Morgan Stewart had a great post yesterday on the MediaPost Email Insider blog (Don't Confuse Your Personal Experience with Good Strategy). The biggest takeaway for me was the reminder that, for any communication I create, I need to think about what my target customers want and how they will react, not how I would.
If you ever need a reminder that marketers don't necessarily think like the rest of the world, check out the fantastic site Which Test Won, a rapidly growing repository of A/B and multivariate tests. Each test is presented in a fun quiz format. I find that I do quite well guessing which test won, but every once in a while I get one wrong (judging from the vote results, I'm not the only one!). I highly encourage you to check out the site. Not only is it a great way to spend your lunch hour--it can also serve as a warning of why testing is so important.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Irrational Consumers
Sometimes I want to weep for the human race. For example, take a peek at Christopher S. Penn's recent blog post "The sale is better because the sign is bigger." Chris is absolutely right that marketing can manipulate the mathematically challenged. And in his specific example, that is likely the correct analysis.
But what if we take a wider view? The field of behavioral economics has really taken off in recent years. It's best considered as a fusion of economics and psychology, and one of the more interesting veins of study involves irrational decision-making (see Predictably Irrational* by Dan Ariely for a great introduction). Classical economics has traditionally believed that people make decisions rationally (in other words, they choose the option that is objectively most advantageous for them); Ariely and others have shown that this is not the case. People encounter so many stimuli in everyday life that they have to take shortcuts when they made decisions. Otherwise, they'd be paralyzed by indecision. And those shortcuts mean that often the easy choice is not always the right choice.
There are many messages to take away from this. Here are a couple:
1. The human mind is truly amazing, with the myriad stimuli attended to and calculations made in a single day, often subconsciously. But it is also tremendously fallible and prone to manipulation.
2. When you are coming up with offers to incentivize customer action, it's important to test! Customers don't necessarily respond rationally. For instance, I am reminded of a company that did an email offer test of $50 off vs. 15% off. $50 was 15% of the average order value ($350), so the offers were basically equivalent. The dollars-off offer pulled 170% more revenue than the percent-off offer, even though rationally a % off is better because the more you buy, the bigger the savings.
Think about it--what can you do to make your product/service the easy choice?
* affiliate link
But what if we take a wider view? The field of behavioral economics has really taken off in recent years. It's best considered as a fusion of economics and psychology, and one of the more interesting veins of study involves irrational decision-making (see Predictably Irrational* by Dan Ariely for a great introduction). Classical economics has traditionally believed that people make decisions rationally (in other words, they choose the option that is objectively most advantageous for them); Ariely and others have shown that this is not the case. People encounter so many stimuli in everyday life that they have to take shortcuts when they made decisions. Otherwise, they'd be paralyzed by indecision. And those shortcuts mean that often the easy choice is not always the right choice.
There are many messages to take away from this. Here are a couple:
1. The human mind is truly amazing, with the myriad stimuli attended to and calculations made in a single day, often subconsciously. But it is also tremendously fallible and prone to manipulation.
2. When you are coming up with offers to incentivize customer action, it's important to test! Customers don't necessarily respond rationally. For instance, I am reminded of a company that did an email offer test of $50 off vs. 15% off. $50 was 15% of the average order value ($350), so the offers were basically equivalent. The dollars-off offer pulled 170% more revenue than the percent-off offer, even though rationally a % off is better because the more you buy, the bigger the savings.
Think about it--what can you do to make your product/service the easy choice?
* affiliate link
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Love the LOFT
Pretty much anybody who works with me knows that I love the LOFT--about 85% of my work clothes come from the store. So naturally I became a fan (now liker, I guess?) of their Facebook page. If you're looking for a fantastic example of a company using Facebook to build brand loyalty and keep in close communication with their customers, make sure you check them out. Even Mashable agrees!
The Mashable post details LOFT's responsiveness after customers complained that a certain pair of pants would only look good on a model. So LOFT posted pics of 5 employees of varying heights/weights wearing the pants. They still didn't convince everybody to buy the pants, but they did earn major brownie points for listening!
And as a marketer, I love the fact that, unlike many other stores, they don't focus too much on coupons and discounting to attract people to their Facebook page. Exclusive fashion tips, heads-ups on new arrivals, and quick answers to customer questions and complaints are so much more powerful than coupons when it comes to building long-term loyalty. Now if they could just try that with their other marketing channels. I get so many coupons by email and postal mail that I couldn't possibly use them all...
What's a Few Years Between Friends?
Yeah, so I took a little hiatus from the blog thing, but I'm back! New posts coming soon...
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