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Welcome to the MBA 604 Roundtable, where everyone gets a turn to speak and respond.
We do not spend our lives communicating information and collections of data and experiences. Instead, we communicate ways of seeing that enable us to interpret information, a set of data, and experiences. This is difficult to do in class. The Roundtable will give you a chance to consider your ideas and to continue developing them after other students respond.
The purpose is for you to think critically and express yourself cogently. If you do that, I don't mind whether the Roundtable stays on topic or takes its own direction.
I'm hoping to challenge some of the ideas about marketing that you brought to the MBA program.
Control
Choices and Network Effects in Hypertext Systems
by E. James Whitehead, Jr.
University of California, Irvine, 1999
To examine how a hypertext system generates network effects, it is useful to examine two sets of users, the readers, and the content providers. A reader uses the hypertext system in a read-only fashion, viewing information and using services provided by the system. In contrast, a content provider uses the hypertext system in a read/write manner, both providing new content while also reading information and using services on the system. So, while all users of a hypertext system are considered to be viewing content, a subset of the users also adds (and removes) information to the system.
To what extent are you moving from being a reader to being a content provider aka writer?
Reading + writing = literacy
In order to not just survive but thrive, every organization needs to make decisions based on market research.
You must improve and innovate, which will take information, statistics, and knowledge. To the extent that you rely on technology, just keeping up with relevant developments is a full-time job.
What do you need to know more about?
How
will you acquire this information?
How
will you organize it, for example, by market segment, by technology, by source
of information?
Insight | Why do I rail against paper? Because it has crippled your thinking. Your education has made you very good at structuring documents. It has not prepared you at all for the world where you structure information.
name of each competitor; link to web site
basic
stats: where, how large
their
market share
how
direct a competitor?
which
of you has competitive advantage: better, faster, cheaper
learn more: competitive intelligence resources
Don't forget your own company. What will your competitors learn if they research you like you're researching them?
who are your customers?
How big is the market?
Is
it growing?
Are
you going to develop new customers or take a share from a competitor?
How
are you dividing it up: age, geography, income?
List
and name your demographic segments.
-- note: for purposes of this seven-week course, we're going to stipulate much of this important information
who are your potential investors?
Create at least one profile for each segment, in as much detail as possible. Pictures are good. In addition to personal information, think about this customers' psychology. Marketers often analyze them in an appropriate typology (or stereotype, though it has negative connotations). For one example of such a typology:
Your customer is extroverted, seeks new stimulation when
shopping, and is likely to buy impulsively.
Your
customer is anxious and cynical and looks skeptically at any brand. A careful
shopper, he or she avoid new things because they appear scary.
Your
customer is very brand conscious, into the latest styles, chic and gadgets even
a bit of a brand slave.
Your
customer looks for authenticity, the unique. On the one hand, this customer
loves quality, wants the best and the rare. On the other hand, this customer is
a pretentious snob who always wants something his or her neighbors don't have.
In this article, Gerry McGovern is writing about website editors and readers, but what he says applies to everyone in marketing and their customers.
Web
editors have a great future
by Gerry McGovern
New Thinking, April 18, 2005
The first and by far the most important skill you must
develop is to have a gut instinct for what your readers want. To develop a gut
instinct -- to have your finger on the pulse of what your audience wants -- you
will need constant contact with that audience.
Every week you must observe, meet, phone, and email your readers. Nothing else
-- absolutely nothing else -- is more important. There is no greater skill to
develop than to know what works with your customer and what doesn't; to know
what they will read -- how much they will read -- and what they will not read.
Developing a gut instinct allows you to quickly evaluate the worth of new ideas
for content or applications. This is a tremendous skill and will guarantee you a
successful career in web management.
What will you ask?
questionnaires
You can put these on your web site, you can hire a company to administer them by phone, and you can keep asking them every time you have contact with your customers.
focus group scenarios
Periodically, in-house or with third-party help, you should bring customers together to talk about and use your products and services under observation. For example, ask them to go to Google and search for your product. Ask them to find something on your web site.
web analytics
You should archive all the server logs and periodically report visitor and customer data.
due November 2
Please go to the Bistro MBA 604 Roundtable's Market Research topic and respond to the customer profile section above in one of two ways. Put your responses (1) directly at the Bistro or (2) on your Plaza web and then put a link to that page at the Bistro.
Introduce your customers to us. Create at least one profile for each segment, in as much detail as possible.
In class on November 2, we will look at as many profiles as we can in fifteen minutes.
Since we have enough budget (cough! cough!) for some independent, third-party marketing research, what do you want to know about your customers that can be learned through surveys and focus groups?
Here a list of common and obvious questions. They need to be tailored to your individual business plan.
1) Where to find customers, where are they paying attention,
what type of media, or other electronic resources?
2) What is the range people are willing to pay, compare different packages.
3) Which logo / slogan / web site design accomplishes which branding and
usability objective?
4) How do customers naturally segment?
5) What customer segment offers the most potential growth?
6) What other companies (in any industry) offer benchmarks in areas (ex.customer service) that we should
strive to be like?
due November 9 for discussion in class that week
Please go to the Bistro MBA 604 Roundtable's Marketing Research Problem topic and tailor one or more of the questions above to your individual business plan.
No Logo:
Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
by Naomi Klein
web
site, chapter one, New Branded World:
part I |
part II
A Window into the Soul of the Consumer:
New Approaches to Gaining Marketing Insights from Online Behavior
by Daniel E. Hess, October 24, 2002
Unfortunately, this seminar is no longer available at WebEx. The summary here doesn't do it justice because you need to see and hear the creepiness of it.
Daniel Hess works for comScore Networks, makers of analytical models to predict offline economic trends based on online consumer behavior. He talks about all the things he can learn if people let him record every click of their computer. He can learn more about you than you know about yourself.
Many companies monitor every keystroke of their employees already. What that could learn from mining that data is frightening.
Using M.R.I.’s to See Politics on the Brain
by John Tierney
New York Times, April 20, 2004
The political consultants discreetly observed from the next room as their
subject watched the campaign commercials. But in this political experiment,
unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by turning a dial or
discussing his reactions with a focus group.
He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of
his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles,
measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead of asking the subject, John
Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in a
Bush campaign commercial, the researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham's
brain were active as he watched. The active parts, they also noted, were
different from the parts that had lighted up in earlier tests with
Republican brains. (my emphasis)
PBS Frontline's
The
Persuaders, especially the part on
neuromarketing
Commercial Alert Asks Senate Commerce Committee to Investigate Neuromarketing
by Gary Ruskin
News Release, July 12, 2004
What would happen in this country if corporate marketers and political
consultants could literally peer inside our brains, and chart the neural
activity that leads to our selections in the supermarket and the voting booth?
What if they then could trigger this neural activity by various means, so as to
modify our behavior to serve their own ends?
We Americans may find out sooner than we think. “Orwellian” is not too strong a
term for this prospect. Yet this research is happening right now, conducted by
neuroscience and marketing professors affiliated with some of this nation’s most
prestigious universities, such as Harvard, Baylor, CalTech, Penn State and
Emory. They are using medical technologies such as functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) not to heal the sick but rather to probe the human psyche for the
purpose of influencing it.
BrightHouse's Neurostrategies
how
the brain categorizes things it likes and dislikes
insight
into the foundation for brand loyalty
Behavioral targeting (BT) is an advertising methodology in
which an advertiser’s creative is shown to users based on the sites they visit
and/or what the user does on those sites.
The network or publisher creates behavioral segments based on where the user has
gone and/or what they have done on various web pages. These are typically broad
based descriptions like “Travel Shoppers” or “Auto Enthusiasts”, but they can
also be very specific to an advertiser like “Users who put items in their
shopping cart, but did not check out”. Another example is a segment based on
users who have searched for an advertiser’s company name or product name.
What's going on with Chris Locke? Don't miss his
95 Theses.
What's wrong:
ClueTrain Manifesto
How to fix it:
Gonzo Markets
In his first book since co-authoring the wildly successful Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke speaks out on corporate conversations, how Internet marketing is different at its core, and why you really can have it all…if you just forget everything you already know.
Frankenstein Reversed: Notes on Gonzo Marketing
by Tom Matrullo
Weblogs.com, October 16, 2001
The market, he argues, is changing into something else, rich and strange, and business can either change along with it, or crash and burn. Business must see that the emerging market, thanks to the catalyst of the Net, is developing deeper heart, richer consciousness.
Reviews of The ClueTrain Manifesto -- the author isn't shy about sharing them with you. At Slashdot, Jason Bennett reviewed The ClueTrain Manifesto. This excerpt from the review summarizes Internet Apocalypso, chapter one of the book, which you should read.
Basically, commerce as we know it is a lie. For most of
human history, trade has been about interacting with other people. Going to the
market, seeing your friends, checking out the various stalls, conducting
business, and generally doing the important things of life. Craftsmen proudly
displayed their wares to all who would see, touch, and smell them. People
discussed which merchants were fair, who had the best quality, and so on. The
market was the center of human interaction, where politics, society and business
merged (see the Greeks for an excellent example).
The Industrial Revolution changed all that, however. With the advent of mass
production and economies of scale, production and consumption became all
important. Craftsmanship was discarded in favor of turning out as much
interchangeable product as possible, using interchangeable workers in
interchangeable factories. The marketplace ceased to be a conversation, and
became a one-way street, aimed directly at the consumer.
The rise of mass media completed the transformation from conversation to
lecture. No longer did customers roam the marketplace, but instead consumers
were lulled, bribed and manipulated into buying the latest and greatest, because
TV told them so. The idea of the interchangeable consumer came to be the
industrial ideal. Nothing was left to chance: You could get anyone to buy
anything made by anyone, and all that mattered was the money. This ideal never
totally came to pass, of course, but it was the driving force behind many
decades of business.
According to Rogers'
diffusion theory, the change agent:
develops in others a need for the change
establishes information-exchange relationships
diagnoses problems
creates intent to change
translates intent into action
stabilizes adoption and prevents discontinuance
shifts others from reliance on the change agent to self-reliance
due November 16
Please go to the Bistro MBA 604 Roundtable's
Future of Marketing topic and talk about what you learned from reading the
articles linked from there.
What important ideas you are taking away from each? Elaborate on those ideas in
a couple of hundred words.
Is there a direct connection between these ideas and your experience online?
Please explain. Why would I be assigning these?
For example, what challenges does Chris Locke present to old ways of thinking.
He is clearly a positive change agent for some, at least through Rogers' first
three, especially diagnosing problems. For others, Chris is too radical to even
read let alone take seriously. How do you respond to him? Has he correctly
diagnosed the problems with Industrial Age marketing? What about his solutions?
Can you make a business case for them? How would they benefit a new economy
business model? Can you make money using Chris's kind of marketing? Or would you
be fired outright?
I encourage you to do a little outside-the-box thinking.
I recommend that you compose your reply off-line and save it before you
copy-and-paste it into the Bistro reply box.
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Roundtable
