Re: [projectvrm] Multifunctional Advertising

[Iain Henderson < >]

And a couple more metrics.

Average tenure of a marketing person in the same role - 2 years

That is to say, long term customer satisfaction/ value is someone else's 
problem.

Average tenure of a CEO in a large B2C organisation - 3 years.

I've had several consulting projects about customer-centricity that hit 
road-blocks at CEO level; the simple and openly stated issue being that 
whilst they recognise the logic, they know that to make radical changes (from 
typically a product-centric strategy to a genuine customer-centric) will cost 
them money and competitive positioning in the short term. There are ways to 
get a good blend of customer and product-centricity, but most organisations 
don't have the data, the top-level buy-in or the patience to pull that off.

Iain


On 18 Feb 2013, at 14:04, Doc Searls 
<
 >
 wrote:

> One additional point: most of the time we aren't buying anything, or even 
> considering it. That also narrows the windows of "now."
> 
> But there are times we are shopping or buying — or dealing with issues of 
> ownership. Then what? Well, VRM should be there to help with that. 
> 
> Doc
> 
> On Feb 17, 2013, at 11:01 PM, Chris Savage 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
>> Well, a couple of things that build on this.
>> 
>> 1.  I read of a psychological study that found that the subjective 
>> experience of "now" lasts about 3 seconds.  That is, if you ask people 
>> about whether some stimulus or whatever the researchers were looking at 
>> was happening "now," the general response was "yes" as long as the thing 
>> occurred plus or minus 1.5 seconds or so of the time of the asking.
>> 
>> 2.  This actually can be converted to a measure of how much attention 
>> people have in a day.  If at each quantum of "now"-ness a person can only 
>> effectively be attending to one thing, then in a 24-hour day, if we assume 
>> 16 are conscious and available, that's roughly 19,200 "moments" of "now" a 
>> person has each day.
>> 
>> 3.  Advertisers well know how to command (literally, as in, what we are 
>> hard-wired for) our attention: loud noises, quick movements, flashes of 
>> light, attractive women (to get male attention) etc.  So, on the "tragedy 
>> of the attention commons" I was postulating earlier, what we have is a 
>> large but non-infinite number of opportunities for folks who want our 
>> attention, to grab it.  By going from traditional print to the Internet, 
>> we have created a lot more opportunities for that.  There are 19,200 
>> "nows" per day per person, that can input either signal or noise.  
>> Increasing ads (including directed ads) means more noise and less signal, 
>> net.  Key point: The pool of available attention is very limited.  (Note: 
>> if it's really 3.2 hours per week, that's only about 3,840 
>> moments-of-attention available.)  That very limited pool is what more and 
>> more advertisers are trying to colonize.  So it's no wonder, it seems to 
>> me, that people are both building taller defenses and getting more 
>> exhausted in maintaining them.
>> 
>> 4.  There are some behavioral economic studies being done by a guy at MIT 
>> that analogies the lives of people in poverty that indicates that their 
>> choices are harder to make than non-poor folks, in an analogy to what is 
>> called the "suitcase problem."  Suppose you are packing for a weekend 
>> trip, and you have a very large suitcase.  Packing is easy: you put in 
>> stuff you know you'll need and stuff you might need.  Very little mental 
>> effort.  Now imagine going on a one-week trip and all you are allowed is 
>> one carry-on-size bag.  Now you have a hard problem: you have to decide 
>> what is essential and what isn't, what has to go in first in order to make 
>> sure everything will fit, etc.  It's a harder mental task (which various 
>> studies have shown truly use up biological energy).  The MIT guy points 
>> out that the entire task of facing the economy is, for a poor person, like 
>> trying to pack for a week-long trip with too small a suitcase: the 
>> suitcase is their money, and the clothes, etc., to go in, are their needs. 
>>  Every day is mentally exhausting for poor people, because poor people 
>> actually have to do a lot more mental work to get through a day than does 
>> a middle-class or rich person.
>> 
>> 5.  A similar phenomenon occurs with the issue of allocating our 
>> attention.  Figuring out what is signal and what is noise takes work, and 
>> it takes more and more work the more noise there is -- like listening to 
>> your favorite radio station as you drive further and further away on the 
>> long-distance highway.  It gets scratchier and fuller with static, but if 
>> you keep listening harder (interesting     idiom there...) you can still 
>> hear what they are saying.  With more and more informational static being 
>> thrown at us for our 19,200 "nows" per day, it takes lots of mental work 
>> just to try to keep focused on what actually matters in a life (kids ... 
>> job ... spouse ... spiritual practice ... hobbies/interests).  Fitting all 
>> of that into the mental time suitcase can be really hard.  Adding all the 
>> noise makes it harder.
>> 
>> Do advertisers ever think in terms of their effects on a limited, shared 
>> resource, aka, my brain cycles?
>> 
>> Chris S.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 2/17/2013 5:07 PM, Iain Henderson wrote:
>>> Thanks Katherine, your point re number of hours in the day reminded me of 
>>> a key quote sent to the list a few months back (by Richard Bates, 
>>> Consumer Focus, UK).
>>> 
>>> “Consumers are however pressed for time and spend on average only 3.2 
>>> hours a week on all consumer tasks. To ensure that consumers remain 
>>> empowered in the face of the growing information overload and increasing 
>>> lack of time for shopping, new shortcuts and comparison tools need to be 
>>> found.”
>>> 
>>> That quote came from a research study across more than 55,000 
>>> individuals, so pretty robust. European Commission Staff Working Paper 
>>> (2011): Consumer Empowerment in the EU (SEC [2011] 469 final), Brussels: 
>>> European Commission –  http://bit.ly/J45aRl
>>> 
>>> Add to that, one of the main effects of The Internet on the individual 
>>> being that they typically have an awful lot more supplier/ service 
>>> provider relationships to manage than they did before, and you therefore 
>>> have a huge volume of 'permissioned' advertising being squeezed into what 
>>> amounts to a very small amount of time.
>>> 
>>> In that respect, our job is to build tools that help get a better return 
>>> out of those 28 minutes, and maybe even one day increasing the time spent 
>>> because the return on it is much improved.
>>> 
>>> Iain
>>>  
>>> 
>>>   
>>> 3.2 hours a week is 192 minutes, or almost 28 mins per day.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 17 Feb 2013, at 15:28, Katherine Warman Kern 
>>> <
 >
>>>  wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Sylvan and Chris,
>>>> 
>>>> As a practicing planner who takes pride in being a trusted advisor, I'd 
>>>> like to share some insights from the perspective of my clients.
>>>> 
>>>> The reality the consumer has an overabundance of choices and a marketer 
>>>> has an overabundance of tools to choose from. 
>>>> 
>>>> But the number of hours in a day to make those choices has remained 
>>>> exactly the same.
>>>> 
>>>> As the number of choices have increased, the odds that bad choices are 
>>>> made increases.  
>>>> 
>>>> Share of Voice, as many measuring sticks, is flawed from the start 
>>>> because there is no truly accurate way to measure or project it.  One 
>>>> marketer can spend the same amount of dollars much more effectively than 
>>>> another.  And since few marketers publish their mistakes, no one really 
>>>> knows what really happened. In fact most published accounts of marketing 
>>>> case studies have very little resemblance to what really happened.
>>>> 
>>>> I continue to be shocked that no new entry capitalizes on digital 
>>>> technology and social media to offer an improvement over Nielsen to 
>>>> monitor integrated marketing in real time.  
>>>> 
>>>> K-
>>>> 
>>>> Katherine Warman Kern
>>>> www.comradity.com
>>>> @comradity
>>>> 203-918-2617
>>>> 
>>>> On Feb 17, 2013, at 9:37 AM, sylvain willart 
>>>> <
 >
>>>>  wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> This "tragedy of the commons" made me think when you first posted about 
>>>>> it.
>>>>> The sheep example you mention is well-studied in economic game theory,
>>>>> and there are some writings as well in Public Economics sudies dealing
>>>>> with scarce resources,
>>>>> But I very rarely read this kind of thinking in advertising/marketing.
>>>>> Only perhaps in "Store Wars" (Corstjens & Corstjens , 90's). Actually,
>>>>> the hypothesis of the consumer brain being a scarce resource is
>>>>> sometimes discussed, but never measured. And media planning relying
>>>>> heavily on measures and metrics, this hypothesis does not well fit in
>>>>> traditional approaches.
>>>>> Moreover, you can expect people to protect scarce natural resources
>>>>> (even if they loose direct advantage) for the sake of a "bigger cause"
>>>>> involving altruism (a long studied effect in game theory); but who
>>>>> really cares about the exhaustion of conusmer brain? there is nothing
>>>>> here a good night of sleep can't fix... (the consumer himself may be
>>>>> the only one to care, hence the importance of VRM tools IMHO).
>>>>> Media planning is also competitive by nature, and while planning you
>>>>> have to care more about your competitors' expenses than your
>>>>> consumers' ability to process all those ads. An important metric in
>>>>> media planning is for example the "share of voice" (your expenses
>>>>> divided by the market expenses), perhaps the dumbest metric ever
>>>>> invented, as it is known from long it is not robust at all (meaning it
>>>>> can lead you to make stupid planning choices)
>>>>> The entropy hypothesis however may be quite appealing, and this metric
>>>>> is often used in other field of marketing (for measuring variety of
>>>>> assortments for example). I'll try to dig into it to see wether it has
>>>>> been used in advertising/intrusiveness research.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Sylvain
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 2013/2/17 Chris Savage 
>>>>> <
 >:
>>>>>> Sylvain,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Thank you, this is very helpful.  I will ponder a bit more.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I have mentioned, perhaps on this list, my sense that there is a 
>>>>>> "tragedy of
>>>>>> the commons" effect going on among those who would sell me stuff.  
>>>>>> Just like
>>>>>> in the Garrett Hardin story where each shepherd looks at the common 
>>>>>> field
>>>>>> and thinks, "Oh, letting one or two extra sheep from my flock graze 
>>>>>> won't
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> e-mail: 
>>> 
 
>>> blog: www.iainhenderson.info
>>> twitter: @iainh1
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> 


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