The End of Consumer Surveys? – Commentary on Ad Age Article

Large companies are beginning to strongly consider the limits of the consumer survey, and their efforts are nicely laid out in a a recent Ad Age article, which reports on a new series of summits held by the Advertising Research Foundation, which will include companies like Proctor and Gamble, Unilever, ESPN and others.

“I don’t know if we are going to have a choice but to move away from survey research,” said Donna Goldfarb, VP-consumer and market insights for Unilever Americas, who will headline a Sept. 22 workshop ARF is hosting in New York. “We continue to torture consumers with boring and antiquated search methods.”

What these companies are proposing instead is the use of what i will call for the purpose of this article “consumer observation” techniques, through which, according to Artie Bulgrin, senior VP-research and sales for ESPN,

“We can actually improve our [initiative's] success rate if we just listen a bit more … on a passive basis.”

Which means that they will be using services which will sniff out conversations around their brand and listen in as a means of gaining insights.  For an example of this methodology, visit this link to see all of the things that have been said on the microblogging service Twitter about Proctor and Gamble.  (you can also search for your own company there as well)

I would like to suggest a metaphor for the different approaches companies are talking about with respect to their consumer relations.  (note: i am not in any way suggesting that companies ought to treat consumers as monkeys.  heck, i’m one of those monkeys!  ..and heck, i’m looking forward to the day when terms like “consumer” and “user” are replaced by more human terms.)

Consumer Surveys: Domesticating Consumers
One way to learn about animals is to put them in a zoo, where you can watch them interact with each other and with the environment.  The problem, however, is that we do get to see them in a real environment, eating their actual food, living their actual lives.  If we were to extrapolate all that we know about animals from the zoo, we would have a very limited knowledge indeed.  ..And animals don’t generally seem suited to this type of treatment, in my opinion.  Consumer surveys and similar methods are similarly limited in the knowledge that they can provide about a real-world consumer.

Observing Consumers: Understanding them from a Distance
At the opposite end of the spectrum from domestication, some naturalists prefer to study animals in their natural habitat from a great, objective distance, watching their behaviors through a zoom lens so as to not interfere.  The new approach discussed in the Ad Age article reflects this mindset – and will yield a lot more genuine consumer insights by understanding what we all think and say when the corporate folks aren’t around. While certainly a step ahead of “consumer domestication” in my opinion, there is a third way that needs ongoing consideration:

Interacting with Consumers: Learning from Each Other
I would like to suggest a third metaphorical approach to gaining consumer insights which was not mentioned in the article.  It is similar to the approach that famous primatologist Jane Goodall took in understanding primates.  In her work, Jane actually went and lived among primates, interacting with them.  Though her methods have sometimes been criticized for their lack of objectivity, the type of intimate knowledge she gained was far different from methods that sought either to domesticate or to observe from a distance.  The use of social media in business has a great deal of promise in this sort of research.  Companies can now not only observe consumers from a distance, but even interact substantively with them in conversations that will allow each to learn from the other.

This third metaphor represents a pretty fundamental philosophical shift for companies.  I will write more on my academicky blog in the next few days for those of you interested in a slightly deeper look at this.

Bridging the Industrial Age Gap

Let’s face it. For people involved in a brick-and-mortar business (both customers and employees), the concept of participatory social media is at first a little weird. There appear to be two reasons for this:

1. It’s new. Any brick-and-mortar business’s community has grown accustomed to interacting in-person. The idea of conversing online with people from a physical business is new and at first a little weird.
2. It goes against 200 years of history. For all of our talk about “transparency” and “social justice,” most of us are still grandchildren of the industrial revolution, which told businesses that customers are pawns to be manipulated and told customers that businesses cannot be trusted.

And yet social media is clearly an important part of many marketing strategies – even for brick-and-mortar businesses. So to get social media going within a customer community, it is clear that a business must make over-the-top efforts to undo that history. Starbucks is an example of one company that seems to have successfully bridged the gap between their brick-and-mortar business and online social media push with the launch of MyStarbucksIdea.com – which currently has over 55,000 customer-submitted ideas for product, service and company improvements.

Reaching Out With Abandon
In March, Starbucks kicked off the campaign to reach out to customers. I wrote about the initial media reaction earlier in the year, but thought it might be interesting to see some of the methods they used to bridge the gap between their in-store customers and a social media site. The important thing to note, in my opinion, is that Starbucks went full steam ahead to overcome 200 years of divided history in order to convince their customers that they were really interested in their feedback by placing banners, suggestion cards, and even signs on the trash barrels – one of which was photographed by a friend of mine. I’ve included the photo here (click on it to see the writing):

Additionally, they let their employees know that they ought to promote the effort by letting customers know. Now to be clear, at the outset a lot of industry pundits were cynical about the effort, as i presume were customers who were stuck in the industrial revolution mindset. “Is Starbucks really looking for my idea – or is this just some sort of an advertising ploy?” But still the company persevered with their campaign despite the detractors.

Reporting Back the Results
Starbucks then began to answer the questions of detractors pretty directly by reporting back the ideas that had been implemented both online and in-store. A photo example of this was captured by http://flickr.com/photos/rbieber/2585014474/ , reporting in-store that a community-generated idea for a loyalty card had been implemented. Since then, there have been hints that a number of popular ideas are being considered or are coming soon on the site as well.

Any business looking to bridge this tough gap can learn a little from the Starbucks approach, i think.

The Speed of Social Media Marketing

For those of us who are more accustomed to traditional media marketing and advertising like radio, print, television, internet, it is not always easy to quickly make sense of Web 2.0 and social media marketing using tools like blogs, social networks, Twitter or Bigtreetop. One very big difference is the cycle of impact that a typical social media effort will follow. Traditional marketing often follows something like the blue curve in the chart below, where a big media and public relations push generates a great deal of quick impact as customers learn about the company or the product, and make their decisions to or not to buy. The impact, though, starts to fade relatively quickly after the initial push.

A social media effort, on the other hand, usually starts off relatively slowly as a business begins to share its thoughts, ideas and goals with the customer community, inviting customers to join in the discussion. Over time, however, the impact of a social media effort begins to increase more quickly as the members of the community begin to participate more in the conversation and in inviting their friends to be a part of it as well. Eventually, if the organization puts in its time early, the community becomes practically self-sustaining as more and more people continue to contribute.

(note: this chart is not based on actual numbers – just used to illustrate the difference)

If you are at the beginning of your use of social media, therefore – just starting your blog, or a Twitter account or your BigTreetop Treetop, it’s important to remember that:

1. you should expect to put in some early work yourself, but that you will see powerful, long-lasting results later if you stay focused
2. you may want some sort of a mix of traditional and social media marketing to both raise initial community awareness – but then to sustain that awareness effectively over time
3. the later parts of the cycle can bring very large ROI (return on investment) as the community begins to do the marketing for you via word-of-mouth

6 Weeks to Communities of Steel

It occurred to me recently that, for any organization that is just starting to use social media like BigTreetop.com (or any social media, for that matter) to connect with their community, the process is very much like a person starting an exercise program. Here’s why:

• Neither yields immediate results
• With a little discipline and the right equipment, a good program can take minutes per day
• As they start to work, both tend to be far more effective and healthy than other short-term alternatives

For some idea of how comically close this analogy is, check out the SoloFlex website’s guide to “Getting Started Lifting Weights.” Here are a few quotes from the guide, with some of the words replaced below in italics to make the quotes fit the use of social media:

• Weightlifting Using social media is like anything else: it takes a little knowledge and time to do it properly and see real results. However, you will probably be surprised how quickly you your organization and its community start to feel and look better connect and create a better future as a result of properly lifting weights using social media.
• In your first couple weeks lifting weights using social media, your objective is learning and creating community, not muscular development big business gains.
• When you start your workout program social media efforts, only do 5-6 repetitions with a light weightreps post an idea or experience every few days. Doing more posting can bring on fatigue and the possibility of social media soreness or injury.
• If you desire greater strength and/or muscle mass gains in your community, you will have to gradually reduce the number of repetitions top-down control while increasing the resistance empowerment of your customers and employees and number of sets frequency with which you implement their ideas.
  
• Never sacrifice form honesty, manners or respect for weight increases blatant marketeering.

In the near future, we will be posting some more specific “social media exercises” that you can do to work toward your own “Communities of Steel.” For now, though, the best thing you and your organization can do is to get familiar with the equipment, see how other people are using it, and begin the regular discipline of reading experiences and ideas, voting on them, and posting some of your own! Some of the organizations on BigTreetop.com are already “exercising” on a regular basis and starting to show results.

If You Ask, Customers Will Answer

I’ve been chatting with a lot of small business owners lately about the possibilities of consumer involvement, and just how much people are willing to do for/with a business. Once we launch BigTreetop.com, we’ll have a better answer to this question for small businesses. Obviously the BigTreetop team is confident that with the right mindset and a good set of tools, the answer is going to be very, very positive. We are especially confident that if we all do it right, local businesses can get even more consumer involvement than big chains because of the close proximity of the customer to the actual decisionmakers in the business.

In the interim, here are a few examples of how much people will contribute to big businesses which have little or no real local loyalty:

Kroger “Design a Green Bag” Contest (http://www.designagreenbag.com/)

Details: Started in Spring of 2008. Allows people to submit a design online for a new green grocery bag and vote on other people’s designs. The top-rated idea in the end will be used, and the person who designed it will receive $500

Participation: 32,288 entries as of May 14th, 2008, with the top-voted bag receiving 110,196 votes.

Comments: This site, a one-off design, is probably costing Kroger at least $20-30,000 dollars to implement – not including the advertising to attract people to the contest. They obviously realize the power of customer involvement. The $500 reward may have been a motivator for the first 1000 people who may have felt that they had a chance to win, but for the next 30-something-thousand, the motivation had to be the enjoyment of participation in something public – something bigger than their normal everyday lives.

My Starbucks Idea (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/home/home.jsp)

Details: Started in April 2008. Allows people to submit ideas for Starbucks and vote and comment on other people’s ideas

Participation: 37,400 ideas as of May 14th, 2008 with the top-voted idea receiving 94,120 votes.

Comments: An interesting phenomenon has occurred more often than not, where one customer posted a very anti-Starbucks comment and other customers jumped in to defend the company.

Starbucks Takes Experience Seriously

Starbucks is one of the organizations most credited with starting “The Experience Economy,” where consumers care more about how they feel than how much they pay. After its stock recently fell by 40-something percent, Starbucks decided it was time to

“..close all of our U.S. company-operated stores to teach, educate and share our love of coffee, and the art of espresso. And in doing so, we will begin to elevate the Starbucks Experience for our customers.“

Just to be clear, in order to do this, Starbucks closed all of their U.S. stores today for three hours. Customers pay $3-5 for it in each daily cup of coffee. Starbucks today took a loss of millions for it. Experience is serious business.

http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=833