technology

Wasserkocher and Net Neutrality

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Okay so my birthday happens week after next and I just realized I actually need something. My beloved electric kettle just started leaking in a weird way – and now is my chance to replace it with a kettle that matches my other kitchen appliances! I am kind of excited because I did not even know that KitchenAid made kettles. Please someone procure it for me. Hahaha.

KitchenAid kettle to match my kitchen

KitchenAid kettle to match my kitchen

In other news, the HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver is just getting better and better. The whole program was fantastic (loved the evisceration of Australian PM Tony Abbott), but Oliver’s critical rant of the US net neutrality issue is precisely the kind of thing that illustrates why Oliver deserves his own show.

 

Teach Yourself Revolution: Good Intentions

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A lot of us sign up for online courses – online education is becoming more and more dynamic and accepted. People do it for enrichment, self-betterment, refreshing skills, dipping our toe into something totally new, for diversionary purposes, for actual university-level degrees. I have signed up so many times for these MOOCs (massive open online courses) and never really participated in a single one until now.

Not surprised, then, when I visited my current course’s webpage to read: “If you have got this far and completed the first test, you are amongst the 45 percent left who started the course.” Three weeks in (one-third of the length of the class), fewer than half are still in the course. According to UK Times Higher Ed online (2013), only about seven percent (!) of MOOC students complete the courses they start. Remarkable.

Then again, it is not surprising – there is nothing holding you accountable. The learning with MOOCs, if you learn or engage at all, is passive at best.

While not nearly as passive (collaboration/group work and interaction is required), I have nearly completed an MA degree completely online but have not finished the last little bit – but I found that even with the level of self-discipline I have (I work mostly at home), finding the time and discipline to keep up on readings and lectures was really tough. If school/studying is not the priority or does not have some immediacy in my daily life (that is, the Coursera class I am taking now is quite relevant to my daily work while my MA had very little to do with my life or career), I am not going to be nearly as motivated to make it a priority.

But every time I sign up, I have high hopes and, even more, the best of intentions.

Marketing: Sometimes It is the Messenger

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As I have mentioned a bunch of times already, I am following a Coursera/Wharton Intro to Marketing course on the Coursera website. I was taking a peek at some of the discussion boards and found that for once I felt like contributing. I tend to be pretty passive in those kinds of things, but somehow I just wanted to ramble in pretty much the same way I do here.

Someone posed the question as to whether there is value in celebrity endorsements, which got the community engaged in a good discussion on how celebrity endorsements have changed in the ever-shifting, digital landscape. The question went a step further, asking whether consumers would be more likely to trust celeb endorsements OR crowdsourced reviews and information (such as information from Yelp, Trustpilot or even customer reviews on Amazon or something similar).

I have given a lot of thought to celebrity endorsements, and more specifically, celebrity activism and causes. We’ve seen celebs like Angelina Jolie as a humanitarian activist and UNHCR goodwill ambassador and pompous mouthpiece Bono of U2 appoint himself a kind of expert on developing-world debt and debt forgiveness (he is possibly the most visible – even if his fellow countryman Bob Geldof got the ball rolling with his Band Aid and Live Aid initiatives back in the early-to-mid 1980s and continues to work with debt forgiveness today). While undertaking my MA in communications for development, there was a segment focused on celebrity activism and cause marketing – as well as “brand aid”, where brands become actively entwined and aligned with a well-known cause or charity, and market their products in a way that makes the consumer feel good about him/herself for buying it, i.e. “One dollar of every purchase goes toward –insert cause here”. A lot of what we studied and discussed had to do with how much of this successful marketing actually contributed to the efforts of the cause – in many cases, just contributing directly to whatever cause would be considerably more advantageous for the cause, so the benefit in the end was debatable.

Point being – are people influenced by celebrity (or brand) involvement? And has this changed? Does it make a difference if it is cause-related? Does the messenger make that big a difference?

During my exploration of the discussion on the Coursera site, I thought about it and concluded that celebrity endorsements may take different forms than they have in the past. That is, giant ad campaigns for Pepsi, for example, featuring mass market stars might not hit the way they would have in 1983 or 1993. But with the granular-level of user data available to begin segmenting and targeting audiences, “smaller-scale” celeb endorsements that target specific groups become possible. Similarly, with social media, a “minor” or “niche” celebrity can have untold numbers of followers that they influence – and this can have a significant effect (and can be a cheaper, easier reach alternative for companies who still want celebrity connections but in a scaled-back way). The channels being used today (not the traditional ad campaigns, etc.) also allow for less overt “endorsement” and more subtle influence.

A few other students made very valid, important points – the nature of the product is key. A celeb endorsement for something like fashion or cosmetic items allows the consumer to project him/herself into that celeb’s lifestyle (“buying a dream”, even if it’s something simple like a new shirt or a bottle of perfume), so they might buy it based on that projection alone, even on a whim. Almost the same could be said for buying a car. A celeb might endorse/advertise a car brand – which might influence the consumer’s positive or negative perception of that brand – but would not ultimately make most consumers buy a big-ticket item like a car based on the endorsement alone. They will do their homework – research and look at actual product reviews from real consumers. Celeb endorsements in those cases create buzz and the “all eyes on me” syndrome.

A good set of examples, actually, comes from Volvo. They built enormous buzz with their “Epic Split” video featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme – and consumers talked a lot about it when the video of the ad went viral – but consumers were not the target of these ads for Volvo (commercial trucks).

But did it pique their interest in Volvo as a whole? Probably. Similarly, targeting consumers, Volvo tapped footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic for another ad campaign – obviously appealing to an entirely different target group. Would anyone buy a Volvo because Zlatan gives his stamp of approval? Probably not – but his endorsement raises the profile and opens the door to research and crowdsourced reviews. Then with the reach of social media, ad campaigns and consumer reviews get a much extended reach – so even if an ad campaign was intended for only the Swedish market, for example, it would not be long before that campaign is seen worldwide if it has that big an impact.

With all of this in mind – having written mostly that “take” on it, I walked away with the ideas still stirring in my mind. I watched a few episodes of the series Years of Living Dangerously, a Showtime documentary series that follows actors/celebs into various places and stories that paint an alarming picture of climate change/global warming. Interesting enough but what struck me was how the show is a kind of “cause marketing” that employs both celebrities and a kind of “crowdsourced expertise”. A lot of documentaries take this tack, of course, asking experts to qualify and confirm the statements someone is making. But in this case it was a less than subtle move to target a specific group of people. Maybe someone would watch this and take Harrison Ford’s word for it that Indonesia has been deforested at a shocking rate. But someone else – particularly someone with disdain for “liberal celebrities and media” would not be inclined to believe a famous actor’s take on climate change no matter how much science or information s/he cited. This came into play when actor Don Cheadle traveled to Texas to assess drought conditions there that have put people out of work, put farms out of business and devastated industry, landscape and economy. The population/target audience, as Cheadle’s narration explains, cites Biblical causes and “solutions” – the people he meets do not believe in science or in the whole concept of global warming. Then Cheadle meets a scientist who also happens to be an evangelical Christian – she is also a loud voice for the truth and science of climate change. Because of who she is – both a scientist and a devout Christian – she is able to talk to and reach this particular audience and get past their doubts and convince them not only that climate change is real but that scientific belief is not at odds with their religious faith. She is not saying anything different from what Al Gore ran around preaching but the audience would not listen to him.

Cheadle made the point that actually gets to my bottom line: Sometimes it is not the content of the message but who delivers it – and this is why both celebrity endorsements and crowdsourcing have their place.

Stat Explosion and Data Overload

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May 18 skewed my blog statistics in a big way. As someone who manages a very niche, limited-reach blog for a corporation in my professional life (obviously not THIS blog), this sudden and brief explosion was an interesting look at what immediately drives traffic (a retweet from a famous person). Or rather what won’t. The corporate blog gets readers, and the number of readers and subscribers grows slowly but steadily. It is such a specialized area that it is not as though it would ever get the kind of readership that even my personal blog gets – and my personal blog is all over the place – personal, lacking in a theme or point and not actively trying to drive anything. It started as a baking/recipe blog when my colleagues (whom I had stuffed to near-death with cookies and cupcakes) demanded recipes. It evolved into a dumping ground for my thoughts and commentary on television, news/current events and all manner of other nonsense. Even if my personal blog had a steadier stream of traffic than my work blog (makes sense because the randomness of my personal blog means that all kinds of Google searches, from Mobutu Sese Seko to white chocolate macadamia cookies, from the benefits of telecommuting, to pictures of brown sugar cupcakes piled high with mounds of maple Swiss meringue buttercream and candied bacon. might lead someone to my blog), I never achieved any great reach.

on the bacon bandwagon

on the bacon bandwagon

Until today, my personal blog’s best stats never reached more than 250 visitors – and that was when I was baking a lot and posting recipes and pictures of cakes. In the absence of that, I maybe get 30 or 40 visitors. I am not that concerned with the statistics on my personal blog – I write it for my own sake and if someone else gets there and likes it, or even doesn’t like it, that’s fine with me.

But this morning, which has felt like a neverending night now that Swedish near-endless light nights are here, I posted an article about how I finally watched the witty and insightful Inside Amy Schumer, despite the misleading, one-dimensional Comedy Central ads for it that had so long turned me off. I posted about the blog via Twitter, which was retweeted from Schumer’s own account, which then led to what is for me an unprecedented avalanche of activity. Suddenly my phone was chiming: ding ding ding ding ding ding because, thanks to Schumer’s devotees (a more pleasant word than “followers”), people were retweeting and favoriting my original tweet. (Yes, I am perfectly aware of how asinine this sounds. A non-Millennial person describing the tweet and retweet process like it’s really serious business just sounds funny – even if it does have its own importance. It’s just not the be-all, end-all.)

But more than that, the link to the blog in which I wrote about changing my mind about Amy Schumer’s show made the blog statistics skyrocket. In a couple of hours, there were well over 1,000 visitors. The downside is that this opens the door to a lot of unprovoked criticism from complete strangers. But then yeah, the world’s full of haters, and that is completely fine. I hate a lot of stuff too. It is also easy to have a knee-jerk reaction (no emphasis on “jerk” or anything) – as I did to the ads, and as the commenter had to my post. But I am sure we are both cool enough people in our real lives.

The only comment on the Amy Schumer blog entry, in fact, was a negative one, basically laying into me for my “judgmental, accusatorial” observations about an ad. But, as I commented back (and I think we’re cool now), most of our judgments and decisions are kind of “split second” in nature – especially to ads. They are meant to appeal to us on some level, get our attention and in 30 seconds to make us want to do something, consume something, watch something or buy something (I won’t even use as strong a word as “persuade” since it’s more like advertisers tease and tempt with an elevator speech – so shouldn’t it be a bit more tempting, somehow?). Of course, I don’t know who the target audience was with the Schumer ads, but it’s not me – and that’s fine. But I still had to see them, and I made a judgment that watching the show might not be the best use of my time. Or that it would be as crass and shallow as the ads made it seem. That is no judgment of the show itself or Amy Schumer. And my writing about it was more like, “Hey, I was completely wrong about this – and the two people who read this blog and generally trust my opinions on these matters should know it. Watch Inside Amy Schumer!”

With a fleeting moment of greater reach, you simultaneously become a lightning strike (gone in a flash) and a lightning rod.

I suppose a celeb retweet or starting/being part of a trending topic is the sort of thing that one has to get to gain some traction. Even if, for example, in this case, it is a bunch of clicks – not “traction”. We all know it but there’s no way to predict whether any social media activity will lead to anything. Visitors to my personal blog are nice – but much like in the corporate blog environment, it’s not like they stuck around and read other things. And for personal writing, it doesn’t matter. I write what I write, I post it online and to a limited extent in social channels, but I am not writing for an audience or to achieve something.

But for the corporate writing, you sort of want to extend the reach – establish yourself as a thought leader – but you cannot do anything to damage your credibility or try to somehow get that reach artificially. It doesn’t work and won’t hold anyone’s interest. For instance I could try to steer the corporate blog in a direction where “celebrity surgeons” (is there such a thing other than the odd Dr Oz and some plastic surgeons who show up on makeover shows??) somehow feel compelled to retweet the content, but while that might extend reach for a day, it is not delivering quality or longevity or even the target audience we’d want to reach.

In a kind of related area…

“Data data data – you cannot make bricks without clay…” –Sherlock Holmes in TV show Elementary

All this discussion of statistics should lead to an action plan on how to take advantage of statistics and visitor data to guide future blog content – “give the readers what they want”. At least this is true for the corporate blog – consumer/user/customer responsiveness and centricity is really the only way to ensure continued growth for something like this.

I have been participating in a Coursera/Wharton School online class about marketing, and this week was all about customer-centricity. Since I work a lot with the ideas underpinning “taming Big Data” to gain customer insights in my freelance work, the whole idea of customer focus as one of the only real ways to differentiate makes a lot of sense – and customer data (overload) is the key to giving users what they want.

Never mind that I am totally distracted listening to the professor, Peter Fader, deliver his lectures, because he sounds too much like Bob Odenkirk – so I am supposed to be looking at a PowerPoint slide describing a couple of case studies of companies that have put customer data to good use, but it’s like I am hearing Saul Goodman explaining customer centricity to me. (And Saul Goodman arguably did put his customers first, sometimes to his own detriment and at his own peril.)

This customer-centric, data-driven approach is finally taking root in all kinds of business segments and industries. As Fader pointed out, direct marketing has always used data to target customers – but now, in the digital age, this data is readily available to almost everyone (I won’t get into the ethics of data collection, privacy, etc. except to say that while it’s great for businesses, it’s creepy for customers – see a recent article about a pregnant woman and Princeton professor who had to go to insane lengths to hide her pregnancy from advertisers, retailers and the Big Data machine.) At first companies like Google and Amazon tapped into user data because it’s in their DNA – I have spent a lot of time looking at how old-style, traditional publishers who lost both revenue and subscribers in the big digital shift are now taking back control their data (they had ceded a lot of it to third parties who started taking an ever-larger share of the pie from them) to target their website visitors, readers, subscribers with content and advertising that is highly personalized. And just today I saw a news report about a museum in London that has begun to use all kinds of data collection (traditional and digital) to continue to attract visitors. As the report stated, “Research is a key part of the museum’s arsenal.”

The application of data and personalization is the next logical step, but I wonder about the quality and longevity of this too. Collecting, analyzing and applying user data can only go so far before people feel as though someone is always looking over their shoulder. I cannot help but wonder if that sense of Big Data infiltrating one’s life will start to feel too much like Big Brother and begin to change and influence consumer behavior?

(As advertised – I rambled aimlessly!)

Made Up Make-Up? Innovation and Shifting Trends

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Every place you go today, someone is opening their mouth too much and too enthusiastically about “innovation” and setting an “innovative mindset”. While I am all for shifting the way of doing things to reach unheard-of, unthought-of conclusions, innovation – as those who really work with it know – is the end product – sometime after it is in the market or being used. Usually a person or team does not come up with an innovation by sitting in a workshop talking about what would be innovative. It comes from a lot of different places, angles and factors and can only be called “innovation” – or true innovation – after the fact when its results are known.

I would never have imagined, for example – and this is a point that lies at the heart of “innovation” – something happens that no one imagined, knew was needed or possible that changes the game somehow – either an entire market, a market segment or even whole industries and cultures – that we needed or would see some kind of major innovation in the area of consumer cosmetics and access to them. But the tech-news circuit is abuzz this week with the story of Grace Choi, a Harvard Business School grad, who realized that she could use cutting-edge 3D printing technology to print her own cosmetics.

Recently I started refreshing my basics of marketing knowledge by taking an online course via Coursera/Wharton. One of the cases the professor made was the changing face of consumer interaction with cosmetics. It used to be, if one were not going to the drugstore or big box store (e.g. Wal-mart, Target, etc.), the consumer had to ask for help from a salesperson, all the merchandise was hidden away behind a counter and each brand had its own area/station – meaning that there was not a lot of opportunity for testing and comparing things right next to each other or without having to interact on some meaningful level with another person. This perhaps created a more upscale, customer-oriented experience but for some it was inconvenient and intimidating. And completely out of the customers’ hands. The marketing model and the ways in which the brands were marketed to consumers started to change, though, when online shopping became the mainstream and when the retail experience changed by introducing stores like Sephora. Sephora is an emporium full of all kinds of different cosmetic brands, offering some staff to help out but mostly putting the testing and trying experience into the customers’ hands. To some degree, shopping online changed the process of buying cosmetics as well – but makeup is still such a trial-and-error thing – the expense of it makes one really want to test things out before committing to buying, which led to the very logical but very different retail experience in the form of a Sephora experience.

Now, thanks to some clever innovation, technology and someone simply saying, “Why not?”, we can see the next incarnation of this developing trend of putting the power (whether it is cosmetic creation or something entirely different) in consumers’ hands.

But now with her Mink printer, Choi has used 3D printer technology to remove the middle man (and its often exorbitant mark-up and lack of choice) from the equation, creating a whole new groundbreaking platform to think about. A consumer is at home and can select, print and try just about anything they want in the convenience of their home, the privacy of home, without breaking the bank. This has major implications, of course, for the multibillion dollar global cosmetics industry, especially as this innovation becomes mainstream and is perfected for consumer use. It’s early days – and maybe right now really will only appeal to Choi’s target audience (teen and young-adult women) but like everything that revolutionizes daily life, our purchasing habits – we will start to think about these things in a different way. Today we think about going to Sephora and testing out lots of colors, brands and styles. Yesterday we thought we’d go to the Chanel counter and have to ask for help at the local department store. And tomorrow we can print anything we want.

I exchanged a couple of surface-level Tweets with thinkspace (thinkspace) (after reTweeting their initial Tweet about the Mink printer) and they posed the question, “Would you buy the printer?” And the truth is, probably not now. With most things, I am not an early adopter – and I am not the target audience for this product in any case. I like to wait for things to be perfected and to offer a few more choices and options before I jump in and buy. But as someone who is always thinking about where innovation is born and how it unfolds in unexpected ways, this struck me as a game changer – even if people don’t start printing their own make-up en masse – it may shift the dynamic in terms of how cosmetics companies reach out to consumers, in the choices they offer – and that is just the beginning.

And it really could not come at a better time. In a 2012 McCann WorldGroup study, women expect brands to do more than they currently do “to help guide the process of discovery, choice, purchase and application of products, as beauty regimes become more complex”. If this is the feedback cosmetics companies are getting and they don’t respond, then I assume it’s about time that some other solution come along and deliver what people are asking for.

“When I drink I don’t panic…”

“Do not play fast and loose with my heart…”