How to make information affect behaviour?

I read an interesting article on how data which is coverted into information affects behaviour. Most often, all data analyzed and presented as information to users or even to customers may not necessarily have the desired impact to affect behaviour.

Here are some interesting perspectives and points that we need to think to help present data in a manner that can seriously help people change behaviour: 

1. Intuit/Mint are great examples of customers having their financial data(online) of where they spend their monies and how they invest & save. By uploading this data, do people change their behaviour to either spend less or save more? - Mint definitely believes so. According to Mint, they started as analysis tool but slowly progressed into providing insights to customers on their current behaviour and promoting actions that affect behaviour!
   
2. The question really is if data can help change behaviour, how do we present this data so that it really has a telling impact on the customers/users who are using it?
   

       The idea data according to this article that can help this is:

      a. Passive data ( The user has nothing to do with this data)

      b. Non-invasive

      c. Real-time

      d. Focussed ( Like a dashboard with key metrics)

      e. Linked in real-time to the desired effect

      f. Simple to gain insight and understand

      g.Linked to private and personal benefits ( Weight loss/gain)

      h. Linked to public benefits ( Reduces carbon footprint)

      i  Quirky positive feedback

      j. Non-threatening negative feedback

      k. Socially connected to take advantage of human nature

This led me to think how we present various data to our stakeholders across businesses and user departments today. We still have a long way to go especially given the fact that discovery of insights after mining the data, needs to be presented well for it to change behaviour across an organization. Also, if we want customers to either buy from us more or recommend alternative products or services, it needs to be done a lot more intuitively by presenting the facts & insights well to get them to consider our recommendation.   

 

Affiliate Marketing meets Social Marketing

With digital marketing taking centrestage, it time to reassess and evaluate age-old marketing techniques and adapt them to new digital world. Here's how Domino's Pizza is doing it.

Domino's Pizza is using the persuasive power  of socially connected consumers who have huge influence over each other; the key idea here is  how they harness that power and put it to work for thier brand—with rewards, of course, for the consumers in question.

Domino's Pizza has developed a widget that consumers can place on their social networking profile, blog or other online presence, which their friends can then click on in order to order a pizza. For every order, they get 0.5 percent of the sale.

 

Read more here

Talking to your CFO makes Marketing smarter!

The troubled economy is forcing corporate leaders to re-evaluate their spending plans across the board and marketing is not exempt. In reducing marketing budgets, corporate leaders face a difficult set of choices: How much is too much? Are we negatively impacting impacting Revenue producing potential with deep cuts.

Making these choices is particularly difficult if the marketing team lacks a systematic method of measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing spending and a proven method to link marketing spending to business outcomes.

According to Fred,all marketing investments do at least one of three things:

1.    They change customer perceptions in a way that encourages them to buy more.

2.    They provide temporary monetary incentives for customers to buy more.

3.    They make the brand more available so customers can buy more.

While budget cutting and planning for an economic downturn are never enjoyable, they can provide an opportunity for inserting greater rigor, and better capabilities and metrics to make marketing investments more effective in the long run.

See what Fred Geyer and Chiaki Nishino have to say about ‘Making Marketing Smarter Amidst the Cuts’.

http://www.prophet.com/downloads/articles/geyer-nishino-smarter.pdf

Also what this is doing is creating a much greater focus on Marketing accountability. Suddenly the CMO’s are talking to the CFO’s.

 The 2009 Association of National Advertisers (ANA)/Marketing Management Analytics' (MMA) Marketing Accountability Survey, which surveyed 95 senior-level marketers in June, revealed some surprising results. Despite a 75 percent decrease in marketers' marketing budgets this year, as well as 65 percent who said they were expected to drive more sales with the same or lower budget, marketing accountability programs have taken on a greater significance.

Some of those findings include:

1.    An increase in cross-functional marketing accountability teams. Thirty-two percent of respondents said their teams included representation from marketing, finance, and research, up 22 percent from 2008.

2.    An increase in speaking the language of finance. Thirty-eight percent agreed that marketing and finance share common metrics (up significantly from 27 percent).

3.    Use of more sophisticated analytics to determine marketing budgets. Seventeen percent of respondents said they use "what if" scenarios at different budget levels to determine sales and profits--more than double the response from the 2008 survey.

4.    A greater use of predictive modeling. Forty-three percent of respondents said they use customer lifetime value models as an accountability technique, up from 27 percent in the prior year's study.

 My take is the following:

1.    Have you created a set of metrics along with your CFO to measure the effectiveness of your marketing?

2.    Is someone from your Finance team actively measuring your investments in a way that creates joint ownerhip?

3.    Are you measuring both short term and longer term results- as an example a bank may measure short term impact of a promotion on Credit card spending and also evaluate whether in the longer term the credit card customers behaviour changed in terms of increased profitability(larger ticket sizes, more revolve etc)?

INNOVATION LESSONS FROM THE 1930S

History suggests that even the deepest downturns can create huge opportunities for companies with money and ideas. Recent turmoil in global financial markets and its spillover into the real economy have generated considerable interest in the Great Depression.

Especially in growing economies like India,isn't this the best time to challenge all "accepted norms". In many businesses not enough innovation has been directed towards improving the "customer experience". A side effect of a "slowdown" is also that as a retail business or a bank you have fewer customers walking into your stores & branches. That is a great opportunity to invest in innovation at the front end. During boom times such ideas were considered heretical because the front end employee was too busy managing the "footfall".

Can the business practices of the 1930s yield useful lessons for executives setting priorities in today's uncertain and evolving environment? For investments to promote innovation, the answer may be yes. Executives are often told to maintain investment during downturns. It's easy to question this countercyclical advice, however, in times like the Depression or the present, when the volatility of financial markets (an indicator of uncertainty) reaches historic highs. Is the typical behavior of executives-act cautiously and delay investment projects until confidence returns-the wiser course?

Tom Nicholas, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School illustrates the broader points businesses must learn from the experience of the 1930s.

http://www.sata.ca/docs/InnovationLessons.pdf

 

Case Study: How Harbor Sweets uses customer data effectively

 

Harbor Sweets is a Massachusetts-based gourmet chocolate company that offers a variety of premium sweets. In 1973, the company emerged from humble beginnings when Ben Strohecker set out to create the "best piece of candy in the world." The result was Sweet Sloops, a sailboat shaped piece of almond butter crunch, covered in white chocolate dipped in dark chocolate and crushed pecans. Over the years, the company grew to feature additional candy lines and retail outlets across the U.S. Harbor Sweets also added a significant mail-order catalog division.

Their catalog program was successful in delivering sales during key holiday buying seasons, but the company also wanted to ensure that holiday mail campaign mailings- the main driver of catalog business - were maximizing sales. Harbor Sweets needed a solution that would efficiently turn existing customer data into actionable next steps for their campaign planning. Essentially, Harbor Sweets wanted to find out if removing a single mailing to "active customers" from the holiday mail schedule - which included mailings every month from September through December - would conserve marketing resources, while refraining from negatively impacting revenue or overall response rates.

Harbor Sweets conducted a suppression test, assessing how effective the holiday campaign mailing had been at driving sales. To measure the effectiveness of their campaign services Harbor Sweets mailed the catalog to everyone in December and ran a suppression test for September, October and November. The results were surprising. Harbor Sweets was actually hurting sales by mailing too many catalogs to customers during the holiday season. The results also found that the cadence for the catalogs could be reduced to three, while still achieving similar results.

Additionally, Harbor Sweets learned firsthand that it is imperative to be open to analyzing data and customer behavior in new ways. The more information available on existing customers, the more effective the software is in its results, whether it is predicting customer's next steps or customer attrition.

The results allowed Harbor Sweet to develop a long-term customer-centric marketing process for the future. Better target identification results in the revenue saved by removing one mailing is now applied to another mailing during non-peak times to provide customers with a more effectively targeted, timely catalog.

Take a look at this DM review article which talks about how we can leverage customer behavior information for better customer management