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When I moved to the great state of North Carolina, I learned an important lesson: Never talk about religion, politics, or college basketball in polite company. College hoops is taken seriously in these parts.
This is rivalry week in the Triangle, with Duke and UNC meet for the first of two (or three) times this season on Wednesday night. One the eve of what will certainly be an epic matchup, one of the nation’s leading political polling firms, Public Policy Polling, have released their annual UNC/Duke Poll.
Here are a few of the highlights:
- UNC is North Carolina’s most popular school, with 32% of respondents saying it’s their favorite college. Duke (19%) and NC State (18%) are in a tight battle for second place, with ECU claiming 8%, Wake Forest 6% and 17% saying “none of these” schools are their favorite.
- UNC also leads when voters are asked who they’ll be rooting for in Wednesday’s Duke-UNC men’s basketball matchup, 41-31.
- There’s a healthy amount of respect between the fanbases. 49% of UNC fans say they “respect” Duke while just 16% “hate Duke.” And 53% of Duke fans “respect” UNC with only 16% “hating” the Tar Heels.
Regardless of who wins on Wednesday night, this is the greatest rivalry in sports, IMHO. The proximity (8 miles from campus to campus), success (UNC and Duke have 10 national championships between them), parity (the cumulative point total for the last 75 meetings is Duke 5,858- UNC 5,857) and sheer hatred are unrivaled in any sport, college or pro.
The world is always a bit off kilter. Nothing is exact. But my current profession as a market research guy has, in my opinion, developed a mantra that requires that the reseach I conduct for a client be “rock solid,” i.e. grounded in either well-founded objective fact (when dealing with quantitative data) or succinct insights (when delving into the qualitative realm). Regardless of the nature of the project or methodology employed, my point of view is expected to rest well within defined lines. I must be precise.
This current market research lens may actually cloud my findings. Rather than stuffing marketplace phenomena into a presentational bullet or pithy one-liner for my client, I often find myself wanting to “go wide” and start speaking on the non-alignment of the phenomena I’m investigating, for that’s where I believe interesting findings float.
A great example of this is the Italian fashion practice of sprezzatura. Sprezzatura is the belief that to look correct, things should always look slightly wrong. It is the act of studied effortlessness. A description of naturalness, by design. And when I think of either the natural or manufactured world in which people live and make consumer decisions, it answers a lot. My goal now is to further integrate this concept into the design and execution of the work I do, rather than drawing arbitrary lines in crafting market research. It’s the right direction to take.
A good starting point has been re-examining the basic tenets and overall premise of how I approach market research. Up until now, market research has, more and more, emphasized the science of its practice. Born of the social sciences, it continually seeks legitimization as a ‘true’ science. Unfortunately, in my experience, to use a well-worn phrase, it’s ”too fuzzy” for such rigor. Rather, I believe breakthrough research is more likely to occur if we allow the foundation of the practice to flow from the humanities, and not social science: writing, illustration, design, voice and performance.
So far I’ve found this premise to be powerful in the work I do. It’s decidedly different, and refreshing. Let’s face it, market research as we’ve known it for the past fifty plus years can be stale and uninspiring, regardless of how lofty our ideals. I think research should take a shot at being beautiful instead.
The U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies has long supported (for the past ~5 years) an online system for pulling area-based employment and residence data using a visual map-based selection tool called OnTheMap. This software is fairly intuitive and fun to use, but can also be quite useful in exploring a specific market or region to understand where workers live and work, and how that has changed over time.
OnTheMap is useful for more than work location, however. It’s a multi-layered mapping tool, with companion data on demographics, earnings, industry characteristics. We’ve also used it to identify exact metropolitan statistical areas and radius ranges, to find transportation routes, greenspace, and tribal and military lands, and to simply better understand a physical marketplace.
For years, organizations like the Census Bureau relied heavily on point-in-time estimates, tables of statistics and physical and static maps for data exploration like this. As new systems come online, are developed further, and improved over successive versions, our ability to access information from our desktops is not only facilitated but empowered.
Beautiful series of infographics by Peter Orntoft about how the Danish people feel about a number of pressing social issues. Though shortfalls of time, budget, and creativity force us to revert to PowerPoint Smart Art, it’s inspiring to see work that challenges what an infographic can be.
Jeff Ely, economics professor at Northwestern University and contributor to the Cheap Talk blog, recently wrote a great article about titles, or names. His examples focus on bank names, and how they engender trust, and the names of legal documents, which could perhaps be simply skimmed to get a sense of utility or relevance. But the article is an interesting reminder and idea spark, for researchers and marketers.
There are varying degrees of scope and sophistication in our wildly different projects and initiatives. Our work is passed to our clients, to internal teams, to executive management, to various partners and outside parties. The names of studies, reports, presentations, tools used in the process, task force teams, strategic plans, products in development, etc. do matter.
Names should be clear and communicative – presenting the topic but also the considering the audience. Names should not be overly technical or detailed. Names should be intuitive, parsimonious, and should be readable (and intelligible) “out loud.” But names should also hold up over time, regardless of how related issues change or evolve. Future researchers should be able to refer back to your work, referencing a name that still communicates something to them. It’s somewhat a lofty challenge, if you think about the implication of the choice of title. The goal is to strike a balance between communication and brevity – if the name simply “fits” in these terms, it will likely carry and communicate as desire.
A recent article from Wired discusses the hidden sales potential in marketing innovative products to laggards. (A fragment of the consumer segmentation scheme borrowed from the Diffusion of Innovations theory, laggards refer to traditionalists who are generally wary of innovation and tend to wait till a product has become accepted and established before purchasing.) Writer Clive Thompson forwards a theory belonging to marketing professor Jacob Goldenberg, who posits that disregarding laggards in marketing efforts for new gadgets and toys could prove to be serious negligence.
Goldenberg believes that laggards tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch. Given the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power. Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.
The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate. How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant lagg
ards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution. Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.
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A recent article from Wired discusses the hidden sales potential in marketing innovative products to laggards. (A fragment of the consumer segmentation scheme borrowed from the Diffusion of Innovation theory, laggards refer to traditionalists who are generally wary of innovation and tend to wait till a product has become accepted and established before purchasing.) Writer Clive Thompson forwards a theory belonging to marketing professor Jacob Goldenberg, who posits that disregarding laggards[k1] in marketing efforts for new gadgets and toys could prove to be serious negligence.
Goldenberg believes that laggards[k2] tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch. Gven the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power. Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.
The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate. How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant laggards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution. Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.
Few fans of the magazine Gourmet expected the November issue of 2009 to be its last. However, a struggling economy, along with the internet, has made it hard for many magazines to survive.
After nearly 70 years, publisher Condé Nast abruptly stopped production of the monthly magazine due to lack of advertising sales and a shift in consumer interest. At the time of Condé Nast’s decision, both Gourmet and its sister magazine, Bon Appétit, were struggling with ad sales. Bon Appétit made the cut. Gourmet didn’t. Bon Appétit was offered as a substitute for Gourmet for the remainder of almost one million subscriptions.
Since then a slight margin (a slim 20 percent to be exact) of past Gourmet subscribers have chosen to switch to Bon Appétit. This seems odd for such highly dedicated and long-term subscribers. The lack of transferred subscriptions poses a hard question. Why did Condé Nast choose not to research the niche market of such an obviously successful magazine like Gourmet in order to keep those dedicated subscribers?
On the cover, the magazines look similar. Both share great recipes. Both feature articles about food, culture, and politics. However, the audiences of each magazine differ greatly. This is evidenced through both magazines advertisements as well as their contrasting takes on good living. Gourmet was luxurious and indulgent. It stressed extravagant travel and an elitist lifestyle. Bon Appétit stresses a comfortable home life, centering on family cooking. It offered complex, yet more accessible recipes.
While many Gourmet readers feel heartbroken about no longer receiving the magazine each month, Condé Nast’s decision makes good sense, especially when considering the economic forecast that sunk Gourmet. Foodies aren’t paying for exotic trips to experience food anymore. They’re cooking at home with their families, growing their own gardens, or buying local food. Despite a large fan base, Gourmet’s attention to life’s luxuries and hefty subscription fees failed to keep advertisers interested. In the case of Gourmet and many other magazines, ad money trumps readership and loyalty.
But after loosing 800,000 subscribers, it seems that Condé Nast missed a really great chance to study their Gourmet readers. The magazine may have been out-of-touch with the current economic reality, but its subscribers were still writing checks every year. If Condé Nast saw the end of Gourmet magazine in sight, why not find out what it was that appealed to readers and kept some subscribing for decades. That sort of insight would have been exactly what Condé Nast could have used to align Bon Appétit toward the views and preferences of Gourmet’s readers in order to boost the number of subscription transfers and keep those loyal consumers.
Well, maybe not an app but a text will certainly suffice. According to a recent study by Boston-based marketing research firm, Cone, nearly 13 percent of Americans ponied up the money for Haitian relief assistance via a text donation. While this number may seem like small potatoes, Cone says that it is actually an indicator of the building traction of the “text-to-give” trend.
The new percentile, acquired through a brief two-question online survey held in February 2010, represents a 100 percent jump in text donations in comparison to Cone’s 2009 Consumer New Media Study where only six percent of adults reported donating to any cause via mobile phone in a 12-month period of time.
With the impressive success rate of the recent text relief fund – the American Red Cross raised more than $32 million during the aid campaign for Haiti- organizations are taking note and striving to change the face of charity. A new campaign revealed during the Super Bowl by the United Way is a clear indicator of future text-to-give marketing strategies as philanthropic organizations implore cell phone users to use their digits for the greater good.
