Measuring the success of design can feel like two radically different, but not mutually exclusive, experiences. On one hand, it can feel a bit like sorcery: mysterious, risky and totally unpredictable. At the same time, it can feel like a widget assembly line: calculated, dull and safe, often with little reward. In many organizations, this cycle can hinder breakthrough thinking and innovation. 

To make effective decisions, we need to balance the chaos with the predictable by finding ways to inspire great work and mitigate risk. So how do we harness and measure the power of design, without snuffing out the “magic” that makes breakthrough ideas take hold? How do we effectively lead innovation into the future, without taking a blind leap?

Building in Confidence: Lead and Lag Thinking

The answer lies in the balance of leading and lagging indicators, and in knowing what each can do to unleash more powerful design solutions. Weaving the right balance of inspiration, intelligence and validation into the design process creates outcomes that are efficient and prolific. 

Leading indicators help us understand the consumer, category and culture. This kind of insight work acts as a compass—it enables design teams to navigate the challenge and keeps them pointed true north. If we are missing meaningful, timely and actionable insights in any of these areas, we need to examine how our business strategy can be realized with an incomplete picture. Brands can’t thrive in a vacuum of consumer, category or cultural context, and design starved of meaningful inspiration will, more often than not, fall flat. 

Lagging indicators help us to validate the well-informed hypotheses we have asserted in our design work. If the leading indicators are robust, this validation is a pleasure to experience, because the work hits both strategic and executional bullseyes. Learning can then be focused on optimization of what we already know, instead of holding our breath to find out things we should have known before we began.

Leading Indicators: Identify and Focus the Challenge

Consumers can’t tell us what the future looks like, but they can tell us what their lives look like, and how we fit into it (or don’t). Early ethnography or other qualitative insights work goes beyond demographic realities: Their unique worldview creates a powerful lens through which we can inspire and motivate. It helps us understand and tap into their ever-evolving needs and barriers more meaningfully. If you haven’t refreshed your segmentation or consumer target intelligence in 18-24 months, you’re overdue to hear from them. Consumer insight work doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming—neither is it a zero-sum game. If budget is tight, scaling your insights approach can target gaps in your intelligence without derailing the job to be done or overspending.

Leading Indicators: Accurately Inspire Effective Work

Category and cultural intelligence is equally important. Without understanding the trends that drive category evolution, the future is difficult to see. Without understanding the emergent visual language that fuels these trends, we won’t be speaking in a language that inspires or responds to consumer needs and desires. 

Design semiotics is a powerful way to uncover this fertile ground, building relevance and longevity into your brand expression. Though the term “semiotics” sounds complex and expensive, it’s actually quite simple. Think of it as a competitive audit of newness. What niche brands are tipping into popular culture? What design trends are they instigating? In regions driving the most innovation, what emergent design language is manifesting? What new meaning spaces can we tap into?

Lagging Indicators: Validate Your Early Decisions

Quantitative or hybrid methodologies can be a great way to validate design decisions, if the work has been informed in a relevant way. When leading intelligence is strong, design strategies become inspired, prolific and inevitable. Testing them quantitatively can feel like a win, and even produce multiple “winners.” The key to great quantitative outcomes is to focus learning objectives on the business strategy that drove the change. Ensure focus on the meaningful and actionable, avoiding subjective “Do you like it?” lines of inquiry or data collection. 

Loyal consumers who observe the change with a little confusion or discomfort is inevitable—the meaningful inquiry lies in what the change means to them, despite their discomfort. If the design resonates with new growth targets and doesn’t cue a tangible negative change with loyals, we have created a successful solution.

Lagging Indicators Can Focus Optimization Quickly

Smart, effective design testing allows for easy optimization of design solutions, because the strategic guardrails on the visual landscape have already been established. With this confidence, feedback from quantitative research becomes highly actionable and clear. 

For example, if we:

then we will know definitively what levers to push or pull to take a design from good to great. Whatever your business strategies are trying to achieve, ensure that you’re customizing your research for success against those specific, focused objectives. If design testing is directing you to go back to the drawing board, you simply haven’t informed the work with enough leading indicators.

Leading: Informing and Inspiring Your Design

Lagging: Validating and Optimizing Your Design

Benefits of Balance

A robust intelligence phase that informs key consumer, category and cultural insight is crucial, and provides the guardrails for effective and inspirational design solutions. It also allows quantitative validation to perform optimally, doing the right job at the right phase in the process. If we allow our teams to solve design problems with all the intelligence they need, with a full and well-rounded toolbox, validation becomes more valuable and more meaningful. It creates a playbook for designers to execute with excellence, early and proactively, instead of reacting to unexpected research results late in the game. 

Working this way builds confidence, consensus and rich intelligence along the way—but most importantly, it creates prolific design outcomes that win. 

The post Generating Metrics That Inspire appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

People frequently ask me how they should use this or that analytics report. Usually, I have no clue and there are many reports that I never review. Google Analytics alone has 100-plus reports, some of which I’ve never seen.

But I’m probably not missing out.

I never start with a report and then try to find an insight. I start with a question and use the report that has the answer.

Think of it this way: In the bottom of one of my kitchen drawers, I have these scissors for cutting pizza:

Imagine walking into your kitchen, grabbing these and then looking for a way to use them. We would never do that, but instead we reach for the tools when we need them.

I’ve compiled a list of the tools I never reach for because, to me, they are the least useful. (Call them the pizza scissors of Google Analytics.)

New vs. Returning

There’s bad news in this report for everyone. You can see it and say: “Why are so few visitors coming back?” Or you can say: “Why aren’t I attracting more new visitors?” You could lament the numbers either way.

• If returning is low, you’re not triggering loyalty or creating a memorable brand.
• If new visitors is low, you’re not growing an audience and expanding brand awareness.

Because most people don’t have access to any account but their own, they have no point of reference. After I looked at a dozen or so accounts, it seemed that 8-12% of returning visitors is typical for sites with high-ranking content, while 12-20% is typical for sites without search-optimized content. This is because sites with lots of high-ranking content tend to attract lots of new visitors, changing the ratio and pushing down the returning visitors percentage.

There are also accuracy issues in this report, as it suffers from the “one visitor on two devices” problem. If I visit you from my laptop, then return from my phone, I’m two new visitors rather than one returning visitor.

I could live a long, happy life without analyzing this report. It’s at the top of my probably-will-never-need-it list.

A useful alternative: All Channels Report

Here you can view the breakdown of where people are coming from and the conversion rate for each of the default channel groupings.

Bounce Rate

Controversial, I know, but I pay very little attention to bounce rates for two reasons:

1. I don’t do any paid marketing, so I’m never optimizing pay-per-click landing pages. Bounces don’t cost me any money.
2. I have a lot of articles that rank high for information-intent key phrases. These visitors bounce at super high rates, which is fine with me. They came for an answer, found it and left.

I realize that bounce rates are important to some people and for some pages. But when people look at aggregate numbers for an entire website and panic, we need to explain that not all bounces are the same.

Here are . You can see that average across all the websites and all traffic sources is 61%.

So yes, if the traffic source is paid search, you should be panicking if your bounce rate is 80%. But if the traffic source is social media, those visitors don’t have strong intent. A bounce rate of 70% isn’t really off the charts.

A useful alternative: Time on Page

Check the average time on page for a given page. Although it has some of the same accuracy issues (Analytics doesn’t know time on page for one-page visits), it’s a better indication of whether the content is connecting with your audience. You’ll quickly notice which pages and topics get the visitor to linger.

Behavior Flow/Users Flow

Note: These are similar, so I’ll combine them. Behavior Flow shows top page paths (with or without events included) and the Users Flow shows visitors’ paths (no events can be included).

These might be the prettiest reports in Google Analytics, but they’re difficult to read and very hard to pull insights from.

It’s an impressive feat of engineering. On one screen, you can see how people flow from page to page from any traffic source, landing page, event, etc. It also shows drop-offs from each page in the flow. It’s an attempt to show everything in Analytics on one screen—but it’s just too much.

These reports are also buggy. If you click on the green box for any page, you get a menu. The “Highlight traffic through here” works, but the “Explore traffic through here” almost never works. It’s supposed to remove everything but traffic that flows through that page.

These reports show a very high-level look at the top highways and traffic paths. If you didn’t know this already, that could be useful, but I’ve never done any detailed analysis from this.

A useful alternative: Navigation Summaries

Go to the specific page in the All Pages report and choose Navigation Summary. Here you can see, at the page level, where visitors came from and where they went. It’s an incredibly useful report, answering some of the most important questions about user experience:

• What is the most-clicked item in your navigation?
• Which items in your navigation never get clicked?
• Are there little things that get clicked a lot?
• What percentage of visitors click on the big call to action?

If the biggest, most prominent navigation item is clicked on by less than 1% of visitors to your homepage, you have some options: Relabel it, move it or remove it.

It’s ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍřt Analysis, Not Reporting

This is the fundamental difference between good and great marketers. Some believe that reports are inherently useful, but they’re not. A report is only valuable if it has a specific utility in that moment and if it’s applied for a purpose.

Reports don’t affect marketing outcomes, only actions do. Put down the pizza scissors, ask a question, find an answer and take action.

The post The 3 Least Useful Metrics in Analytics and What to Check Instead appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

When I recently asked a friend of mine what her 13-year-old daughter might want for a gift, she responded, “Pretty much anything that we liked in the 1980s is perfect.” From hair scrunchies to slap bracelets, it seems we should have saved our accessories over the past several decades. In fact, there are many brands experiencing a resurgence of their past popularity and familiarity. Some of this is due in part to the symbiotic relationship between brands and the media.

If you ask a teen where this ’80s craze came from, they typically have one answer: “Stranger Things.” Part of the appeal of the wildly popular Netflix series is the homage it pays to the decade of excess. Featuring brands, clothing and even slang that reminds many of us of our own youth, the show somehow makes our kids nostalgic for an era that existed far before they did. From Eggo waffles (which didn’t entirely disappear over the past few decades) to front-pleated pants (which thankfully did), there is a host of brands and products featured in the show. As parents exclaim, “I remember that!” kids are searching on their phone for where to buy it.

This symbiosis is manifesting itself in myriad ways in the “real world” as brands scramble to keep up with new demand that media has created. Partnerships between well-known brands and Stranger Things have popped up everywhere, including a sold-out special edition and a featuring 1980s design elements. Other brands have jumped in on the Stranger Things phenomenon despite not having been featured on the show. Brands like  leveraged their popularity in the ’80s and popularity of the show to promote themselves. If you can’t have Dustin’s hair, you can grow it on your very own Chia.

Often mocked for its flamboyance and over-the-top everything, many left their Chia pets and the ’80s behind at a dead run. Products that were popular at the time lost their appeal, dragging with them baggage from an unfashionable era. The fact that big hair, crop tops and shoulder pads can be fashionable again just shows the undeniable power of the media to revive pieces of the past. “Old” brands and styles are experiencing a wonderful renaissance.

So how can brands capitalize on trends like this? There are a few things you can do to stay on top of the powerful influence that pop culture media has on consumer preference and behavior.

1. Broaden Your Outlook

Take a look at what’s rocking the cultural boat. You may not be a Stranger Things fan, but you should at least be aware of the show’s existence and popularity. Try to stay up to date on what’s popular, influential and happening in culture. śŮ´Ç˛Ô’t limit yourself to just media. Take a look at all aspects of culture from popular shows on Netflix to who or what sent shockwaves across the floor at the Met Gala.

2. Ask Your Kids (Or Your Friend’s Kids)

What are they watching, playing or singing? Kids have their finger on the pulse of everything that is new (and new again). Ask them what’s popular among their friends and why. Why do they like it? What makes it interesting to them?

3. Leverage “Ranking” Resources

Use collected data and lists to give you a window into what’s happening. Amazon ranks the tops toys of the year. Google can tell you the most searched words. These rankings can give you an idea of what is having the most influence and holding the most attention.

Using these techniques can help give insight into what’s influencing how people think, feel and act. This knowledge, combined with the strengths of your brand, could help you find an interesting and exciting space to explore. Who knows? Maybe you could be the next Dustin Chia Pet.

Photo by Thibault Penin on .

The post The Symbiotic Relationship Between Brands and Media appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

The data and insights industry can seem almost invisible. It’s tucked behind marketing and business decisions, providing proof points for new products and services, for governments and businesses alike. But this behind-the-scenes industry—valued at $80 billion globally—would be the 67th richest country by global domestic product and is worth almost twice as much as the film industry’s global box office value.

In many ways, it’s unsurprising that an industry built on consumers—their perceptions and behaviors—reflects the characteristics and influences of the consumer world. The same innovations transforming the way organizations provide better and more efficient services to the public are also driving change within the insights industry—and the shift has been rapid.

For the first time, in this year’s ESOMAR Global Market Research report, those innovative methodologies (big data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, do-it-yourself services, text and advanced analytics, etc.) are valued at the same amount as the originally defined market research sector (online and offline qualitative and quantitative, brand trackers, focus groups, etc.). In fact, 2019 is forecast to be the first year that these new methodologies will exceed the value of the traditional market research sector.

This certainly feels like a watershed moment for the data and insights industry. Heightened trade sensitivity, commercial tariff brinkmanship, currency volatility and unpredictable geopolitical conditions have slowed global growth in many sectors, including conventional market research. An initially healthy-seeming 2.1% growth in the sector reveals a more stagnant picture once inflation is factored in, reversing the trend to a slightly negative 0.3% decline. However, the maturing data analytics and new methodology counterpart bucked these trends with a remarkable increase of 10% based on the previous year.

It’s astonishing to witness the hardships of one half of the industry in contrast with the buoyancy of the other. Yet both are devoted to the same basic activity: analyzing data in order to provide contextualized insights and facilitate better decision-making. If the goal is comparable, then what are the reasons for the conventional sector reporting a net decrease of 0.3%, while the data analytics and insights counterpart reports an increase of more than 10%?

There are numerous reasons for this; the growth of tech-enabled systems, automation and differing definitions of what is and isn’t included in those sectors are but a few contributing factors. What is clear is that the industry is evolving and transforming, and that investment in market and consumer intelligence is on the rise.

Implications for the U.S.

The U.S. is the largest market of data and insights in the world. For the conventionally defined market research sector, North America accounts for 45% of turnover, followed by all of Europe at 35%. We also suspect that the U.S. holds a larger share of the research performed in data and analytics. Throughout the years, the U.S. has been one of the most dynamic and resilient global markets. When looking at the expanded top 10 global companies (both traditional market research firms and newer data and analytics companies) in terms of revenue, five of the 10 are headquartered in the U.S.

But there is an underlying story to the top 10 traditional market research organizations. Four out of the top 10 companies signaled a reverse in growth between 2017 and 2018. There can be many reasons for that, but it does fit with the growing industry trend of specialization. As brands bring more insight functions in-house, there is a greater demand for specialization in insight and analytics companies, whether in methodology, vertical sectors or data sets (think big data sets or passive measurement). These companies are often smaller and more agile than their larger counterparts. Smaller boutique agencies, and those exploding out of the tech sector, are driving innovation in data and insight.

For marketers and insights teams in the U.S., it can be beneficial to explore the new perspectives these companies provide to solve business problems, while balancing the new with the reliability and tried-and-tested work of the larger generalist agencies. Although North America is a vital hub for innovation in data and insight, incredible tech-driven transformations in data are happening all over the world. Insight is being disrupted by companies across Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Because we exist in an always-on, tech-enabled global economy, it’s as easy for a New York-based brand to work with an agency in Portugal as it is with one in Chicago.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

With the traditional market research sector facing a decline for the first time in some years, and with an ascending tech-driven data and insights sector, does that mean we’re looking at the start of the slow death of traditional market research? We don’t think so.

A huge part of this new sector has been created by our ever-increasing digital fingerprint. Our behaviors—what we think, feel, say and do—are being recorded digitally. From this, a hosepipe of data companies emerged to analyze the increasing volumes of data to reveal key patterns, trends and associations. This has undoubtedly been key to the expansion of the industry and the delivery of new actionable insights at scale over the past few years. But there’s still a vital role for traditional market research to play.

Big data, social media measurement and other forms of passive analytics only tell one side of the story. Just because something is measurable doesn’t mean that it can be applied to key business questions. The value of insight is getting behind the data and looking at perceptions and motivations. Big data can sometimes seem adrift, floating all around us, untethered by context. The problem is that while big data is sizeable, it can also be thin. It hasn’t been the silver bullet that some commentators expected. When combined with other methods, qualitative research in particular—or “thick” data, if you will—then you can really start building valuable and strategic insights and informing better decisions. Providing context is where the traditional market research sector excels.

That’s not to say that newer methodologies are all based on the analysis of big data. Technological advancements such as automation and AI are providing opportunities to revolutionize how we conduct and structure traditional market research methodologies, but they’re based in the theory and practice of decades of statistical and modeling work—the very epitome of conventional research.

Another consideration is around data ethics and transparency. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation has been introduced, while in the U.S. we see the introduction of the California Consumer Privacy Act and the beginning of a lengthy discussion around a federal privacy bill. With the growing uncertainty of third-party cookies, it’s become increasingly apparent that success is not defined by the amount of data gathered, but what organizations can do around compliance. In the traditional research sphere, a core pillar in the collection and treatment of data has been data ethics and transparency. This pillar has created a set of checks and balances that’s allowed us to stay self-regulated and offers protection to both consumers and companies. Whatever happens with passive data collection, the traditional research industry will be asking questions and providing insights for better business decisions.

For marketers, the expanded research universe is a dynamic and valuable sector. Insights can be generated with speed and efficiency never seen before, and the U.S. is a vital part of that ecosystem. The Global Market Research report shows an industry that progresses, transforms and impacts businesses across sectors like no other. Whatever the future holds, data and insight will continue to be the keystone for marketing decisions.

The post The Global State of Data and Insights: Emerging Technologies Maturing appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

“I know our messaging needs help, but how can I prove the ROI?”

I’m asked fairly often how to quantify the value of investing in creating a more compelling brand message. At a granular level, the question is repeated regarding investment in creating higher-quality ‘content.’

These questions usually come from people who themselves have no doubt about the value of a clearer story. CMOs and other marketing leaders who came up through a content marketing or product marketing path understand this need in their bones. By the time we start talking, they have usually experienced firsthand the pain of trying to create a high-quality content stream or grow pipeline without having the company aligned on a clear core message. The question is really a plea to help them justify the investment of money and executive time to their colleagues.

I get it. We’ve long since moved from “mad men” to “metrics mavens.” Over just the decades of my own career, marketing has become far more quantitative: click-throughs, pipeline conversion, return on advertising spend. Data, data everywhere. Compared to the apparent precision of these metrics, measuring the value of brand message can feel very “squishy”—even if getting it right is essential to driving the rest.

Messaging is innately subjective, even if a lot of my own work centers on guiding that subjectivity into a structure. But the effects of getting it right can at least partially be measured. As an analogy, it’s hard to objectively measure the catchiness of a pop song—it’s something you feel in the listening. But streams and downloads can be quantified. The same marketing machinery applied to a song will yield very different results.

With that in mind, here’s a partial guide to quantifying the return on investment for clear and compelling messaging. The good news is that, because a clear brand story affects so many parts of a business, even relatively imprecise measurement often yields a strong business case.

Set the Bar High

My recommended first step in building a dollars-and-cents business case for a messaging makeover is, oddly enough, to make building that case harder. Rather than trying to create an illusion of quantitative precision, I suggest setting the ROI standard so high that even less precise estimates of return still yield a good decision.

When quantifying something that is difficult to measure, it’s a good general practice to set the standard higher to account for a margin of error. A 20% ROI might be acceptable on a pay-per-click ad campaign, where that percentage can be precisely measured. In contrast, investing in core messaging should be held to a higher standard.

For example, when clients are considering whether to invest in a message matrix process, I suggest that they determine whether it is likely to yield 500% their investment. This ROI standard is so high that it can reasonably be considered to overwhelm any imprecision in measuring message value. If the measurement is off and the downstream effects of more compelling messaging “only” reach 300% ROI, this still exceeds the return of most other available investment options. If, on the other hand, the potential value of a clearer brand message does not seem likely to yield a multiple of their investment, I advise potential clients to spend their resources elsewhere.

Fortunately, in many cases the return is in fact much higher. Let’s look at the elements that lead to meeting this high standard.

The ‘One More Deal’ Rule of Thumb

In B2B businesses in particular, the value of each additional customer or transaction can be quite high. The scale of the business determines whether “quite high” means $50,000, $100,000 or $1 million in revenue. In any of these cases, though, it’s reasonable to ask oneself, “Would a clearer story get us at least one more deal?”

Of course, whether a more compelling message would secure one (or many) more deals is a subjective judgement. However, it’s a judgment that executives considering a messaging exercise usually find very easy to make. If the company has lost deals it should have won, and if the losses were due to poor communication rather than poor product fit, then a clearer message is likely to help. If the answer is “yes” and the average deal value is high enough for a few incremental deals to meet the 500% messaging ROI bar, the business case is made.

Percentage of Sales

Of course, a clearer brand or product message should affect far more than one additional deal. When a business is in a period of transformation—be it turnaround or rapid growth—a more compelling story can produce a substantial lift in overall revenue. For some companies, re-messaging can even be the foundation of turnaround from sales decline to growth.

Messaging never works in isolation, but it affects almost every other aspect of the business. From internal alignment, to increased conversion rate on marketing campaigns, to increased and improved press, the effects of a clear and compelling story are pervasive.

One example I’ve experienced is the transformation of European meteorological services company . While the company transformed many aspects of its business, its CEO, Donat Rétif, cited re-messaging as the foundation of the company’s turnaround. “[We were] actually declining in revenue for over two years, and within six months we’ve been able to find the inflection point and grow again with almost double digits over the last four quarters, so it has been something that has been absolutely sustainable,” he says.

What percentage of sales lift can message clarity provide for your company? Your mileage will vary and it’s best to be very conservative in your estimates. Some clients will create a spreadsheet that estimates increases in pipeline, conversion percentage and leads derived from increased publicity to arrive at an overall revenue lift estimate. Others simply make a best judgment estimate, then cut that estimate by 30% or 50% to create a conservative business case.

Lifetime Message Value

Like capital equipment, a brand message is a durable asset that yields value over its useful life. Any estimate of ROI should include all of the positive effects cited above over a period of years. In fact, it’s common for the effects of improved messaging to increase after year one, since it takes substantial time for the new message to imprint on the market.

Brands and their value can, of course, persist for decades or longer. But in rapidly changing fields such as technology, I’d suggest assuming a shorter asset life. The refresh cycle I’ve seen in my practice is about two years. This isn’t to say that your core brand will completely change after two years, but that it seems to be the median period for doing a review and possibly a refresh.

Because a refresh means a new investment, for ROI purposes two years is a conservative interval for estimating the value of your initial messaging investment. Expecting more pipeline or higher conversions when your message is clearer? Multiply those annual estimates by two years for a conservative estimate of lifetime ROI.

Quantifying the Qualitative

As you can see, my approach quantifying the value of brand messaging is hardly exact. It rests instead on the fact that story clarity affects so many aspects of a business that even the most conservative estimates often yield an indisputable business case.

Do you have thoughts for how to better measure the “return on message?” Perhaps ideas for a handy messaging ROI calculator?

Illustration courtesy of .

The post A Basic Guide to Quantifying ‘Return on Message’ appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Targeted ads are nothing new. Companies are afforded easy access to your web browsing and social media data, so it’s commonplace to visit, say, an online retailer and find their ads following you around the internet.

But a new deal between three of the biggest cable operators will pull targeted advertising onto your television screen. that National Cable Communications (NCC), a company owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox, is about to offer advertisers the ability to play specific ads in specific households based on information pulled from cable registration forms. Companies previously had access to general location data, but they may now access information such as viewers’ exact addresses and average household income. This could influence which car ads are served to a household, for example—luxury sedan versus budget compacts. Such targeted advertising can be as granular as showing a different ad to your next door neighbor.

According to the —NCC plans to rebrand as Ampersand—those who work with NCC have access to 85 million households in the U.S., with 40 million of those marked as proprietary. Speaking to Marketplace Tech Blogs earlier this year, warned that the shared data won’t stop with your registration form. “In some cases, if you have an internet service bundled with your TV service, they can also track your browsing as well, what websites you visit,” he says. “If you have a cell phone service that’s also connected, they can know where you’re going out in the world and be able to take all that information into account to target you with ads on TV.”

Speaking to Marketplace Tech Blogs earlier this year, warned that the shared data won’t stop with your registration form. “In some cases, if you have an internet service bundled with your TV service, they can also track your browsing as well, what websites you visit,” he says. “If you have a cell phone service that’s also connected, they can know where you’re going out in the world and be able to take all that information into account to target you with ads on TV.”

NCC CEO Nicolle Pangis further adds that companies can tell when you turn your TV on and off, therefore informing which commercials you have already seen.

“We’re very careful to be privacy-compliant, because of the nature of the data,” . “We’re putting that data together to be able to use it both on the linear and addressable sides of the business.”

Small-screen marketers can expect access to this data soon, although it’s uncertain exactly how much will become available. , which explains how they collect personal information, states that it doesn’t apply to “data collected through Apersand’s advertising services and technology.” A privacy policy directly addressing NCC’s new TV monitoring could not be located.

The post Cable Companies to Offer Viewer-Specific Ads appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

The latest Marketers’ Confidence Index report, released in July 2019, demonstrates virtually no change since revenue growth performance, investment climate and customer spending, among other metrics, were last measured in January. The MCI itself dropped only a single point, from 122 to 121. Across the board, however, the outlook for marketers remains positive.

These results are drawn from the Marketers’ Confidence Index, a semiannual survey sponsored by the ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř and to determine the state of marketing, as told by ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř newsletter subscribers and followers. This year, 207 respondents were included, with most coming from the VP/director or manager levels of organizations—33% and 32%, respectively. More than half of these executives come from companies with 500 or fewer employees, and 31% practice both B2B and B2C work in equal parts.

The survey further dives into how those organizations are spending their marketing dollars. Currently, 27% of budgets are allocated for creative and 22% goes to media placement. Those two arenas would also see projected increases in spending should marketing budgets increase. Sponsorship was found to be the area most likely to see a decrease should budgets be slashed, by a rate of 27%.

Curiously, while customer spending demonstrated an incremental increase over the last six months—from 35% to 39%—marketing budgets have increased at lesser rates, dropping to 28% from 33%.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to remain optimistic. Revenue growth has continued to improve, with 11% of respondents claiming they are faring far better than their competitors. Changes to all numbers across the board are still far less significant than when the Marketers’ Confidence Index sank from 131 to 122 between July 2018 and January 2019.

Participants also shared some of the most exciting developments in their field, which included marketing automation via AI, targeted metrics, expanded digital marketing possibilities and a shifting technology landscape.

Download the full survey here.

Illustration courtesy of .

The post Marketers’ Confidence Index Demonstrates Consistent Results appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Last year, the world’s leading consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, : “To put it bluntly, much of the $5.7 trillion global grocery industry is in trouble.”

The report, “Reviving grocery retail: Six imperatives,” continued just as pessimistically, despite the grocery sector’s top line of recent steady growth. “Although it has grown at about 4.5% annually over the past decade, that growth has been highly uneven—and has masked deeper problems. For grocers in developed markets, both growth and profitability have been on a downward trajectory due to higher costs, falling productivity, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. One result: a massive decline in publicly listed grocers’ economic value.”

McKinsey went on to predict a coming era in grocery marked by mergers and acquisitions. From a customer experience standpoint, many grocers are now indistinguishable from one another. Mandy Rassi, Kroger’s head of brand building, this “sea of sameness” in grocery retail advertising, the quickest escape from which starts and ends with rethinking customer experience.

Kroger’s new agency of record, , is its first in its 130-year history. The agency’s challenged with “developing a refreshed, stronger brand identity” for the supermarket and retailer giant. For clues as to the direction in which Kroger may be taking its advertising, check out the 12-minute “” comedy video released on Funny or Die that features actors Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard cooking a meal with ingredients purchased at the grocer.

In-store distinctions exist as well. In June, the latest version of the reports that just 13% of Americans limit their food shopping to a single retailer. A typical household makes 1.6 trips to a grocery store each week, spending a weekly average of $113.50. By the end of the month, an American shopper will visit an average of 4.4 different stores in one month, up from 4.1 in last year’s report. For millennials and Generation Z, that number is even higher, recording an average of five and 6.2 different retailers per month, respectively.

However, most shoppers (92%) say that they have a single favorite store where they do the bulk of their shopping. This is a place they know by name and where they spend the lion’s share of their grocery budget. For 49% of shoppers, this place will be a supermarket. But FMI researchers have identified four additional purchasing behaviors that cause all shoppers to look past their preferred store. These behaviors are informed by experience—people want different in-store experiences at different times.

First is the stock-up strategy, which FMI classifies as separate from regular bulk shopping. Rather, it denotes times when shoppers are looking to replenish household staples intended to last weeks or months. Shoppers will usually perform this type of strategy at warehouse, supercenter or discount stores.

Then there are specialty-item visits, undertaken when consumers are seeking unique items or brands that are specific to one location. Trader Joe’s is a cornerstone for these trips, offering an abundance of special products that its devotees cannot live without. Yet another type of visit is driven by the pursuit of quality, which can draw thrifty shoppers into more expensive environs to hunt for premium produce, meat or seafood. Finally, there is the need-it-now shopping behavior for harried households that need a basic item or two from the most convenient locations.

Shoppers may believe that warehouses are the best places to buy in bulk, but not if they need items in a hurry. For that, they choose the closest, most efficiently organized or most advanced self-checkout options. Pricy joints might scare away budget-conscious consumers, only to lure them back when they are shopping for a special occasion. For everything else, there’s the mainstay supermarket. The type of experience shoppers require determines where they will go.

Grocers need not become all things to all people. Struggling stores would be wise to concentrate on a single area, and all grocers should take care that they don’t fall too far behind in any single category. As Steve Markenson, FMI’s director of research, writes, “Perhaps the question retailers should ask themselves is, ‘How can I get a larger share of my grocery shopper’s spend?’” The operative word is “my”—grocers need to define what experience their core buyer needs and cater to it.

Another way to get a handle on customer experience divorced from shopper strategy is to view customer satisfaction scores, benchmark them by industry and break them down by company. This method, albeit indirect, reveals where customers do and don’t love to shop.

The has tracked consumer happiness by industry on a nationwide basis for the past quarter-century. Scores are issued on a 100-point scale and based on a proprietary calculation that factors in perceived quality, customer expectations, perceived value, customer complaints and customer loyalty. Data is collected annually in the form of 180,000 interviews. Separate studies in the Journal of Marketing have found that a portfolio of stocks chosen on high-ranking ACSI companies .

“Customer satisfaction is a leading indicator of company financial performance,” says David VanAmburg, managing director of the ACSI. “Companies with high ACSI scores tend to have better-performing stocks than those of companies with low scores. Additionally, changes in customer satisfaction impact the willingness to buy. The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they’ll become a repeat customer and thus help grow a business.”

In 2018, breweries were the most beloved industry with a score of 85, while cable companies garnered the least love of all with a score of 62. Supermarkets found themselves in the middle with a score of 78.

Looking within the supermarket sector, Trader Joe’s leads the pack with a score of 86. The brand goes all out with its experience, decorating stores with bright colors to fit its nautical theme, training Hawaiian-shirt-clad staff to engage and open any products customers may want to sample, and providing a cornucopia of goodies you can’t get anywhere else.

Wegmans clocks in at No. 2 with an overall score of 85. The northeastern luxury grocery has become the stuff of legend with its assortment of prepared foods, tech integration, locally sourced produce (some from its own farm) and happy workers.

Southeastern chain Publix places at No. 3. More of a conventional supermarket than the top two stores, employee-owned Publix nevertheless wins accolades for its helpful, knowledgeable, well-trained workforce; regionally attuned bakery and deli selections; and competitive prices.

Aldi, a no-frills hard discounter not known for providing an opulent shopping experience, is No. 4. This aligns with the theory that different purchase behaviors drive what makes a good customer experience. Shoppers who want unique, quirky products will find satisfaction in Trader Joe’s; those seeking a fast, affordable stop will be pleased with Aldi.

“Customer experience is the most important part of any campaign for a retailer’s execution,” says Karen Sales, an independent consultant and former Albertsons vice president of shopper marketing. “If you put the shopper first in all of your marketing, operations and merchandising efforts, you have the best chance of winning in today’s environment. Make it easy for the shopper. Make it friendly, local, personalized and at a good value. The grocery stores that can bring those four things together have the best chance of succeeding and winning more of each shopper’s dollar.”

The search for the right elixir has created some truly unique offerings. Giant Food Stores, a chain of 172 stores throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic, is unleashing googly-eyed helper robots to search for spills. The New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose in July, tweeting, “My grocery store got a robot that is supposed to monitor the aisles, but it can’t get to the aisles because people just stand around staring at it.”

My grocery store got a robot that is supposed to monitor the aisles, but it can’t get to the aisles because people just stand around staring at it.

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose)

In the southwest, H-E-B—America’s 15th-largest privately held company—is equipped with various climate-controlled sections capable of storing frozen foods, produce and dry goods. Kroger is investing heavily in a subsidiary called that’s charged with developing next-gen tech for its own supermarkets and to license to other stores. Elsewhere, Pittsburgh-based Giant Eagle is experimenting with a , and Albertsons is adding an to boost purchase frequency.

Sales, who left Albertsons in May to launch her own consulting service after four and a half years with the supermarket, also gives praise to old-school promotions, such as games and loyalty programs. Albertsons has used a for 11 years, in which shoppers collect game pieces by making grocery purchases, then match the pieces with spaces on a Monopoly game board for a chance to win cash, grocery products and other prizes. This program has been updated to include an app.

Looking ahead, Sales points to digital shelf tags and displays as the new untapped frontier in grocery. Digital shelf displays rethink the shelf space between rows of products, typically filled in with physical price tags. They replace the analog tags with a digital display that flashes dynamic advertising and nutritional information to passersby and their smart phones.

“The technology, cost of equipment and Wi-Fi solutions are now at a point where scale is possible,” Sales says. “Along with e-commerce, this will be the biggest game-changer in grocery and mass retail over the next few years.”

Aldi’s aisles are wide, the assortment is well-placed, checkout moves swiftly and the prices are cheap. The small inconveniences customers endure would be unheard of at other stores. First, there’s the requirement of depositing a quarter in a shopping cart to unlock a basket (customers get the quarter back when they return the cart). Aldi’s product assortment is smaller and departments are limited to what gets delivered in trucks. There’s no bakery cranking out fresh pastries, no deli assembling sandwiches. Patrons are expected to do their own bagging with totes that they’ve brought, or else pay extra for in-store bags.

Once dismissed as the bottom-feeders of the grocery ecosystem, deep discounters such as Aldi have ramped up quality while proudly wearing their reputation for low prices as a badge of honor, refashioning themselves into formidable competition in the process. In Germany, Aldi enjoys a market share between 20% and 50%, according to McKinsey.

Closer to home, Aldi is angling to do something similar. The chain is amid an ambitious five-year plan to transform itself into one of America’s largest grocers. IBISWorld estimates that Aldi’s U.S. revenue totaled $13.5 billion in 2017, only about one-tenth of Kroger’s $97 billion. To close that gap, the company will open 800 new stores in the U.S. and remodel older ones while upgrading its assortment. By 2022, the company projects to reach a store count of 2,500 locations, more than any other grocer besides Kroger and Walmart.

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, was so impressed by the performance of hard discounters that he made them the subject of his fourth book, Retail Disruptors: The Spectacular Rise and Impact of the Hard Discounters. He sees Aldi and similar stores as the main disruptor in the grocery world at the moment, with an impact more outsized than that of online channels.

“There are very few national chains,” Steenkamp says of the U.S. market. “Most are regional. Many of those chains are not particularly strong, meaning that consumer satisfaction with them is low. Perceptions of key store attributes is low.”

Joining Aldi is Lidl, a German-based hard discounter. The chain first made waves in the U.S. four years ago when it announced that it would enter the American market. The first stores opened in 2017, and there were plans to launch 100 by the summer of 2018. However, only 68 U.S. locations are in operation as of the end of June. Steenkamp admits that Lidl’s American invasion was fraught with missteps—the director of Lidl’s parent company called the rollout a “catastrophe.” But where Lidl has taken hold, it’s had an impact. Steenkamp reports that retailers operating near Lidl stores must drop prices on their private labels by an average of 10% to remain competitive.

The discounters are adding pressure to what is already under siege. Supermarkets may never face existential obsolescence the way newspapers or coal mining might—we all need to eat—but the options for food shopping at non-traditional grocers have never been more numerous. If left unchecked, $200 billion to $700 billion could shift to discount, online and nongrocery channels by 2026, according to McKinsey industry analysis.

In the FMI report that outlines different experiences customers seek when grocery shopping, Aldi arguably makes a strong showing in three of the five categories: The chain has become the preferred bulk destination for many shoppers. Though it can’t offer the large quantities of a Costco or BJ’s Wholesale Club, it doesn’t charge an annual membership and its low prices encourage shoppers to stockpile nonperishables. Finally, its limited assortment and barebones checkout possess obvious appeal when shoppers shift into need-it-now mode.

“Sometimes, it’s nice to shop at a store and find some new things. There is some shopping experience there,” Steenkamp says. “But there is another type of shopping experience, which is also highly valuable: no hassle. Get in, get out.”

When it comes to quality or specialty items, Aldi will be never be considered the top of the line. But it has made strides with its private-label items, which now rival or surpass the competition, Steenkamp says. “The quality of the store-brand products offered by Aldi, Lidl and Trader Joe’s is better than what Walmart and Foodline offer,” he says. “They are not catching up—they are better.”

For years, industry-watchers have expected a great online shakeup to mark the next evolution of grocery shopping, but there’s little such evidence. The McKinsey report identified Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods to be a game-changer, but there is cause for moderation when assessing the immediate future of e-commerce. The U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report notes that while millennials make up the largest portion of online grocery shoppers, their numbers have remained flat for the past two years, suggesting that the growing acceptance of online grocery shopping in Gen X and Gen Z might plateau as well.

Steve Dennis, founder and president of SageBerry Consulting, sees a customer experience problem. Grocery is lumped in as part of retail, but food shopping is vastly different than buying clothes or hardware. This is apparent in online shopping: Traditional e-commerce design doesn’t lend itself to grocery shopping.

“In most parts of e-commerce, you’re usually going to buy an item or two,” Dennis says. “If you’re buying multiple items on Amazon, you’re usually on a mission. Grocery, to me, is not a search-driven business, it’s more of a browsing-driven business. … It’s a hassle to put together a shopping basket on most grocery websites.”

Delivery itself is also a hurdle. McKinsey points to the cost of delivery infrastructure as a thorny and expensive issue. If grocers aren’t willing to find partners or develop their own advanced analytics, warehouse relocation and automation system, online delivery will never reach the point of workability.

FMI reports that 17% of grocery deliveries are made through standard package-shipping services, while another 17% are set aside at kiosks for consumers to pick up themselves. Thirteen percent are delivered by a store’s specialized delivery service, and 8% of online grocery purchases are delivered as part of recurring subscriptions. The mishmash of last-mile solutions explains why center-store goods, such as salty snacks and other longer-shelf-life items, dominate online grocery purchases. Sixty-nine percent of consumers say regular supermarkets do a better job of preserving freshness than online delivery.

What’s a grocery store marketer to do? The first step is to embrace either end, or both, of a stratifying marketplace. Major middle-class grocers might be unique with their “sea of sameness” conundrum, but they are far from the only retail sector that is seeing the market gravitate away from the middle. Deloitte calls this phenomenon “the great bifurcation,” and Dennis has studied it extensively.

“You see this spilt between retailers. On the higher end, more experimental, unique product retailers are doing well,” Dennis says, adding that toward the bottom of the spectrum are the Aldis of the world. “But the folks that are in the middle that aren’t particularly convenient or low-cost—or they aren’t particularly high-interest or high-service—are sunk.”

Grocers looking to avoid the drain must decide if they want to go bougie or go budget. There are a few options in each playbook, which Steenkamp calls offensive or defensive.

“Defensive is touching the price of the shopping basket,” Steenkamp says, the most obvious tactic being to slash prices and bleed your competitors before they bleed you. Introducing a line of store-brand economy products is another lever to pull. The most well-heeled and far-reaching initiative is to spin off a separate brand of hard discounters. There’s no U.S. model for this route thus far, but iconic British grocer Tesco launched a cheaper version of itself last year called Jack’s, which advertises itself as “the cheapest in town.”

Marketers need not limit themselves to a smashmouth race to the bottom. They can go on the offensive by adding value to the shopping experience. In-store elements—such as a unique assortment, extra service, in-store experience and curbside pickup—are all proven options that attract most shoppers at least once or twice a month.

Above all, Dennis encourages experimentation. “Too many companies, not just the grocery industry, have been afraid to fail,” he says. “There’s a big process to decide what to invest in and things get averaged out and become not that interesting. If it turns out it doesn’t work, then you have to go back to the drawing board and you’ve lost a year and a half or two years.”

The post Shopping for Grade-A Grocers appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Since 2017, my colleagues and I have conducted a large-scale survey of more than 7,900 B2B customers. B2B managers in our survey have rated more than 600 companies, including many Fortune 500 firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Dow, Caterpillar, UPS and 3M. The survey participants are B2B customers at all levels, including managers, directors, vice presidents and CEOs. In this benchmark survey, respondents rate their satisfaction with eight areas of their overall experience: sales and bidding, communication, pricing and billing, product or service quality, project management, safety, ongoing service and support, and sustainability and social responsibility. We can statistically ascertain the importance that customers put on each of the eight areas, but also various sub-components of each area. The results provide important insights for B2B companies to improve their pricing strategies.

B2B Customers See Price as a Small Component of the Total Value Proposition

Among the eight areas evaluated by B2B customers, pricing and billing accounted for 9% of customer value, with ongoing service and support (34%), product or service quality (17%) and communication (15%) representing two-thirds of value. Yet many sales executives believe that price accounts for most customer value that they provide. Nothing could be further from reality: Although pricing may be important for the procurement department, it may not hold the same importance for other stakeholders in a client organization.

The latter stakeholders may value communication, ongoing service and support, and the quality of the offering. When asked about price, savvy salespeople start by enumerating the total value that their offering provides and then end with the price. Inexperienced salespeople start and end with price, extolling how their price is lower than specific competitors.

B2B Customers Prefer a Fair Price Over Lowest Price

Technological innovation in the B2B sector is typically geared toward increasing product quality and lowering price. Companies lower price to gain market share with the goal of rationalizing their product costs over a larger customer base.

Our study results refute the logic of this approach. Customers in our survey rated their satisfaction with getting a fair price as well as the lowest price. Surprisingly, getting a fair price is three times more important to respondents than getting the lowest price. We have found this same result in many B2B companies involving software, parts distribution, oil field services, engineering and construction, and mobile-office units.

Fair price means that you are not priced at the extreme (highest or lowest), the pricing structure is easy to understand and the price is closer to industry-sector average (slightly higher is OK). For example, the price for property-management services for single-family homes in a Houston suburb ranges from 3-10% with an average of 5%. By offering a flexible pricing structure in the 4-6% range, a management company was able to increase the count of properties under management from 80 to almost 150 within the span of a few months.

B2B Customers Want Pricing and Billing to Be Managed as a Process

At retail stores, customers choose a product, make a payment, get a receipt and walk out. The receipt serves as a clear reminder of the price paid and makes the bottom-line price relevant to customers. B2B transactions are different: While pricing is relevant during the bidding and procurement stage, the billing process becomes important during the project execution phase. Over time, the customer expects the billing and invoicing to accurately and clearly document what part of the contract has been delivered, how it was priced, account for any variance from the original contract and so on. The billing statement becomes an ongoing communication tool for aligning customer and supplier expectations. Our study participants rated the clarity of billing statements, accuracy in pricing and ease of understanding pricing as some of the most important factors driving their satisfaction.

In one example, a waste-management company serving retailers and chain restaurants was losing clients despite low price and timely service. In-depth interviews with recently defected clients revealed dissatisfaction with the billing and invoicing process, not pricing. The billing statement did not clearly indicate what each charge on the invoice represented. Customers could not store and search invoices online or get charges broken down for each location. There was no easy way for customers to dispute charges. Once the billing process was overhauled, customer retention increased in a matter of months.

Manage Pricing Holistically for Customers

In a B2B context, price is part of an initial negotiation and purchase. It also provides a forum for managing the give and take between customers and suppliers during consumption. By pricing holistically—going beyond the bottom-line price—suppliers can add value for customers through flexible credit terms, cash discounts, volume discounts, rent-to-own terms and leasing options. Rather than manufacturing and selling multimillion-dollar planes to its clients, Boeing started a leasing company to help smaller airlines afford its aircraft. A valve manufacturer in Texas expanded its market to small- and medium-sized clients by maintaining its original price but supplementing it with a three-month extended payment option to qualified customers.

Suppliers can also extract value by pricing holistically. Frequently, many suppliers price the core product or service but give away many services for free. At the very least, you should price the entire offering to include any additional services and components. These can include service calls, on-site repairs or add-on consulting. Later, even if you decide to provide some of these for free, the client can quantify the value. As the relationship evolves, some or all of the additional components could be provided for an agreed-upon price.

What Now?

Pricing B2B offerings is a complex endeavor that should go beyond determining the bottom-line price. Fixating on the final price is a mistake in B2B contexts because customers view pricing as a broader concept. To meet customer expectations, you must realize that pricing is one component of a larger value proposition. You should manage your price holistically rather than striving to be the lowest-price provider. Incorporating the billing and invoicing process over time can be even more important to customers than getting the lowest price.

The billing and invoicing process can become a valuable tool to manage client expectations, build stronger relationships and even upsell to customers. Accomplishing these pricing objectives requires close collaboration among the sales, finance, accounting, customer service and commercial departments of any B2B company.

The post A Better Way to Price B2B Offerings appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.

Imagine that you’re waiting in a doctor’s office. You may feel sick, worried or in pain, but you know that your medical information will be safe—the doctor is legally obligated to protect your data. You feel comfortable that your information won’t be used nefariously or even questionably.

The term “online privacy” means different things to different people, says Jenna Jacobson, assistant professor of retail management at Ryerson University. Jacobson—an author of a 2019 paper titled “” published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services—says that while it’s perfectly legal for marketers to collect, analyze and use publicly available data, brands don’t often consider whether they’re making consumers feel comfortable.

The information you provide at the doctor’s office is private, but what about that which you publicly post to social media? The premise changes: Most people openly post but aren’t sure how brands use their likes, statuses and photos. For such an opaque part of the marketing process, the stakes are high. A found that 65% of people don’t know which brands are using their data, while 65% said that they’d stop doing business with a brand that was dishonest about how it uses their data. This public data isn’t legally protected, so it’s up to brands to determine how they’ll collect, analyze and use it, often leaving consumers in the dark on their privacy rights.

“I think that there’s a lack of understanding about how social media data can actually be used,” Jacobson says, also noting a lack of professional and organizational norms in marketing and many other professions. “For us, it was important to acknowledge that just because social media data is publicly accessible doesn’t mean that individuals don’t have concerns and feel discomfort with third parties using their data.”

According to Jacobson’s research, the majority of consumers aren’t comfortable with how their data is used. The paper found that 53.1% of consumers are uncomfortable with their data being used for targeted ads, 42.3% are uncomfortable with it being used for opinion-mining and 41.9% are uncomfortable with it being used for customer relations.

This doesn’t mean that consumers want to hide. The paper found that consumers are constantly assessing the benefits and risks of sharing online and managing their data privacy boundaries by considering what they share. They continue sharing because they want the benefits of using social media, whether that benefit is communication with people or being shown something useful they didn’t know about through marketing.

Brands can collect data and use it in a way that helps consumers, but Jacobson says that they often don’t contemplate what consumers could find unsettling. Your doctor isn’t likely to go off on a negative rant about your health to a nurse in front of you—although it’d be legal—because it would likely make you feel terrible. Jacobson says that brands should consider what data practices would make consumers uncomfortable if they found out about them and brainstorm ways to change these practices. The goal should be to build consumer trust in the process and leave them without unpleasant surprises, perhaps by creating guidelines or practices on a business or industry level.

In Jacobson’s paper, she and her co-authors argue that marketing professionals have ethical responsibilities that extend beyond legal requirements. “For social media marketing to be executed effectively and ethically, the recipient of the marketing material—the consumer—needs to be comfortable with the practices,” they write. If consumers discover that a brand is using their data in a way that makes them uncomfortable, they may no longer buy from that brand.

People often think about data ethics in terms of politics. Much of the past few years has been spent debating what’s ethical and unethical when it comes to political data collection and targeted marketing.

Morten Bay, a research fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, had his interest in the topic piqued by observing how ISIS and Russia used social media as something of a virtual warzone. His interests extended into how social media was used during the 2016 presidential campaign, especially the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which President Donald Trump’s campaign leveraged third-party psychometric data—measures of a person’s knowledge, abilities, attitudes and traits—to target individual voters. Some compared this use of data to the microtargeting used by President Barack Obama’s campaigns, but the data procured by Cambridge Analytica was or knowledge that it’d be helping a political campaign, a far cry from collecting publicly available social media data.

Bay wrote a paper—titled “,” published in a special issue of ACM Transactions on Social Computing—arguing under a framework of philosopher John Rawls that using hypertargeting and psychometrics in politics was not ethical, as it blocked out the competing information necessary to a democratic society. In his paper, Bay writes that persuasion on social media is a zero-sum game: “Part of a persuader’s mission is to succeed in presenting information in a way that blocks out competing, contradictive information.”

But hypertargeting is different in commercial use, Bay says, and not exactly unethical. One can argue that people aren’t well-informed enough to know about data mining and targeting in marketing or advertising, he says, but that isn’t necessarily an ethical problem if they aren’t sold a certain product. The Rawlsian framework doesn’t see targeting used in marketing and advertising as unethical, so long as consumers have the chance to both opt in and out—in politics, users can’t opt out, as social media has become a central location for political news and debate.

“I’m not sure we can do anything about it in a commercial sense unless there’s an actual breach of contract,” Bay says. “But on a political level, the stakes are much higher.”

So how can a brand strike a balance between doing something that’s clearly legal and perhaps ethical, but makes consumers feel disconcerted?

Have Clear Policies, But Educate and Empower

Jacobson’s paper finds that it’s necessary to create a clear privacy policy, but that alone isn’t sufficient to make consumers comfortable. After all, .

Jacobson and her co-authors write that brands should “empower users with a higher level of control over what information they want to share, with whom and for what purpose.” Much of this will likely start with education on how brands use consumer data. Although most consumers are uncomfortable with targeting, people are more familiar with targeting than they are of opinion mining or customer relations, two tactics which are more masked and less apparent to the average user. This means that brands have an opportunity to educate consumers about these marketing practices, using education to build comfort.

“Digital literacy will continue to be crucial as technologies evolve and new ways to use individuals’ data emerge,” Jacobson and her co-authors write. “The onus does not only lie with individuals; rather, third parties that use the data need to be held to higher ethical standards.”

Be Transparent

Like Jacobson, Bay believes that it’s up to marketers and advertisers to figure out how they want to represent themselves ethically. Society may tacitly accept current data collection practices—most of society is blissfully ignorant, as Acquia found—but consumers may learn more about these practices and quickly sour on how their data is being used and their privacy invaded. What was once a benign practice could quickly turn cancerous for a brand.

To prevent being caught engaging in something consumers may one day see as unethical, Bay suggests that brands be transparent with how they collect, analyze and use consumer data.

“If you say to people, ‘We would like to give you X opportunity, but it requires us to get your data and perform this analysis on it,’ then people can make up their own minds,” he says. Companies often falter here by telling consumers what data they collect but not how they’ll analyze it, “but as long as they make sure [everything] is transparent and people are informed, [data practices] can never really be completely unethical,” he says.

Do You Need the Data?

Though it may sound counterintuitive for marketers who want to be on the cutting edge of data analysis, Bay says that brands should consider what kind of data they actually need to collect.

“What’s your benefit of actually starting to collect this data?” he says. “Can you actually use it for anything useful? … I would imagine that for 40% or 50% of companies going into this field right now, they’re just doing it because of the hype.”

Consider Becoming a Privacy Champion

Brands have an opportunity to become a champion of data privacy and perhaps win new business.

Jacobson says that she could envision a brand positioning itself as an ethical leader. This would be a challenge for most marketing departments, she says, as being a champion of data privacy would mean a high level of data literacy, something that doesn’t come easily and requires following industry changes. But brands that are outwardly ethical and put consumers’ comfort first could win their trust and increased sales.

Jacobson says that data privacy is constantly evolving­—and it may be the new frontier for ethical practitioners. She sums it up simply: “These ethical practices are good business practices.”

The post Reassuring Consumers on the Use of Their Data appeared first on ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍř.