Posts filed under 'Understanding users'
Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.
In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by “interface.” (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into “Original” and “New with XYZ.” In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the “features.”
Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??
Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.
We all know that youth talk about certain products as “sooo last year.” This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is “so middle school” and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption “10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.”
Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to “personalize” your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?
I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.
If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.
Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me - you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.
Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.
February 23rd, 2008
CBS Mobile have announced the first US trial of location-based advertising to mobiles, in partnership with Loopt, the friend tracking and networking site. The service will be opt-in and the ads will arrive at CBS web sites on subscribers’ phones. Having worked on ‘future concepts’ of this kind some years ago (with the luxury of not having to join up the underlying technology, nor worry about the protection of individuals’ privacy) it will be interesting to see the service develop. (In fact the concept I worked on was peer-to-peer, rather than advertiser-to-consumer: a sort of location based Gumtree, where individuals could advertise rooms to let, yoga classes, lost cats etc. And I’m sure such a mobile service will emerge sooner or later.)
I wonder how many people will opt in to the CBS Mobile service and, once in, will use their web sites often enough to get the benefits of the advertising. It will, of course, depend on what the deal is and whether the content is enticing. With the delivery format as described, it’s likely to be a service people with conventional cell phones use when they have some down-time ‘let’s see if there’s anything interesting near here’ rather than always on. How many times would you go through the process of accessing a web site and finding nothing relevant to you before you stopped altogether? Still it’s early days and I’m sure this is nothing CBS Mobile and Loopt haven’t thought of.
If the location-based element is combined with personal profiling the service could be powerful, e.g. just as I’m going into a bookshop to buy a birthday present for someone, I’m notified that there’s a sale on all SciFi (having previously listed SciFi in a profile of my reading). Anecdotally it seems there might be broadly two sorts of response to this kind of prompt: some would welcome it (just as they welcome Amazon recommendations ‘those who bought this, also bought…’); and some would dislike the intrusion (and probably wouldn’t sign up to the service anyway). In any case, the combination of location and personalisation might be too ‘micro-personalised’ for advertisers who may want to prompt more serendipitous buying. And (although it’s hard to tell from the available information) that sort of personalisation may not be possible with the current CBS Mobile plan, where advertising is to be delivered anonymously.
Now that mobile advertising is up and running in several different implementations it will take some time before effective delivery formats bed down i.e. until users vote with their feet about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And my suspicion is that it might be quicker on mobiles than on traditional internet (i.e. via computers), where many companies continue to use advertising practices that frustrate users (despite the admonishments of usability guru, Jacob Nielsen). With mobile phones, however, there’s less space and, in most, less processing power to play with, plus a sensitivity to cost that is largely absent from computer use. Indeed the whole context for use differs dramatically from the computer. So people’s acceptance of formats that don’t suit their actual use of the phone may be limited.
So much of acceptance depends on the right implementation for the device being used and the context of use, as a quote from John Strand, attending this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, highlights
“One thing is to come out with an announcement. The next is to deliver. At the end of the day, the user decides who is the winner and who is the loser. The winner is the one who can give the best experience.”
Thanks to Richard Linington for pointing out the CBS Mobile/Loopt announcement.
February 12th, 2008
Blyk had many pixels of trade press last week. Yet because of its softly, softly launch many people still don’t know about it. When I describe it to people who haven’t come across it I usually get two, polarised reactions (sometimes from the same individual):
‘Great, it’s about time someone tried a new approach to mobile phone charges.’
‘Eeuch, there’s enough advertising around already.’
However tentative Blyk members may feel about receiving advertising on their phones, it seems some are responding to the experience. Blyk has reported an average 29% response rate to its ads and last week revealed a 45% response rate to a campaign by Penguin Books, where members could click from the ad to download an audio chapter of Nick Hornby’s book, ‘Slam’. This kind of statistic is, of course, great news for Blyk. It may also surprise sceptics who might not have expected Blyk’s advertising to include book downloads (to be fair this is just one element of Blyk’s advertising mix). The success of this specific ad also suggests that when the content is right, and the process of accessing it is smooth, and free, people will begin to use phone functionality beyond texting and calling (although there’s no doubt these remain primary).
The response to the Penguin campaign is good news for book publishers, too. Statistics for book reading are depressingly low, and some, including Steve Jobs and Michael Hirschorn (not surprisingly, of the computing and TV industries, respectively) are saying reading’s a thing of the past. The web is a great place for committed readers to share their thoughts via book clubs and forums, but generally it competes, alongside TV, for potential readers’ attention.
So in order to build readership it makes sense to go where your readers might be. Paul Coelho, who seems to have a very shrewd understanding of his audience, has claimed that pirating his own books on the web increased sales of the books themselves. Not surprisingly, Coelho’s initiative generated far fewer column inches than Radiohead’s free album download: most book publishing lacks the scale and glamour of rock music; besides a book delivered by the web is a much less consumable item than music, so there is a more obvious path from web delivery to buying the book itself.
And it’s this path that Penguin are following. Last year they partnered with social networking site Piczo to promote six classics to a young teen audience. Now they have taken a punt on Blyk. So I say three cheers for Penguin (those who regret that this was an audio, rather than written, download will, perhaps, allow two and a half cheers). For the sake of authors, book publishers and, most importantly, potential readers, I hope the punt pays off.
February 4th, 2008
More stats have come through showing use of the web from the iPhone. It looks pretty solid: Google traffic from US iPhones (2% of the market) is about level with traffic from Symbian operated phones (63% of the market). Even if you factor in that iPhone users might be particularly inclined to access the web or that iPhone is still a novelty there is, as John Naughton points out, a lesson here. In a different context Quentin Stafford-Fraser comments ‘pixels are like broadband. Once you have them you don’t want to give them up’. And what iPhone demonstrates is that when pixels are limited applications need substantial design effort, right from user interface through to underlying processing, if they are to produce a good user experience. Without that design effort we might accept fewer pixels in exchange for mobility, but we may also limit the tasks we do on the move, saving the more demanding ones for a large display, possibly more processing power, efficient input device and the environmental comfort that a desktop or laptop computer is likely to bring.
Is this just a fogey’s view of the world? I have seen teens make these ‘horses for courses’ choices too, with the significant dimension of cost also putting them off accessing the internet from their phones. Last week on Digital Youth Research’s blog danah told the story of a teenager buying a dress, and using a suite of digital tools to help her make the best purchase. While possibly at the more extreme end of consumer decision-making the story reflected a trend of digital trying-before-buying. And the teenager’s choice of tools all made sense: a digital camera to take pictures of herself in a range of potential dresses (probably better lens than her phone camera and more memory for multiple images, also saving her phone battery for text and talk); Facebook on her computer to circulate pictures (ease of selecting pictures to send on her computer, larger images for her friends to view, and way, way cheaper to exchange images and get feedback via Facebook than MMS) and, similarly, computer to research her decision and find the best possible price (‘free’, fast, usable interface and lots of visual bandwidth). Her choices were made effortlessly as part of the flow of using digital technologies. Why should she have compromised her project at critical points by sacrificing pixels, or processing power, or comfort (the current corollaries of ‘fixed’ computing)?
When iPhone was launched in the UK a journalist asked my opinion on whether mobile phones would now become an important medium for creating and sharing marketing presentations in business – to be fair, this angle probably wasn’t his choice. Yes, one can see contexts where mobile presentations could add to the mix of business communications but, also, no, a key role for marketing presentations is for shared exchanges between presenter and audience, ideally in the same place (video-conferencing sometimes bridges gaps, but isn’t most people’s first option). It’s hard to see how a presentation delivered to a mobile phone could have the same impact as a shared exchange (will I regret saying this?); it might support or augment a traditional communication, but wouldn’t seem to be the medium of choice.
The iPhone web data open up the horizons for mobile browsing. But let’s not extrapolate from this to ‘everything mobile’. We connect through physical as well as virtual space (and weren’t Nintendo clever to recognise this). The things we do have cognitive, emotional and social components that can’t all be supported by hand-held devices. A friend recently described his iPhone as ‘THE best device I’ve ever owned.’ I’ve no doubt about that. But just as digital communication has not yet made us paperless, so the larger scale and (relatively) fixed technologies have their role which will be augmented, rather than completely supplanted, by mobile connectivity.
January 17th, 2008
I want to respond to danah’s post at some length, hence a separate posting. To understate the case, our relationship to advertising is a complex one. We can recoil when we read reports of advertisers’ manipulative practices, yet we can also enjoy advertising, and find it genuinely informative; while it’s often a delight to escape advertising in unspoilt landscapes, we have probably driven our branded car to get there, are sporting branded outdoor gear etc. etc. I suspect there are as many inconsistencies in our attitudes to new media advertising as to traditional media. So, for example, the same people who complain about pop ups and banner ads in web pages (and, yes, there is evidence that advertising on web sites disrupts processing of site content) may also be watching and sharing favourite ads on YouTube. We’re in it to the hilt.
So advertising is part of popular culture, much of which we may not particularly want to espouse, nor to see influence our children. There is conflicting data concerning children’s understanding of advertising, and its influence on their decision-making (always a good idea to look at who is publishing the data). Some suggest that children become sceptical about advertising pretty early on (we might question whether this a scepticism we want our children to develop; my understanding is that the French, who have light regulation on advertising to children, take the view that it’s part of growing up). Most European countries have some restrictions on TV advertising to children, with Sweden at the most stringent end of the scale and the UK among the more relaxed. And there may be downsides to these restrictions: the British advertisers’ association, the IPA, have claimed that in Greece, where there is a restriction on advertising toys during children’s TV, there has been a reduction in the quality of children’s programming, with cheap imports substituting for more expensive, locally-generated programmes (it’s their role to point to these kinds of consequences, of course). Recent UK restrictions on TV advertising of junk food to children have seen a migration of advertising to the net. I don’t think we yet know what influence it has there but it’s hardly likely that businesses would be investing in it if they didn’t think it would have some effect. Marketing takes the opportunities that are available and if we want the benefits advertising brings (e.g. sponsored events, broadcasting, on-line experiences, phone services etc.) we also have to be aware of its impact and vigilant for potential abuse.
And if the impact of advertising in our everyday lives is complex so, too, is our role in working for companies of all kinds that use advertising to promote their products or sponsor their activities. In the UK there was a ripple of press reports in 2003 when a collection of documents from advertising agencies working on campaigns for tobacco manufacturers revealed an agency’s derogatory classification of their market segments, including a description of some smokers (low income) as ‘slobs’. It’s not hard to see how these cynical attitudes can develop if, at best, a company’s only contact with its customers is to herd groups of them into a strange environment and observe them from behind a two-way mirror in the forced discussion of a focus group. Hardly a recipe for empathy. Short-hand labels for customer segments are efficient for internal communication, but they are only a key to the real people, with everyday lives, emotions, aspirations, behind the labels.
How can we mitigate the distanced cynicism that tempts companies into manipulative advertising practices or, for that matter, to ship untested goods, plan obsolescence into products, snare unwitting customers into providing personal data that can be traded, fail to deliver adequate customer support and so on? We have to recognise that business has its agenda and it’s not the same as its customers’, although some congruence is needed for a business to succeed. As researchers we have a role - albeit a relatively small one - in creating that congruence. The closer a business is to its customers, and the more it understands them, the more opportunities it has to choose not to be exploitative, to be humanely human-centred. The conventional research recipe of clusters of regional focus groups are not going to raise executives’ social consciousness. We have to push for imaginative approaches to doing and presenting research that keeps the internal team as close as possible to its external customers. That can mean working outside our own comfort zone sometimes, experimenting with new methods, learning new techniques. The subtleties of different research approaches may not be of interest to the people who use our research, but as researchers we’re guardians of the methods being used, and the conclusions that are drawn from them.
January 10th, 2008
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