Yesterday’s piece on the pitfalls of mystery shopping brought, I hope, some important perspective on the dangerously deceptive data that a poorly-designed mystery shop can bring in.
So, how does one conduct a proper mystery shop?
STEP 1: Develop a management problem statement. Mystery shops, like any other sort of research, should never be done just for the sake of doing them. They should have a purpose behind them that is clearly defined by management. I recommend that this be turned into a formal statement called a management problem. The more specific in scope and application, the better.
BAD PROBLEM STATEMENT
“The management of ABZ Retailer would like to ensure that front-line sales staff members are giving customers a superior customer experience.”
GOOD PROBLEM STATEMENT
“The management of ABZ Retailer would like to improve the ABZ employee training program by conducting mystery shops within a random sample of stores and determine how well employees are adhering to the guidelines set for them during the training process.”
Note that the bad statement is likely to be the original reason for the study, whereas the good statement takes the concept and shapes it into something that can actually be researched and acted upon. It is extremely important that the ultimate result of the study be actionable from a management perspective. Without a clear idea of what you want to do with the data, it can be counter-productive (and even a negative influence on morale!) to conduct a mystery shop study.
Step 2: Develop Research Objectives: Research objectives help you to narrow down what you really want to learn from the research. There are two ways of developing these: by asking general research questions and determining the specific objectives you’ll need to answer those questions, or by stating general research objectives and determining which questions you need to ask to meet them. Either method is valid, and both will create a hierarchy that will look something like this:
RO1: Determine how well employees are adhering to the dress code.
RQ1.1: Are employees wearing name tags?
RQ1.2: Are employees wearing proper uniforms?
RQ1.3: Are employees wearing proper shoes?
RQ1.4: Are employees smiling?
RO2: Determine how customers are being greeted when they walk in the store.
RQ2.1: Are customers being greeted within 60 seconds by an employee?
RQ2.2: Are employees greeting customers from behind the counter or walking out onto the floor?
RQ2.3: Are employees using a proper greeting or asking a discouraged phrase like, “May I help you?”
RQ2.4: If any employee is on the phone when the customer walks in, is the employee interrupting the call to briefly acknowledge the customer?
RQ2.5: Are employees engaging in any behavior when the customer enters the store that appears to be improper or unprofessional?
And so on. The advantage of creating this hierarchy is that it gives you a very nice outline for your survey instrument later on. It also helps you to avoid to asking those, “everything but the kitchen sink” questions that are not relevant to the study.
Step 3: Determine your action standards. Ultimately, the goal of marketing research should be to develop action standards that are a direct result of the research. It’s tempting to just gather information and respond to it once you’ve got it, but it’s far better to have a clear idea of what you want to do with the information before it’s collected. This will keep you from overreacting to negative data and help you to keep sight of the bigger picture.
Good action standards are based on research findings, and should be tied to the major themes of the study. At the same time, you can establish standards for correcting specific behaviors if they fall below a certain threshhold.
BAD ACTION STANDARD
AS1: If employees are found to fail to live up to the training standards, they will automatically be enrolled in a remedial training program.
GOOD ACTION STANDARDS
AS1: If it is determined that an aspect of the uniform and dress code policy is not being adhered to by fewer than 75% of employees, management will require that all front-line employees review the dress code policy and sign a statement indicating that they agree to adhere to it.
AS2: If it is determined that more than front-line 25% of employees are using discouraged phrases such as, “May I help you?” to open a sale, all front-line employees will be required to undergo a one-on-one sales training coaching session with a store manager or district manager.
AS3: If it is determined during two or more shops of a single store that employees are engaging in unprofessional or inappropriate behavior when a customer walks into the store, the district manager will be asked to investigate the situation and enforce the appropriate disciplinary protocols.
These action standards are clear, they’re specific, and they lay out the protocols for dealing with problems in a manner that is preemptive rather than reactionary. It also gives the management involved in the design of the study time to determine what the acceptable threshholds are for negative marks on a mystery shop so that there is less of an opportunity to overreact to them after the data has come in.
Step 4: Generate a sample. Depending upon the size of your business and the number of outlets, it may be in your best interests to generate a random sample for each phase of the study rather than trying to take a census of all stores. The advantages of taking a random sample are that you can complete the study much more quickly and at a lower cost. A census should only be used if you have a small number of locations. It is probably not necessary for a business with more than 100 stores.
As a general rule, you will need to shop at least 30 stores from your random sample to have any sort of statistical projectability to your data. All of your statistics will have error associated with them, so the more stores you can shop, the less error these statistics will have.
Step 5: Determine the number of shops. I recommend doing three shops per location for each phase of the study. This will help you to mitigate outlier behavior (such as an employee who forgot his or her name tag one day or a busy assistant manager who is trying to juggle multiple tasks while running the sales floor because a part-timer called in sick) and also help you to determine if improper behavior is a pattern at a particular store. One shop is simply not enough to tell you whether or not a store has a need for better training.
I recommend that you use different shoppers for each of these shops to decrease the effects of personal bias. If three different shoppers all have the same negative impression, it’s much more likely to be true than if one shopper has a bad experience the first time and goes in expecting that experience the next two times.
Step 6: Develop a survey instrument. This should be a one or two-page document that shoppers can fill out after their experience. It should follow your research objectives closely and only ask the questions that are important for the research. For example, if you are not concerned about the relative cleanliness of a store, it should not be a question on the survey.
It is easier to evaluate mystery shops if shoppers are required to rate individual elements on a scale and then provide comments to clarify their rating. This scale does not need to be very sensitive; I recommend three points of distinction for subjective questions (“How enthusiastic was the greeting you received when you walked in the door?” “Not enthusiastic,” “Somewhat enthusiastic,” “Very enthusiastic”) and two points of distinction for compliance issues (“Was the employee wearing a nametag?” “No” “Yes.”). If you feel the subjective scale needs to be more sensitive, I would not take it beyond five points, simply because scores may vary due to individual shopper bias.
Step 7: Train your shoppers. Don’t outsource mystery shopping to a national firm and wash your hands of it — make sure you train all of your shoppers to do their job properly, even if that means you need to train them over the phone or on Skype. This can be time-consuming, but it will ensure that you explain the entire process to them and help them to understand your expectations for what they are looking for.
Don’t tell them too much about the aims of the study, though; just focus on the survey instrument. The less a shopper knows about the big picture, the better, since he or she will do a better job of getting all of the information knowing less about what you really want to know.
Step 8: Validate shoppers. If you want to ensure that your shoppers actually make a purchase, I suggest giving them a gift card or some other form of currency that’s not cash in advance for their shopping experience. Mystery shopping studies that make shoppers submit receipts or expenses for reimbursement encourage shoppers to pull all sorts of shenanigans, whereas gift cards can be electronically validated to ensure that the purchase matches up with the time that the shopper was allegedly in the store. This will give them more of an incentive to actually do the shop — there’s no cash to pocket, and the gift card can be canceled if they don’t live up to their end of the bargain. It will be easier for them to just do the shop.
Step 9: Keep the data blind. Once the shops start coming in, identify each store by an arbitrary ID number and enter the data accordingly. Present this data to management in aggregate, with no identifying information so that managers will focus on the action standards and not individual retribution of stores. If one store is show to have a consistent pattern of poor behavior, then and only then should the store be singled out and dealt with, and even then by the previously established action standards and not by some hotheaded decision made after the fact.
It is extremely unwise to send the individual reports back to stores. Rather, share the aggregate data with them as well as their average scores (if they were part of the sample) for each question so they can see if they were above or below the mark. Do not present any form of ranking, and do not allow district managers to share the results over conference calls. District managers should independently review each report with each store to help them understand how they can improve their scores for the future through better training. These mystery shops should in no way be tied to the manager’s annual performance review or bonus.
Step 10: Repeatregularly. If you want to see the long-term effects of changes you are making in training or company communication, repeat the mystery shops once every quarter or, at a minimum, once every year. Use the same process, but feel free to tweak the objectives and action standards as needed to continue improving your organization.
Make sure your repetitions are at regular intervals, but don’t do them too frequently. I would avoid the temptation to use mystery shops as a monthly diagnostic, since it is very expensive to do this properly and probably won’t show you the effects of changes that you’ve made until two or three months into the process.
With all that said… if you have any questions, post them below, and I’ll be happy to answer them!
When I was working in retail, one announcement I absolutely dreaded was that sometime in the next few weeks, my store would be mystery shopped.
Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t have anything to hide. But I’d been through enough mystery shops to know that they almost always yielded bad things for me as a front-line manager.
Mystery shoppers are field researchers who are supposed to interact with front-line staff incognito and ensure that they are doing their job properly. Their job is to pose as a customer, pay attention to the details, and then fill out a form describing their experience. They are often asked to answer such questions as, “Was the associate smiling?”, “Was the storefront clean?” and “Was the open sign turned on?”.
The problem is not in the data that’s collected, of course, because these are all important things to know if you are trying to improve the consistency of a store’s service quality. The problem is in how the information is dealt with.
You see, every few months, I’d receive a mystery shopping report that would point out some glaring flaw in my store’s service. Maybe the mystery shopper had to wait in line because an associate was helping another customer. Maybe an associate had forgotten his or her nametag that day and foolishly decided not to wear one. Maybe the mystery shop occurred when I was on a mandatory conference call and trying to man the sales floor at the same time because an associate had called in sick.
The point of course, being that mystery shops didn’t always reflect the reality of what was going on in my store, and were just as prone to outlier behavior as any single sampling technique might be. (To understand what I mean here, imagine that you’re blind and you’re reaching into a fish bowl filled with 500 jellybeans and 10 pieces of gravel. If you grab one of those pieces of gravel, you might make the erroneous assumption that the entire bowl is filled with rocks, even though the odds were high that you’d grab a jellybean.)
What’s more, the way the data was applied was to publicly shame managers during conference calls who did not achieve a 100% rating and to use bad shops as a means of writing up employees (or managers!) for less-than-stellar service.
From a research standpoint, this is probably one of the worst ways you can apply data gleaned from a study. Instead of teaching front-line staff to embrace mystery shops as a valuable tool for improvement, you teach them to dread mystery shops and to resent the results.
There are a few other problems with mystery shopping that need to be addressed:
1) Who are these mystery shoppers? I did some mystery shopping once for a firm I signed up for via the internet. I was paid $10 to go into a bank and pretend to open an account, and then told to back out at the last minute and thank them for their time. All of this was dutifully recorded on a sheet of paper and sent in. It was one of the most awkward experiences I’ve ever had, and it turned me off to mystery shopping. Another time, my mom decided to sign up for restaurant mystery shopping, and she was assigned to a restaurant she didn’t like for a shop. She tried her best to be objective, but she already knew going in that if the service was bad, she was going to hammer them.
Many firms who provide mystery shoppers at the regional or national scale are recruiting folks like me and my mom to do the shops. We both received no training and were given very little direction. Would you want to trust the validity of that data when making decisions about service satisfaction?
2) Mystery shoppers have a built-in bias. Mystery shoppers are not the same as normal customers because they know that they are shopping with a critical mindset. Things they might have ignored in the past are suddenly obvious to them; behaviors they might have excused on their own suddenly become very important. Mystery shoppers are going to be far more critical than the average customer, simply because they’re more involved in the interaction. You have to be very careful in framing your study or you are more likely to see a negative bias in the results.
3) Mystery shoppers can lie. This is absolutely a problem in research, and it’s one of those things that’s very difficult for clients to verify. Mystery shoppers can very easily go into a store, get the bare essential details, and then leave without ever interacting with the staff, but fill out their forms as if they had. I know it happened to my own store on one occasion, and it probably happens more than most researchers would like to think, because mystery shopping requires a lot of nerve. Unless a mystery shopper is doing a quick transaction (like going through a drive-thru at McDonald’s), the whole exchange requires some acting and, sometimes, quick thinking. Mystery shoppers who have a minimal amount of training are going to be more likely to slip in and slip out than those who know how to handle a contingency.
4) Staff are usually warned about shops ahead of time. There is an ethical question as to whether or not mystery shopping should be conducted with the awareness of the staff. Ethically speaking, field research should not be conducted on an unknowing employee unless the employee’s knowledge will invalidate the research process. To get around this, most mystery shopping studies give managers and district managers a window of time in which a shop might occur, such as “the last two weeks of the month” or “sometime this quarter.”
Here’s the problem: any time you put this information out into a hierarchy, you’re going to see downward pressure to master the mystery shops. District managers will announce the mystery shops and then try to hold each manager accountable for getting a perfect score. This may result in an artificial improvement in service until the mystery shopping period is over. This invalidates the data and makes it more likely that the busy people who really are doing their job correctly will get caught in something stupid, while the not-so-busy people who are not doing their job correctly but who are good at faking things to meet the criteria will look like they’re model employees.
5) Information obtained from mystery shops is often sent to managers without qualification. When I would get my mystery shop reports as a manager, I was not told how to deal with them. I was smart enough to know that singling out employees was not a good practice, and I would only address issues with individual employees if they showed up repeatedly. But many managers don’t really know how to manage people very well, and they use the mystery shop reports as leverage. What’s more, when managers are mystery shopped and fail to live up to standards, employees often see these reports as evidence that they should not have faith in their bosses to do their jobs correctly.
It’s an ugly cycle.
So, what can be done?
Tomorrow, I’m going to offer a piece called “How to Conduct a Proper Mystery Shop.” It will explain how you can correct all of these problems and use mystery shopping to its fullest. Don’t miss it!
As I’ve moved out of my twenties and into my thirties, I’ve become a bit more socially conscious. One of the biggest areas I’m focused on right now is in the area of sustainability. I’ve realized that I’m wasting tons of electricity and water every day, that I’m generating mountains of trash, and that I’m helping to pollute the air of St. Louis by driving my car to work every day. (Climate skeptics, say what you will about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere having little to no effect on the environment, but all that car exhaust has a definite effect on the local air quality!)
As such, I’m probably a prime target for the various “green” marketing campaigns that have been going on over the last few years, and yet, I’ve noticed that many of the more environmentally-conscious products have all but vanished off of the shelves. It’s been suggested to me that “green” products always fall out of favor during a recession because people don’t want to pay extra for socially-conscious products. I think there’s some merit to the argument, but I’m also starting to wonder if “green” marketing has become a cycle that rears up every decade or so to bring some improvements to processes and open up new product categories.
Consider this: during the early 90s, a green wave hit the marketplace and products such as recycled paper were being pushed as the environmentally friendly alternative. I remember proudly buying some gray notebook paper that was 100% recycled. It was terrible paper — very hard to write on, and easy to tear. But darn it, I was doing my part, as a kid in school, to help reduce waste.
The demand for 100% recycled paper died down. But paper companies continued to use some recycled content in their paper and improve the process. Much of the notebook paper kids use for school today has some amount of recycled content in it, as does a lot of the cardboard used for packaging fast food. The green wave of the 1990s might have died down, but it did bring recycled materials to the forefront as a viable way to create products.
This “green” wave of the last decade has brought forward a new product that I’m still seeing — reusable grocery bags. Prior to the latest green trend, it was considered hippyish or “low rent” to reuse your bags. Most grocery stores had plastic bag recycling, but very few were pushing customers to use their own bags.
Grocery stores started rolling out reusable bags in 2008, and now, they’ve become a standard item. What’s interesting is that consumers have found these bags to be tremendously useful for a variety of applications outside of buying groceries. (My wife uses one of hers for library books.) They are also much easier to carry and use since they’re large, like a paper bag, but have handles, like a plastic bag. They’re a great marketplace innovation. Why didn’t someone think of this before?
The truth of the matter is that reusable bags have been out there for years, but they haven’t been produced at a low enough price that they’ve been attractive to consumers. When grocery stores embraced them during the last “green” wave and began offering them for a dollar a bag, consumers could see the value of having a few. When being socially conscious is cheap and easy, many people are willing to give it a try.
So, “green” marketing can be a good thing that brings about permanent change in the marketplace. But if that’s the case, why does it have to occur in cycles?
The problem with “green” marketing is that it plays on guilt rather than positive reinforcement. Oh, sure, the messages tend to be positive, but most of the time, there is subtext of, “you’re not doing enough for the Earth, and you need to buy more expensive products to do your part.” Consumers are willing to spend a little more to ease their consciences as long as they care about an issue, but in the end, complacency is a lot easier than being broke.
Plus, the whole mentality of “buy more to do more” is at odds with many of the messages that environmental groups provide. Most environmentalists encourage consumers to reuse products as many times as possible before throwing them away, to consider purchases more carefully and to spend more time enjoying nature instead of man-made amusements. This leads to “green” products being less and less popular as consumers either fall away from an interest in environmentalism or embrace the message of buying less and reusing more. In either event, it’s very hard to build a long-term strategy around environmental messages.
So, is “green” marketing destined to remain a cyclical trend? It seems likely that it will. But don’t discount “green” marketing as being a bubble that bursts when the trend is up — rather, look at it as something that bubbles up, elevates the marketplace to a better standard, and leaves behind a few marketplace innovations that are better for everyone.
What are your thoughts on “green” marketing? Post them below!
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I used to work as a retail manager, and a good one, in fact. I was a manager for EB Games, a video game retail chain that was eventually acquired by its rival, GameStop.
Here’s a little video I made for a contest we had one year to explain why our store was “The Best Game in Town.” My video should have won (the judging was a disaster), but I think it stands as a strong testament to what I wanted to accomplish in that store:
During my time there, I ran the top-ranked store in the entire Midwest region (around 200 stores) for two years in a row, a feat that had never been achieved in the history of the company. During my third year, we slipped to the second-highest ranked store. (We were edged out by the store where the regional manager had his office, so if anyone was going to beat us, it was them!)
What was the secret of my success? I could tell you, but you wouldn’t full appreciate what I was saying because it would seem too simple. So instead, I’ll offer a story that frames the matter nicely.
We had a management meeting one day, and all of the managers from the various stores in the St. Louis region got together to chat. Our district manager, Tom, asked everyone to go around and share one thing they’d learned from being managers and that they’d like to share with three new managers who were joining us.
We went around the circle, and every single manager had the same story to tell: the customer isn’t always right. Granted, they all had different angles, but the message was always the same. Most customers were time-wasters, these managers said, and it was best to avoid contact with them as much as possible. Children were to be particularly avoided, since they never had any money. Their advice was to focus instead on the customers who spent the most money in the store. Those customers, they surmised, made up most of their sales anyway. As these stories were told and advice was imparted, heads were nodding everywhere. This was the conventional wisdom.
When it was my turn, I stood up and cleared my throat nervously. “Well, I have to admit, I have a different philosophy,” I said. “I have built my store around my customers, and I don’t worry about how much they spend as long as they’re shopping with me and not someone else.” I went on to explain how I’d organized weekly tournaments for children to give them a place to hang out on Saturday night, how I’d invite customers to remain in the store and try out new games even if I didn’t think they were going to buy them, and how I was constantly looking for ways to delight customers with even the simplest transactions so they’d come back the next time.
No one was nodding as I spoke, and a few of the people looked mad. I finished talking, sat down, and listened to the next manager going right back to the “only focus on your best customers” mantra. My words, it seems, fell on deaf ears.
It was that day that I learned why my store was doing so much better than everyone else’s, and why I was seeing such enormous success while the rest of them were experiencing such failure. Many of the managers wrote me off as having a good location, but the truth of the matter was that I had three competitors within a mile and was located at the end of a strip mall. It wasn’t just location that made me successful.
It was the fact that I was willing to be slightly better than the average in the way I treated my customers.
My store wasn’t perfect, and we certainly had our issues with customer service from time to time. But I instilled a culture of treating every customer as a valued asset into my staff, and I enforced it by constantly modeling the behavior myself. It didn’t take long to get customers who would tell us that they’d drive the extra distance to get to our store, or that they’d stopped shopping elsewhere because they appreciated the way we’d handled them when they’d come in on a previous visit.
And those kids who I welcomed into the store every Saturday night? They didn’t spend much. But when birthdays or holidays would roll around, their parents sure did. Some of those kids became valuable sources of referral. Others became great customers in their own right when they got teenage jobs, and a few of them even had the chance to work for me.
Retail customers don’t ask for a lot. Most simply want to be left alone initially so they can browse, and then immediately helped when they have a question or are ready to make a purchase. They don’t mind conversation, and they appreciate frankness. They hate being told that they can’t be helped, especially when it’s because of some arbitrary policy. They also hate feeling like they’re not important because they have not yet made friends with the staff.
As it happens, most retail operations don’t do a good job of even meeting these minimal standards. So, if you can make your store simply meet their expectations, you can be successful.
That’s all it takes, folks.
As for my own store, as soon as I left and another manager took over, its sales dropped. From what I’ve been told, it’s considered an underperforming store now. I run into old customers every now and then, and they tell me that the spirit of the place left with me, and that it’s not the same experience that it used to be. The manager who took over decided to embrace the conventional wisdom and put a stop to all of the things I’d done to build the place up. She was more interested in the status quo than in success.
What are your thoughts? Am I oversimplifying things… or is being better than average really all it takes in the service industry? Post your comments below!
Would you like someone to write a song for you? Or maybe make a virtual box for your product? Or give your technical document a once-over for obvious errors?
What if I told you that you could get each of those services for just $5?
Fiverr is a new site that’s making the rounds on the blog circuit today. Essentially, the idea of the site is that anyone can post up a service of almost any sort for $5 (the more easily done digitally, the better!). While some of the services offered are sort of silly (“I will write a love letter to your girlfriend for $5″), some of them are exactly the sorts of things that would be nice to outsource, but which are typically cost-prohibitive.
What’s most interesting about Fiverr is not its concept, but its execution. For years, people have been offering services on sites like eBay and Craigslist with mixed results. Most people don’t look to these sites for services, and those who do are often seeking professionals who are going to charge an appropriate rate for their experience and service quality.
Fiverr, on the other hand, encourages those with skills that are typically not very marketable to think about listing their hobbies or skills on a smaller, more specific scale. Some of my favorites include:
And to make things even more interesting, Fiverr also allows users to wishlist things that they would pay $5 for. This means that even those who lack confidence in listing their own skills can respond to the “most wanted” jobs and make $5.
I’m intrigued. While this site is likely to remain a novelty, I think it has some interesting promise for the young and easily amused to augment their income with little free-time jobs here and there.
A few days ago, I posted an article called, “A Tale of Two Billboards.” In this piece, I explained that billboards are one of the few types of advertising that still reach me, and I compared two billboards for educational institutions, one that I feel is right on the money and one that I feel is ineffective. (Some of the commenters disagreed, but that’s why it’s fun to talk about ads… everyone has a different perspective!)
Driving in today, it occurred to me that I should probably explain what makes a good and effective billboard, because there are certainly a lot on my commute that could be better. Keep in mind that I am approaching this from a communication standpoint, and not from a pure marketing standpoint. After all, it could be that a billboard that appears poorly designed to 90% of the population is super effective with the 10% of the population that’s within an organization’s target. You can’t just stand on the sidelines and judge what an effective message is without having some knowledge of the target market.
But from a communication standpoint, I often find that billboards are lacking in their ability to be clear, concise and understandable, which means that their message gets lost. Drivers only have a couple of seconds to absorb a billboard’s message, and unless they are going to be stopped in traffic, they probably won’t have the time or interest to read a lot of copy or dissect a complex layout.
Billboard ads should have a simple message. Typically, this message should be just a few words long. The message needs to be short and punchy, and easily understood. For example, a billboard for a notebook computer repair company might have three or four lines about all the work they can do and all the certifications they have. Or, it could just simply have a picture of a broken laptop and big, bold letters saying “WE CAN FIX IT” with the logo and Web site for the company underneath. The second message would be far more effective, simply because it’s easier to read and understand.
Billboard ads can say more with a clever image than with lots of words. The St. Louis McDonald’s region has been running annual Filet-O-Fish ads depicting the sandwich in larger-than-life situations. Last year, they had animals coming out of the billboard trying to get to the sandwich. This year, they’ve made it look like the sandwich is the catch of the day by depicting it in fishing nets, on a tape measure, or on a hook. This conveys a rather complicated message about the sandwich being fresh and appealing as well as easily available, but it’s so easily understood that any motorist could pass by it, glance up, and be reminded that the Filet-O-Fish is a viable option for lunch or dinner.
As it happens, there’s an ad from Circle K convenience stores on the same stretch that uses an image effectively and then mars it with copy. The ad depicts a 7-Up two liter bottle with a sparkling glass of ice. The copy says something along the lines of, “Deliciously bubbly, even during rush hour.” And then, in smaller print, “2-liter bottles just 99 cents.” The copy completely ruins an otherwise striking image and, in the most baffling move of all, doesn’t match the target market. (Who wants to deal with a 2-liter during a rush hour commute when you can buy a more car-friendly fountain drink at any gas station?) The billboard may have increased some impulse sales, but it would be far more effective if it should the same image and simply said, “Fill’er Up” or something along those lines with a Circle K logo at the bottom. The image conveys a lot; the copy needs to get out of the way.
Web addresses are a call to action; phone numbers are not. I’m sure there are some people who call companies offering services because they saw a billboard, but I’d be willing to bet you that few of them used the number printed on the ad. They more than likely remembered the name of the business and looked it up in the phone book or online. That’s because phone numbers are too hard for people to remember unless they’re REALLY simple.
But you know what people can remember? Web site names, especially if they match the name of the company. And just the presence of the “.com” at the end of the Web site name is a call to action in itself. When I see a billboard that says, “Shop St. Louis.com”, I can remember that and immediately know what to do with it. If I see a billboard that says, “Call 1-800 ShopSTL for more info”, I’m not only likely to forget it, but also unlikely to call it because I don’t want to have to speak to a live person about information I could just dig up on my own.
Web sites also make for a simple message, provided that they’re part of a campaign and not just a standard homepage. This is one of the reasons I feel “BeABilliken.Com” is such a strong message – it offers a marketing message AND a call to action AND a place to go for more info.
Billboards are not print ads. The best and most striking billboards are simple in design, limited in copy, and focused on a very specific message. They have the ability to be larger than life, and they also have the ability to change ever week to keep commuters’ interest. Rolling Rock did a great campaign a couple of years ago where they had billboards announcing some weird thing called “Moon Vision” and then gradually explained, via billboard and radio ads, what that mean. It certainly got my attention, and I know others were talking about it as well.
One of the best billboard campaigns I’ve ever heard of was something one of my marketing professors at SIUE experienced. In the town where he was growing up, someone took out a billboard that said, in large block letters, “WHO CARES?” The billboard was mysterious and became the talk of the town. Everyone wondered who had put it up, and why.
Soon after, the billboard was replaced with something along the lines of “Fred Jones Ford Dealership Cares!” A disappointing payoff, perhaps, but it got peoples’ attention.
What are your favorite billboards? Which messages stick with you best? Post your comments below!
Esquire Magazine's December issue featured a special cover that could interact with readers' computers via an Augmented Reality app.
Half a lifetime ago, when I was in high school, people were positively buzzing about “virtual reality,” also known as “VR,” a science-fictiony concept that involved putting oneself into a virtual environment by donning a special helmet that allowed you to look around, hear three-dimensional sound, and feel immersed in a world of polygons.
Of course, VR was a little too high-tech for many people. I remember getting very excited about potentially being able to play a game called “Dactyl Nightmare” at the Virtual Reality arcade at St. Louis Union Station only to be told by my mother that I was forbidden to play it because she didn’t like that virtual reality and actual reality were so close together. She was afraid it could have some sort of negative effect on me. In essence, she was frightened by what she didn’t understand.
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Augmented Reality, or AR, when they first hear about it, because it bridges reality and technology in a bizarre and semi-frightening way. The idea behind Augmented Reality is that you can use your smartphone or computer to see the world around you in a different light. Many of these applications are built for the iPhone, so we’ll use it as the standard here. For example, you can:
Use an AR Yelp! Monocle application to scan an area with your camera, and the application will access your GPS to figure out where, exactly, the best places to eat are within your vicinity, actually overlaying Yelp! reviews over the image on your screen with approximations on where the restaurants are located.
Use an AR app called Wikitude World Browser to scan a tourist attraction (such as ruined building in Greece or Rome) to pull up the Wikipedia entry for the site.
Use an AR app called Twittaround to find location-stamped tweets from other Twitter users.
Use an AR app called iPhone ARider to hook your iPhone up to a special bike helmet peripheral so you can see real-time Google Maps data and know where you’re going when you’re riding your bike.
Coming soon: an AR app called TAT Augmented ID that will allow you to scan a stranger’s face and find out who they are by searching public profiles on social networks.
(I used this articleto learn more about these apps, since I use a Blackberry, not an iPhone or an Android phone.)
Esquire recently did a cover story on AR with Robert Downey Jr. sitting on an odd-looking box. Those who downloaded some special software from the Esquire site and who held the magazine in front of a webcam were treated to a number of neat features that could be manipulated by moving the magazine around. (Read more here.) McDonald’s did something similar by offering Avatar-themed AR cards that would allow customers to take interactive tours of the fictional world of Pandora from the film. Hallmark has even created AR cards that can be held up in front of a webcam to give a special animated greeting that moves around with the motion of the card. (Watch this video to see it in action!)
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine AR software that allows you to try on clothing or accessories before you buy them, simply by sitting in front of a webcam. Consider the possibilities of that for a moment — being able to see items on your body without ever having to wear them. This sort of thing could change retailing forever, right?
Ready for a shocker? Ray-Ban rolled this technology out over a year ago with their “virtual mirror” software. (No, really. Click here for more info!)
The neat thing about AR is that its applications are just beginning to surface, and it’s popping up in all sorts of unexpected ways. Both Microsoft and Sony are about to launch AR platforms for their game consoles, and it’s likely that within a few years, AR kiosks will be a common sight in malls and big box retailers.
So, why should marketers care? AR has several advantages over traditional Web sites and in-store marketing:
1) AR encourages users to be engaged with a brand or product. AR messages are active, not passive, and they allow users to have a heightened sense of activity with a brand or product without actually using it. It makes the message much more memorable and it allows for a longer exposure to marketing messages.
2) AR encourages users to be connected. Think about how useful it could be to be visiting a city like Chicago or New York City and to be able to use an AR application on a smartphone to track down good restaurants, hidden stores, or lesser-known attractions. Unlike annoying “push” text messaging systems that want to send marketing messages out to cell phones as users walk by stores, these applications would encourage users to find the messages for themselves — a much more valuable and meaningful way of sending a message to potential customers.
3) AR can become a new touchpoint. One thing I have not seen yet, but I’m sure is coming, is AR as a means of improving sales and customer service. AR can allow reps to give more exciting demos, give customers the ability to share rich content such as real-time photos or videos with agents during exchanges, and even allow those sitting through a virtual presentation to make notes on virtual slides or submit real-time questions to presenters without ever having to speak a word. There are all sorts of options, and the applications will be limitless once the technology is a little more established.
For now, AR is more of a novelty with some exciting potential. But I would be willing to guess that within the next decade, it will become a standard way of reaching out to customers… and maybe even its own discipline within the field of marketing.
What do you think about AR? Post your comments below!
It's time to take a look at Twitter's failings for a change.
I was linked to an article from the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday that’s about a year old, but which argues that the New York Times Company should acquire Twitter to gain a shot in the arm. The article is nearly a year old, but it’s still relevant today since the NYT is struggling and Twitter seems to be mentioned all over the place.
I’ve talked about some of the virtues of Twitter here on this blog, but I think it’s time to present the other side of the argument. You see, I’ve been researching Twitter off and on for about a year now, trying to figure out if there are any opportunities with it for the research industry and for marketers in general. And in doing so, I’ve noticed a few things that are problematic for Twitter.
Twitter is too hard for most people to use properly. Twitter itself is very easy — you log in, post your 140-character message, and submit it. But that’s not how Twitter really “works”. Follow a few experienced Twitter users and you’ll find abbreviations, retweets, short URLs and those pesky @ messages, all of which are baffling to the uninitiated.
The problem is that the alternative and current standard for social networks, Facebook, is very easy to use. You can post up a much longer update, link articles or videos independently of your message, tag your friends, and, best of all, comment on other users’ posts in an easy-to-read thread that takes place immediately below the comment.
Twitter.com is sort of a mess. To get the most out of Twitter, you really need to use a Smartphone and a third party Twitter client like Tweetdeck. The site itself is slow, goes down often, and isn’t very easy to navigate. Feeds can be very difficult to read, the “lists” don’t make a lot of sense to casual users, and it’s very easy for messages you want to read to go unnoticed because one of the people you’re following is spamming your feed with messages from a video game or too-frequent updates.
In this realm, Facebook is not much better, but Facebook does offer a few important features. The first is the ability to hide certain types of content (such as notifications from applications like Farmville) without hiding the user him or herself. The next is the ability of Facebook to lump similar posts together when they are not relevant to your interests. A third is Facebook’s ability to distinguish between mobile updates and PC updates — which tells you if someone is updating from a PC (and thus available for chat or email) or if you need to give them a call because they’re on the road. There are other features as well, but these are some of the many that Twitter needs to catch up on before it will be useful to a broad spectrum of users.
Twitter is a fairly mundane experience for the average user. The most compelling arguments I’ve heard for using Twitter are to stay on the cutting edge of news and to follow celebrities or media personalities. That’s it. Personal messages really don’t mean much unless they’re newsworthy or interesting, and for many Twitter users, that means it’s better to follow than to update. This probably explains why half of all Twitter users sign up for accounts and then don’t use the service for anything more than following. (The median number of posts per user, according to an HBR study, is 1 post every 74 days.)
The other problem, of course, is that users no longer NEED to follow celebrity tweets and news tweets because the bloggers and aggregators pick them up so quickly. Often, when news makes its way around Twitter, it’s in the form of retweets, and unless you’re in an emergency situation where any news is helpful, those retweets can be a burden to sort through and make sense of. There have been situations where Twitter has been used to help people out of trouble or to draw attention to breaking news, but a simple phone call to someone sitting at a computer or an email from a smartphone often could have a similar effect.
Twitter is down a lot. This is one of the reasons I only use Twitter to fill a sidebar news feed — it’s not a reliable means of talking to people. It’s nice that Twitter feeds can be integrated with so many services, but if Twitter weren’t around, other software would fill the void.
Twitter forces you into a mold. This has always been my chief objection about using Twitter — you are literally forced to say something in few words, or not at all. This means you either have to save something superficial or pithy or that you wind up using all sorts of tricks to abbreviate your messages. Since the network is trying to force you towards saying what you are doing right now, it actually restricts you from sharing real information without linking to an external site.
I resent being told I can only use a social network in one way, and I also resent having to do a lot of extra work to make the social network do what I want when there are other free social networks out there, like Facebook and Google Buzz, that are so much less restrictive.
So, there you have it. Twitter isn’t bad, but it certainly has some problems that can only be addressed by changing the very nature of the service. What are your thoughts?
I was reading a news story today about Fox’s search to find the next “Harry Potter”. They’re not looking, of course, for the next story about wizardry and schooling, but the next cultural phenomenon. Fox believes they’ve found it with a novel by Catherine Fisher called Incarceon. Granted, the premise does sound interesting (a dystopian future where prisons are run by computers), but this is hardly the stuff that cultural phenoms spring from. Eragon, The Golden Compass and even The Chronicles of Narnia were all supposed to be the next big franchises after Harry Potter, and instead, the only thing that’s gotten big is Twilight. Ugh.
The problem, of course, is that Harry Potter created a bubble in the marketplace, and everyone wants to find that next bubble because bubbles tend to make a lot of money. But what these folks don’t seem to understand is that bubbles are not caused by aggressive marketing or searching for “the next big thing.” They occur almost at a grassroots level and bubble up because they start to get big before anyone realizes how big they’ve gotten. Twilight did not cement itself in the cultural consciousness until the fourth book and the first movie came out. Harry Potter went through the same process. Neither series hit the ground running; both came out, built up audiences and support, and then bubbled up into becoming culturally relevant.
Bubbles aren’t restricted to entertainment media, of course; they occur all over the marketplace. We recently saw a bubble pop up for the Snuggie / Slanket / Freedom Blanket products. We saw a premium coffee bubble emerge over the last decade. We see bubbles on Wall Street all the time. We even just saw a housing bubble go bust.
The thing about bubble is that it’s very hard to capitalize on them once they’ve started to rise, because many people will jump in with the same idea. Some bubbles get very large and then shrink down to a more permanent size. Some deflate over time. And some burst, causing everyone to lose.
It seems to me that the more people there are trying to capitalize on a bubble, the more likely it is to burst. The housing market is a great example — you had all these individual people trying to make a fortune on homes, and that sort of thing led to a lot of the practices that caused the housing market to eventually collapse. It was possible for a few people to make money with these practices, but when everyone got into the game, the bubble couldn’t support them all.
The trick in expanding business is to examine new markets carefully and to understand how they are going to make money. I have been surprised by the number of times I’ve seen businesses attempt to expand into a realm where many other businesses are already competing just on the logic that since everyone else is making money there, they should too. It’s far better to find the potential for a bubble and to position one’s organization to take advantage of it than it is to jump onto a bubble with a structure that others are already stressing.
I’ll conclude by saying that bubbles tend to have another characteristic that is often missed by those coming in later: they rose up because a market that was not being targeted rose up to increase demand. In the case of Harry Potter, the bubble initially arose because adults were as excited about the books as kids, and many adults bought copies of their own. In the case of housing, individuals watching shows like Trading Spaces got the bright idea that they could buy, fix and flip houses because it looked so easy on TV. In the case of coffee, a bubble rose up because people wanted on-the-go energy, and coffee was able to meet that need.
I realize, of course, that I’m grossly oversimplifying some economic concepts, so please… share your thoughts below!
During my Master’s degree program in Marketing Research, I took two classes where we discussed the drivers of buyer behavior. And I’m sure it comes as no surprise that emotion was cited as one of the chief reasons that customers buy. This isn’t exactly revolutionary stuff; in fact, it was a central theme of Gerald Zaltman’s book, How Customers Think.
And yet, I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that consumers make decisions about purchases based on emotions just as much as I’ve been skeptical that consumers make decisions based on cognition. Both of these arguments are a little too simplistic and, to my thinking, don’t accurately represent the way customers actually buy things. I take particular issue with the emotional argument because there are many emerging qualitative techniques that are supposed to deliver emotional responses and insights, but which I maintain deliver information that can confuse clients about big decisions.
So, I’m going to take a stab today at identifying some problems I have with the argument that emotions are the drivers of decision-making.
1) The evidence is flimsy. Emotion proponents often cite cases such as a neurological study where brain patterns were studied while respondents were given Coke and Pepsi to taste. During blind tests, respondents could not tell the difference. But during tests where the brand names were identified, Coke was preferred, and the memory portion of the brain was triggered. The conclusion? That Coke had more positive memories for the respondents, and therefore, the emotion of the brand led to a preference.
I’m often surprised that this gets by without some obvious challenges. For example: Coke and Pepsi are both similar-tasting beverages that have a number of flavors mixed in with carbonated water. It’s very hard to tell them apart based on a small taste sample, just as it’s hard to tell them apart from competing colas. The branding is the product in this case. The same problem could occur when trying to compare two similar brands of chewing gum, two similar brands of potato chips, or two similar brands of toothpaste. They’re just not different enough for most people to understand the difference. They need that extra bit of belief about the product to help them decide what they prefer.
But that’s really only true for products that are so similar it’s hard to otherwise tell them apart. Emotion might be a fallback for products that are unfamiliar or which have a special sort of cultural relevance (Cadillacs were, for a long time, a far more emotional product than a practical one), but it’s not a fallback for products that are well-defined and that have clear points of distinction among their competitors. For example, if one is buying windshield wipers, the decision is going to come down to features and price, not emotional attachment to brands. If one is setting up a bank account, the decision is going to come down to convenience and rates, not brand belief.
2) Most commodities have very little emotional attachment in the minds of consumers. That’s because consumers don’t want to have to spend a lot of time thinking about the brands they purchase. Once a belief is created, it’s generally assumed to be true until it’s disproven or a more compelling belief from a competitor is accepted. That’s how the human mind works, and not just with products; it’s how we tend to approach the world. We evaluate all information for truth and, if we can accept it, we believe it. In order for a belief to be challenged, we must weigh the evidence for the counter-argument and accept or reject it. Emotion can override this cognitive process, but so too can cognition override emotion.
Does this mean that emotion is useless? Not at all. But it’s not exactly accurate to say that just because consumers can express emotional characteristics about, say, their laundry detergent or pet food that these products are truly emotional for them. Rather, they have established a belief that this brand is “good enough” and that until they are compelled to change, there’s no reason to. They might describe the brand as a comfort in a marketing research study, but really, that comfort could come from not having to make a decision every time they’re in the detergent aisle. We tend to take comfort in convenience, after all.
3) Emotions are far too easily manipulated to be reliable. Emotions can characterize an exchange in what we call a “situation” — if a consumer is sad or depressed, he or she might not purchase in the same way that he or she might during happier times. The same could be true if the consumer is feeling stressed, or in a hurry, or extremely happy. Some marketers rely on emotional manipulation to sell products, but most just accept that sometimes, customers get in a mood and behave differently than normal.
But doesn’t this pose a problem for marketers if a customer suddenly moves into an altered emotional state that lasts for a prolonged period of time? What if a good and regular customer suddenly switches brands on a whim because he or she needs the thrill of changing things up a bit? Or, what if a very emotionally stimulating marketing campaign persuades him or her to give another brand a trial?
This is one of the big problems with emotional marketing research — it seeks attributes and stories that are emotional in nature, but never considers the impact of emotional manipulation. I could switch from buying Pizza Hut pizza to a local pizza place’s pies simply because the local place suddenly seems to me to be the sort of family place I want to endorse. I could switch back a year later because I fondly remember hitting the Pizza Hut buffet as a kid and loving the all-you-can-eat experience. This can happen due to nothing more than my own variety-seeking behavior. There’s no way to predict it, and no value in understanding my more tertiary emotions because they’re not relevant or important in this decision.
Granted, I’m just scratching the surface of a very complicated argument, but I think it’s a good starting point. So, what do you think? Are emotions drivers of purchase decisions… or is there more to the story? Post your comments below!
Marketing Musings is a daily source of articles and postings about the field of marketing.
The blog is authored by Sean J. Jordan, a marketing research professional who enjoys sharing his unique perspective about the world of business and marketing.
Sean is also the Research Director for The Research & Planning Group, a Qualitative and Quantitative Marketing Research firm based in St. Louis.
