DraftFCB | 2010 Agency of the Year

Changes We’d Like To See

// November 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

• The release dates of the two Hobbit films moved up to mid-2012 so that we can have our Middle Earth fix faster
• Modifications to electoral law so that no electioneering happens other than within a week of the Election Date
• Toothbrushes with Artificial Intelligence that manage the brushing process to remove all the gunk by themselves
• Car tyres that report back to the dashboard on their tread depth and necessity for replacement
• Honest newspaper and magazine articles on new TV shows (“this one tanked in the U.S.”) so we don’t have to waste our time finding out for ourselves
• Vacuum cleaners that actually suck
• Paper that turns blank if we don’t file it immediately after touching it once
• PowerPoint software that won’t let us type more than seven words on any slide

Why we don’t change even when we should

// November 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

The 2011 Edelman Health Barometer (a 12-country, 15,000-person survey on health attitudes and trends) was recently released. Its findings:

• 56% of those surveyed admitted that their personal lifestyle had the greatest impact on their health, slightly ahead of their nutritional habits (55%) and well ahead of their environment (44%) and the healthcare system (38%)
• 79% agreed that they themselves were most responsible for the state of their personal health (although 38% of those aged 18-30 cited their family and friends as having a role to play in that regard)
• Just 20% said they regularly use tools, devices for apps for managing or tracking their health; of those who did, just over two-thirds claimed that their health had improved as a result

The most telling results of the study emerged when respondents were asked firstly what would motivate them to change behaviour that negatively impact their health; and secondly why past attempts to change behaviour have failed.

The top five reasons that (in the respondents’ opinion) would/should motivate change:

1. Knowing that their long-term health would improve
2. Their physical appearance
3. Teaming up with others
4. Making a personal commitment
5. Reading or hearing about benefits (in the news)

In reality, however, 62% of respondents had previously tried to change a negative health behaviour. Half had subsequently returned to their negative health behaviour, because of:

• 30% Enjoyment of the negative behaviour
• 20% Addiction or dependency
• 18% Did not experience benefits soon enough
• 16% No longer cared about the original reason to change
• 13% It made no difference to their overall health
• 13% They reached the goal
• 12% Experienced a significant life event

The results won’t come as a result to most health professionals – nor, for that matter, to anyone who has attempted to modify behaviour in any sphere. Our stated goals and motivations may be lofty and selfless; the reality is rather more prosaic and mired in self-interest.

The Importance of Research Design

// November 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Allow us to introduce you to John and Mark:

• John is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and jealous
• Mark is jealous, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent

Who do you think you would like more?

It shouldn’t make a difference, since the descriptions contain exactly the same words, and yet (according to “Consumerology” by Philip Graves, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2010), most people unconsciously attach more weight to the words they hear first and say they prefer John to Mark.

Similarly, using neither calculator nor spreadsheet, have a guess at the answer to each of the following two calculations:

1 X 2 X 3 X 4 X 5 X 6 X 7 X 8 = ?

AND

8 X 7 X 6 X 5 X 4 X 3 X 2 X 1 = ?

The average guess for the first calculation, according to Consumerology, is 512, for the second 2,250 (more than four times higher). The actual answer, 40,320, is exactly the same for both. Again, people attach greater significance to the first few numbers and estimate an answer accordingly.

Both examples illustrate the dangers of research design. As Steve McKee noted*** in a BusinessWeek article:

Google once asked users how many research results they’d like to see on one screen. Since conventional wisdom says more is always better, people naturally said “more.” When Google tripled the number of results, however, it found that traffic actually declined. Not only did the results take a fraction of a second longer to load, but having more options led people to click on links that were less relevant. The respondents in Google’s research didn’t intentionally lead researchers down the wrong path; they just didn’t understand the real-world implications of their choices.

For any research to be scientifically reliable, every variable other than the one being tested must be controlled. But in most marketing research it’s impossible to control all the variables, which means a certain amount of error is in every study. Where that error lies, and how significantly it affects the outcome, is always a mystery. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

***http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100312_705320_page_2.htm

How a simple graph saved so many lives

// November 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

For thousands of years, war has brought death to soldiers and those unfortunate to have been in harm’s way. And for most of those millennia, the overriding perception has been that war injuries are the cause of the high mortality rate. For all but the last 150 years, however, the reality has been that most did not die from their wounds; they died from disease. In his book “Iconoclast” (Harvard Business Press, 2008), neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns relates how the truth came out:

During the winter of 1854, Florence Nightingale and a staff of thirty-eight women volunteered to staff the British barracks near Constantinople. Far from being effective, she watched helplessly as the death rate soared. Instead of dying from their wounds, soldiers were dying of highly communicable diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Initially, Nightingale believed these deaths were due to poor nutrition, which was the prevailing explanation.

Then a simple external event made Nightingale see the deaths in a different light.

In the spring, the makeshift sewers in the barracks were flushed out, and the death rate began to fall. This was a key event for Nightingale that caused her to change her perception of what was killing people. She began to systematically collect information for the investigation on the causes of death and their relationship to injuries, nutrition and hygiene.

Nightingale reported the results of her investigation to Queen Victoria using a novel form of data presentation, a polar diagram (similar to a pie chart).

Nightingale graphically demonstrated how many men were dying of diseases stemming from poor hygiene. [That graph powerfully illustrated] how simply taking information and presenting it in a new visual configuration is an effective way to change one’s perception of cause and effect.

These days, we’re drowning in data and our senses are so dulled by a million Powerpoint slides that we can overlook the importance of interpretation in making sense of information overload. The Nightingale story is a valuable reminder of the power of visual aids – you’re unlikely to equal the profound impact of that particular graph, which led to wholesale changes in the way that patients are treated, but clear communications can have a dramatic impact within your own field of endeavour.

The Commoditisation Dilemma

// November 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

The new US television series Pan Am, set during the early 1960s, paints a glamorous picture of air travel (which it uses as a backdrop to the lives and loves of the pilots and stewardesses working for the world-famous airline). It’s a setting that’s at odds with today’s more typical perceptions of air travel as a commodity business populated by discount airlines and low-price daily deals chasing the bargain hunters to the bottom.

Of course, not every airline is labelled a cut-price carrier – and many operators focus on service rather than price as a differentiator. By and large, though, intending travellers are obliged to wade their way through price-based search engines, with little specific guidance as to what makes one airline a more pleasurable experience than another. As a result, consumers are forced to supplement price-based recommendations through word of mouth, anecdotal evidence and advertising-fed brand perceptions – all very inexact predicators of the experience that lies ahead.

A handful of metasearch providers are now offering a somewhat richer analytical experience that goes beyond the pricetag parade to rank airlines on a variety of criteria.

InsideTrip.com ranks what it calls TripQuality on Speed, Comfort and Ease, further differentiated into a total of twelve measurable factors (which can be selected or removed by the consumer, depending on the factors which are important to them):

Speed

• Number of stops
• Travel duration
• On-time stats
• Security wait time

Comfort

• Legroom
• Aircraft type
• Aircraft age
• Historical load factor

Ease

• Connect time
• Routing quality
• Lost bags rank
• Gate location

InsideTrip then assigns a mathematical value to each element, providing a composite score per airline.

Another Travel Search website, Hipmunk.com, offers up the rather more emotive rankings labeled “Agony” and “Ecstasy”:

• Hipmunk automatically sorts results by “Agony,” which is primarily a combination of price, flight duration, and number of stopovers
• The site also sorts by “Ecstasy,” which is a combination of price, amenities, and reviews

The more experienced the traveller, the more important these types of rankings become. We doubt that either InsideTrip or Hipmunk provides the perfect antidote to commoditisation, but each offers useful progress — diminishing Price’s pre-eminent role in the decision-making process and elevating other relevant considerations accordingly.  It’s an important outcome, not just for airlines but for any industries determined to preserve the intrinsic values of their products and services.

If Only Consumers Would Do What We Want

// November 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

MySpace was an internet darling. Created in 2003, it was purchased less than two years later by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a staggering US$580 million. From 2005 until early 2008, MySpace was (according to Wikipedia) the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States.

Then along came Facebook, which knocked MySpace off the top spot (in terms of unique worldwide visitors) in April 2008. As the new social giant attracted more and more users, MySpace declined steadily (by October 2011, MySpace had slipped to 103rd as ranked by total web traffic).

News Corp attempted to relaunch MySpace in 2010, but consumers had moved on – they’d followed each other to Facebook and weren’t willing to go back to their old haunts (at least not without more compelling reasons than News Corp was able to muster).

Finally, on June 29, 2011, MySpace was sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for a reported US$35 million, a tiny fraction of News Corp’s original purchase price. What Justin & Co can do with MySpace remains to be seen.

Michael Jones served as co­president and then CEO of MySpace for the last two years of its life under News Corp. He spoke to Fortune magazine* about why their latest attempts to revive the brand failed:

While it’s true that MySpace faced a variety of organisational challenges that impacted the speed at which we could transform the company, in the end, it was the fundamentals that held us back. And many other legacy Internet businesses are grappling with the same kinds of problems. Here are some of the top lessons we learned:

• Consumers have long brand memories. The lesson here is for legacy brands: there is often more reward for creating a new brand than investing in an existing brand. For example, Google launched Google+, not Buzz or Orkut. In our case, we chose to keep the MySpace brand. This was a mistake. We found that regardless of how much we improved the product or the marketing message –– consumers’ memories about the brand were too strong to allow them to view MySpace with fresh eyes and an open mind.
• Utility Outlasts Entertainment. MySpace Music has always had a strong brand affiliation with entertainment. However, where MySpace came up short was on utility — that is, we didn’t have a product that compelled users to come to the site every day, something that had true-long lasting utility for consumers.
• Perceived momentum = perceived value. As of August 2010, MySpace was interacting with over 100 million users a month, generating billions of page views and streaming hundreds of millions of songs. Yet, despite these incredible metrics, the market value for MySpace was far below the value placed on many other smaller, yet similar, businesses. [However,] the market determines value based on the perception of a company’s momentum, whether it’s a small businesses or a large legacy enterprise.

Time for the classic New Yorker cartoon** – “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” – to be reworded: “On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog.”

Can an ageing brand lure back former followers?  The MySpace story suggests not – at least, not just with a lick of paint and a bit of a makeover. Consumers are unlikely to change their allegiance for such minor improvements. And yet – as we’ve seen with the late Steve Jobs, who was able to make Apple hot again by completely reinventing the company’s style and substance – second acts are still possible after all. Just ask Old Spice.

* http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/10/24/mike-jones-MySpace/?section=magazines_fortune

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog