What we can learn from “The Ice King”

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You’ve probably heard the expression “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Now, trash might not be the best analogy for ice but the expression holds true when we think about the ice trade of the 19th century.

This is Frederic Tudor. If you’ve never heard of him before, it’s okay. Neither had I until I recently read Steven Johnson’s brilliant book “How We Got To Now” where he presents 6 discoveries humans made that propelled our species forward to where we are today. And believe it or not, ice was one of them. I am not going to talk about why ice was a game-changing discovery and how it affected human civilization in this article but instead I want to share some interesting facts from Tudor’s venture as the largest ice trader of his time.

 

What is the big deal with ice?

In the 19th century, ice was a luxury good that was mainly consumed by the rich. Unless you were living in a cold climate where water froze in winter to create natural ice, it was not attainable for the average person.

Frederic Tudor was born to a wealthy family in Boston. As a young man he spent a lot of time in the American Northeast, as well as Cuba. Having experienced extreme cold and extreme heat, he thought that people in warm climates like Cuba would benefit greatly from the wonders of ice, which was abundant in Northeastern United States. It’s also important to note that in the 19th century, ice was the closest thing to refrigeration; it was not only used to cool drinks but also as an air conditioner. (It was not uncommon for hospitals to hang large blocks of ice off the ceiling to cool the rooms).

Tudor’s idea was simple (at least in theory): cut blocks of ice from the frozen lakes and rivers in New England and ship them to warmer climates where people had no access to ice.
There were a few major challenges with this idea, the most important of which was keeping the ice intact without melting during shipment. Over the course of a decade Tudor tried different ideas and lost his entire family fortune in the process, going to debtors prison twice. But he never gave up. He believed that he had a great idea and despite all the hurdles he wanted to see it through.

From prisoner to “The Ice King”

His breakthrough came when he finally discovered the perfect way to insulate the ice while traveling on ships for weeks on end: sawdust. He found out that the sawdust was a much more efficient way to keep the ice intact than hay, which is what he had been using until that point. From that moment onward, his business took off and he died a millionaire in 1864.
Now here’s the brilliance of this entire ice business: Tudor took a product (ice) that cost nothing except the labor to cut frozen chunks out of the lake, he then shipped it for a bargain on boats that were travelling practically empty on their way south, using an insulator that cost him nothing because sawdust was the byproduct of forestry industry in New England and was practically everywhere.

Free ice, free sawdust, empty vessels.

An average New Englander’s “trash” became the “treasure” that Tudor “The Ice King” delivered to far away places.

Tudor’s ice trade was also one of the first examples of a “zero-waste” business model, without even consciously trying to be a sustainable operation. His product was naturally occurring in one part of the world, covered by a recycled byproduct from another industry, transported on vehicles that would otherwise make the trip empty and waste fuel, as well as space.
Lastly, Tudor’s ice trade was a major paradigm shift in business principles. Up until that point, businesses were always attracted to “high energy” locations. Warm climates had fertile soil that could be worked all year round and yielded good produce whereas places like the American midwest were cold with barren lands that could not be used half the time. Never before Tudor had anyone considered that these cold places could offer anything to the rest of the world, let alone frozen water.

Looking at the ice trade of the 19th century in hindsight may not impress us too much, since most of us were born into a world that had refrigerators. (I don’t remember not having a refrigerator ever). But when we think about these events in their own context it becomes a whole different story. People like Tudor are the visionaries of their centuries. They could see what others did not at the time and were probably considered crazy. But that’s just the thing about visionaries, their ideas are so far ahead of their time that sometimes it takes decades for the rest of us to catch up.

Social Distrust (Or The Tragedy of the Commons)

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Lately, with all that is going on in the world, I keep remembering a passage about the tragedy of the commons from Dan Ariely’s amazing book ‘Predictably Irrational’. I think that the timing is perfect to post it here so that others can read and draw parallels of their own…

“Trust, like money, is a crucial lubricant for the economy. When people trust other people, a merchant, or a company, they are more likely to buy, lend, and extend credit. In the old days, business was conducted on a gentleman’s handshake. But when the handshake results in a swindle, trust disappears and all subsequent transactions—whether between cheaters or the genuinely good-hearted—become more difficult.

A good analogy for social distrust can be found in the “tragedy of the commons.” This phrase can be traced back to Oxford professor William Forster Lloyd, who described the phenomenon in his 1833 book on population. He noted that in medieval England, parishes had common land on which each member of the community could graze a limited number of cattle and sheep.* Keeping the number of animals low allowed the grass to grow back at a speed that kept its level more or less the same. This approach was rather successful when all the farmers stuck to the rule. Unfortunately, in their selfish desire to improve their own financial situations, some of the farmers increased the number of their animals to a level that the land could not sustain. This strategy was very good (at least in the short run) for the individual farmers who had more animals, but each additional cow or sheep resulted in less grass for all of the animals. As the grass dwindled, all the livestock on the commons became malnourished and underproductive—a result that hurt everyone, including the greedy farmers.

Today, psychologists, economists and environmentalists use the phrase “the tragedy of the commons” to describe the same basic principle: when we use a common resource at a rate that is slower than the rate at which it replenishes, all is well. However, if a few individuals get greedy and use more than their share, the system of consumption becomes unsustainable, and in the long term, everybody loses. In essence, the tragedy of the commons is about two competing human interests. On one hand, an individual should care about the sustainability of shared resources in the long term because everyone, including the individual, benefits from it. At the same time, in the short term, the individual benefits immediately from taking more than his or her fair share. (Social scientists refer to such betrayers of social contracts as “defectors.”)

Of course, if we all cared about the common good or thought about the long-term consequences of our actions, we might not run into resource-sharing problems. But because human beings tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently. Take the wild salmon population, for example. While it is ideal for fishermen in general to limit their own catches so that the salmon population can be sustained, it’s more profitable for an individual fisherman to overfish in a given year. But if too many fishermen even slightly surpass the sustainable limit, the overall fish population becomes depleted. (For this reason, salmon fishermen are now constrained by law to a limited number every year).

The current energy crisis is another example of the tragedy of the commons. Although there is a finite amount of fossil fuel in the world, some countries, industries, businesses, and individuals use far more than others while making little effort to minimize their impact on the common pool. Even public resources such as clean air, land, trees, and water fall victim to this problem. In the absence of cooperation among all the players in protecting such resources, a small number of misbehaving entities can have a devastating effect on everyone.”

The Importance of Whitespace for Web Design

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Design is one of the most critical aspects of any marketing and branding strategy. The impact of good design on conversion can be vital for any business but often times it gets overlooked at the expense of jamming as much information as possible into the available physical space. This could be space on a web site, a business card, a brochure or any other marketing material that you can think of.

What is Whitespace?

Whitespace, also referred to as “negative space”, is an aesthetic tactic utilised in design. In its simplest definition, whitespace refers to the strategic visual sections of a page/illustration that are left unmarked and thus uncluttered by any other aesthetic detail. Think about the margins we leave at the edges of a Word document, or the space we leave around an image on a web page. These are all examples of whitespace.

Why is Whitespace Important?

Simply put, whitespace is important because it is extremely difficult for our brains to process too much information all at once. Just think about those old phone books with tiny text squished together in order to fit as much information as possible into one small box. It is overwhelming to even look at a page from a phone book, let alone processing that information.

On the flip side of this spectrum is the overuse of whitespace, which can also be problematic. Too much whitespace will fail to guide the users towards additional content that is present off-screen, creating an ‘illusion of completenes’. It is especially important to keep this in mind for mobile design, as big chunks of whitespace on desktop can translate to even bigger spaces on mobile devices.

Less is More

The idea is finding the right balance to convey the necessary information in the most digestible way possible. Case studies suggest that appropriate use of whitespace in web design increases conversion rates by almost 20%! By giving your audience some breathing room in between your content blocks, you are in fact allowing them to process the information that was just thrown at them. It may seem odd, maybe even counterintuitive to think that less content in a given space produces better results in sales but when you think about the barrage of information that we face everyday in the digital age, less is really more.

When it comes to visual aesthetics, it boils down to each individual’s personal preferences. With that in mind, here are some websites that I think showcase great examples of efficient use of whitespace:

  1. Shopify
  2. Ernie Ball Music Man
  3. Wufoo
  4. Airbnb
  5. Uber
  6. Lyft
  7. Boegli Gravures
  8. 56 Digital
  9. Sonikpass
  10. Rolex

Emotion Recognition Technology in Marketing

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If you think responsive design was a game changer, think again. Recognizing the screen size of a device and adapting to that resolution is a pretty awesome feature that has pretty much been an industry standard now. What if your website could recognize the emotional reactions of a user and be responsive to that as well?

In a previous post I talked about the power of senses and how they help forge emotional associations with a brand or a product. Now imagine if you could identify these emotions and adapt your messaging accordingly. Live, real time, on the spot!

No, this is not from a science fiction movie. It is quite real and it is happening. It will probably be a few years until it is a reality but there has been a mountain of investment behind emotion recognition technology lately.

Power of Emotions in Marketing

The most successful and widely acclaimed marketing campaigns are always the ones that manage to make an emotional connection with their audience. Think Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign or Kleenex’s ‘Unlikely Best Friends’ campaign. They all have elements that appeal to different emotions and create really powerful, long lasting connections with the brand.

If you are thinking ‘the purpose of marketing (or being in business for that matter) is not to create emotional connections but to increase revenues’, there is a Nielsen study that was conducted in 2015, which revealed that ads with the highest emotional response resulted in over 20% increase in sales.

The greatest thing about emotional marketing is the longevity of its results. Emotions are extremely powerful. In fact, they are the main drivers of most human behaviour including purchasing decisions. So you can imagine how long lasting the results would be for a business that manages to create positive emotional associations with its customers.

Given the power of emotions, it is not a big surprise that emotion recognition technology is a hot topic in marketing these days. According to Markets and Markets, emotion detection and recognition market is estimated to be worth $22 billion USD by the year 2020.

Of course we cannot talk about cutting edge technology without mentioning Apple. The company has been very interested in emotion detection technology and even acquired an emotion recognition company earlier in 2016.

How Does Emotion Detection Work?

The idea is to catalogue hundreds of thousands of facial images and expressions on a daily basis to create a library, based on which a computer can recognize the changes on somebody’s face and understand their mood instantly.

And that will not be the extent of that either. Thinking about the rise of wearable technology in the last couple of years, collecting emotional data becomes even easier and more real-time. Your mobile devices and computers can only collect data when you are actively using them. But wearables are always connected to us. They are constantly measuring signs like heartbeat and breathing patterns. As the technology for these devices advances and they become more capable of tracking signs such as temperature, blood pressure and other vital functions, emotion detection will be even easier and more precise.

What Does This All Mean For Marketing?

When implemented fully, emotion recognition will be nothing short of a revolution in the world of marketing. The trend in the last 5 years has been towards more and more personalized content whenever and wherever possible. Emotion recognition will only make this easier for marketers and allow them to calibrate marketing efforts mid-stream. Every individual will experience a brand differently based on his or her reactions.

The flip side to this phenomenon is the fact that users will never know if they are seeing “the real” content. When everything is being adjusted to one’s current emotional state in real time, the transparency between a brand and its prospects could diminish dramatically. As much as personalized content makes us consumers feel special, we do not want to feel that we are being sold. There is a fine line between a genuine interaction and a sales pitch that only tells the prospect what he/she wants to hear and brands that know how to walk this line will come out as winners in this new era.

Devil is In the Details

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I am not a professional copywriter by any means, but I do appreciate well-written content when I see it. Even as a reader it gives me quite a bit of satisfaction to read good copy, I can only imagine the gratification that the writer gets from a beautifully crafted message.

As a marketer, I have always been told about the importance of copywriting and how even the smallest of details in a message can change people’s perceptions. Intellectually, I know how critical it is but I still get surprised when I come across research data that shows the result of minor copy tweaks in metrics such as sales revenue.

Every penny helps

Dr. Robert Cialdini is a Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and the writer of New York Times Business Bestseller Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. He has done extensive research in consumer psychology and behavioural analysis. In one of research studies, he examined the donation process of the American Cancer Society and how a minute change in copy resulted in drastically different outcomes. The researchers used two different phrases for door-to-door donation requests to see if the variation will make a difference the amount of donation received.

Phrase 1: Would you be willing to help by giving a donation?
Phrase 2: Would you be willing to help by giving a donation? Every penny will help.

As you can see, we are looking at a very subtle difference between the two messages. The results, however, are not so subtle!

People who were asked the second phrase were almost twice as likely to donate than people who were given phrase 1! 28% vs 50% to be exact.

Just by reframing the concept of helping in a way that communicates the importance of even a penny, the message was able to make a connection with people who would otherwise think they would be expected to pay lots of money to actually contribute to the cause. And the interesting thing is amount of money they donated did not diminish. Knowing that “even a penny” helped still catalyzed them to give as much as respondents to the first phrase gave.

How Uber outsmarted Lyft by 1.25x

As you may or may not know, Uber and Lyft are both transportation network companies that offer peer-to-peer ridesharing services to customers. They are extremely popular alternatives to traditional taxis, especially among millennials who like to do everything via apps. Although Vancouver prides itself as being the tech hub of Canada, we are deprived of great technologies like these, but I promise you they are real and they are actually incredibly useful.

One of the things with both of these services is the surcharges that apply in busy times such as Friday after work. In high demand times like this, the riders are charged an additional fee that is applied towards a tip to the driver.

Let’s be honest, nobody likes to pay extra so there is no sugarcoating it. There are, however, different ways to say it so that it generates different responses in the customer’s mind.

How long would you be willing to walk to avoid paying a 25% premium?
This is the question that one asks himself when using Lyft at prime time.

How long would you be willing to walk to avoid paying 1.25x the normal fee?
This is the question that one asks himself when using Uber at prime time.

Same fee, same essential message, different delivery.

 lyft

Close to 45% of participants surveyed said that they would walk 5 minutes to avoid the surcharge when it was presented in a percentage format.

When it was presented in a numeric format (1.25x) 38% of participants said that they would walk 5 minutes to avoid the charge.

The difference between 45% and 38% may not seem that critical at first sight but remember the scale at which these services are being used everyday all day. To put that in context, Uber has more than 10 million users just in the US. So the difference between a 45% acquisition rate and 38% acquisition rate adds up to 700,000 users. Based on an average transaction value of $20, that could be $14,000,000 in lost revenue. And all because of a tiny difference in presentation!

How do I know what works?

I think the biggest question people have when looking at all these examples is “how do I know what is going to work and what is not?”. It’s a fair question because you don’t know what you don’t know… This is where techniques like A/B tasking come to the rescue. With today’s advanced marketing tools even small businesses with limited budgets are able experiment with testing different ideas in the market. If you can’t pay millions of dollars to market research firms, you can always conduct your own research out in the real world.

The only caveat is that you need to be able to track all the data from your experiments. At least the data that is going to be meaningful to what you are trying to find out. If you launch an email newsletter campaign with a few different versions that feature a different subject line, messaging, imagery etc, you need to be able to track which ones are generating more lead and/or revenue for you. At the end of the day, the goal is to shift from shooting in the dark towards a more conscious and aimed marketing strategy that will work for you.

Creativity Knows No Bounds… Or Does It?

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The conventional belief is that freedom fuels creativity. When you have artistic independence with no preconceptions or guidelines limiting your creativity, you are considered to have the optimal environment to come up with brilliant ideas.

However, if you are anything like me, you may find this concept a bit intimidating and overwhelming. I find that the idea of unlimited possibilities actually limits my ability to create anything because there is an infinite number of things I can do and in the end I feel overwhelmed with the number of options.

If you share this feeling, don’t feel bad because it turns out that we are not the only ones! Lately I have been reading a number of articles that talk about the correlation between constraints and creativity and how a healthy balance of restrictions can actually fuel the creative genius in people.

“Constraints can force people to be imaginative and think outside the box”

pi14802-hrWhen the German car manufacturer Audi was looking to improve its Le Man’s race car performance, the chief engineer presented his team with a constraint. He asked his team how they could win the race if their car couldn’t go faster than anyone else. In other words, he challenged his engineers to find a way to improve the car’s performance without increasing the vehicle’s top speed (the constraint). This self-imposed constraint forced the engineers to think outside of the box. Since they couldn’t increase the speed, they decided that making fewer pit stops during the race would put them ahead of the opponents if their car could go longer without having to refuel.

How could they make fewer pit stops? If they had a more fuel-efficient car.
How could they make the car more fuel-efficient? Use diesel technology.

As a result of this process, Audi came up with its R10 TDI race car that ended up winning Le Man’s for the next three years straight! All because of a limitation that pushed the engineers to find a different solution that they normally wouldn’t think about.

Let’s get more scientific

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence that glorifies one isolated example. But there is also academic research data that supports this theory. A study conducted by the University of Amsterdam set out to research people’s global processing ability based on a computer maze game.

Participants were divided in two groups; one group was given an easy maze with no obstacles and the second group was given a harder version of the same game with obstacles blocking one of the routes, which limited the player’s options.

After both groups finished the game, they were given a standard creativity test containing word puzzles. Three words appeared on the screen and the participants were asked to find the fourth word that connected them all.

The result, as you may have guessed already, is that the group that played the harder puzzle with constraints solved more puzzles than the other group (40% more to be precise). The researchers concluded that the constraints in the difficult version of the game forced the subjects in that group into a more creative mindset that later helped them perform better in the word puzzle game.

To conclude

If you are in a creative field or in any way required to come up with ideas and solutions to different challenges all the time, constraints are not always your enemy. A healthy balance of restrictions on projects can actually act as guidelines to streamline your creativity without being overwhelmed by the infinite other possibilities that can haunt you.

When working with a client, I find that I can deliver much better products if I am presented with certain conditions or challenges, as they help me focus my creative attention and be a lot more imaginative than I otherwise would be. If you are having a hard time getting started on a project because of infinite options, it may be worthwhile considering some self-imposed restrictions.

What we can learn from Starbucks’ label incident

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By now everyone heard about the label incident that happened recently at a Starbucks location in Florida. If you haven’t, here’s a quick rundown:

A barista served the popular grande white chocolate mocha drink to a customer with a label on it that read “DIABETES HERE I COME”. Needless to say that the customer was furious and felt extremely insulted by the unexpected comment. Moreover, what the barista didn’t know was that the customer had two sisters who struggled with type 1 diabetes, which added insult to injury.

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News travel fast these days and an incident like this could be a big blow to a brand’s public image. Thanks to social media every individual has the opportunity to be a publisher regardless of his/her background or resources. This is why a faux-pas that could have gone unnoticed in the early 1990s becomes highly publicized in this day and age.

Which begs the question “is this the case of one rogue employee, or an indication of a deeper conundrum in a business that relies on front-line employees to deliver its brand experience?”

As someone who works in marketing, I can empathize with an employee who is struggling to internalize a product or service he/she doesn’t believe in. In no way does this justify what the barista did but it could help uncover an underlying problem that Starbucks might have in its hiring strategy.

The obvious first reaction to an incident like this is “the employee should never have worked for Starbucks in the first place.” And that makes perfect sense. If you don’t think that people should be drinking sugary beverages, perhaps a barista job is not the right career choice for you. But what about the people behind the scenes who made the decision to hire this individual?

I have a theory.

It is not for everyone. It will probably defy some traditional schools of thought but I think the Starbucks example makes a strong case for it.

I am a firm believer of the importance of front-line employees. You know the ones; your barista, your McDonalds cashier, your receptionist who answers the phones and greets customers. In some aspects, I would even say that these employees are more important than your high-level executives and here’s the reason:

The front-line employees are the ones who deal with real customers on a daily basis. Not only do they represent the brand with their behaviour, but they are also seen as the face of a company by customers. If a problem occurs such as the one in the Florida Starbucks location, the frustrated customer does not think about the VP of Marketing or the CEO. To that customer, the barista who wrote that note is the representation, the extension of Starbucks. Interactions like the one between a barista and a customer happen hundreds of times every day, all day long. Those interactions are the main points of contact between the brand and the consumers.

When we receive great service in an establishment such as Starbucks, we tend to attribute this to the company rather than the individual who provided the service. We tend to believe that there is a great training program that empowers and encourages the employees so that they can provide outstanding service. For Canadian readers, WestJet is an excellent example of this. As a company, WestJet made the decision to eliminate middle management so that the front-line employees can be empowered to make more decisions at their discretion. This is an incredibly powerful way to develop leadership within entry-level positions. The unfortunate flip side of this is when an incident happens where an employee makes a bad decision, it can bring the brand down on a larger scale.

We put so much emphasis on choosing the right management team and paying them well that we often forget about the real people who are dealing with real customers on a day-to-day basis. I am not suggesting that we should start paying our front-line entry level employees VP salaries nor am I advocating for more strict disciplinary measures. The point I am trying to make is that the difference a front-line employee can make on brand perception is sometimes even stronger than what an executive level employee can. Which brings me to the two great lessons that I think we can learn from the Starbucks label incident:

  1. Strategic hiring is critical for companies. In fact it is so critical that it might make or break a brand. Perhaps a company like Starbucks has enough brand strength to survive these isolated incidents but if they keep making the same hiring decisions, these isolated cases may become regular and damage the brand.
  2. Job seekers have just as much responsibility as employers in making the right decisions for themselves. If you somehow end up working for an establishment that you fundamentally disagree with, you still have the responsibility to represent the brand in a manner that is acceptable to their standards.

In order for everyone to win, companies need to be able to successfully communicate and train their employees on their brand, and employees need to actually share these brand values. Starbucks is a brand that is renowned for its employee training program but there is only so much that training can achieve if the wrong people are hired.

 

Why do some ideas go viral and others don’t?

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As marketers, our job is to spread the news about our products or services to as many relevant people as possible using various channels. What marketer wouldn’t want his/her new campaign to go viral and be shared by millions of people? At the end of the day, in an overcrowded competitive landscape it is all about awareness and being top of mind so when consumers want a product, yours is the first one they think about.

But how do you design a campaign that will have a better chance of catching on? After all, 50% of the videos on YouTube have less than 500 views. If nobody passes the message along, then nobody will know about your product.

Can anything go viral?

Conventional wisdom suggests that some ideas are naturally contagious and some aren’t. And this makes intuitive sense if you think about an interesting product such as a cool new smartphone versus a boring old kitchen blender. But when you think about how the ‘Will it blend?’ video series from Blendtec went viral, it makes you question the convention.

Jonah Berger offers a framework to make ideas go viral in his book Contagious. After researching hundreds of campaigns that went viral on YouTube and other social media channels, he identified 6 qualities that are common to all of these ideas, which suggests that virality is not born, it is made.

1. Social Currency

Simply put, social currency refers to the fact that people share things that make them look good to others. If you discover an amazing new hole in the wall restaurant in the city, you want to share that information with your friends. Perhaps you will go online and write a review for it, or you will post on your Facebook to tell your connections to go try it. This gives the information sender social currency by being the person who shares “cool new things” with others.

Things to Consider:

  • Remarkability: Sharing extraordinary and novel stories makes people seem extraordinary. Normally you might not even consider looking at a blender ad, let alone sharing it with your friends. But the unexpected content makes it so remarkable that you do.
  • Game mechanics: Leveraging game mechanics has been an increasingly popular method, especially with gamification. When brands design successful loyalty programs that generate a lot of buzz, there is almost always a game aspect to it. You collect points and as you hit certain milestones, you receive rewards or reach a certain status that puts you in an exclusive tier. (Think airline loyalty programs, air miles etc).
  • Being an insider: When people feel like they are part of a special, exclusive group, they like to talk about it. Because having insider knowledge is social currency. This is generally achieved through scarcity and exclusivity.

2. Triggers

MarsTriggers are the stimuli in the surrounding environment that makes us think of a product or brand. They are environmental reminders for related concepts. When you are walking down the street and smell the coffee aroma wafting from the coffee shop it might remind you that you are running low on coffee at home. We are surrounded by stimuli that constantly trigger related thoughts and concepts. These triggers are important because when particular thoughts are top of mind, it leads to action.

A great example of this is how the candy bar company Mars experienced a completely unexpected increase in sales in 1997. The company was taken by surprise because it had not changed its marketing tactics, nor had it adopted a new pricing strategy. But 1997 was the year that NASA’s Pathfinder successfully reached Mars (the planet, not the candy bar) to collect samples. It was all over every news outlet, which acted as a trigger for many people.

Things to consider:

  • Frequency of the stimulus: It is important to choose a trigger that is frequent enough for people to establish a strong connection to your brand.
  • Strength of the link: If the trigger is tied to too many different things, the link will be weak. If you are using the colour red as a trigger, you might not get too far, as too many other concepts are already tied to that trigger such as Coca Cola, Ferrari and Marlboro to name a few.
  • Where it is happening: You want the triggers to happen near where the desired action takes place. Public service announcements on TV are good examples of this. In general they carry very powerful messages conveyed through remarkable stories but they fail to catch the target audience in the right touch point.

3. Emotions

We are emotional beings driven by our instincts and impulses. As much as we try to act rational in many situations, emotional connections are what make us tick. This is why focusing on feelings rather than the features of a product is much more powerful on a very fundamental level.

When it comes to sparking an emotional response, the most critical thing is to focus on what kind of emotion is evoked. Recent research suggests that high arousal emotions such as anger, awe and excitement trigger action whereas low arousal emotions like contentment and sadness stifle action.

High Arousal Low Arousal
Positive Awe
Excitement
Amusement		 Contentment
Negative Anger
Anxiety		 Sadness

Activating emotions is key to transmission. Anthony Cafaro, who helped create the ‘Parisian Love’ video understands it very well.

“Whether it’s a digital product, like Google, or a physical product, like sneakers, you should make something that will move people. People don’t want to feel like they’re being told something—they want to be entertained, they want to be moved.”

4. Public

To be a bit clearer, we are talking about making what is private public. The premise here is that if a behaviour is observable by others, it is more likely to be widespread. People imitate one another and tend to use others’ behaviour as a guide to make their own decisions. Ideas are much more likely to spread if others can see it out in public. An interesting social consequence of this effect is observable in different regions due to different climate patterns. In sunny places such as California and Miami, people are much more likely to be influenced by their neighbour’s car purchase than they are in colder climates where cars are kept in enclosed garage spaces. The reason? Because they can see it out in the driveway.

movemberA good example of this phenomenon is the Movember movement. Until a group of drunk Australian guys decided to grow moustaches to raise awareness for prostate cancer, men’s health was a private topic that nobody barely talked about. It is now a global campaign that has become more public than ever with hundreds of thousands of men growing their moustaches every November for this cause. Intentionally or not, the Australian group started a global initiative that went viral since it began, all thanks to making a private issue public.

5. Practical Value

Passing along practical and useful information such as helping others save time and/or money is a powerful incentive for people to share the message. The advantage of this is that the incentive is embedded into the message, which makes the information naturally shareable. Social currency is about the information sender; practical value is about the information receiver.

We talked about the new restaurant that you just found under Social Currency. When you spread the word for that restaurant, that give you social currency and makes you look good to others. Now imagine that the same restaurant has an amazing deal that offers a 2 for 1 dinner deal. Not only did you discover a hip new spot in town, but you also came upon an unmissable deal. When you share this information with others, you are earning yourself some Social Currency, and you are providing practical information to others that will help them save some money on a nice night out.

6. Stories

Humans don’t simply think in terms of information but in terms of narratives. Making sure that the information is embedded into a story will help the potential virality of an idea.

Before we had radio, television and the Internet, we only had our friends and family to tell us stories about what is going on around us. Stories are the vessels that carry important and valuable information.

In a world where user generated content is becoming one of the most important sources of information for making purchasing decisions, telling stories are more important than ever. When we are trying to make a decision on which product to buy, we turn to user reviews and see what others are telling us about that product. These peer reviews are almost always embedded in narratives that give us background information.

Here is a real online user review about a laptop:

“I bought this laptop a few days ago and it has been really good.  The size is perfect to bring to school and back. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it’s red, if it was silver it would have been better. I would definitely recommend this to anyone in high school because it is small enough to carry and does just about everything.”

Just from that one paragraph of information there is already a story that is forming about the user; his/her preferences as a consumer and lifestyle. If you are a high school student reading this review, you will most likely decide to go with this product.

Things to Consider:

  • Relevancy: Something might be remarkable but if it is not relevant to the product or brand you are advertising, nobody will remember your company’s name. They will remember the idea but not what you are trying to advertise.

Incorporating these components into the content

There are no guarantees as to what content goes viral and what does not. However, virality is not a random occurrence and this framework is a good guide for content producers to make sure that their ideas are as shareable as possible.

Social epidemics follow certain patterns and these six steps cover critical aspects of them. Some ideas may already have some of these steps embedded into them and some may be more difficult to incorporate them. But what we see from Jonah Berger’s research is that the most successful ideas that achieved viral status have all six components entrenched into them. In a landscape where content marketing is becoming increasingly important and competitive, this framework sets a clear and tangible goal for marketers when designing content.

Marketing to Senses

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In a previous post I talked about the power of sensory branding, which I believe, will be more and more relevant for marketers across the world. In a nutshell, sensory marketing is an all-encompassing approach that capitalizes on more than just the two senses (visual and auditory) that conventional marketing practices target. It aims to create an emotional bond between a consumer and a brand by stimulating multiple senses and reinforcing these associations over time.

The stimulations we are talking about here – be it visual, auditory, olfactory or other – can happen in one of two ways: branded or unbranded.

Imagine you are walking down the street going to work on a cold morning. As you are passing one of the stores, a nice freshly brewed coffee aroma is oozing out and tempting you to go inside to get a cup. In this example, the coffee smell on its own is a non-branded olfactory stimulus (unless your nose is so well trained that it can tell the difference between Starbucks and Tim Hortons). It becomes a branded stimulus when you see the coffee shop sign and associate the image with the smell.

As easy as it may sound in this example, a branded stimulus takes a long time and constant, persistent reinforcement to form. To establish the bond between a brand a sensory stimuli, two things are essential: uniqueness and habitualness. The stimulus has to be unique to the brand, rather than generic and replicable by others. It also needs to be reinforced by habits and repetition so that a strong association can be established. The good news is, once this association is formed, it is an extremely strong and long-lasting bond that can be utilized to its fullest.

The habitual nature of a stimulus is not just a marketing tactic, but also a scientific fact. Our brains are wired to form habits to facilitate our day-to-day activities. As Charles Duhigg explains it, “when a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit the pattern will unfold automatically”.

This impact of habits plays a huge role in establishing impulse buys in marketing. This is why every McDonald’s looks the same. The company deliberately standardizes the look and feel of its restaurants, as well as what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger the habit loop.

Back to sensory branding

A great example of how a sensory experience can change customer perspective was demonstrated in a study carried out by Dr. Alan Hirsch. Researchers placed two identical pairs of Nike shoes in two separate but identical rooms. The only difference between the two setups was that one room was infused with a pleasant floral scent while the other one was not. The participants were asked to examine the shoes in each room and then fill out a questionnaire. Amazingly, subjects preferred the shoes in the scented room by 84%! Moreover, when they were asked to appraise the value of each pair, they estimated the Nikes in the scented room costing on average $10 more than the ones in the non-scented room.

This experiment is a great illustration of how incorporating multisensory touch points into customers’ purchasing journey can improve the experience, as well as the perceived value of products.

Next Steps

Despite all the advantages that sensory marketing offers, there are still barriers to be overcome. I am talking about the physical limitations such as the inability to incorporate smell and taste into a TV commercial or a radio ad. Having said that, there are already companies offering sensory branding experiences in different touch points.

Cinescent is one such company that allows marketers to pump out fragrances into movie theaters when commercials for those brands are displayed on the screen. An interesting case study was conducted for Nivea wherein the scent of Nivea sunscreen was infused into the theater simultaneously with the commercial. Results were quite incredible based on the cinema exit polls. Moviegoers who were exposed to the scent displayed a 515% increase in brand recall compared to the group that saw the ad without the scent.

It is interesting to think about what the future holds for sensory marketing. As the technology advances, we will see more and more sensory experiences being incorporated into advertising in creative ways. It is the only way that brands can break through the clutter in the oversaturated world of visual ads.

“All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

Why User Generated Content is Critical for Brands

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User generated content (or UGC as it is called by acronym-loving marketers) has become one of the main trends in the industry. What UGC really means is that consumers are now in control of their own story. It is no longer a journey where companies are in the driver seat telling consumers where to go but rather a two-way communication in which the consumers decide where they want to go and how they want to get there.

In this new user-focused landscape, there are several different reasons why UGC is crucial for brands. The user-engagement methods may vary from industry to industry but the importance of UGC is the same for all of them.

It lets your brand develop its personality

personalityOne of the benefits of UGC is the fact that consumers can bring their own perspective of the product to the table. If a company has 100 customers it means that there are 100 different ways that people are experiencing the product. What better way to make things interesting than to let your customers share these experiences? This can really help a brand develop its own personality in the digital space.

It is measurable

measureAs great as it is to generate valuable content, what ultimately matters is the results. The return on investment on UGC is completely measurable through social media analytics tools and Google Analytics so that businesses can tell what is working and what is not. It is the ideal way to drive revenue and demonstrate value by measuring the engagement.

Millennials like it

millennialsWith e-commerce rapidly increasing in popularity among millennials, purchasing behaviour is naturally evolving with it. Millennials, otherwise known as Generation Y, are estimated to be the largest consumer group in the US history. According to market research reports by Ipsos and Crowdtap, a large percentage of millennials say that they use UGC to inform important purchasing decisions that they make.

UGC is more influential on purchase than any other media

As irrational as it may seem, nowadays customers are paying more attention to peer reviews than professional evaluations. In a landscape where 50% of the audience is using fellow consumers’ opinions to make decisions, it is impossible as a brand to ignore the significance of UGC.

It overcomes trust issues

trustThese days, consumers have inherent trust issues against corporations. Every time we see an ad that says “free …” we are immediately suspicious. Consumers know that there is no such thing as free when it is coming from a company that is looking for ways to increase its bottom line.

This phenomenon was tested in a very interesting experiment by Ayelet Gneezy, Stephen Spiller and Dan Ariely, who set up a booth in a busy location with a large sign that read “Free Money”. All that passers-by needed to do was to stop, grab a $50 bill from the table and move on with their day. Despite the simplicity of it, only 19% of passers-by stopped to take the free money. The researchers concluded that consumers have become so cynical that they disengage as soon as something sounds too good to be true.

UGC is a huge step in mitigating this mistrust by letting the real users of a product do the talking for you. When the information is coming from the company itself, we immediately activate our cynicism and start questioning it. But when the claims come from other users just like us, we know that they have been through the same process that we are planning on going and they are telling us their first hand experience, which we perceive as a much more credible source of information.

It is psychologically proven

psychSocial proof theory suggests that people are automatically drawn to things that they know others already like and trust. This goes hand in hand with building trust, as the more people are talking about a product (and hopefully saying good things), the better the chances of recruiting more customers. This works from both a consumer and a business perspective. When people don’t have enough information or are unsure of what to do, they turn to a larger group of people who have more knowledge than them. As for the companies, it is a great way to legitimize their claims about a product through actual users validating it for them.

Monitor and Engage

To be clear, UGC is not simply about asking your customers to write reviews for you. It is about engaging in the conversation and continuously monitoring the Internet to see what is being said about your brand.

In order to achieve this, companies need to know how their customers spend their time on the Internet. What social media sites do they regularly follow? What channels do they use to find information? Once these potential touch points are identified, it is easier to connect with the consumers at the right time with the information.