How to make information affect behaviour?

I read an interesting article on how data which is coverted into information affects behaviour. Most often, all data analyzed and presented as information to users or even to customers may not necessarily have the desired impact to affect behaviour.

Here are some interesting perspectives and points that we need to think to help present data in a manner that can seriously help people change behaviour: 

1. Intuit/Mint are great examples of customers having their financial data(online) of where they spend their monies and how they invest & save. By uploading this data, do people change their behaviour to either spend less or save more? - Mint definitely believes so. According to Mint, they started as analysis tool but slowly progressed into providing insights to customers on their current behaviour and promoting actions that affect behaviour!
   
2. The question really is if data can help change behaviour, how do we present this data so that it really has a telling impact on the customers/users who are using it?
   

       The idea data according to this article that can help this is:

      a. Passive data ( The user has nothing to do with this data)

      b. Non-invasive

      c. Real-time

      d. Focussed ( Like a dashboard with key metrics)

      e. Linked in real-time to the desired effect

      f. Simple to gain insight and understand

      g.Linked to private and personal benefits ( Weight loss/gain)

      h. Linked to public benefits ( Reduces carbon footprint)

      i  Quirky positive feedback

      j. Non-threatening negative feedback

      k. Socially connected to take advantage of human nature

This led me to think how we present various data to our stakeholders across businesses and user departments today. We still have a long way to go especially given the fact that discovery of insights after mining the data, needs to be presented well for it to change behaviour across an organization. Also, if we want customers to either buy from us more or recommend alternative products or services, it needs to be done a lot more intuitively by presenting the facts & insights well to get them to consider our recommendation.   

 

Talking to your CFO makes Marketing smarter!

The troubled economy is forcing corporate leaders to re-evaluate their spending plans across the board and marketing is not exempt. In reducing marketing budgets, corporate leaders face a difficult set of choices: How much is too much? Are we negatively impacting impacting Revenue producing potential with deep cuts.

Making these choices is particularly difficult if the marketing team lacks a systematic method of measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing spending and a proven method to link marketing spending to business outcomes.

According to Fred,all marketing investments do at least one of three things:

1.    They change customer perceptions in a way that encourages them to buy more.

2.    They provide temporary monetary incentives for customers to buy more.

3.    They make the brand more available so customers can buy more.

While budget cutting and planning for an economic downturn are never enjoyable, they can provide an opportunity for inserting greater rigor, and better capabilities and metrics to make marketing investments more effective in the long run.

See what Fred Geyer and Chiaki Nishino have to say about ‘Making Marketing Smarter Amidst the Cuts’.

http://www.prophet.com/downloads/articles/geyer-nishino-smarter.pdf

Also what this is doing is creating a much greater focus on Marketing accountability. Suddenly the CMO’s are talking to the CFO’s.

 The 2009 Association of National Advertisers (ANA)/Marketing Management Analytics' (MMA) Marketing Accountability Survey, which surveyed 95 senior-level marketers in June, revealed some surprising results. Despite a 75 percent decrease in marketers' marketing budgets this year, as well as 65 percent who said they were expected to drive more sales with the same or lower budget, marketing accountability programs have taken on a greater significance.

Some of those findings include:

1.    An increase in cross-functional marketing accountability teams. Thirty-two percent of respondents said their teams included representation from marketing, finance, and research, up 22 percent from 2008.

2.    An increase in speaking the language of finance. Thirty-eight percent agreed that marketing and finance share common metrics (up significantly from 27 percent).

3.    Use of more sophisticated analytics to determine marketing budgets. Seventeen percent of respondents said they use "what if" scenarios at different budget levels to determine sales and profits--more than double the response from the 2008 survey.

4.    A greater use of predictive modeling. Forty-three percent of respondents said they use customer lifetime value models as an accountability technique, up from 27 percent in the prior year's study.

 My take is the following:

1.    Have you created a set of metrics along with your CFO to measure the effectiveness of your marketing?

2.    Is someone from your Finance team actively measuring your investments in a way that creates joint ownerhip?

3.    Are you measuring both short term and longer term results- as an example a bank may measure short term impact of a promotion on Credit card spending and also evaluate whether in the longer term the credit card customers behaviour changed in terms of increased profitability(larger ticket sizes, more revolve etc)?

NEXT-GENERATION CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT: ENGAGE YOUR CUSTOMERS

For many marketers Campaign management is purely a tactical and operational process. While to some extent this is true,what marketers do not realize is that at its core Campaign management needs deep insights into Customer strategy and without that creating automation to support customer engagement is meaningless! Often the Campaign manager ends up being the execution arm and is not able to influence the levers of customer strategy. Especialy in growth markets where customer acquistion rates are galloping,it is all the more important to allow a coherent customer strategy to drive your company's campaign management.

Marketing can no longer afford to simply act as a bullhorn pushing the product du jour or blasting cross-sell and up-sell offers. Ad overload, consumer neglect is only the few things that marketing campaign management cannot ignore. The requirement is for creating an integrated marketing effort across the organisation to enhance interactive marketing.

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/next_generation_campaign_management

INNOVATION LESSONS FROM THE 1930S

History suggests that even the deepest downturns can create huge opportunities for companies with money and ideas. Recent turmoil in global financial markets and its spillover into the real economy have generated considerable interest in the Great Depression.

Especially in growing economies like India,isn't this the best time to challenge all "accepted norms". In many businesses not enough innovation has been directed towards improving the "customer experience". A side effect of a "slowdown" is also that as a retail business or a bank you have fewer customers walking into your stores & branches. That is a great opportunity to invest in innovation at the front end. During boom times such ideas were considered heretical because the front end employee was too busy managing the "footfall".

Can the business practices of the 1930s yield useful lessons for executives setting priorities in today's uncertain and evolving environment? For investments to promote innovation, the answer may be yes. Executives are often told to maintain investment during downturns. It's easy to question this countercyclical advice, however, in times like the Depression or the present, when the volatility of financial markets (an indicator of uncertainty) reaches historic highs. Is the typical behavior of executives-act cautiously and delay investment projects until confidence returns-the wiser course?

Tom Nicholas, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School illustrates the broader points businesses must learn from the experience of the 1930s.

http://www.sata.ca/docs/InnovationLessons.pdf

 

The One-to-One Marketing Myth

We have all fallen into the "one-to-one" marketing trap. Songwriter Randy Newman once penned, "One is the loneliest number," yet we promote one-to-one marketing as a strategy to be embraced.

Often it is hard to support the strategy in the "trenches" and then not only does "one to one" lose its value-it can even do damage. An example could be a Retailer who promise Express check out lines to PLatinum customers on paper but at the store they do not have the manpower to run the extra line! 

Many companies manage some powerful database-driven, relationship-marketing programs. All have the overriding objectives of driving frequency and building individual consumer sales. But it's a bumpy road and "one to one" marketing should not become the art of compromise argues Bart Foreman in a compelling article! For example, one client has almost 1,400 stores, so management says it's impossible to keep a list of store managers current and all communications come from the vice president of marketing. The net result is that one of the "ones" in one-to-one marketing is a faceless manager in a big company.

Every customer has potential: Your best customers have the potential to leave; your marginal customers have the potential to buy more; and other consumers have the potential to buy. A carefully crafted relationship marketing strategy, coupled with a customer-centric focus from your front-line sales associates, will bring marketing and service closer together. The end result should be sustainable, long-term growth one customer at a time.

Bart Foreman replaces the original concept of one-to-one marketing with a literal, but convincing view in this article.

http://promomagazine.com/mag/marketing_onetoone_marketing_myth/

Making mass marketing more personal!

When you think about the marketing strategy of any of the large Packaged consumer goods companies , you are likely to think about Mass marketing! An interesting variation to this is Coke with its My Coke Rewards.In fact, Coca-Cola often thinks instead in terms of large niche markets driven by lifestyle or life stage, according to Michael La Kier, director of My Coke Rewards for Coca-Cola North America.One place the company focuses in on its niche-market consumers is online via mycokerewards.com. The site offers personalized home pages based on consumers’ preferences (e.g., preferred brands, activities, etc.). In the course of 24 hours the website gets more than 285,000 visits, during which the average length of stay on the site is 9.5 minutes, and about 13,000 new members join. The program currently has more than 9 million members who have logged in more than 100 million times and have redeemed about 5 million rewards in total. Ginger Conlon has this interesting article on Coke’s marketing strategies.