Brand Beliefs and the Facebook Factor

Last week I talked about the power of our beliefs to shape our view of the world around us. I also mentioned how our belief constructs impact our view of brands. As luck would have it, two separate pieces crossed my path this week and I think both provide excellent examples of how we may perceive brands, and how marketers often get it wrong when trying to shepherd a brand through the marketplace. The first piece was Does Branding Need to be Rebranded by Mediapost’s Matt Straz in Online Spin. In it, Matt mentioned the backlash against Sir James Dyson (he of the cool vacuums) when he dared to mention that he doesn’t believe in branding. Now, to clarify, Dyson doesn’t believe in branding the way it’s practiced by many companies, where through sheer force of advertising, their heavily controlled (and often contrived) brand story is theoretically imprinted in your brain.  This isn’t so much branding as brain washing. Let’s call it “brand-washing.” But let’s go back to how our beliefs define our view of brands. We use beliefs as [...]

Believing is Seeing

In his book, the Believing Brain, Michael Shermer spends several hundred pages exploring just how powerful beliefs are in forming our view of the world. Beliefs impact not just what we think, but it literally filters what we see and do. And, once in place, beliefs tend to be stubbornly unshakeable. We will go to great extents to defend our beliefs with rationalizations that are often totally or partially fabricated. As Shermer says, “Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.” In the world of consumerism, this becomes important in any number of ways. For one, we have beliefs about brands, both positive beliefs and negative ones. And, as previous neuro-research has shown, those beliefs can dramatically alter how we sense the world. In a study at Baylor University, Dr. Read Montague found that the reason Coke devotees are so loyal has almost nothing to do with the actual taste and much more to do with the Coke brand and what it says about them as people. It’s not the taste of Coke we love; it’s the idea of Coke. A [...]

The “Field of Dreams” Dilemma

There’s a chicken and an egg paradox in mobile marketing. Many mobile sites sit moldering in the online wilderness, attracting few to no visitors. The same could be said for many elaborate online customer portals, social media outposts or online communities. Somebody went to the trouble to build them, but no one came. Why? Well, it could be because no one thinks to go to the trouble to look for them, just like no one expects to find a ball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. It wasn’t until the ghosts of 8 Chicago White Sox players, banned for life from playing the game they loved, started playing on the “Field of Dreams” that anyone bothered to drive to Ray Kinsella’s farm.  There was suddenly a reason to go. The problem with many out-of –the-way online destinations is that there is no good reason to go. And, because of this, we make two assumptions: -       If there is no good reason for a destination to exist, then the destination probably doesn’t exist; or, -       If it does exist, [...]

Wonder What They’re Doing on Captiva?

I kind of feel like a kid that stayed home while the rest of his friends headed off to summer camp at Lake Winnigapahaha. I just know they’re having more fun than I am. To really drive it home, my friend Ken Fadner, the publisher at MediaPost, sent me a picture the other day of the launch of the Search Insider Summit on wonderful Captiva Island. “Missing you” was Ken’s postscript. Awww… I miss you too Ken! You’ll forgive me if I feel rather possessive of the Search Insider Summit. For the last several of them, I’ve been the Programming Chair and Emcee. Last year, I handed the reins over to the very capable team at MediaPost, but I still feel like I’m missing my left arm. In the past few weeks, as the event was drawing nearer, I even had “phantom” pains. I’d jolt upright, worrying about a keynote cancelling or irresolvable scheduling conflicts, only to remember that it’s now someone else’s worry. I had to give this year’s event a miss due to scheduling conflicts, but I also [...]

Search and the Age of “Usefulness”

There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over the recent changes to Google’s algorithm and what it means for the SEO industry. This is not the first time the death knell has been rung for SEO. It seems to have more lives than your average barnyard cat. But there’s no doubt that Google’s recent changes throws a rather large wrench in the industry as a whole. And in my view, that’s a good thing. First of all, from the perspective of the user, Google’s changes mark an evolution of search beyond a tool used to search for information to one used by us to do the things we want to do. It’s moving from using relevancy as the sole measure of success to incorporating usefulness. The algorithm is changing to keep pace with the changes in the web as a whole. No longer is it just the worlds biggest repository of text based information – it’s now a living, interactive, functional network of apps, data and information, extending our capabilities through a variety of connected devices. Google had [...]

Looking for the B2B Needle in the B2C Haystack

It’s not easy being a B2B marketer of the digital variety. Trust me. The problem is that 99% of the online world seems to be built specifically for the consumer market, and us B2B types have to try to divvy up the 1% that’s left. And that’s where it gets challenging. The Tip of a hidden B2B Iceberg One of the challenges is the lack of definition of the B2B market. It’s massive. But no one really seems to know just how big it is. When I was writing my book on B2B digital marketing, I tried in vain to try to find some reliable quantification of the immensity of the market, but I never did find a number that seemed fit for quoting. I had consumer market stats coming out of the ying-yang, but no one wanted to go on record to try to nail down the size of the business-to-business marketplace. Consider this though. For every consumer product that ends up in your hand, there is a long string of B2B transactions that precedes it. Some are materials [...]

Reinventing AIDA

Last week, my column was about how branding differs between search and more traditional brand channels like TV and print. It came from a recent client conversation I had. Rob Schmults from Intent Media added a well thought out and on the mark comment that deserves a follow up. There are three points in particular I want to dive deeper on. “ I think part of the problem in attempting to do so is that branding is all too often an end in and of itself rather than a means.” Absolutely. Most sales and marketing happens in dozens of disconnected siloes, with little thought about how the actions of one silo impact all the others. Each silo measures progress by its own metric and set its own agenda. The problem is that all these different initiatives are aimed at the same target, but there is little thought as to how each initiative can impact the prospect. For the past year, I’ve been thinking about how to approach marketing starting first with creating a common understanding of the buyer’s motivations and [...]

There is No Floor on Search Spending

I was asked an interesting question by a client the other day: “What is the minimum spending threshold for paid search? Below what level does it not make sense to invest anything?” A little context is in order here. This same client had been through a vigorous round of budget discussions, where the digital and branding teams were fighting for the same bucket of dollars. They were trying, with almost no success, to compare effectiveness of digital and branding on a dollar for dollar basis. The brand team’s tactic was that they couldn’t give up any budget because they were already at minimum spending levels. Even a dollar less would drop them below the level required to hit the reach/frequency minimums dictated by the agency who was handling the media buys. The answer, of course, is that there is no minimum when it comes to paid search. Each click you buy generates a potential lead. But the reasoning behind that answer speaks to the unique nature of search, when compared to traditional brand building channels. Online Branding is a Different [...]

Welders: Creating Sparks in the Social Space

A few weeks ago, I was asked to keynote at an annual gathering of welding equipment manufacturers. The topic? Social Media. In the previous conference, it emerged as the number one thing these industrial marketers wanted to learn more about. Now, if that image introduces some cognitive dissonance, you’re not alone. Anyone I mentioned this to tended to raise an eyebrow and look at me with skepticism.  I quickly learned to counter with, “Did I mention that the conference was in Indian Wells, California at a beautiful resort at the end of February?” “Ohh,” they would respond, nodding knowingly, “well, that makes sense then.” I wouldn’t press the issue, but I also knew something they didn’t know.  Don’t be too quick to judge welders, because they’re a different breed. I know this because life has surrounded me with welders. I have two brothers-in-law that are welders. I worked my way through college working summers on pipeline crews, doing the jobs welders didn’t want to do. I’ve had several years of observation of the welding community under my belt, and it [...]

Has Technology Spoiled Us?

“We live in an amazing, amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots.” Louis C.K. If you want to see “amazing” as it emerges onto our collective radar, your best seat is in front of the TED stage. It’s like a candy store of jaw dropping technology. This year’s edition was no exception. We saw flying robots, virtual cadavers (to train new surgeons) and enough other techno-goodies to keep the TED audience in a digitally enhanced state of rapture. One that stood out for me doesn’t exist yet, but Peter Diamandis and his “X Prize” have placed their bets on something called the Qualcomm Tricorder Challenger. Remember the Tricorder from the original Star Trek – a nifty little piece of hardware that could instantly diagnose Star Fleet crew members and other assorted alien life forms? Well, the X Prize foundation thinks we’re at a point where we could turn that particular piece of science fiction into science fact. They’ve put $10 million up for grabs for whoever can create a handheld device will be “a tool [...]

Who is Joseph Kony, and Why Does It Matter?

“Do you know who Joseph Kony is?” The question was posed to me this week by my 16-year-old daughter, Lauren. Immediately I knew something was up. Lauren delivers everything with a half smirk, which is generally followed by some sarcastic comment. But this time, she was disarmingly serious in her question. I curbed my knee jerk reaction, which was to respond with an equally sarcastic comeback (genetic testing not required to prove paternity in this particular case) and simply said, “No.” “I want you to go check out this site – kony2012.com” I did, and ran into one of the most compelling uses of digital communication I’ve ever seen. So I wanted to use this column to do two things: First, take the time to visit the site. It’s a crash course in effective online communication that any digital marketer could learn from. But secondly, and more importantly, by tomorrow I want you to know who Joseph Kony is. It might be the most important thing you do today. First of all, let me give you a brief introduction to [...]

An Introvert’s Confessional

I am an introvert. Which, I guess, qualifies as an Introvert’s confession – a metaphorical “coming out of the closet”. But if you were an introvert, you would know that’s the last thing you really want to do. The closet is such a non-threatening place to be. A few columns ago I wrote about personality tests and said that, according to the Myers Briggs Personality Test, I’m usually tagged as an “INFJ” – which, according to the labels applied, means I’m an Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling and Judgmental person.  Apparently that’s one of the rarest of the 16 personality types. Only 1 to 3% of the population are “INFJ”s. Depending on when I’ve taken the test, the last two letters have wavered a bit, but never that first “I”. I am, was and always will be an introvert. I write this from TEDActive – which may just be the definition of Introvert’s hell. It’s a gathering of some 600 well-meaning, gregarious TEDsters in the desert east of LAS (Palm Springs) who are prodded at every juncture to “interact” and “connect”. A [...]

Behind Every Search there’s a Story

This week, I was reminded why I got into this business. The timing was good, because to be honest, after being involved in too many discussions revolving around search budgets and cross channel attribution models, I had lost touch with what I found so magical about online marketing in the first place. But Tim and Daniel reminded me. It’s a story worth repeating. About a week ago, I was sitting at a board room trying to find an “apples to apples” comparison for a CMO of a huge company to help validate moving money from traditional brand building channels into search. We had run dozens of models, compiled multiple spreadsheets and put together at least 6 different slide decks. In the process we did our level best to suck all the life out of the exercise and reduce it to a colorless discussion based solely on numbers. We were trying to find that elusive formula that would allow us to compare the impact of a dollar spent on search vs a dollar spent on TV. It was a variation of [...]

Ramblings of a Feverish Mind

I’ve had the flu for going on a week now. My head hurts and my tongue feels like a terry cloth towel. My voice sounds like a cross between Satan and a barking seal. Any lucid thoughts I may have had have long been beaten into submission by repeated doses of NyQuil. And now I have a column to write. What strikes me the most about my current state of mind is how little tolerance I have for the stuff that normally makes up my life.  The saying “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” must have an illness-triggered corollary – “Fever induced sweat seems to wash away all the little crap.” Before I got sick, I had a mountain of stuff that was all vitally important. Then I lost 2 and a half days because I simply couldn’t raise my head from my pillow. Something had to give. Actually, several things had to give. And you know what? The world didn’t end. Life went on. It’s a revelation of much less significance than Steve Job’s more eloquent version in his 2005 [...]

Marketing Physics 101

Physics has never been my strong suit, but I think I have a good basic grasp of the concepts of velocity and direction. In my experience, the two concepts have special significance in the world of direct marketing. All too often I see marketers that are too focused on one or the other. These imbalances lead to the following scenarios: All Direction, No Velocity As a Canadian, I am painfully familiar with this particular tendency. Up here, we call it a Royal Commission. For those of you unfamiliar with the vagaries of the Canadian political landscape, here’s how a Royal Commission works. It doesn’t. That’s the whole point. Royal Commissions are formed when you have an issue that you wished would simply go away but the public won’t let it. So a Royal Commission deliberates over it for several months, issues a zillion page report that nobody ever reads, and by the time the report comes out, everybody has forgotten why they were so riled up in the first place. This is similar to company’s noodling for months, or even [...]

The Facebook Personality Test

I’ve always believed that you could learn everything you needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. To back up the efficacy of this bulletproof psychological profiling tool, there are several online Beatle personality tests.  I mean really, if you can’t build an online quiz from it, how valid can a psychological tool be? I, personally, am primarily a John Lennon, with George Harrison undertones. But for the test to work, you actually have to know the Beatles on a fairly intimate level, and their status as a cultural baseline is regrettably eroding. Now, you could use a more standard but much less interesting approach; say a Myers-Briggs personality sorter, or the “colors” test. I seem to bounce back and forth between “INFJ” and an “INTJ”. But a recent paper by Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan Hofman (both from Boston University) in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences offered a more timely way to sort out the Extroverts from the Introverts (and the neurotics from the narcissists). It seems our usage of Facebook may [...]

What is the Role of an Agency?

Last week, I was talking to someone about the role of a digital agency in the future. We went down all the usual paths and came up with the usual answers, but afterwards, the question lingered. What is our role in the future? I’m reasonably certain it won’t be the same as our role in the past. In cases like this, I sometimes find it helpful to do a little linguistic excavation. I’m constantly surprised by how concise and accurate the labels we choose are, if we spend the time to explore their roots and unearth their true meaning. What then is an “agency”? Well, agency is simply the capacity of an agent to act. It’s the sphere of “action” that surrounds an agent. So, we have to dig a little deeper. What is an “agent”? An agent is one who acts for another, by authority from them.  It seems simple, but is there a fundamental concept here that has got fuzzy with time? I think, in the early history of advertising, that agencies very much aligned with this definition. [...]

As We May Remember

In his famous Atlantic Monthly essay As We May Think, published in July 1945, Vannevar Bush forecast a mechanized extension to our memory which he called a “memex”: Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. Last week, I asked you to ponder what our memories might become now that Google puts vast heaps of information just one click away. And ponder you did: I have to ask, WHY do you state, “This throws a massive technological wrench into the machinery of our own memories”, inferring something negative??? Might this be a totally LIBERATING situation? – Rick Short, Indium Corporation Perhaps, much like using dictionaries in grade school helped us to learn and remember new information, Google is [...]

Is Google Replacing Memory?

How old is Tony Bennett anyway?” We were sitting in a condo on a ski hill with friends, counting down to the New Year, when the ageless Mr. Bennett appeared on TV. One of us wondered aloud about just how many new years he has personally ushered in. In days gone by, the question would have just hung there. We would all offer our guesses but there would be no definitive resolution of the question. It would probably fill up a few minutes of conversation. If someone felt strongly about the topic, it might even start an argument. But, at the end of it all, there would be no definitive answer. There would only be opinions. This was the way of the world. We were restricted to the knowledge we could each jam in our noggin. And if our opinion conflicted with another’s, all we could do is argue. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen set up the scenario perfectly. He and Diane Keaton are in a movie line. Behind them, an intellectual blowhard is in mid-stream pontification on everything from [...]

Look at the Big Picture in 2012

Another year’s pretty much in the can. And because I’m working on idle this week, trying to catch my breath with my family before plunging headlong into 2012, search marketing falls somewhere behind the recent releases on NetFlix and trying out the new Wii game on the list of things preoccupying my mind. So, don’t expect any salient and timely search news from me! When I look back on what has preoccupied me over the last 12 months, I will say that much of it has been spent “stepping back” and trying to look at the bigger picture. As online interactions have taken a bigger and bigger chunk of our lives (you’ll notice that both of the recreational options I mentioned have online components woven into them), trying to understand how our actions play out against a broader online backdrop has been the thing I think about most often. We digital marketers tend to take that “bigger picture” and break it into pieces, trying to make sense of it by focusing on one small piece. Digital marketing lends itself to [...]

In Search of Simplicity

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This quote, from Leonardo da Vinci, was on the original brochure for the Apple II. Throughout his life, Steve Jobs didn’t stray far from this principle. In fact, he was obnoxiously obsessive about it. When Steve returned to Apple after his 12-year hiatus, he embraced simplicity with a vengeance. While Apple was wondering in the wilderness, they somehow managed to amass no fewer than a dozen different variations of their various computers. All were crappy (and I speak as a former owner of several of them) but at least there were a lot of different varieties of crap to choose from. One of my favorite passages from Walt Isaacson’s book describes how Jobs quickly pruned the unwieldy product portfolio back down to size: “After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he [...]

Can Websites Make Us Forgetful?

Ever open the door to the fridge and then forget what you were looking for? Or ever head to your bedroom and then, upon entering it, forget why you went there in the first place? Me too. And it turns out we’re not alone. New research from the University of Notre Dame’s Gabriel Radvansky indicates this sudden “threshold” amnesia is actually pretty common. Walking from one room to another triggers an “event boundary” in the mind, which seems to act as a cue for the brain to file away short-term memories and move on to the next task at hand. If your tasks causes you to cross one of these event boundaries and you don’t keep your working memory actively engaged through deliberate focusing of attention, it could be difficult to remember what it was that motivated you in the first place. Ever since I’ve read the original article, I’ve wondered if the same thing applies to navigating web sites. If we click a link to move from one page to another, I am pretty sure the brain could well [...]

Is There a Search Marketer in the House?

Once…just once…I’d love to hear an announcement come over the PA system in some public venue:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, your attention please. Is there a search marketer in the house?”
Let me explain. Recently, a friend of mine was at a soccer tournament with our school team. One of the other parents had a sudden heart attack. My friend, who is in the medical field, swung into action and applied CPR. When the first response unit took over, one of the attendants told my friend that he saved the parent’s life.

The Challenge of Social

Every quarter, I fill out an online survey about digital marketing trends. One question always shows up: “Are you looking at social as a replacement for search in your online marketing strategy?” I always answer no, and to myself, comment that it’s a stupid question asked by someone who obviously doesn’t know much about online marketing. But I wonder  – is it really such a stupid question? Aren’t many experienced marketers asking themselves exactly the same question? The Social Graph – or Network – or whatever you want to call it – should be the single biggest opportunity in marketing history. But marketers are stubbing their toes by the millions in trying to step over the threshold into the golden glow of the online social party. It seems it’s incredibly difficult to figure out. Search, on the other hand, was easily pigeonholed as a direct marketing channel. Search was so easy to “get” for marketers that Google turned it into a self serve model and became the fastest growing company in history as a result. For marketers, I suspect, the [...]

Walmart vs Amazon: A Regime Shift in Motion

Financial analysts are not predicting a rosy short-term future for Amazon’s stock price.  Recent blunders with the roll out of new Kindle devices and earnings under increasing pressure have these analysts predicting a shorting of Amazon stock. In all likelihood, Amazon’s share price will tumble. So why is Walmart so worried about Amazon? A recent article in Ad Age indicates that Walmart is preparing for what could be the “retail battle of the decade.” When you match the two up on numbers alone, it seems like the “mismatch of the decade.”  Walmart is 10 times the size of Amazon in overall sales. It’s the largest retailer on the planet, but a huge margin. Amazon doesn’t even crack the top 10. In fact, Amazon sits at #44 on the list of Global retailers. But let’s flip the numbers. When it comes to online sales, Amazon outsells Walmart 10 to 1, and it’s topline growth is 44% while Walmart’s per location sales growth is trapped in the low single digits (if there is growth at all). So, if online retail is a [...]

The View Above the “Weeds”

Yesterday was not a good day. It was a day that made me wish I had never gone into this business – a day that made me long for a warm beach and a mai tai. I don’t have these days very often, but yesterday, oh boy, I had it in spades! I’ve been doing search (yesterday, I used a different, less polite noun) for a long time.  And I have to be honest, some days it feels like a thousand leeches are sucking the blood out of me. Given that, it was impossible to muster up much enthusiasm for the roll out of Google+ Business Pages or the raging controversy of Facebook’s “LikeGate”. Really? Are those the most important things to litter our in-boxes with? On days like yesterday, when I get caught in the weeds of digital marketing (where the blood sucking leeches tend to hang out) I sometimes lose sight of why I got into this in the first place. This is a revolution. What’s more, it’s a revolution of epic, perhaps unprecedented, proportions. In macro-economic terms, [...]

Bye Bye Big Box, Hello Digital!

My friend Mikey (who you may remember from the “Mikey Mobile Adoption Test”) and I were recently driving through our hometown, past a long row of new “big box” retail locations that have recently sprung up. I, somewhat exasperatedly, said, “Who the hell is going to buy all this stuff?” Our town’s population is only 120,000 but we seem to have a huge overcapacity of retail space, with more going up all the time, thanks in part to a development hungry First Nations band with plenty of available real estate. Mikey replied, “Well, the town isn’t getting any smaller and people need to shop somewhere.” That, and a recent article by MediaPost reporter Laurie Sullivan, got me thinking. Do we? I mean, do we need to shop “somewhere” as in a physical store location. I paused, and then replied, “I’m not so sure. I buy a lot more things online.” “Really?” “Really.” A few days later, I was in a presentation where someone showed digital marketing growth projections for local advertisers on a slide. The growth over the next few years [...]

Why Google has to “Get” Platforms – It’s the Future of Search

Last week, I shared portions of Steve Yegge’s post (from inside Google) about how Google doesn’t “get” platforms. But why, you may ask, does Google have to get better at platforms? Certainly, open platforms open greater levels of innovation, one reason why Facebook gained the critical mass needed to dominant social networking. That is certainly applicable given Google’s forays into the social space. But there’s another reason, one very germane to Google’s core business. Becoming a platform provider is likely the only way Google can compete in a new search ecosystem. Consider this recent shot across the bow from Microsoft. They’re opening the Bing backend as a service to be integrated into third party apps. They’re making their search engine a platform. And, according to Yegge, Microsoft does “get” platforms: “(Microsoft) understands platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because [...]

Amazon = Evolution, Google = Intelligent Design?

Ironically, the hottest thing on Google+is a rant from a Google Insider about how Google+ is hopelessly limited because Google doesn’t get the importance of platforms.  Steve Yegge goes on at some length (over 4000 words) contrasting his first 6 years at Amazon and his last 6 years at Google. The media jumped on it, because Yegge spent some of his rant bashing Google+, which is rapidly collecting more holes than Bonnie and Clyde’s ill fated 1934 Ford sedan. But Yegge was simply using Google+ as an example of how badly Google has dropped the ball when it comes to building platforms to support external development. There are many, many things that Google does far better than Amazon (according to Yegge) but building out platforms is not one of them: “Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.” In contrast, Google tends to keep their code base under internal lock and key to protect their IP. In fact, even their own Chinese developers didn’t have access to Google’s core code, for fear [...]

Steve, I Wish I Knew You

I wish I had met Steve Jobs. My heroes from the world of business number exactly two: Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Walt died when I was 5 years old, so it’s not surprising that our paths never crossed. But theoretically, I could have met Jobs. It was not beyond the realms of possibility. Unfortunately, I never got to meet either of them. And for that, I’m immeasurably saddened. The thing I admired about both of them goes beyond what I have seen in the recent stream of accolades that has issued forth since last week’s news of Jobs’ passing. Jobs, and Disney before him, had an amazing ability to know what it was we wanted before we knew it ourselves. It wasn’t business or technical acumen, although both men had it in spades. It was the uncanny ability to ride on the edge of reason and intuition while placing bets on the future, getting it right more often than wrong. If I knew more about them, I suspect I’d add Henry Ford and Thomas Edison to the list, but [...]

Google’s Plus One goes Critical, but not in a Good Way

I was in Minneapolis’s Mall of America and happened to wander by the new Microsoft store. The layout, the look and the feel were a near-exact clone of the very popular Apple Stores, one of which just happened to be directly across the concourse. Here, in the largest mall in the world, I had the opportunity to compare and contrast the physical embodiments of two of the most ubiquitous brands in the world. If not for the several floor staff in the Microsoft store, it would have been almost empty. Only one person was wandering through the aisles of new Windows phones and other devices showing off the latest from Redmond; significantly outnumbered by the two staff glued to his side, as well as two more looking on over the potential buyer’s shoulder and still one more, whom I took to be the manager, overseeing the scene from a more discrete distance. I then swiveled 180 degrees and saw how the Apple store stacked up against the Microsoft challenger. To be fair, the store wasn’t nearly as busy as most [...]

Don’t Typecast Search as “Direct”

We should have taken it as a sign of things to come. The panel I was moderating at OMMA, with the highly provocative title, “The Evolving Role of the Search Marketer”, was in a tiny room that seemed to be an afterthought of whoever planned the meeting space layout in the Marriott Marquis in New York. You actually had to walk through another, much larger room and go through a door tucked in the back corner. If one of the show organizers wasn’t personally guiding me, I might never have found it. The second sign was equally hard to miss. Outside the “secret” door to my session was a small standard that indicated that this was the “Direct” marketing track. Okay, relegated to the back closet and in a track that restricted search to being a “direct” channel – so far things didn’t bode well for the insightful voyage of discovery I was envisioning. Nevertheless, we forged ahead with a very enthusiastic audience (who were no doubt glad to just have found the session) and a very seasoned panel of [...]

The Psychology of Couponing: Where Ajillitee Went Wrong

Is a Groupon model the next big thing for B2B? Apparently not. Or, at least, not now, based on an early trial by a Chicago-based consulting firm, Ajillitee. They used Groupon to offer $25,000 worth of consulting services at half price. It was the biggest deal Groupon had ever offered. Hey, keeping $12,500 in your pocket is nothing to sneeze at. And knowing buying consulting services is not exactly the same as snagging a half-off lunch coupon, the offer stayed open for 3 weeks, giving all potential takers plenty of time to act. But, at the end of the 3 weeks, the offer disappeared. The result? Nary a sale..not even one. Ajillitee extended the offer on their own website, with the same result. “We were really trying to test the market,” said Ajillitee CMO Diann Bilderback. “What we learned was that we were early to the game. Groupon’s platform is the platform for this (online coupons), but it’s very consumer-oriented. The rules didn’t align with our kind of sale. Groupon works on snap decisions, but business decisions typically take longer.” [...]

Is it Time to Re-label “Search” Marketing?

Last week, I asked the question, “Is the word “search” the right label for what we do on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other engines?” When Internet search debuted in the early 90’s, it was probably pretty accurate. But today, the concept may have passed the label by. And, if that is true, then the same is probably true for “search marketing.” The main gist of my argument last week was that the word “search” implies the expenditure of a significant effort with no guarantee of a successful outcome. But today, more than ever, we look to these engines to connect us with information and functionality. We want to “do” things when we click through to the other side of the search results. I also said that it was difficult to find any one label that covers all our intentions when we turn to a “search” engine. In the beginning, when the Web was one large bucket of ill-formed data, “search” worked as a universal label. But that’s not true today. Now, the web is becoming increasingly structured, and a search [...]

What’s in a Word?

I served for 6 years as a director for the Search Engine Marketers Professional Organization. Every 6 months or so, we’d get together to talk about the future of the organization. As you can imagine, the future of an organization catering to industry professionals is inextricably linked to the future of the industry itself. So, our conversations weren’t so much about the future of SEMPO as they were about the future of Search, and by extension, the future of Search Marketing. Every time we embarked on this task of joint navel and crystal ball gazing we ran smack dab into the same dilemma: how do you define search? What is search? Should it even be called search any more? Esther Dyson, amongst others, thinks the term “search” may have outlived its usefulness. Perhaps “connection”, “fulfillment” or “action” is a better connation. At least they imply there’s something of substance on the other end of the search. They hint at successful outcomes. When Microsoft debuted Bing, they sought to differentiate themselves by calling it the “Decision” engine – “Bing is a [...]

A Peek “In the Plex”, by Steven Levy

As promised, this week I’ll be doing a quick review of Steven Levy’s book, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives. As a tech journalist, Levy had a perspective on Google that few have enjoyed. John Battelle, who previous tackled Google in his book The Search, said, “I had limited access to folks at Google, and *really* limited access to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Levy had the opposite, spending more than two years inside the company and seeing any number of things that journalists would have killed to see in years past.” Levy was first introduced to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1999, when Google was just another Silicon Valley start up, albeit one that was creating a ton of industry buzz. Because of that early advantage, Levy was able to observe Google’s subsequent stages of evolution – from start up to search dominance, from an atmosphere that seemed more of a religious  “cause” than “company”, from “don’t be evil” to “evil may be in the eye of the beholder.” Given the intimate viewpoint [...]

Google and the Great Wall

“Have You Heard of Google?”

The question was asked by a group of travelling Google product engineers who had just entered the rural Indian village of Ragihalli, thirty miles outside of Bangalore. It was a Google version of a “walkabout”, a 2007 foray out into the world to see first hand how Google was wrapping it’s ever extending tentacles around the globe.

In Defense of Google

Michael Mar­tinez and Jim Rudnick..you are both oh-so-wrong! Michael responded to Derek Gordon’s col­umn on Tues­day about the Google “Dog pile” with this rejoin­der:
“No market-dominant com­pany ever gets to the top through “qual­ity of the ser­vice it pro­vides” — they get there through mar­ket­ing, and Google has done PLENTY of that.”
Then, Jim Rud­nick “piled on” with this addi­tion: “As Michael stated, Google has more “mar­keters” IMHO, than engi­neers!” (which he later qual­i­fied with a “well, not really”).
Mr. Mar­tinez and Mr. Rud­nick, it’s real­ity check time.

Is Google God?

Seriously, there are “Googlists” behind www.thechurchofgoogle.org who offer incontrovertible proof that Google is God: Google is the closest thing to an Omniscient entity in existence, which can be scientifically verified Google is everywhere at once Google answers prayers Google is potentially immortal Google is infinite Google remembers all Google can “do no evil” “Google” is searched for more than “God”, “Jesus”, “Allah”, “Buddha”, “Christianity”, Islam”, “Buddhism” and “Judaism” combined! Evidence of Google’s existence is abundant. Compelling evidence, and if you’ve read the many books on Google, it’s hard not to believe Larry and Sergey have just a touch of a Messiah complex about them. But is our faith in Google unshakable? A little while back I was talking to Jacqueline Krones, a senior product manager at Bing, who headed up a large-scale ethnographic study of search usage. Microsoft has repeated this study every three years, starting in 2004 and following up in 2007 and 2010. Over those three studies, Krones found an interesting shift in attitudes towards search in general, and, by extension, to Google specifically. “In 2004, people said [...]

An Internet Marketer 50 Years in the Making

This past weekend, I turned 50. In the deluge of smart-ass cards I received, there was one that was at least noteworthy for the twist it took in insulting me. It reminded me that when I was born, “cable” referred to something that held up bridges, a “cell” was something that contained criminals and the “net” was used to capture a fish. As I paused to reflect (something you’re allowed to do more often when you cross the half century mark) I thought it would be interesting, given the ever-accelerating pace of technology, to look back and see just how far we’ve come in the past 50 years. Perhaps it was coincidence, but the year I was born was one when America’s eyes were firmly focused on the future. Kennedy was in the White House and just that year had promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. As the decade dawned, futurists were working overtime imagining a glossy, if somewhat sterile future that involved flying cars, moon colonies, videophones and robot servants. Imagine [...]

The ZMOT Continued: More from Jim Lecinski

Last week, I started my conversation with Jim Lecinski, author of the new ebook from Google: ZMOT, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. Yesterday, Fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman gave us his take on ZMOT. Today, I’ll wrap up by exploring with Jim the challenge that the ZMOT presents to organizations and some of the tips for success he covers in the book. First of all, if we’re talking about what happens between stimulus and transaction, search has to play a big part in the activities of the consumer. Lecinski agreed, but was quick to point out that the online ZMOT extends well beyond search. Jim Lecinski: “Yes, Google or a search engine is a good place to look. But sometimes it’s a video, because I want to see something – I want to see it in use, show it to me. Then – your social network. I might say, “Saw an ad for Bobby Flay’s new restaurant in Las Vegas. Anybody tried it?” That’s in between seeing the stimulus but before the shelf – in that case, making a [...]

Marketing in the ZMOT: An Interview with Jim Lecinski

A few columns back, I mentioned the new book from Google: ZMOT, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. But, in true Google fashion, it isn’t really a book, at least, not in the traditional sense. It’s all digital, it’s free, and there’s even a multimedia app (a Vook) for the iPad. Regardless of the format, I did catch up with the author Jim Lecinski recently and we had a chance to chat about the ZMOT concept. Jim started by explaining what the ZMOT is: “The traditional model of marketing is stimulus – you put out a great ad campaign to make people aware of your product – then you win the FMOT (a label coined by Proctor and Gamble), the moment of truth, the purchase point, the shelf. Then the target takes home the product and hopefully it will live up to its promises. It makes whites whiter, brights brighter, the package actually gets there by 10:30 the next morning – What we came out with here in the book is this notion that there’s actually a fourth node in [...]

The “Mikey” Mobile Adoption Test

The time to get serious about mobile is here. I say that not based on any analyst’s report, industry intelligence or pronouncement from any of the companies who have billions riding on it, but rather due to the “Mikey” test. What, you ask, is the “Mikey” test? I thought you’d never ask. My friend Mikey (and yes, he lets me call him that and yet we’re still friends) is a building contractor. Recently, he oversaw the renovations on our home. We were a little concerned by the fact that in the middle of renovations, during a critical period when kitchen cabinets would be installed, old walls would be ripped down, new ones put up and our bathroom floor would be retiled, we would be 3000 miles away on the most remote land mass in the world, Hawaii. “It’s all good!” said Mikey (he says that a lot, which is another reason why we’re friends), “I’ll keep you up to date with this!” From his pocket, Mikey pulled out a brand new iPhone. “I’ll just take pictures and send them to [...]

What’s So Interesting about Google Anyway?

I just received my review copy of “I’m Feeling Lucky, The Confessions of Google Employee # 59” by Douglas Edwards. That brings to 6 the number of Google themed books that are sitting on my bookshelf (including one by fellow Insider Aaron Goldman). That got me to thinking. Are 6 books a lot to be written about one company? Well, it turns out that there are more than 6. A quick check on Amazon turned up no less than 11 books on Google, the company. That doesn’t include the gazillions of Google inspired “How To” books. So, to return to my original question, are 11 a lot? And if they are, why do authors write about Google? What does Google have that other companies don’t? And how does the Google story stack up against other corporate sagas? It seems that Google is actually heading the high tech pack when it comes to attracting ink. Again checking Amazon, I only found one book on Yahoo and 2 on Facebook. There were 4 on Microsoft and 7 books on Apple. Of all the [...]

Each Day Is a Gift

I’m struggling with the onslaught of time. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m turning 50 in a few weeks. Maybe it’s that I attended the funeral of an old business colleague, friend and mentor who unfortunately was taken away much too early (at 66) due to Alzheimer’s. Or maybe it’s that my oldest daughter is graduating high school this week. Whatever the reason, I just want everything to slow down a little. At the funeral, which was in a Baptist church, the pastor comforted the congregation by telling them that this life is really a trial run for the after life. The days we spend in our corporal form are “pointless…a cruel joke” with “little meaning.” He used the analogy of a dragonfly, which lives two lives, one in a larval stage as a nymph buried at the bottom of a slough (presumably analogous to our earthly stint) and the other as the aerobatic insect we’re familiar with.  He was a little shaky on his biology, but I got the point. I just don’t happen to agree with it. I [...]

The Vancouver Riot Social Media Backlash: Justice or Revenge?

In the 25 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never had to say this – indeed, I never believed I would ever say this – but last Wednesday, I was ashamed to say I live in British Columbia. I wasn’t the only one. I’m guessing the vast majority of the other 4.5 million people that call this Canadian province home felt the same way. In fact, the only people not feeling that way were the idiotic jerks that caused our collective shame. They were the ones using the Canuck’s loss to Boston in the Stanley Cup final as an excuse to wreck havoc on downtown Vancouver. “You can’t cure stupid.” We went into the night holding our collective breathe, hoping the sad scenario of the 1994 riot, after a similar Game 7 loss to the New York Rangers, would not repeat itself. The Olympics had given us hope that we could be placed on a world stage without burning it to the ground. But, as one police spokesperson said, “You can’t cure stupid!” Sadly, it proved to be true. BC is [...]

We’re Looking in the Wrong Place for Our Attribution Models

The online landscape is getting more complex. Speaking from a marketer’s perspective, there are more points of influence that can alter a buyer’s path. At the last Search Insider Summit, John Yi from Facebook introduced us to something he called Pinball Marketing. It’s an apt analogy for the new online reality. Hoping for a Strike In the past, marketing was like bowling. You would build a campaign with sufficient critical mass and aim it towards your target, hoping at the end of the campaign (or lane) your aim was good enough and the ball/campaign had enough kinetic energy (measured in REACH X FREQUENCY X AD ENGAGEMENT) to knock down all the potential customers.  If you think about marketing in this perspective, it explains the massive amount of pain traditional marketers are feeling as the pull their bowling shoe clad feet from the old world and gingerly dip their toes in the new. The bowler was in control (theoretically) and the success or failure of the campaign lay in their hands alone. The paradigm was simple, clean and linear, just the [...]

Different Platforms, Different Ads

There’s little argument that mobile’s time has come. According to Google, mobile searches make up anywhere from 5 to 12% of the total query volume for many popular keywords. And for many categories (i.e. searches for local businesses) the percentage is much higher. That officially qualifies as “something to consider” in most marketing strategies. But for many marketers, the addition of mobile is a simple check box addition in planning your search campaign. In Google’s quest to make life simple for marketers, we’re missing some fundamental aspects of marketing to mobile prospects. Okay, we’re missing one fundamental aspect – it’s different. Really different. Last week, I talked about how my behaviors vary across multiple devices. But it’s not just me. It’s everyone. And those differences in behavior will continue to diverge as those experiences become more customized. The mobile use case will look significantly different than the tablet use case. Desktops and smart entertainment devices will be completely different beasts. We’ll use them in different ways, with different intents, and in different contexts. We’d better make sure our marketing messages [...]

Captiva Eve: Three More Sneak Previews of the Search Insider Summit

One week from today, the formal part of the Search Insider Summit will be kicking off on Captiva. Here are three more of the presentations you’ll be catching if you’re lucky enough to be joining us in Florida. Reinventing the Agency Yesterday I received an email from Advertising Age asking whether we should consider nixing the term “ad agency” all together. The “ad” part of that label, once a badge of honor held aloft along with a martini glass and a Gucci watch, has been pretty much stricken from the marketing vocabulary. But the email, which was an invitation to take part in a poll, was suggesting that we may want to consider throwing “agency” into the dustbin along with it. It brings home non-flattering images of a Don Draper gone to seed. Three different presenters will be tackling the question of what an agency might look like in the future. Dave Tan from Google, Lucinda Holt from Click Equations and fellow Search Insider Rob Griffin from Havas Digital will each peer forward into the not so far off future [...]

New Circles of Intimacy: Presenting in the Social Sphere

The recent Search Insider Summit provided me with a real world example of how our world is connecting in new ways. First, let me set the stage. In the conference room on Captiva Island, we had the actual attendees, usually averaging between 85 and 120 people. But the typical one-way exchange of information in most presentations was made a little less asymmetrical thanks to Twitter. The folks at MediaPost put a screen next to the stage where there was a live stream of Tweets with the #mpsis hashtag, giving us a real-time social commentary on what was happening at the front of the room. The vast majority of tweets came from people in the room (and the vast majority of these came from Rob Griffin – @telerob – who gained notoriety as the Joan Rivers of the summit for his acerbic commentary). The addition of real time tweet monitoring is fairly common at conferences now, but feedback seems to be mixed.  I think speakers are fairly unanimous in detesting it (it can be incredibly distracting). That said, Craig Danuloff threw [...]

Two Sides of Social: Connecting or Disrespecting?

Apparently I opened a can of worms in my last column. I was talking about real time tweeting during the Search Insider Summit, lead largely by Rob Griffin, who added additional comments after the column ran.  The collective force of the Search Insider audience jumped on Rob with a pretty unanimous condemnation of tweeting during live events. Some of the snippets: “We are not the multi-taskers we’d like to think we are. If you’re tweeting instead of listening, you may as well not be there.” – David Lott “Save the tweets for the birds. Disrespectful is not a strong enough word.” – Paula Lynn “Encouraging the attendees to clutch their phones, feverishly pecking out the next great tweet while viable information is being presented…is yet another segmentation of our society!” – Catherine Maino “I teach at a university – and I ban phones in the classroom. Anyone one who is typing [even 140 characters] is not listening to what is being said” – Alan Charlesworth I’m going to steer clear of the disrespect minefield, and dig a little deeper at [...]

The Segmentation of my Slime Trail

My connected life is starting to drop into distinct buckets. Now that I have my choice of connecting through my smartphone (an iPhone), my tablet (an iPad), my work computer (a MacBook) and my home computer (a Windows box), not to mention the new Smart TV’s we bought (Samsungs), I’m starting to see my digital footprints (or my digital slime trail, to use Esther Dyson’s term) diverge. And the nature of the divergence is interesting. Take Netflix for example. It’s finally come to Canada, although with a depressingly small number of movies to choose from. My Netflix account stretches across all my devices, but the things I watch on my iPad are quite a bit different than my choices on an iPad. And there is yet another profile for the things I choose on my MacBook (mainly when I travel). On the iPad, it’s typically an episode of Arrested Development, Fawlty Towers or, if I have a little more time, Mad Men, (and yes, I realize those three choices create an interesting psychological profile of myself) that offers some respite [...]

There is No Blank Slate in Marketing

In 2002, Steven Pinker wrote a book called The Blank Slate. For 509 pages, Pinker argues that when it comes to our brains, and by extension, our minds, there is no such thing as a blank slate. While our destinies are not predetermined by our genes, there are certainly hardwired mechanisms that influence the paths we take.  It’s not solely Nature or Nurture, but a combination of both. Our minds are neither perfectly malleable plastic (the “Blank Slate” of behavioralists) nor are they cast in stone. In the end, you cannot deny human nature. Recently, Google has been spending a lot of time talking about the Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT for short. In effect, they’re saying that when it comes to influencing a buyer, Pinker’s argument is also applicable. In marketing, as in psychology, there is no such thing as a Blank Slate. Former Procter and Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley started this market driven quest for truth a few years ago when he introduced the first and second moments of truth. The first (abbreviated as the FMOT) was [...]

Countdown to Captiva: Reinventing the Organization

Aaahhh…I can almost feel the warm tropical breezes of Captiva. We’re getting very close to the Search Insider Summit and, as promised, I wanted to preview some of the sessions we have lined up for the agenda. As a quick reminder, the theme is RE:Invention. I’m particularly looking forward to a number of sessions we have scheduled that will explore the reinvention of the organization. I spend a good part of my time talking to marketers within organizations that are challenged with guiding traditional organizations through the massive transformations required to compete in a digital marketplace with totally new rules. It’s a topic that’s particularly fascinating to me. Most of the brands we know today were built in a marketplace that favored size and scale. The ability to have a presence in as many locations as possible was key, so complex market distribution networks quickly sprung up. But today, thanks to a digital paradigm shift, the marketplace is defined differently. Physical fulfillment is being outsourced, allowing the smallest E-Bay vendor to sell globally and the importance of physical “shelf-space” in [...]

7 Years as a Search Insider

“Ahh…our fledgling little industry is growing up.” And with those words, I became a Search Insider on August 19, 2004, writing my very first column for MediaPost. Today, 6 years, 7 months and 26 days later, I’m writing my 300th Search Insider column. And yes, our little industry is still growing up.

Captiva: 27 Days and Counting

As I mentioned a few weeks back, we’re trying to put a little more vertical in our perspective for this summit, taking our view to a higher level than is typical at most search based conferences. The theme is Re:Invention, with sessions on the Re:Invention of Marketing, Organizations, Customers, the Search Experience and pretty much everything else.

Vacationing “On the Grid”

Today I earn my living by constructing ideas rather than stuff, and ideas are pretty portable. They have a nasty habit of following you around the world. In fact, the whole justification of getting “off the grid” is to recharge your mental batteries so you can come up with more ideas. It may cut into your vacation time, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

The View from Haleakala

One of the non-vacation things I’m doing on this trip is finalizing the agenda for the Search Insider Summit on Captiva. The sheer complexity of search was driven home as I reviewed dozens of pitches for the available slots on the agenda.

The 1% of News that Matters

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

A Search History of TED

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.

Why Can’t I Argue with Google (or Malcolm Gladwell)?

This week I was in San Francisco for Big Think’s Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box. I took copious notes but there was one comment in particular I found intriguing. Luc Barthelet, from Wolfram|Alpha said that their goal is not just to provide an answer, but show the route taken to arrive at the answer.  Then we’re free to question the validity of the answer. “I want to argue with a search engine. I want to be able to challenge its logic.” This was the first time I had ever heard this, but it immediately struck a chord. Why can’t we argue with Google? Why do we just accept its answers? How do we know they’re right? Of course, Google doesn’t really create an answer, it connect us with answers. But more and more, Google is disintermediating the source of the answer. For many searches, we never go beyond the search results page. We accept the answer as presented by Google, without ever questioning the rationale behind the answer. Why is arguing important? What could we gain from arguing with [...]

Google’s Mission and the Economic Colonization of the Web

Aaron Goldman and I agree – it’s time for Google to rethink their mission statement. But we disagree on the reason. Goldman thinks it’s time “to call a spade a spade” and for Google to come clean on their intention to grab as many ad dollars as possible.  From this perspective, the change in the mission statement is really just to better align it with Google’s business. I think “organizing the world’s information” needs to be changed for a different reason. I think there are inherent limitations in it that may serious impact Google’s revenue stream in the future. A Quick Update But first, some background. Eric Schmidt has moved into that corporate limbo called “executive chairman”-ship. I don’t really know what an Executive Chairman does. I asked Google and it’s also pretty fuzzy on the concept. According to Schmidt, it’s to focus on external partnerships and to “advise” Larry and Sergey. To me, it sounds like a long and polite good-bye. Whatever we know about the shift, I guarantee there’s more to the story. Also, Google rocked expectations on [...]

The World Out of Context

Did you see Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes? No? Neither did I. Neither did about 98% of the population of North America, according to the ratings numbers. Yet I would bet in the past week that we all knew about it, and we all talked about it. But we’re basing our judgments, opinions and conversations on something we’ve, at best, read online, heard about through the network (virtual or otherwise) or seen on Youtube. We’re experiencing the simultaneous pleasure and pain of Ricky’s Golden Globe Roast through hearsay and sound bites. This isn’t an isolated incident. More and more, our view of the world comes after the fact, often filtered through fragments found somewhere online. Most of our experience of the world is out of its original context. This phenomenon isn’t new. Gossip is as old as language. We all love to talk about what’s happened. But the prevalence of digital footprints throws a new spin on this inherently human tendency. The impact of that spin, I’m afraid, is still to be determined. The World as I Remember It [...]

High Risk & High Reward: Fully Engaged Buying

Last week I talked about High Risk/Low Reward purchases and said that when you’re in this quadrant, your “buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards.” True, but at least there is some consistency in the behaviors – risk trumps all. When you’re navigating through a High Risk/High Reward purchase, you can be forgiven for appearing schizophrenic in your decision making process. We swing back and forth from logic to what can only be described as love with the volatility of a pendulum. If ever we were fully engaged in a buying process, this is the time. It’s all hands on deck for this purchase. High Risk/High Reward purchases include new homes, vehicles, expensive toys and extravagant vacations. We spend a lot but we also expect a lot. Game theorists and economists use a term called expected utility to describe our envisioned probable outcome from a decision.  It’s a pretty colorless term, and in theoretical terms, the lack of color in the label reflects the lack of emotion in the decision. Here, we weigh risk against logical outcomes, [...]

High Risk & Low Reward: Buying with the Brakes On

After a brief detour last week (thanks for the many heartfelt messages for my Uncle Jim) I want to return to my exploration of the role of risk and reward in our online consumer behaviors.  We looked at the low risk/low reward and low risk/high reward quadrants. Today, we’ll continue by exploring the high risk/low reward quadrant. As a brief recap, our brains tend to apply brakes or step on the gas when steering through a buying decision based on the degree of risk and the promise of reward inherent in the decision. This dictates the nature of the consumer journey we take – both in terms of paths chosen and duration. I’ve talked before about the concept of bounded rationality, or the threshold of logical consideration we give to any decision. As behavioral economists have found, in almost every human decision, ration is modified by gut instinct. We call this “satisficing”. The only question, it seems, is the balance between the two. Risk and reward are hugely influential in determining our “satisficing” threshold for any purchase decision. High Risk/Low [...]

Uncle Jim: My Information Highway

For my last column of 2010, I’d like to take a little detour from my usual subject matter and tell you about someone very special to me. I’d like to introduce you to my Uncle Jim, who passed away on Christmas day. He was, in many ways, a precursor to the connected world we write about constantly in this column. Uncle Jim was a long haul truck driver. For most of his life, he delivered bricks in Eastern Canada and the United States. Over the last several years of his career, he hauled specialty vehicles for the rich and famous (i.e. he transported Celine Dion’s car from Florida to Vegas). It was this last job that caused him to criss-cross the continent. And it was during this time that many of us in the family got to know Uncle Jim. Our family is pretty spread out. In Canada, we literally span the country, from Halifax to Vancouver. And we have members who also live south of the 49th parallel, primarily in Texas. Over the years, the bonds of our family [...]

Risk, Reward and the Buying Matrix

Last week, I explored how two parts of our brain, the Nucleus Accumbens and the Anterior Insula, are key in driving our buying behaviors. I compared them to the gas pedal and brake of our buying “engine”. The balance between the two is key to understanding how we are driven towards our ultimate decisions. The Nucleus Accumbens drives our anticipation of an emotional reward, and the Anterior Insula creates anxiety around areas of risk. As it turns out, you can plot the two as the axes of a matrix on which, theoretically, you could plot any purchase. The four quadrants would be, starting in the lower left and going clockwise: low risk/low reward, low risk/high reward, high risk/high reward and, finally, high risk/low reward. Let’s take a deeper dive in each quadrant to see what kind of purchases fall into each. Low Risk/Low Reward This is the stuff of everyday life. If you’re a “to-do” list kind of person, it would be these types of purchases that would tend to be on it. Think of household supplies like toilet paper [...]

The Insula and the Accumbens: Driving Online Behavior

One of the more controversial applications of new neurological scanning technologies has been a quest by marketers for the mythical “Buy Button” in our brains. So far, no magical nook or cranny in our cranium has given marketers the ability to foist whatever crap they want on is, but a couple of parts of the brain have emerged as leading contenders for influencing buying behavior. The Nucleus Accumbens: The Gas Pedal The Nucleus Accumbens has been identified as the reward center of the brain. Although this is an oversimplification, it definitely plays a central role in our reward circuit. Neuroscanning studies show that the Nucleus Accumbens “lights up” when people think about things that have a reward attached: investments with big returns, buying a sports car or participating in favorite activities. Dopamine is released and the brain benefits from a natural high. Emotions are the drivers of human behavior – they move us to action (the name comes from the Latin movere, meaning “to move”). The reward circuit of the brain uses emotions to drive us towards rewards, an evolutionary [...]

Search Breaks Out of the Box in Park City

Wow! The Search Insider Summit is in full swing in Park City, Utah and for the first time in 6 or 7 Summits, I’m not there. I don’t mind saying, it’s feeling kinda weird. Laurie Sullivan and the team, including your emcee Aaron Goldman, did a bang up job putting the show together. I did have some limited involvement, looking on from the sidelines as they lined up the speakers and nailed down the agenda. They’re touching on all the hot topics: the convergence of display and search, social and search (pretty much everything and search), new platforms to allow for more effective targeting, the ongoing changes on the SERP, using data to make smarter marketing decisions, and yes, once again, how mobile will change everything (and this time, it’s really true!) The agenda is a broad one, reaching into virtually every aspect of online activity. And really, that’s what any search agenda has to be. One of the ongoing challenges of programming the past several summits has been where to draw the line. Despite the best efforts of many [...]

Baring Your Corporate Soul Online

Web presence is taking on a whole new meaning. I’m having more and more conversations with companies that are in the middle of redefining who they are online. In that process, they’re just not sure what they expose and what they keep hidden behind the kimono. Their website started as a marketing channel, but the explosion of potential customer touch points online makes the whole idea of a website seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet, there’s a limit in scope and complexity that makes websites an easily grasped online concept. Here are some selected snippets from those conversations: 1. “Is blogging really worthwhile? It’s a pretty high investment for the low traffic that blogs get” 2. “Yeah, we don’t really talk about that on our website. Would anyone be interested in that?” 3. We launched our Facebook page and we have 170,000 fans already. Other than a potential audience to advertise too, we’re just not sure what that means” Here, then, is the business reality that lives on the other side of all these comments: 1. The company in question is literally [...]