Marketing in Real Life

Short post today, but check out my interview with Cathy Harrison from AMA Boston on measuring marketing effectiveness at: http://www.connect.amaboston.org/profiles/blogs/measuring-marketing

Here is the first of the takeaways from presentations at the Shopper Insights in Action Conference earlier this month in Chicago. This presentation was from Chris Gray, Vice President of Shopper Psychology (cool title!) at Saatchi & Saatchi. Winning Her Wallet By Meeting Her Mind. 33 percent of brand loyal customers in 2007 abandoned those brands in 2008 Shopper marketing has 3 secomds to make an impression, which is long enough for people to decide Shoppers are consumers on a mission... they become task oriented, make choices beyond their normal considersation set (when not shopping), are pressured and bombarded while choosing, and are decision makers. Deselection (being automatically ruled out) is the worst case scenario for brands Ratonal claims work because they speak to consumers' emotonal goals. Make your teeth 30% whiter = i want to feel more confident and attractive Positive emotions drive positive behaviors and the converse is true. Narrowed focus, smaller budget, fast...

Seth Godin had a great post on the use of graphs in the business world that I thought was particularly useful after being at the Shopper Insights in Action conference last week. It is fascinating, but not shocking watching people perk up for images and stories and videos and slump into their chairs at the sight of charts on a screen. It's not that the data isn't important, it is just that the data should be used to support a story, not to tell the story. Over the next week or so I'll be posting notes from select sessions at what was an excellent conference. Stay tuned!

As anyone who does research for a living knows, the two biggest challenges are getting funding and getting insights used. And in design and engineering driven cutures this is even more of a challenge. BusinessWeek ran a great case study earlier this month on how the team at Steelcase "turned research into innovation gold." One key to their success? Bringing the entire team together for a a two-day event that included marketers, engineers, industrial designers, and other stakeholders. This event was used to combine all of the data collected over months with their own knowledge and experiences to come up with actual insights. Read the entire article here.

Earlier this week, we re-launched the Chadwick Martin Bailey brand and web site internally and I thought I'd offer four tips for a successful re-launch beyond just throwing a party. 1) Tell people why you made the changes and how it supports the business 2) Arm people with all of the tools they need (spend a lot of time thinking this through!) and be responsive to those needs you hadn't anticipated 3) Dont get bogged down in the details at the launch, those can be worked through in smaller groups at another time. 4) Give people hard copies that they can refer back to and show off to others.

Sorry for the lack of recent posts, but next week is a big week. The new CMB website launches Tuesday and Wednesday we'll be in Chicago for the Shopper Insights in Action Conference - always an excellent event! My friend Brant Cruz will be presenting alongside EA Sports' (It's in the game) Stephen Day about work we did together to help develop a strategy for the new 'gamer' market. The first tangible result being the very cool EA Sports Active . Drop a line if you're going or swing by our booth to say hi!