Author Archives: SeanB

The NEW Consumer Purchase Funnel

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I’ve just read a really interesting article from those learned folk over at McKinsey’s about the Consumer Decision Journey and thought it well worth sharing:

McKinsey's Consumer Decision Journey

Click above to read the McKinsey article

McKinsey’s have also posted a nifty 5 min video that takes you through their thinking here: http://tr.im/pIzL

They’ve been out speaking to consumers and doing some qual research looking into how the modern shopper goes about purchasing stuff. What they’ve found is that the traditional purchase funnel (Awareness -> Familiarity -> Consideration -> Purchase -> Loyalty) is not as linear as we once thought. There are no major surprises here, but the more interesting point that they have made is that consumers tend to go from a repertoire of a small number of brands in any given category (there’s some research suggesting this is as low as 3/4 per category, but I can’t find the source – post a comment if you have any ideas!) to a much larger repertoire as they do more research on their purchase.

Whilst it’s obviously important to try and be a part of a consumer’s initial, small repertoire of brands, this also supports the idea that it’s just as important to be visible when consumers are researching your category as well. And where best to be when consumers are researching? Our favourite fact-finding tool: Search.

For a challenger brand that finds it difficult to break into the top 3/4 brands in their category this could be a valuable learning.  Running an ongoing, consistent search campaign that adds them to a consumer’s consideration set is a much more cost-efficient and lower risk strategy for gaining market share than trying to directly compete with the big boys. Let them do the heavy-lifting of getting consumers into the category and then mop consumers up whilst they’re doing their research. It’s a given that this will work much better in some categories than others (high interest vs. low interest categories), but is definitely something worth bearing in mind for some of our clients in 2010.

Let us know your thoughts below…

Useful and Interesting 12.06.09

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This week the Binns has mostly been working, which is why we’re picking up the reigns to deliver this week’s Useful and Interesting post. We’ll probably get into trouble for this, but rather against the grain we’re giving the post a very contemporary feel by adding Capital Letters and punctuation ;)

1) http://tr.im/og1d

First up, an interesting article on how one of the original open-source communities is nailing grass-roots marketing. Mozilla (who create Firefox, the 2nd most widely used browser behind Microsoft’s behemoth) is spending nothing but man-hours and competing (successfully) against some huge marketing budgets from the aforementioned M-soft and Apple. It may not be replicable, but certainly food for thought about whether or not online marketing should have any media spend at all…

2) http://tr.im/og2P

Following this theme, here is a collection of 10 fantastic presentations that explain what Social Media is and why it’s important. Our favourite is the appropriately titled ‘What The F*ck Is Social Media?’… File this under useful.

3) http://tr.im/og5n

This is a post called ‘Fluff vs. Meaning’. Whilst we think it’s more the former than the latter, it does make a good point – context is everything. All too often clients and agencies operate in their own safety-bubbles and fail to grasp the wider context that their marketing/communications operate in. It’s our job to open their eyes through the medium of insights and bring everyone around the table back down to Earth. This is what zig-zagging is all about.

4) http://tr.im/og79

Seems like one of our favourite bloggers is talking at the annual dConstruct conference this year. For those of you not in the know (and we weren’t until we stumbledupon his blog) it’s a conference about design for tomorrow. Whilst this doesn’t seem immediately relevant, what Mr. Davies is talking about is how our data is not only increasingly getting ‘spread’ around the web but will soon be escaping the web and becoming physical again. It’s what the uber-geeks are geeking out about and here’s an example of what it is  – http://tr.im/og8C

Well, that was a bit of a whirlwind but we hope you enjoyed it.

As the man would say – Peace.

Sean B, Ben & Tim

Is this the future of Outdoor?

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If you haven’t seen this month’s Wired magazine (July issue) you really should. The main feature (entitled ‘You Will Buy Me’) has 9 fantastic articles discussing how marketers are increasingly using new technologies to try and influence consumers’ purchasing behaviour.

You can see two themes developing here – firstly, I do like Wired magazine…very much. Secondly, this is becoming a bit of a series of ‘Is this the future…?’ posts…

Anyway, one of these articles (click below to read more) discusses how a company in the US is mounting ‘face tracking’ cameras onto their Digital Outdoor sites:

Is adding camera to Outdoor sites a good idea? (Wired Magazine, July '09) - Click to read article

Is adding cameras to Outdoor sites a good idea? (Wired Magazine, July '09)

Adding this technology to Digital Outdoor sites allows the advertiser to do 2 things. Firstly they can use face recognition to (roughly) determine who’s looking at the advertising (Male/Female, Young/Old etc.) and then ‘serve’ an appropriate message for them. Secondly they can work out how many of the consumers walking past an ad actually look at it. Sounds brilliant, but it got me thinking:

Firslty, if all Outdoor sites had this technology then we would be able to be much more targeted with our Outdoor communications. However, does this not work against one of Outdoor’s main strengths of being the only truly broadcast medium left?

Secondly, and the most compelling for me, is that this technology would be able to make Outdoor advertising perfectly measurable and truly on a par with the accountability of Online.

The problem with all of this is that’s it’s fantastic for advertisers but not necessarily great for consumers. Whilst you could argue that consumers benefit from receiving tailored messages, the other side of the coin is that it could be seen as an invasion of their privacy. This is probably much less of a problem in the ‘CCTV-age’ we live in but will still be seen by some as a step too far.

What do you think – is this a good way of making Outdoor more targeted and accountable or is it too much of an invasion of consumers’ privacy? Let us know what you think:

Is adding 'face recognition' cameras to Outdoor sites a good idea?

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How To…Win A Debate

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Hello FTMFers,

I have recently been gorging myself on the new edition of Wired magazine and came across an interesting article that I thought worth sharing:

How To Win A Deabte (Wired Magazine, July '09)

Article on How To Win A Deabte (Wired Magazine, July '09)

I think this advice provides some valuable lessons on how we can persuade clients to buy into our campaign strategies and may even be of use in the odd Reckonomics session or two…

What debating/story telling tips have you got to share?

Is this the future of Newspapers?

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I was browsing one of my favourite new media sites this morning (If you haven’t already, you really should check out Mashable – http://mashable.com) and came across an interesting article on what the NY Times is up to these days:

The Paper Without The Paper

The Paper Without The Paper - click above to read more

Whilst the article mostly concentrates on how the NY Times is digitally recreating the ‘analogue’ reading experience (it’s also worth reading some of the comments on the article too for more of a user persepctive) it got me thinking:

If fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for their news content (or any content for that matter) and more and more people are demanding more ‘real-time’ news (as seen by the rise of twitter and ‘real-time’ search) – where does this leave our black and white paper bretheren?

Will consumers still crave the physical experience of reading their daily rag and value their editorial viewpoint or will newspapers become fully digital and exist solely on iPhones, Amazon Kindles and the like?

I suppose only time will tell, but i’m an impatient bugger – let us know what you think on the poll or if you’re feeling frisky join in the discussion below:

Will newspapers remain analogue or go totally digital?

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