Lessons

The most important lesson that I’ll always remember from this class is how important it is to approach marketing, or really anything we do in our lives, with a general human-centered approach. It’s not about us, or how we can make more money for our companies, or how we can trick customers into buying things. Even if something does have a great marketing campaign and attracts both new and old customers, there’s no value in it if the underlying product or service is mostly generic or useless. (That’s an extreme example though.) Especially as business students, we usually concentrate on things that can maximize profit from our customers. Too often, marketing seems to be about analyzing data to isolate target markets, then trying to sell products and services to these markets according the data we already have on them. I think the reason that real-world marketers emphasize quantitative research is mostly because it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to do (again, to try to add to the bottom line), and it does usually provide some interesting findings. However, it’s also boring and doesn’t really capture the nuances of real customers. If we approach things from a human-centered perspective, as our group and others did with journals, observations, and on-site interviews, the process is much more about understanding people rather than trying to find out what we can get them to buy. To do their jobs to the best of their ability, marketers must have the right motivation: genuinely trying to improve people’s lives and contributing to a more harmonious and better-functioning society.

My second point stems from the first; it’s important that marketers go directly to the customers for ideas, a seemingly obvious source that is often underutilized. At least from my experience, traditional research sticks to a rigid set of questions, which is done for facilitating analysis later on, but it’s also because researchers already have some expectation of what people are going to say and simply want to validate their own hypotheses. The research methods we discussed in this class, though, were much more open, flexible, creative, and personal, and are able thus to elicit fuller, more interesting responses that can ultimately be turned into true insights. Instead of the emphasis being on how to homogenize people into easily packaged markets, it’s much more valuable to see them as distinct individuals. If we try to understand people holistically, including looking at their lifestyles and their likes and dislikes, we can get at insights that we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves. In our project, we did this through journals, interviews, and asking for feedback, all of which were very open-ended and allowed people the freedom to express their true feelings. This process is much more organic. We don’t presume what people will like or respond to – we actually ask them how they would improve products, because they’re the real experts. It’s definitely not as easy or as concrete as analyzing the minute details of quantitative data, but it provides a broader picture of people’s motivations, wants, and needs.

You can probably tell so far that I don’t really have patience for things that are generic and impersonal. At the beginning of our project, I honestly wasn’t sure about our persona, which was the middle class family with two young kids who were all very involved with school and community activities, in addition to being happy, family-focused people. I think I’m just cynical, but I didn’t really think people like that existed too much anymore. Further, I didn’t think they would actually need anything because they probably lead pretty comfortable lives, especially since you had just shown us essential and ingenious products like the LifeStraw. However, the family that I interviewed very much embodied the persona that we had envisioned, so I started believing in our project much more. I saw that these people did exist and that they had their own immediate wants and needs – organization in the living room, for one. In developing our prototype, I think everyone in the group realized the potential of our digital game board product. It wasn’t just an electronic device that held all the board games you already had – it also had other features that were inspired by the changing technologies around us, including video game consoles and the iPhone. Your thoughtful philosophy about the course in general helped us keep the customer experience in mind in everything from grooves to better handle the game board to how various features could be cool and useful for both the kids and the parents. In the end, my group was great; we all played different roles, which maintained a great balance, and I definitely turned around to the idea of our persona.

One other thing: I LOVED Kate and thought she was the coolest person ever. I want to be her when I grow up. Please keep bringing her back for future semesters.

Wal-Mart!

Wal-Mart seems to primarily use the data that they glean to serve their own purposes of maximizing profit, which is to say that they’re concerned about themselves foremost, and any beneficial experience for the customer is almost just a serendipitous byproduct. Of course, if they’re aware of which items are bought together in a basket, or which items are in high demand during a hurricane, they can keep the right amount of inventory and better meet the needs of their customers. Naturally, it’s more advantageous to be informed about your customers than not. However, especially from the tone of the article, I don’t get the sense that they’re doing all this for the betterment of customers’ experiences. This is confirmed by Wal-Mart’s general lack of transparency about the information that they have on their customers, which probably accounts for why certain groups object to their actions. However, even if Wal-Mart is primarily using all their data for their own good, it is a justifiable and intelligent use of their resources.

Wal-Mart’s knowledge does indeed provide them with a competitive advantage. Because they serve more customers, they have more depth and breadth of knowledge into their customer base than any competitor. In fact, some people probably criticize the extent of Wal-Mart’s customer database just because Wal-Mart has so much data, even though many stores utilize the same methods to gather data on their customers. Moreover, it definitely makes sense that retailers in general would want to be smart about using this information to better anticipate their customers’ needs. Since Wal-Mart and other stores had already been collecting data just by way of checkout transactions, it was simply a matter of analyzing it, interpreting it, and putting it to practical use. Going straight to the source – detailed histories of customer behaviors – is no doubt a more accurate and precise method of assessing inventory needs than relying on records of inventory counts. With specific customer data, they have a more robust pool of data to pull from, including demographic preferences, which items are commonly bought in a basket, etc. This way, they can glean more rounded insights into not only what customers are buying, but also why they are buying them. In turn, they are more likely to market products in a way that is directly relevant to customers’ needs.

Personally, I don’t believe the privacy issue is too much of a problem because it wouldn’t be in Wal-Mart’s best interest to abuse their use of the data. They would be too fearful of the repercussions if they were ever found to be exploiting their knowledge of intimate customer data like Social Security numbers, and in any case, that’s not the purpose of their database. It appears more so that Wal-Mart observes buying habits from a macro level and breaks down customer behaviors only in terms of market trends like region, season, basket items, etc. – all reasonable information for them to assess, and in line with common market research methods.

Wal-Mart is perhaps being unduly singled out merely because they are a large company, an easy target. No, they probably don’t need our Social Security numbers or our court dates (and they should perhaps consider somehow getting rid of that information in their mainframes, both because it’s irrelevant for forecasting and to promote good press), but it is completely valid for them to want to know as much as they can about customer buying habits. And the more information they gather over time, the more reliable all of it will be, and the more accurate their inventories will be. I think we can rest assured that there won’t come a day when Wal-Mart or any other retailer can anticipate our every move, Big Brother-like, solely with their fancy-schmancy technology. In the end, customers will always be weird, fickle, and unpredictable. Of course a large company with millions of discrete unpredictable customers to serve will want to somehow make sense of it all. Even if it’s focusing on how to maximize their own profits by strategically balancing the prices of items in a basket, it also means that customers can always depend on Wal-Mart to have what they need. In a one-stop shopping world, that’s a lot.

Scribblenauts!!

At first, I really had some trouble coming up with what I thought was innovative or creative. I don’t particularly use any special products, and I’m more suspicious of new technology than the average person my age because I think there is such a thing as too much connectivity (Twitter, anyone?). I was trying to think of something cool that I had in my apartment, and sadly, I was just about to write about my hot water dispenser (which I do love though), when I remembered the awesomeness that is Scribblenauts. I don’t know if those in the non-gaming community would’ve heard of it, but I’ve embedded a trailer at the end of this post, and I hope you’ll take a minute to watch it.

It’s basically a puzzle game with hundreds of levels, and each level has a different goal that you’re trying to reach. “You” are Maxwell, a really cute kid with a rooster hat, and you have to think up ways to overcome or destroy the obstacles in the level and try to get the “Starite.” The hook of the game is that you can summon nearly any object that you spontaneously imagine because the creators put in a database of tens of thousands of words – just type in the word with the touchscreen! As a result, there are literally endless ways to solve a puzzle, and the fun of it is trying to think of something really interesting and creative. One early puzzle, for example, tells you to “get the kitty down from the roof.” Sure, you can invoke a ladder and climb up, but a mouse also works because it attracts the cat to the ground, and so does a fireman!

The game is incredibly addictive because it’s easy to keep saying just one more level, and it’s even easier to see what weird words and combinations you can put to the test. After a while, when the puzzles get much harder and a little bit frustrating to solve, it’s more fun to go back to making up crazy scenarios and watching them play out. Hey look, lions consume dinosaurs! God beats Cthulhu, but not Death! And riding on an armored panda while jousting with a knight? Entirely possible in Scribblenauts world.

The concept is so simple, yet the execution is cool and innovative. The creators of the game must have spent so many hours coming up with all those words and thinking up the infinite resulting interactions. A lot of times, video games are denounced for being big time-wasters that make kids reclusive and violent, but Scribblenauts encourages creativity, experimentation, and childlike imagination. There is a downside, however. The singular focus on the innovative “solve the puzzle in any way you can think of” idea means that there’s less emphasis on the larger quality of the game. This is common in a lot of the creative arts – think of the cool, experimental movie that’s flashy and original, but doesn’t really work as an emotionally compelling narrative. For Scribblenauts, especially for the harder levels, sometimes you can think of the most inventive ways to solve a puzzle, but the more boring and predictable solutions are the ones that actually work. The result is that you revert to just making up interesting objects and seeing how they interact instead of the professed objective of the game – completing puzzles.
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One criticism I have of the article “The New, Faster Face of Innovation” is that it assumes that customers know exactly what they want when they’re presented with something new. Yes, technology can really speed up R&D and the process of testing out new ideas, which is probably generally useful, but I also think that not every idea shows immediate, certifiable results. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea – it might mean it needs to be developed more, or that customers need more time to adapt to it. But if companies get used to the expectation that quick, efficient, and technology-based testing is always the best way to go, they might be missing out on deeper insights. In addition, they may become so focused on solely the innovation that they miss out on the bigger picture a little bit, as with Scribblenauts’ amazing but also ultimately limited realm of possibilities. (Still, watch the trailer please.)

Predictably Irrational?

In probably every aspect of our lives, our preconceived expectations color our subsequent perceptions. This occurs because when we encounter unfamiliar situations, we use our lifetime store of knowledge and experience to prejudge the situation. As Ariely says near the end of the chapter, these preconceptions are not necessarily bad. Instead, they’re tried-and-true biases that have proven accurate again and again, leading to a basic human tendency to judge the quality of things based on appearances, and not necessarily reality. It’s not something that we usually notice (case in point: the psychology experiments that primed people to think and behave one way or another based on their innate biases), and it’s not really our fault – it’s actually a handy tool most of the time, and it allows us to make quick decisions about the new things we come across every day without overanalyzing every last detail every time.

When we are uncertain about the quality of things, of course it makes sense that we would rely on what we know and what makes the most sense based on that previous knowledge in order to make decisions. This fact jumped out at me when Ariely gave the example of how the catering service with the flowery food descriptions sounded more appetizing. This was most likely because the description of the “mélange of the freshest roma tomatoes…” presents the food in a way that strongly suggests quality and a thoughtful attention to detail, both of which are definitely within our concept of what good food is.

If people have established expectations of how things should be, as in, beer shouldn’t have balsamic vinegar in it, good coffee comes from a well-presented place, our football team surely is always in the right, etc., then we will seek out to confirm those biases in order to maintain consistency with our beliefs. Marketers can take advantage of this by challenging expectations:

1) Presentation is everything. The right presentation immediately triggers ideas of what the product or service is like, and having this positive visual association enhances customers’ expectations and subsequent impressions. As I mentioned, if they’re expecting a good experience just by seeing something being well-presented, they will likely confirm their own expectations when they actually use it. For example, if a company wants to present its product as high-class, they might want to make the packaging more streamlined and professional-looking. This is relevant for store brand items, which are often the same quality as more recognizable brands, but the packaging usually prominently presents itself as being generic and thus of lesser value.

2) When marketers want to attract customers to their product or service, maybe especially one that may not be well-received, they should follow the example of Ariely’s beer experiment and be selective and careful about how to divulge information about it. In this experiment, participants tasted regular beer and a beer with added balsamic vinegar and were asked which one they preferred. Those who were told about the vinegar beforehand claimed to prefer the regular beer because the presence of the vinegar was too strange and unheard of, even though those who blindly drank both beers vastly preferred the reengineered beer. Indeed, too much of something unusual will alienate people immediately because they don’t understand it and don’t want to, because they don’t want to be bothered to diverge from the familiar status quo.

Since I’m a movie buff, I can relate to this by recalling all the past instances of when I was discouraged from seeing movies that initially seemed interesting to me just because they received an average or low rating on rottentomatoes.com (an aggregate of movie reviews from various publications). And when I decided to watch some of them anyway, I enjoyed them a lot less than I probably would’ve had I not already read about all the ways in which they were subpar and unworthy. Like the beer experiment, these reviews altered my expectations for the worse and resulted in a less satisfying experience for me as a movie-going customer. That’s why it’s more and more common for movie studios that know they have a dud on their hands to not show screenings to the press beforehand. This way, the inevitably poor reviews (and thereby the bad word of mouth and customers’ bad expectations) are delayed at least until the day the movie comes out and it’s available for the public make its own judgments. Of course, at this point these judgments, too, have been colored by trailers, marketing campaigns, Internet buzz, etc. We can’t really escape the ubiquitous messages from every corner, constantly trying to color our points of view and change our biases in their favor.

The typical Generation Y, college-age female

1. I get most of my entertainment and information from the Internet. My laptop is my home base. It’s where I keep all my music and a lot of my movies, and I use it to write papers for school, catch up on news, watch TV on the Internet, read blogs, use Facebook, and watch videos on YouTube.

2. This is related to the first point, but it’s so prevalent that it needs its own paragraph – my generation procrastinates, a lot. This is because we’re addicted to getting instant gratification, and it’s a lot easier to do that by enjoying some YouTube videos than it is completing a ten-page paper for school. There’s so much cool technology to feed our ADD that we can’t help but to be constantly distracted.

3. I like indie music, and I think a lot of other people do too, given the recent popularity and proliferation of days-long music festivals like SXSW, Coachella, Bonnaroo, ACL, and Lollapalooza. I like indie music because it’s so varied – while the Top 40 usually solely consists of pop and hip hop, indie music can be pop, dance, rap, electronic, instrumental, you name it.

4. Speaking of “indieness,” there’s a group of young, educated, usually white people of my generation who are commonly known as “hipsters” and worship everything indie. They wear American Apparel, Converse, and thick-rimmed glasses, are sometimes vegan, and turn up their noses at everything mainstream. There’s definitely a very strong market of young people who are constantly striving to be “hip” and “cool.”

5. I love movies, and I want to somehow be a part of making them one day. I like quiet, small films like Lost in Translation, foreign ones like Oldboy, and ones with great style and humor, like Kill Bill. I think films are fascinating because they create alternate realities, and if done well, they allow viewers to identify with fictional characters and in turn understand more about ourselves.

6. I’m somewhat interested in fashion. I have a subscription to Vogue, I watch Project Runway, and I read fashion blogs. About once a month, I get an itch to shop and buy about $50 worth of clothing or shoes, which isn’t too bad, right?

7. My generation is confident and independent. We think it’s really important to lead the life that we want, though this is manifested in different ways. Business students tend to be career-focused and sure-footed, while other, more liberal arts-y students give themselves time to explore their interests. Sometimes this is seen as having a lack of direction, though it’s just because we want to make sure that we find what really fulfills us.

8. My generation is fascinated with celebrity culture, as evidenced by all the tabloids, trashy TV shows (The Hills, anyone?), and blogs like Perez Hilton. I think it’s because it’s kind of comforting to see that the lives of people so wealthy and famous are often much more messed up than our own. We want to live vicariously through them, but we also, maybe wrongfully, revel in their personal failures because it makes our own problems seem a little more manageable.

9. One of the things I value most is creativity. It’s an interesting concept to explore because it’s so difficult to define and identify what it means. I don’t really consider myself creative, so I really admire those who are. I believe that creativity drives the progress of society, quite literally. Without new ideas, there’s really no evolution of society. In fact, I think it’s the most valuable thing that any educational system can teach – how to encourage children (who are already inherently curious and imaginative) to continue asking questions and think about their world in original ways.

10. We’re idealistic and interested our world. We want to save the environment, travel to foreign lands, and understand other cultures. As globalization continues, we are ever more connected, and we have almost boundless opportunities to learn new languages and be exposed to the unfamiliar and the exotic. We’re excited and ready.

Hello all!

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