Archive for June, 2007
2 Ways to Get Started With Personas (Part 1)
I was having a conversation with the experience team at a major “entertainment” company after my presentation at the Internet Retailer conference a few weeks back. We were discussing ways they could get started on Personas, and how to overcome the challenges they’d faced thus far. Given that this dialog took place just off-stage, we had no expectation of privacy. Then again, I had no expectation that well over 100 retailers would be so interested in this conversation as well. It became “the presentation after the presentation”–so much so that the conference producer had to politely ask me to take the impromptu mob outside into the main hall… sorry again, Kurt 
–and I promised all those who wanted to listen in that I’d write up my thoughts and take them to a more appropriate vehicle. So, without further ado…
There are 2 ways to begin a Persona project:
1) Hire a firm to conduct research.
Level of difficulty: easy
Likelihood of success: minimal
Expect to cough up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on this research–and the wise marketer would do everything in her power not to entertain discussions of ROI (at least positive) from this exercise. Expect the resulting research to create beautiful-sounding Personas and make excellent posters to put up on the wall. In some organizations, you may even expect a raise for a job well done, but you’ll profit more from selling all your company stock short. (Bryan chronicled this approach in his ClickZ column, but it’s worth diving into even further, because the underlying question marketer’s are asking when they hire a research firm is an understandable, but flawed one.)
The question being asked of the research is, “How do we know which types of people make up our audience?” Cough up the dough, create a survey, and you’ll find out something absurd, like your audience is made up of “Info-Driven types,” “Conquerors,” and “Browse-2-Buy” types. How did they determine that? They asked about past purchases, of course, and–naturally–those are good predictors of future behavior, right?
Let me know how that works out for you.
Our clients undoubtedly tire of hearing us over-communicate, “Believe what they do, not what they say they’ll do“. Why? It’s simple. People lie. Not intentionally per se, but between people telling you what they think you want to hear (in America, there’s a bias against being “wrong”), people telling you what they want to be perceived as (what they wish were the case), and finally, people telling you something they simply don’t know (the right brain makes the decisions, and the left brain articulates & rationalizes them, yet both sides of the brain “speak” in different languages. Ever played the telephone game?), it’s virtually impossible to separate the signal from the noise.
“Who makes up my audience?” isn’t the question to be concerned with; rather, “How will each different type of person approach and buy my product?” The smart marketer uses this last insight to align the sales process with their customers’ buying process.
Let’s look at a concrete example of why “who” makes up your audience is irrelevant, while understanding the “buying mode” they’re in is essential.
My mom is a Methodical personality type, meaning her preference dictates a logical process, and one that is rather deliberate in its pace. She works professionally as a bookkeeper and routinely catches oversights by the auditors of her books. She remarks with bewilderment that someone whose singular concern is maintaining hyper-accuracy of the data can so easily miss the details. Notice, she wouldn’t qualify the details as minute, though to many they would be. To a strong Methodical, no detail is too fine. When she buys, chances are she’ll ask 10 - 20 extra questions than most other buyers, and with each successful answer, she’ll gain a touch more confidence.
My preference shares her bias towards a logical process, but has a much faster pace; what we call a Competitive personality type. Whereas Methodicals need a sense of order (or structure) to their process to gain confidence over time, Competitives are perfectly comfortable living amongst the chaos, and letting intuition guide their decision making process. The Competitive type can quickly dismiss logical-sounding fluff (you know, the statistical correlations marketers present when they have no actual causation to report). Think like “The Donald,” and you’re probably closely resembling the Competitive’s approach. When he buys, he’s in a hurry, and just wants the bottom line.
The key word in the examples above, is preference. My mother doesn’t methodically choose where to get her nails done, or where to go for a special dinner. In both of those cases, she buys more experientially, favoring more of an emotional process, and eschewing her normal deliberate pace for a much quicker one. She’s quite comfortable giving it a whirl. After all, “How bad could it be”? (Spoken like a true Spontaneous type, she’s operating outside of her typical buying mode.)
I went to buy my first car right out of college and, despite my bias toward a logical process, did zero research on the ‘net–and never checked out a consumer report. I also didn’t use my typical fast pace; I was much more deliberate. I talked to other people who’d owned the car previously and asked for their opinions and experiences. I considered the car to be an extension of my personal brand. My process was almost purely emotional and, with the deliberate pace, was the complete opposite of my typical buying preference.
Had the manufacturer done market research and decided Competitive types were their #1 audience segment, what would they have done? Built a micro-site catering only to fast-paced, logical thinkers. If they did, the conversion rate would’ve likely been the same anemic 2.4% we see today (because, after all, that’s what most sites today do: cater to one type of person, usually resembling the CEO/founder or IT professional who put the site together in the first place).
The point is, knowing your audience’s type doesn’t tell you which mode they’ll be in once they buy your product. That’s what you want to know and, unfortunately, research can’t tell you the answer to that question. If it can, it’s totally different research than anyone has ever done before. It involves using live test subjects, and not in some contrived listening lab. It involves designing the experiment so that the subjects don’t know they’re participating, they’re actually operating according to their own motivations. It involves making the experience become the experiment.
Planning the customer experience in advance, so you can hypothesize motivations, will drive their buying process (read: what mode they’ll be in). Once you’ve properly accounted for motivations, you can test their actual behavior–in a real environment–thus proving your assumptions about their motivations and optimizing the experience accordingly. The level of difficulty is far higher than simply hiring a firm to conduct research, but the likelihood of success is infinitely higher. And there’s a process to it, so you don’t have to bite off the entire approach in one sitting. This process leads me back to where I started, the second way to get going on Personas.
To be continued . . .
[Read Part 2 to learn how you can build Personas from the ground up without costly research, and build in the feedback loop necessary to know where you’re right and where you need to focus additional energy.]
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
iPhone Campout = “Brand Loyalty Beyond Reason”
Has anyone camping out for an iPhone realized that you don’t have to go to an Apple Store? As you may recall (from the only negative moments in any of the reviews), it’s an AT&T device. I just called a few AT&T stores in Brooklyn. No lines.
Apple has become the #1 brand this year for making people blind to the obvious. Don’t get me wrong; we love Apple so much our entire office has gone Mac. Still, this is nuts…
In fact, it might be the biggest example ever of what Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts calls “brand loyalty beyond reason.”
So, contact AT&T if you don’t want to “reach out and touch” the person next to you in line. Works better than “The new AT&T,” doesn’t it?
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Perception is Reality… At Least That’s What it Seems Like
Let’s play a simple game. Tell me what this picture is.
Most of you probably thought of a candlestick or two faces, right? Well, which one is correct? Both are and that’s because we believe what our eyes tell us.
You’d think if you’ve seen one checkout process, you’ve seen them all. How different can putting your name, address, and payment info be? We all like variety in our lives, but shouldn’t this be one of the simplest things? Still, every time I’m ready to checkout, I get thrown a curve-ball and yet another reason to leave the site.
As I scroll down the page, there are forms and fields I’ve never seen before. How long is this process? Why are you asking me this question?
The perception of time and length of the checkout process plays a major role with how visitors view usability. Ask anyone who’s purchased online, and they’ll tell you, just keep it simple, stupid! Yet e-tailers never fail to make it an experience you WANT to forget.
If e-commerce sites want their visitors to turn into satisfied paying customers, listen up:
• Be transparent from the beginning.
Even before your visitors get into the checkout process they should have some simple questions answered. These questions include when the item will ship, what are the shipping and handling fees and what are your return, privacy and security policies. This will prevent shopping cart abandonment and resentment when they have to fill out several forms just to get all these simple questions answered.
• Get right to the point.
Keep it as simple and intuitive as possible. Name, address, and payment info. What else do you really need to know? Don’t distract visitors with colorful flash or crazy questions that make them wonder what any of this has to do with them purchasing right now.
• Don’t make me scroll.
If you can limit the amount of scrolling on a checkout page, do it. The more you make a visitor scroll, the longer they perceive the process to be. If the scroll bar looks like it will go on forever it makes them feel filling out the form will too. Shorter forms that are stacked all onto one page seem more time-consuming than slightly longer forms over multiple pages. Remind customers with a “breadcrumb” page indicator of which step they’re at in the checkout process and how many more steps until they can go back to watching TV. Why does it need to be more than 3? Keep them focused on the task at hand.
• So where do I pay?
Get them in, get them out. Customers who enter the checkout process WANT to give you their money. So, Get the Cash! Clearly show them what they need to do and how to do it. Make each step intuitive, provide assurances at each step, and offer more than one payment option upfront. This is the last place you want them to take a second guess.
If visitors perceive something to be a negative, it probably is. You work hard to get visitors to close. Don’t make it any harder when they want to give you their money. Play nice and you’ll have the most popular checkout on the block.
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Written by:Peter Lee
Do French Canadians Search Different?
I’m not French Canadian; I’m English-Montreal Canadian. Born and raised in a city with a large French Canadian population, Montreal’s culture feels more European than it is similar to any other Canadian or American city. I would go to school in the morning and kiss my friends on both cheeks. We’d go for coffee every day after school. A social and laid back environment was the norm. Working from 9am to 5pm literally meant that people went home at 5pm.
After reading this article about French Canadian search behavior, several questions popped into my mind.
First of all, no matter what culture you come from–and no matter what language you speak–if you’re going to get relevant results from search engine, you’ve got to use words that describe your motivations and intent. So, I wouldn’t expect that French Canadians would use more or less words in a search engine when performing a search.
Still, 85% of respondents described that they were satisfied with the primary search results. Knowing the French Canadian culture, I know that people would be much more relaxed about their expectations. Therefore, no matter what the search results were, they would likely be satisfied. Maybe not ecstatic, but satisfied. It’s just very laid back and there’s little reason to disagree or be unsatisfied. It’s sometimes entertaining to go for dinner with Americans in Montreal because the service seems horrible. You wait for a long time for a table and then you get little to no attention from your waiter!
My hunch is that French Canadians are experiencing the same problems online that most of us are experiencing. I’d even go out on a limb and make the assumption that they might even have a worse experience due to the fact that there are limited French websites that can provide them with the answers to their questions, whereas we have a much larger pool of English websites that the search engine spiders are crawling through to find the most relevant results for our search.
What are your thoughts?
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
2 Minutes In The Age of Speed
Speed?
This isn’t a post about NASCAR, weight-loss pills or Speed Racer (ah, the Mach 5). I know you’re in a rush, so I’ll get to the point.
In September, Vince Poscente’s book, The Age of Speed, will be in book stores. In preparation for the release, Vince is conducting a survey that takes less than 2 minutes to complete. Plus, if you’re among the first 100 to complete the survey, you get a free copy of his book–not a bad deal.
The opening line in the survey says it all: “Is our 24/7, more-faster-now world eating us alive or setting us free?” (Take the survey here.)
Curious about the book? Here’s what Vince’s website says:
Unraveling the notion that in today’s world we need to slow down, Poscente illustrates why harnessing the power of speed is the ultimate solution for those seeking less stress, less busyness, and more balance. The Age of Speed shows this and other groundbreaking revelations at work with case studies drawn from renegade companies such as Netflix, Google, and Geico. And in the tradition of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, a storyteller’s voice enlivens its provocative research and counterintuitive insights
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
The 5 W’s of Purchase Behavior
In expanding the question about relational-transactional purchasing by asking the question of WHAT makes people buy, a fellow deep thinker from the Wizard Academy shared that we should also add in the essential “reporter” questions:
I’d lump them into four categories: Who … Why … What … When-Where-How. Who, Why & What are big driving issues, while you can lump the other three (When, Where, How) together as the sort of mechanics of purchasing.
WHO we are (or think we are and desire to be) deeply influences WHAT we buy. Our “tribes” and “identities” are wrapped in and around our buying impulses. The other aspect of WHO is Who influences us. We care more about the opinions of people we know than we do from some ad. From the list, this might include: Prestige or Aspirational purchase - Name Recognition - Fad or Innovation - Niche Identity - Peer Pressure - Ego Stroking -
WHY we buy … this is the emotional stuff, Maslow’s pyramid, our inner individual needs that drive us. The list of intensely emotional triggers include: Emotional Vacuum - Scarcity - The “Girl Scout Cookie Effect” - Fear - Reciprocity or Guilt - Empathy - Addiction - Indulgence -
WHAT we buy … Buying a new car is a different experience than buying groceries. A car is a big purchase that in many ways is an extension of our identity. A redneck kid from West Texas will be drooling over a 4-wheel drive 3/4 ton pickup truck while the 30 year-old career girl in California is thinking her car not only has to match her “style,” it has to be green.
1. Basic Needs (food, staples, repairs, etc.)
2. Lifestyle items (beer, eating out, clothing… anything you buy that’s an extension of you and your lifestyle)
3. Luxury purchase (Rolex, big screen TV, vacation travel, etc.)
4. Major purchase (house, car, long-term health care, big investments)
5. Crisis needs (medical emergency, disaster, addictions)
When-Where-How
When we buy … Is it an impulse buy? Is it a recurring purchase. Is it a major purchase like a house or car that is really a buying event that only happens a few times in a persons life? Young people have different needs (and buying power) than old farts (like me).
Where we buy … This has changed with the internet. We go window shopping online and quite often just click and get it. UPS and FedEx are as vital to online shopping as Amazon.
How we buy … Credit cards have turned us into a retail junky nation. Virtually anyone can get a card and spend their life savings drinking lattes from Starbucks.
W-W-H buying factors include: Convenience - Replacement - Lower Price - Great Value - Compulsory Purchase - Event - Holiday - The big When-Where-How companies are Wal-Mart and McDonalds.
All of these come into play in our buying. The question for marketers is where do they fit? Where can you leverage this in your marketing?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Andy Sernovitz, Word-of-Mouth Expert, is a Metrosexual…
Actually, that’s putting it lightly. Andy’s screaming that ProFlowers’ email marketing thinks he is gay, and he’s telling everyone! Maybe because it’s Pride month, or perhaps the rainbow reference in their copy, but that’s Andy’s impression.
I’m sure this wasn’t Proflower’s intention. It was, however, a poor job of personalization. What ProFlowers did was take a professional relationship and turn it into personal familiarity. They do a fabulous job of personalizing around birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays–but those are set events on a calendar. This is much tougher in a “just because” email for the simple fact that relationships–like the one between Andy and ProFlowers–doesn’t exist on a calendar.
I hope my friends from ProFlowers go ahead and forward the following couple of posts to the email marketers:
Your Email Marketing Sucks!* Study Says So…
Why “Personalization” of the Web Scares Me
I do want to thank ProFlowers, though, for reminding me that I haven’t touched based with Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa in a while–she’s the last person I sent flowers to from ProFlowers. (Apologies to my lovely wife. It’s not what it seems.)
Be proud, Andy. Spread the word!
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Clothing Websites Designed for Women
I recently received an email from a reader who has a website that sells cool women’s clothing by indie designers callled Smashing Darling. She was asking about design (Web design, that is). I love the concept of the site, but–simply from a gut feeling–the site’s design didn’t appear professional to me. It didn’t inspire confidence in their credibility. It didn’t look like a woman’s clothing site.
This got me thinking; what does a women’s clothing site look like? Is there some sort of template I’ve come to expect? So, I pulled up a bunch of sites–yes, some are for women and men–and, to my surprise, there actually were a lot of similarities. Take a look.
The main thing thing that struck me was the use of white space. But there seem to be some other common themes (hint: navigation). What are the other similarities you can pick up? Or perhaps some interesting differences?
Do you agree Smashing Darling has a design that somehow lacks credibility? Maybe it’s just me, but I keep wanting to scroll up - it looks like the top is cut off for some reason. What do you think?
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Guy Kawasaki on Making $5M/yr in Your Underwear…
It’s pretty nice work, if you can get it:
Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.
I’ve moderated many panels in my time, and if I had to choose one that entrepreneurs should watch, this is it. If you’re one guy/gal or two guys/gals in a garage, it will push all the right buttons, and you’ll love it. However, if your plan is to raise several million dollars from venture capitalists and then hire five engineers, one VP of biz dev, one CTO, two testers, and a VP of marketing to ship a product in a year, you probably shouldn’t spend your time watching it.
I only watched the first 30 minutes of the Google video this AM, before I realized that 15 minutes of checking Bloglines had stretched well over an hour. I’ll be back later to watch the rest, and comment on the highlights. Will you?
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
Bloggers: Use Google to Get Links
After 5 months of using our RSS Discovery Engine at Today.GrokDotCom.com, we’ve come to a very elegant conclusion:
Blogging about Google gets you a crazy amount of links.
Now, slow down for a moment. I can almost hear the cries of “link-baiter!” and it saddens me. So, allow me to be perfectly clear. Of course I’m baiting links. (Duh.) But here’s the point: you’re reading this. So, before you get upset about it, allow me to submit for your consideration that any post with the word “Google” is de facto link bait.
Consider the field research & analysis from our system…
Born from our staff’s collective list of 400+ blog feeds–a list that’s snowballed to include more than 5,000 interactive marketing blogs, thanks to the algorithm behind our Discovery Engine–we’ve now featured, as of the most recent publication from the last 30 days alone, exactly 248,201 blog posts, over a third of which are about Google.
Mind you, it’s not as though we go out and find each story about Google. We don’t find any of the posts; the Discovery Engine ensures that they find us. The really cool thing about this process is that the algorithm behind it is purely democratic. The way it works is that the most linked-to blog posts, from all the 5,000+ blogs that are fed into the system, get featured. From today’s breaking news, to the top recent stories, to the best of the week, and best of the month, your links decide what’s important.
Notice a trend? How many stories do you see about Google? And, without giving out numbers, let’s just say that some of those best-of-week and best-of-month posts have hundreds of blogs linking to them.
Still, we manage it. And for those who think it’s rigged because I used the word “manage,” yes, it’s slightly rigged. If I didn’t delete duplicate posts on the same topic, if I didn’t occasionally delete less-relevant posts (again, our call, but I’m mostly doing you a favor), and if we didn’t take down multiple posts by top blogs so lesser-known bloggers could get through, there would be even more stories about Google. (Yes, really.)
Of course, telling bloggers what to blog is a recipe for disaster. And far be it from us to do so. Blog whatever you’re passionate/knowledgeable about. But, just so you know, the key to frenzied linking remains: Google.*
[*Robert Gorell is Managing Editor of GrokDotCom. He was not paid by Google to imply you should write about Google. In fact, Robert thinks whatever you blog about is just fine, within reason. Although Google’s perfectly welcome to attempt to pay Robert for his views, he’s merely trying to show that you, not he, are obsessed with Google–which, by the Transitive Property, is just fine. Robert would also like to apologize for writing about himself in the third-person in such a ridiculously obvious manner.]
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Written by:Robert Gorell
