Using social media to gain insights

It was very exciting to learn about generative research as a tool to gain insights about what consumers want and how to better serve them. The tools we have discussed in class were interesting mechanisms to get a glimpse into the world of your target customer. I enjoyed reading and experimenting with those techniques because they sparked conversations that were deeper than any survey; they moved beyond the distance that is generated when an interviewer is asking questions and the subject is responding. Generative research gives us tools to move passed what is socially acceptable to answer and into what the consumers really do with the products they take home, their real needs and struggles, and secret desires.
The web offers marketers with something similar to generative research: a platform for people to communicate with one another, sharing opinions, views, and even very personal information, all the while maintaining a certain level of anonymity. Okay, maybe social networking sites are not that anonymous, but reviews, blogs, and tweets can be. It is the fact that you have an easy platform to express yourself without being criticized to your face that makes publishing things on the web so attractive! The whole idea of having to ask yourself what other people will think is gone on the web (again, with the exception of SNSs, where your name is there for all to see, even potential employers).
One of the groups that I have noticed taking a lot of advantage of the anonymity to share information is the Alpha Mom group, discussed in groundswell. This group is the one I have been researching for my group project for this class, which led me to read some blogs that were posted by mothers interested in sharing information about parenting.
What amazed me the most was the amount of personal and sensitive information these women were willing to disclose on a blog or a discussion forum! Check out this forum discussion about a woman's sex life post-baby.
It was the kind of detail I would only share with my closest friend, behind closed doors, but alpha moms were talking about it in on their blogs and forums, protected by their aliases. This abundance of unsolicited and uncensored information is a mine for a marketer! It is great, because the groups already segment themselves; alpha moms writing to other alpha moms, tech savvy people sharing their knowledge with other tech savvy people.
It is a matter of sifting through the mountain of data to find interesting ideas. I am not sure if the munchkin diaper pail was developed by gathering insights like this, but I can definitely see it as being the case. http://www.munchkin.com/products/detail.html?pID=1335
Imagine a mommy sick and tired of the smell of the dirty diapers, and of having to make several constant trips to take the diapers outside. She has tried other things, like febreeze, but she is worried that the chemicals will be bad for the baby. As a typical Alpha mom, she goes to a forum and inquires about a way to get rid of the smell. Other mommies are having the same issue and one says she has been putting baking soda in the trash can and it seems to help. Munchkin has been monitoring that forum and comes up with the diaper pail “powered” by Arm and Hammer.
Not only marketers can gather information from existing forums, they can create a forum and encourage the groundswell to congregate there to share their views, thus gathering interesting input for new developments. The input that comes out the forums and blogs can help on other fronts. Knowing what the customers’ needs really are, their concerns, and where they are likely to shop and discuss their products, it is easier to position a new product and to cater a message to that segment. Also, advertising online can be much more dynamic than in print or on TV. The ads can be changed as the trends online are changing too.
Of course, it sounds easy and simple. But it does require that the marketing department be constantly on the look for the new blogs, trends, tweets, forums, or any comments that may provide insight or jeopardize the brand.

Using data for "evil"

Last Fall I had the opportunity to listen to Walmart’s treasurer talk to a group of GWIB (Graduate Women in Business) members. Most of us were curious about Walmart’s ability to deal with the financial crisis that had struck the country the year before. Of course, low debt levels and high cash flows generated daily in stores all over the country where the main reason Walmart didn’t have many issues during the crisis. However, the treasurer mentioned that the executives at Walmart understood their social responsibility towards the public and that they saw their customers as counting on them during the tough times.
The use of data played an important role in the story told by the treasurer, because Walmart was actually doing analysis on their data and have found out that stores in areas severely hit by the falling real estate prices and unemployment were experiencing increase in sales. Other trends, he pointed out, were the redemption of coupons and acquisition of smaller packages. While the redemption of coupons is an obvious event during a recession, the acquisition of smaller packages seemed strange. Usually consumers prefer to buy larger packages of goods, to get a better price and save also by making fewer trips to the grocery store. In the past couple of years, there has been an increase in the number of people living paycheck to paycheck and not being able to afford a large pack of diapers before the next paycheck.
All this information does serve Walmart well to build their competitive advantage. Knowing that their consumers are struggling enables Walmart to create promotions that will bring the customer in the store. They recently released a campaign advertising even lower prices on particular items in particular days. Negotiations with suppliers to reduce the package sizes are another application of Walmart’s plethora of data.
Other businesses have access to data that could be used for “evil”. Google, for example, keeps a log of all searches performed in their search engine by each IP address. This kind of data can be subpoenaed by the court system and used to convict criminals. Google could be using the data to define new product offerings to the public, to improve the algorithms on their search engine, and to sell advertising space on their website, increasing Google’s profitability.
Most companies in fact use data they accumulate from their customers to perfect their offerings and encourage buys. For example, amazon.com recommends books and other products based on past purchases and purchases from people with similar profiles.
So far, Walmart has showed customers they can be trusted with the data they have. Walmart seems to be using the data to tailor the offers and promotions to the customers, benefiting both the customer and Walmart. While the data could be used to select or turndown customers, it doesn’t seem Walmart has been doing that.
I think Walmart is not doing more with the data because it goes against their proposition of keeping costs and prices low. Once Walmart starts digging through the data and increasing segmentation and differentiation between its customers to create different experiences for each of the segments, costs will go up, reducing Walmart’s traditional competitive advantage. In my opinion, there is no harm in using the data acquired to profit directly from making better offerings to the customer. The problem with the use of the data comes when companies use the data to discriminate against customers or employees, as described on the article.
For the suppliers, having access to the data is helpful on several levels. One advantage to the suppliers is to be able to better forecast future sales, so the companies can optimize inventory, distribution, and negotiations with their own suppliers. Another advantage to the suppliers is the ability to find out more information about their customer and cater promotions to them, such as end-caps, combinations with other products, and figuring out the best time to run price promotions.
On the other hand, the suppliers have no access to competitor data, making it difficult to calculate market share and identifying what other marketing strategies the competition is using, without using additional data from companies such as Nielsen.
Carefully managing data from customers to get increase profitability is not a problem, it is part of business. People may take issue with the amount of data Walmart has overall. Thinks may change if Walmart decides to use its data as a discrimination tool.

How to enhance the customer experience for men shopping for cosmetics

I was talking to a friend of mine about his skin care regimen, I guess after we had seen the abundance of commercials spots Dove has been buying on TV for their new line of skin care for men. He told me: “Oh, I am a Kiehl’s man”. As a Sephora customer myself, I knew very well where my friend could get his Kiehl’s fix, but I decided to ask him anyway where he bought his creams and lotions. The answer surprised me – he buys them online.
My surprise to his answer was due to my own preferences when shopping for cosmetics. For me, the experience of going into a store and trying new products, after having read about them in a magazine really plays an important role on my decision making. Other times, I like going to the department store cosmetic counters and have one of the saleswomen play around with an array of different products and tell me the best way to apply this or that or the other.
It is clear that the pursuit for younger and healthier looking skin is no longer the domain of women and is going mainstream for men, as evidenced by the new launches by Dove and expansion of Axe. However, the shopping experience for the men seems to be undefined and unexplored.
A quick trip to Walgreen’s with the “Kiehl’s man” had me baffled at the huge display of Axe body wash at an end cap. Looking around the store for men skin care products showed me there is a lot of room for improvement: the products were all in the lower shelves, close to the shaving items. Another funny thing: the Axe display was an arch at the entrance of an aisle, standing at about 6’; my friend is 6’5” and had to skip that aisle altogether, to avoid having to lower his head to go by.
I could think that my very tall moisturized friend is an exception, but I don’t think so. An ex-boyfriend once complained about the dark circles under his eyes. I told him to try some of my eye cream, which he did. He is now a faithful customer of Neutrogena’s eye cream, which is targeted for women. I don’t see either of them entering Sephora to play around with different creams.
Although this is all anecdotal, Dove’s expansion to the men’s market is evidence of a change that needs to take place. Also, on the article “Masculinity in a spray can” by Jan Hoffman, published in January 29th 2010 in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/fashion/31smell.html?pagewanted=1&hpw), younger boys are also starting to become avid consumers of beauty products. Here is a link to Dove's skin care for men website:http://dove.us/mencare/Products.aspx
For my paper, I would like to investigate the following points:
How have men historically viewed cosmetics – Here I want to explore how men have used grooming products throughout history the recent history (19th, 20th and 21st Centuries) and the metro- sexual fad that happened earlier this decade.
From some of the papers I have started to investigate, men skin care business has been discussed as a high growth potential market, but it never really took off. My guess is that the industry still sees that portion of the market as an after-thought and hasn’t honed in to what experiences will drive men to the cosmetics counter and what the needs of that target consumer really are. The article “Making Himself Attractive: the growing consumption of grooming products” (Sturrock and Pioch, 1998) discusses why men have increased the consumption of grooming products and points to a trend that will keep growing. The growth has not been as large as that of grooming products for women.
The new segments of men’s skin care consumers – For this section, I would like to create personas that will identify the consumers of men’s grooming products. I am curious about who they are, how they currently shop for grooming products, what are their needs. For women, there is an abundance of fashion magazines that advertise skin care products and the latest and greatest innovations in the market, as a way to encourage the consumer to try new brands (and increase top of mind awareness). Are these male personas reading Men’s Health Magazine and GQ and looking for articles on skin care?
The shopping experience for women’s skin care – I think a brief analysis of what women’s experience when shopping for cosmetics and some research on which aspects of the shopping experience for women’s skin care can be applied to men and which need to change, in relationship to the identified segments.
I would also like to do some of my own “research”, by investigating local stores that offer products for men and see how the product is displayed, what kind of promotions are run, and interview some sales people regarding selling products to men.
Ultimately, I would like to come up with a set of recommendations for each of the different personas, as to what can stores to do to enhance the experience for their male customer.
References:
Sturrock, F and Pioch, E - Making Himself Attractive: the growing consumption of grooming products – Marketing Intelligence and Planning – 1998 – Vol. 16 – Issue 5

Dealing with an internal customer

My job as an engineer often resembled the famous comic strip Dilbert. That resemblance was due mostly because of the communication – or lack thereof - between management and the engineering department. Please indulge me for a moment in exploring how I tried to apply the concepts discussed in Kenna’s Dilemma (by Malcolm Gladwell), Turn Customer Input into Innovation (by Anthony Ulwick), and Metaphorically Speaking (by Gerald Zaltman) on one of my projects at my previous employer. I wish I had read these articles before.

For a while I had the job nobody wants in the engineering department: project manager. In fact, most other engineering departments in that company didn’t have one, because first level managers didn’t want to deal with a person who didn’t understand the ins and outs of the engineering tasks at hand. However, schedules had to built, progress had to be tracked, and budgets organized, with carefully crafted reports that were sent weekly to second and third level managers for appraisal.

So let’s assume that I was dealing with a real market situation and the following character were involved:

· Engineers are the experts described by Gladwell – they know what has to be done in a project in great detail, they are actually doing the work, and they need a tool to show them where they are in the project

· Second and third level managers are the end consumer – since they are actually using the reports and paying for it

· “Market research” - a third party translating the needs of the end consumer to my company. In this case trying to use tried and true techniques to find out what the end consumer wants)

· The company who needs to provide a service is my first level manager and me, the people generating the schedules, metrics, and reports.

As a company with a service to provide and easy access to experts but not the end consumer, I held a series of interviews with those experts trying to identify what they thought was important in managing a project. This was the first instance where Turning Customer Input into Innovation would have come in handy. My mistake was that I started the interviews with a lot of biases and asked very guided questions regarding what our project schedule should look like, how granular the tasks should be, and how progress should be tracked. I didn’t follow the steps of breaking out the project management task into pieces, organized the solutions into outcomes, or tried to rank the outcomes in order of importance. I also didn’t use metaphors or imagery to try and get the best information out of my experts. I assumed that as one of the engineers in the project that was unnecessary.

Still, a schedule was built that captured all the important tasks to the experts, with dates and durations that they liked and a way for them to monitor when a task was lagging behind, so that corrective actions could be taken. The experts seemed happy with the outcome. I was also happy with the outcome, since as a service provider, I made sure that the metrics and the schedule were easy for me to update. It was a good set of product and services. I was proud of my accomplishment.

But then news came out of “market research” that our end customer wanted something else. According to market research, our customer really wanted a schedule that had more constraints: each task should not exceed 90 days. Also, the tracking mechanism for progress should be a direct translation between the percentage of task completed and the hours spent on that task. To the experts, that was a travesty, because it assumed no room for any error on their part in assessing the lengths of tasks or for additional work that could have come up on those tasks. Plus, there had to be a report showing the discrepancies between the hours planned for each week and the hours worked on each task, if they did not match.

There were countless meetings, in which I argued with the customer (I guess that should never be done in real life) about how the system I had developed with the experts was good. I felt like Dilbert trying to present an idea to his pointy haired boss, knowing very well it was falling on deaf ears. After reading about metaphors, I would have used more images and analogies to present and sell my point to the customer, as opposed to using it as a way to finding out what the customer wants.

As if it weren’t enough, the end customer kept changing its “wants” every 2 or 3 months. Market research would indicate there was a need or a want for a new report or a new plan for the same project to accommodate new dates.

As a good service provider, I adapted. I change the schedule to be as flexible as possible to meet what I thought were the end customer and the experts needs. I tried to make it my business to anticipate the end customer in new reports, so that I wouldn’t be caught off guard. I also kept close contact with the experts, to identify changes in the project itself early on, so that the reports would flow smoothly.

When I was leaving my job to start graduate school, nobody in my team wanted to take that task from me. I think that after reading these articles, I have a much better understanding of what needed to be done. I would have conducted the interviews with the experts in a different manner. I would have communicated more with market research before developing a product based only on the experts’ opinion. I know I would have come up with a better product for everyone.

My Persona

The closest vignette to my life style would be “Educated Working Women”. However there is more to that than meets the eye. I have various interests and a very unusual background.

I was raised in Brazil by a family of academics. Going to college was never a matter of if, but where. I ended up attending the same university where both my parents and my grandmother teach in Brazil, attaining a degree in Mechanical Engineering. After graduating, I went to work in the aerospace industry for almost 9 years. For the last 5 of those 9 years I have been rehearsing a career switch.

The rehearsal started with a degree in Fashion Design, while still working in aerospace. Then it was followed by an MBA with emphasis in Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, where I am currently.

The mix of engineering, fashion, and marketing manifests itself in the way I make choices every day. I admire good design and craftsmanship, because I know how much hard work goes into making certain items. I also admire creative and innovative designs done by people who think outside the box and ahead of their time, but I also have a high regard for classic and iconic pieces that stand the test of time in terms of style.

In my spare time (which I don’t have much of nowadays), I like to create and sew my own clothes. I draw inspiration from fabric stores, cityscapes, and architecture. In the past, I have also dabbled in some woodworking, designing and building my own shelving units and desks. However, I am not very good about completing some of the projects I start, and I wonder if there is a service out there that would help me finish unfinished garments.

Everyone in my family is very tech savvy, which is a great advantage when they live several thousand miles away (they are still in Brazil). We communicate over email, google chat, facebook, and blogs. I even talk to my grandmother over skype.

Additionally, I am always looking for products and services that will make my life easier. For example, websites or software that will help me keep my work out habits in check, gadgets to organize my grocery list, or suggestions on how to keep my closet in order.

I also like to travel and move to different places that I think will provide me with intellectual excitement, thus far I have lived in Brazil, Germany, Seattle, and now Austin.

Getting Started!

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