MROCs: The Long And The Short Of It

When MROCs – Market Research Online Communities – were first invented, they mirrored the way online communities worked. They were very much like web forums: big, long-running, semi-permanent structures with hard-working moderators whose participants dropped in and out at leisure.

The main difference was how quiet a lot of MROCs felt. In an environment where getting 20 minutes input a week from a participant was a success, it’s no surprise most communities seemed somewhat empty. And no wonder. MROCs bore the same relationship to functioning web communities as a movie set does to a real place. Devoid of life until the director turns up and says “action!”.

Aaaand… discuss!

For a while people made efforts to change this – to make research communities more vibrant or more engaging. But it didn’t solve the problem.

The Natives Are Restless

Last week we were at the WAN-IFRA Innovation Day in Amsterdam, talking about the 10 Rules Of Digital Advertising. Most of them were really variations on the One Rule Of Advertising we talk about all the time – that if people feel nothing, they’ll do nothing, so you need to orient your advertising around emotion rather than use it to persuade.

One thing we didn’t talk much about was content marketing and native advertising, which some people feel is the future of the whole digital shebang. Native advertising is in the news today, as Yahoo!’s $1bn+ acquisition of social blogging platform Tumblr is widely considered to be a bet on native advertising as a platform.

Image via Business Insider

So it’s worth writing a post about native, and where it fits in our overall conception of advertising and how it works.

Make It Easy On Yourself

Martin Weigel is a the Head of Planning ad Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam, and his blog, Canalside View, is one of our favourites. His latest post has as neat a summary of what advertising (and all marketing) should aim for as I’ve seen:

“So perhaps all we should be asking…“What can we do to make this brand easy to think of, and easy to buy?” While the answer(s) might not be simple, could the question really be that simple?”

And we would agree – yes, it could. It’s why we keep going on about making decisions “fun, fast and easy”, and how market research fits into that. It’s the thinking, for instance, that went into our most recent product launch – the System 1 Pack Test – which is all about creating packaging which makes a decision easy at shelf. And as Weigel says of advertising, that ISN’T by freighting it with extra information or messages.

But Weigel’s simple question hides a great deal of subtlety, and not just because the answers are difficult. “Easy to think of” sounds pretty straightforward – but does that mean conscious recall? Can the thought be implicit? Does it imply some kind of positive emotional content? Should only the brand be easy to think of, or its core promises and messages too? Your answers to each of these will determine – for instance – the kind of creative work you commission and the kind of research you do on it.

(Our answers are roughly: “No; yes; yes; just the brand is fine”, incidentally)

As for “easy to buy”, there’s a sly ambiguity there too. It can mean “easy to buy” in a physical, logistic sense – it’s there in front of you when you shop or search a category, for instance. But also in a competitive sense – it’s easier to make the choice to buy one brand than another. Both types of ease need to be addressed in separate, but complimentary ways.

But these hidden complexities don’t detract from the post. In fact I think this is the really powerful thing about Weigel’s question – it unifies advertising, distribution, and point of sale marketing, making them all parts of the same problem. Which of course they are.

(EDIT: Martin has kindly pointed out that full credit for his thinking goes to Byron Sharp, William Moran and especially Andrew Ehrenberg, so we’ll pass that credit on. Here’s a PDF on the “Ehrenberg Legacy” that was going round Twitter this morning.)

How To Eat A Sandwich (The Daniel Kahneman Way)*

This is a post about how to get a better experience from your lunchtime sandwich.

Here is a sandwich. This particular sandwich is a chicken, bacon and avocado baguette, but don’t worry! This powerful psychological trick works with any kind of sandwich.

How would you eat this sandwich? You might start at one end and finish at the other. But then you are left with this as your final bite.

Not very exciting.

But why does that matter? It’s all to do with something Daniel Kahneman hypothesises in Thinking, Fast And Slow: the peak-end rule.

“I Can’t Even Remember Whose Ad It Was!”

Scene: A train, or a pub, or an office. A few years ago.

“Have you seen that ad with the gorilla?”
“Which ad?”
“The one with the gorilla playing the drums.”
“Oh! That one! It’s funny.”
“Yeah.”
“I couldn’t tell you who it’s for.”
“No, me either. Bit pointless if you don’t know who it’s for.”
“Is it a chocolate bar or something?”
“Oh right yeah, Dairy Milk.”
“Dairy Milk! That’s it! What’s a gorilla got to do with Dairy Milk?”
“No idea. It’s stupid. It’s a funny ad though.”
“Nobody’s going to buy Dairy Milk because of a gorilla.”

The face that launched a thousand posts.

You might have had a conversation like this. It needn’t have been about a gorilla, of course. It might have been about a pony, or rollerskating babies, or a kid dressed up as Darth Vader.

But chances are you’ve had a conversation in which somebody says that they don’t know who an advert is for, so what’s the point of it? Next to “I never buy anything because of an advert”, it’s one of the things you hear people say most.

Researchers often encourage this line of thinking, by filling up surveys with questions about things like recall, or link to the brand.

We don’t, though. Because if you look at that conversation above, the people are mentioning the brand four times. If you’ve got an ad that makes people feel good enough to talk about, what you’ve effectively done is changed the rules of recall and brand linkage. “Who the advert is for” becomes a piece of information about an ad, rather like “what’s the song in the ad?”.

And it only takes one person in a conversation to know that information for everybody to be reminded of it. Organically reminded, at that. And the act of reminding – being the person who knows the brand, or the song – is a nice bit of social currency. So everyone wins!

Basically, if you’ve made a fame ad – the kind of ad people want to talk about – you’re outsourcing recall and brand linkage to the crowd. You can – in fact, you should – worry about it a great deal less.

(EDIT: Just to clarify, we’re not saying adverts should feature NO branding. We’re saying that in a fame ad, light branding will work just as well as heavy branding – and see here for more on the emotional trouble with heavily branded ads.)

Banking On Emotion

People hate banks, but like using them. Why?

One of the really good things about having a consistent system of emotional measurement is that it lets you compare very different parts of a customer’s experience with your business. By measuring the same emotions in the same way, you can start investigating how well general feelings around a brand or category are reflected in specific interactions.

Take financial services, for instance. Yesterday I gave a presentation at the EFMA Customer Week which drew on several entirely different studies across a number of years. One was a customer satisfaction study, one an online behavioural project, and one a brand image survey. Different brands, different markets, different times – the data couldn’t be fused. But because each project was measuring the same emotions in the same way, the data could be compared.

Jérôme Kerviel – Still a consumer supervillain?

A Tale Of Two Simpli-Cities

One of our constant mantras at BrainJuicer is “Fun, Fast and Easy” – it’s our shorthand for how quick, instinctive “System 1” decisions should feel. Most decisions people make are taken quickly (“fast”), routing around difficulty (“easy”) and make the decider feel good about their choice (“fun”).

But of course there’s more to it than that. What happens, for instance, when two of these imperatives are in conflict? What happens when making a decision easier also makes it less fun?

Two news stories last week perfectly shed light on this fascinating issue. They both involve root-and-branch redesigns, and both redesigns put simplicity at their heart. One has been a roaring success, one a complete disaster.

The disaster first. The plunge in US retailer JC Penney’s fortunes under its ex-Apple chief executive Ron Johnson looks likely to become one of this decade’s touchstone studies in business catastrophe. Johnson was ousted on April 8th after a brief reign which had seen sales nosedive, with his signature “Everyday Low Prices” policy widely blamed.