Elderly Care Needs Better Market Research

After my last post, I got to thinking about other industries/trends that may defy any economic downturn. Elderly care is perhaps one of them. Much has been written of late about the Boomers retiring, and I won’t rehash that except to say that -having first-hand experience with our current middle class elderly care system – I don’t think the Boomers are going to be happy with it.

So what might future elderly care look like? Current trends revolve around the resort model Hyatt and other major players have taken. Some elderly but still able folks are returning to city cores in order to be within walking distance to culture, food and public transportation. I’m wondering if anyone has considered studying how to match up current real estate “opportunities” with managed care facilities. I would imagine that many Boomers in the US might prefer something more along the lines of a bed and breakfast rather than the large suburban hotel model that dominates now. No matter how luxurious a retirement “center” is, I suspect your stereotypical Boomer might begin to find it, well, boring.

But I wonder how many seniors in the US would refuse to even consider the advantages of retiring to an urban center because of how our culture frames the expectations of retirement – and of what living in an urban core is like. Perhaps qualitative studies designed to probe how people feel about non-conventional retirement and care facilities might uncover untapped new business ideas that use the existing infrastructures of city cores as their foundation.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Do It Yourself

If we are indeed headed for a recession, which industries or segments are going to be the most resilient? What new or unusual market research opportunities might arise? One trend that will almost certainly continue and deepen is the do-it-yourself (“DIY”) aesthetic. The recent housing bubble brought DIY to the fore for homeowners (and earned companies like Home Depot and Ace Hardware a lot of money). Moreover, the DIY trend has itself become, well, trendy, with events like Make Faire, the renewed interest in gourmet cooking at home and online mashups. Many small businesses have already made a partial leap into DIY with SaaS allowing users to “roll their own” phone and CRM systems and PayPal enabling small scale transactions. Some small businesses are even doing their own market research!

Although the DIY trend seems to be part of our changing zeitgeist, consumers eager to save money and squeeze more from what they already have are likely to drive the change. I doubt we’ll see the level of ingenuity on display at blogs like the excellent Afrigadget, but some of these extreme DIY examples point to some interesting possibilities for businesses. For example:

• Are consumers buying more or less of your product based on its modifiability or durability? (e.g., Honda Civic “tuners”)
• Are consumers re-purposing your products for other, unanticipated uses? (e.g. using the game controller from the Wii to construct an interactive whiteboard)
• Does it matter whether or not you have a reputation as a “hack” friendly company (e.g., the Roomba)

So, how do you measure and qualify whether and how consumers are reusing, re-purposing or otherwise relating to your brand in a DIY context? You might address this question with traditional MR methods like surveys and focus groups, but perhaps those approaches yield more actionable data after you’ve identified what consumers are actually doing. Maybe a more interesting approach would be to gather together several companies who have an interest in the topic and initiate a sort of neo-syndicated ethnography project to collect data on what consumers are actually doing when they re-purpose or reuse products in novel ways. After a bit of more traditional MR, business could fine-tune their messaging – perhaps not too overtly – to emphasize how their brand is DIY friendly.

Filed under: Marketing, Uncategorized , DIY, ethnography, trends

Super-Influencers and Memes: Useful Explanations or Vodoo?

This long and interesting post from the Neuroanthropology blog showed up on one of my friend’s shared RSS feeds recently. Essentially, the post eviscerates several talks on memes at the recent TED conference, demonstrating how inappropriate it is to ascribe evolutionary mechanisms to ideas (memes). Although we love us some Dennett around here, I must say Greg Downey’s criticism that there’s little empirical basis for using memes to explain human behavior and social development is hard to dispute.

Outside the world of academia, others are beginning to doubt the related “super-influencers” explanation of how trends spread and products become popular. In this model, super-influencers are more fit “hosts” that allow memes to propagate further and faster than than the same ideas would through “regular” people. It’s sort of a disease-vector model of marketing success and failure.

And this model has made sense from a marketing point of view for a while now as it seems to explain in part why some products and trends catch on while others don’t. But just as there’s little falsifiable evidence for memes, it would seem that there is equally little evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of marketing to super-influencers. Which is not to say that super-influencers and memes aren’t useful metaphors for how preferences and ideas spread – it’s just that we have to recognize the limits of these models. That’s kind of a shame: they were neat models.

Filed under: Marketing, Networks, Science , cognition, ideas, Marketing, memes, super-influencers

Privacy, Convenience, and Why I’m Still Buying an iPhone

Since this is a business blog, I try to keep my tone neutral and to dance around any politically loaded issues.  That said, in my personal life, I tend to be wary of trading privacy for convenience.  So why am I buying an iPhone from AT&T, the ISP who assisted the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program?

A little background is in order.  Most people who know me would be shocked to learn I don’t already own an iPhone.  I’m a typical early adopter of almost every kind of technology.  I played on the Sierra Network, stored my contacts in a Psion 5 and listened to mp3s on a Rio long before AOL rose to prominence, before Palm stormed the market and before white iPod earbuds become ubiquitous.  But with cell phones, I’ve been a deliberate laggard.  Initially this was because I moved back to the States from Europe in 1999 and missed the initial wave of cell phone adoption in the US (a wave that would soon crash into Europe with such force as to impact beer sales!).  Later, although I used SMS, I didn’t see the value in maintaining a convergence device like a Blackberry, especially as I almost always had my laptop with me.

However, several things have changed, and now I feel compelled to take the plunge.  First, many of our critical applications at Sorgenfrei are SaaS based, like our phone, CRM, and project management systems.  I often find myself making multiple, short entries during the day or quickly checking on the status of a contact or a project.  With a convergence device I can do that where ever I am, whether or not I’ve got my laptop with me.  And since many of our meetings take place in New York City, I’m increasingly missing not having mobile email and Google search.  Finally, and probably most importantly, the iPhone’s careful design and deep compatibility will make the learning curve much less painful than, say, with a Blackberry or N95.

But if you want an iPhone in this country, you have two choices:  jailbreak it, or sign a two year contract with AT&T.  While it’s true that most U.S. telcos went along with the NSA (with T-Mobile and – in part – Verizon being the exceptions), AT&T actively helped the NSA tap the backbone.  Certainly in the public mind, AT&T is the company most closely associated with the wiretapping program.  I’ll admit:  I’m reluctant to reward AT&T with a contract.  I could stay with Verizon and buy a Blackberry, but I’m not crazy about RIM’s form factor, and Verizon’s CDMA based system is useless in Europe, and I travel there frequently.  I could buy some other convergence device and use some other carrier, but the iPhone is so convenient, so seductively easy to use and maintain…and when I think about it, none of my email or phone calls are (potentially) private or secure anymore anyway.  So why not go with what’s easiest and best?

I’ve written about the trade-offs between privacy and convenience before. Although I believe consumers will become increasingly savvy about their personal data, in the end, people are still going to choose to trade privacy for convenience.  The challenge for business is to strike an acceptable balance between the two, as Google has now learned the hard way with the YouTube/Viacom debacle.  Clearly, video as a medium struck a chord that wiretapping didn’t, and the businesses that can predict these type of reactions are the ones who will do well navigating our ever-interconnected marketplace.

Filed under: Information, Networks , Consumer, Convenience, iphone, Privacy

Market Research, Technology and the Improbability of Free Will

Market Research, Technology and the Improbability of Free Will

OK, so that’s a big title to live up to.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article in their Science section last week on recent experiments into how people make decisions. What they have discovered, using fMRIs and cleverly designed experiments, is that people make certain types of choices before they are aware of, or act on, those choices. What’s more, people decide up to 10 seconds before they themselves are aware of the choice they have made. Here is how the WSJ article explained one of the experiments:

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button. Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

The idea that we make decisions before we think we make them is almost as counter-intuitive as quantum entanglement. The question is: does knowing there is a “preconscious” component to how we make decisions make any difference in the real world? Up until recently, had you asked this question about quantum entanglement, the answer would have been, “No, it makes no difference in the real world at all.” That was, until we found a few practical uses for “spooky action at a distance.” So perhaps we can ask the same question about the relationship between choice and that bugbear of a concept, Free Will.

You don’t have to be a full-blown Functionalist like Dennett to appreciate the implications of influencing choice by tinkering with what people think of as Free Will. The WSJ article cites a Dutch study where researchers,

…found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices — which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take — appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

So is it a good thing or a bad thing that distracted people, operating on gut feelings, make better choices? I suppose that depends upon whether or not what you’re selling counts as a “sound decision.”

In the future, I can imagine advertisers or salespeople learning how to take advantage of this phenomenon, perhaps incorporating it into NLP-based approaches. Likewise, if smaller or perhaps portable fMRIs become more widely available and affordable, it might become possible to “cut out the middleman” of moderator interpretation in qualitative research by recording consumer preferences at the moment they occur in the brain. This would give you an immediate and highly accurate reading of how people respond to your branding, like the character Cayce in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition who is a highly paid marketing consultant because she becomes physically ill in the presence of bad branding.

Regardless of the scientific and philosophical debate over Free Will, consciousness and decision making, companies still need to get their data (branding, positioning, etc.) into the heads of consumers in order for them to make any decision at all. Consumers aren’t going to abandon the idea that they exercise their free will when they make choices, and it’s the job of marketing to “help” this process. As we better understand how the brain or “mind” works, companies will attenuate their advertising and sales tactics – and it will be interesting to see how consumers respond once they understand these new marketing and sales tactics.

Filed under: Marketing, Science , Consciousness, Decision Making, fMRI, Mind, qualitative research