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Federico Trovato, Chief Client Satisfaction Officer at BrainJuicer®, says that brands can make us happy – even after a bad experience.
Bad experiences happen to everyone, but how and when a brand attempts to understand how we feel about them can make all the difference in the world.
Some time ago, my wife and then-toddler son, both exhausted from their travels, were flying a short regional route back from our country home, after two weeks of my wife being a “single parent” whilst I travelled on business. Though the flight was completely booked, forcing the assistant at the teller to assign them separate seats, the check-in desk assured my wife that the flight attendants would seat them together on board.
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Posted: February 1st, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: brainjuicer, customer satisfaction, Federico Trovato, Makes You Think, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog | Leave a Comment »
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Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer at MDC Partners, says we shouldn’t be asking what advertising agencies do – we should be asking what are advertising agencies for?
Outside of the industry, it is little recognized that advertising agencies do not actually make television commercials—this is outsourced to production companies.
Agencies germinate, direct and manage the processes of advertising production. However, the question is more fundamental than what do they do, but rather, what are advertising agencies for?
In 1975 Theodore Levitt wrote one of the classic texts of marketing. “Marketing Myopia” is the “quintessential big hit HBR piece”, to quote a later article about it from the self-same Harvard Business Review.
In it, Levitt points out that every industry was once a growth industry but that never seems to last, not because the market is saturated but rather because companies misinterpret the fundamental question: “What business are you in?”
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Posted: January 31st, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: clay shirky, Faris Yakob, Kodak, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, MDC Partners, nike, Theodore Levitt | Leave a Comment »
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This month Seth Godin says that pricing a new product is easy as long as you consider it from the buyer’s point of view.
Years ago, my bosses and I needed to finalize the pricing for a new line of software I was launching. In the room we had MBAs from Harvard (2), Stanford, Tuck and, I think, Wharton.
We had three prices in mind, and the five of us couldn’t agree. So we did the only scientific thing: we flipped a coin (two out of three, just to be sure).
Pricing your product is actually simple, as long as you consider it from the buyer’s point of view. How much it costs you to make something is irrelevant. They don’t care (of course, you can’t price something at a loss and hope to stay in business for long). The two keys to the analysis:
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Posted: January 24th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: Makes You Think, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, pricing formula, seth godin | Leave a Comment »
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Crawford Hollingworth, founder of The Behavioural Architects, explains how simple changes in the presentation and framing of information can lead to radical changes in behaviour.
Behaviour is often deeply ingrained and in order to alter it we need to work extremely hard if we want to succeed. However, this is not always the case, and there are many examples from the behavioural sciences of how simple changes in default settings or the presentation and framing of information can lead to radical changes in behaviour.
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Posted: January 24th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: behavioural commitment, behavioural economics, Bias aversion, cognitive biases, Commitment mechanisms, consumer spending, crawford hollingworth, Disney Corporation, IEI, loss aversion, Makes You Think, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, the behavioural architects | Leave a Comment »
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This month David Wethey, founder AAI, discusses what he thinks were the best and worst decisions of 2011.
Everyone will have their own ideas about which were the best and the worst decisions last year.
Because 2012 is the year I am going to publish a book on decision making, it was hard to resist the temptation to pick five winners and five clangers from the year just ended. I’ve restricted myself to just five categories in each case. All the normal caveats apply:
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Posted: January 18th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: Arab spring, David Wethey, downton abbey, John Lewis, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, Rupert Murdoch | Leave a Comment »
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Mark Sherrington, Marketing Society fellow and director at Brandtone, discusses brand attitude.
Brand positioning is important, right? Of course it is. All brands must set out the basis of their competitive advantage in such a way that all those involved in developing or delivering the brand can stay within the guardrails. Thus we achieve a consistency in branding that we all know to be vitally important.
So over the years a ‘catwalk’ (I have decided this will be the collective noun) of Brand Positioning Models (get it?) has been developed and, I am proud to say, I have made a big contribution to this.
The secret, you see, of a good Brand Positioning Model is to have a distinctive visual template to which you give you give a name and that name should capture the template. Brand Onion (ogres have layers and so do brands), Brand Triangle, Brand Bullseye and Brand Key. Those last two were mine by the way. There were others involved in their conception but I shall not name them but will rather take all the credit myself.
Some believe that it is enough just to give the Brand Positioning Model (more technique in my view) a title. The Brand Mantra (to be chanted every morning at dawn); The Brand Chord (excellent for the musically gifted brand manager – different notes make up the chord and each note represents a distinct but complimentary idea); The Brand Ideal (more than just an idea, a higher purpose). Actually, as I shall explain, I see merit in these techniques, all of them, and I intend to introduce a new one. But, sad to say, I’ve gone off the Brand Models.
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Posted: January 10th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: Brandtone, John Hegarty, Mark Sherrington, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog | Leave a Comment »
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Many years ago in America, Listerine had an antiseptic liquid they needed to find a mass-market use for.
So they invented bad breath, and with it mouthwash.
And consequently they owned the market.
No one noticed bad breath until Listerine sold it.
The more Listerine sold bad breath, the bigger their sales.
Subsequently, of course, other mouthwashes copied them.
But they were all small sellers because Listerine dominated that market.
Any message about ‘cures bad breath’ would just increase the size of the overall market.
It wouldn’t change the market dynamics.
Which meant all the little brands were doing Listerine’s job for them.
As long as they were just saying ‘cures bad breath’.
Then along came Scope.
Scope was marketed by people who actually knew what they were doing.
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Posted: January 10th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: Bayer, Dave Trott, Listerine, Makes You Think, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, Scope, Tylenol | Leave a Comment »
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Crawford Hollingworth, founder, The Behavioural Architects, provides some top tips on how we can make our New Year’s resolutions work.
It is a known fact that three out of four New Year’s resolutions typically fail. But help is on hand, you can use some of those clever insights into how our brains are wired to make success a little more likely.
Play to the commitment bias and loss aversion
Accept that your willpower is not perfect and make use of commitment devices (see earlier article – Unleashing the Power of Commitment). A great example of using commitment devices successfully to make sure we stay true to our exercise programme is Gym-Pact in the US. Set up by students following a class on behavioural economics, Gym-Pact helps struggling gym users exercise regularly by asking them to make a commitment to go to the gym a number of days a week. Recognising that most gym goers suffered from time inconsistency and self-control problems (wanting to get fit…but not today) they use commitment bias and loss aversion (the money gym users have committed to their membership) to increase gym attendance. The clever part is that it only charges you when you miss appointments you committed yourself to. The organisation is not a gym in itself, but it partners with gyms based in the Boston area to help their users attend. (gym-pact.com/).
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Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: behavioural commitment, behavioural economics, bias and loss aversion, cognitive biases, crawford hollingworth, Fogg, gym-pact, rsoultion into a habit, stickk, the behavioural architects | Leave a Comment »
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This month David Wethey, founder AAI, discusses why marketing isn’t loved.
You would think that a profession dedicated to creating affection for inanimate objects like brands would know a thing or two about making itself loved, and its leading lights adored.
But marketing isn’t up there in the popularity charts with the stars of entertainment and sports. It isn’t admired in the same way as pioneers and explorers. Outside its own world, it doesn’t even earn many marks for cleverness and ingenuity.
Where did marketing go wrong? And should it matter to us that marketers are not heroes?
I came into the orbit of marketing when I left university in 1965. Three years as a Nielsen presenter gave me a taste for being more than a semi-empowered weather forecaster. I came to London and joined a fantastic creative agency with the prosaic name of Pritchard Wood & Partners. Fleetwood Pritchard and Sinclair Wood were long gone, but Stanley Pollitt had just invented planning. Creative legends like John Webster and the enigmatic Gabe Massimi were turning the insights it yielded into amazing campaigns, which were sold to clients by account men like Martin Boase and the departing Frank Lowe (whose shoes I was optimistically hired to fill). We didn’t wait for client briefs. We took the initiative all the time.
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Posted: December 20th, 2011 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: AAI, David Wethey, Marketing Blog, marketing society, Marketing Society blog, Marketing Week, Mhairi McEwan | Leave a Comment »
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Crawford Hollingworth, founder, The Behavioural Architects, explores the power of feedback loops to make or break habits:
Most of the time we humans are effectively on cognitive autopilot and therefore much of our ingrained behaviours take place with little conscious thought – we just do them. So it is not surprising that in order to change an existing behaviour or create a new one we are receptive to mechanisms which bring something into our front of mind consciousness.
One way to achieve this awareness and motivate behaviour change – in what is termed a reflexive way – is to give real-time feedback which gives someone greater control over their behaviour. As Thaler and Sunstein say “Learning is much more likely if you get immediate, clear feedback after each try.” [Thaler, R. Sunstein, C. ‘Nudge’, p82] A simple example is the much loved/much hated spell checker on our computer.
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Posted: December 20th, 2011 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think, Uncategorized | Tags: behavioural commitment, behavioural economics, cognitive biases, crawford hollingworth, Garmin Connect, Makes You Think, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, Movescount, nike, similey SID, Smart toothbrush, the behavioural architects, the Hawthorne effect, Unilver | Leave a Comment »
Federico Trovato, Chief Client Satisfaction Officer at BrainJuicer®, says that brands can make us happy – even after a bad experience.
