Insights Come from Clues

What can we learn from product purchases?

In one of the most interesting cases of using data to create insights, the NYT reported and Forbes followed up on how Target figured out whether someone was pregnant. Using changes in product purchases the analytics team estimated the likelihood that a guest was pregnant and specifically in which trimester.

The marketing reason for such an analysis: identifying someone who is about to have a baby can be the basis for forming a long-term relationship. The business reason for doing so: If you can do that before other companies, the odds are much more in your favor of creating the habit that drives loyalty.

Those articles were shared by the boatload with lots of discussion.  The response was usually somewhere between cool and creepy; particularly when you start thinking about "selling the pregnancy score."  (Pic from that article.)

I'll leave the debate as to whether this goes beyond the boundaries of leveraging personal information to the ethicists.  From an analytic perspective, this a good example of how it should work.

1. Identify a question that hasn't been adequately answered before.
2. Attempt to infer the existence of a market based on what little we know.
3. Create, execute and refine a plan based on the clues.    

No report could have produced this type of analysis. 

Marketing Platforms and Human Behavior

Can marketing ever be automated?

The marketing of marketing technology fills our minds with the idea that it can be streamlined and automated.   However, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it can never be a hands-free process.   Consider the issues with email marketing where list decay, declining click thru rates, and better filters result in a constant battle to just stay even, never mind improving things. 

Like Sisyphus, we continue to believe we're making progress only to find up we are further behind.

To succeed at our jobs as marketers, which in my mind is about influencing choice, suggests we would be better off if we focused on consumer behavior.   We need to garner insights, understand content consumption habits, and anticipate the path to purchase.   Individually the verbs "garner, understand, and anticipate" don't strike me as things that can be automated very well.  And the combination of the three would be a daunting task indeed. 

The questions we should be constantly considering include:

• What would be of interest right now?
• How can we alter the probability of choosing us?
• What can we do to remove friction along the decision path?

Landscape of Marketing Technology

What works when and for whom?

With the myriad of platforms, vehicles, and tools available to marketers it seemed inevitable that someone would come up with a framework for understanding what works for whom and when. 

The Grocery Manufacturer's Association and Booz & Company released their fourth annual installment of 'Shopper Marketing' and while focused on the buying part of consumer behavior, it does offer a good framework for overlaying marketing objectives on top of technology. 

The key findings:

• Marketing spend  on helping consumers choose (buy) continues to rise faster than other categories.
• Deal seeking, particularly digital, continues to be integral to the decision-making process.
• Proliferation makes for a complex world complex that eschews testing for the tried and true.

The overlay of business objectives and path to purchase on top of the effectiveness of various vehicles is worth the read.  

The New Tenets of Marketing Plans

What are the foundations of marketing planning?

A recent request on what the technology trends are led to thinking about some core elements that now have to be a part of any discussion about marketing plans.

Mobile is the center of the experience.

• Point-Know-Buy:  Consumers will be able to find out about anything simply by pointing to it.  The trend is to understand any object, not just those with codes or embedded activation.   Great examples from trendwatching.    

• Showrooming:  in-store mobile commerce; the trend to leverage both a network (phone calls) and the Internet while standing in a store.    

• Wireless Wallet: cash and cards will be marginalized as the wallet itself pays for everything.   

 Consumption gives way to Sharing.

•  Continuation of a trend; sharable content will overtake content designed for consumption.  Time spent on Facebook is now >15% of Internet minutes.    

• Content Know Thyself: Intelligence will be built directly into content for tracking and linking;   based on personal conversations with Adobe folks. 

Marketing and CIO are Joined at the Hip.

• Digital advertising now exceeds 30% of spend; will push toward 50%.  Because we're dealing in bits – the advertising world is often a technology one first, a marketing one second.  Complexity of just display illustrated here by LUMA and simplified by PerfectMarket. 

• Contact platforms will first extend horizontally to cover channels and then move vertically up into the business.   Already seeing this with platforms moving from email to multi-channel management.

•  Marketing firms are creating 'chief marketing technology' roles that effectively join the CMO and CIO roles.

Modularity and Place Independence.

•  Stuff will simply be there.   While the cloud was originally thought of as a cost-saving alternative to the DIY Glasshouse; the unintended benefit is that content is accessible from anywhere.   From Dropbox, match from iCloud, to telematics in cars the notion of content storage as part of an app will evaporate.

•  Mashups will succumb to modules.   The open nature of APIs allowed individuals to create new things; but that doesn't always scale.  In its place will be higher-order modules that connect with a host platform. Facebook, Amazon, salesforce and Adobe all have visions of being the center of a Hub and Spoke architecture because they own a verb.  The best apps will disappear because they become part of the device.

Data Makes Decisions

•  Personalization, relevancy, and customization will be driven by the math – gone will be the sessions trying to prioritize offers.  If we can optimize a banner ad on a publisher's site for a particular set of eyes, we should be able to do it for coupons.  Real time bidding and other sophisticated analytics will be applied to flyers.     

•  Big Money from Big Data:  the ability to wrestle the sheer magnitude of data into submission, never mind gleaning insights, will be a premium.   McKinsey predicts a 50% gap in required skills by 2018.   

Guess I'll have to update those planning templates and dig out my old slide rule.

Markeing's Goal: Own a Verb

What's in a word?

Often in positioning a product or company we talk about owning a word: safety, easy, etc.  On NPR this morning with Mark Pincus of Zynga made an interesting point: Don't own just any word, own a human activity.

Quick, who owns:

Shop
Search
View
Share
Play

What's the combined value of those verbs?
What is the market cap of Amazon + Google + YouTube + Facebook + Zynga?
The 'next big thing' will own a verb.