Creative Traction » Research

Did You Know?

Duane Brown — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:19:15 +0000

I often watch this video with excitement as I think about what the future will hold as I take the next step in my life. However, the title of this video is also how I felt today. There was a lot I didn’t know or at least felt I didn’t. But come Monday… the gloves are coming off. It’s time to wow the client.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Razorfish’s Feed 2009: It’s not about the connected consumer

Duane Brown — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:32 +0000

Last night I finished reading Razorfish’s Feed Report 2009 and overall I thought it was well written. However, I’ve a few issues that popped out at me well reading it. The report talked a lot about the connected consumer and the characteristic that made up that type of person:

Broadband access
Spent $150 online in the last 6 months (travel, Netflix, tickets, Amazon, gifts..ect)
Visited a “community site” (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Yelp)
Consumed or created some form of digital media, such as photos, video, music or news.

Razorfish said this throughout the report but is the connected consumer really the majority of the US now? People like my mom or my ex-Will’s parents could fit into this category. We are talking about adults who are not that technology or Internet savvy as a whole. Razorﬁsh said they surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers (50.5% female, 49.5% male) split across four major age* groups and spread out across 10 major US states**, which sounds like a very good sample to me. However, I don’t believe that majority of the US is now apart of what they call the connected consumer, because if they are then we’ve some issues to deal with. I thought marketing was about going hyper niche these days and targeting more relevant people and not just everyone, like this reports seems to imply that brands want to go after.

Connected consumer use to be the early adopters and people you wanted to connect with as they were passionate about your brand. They would sit and watch your ad/commercial and look for information about your company. But this report seems to say now that the connected consumer could be anyone in the US and that is something I don’t agree with. Based on this report pretty much anyone could be a connected consumer and if that’s the case, then the 330+ million who live in the US is a connected consumer as long as they have broadband access.

Razorfish, when you lower the barrier of entry to a study so anyone fits into the study, you have me start to question your data and your data was another area that I had an issue with. If these are the connect consumers that firms like Starbucks, Dell, Nike and Apple want to reach as you say. Then I think we may have some issues with reaching them. 49.55% of these connected consumer have a smart phone that is either a Blackberry or an Apple iPhone. However, only 23.60% have downloaded a branded app and another 24% have ever produced content to enter a contest. And there is more…

42.20% sometimes or 30.90% never read blogs produced by products or brands (e.g., Nintendo)
50.70% sometimes or 23.20% never Watch commercials or video advertisements on YouTube
38.90% sometimes or 17.20% never Play games in your browser
39.30% sometimes or 35.40% never Play browser-based games produced by a brand (e.g., Got Milk?)
24.10% sometimes or 42.50% never Access an Internet service from your phone
27.90% sometimes or 49.60% never Download an app for your phone

If I’m a brand then I’ve to start questioning why I’d created an app when the stats above don’t look so good for that. 56.30% of the people polled have Internet access on their phones but almost 43% of people don’t use it and another 49.60% have never download an app to their phone. That’s a scary number when you think that the 1,000 people polled for this report represent the majority of the US with broadband access, but will never see your mobile website. If these connect consumers are saying that 42.20% of them sometimes or 30.90% of them never read blogs produced by products or brands. Then as a brand I’ve to ask myself a few important questions:

Why are so many brands producing corporate blogs?
Do I really want to go after about 70%+ of these connect consumers who don’t read my blog , let along subscribe by RSS feed?
Should I listen to my agency when they say we need content that these connect consumers don’t care about?

I can’t really answer question 1 because I’m not in the boardroom with the C-suits when this idea is talked about. However, for questions 2 & 3 the answer is no. In fact you should fire your agency if they tell you to go about this 70%. You don’t want to go after these connected consumers that are the majority of this report because they are never going to see your content, media or anything you produce. You may want to go after the other 30% and smaller minorities that make up these “connected consumers” because these are the people this report should have been based on. I want to know what the people who read blogs, download apps and interactive with me really know. I don’t care about the percent who only follow me for exclusive deals. These aren’t going to be future brand ambassadors to my company.

* 18 – 24 Years Old = 11.70%
25 – 36 Years Old = 33.70%
37 – 44 Years Old = 26.40%
45 – 55 Years Old = 28.20%

**CHOICE                              FREQUENCY           PERCENT
San Francisco Bay Area   50                                5.00%
Seattle                                 43                                4.30%
Dallas                                  50                                5.00%
Atlanta                                50                                5.00%
New York City                   48                                4.80%
Chicago                               51                                 5.10%
Miami                                  42                                4.20%
Boston                                 50                                5.00%
Washington, D.C.              50                                5.00%
Los Angeles                        50                                5.00%
Other                                   516                               51.60%
TOTALS                              1,000                           100.00%

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Redesigning a Website

Duane Brown — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:12:36 +0000

A client asked me to take a look at their website and give my opinion of it. The client is in the video game space and trying to gain a mixed balance between male and female gamers, which can be hard for some sectors and games within our industry. I think they can do it if they focus on creating a great experience for each of their customer.

I get a few web projects a year from clients asking if I handle that on top of my work I do with them in strategy and research. Using what I know about usability and reading; 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines , has given me the creative ideas I need to put together a mock up for the client tomorrow. I’m going to show them how I reenvision the home page and make better use of the space, colour and common human behavour.

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Social media practitioner survey

Duane Brown — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:55:15 +0000

Bud Caddell is a strategist over at Undercurrent, which is a think tank. He’s trying to put together a survey looking at social media from a practitioners point of view.

The objective of this survey is to gain a greater understanding of how social media is put in practice by agencies and clients, including: how objectives are defined, how results are measured, who is doing the work, the level of compensation, and what resources are most popular among practitioners.

Who should take the survey?
Anyone that handles social media strategy, manages a social media team (internal or external), or conducts social media outreach on behalf of or within a brand.

Survey: http://bit.ly/socialmediasurvey

The survey won’t take more then 10 minutes. I encouage you to get out there and take it. The more people who take it, the better the results will be.

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Canadians don’t care about the long tail of search

Duane Brown — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:10:15 +0000

BMO logo

Hitwise just released their second post on Canadians and our search patterns yesterday. It seems leading up to May 30th, 2009, 51.56% of Canadian search terms contained one or two words. The long tail is all about 3 or 4 words search and that makes up roughly 32% of the searches for the same twelve week time period. According to the post, the UK seems to veery simialr to us. However, it’s the US where the long tail of search is starting to take hold. Searches using 3 words is comparable to two words and leaves one word searches in the dustry. This begs the questions,.. why?

Delving a bit deeper, we looked at search terms sending visits to a number of categories. Shopping and Classifieds websites broadly mirror the pattern for All Categories while search terms sending visits to Travel and to News and Media websites tend to be slightly longer. By contrast, 41.87% of search terms sending Canadian visits to Banks and Financial Institutions contained one word.

One word searches for Banks and Financial Institutions makes a lot of sense since most of our banks are abbriveated to a few letters/ one to two words these days. Do you see this trend continuing in Canada? Or are we going to a future more enline with the UK & US?

Update: Check out the latest post from HItwise that follows this posts theme: What Canadians are Searching for Online

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Canadians Spending Time Online

Duane Brown — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:29:09 +0000

Hitwise just launched in Canada recently. Their inaugural post is about How Canadians Spend Their Time Online. The following are the top 5 popular parent categories for Hitwise data:
Search Engines

Social Networks & Forums

Entertainment

Email Service

Business & Finance

Search Engines attract a much larger share of visits in Canada than in the US or UK. Search Engines account for a 53% larger share of Canadian internet visits compared to the US and 22% larger than the UK. Social Networks, Entertainment (in particular YouTube) and web based email are also much more popular (as measured by share of Internet visits) in Canada than in the UK and US. Conversely, Adult and Shopping and Classifieds attract a much smaller share of visits in Canada than in either the UK or US.

You can check out of the full post, which I think is a great comparence is my post yesterday about Canadians Social Media Habits. It’s great to see more firms breaking out Canadian data and not just lumping us into the US. I find we get left off of some global reports, which I’m extremely glad to see is changing.

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Canadians Social Media Habits

Duane Brown — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:05:22 +0000

One Degree has a mini-post about Delvinia and their recent survey about Canadians and our use of social media. You can go and check out the post: Even More Social Media Stats about Canadians. Results are based on 11,559 regionally and demographically representative* AskingCanadians™ panelists surveyed, 50/50 gender split, broken down as follows:

1,112 were 18-30 year olds (NGen)
3,432 were 31-44 year olds (Gen X)
6,222 were 45-65 year olds (Boomers)
793 65+ were olds 65+

Some of the high lights from the survey include:

Canada’s view towards Social Networking:

83% of female Canadians aged 18-30 feel digital technology allows for easier social connections, compared to their male counterparts at 76%.
Only 6% of NGen and 4% of Gen X report visiting recent media darling, Twitter, in the last month. The same as other, less talked about social networks including Hi5, DIGG and Tagged.

SHARING INFORMATION

When sharing information online, here’s how Canadians felt:

Only the majority of NGen are comfortable sharing demographic information (53%) – the majority of all other generations are neutral or not comfortable sharing information like their age, gender and marital status.

*Representative of Canada, based on Stats Can figures

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The Digital Gamer: All Grown Up?

Duane Brown — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:36:56 +0000

Nintendo Wii - Mario Kart - Digital Gamers

On Monday the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog posted The Grown-Up Gamer. As a digital marketer and gamer I decided to check out the article. I thought it would provide me with some new knowledge or bring a unique perspective to the search game. However, the article mainly focused on how gamers are mostly 25 – 54 and that as marketers we shouldn’t be ignoring this target group by just advertising to kids.

Wait! Gamers aren’t kids anymore..? This can’t seriously pass as news worthy in 2009. Its great that Neilson’s did the study and Yahoo felt like posting it but the Entertainment Software Association has been posting this type of demographic information year over year for as long as I can remember. Just look at their industry facts page:

Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).
Sixty-five percent of American households play computer or video games.
The average game player is 35 years old and has been playing games for 13 years.
In 2008, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 50 played video games, an increase from nine percent in 1999

Major newspapers around the world, The Economist and Business Week are covering the industry as more people move towards gaming as their chosen form of entertainment. With the added benefit of games like Halo & Grand Theft Auto and campaigns like I love Bees having brought video games and interactive entertainment into the mainstream even more. The average age of a gamer should not be considered news. If you are in marketing and you don’t know this. Then I believe you’ve been living under a rock of the last 6+ years.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user World of Oddy.

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Planners Unite – Toronto: April 9, 2009 from 2-6pm

Duane Brown — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:37:08 +0000

I’m having the pleasure of getting the chance to attend Planners Unite – Toronto next Thursday April 9, 2009. From the event page:

Interested in marketing strategy? Come on out to Planners Unite - the (hopefully) first in a regular series of events for the strategic planning community in Toronto. It will be equal parts socializing and inspiration, with some great guest speakers to provoke ideas and discussion.

Our Keynote is Mark Earls (AKA Herdmeister). His latest book, “HERD” has won much applause. Mark is a recovering account planner who now works independently out of London under the banner of HERD Consulting. Prior to HERD, Mark was Chair of the Global Planning Group at Ogilvy Worldwide and Planning Director of the radical creative co-operative St Luke’s.

The other speakers:

Laurence Bernstein: Innovating market research using behavioural economics, the wisdom of crowds, and predictive markets.

Matthew Milan and Michael Anton Dila: Innovation Parkour: a new method to find innovative answers to complex strategic problems.

Sean Howard: The Passion Economy

Jason Oke: Event chair & moderator

If you are going to the event, I would love to connect and meet other local planners… digital or otherwise. You can find & connect with me on Twitter (@DuaneBrown) upto and including event day. I’m also hoping to write up a post or two for OneDegree as well. See you there.

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The Importance of Market Research

Duane Brown — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:02:26 +0000

There was a time 6 years ago when I didn’t believe in market research and the importance that it can play in the livelihood of a business. I was a bright-eyed 20 year old taking my first market research class.Up until that point the only market research I ever came into contact with was during government elections.

Flash forward 6 years: having done more then a few academic and real-world market research studies for both national and international clients, I can firmly tell you that the end results can reveal more about a business, industry, clients and employees than you may already know. Market research is like the smart kid in school who knew everything and was always right.

One of the best examples from my past experience was when a client wanted to apply for a government grant. They had an idea of who they thought their target market was and wanted to put that on their grant application form. After finding out that the number was more of a guess than based on hard facts, I asked for some time to complete some market research to find a more accurate demographic profile for them. After a full week and 60+ hours later, I was able to prove that their demographic was about 10 years younger than they thought and included more Gen Y than originally planned for.

Since that early project I’ve seen the power of market research. It can be costly both in time and finances but the results can only help your business. Plus not doing any market research can end up costing you more in the long run if you make the wrong decision. Market research won’t solve every problem, but it can help you better understand your business and make a more informed decision.

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