All posts tagged advertising

9 Posts

June 3, 2013 · Social media

Why a #TAG made me switch banks

There’s been a fair bit of buzz around the agency (and agency-land) about #unexpectedtweet …that totally irreverent campaign from First Direct that instantly struck a note with a lot of people. It really did and here’s the proof – It made me switch my bank account to First Direct after being with my current bank for 18 years.

I saw the abstract advert that didn’t even tell the viewer it was First Direct (The one above with the Beatboxing Bird – I didn’t even catch the Platypus one till almost a week later!) and hit rewind on the TiVo about 4 times trying to work out what the hell it was and who the hell it was for (The wife was going spare – “what the hell are you doing, I want to finish watching Kirsty & Phil you moron!“). Nada. Nothing. I went on Twitter and got stuck into the conversation… I shared the advert on Facebook with my friends; “check it out, it’s brilliant… no idea who it’s for”. When I finally found out it was for First Direct I literally went straight to the website and applied for a new bank account. No bribe, no bung, no special offer and promise of a killer app. They bought me with entertainment.

The debate raged at work for a while too; “Oh, it’s because it’s showing that First Direct is a better bank, more in tune with the populous because they do this kind of advertising!” and rhetoric along those lines in various flavors.

Well in reality it’s nothing of the sort – It’s a lot more basic than that… and here’s my thinking;

Banks all do the exact same thing. They always have and they always will; You give them your money, they put it into a big virtual, intangible vault (where they profit from you) and they keep it safe for you. It’s always been that way;

“BANK”: An institution for receiving, lending, exchanging, and safeguarding money and, in some cases, issuing notes and transacting other financial business.

Money goes in. Money goes out. Your money.

The toughest decision you have to make when you start earning money is where to dump your hard earned wages & that’s usually somewhat dictated somewhat by who your parents bank with. Most banks are all reasonably competitive on product & benefits package (excluding credit & investments products, I’m just talking EVERYDAY BANKING here) and they all have a very similar channel strategy (bank with us and you’ll get access to Mobile, Online and Branch etc). Some are ahead in some areas and behind in others, but they’re all heading in the same sort direction. Virtual wallet. Banking on the move. New ways of moving your hard-earned virtual currency from one person or company to the next blah blah blah. It’s just banking & long may it continue to be that basic!

Lets have a look at a really simple experience model called Prochaska;

At the moment most financial institutions (and in fact most companies) have 2, 3, 4 & 5 in the prochaska model reasonably sown up. They advertise to make you contemplate at point 2 or you might have had a bad experience and you’re hunting for something new and the bank gives you offers on aggregators; it pulls you into 3 which then converts you & locks you into the cycle 4, 5 & 6. That’s the easy bit (in theory). It’s banking (and marketing) 101.

So here’s the kicker. Most institutions have totally forgotten about steps 1 & 6 (or in reality 6 and 1 in that order). Most people are apathetically floating around in 5 doing all they’ve ever known. They get reasonable service & utility, it does what it says on the tin, when you were robbed it took a couple of days and you got reimbursed yada yada. It’s all very banky. You’ve no real need to switch banks and it’s the devil you don’t know that alludes most people.

That’s where First Direct (well JWT the advertising agency) got it bang-on. They never really talk about ‘Banking’ in the adverts and they don’t really need to talk about it, because nobody cares. To get into peoples Pre-Contemplation at point 1 you need something really disruptive that makes you think “oh that’s different, who the hell would do something like that?” (Think Different – Apple anybody?). It’s as crude as that. I’d never even contemplated First Direct before because I figured they were just like the norm & I know the norm. They’re not the norm… they’ve got my attention. I’ve switched to them because MAYBE, just MAYBE they have the chops to do things a bit differently and I’ll be on the edge of innovation the whole time (where-as in reality it’ll be the same stuff – Look after my money in the same way!).

They got into point 6 (relapse) by making me think the bank I was currently with hasn’t done anything to make me notice them for 18 years, then they made me notice them by showing me something that I’d never seen before. That was it. No extra utility value and no app that sends money using blinking or toe-wriggles… just straight forward, old school disruptive marketing. I didn’t even get the £100 for switching offer. The rest as they say is history… in I go and there I’ll stay until the next wave of marketing from an equally disruptive bank comes along (or maybe it won’t even be a bank who get to keep my money safe next!). But be warned… I’m fickle enough to have a love affair with good advertising… My old account stays open & I can turn on a penny & switch back in a heartbeat!

Let me end with the out-takes… #LOVETHISCAMPAIGN

December 5, 2012 · IA, UCD, UX

I.A is just a communications tool

There’s a lot of discussion around the office and the industry about I.A and it’s role… how it should be done… who should do it (clients and account staff have started handing me ‘wireframes’ and saying “I want that” which is just plain dumb & subjective!) and what level we should be producing it. I have a very straight-forward take on Information Architecture and that is “It’s JUST a communication tool” which could infuriate some people who think they’re more than that.

So let me quantify that train of thought. In 15 years of working in ‘The Big D’ I have had to continuously adapt and refine my style of I.A to the audience who are going to be working with it. I’ve also had the great privilege of working in so many different types of agency now that I’ve constantly had to swap and change the way I produce I.A work. I’ve worked in tactical advertising where we were churning out lots of rich, interactive micro-sites with short shelf-lives and even smaller budgets where I had to scrimp on the objectivity and use a bit of best luck & judgement + knock out rusty wireframes crudely in no time at all so the designer & the developer sitting next to me had a rough steer… All the way through to massive technology companies like Sapient Nitro where the rigor has had to be there because we’re building giant platforms that get developed off-shore. I’ve done a start-up where we had the luxury of being able to take a more Lean approach and most of the I.A was just drawn on the walls. Then there’s the agencies where we were doing more ‘Optimisation’ type work and we’d build detailed Axure Prototypes to do rigorous user-testing. But one thing unifies all those different approaches – whatever I was doing it was always about communicating back to the internal or client audience. It’s always been about showing people the way.

Advertising is a great analogy. You have a message that you need to tell the audience of consumers. You choose the media types best suited to that identified audience. I.A is the same. We have a message and we have to work out the best way to communicate that message and solution to the audience pre-public consumption.

If I meet another I.A who ‘only uses Axure’ or ‘only does Balsamiq’ because it’s their favorite tool then I’m going to explode. It doesn’t do you any favors being that one-dimensional. You have to choose the right tool for the particular job but more importantly you have to be an effective communicator. If you can show me how something needs to function on a wall with a pen then do that… if you can get across the detail using paper and pens then do that too. How it’s presented is secondary to the strategy, insight, research and thinking that’s gone into it.

I’ve tossed away CVs / Portfolios of IAs before because it’s jam-packed full of glossy wireframes… all in the same style, all Omnigraffled with such precision that they’re almost works of art on their own. Why? Because they might be brilliant, but they don’t show me that you’re adaptable and fluid. They show me you’re a great crafts-person with great thinking but they don’t show me that I can throw you into a multitude of scenarios and that you’ll be able to adapt your communication to the audience. Your I.A work is an interpretation of a brief, make people paying attention to it the reward.

A technique or look is no substitution for substance

So in summary – Just be mindful that I.A is a way of communicating the idea, solution, product, vision and function to an audience. That is all. Mastering the art of communication is more important than mastering the art of the wireframe. If it’s objective then it’s UX. If it’s subjective then it’s Design. But whatever it is you have to twist & mould.

June 1, 2012 · behaviour, design, digital, Experience Design, mobile, UX

The lines of experience

It’s been an exciting couple of years hasn’t it? The whole offline / online thing… the internet went from being a place you visited to ‘digital’ which exists in multiple places simultaneously and intrinsically woven into our lives. The Eco-System effect. How about this one, you’ll like this and be repelled at the implications in equal measures. There are some bars and clubs in the U.S using a novel technology to help partygoers decide where to party. SceneTap, an American start-up, uses cameras to scan the faces of those who enter and leave participating establishments. Its software then guesses each person’s age and sex. Aggregated data is streamed to a website and mobile app. This allows punters to see which bars are busy, the average age of revellers and the all-important male-to-female ratio. The bar owners gain publicity and intelligence about their customers. For instance, did a promotion aimed at women attract many?

It’s the phone angle. You can adapt your behavior in advance when things used to be essentially ‘pot-luck’. We’re almost cyborg in nature by virtue of having our lives augmented with mobile. We can see through walls now. Bye-bye FourSquare, I’m not going to ‘check-in’ because it already knows I’m there and tells people if I opt in to be auto-detected.

Many companies face the challenge of creating entirely new behaviours for new products. However, my thinking is that behaviour change is far more successful when it aligns with a habit we’ve already formed, which apparently shapes nearly half of the decisions we make every day.

Around 74.2% of the UK’s population, totalling 47m, will go online at least once a month this year on a range of devices including smartphones and tablets, according to eMarketer stats… and that number has almost quadrupled in 5 years because of the rise of the smartphone. We’re all getting smarter at astonishing rates.

I’m also loving the Nike Fuel Band and it’s bigger applications… At SXSW this year, to promote the Fuel Band, Nike essentially turned the inside of a venue into one huge Fuelband wristband with the same colored lights and ability to track energy level. Except in this case, Nike was tracking the energy level of the whole crowd.

Across town from the gig they had rigged up lighting in a building to react to the audience at the gig. The more energetic the crowd, the greener the building became, so that people outside the event could witness the level to which the crowd was going off. It helped that Nike picked two very high energy bands for this show: Diplo and Sleigh Bells. Nike measured the crowd’s energy level by placing Nike FuelBands on the wrists of a large number of attendees, then tracked the activity using customized wireless technology that functions similarly to the way the iOS app works. It’s an extreme example but think about it… using digital, people influenced the lighting at another location. I remember when I got my first feature phone in 1997 people said I was mad because the SMS thing would never take off!

What happens when all these new ways of doing things start converging and the lines start to blur? For instance… Online sales are expected to reach to a staggering $317 billion by 2016 in the U.S which is phenomenal, right… but I’ve always had this hypothesis that online sales aren’t just about convenience, they’re also about data. People love the fact that they can see something rated or reviewed, or find obscure things that are just too difficult to find on the high-street. It’s a demand thing. I’d be fascinated to see what starts to happen when those ratings and ‘easy to find’ influences start popping up in more Urban environments – “Hey Pete, there’s a huge footfall of people like you occurring at this place not too far from where you are right now & they’re all buying things you might like, let me lead you there“. Augmented behavior offline using online data. Could be huge.

Users understand the importance of the internet and a bad experience can go a long way; 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online according to a report by KissMetrics. So take that sentiment offline and there is this whole “don’t go in there Pete, a lot of people like you had a rubbish time”…

Then there’s the growing behavior around tablets. Sure, it was bound to happen, we just needed Apple to lead the charge, but it’s the way they’ve altered and augmented behavior that I find astonishing. 69% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month, according to stats from inMobi and Mobext. 50% of tablet owners spend at least an hour a day accessing media content on their tablets, and 72% use it while watching TV. So it’s not a huge leap ahead of us to assume ‘shopping the adverts’ is just around the corner. The advertising they said was dead is just about to be supplemented by technology. My behavior doesn’t change, but the experience is augmented by the ability to just a button on my iPad & buy what I’m watching. Makes sense. Especially if there are “100 people like you all doing the same”.

According to an IAB/ValueClick study, 52% of consumers are happy to see online advertising because it allows them to view content or use services online at no cost – they’ve brought their offline viewing habits with them. But 55% said they would rather see advertising relevant to their interests and 59% would prefer a lower number of relevant ads than a higher volume of irrelevant ones. So how long before that mobile or tablet you use influences what adverts you see while you’re watching your favorite shows, so when you reach out and buy it instantly you’re actually just choosing to buy from things you’re really only interested in. I don’t have a dog, don’t show me adverts for dog food… Augmented advertising comes to the TV experience. It’s all totally feasible now.

Digital experience crossing over in the real world is becoming more and more a reality and the next few frontier years are going to be really exciting. The possibilities are endless and impact on our lives can only be positive.

February 4, 2012 · advertising, design

The Crazies

Remember the Apple Think Different campaign? Seeing as how there’s been a few references to Steve Jobs and Jonny Ives (strategist / tactician and a designer working in harmony anyone?) recently I thought I’d just surface my favourite advert of all time:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

It’s a beautiful piece of poetry by two incredibly talented wordsmiths Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall from Chiat Day. I was lucky enough to visit and work at Chiat Day in LA back in 2008 and it reminded me why I love what I do. Meeting someone as industry defining as Lee Clow was humbling and a grounding experience. These guys make things simple. They’re designers of words and thoughts and they make it approachable and elegant and I think we as UX tradesman and women can learn a lot from that.

December 19, 2011 · advertising, behaviour, digital, mobile, Social media, UX

Digital Wrap-Up 2011

Wendell Phillips said “revolutions never go backwards” so what a year of permanent change through great work in the ‘Big D’ 2011 was. From social to relaunches and updates of services like Twitter and that Face-thing. I’ve been in the industry for 15 years this year and it’s my own personal view that 2011 has genuinely been the best year of change since the inception of the commercial internet. I think it’s because everything has matured so much – especially in the UK – to the point where things are starting to gel… which I think is reflected in my digital wrap-up below. I’m a UX guy in theory, but actually I just love good solid tech and creative work above all the UX hyperbole. If it’s urban, mobile, unique, easy to use and instant-utility then THAT is awesome UX as far as I’m concerned. 2012 is going to be the year I upset a lot of my peers in the UX community by championing the end of all this chat that goes on about standards and patterns and familiar paradigms and so on and so on and so on… 2012 is the start of the age when we continue to marry great tech’ with amazing ideas and give the end consumer awesome experiences that change their lives in little ways.

I’ve hand-picked a couple of my highlights and it’s no surprise that they all span so many different pillars of the ‘Big D’ and also appear on pretty much every other list you’ll see summarizing 2011. So here we go in no particular order:

Tesco Homeplus – The QR Store in Korea

The objective was to make Tesco the No 1 seller in Korea… but the competition have way more stores… so what do you do? Take the ‘store’ to the people and let them shop with their phones. People should find Tesco Homeplus wherever they are without having to go to the brick and mortar store. Moreover they could make good use of the wasted times and enjoy their free time.

RESULTS: 76% of online members & +130% of online sales. Homeplus became N°1 in online grocery shopping and is a very close 2nd offline. Novelty? Or game-changing? I think a little of both… it certainly helped QR codes come of age a bit too…

New York – The World Park

The concept was simple… Create a museum in the park to create an entirely different experience using QR codes that gave access to other content integrated into the context (including History, pop culture, music & science). They also included elements of gamification.

Again – Another quality use of mobile (I see a pattern emerging) and QR codes… Marketers are sometimes nervous about or afraid of technology but nowadays, technology enables the possibility of amazing experiences. Note that you should be careful about sharing specific content with everyone.

IKEA 365

Create one simple creative campaign everyday including a new product to create a story and engage consumers. I always loved the concept brought to me by a colleague that digital is about a myriad of little ideas not ‘the big idea’ now and this campaign pretty much embodies that to the letter. IKEA proving they’re still one of the most innovative brands on the planet.

Volkwagen – Planeta Terra

Create awareness of VW’s sponsorship of the Planta music festival in Brasil… to an audience who are generally quite apathetic about VW. This was one of several awesome campaigns run using Twitter and Google Maps as the gaming platform. Pretty simple really… Tickets to the music festival were strategically placed around locations high-lighted using Google Maps… the first person to find the tickets wins them… But here’s the kicker… ‘Tweets’ made the map zoom… so the more the protagonists tweeted the closer the map zoomed to the location of the tickets. A beautiful self-fulfiling prophecy of a game.

Microsoft Bing

We’ve already seen a campaign using Google Maps and that was a lot of Microsofts challenge this year… how do you raise awareness of its own service ‘Bing’. In some ways a far more superior service in the same way that Vimeo is to YouTube, but displacing existing behavior is next to impossible (don’t get me started on Google+). So what they did was pretty clever… They placed each of the 320 pages of Jay Z’s book, Decode, in 600 unique traditional, nontraditional and digital advertising placements in 15 cities around the world.

The best of the ‘hide and seek’ games from the year for sure… results speak for themselves: 11 min per visit on the specific website. +11,7% of visits to bing. ~$1,1 B worth of media impressions.

Greys Anatomy Sync app for iPad

The best of the iPad offerings this year (for concept rather than longevity). The Grey’s Anatomy Sync app for iPad lets you experience Grey’s Anatomy in an entirely new way! You’ll get to interact with other fans and get exclusive episode-related content delivered to your iPad in real time while you watch Grey’s Anatomy live on your TV.

So what? It’s just back-channel stuff which we’ve all seen, right? But think about it a bit more. It actually used the coding baked into the show to talk to the app. I love that. Old media being used to control new platform. Awesomely powerful idea.

Empire Avenue

My big big digital addiction of 2011 is without a doubt the genius ‘Empire Avenue‘. I’ve spent more time working on my social share price this year than my actual shares! Fact. It’s a simple concept – Register. Hook-up all your various social media profiles, channels and wasted time interfaces and Empire Avenue gives you a shareprice. You buy other peoples shares and they buy yours. You make money, you lose money and you can’t help but go to that dreaded iPhone App every morning to see how well you’re doing. This is gamification of the highest order and I’m going to need some kind of therapy next year if I’m going to ditch the habit.

Summary

There were so many more too, but I just haven’t got time to highlight them all in any great detail… I will just highlight ‘World of Fourcraft‘ as the best gamification idea of the year… pure genius… and leave you with this round-up:

In 2011:

Multichannel became Multichannels
Point of Sale became Points of Sale (sell everywhere using mobile)
Using ‘Free Time’ became the big success currency
Gamification stopped being a fad and a buzz word and started being a genuine thing
Thinking outside of the box became acceptable and not just rubbish ATL buzz generation
Customer Experience became the new User Experience
The simple ideas still run the roost!

My predictions for 2012:

The mobile wallet will become a reality and we’ll all start to embrace the ‘idea’ of using our phones to pay for things
Facebook will announce that it’s Facebook Credits idea will become an offline currency too and try to take on PayPal using mobile as the payment device for the Facebook Credits
Apps will start to diminish in favour of fluid HTML 5 pages that can be used on all devices and give the same experience as an App
User Experience will be even more integral to the industry than before

May 1, 2011 · behaviour, digital, Social media

Viral Loop – Pass the bucks

I’ve mentioned Viral Loops before in a couple of posts. Since I started talking about it a lot of people have been asking me to ‘do it for them’ like it’s some sort of silver bullet you can just load into any digital gun & fire at a target which makes me chuckle every time. In reality my theory is that sites and content that go viral are more a product of the ‘when’ and ‘where’ rather than the ‘what’. It’s about being in the right place at the right time – call it ‘fluke’ if you want. Most videos that go viral on YouTube were never designed to do so & the ones that were engineered by an agency and go ‘viral’ have spent money with a company like Rubber Republic to get people to view them and I don’t classify those as viral, I classify that as paid-for-media (old school advertising to you & me!). Most websites that go viral have a built in loop for sure, but there is also a lot of luck & right-time-right-place about them.

There are obviously some conditions you can promote within your agency or organisation or start-up that MIGHT have the desired effect… but don’t put all your eggs in these baskets because chances are if the time that you launch isn’t ripe for you product or content it won’t make any difference how potent your viral idea is or how rigorous your viral loop mechanics are:

Viral content has to be web based – It just belongs in the frictionless world of the internet. Too many people are asking me how they can create an offline viral idea… sure you can seed stuff offline to raise awareness (more paid-for-media / advertising!) but don’t bother trying to create an offline viral loop. It’s just silly. Use the internet – it’s what it’s there for!
It’s GOT to be FREE – Users need to consume your product or content at no charge; after aggregating a mass audience you may be able to overlay various revenue generators… but nothing that you had to initially pay for ever went viral. Fact.
Think about organizational technology – The kind of sites that don’t create content, their users do. They simply organise it, but facilitating can lead to a mass audience – just ask Google!
It’s almost always about the network effect – The more people who join, the more people there are to have an incentive to join… Every time I talk to clients or colleagues about viral loops I keep on hammering home the point that it’s NOT about the person you recruit to your website, it’s about the people that person knows.
Your site HAS to have built in virility – Users will spread a product purely out of their own self-interest and, in the process, offer a powerful word-of-mouth endorsement to each subsequent users… but without the thought about how that invisible virility works right up front you’ll probably lose the opportunity. Apple have recently done it to perfection with PING. I happen to think it’s growing into something of an interesting product is that PING thing (and with the looming downfall of Spotify it’s set to take the main social music crown) because for months now I’ve been sending out Tweets from Itunes and I didn’t even realise I was doing it… how crafty is that… It’s damn annoying but quite quite brilliant. I was telling my 600 odd followers on Twitter what I was buying on iTunes and I had no idea.
Remember that a point of non-displacement (or a tipping point to quote Gladwell) is that moment when it’s nearly impossible for a competitor to take a company down. Here’s the harsh facts of life amigos… if you’ve got this big bold viral idea (be it content or a new service) and someone is already out there and it’s got a million subscribers or it’s had a bajillion hits… then don’t bother wasting your time doing it yourself. I’m serious too! The point of non-displacement is a serious fact and reality. You cannot displace something that’s already ubiquitous in peoples lives even with an idea that is 100 times better.

There’s not much more to say really except give up on the idea of ‘planning a big viral event’. It just doesn’t work like that. You can’t BUY virility (well you can, but it’s not viral at all, it’s advertising – a rose by any other name blah blah) and you can’t spoof it. It won’t JUST HAPPEN and if it does it’ll probably happen by accident. So stop trying, sit back, do creative things & play by the rules… you never know, it might happen by accident and all that glory will be yours!

March 25, 2011 · advertising

The Last Advertising Agency on Earth

You know me by now… so you get that I’m an advertising junkie. I actually see UX as a strand of advertising (call it marketing if you like!) and with that in mind I love finding things like this:

September 22, 2010 · digital

Company X

Here’s it is… my fantasy company… the utopia… now I need to explain what’s going on here before battle-lines are drawn and those that didn’t make the cut complain. A few of us do this every few years. It’s a nice way to stop & take stock. Get a little restrospective. The scenario we set ourselves is this:

3 million quid to spend setting up the perfect digital advertising agency. Must take into consideration start-up costs.
Every person in the agency must have worked with you directly at some point in your respective careers.
Assemble a team of less than 50 people to work together to win a large, muti-national FMCG client.

I’ve built my fantasy agency around a number of my own criteria;

I’ve put most of my fantasy company into the roles they were working in when I was working with them (there are even a few people here who I didn’t work with, but in fact work for me when I was their client, they impressed me!)… some of them have moved on, changed roles, been promoted since I worked with them… etc etc… I’ve even gone as far as to demote (in a fun way, not a bitchy way) some people in the roles I think would actually suit them better. If that’s ‘you’… remember you still made it into my fantasy company… so don’t moan! I’ve literally worked with hundreds of people, you’ve made my top 50.
Note my company structure. None of my departments work in ghettos, it’s purely a split of discipline.
Every member of the team will take an equal salary.
I’ve selected people not just based on their raw talent, but based on how well I think they’d gel and work with all the other members of my fantasy company. I’ve missed off a lot of talented individuals – But this here is my ultimate mash-up… If I put you all in a room together it would set the industry on fire.
A few people I’ve even thrown in just as geling agents, which in itself is an incredible, natural talent. It’s my belief that this fantasy company not only brings the very best of all the talents, but also with it an atmosphere of collaboration, fun, integrity & mutual respect that would make it thrive amongst a lot of sour, old-skool agencies littering the industry today.
There is no board in my fantasy company… it’s a co-op… every member is equal and has earned that right by being individually brilliant at their own disciplines but more importantly by being an amazing team-player.

This isn’t necessarily a fait accompli… it’ll probably evolve and change. But up to now this is 15 years of career solidified into 42 individuals (well… 41 and me). Click on the picture below to see the full version.

Anyway… take it with a pinch of salt… this is just a bit of fun some of us have every few years. It is nice to note that these are the individuals who’ve made the biggest impression, impact & brought the most joy to my career & I’d happily go into battle with this little lot anyday:

June 1, 2010 · Social media

The rise of the Twinsumer

The proliferation of the use of digital marketing has led to significant growth in brands using social marketing campaigns to increase consumer engagement. Social channels facilitate the art of listening, learning and sharing, so consumers are now using online channels to find the exact product to match their tastes based on fellow consumers’ recommendations.

Moreover, they are not just listening to any old recommendation they find online but are listening to their taste ‘twins’. These are consumers who share the same opinions, whose purchase procedure, engagement and characteristics are very similar. Ultimately, by mimicking other users’ behaviour and purchase patterns these people are becoming ‘twinsumers’.

Before the digital marketing age, marketers were reliant on influencers who would spread their customer experience by word of mouth, to their ‘real-world’ friends, to encourage other shoppers to visit their stores. Although customer loyalty schemes did help to track the customer journey, they still did not allow marketers to see the full consumer journey and to track shoppers at every touchpoint. Without this information marketers would struggle to see exactly who their customer was and at what point they were being turned off by the brand. The explosion of e-commerce brought many opportunities for marketers to track customer insight and recommendations online but all too often it came without in-depth analysis of what was making the customer engage with the product in the first place.

So why should marketers be interested in these twinsumers? Firstly, as the online environment is now a hotbed for social interaction, buzz around a brand can have longevity as audiences continue to engage in dialogue about it. It really cannot be underestimated how much consumers are relying on peer opinion over advertising when it comes to purchasing decisions; most importantly, consumers are increasingly looking at opinions that have been posted online to inform their choices. The twinsumer phenomenon turns millions of reviews, ratings and recommendations into truly valuable results that can exactly match one person’s particular preferences to another.

This is crucial for businesses as the nature of these well-linked and related recommendations often leads to impulse and surprise buys, as well as generating more sales. Statistics also show that click-through and conversion rates of recommendations based on collaborative filtering are much higher than untargeted content such as banner advertisements or top-seller lists. Consumers respect the opinion of others, and twinsumers respect the opinions of those who share their characteristics. You can’t impress them with traditional marketing and advertising alone any more.

Marketers need to consider if their brand can exploit this new wave of twinsumerism and adapt their websites accordingly. Do they already provide a review, opinion or recommendation area on the site? If so, then consider adding the functionality for personal profiles to allow real twinsumerism to blossom. This should include everything from your customer’s age, appearance, occupation, favourite websites, hobbies, interests and musical taste to entire biographies. In fact, anything that allows other consumers to grasp a better feel for how compatible they are with the brand.

While many twinsumers bond over a niche market such as travel, books or reading, marketers must not ignore the impact of the ‘Master Consumer’: a leading twinsumer and a mass influencer. These are certain reviewers, bloggers or consumer experts who have become so popular that they appeal to large numbers of other consumers who will trust and follow their recommendations even if their profiles do not match the usual narrowly defined twinsumer matches. By identifying which of these master consumers are relevant to a brand, marketers can look to initiate twinsumerism by specifically targeting these influencers.

Twinsumers are an important part of the process of how we make purchasing decisions online. The digital generation emerging is the first group of consumers to grow up with all these new tools and peer-to-peer options through which they are ready to contribute. There are already millions of personal profile, blogs and homepages up and running exchanging this information. With online sales continuing to increase, marketers need to leverage every opportunity to ensure they can achieve the most cut-through. While twinsumers are an emerging phenomenon, as a purchasing group they are perpetually growing and it is imperative for any marketer to consider these consumers within existing and future digital strategies.

Published by Figaro Digital – 01/10/2009

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