There has been much debate on the future of “print”. As technology progresses and information is made available quicker and quicker, print will indeed have to change or die. But also, we need to look at how we define “print”.

To us, print can be defined as any presentation of words or content that the user can take the time to personally engage with. So, therefore, print can be almost anywhere. It’s how it’s executed and presented that make the difference as to whether it will be successful in communicating a message. Or being compelling enough that people will take the time to read, or experience it’s content. Much like any endeavor, it’s the consumer experience that make a difference.

There is some amazing technology being developed that will indeed change how we view, and interact with, print. The goal is still the same, to create a user experience that is both rewarding and fulfilling for the consumer and financially feasible for the producer. Magazine and newspaper publishers have been dealing with this for years. Hell, anyone who produces any type of content that they want consumers to notice have been dealing with this for years. The methods of delivery are changing and we’d better be ready to change with it.

The goals are still the same.

1. Take content, information or some type of message and make it compelling enough that people want to interact with it, or “consume” it if you will.
2. Provide such a unique message or experience that when they “consume” it that it provides a value to them to the extent that they are willing to either take some type of action based on this message, or be willing to pay some amount to be able to continue to have that experience.
3. Be able to “own” this particular space, content or experience for the furtherance of your “brand”.

If these goals sound like the goals of almost any good communications or advertising plan, you are correct. It will be the way that we use these new tools that will make or break the success of these efforts.

The next two often overlooked parts of this equation are design and interface. You may have all the right elements and content, but if they are not presented in the right way to create the best user or consumer experience, there’s a good chance that it may fail.

This is not to say that that things need to be “hyper-designy” or overly pretty. A great example of this concept is the SONY Walkman and Apple’s iPod. The iPod was able to take over the world because it made all of its bells, whistles and music available to the average consumer in a seemingly simple way. It wasn’t over designed with graphics or features, nor was it lacking. The SONY Walkman is actually a brilliant piece of technology. It was designed to do all of the things that the iPod was plus even more things that consumers said they “wanted”. So why is the Walkman not even really mentioned in the music device “wars” anymore?

The Walkman was designed by brilliant engineers and functions as a brilliant engineer thinks and interacts. Your average consumer is not a brilliant engineer (myself included) and just wants to simply access our music, or other digital files or games and be able to use them in a very simple way. iPod was able to create a delivery of a product(s) in a very simple, approachable way. Its design is beautiful in it’s simplicity and the user experience and interface is beautifully simple.

In essence, a lot of what people now use their iPods and iPhones (and any other “smart” device) to access can, by the definition above, be defined as “print”. Read it again and see if you agree. Don’t try to define it in literal, tangible terms, but what it’s trying to accomplish.

So let’s re-examine “print”, how we use it, and how it becomes a valuable asset in the future. We still need great writers, designers, photographers, illustrators and content. Now, with the technology we have coming available we will be able to even further tailor the user experience with the interface design and creating a unique experience with our content. It can be beautiful, inspiring, relevant and valuable just as people in yesteryears defined “traditional print”.

This is a great example of how the “print” experience is evolving and some of the opportunities and possibilities that will be emerging any day now, and it’s beautiful.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mag+ (video prototype footage only) from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This post was written by Tim Scott, founder and creative director of THEM!. THEM! is a creative company founded to find new ways to help companies create marketing efforts that get results and create opportunities, through any technology or media possible. Contact THEM! at www.THEMdidit.com or call 541 306 6723 for more information.

Tap into Your Super-Consumers
8:39 AM Wednesday November 25, 2009 
by Eddie Yoon

In any product category, roughly 10% of the consumers account for more than 50% of the profits. These super-consumers, as we call them, are the hot dog buyers who eat five pounds of hot dogs a month, wolfing down as many as 4 per sitting. They are the stapler users who own 8 different staplers. They know what they want, they’ll buy a lot of it, and they’ll pay a premium for it. They’re passionate and engaged — sometimes even a little obsessive — and they exist in every category, from soft drinks and air travel to fast-food and oral care products. Many managers assume that their super-consumers are a unique species whose extreme appetites say little about what more casual consumers might go for. They also figure that their super-consumers are already sated, so there’s no point in probing them further. That’s a mistake.

We’ve found that companies that listen to their super-consumers and use their insights to refine their message ultimately grow sales and margins across all segments. These companies aren’t trying to convert light users into heavy users. Rather, they’re figuring out what it is the super-consumers like so much and then offering it to them. Invariably, acting on the insights from those consumers who spend disproportionate time and energy in the category uncovers insights and innovations that encourage trade-up behaviors across other segments as well.

Consider this: A stapler company we consulted for found itself heading for a price war with competitors. What to do? Market research with its community of stapler groupies — users who stapled ten times as much as the average person — found that they valued anti-jamming above all other features, and would happily pay a premium for high-performance, jam-free staplers. Running with this insight, the company redesigned its point of sale to emphasize electric staplers and refocused its marketing message across all products on benefits (like reliability) rather than features (like color). The strategy boosted sales by 20% and improved margins overall. Not only did electric stapler sales increase (fueled by super-consumers), but the merchandizing strategy emphasizing the benefits of trading up increased sales of heavy-duty manual staplers across other segments.

Or consider how a refrigerated-meat manufacturer used super-consumer feedback to develop a fuller understanding of its true core customers — teenage boys and their moms. Their heaviest users, they found, were not summertime backyard grillers, as they’d thought, but households with teenage boys who eat hot dogs for after school snacks. The boys liked the taste of the all-beef products, and how filling and easy to cook they were. The moms liked their quality (certainly compared to the junk teenage boys normally eat). Armed with this insight, the manufacturer focused its portfolio strategy on all-beef products, emphasized taste at point of sale, and shifted its marketing to extreme sports and gaming environments to build awareness among teen boys — who’d push their moms to buy the brand.

While these decisions were grounded in the insights of the super-consumers, the strategy ultimately paid off across all segments. The brand grew over 40% in three years, increased its share of household penetration and successfully usurped the number one position in the category. While super-consumers accounted for more than 40% of that growth, those weekend backyard grillers drove a nearly equal percentage, with the remaining 20% realized through category expansion. Delivering the optimal product to super-consumers was certainly the primary goal, but in the process the brand succeeded in commanding a price premium and encouraging trade-up behavior across other segments as well.

Has your company tapped the wisdom of its super-consumers? Are you willing to listen to them — and respond? 



Eddie Yoon is a Principal with The Cambridge Group. During his more than ten year tenure with the firm he has helped global clients across industries leverage super-consumer insights to fuel profitable growth.

This post is originally from HarvardBusiness.org and can be found here.

Watch this and then think again:

9:00 AM Friday November 13, 2009
ANDREW MCAFEE

You’ve probably heard by now that “your brand is no longer yours.” The assertion’s based on simple math. In the era of blogs, discussion boards, Facebook, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 tools, virtually everyone can get online and talk about your company and its offerings. As a result, the amount of information your marketing and PR departments can generate is only a small percentage of the total volume of content on the Internet about your firm.

What’s more, if some of the external voices become as popular, or perish the thought, more popular than your official voice, then they’re going to show up high in organic (as opposed to paid) search results. For example, I just typed “Hummer” into Google. The second result is the Wikipedia entry about the vehicle, and the fourth one is a site full of user-submitted photos that are not likely to please the brand’s owner.

Every large organization I’m aware of is highly sensitive about its brand, and few are happy about losing or even sharing control over it. They react to the reality of Web 2.0 era in many ways, but most of them amount to some form of trying to exert or reestablish control. Some move their mass media campaigns online to counteract the outside conversation. Some try to influence the influential external voices. Many companies monitor the new online conversations, and also participate in them by setting up official Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and so on. More than a few try “sock puppeting” or having someone on the payroll pose as an outsider with nothing but good things to say. This rarely works; Web users are reasonably good at sniffing out inauthentic voices and ignoring or blowing the whistle on them.

A few large, brand-sensitive organizations have taken another approach; they’ve accepted their lack of brand control and have actively encouraged insiders to join the online conversation without making any attempt to censor or even guide them. They’ve said, essentially, “You know us really well. Talk about us on the Web. We want the world to hear what you have to say.”

Does that sound risky to you? Can you envision dozens of ways in which that approach can go horribly wrong? Me, too. And yet, I keep reading stories like the recent one in the New York Times about MIT’s student bloggers, and they make me appreciate the brilliance of this approach.

Five years ago Ben Jones, then the director of communications in MIT’s admissions office, added a single student blog to the office’s web page; there are now eleven of them. Student bloggers are selected after submitting writing samples, and are paid $10 per hour.

I was an undergrad at MIT (just a few years before the blog era) and I assure you that most students there would treat the administration’s suggestions about appropriate self-expression about the same way Roger Federer might treat the local club pro’s tips on improving his forehand. The admissions office understands this, and wisely doesn’t try to edit posts or comments.

And not all content reflects glowingly on the institution. One blogger complained about problems with the resident advising system, while another wrote that she’s felt several times that she didn’t fit in at MIT. She also went on to say, as the Times story reports, that “MIT is the closest you can get to living on the Internet…IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.”

MIT could spend lots of money on their brand and image and never come up with a better advertising tag line than “The closest you can get to living on the Internet.” Indeed, part of what makes it so effective is not just its clarity and cleverness, but the fact that it’s being shouted across the Internet by a current student who is clearly speaking in her own voice. It’s just tremendous marketing; the admissions office couldn’t ask for, or pay for better.

Putting student blogs front and center is a mark of MIT’s confidence: confidence in itself as a healthy organization where the pros outweigh the cons, confidence in the members of its community who represent it to the world, and confidence that the people who come to its website will know how to interpret the information they find there. According to the Times article, potential applicants to the university are “less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.” Does that sound at all like your customers?

Is your organization as confident as MIT? Are you ready and willing to let more internal voices communicate and shape your brand over time? If not, why not? Is it that you don’t trust your people, or your customers? Is it that you don’t want any negativity at all to appear on your digital properties? Or is it that you’re afraid there might be too much negativity?

I don’t think these are unfair questions, or trivial ones. Their answers will reveal not only how your organization sees itself, but also about how it’s responding to a world of reduced control over brands, conversations, and messages. Leading organizations are embracing this trend and, like MIT, they’re giving up tight control even when and where they don’t have to.

Lagging organizations are holding on to the illusion that tight control is still possible.

———————————————————

The original post is from the Harvard Business Review and can be found here. It was written by Andrew McAfee. Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. He also maintains a Facebook profile and Twitter account.

McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT. McAfee is the author of Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (2009, Harvard Business Press).

This is a great article from 2005 that holds true today. Let’s refocus our efforts and thinking to a way that truly benefits everyone.

THE MARKETING COMPANY COMMUNICATIONS DISCONNECT
And Why Ad Agencies Are Viewed as Laborers Rather Than Architects
June 06, 2005
By A. Louis Rubin

Marketing communications companies are not being given a seat at their client’s strategic table. It’s the sad truth that no one in the communications business wants to acknowledge or admit.

It’s not that brilliant communications ideas don’t have a profound strategic impact on a business, because they do, but that clients view their communications companies as purveyors of execution with a bias toward the “what” of “what’s for sale” in the back room of their various “factories.”

The problem is widespread. A recent informal survey of corporate communications officers found them all in agreement that their CEOs did not value their marketing communications firms as a complete strategic partner to their business.

Boards of large public companies
More telling is how few communications professionals sit on corporate boards of large public companies. An examination of the Fortune 20 finds only GE with two working practitioners on their board (Ann Fudge of Young & Rubicam and Shelley Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather). J.P. Donlon, editor in chief of Directorship, a monthly publication on corporate governance, notes that the “reason why there are few communications professionals on boards per se is that only a handful understand that communications is an amplification of business strategy — not something separate or apart from it. Certainly CEOs need to understand this as well.”

The bottom line is that few communications professionals are invited into the inner sanctorum of marketers’ strategy and planning sessions on the executive committee level.
How did this happen?

Somewhere along the way, ad agencies and other communications companies started thinking less about the strategy and more about selling execution. Worse yet, they started to fill their staffs with people who were craftsmen and not strategists. The result: They began to be viewed as laborers, not architects.

It wasn’t always so
It wasn’t always so. At Scali, McCabe Sloves, Ed McCabe invented some memorable advertisements that were also great strategic synopses (for Volvo: “Safety”; for Nikon: “We Take the World’s Greatest Pictures”; for Purdue: “It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken”). Looking back on those executions today you can see they are pretty simple demonstrations of the strategy. No talking animals, no hordes of barbarians storming the shopping mall, no bikini teams. The executions were not a pantheon of special effects. They had a strategic underpinning that reflected the clients’ overall business goals. They were strategic organizing principles upon which to base all brand communications.

The work that Young & Rubicam did for RadioShack in the early ’90s is another good example of how good strategy affects a business and cements the relationship between client and agency. RadioShack’s “You’ve Got Questions. We’ve Got Answers” campaign was created to recognize that service at the retail level is what was for sale. It gave customers a reason to seek out RadioShack — not just a piece or a part. It told employees what their jobs were about. It was a big strategic idea and Len Roberts, then CEO of RadioShack, invited his agency team in on every key business decision because they offered strategic insight into the client’s most urgent business needs.

What these examples have at their core are big strategic ideas, because the only thing that binds people in an asexual entity called a corporation is an idea that people understand and live by. Says Donlon, “No executive or employee is going to throw himself or herself on a grenade for shareholder value. But an employee at Merck or Pfizer might stick his or her neck out to get a cure for cancer. The job of the communication strategist is to ensure the idea is big enough and powerful enough to convince people that the [business] goal is worth the effort and treasure. It’s also the CEO’s job to reinforce this every day.”

Puerile jokes and titillation
But these examples tend to be the exception, not the rule. Nowadays, execution trumps strategy, special effects reign and puerile jokes and titillation are the platforms from which products are sold. And very few communications efforts represent the strategic underpinning for how a brand can utilize all the tools of an integrated marketing communications program — from Web and public relations to advertising and trade shows, collateral sales material and internal communications.

It’s great strategy, not execution, that can inform every constituent, from customer and salesman, from factory worker and portfolio manager to Wall Street analyst on how to view the brand and the company. The right strategic platform helps employees understand why they work for the company and provides a badge of pride that gets translated directly to the bottom line through productivity and purpose. It tells the investment community why this is a good company to invest in. And finally, it gives customers a deep, fundamental, thoughtful, considered and enduring reason to do business.

How to Develop Good Strategy

1      First acknowledge that strategy is what you are selling. Not an ad. Not a logo. Not a list of public relations tactics. These are only executions and that makes them commodities to be evaluated subjectively, or worse yet, based on price of execution.

2      Tell the truth. Suppress your excitement at having a revenue-potential client at the table and focus on the truth about product reality, competitive strengths and weaknesses and organizational problems and issues. CEOs have trouble determining truth from myth because everyone around them has an agenda to sell. To stand out, tell the truth.

3      Throw out your factory — the daily special on the menu — to offer what the customer wants, not what you have in inventory. You must solve the client’s business problem, not go in with your CFO’s cost structure of how you have to utilize the specialized resources on your payroll.

4      Focus on the client’s customer. Avoid the product attribute discussion that your client wants you to execute. Building a great strategy begins with an understanding of customer needs. And too often execution panders to internal audiences versus a strategic insight about the end-user.

5      Hire people who think strategically. Now this may sound just plain dumb, but how many of you have recruiting policies in place where you go and visit Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, etc. in the spring to find the smartest, most imaginative minds in the world? How can you expect your organization to grow with the best talent if you don’t have a program in place to find them?

If you want your client marketers to respect your thinking, start thinking from a strategic vantage point in an unbiased way. Start telling the truth. Divorce yourself from execution. Find the best fresh minds in the world to help. And maybe then you’ll get invited into that walnut burled conference room.

Another good article on marketing strategy vs. tactics here.

Thursday October 29, 2009
by Ron Ashkenas

Have you noticed that more and more companies are marketing “simplicity” as a reason to buy their products or services? For example, Philips Electronics advertises “Sense and simplicity” while Bank of America promotes “Clear, easy-to-understand products.” Simplicity also is the subtle message that Schwab conveys when it says “Talk to Chuck” and that Fidelity suggests when it says just “Stay on the line.”

The reality is that simplicity is highly appealing in a world that is getting more and more complex — where consumers have too many choices, where technology is constantly evolving, and where the political and economic environment is unpredictable. In the midst of all this instability and change, people want to get back to basics. They want uncomplicated products, straightforward guidance, and things that work quickly and simply the first time, without lots of extra effort.

What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it is in sharp contrast with the thinking of the past few years — which was that consumers wanted unlimited choice so that they could customize their products and services to fit their own unique needs and lifestyles. As such, technology companies pushed for more and more bells and whistles, while other firms drove towards mass customization. The result was a huge array of choices that became almost overwhelming and costly.

For example, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller discovered that it was giving consumers so many choices for customizing its popular Aeron chair that it had to be prepared to produce over four million variations on the basic model — even though only a few thousand configurations were actually being ordered. Similarly, Cisco Systems learned from its top corporate customers that all the new features in its networking products were actually causing instability in the corporate networks because they couldn’t be integrated easily with existing hardware and software.

It’s easy to create slogans and marketing materials about simplicity. The challenge is to truly make things easier for the customer so that simplicity becomes a competitive advantage.

To do that, companies need to listen to their customers and truly engage them in dialogue about their needs — and their perceptions of products and services offered. For example, Cisco works with a number of customer advisory groups that meet regularly with senior executives and product developers; Fidelity executives either answer their 800-number consumer phone lines or listen to tapes of the calls; ConAgra Foods product managers make field visits to consumers’ homes and to grocery stores.

In addition to listening to customers, companies also need to design their products and services from the customer perspective. When Intuit developed its small business accounting software package, the product developers realized that most small business owners were not familiar with accounting jargon, and in fact were intimidated by it. So instead of using the term “accounts receivable”, they called it “money in.” Similarly, “accounts payable” became “money out.” As a result of developing a product from the customer perspective, Intuit sold 100,000 copies of the software the first year.

Not every company needs to create its own version of the iPod, an icon of simplicity. But there is no reason why every company can’t listen to their own customers and design products and services in ways that better satisfy their customers’ desires for greater simplicity and ease of use. If you don’t, your competitors probably will.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the forthcoming book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done

This article is from the Harvard Business Blog. Original article can be found here.

By Anthony Tjan via harvardbusiness.org.

I recently sat down with my BlackBerry voice recorder and Mats Lederhausen to ask him to share his philosophy of “purpose bigger than product.” Mats is a great entrepreneur and also had one of the most successful careers at McDonald’s where he was a driving force for its turnaround. He currently runs his private investment vehicle Be-Cause and is a Special Partner at our firm, Cue Ball.

What is your philosophy of “purpose bigger than product” all about?

At its core, it is about being real and idea-driven. Trust is perhaps the most important currency in business, and big ideas may be the only true source of competitive advantage. Lack of trust is a form of tax. And that tax rate has increased in the past number of years. Customers simply don’t trust institutions as much today. Particularly large businesses. The main reason is that we now live in an “information everywhere” and more transparent world. Every customer has a camera in their cell phone, a Facebook in their pocket and Twitter at their fingertips. This means we hear and see evidence of businesses not walking their talk. Their products don’t match their promise. In order to regain this trust you must simply make sure that all your products, your merchandising, your advertising, your people and the totality of your touch points with consumers sing from the same hymn. And that hymn is what I call purpose. Some people call it vision. Others call it focus. It is the same thing. It is source of your promise. It answers the question: Why are you here?

Talk a little more on the notion of “big ideas.”

I often talk about “altitude creates attitude”. When you meet people that have a big idea it is almost impossible to be unaffected. It is like a perfume. You can smell it miles away. I firmly believe that the source of human energy and creativity can be found in the distance between where we are and where we’d like to be. It is that creative dissonance that is the entrepreneurial rocket fuel. If human beings could have walked everywhere on the planet I don’t believe we would have invented trains, planes and automobiles. So, if you really want to build great companies you need big ideas.

Certainly, not all big ideas may be viable in all incarnations. What about the reality of these ideas?

Of course they have to be believable. They can’t be pipedreams. Or as John Naisbitt once said: You can’t get so far ahead of the parade that no one knows you’re in it.

From an execution perspective, you have to think big, start small, and scale fast. You can’t think big and start big, that’s almost impossible. You need miniature versions of your grand idea so you can validate its parts, and then iterate and tweak constantly. There’s nothing wrong with having a really big idea and launching only aspects of that idea. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Take Chipotle, for example. Steve Ells had a very big idea about food, but he didn’t start by executing 100% of his vision; he gradually did what he could towards that theme.

It is also important to remember that your purpose is not what you “tell” customers, but what you do. The best way to disappoint everyone is to over-promise and under-deliver. Therefore you must be humble AND committed at the same time. In fact, customers are more forgiving when you make mistakes if those mistakes are honest efforts in trying to improve towards a known and worthwhile direction.

How can a purpose be instrumental in leading an organization?

I look at purpose as the guiding star. The compass. The soul. Steve Jobs once said “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation”. And everything we do is design in one form or the other. And if you have a fuzzy idea of your own soul, your design will suffer. On the other hand, like Steve Jobs does, if you have a sharp idea of your soul and what footprints you want to leave, all your design will complement and reinforce that soul of yours.

How did you come to have this philosophy?

There are a few parts of the answer. First, to be honest, it’s hard to know the answers to the bigger questions in life, like why we believe what we believe. To a certain extent it’s the result of the sum of all of our experiences since birth. Second, I’ve been influenced by seeing what really works. I think strong conviction and a sense of purpose enables focus, and the biggest culprit of bad performance in a company is lack of focus. It’s hard to set direction if you don’t know who you are. Thirdly, I’ve decided that I only want to work with companies that are trying to do something important. It’s about human progress and adding value to society.

What do mean when you say “important?”

While we have significant global issues to be concerned about, an important business doesn’t have to be grandiose or socially driven in order to be important. General contribution to the well-being of another human being is worthwhile. It could be a restaurant that’s creating jobs and leaving customers just a tad bit happier than when they arrived. Or a concept such as MiniLuxe, our Cue Ball investment that is trying to “Starbuck” the nail salon, which has innovated a lot around hygiene and customer experience. It is an example of a business with a clear purpose that is trying to do something remarkably better than the industry norm.

What companies really celebrate this philosophy?

Nike is a company that understands it. They have always had this idea that it’s more than a sneaker. They are about getting into the game, being more than a spectator in life, and embracing activity. In their words, “Just do it.” If you go to their headquarters in Oregon, it’s like being in a gym: it breathes “active lifestyle.” That’s what they’re about and they have consistently executed around it.

Southwest Airlines is about giving people the freedom to fly. They are about seeking and loving freedom, and they enjoy being a bit nutty about celebrating that notion. And there are many others as well. Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Google, Patagonia, IKEA, and a host of others. There is one thing that is interesting to me to note about all these companies. They are very different in so many ways. But they are also very similar in one way. They all have their founders alive and kicking. When the source of the original idea is still around it is harder to lose why you came to this world in the first place.

The state of the “ADVERTISING” business.

Preview:

The Breakup:

The plot thickens:

Thought for the day:
Build relationships. Not impressions.

ANTHONY TJAN

Customer research tends to be demographically-biased in its design. But it is time for us to go a little psycho on customers — psychographic, that is.

When it comes to purchasing behavior, it is obvious that personalities matter. So why is it that we so often look at detailed website usage or customer data along impersonal demographic dimensions like age and gender? While useful, those characteristics don’t describe attitudinal trends which may be more important — and need to be a critical complement to other data.

Psychographics are the data points that describe a user’s values, opinions and lifestyle. Think of psychographics as the kind of data a psychologist or anthropologist would use to profile someone, as opposed to the demographic data that a census surveyor wants to collect.

Or consider what information you might want to collect for a blind date. Demographics may be useful to narrow the pool down to, say 30-year old males in Chicago, but would that be enough? To choose your partner, you likely want to consider personality, interests, and values. Similarly, for customers to fall in love with your product or brand, you need to understand their personality and passions and see how those connect with your product or service.

While there’s no standard psychographic profile, we can borrow some ideas from psychology. A psychographic profile should tell us about how a person interacts with the world (are they extroverted or introverted? analytical or emotional?) and what they value most (security? family? the environment?). You can combine more “classical” survey methods with questions that are personality or association-based. For example, ask the question: If you (or this product, or this service) were a car, what kind of car would it be? A Mini, a Mercedes, a Range Rover, or a Prius? Each of these cars connotes a different personality and you can use such responses to infer desired personality traits.

In the pre-digital world, gleaning sufficient information to constitute a psychographic profile would often require prohibitively expensive customer anthropology. Imagine researchers observing and following customers as they interact with a product. Now, however, as consumers spend increasingly more time online, a level of digital anthropology is more feasible because consumer data can be better aggregated and analyzed — cheaply.

Cameras within stores can also share tremendous insight. Video anthropologist and consumer researcher Paco Underhill has filmed thousands of hours in retail settings. One discovery: customers buy less when their arms are full of products; shopping baskets in the middle of the store can help increase sales. In an intense retail customer research assignment I once did, we discovered that new mothers were significant purchasers of both diapers and digital cameras — placing these two seemingly disparate product categories closer together helped drive cross-selling.

So, how can you use psychographic data? Suppose you wanted to market a new brand of organic, flaxseed-infused cereal. While there is no clear demographic group for that product, there may be a well-defined pyschographic one. You could target anyone who identified Whole Foods and Eastern Mountain Sports as favorite brands, expressed a concern about health and fitness, and is environmentally conscious. You can also use psychographics to inform how you market to a particular group. You could market to “analytical and research-oriented” folks by talking about the cereal’s unique formula, while you could reference case studies and endorsements when marketing to people who value expert opinion.

The task for next-generation online audience measurement and sentiment tools, then, is to start understanding traffic along psychographic axes. There are a few ways to do this.

First, members of an audience measurement firm’s user panels could complete a psychographic questionnaire: What are their three favorite brands? What kind of car would they like to be? On a Friday night, would they rather stay in and watch a movie or go out on the town?

The second way is to understand what your users are doing before and after they interact with your company and profile the content and audience of those sites. In my HBR piece on customer strategy, we discuss a technique we used at Thomson Reuters called the three-minute rule; we observed what users were doing three minutes before and three minutes after each interaction with the product.

Lastly, so-called “single sign on” services will make associating user behavior on different sites much easier. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! all participate in the OpenID project, and Facebook has a competing platform called Connect, which allows a user to log into many sites with one set of credentials. A central database could contain everything from blog comments and self-descriptions on social networking sites to purchasing data and search history.

Pyschographics offer us an ability to understand current and potential customers in terms of the beliefs and values that drive their purchasing behavior. In our more voyeuristic and measurable digital world, psychographics will increasingly drive customer understanding.

Original article can be found here.