Tag Archives: FOCI

When The Future Begins – A Guide to Long-Term Thinking by Magnus Lindkvist #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

When The Future Begins – A Guide to Long-Term Thinking 
Magnus Lindkvist, TRENDSPOTTER & FUTUROLOGIST

  • B2B really means brain to brain 🙂
  • in 1800 it took 6 weeks to move an idea from chicago to new york
  • today, anyone can go anywhere within 47 hours, or 47 seconds if you use email
  • time lag is our best friend today, it makes intention easy, R&D = rip off and duplicate
  • cities used to look completely different and now they all have the same style of fancy modern buildling, they all look and feel like downtown LA
  • business have done the same, ten years ago phones looked a little different, today all the phones look they same – same size, same shape, same colour – of course market research firms are all different [funny guy!]
  • annual return on assets has declined over time, don’t look at equity because that can be manipulated
  • if everyone has the same skill level, luck would have a large role. swimmers win by 1/1000 of a second. this is luck.  We have free checkin. Oh yeah, we also have free wifi. Oh yeah, we also have free fitness.
  • Improvements are really magic – when people started to live longer, when children lived beyond 5 years
  • a lot of technology is fun or new, but certainly not magic
  • do we make magic?
  • IKEAfication – technology when it’s new is fun and sexy, technology needs to become boring to change the world, technology needs to become invisible and nameless to be used highly
  • “internet connection” only has relevance to people who remember dial-up. for children, hearing about internet is as exciting as a toilet.
  • [goodness this guy is funny!]
  • aging society – people are living longer, the first person to live to be 200 has likely already been born
  • if we live longer, we start doing new things in life
  • in the fifties we invented teenagers. prior to that, you were a child for 3 years and then had your own kids at 14
  • now, you have multiple careers over a long life, marriage is no longer a judicial contract to protect property, now its for love
  • most companies want to grow by replication, expand into another country
  • very few talk about growing by magic, how do you grow by magic?
  • viagra was a failed blood pressure medication with side effects, now we can invest our money in some birds that are really angry
  • we are frozen in uncertainty so we hoard cash in case we come across the next angry birds.
  • should we compete or create? competing rewards familiarity. creating makes enemies.
  • how long do you want to work to create one hour of reading light – in 1800 you had to work 6 hours, in 2014 it takes on half a second of work. lights could grow by replication – big candles, yellow candles, candle conferences, candle meetings. or you could build a lightbulb. new companies aren’t bound by what we’ve been doing all along.
  • a good measure of progress is liberation.
  • only ideas with true potential make you frown or smile. not something something big data something something social listening.
  • look for secrets, unarticulated needs
  • we look for ideas in the wrong people sometimes, just people they say the right things and sound intelligent
  • to live is to poke around, we don’t plan everything and some of our ideas are bad
  • look for secrets, experiment, recycle failures, be patient and persistent
  • companies often feed problems and starve opportunities
  • it is stupid to say “We have tried that before”  Check out the history of the “Torn” song
  • keep ‘making enemies’ at the top of the list, ideas that sound strange have potential to succeed

 

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The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One Ray Kurzweil, Google #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One
Ray Kurzweil, Author, Inventor, Futurist, Director of Engineering, GOOGLE

  • data is amazingly predictable
  • brains are designed to make linear predictions, originally for personal safety and survival
  • step 30 of linear progression is prediction, step 30 of exponential progression is a billion and far more than a prediction
  • we can change any outdated software in our bodies – genes – insulin receptor genes need to change because we know the next hunting season at the supermarket will be good; we can now fix damaged hearts, we’ve modified stem cells
  • Moore’s Law – over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years, progression is very predictable
  • will i double my consumption? yes, we more than double it each year. increases 18% per year in constant currency, reason is innovation and invention
  • Law of Accelerating Returns – An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense intuitive linear view
  • 3D printing is in the hype phase right now, won’t make it big until 2020 because resolution isn’t good enough yet, will be able to print out clothing by 2020, pennies per pound, there goes the fashion industry… no?
  • we used to have to send books, movies, and music by fedex but now we can do it in an email, much of it is free but people still spend money on these things, revenues in these industries is going up fueled by ease of transportation
  • body doesn’t yet recognize cancer but maybe we’ll be able to download an app that can do that for us
  • neocortex used to be the size of a postage stamp but it was capable of a new kind of thinking, it allowed invention and innovation – invent a new path of escape, inventions within a person’s lifetime not within generations of lifetimes
  • neocrotex is still a flat structure but now it’s the size of a table napkin, the curves and ridges allow it to expand the surface area and now it’s 80% of the brain
  • IMG_1079[1]amygdala no longer decides what to be afraid of, the neocortex does
  • by adult, many of the connections that were there but never used have died out
  • when a person is blind, does the visual cortext die off? no, it moves on to help out with language
  • WATSON was a test of human intelligence on Jeopardy, those queries involve humor, jokes which we think only humans can do; got it’s knowledge from reading wikipedia and many other websites, not from the engineers; it makes up for weak understanding of what it’s read with the volume of pages read
  • eventually we will communicate directly with others using nanobots that communicate with neurons
  • we will become a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking
  • Have you backed up your laptop lately? what about your ‘mindfile’
  • Enjoy this video of income and life expectancy over time
  • [I’ve done a poor job of transcribing his thoughts. Buy his book. 🙂 ]

 

 

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Data Philanthropy: Unlocking The Power Of Adjacency Across Sectors by Kyle Nel #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

Data Philanthropy: Unlocking The Power Of Adjacency Across Sectors
Kyle Nel, LOWE’S

  • uncommon partners create uncommon results
  • as a marketing researcher, he only cares about changing behaviour, insights are only helpful if they lead to behaviour change, everything else is just nice to know, lots of insights don’t lead to any behaviour change “I’m having a hard time getting a seat at the table” – well, not if you change behaviour
  • there were lots of really smart people at blockbuster and kodak building and improving their products, but they weren’t doing it fast enough, it was linear change not exponential change
  • knowing where we are going is more important than the steps to get there
  • what can you do?
  • take merchants to their section in a store – take new brand managers to talk to customers in their aisle, people will tell you all kinds of reasons from value to memories to dunno. the brand managers think this is insight gold. but when you go outside where people are holding their bags. Offered to give people $20 to name half the things in their bag. Only a quarter of people could remember and they never mentioned the brand names.
  • most marketing research is really abstract. we ask people and believe they know why they do the things they do. it’s bizarre. things have changed. there are other ways to do this. insights are a stepping stone to understanding behaviour. does it matter WHY if you know that action A creates action B [Love it]
  • time is our biggest enemy, not really money

 

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Using Consumer Insights/Data to Create A New Consumer Category through D2C by Theresa Farrell and Rebecca Dilnik #FOCI14 #MR

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

Using Consumer Insights/Data to Create A New Consumer Category through D2C
Theresa Farrell and Rebecca Dilnik,
KIMBERLY-CLARK CORP.

  • proactive is a direct to consumer billion dollar brand via television
  • hard to innovate in the consumer packaged goods area, traditional method has a lot of issues
  • complex – marketing, media, distribution and more
  • expensive – buying media, planning distribution, stocking, inventory, training
  • risky – CPG innovation failure rate is between 50% and 90%
  • inflexible – once machine is moving, media is bought, customers are ready, you can’t just stop it
  • success won’t be known for six months
  • test markets are complex, expensive, time consumer, and maybe not even predictive if you don’t match them well, garbage in garbage out
  • in direct to consumer space, you can sell a little bit and learn a lot
  • lower investment than with a national launch, don’t have to build up large inventory, you can measure instantly what was bought and by whom, you can modify your plan more quickly
  • Case study #1: Neat Sheet
  • Little Swimmers are diapers so toddlers can swim)
  • the outer cover prevented sand from sticking to it so why not transfer that into a little ground cover – the NEAT SHEET
  • projected market results were not met, tests said it would work but couldn’t get it in the stores and consumers couldn’t find it, people loved the product and they needed to raise awareness of it
  • works at the beach, working on your car, at sports events, at concerts and 100 other uses
  • how could they get stores interested in the product? QVC would be a great opportunity
  •  good sales in 2002 and 2003, but by 2007 they took it off the market, but lots of great learnings about how to prepare to use QVC
  • Case Study #2: Kleenex hand towels
  • discovered via diary data, tested really well, packaging is designed to fit any bathroom on a towel bar or on the counter. but kleenex is a big brand and habits are hard to break. people are used to using a regular towel. consumers need demos.
  • tested in january 2010. in 8 minute slot they had several demos. first slot had 2700 purchases. $7500 per minute. QVC says if you get $5000 per minute they will keep you on air longer. They were able to figure out where within the 8 minutes they got the most interest. ended up selling more than $9000 a minute which was the best of the day.
  • a fresh clean towel every time you dry your hands eliminates the “yuck” factor and is a good health benefit [but boy is that wasteful!]
  • learned a little more, sold a little more.
  • retailers were sold on the DTC results and were able to get store distribution a lot easier, continue to see adoption to today
  • Case Study #3: Truist moisturizing socks and gloves
  • designed for women over 50, positioning is not maintaining youth, it is honest aging and taking care of yourself and the changes that come with it [deemed a risky position. sigh. okay, be happy with who you are. right now.]
  •  we are taught about the aging process way too early, we are expected to look impossibly perfect [hell yeah! yes, I took a less than flattering selfie of myself today 🙂 ]
  • how do we support a great product and minimize the risk? start with DRTC. Made a 30 minute infomercial with real women. Great viewership but low sales.
  • switched to a 5 minute version to the target audience, modified the video to show real women using the product. this worked but adding free shipping helped more.
  • fortunately experiments are quick and cheap – media format, optimal line up, price experimentation, free products or free shipping, find the right TV channel to put your infomercial on
  • Key takeaways for DTC for innovation
  • you can get in the market a lot faster, lower investment of media and product, real time research of changing price product format [honestly never thought that major brand names did infomercials]

 

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How To Generate Word of Mouth by Jonah Berger #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

How To Generate Word of Mouth 
Jonah Berger, Author, CONTAGIOUS WHY THINGS CATCH ON

  • how tasty are our messages? are they broccoli or cheeseburgers?
  • is it tastier to tell a pregnant woman “Don’t drink alcohol” or “It’s your choice”
  • does Disney, Cheerios or Scrubbing Bubbles generate more word of mouth. it doesn’t matter. what matters is WHY any of them generate more word of mouth.
  • why does cheerios generate most word of mouth?
  • WOM is 10 times as effective as traditional advertising. a dollar spent goes 10 times as far.
  • WOM generates more than twice the sales of advertising
  • do you care if you see a celebrity advertising a product? we don’t trust ads. they all say something is fabulous. they don’t say “this movie isn’t as good as the original.” Our friends tell us straight out.
  • ads need to advertise in the right space and you have to find that space.
  • WOM is always targeted – from interested person to another interested person.
  • why not let your customers figure out who would be interested in your product. if you find a great baby website, you will share that site with other people who have babies. and people generally have friends who are like them.
  • 7% of all WOM is online. so why are we spending so much online? Online does not = WOM.
  • will facebook or twitter be around in five years? who knows. myspace and QR codes didn’t really make it.
  • if there were no cats, there would be no internet [har dee har 🙂 ]
  • six key stepps – Social currency, Triggered, Emotion, Public, Practical value, Stories
  • Need to turn customers into advocates
  • social currency is having knowledge that people want, people want to be the first to talk about something, it’s a signal of who they are just like how they dress, we want to look good
  • * Make people feel like insiders, make them feel special [funny, a million people feel that they are the only ones with the information]
  • mcdonalds decided to release McRib only in certain places at certain times and now people get really excited about when they can get one, they made people feel like insiders
  • In-and-out has an insider menu, makes you feel like you have status, are in the know
  • but what if you sell something really boring, remarkable
  • * find the inner remarkability, surprising, novel, or interesting
  • can you sell boring blenders? make them remarkable and interesting – check out “Will it blend”. millions of people share these videos. 700% sales increase after these videos. do you know what kind of blender you have and will it be able to do this? I bet you’re going to check what blender you have. anything can be made remarkable if you think about it.
  • * triggers. remember the humpday advertisement with the camel? this Geico
  • ad is not funnier than any other ad, they don’t show it more than any other ad, but it is the second most shared ad. it spikes in shares every wednesday. if we think about something, we’re more likely to take action on it. liking isn’t enough. it needs to be memorable so that people think about it. Top-of-mind means tip-of-tongue. Playing german or french music increases sales of german and french wine because it is more top of mind.
  • You don’t go to disneyworld everyday but you do eat cheerios everyday. that’s why it has more top of mind, WOM.
  • what will make people think about you every day? what’s in the environment? jelly relys on peanut butter to make people remember it.
  • KitKat plus coffee. Pick something that is frequent – coffee four times a day, wednesday once a week. And the trigger needs to happen first.
  • * Make the private public. Just say no ads were govt attempt to stop using drugs. simple plan. but did it work. no, it didn’t decrease drug use.
  • people who saw the ads were more likely to do drugs… because most people weren’t thinking about it anyways and now you’ve just reminded them, now you’ve just told them the cool kids are doing this, other people are doing this. If you can’t see what people are doing, you can’t imitate them.
  • how do you pick a restaurant in a strange place? you choose a full restaurant, we use others as a signal. Is everyone carrying an umbrella? Are other people parking here?
  • remember apple’s headphones – white headphones – we could see who was using a digital music player right away, and the brand name. Make the private public.
  • People are more interested in 25% off vs $5 off of a $20 purchase. But when you talk $2000, people want to hear $500 off not 25% off.
  • Trojan horse story – good stories hide a lot of information. even though they didn’t tell you the blender was durable and tough, they created a trojan horse that carries that message. blend anything and everything easily, even an iphone.
  • Never say no to Panda ads – humor drives people to share, try to tell someone about the ad without saying the word ‘Panda’
  • Find your message and apply the STEPPS

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Holiday Shopping with All Screens 24/7 by Maria Domoslawska, and Roddy Knowles #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

Holiday Shopping with All Screens 24/7
Maria Domoslawska and Roddy Knowles, RESEARCH NOW

  • multimode starting with online, going to metered PCs, mobile phones, and then mobile diary GPS tracking which adds more engagement and gets us closer to the consumer
  • sample sizes of thousands, conducted around Thanksgiving
  • partnered with Experian for Hitwise data, tracked the top 20 retailers
  • 3% of people used mobile for purchasing but we will see mobile did play a central role
  • saw spikes for black friday and cyber monday on PC traffic
  • even though people aren’t necessarily shopping on their phone, the phone is with them at all times, they use their phones while they shop a lot more than they used to
  • 40% of consumers say they LIKE the huge crowds in the UK, and plan to do this
  • 31% of people made only unplanned purchases, impulse
  • 26% made planned and unplanned purchases
  • purchase planning by store – more unplanned at CJP, Macy’s, Kohl’s – clothing stores
  • in the UK, they plan to buy after Christmas, they give gifts on boxing day because they know they can get a better deal
  • more planned purchases for bigger ticket items like appliances and electronics
  • flowers and small gifts were mostly unplanned
  • ask people to take photos of their receipt – would people actually do it? and are panelists buying what they said they bought – did they forget something?
  • used the mobile diary to determine if people could actually find what they were looking for
  • were able to capture basket spend via diary data and determine average expenditure by store, matched well with responder data so people were able to recall quite accurately
  • 74% say gift giving makes them feel good
  • Key takeaways:
    • multi-country tracking help find subtle changes in your market which can become a big creative idea for your next program
    • mobile is in shopper’s lives and will not go away. it is an essential device for shopping even if they aren’t actually purchasing on their device
    • getting close to the point of experience yields rich and accurate data on shopping behaviours
    • not every datapoint is going to add value but layering survey data with new variables of passive behavioural data can activate your hypothesis

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Location and the Art of Business Analytics by Simon Thompson #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

Location and the Art of Business Analytics 
Simon Thompson, Director, Commercial Solutions, ESRI

  • language evolved in order to map things in our head
  • we implicitly understand location, our smartphones understand our exact location to 6 decimal places of latitude and longitude which is 100 meters
  • we use location to add context – addresses, activities
  • if you buy a phone with an air pressure sensor on it, then you can tell the elevation, which floor of a building – time, location, height means you’re at this marketing research conference
  • i will target certain things to get a coupon but they don’t need to know where I am all the time
  • context trumps content
  • in 2020 there will be 50 billion connect devices and they are all location aware
  • 55% of all retail internet time originated on smartphones and tablets
  • the death of things – paper maps, notebooks, business cards, pedometer, tape measure, scanners – all dying because of smartphones
  • people think about geography as getting coupons – is this minority report?
  • 80% of purchases are made within 10 miles of home or work
  • combine social media mining with location monitoring
  • locavation – reason for being in or at a place, act of giving someone a reason or incentive to be somewhere, commitment that makes someone want to be somewhere, behaving in a particular way in a particular place
  • location is the new cookie – place impressions out perform page impressions
  • we live in the internet, not on the internet
  • recall the case when Target identified an underage girl as being pregnant, and then sent advertising to her? Why didn’t Target recognize she was a GIRL, not an adult? They had all the data to identify that datapoint as well but they ignored it?
  • “if you build it, you can monetize it” — that’s scary! build a technology and then try to use it
  • the shopping journal is just like a shopping journal online – except online you can also get a welcome back, personalized offers, recommend products, tailor the content, analyze behavior
  • can a physical store do this? with location devices you can localize products for an area, detect arrival at a location, tailor offers by proximity, analyze raw data, concierge services for premium customers, validate effectiveness of window displays, modify store layout, analyze checkout queue times
  • indoor mapping with transform retail in the same way that freeways did in the 1950s
  • smartphones make it hyper hyper local

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Jack Be Nimble: Faster & Richer Insights Through Insourcing by Richard Shakarchi #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

Jack Be Nimble: Faster & Richer Insights Through Insourcing
Richard Shakarchi, E*TRADE FINANCIAL

  • you can’t have faster, cheaper, better – one will always suffer. it’s a zero sum game
  • There is a pyramid of services
    • do sample providers provide direct value? not terribly [HEY! disagree!] easily outsourced.
    • Research operations gets work programmed. do they add direct value?
    • What about project management who makes sure things are done on time? Could be outsourced
    • Design and reporting translate business need into research design. sometimes outsourced.
    • Then comes insight at the very top. frequently omitted.
  • Project information and design and reporting people give you tons and tons of data. but where is the insight. are we training anyone to become insights professionals?
  • budgetary constraints are driving industry change [do you think budget would be an issue if researchers proved they were essential? no]
  • many innovative techniques actually cost more
  • budget constrained researchers can use omnibus surveys, google consumer surveys, good for generic simply research but not the deep dives
  • if money determines which method you are using, then you are sacrificing something
  • DIY research has a really bad reputation.  OPen access to non-professional less to less than stellar control, quality of research deteriorated, limited capabilities for better design. Yes, cost went down but so did quality.
  • Since early days, DIY has dramatically evolved, it’s not just surveys any more. we can do user testing of websites now, face-to-face interviewing, online communities
  • I know I CAN DIY, but should I?
  • Read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”  As an industry evolves, new technologies will emerge. In the early days, the tech won’t be that great and people will ignore those tools. But just you wait. They will eat at the heels of the higher quality providers. But those “new” technologies eventually become just as good and now they are cheaper.
  • “Guns don’t kill, people do”  Don’t blame the DIY tools for the problems of those who use the tools.
  • Break the paradigm.  Among skilled researchers DIY is faster, better, cheaper.
  • Own the insights. Clients are the category expert. They know all the products inside and out, the financials, and how the survey was programmed. No one is better qualified to explain the insights.
  • If you do it long enough, you will have your own benchmarks for all the same types of measures your research supplier had.
  • make sure the DIY team has all the expertise they need from consulting to project management, research design, question writing, survey programming, database skills, data processing, basic and intermediate statistics, storytelling -[okay, one person can’t know it all but your team can]

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The Role of Social Across the Consumer Decision Journey by Ramona Harvey #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

The Role of Social Across the Consumer Decision Journey 
Ramona Harvey, EBAY

  • talked to millennials in their homes, how do they communicate with their friends, do they talk about which things to purchase or which things they did purchase
  • online interviews with more than 2000 people to figure out the consumer driven journey CDJ
  • 66% of purchases were the result of a brand posting or a friend posting online
  • heavy social shoppers are on ALL social sites, particularly twitter and tumblr
  • heavy social shoppers are currently unfulfilled by social
  • electronics purchases are most socially engaged along the consumer driven journey
  • five key activities help identify heavy social shoppers – age or purchase type are not the best predictors
  • people remain hungry for information even though we think we’re providing a lot, people want things to be easier to find, need an easier way to see what MY friends are talking about, they don’t want to share their actions with everyone, make it easy for me to find sales
  • a lot of people use twitter in the moment – i’m going to this story now, i’m at this story now
  • 7 of 10 people are inspired to purchase by something they see in their social network
  • youtube is an important driver for millennials, they use it in the way that most people use google, for searching, to learn how something works
  • they trust reviews, but they don’t necessarily trust their friends views, particularly if they think their friends don’t have expertise, it really is about word of mouth
  • a share button next to a purchase doesn’t really happen because people don’t want to inundate their high school friends and other people who don’t really care
  • sharing with a network is indeed higher in the electronics category
  • social activities within the CDJ are more important for passion purchases than non-passion purchases
  • electronics purchases are highly socially engaged during the CDJ process, likely due to the nature of the products that require research

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Building a Social Spine in Tracking Research by Larry Friedman #FOCI14 #MRX

Live blogging from the #FOCI14 conference in Universal City. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.foci14

Building a Social Spine in Tracking Research
Larry Friedman, TNS

  • turn tracking research from a rear-view mirror into something that is windshield oriented, looks to the future
  • historically tracking is survey research
  • lots of information is observable, passive, that we didn’t have available before – social data
  • we need to use obtrusive (surveys) and unobtrusive research together, MR rarely uses unobtrusive methods
  • The Trouble With Tracking – insights not actionable, flat-line metrics, far from real time, long vague surveys
  • is social media data a real alternative? real time, sensitive to events real consumers talking to each other in their own words at their own pace
  • has social worked? hasn’t made the case yet, mostly because there is a lot of discussion and it’s not always what we’re interested in, hard to find the signal over all the noise. hard to understand what the metrics really mean. people want a one-to-one metric with external measures as in how we compare survey metrics
  • what does the number of negative mentions in social really mean? how does it compare and to what?
  • some worry that social isn’t representative because not everyone is online, not everyone uses these tools [and everyone participate in surveys??]
  • the real issue however is predictability. even if it’s not representative, if it predicts it’s got value [heck yeah! first time I’ve ever heard someone other than myself shout this out]
  • should social data look the same as survey data? why should it? shouldn’t it really be different?
  • great success in predicting brand health by putting social and search data in the model
  • data cleaning is extremely essential, discussion must come from the correct geography – avoid english conversations around the world, avoid the coupon and sales bots, ensure you are getting apple computers not apple pie
  • social lets your track your brand equity today instead of 3 weeks from now when something major could have happened and been dealt with
  • make the social equity score a leading indicator, plan for several weeks ahead, prevent problems sooner
  • most social analyses are mass market analyses, we can’t throw away surveys just yet. surveys are needed for deep dives
  • models need to be updated more frequently – pinterest and vine are brand new and suddenly huge, social sites will come and go very quickly
  • google modeled trends in flu reporting, people search for flu symptoms online – model could anticipate trends in flu that CDC was reporting, model worked well for a couple years. model is no longer active perhaps because google changed how it does it’s search terms, changing their own data changed their own model
  • old tracking model was a project on it’s own, you discussed not changing the tracker so as not to change the trend.
  • new tracking model is an integrated program from a variety of sources to give a forward look into the market place
  • need to consider what consumers say (survey), think (social), and do (POS)
  • able to predict car registrations by using all forms of data together
  • difficult part – we see a trend that is decreasing and so take action to improve it… and then the trend increases. but was your prediction accurate? did you fix the problem or did the trend just increase as it was going to anyways?
  • why do you use tracking surveys if you make no changes to affect those ratings? why bother tracking numbers that never change [fabulous point]
  • we need to learn more about which and when spikes matter

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