Category Archives: Web Analytics

Awareness versus Persuasion

Analytics Education, DataBase Marketing, Web Analytics

In the early days of Home Shopping Network (live TV, not online), we were doing some ethnographic research and started to find “physical clusters” of customers – neighbors or people who worked together. For example, one of these groups was nurses at hospitals, especially nurses who worked the night shift.

We looked for the most active member of the cluster (our “thought leader”) and asked them if they would help us with a “member get a member” program. Would they be willing to distribute discount coupons to their friends, especially ones who were not already customers? Time after time, the answer was:

“Honey, all my friends are already customers of yours”.

We launched the program anyway, because it was a pet project from upstairs – I was a junior marketer at that point so I couldn’t kill it ;) The program never, ever worked, no matter how hard we tried. It generated very few new customers while giving lots of discounts to people who were already active buyers. Basically, the cost of those discounts overwhelmed the value of the new customers generated.

Apparently a similar thing happens online with Social marketing.

As part of a DAA program that reviews academic research for DAA members, I was able to take a look at a paper titled: Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test by David Godes and Dina Mayzlin.

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Adoption and Abandonment

DataBase Marketing, Marketing Research, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

Out of the Wharton School we have a nice piece of behavioral research on the effect speed of Adoption has on longer-term commitment.  The article, The Long-term Downside of Overnight Success, describes research finding “the adoption velocity has a negative effect on the cumulative number of adopters”. 

This research dovetails nicely with a lot of the topics discussed here on the blog lately, so I thought I’d use it (with a nod to Godin’s post on Strategy vs. Tactics today) to provide some fodder for thought.

First, the importance of Psychology in Marketing.  So many of the “discoveries” arrived at through  brute force testing of Online Advertising are already well known in the greater discipline of Marketing through Psychology.  For more on this read “The Other 3P’s” and if you’d like to do something about lack of knowledge in this area, make sure to read this comment on source books.

Second, this research is a great example of isolating the true drivers of behavior.  The idea of looking at baby names to isolate the real behavior from “technology and other commercial effects” while including “symbolic meaning about identity” results in a broad, Strategic-level answer to the question, not a Tactical one. 

Why is this important?  It means the results can be applied across a host of different Marketing situations, rather than only a specific one. 

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Norms of Reciprocity

Analytical Culture, Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics,

Social Marketing Doesn’t Rely on Social Media

Do you believe human beings share certain fundamental traits that define “being human”?

If so, do you believe that human beings tend to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances?

If so, do you then believe since human behavior has these tendencies, it can often be predicted?

If so, then do you think perhaps the study of Psychology and Sociology might provide you some clues to creating successful businesses, campaigns, products, and services?  While your friends and competitors are all iterating their way into oblivion?

On the web, time and time again, we see the same themes repeating.  Yet with each introduction of a new technology, these themes tend to be treated like a new discovery, even though the theme has been well established in the past.

Norms of Reciprocity is a constant human theme.  You may know the expression of these norms as “Sharing”.  Web old timers will probably recognize this idea as “Give, then Take” from the I-Sales discussion list as early as 1995.  In various forms, this theme goes back to the beginning of human history, all the way back to the handshake and other greeting gestures.  This same theme is embedded in countless Religions all over the world: “Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you”.  At least a couple centuries old, this idea.

Norms of Reciprocity simply means this: When you do something nice for a human being, help them in some way, this human tends to feel Gratitude towards “the doer” and tends to do something nice back.  Gratitude drives the desire to Reciprocate, because it’s just what humans do, it’s normal, a “norm”.

Norms of Reciprocity.

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