Social Media Helps You Understand the Price-Quality Formula

Throughout the troubled economy, I observed the impact of the recession in people’s attitudes towards consumer packaged goods, technology, communication, travel and other services.  One of the most common themes in social media discussion highlights the fascinating relationship between cost and quality of goods and services. How much is one willing to forego in terms of benefits to achieve savings is a key question.  As I listen to these conversations, I begin to glean distinct personas that appear to have a specific threshold when negotiating between cost and quality. 

Let me give you an example comparing two personas.  

First, bargain hunters.   We all know who they are.  They are easy to spot and relatively simple enough to convert.   Their propensity to buy is driven primarily by a low price point, and this attitude is magnified by the lousy economy.  They predictably go for the cheapest available option, thanks to having the lowest expectations on quality and other attributes.  In social media, they usually drive the positive favorability towards bargain brands.

A slightly more complex group of consumers are those that appear to be willing to pay more for better quality or better experience (as they have had the opportunity to enjoy premium brands in the past), but are guilt-ridden with the idea of splurging due to the current state of the economy.  In conversations, they oscillate between mid-tier and premium brands, weighing the cost-quality benefits.  Unlike bargain hunters, their decision-making is more nuanced and less predictable, but discussion in social media does glean an interesting finding about their propensity to buy.  A premium brand becomes more attractive than ever to this group when they feel that they are getting the product or service at a lower-than-usual price point, even if, technically, it is more expensive than anything else in the market. A mid-tier brand, however, will not be quite as compelling to them even if the price drop is more significant.

The learning: amidst the recession, there is still opportunity to appeal to what consumers want beyond what they simply need, and social media will tell you how.

Marketers know that the price-quality formula is more important than ever in these economic times, and the resonance of this topic in social media substantiates its influence in purchase decisions.  The winning brands – those that generate the strongest sentiment overall – appear to have found the sweet spot in a price-quality structure that appeals to the market majority.  

Many reports claim that the economy is getting better.  To a degree, social media commentary will reflect this.  I look forward to witnessing how the trend in conversations and brand sentiment shift as market conditions (continue to?) improve.  This optimist can hope. 

Posted by Cathy Buena on February 2, 2010 at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Hello (Social) World.

I could probably talk for weeks at a time about printing, publishing, and enterprise content management (ECM) as a former technology research analyst. In fact, that was largely my job until 3 weeks ago, when I first joined the Cymfony Insights team. Researching content management, social media, analytics, and automation technologies; I focused on improving companies’ internal and external communication processes - from print to digital to social. Turning my attention to Cymfony, I intend to take advantage of this technology and research background to deliver unique insights about the social media channel, where it’s headed, and how to extract as much market information and leverage from it as possible.

While we are only on the cusp of the social revolution (no Marxist commentary intended), social media monitoring has already catalyzed a vast methodology shift in market research. No longer limited to standard measurement approaches such as surveys and focus groups, burgeoning online content – both social and traditional media – enables a new kind of monitoring. Focused on mashing disparate data sources, dynamically analyzing them, and responding in real-time, perhaps “listening” is a more appropriate term for this methodology.

As we get comfortable in the third millennium, it’s worth considering how far we’ve come from the first blog post and how much farther social media will take us. Penetrating every aspect of our culture, social media has the potential to re-define the way we work and the way we live. In the meantime, the Insights team (and this new member) is dedicated to providing visionary and credible studies of this exciting new world! (Twitter: @omriduek)

Posted by Omri Duek on January 25, 2010 at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Traditional Media Still Rules!

This article in the NYT yesterday shows that traditional media still leads the blogosphere in breaking news by an average of 2.5 hours.

Since the emergence of blogs, companies have developed paranoia that a blogger can create a crisis faster than you can type "meme". This study states that only 3.5% of the "memes" tracked originated on blogs.

In other words, 96.5% of the time, bloggers are talking about what they read in traditional media. But what is most interesting is how the blogs pick up a meme and propagate it, lengthening the news cycle and keeping attention on a topic well after the traditional media has moved on to the next story.

A couple of caveats about this study: it looks specifically at news (and only online news, not offline publications), and not mentions of brands or companies. The dynamics of how people talk about brands in social media are likely to be different.

That said, it suggests that it may be more important to reach out to bloggers to dampen a meme that is damaging or to give a push to one that is positive, than it is to try to get the bloggers to start the meme in the first place. But with only a 2.5 hour lag, you have to act fast.

The story summarizes a study done at Cornell University -- it's well worth a read!

Posted by Jim Nail on July 14, 2009 at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Social Media: Strategic Tool 2.0

Social media tracking is no longer just for damage control and seeing what the consumers have digested, it is about looking toward the future and discovering what the consumer wants and how they make their decisions.

Recently the Cymfony CPG team has been working on bringing more of our Clients away from the purely tactical uses of social media and into looking at it as a strategic tool.  Currently I am working with a Client who has been with us for years.  They originally came to us to use our tools to track a negative PR episode and never adjusted the scope of work after things had died down.  For the last three years we were able to give them metrics that allowed them to keep a handle on damage control, but last week they came to us and asked, ‘how are some of your other Clients using the data you give?’

As social media evolves, it is becoming a more strategic tool for businesses and brand managers.  We have been hearing feedback from Clients in various verticals about using our data and insights to make changes in their customer service relations, or as fuel for long-term campaigns.

So for this Client, instead of reviewing the data on a monthly basis, we looked at the first quarter of 2009.   Rather than looking at the same data that we reported on, we looked at everything that was brought into our systems.  And finally, instead of looking at our narrow scope, we did a blanket search for "unbranded" key terms in all social media that is available to us at this time.  By doing that, I was able to describe consumer motivations in the category and identify alternative services outside of the Client’s definition of ‘direct competitors.’  This gave them data that validated a direction they were considering and helped them move forward to execute it.

Posted by Kate Kurtin on May 20, 2009 at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Holiday Story

I hope you find this little fable to be an amusing seasonal diversion....

Posted by Jim Nail on December 17, 2008 at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

More on Obama and Social Media

In a recent post, speculated that President-elect Obama will not abandon the social network he built during the campaign but use it to mobilize supporters to push the change he envisions. Here's an article with the full scoop....

... in the September/October issue of Technology Review. Note: the article is free but registration is required (it is really worth it.)

My favorite line in the article describes the McCain campaign "blogette" (what is that anyway?) written by Sen. McCain's daughter, with this description:

  • "The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie Germany, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University."

If the McCain campaign thought like this think-tank person, no wonder they fumbled the social media opportunity. Trying to present the "image" of being hip and young with some clever graphic design while the McCain social network site is described elsewhere in the article this way: "It was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."

But few of us in marketing can afford to laugh at hapless politicians out of touch with young voters. How many of us are trying to create walled gardens for our brand communities? Or trying to put a hip, young image on a one-way mass marketing communication model? How many of us are really ready to entrust spreading the message about our brands to our consumers, the way Sen. Obama let his supporters spread the word about his candidacy?

I think we will all learn a lot from the Obama administration's social media strategies.

Posted by Jim Nail on December 2, 2008 at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Transforming Research, Step 3: Storytelling -- or tailoring?

  At the October 29 ARF Transforming Research conference, there was a strong theme that market researchers should weave interesting stories about how consumers interact with brands rather than present reams of data to induce a Powerpoint coma. But storytelling risks creating a fiction that loses touch with the carefully gathered facts in our research. Perhaps the better way to think about it is tailoring...

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while then this weekend a program on NPR's "Speaking of Faith", spurred me to do it. A cancer doctor spoke of her evolution from speaking with patients about the facts of their disease to listening to their life stories and how the cancer has affected them. She eventually followed this into a psychotherapy practice.

What does this have to do with the market research industry? One line in the interview really caught my ear when she said that the facts of the disease don't mean anything about the person and their struggle. Their stories held greater truth about the person than what stage the disease was at, how tumors grew or shrank, what the various tests tracked, etc

Isn't this the same with market research, especially when we are trying to understand concepts like brand engagement? The facts - the demos, market share, even time spent with a medium or a web site - don't really say anything about the nature of engagement. For that we need a different level of understanding, one that is more qualitative, one that looks not just at the interaction between the brand and the person, but broadens the view of that interaction in the context of the person's life.

That's the power of ethnography. And that is the kind of story that social media analysis at its best delivers.

The challenge for market researchers is to prevent the "story" from crossing the line into fiction. While stories need to put data in the background and bring the narrative to the fore, they must remain true to that data. To be storytellers, researchers must leave the safety and security of the survey tabulation and create a three dimensional being.

But perhaps storytelling isn't the right way to think about it. After all, Homer was free to create characters like Hector and Achilles, whether they existed or not because his concern was to communicate his ideals of courage, loyalty, patriotism, etc. He could shape his characters to make his point.

Researchers, on the other hand, must first draw the characters, then figure out the "point": the person's motivations, the relationship with the brand, the likely behavior.

150px-TailoringFirstFitFront01[1]So perhaps we should think of the evolution of research more like being a tailor. We have a set of measures -- waist, chest, sleeve length, inseam -- and we must now make a suit that fits the person. If we deviate too far from the measures, the suit won't fit. But if we stick to the measures and carefully stitch them together, the end result is something far more compelling than the numbers alone would suggest!

Posted by Jim Nail on December 1, 2008 at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Cymfony's Super Bowl Analysis is a Double Award Winner!

AMEC_Awards_logo-[Converted]  Pardon me while I toot our horn and go blatantly hard sell for one post!

I'm pleased to announce that the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications recognized our Super Bowl Advertising Audience Impact Report with 2 awards!

First, we took the Gold in the category "Best Use of Measurement for a Single Event". The award judges cited our combination of traditional and social media as a "benchmark for the future" and praised it as "an intellectual piece of work" that "had real value for advertisers".

In fact, they liked it so much the judges also awarded it Grand Prix -- Innovation Award. In explaining why we were selected for this award too, the judges said it was a "ground-breaking analysis" and we earned "Top marks for the idea and the execution"

Thanks, AMEC! We are honored!

PS. If you are with a brand that is advertising on the Super Bowl, or an agency for one of those brands, we are offering this service again this year! Come to the Super Bowl page of the Cymfony site to learn more.

Posted by Jim Nail on November 25, 2008 at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Super Bowl Ads -- It's Not About the Game!!!

A WSJ article today says that many long-time advertisers are wondering if, in this tough economy, they should invest $3 million for :30 seconds on the game. The key is not the game: they key to ROI is the PR activity before the game.

Come to my ARF webinar tomorrow -- "Effective PR and Word of Mouth Strategies to Maximize a Brand's Investment in Super Bowl Advertising" -- to learn more but here are the topline findings from two years of analysis Cymfony has done on Super Bowl advertising:

  • PR adds significant audience. The prospect of reaching 90 million people on February 1, 2009 makes media planners drool. But PR can add brand reach prior to the game: Doritos drove 40 million impressions prior to the 2007 Super Bowl.
  • To get WOM, drive PR. Spurring word of mouth discussion after the game is a key goal -- that's why brands and agencies go to great pains to come up with breakthrough creative. But the brands that are successful in post-game are consistently the brands that get the most pre-game coverage in traditional media.
  • Social media discussion is a good proxy for likeability. For the 2008 Super Bowl, we collaborated with our colleagues at TNS who conducted a classic ad likeability research survey and compared their results to the "favorability" of social media posts. The same10 advertisers were on the top of both lists. While the social media audience displays some unique characteristics, their opinions accurately reflect the broader population.

So GM, Fedex, Monster, Pedigree, and others who are on the fence: tune in to my webinar before you make your final decision!

Posted by Jim Nail on November 11, 2008 at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Learning from the Obama Campaign

Since Tuesday I've seen lots of stories and posts about what marketers and PR people can learn from president-elect Obama's use of social media. My main takeaway: wait. There's more to learn in the coming year as President Obama mobilizes his social media skills to use the power of "We, the People" to trump the lobbyists and legislators who will try to advance their own agenda over his.

There's no doubt that the Obama campaign masterfully used social media to mobilize new voters. There's no question in my mind that this race will mark a watershed in campaign media stratgy not seen since the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy campaign ushered in the era of political television strategy.

But the real story is just beginning. A savvy social media user like Obama won't disband it, in the way he disbands his campaign staff. In the coming year, President Obama will mobilize this network to help him drive change and repel the usual Beltway obstacles that are undoubtedly already plotting to drive the agenda their way.

This will be an even greater testament to the strength of American democracy than electing an African-American to the presidency, which is rightly hailed as a great moment in America. If he can leverage social media to offset the forces of money and special interests that drive so much of our national agenda, an historic election will be followed by an even more epochal change: a return to "We, the People" promoting the general welfare and not narrow interests.

Marketers and PR people take note: this will also signal the end of the campaign-oriented mentality of our current approach. It will usher in an era of understanding that a brand relationship doesn't begin and end with a purchase or a coupon redemption, any more than a presidence begins and ends on election day. It is a living, breathing bond that can now be nurtured in a way impossible before the advent of social media. Strong brand bonds will trump even the best advertising and promotions of brands without this relationship.

Can the marketing and PR professions make this change?

Yes, we can!!

Posted by Jim Nail on November 6, 2008 at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack