Marketing News: November/December 2019

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

AMA.ORG

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

BRANDS, TIME TO KISS*

IT *KEEP SIMPLE, STUPID

THE STATUS OF THE MARKET RESEARCH INDUSTRY TOO MUCH DATA, NOT ENOUGH DIRECTION THE TECHLASH IS UPON US

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 NO.

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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

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SEEN ON AMA.ORG

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ANSWERS IN ACTION • Snapshot • Core Concepts • Ethical Marketing

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Consumers Just Want the Basics from Voice Assistants

People are drawn to Alexa, Siri and other voice assistants because they simplify their lives. Brands can appeal to this sensibility by setting a voice strategy that values function over form.

SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS • Research Digest • Repurposed Goods

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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Michael Krauss • Andy Crestodina

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CAREER ADVANCEMENT • Soft Skills • Martech

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AND NOW, A WORD FROM...

42  The Global State of Data and Insights: Emerging Technologies Maturing

The data and insights industry can seem almost invisible. But this behind-the-scenes industry—valued at $80 billion globally—is worth almost twice as much as the film industry’s global box office value.

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 Most Marketers Are Missing the Data They Need and the Context to Find It

A recent report from Kantar found that more than 90% of marketers don’t know what they don’t know, creating problems with consistency and marketers’ ability to act. How can they blend art and science to fill in the gaps?

54 What Is the Techlash – and Should You Care?

How consumer media use is set to evolve, and whether marketers are doing enough to adjust their digital marketing strategy.

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2019

A New Era for Marketing News

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he magazine you’re holding has evolved many times over its long history and is about to make another great leap. Beginning this spring, Marketing News will become Marketing News Quarterly, with a new depth and focus to better serve our members.

It’s not the first change of this sort we’ve made over the decades. The AMA has published Marketing News since 1966 in a variety of formats. We’ve been a tabloid newspaper, a fortnightly and, at one time 25 years ago, we even considered (briefly!) becoming a weekly.

In each case, the strategy was dictated by two interrelated factors: what served our members best at the time and what the technology of each era allowed us to do.

Today, in terms of technology, you could argue we don’t need a print magazine at all. Like most publishers, we distribute all our content online. What’s the value of print in a digital world?

We believe print can benefit our audience in some ways that digital can’t. It allows us to serve readers more compelling packages offering greater impact and

VOL. 53 | NO. 10 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Stacy Armijo Chairperson of the AMA Board 2019-2020 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

Phone (800) AMA-1150 Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org

depth, and gives access to prominent visualizations of data and infographics.

It’s easily savable by readers for quick reference and shareable among colleagues in a tangible way. The essence of print is its user-friendly, familiar physicality, and we want to reimagine the new Marketing News Quarterly to all these ends.

Internally, the shift from 10 times a year to quarterly allows our staff more time to ensure that each of the four issues every year is truly special. We’ll also have more time to coordinate our print and digital strategies so each can feed off the other, improving the content we offer members across all channels.

This is an exciting transition for Marketing News to make, and while it’s not our first big change, we hope it’s the best yet. Enjoy this current issue, and we’ll see you again in April with the debut of Marketing News Quarterly.

DAVID KLEIN Chief Content Officer

David Klein, Chief Content Officer dklein@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Managing Editor ssteimer@ama.org Julian Zeng, Assistant Managing Editor jzeng@ama.org Steve Heisler, Staff Writer sheisler@ama.org Bill Murphy, Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Nicola Tate, Associate Director, Media Channels ntate@associationmediagroup.com (804) 469-0324 Rianne McMahon, Recruitment Advertising Specialist Rianne.McMahon@CommunityBrands.com (727) 497-6565 x3467 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

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Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff.

Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.

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Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for all content (including text, representations and illustrations) of advertisements published, and also assume responsibility for any claims arising therefrom made against the publisher. The right is reserved to reject any advertisement.

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HAL CONICK

CRAIG CHARNEY

Hal Conick is a writer in Chicago who has previously written for Marketing News magazine, Crain’s Chicago Business, Chicago magazine and Slate.

Craig Charney is president of Charney Research, a New York-based market research firm with a focus on tech, health and global markets. He has been in the field for more than 20 years, with extensive experience in studies in the U.S., Asia and Africa. Clients have ranged from major tech companies and consulting firms to the World Bank, Nelson Mandela and President Bill Clinton.

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Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org.

Printed in the U.S.A.

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LETTER FROM THE CEO

Suspending Disbelief to Fuel Connectivity

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eonardo da Vinci once asserted, “Realize that everything connects to everything else.” He was right, but I wonder if he could have imagined a world that could be connected and powered by the internet of things.

I have long believed that if you can imagine it, you can achieve it. There’s no better example of this than to see how science fiction has, in many ways, become science reality. As a genre of entertainment, science fiction has arguably had as profound an effect on the evolution and quality of life here in the U.S. and around the world as any true discipline of science.

One of the most fundamental concepts of what makes the entertainment world function predates the cinema: a suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief is a theory intended to characterize people’s relationships to art. Coined by poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, it refers to the willingness of a person to accept the premises of a work of fiction as true, even if they are fantastic or impossible.

It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of a given premise. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.

Suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient in the enjoyment of many B-grade science fiction films and television series, such as the early era of “Doctor Who,” “Flash Gordon” or “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” The audience willingly ignores preposterous low-budget props and occasional plot gaps in order to fully engage and embrace an entertaining story.

Suspension of disbelief professes to explain why action movie fans are willing to accept the idea that the good guy can get away with shooting

guns in public places or never running out of ammunition, or that our hero seems to have the uncanny ability to avert a spray of machine gun bullets by dodging and diving behind defenses that a bullet would go right through.

Or simply not being able to recognize Clark Kent as Superman because he’s wearing a pair of eyeglasses.

Without suspension of disbelief, there might be very little, if any, true innovation on the planet. I’ve used this concept several times with my marketing teams when discussing future scenarios for which our business or brand must prepare. I have always said that while we can’t predict the future, we can predict futures. But you can’t even do that if you’re unwilling to suspend disbelief.

Such is also the case when setting up for innovation. True innovation to its fullest degree, innovation that creates brand new business or disruption, requires an imagination. It can feel fanciful or capricious, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In my opinion, there is no better example of suspension of disbelief than how the epic television series “Star Trek” paved the way to inventions that today seem unremarkable. Take, for example, how officers on the Starship Enterprise would pull up a live image of a person on a large screen and talk to them in real time. It was unimaginable in 1966, but not in today’s world of Skype and FaceTime.

Fast-forward to today, when the internet of things holds the promise of more connectivity between machines and people. Yet of all prospective machine-to-machine, machineto-person and person-to-person connectivity that exists, less than 1% is currently active. This dramatizes the untapped potential for innovative commerce. The world as we know it has not yet been fully imagined, and the innovation that will be enabled from the potential connectivity has yet to be conceived. If you can imagine it, it can be realized. I encourage all of the

dreamers out there to get a second wind with this opportunity in mind.

It’s not difficult to envision the estimates for GDP growth tied to an increasingly connected world in the trillions of dollars. If following the money motivates where research and innovation occur, then we should all be doubling down on the promise of a connected world. Think about the product or service for which you’re marketing and growing. Can it be connected to other products or services to enhance customer value?

Can it be connected to other people?

Can your product or service enable new and meaningful connections between people? Set aside what you know to be possible and breathe in the clean air of suspending disbelief.

Maybe you won’t invent the next smartphone the moment you suspend disbelief, but you can set in motion a new blast of energy that will most certainly be needed to fuel the innovation required for you to avoid the No. 1 stall point of all enterprises: the failure to innovate.

As much as joyfulness and fun are important cultural values for the AMA, let’s not forget that suspending disbelief is serious business in the world of long-range planning and innovation.

RUSS KLEIN CEO

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Unwrapping the Hidden Appeal of Unboxing Videos ASMR, the phenomenon of inducing sensory tingles from sounds, elevates influencer marketing to levels consumers can’t ignore

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lue Apron, the delivery meal kit brand, sends its products to YouTube influencers to be featured in the popular content producers’ videos. Some of the influencers they target aren’t your typical cooking channels. Instead, accounts such as Gentle Whispering ASMR and Gibi ASMR are dedicated to producing videos that stimulate a tingling sensation in viewers.

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is a relatively new phrase—the first clinical study of the phenomenon was conducted in 2013—but many have

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felt the sensation their entire lives.

It’s categorized by a fuzzy feeling in the scalp that trickles down the spine to the chest area. Though it can occur inadvertently, there is a consensus as to what sounds can induce ASMR: speaking softly, the crinkling of wrapping paper, tapping fingernails on hard surfaces and lightly brushing a microphone, to name a few.

The concept has been used in prominent advertising campaigns of late, notably a Michelob Ultra commercial featuring Zoë Kravitz that aired during Super Bowl LII. Brands benefit from ASMR because it immediately captures

the focus of viewers, even those who aren’t actively watching the screen (some swear the audio helps them relax or fall asleep).

In the case of the Michelob spot, the bottle is opened and slowly poured, then the glass is held up to the microphone to capture the sounds of the bubbles dissipating.

ASMR also enhances replay value: Vulture reported that some viewers rewound their DVRs to rewatch the commercial.

ASMR dominates YouTube channels and attracts loads of attention. As of October, there are more than 30 top ASMR content creators that boast hundreds of thousands of followers and tens of millions of views. MarTech Today recently covered ASMR with the headline, “Why brands need to take ASMR more seriously,” and noted that one form of ASMR videos, in which people knead goopy slime, garnered 25 billion views in 2018.

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The content of Blue Apron ASMR videos resembles that of any cooking how-to video, but slowed down and with the volume turned up. Maria Viktorovna, the on-camera face of Gentle Whispering ASMR, runs her Blue Apron videos by first opening the box and pulling out the ingredients one at a time, massaging the soft packaging of each until it crackles or patting her fingernails across hard plastic containers. The camera remains close to the food itself as Viktorovna slowly and deliberately slices onions on a cutting board and tosses them in a pan to simmer. She narrates each step in a metered whisper, popping her P’s. Each of these aural cues is a potential trigger for ASMR. ASMR aside, unboxing videos chart a similar course— minus eating. (The sound of chewing is another known ASMR trigger.) Influencers are sent mobile phones, baskets of beauty products, video game consoles or toys, then simply open the packaging in real time for the camera. The goal is to capture their excitement to recreate the experience of unwrapping a holiday present.

In particular, children seem to love unboxing videos for the surprise value and their simplicity. The No. 1-earning YouTube star is an 8-yearold boy named Ryan Kaji who opens and reviews toys under the username Ryan ToysReview.

He generated $22 million in pretax income from June 1, 2017, through June 1, 2018.

Unboxing videos are attractive in part because they produce unintentional ASMR. They contain stretches without talking in which the only thing being recorded is the sound

of opening boxes or torn-off plastic. The unboxers handle the items with care, often zooming in so viewers can admire each contour of the device being opened. They involve a single camera and microphone so words can remain quiet, further stimulating tingles.

Recently, Domino’s and Google collaborated on an unboxing that showcased both brands. The companies sent pizzas to influencers that contained pizza in one box and a new Google Pixel 4 smartphone in the other. The shots of food accompanied by the sounds of plastic films being peeled from the phone screen combined to form videos that inspired tingles as much as pangs of hunger.

If you’re thinking of sending packages of your product to YouTube ASMR influencers, consider those with the proper equipment. Watch a few of their videos to see if they have highquality microphones, particularly some that offer binaural recording. This type of audio gives off the impression of 3D stereo, which has been shown to enhance the effects of ASMR. Check for high visual production value as well. While audio triggers are the most prevalent, some people also find that seeing someone perform rote or mundane tasks, such as cooking, can induce ASMR; triggers vary per person, so don’t neglect visuals entirely. Also consider the location of your YouTuber.

ASMR videos are more popular in the U.S than elsewhere in the world.

Watch some videos and try to induce the tingles on yourself.

Understanding the appeal helps you decide which crinkly materials to include in your box.

—STEVE HEISLER

Brands benefit from ASMR because it immediately captures the focus of viewers, even those who aren’t actively watching the screen (some swear the audio helps them relax or fall asleep).

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The Loss of Net Neutrality and What It Means for Brands Given a recent ruling against net neutrality, how can brands maximize a throttled internet connection?

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dds are that your business has benefited from net neutrality.

The practice, which was repealed by a federal court in June 2018, forbids internet service providers from throttling or otherwise limiting bandwidth to particular sites. For example: Hulu is a joint venture owned by Disney and Comcast, so without net neutrality, Comcast could severely reduce the speed afforded to Netflix or Amazon Prime Video in all homes running Comcast internet, instead favoring Hulu and Disney’s upcoming streaming service, Disney+.

Big brands aren’t the only ones relying on net neutrality: Any brand competing with a company owned by a major media conglomerate is in danger of having its website speed neutered or its ads load slowly.

On Oct. 1, a federal judge laid out a ruling that ostensibly benefits the FCC and large monopolies but retains protection for brands of all sizes. A collection of online advocacy groups, along with 22 states’ attorneys general, had filed a case hoping to reverse the 2018 decision to strip net neutrality.

They lost on Oct. 1, but the court maintained a state’s right to set its own internet regulations—making it difficult for Comcast and others to enact non-neutrality policies across the board. After all, national companies run into legal challenges when attempting to blanket the country, as each state maintains different rules.

The lawsuits will certainly continue, keeping the fate of net neutrality uncertain. Here’s why brands should follow the progress.

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E-Commerce Concerns It’s difficult enough for small online shops to compete against Amazon.

The retail behemoth sells everything and anything for low prices at nearly instantaneous delivery speeds. The loss of net neutrality further inhibits the growth of specialty markets, in that the performance of those e-commerce sites will be significantly diminished and prone to technical issues. SEO would also be at risk, given that large corporations can directly pay for higher search ranking above and beyond SEM. If your brand doesn’t fall under the umbrella of a major telecommunications company, consider revamping your e-commerce site to include smaller-resolution images to aid with load times—so long as they’re not grainy.

speeds, perhaps social media could play a larger role in your analysis.

Heavily Internet-Reliant Technology On the other hand, companies breaking into innovative spaces might serve to benefit from a lack of net neutrality. The Los Angeles Times explains that technology such as selfdriving cars or real-time healthcaremonitoring software can rest easy knowing they’ll always enjoy a strong, unencumbered internet connection— for the right price, of course. This stands to create a better brand experience for consumers dipping their toe into the future of web-heavy services.

However, any startup breaking into this space starts at a severe disadvantage, as they’re less likely to be able to afford the same highspeed internet connection. This leads to less competition and, eventually, the same kinds of monopolies that stand to benefit the most from abolishing net neutrality in the first place.

—STEVE HEISLER

Ad Revenue and Metrics Just as images and videos will load more slowly in a non-net-neutrality world, so will banner ads and other digital marketing tools. This can be a major issue for brands relying on ads to get the word out, as ads typically load last and customers might have blazed past that particular page by the time the ad is ready to be viewed.

And if brands want to advertise on pages that aren’t throttled, they should expect to pay a pretty penny.

Small companies would be wise to start thinking about other sources of marketing—possibly sponsorships or branded content—that venture away from traditional models of online advertising. It may also be worth diving into different metrics to prove the effectiveness of campaigns. If clicks and concurrents become more difficult to measure due to slow load

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SPONSORED CONTENT | PROVIDED BY COLLEGIS

Refocusing Higher Ed Marketing as Enrollment Continues to Decline Undergraduate fall enrollment in the U.S. is down for the seventh straight year. Reasons cited range from a declining birthrate to low unemployment. But it’s clear that competition is increasing, and universities can no longer rely on traditional marketing tactics to engage prospective students. Marketing News spoke with Megan Danielson, associate vice president of marketing at Collegis Education, about some new strategies for navigating these changing market forces.

Danielson has 14 years of experience in the higher education space and built her career around creating cutting-edge digital strategies and go-to-market solutions for educational clients. She leads the team responsible for helping clients with branding and creative through digital advertising, website strategy, conversion rates and SEO at Collegis.

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What shifts are you seeing in the education market and what prospective students expect of higher education?

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There are definitely some interesting dynamics at play. Because of low unemployment, more competition and the shift in student preferences, institutions need to work harder to gain a student’s attention.

Really, a lot of the change has to do with consumer communication preferences. If you think about your own shift in decisionmaking behavior—how you use your mobile device today versus 10 years ago when making purchases or conducting research— some of those preferences should be clear.

Shorter content. Multiple touchpoints and engagements. Mobile-ready web pages.

Simplified web experiences. With increased mobile-centric consumer needs, consumercentric marketing experiences for the smaller screen are needed now more than ever.

Also, institutions have to own their brand identity and understand what differentiates them. Everyone has “online, quality, flexible” programs. Students want to know something different about you—that they identify with your values—and you need to communicate that within three seconds of them visiting your website.

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What do you see as the best way for university programs to market themselves to prospective students?

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What kinds of experiences are today’s students looking for?

Prospective students are just like any other modern consumer—they want experiences to be frictionless, relevant and distinct. Most universities let their internal processes and functional silos dictate their consumers’ experience instead of the other way around. Some of the steps students need to go through just to get started are not aligned with the desired outcome.

Students shouldn’t have to provide personal information like their birthdate on initial forms just to begin a conversation. Instead, this should be a simple, integrated process already mapped out with the student in mind.

Another inquiry form example is on the “thank-you” page. As an industry, we have been so motivated around generating the inquiry that we focus on the form and forget what happens after a prospective student clicks “submit.” Doing nothing at all is a missed opportunity. Is that really how you want to introduce someone to your institution? All it takes is a simple “thank you” to show you appreciate them and to help boost their excitement.

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It’s amazing to me how much focus in higher ed marketing is still on acquisition through list-buying and paid media. Those strategies bring in quantity, but don’t necessarily bring quality applicants or drive sustainable yield improvements. An institution’s website is the primary source of brand and enrollment engagement. If you’re not communicating your brand and driving students through the enrollment process on your website, then you can’t leverage any of your marketing to its best advantage.

The first step is understanding the prospective student’s needs and aligning your brand and program differentiation.

Don’t just use catalog or academic content to populate your key marketing and enrollment assets.

You need to start thinking about communications from their perspective. For website delivery, this really means filtering your webpages, communicating key pieces of information quickly and identifying what action you want them to take. Be strategic about addressing the students’ needs and build your website to address those needs through content and design.

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SPONSORED CONTENT | PROVIDED BY COLLEGIS

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What are the biggest website performance issues you see in higher education that prevent growth?

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Most institutions manage their website for multiple owners. When your website incorporates input from faculty, deans, alumni and current students, it dilutes the intent to engage core audiences (prospective students, current students, academics). Universities need to shift their thinking to show how their content aligns to these needs.

Knowing your data and understanding who is coming to your site and who you’re designing it for makes a huge difference.

At Collegis, we center an entire discovery period around identifying a university’s unique audience and helping them navigate placing the best mix of information on their homepage to serve multiple audiences while engaging prospective students.

A lot of universities might not feel like they have that kind of data from their website. What big, long-term wins can universities pull from the data they currently have?

Actually, universities have data all over the place—it’s just in silos. To get to long-term wins, you need to make connections in your data to inform what kind of students you should go after. Dig into alumni databases and enrollment records to see who has been successful at your institution and who hasn’t. Look at student profiles to develop unique identities at your university. That kind of data can inform your conversations about marketing direction and help tighten up those critical engagement points in the student experience.

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How can universities set themselves up to get the data they need that will help them differentiate in the future?

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Data is extremely intimidating for most of us. It will always be messy and it will never define truth. But it should lead to an outcome—and the best way to accomplish that is to start with a set of questions. With a tool like Google Analytics, you don’t need to be a super user to inform questions like where your students are coming from and what social media communities they belong to.

Websites and data don’t need to be intimidating if you think through them the right way. One individual—even several teams—can’t organize this information and communicate on it alone, though. Align on the key questions that you want the data to address and use that data to empower decisions that you are making about your overall brand differentiation.

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answers in action

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Aloha! Per My Last Email...

Young professionals are more interested in blending work and play, using their travels to re-energize their careers. Through a professional residency program and ad campaign, Hawaii asked New Yorkers to consider its islands as their muse.

BY SARAH STEIMER | MANAGING EDITOR

 sheisler@ama.org Goal Americans are notoriously bad at vacationing. The U.S. is the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any paid time off, and—according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research—a quarter of America’s private-sector workers don’t receive any time off at all.

Those working for companies that do provide PTO have an average vacation time of 15 days per year, still lower than the minimum amount legally required in 19 of the wealthiest countries in the world.

But even those with PTO aren’t always using it. U.S. Travel’s “Project: Time Off ” initiative found that 55% of Americans said they lost vacation time that went

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unused in 2018, and more than a quarter (27.2%) of PTO went unused in 2018.

So, what’s a tropical paradise have to do to get a little attention these days— especially from work-obsessed New Yorkers? While the vacation statistics don’t paint a rosy picture, one fact gave the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau hope: 96% of New York millennials believe that getting away from their work routine is essential to driving their creativity. The bureau and its agency, Edelman, saw an opportunity to pitch Hawaii not as a place to get away from it all, but as a place to re-energize their career.

After all, of the numerous workplace acronyms, few are as beloved as WFH (working from home) or even OOO

(out of office). What could be better than finishing up a presentation in your pajamas from the comfort of your home office?

Maybe if that home office had views of Hulopoe Beach on the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

Because most travelers to Hawaii have to fly there, the state has quite a bit of data on who’s coming, when and from where.

The HVCB used this data to identify about 26.3 million potential visitors from across the U.S., finding New York City to have the largest percentage of its target audience.

“We saw that there was an opportunity to increase business by focusing on New York, particularly since we’ve been doing really well on the West Coast,” says Jay Talwar, CMO of HVCB. “We knew the challenges were myriad, [such as the] time, distance and misperceptions about the destination. We really saw it as a challenge, but certainly it’s an opportunity.”

The misperceptions Talwar references came from survey research, which found that some people consider Hawaii dated or kitschy, or that it’s expensive and perhaps not so exotic given that it’s part of the U.S. “When we start talking about the individual islands—Molokai, Kauai,

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Maui—people start conjuring up different imagery,” Talwar says. “It was key to us in terms of messaging to define the Hawaiian Islands as a series of six unique islands, each with their own set of experiences.”

The other significant misperception that HVCB and Edelman had to contend with was that Hawaii is merely a place for people to post up on the beach. Certainly, that happens plenty. But to target New Yorkers, who often define themselves by their careers, the state needed to show how attractive it is not only for people looking to unplug, but also for those on a quest to up their game. The new world of travel required Hawaii to prove itself as a place to recharge—both personally and professionally.

Action Hawaii Tourism United States commissioned a survey, conducted by Wakefield Research, of more than 1,000 Americans, finding that 60% have worked during a vacation. The survey also found that 83% of millennial respondents feel more productive when they work away from a traditional office setting, and feel they would benefit in both productivity (83%) and creativity (91%) from combining work with play.

From there, Edelman devised a campaign that would entice New Yorkers to visit the Hawaiian Islands—there are eight main islands, but they focused on the six that Talwar says people typically visit. The campaign was a professional residency contest designed to draw the attention of professionals from the top careers in the city. HVCB and Edelman used their island branding research to guide which professional would benefit from which island’s experience offerings.

For example, they positioned Oahu as the perfect destination for a designer, with opportunities to participate in Honolulu’s arts scene, collaborate with local artists and learn about traditional Hawaiian design techniques.

To promote the residency program— cheekily called WFH, or Work from Hawaii—ads went up on professional touchpoints: social media, WeTransfer, WeWork spaces and other out-of-home locations along New Yorkers’ commutes.

The team used Facebook interest data and heat mapped neighborhoods to target the right professionals, even directly inviting many to apply for the residencies via LinkedIn. “To come to a New Yorker with the proposition of taking vacation, to leave your work behind, that’s not the mindset of the career-focused hustle of a New Yorker,” says Kelson Berkus, senior vice president and creative director at Edelman. “We invited New Yorkers to bring their hustle with them to Hawaii.

It’s also building on a trend that we were observing: There’s this ‘bleader,’ which are business leader trips. You’ve got digital nomads who now are untethered from their offices and able to be productive and telecommute. And there’s so many different ways to stay focused and collaborative—that idea that the time off makes your time on better.”

Hawaii would be the muse for six of New York’s top professionals: a designer in Oahu, writer in Molokai, business leader in Lanai, location scout in Kauai, digital creator in Maui and musician on the Big Island. “What if this was a trip where it was designed to inspire the best work of their life?” Berkus says.

If nothing else, the campaign inspired more than 2,000 New Yorkers to apply.

Result Only six New Yorkers were chosen for the residency program, but the campaign piqued the interest of many more. There was a 53% increase in organic travel queries from New York, and the campaign helped to generate a $342 million increase in U.S. East visitor spending across the islands.

“Earned media was a huge part of this [campaign],” says Charlotte Bruner, senior

answers in action

COMPANY

Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau HEADQUARTERS

Hawaii CAMPAIGN TIMELINE

April-December 2018 CAMPAIGN RESULTS:

More than 500 million earned media impressions, 53% increase in organic travel queries from New York, $342 million increase in U.S. East visitor spending across the islands. Shorty Award, three Webby Awards, short-listed for Cannes Lions, SABRE Awards and Jay Chiat Awards.

vice president and account and client lead at Edelman. “This was really driven by what we call ‘Edelman earned creative.’

As we’re thinking through campaign ideas, we’re really thinking through how we’re going to earn attention in the market. This campaign really did that. It’s hugely successful from an earned media standpoint, and had a lot of coverage across a number of local and national media outlets.”

Press coverage included mentions in New York Post, Mic, Thrillist, Fast Company, Time, Apartment Therapy, Travel + Leisure, Mental Floss and Forbes.

Earned media impressions totaled more than 500 million.

The campaign also helped change Hawaii’s image as a destination once found in honeymoon photos from the Greatest Generation to a more inspirational spot to help recharge career-minded millennials and boost them to the top of their professional game.

Says Talwar, “It’s more about inspiration than pure relaxation.” m NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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CORE CONCEPTS

The Reviews Are In: It’s Worth Promoting Customer Feedback Customers rely heavily on product and service reviews. Here’s how to highlight the best—even if you don’t have the most.

BY SARAH STEIMER | MANAGING EDITOR

 ssteimer@gmail.com

J

ust as some customers walk directly to the back of a store, knowing this is where the retailer displays sale items, many shoppers quickly scroll down a web page to seek product reviews. Checking reviews has become second nature to consumers. Looking for a new taco joint? See what’s rated well on Yelp. Torn between two vacuum cleaners? See which has the better star rating.

The age of ratings and reviews was arguably ushered in by Amazon.

The company has perfected the art, implementing a standard five-star rating

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system that allows customers to post photos and videos of products, and even making reviews searchable for those with a specific question or concern. But they’ve also opened themselves up to abuse, spawning fake reviews and manipulated ratings.

Customers still rely on these systems to guide their purchasing decisions.

Ethical brands shouldn’t directly guide or censor customer feedback, but they can help build robust, trustworthy review systems that can help answer shopper questions.

Why Ratings and Reviews Matter According to Pew Research Center, 82% of U.S. adults say they at least sometimes read online ratings or reviews before buying items for the first time, including 40% who say they always or almost always look at ratings or reviews. According to BrightLocal’s annual report on customer reviews, the typical next step after reading a positive review is for the consumer to visit the company website (50%) or search for more reviews to validate their choice (19%). This marked a notable shift from 2017, when visiting the website as a next step was chosen by 37% of survey respondents and 26% said they searched elsewhere for validation.

The robots are also looking at reviews: Moz’s 2018 research found that review signals—defined as review quality, velocity and diversity—ranked as the third-most important factor in local search-ranking factors.

Cheryl Sullivan, president of price and promotion at DemandTec and previously CMO of PowerReviews, says that customer reviews—also referred to as user-generated content (UGC)—went from “nice to have” to “need to have.”

“Shoppers have lost a lot of faith and trust in retailers and brands today, and they’re really starting to turn more toward other shoppers,” Sullivan says. “Brands and retailers are starting to realize that [UGC] has to be part of their overall marketing strategy.”

How to Get Customers to Post (Helpful) Reviews Sullivan says that encouraging shoppers to review a product can be difficult, so it’s incumbent upon marketers to guide them to take action and provide robust content.

For example, she recommends directing post-purchase consumers to a display they can fill out with their review, one that asks questions that are customized to their buy.

“We’ll try to get images, we’ll try to get video, things like that up front because that’s more compelling content,” she says.

Many companies compel customers to review their products or services by offering something in return. Perhaps

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CORE CONCEPTS

you’ve been to a dentist that offers a free tube of lip balm if you review them on Yelp, or maybe you’ve received email offers to be entered to win a gift card if you review a clothing purchase online.

Incentivizing reviews is absolutely a strategy, but it should be done cautiously.

“There is a debate in the industry right now specifically on that question [of ethical incentivizing],” says Jared Watson, assistant professor of marketing at New York University. “There are some who suggest that it creates a biased account of the product when you incentivize reviews.

And therefore, when companies choose to incentivize reviews, they’re actually sort of misleading their potential customers.

My personal take on it is that [it’s acceptable] as long as you’re forthright about, ‘You’re entered into this contest, regardless of what kind of review you write for the product.’ But anything that helps encourage more reviews is better for the ecosystem.”

If you do plan to use a specific review in marketing collateral, be sure to make that clear to the reviewer. Either explicitly mention that their reviews may be used in advertising upon submission, or contact the reviewer before using it in an ad.

Highlighting Your Reviews The best reviews go beyond a simple, “Product xyz was good,” and provide details—especially as it relates to use.

“Anything that helps the consumer visualize usage helps,” Watson says.

“Obviously, pictures and videos help consumers visualize how it might be used, where it might be placed, how it might fit with other things. You can also do the same thing with text: Descriptive text describing the flavors and the contrast of everything at that restaurant might be more impactful than simply, say, ‘This was good’ or ‘It had a fair price.’ Take some of those descriptive words that might be sort of emotionally laden—beyond ‘I was satisfied with things,’ use ‘I was thrilled, I was exuberant, etc.’ Everything that can evoke emotion and invoke the ability to visualize the experience or the usage of that product helps.”

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Customers still rely on these systems to guide their purchasing decisions. Ethical brands shouldn’t directly guide or censor customer feedback, but they can help build robust, trustworthy review systems.

Watson says consumers often place more weight on the actual text of the review, relative to aggregate metrics.

Think of the ability to search reviews for keywords on Amazon, or the way some clothing retailers allow review filters by item size.

“Advertising specific lines or sentiment that comes from other people could help you overcome some of those deficits that you might have in the aggregate categories of ratings or the number of reviews,” Watson says.

Highlighting specific use cases via UGC can help potential buyers imagine themselves using the product or service as well. It’s similar to brands migrating to microinfluencers: It’s easier for a consumer to relate.

“What shoppers really want to see is people like them, that they know—not a Kim Kardashian that’s going to have a makeup crew behind them to make the product work,” Sullivan says. “They want to know what somebody like me, like you [thinks] and how their experience was around this product.”

Be Honest About Ratings Consumers want to trust other consumers, but brands need to do some work to make the whole process more honest and transparent.

Because of the issues surrounding fake and paid reviews on Amazon, some other review companies have instituted systems to check the validity of reviews.

For example, Sullivan says PowerReviews combines artificial intelligence and human moderators to ensure content is authentic.

The reviewers aren’t the only ones who need to be honest: Brands need to let all

reviews live, not just the best ones.

Killing a one-star or angry review won’t win you any new fans—and it can even hurt a brand’s authenticity. It would be akin to saying you don’t have any shortcomings in a job interview. “A lot of people try to prevent the bad ones from going through,” Sullivan says. “There is a misnomer that five stars is good. In reality, what’s good is 4.5 and 4.6. People don’t even trust five stars anymore.”

Brands also have to work against a simple reality: Research by Watson and his co-authors shows that consumers are more willing to trust a product that has more reviews with a lower average rating than a product with fewer reviews and a higher average rating. But the product with more reviews may simply have been on the market longer—it isn’t necessarily the superior item. Watson suggests pointing this out to consumers, or running a promotion seeking reviews and explaining why.

Watson also suggests promoting velocity metrics over absolute numbers of ratings in volume. “[This is] being able to say that over the last week the number of reviews has increased by 10% or the change in ratings has changed by 10% up or 10% down,” he says. “That gives consumers some insight into that time dimension. … Knowing how many people are buying it today or this past week or this past month might be better than knowing how many people bought it over the lifecycle of the product. That’s something that I think managers and retailers from the brand and the retail perspective aren’t emphasizing enough, the philosophy when it comes to word of mouth, because that would be a more accurate picture to the consumers.” m

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ETHICAL MARKETING

Brought to you by ...

Native Advertising Is Deceptive in Nature, But Transparency Can Help Make It Ethical There’s revenue to be found in content marketing, so long as you focus on legal guidance and reader expectations

BY HAL CONICK | FREELANCE WRITER

 halconick@gmail.com

S

oon after Jeff Jarvis created Entertainment Weekly in 1990, he recalls an odd ad coming across his desk. It looked like any other page of the magazine—same font, same layout—but had one big difference: the image of a hand holding a bag of Frito-Lay chips bursting through the print. The ad department said they wouldn’t run it because its similarity to the rest of the magazine would be too confusing for readers.

The Frito-Lay ad was the first time Jarvis recalls seeing a company mimic the look of a publication. Jarvis says

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that advertisers have always tried to fit seamlessly into the journalistic integrity of their respective publications, despite resistance from news organizations.

But 30 years after the Frito-Lay ad, publications have given in to native ads.

It’s rare to peruse a magazine, newspaper or online outlet without finding branded content that mirrors the publication.

Often, the lone differentiator is a small, two-word “sponsored content” label somewhere on the page—sometimes, even that label is absent.

Many journalists fear that running sponsored print ads will confuse readers,

diminishing trust in news and bringing journalistic integrity into question. “The problem with native [advertising] is that it does try to confuse the reader,” Jarvis says. “And as [the journalism] industry got more desperate, we finally got ready to sell our seed corn. That is our reputation, our editorial space.”

Native advertising does seem to be embraced by the audience. A 2018 report from Reuters found that 73% of readers prefer branded content to traditional ads.

And as native ads have proven effective, advertisers have invested. EMarketer predicted that advertisers would spend $43.9 billion on native display ads in 2019, nearly $9 billion more than they did the year before.

While social media platforms receive the largest chunk of that money, the revenue will mean far more to news organizations, which have suffered financially in the transition from print to online. In 2017, a study from WAN-IFRA and the Native Advertising Institute found that native ads brought in 20% of overall advertising revenue for news media organizations. By 2021, this figure is expected to rise to 36%.

But native ads are inherently confusing. They mimic their surroundings and try to avoid being an interruption. Although Reuters’ study finds that 86% of readers can tell the difference between editorial and branded content, 14% can’t—a non-negligible number in journalism, an industry that relies on reader confidence.

In a 2016 paper titled “Native Advertising Is the New Journalism: How Deception Affects Social Responsibility,” researchers asked journalists, advertisers and public relations professionals about their perceptions of native advertising.

Each group raised ethical concerns, primarily worrying that native advertising is deceptive and lacks transparency.

But advertising and public relations professionals said these ads are a necessary evil, one that’s effective and could be done ethically. One of the study’s authors— Erin Schauster, assistant professor of advertising, public relations and media design at the University of Colorado

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ETHICAL MARKETING

Boulder and a former advertising account executive—finds it troubling that any readers would be unable to tell the difference between a reported piece and a branded one. She’s unsure if native ads can ever truly be ethical. Not only is journalism’s reputation based in accuracy, but advertising’s reputation is built on trust and the best interests of customers. “You’re not representing the best interests of your client if that’s the approach you take,” Schauster says.

Perhaps the best example of readers feeling tricked by a native ad came in 2013, when sponsored content from the Church of Scientology was posted on The Atlantic’s website. Readers expected a piece of reported journalism about the religion and instead got a laudatory piece of content marketing. Readers were upset, causing the magazine to quickly pull the ad, apologize and change its ad policy.

Since then, The Atlantic’s branded content has seemingly improved—in 2016, the company’s senior vice president and publisher Hayley Romer said sponsored content comprised 75% of The Atlantic’s revenue.

Jarvis, now director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at The City University of New York, says he now finds branded content acceptable, so long as it’s clear that the ad is actually an ad. But he believes that publications should follow the advice an editor gave him decades ago: “The reader must never be confused about the source of content.”

Here are six ways advertisers, publishers and journalists can ensure that the native advertisements they create are clear and ethical.

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Follow FTC Guidelines Schauster says that the baseline for any piece of branded content must be the FTC’s guide to native advertising. Even these rules are often broken, she says.

The FTC’s policy boils down to these tenets: • Be transparent.

• Disclosures are necessary where content could be deceiving.

• The disclosure, when needed, must be unambiguous and prominent.

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Clear Labeling The FTC’s “when needed” caveat grants wiggle room to advertisers and publications. Some try to weasel out of clear labeling by changing the ad’s font as a differentiator, Jarvis says. But the average reader won’t know or care what a different font means.

Even true labels can be opaque. Jarvis says that the Forbes’ “Brandvoice” label—denoting Forbes’ content marketing arm—is an example of bad labeling. Forbes used to have a “What’s this?” link next to the Brandvoice label, Jarvis says, but a label isn’t clear if a reader sees it and immediately asks, “What’s this?”

To be ethical, sponsored content labels must be obvious. No trickery, font changes or off-kilter paragraph alignments.

3

Research More Jarvis believes that publications, advertisers and researchers should study how the audience sees labeling as they read.

Jarvis says that he recently spoke with a researcher who told him that publications should avoid putting the label in the top quarter of the page— readers have been conditioned to know that this part of the page has no new content, so a “sponsored content” label is likely to get lost. But he believes that more research could help all sides of the native advertising debate.

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Make the Brand Part of the Byline Schauster makes the case for brand names appearing in the byline, making it more obvious when a piece is sponsored content. This would also give the brand ownership of the content.

“Brands are all about building reputations with their consumers,” she says. “One way [to do that] is through editorial content that we publish. We’re sponsoring that content to be written, published and brought to an audience.

Let’s make that known that we’re aligning with that content.”

answers in action

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Never Hard-Sell Schauster says that brands writing native advertising pieces should leave out the sales pitch.

“It can’t have a slant. That’s not what it is,” she says. “[Native advertising is] aligning your brand with content and the stories that you think are of interest and value to the reader.”

Schauster says that The New York Times’ piece on female prison inmates is a great example of sponsored content that didn’t try to hard-sell readers.

The piece was sponsored by Netflix to advertise its show “Orange is the New Black,” placing logos of the show throughout the piece.

“Obviously Netflix was promoting a show, but there was no hard promotion,” she says. “That’s the advertising nature— the financial support. But it’s not a hardsell. It’s information. It’s content that’s of value to your reader.”

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Staying Out of the News The Netflix-sponsored piece was written by Melanie Deziel, who was the Times’ editor of digital branded content.

Jarvis says that if news organizations run sponsored content, they should leave the writing to those outside of editorial, as the Times did. Journalists can’t serve both the brand and the public, he says.

From the advertiser’s side, Schauster says that sponsored content works much the same as public relations—call the media’s attention to an issue, then stay out of the process. Many newspapers and magazines now have their own advertising arms to create sponsored content—Buzzfeed, The New York Times and The Atlantic are some of the most prominent examples.

Leaving the writing to publications is more than just ethical; it’s a benefit to advertisers, too. While advertising agencies know about audiences, analytics, developing creative and media placement, Schauster says that they don’t know about writing engaging news content. Maybe one day ad agencies will hire journalists to write sponsored content, she says, but until then: “You leave it to the publishers to do that.” m

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At our core, we believe marketing does good. Through our awards program, the American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF) elevates marketing visionaries who are impacting our profession and inspires future generations to make their mark on our industry. Congratulations to our most recent award winners!

Williams-Qualls-Spratlen Multicultural Mentoring Award of Excellence Mentorship is one of the most important determinants of a successful career in marketing, yet it is rarely rewarded. This award honors the legacy of three worldclass marketing scholars, educators and mentors of people of color, Jerome Williams, Bill Qualls and Thaddeus Spratlen.

RECIPIENT: Tiffany Barnett White, Associate Professor of Business Administration and Bruce and Anne Strohm Faculty Fellow, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Valuing Diversity Ph.D. Scholarship This award widens the opportunities for underrepresented populations to attend marketing doctoral programs.

RECIPIENTS: Verónica Martín Ruiz, Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University

Patricia T. Gouveia, College of Business at Florida International University

Alejandra Rodriguez, Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University

Call for Nominations Know any outstanding marketers? Honor them for their achievements by recommending them for an AMA award.

Nominations are currently open for:

» » »

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Nonprofit Marketer of the Year ama.marketing/NP20 4 Under 40 Award ama.marketing/4U4020 Robert J. Lavidge Award ama.marketing/Lavidge20

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scholarly insights

RESEARCH DIGEST

Latest Research Insights Highlights from the AMA journals—and what the findings mean for practitioners

Media Coverage of Climate Change Increasing Hybrid Vehicle Adoption YUBO CHEN, MRINAL GHOSH, YONG LIU, LIANG ZHAO

“Media Coverage of Climate Change and Sustainable Product Consumption: Evidence from Hybrid Vehicle Market,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (December 2019). >>IN A NUTSHELL: The

authors show that massmedia coverage of climate change or global warming can increase adoption of hybrid vehicles, even when that coverage is general and does not pertain specifically to vehicle emissions.

Such coverage can create and shape the norm that sustainable consumption is socially desirable. One caveat: Media coverage that either denies climate change or holds a neutral position on the issue has little impact on hybrid vehicle adoption.

>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: An effective, long-run marketing strategy for firms selling sustainable products is to proactively work with the media on sustainability issues rather than simply focusing on marketing their own products.

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RESEARCH DIGEST

Customer Participation Improves Bank Branch Performance

Social Metrics Can Help Determine Global Brand Reach

SEIGYOUNG AUH, BULENT MENGUC, CONSTANTINE S. KATSIKEAS, YEON SUNG JUNG

MOON-YONG KIM, SANGKIL MOON, DAWN IACOBUCCI

“When Does Customer Participation Matter? An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Customer Empowerment in the Customer ParticipationPerformance Link,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (December 2019). >>IN A NUTSHELL: Is it

worth allowing customers to participate in shaping product offerings? This research shows that the return on customer participation (CP) is tangible and benefits the organization. In the context of the banking industry, the authors show that customer satisfaction and empowerment influences bank branch performance in terms of profitability, sales growth and customer retention.

>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: The authors caution against formalizing CP, as customers desire discretion, control and autonomy in how they participate. They suggest that offering feedback on customers’ input empowers them and lets them know their participation is valued.

scholarly insights

Format Matters in Student Loan Repayment

“The Influence of Global Brand Distribution on Brand Popularity on Social Media,” Journal of International Marketing, 27 (December 2019).

Where Your Customers Live Can Predict Product Success

YI ZHANG, RONALD T. WILCOX, AMAR CHEEMA

>>IN A NUTSHELL: Gauging

“The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (December 2019).

“The Effect of Student Loan Debt on Spending: The Role of Repayment Format,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 40 (January 2020). >>IN A NUTSHELL: Student

loan borrowers are often not aware of the cost of higher education until much later. Seeing these large debts can overwhelm inexperienced student borrowers, so much so that the feeling of difficulty associated with paying off student loan debt decreases the motivation to control spending. A motivated and committed borrower will likely make every effort to control spending. Unmotivated and indifferent borrowers, on the other hand, are more likely to overspend.

>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: The authors find that presenting student loan debt in an attainable monthly repayment format helps borrowers stay motivated and control their spending.

the success of a global brand’s social media strategy can be tricky; traditional sales-based measures may not provide clear guidance. The authors find that country brand popularity is influenced by brand (brand globalness, brand home country and social signaling industry), culture (power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation and indulgence), social media accessibility (English speakers, internet penetration and cell phone penetration) and economics (per capita GDP, trade importance, Gini index).

>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: Think beyond traditional sales-based measures to understand the global reach of your brand on social media.

DUNCAN I. SIMESTER, CATHERINE E. TUCKER, CLAIR YANG

>>IN A NUTSHELL: Previous

research has identified “harbinger customers” as people who systematically purchase new products that fail and are discontinued by retailers. These harbingers have preferences that are not representative of other customers in the market, and they show a pattern of adopting niche products.

This article finds that these harbingers tend to live close to one another, in “harbinger ZIP codes.”

If households in these ZIP codes adopt a new product, this is a signal that the new product is likely to fail. Furthermore, households in harbinger ZIP codes tend to make other decisions that differ from most households, such as contributing funds to a political candidate who is ultimately not elected.

>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: “Know your customer” has never been more relevant. Determining if they live in a harbinger ZIP code can provide a wealth of information.

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scholarly insights

REPURPOSED PRODUCTS

A New Strategy for Driving Sales of Repurposed Goods

BY BERNADETTE KAMLEITNER, CARINA THÜRRIDL AND BRETT A.S. MARTIN

E

very year, 2 billion tons of waste end up in landfills around the world, posing a continuous threat to the environment, economy and society. In response to this trend, companies have begun to repurpose— meaning upcycle or recycle—old or discarded products to create new ones.

The creative industry has started to push repurposing, too. For example, a popular main character from “Toy Story 4” is Forky, a toy figure repurposed from an old plastic spork.

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Despite an increase in repurposed products in the marketplace, consumers still opt for conventional products in most cases. A new study in the Journal of Marketing explores how companies can increase the appeal of repurposed products.

In the past, companies sold these products by stressing their proenvironmental benefits, but our research team discovered a new way to create demand for repurposed products.

Rather than emphasizing the benefits

of repurposing for the environment, companies can embrace a novel way of storytelling. Like Toy Story’s Forky, every reused item has a past identity as waste (e.g., a plastic spork) and a new one as a repurposed product (e.g., a toy figure). Repurposed products have a story resembling that of Cinderella, who transforms from a young woman of meager means into a princess of great fortune. Repurposed products have their own biographical stories to tell. We discovered that alerting consumers to a product’s past identity leads them to understand that the product holds a story.

Interestingly, we also find that consumers deem a product to be more special once they understand that it has a unique biographical story.

Across field studies and more controlled ones, we consistently find that demand increases once consumers are alerted to a product’s past. For example, in an upcycling pop-up store, revenues

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REPURPOSED PRODUCTS

more than quadrupled when we made the past lives of products the focal point of our marketing materials. This holds across a wide variety of products ranging from bags made from mosquito nets to tables made from pallets, to cake stands made from pot lids and chandeliers made from test tubes. We also find this holds for both upcycled and recycled products.

Highlighting a product’s past identity as waste never reduced demand, even if it was unappealing or disgusting.

For marketers, our research shows that the key to selling repurposed products is to highlight their past identities, because these are the beginning of their unique product biographies. Marketers should remember that consumers appear to feel special when they obtain a product that holds its own story. Perhaps it’s time to think of marketing as the creation of a projection space for stories told by consumers, rather than marketers.

In our paper, we discuss many ways to highlight repurposed products’ stories. For example, an ad or product display could:

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• Directly reference a product’s prior life, such as, “In my previous life, I used to be old plastic.”

• Feature a heading that states what the product has been in the past: “I used to be an old bottle” for an ad featuring a backpack that was upcycled.

• Highlight a product’s materials. For example, “Made from a pallet” in an ad for an upcycled table.

• Include a photo that shows what the old product or waste looked like.

Sometimes, customers can easily determine the product’s past identity at a glance. For example, if a vase is made from a light bulb, the past life is obvious to consumers. In these cases, the product itself tells its story and companies don’t need to highlight its past identity. But marketers can help tell these stories by reinforcing a natural flow: Feature the past identity first, then show it in the present.

For consumers, we find that repurposed products hold allure because they differ from the norm. Repurposed

products tell unique stories that the consumer can talk about and that set the product apart. Buying repurposed products means a chance for a consumer to feel a bit more special and to reduce waste at the same time.

For societal stakeholders, we offer a new strategy for pushing proenvironmental behaviors without appealing to people’s conscience by urging them to care for the planet. In the case of choosing repurposed over conventional products, pro-environmental behavior can become an added treat, thanks to the fact that these products have a special biography. m BERNADETTE KAMLEITNER is a professor of marketing at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.

CARINA THÜRRIDL is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Amsterdam.

BRETT A.S. MARTIN is a professor of marketing in the QUT Business School at Queensland University of Technology.

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executive insights

AT C-LEVEL

What Marketers Can Learn From ‘The Fifth Domain’

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

 michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com

M

arketing is a cross-discipline profession. We must do more than represent the customer to the business—we need to understand the “three C’s”: customer, competition and company. Too often, we view our internal company and C-suite colleagues as adversaries rather than business partners.

At a recent CMO dinner in Chicago, a group of marketing leaders were lambasting their CFOs and CIOs for underfunding marketing and overinvesting in technology. I disagreed.

We marketers need to make the CFO, CIO and—increasingly—the chief information security officer (CISO) our teammates and best friends.

The folks around the table became uncomfortable. They argued that business leaders should reinvest in creativity. I agreed that marketing creativity is a key differentiator, but technology investments are going to continue. As technology evolves, we marketers must be alert to both the advantages and risks of digital disruption, including the threats of data breaches.

Data breaches may not be on marketing’s radar, but they should be.

There can be enormous reputational risk, which marketing will need to address in the event of a breach. And, cybercrime can be costly to the enterprise.

In a disruptive digital world guided by social media, mobile solutions, analytics and cloud platforms (the SMAC technologies), had these leaders met with their CISOs? Do they discuss enterprise risk management, social media and digital marketing programs with their

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CFOs? Are they prepared to respond to the reputational risk of a data breach, data exfiltration and ransomware? Had they read The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake?

A class on cybersecurity may not be high on the agenda for marketers at the top university programs in the country, but it should be. As Clarke and Knake point out in The Fifth Domain, cyberattacks have cost pharmaceutical giant Merck approximately $900 million and shipping leader A.P. Moller-Maersk about $300 million. Other cyberattack victims include Mondelez International, Marriott International, Equifax and Target, to name just a few. Even entities such as the city of Baltimore are facing cyber-based ransomware attacks.

Every marketer needs to read a primer on cyber defense, and The Fifth Domain is the perfect resource. It’s written without technical jargon and is an excellent longitudinal overview of the cybersecurity threat, from emergence to

present-day risks and potential solutions.

The book is comprehensive without being weighty. It describes the threat actors, policy problems and solutions, and the actions that enterprise executives should consider.

Clarke and Knake have been policy and technical leaders on the issue of cybersecurity for many years. Clarke served at the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of State, and Knake served at the Department of Homeland Security. Both have held leading roles on the National Security Council—Clarke under Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and Knake under President Barack Obama.

Their 2010 book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, was intended to “raise the alarm” about cyberthreats. The authors write that The Fifth Domain is “about how the balance between offense and defense is changing and how the rate of change can be increased to set us on a path of stability.”

They argue that, up until now, the cybercriminals and rogue cyberattacking nation-states have had the advantage and are winning. The authors explain what can be done via government policy, enterprise actions and collaboration to achieve “cyber resilience”: in which attacks, when they occur, are manageable and the “advantage will shift from the attacker to the defender.”

There are parts of The Fifth Domain that read like a classic spy novel and will keep you riveted. The authors describe the

If we are to be effective “three C’s” marketers, we should extend our purview beyond customer and competition. We should be attuned to our company and its capabilities, as well as serious threats and risks such as cyberdefense.

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AT C-LEVEL

origins and impacts of the Petya, WannaCry and NotPetya attack tools.

They write, “NotPetya was an operation run by a military unit, specifically the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Federation’s military, often called the GRU or Russian military intelligence.

“The Russian military did not, we suspect, intend to indiscriminately attack global corporations,” the authors write.

“What it had intended was a crippling attack on Ukraine on the eve of its national holiday, Constitution Day. The GRU had figured out a truly creative attack vector, a channel that could be used to spread an attack.”

Clarke and Knake go on to share how Fancy Bear penetrated the servers of Ukrainian government and commercial enterprises. “The GRU attack worked almost flawlessly, destroying almost 10% of all devices in Ukraine. … What the GRU had apparently not recognized (or maybe they did) was that global companies operating in Ukraine would also be hit (and would spread the attack around the world).”

An equally chilling segment of The Fifth Domain describes a fake scenario in which an international ally of the U.S. is physically attacked, but American war ships and resupply depots are disabled through cyberattacks that diminish the ability to respond in real time. The scenario is frightening—and it has the potential to become reality.

The Fifth Domain is a provocative and thoughtful read for anyone who aspires to lead in business today. It is especially relevant for marketers and communications executives.

Cyber risk equates to brand and reputational risk, so marketers need to participate in risk management. We also must be certain our marketing programs don’t generate cyber risk for the company.

And, if marketing truly seeks a seat at the table of enterprise leadership, we should be attuned to such potential business threats. If we are to be effective “three C’s” marketers, we should extend our purview beyond customer and competition. We should be attuned to our company and its

capabilities, as well as serious threats and risks such as cyberdefense.

Marketing, communications, legal, technology, risk management, HR, the CEO and the board must all be prepared and ready to act when a data breach occurs.

Marketers should understand the nature and evolution of the cyberthreat.

We should be advocates for better cyberdefense in our enterprises and

executive insights

circumspect about the cyber risks engendered by our marketing programs.

We should be participating in tabletop exercises to prepare for any cyberattack.

Primarily, we should be educating ourselves about cyber risk and cybersolutions—and that’s why we should read The Fifth Domain. m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group, based in Chicago.

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executive insights

HUMANIZING BRANDS

Humanize Your Marketing: 5 Ways to Make Your Brand Personal

It’s easy to delete email from a brand.

It’s psychologically a bit harder to delete a message from a person. Deciding whom to name as the sender might be a challenge, but it’s worth considering.

Our clients have seen an immediate 20% increase in open rates just from making this one simple change.

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BY ANDY CRESTODINA

 andy@orbitmedia.com

A

fter thousands of conversations with hundreds of brands, I’ve noticed something strange: Small brands are always trying to look big, while big brands are often trying to look small. I understand where each is coming from, but my advice is the same: It’s more important to make your brand seem human.

The more personal your marketing, the more likely the audience is to feel a connection to the brand, to care and to know what matters to you. Big or small, the brand that feels most human is likely to win the business.

There are so many areas to add a personal touch to your marketing, yet so many brands miss these opportunities.

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Social Media Content Social is a good place to start making personal connections. As a data-rich environment, the impact of engaging users is also easy to measure.

The LinkedIn marketing team does a lot of testing. Whenever you see

a post by the LinkedIn team, you’re looking at either A or B in a test. They test everything and are generous about sharing results.

They tested the effects of images on social engagement and found that images with people had a 160% higher clickthrough rate than images with objects.

People and faces make a huge difference in the ability of a social post to drive traffic to content.

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Email Marketing As you read this sentence, your target audience is receiving email. If you sent something today, your message is in the mix. But whether the recipients open it depends on three factors: the sender name, subject line and preheader text.

The sender name is another chance to be human, yet a lot of brands choose to use a company name instead of a person’s name. It takes only a minute and costs nothing to update the sender name in your email service provider. Doing so can have a big impact on your open rates.

Sales Pages Websites can feel like the empty shop in that mall that no one goes to anymore.

Some sites have no faces anywhere, or— almost as bad—they’re filled with stock photos of people who don’t seem real, like mannequins in a department store.

Sales pages are some of the most important places to be human because they’re where your audience is making decisions about working with you. Here, personal connection is more important and more powerful.

Testimonials with faces of clients will guide visitors’ eyes to that part of the page. Those faces add color, emotion and visual prominence. The testimonial itself adds supportive evidence to the nearby content. A sales page without evidence is a pile of unsupported marketing claims.

And a separate testimonials page is simply evidence without context.

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The ‘About Us’ Page I have access to hundreds of Google Analytics accounts, giving me a glimpse into the behavior of a wide range of visitors. Almost all websites have one thing in common: The “About Us” page is one of the most visited pages. Why? Because visitors want to make a personal connection.

A C H A N C E TO

BE HUMAN

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SENDER NAME

PERSONAL SENDER NAME

SUBJECT LINE

COMPELLING SUBJECT LINE

PREHEADER TEXT

MEANINGFUL PREHEADER

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executive insights

HUMANIZING BRANDS

The “About Us” page helps to tell a brand’s story, beginning with the characters. It’s the most personal part of the site, but it’s not just a “we love us” page that’s focused only on the positive.

It’s not a bland mission statement, like a plaque on a wall.

Use the “About Us” page as an opportunity to showcase your organization’s personality: • Tell the story of how the business began, including challenges and failures. Why does this business exist?

• Explain what the founders and employees believe, and what their deepest passions are.

• Show the faces and interests of key team members, going beyond what they’ve posted on LinkedIn. Upgrading the format—from text to video, perhaps—makes the personal touch here (and anywhere) more compelling.

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Articles and Blog Content There are two kinds of articles: collaborative and single point of view.

Unless the content is a strong opinion, original research or true thought leadership, single POV content has a natural disadvantage.

Content that features experts tends to be higher quality. Content that features influencers tends to have greater social reach. So, collaborative content that features both—also known as organic influencer marketing—is more likely to attract and engage with readers.

The difference is as simple as a contributor quote with input from an expert. To make it human and personal, add an image of the subject’s face along with a few of their credentials. This makes the content more visual and personal, two elements that help build connections with readers.

A journalist wouldn’t write an article without a source. Why should a content marketer write an article without a contributor quote?

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You Are Your Difference The other thing that all brands have in common, regardless of size, is the drive to differentiate. It’s common to complain about standing out, but one of your differences is in plain sight: It’s you and your people.

You are the only company that has your team. Proving that you’re different is a matter of showcasing who you are. m ANDY CRESTODINA is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media. He’s an international keynote speaker and the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Guide to Content

The more personal your marketing, the more likely the audience is to feel a connection to the brand, to care and to know what matters to you.

Marketing.

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No Frills: Consumers Just Want the Basics from Voice Assistants

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People are drawn to Alexa, Siri and other voice assistants because they simplify their lives. Brands can appeal to this sensibility by setting a voice strategy that values function over form.

By Steve Heisler Photos by Vince Cerasani

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Your next great brand ambassador lives inside a glowing cylinder roughly the size of a tuna can. The Amazon Echo Dot carries the hypnotic, homorhythmic voice of a semi-cyborgian woman and has access to the internet and the internet of things, performs household operations and delivers up-to-the-minute analytics about how customers are interacting with your brand. It may rest on kitchen counters and recite recipes, or on the bedside table to play white noise for light sleepers. Power users likely own multiple devices scattered throughout the home, which chat with one another over Wi-Fi. All are equally capable of placing product orders based on user preferences or of singing “Happy Birthday.” Part market maven, part consumer confidant and totally to-thepoint: Users aren’t wasting any time by picking up their phones or performing a web search, and they expect quick, time-saving answers.

Amazon’s Alexa and other voice assistants have seen recent spikes in usage rates. According to predictions made by eMarketer, 111.8 million Americans (33.8% of the total population) will use a voice assistant in 2019 at least monthly, accounting for 39.4% of internet users. As for the access devices themselves, Voicebot.ai reported that 66.4 million Americans own smart home speakers as of 2018. But also consider that Statista estimates there are 265.9 million smartphone users in the U.S., and all of those devices ship standard with some form of voice assistant. These numbers illustrate a juggernaut industry trend that marketers can no longer afford to ignore.

Voice technology offers a vast world to explore, but brands benefit most by thinking small and contributing only basic functionality. Trends in consumer behavior reveal that brands that accomplish simple tasks on voice elegantly, effectively and quickly—such as allowing

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customers to reorder a favorite Starbucks coffee by uttering only a few words—receive better reviews and a steady rise in brand equity.

Brands will also be hitching their wagon to the biggest companies in the tech and mobile device industry: Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft are all experimenting with voice technology. Working cross-platform requires a bit of customization—SEO strategy may require a tweak knowing that Amazon Alexa uses Bing, while Google Assistant runs on its namesake search engine—but in choosing which companies to align themselves with, their main brand consideration is understanding public perception. For example, should Amazon face further outrage over its privacy policy, there’s a chance that brands on the Alexa roster will feel the blowback.

What’s unique about Alexa’s technology is that it’s tethered to Amazon-produced speakers and not available for download in app stores or included

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standard in phone purchases in the way Siri has been synonymous with iOS since 2011. Customers are consciously welcoming this voice assistant into their homes and making it privy to intimate conversations—all in the name of easing simple tasks like setting timers and adjusting smart thermostats.

It’s therefore worth analyzing Alexa to better understand what drives its infiltration and adoption.

Two key motivating factors to embrace Alexa’s presence in the home are simplicity and consistency. Alexa is ready to rock right out of the box. Questions asked to Alexa receive instant answers, or at least approximations. Regardless of what Alexa is doing, it maintains the same voice, cadence and tone. Therefore, brands receive the greatest benefit by interfacing with users in a way that values function over form—perform one task well and ask for minimal user input aside from a one-line command.

“Branding is voice-based, so there’s not necessarily colors or labels or content, and it needs to be short and concise,” says Keval Baxi, CEO of UX and design agency Codal. “Brand loyalty is almost deterred to convenience. … It’s the race to better customer experience.”

O

ne of Alexa’s key features is its ability to order products directly from e-commerce sites, which means users tell the device what to add to their shopping cart. Some brands have a head start on establishing themselves in voice because their name has become the generic term for the product—consider brands such as Kleenex or Ziploc. It’s highly unlikely a consumer would ask their voice assistant to “reorder facial tissues” or “sandwich bags,” as the two bigname brands have become synonymous with those products. This places Puffs and Glad at a disadvantage right off the bat.

Short of becoming Xerox, brands can get ahead by developing what’s known as a “skill,” essentially

a third-party voice app built by the brand itself to execute basic functions. Customers look to skills to personalize their device, and the branded skills they choose will find a permanent home inside their Echo Dot. A staggering number of brands have arrived at that space. As of January, Alexa boasts 80,000 skills, from brands like Spotify and Jeopardy!, and Google Assistant has 4,200 actions—its version of a skill—according to Voicebot.ai.

Dennis Maloney, senior vice president and chief digital officer of Domino’s, attributes the success of his company’s highly ranked skill to understanding that his customers want pizza, not frills. “Customers come to Domino’s because they’re hungry and trying to order food,” he says. “Functionality is way more important for a consumer.” Using Alexa with the Domino’s skill, for example, customers can place a new order from scratch, repeat past orders or ask for a delivery status update using the pizza tracker function.

Donna Hoffman, marketing professor at George Washington University, notes that brands win big with expediency as well—even weighing functionality or ease of use over cost. “You might start to use [voice assistants] for things that you previously didn’t trust before, like to reorder products,” Hoffman says. “And if it doesn’t tell you the price, that’s pretty trusting. What will happen is we cede a lot of control to these devices over time and they become more autonomous and independent.”

When reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson echoed that sentiment and confirmed that the company hopes to transform science fiction into technological fact: “Our goal is to shape [Alexa] through the lens of the customer and the holistic customer experience. … [We] want her to understand, anticipate and react to our customers based on their preferences, interests and needs.”

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Currently, those needs are pretty simple. A look at Alexa’s top skills reveals that most of them perform one function very well. Skills from NPR and Reuters deliver quick briefings on the day’s top headlines, and Find My Phone does just that.

Another top skill simply plays rain sounds.

Keith Soljacich, vice president and group director of experiential technology at Digitas, says that because consumers are currently making simple requests of their voice assistants, all brands can benefit by introducing even the most pareddown skill. “One thing I know that the platforms have done is they’ve made it easier for brands to come onto the platform and make sure you can get some basic information about your brand, your products and services,” he says. “You can’t be part of the game unless you actually play.”

S

EO is crucial for brand success on Alexa, and the fight for the limited real estate is especially cutthroat.

To win the optimization battle, brands must first get into the mind of Alexa to understand how searches are parsed. Soljacich notes that people have gotten used to how they interact with text-based engines to receive optimal results. For example, you may type “best cheeseburger Racine Wisconsin hours,” but when asking out loud, you’d say something to the effect of, “What’s a restaurant near Racine, Wisconsin, that’s open now and serves the best cheeseburger?” The results Alexa returns are not chosen based on the keywords of the voice query but on what’s called an “intent”—a translation of the voice request into the types of truncated word strings you might type into a search bar.

Soljacich says that good SEO for voice resembles good SEO for web search: Focus on optimization of the intent and stay away from trying to win out on basic functions Alexa can perform itself—such as a company producing a skill that reads the weather forecast, when Alexa is perfectly capable of handling the task itself. He also says that the process by which Alexa determines which skill to open, like when ordering a pizza, is still somewhat of a “black box” for brands.

Dan Golden, president of digital marketing agency Be Found Online, says that in order to rank for voice, SEO optimization needs to be relentless. Being located on the first page of a Google or Bing results page on a browser is an admirable achievement, but unless your company finds itself at No. 1 or is included as the featured snippet at the top of a page, your organization will get completely lost on voice assistants that often only return the top result.

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“That’s a whole new world for marketers, where you either win or lose,” Golden says. “I’ve been making brands loads of money for years by targeting position two and three because it’s more economical, but in the case of voice search, you have to be that answer.”

Even though Maloney admits Domino’s isn’t currently focused on SEO—he believes the industry best practices are still sorting themselves out—consumers are nevertheless discovering his company in pursuit of a better ordering experience beyond the top search result. “Our experience from a functionality standpoint is where we differentiate ourselves,” he says. “I’m really not interested in matching competition.”

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digital assistant with access to living spaces and the ability to spend users’ money raises obvious privacy concerns. A 2018 study by PwC found that the majority of people who don’t use voice assistants—and don’t plan to start— cited concerns for how their data was going to be mined and used. Of those surveyed, 38% cited the creep factor of having a device listening in the background, and 28% explicitly said that privacy regarding their data and security was the main reason they’d continue to abstain.

But these assistants are expected to further infiltrate every facet of our lives. In September, Amazon announced a slate of forthcoming products. In the near future, people will be able to access Alexa via earbuds, glasses, a ring, a nightlight, a smart oven, miniature cameras for the home and a collar tag for the family dog (appropriately named Amazon Sidewalk).

At the same event, Amazon addressed the elephant in the room, or rather the elephant ears in the room that monitor user activity. The company introduced two Alexa commands that more overtly demonstrate how people can better trust the company to have its best interests at heart. Now users can say, “Alexa, tell me what you heard” and “Alexa, why did you do that?” to understand the source of an Alexa command that was ordered, intentional or not. This helps get to the root of a mispronunciation. Consumers also maintain the ability to delete any recordings whenever they’d like.

Privacy concerns aren’t unique to Alexa, but Amazon made headlines in April when Bloomberg reported that thousands of its employees around the world have been listening to recordings and annotating them in an attempt to improve the voice-recognition software. In particular, they work

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Top Words Used in Voice Searches

How 8.6%

What 5%

Best

The 1%

2.6%

Easy

Is

0.4%

0.7%

Top

Can

0.55%

0.56%

Where 0.57% WORD SEARCH RESULTS VIA BRIGHTLOCAL.

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to eliminate accidental activation and ensure that Alexa is correctly answering questions it’s asked.

In a statement to Bloomberg, an Amazon spokesperson abated fears of a forthcoming nanny state by clarifying just how hard it would be to abuse the system. “Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow,” the spokeperson wrote in an email. “All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multifactor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it.”

Hoffman counters that there are still issues that go beyond simple mining to further Alexa’s speech evolution. “These things come into your home in your most private spaces, when you’re in your intimate life with you and your family, and you start to think of them as ancillary family members,” she says. “That can be really dangerous. Now there’s research looking at what these devices are doing even when you’re not interacting with them.

They’re connecting with other devices and sending information about you and your behaviors without your permission—and that’s pretty intrusive. We’re interested in what people’s thoughts on those sorts of things might be depending on how they view the device. If you see it as a family member, you might say it’s OK. But if you see it as an AI who’s out to maximize ad targeting, you might not think it’s OK.” Jim Mourey, a researcher and marketing professor at DePaul University, says the data could also be mined and run through sentiment analysis, which is when companies scrape people’s social media feeds to piece together a rough idea of users’ general emotional state. “You can imagine the same thing happening, and it probably already is, of assessing the emotional state of users of voice-activated assistants,” he says. Brands could benefit from this data by aligning themselves with particular emotional states. The example he gives is if a user sounds distressed or overwhelmed, Alexa could suggest ordering a pizza and some ice cream.

Currently, brands are afforded access to customer data, but on a limited scale. Amazon maintains a “skill metrics” section for brands that have written a skill, which keeps tabs on skill-specific information.

For example, a brand can learn how many times its skill was invoked, what sorts of phrases customers said while interacting with it and basic demographic information about users.

Maloney says Domino’s is able to use this data to better its voice strategy by homing in on its intents to make sure they are close to perfect. “We try and

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create as transparent an experience as possible and give customers the choice to use [our skill] or not—it is definitely not the only way to order Domino’s,” he says. “There is a level of privacy that consumers do give up, and that is really a result of just making the functionality better. [Otherwise], it’s really hard for the experience to get any better.

The expectation should be that [data] is not being used for malicious things.”

T

he way users feel toward their voice assistant, and their fear that the technology may be too intrusive, can affect how they view the brands alongside it. “I think we generalize our overall experience of engaging with Alexa, which then could have negative ramifications for a company or brand,” Mourey says. “If the experience is negative, [there’s] kind of a halo effect, like we spread it out to whatever it is that she’s talking about.”

Brands also face an inherent bias that consumers hold against voice assistants. Mourey proved how high the expectations are for Alexa in a recent study. His research team isolated three groups and asked each to make weather predictions: real flesh-and-bone meteorologists, apps on mobile devices and voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa.

The results showed that when all three groups accurately predicted the forecast, there wasn’t much change between how people felt about each.

When the forecast was predicted incorrectly, people tended to offer excuses for the humans and the mobile apps, claiming mistakes are made via human error or miscalculations. However, they tended to get angry at voice assistants when they were wrong.

“We make immediate social judgments of people based on two dimensions,” Mourey adds.

“One is how warm they are, and the other is on competence. No surprise, when you ask humans to assess the warmth and competence of other humans, they tend to say that humans are high on both because they otherwise would be basically saying that they themselves aren’t very warm or competent. When you look at apps, people [think they are] super competent but not particularly warm. But with Alexa and Siri and all these other digital voices, they kind of have to be the best of both worlds because they’re attempting to emulate a human.”

This phenomenon was on display last year when Google demonstrated its forthcoming Duplex technology. In front of a crowd, Google Assistant placed a phone call to a hair salon to make an

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The Players Apple Siri

Google Assistant

Amazon Alexa

Samsung Bixby

Microsoft Cortana

INTRODUCED: 2011

INTRODUCED: 2016

INTRODUCED: 2014

INTRODUCED: 2017

INTRODUCED: 2014

MARKET SHARE: 45.6%

MARKET SHARE: 28%

MARKET SHARE: 13.2%

MARKET SHARE: 6.2%

MARKET SHARE: 4.9%

AVAILABLE ON:

AVAILABLE ON: iOS, Android, Google Home speakers and Nest screens

AVAILABLE ON: Echo smart speakers and screens

AVAILABLE ON:

AVAILABLE ON:

Android, Galaxy Bixby home speakers

Windows, iOS, Android, Harman Kardon speakers, Xbox One

MacOS, iOS, Apple HomePod speakers SEARCH ENGINE:

Google

SEARCH ENGINE:

SEARCH ENGINE: Bing

Google

ADD-ONS: Skills

ADD-ONS: Actions

WAKE WORD: “Alexa…”

Siri…”

WAKE WORD: “OK,

“Echo…” “Amazon…”

NEAT FEATURE: Tracks

Google…” “Hey, Google…”

“Computer…”

ADD-ONS: Apps WAKE WORD: “Hey,

airline flight patterns overhead

NEAT FEATURE: Can

deliver The New York Times headlines from any day back to 1851

NEAT FEATURE: Knows the rules to nearly every board game

SEARCH ENGINE:

Google ADD-ONS: Capsules

SEARCH ENGINE: Bing ADD-ONS: Skills

WAKE WORD: “Hi

Bixby…”

WAKE WORD: “Hey,

Cortana…” or custom

NEAT FEATURE:

Partners with Elle, Cover Girl, Laneige and Sephora to let users virtually try on make-up

NEAT FEATURE: A champion at rock, paper, scissors

MARKET SHARE DATA VIA STATISTA.

appointment for a user, negotiating in real-time with the receptionist to pick out an ideal time that jibed with the user’s calendar. The technology on display was certainly impressive, but notably the speech pattern Google Assistant used was peppered with conversational tics like “ums” and “ahs” to more accurately match how a person would speak.

It’s an example of why many worry about the ethical undertones of this technology. Mourey wonders what rules will be followed as far as letting the person on the other line know if they are interfacing with a robot. Soljacich says that this kind of technology must consider different dialects, and that accessibility for folks with speech disabilities can get complicated. One Vox reporter was unimpressed with a demonstration of Google Duplex, noting that the technology kicked him to a real operator who works on behalf of Google when the AI failed.

True responsive voice intelligence is still a ways away, but there’s plenty to optimize for today. Domino’s is exploring the possible use of voice assistants in its physical locations, but Maloney maintains equal focus on how his brand can deliver hassle-free value for users right now, and encourages other brands to strike a similar balance between the present and future. “Find the one or two things that you can turn into a voice experience that create real, tangible benefit for your consumers. Get those right, and you you can start building from there,” he says. “[At the same time,] recognize that this is not a short-term or a onetime investment; you are getting into something for the long haul, which has a long way to go before it replaces our other interfaces as the interface of choice. There is a long-term investment involved in part of that process, hopefully with good benefits at the end.” m NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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THE GLOBAL STATE OF DATA AND INSIGHTS: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES MATURING

BY FINN RABEN, DIRECTOR GENERAL, ESOMAR

THE DATA AND INSIGHTS INDUSTRY CAN SEEM ALMOST INVISIBLE.

It’s tucked behind marketing and business decisions, providing proof points for new products and services, for governments and businesses alike.

But this behind-the-scenes industry— valued at $80 billion globally—would be the 67th richest country by global domestic product and is worth almost twice as much as the film industry’s global box office value.

In many ways, it’s unsurprising that an industry built on consumers— their perceptions and behaviors— reflects the characteristics and influences of the consumer world.

The same innovations transforming the way organizations provide better

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and more efficient services to the public are also driving change within the insights industry—and the shift has been rapid.

For the first time, in this year’s ESOMAR Global Market Research report, those innovative methodologies (big data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, doit-yourself services, text and advanced analytics, etc.) are valued at the same amount as the originally defined market research sector (online and offline qualitative and quantitative, brand trackers, focus groups, etc.).

In fact, 2019 is forecast to be the first year that these new methodologies will exceed the value of the traditional market research sector.

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Value of Market Research Sectors (in $U.S. billions) Field

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2017/18 net growth

Share of total

Traditionally defined market research (ESOMAR GMR 2018)* 41.93

39.54

40.05

39.73

40.74

-0.3%

51.0%

Online analytics

7.95

8.84

9.55

11.02

11.98

8.5%

15.0%

Consulting firm research

5.28

5.62

5.94

6.28

6.86

8.9%

8.6%

IT and telecom research

3.84

4.07

4.40

5.13

5.92

15.0%

7.4%

Marketing reports and research

3.58

3.59

4.51

4.42

4.92

10.5%

6.2%

Social media monitoring

1.73

2.08

2.72

3.13

3.55

12.5%

4.4%

Social media and communities

1.93

2.01

2.15

2.34

2.57

8.7%

3.2%

Web analytics

1.06

1.13

1.20

1.39

1.45

2.6%

1.8%

Sample panel providers

0.95

0.99

0.96

1.00

1.02

-0.8%

1.3%

Survey software

0.50

0.56

0.60

0.70

0.82

14.0%

1.0%

Incremental turnover from subsegments

26.83

28.89

32.02

35.40

39.09

10.3%

49.0%

Total value expanded market

68.76

68.43

72.07

75.13

79.83

6.2%

N/A

This certainly feels like a watershed moment for the data and insights industry. Heightened trade sensitivity, commercial tariff brinkmanship, currency volatility and unpredictable geopolitical conditions have slowed global growth in many sectors, including conventional market research. An initially healthy-seeming 2.1% growth in the sector reveals a more stagnant picture once inflation is factored in, reversing the trend to a slightly negative 0.3% decline. However, the maturing data analytics and new methodology counterpart bucked these trends with a remarkable increase of 10% based on the previous year.

It’s astonishing to witness the hardships of one half of the industry in contrast with the buoyancy of the other. Yet both are devoted to the same basic activity: analyzing data in order to provide contextualized insights and facilitate better decision-making.

If the goal is comparable, then what are the reasons for the conventional sector reporting a net decrease of 0.3%, while the data analytics and insights

44

counterpart reports an increase of more than 10%?

There are numerous reasons for this; the growth of tech-enabled systems, automation and differing definitions of what is and isn’t included in those sectors are but a few contributing factors. What is clear is that the industry is evolving and transforming, and that investment in market and consumer intelligence is on the rise.

Implications for the U.S. The U.S. is the largest market of data and insights in the world. For the conventionally defined market research sector, North America accounts for 45% of turnover, followed by all of Europe at 35%. We also suspect that the U.S. holds a larger share of the research performed in data and analytics. Throughout the years, the U.S. has been one of the most dynamic and resilient global markets.

When looking at the expanded top 10 global companies (both traditional market research firms and newer data and analytics companies) in

Expectations of Industry Performance

EXPECTED GROWTH FROM 2017 TO 2018

4%

WAS GROWTH IN LINE WITH THE EXPECTATIONS REPORTED LAST YEAR?

NO

EXPECTED PERFORMANCE OF THE INDUSTRY FROM 2018 TO 2019, MINUS INFLATION

3%

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Spend by Research Design, 2018 (%) U.S.

30% AD HOC RESEARCH

15%

35%

20%

OMNIBUS SURVEYS

PANEL RESEARCH

OTHER CONTINUOUS

37%

9%

31%

20%

WORLD OTHER TYPES OF RESEARCH

2%

Spend by Research Method, 2018 (%) SECONDARY ANALYSIS

SECONDARY ANALYSIS

OTHER

4%

3%

3%

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

14%

14%

U.S.

OTHER

5%

WORLD

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

79%

78%

Top Ten Global Market Research Companies Rank

Company

Headquarters

1

Optum

Eden Prairie, MN

9,008

2

The Nielsen Company

New York

6,515

3

IQVIA

Durham, NC

3,904

4

Experian

Dublin

3,877

5

Gartner Inc.

Stamford, CT

3,516

6

Kantar

London

3,449

7

Epsilon

Irving, TX

2.175

8

Ipsos SA

Paris

2,067

9

IHS Markit

London

1,996

GfK

Nuremberg

1,616

10

2018 revenue in $U.S. (millions)

terms of revenue, five of the 10 are headquartered in the U.S. But there is an underlying story to the top 10 traditional market research organizations. Four out of the top 10 companies signaled a reverse in growth between 2017 and 2018. There can be many reasons for that, but it does fit with the growing industry trend of specialization. As brands bring more insight functions in-house, there is a greater demand for specialization in insight and analytics companies, whether in methodology, vertical sectors or data sets (think big data sets or passive measurement). These companies are often smaller and more agile than their larger counterparts. Smaller boutique agencies, and those exploding out of the tech sector, are driving innovation in data and insight.

For marketers and insights teams in the U.S., it can be beneficial to explore the new perspectives these companies provide to solve business problems, while balancing the new with the reliability and tried-andtested work of the larger generalist agencies. Although North America is a vital hub for innovation in data and insight, incredible techdriven transformations in data are happening all over the world. Insight is being disrupted by companies across Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Because we exist in an always-on, tech-enabled global economy, it’s as easy for a New York-based brand to work with an agency in Portugal as it is with one in Chicago.

Two Sides of the Same Coin With the traditional market research sector facing a decline for the first time in some years, and with an ascending tech-driven data and insights sector, does that mean we’re looking at the start of the slow death of traditional market research? We don’t think so.

A huge part of this new sector has been created by our ever-increasing digital fingerprint. Our behaviors— what we think, feel, say and do—are NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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Global Market Research Turnover, 2018 | % of total $47.362 trillion, in U.S. billions

EUROPE $16,541

35%

NORTH AMERICA

ASIA/ PACIFIC

$21,094

45%

AFRICA

$7,330

$524

15%

1% MIDDLE EAST

LATIN AMERICA

$389

$1,484

1%

3%

being recorded digitally. From this, a hosepipe of data companies emerged to analyze the increasing volumes of data to reveal key patterns, trends and associations. This has undoubtedly been key to the expansion of the industry and the delivery of new actionable insights at scale over the past few years.

But there’s still a vital role for traditional market research to play.

Big data, social media measurement and other forms of passive analytics only tell one side of the story. Just because something is measurable doesn’t mean that it can be applied to key business questions. The value of insight is getting behind the data and looking at perceptions and motivations.

Big data can sometimes seem adrift, floating all around us, untethered by context. The problem is that while big data is sizeable, it can also be thin. It hasn’t been the silver bullet that some commentators expected.

When combined with other methods, qualitative research in particular—or “thick” data, if you will—then you can really start building valuable and strategic insights and informing better

46

North America - Top 3 Client Sectors, 2018

INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION (MEDIA & BROADCASTING)

25%

OTHER

41%

MANUFACTURING (PHARMACEUTICAL)

24% MANUFACTURING (CONSUMER/NON-DURABLES)

10%

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Spend by Client Type - U.S., 2018 (%)

Manufacturing (consumer non-durables)

Manufacturing (consumer durables)

Manufacturing (pharmaceutical)

10%

5%

24%

Manufacturing (automotive)

3%

Utilities: electricity, gas, water, postal services

1%

Wholesale and retail trade

4%

Information and communication (advertising) Information and communication (telecommunications and information communications technology) Information and communication (media and broadcasting)

10%

2%

25%

Financial and insurance activities

5%

Public administration and defense; compulsory social security

7%

Non-profit and nongovernmental organizations, international organizations (World Bank, United Nations)

1%

Education: research institutes

1%

Tourism, travel and recreation

1%

decisions. Providing context is where the traditional market research sector excels.

That’s not to say that newer methodologies are all based on the analysis of big data. Technological advancements such as automation and AI are providing opportunities to revolutionize how we conduct and structure traditional market research methodologies, but they’re based in the theory and practice of decades of statistical and modeling work—the very epitome of conventional research.

Another consideration is around data ethics and transparency. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation has been introduced, while in the U.S. we see the introduction of the California Consumer Privacy Act and the beginning of a lengthy discussion around a federal privacy bill. With the growing uncertainty of thirdparty cookies, it’s become increasingly apparent that success is not defined by the amount of data gathered, but what organizations can do around compliance. In the traditional research sphere, a core pillar in the collection and treatment of data has been data ethics and transparency. This pillar has created a set of checks and balances that’s allowed us to stay self-regulated and offers protection to both consumers and companies. Whatever happens with passive data collection, the traditional research industry will be asking questions and providing insights for better business decisions.

For marketers, the expanded research universe is a dynamic and valuable sector. Insights can be generated with speed and efficiency never seen before, and the U.S. is a vital part of that ecosystem. The Global Market Research report shows an industry that progresses, transforms and impacts businesses across sectors like no other.

Whatever the future holds, data and insight will continue to be the keystone for marketing decisions. m FINN RABEN is director general of

Other

1%

ESOMAR. He has spent most of his career in market research, previously working at Millward Brown IMS in Dublin, Nielsen, TNS and Synovate.

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Most Marketers Are Missing the Data They Need and the Context to Find It A recent report from Kantar found that more than 90% of marketers don’t know what they don’t know, creating problems with consistency and marketers’ ability to act. ow can t e blend art and cience to ll in the gaps?

By Hal Conick

W

hen John Keenan worked in database marketing at Leo Burnett in the early 1990s, data collection took great effort.

Keenan and his colleagues would send coupons to consumers through snail mail, waiting for weeks to get a vague sense of how a campaign was performing. Response from mailers lacked precision; Keenan and his team wouldn’t know where or when the coupons were redeemed.

Their hard work yielded a vague understanding of why the coupons were used and they could only approximate whether the campaign had paid off.

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Now, Keenan works as executive vice president of marketing analytics at creative agency Periscope and can track consumer data down to a precise moment. Granular data—where a customer bought a product, at what time and even what the weather was that day—is available and easily accessible within a closed loop to any marketer with the right technology. In closed-loop reporting, an incredible amount of data is available to both marketing and sales teams. Rather than the vague approximations Keenan had to surmise from mailers, he and many other marketers now receive consumer data from apps, websites, third-party data vendors and CRM platforms—and new methods of data collection keep coming. With more consumers online and more ways to collect information than ever, data has exploded: A 2017 report from IBM found that 90% of data in the world today was created in the previous two years, a number that has surely risen since.

Although data collection has become easier, marketers still struggle to make sense of their data.

Kantar’s 2019 “Getting Media Right” report finds that fewer than 10% of marketers say that they have all the data they need—the rest can only collect a fraction, or they notice gaps in the data they have.

“To me, it’s really kind of astounding, especially [with] North America being such a mature market,” says Aaron Peterson, senior director of marketing of Kantar’s insights division and author of the report. “We hear from [clients] that they have so much data at their fingertips, but it’s not the right set of data that they need to actually make a decision. They just have all these data points and they’re still kind of struggling with what to do with all that data that’s in front of them.”

The Kantar report found that marketers have a hard time translating their data into actionable insights. Kantar surveyed advertisers, agencies and media companies on their confidence in being able to integrate multiple data sources to discover insights—47% of advertisers said they were “not very/not at all confident,” compared to 26% of agencies and 31% of media companies.

And with inconsistent data and insights comes inconsistent measurement. In the report, 76% agreed that it was difficult to assess how well the brand was performing across multiple channels.

While the majority of marketers responded that they track reach and frequency, Kantar found that other methods of measurement vary greatly across the industry, disrupting the performance of data. Kantar’s report says that measuring brand effectiveness can harmonize cross-channel

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currency, but it’s only being used by half of all marketers. And marketers are inconsistent in their cross-channel measurement of sales and ROI— while more than half of advertisers and agencies track these measurements, only 35% of media companies do so.

Inconsistent measurement has likely led to a foggy understanding of ROI. A third of advertisers and agencies and 22% of media companies say that they measure ROI once a year or less, while about a third of all groups say that they measure ROI continuously. In the age of instantly available data, why do as many marketers measure yearly as those who measure moment by moment?

The promise of marketing data has always been about understanding business, taking better actions and getting better results. It’s great to know how people shop, but marketers are in the business of selling, not measuring. And thus far, the data revolution hasn’t allowed for action nor consistent results. Kantar reports that more than half of the advertisers and media companies they surveyed believed they were not successful at acting on data in real time.

The heart of the problem lies in the fact that such a small percentage of marketers have all the data they require. How can the more than 90% of marketers who are struggling with data find what they need?

What’s Your Business Objective?

The same mistake keeps popping up, Keenan says: A company will dive into data that already exists without first figuring out its business objectives.

Recently, a potential client of Keenan’s expressed interest in digging into some data for something they wanted to measure. Keenan sought to understand the purpose of this exercise and what need it filled for client or internal development, but the potential client didn’t have an answer yet.

This is how many data inquiries start, Keenan says, which is backwards.

Keenan says that marketers should start with a requirements analysis to define the expectations of the search for data and then use the analysis to find the right data. Even 25 years ago with mailers, Keenan says that his teams would always start by finding the objective and asking, “Why?” And it’s not enough to simply know the questions and start analyzing the data—there’s an art to data science, Keenan says. Marketers must consider the exact business contexts that matter, those that will truly affect their objectives. The art

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must precede the science. “If we’re thinking about something with our analysts, they shouldn’t go back to their desks and start coding right away,” he says. “[If they do], they haven’t been thinking about what they should be doing first.”

The process of data analysis and insight discovery is often overwhelming for overly eager clients, but Keenan says it can be made easier with patience—stating objectives, asking questions and planning thoroughly. Although diving in to available data right away may seem more appealing, Keenan says that it usually leads to greater challenges—and it’s likely a big reason why many marketers find holes in their data.

“In order [to] not be overwhelmed, you have to know how [the data] plays into what you’re trying to achieve,” he says. “You have to start with context.

Then, everything else becomes easier.”

Whittling Down the Metrics

Nichole Urigashvili, senior data scientist of research science at food-ordering service Grubhub, determined the business objectives and asked all the requisite questions, but she was left with about 150 different metrics in her data model. “I talked to my manager the next day and they were like, ‘You know what? We just need to take some out,’” she says.

Nailing down business objectives and the contexts in which they exist are essential steps in gathering data, but narrowing the metrics to be followed may be just as important. Both steps consolidate an overwhelming mountain of data into a climbable hill.

If you’re following too many different metrics, Urigashvili says that you can work logically to cut them down. For example, if two metrics are similar, remove one. Or thin the herd by analyzing the data

further and focusing only on the metrics that most affect business objectives.

It’s important to remember that even when you know the direction you’re taking, the amount of consumer data can be cumbersome. Often, data can become too granular. For example, it wouldn’t likely be fruitful for Grubhub to attempt to change the actions of 10 people who live on a single block, but the company could find benefits in analyzing consumer trends at a neighborhood level.

When data gets too granular, analysis becomes too much about reaching a few people rather than large swaths of consumers. Keenan recalls a job where he mined grocery store data and had 5,000 shopping indicators on individual shoppers before he could even attach the data to their digital footprint. He had information as specific as whether shoppers bought paste or gel toothpaste, carbonated or non-carbonated water, Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Analyzing data this granular often casts too small a net. “There’s a lot of data out there, so it’s about deciding what’s relevant and actionable in service of the objective,” Keenan says.

Urigashvili says narrowing your data is sometimes about digging deeper and asking more precise questions. For example, if Grubhub is researching churn rate, they’d first need to ask if there’s something they can do about the lapse in support. Who’s leaving? Is it drivers, restaurants or customers? From there, they gather potential metrics to follow and analyze to determine which metrics have the closest relationship to business results. If there’s little or no relationship, that metric can be put aside.

The metrics that marketers follow must serve the business objective—just because something is measurable doesn’t mean that it matters to the organization.

The Long- and Short-Term Mix Kantar’s Peterson says that marketers need to educate their senior leadership on the power of data and long-term measurement. Executive teams usually want to measure for short-term results, he says, but marketers know that campaigns often take a while to pay off. In the best cases, there’d be a mix of both short- and long-term measurement, but the best case often doesn’t happen. For example, 88% of advertisers told Kantar that they believe that it’s best to mix both short- and long-term measurement, but only 66% actually use a mix, while 31% predominantly measure short-term results.

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Translate Data for the Innumerate

During a day-long meeting at 4C Insights, a data and marketing technology platform, CMO Aaron Goldman asked Ashley Tomzik, his team’s new marketing data scientist, to help ground the session in data. Goldman had just hired Tomzik away from 4C’s engineering team a few months prior and was blown away by her work in that short time.

“She pulled up a few dashboards,” Goldman says. “There were all the charts we were used to looking at. But then at the top, she had written actual words—imagine that—telling the story or the key insight of what we should take away from each of those [charts]. It was the first time in as long as I can remember at 4C where we didn’t just immediately dive into dissecting a chart. We actually started with some context and a story, a key insight that was drawn out.”

Tomzik says that she knows not everyone easily understands numbers—while it’s her job as a data scientist to make them palatable, she acknowledges that they can make people confused, sleepy, frustrated or bored. When people looked at the charts she presented, she wanted them to see numbers in the proper business context and understand what they meant.

“The numbers aren’t going to be obvious at first,” she says. “You need to understand the whole picture to be able to understand why something might be happening and how things are relating to each other to draw insights from your data.”

There’s a demand for data scientists like Tomzik. LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue told attendees of a Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Knowledge@Wharton town hall that demand for data scientists has seen 15- to 20-times growth over the past three years. But Tomzik says that data scientists in marketing must be able to translate the numbers into words or stories for the rest of the company—if the data scientist understands the numbers but the executive doesn’t, the marketing team won’t likely benefit.

Kantar’s Peterson says that a problem for many marketing departments is that their numbers are crunched by those outside of marketing. “For a lot of companies, there’s somebody within their IT department that’s actually collecting and organizing all of the data and then pushing it back to the marketing team,” he says. “A lot of businesses … are still creating a bit of a silo situation. Marketers need to be able to talk more directly with those folks that are managing the data to really get them to understand what is going to be useful for them versus just pushing the data out.”

It’s important to have someone on the team who understands the business contexts. Goldman says that Tomzik’s ability to translate the data is much better than crunching the numbers themselves or having someone else do it. With Tomzik’s help, Goldman says that the marketing team has narrowed the number of metrics it follows, become more confident in its ability to track data that matters and gotten quicker to act—this year, 4C started working toward unique quarterly goals rather than annual benchmarks.

Follow the Numbers

As data analysts, Keenan says that it’s important to know what people are looking for to understand how data can best support their goals. An organization can be successful with differing views of the same problem, but marketing data analysts must understand what these contrasting views mean.

Urigashvili says that data could be more consistent if everyone better understood what’s being measured. For example, if Grubhub was analyzing the cancellation rate for orders, some in the company may view it purely as a user issue, but that disregards the potential that a cancellation may have come from the business or issues with the delivery driver. Getting more specific on the matter of cancellations can get everyone on the same page, a good step toward solving the problem.

As Tomzik says, it takes good communication to clearly explain these analytic differences to others

Keep Data Clean Another problem Grubhub’s Urigashvili has found is that data often isn’t stored well. Analysts frequently nd t at t ere are mi in alue or bi a in data or t i e a t at it ould be “cleaned ” leanin data mean determinin w ere a e i t and ow t e roblem can be ol ed com anie ma be be t er ed b im l ettin rid o bad or corru ted data

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in the company. But data analysts must serve the business by delivering actionable insights.

Finding Insights and Taking Action

If data is a rainbow, insights are the mythical pot of gold at the end—which most marketers fail to find.

Keenan says that the process of finding actionable insights should originate with your objective and the context of the data you search for, as insights are the interpretation of the data you’ve found.

These insights will be used to determine what steps the business takes next.

For example, if Keenan’s team was performing a campaign analysis, he says that they’d need to understand the objective of the campaign and how they reached out to consumers to find insights. The team’s analysts would be armed with the contexts of the campaign, such as the kind of offer and style of communication. Then, instead of reporting back the response rate within certain subjections, the analysts would know the context of the interaction and interpret it themselves. Finding insights is concluding why consumers responded the way they did and what that means going forward. Was the response rate lower or higher than usual? Why? How should this affect the next campaign?

Once a business starts gathering insights, acting on them and seeing success, Grubhub’s Urigashvili says that they’ll have an easier time defining and solving future problems, gaining even better observations in the process.

How to Start

If Urigashvili was starting a data team from scratch, she says that she’d first look to understand the business at a high level. For example, how could data potentially be used to help the business?

By knowing how data can be leveraged to reach business goals, Urigashvili says that marketers should be able to score some quick wins, which can prove that being data-driven works. These quick wins will be essential for the most important part of becoming driven by data: getting the entire organization, especially leadership, on board.

Hiring smart, creative people who ask the right questions and know the business objectives is great, but change requires a senior leadership team that’s willing to listen and see that data can have a positive effect on the company.

“Companies that aren’t data-driven, especially if their leadership isn’t data-driven, make it hard for a data team to start pushing and advocating for analytics,” she says. “It’s really going to be this organizational culture change. We can use data; this is how we can use it. If we have this type of problem, don’t just go with your gut, let’s utilize data to be able to help with that.” m

Creating a Flow Kantar’s report says that combining the results of marketing campaigns across channels and platforms with brand engagement from areas typically outside of marketing’s view would create a more “balanced flow” in marketing efforts.

When Kantar asked advertisers, agencies and media companies whether they’ve been able to integrate their ROI results:

Yes, we’ve figured it out ADVERTISERS 15% AGENCIES

28%

MEDIA

22%

We’re working toward it ADVERTISERS 51% AGENCIES

59%

MEDIA

62%

No, we use them separately ADVERTISERS 34% AGENCIES

13%

MEDIA

16%

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What Is the Techlash –– and Should You Care?

How consumer media use is set to evolve, and whether marketers are doing enough to adjust their digital marketing strategy

BY CRAIG CHARNEY

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T

he techlash has hit.

As marketers barrel toward a brave new world of marketing technology, many are heading straight at an unexpected obstacle: the consumer.

According to a new report published by AMA New York, titled “The Future of Marketing,” Americans will ease off of social media use and online gaming in the next three years, even as advertisers plan to up their stakes in these arenas.

Moreover, American consumers are worried about smart speakers, the internet of things and other marketing innovations. They’re also fearful about privacy, falsehoods and psychological harm. But many marketers overrate how positively consumers view marketing change and underrate their concerns.

“Techlash is here,” says Karen McFarlane, president of AMA New York. “Despite their fast adoption, consumers have profound concerns about their personal data and how it will be used or compromised. When it comes to the growing intersection of IoT, ad tech and artificial intelligence, marketers must amplify brand trust and become unmatched champions of consumer privacy.”

So what is the techlash? Last year, Oxford Dictionaries defined it as “a strong and widespread negative reaction to the growing power and influence of large technology

companies, particularly those based in Silicon Valley.” (They rated it a “word of the year.”) For marketers, techlash means consumer hostility or unease about new marketing technologies or approaches—and whomever deploys them. It takes many forms, including shunning products, quitting platforms, reducing usage or reputational damage.

SIGNS OF TECHLASH Signs of the techlash are visible in media use trends revealed by the study, such as the expected leveling off of social media use and online gaming in the U.S. Overall, net audience change (i.e., proportion expecting to spend more time minus proportion expecting less) expected for social media use is a predicted 6% decrease and a 4% decrease for online games. This is consistent with other recent studies by Pew and eMarketer.

It’s true that consumers are moving from older media to online alternatives, but the big gainers are likely to be websites, email and streaming media rather than social media or gaming, despite their hype. In particular, Facebook and Instagram use is forecast to level off through 2022, while consumers expect net declines in their use of Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn. Growth is forecast only for YouTube, similar to streaming media in general.

EXPECTED CHANGE: CONSUMER TIMESHARE AND AD SPEND SHARE (BY MEDIUM) - U.S. Websites Social media Email Online games Streaming TV/radio Broadcast/cable TV Broadcast radio *

Print Postal mail In-store -20%

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

* Not available

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Facebook’s spectacular stumbles and the resultant damage to its image have drawn widespread publicity, but social media anxiety has spread further. Edelman found that 61% of Americans mistrust social media companies in general to protect their data.

The consequences of consumer mistrust are real. An AxiosHarris poll of trust in 100 tech companies revealed Facebook plunged from 51st place in 2018 to 94th this year, while Google dropped from No. 28 to No. 41. Polls show Facebook’s worsening image has hurt usage and engagement.

But even as techlash has hit America, the AMA New York research shows that some marketers haven’t noticed.

Marketers report over-indexing on many social media platforms already. Despite the projected slippage in social media and gaming audiences, 68% and 25% of marketers anticipate increased marketing spend in these respective categories.

THE DIGITAL DISCONNECT Beyond shifting their media use, the Future of Marketing study shows Americans are ambivalent and divided about martech and the IoT—which may surprise many marketers. None of the nine marketing innovations tested with descriptions in the study are favored by a majority of consumers, though pluralities preferred four of the innovations and noteworthy proportions say they “don’t know.”

The innovations most consumers are skeptical about include many popular with marketers, including personalized ads (just 35% of consumers found favorable), IoT-connected home devices (37%), micro-influencers (29%), employee

influencers (32%) and augmented reality (36%). At present, the only innovations with plurality consumer support are ones that can be voluntarily used, such as virtual reality (45% favorable), smart speakers (44%), AI assistants (46%) and omnichannel (41%).

These findings are not outliers and are consistent with other recent research by the Internet Innovation Alliance, NBC and the Wall Street Journal.

But of all the new martech tested, substantial proportions of consumer respondents—from 10% to 24%—are uncertain about what they think of the changes. This suggests a big chunk of consumers may be convinced by the merits of martech.

American consumers are relatively open to the benefits of new marketing technology, but they have a lot of anxiety about the potential drawbacks.

When we tested positives for the martech innovations described above, Americans agreed with most of the claimed benefits (except those for IoT). Percent majorities from the low 50s to low 60s say that new technology will make shopping easier, quicker and better-informed, and improve access to brands’ understanding of their needs. Almost half of consumers also say shopping will be more fun. But favorability is not consistent: Despite moderate numbers for each claimed benefit, only one in four Americans agree with seven or eight of them.

On the other hand, majorities or pluralities of consumers worry about all six negatives we tested. The most widespread concern was that four in five consumers fear fake accounts, falsehoods, hackers and bots will mislead them. Nearly as many fear that they will lose their privacy and be under

Employees as influencers

CONSUMER FAVORABILITY TO MARTECH

0%

20%

Smart speakers

Augmented reality

Internet of things

Virtual reality

Personalized ads

AI assistants

Micro-influencers

Omnichannel

40%

60%

80%

Favorable

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100%

0%

Unfavorable

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Unsure

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What About China? constant surveillance. Two-thirds say that martech will take the human touch out of shopping or that it will spread isolation and depression. Almost half believe it will make ads less creative.

The digital disconnect is sharp: American marketers overrate the perceived positives of marketing innovations, while not taking consumer concerns seriously enough. Most expect U.S. consumers to consistently welcome them, but the perception gap between marketers and consumers averages 27 points. Marketers are more aware of the possible problems, but still underrate them. Although majorities recognize customer concerns regarding five of the six negatives (all but loss of creativity), the proportion expecting consumers to be bothered by each consistently runs below that of consumers who are—by as much as 22%.

TOWARD DIGITAL DIALOGUE Consumers and marketers agree: In a decade, marketing will live mostly online, while buying will remain omnichannel. Yet to close the digital disconnect, marketers must recognize the trends and dangers, educate consumers and lead changes to improve marketing practices and privacy.

This will mean: • Putting ad dollars where consumers are actually going, even if the marketing herds are stampeding toward social media and online games.

• Educating consumers about the benefits and value of new martech.

• Accepting the continuing differences between online marketing and omnichannel sales.

• Giving consumers control and transparency regarding use of their data, as well as incentives.

• Emphasizing consumer choice regarding technology and introducing changes that consumers can choose to use (virtual reality, for example).

• Establishing standards of online conduct and data protection through company codes, industry action and negotiations with regulators.

For a future of online marketing to win consumer trust, marketers need to listen and respond to related consumer concerns—and the time to start is now. m CRAIG CHARNEY, AMA New York board member and Charney Research CEO, led the Future of Marketing study.

THE AMA NEW YORK’S FUTURE OF MARKETING study surveyed consumers and marketers and looked at industry trends for the coming three to 10 years. The study consisted of an online poll of approximately 500 consumers and marketers in the U.S. fielded in January by YouGov, along with similar numbers in China by Kadence in March, and questionnaire and analysis by Charney Research. The U.S. sample was nationally

Chinese consumers are bullish about martech, but have their concerns

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he Future of Marketing study found some key differences in media trends and martech reactions between Chinese and American consumers, along with shared concerns.

ONLINE MEDIA SOARS IN CHINA

Social media is massive and exploding: Majorities of our mostly urban, middle-class China sample use all six top social channels (WeChat, Baidu, Sina Weibo, Youku Tudou, Toutiao and TenCent Weibo) on a daily basis. Users expect to spend more time on all in three years, with a net gain for all social media of 34%. The trend is the same for other online media, with net increases forecast for websites (42%), email (12%) and streaming media (5%). Gaming is the exception, as in the U.S., with a net loss of 11%.

CHINESE CONSUMERS ARE POSITIVE ON MARKETING INNOVATION

Perspectives on new marketing technology are much more positive in China; lopsided majorities favor all nine of the marketing innovations we tested. Some 70% or more feel the changes will make shopping more fun, easier, quicker and better-informed, as well as improve access to goods and bolster brand understanding. Unlike Americans, similar proportions say the IoT will improve their lives and cities. In total, 65% of Chinese consumers agree with seven or eight of the benefits, almost three times the proportion of Americans who do.

THERE IS ALSO A TECHLASH IN CHINA

Majorities of Chinese polled feared five of the six negatives to martech we tested, including misleading information, loss of privacy, constant surveillance, isolation and depression, and loss of the human touch in shopping. Other research has shown majorities in China don’t trust social media to protect privacy and have deleted at least one social media app due to privacy concerns. Yet marketers in China miss this altogether—they don’t think any of the issues we polled will trouble their customers.

representative, the Chinese sample mostly urban and middleclass. The full report is available at amanewyork.org/techlash.

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SOFT SKILLS

Speak Up for Yourself Public speaking boosts your chances for employment and promotions. Here’s how to kick off this skill development on the right foot.

BY STEVE HEISLER | STAFF WRITER

 sheisler@ama.org

A

1974 episode of “The Brady Bunch” offered what is collectively considered the golden piece of wisdom about public speaking. Mike Brady, concerned for his daughter Jan’s upcoming debate, suggests she imagine the audience in their underwear. No one looks intimidating when they’re stripped to their skivvies, he says.

The tip has maybe worked for some, but Mike Brady’s advice hasn’t aged with

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the modern workplace. Many conferences and presentations happen digitally nowadays, so it’s impossible to catch a glimpse of any participant, let alone the collective audience.

Regardless of the medium, public speaking opportunities aren’t going anywhere. The BBC estimates that a staggering 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created each day around the globe. Despite the high likelihood

of giving a presentation, 25.3% of the population reports being terrified of public speaking, according to The Washington Post. But the right amount of preparation can help you ease those fears.

Here’s more about what public speaking is and how you can improve and successfully execute an excellent presentation.

What Is It and Why Is It Important?

Public speaking means more than presenting to a boardroom of 20 or an arena of 20,000. The skills required to be an engaging public speaker come into play during client calls, internal discussions and team meetings.

“It could be 10 people, five people, three people,” says Carolyn Cohn, co-founder and chief editor at

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SOFT SKILLS

communications agency CompuKol. “At some point, and probably more frequently than infrequently as a marketer, you’re going to be standing in front of an audience.”

And when that time comes, excelling as a public speaker is paramount. A 2017 BBC piece reported that “oral communication” and “presentation skills” were the No. 1 and No. 4 skills employers seek in applicants, respectively. Of those employees who did use public speaking at their job, 70% said they found the skill “critical to their success at work.” The consultancy Magnetic Speaking further breaks down how crucial public speaking can be. Its founder, Peter Khoury, writes, “Fear of public speaking has a 10% impairment on your wages and a 15% impairment on your promotion.”

The good news is that you may already possess many of the important skills necessary to be a great public speaker.

Francine Lasky, a business leader consultant and seasoned public speaker, explains that the ideas behind storytelling are directly transferrable to public speaking. “Be able to break an idea down into pieces,” she says. “If you’re good at figuring out a strategy, you can apply that to communication. … Put your audience into the story by giving them details—it may be by [introducing] a situation that would be familiar.”

How Do You Hone This Skill?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, practice, practice.

“Practice in front of a mirror and in front of your friends,” Lasky says—in both cases, you’ll be presenting to a forgiving audience. “Videotaping yourself is hugely painful [to watch] but has been amazingly helpful. You will never learn as much as you do after you watch yourself in videos. You will stop doing the things you don’t like. You’ll start doing things you do like.”

Cohn prefers that you train in front of people who may not already know you. She recommends seeking out organizations such as Toastmasters—a supportive group in which members

practice giving speeches and receive feedback on their performance.

When you’re feeling somewhat prepared, it’s time to begin presenting in low-stakes work environments. Take the initiative by explaining to your manager that public speaking is a skill you are determined to develop, Cohn says. That way they’ll be excited to see you present and offer feedback and more opportunities.

Lasky offers some specific suggestions.

“Present a new idea internally; go to HR and [ask to] do the presentation on the next 401(k),” Lasky says. “Give them a demonstration of how you speak, how you can engage an audience. You probably already know the message.”

Of course, nobody emerges as a brilliant orator on their first few tries.

Otherwise, we’d all be at Carnegie Hall right now. Once your crowd grows large enough to include folks you didn’t know beforehand, Lasky recommends bringing along evaluation forms. Not all conferences distribute them, she says, but they’re a great way to receive nuanced feedback and make new contacts. “Lead people to say what they got out of [your talk]—not just that you were a great speaker,” she says.

While studies show that great speakers can engage audiences regardless of the message, don’t neglect focusing on the work itself. “PowerPoint is the best way to turn your written materials into a presentation,” Cohn says—but she recommends practicing restraint. “You don’t want to pack those slides with a million things. They’re launching-off points—a couple of bullets on a slide and some graphics.”

Set the proper tone by easing the crowd into your presentation with something light and interactive. “Inject some sort of humor into the very beginning because then people will start to pay attention right away,” Cohn says. “[Or] ask an engaging question.

Everybody in the universe wants to know that they count and that their opinion matters. And if you ask a question ... you’re opening the door for them to actually tell you what they think.”

career advancement

Consider tweaking your message to connect with as many audience members as possible. “One of the major mistakes people make is they assume their audience, whether it’s small or big, all have the same communication styles they do,” Lasky says. Vary your presentation to include bullet points, sure, but also charts, graphs, audio snippets, short videos and interactive bits with the audience.

Think about the nonverbal elements of your presentation as well. Each contributes to the amount of confidence you’ll project. “You want to dress appropriately,” Cohn says. “You may have really individual taste, but there are certain times and places where that’s just not well-received. … You’re not going to be standing still, just by a podium holding onto something; you’re going to be walking around addressing the people in that audience. Always look them in the eye.” Cohn adds that eye contact is the first thing she notices when a new speaker takes the stage.

How Can You Demonstrate Your Mastery?

The best way to secure more speaking opportunities is to capture video of your presentation and share it with conferences or on social media like LinkedIn. Viewers will be able to observe your tone, mannerisms and engagement with participants. They’ll also develop a sense of how your audience reacts. Your phone or other device should suffice; you can even ask one of the conference staff in the front row to tape for you.

Don’t forget to pass out those evaluation forms when you’re done. The feedback you receive not only helps you improve but makes for a great résumébooster. Keep tabs on each talk you’ve given and list them either directly in your résumé or in a cover letter, along with select testimonials, when submitting job applications or applying for more speaking engagements. You can include links to your videos in an introductory email.

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MARTECH

How to Conquer the Martech Challenge and Achieve Customer Nirvana A successful martech launch requires a robust CRM platform and a leader to champion its adoption

BY JESSAMY LELLIOTT

 jlelliott@Mktpoint.com

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uccessful martech leaders are datadriven technologists who embrace change-and-seek solutions that place the customer at the center of their business. They possess a clear go-tomarket strategy and understand how new technologies support it. They can also

successfully articulate their vision and facilitate end-user adoption.

After deciding on which technologies to adopt that will drive a marketing strategy, the next challenge for a martech leader is implementation. This requires internal process changes, which are often

career advancement

met with resistance and can result in painful experiences. If you’re charged with leading martech initiatives within your organization, you must understand how to overcome both obstacles.

Your implementation strategy should extend beyond the launch. How will it be introduced, so that people are motivated and supported after the initial launch or relaunch? The key is to serve as the human face of the system—someone who is accessible, rather than a cold systems administrator who does not understand how to drive end-user adoption.

CRM Rules A solid CRM system sits at the center of the martech universe. It stores priceless prospect and customer data that delivers valuable customer insights, which is the lifeblood of all marketing activity. As a martech leader, it is your job to ensure NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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MARTECH

your organization embraces this vital system where data is not only stored, but cleaned and updated on a regular basis. But take heed: Discussion about CRM often invokes a big yawn, or worse, resistance from end users, especially sales.

Often, the biggest hurdle to introducing a martech solution, such as CRM, is convincing sales, marketing and even customer support to use the technology.

The ability to put yourself in their shoes is crucial. Understand their reluctance to change and explain how the technology will benefit them personally, in addition to the organization as a whole. You must be able to articulate the benefits, such as demand generation, prospect and customer insights, revenue generation and excellent service that creates happy, loyal customers.

Champion the Cause As a martech leader, the onus is on you to demonstrate to the sales team how a particular software such as CRM will enable them to be more successful in meeting quotas. When introducing a new technology, find an internal champion who has influence in a group, someone who will go above and beyond to make sure the team has an open mind when incorporating the system into their routine. This “super user” needs to communicate the benefits of the CRM system in a clear, demonstrable manner so that others are involved, energized and motivated by their success.

Communication is key. Some of the most effective channels of communication may include email updates, lunch-andlearns and online discussion boards.

Common challenges such as a lack of change management or executive leadership, insufficient data models and unclear strategies will result in inadequate user buy-in and rejection of your system.

As a martech leader, you must be an ally and catalyst for overcoming these pitfalls.

A true martech leader goes the extra mile to be the key point of contact throughout the process, ensuring that each user is supported. This is essential to gaining maximum user buy-in. If a salesperson encounters any roadblocks when working their way around a new

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system, they will give up and go back to their old ways of conducting business.

Interactive manuals and face-to-face “CRM clinics” are other vehicles to encourage adoption and reinforce training.

Integrate Martech and CRM A lack of CRM integration with other marketing systems can be a death knell. This is where the martech leader can become a star. Ensure these three solutions are tightly integrated to maximize your tech investment: • Marketing automation.

• Inside- and mobile-sales automation.

• Customer support and the call center.

Your goal is to weave these together so data is stored centrally as representing a single version of the customer. Once this mission is accomplished, you and your organization will have reached nirvana (from a customer insights perspective).

Be Compliant Now that you’ve connected all systems, a final but critical success factor is providing 100% compliance and adhering to current privacy laws. Abiding by regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation makes it easy for your customers to opt in and establish a preference center that’s accessible via all channels. This enables the delivery of personalized information and services according to your customers’ unique preferences.

The ability to add a human touch when implementing new technologies is crucial to success. True martech leaders understand the impact these technologies will have on end users and help them manage the changes. Successful leaders embrace a big-picture perspective and enable their organizations to achieve a measurable return on their tech investments to maximize productivity and profits. m JESSAMY LELLIOTT is a marketing associate for Marketpoint CRM. She has an extensive background in digital marketing and technology, and is responsible for driving marketing campaigns including

Tips and Tricks of a Martech Superstar

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aking on the role of a martech leader can be overwhelming, as it’s up to you to implement change within an organization. Everyone deals with change differently.

Some welcome it with open arms, while others retreat to their comfort zone.

The ability to manage this requires great leadership and determination. You must be able to gain employee trust so that they can see your vision.

Evidence-based facts and statistics, success stories and customers insights are all essential elements to present to your team so that they can get a glimpse into what the future holds when they embrace this change.

The word “martech” has a technical connotation.

While being data-driven and tech savvy is important, people skills really make the difference. You must possess empathy and be able to view the problem from each user’s point of view—understand how this new technology will impact his or her life. With this knowledge, you can tailor implementation, training and reinforcement to ensure a smooth transition with maximum user buy-in for the long term.

event marketing and social media.

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advertisers’ index ADVERTISERS’ INDEX

Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the November/December 2019 issue of Marketing News.

2019 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education Thank You to Event Sponsors ................. p. 13 URL: ama.org/highered AMA Digital Marketing Bootcamp ............................ p. 25 URL: ama.org/bootcamp AMA Marketing Management Bootcamp ................................................ inside back cover URL: ama.org/bootcamp

Collegis Education ................................ p. 7-9, back cover URL: CollegisEducation.com AMA Foundation / Williams-Qualls-Spratlen Multicultural Mentoring Award of Excellence / Valuing Diversity Ph.D Scholarship ...................... p. 18-19 Calls for Nominations: Nonprofit Marketer of the Year – ama.marketing/NP20 4 Under 40 Award – ama.marketing/4U4020 Robert J Lavidge Award – ama.marketing/Lavidge20

AMA Professional Certified Marketer® Program ....................................................... p. 31 URL: ama.org/pcm

Salesforce ................................................ inside front cover URL: salesforce.com/ama

AMA Training Series .................................................... p. 29 URL: www.ama.org/trainingseries

Submittable ................................................................... p. 15 URL: submittable.com/ama

AMA Winter Academic Conference / Consumer and Firms in a Global World .................... p. 23 URL: ama.marketing/winter2020

Telepoll Market Research ................................. p. 40-41 Ph. 1-800-743-6443 URL: www.Telepoll.net

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And now a word from…

BLUE BONNET GIRL

Official mascot for Blue Bonnet margarine

What is your origin story? How did you come to represent Blue Bonnet margarine?

My likeness was inspired by a woman named Jeni Freeland, who was selected in 1948 as Miss Blue Bonnet. Jeni was a former Miss Florida, competing in the 1945 Miss America Pageant.

After making public appearances on behalf of the brand, she became so popular that her likeness began appearing on packaging.

What are some of your favorite recipes that use Blue Bonnet products?

Baking is one of my favorite hobbies. I love muffins, cakes, brownies and cookies.

This time of year, pumpkin treats are especially popular, so I have a pumpkin cake recipe that is one of my favorites.

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What gives Blue Bonnet its signature taste?

There’s a creamy, fresh taste to Blue Bonnet that’s been enjoyed by generations of fans. And Blue Bonnet bakes like butter, but without the cholesterol!

A recent survey by Crestline showed that you were the most recognizable brand mascot among baby boomers. Why do you think that is?

Good food is warm, inviting and makes you smile. I’d like to think the iconic Blue Bonnet logo has those same qualities. And besides, you can’t mistake my signature headgear for anything else!

Since becoming the face of the brand, how have you seen people’s tastes change?

Margarine continues to be a popular baking staple, and what’s been fun over the years is to see the breadth of creative ways people use it—as a topping, a spread, an ingredient and more. Its versatility is truly amazing.

Has anyone ever confused you with the bluebonnet, the state flower of Texas?

A lot of consumers do think we have Texas roots, but the brand was actually founded in New York City in the mid-1940s.

A number of celebrities have donned your iconic blue bonnet in TV commercials. Who have been some of the most notable ones?

Some of the most notable Blue Bonnet ads were from the early 1980s and featured “M*A*S*H” star Jamie Farr, Georgia Engle from the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” and baseball hall of famers Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

STATS Organization Blue Bonnet margarine Date of birth 1946 Residence Chicago Uniform The blue bonnet, of course Slogan Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it!

If you had the choice, what would be your alternate headwear?

I think I’d have to choose something that provided optimal coverage in the sun. A straw hat wouldn’t be quite as distinct, but it would no doubt fulfill my needs.

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