Snake Coffee

From Businessweek, an interview with Marty Neumeier, author of Zag. Neumeier spins one of the fundamental motherhood rules of brand management (differentiation) into this book, based on the simple idea that a statement such as “Our brand is the only _____ that ______.” is essential to building a strong brand.

A much more interesting part of the book is a a Good Versus Different graph, in which he plots products into four quadrants based on their performance along the two axes of good (high quality, workmanship, aesthetics, etc.) and different (surprising, fresh, offbeat, etc.). The surprise is that products in the Not Good and Not Different quadrant, obviously a bad place to be, tend to test well in market research, while products in the best quadrant of Good and Different tend to test poorly.

Unfortunately, despite the obvious danger spelled out above, a very common practice today seems to be to test new products in exactly this way, without stopping to think about when such testing might actually be useful.

Neumeier offers an alternative for those managers who are unable or unwilling to take the “leap of faith” or judgement required to solve the class of decision problems that Malcolm Gladwell would call Mysteries.

If you apply straight-line metrics to ideas like these, you get a resounding “no-go”. The trick is to evaluate ideas the way a designer would, by matching the customer reactions to previous success patterns. What you’re looking for is not an idea that everybody believes is terrific, but an idea that gives people pause, yet that has undeniable benefits over existing alternatives.

Two seemingly unrelated articles from MIT’s Adverlab point to the future of advertising.

 ”Sony Corp. has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.”
– Reuters

Wired writes on emerging mind control ad technology that lots of people are dismissing as bogus science (a recent conference on neuromarketing had to be canceled due to lack of interest): “Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as “neuromarketing,” could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes.” It’s interesting that CalTech is already in the game.

Is another “creative art form” going to become a mechanistic, computer-driven science?

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article on Enron puts the spotlight on a very useful framework, first described by Gregory Treverton, for addressing decision problems. It is easily and usefully applicable to most marketing problems.

Is it a Puzzle or a Mystery?
A puzzle is a problem or a question with a definitive answer. Its solution depends on finding all the relevant pieces of information.

Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

A mystery, on the other hand, is a problem or a question without a definitive answer.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

A Typical Case
Consider the case of a soft drinks company with a couple of familiar marketing problems. Why is the company losing market share to its rival? And what can it do to win back share?

The first question is a Puzzle. Solving it requires nothing more than finding all the pieces of information that explain the situation, such as competitor activity, distribution figures, promotional spends, and changes in consumer preferences. This calls for the rigorous application of traditional Marketing Research techniques and reports.

The second question, on the other hand, is a Mystery. No amount of Marketing Research can solve this problem. Its solution depends on the creative use of what Theodore Levitt famously described as the “Marketing Imagination“. (It’s one of my favourite books.)

Imagine treating this problem as though it were a Puzzle. The marketing manager at the soft drinks company would probably carry out a series of Marketing Research studies designed to find the solution, such as need-gap analysis, concept testing, product benchmarking and so on. The problem with this approach is that this kind of research is usually a rear-view mirror. It can tell us where consumers were and what they wanted when we carried out the research but it can’t tell us anything useful about how they might behave in the future.

(This is also known as the Sony Walkman conundrum, because in the world that existed before the Walkman was invented and marketed, all available research showed that consumers reacted negatively to the idea of a portable music device. Take that, iPod!)

I think that most marketing problems can be classified as Puzzles or Mysteries and this framework makes it easy to determine when to apply Marketing Research techniques and when not to do so.

What do you think? Do write a comment if you think this framework makes sense (or not).