Perspectives on Consumers

I was asked to participate in this with relatively short notice, so I reserve the right to change my mind about this as I think about it more!  However, for now…

My top five market research trends moving forward:

• The ability to accurately code open text/real language, which I expect will make great advances in the coming years, will enhance our ability to manage and analyze large volumes of data; the ability to be in touch with consumers’ thoughts/feelings in this way will elevate the role of the consumer researcher within organizations
• More interviewing will be done from remote locations (e.g., mobile, iPad kiosks).  This sounds obvious, but I don’t think we’ve seen the full impact of wireless technology on our industry yet
• MROC (market research online communities) will continue to evolve; for those who can’t afford their own, syndicated services will emerge
• How reports are delivered, and what they include (multimedia, the structure of implications, etc.), may be the way in which companies further distinguish themselves from one another.  (This has always been the case, but with technology, large and small companies will really need to work hard to stay ahead – a dated look will suggest dated thinking)
• The “anyone over 55 isn’t important” mindset (often held among advertising agencies and clients) will be seriously challenged in the next few years; related to this, matching targets to interviewing methods will contribute to even more mixed method studies

My five less-than-hot issues:

• Interest in certain types of social media research may cool among larger clients (just because “we can” doesn’t mean we always get valuable insights)
• Physiological testing, such as fMRIs, may not develop further as there are health/privacy-related issues to conducting this type of testing
• Respondent privacy issues will continue to discussed as the technologies evolve; while this issue isn’t “hot,” it’s still critical
• Back to basics:  it’s hard to find people who really do a great job recruiting for qualitative research and more emphasis will be placed on this by the community overall
• The debate about “the focus group is dead” will die back, as it always does; it’s just part of the cycle of what’s hot and what’s not.  We make it “hot” again by inventing new approaches to answer today’s (and tomorrow’s) questions

YouTube recently announced its new(ish) TrueView ad system, which allows visitors to skip ads they’re not interested in.  Specifically, “viewers can choose to skip a video ad after 5 seconds, and you only pay when the viewer has watched the full ad or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter.”  (source: Google AdWords) View-through rates during the testing phase were between 20-70%.

Some in the ad community are happy with this trend as it allows them only to pay for those ads viewed.  (That assumes consumers are watching and aren’t in the middle of multi-tasking when the ad is running – but that’s always been an issue.)

In the online world, pay-per-click has been around since the mid-1990s.  The fact that this could be done for video and have appeal shouldn’t be a surprise.

With YouTube in particular, advertisers have been creating and posting special videos for quite some time, hoping a message goes viral.  So this isn’t a passive ad placement channel to begin with.

However, I’m not sure how YouTube’s new system would translate to less video-intensive sites.  Maybe the “choose one of three ads” approach, an option we’re seeing on several other sites, will become the better ad model for those outlets.  It requires some captive attention and, by picking, consumers might be more likely to view the ad in this setting vs. the way video ads are run today.

Your thoughts?

After 10 years, my Volvo needed to be replaced.  I don’t drive that much, so a car is less important to me than a new computer, for example.  But I do live in LA, where having a car isn’t an option.

I wanted to buy American.  I’ve never owned an American car before, yet given these economic times, I thought supporting US jobs was an important thing to do.  And I did my homework, taking more than a month to narrow my decision down to four cars.

As I’m sure you know, what “American” is can be debated, so I ended up with a couple of cars on my list that have a greater connection to US jobs than did some of the American cars I considered.

It’s not important that I ended up with a Hyundai Sonata.  What is important is that my experiences at a couple of Ford dealerships turned me off completely to that brand.

The first Ford experience was in Santa Monica.  The very first day I started looking, I stopped in to just look at a couple of cars.  I was told that all the sales people were in a meeting and no one could help me.  This was on a Friday at 1PM.  How is it that you leave no one on the floor at all?  When the president gives his state of the union address, one cabinet member gets left behind.  They couldn’t do this at the dealership?  The woman at the desk was less than helpful:  there was no literature out and when she called for someone to come with some, they never came; after 10 minutes of waiting, I left, never to return.  (The receptionist’s comment:  “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”)

While the Marina Ford dealership at least had someone on the floor who was nice and a manager who seemed engaged, and the Valencia dealer had a lovely salesman (who, for whatever reason, seemed a bit inflexible on price), it was the Galpin Ford dealership Sunday afternoon that sealed the “can’t-buy-a-Ford” deal.

Yes, we were greeted before entering the showroom.  I was looking at test driving a Fusion.  As we started our drive, I asked the salesman if there was anything he wanted to tell me about the car.  His answer:  “If you’re interested in it after you’ve driven it, I’ll tell you more about it then.”  What?  Don’t you want me to fall in love with the car when I’m driving it?  Sell me on all its cool features?

The car was actually a bit more comfortable for me to drive than the Sonata.  Not by much, but enough for me to consider exploring price, despite his off-putting sales style.  So…

First, they didn’t have a car with the options I wanted – just the more expensive package was available.  (And if I wanted that options package, they could order it, but he said it would take 8-10 weeks for it to arrive.  When I got my Volvo, they didn’t have the car with the options I wanted at the dealer I bought it from; they arranged for me to get the car from an unrelated dealership in a town close by.)

Next there was the nearly $600 in car-alarm related features that I didn’t need – which was a Galpin thing that you just had to accept.  “We put it on all our cars because our customers want it”  Well, I’m a customer who didn’t want it or need it.  I had no option – and it seemed like it was just another way for them to make a profit.

And then there was the extra closing costs, that if I remember correctly, ran another $400.  The one item that got to me was the $102 to prep my car for delivery.  That’s washing the car and filling it with gas – something every other dealer I’ve ever visited throws in for free at the time of sale.

And finally, the guy didn’t even know all the incentive programs Ford was running at the time or he chose not the mention the big “year end event” promotion terms.

We were then asked, “If you don’t have any other questions, I have another person waiting for help in the showroom.”  No hand shake, no business card, no good-bye.

As we were driving back to the Hyundai dealer, my sister who’s spent most of her life in sales, was recounting the worst bits of this over and over again – something she’ll only do when the situation is egregious.  Shockingly bad is all I can say.

And it doesn’t matter to me how many times the salesman said Galpin is the largest Ford dealership – this isn’t the way that you get someone to support an American (or any) company.  In fact, it epitomized the “ugly American” stereotype that Europeans often accuse us of:  boorish, superior, with a bit of stupid thrown in for good measure.

While I’m not a mystery shopper, if I were, this isn’t a report I’d want to get if I were the client.  Am I soured on buying American wherever else I can? Certainly not.  But it’s unlikely that next time I shop for a car Ford will even make my list, which is a shame.  You can have the best product around, but if you have a lousy representative, it’s all for naught.

P.S.  Can you tell me why the name plates on Chevy and Ford need to be so ugly?  And big?  On the Chevy in particular, it was a real turn-off.

Back in April, I blogged on Linked Data.  Linked Data advances the notion of “Web” searchability, whereby databases “talk” to each other so that more complex answers can be obtained.  (E.g., which football players went to the University of Texas, Austin and played for the Dallas Cowboys as cornerback?)

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in Newsweek on Qwiki.  It won the TechCrunch Disrupt award this year and I think it’s well deserved.  It advances searchability in another direction.

Currently in Alpha (you have to apply or I can invite you to join), there are a few (expected) bumps, but what they’ve done is pretty amazing.  Each “video” pulls together information from different Web sources on a given topic; over time it’ll include more sources.  The video talks and shows corresponding pictures to help explain the who, what, and where.  At the end of the video, it recommends other, related videos to watch.

I explored Los Angeles, my hometown, and learned a few new things about our weather patterns. Want to see a comic book example?  View the video below.

With this advancement, the Internet opens up the world to people in new ways.  Certainly, if I were planning a vacation to a new city, a resource like this would be useful.  But imagine its potential for interactive learning, for people who aren’t as computer savvy, for people with motor or visual impairments, etc.

I’m very excited by this advancement and look forward to what’s next.  It also makes me a little sad that my grandfather is no longer with us:  if he thought a fax machine was nifty, he would have loved this!!

Let me know if you’d like me to send you an invite.

This month, after the Nielsen/PatientsLikeMe.com story broke in the WSJ, several of the market research forums and LinkedIn groups were abuzz.  The best of the lot was led by Tom Anderson of Anderson Analytics and his Next Gen Market Research group. 

In case you missed the dustup, here’s an excerpt from the WSJ.com article:

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.

Bilal Ahmed wrote about his health on a site that was scraped.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

I felt totally violated,” says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

After PatientsLikeMe told users about the break-in, Mr. Ahmed deleted all his posts, plus a list of drugs he uses. “It was very disturbing to know that your information is being sold,” he says. Nielsen says it no longer scrapes sites requiring an individual account for access, unless it has permission.

Coincidentally, the 11/1/10 issue of Newsweek has an article entitled “Privacy is Dead.”  The author, a young woman, describes a new “score” created to help employers understanding social media behaviors of potential employees.  For this article, she hired a company called ReputationDefender (who works to clean up online reputations, but has a mixed reputation themselves) to see what they could learn about her (a job they usually don’t do).  As she said:

Three Silicon Valley engineers, several decades of experience, and access to publically available databases like Spokeo, Facebook, and LinkedIn (no, they didn’t do any hacking) – and voila.  Within 30 minutes the company had my Social Security number; in two hours they knew where I lived, my body type, my hometown, and my health status.

As she points out, it’s one thing if employers get this info; another if it’s a credit-card company or data aggregator who is turning around and selling info on you to other companies for a profit.  And maybe these companies aren’t talking about what they’re doing;  end-clients may not know (or don’t ask) how these companies are so effective in reaching a marketer’s  target audience.

The “debate” centers on several factors: 

What is “Public”?  I think we all believe that if we post something to our own public blog, or to a public LinkedIn or Facebook group, or Twitter, there’s the expectation that people can “take it” for analysis.

The Gray Area.   I was never naïve enough to believe that sites weren’t using our information for profit in some way.  However, I did assume that there was a gatekeeper in place: 

Case 1:  Amazon makes recommendations to its own customers based on past shopping and purchasing behaviors.  This is a closed system; I know I have a relationship with Amazon.

Case 2:  Site A describes its user profile to Advertiser B.  Advertiser B says they’d like to reach just those who are, let’s say, unmarried women under the age of 30.  Site A says no problem, send over your ad, and using an ad-server engine delivers the ad to just the desired target.  (Okay, a lot more complicated than that, but similar to how magazine lists were “rented” in the past.)

The Ugly Underbelly.  But what’s going on is often ugly and/or dishonest:  lying to join sites to scrap content; changing a privacy policy after someone has signed up to create a loophole for selling what had been private info.  Facebook’s privacy issues over the past year is the most well-known example of this right now – and Congress continues to investigate. 

Nielsen is a very large and respected media research company.  However, this Nielsen case, in my opinion, is just another part of the ugly underbelly – “mindless parasites” that weren’t programmed to consider the ramifications of their methodology.    Nielsen joined PatientsLikeMe.com with the intent of eavesdropping, not participating as a member.  Not okay – and I respect them less for having done so.

The good companies doing social media (text) analysis will seek permission from a site to analyze its content for a client (who’s likely to be a potential advertiser).  You might ask why a company would agree to have their content scraped.  It’s simple:   It’s another revenue stream.

Setting Some Standards Today. 
There are many aspects to this debate and I really urge you to think about what the possible solutions might be.  The leading market research organizations around the world, including ESOMAR, are dealing with these topics right now.  In the meantime, here are my initial thoughts:

• If a comment was made on a public blog, it can be quoted in a report delivered to a client.
• If a quote was made by a member of a private site, with the permission of the site owner to look at the data, those findings should not be quoted, but can become part of the aggregated analysis.
• Reporting is a greater challenge for qualitative approaches which tend to rely on quotes. 
• Finally, Terms of Service will need to evolve so consumers have greater buy-in when they sign up and as policy changes are made.  Easy to say and really hard to do. 

Clearly this is a topic I’ll continue to watch closely as it impacts marketing research, including qualitative analysis of social media content.

Your thoughts?