Wednesday, June 20

Supernova 2007 - Research and Relationships

Moderator from Max Kalhoff, BuzzMetrics
Panel: Aaron Coldiron, Microsoft; Ellen Konar, google; Amy Guggenheim, McKinsey

Perspective - market information business (mostly startups) - market intelligence, market information, innovation. Digital transformation - impacts on these areas.
How marketers create their understanding of customers and prospects - built on a foundation of active participation with the customers and consumers. e.g traditional survey research - challenges of elusive consumers, attention erosion. Traditional market research - interception, interruption, coersion.

Interesting value proposition - much more difficult to do true market research - but with these issues, new opportunities coming up with solutions.

Landscape: Major Powerpoint slide with LOTS of dots - brand association map. Mapped out the major words and maps it out with the most relevant association. Breakdown via competitors, products, related concepts, brand attributes. Nice visualization once you take the time to understand this.

Ten Major Disruptions in Measurement
  1. Rise in Online and Digital - percentage of adults online over 70%
  2. Attention Erosion, Research Adversion - engagement - increasingly becoming an anomoly
  3. Speed of measurement increases
  4. Data commoditizing and democratizing - blogpulse, google Analytics
  5. Passive Behavior and Attention Measurement - hitwise, comscore
  6. Measurement and Analysis of Unstructured Data
  7. Consumer-centric Measurement and Planning - now migrating toward more targeted distinctions (qualitative factors)
  8. Qualitative Comeback/Feedback
  9. Data Integration Comes of Age
  10. Attention-Data Ownership - attentiontrust.org - data following consumers around - trail exists into perpetuity. What becomes the relationship between the marketer and the people formally known as the research subjects?
Question: What do you do? Why are you here?
Ellen: comes from google - started in org research, moved into market research (at the time, was with IBM) - thrilled with getting involved with customers, businesses, etc. Worked at Intel in "traditional" market research - got increasing frustrated with the effectiveness of market research. Fits very well with google's perspective - let customers define the products. Launch products in a "beta phase" and watch their verbal and behavioural feedback.

Amy: McKinsey's Digital Marketing Practice on the West Coast - developing McK perspective on digital marketing and issues around that as well as clients and teams in regard to ecommerce/digital marketing strategies. Everyone is trying to figure out what is next.

Eric: work at Microsoft - word-of-mouth marketing - entering conversations online, listening to customers discussions online and how do we figure out ROI online. How do we quantify how the marketing effect how products are bought and/or used.

Question: now, we live in a digital world with a trail of meta data followings - breadcrumbs of insight is everywhere, but we are not using them. What is the gap in where we should go and where we are?
Ellen: on research side, makes the job easier and harder - we used to spend so much time trying to generate data. Did some focus groups to generate data. Now, the data is a lot of noise though cheaper. Can not design a nice little study out of the databases. Datasources are a "hell of a lot harder" - but on the flip side, as a recipient of data - much more fulfilling. Now, not small portions, but by large groupings of data. now it is not hypothetical - it is now directly accessible. It is from the real customer base.

Amy: we are talking about consumers are more and more engaged with companies brands - input to you - how can you evolve your marketing model? Now we are creating "participatory marketing". How can we use users to evolve how we do PR? Customer service? Marketing with a HUGH CAPITAL M. Example of NetFlix - running a contest to improve their movie recommendation algorithm - more than likely someone in company wanted to improve the algorithm and realized he/she could have the crowd develop a better algorithm and give the winner a $1MM since it will be a very effective way to evolve your product. Lots of press and LOTS of engagement. Very organic marketing success. How do you make it programmatic? Need to focus on your "brand promise" - what your brand delivers against that. E.g. Kryptonite video - 15 second video - always used this Kryptonite lock, showed the pen - and became a huge impact. The rumor had been around for years and year, and now - with YouTube and other video distributors - the impact was a heck of a lot more impactful.

Eric: we are all just "getting started" - how is media controllable. The brand is "out of your hand". It is in the digital ether into perpetuity. Difficult to force a particular brand - need to engage the customer on how to establish the brand.

Question from the audience: how do you systemitize it and/or control it - what do you lose when you do this? Amy: some things can be systemitized, make programmatic - salesforce.com opens up the product roadmap.
Eric: when you connect the engineers to the brand - a lot better in developing better products.

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