaluated and paid based on how many new accounts they opened. Or consider educational goals linked to test scores, leading schools to “teach to the test” and not emphasize well-rounded education.

Maurice Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, says that when a company or manager creates a metric, the result may be measurable but may not be the desired outcome. “We, as managers, need to be very careful to make sure that the culture doesn’t communicate the idea that the objectives come first, and the integrity of the organization comes second,” Schweitzer says.

The Problem with Quantitative Goals

, Schweitzer, co-author of Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both, found that goals can be motivating, but can cause people to cut corners.

“When we have these kinds of incentives in place, people are super motivated to hit that target, but they might either fudge numbers or do things to misrepresent their performance. [Or] they might engage in unethical behavior to achieve a particular goal,” he says.

Marketers often measure their progress through such quantitative goals, particularly in digital advertising. But these numbers don’t always tell a full story about the quality of the data. Exchange-based digital ad buys have created a “weirdly incentivized market,” says Kevin Stalder, vice president of client services at , a brand safety planning tool for programmatic advertising. Because there’s an endless demand for digital ad metrics, such as views, companies have raced to place their ads anywhere on the internet—including on platforms that post false or misleading information.

Stalder references Goodhart’s law, which states that when a measure becomes a target, it’s no longer a good measure. “[Marketers] can kind of be duped into these fallacies of, hey, viewability is a good thing,” Stalder says. “Let’s just drive everything toward viewability. Much like the Wells Fargo case, if you want people to open accounts, that’s what you’re going to get—you just may not like how they’re going to get there.”

Some companies have the goal of running digital campaigns that have extremely high viewability rates. But Stalder says, “You have to ask yourself: ‘How are these guys constantly doubling what the average site would realistically be doing?’”

The answer: ad clutter. For example, four ads may be placed above the fold on a webpage. Once you read down the page and click “next,” there may be another two ads. Perhaps there are six ads per page on four pages of content. “In an Excel spreadsheet, that site’s going to look great because you’re going to have really good performance, lots of ads served almost all in view,” Stalder says. But more companies, such as Trust Metrics, are beginning to ask whether these are worthwhile metrics. The user may have seen a high number of ads, but it wasn’t a good experience. “The low-ad clutter sites have the highest click-through rates. There’s an inverse relationship there.”

An explored the “perverse incentives” of digital marketing. “While the sell side of the industry has woken up to the perils of perverse incentives, with efforts like the , the real driver of change will come from marketers who clearly articulate objectives that drive the right behaviors from the start,” Minnium wrote.

Using the example of ad viewability, it’s obvious that viewed ads have greater consumer engagement, simply because a reader cannot engage with an ad they don’t see. But correlation isn’t causation. While viewability is measurable, the real goal is conversion.

“That’s how you get into the Wells Fargo situation. Yes, you’re opening bank accounts, you’re getting viewed ads, but it’s being done in a way that’s inorganic and therefore not actually driving the real numbers you want,” Stadler says. “Nobody really cares about a viewed ad. We’re not here to just sell advertising. We’re here to actually drive business.”

Leading with Quality Goals

It’s up to company management to maintain quality goals that incentivize the ethical action, rather than keep a tally on empty results. Schweitzer underscores two management actions. One: Communicate strong values. “We might have goals—sales goals or some production targets—but you need to communicate at all levels that the ethics and integrity of what we do matters,” he says. Two: Be transparent, so that the company and consumers see that process matters.

Schweitzer cautions against management by objectives—“I tell you what I want, here’s the goal, I don’t care how you get there.” Instead, company leaders must clearly articulate that they care how goals are reached. Otherwise, the firm risks fostering a climate where employees feel like they’re playing a game.

“You shouldn’t have a whistleblower that has to tell the world that your priorities are screwed up,” Schweitzer says. “It’s also long-term versus short-term thinking. That is, what’s the long-term health of the organization?”

Incentivizing one metric—clicks, views or other tallied units—can cause employees to ignore other key parts of the process in favor of hitting quantitative goals for reward. A focus on these counts runs the risk of disincentivizing a team’s creativity or teamwork, for example.

Digital marketers may need to loosen their grip on certain measurements and start embracing more qualitative goalposts. For example, Stalder recommends taking a greater stand against bad publishers and partnering with companies that can help them create whitelists of reliable websites. Brand viewability on these reputable sites are both more ethical and more likely to result in higher conversion.

“You’re going to cut out a little bit of good inventory by doing that,” Stalder says. “But that’s the ethical obligation that we’re faced with right now. And if everybody does it, if everybody suffers 5%, but we strangle out the incentive to create any kind of fake publishing environment, everybody would win in the end.”

The post Disincentivizing Metrics-Counting appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.