Blast Radius by Euna Kang

MARKETING IN THE NOW HOW TO DEFINE MOBILE CONTEXT TO CREATE STRONG CUSTOMER CONNECTIONS

By Gurval Caer, CEO & Sarah Dickinson, SVP Strategy | Blast Radius

In the past 10 years, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen a societal shift in how we publish, distribute and create content. This change in communication has transformed how marketers interact with their customers. Mobile is the latest stage in this evolution, and requires the development of contextual lenses to help understand customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; unmet needs and to develop the strategies to address them. One distinction to be made with mobile is that the role of the media middle man, which has previously shaped the context for the product and brand interactions, is minimized or completely removed. Even more than traditional web, mobile is a direct relationship channel, one that brings us intimately closer to our customer and presents the opportunity to be much more integral and valuable in their lives. As marketers, our ability to connect with customers depends on our understanding of this new context; looking at where, and how, we might deliver real value. In this report, we will explore approaches that shift focus from the technology of mobile to customer-centric views that help us understand the physical, emotional and mental situations that surround mobile usage. This allows us to create mobile experiences that reinforce the brand, create customer delight and, most importantly, drive business results.

While TV is a lean-back medium and web is leanforward, mobile is a lean-on medium. Mobile is taskoriented, where usage is deliberate and purposeful. Even when we’re playing games, we’re intentionally killing time between other tasks. We don’t passively “surf” on our mobiles – this makes interruptive messaging even more unacceptable.

STARTING POINT: DEFINING THE TOOLS

We use four main contextual lenses to deeply understand consumers in order to create powerful consumer-centric, cross-channel marketing strategies: Personal: who is our customer and what do they want?

For this report, we will focus in on three of these methods:

Inter-personal: what is their community? Who are their trusted advisors?

Ethnography – research techniques to establish a consumer’s behavioral and emotional connection to mobile. We include observational studies, camera journaling, one-on-one interviews, surveys, and mobile personas.

Location: where are they using their mobile device? Why and when? Cultural: what is culturally-relevant to our customer right now? We then use the Blast Radius Mobile Research Toolkit to further define context and unmet customer needs.

Customer Pathways – charting your complete brand or product experience, including the milestones that result in moments of inspiration and disappointment, through the eyes of your customers. Network mapping – exploring and understanding the structure of social networks, how people influence each other, and how news, content and ideas are spread through mobile to social.

Work-life and personal-life have merged. We are never on or off, or far from a synced device. In 30 seconds we can send a work email, text friends, and update our statuses. We go from rational, to personal emotional, to public broadcast in seconds. This makes knowing specific context even more important for marketers.

Ethnographic research provides a first hand view of the habits, barriers and triggers that give key insights into mobile usage patterns.

ETHNOGRAPHY: DAY-TO-DAY USAGE INSIGHTS

Asking consumers about their mobile behavior is not a reliable means to extract insights. Our ethnographic studies have observed a number of demographic, situational and cultural groups, all of which demonstrated an increasingly unconscious set of selfmonitoring and usage rituals. Because of this, ethnographic studies have become incredibly useful for initial exploratory research as well as for prototyping. The research can be used to understand broader context of product use, as well as specific mobile behavior. From this research, we’ve discovered that the mobile device has become an identity hub for many consumers. The apps we have, the photos we’ve stored, and how we choose to use our devices in general have become indications of who we are as individuals, and accentuate the need for a highly tailored, contextual mobile experience.

In recent research for a cable communications company, the Blast Radius team looked at device usage in the home and found significant differences between self-reported usage and actual behavior. All participants greatly underestimated how often they checked their phones. Virtually all the interviewees felt like they should be embarrassed or ashamed of how much they use their phones. Many divulged that they had personal rules for how and when they use their device, often times imposed by a spouse. We knew our client’s experience had to be quick and valuable to overcome the consumer’s feeling of guilt.

General

Online

Mobile

Social Participation

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CONNECTION

Poor Experience

Good Experience

DISCOVER

CONSIDER

EVALUATE

PURCHASE

POST-PURCHASE

ADVOCACY

ON A MISSION: Need topurchase.

TIME PRESSED: Want to find store, deals, and browse online.

UNENGAGED: Want videos, seasonal content and community.

UNSATISFIED: Can t search by top brands, best quality, best deals.

DISGRUNTLED: Wish for new inventory alert.

IMPATIENT: Complicated navigation and long click paths.

INCONVENIENCED: Want ability to browse, shop, scan price via phone

UNINFORMED: Not enough product details, image views.

CONFUSED: Can I pick this up from a nearby store? EXPECTANT: Wish they could alert me on order status or on new products.

UNCONVINCED: Want expert and user reviews, recommendations. ANNOYED: Long cart process â&#x20AC;&#x201C; too many questions. I want to be recognized as a valued customer.

ACQUISITION

PEEVED: Want to pick up/return in store.

DILLIGENT: Want to share shopping list.

DEMANDING: Want for automatic renewal of order. NEGLECTED: No follow-up; want to be recognized and rewarded for purchases and referrals

RETENTION

Personalized journey mapping ensures relevance, as opposed to quantitative approaches which look at usage stats and assume all journeys are the same.

CUSTOMER PATHWAY: DISCOVERING OPPORTUNITIES

Mobile has added another contextual dimension to the user experience, with location-aware services enhancing social sharing, group messaging, search and commerce by positioning them in a physical place. To better understand this dimension, we recommend charting your complete Customer Experience Pathway. Not by email outreaches and lead conversions and call center incidents—but by the milestones that result in moments of inspiration and disappointment, through the eyes of your customers.

After an initial observation, we can take this journey mapping further with unguided interviews and camera journaling. These techniques ask the user to talk about, write and visualize their impressions, questions and challenges as they happen. These consumer pathways give us the insight on where mobile can add value on the consumer’s path to purchase. This is key to knowing the role of mobile in a product experience – whether it’s by supporting awareness, supplying more information or just by being an entertaining experience.

While network mapping for a global retailer, Blast Radius researchers spent time in-store looking at how people browse, co-shop, and include their social community in the shopping experience. This gave insights into the collaborative nature of the experience and how it could be facilitated through mobile.

NETWORK MAPPING: UNDERSTANDING THEIR SOCIAL NETWORKS

It has been widely acknowledged that the flames of the social web have fueled the growth in mobile web usage. Similarly, as the 50% mobile stats for Facebook and Twitter usage demonstrate, the geo-locative layer of mobile now allows us to connect, create, and share wherever we are. If things continue at this pace, these two worlds are set to converge entirely, with mobile providing location-based context to everything we do. With this in mind, it’s going to become increasingly important to understand the structure of social networks, how people influence each other, and how news, content and ideas are spread through mobile to social. Network Mapping helps build a better understanding of people’s social networks and their communication behaviors. For brands, network mapping can help guide the user experience, including design decisions and value proposition development, as well as social marketing planning.

Questions to ask when creating network maps include: > Who do your customers communicate with? > When do they communicate with certain people or groups? > What tools do they use to communicate? > When do they choose a mobile device? > How do people interact around brands on different networks? What we learned from network mapping is that mobile is pervasive and invisible, and people don’t silo. As marketers, we need to follow this trend, stop silo-ing our channel mix, and move towards an integrated strategy. Mobile will become the bridge device that will move us from desktop, to laptop, to TV, to automobile, to digital out of home, to point of sale and back.

DEFINING CONTEXT: CASE STUDIES Defining context will help create mobile experiences that create value for brands, but it’s only the beginning. We believe great mobile experiences also share three common threads: Results – delivering value to both customers (with simple, usable solutions that are needed as well as wanted) and businesses (by clearly defining objectives and success metrics) is vital at the outset. Meaning – there has been a profound shift in the expectations customers place on brands. Finding a shared ideal with customers that can be actively participated in by both is at the heart of good mobile experiences and will add emotional and well as functional value.

Delight – use the intimacy of the medium to create beautiful, fun and lovable experiences that make the brand even more unique and memorable. This combination has lead to successful work across the range of our global clients.

NIVEA: UNDERSTANDING UNMET NEEDS

STARBUCKS: ADDING TO THE IN-STORE EXPERIENCE

For NIVEA Sun we designed a mobile app and mobile website that adds value to people out in the sun. The tools use geo-location to give personalized weather and UV radiation information to customers when they need it most. Appropriate products are then suggested to keep them protected.

We leveraged Starbucksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Wi-Fi for the Starbucks Digital Network, providing premium content and community connections to customers while in store. Observational research and interviews were used to better understand userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s waiting behavior, tailor the value proposition and define the user experience for those on the go.

P&G: IMPROVING THE IN-STORE RETAIL EXPERIENCE

For P&G fragrances we used mobile to personalize the shopping experience. On a sales associate iPad app, the customer was able to enter information on their personal fragrance likes and dislikes, as well as their intentions for wear. This generated a personalized perfume recommendation.

TALK MORE? BLAST RADIUS

hello@blastradius.com

is a strategic digital agency that helps connect brands and consumers to tackle the complex issues of growing brand and revenue in a highly connected world. With offices throughout North America and Europe, Blast Radiusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; clients include Starbucks, Microsoft, Jordan, Bacardi, Nokia and NIVEA. The company is a member of the Wunderman Network and WPP.