APUNTES Y LECTURAS

CONDUCTA DEL CONSUMIDOR

LOS INSIGHTS DEL CONSUMIDOR.

Insight es un concepto que está relacionado con la publicidad emocional. Se podría definir
como las sensaciones, preocupaciones, y experiencias que el consumidor siente cuando
entra en contacto con el producto o la marca, y especialmente cuando siente la necesidad
o el antojo que nuestro producto intenta satisfacer.

Se expresa siempre en primera persona, y el publicista debe tratar de encontrar este

insight para ver la manera en que la marca va a responder a estas sensaciones. Se trata
de “ponerse en los zapatos” del consumidor.

Cuando un consumidor busca hacer un viaje, el insight puede ser cualquiera de éstas:

“Me siento agobiado y cansado, me urgen unas vacaciones. Un lugar donde pueda dormir
y tirarme al sol y simplemente descansar. Seguramente será muy caro. No sé qué tanto
pueda pagar, pero lo que sí me queda claro es que me urge salirme ya de esta ciudad”.

“Me siento aburrido. Quiero experimentar sensaciones muy excitantes. Música, fiestas,
alcohol. Quisiera tanta fiesta, que no pienso dormir en todo el fin de semana.”

“Quiero conocer lugares nuevos e interesantes. Algo completamente diferente a lo que

conozco. Un lugar lejano, mientras más lejano, mejor. No importa pagar mucho, porque
quiero realmente conocer lugares y experiencias nuevos para mí”.

Cada uno de estos insights nos dice algo acerca de lo que el consumidor siente y piensa y
quiere. A cada insight le corresponde una campaña de marketing diferente. Para cada
insight, podemos posicionar nuestra marca de manera diferente.

Por ello, es muy importante conocer muy bien al público para saber por qué compra y ahí
van apareciendo las motivaciones y los insights que le llevan de forma inconsciente hacia
el producto.

Así, a la hora de adquirir una vivienda, hay que saber qué impulsa a la gente joven a
comprarla, con qué ideas dan ese paso. De ahí surgirán insights como es el deseo de
libertad, la ilusión por comenzar una vida en pareja, decorar por primera vez todo a su
gusto, etc. Estos insights serán diferentes de las personas que compran una segunda
vivienda, o los que compran para invertir y revender o rentar.

En conclusión, los insights son verdades sobre el consumidor.

TEORÍA DE LA PERSONALIDAD DE FREUD:

Según Freud, la personalidad está formada por 3 partes:

El ello: representa al niño. Es la parte impulsiva que todos tenemos, la búsqueda del
placer, es impaciente y caprichoso, no se preocupa por los costos de sus actos, ni por las
consecuencias, únicamente busca el placer, son las pulsiones y las urgencias que todos
tenemos.

El super-yo: representa al padre. Es la parte que frena y censura al ello. Se preocupa por
los costos y las consecuencias, y su única prioridad es la responsabilidad absoluta,
negando al placer. Es la brújula moral que todos tenemos.

El yo: representa al niño hecho padre, es decir, el adulto. Es un equilibrio entre el ello y el
super-yo. Intenta mediar entre los caprichos y la responsabilidad. Busca la moderación y la
justificación en todo lo que hacemos. Un poco de placer y de gusto no está mal, pero todo
con límites y con responsabilidad.

Todos utilizamos estas 3 partes de la personalidad. Cada una va saliendo según el

momento y la compañía. A veces actuamos como “ello”, a veces como “super-yo”, y la
mayoría de las veces, como “yo”.

Como mercadólogos, es nuestra labor el identificar cuál de estas partes freudianas

queremos despertar cuando el consumidor sienta el insight que lo llevará a comprar mi
producto. Si vendemos comida o diversiones, por ejemplo, queremos despertar su parte
“ello”. En cambio, si vendemos seguros de vida, queremos despertar su parte “super-yo”,
ya que los seguros representan una compra al 100% de responsabilidad, sin ningún
beneficio de placer.

TEORÍA DE LA PERSONALIDAD DE KAREN HORNEY:

Esta psicóloga decía que hay 3 tipos básicos de personalidad:

Personalidades complacientes: buscan quedar bien con los demás, van con las modas y
son convencionales, buscan el aprecio y la aceptación social.

Personalidades agresivas: no son necesariamente violentas, sino que el término se

refiere a la necesidad de ir en contra de los demás, ser lo contrario a lo que se espera de
nosotros, hacer las cosas de una manera poco convencional, es la búsqueda por llamar la
atención.

Personalidades independientes: no buscan ni ser aceptados ni llamar la atención, sino

que hacen lo que hacen porque así les place a ellos.

Todos tenemos un poco de las 3, pero tiende a preponderar una de ellas. Esto representa
una manera más de segmentar a nuestros mercados, para así saber cómo armar nuestras
campañas.

PERSONALIDAD DE LA MARCA
Según lo visto arriba, la marca debe construir una personalidad propia, para reflejar y
complementar la personalidad de mi consumidor.

¿Cómo se construye y expresa la personalidad de la marca?

Como si fuera una persona: Si nuestra marca fuera una persona, ¿cómo sería? ¿Hombre
o mujer? ¿De qué edad? ¿A qué se dedicaría? ¿Cómo sería? Por ejemplo, Bonafont es
una mujer de 27 años, delgada, guapa, activa, inteligente, de nivel socioeconómico B+,
sofisticada, que hace ejercicio y se preocupa por su cuerpo. En cambio, Gatorade es un
hombre de 33 años, deportista, competitivo, ambicioso, en la búsqueda de intensidad.

Como si fuera un animal: Cada animal tiene un simbolismo, y nuestra marca puede
expresarse como un animal para expresar ese simbolismo. Por ejemplo, Bimbo es un osito
tierno y suave y cariñoso. En cambio, MGM es un león hermoso, majestuoso, galante, que
nos impresiona por su fuerza y su rugido.

Como si fuera un símbolo: Podemos utilizar símbolos ancestrales en nuestra imagen o

logotipos, para expresar la personalidad de la marca. Por ejemplo, el logotipo de Televisa
es un sol (el cual sale todas las mañanas y alumbra a todo México y nos permite vernos los
unos a los otros), un ojo (que es el medio para mirar hacia nuestro exterior), y una serie de
líneas horizontales (que sugieren la estática de la señal televisiva). Estos 3 símbolos que
existen en un solo logotipo nos dicen algo acerca de la marca. Televisa es el sol, es el ojo,
y es la televisión.

Por colores: Cada color tiene una vibración y una psicología. Los colores que utilicemos
en nuestros logos, en nuestra imagen, en nuestros empaques, en nuestros productos en
sí… nos dicen algo acerca de la personalidad de la marca. Utilizamos colores pasteles o
sobrios? Benetton, por ejemplo, utiliza ropa vivos y brillantes y con mucha diversidad
cromática. En cambio, Burberry no hace sacos rojos o amarillo canario, sino que sus
colores son más sobrios y señoriales. Cada color tiene su psicología:

Rojo: pasión, calor, fuego, rabia, violencia, sangre, rosa espinosa, peligro,
etc.

Azul: templanza, calma, claridad, frescura, cielo, agua, realeza, mar, etc.

Verde: naturaleza, orgánico, vida, vivo, bosque, dinero, crecimiento, etc.

Amarillo: novedad (como el sol que sale), precaución, es el color que más
rápido captan los ojos, por lo que es el color que se usa para señalamientos
viales y para subrayar o señalar partes importantes en un texto, en los
anuncios se usa para destacar algo y para invitar la mirada.

Blanco: pureza, inmaculado, paz, vacío, “falta de”, dietético, ligero,

elegancia, limpieza, nupcias, etc.

Negro: oscuridad, misterio, noche, pesimismo, elegancia, autoridad, lo

impenetrable, etc.

MOTIVACIÓN DEL CONSUMO

Cuando un consumidor siente una necesidad, un antojo, un deseo, un miedo, o una

aspiración…. Se le presenta la motivación para hacer la compra. Parte del trabajo del
 mercadólogo es exacerbar esta motivación para que la compra se haga hoy y no mañana.
Además, mientras más grande sea la motivación, menor importancia tendrán los costos
asociados con la compra.

Hay diversas maneras de despertar esta motivación de compra:

Motivación racional: obedece a argumentos lógicos, tiene que ver con rendimiento del
producto, atributos, garantías, comparativos de precio, desempeños, estadísticas, calidad
ingenieril, planes de cobertura y servicio, etc.

Motivación emocional: obedece a sentimientos, es irracional, tiene que ver con auto-estima,
complejos, deseos, sensualidad, si el producto “nos late”, y todo lo que nos hace sentir el
producto.

Motivación positiva: tiene que ver con la búsqueda de un beneficio, es la compra que nos
lleva a “obtener algo”. Por ejemplo, “quiero comprar una membresía para el gimnasio para
tener un cuerpo escultural, ver gente guapa, sentirme miembro de un club exclusivo, y
sentirme bien”.

Motivación negativa: tiene que ver con la búsqueda por evitar un peligro, es l compra que
nos lleva a “evitar algo”, y tiene que ver con nuestros miedos. Por ejemplo, “quiero comprar
una membresía para el gimnasio para reducir mi propensión a un infarto, o para no llegar a
la obesidad, o para no enfermarme”.

TOMA DE DECISIÓN DE COMPRA

Es posible distinguir cinco funciones que podría desempeñar la gente en una decisión de
compra:

1. Iniciador. Una persona que sugiere la idea de adquirir el producto o servicio

específico.
2. Influyente. Una persona cuyos puntos de vista o sugerencias tienen algún peso en
la decisión final.
3. El que decide. Una persona que determina alguna parte de la decisión de compra.
4. Comprador. La persona que hace la compra.
5. Usuario. Una persona que consume o usa el producto.

Una empresa necesita identificar estas funciones porque tienen implicaciones en el

diseño del producto, la determinación de los mensajes y el destino que se asigna al
presupuesto de promoción.

TIPOS DE CONDUCTA DE COMPRA

El proceso de toma de decisiones del consumidor varía según el tipo de decisión de

compra. Entre más complejas y costosas son las decisiones, tienden a requerir más
deliberación del consumidor y más participantes en la compra.

  Alto compromiso Bajo compromiso

Diferencias significativas Conducta compleja de Conducta de compra que

entre marcas compras busca la variación
Pocas diferencias entre Conducta de compra que
Conducta de compra habitual
marcas reduce la disonancia

Conducta de compra compleja: los consumidores pasan por una conducta de compra
compleja cuando están muy involucrados en la adquisición y tienen conciencia de que
existen diferencias de importancia entre las marcas, y se ven muy involucrados en la
compra cuando ésta es costosa, arriesgada y muy autoexpresiva. En general, el
 consumidor no tiene una gran conocimiento de la categoría del producto y debe aprender
mucho al respecto. Este comprador pasará por un proceso de aprendizaje cognoscitivo que
se caracteriza, en primer lugar, por el desarrollo de creencias sobre el producto, después
por actitudes y, por último, por hacer una elección cuidadosa de compra. El mercadólogo
necesita desarrollar estrategias que ayuden al consumidor en el aprendizaje acerca de los
atributos y clase de producto, la importancia relativa de estos atributos y la permanencia de
su marca en los atributos de más importancia. El mercadólogo debe diferenciar las
características de su marca.

Conducta de compra que reduce la disconformidad: a veces el consumidor participa

mucho en una compra, pero no observa diferencias entre marcas. La participación intensa
se basa en el hecho de que la compra le resulta costosa, poco frecuente y riesgosa. En
este caso, el comprador realizará compras en distintos lugares para enterarse de qué está
disponible, no obstante, comprará con rapidez porque las diferencias entre marcas no son
notorias. Sobre todo, el comprador responderá ante un precio favorable o comprará por
conveniencia. Después de la compra, es posible que el consumidor perciba cierta
disconformidad, la cual se genera como consecuencia de observar ciertas características
poco favorables, o bien de escuchar opiniones favorables en relación a otras marcas. En
este caso, la comunicación de mercadotecnia tiene que orientarse a proporcionar creencias
y evaluaciones que ayuden al consumidor a sentirse bien cerca de su elección de marca.

Conducta de compra habitual: muchos productos son adquiridos en condiciones de poca

participación del consumidor y ausencia de diferencias de marca importantes. Existe
considerable evidencia de que los consumidores están poco involucrados en la compra de
la mayor parte de los productos de bajo costo y que se adquieren con frecuencia. En estos
casos, la conducta del consumidor no pasa por la secuencia normal creencia - actitud -
conducta. Los consumidores no buscan exhaustivamente información sobre las marcas, ni
evalúan sus características o toma una decisión de peso sobre cuál adquirir. Son, por lo
contrario, receptores pasivos de información cuando ven anuncios por televisión o
impresos. La repetición de los anuncios da lugar a la familiaridad con la marca, más que
convicción por la marca. Los consumidores no forman una actitud hacia una marca, sino
que la relacionan porque les resulta familiar. Después de la compra, es posible que ni
siquiera la evalúen, debido a que no están involucrados con el producto. Entonces, el
proceso de compra es: creencias de marca formadas por aprendizaje pasivo, seguidas por
conducta de compra a la que puede seguir o no una evaluación. Los mercadólogos de
productos de baja participación con pocas diferencias de marca encuentran que es efectivo
utilizar promociones de precio y ventas como incentivo para la prueba del producto, ya que
los compradores no están muy comprometidos con ninguna marca. Deben observarse
varios aspectos: el texto del anuncio debe hacer énfasis en sólo algunos puntos clave, son
importantes los símbolos visuales e imágenes, la planeación de la publicidad debe basarse
en la teoría clásica del condicionamiento, en la cual el comprador aprenda a identificar un
producto determinado mediante un símbolo que lo acompaña en forma repetitiva. Los
mercadólogos pueden tratar de convertir el producto de baja participación en uno de más
alta participación. Esto puede lograrse vinculando el producto a algún concepto de
involucramiento.

Conducta de compra de búsqueda de variedad: algunas situaciones de compra se

caracterizan porque hay poco involucramiento del consumidor, pero diferencias importantes
de marca. Con frecuencia se observa que los consumidores hacen muchos cambios de
marca. La estrategia de mercadotecnia para el líder del mercado en esta categoría de
productos es diferente a la de las marcas menores. El líder en el mercado tratará de
estimular la conducta de compra habitual mediante el dominio de espacio en los anaqueles,
evitando que se agoten las existencias y auspiciando una publicidad que se recuerde con
frecuencia.

ATL (Above the Line)

 → Tailored for a mass audience
→ Carried out through mass media, such as television, radio and newspaper

→ Establish brand identity

→ Difficult to measure well

→ This type of communication is conventional in nature and is considered impersonal to

customers.

→ Everything done prior to a customer's actual entry into a retail outlet.

BTL (Below the Line)

→ Are targeted at individuals.

→ Can actually lead to a sale.

→ Highly measurable, giving marketers valuable insights into their return-on-investment.

→ Refers to forms of non-media communication.

→ Shop-floor activities.

→ It uses less conventional methods, typically focusing on direct means of

communication, most commonly guerrilla marketing.

→ Optimizes the return on marketing budget spent by focusing one's energy on winning
smaller yet more crucial results.

TTL (Through the Line)

→ Strategy involving both above and below the line communications in which one form
of advertising points the target to another form of advertising thereby crossing the
"line".
→ Integrated marketing communications.

WTF IS “THE LINE”?

→ For some marketers the "line" divides the realm of "Awareness or Attention" and that
of "Interest + Desire". (Fórmula AIDA)
 ARTÍCULOS VARIOS / CASE STUDIES

REVISTA ENTREPRENEUR MÉXICO

"Quiero conocer mejor a mis clientes y la industria en

la que participo. ¿Qué técnicas de investigación de
mercado puedo implementar?"
Por: Emilio Betech Rophie

Lo más importante es saber qué es lo que se quiere investigar. Si no, la información

obtenida tendrá poco valor y la inversión irá directo a la basura. Existen dos tipos de
estudios: cuantitativos y cualitativos.

El cuantitativo por excelencia es la "Encuesta", que se realiza con un cuestionario de

preguntas cerradas y a nivel masivo. Las preguntas deben ser "al grano" y estar
redactadas para que no favorezcan ninguna respuesta y permitan obtener información
valiosa. En vez de preguntar "¿comprarías un champú aroma sandía?", cuya respuesta
puede ser "sí" o "tal vez", es mejor preguntar "¿qué tan importante es para ti el aroma de
tu champú?" Posibles respuestas: a) Mucho, b) Poco, c) No me interesa el aroma.
Luego, puedes pedir que te argumenten el porqué.

No debe de tener más de 18 preguntas, ni menos de siete. Se puede hacer en forma

personal, telefónica, postal o vía Internet. Toma en cuenta el tiempo, el costo y la
ubicación geográfica de los encuestados al decidir.

En los estudios cualitativos, uno de los más utilizados es el "Grupo de Enfoque"

(también conocido como Focus Group), que consiste en reunir entre siete y 12
consumidores que vayan de acuerdo a tu mercado meta para, entre todos, comentar el
tema de tu investigación. Si quieres lanzar un nuevo servicio de papelería a domicilio,
puedes preguntar sobre sus hábitos de compra en artículos de papelería. ¿Qué productos
son los que más adquieren? ¿En dónde? ¿Cada cuándo? ¿Qué les gusta y qué no de su
papelería actual? ¿Cómo es su estilo de vida? ¿Qué tan importante es ahorrar tiempo y
traslado para ellos?

Deja que la conversación fluya, pero ten diseñada una lista con los temas que no puedes
dejar pasar. Y no olvides grabar la sesión en audio o video.

Una metodología más nueva es la "Entrevista de Escalera", que consiste en escoger 10 o

15 personas que reflejen nuestro mercado meta y que tengan facilidad para expresarse.
Lo interesante es que cada respuesta servirá para formular la siguiente pregunta:

¿Conoce el nuevo jugo de naranja con fresa, marca "Naranjita"?

No.
¿No ha visto nuestra publicidad en Canal X?

No.

¿No ve usted televisión?

Sí, pero sólo a veces.

¿Qué canales o programas ve?

Las telenovelas de la noche.

¿Sólo ve televisión por la noche?

Sí.

¿Por qué no la ve en la mañana?

Porque salgo muy temprano y no me da tiempo.

¿A qué hora sale?

A las 6 de la mañana.

¿Por qué sale tan temprano?

Porque hay mucho tráfico y trabajo lejos. Hago una hora de traslado.

¿En dónde trabaja?

En el centro.

¿Cómo se traslada a trabajar?

En mi coche.

¿Escucha la radio en el coche?

Sí.

¿Qué estaciones o programas escucha?

Radio Expresión.

¿Entonces escucha Radio Expresión de 6 a las 7 de la mañana?

Sí, más o menos.

¿Qué hace a las 7?

Llego a mi oficina.
¿Y qué hace al llegar?

Me sirvo un café.

¿Sólo café?... ¿No toma jugo?

Sí. Pero eso es más tarde, como a las 10, cuando desayuno.

¿Qué jugo toma?

El que vende el puesto de afuera.

¿Por qué toma ese?

Porque es el que traen mis compañeros de oficina.

¿Nadie toma ningún otro jugo?

Sí, Mónica toma Jugosol, creo.

¿De dónde lo saca?

Lo compra en la máquina...

En este ejercicio ya aprendimos ocho cosas:

* Que este consumidor no desayuna en casa.

* Que no ve televisión por la mañana, pero sí en la noche.

* Que escucha Radio Expresión de 6 a 7.

* Que el café es más importante y prioritario que el jugo.

* Que el jugo lo consume como parte de un desayuno.

* Que a las 10 de la mañana se toma un break para desayunar.

* Que toma jugo de la calle, pero no particularmente porque le guste, sino por la
comodidad de que se lo lleven a su oficina.

* Que hay máquinas expendedoras en la oficina y que tienen producto de nuestra

competencia (Jugosol).

Existen también los "Estudios Observacionales", que analizan en detalle cómo el

consumidor usa y consume el producto, muchas veces en su propio domicilio. Casi
como si fuéramos antropólogos sociales. Otra alternativa está en los mystery shoppers,
quienes investigan de incógnito todo lo que ocurre en el punto de venta (antes, durante y
después de la compra).
REVISTA ENTREPRENEUR MÉXICO

Aprende a leer la mente de tus clientes

Interpretar lo que el mercado quiere y desea es el primer paso para vender. Entrar
en la mente de tus clientes cautivos y potenciales no es tan complicado. Por eso,
aquí te damos "El ABC de la Investigación de Mercados”.

Por: Emilio Betech Rophie

Responde la siguiente pregunta: Un estudio de mercado es aplicar una encuesta para

preguntarle a la gente cosas acerca de un producto. ¿Cierto o falso?

La respuesta correcta es "falso". Un estudio de mercado es una investigación

exploratoria hacia los gustos, preferencias, opiniones, hábitos y comportamientos de
clientes y consumidores reales y potenciales. Sin embargo, la clave para que éste resulte
útil es identificar qué quieres investigar. Si no sabes cuáles son los fines del esfuerzo, la
información obtenida será de muy poco valor.

Existen varios estudios de mercado clasificados en dos tipos básicos: cuantitativos y

cualitativos. Cada uno nos va a proporcionar información diferente y utiliza formatos y
mecánicas distintas.

Para saber cuánto

El estudio cuantitativo más importante es la encuesta y consiste en un cuestionario de
preguntas cerradas. La encuesta se hace generalmente a nivel masivo, ya sea en persona,
por teléfono, correo o Internet. Cada una de estas opciones presenta mayores y menores
niveles de flexibilidad, tasa de respuesta y confiabilidad. Elige la que más le convenga a
tu caso.

Una encuesta proporciona información fácil de graficar y genera estadísticas porque

muestra preferencias, posicionamiento en la mente de los consumidores, hábitos de
consumo y niveles de satisfacción, entre otros conceptos, pero siempre de manera
superficial. Por ejemplo, sabrás que el 65% del mercado está insatisfecho con un
servicio o que el 80% de las consumidoras mayores de 40 años prefiere el sabor cereza.
No obstante, difícilmente sabrás el porqué de estos resultados. 

Para saber cuál

El estudio cualitativo que más se aplica es el Grupo de Enfoque (o Focus Group), que
consiste en reunir a un grupo de siete a 15 consumidores, de acuerdo al mercado meta, y
sentarlos para que comenten y discutan el tema a investigar. Generalmente se usa para
lanzar productos y/o servicios o evaluar preferencias. Con el apoyo de un moderador y
una guía de tópicos, el grupo comentará de manera informal lo que piensa y siente. Es
una manera de asomarnos a los hábitos de compra a nivel cotidiano de los clientes.

Además, el Grupo de Enfoque permite conocer los procesos mentales de nuestros

clientes y su nivel de influencia. Al observarlos en un ambiente de grupo, puedes ver
cómo muchas veces las opiniones se dejan llevar por lo que digan otros o por niveles de
admiración y aspiración hacia otras personas. Recuerda que en el acto de comprar
intervienen motivos racionales y emocionales, y generalmente la emoción es lo que
marca la pauta.

Tanto la Encuesta como el Grupo de Enfoque proporcionan información de utilidad. Si

sabes cómo aplicar estas herramientas, la voz que se obtenga del mercado será mucho
más nítida y precisa. 

¿Cómo se arma un Grupo de Enfoque?

1. Define tu objetivo. Identifica estos temas con toda claridad y a detalle.

2. Define el perfil de los participantes. Deben reflejar a tu consumidor meta.
3. Elabora tu guía de tópicos. Haz una lista de temas que te interese abarcar a lo largo de
la sesión: atributos del producto, promesa básica, precio, lugares de venta,
presentaciones, competencia, y hábitos de compra y uso.
4. Convoca a los participantes. A cambio de su tiempo obséquiales producto o dales un
pago simbólico.
5. Prepárate para grabar la sesión en audio y/o video.
6. Asegura a un observador y a un moderador.
7. Realiza la sesión de enfoque.
8. Haz un reporte. Consiste en una descripción interpretativa de lo comentado para cada
tópico y la interacción entre los participantes.
9. Elabora tus conclusiones. Arma propuestas o planes de acción a partir de tus
conclusiones. 

¿Cómo se hace una encuesta?

1. Define tu objetivo. Qué es lo que quieres investigar y lo que deseas descubrir.

2. Define el tipo de encuesta que mejor te convenga. Puede ser personal, telefónica,
postal u online. Todas tienen ventajas y desventajas en términos de costo, tiempo,
flexibilidad geográfica, tasa de respuesta y confiabilidad.
3. Define quién. Los encuestados deben reflejar a tu consumidor meta.
4. Define dónde y cuándo. Establece un calendario y define los lugares de trabajo.
Recuerda que no es igual aplicar una encuesta lunes en la mañana que sábado por la
tarde. Las respuestas serán muy diferentes.
5. Elabora tu cuestionario. Procura que tus preguntas sean de opción múltiple. No des
por hecho nada y cuida la tendencia de tu redacción.
6. Realiza la encuesta.
7. Captura y contabiliza las respuestas.
8. Grafica las respuestas para cada pregunta. Interpreta tus gráficas para comprender el
porqué de esas respuestas.
9. Elabora tus conclusiones. Desarrolla propuestas o planes de acción a partir de tus
conclusiones.

 
 BUSINESS WEEK

Marketing's Drift Away from Media

A broad recovery may not bring advertising with it. Companies
have found other avenues amid "below-the-line" marketing
This is going to be a column that focuses on a terrible, tooth-hurting phrase, for
which I apologize in advance. But there's no way around it. The phrase is "below the
line," as it applies to marketing. It refers, generally, to all forms of marketing that do
not involve advertising in mass media. "Below the line" is not Web advertising. It is
things such as in-store events, guerrilla stunts that drum up media coverage, and
company-built Web sites.

These things have obvious appeal to marketers frustrated with the limitations of
everyday advertising. Below-the-line moves also tickle an executive's ego: Hey, who
says we need those media guys to market ourselves?

So more attention is being paid to what lies below the line. One top marketing
executive at a major retailer estimates that his company has doubled such
spending, to about 20% of its overall marketing budget, in the past five years. A
survey by Veronis Suhler Stevenson found that spending on below-the-line
initiatives accounted for 62% of total marketing spending in 2008, up from 57% in
2004, while standard advertising accordingly fell 5%. More than $250 billion is spent
on traditional and Web advertising each year in the U.S., so redirecting even a small
percentage of dollars means billions won't go to already stressed established
outlets. Wenda Harris Millard, president of media consultancy MediaLink and
former co-CEO Of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, wonders, "Are we about to see a
shift in where most of the ad dollars are spent?"

There is a whiff of the old-fashioned to some of this. An event showcasing a product

has a lineage you can trace back to a caravan coming to town to put on a show and
pitch the latest, hottest, 19th century patent medicine. But it's also precisely this
kind of intimacy—and the proximity to an actual purchase—that some executives
crave. Or, as Bob Thacker, senior vice-president for advertising and marketing at
OfficeMax (OMX), puts it: "If you've got a live one, sink the hook." The office supply
company is promoting a new line of products by professional organizer Peter Walsh
with in-store events featuring local experts demonstrating his Office Max-branded
organizing system, [IN]PLACE, and has done related Web video presentations.

When eBay (EBAY) sought to promote its "let's make a daily deal" feature last
holiday season, in which the online giant sold a select few products at cut-rate
prices, it recreated a version of the histrionic '70s game show Let's Make A Deal in
Times Square—and added an online component so non-New Yorkers could play,
too. (A spokesman said eBay has shrunk its TV and print spending, though not
necessarily permanently.)

A much less commerce-oriented below-the-line initiative from British Airways

(BAIRY): its Metrotwin Web site, which lists London equivalents of favorite
Manhattan shops and restaurants. Is there an obvious advertising tie-in for British
Airways (BAIRY) in this? Not really. But you could argue the same thing about
BabyCenter.com, the site for new parents run by Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which
has succeeded so well that I've had publishing executives tell me it's a major cause
for the woes suffered by parenting magazines.

So can campaigns such as Metrotwin or BabyCenter be deemed advertising or not?

A promotional vehicle or an actual media property? Good questions. Or, rather:
good points regarding how blurred the lines between everything are becoming. In
many cases, "it's hard to tell, in terms of intent, what is advertising and what is
promotion," says John Rose, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, which
touched on the issues "below the line" raises in a recent research paper.

What is certain is that all such experimenting decouples the success of the marketer
from the success of the media they once relied on more exclusively, and this
development creates new currents with some serious undertow. Rose points out
that, historically, ad growth has tracked economic growth. Yet no such effect will be
seen among traditional or Web advertising in the next economic recovery: There are
too many other ways for marketers to promote themselves now. When it comes to
advertising, marketer and media property were once partners. But that relationship,
like so much else in this space these days, has gotten quite complicated.
The Science Of Menu Design:
How Restaurants Can Make
You Choose A Salad Over A
Cheeseburger
REDESIGNING MENUS TO ENCOURAGE HEALTHIER EATING
CHOICES MIGHT NOT JUST BE BETTER FOR OUR WAISTLINES, BUT
FOR RESTAURANT PROFITS, TOO.

Responding to the rise of American obesity rates, some politicians have

proposed regulations that would require restaurateurs to reduce portion sizes,
eliminate drive-thrus, and limit soft drink sizes. Brian Wansink, author of Slim By
Design, marketing professor, and the director of the Cornell Food and Brand
Lab, thinks the restaurant industry can police itself--and make more money--by
leveraging the power of menu design.

In a recent paper published in the International Journal of Hospitality

Management, Wansink argues that hacking menus to better emphasize
healthier, lower-calorie choices with higher profit margins would have a positive
impact on both the health of restaurant goers and the financial health of
the food industry. The paper is based on the analysis of previous research,
including lab studies in cafeterias and restaurants.
The trick, Wansink says, is to entice customers to make healthier choices by
shifting their visual attention when looking at a menu, making healthier food
sound tastier, and increasing the perceived value of these items.

SHIFTING EXPECTATION

All too often, when customers pick up a menu, they skim right through it to find
what they already think they want to order. It doesn't matter how good a
restaurant's salads are if you can't keep a customer from heading straight to the
burger section.

Wansink suggests a number of ways to flag down the attention of these menu
skimmers, some of it based on studies going back as far as 1980. He points out
that there's been much research showing how restaurants can use bolder
colors, a contrasting font, or graphics to make customers more easily notice the
healthy options.

Another trick, Wansink says, is to place healthier, lower-cost entrees around the
restaurant's most expensive item, known as a menu anchor. By positioning the
anchor in a prominent place on the menu, like the first page, a restaurant can
make the entrees that surround it look like comparative deals.
Likewise, most customers read menus the way they read magazines, scanning
the four corners of every page and then flipping to the next one. By placing
healthier choices in these four corners, which naturally draw our attention when
we skim, a restaurant can boost sales of lower-calorie meals.

MAKING HEALTHY FOOD SOUND BETTER

Words have power, especially when it comes to menu copywriting. In fact, some
studies have indicated that the words used to describe an item on a menu can
boost sales by as much as 27%. Kids, for example, are much more likely to
order X-Ray Vision Carrots than plain old carrots, and adults are more likely to
be drawn to to Succulent Italian Seafood Filet than to fish sticks. No wonder,
then, that modern menus are filled with such elaborate and prosaic descriptions.

But Wansink thinks restaurants can do a better job of using language to push
healthier choices, by contrasting highly prosaic menu names for low-calorie
items with less evocative descriptions for junk food. Compare the plain
"Cheeseburger" with the "Succulent Italian Seafood Fillet." Just by holding back
the adjectives from the cheeseburger, the seafood fillet looks more enticing.

Wansink also thinks that when it comes to naming healthier food, restaurants

should take cues from what works in selling high-calorie items. The velvet in
Velvety Chocolate Mousse can just as easily be applied to Velvety Mashed
Cauliflower, while the Southwestern Tex-Mex Salad could become the
Southwestern Kale Salad. Restaurant owners shouldn't waste their best
adjectives on their worst food.

INCREASING PERCEIVED VALUE

Restaurants already use a number of hacks to make you think the food you're
ordering is cheaper than it already is. For example, they might list an entree
without using a "$" symbol in order to downplay the item's price. A menu might
stagger the alignment of prices, so patrons can't just skim a single column to
find the cheapest item. Or a restaurant might anchor the highest margin items in
the corners of the menu, where patrons are most likely to see them, to
maximize profit.

With a few tweaks, all of these techniques can be used to better emphasize the
value of healthy choices to customers. According to Wansink, healthier
food tends to be easier to prepare, and offer a greater profit margin than more
caloric options: on a menu, a Caesar Salad might be priced the same as a
cheeseburger, but it costs less to make. Keeping the price of these items low
while emphasizing their affordability in large type and anchoring them in the
corners of a menu can help restaurants be more profitable, while encouraging
customers to eat healthier at the same time.

Wansink's suggestions for healthy menu hacks don't end there. He also advises
restaurateurs to consider offering half-size portions of entrees for 70% of the
price, and making salads the default side order with most menu items instead of
fries. But at the end of the day, Wansink thinks that the biggest impact on both
profit margins and the health of customers can be made by using clever
typography, bold colors, smart writing, and intelligent layout techniques to hack
our existing menus into being healthier. "It's win-win," he says.

Can You Spot the Hidden Images in

These Famous Logos?
You’ve seen these famous logos countless times on billboards, passing by on trucks, and at the
grocery store, but there is more to them than meets the eye. If you take a closer look, you will
find that these recognized logos have hidden images and messages. Check out these inventive
designs that cleverly use white space and optical illusions to display subliminal messages.

FedEx

This logo appears to be very simple, but if you look at the white space between the "E" and "x"
in “Ex," you'll find it is more complex than you thought. Can you spot the arrow?

Tostitos
These popular party chips are a staple at many backyard BBQs, but chances are, you've never
noticed the hidden celebration scene concealed within the letters. The second and third "t’s" are
sharing a chip over an "i" that is dotted with a salsa bowl. Yum!

Le Tour de France

Named the world's most famous and prestigious cycling race, bike-lovers and non-cyclists alike
are familiar with the event's emblem. However, you might be missing out on the logo's most
interesting aspect. After careful examination, you'll notice an image of a person riding a bicycle;
the yellow circle is the front wheel and the r is the body.

Amazon.com
Amazon.com has become a go-to source for electronic commerce. Clearly there is an arrow
under Amazon, but have you ever thought about its significance? Take a look at where the
arrow begins and ends: a and z. This secret message seems to conveys that Amazon offers
everything from A to Z!

Hershey's Kisses

The Kisses logo doesn’t have much to it, but if you look at it sideways, you might see a
chocolate kiss formed between the K and the I.

Toblerone

There’s a slightly obscured bear within the Matterhorn Mountain if you look closely. That’s
because the candy bar hails from Bern, Switzerland, a city supposedly named for a bear. 

Big Ten
Penn State became the 11th member of this university athletic conference, hence the
embedded “11” in this logo. That is, until the University of Nebraska–Lincoln became number
12, ushering in a new logo era.

Northwest Airlines

Before merging with Delta, Northwest’s logo was one of the best in the industry. The N and W
within the circle are fairly obvious, but did you know the circle also serves as a compass? And
guess which direction the arrow in the upper-left-hand corner (or the beginning of the w) is
pointing?
THE SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE
Muzak in the realm of retail theatre.

If you blindfolded Dana McKelvey and led her into a retail store, a restaurant, a doctor’s office, or a
bank, she could tell fairly quickly whether the music playing in the background was Muzak. You
may think that you would be able to tell, too, but unless your job is creating Muzak programs, as
McKelvey’s is, you probably wouldn’t. The syrupy orchestral “elevator music” that most people
associate with the company scarcely exists anymore. Muzak sells about a hundred prepackaged
programs and several hundred customized ones, and only one—“Environmental”—truly fits the
stereotype. It consists of “contemporary instrumental versions of popular songs,” and it is no longer
terribly popular anywhere, except in Japan. (“The Japanese think they love it, but they actually
don’t,” a former Muzak executive told me. “They’ll get over it soon.”) All of Muzak’s other
programs are drawn from the company’s huge digital inventory, called the Well, which contains
more than 1.5 million commercially recorded songs, representing dozens of genres and subgenres—
acid jazz, heavy metal, shag, neo-soul, contemporary Italian—and is growing at the rate of twenty
thousand songs a month. (Some record labels now upload new releases directly to the company,
which, like a radio station, pays licensing fees for the songs it uses.) The Well includes seven
hundred and seventy-five tracks recorded by the Beatles, a hundred and thirty by Kanye West, three
hundred and twenty-four by Led Zeppelin, eighty-four by Gwen Stefani, a hundred and ninety-one
by 50 Cent, and nine hundred and eighty-three by Miles Davis. It also includes many covers—
among them, versions of the Rolling Stones’ song “Paint It Black” by U2, Ottmar Liebert, and a late-
sixties French rock band with a female vocalist (who sang it in French) and approximately five
hundred versions of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” which, according to Guinness World Records, is
the most frequently covered song in the world.
“There are so many songs out there that if I listened to just one I’d never know whether it was
Muzak or not,” McKelvey, who is twenty-six years old, and has the kind of soft, persuasive voice
that would sound good on late-night radio, told me. “But I could tell if I listened to the flow of a few.
The key is consistency. How did those songs connect? What story did they tell? Why is this song
after that song, and why is that one after that one? When we make a program, we pay a lot of
attention to the way songs segue. It’s not like songs on the radio, or songs on a CD. Take Armani
Exchange. Shoppers there are looking for clothes that are hip and chic and cool. They’re twenty-five
to thirty-five years old, and they want something to wear to a party or a club, and as they shop they
want to feel like they’re already there. So you make the store sound like the coolest bar in town. You
think about that when you pick the songs, and you pay special attention to the sequencing, and then
you cross-fade and beat-match and never break the momentum, because you want the program to
sound like a d.j.’s mix.” She went on, “For Ann Taylor, you do something completely different. The
Ann Taylor woman is conservative, not edgy, and she really couldn’t care less about segues. She
wants everything bright and positive and optimistic and uplifting, so you avoid offensive themes and
lyrics, and you think about Sting and Celine Dion, and you leave a tiny space between the songs or
gradually fade out and fade in.”
Muzak’s corporate headquarters are in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Naturally, there’s an awesome
sound system, which extends into the parking lot but not (for deeply felt symbolic reasons) into the
elevator. McKelvey works in a section of the building called the Circle, a curved arrangement of
cubicle-size offices, which are the only Muzak work spaces that have doors. She has spent many
hours behind hers, listening to hundreds of songs and thinking about how best to employ music to
further the marketing ambitions of the hundred or so clients she manages at once. At the time I
visited, she was working on a proposal for a prospective customer, a French-owned chocolatier in
New York City. “They want the program to include music from everyplace in the world where cocoa
grows,” McKelvey told me. “It’s a challenge, to say the least, but it’s fun.” Shortly before we talked,
she had been listening to lounge and rhythmic music from Brazil and West Africa, and to a number
of less exotic songs, including familiar jazz tunes that she felt conveyed a mood of chocolate-
appropriate romance.
McKelvey, a creative manager at Muzak, is one of twenty-two “audio architects”—the
company’s term for its program designers. All but two are in their twenties or thirties, and all have
serious, eclectic, long-term relationships with music. (Eight of the architects work in the Circle, ten
work in the Muzak office in Seattle, two work in New York, and two work from home, in
Connecticut and in California.) McKelvey was born in 1980 in Charleston, South Carolina. Her
parents weren’t musicians, but her mother liked to sing and her father worked as a d.j.; he now owns
a night club in Charleston called Casablanca. McKelvey began playing the piano when she was two,
could read notes on the treble clef before she could read words, and took up the violin when she was
seven. Two years later, she joined the Charleston Youth Symphony, as a violinist, and performed
through high school. At home, when she wasn’t practicing classical pieces, she listened mainly to
eighties pop—Michael Jackson, DeBarge, the Jets—and to the music her parents loved, which was
Motown and funk. “I never had a TV in my room,” she told me. “I always had a 45-player. My dad
had an amazing record collection, and he still does, and it’s all first runs, not reissues. Whenever I’m
in Charleston, I try to sneak records from him.” She says her current taste in music is too diverse to
characterize.
People at Muzak sometimes speak of a song’s “topology,” the cultural and temporal associations
that it carries with it, like a hidden refrain. When McKelvey works on a program for a client whose
customers represent a range of ages—such as Old Navy, whose market extends from infants to
adults—she has to accommodate more than one sensibility without offending any. The task is
simplified somewhat by the fact that musical eras and genres are not always moored firmly in time.
Elvis Presley (who is represented in the Well by fourteen hundred and five tracks) sounds dated to
many people today, but teen-agers can listen to Beatles songs from just a few years later without
necessarily thinking of them as oldies.
Spanning musical generations can pose technical challenges. If a track that was recorded last
year is played immediately after one from the forties, fifties, or sixties, the difference in texture can
be jarring. (Anyone who has downloaded music onto an iPod or other digital music player is familiar
with the difficulty of maintaining consistency from song to song.) One of the techniques used at
Muzak is dynamic range compression, which consists of turning down the loudest parts of a signal
and then turning up the entire signal; it’s the reason that television commercials often seem louder
than the programs they interrupt even though the commercials and the programs are technically
limited to the same sound level. In addition, audio architects frequently use tracks as bridges
between music from different eras—say, placing a Verve remix of a jazz standard between an Ella
Fitzgerald classic and a recent release by Macy Gray. Tracks in the Well are catalogued not only by
artist and title but also by producer, label, and date. Recordings from particular studios in particular
eras often share a characteristic sound—like wines from particular vineyards and vintages—and
some juxtapositions work better than others.
Covers can be useful when you have a range of ages, McKelvey told me. “You can play
Vanessa Carlton and Counting Crows doing ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ and it’s relevant to young people
today because the message is still meaningful and they know who Vanessa Carlton and Counting
Crows are, but it’s also relevant to their parents, who think, Wait a minute, I know this song—isn’t
that what’s-her-name? They may not think of Joni Mitchell right away, but the song affects them
because they listened to it when they were younger.”
McKelvey studied marketing at Winthrop University, near Charlotte, North Carolina, and went
to work at Muzak not long after she graduated. She told me, “The first time I explained to my mom
what I do for a living, she said, ‘They pay people to do that?’ Most people walk into a store and hear
music, but they never think that somebody actually put thought into what they’re hearing. A song
they like is playing, and they’re nodding along with it, or maybe they’re kind of dancing to it and
maybe they don’t want anyone to see that they’re dancing. They don’t realize that the song was put
there for a purpose, and that there’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. But there is.”
The company that became Muzak was founded by George Owen Squier, a career Army officer, who
was born in Dryden, Michigan, in 1865. Squier earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from
Johns Hopkins University, in 1893, and he later devised a way to transmit battlefield radio messages
clandestinely by using living trees as antennae. In the early nineteen-hundreds, he invented a system
of “multiplex telephony and telegraphy by means of electric waves guided by wires”—transmitting
multiple radio signals along the outside of electrical, telegraph, and telephone lines. Squier realized
that his invention could be used to deliver music, news, and other programming directly to homes
and businesses. In 1922 (after helping to establish a predecessor to the Air Force, and running the
Army’s Signal Corps during the First World War), he sold a license to the North American
Company, a public-utility conglomerate, which formed a new subsidiary, Wired Radio, to develop
the idea. One of the first test markets was Staten Island. Wired Radio customers there were given a
boxy receiver, which looked a little like a gramophone, and the programming fee was added to their
monthly electric bill. In 1934, Wired Radio—following the example of Eastman’s brilliant coinage,
Kodak—changed its name to Muzak. Squier died the same year, of pneumonia.
As the quality and quantity of wireless radio broadcasts increased, eliminating the residential
market for wired radio, Squier’s company concentrated on selling background music to hotels,
restaurants, and other businesses, many of them at first in New York City. (Muzak is probably called
elevator music because soothing melodies were used in early skyscrapers to make people feel less
nervous about stepping into a contrivance that looked like a death trap.) In the forties, Muzak
introduced a trademarked concept, called Stimulus Progression, which held that most workers would
be more productive if they were exposed to music of gradually increasing intensity, in fifteenminute
cycles. The process was said to be subliminal: Muzak affected you the way hypnosis did, whether
you wanted it to or not. Only sanitized instrumental arrangements were used, because the absence of
lyrics made the music less likely to intrude upon conscious thought. It was sometimes said that if the
songs in a Stimulus Progression program were played in reverse order a listener would helplessly
fall asleep.
Stimulus Progression acquired a vast supporting apparatus of baffling in-house research studies
and impenetrable charts and diagrams. It was pseudoscience, but it remained alive at the company
until the late nineties, partly because it was a useful marketing tool and partly because it seemed so
plausible: most people really were happier and more productive when there was something humming
along in the background. Recorded music was “piped” into insurance offices, ocean liners, hotel
lobbies, and department stores, and Muzak built a network of franchisees to spread its business
further. Today, the company estimates that its daily audience is roughly a hundred million people, in
more than a dozen countries, and that it supplies sixty per cent of the commercial background music
in the United States. (Modern Muzak is delivered to customers by satellite, over broadband, and on
high-capacity disks.)
Until the late nineteenth century, people usually had little access to music unless they made the
music themselves, and even in the nineteen-twenties, when Wired Radio began, most people’s lives
were still tuneless much of the time. Muzak’s early listeners didn’t have clock radios, car CD
players, MTV, home entertainment centers, in-flight hip-hop programs, satellite radio, or iPods, and
when their telephone rang it didn’t play the theme to “The Godfather.” Muzak, for many people, was
the first manifestation of a phenomenon that is now so familiar we scarcely notice it: the shifting,
and frequently inescapable, soundtrack of everyday life.
In 1968, Yesco, a small company in Seattle, began competing with Muzak by offering businesses a
product that came to be called foreground music: a program of popular songs that hadn’t been
transformed into symphonic mush. Foreground music violated all the central principles of Stimulus
Progression.
Until the fifties, “Music by Muzak” and popular music had a great deal in common, and a
number of the company’s songs were recorded by the same big bands that played the hits on the
radio. By the time Yesco came along, though, Muzak and popular music had diverged, and
generational differences in taste were unbridgeable. When I was in high school, my father brought
home a Muzak-like record called “The Beatles Songbook, Vol. 4,” by the Hollyridge Strings. He
meant the purchase as a gesture of conciliation, but from my point of view the album might as well
have been called “Why We Are in Vietnam” (or, more to the point, “Why I Am Not Going to Clean
Up My Room”). As popular music acquired its increasingly rich topology of cultural, political, and
sexual associations, Muzak’s bowdlerized hits seemed more and more like an affront. People began
to use the company’s name as a generic term for anything bland, soulless, and uninspired—so much
so that today many don’t realize that the word has a non-pejorative application.
Muzak was slow to adapt. It didn’t introduce an original-artist program until 1984, and that
program, called TONES, was actually produced by Yesco. In 1986, Marshall Field V, the Chicago
department-store heir, bought the company, and the following year he took over Yesco and merged
the two. Truly modernized Muzak didn’t arise for more than a decade, when the company, which by
then had another new owner, underwent a transformation that employees still refer to gravely as “the
rebranding.”
This big change was initially conceived by Alvin Collis, an unlikely agent of corporate
revolution, who later became the company’s senior vice-president of strategy and brand. He is fifty-
three, tall, and extremely thin, and he wears a nearly unvarying uniform: nice black T-shirt, unfaded
jeans, high-top sneakers, coollooking wristwatch, designer glasses. Not long ago, we met in the
courtyard of the Trump Tower, where he had just had a meeting with the marketing executives of a
luxury clothier, which was considering hiring Muzak to create musical programs for its stores.
 Collis, who recently left Muzak to become an independent consultant, is from Victoria, British
Columbia. After graduating from high school, in 1970, he bummed around Canada and Europe for a
couple of years, and eventually moved to Seattle without a green card. He thought of himself
primarily as a post-punk musician, a performance artist, and a storyteller. In the eighties, he worked
as a freelance sound engineer, and did jobs sporadically for Yesco, and then for Muzak after the two
companies merged. Once, he and a group of other engineers were adding a musical soundtrack to a
movie (a project unrelated to Muzak). They were working on a love scene, which they knew was
supposed to make moviegoers cry. The first time the engineers watched the scene, though, they all
laughed. “We were giggling like crazy, and I was thinking, This is going to be a problem, right?”
Collis told me. The men spent the next three hours trying to find the right background song for the
scene. “Finally, as one song was playing, I turned around and saw that all the guys in the studio were
crying. These were all crusty old guys, and by that time we had watched that scene probably twenty-
five or thirty times. Suddenly, I understood that the emotional content of a movie is driven largely by
your ears. Your eyes can tell you what’s going on in a scene, but it’s hard to feel things through your
eyes. Even if a movie has a really good director and a really good script and really good actors, if
you watch just the raw footage, with no music, you think, Oh, no, it’s going to tank.”
Several years later, Collis was doing an engineering job for Muzak. He told me, “I walked into a
store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors
and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say,
‘Let’s put on a show.’ It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’t really
about selling music. It was about selling emotion—about finding the soundtrack that would make
this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.”
In 1997, the company adopted Collis’s concept—the main element of which he called audio
architecture—essentially in its entirety. Muzak went through an exhilarating period of self-
examination and redefinition, and moved its headquarters from Seattle to Fort Mill—mainly for
economic reasons, but also to sever itself from its stodgy past. In a relatively short time, it
transformed itself from a company that sold boring background music into one that was engaged in a
far more interesting activity, which it called audio branding.
A business’s background music is like an aural pheromone. It attracts some customers and repels
others, and it gives pedestrians walking past the front door an immediate clue about whether they
belong inside. A chain like J. C. Penney, whose huge customer base includes all ages and income
levels, needs a program that will make everyone feel welcome, so its soundtrack contains familiar
and relatively unassertive popular songs like “Kind and Generous,” by Natalie Merchant. The Hard
Rock Hotel in Orlando, which appeals to a more narrowly focussed audience, plays “Girls, Girls,
Girls,” by Mötley Crüe, and cranks up the volume. (Imagine how teen-agers would perceive the
jeans and t-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch—not a Muzak client—if those stores played country-and-
Western hits.) Audio architects have to keep all this in mind as they build their programs. They also
have to be aware of certain broad truths about background music: bass solos are difficult to hear,
extended electric-guitar solos annoy male sports-bar customers, drum solos annoy almost everyone,
and Bob Dylan’s harmonica can make it hard for office workers to concentrate. Audio architects also
have to screen lyrics carefully. They removed the INXS hit “Devil Inside” from many of the
company’s playlists after a devout Christian complained, and they are ever vigilant for the word
“funk,” which almost everyone mistakes for something else.
People often ask Muzak executives whether they worry about competition from the satellite-
radio providers XM and Sirius, which carry a broad range of commercial-free music programs,
divided among many genres. Bruce McKagan, who is Muzak’s vice-president for music and voice,
told me, “Satellite radio is great, but they don’t do what we do. At Muzak, we take a brand and find
music that is specific to what it’s trying to accomplish in the marketplace. That’s different from
simply grabbing a channel and playing it.” XM and Sirius both sell packages to businesses, but
neither company offers the degree of customization that Muzak does. Nor can a business legally use
a consumer broadcast of any kind as background music, unless it pays a licensing fee. (The same
rules apply to digital music. The ninety-nine cents you pay to download a song from iTunes doesn’t
give you the right to play that song to customers over the sound system in a restaurant.) Muzak’s
main competitor is actually another commercial background-music company, called D.M.X.
Last March, at a trade show in Las Vegas, Muzak demonstrated audio branding on a large scale.
The company’s simple rectangular booth had a decorative theme for each of the show’s three days: a
red rose, a Martini, and an eight ball from a pool table. Dana McKelvey had designed a soundtrack
for each day that was meant to evoke the theme musically. While the songs played—Etta James and
Diana Krall for the rose, Frank Sinatra and dZihan & Kamien for the Martini, Blondie and Wilson
Pickett for the eight ball—audio architects interviewed visitors, and used their answers to come up
with a “personal audio imaging profile” for each one; later, back in Fort Mill, the audio architects
used those profiles to create personalized CDs.
I went through the same imaging process during my visit to Fort Mill. Steven Pilker, a twenty-
five-year-old audio architect—he had worked in a record store while in school at U.N.C. Charlotte
and, when he graduated, was offered a job by a Muzak executive who had been a regular customer—
asked me seven or eight questions, none of which had anything to do with music. (“When you’re not
working, what do you like to do?” “If you could choose an actor / actress to star in your biographical
movie, who would it be and why?”) A couple of weeks later, he sent me a six-song program, which
contained nothing connected to what I think of as my main musical phenotype (“classic rock”); in
fact, five of the six tracks were by artists I’d never heard of. Yet I liked all six very much, and later
bought CDs by two of them (Sufjan Stevens and Jamie Lidell). Pilker’s selections aren’t definitive,
of course; another audio architect surely could have had another take on my “brand.” But I was
struck that Pilker, after spending very little time with me, had created an appealing musical program
that was based on his sense of who I was, rather than on any direct examination of the music I
actually listened to if left on my own.
Some Muzak customers have specific musical requirements for their programs; Moe’s
Southwest Grill, for example, wants only songs by Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, and other artists who
are dead. Most Muzak customers, though, are “imaged” in much the way that I was, except that in
their case the investigation is of their corporate self. Dave Keller, who is the creative director of the
company’s music department, told me recently, “Audio architecture involves looking at a client’s
brand, and then matching music to the attributes of that brand. In its simplest form, you use
keywords to define a personality for the brand. You might say that it’s bright, or energetic, or fun, or
classic, or something like that. And then you find music with a subtext that reinforces that
personality. This all really comes from Alvin Collis’s vision.” Collis himself said, “If you ask a
client, ‘What kind of music do you like?’ the answer doesn’t get you anywhere, because musical
taste is very subjective and very personal. You want the client to be thinking, Is this the right
emotion for my brand?”
When the fit is right, the effect can be memorable. At a cocktail party in Manhattan recently, I
met a man who told me that he had loved the music playing in a particular restaurant, and had asked
his waitress where it had come from. “I said, ‘This is the best radio station I ever heard—what is it?’
And she said, ‘It’s not a radio station; it’s Muzak.’ ”
In the late nineties, when the Muzak rebranding was under way, Collis and another executive set a
private goal of securing the Gap as a Muzak customer. Such an association was unthinkable initially:
Muzak was the lamest kid in the class, and the Gap was one of the most astute and brand-aware
marketers in the world. But Collis felt that Muzak would have a chance if it could first establish a
successful record with smaller specialty retailers. It eventually succeeded, and today the four Gap
brands play customized Muzak programs in all their stores. (In ascending order of volume and
boisterous musical energy, those brands are Forth & Towne, Banana Republic, the Gap, and Old
Navy.)
After Collis and I had talked for a while, we walked across Fifth Avenue to the Gap store at the
corner of Fifty-fourth Street. The first thing he noticed was that the music we were hearing wasn’t
Muzak, it was the audio track of an in-house video advertising program, which was playing on a
bank of plasma-screen monitors suspended from the store’s high ceiling. In a few minutes, the
Muzak program resumed—with “Soul Meets Body,” by Death Cab for Cutie—and Collis and I
moved deeper into the store, where we studied the speakers. Muzak prefers to use sound equipment
manufactured by two companies, Bose and Klipsch, and it designs systems depending on the
customer and the musical genre. Collis said, “If you are a company that sells candles, you want an
experience that’s moody, low light, and very organic, and so you want a sound system that kind of
envelops you. If you walked in, you wouldn’t see a speaker, whereas when you come into an
environment that’s more youth-oriented, like this one, the speakers are right there, and they aim the
music at you, so that you feel it and get a real sense of where it’s coming from. And at Old Navy the
music would be even more in your face.”
Muzak’s audio architects do something analogous within programs, too: some customers want
to establish different moods at different times of the day; some want current hits to repeat frequently,
as they do on Top Forty radio stations; some want programs that are closely geared to the seasons.
At some retailers, one of the biggest changes occurs at closing time, when the music becomes
louder, more intense, and presumably more likely to include lyrics that could be mistaken for
profanity. That’s an after-hours program, designed by Muzak’s audio architects for employees who
restock the shelves.
When Muzak undertook its corporate makeover, executives had to decide whether to change the
company’s name, which by then had acquired a surplus of what marketing types call negative equity.
In the end, despite reservations, they elected to keep it and rehabilitate it—perhaps the ultimate
audio-imaging challenge.
Background music is a tough business under any circumstances. Muzak—which is privately
owned, although its bonds trade publicly—has lost money for a number of years. The company has
tried many times to broaden its business, with mixed results. After September 11th, it made a major
effort to sell closed-circuit-television security systems, but that enterprise proved almost
immediately to be a dead end. (Collis told me, “With audio branding, you’re selling emotion, love,
caring, feelings. With CCTV, you’re selling fear. Not a good combination.”) Other ventures have
turned out better. Muzak has a large and profitable “on hold” business, which creates music-and-
voice programming for commercial telephone systems. The voice division also creates in-store
promotional announcements, which can be patched seamlessly into the company’s backgroundmusic
programs. All in all, Muzak creates about thirty thousand voice spots a month. It also provides the
drive-through ordering systems used by many fast-food restaurants.
The company’s most interesting effort to redefine its brand may be one that isn’t meant to be
profitable. It’s the Muzak Heart & Soul Foundation, which contributes money to musiceducation
programs around the country and conducts an annual summer camp called Noise!, whose purpose is
to introduce musically inclined teen-agers to the less visible parts of the music business. LaFouji
Alexander, a thirty-year-old audio architect, thinks Heart & Soul is “the cornerstone of the
company.” (When I asked him to explain his last job, as a Muzak “music specialist,” he said,
“Maybe a Chinese restaurant wants only a certain kind of traditional Chinese music, and if that
means I have to order it from Tibet . . . ”) Most teen-agers, he said, have a distorted view of the
commercial music world. “Shows like ‘American Idol’ give them the wrong idea,” he said. “Music
isn’t just stars; there’s this whole huge industry behind them.” Campers at Noise! visit recording
studios, meet professional musicians and industry executives, make business contacts that may be
useful after college, and—not incidentally—develop favorable associations with the name Muzak.
Alexander said, “I tell my boss all the time that if we directed more outreach toward the kids, doing
more of the things that Heart & Soul does, we wouldn’t have a problem convincing America who we
are.”
During Muzak’s early decades, office workers and others sometimes complained that public
background music was an invasion of privacy. Some people feel that way today, although the first
thing many of us do when we find ourselves alone with our thoughts is to reach for the handiest
means of drowning them out—by putting on a pair of headphones, say, or by sliding a disk into the
car’s CD player. Audio architecture is a compelling concept because the human response to musical
accompaniment is powerful and involuntary. “Our biggest competitor,” a member of Muzak’s
marketing department told me, “is silence.” ♦

HÁBITOS Y CRISIS
por Horacio Marchand

¿Cuándo vamos a aceptar que nuestros hábitos nos manejan a nosotros en

lugar de nosotros a ellos? ¿Cuándo vamos a aceptar que la mayoría de lo que
hacemos es inconsciente, automático, y rara vez lo cuestionamos?

La fuerza del hábito se evidencia desde lo más sencillo, como la pancita que
crece año con año hasta en los proyectos personales, profesionales y
empresariales que hemos arrancado en el pasado pero que quedaron
rebasados por la inercia, fracasaron o lentamente los fuimos abandonando.

Las adicciones y excesos en el alcohol, pastillas para dormir y ansiedad, los

refrescos de dieta, la cafeína, el uso de Internet, el uso de la televisión, el
consumo de tacos de barbacoa y frituras en general son algunos ejemplos de
hábitos que la gente quiere cambiar pero que "no puede".

Por ejemplo la obesidad y la diabetes en Estados Unidos, país con estadísticas

detalladas, crecen vertiginosamente a pesar de que todo mundo sabe cómo no
estar obeso. Y esto no es exclusivo de Estados Unidos e incluso se ha
disparado la obesidad en niños por el globo entero.

Lo paradójico y alarmante es que en ninguna época de la historia hemos

estado tan informados sobre cómo no estar obesos y al mismo tiempo en
ninguna época de la historia hemos estado tan obesos.

¿Pues quién maneja nuestra vida? Entre muchas otras cosas: el hábito.
La inercia es como un monstruo que lentamente sabotea al cambio. Es que
cada cambio que hacemos nos causa un desgaste de energía adicional,
mientras que la rutina es un factor de eficiencia.

Cuando estamos cansados o confundidos buscamos alivio en lo establecido y

nos refugiamos en lo estandarizado, en lo de siempre. Pareciera que
biológicamente existe un mandato de minimizar la energía adaptativa y
aferrarnos a lo que ya tenemos, a no arriesgar, a no enfrentarnos a la
ansiedad y ambivalencia que un nuevo emprendimiento conlleva.

En el cementerio de cada empresa están enterradas las iniciativas que no

pudieron ser implementadas por la razón más trillada de todas: la resistencia
al cambio. Y lo mismo aplica a la hora de querer vender productos y servicios
nuevos al mercado.

Empresas y empresarios se desconciertan terriblemente cuando su producto, a

pesar de ser más barato y mejor, no gana participación de mercado. Les
parece inexplicable, pero la respuesta está en romper el hábito y hacer que
los consumidores alteren su conducta, aunque sea temporalmente, y estén
dispuestos a gastar energía adaptativa para probar el producto nuevo.

¿Cómo lidiar con el hábito, cómo combatirlo o, mejor aún, usarlo a nuestro
favor? El esquema conductista, propuesto por B.F. Skinner, a base de
reforzamientos positivos y negativos suele ser el más socorrido; es decir,
castigas al "no-cambio" y premias al "sí-cambio". Pero estudios recientes en la
plasticidad del cerebro sugieren una vertiente alternativa: no sólo utilizar la
teoría del reforzamiento, sino apuntalarse en uno de enfoque sistémico.

Este enfoque consiste en reiteradamente estar abordando, preguntando,

conversando y deliberando sobre el cambio deseado. Cambiar la narrativa
predominante es quizá el primer paso para el cambio de conducta.

Por ejemplo, si una persona decide dejar de fumar o moderar sus alimentos,
entonces la atención y el apoyo de la gente que está cerca de ella es vital
para mantener la conversación y la atención alrededor de la meta. Por eso las
dietas deben ser públicas (no que sólo la persona lo sepa) y por eso los
dietistas hacen ir una vez a la semana a sus pacientes para revisar su peso,
porque mantienen enfocada a la persona y a la meta vigente.

O si una empresa decide hacer una estrategia de incrementar la tasa de venta

cruzada en clientes, por ejemplo, entonces los indicadores y métricas se
establecen alrededor de eso; pero sobre todo las conversaciones y su
frecuencia. Un director de ventas que entiende esto sistemáticamente
pregunta sobre el objetivo, convoca a juntas para hablar de esto, reconoce a
los que lo están logrando, ayuda a los que no lo están logrando, y a base de
estar duro y dale sobre lo mismo el cerebro de alguna forma se configura
alrededor de esa nueva dirección.

Lo que rara vez funciona son las pláticas motivacionales orientadas a cambiar
la actitud de la gente. Es que si no son recurrentes, si no se mantiene el
enfoque, entonces su efecto no dura. Al final del día, la actitud no cambia la
conducta, sino la conducta es la que cambia a la actitud.

Muchos proyectos empiezan con ánimo, reto o incluso ilusión, pero tan pronto
se deja de imprimir energía en el cambio el monstruo de la inercia, apoyada
por toda la burocracia, gradualmente empieza a recuperar terreno. Y por si
fuera poco este monstruo es invisible.

Ante esta resistencia, el último recurso para aventarse y cambiar es una

crisis. En la crisis se activa el sentido de la urgencia y nada es más eficaz para
disparar el cambio.

In extremis se conoce realmente a los individuos y a los recursos que tiene

una empresa. En un entorno de bonanza hasta al más flojo e inepto le puede
ir bien -además de que hay negocios tan buenos en sí mismos que aguantan las
peores de las administraciones.

La presión de una crisis te obliga a buscar nuevas oportunidades. No te da la

opción a no hacerlo porque tu supervivencia misma puede estar en juego. La
mejor universidad sin duda es la necesidad.

Son los procesos de adaptación forzosa los que hacen un stretch de tu persona
o de tu organización porque activan al espíritu, centran los esfuerzos y
enfocan los recursos.

Sí, es cierto que la inercia es un monstruo que hay que vencer, pero también
la inercia puede ser un aliado divino si convertimos al proceso de exploración,
de reinvención y de detección de oportunidades en algo habitual.

TIEMPO Y CONSUMO
Por Horacio Marchand

¿Habrá alguien que no le interese tomarse un período de su vida para hacer

realmente lo que se le dé su gana? Se requiere de decisión para romper con la
rutina, bajarse del tren, cambiar el juego, desacelerar.

En atención al número de mails y comentarios que generaron los artículos

previos “El exceso del éxito” y “Escapismo”, surgen las siguientes líneas.

Era un Domingo en la noche y la familia regresaba a la ciudad de México

después de un año Sabático.

Había vivido en el montañoso Colorado, EUA, donde esquiaron en invierno y

escalaron en verano.

Convivieron como nunca: hicieron ejercicio, exploraron lugares nuevos, se

hicieron amigos y llegaron a conocerse más entre ellos.

En el aeropuerto fueron recibidos por suegros, hermanos, primos, amigos;

como si fueran héroes que regresaban de la guerra.

El jefe de familia empezaba a trabajar el día siguiente.

Tenía quince días para entender cómo andaban las cosas en el negocio y que
su socio, que se había quedado al frente durante todo ese año, le detallara
pendientes. Ahora él, con todo y familia, se iba a tomar su Sabático.

Como en una carrera de relevos donde uno se queda mientras el otro se va.

¿Sabrán algo ellos que nosotros no sepamos?

Lo que es un hecho es que los estilos de vida son dinámicos. Las generaciones
cambian su conducta según su entorno y la etapa que les toca vivir.

Con Internet, las industrias editoriales y de entretenimiento, la información

está impactando a los sistemas alternativos de vida, y emergen nuevas
formas.

En Italia se detecta una tendencia de hombres cuarentones que siguen

solteros y su mamá les sigue lavando los calcetines, y que deciden no casarse,
“posso aspetare” dicen cuando los entrevistan.

En México la gente se está casando más grande y el concepto de mamá-joven

está cambiando; en ciertas sociedades cada vez se ven más madres o padres
que viven sin pareja con sus hijos;

también se ven noviazgos eternos que lo son todo menos un matrimonio

formal o en otro extremo, la gente se casa varias veces, o cambia de carrera
profesional sin problema.

¿Qué hace falta para vivir como uno quiere, o para decidirse a vivir un
Sabático? O mejor aún, ¿Cómo hacerle para incorporar una sensación de
Sabático en la cotidianidad de la vida?

Por el lado físico, tristemente algunos necesitan un infarto o enfermedad que

represente el exceso. Por el lado de las relaciones interpersonales, otros
necesitan la amenaza o la motivación de un divorcio o la ruptura con un hijo.
Por el lado profesional puede ser un despido inesperado, un quiebre de
negocio. Por el lado personal, un agotamiento crónico, un “ya no puedo ni con
mi alma”.

¿Se tiene que llegar a este extremo para tomar decisiones?

¿Tan fuerte es el guión de vida que se impone desde la infancia? ¿Se podrá
cuestionar? ¿Se podrá ser rebelde con causa?
¿Quién hizo el diseño de que la vida tenía que ser así?

Una autora norteamericana acaba de publicar un libro que describe lo que

califica como un fenómeno social: señoras, entre los 35 y 55 años de edad
empiezan a tomarse Sabáticos.

En el caso de estar casadas, se negocia con la familia, y las señoras salen a

realizar sus sueños: pintar, escribir, cocinar, acabar la universidad, estudiar
una maestría.

Un Sabático permite revisar la dirección de vida, dialogar con uno mismo y en

su caso con la familia, y en general, hacer cosas que normalmente no se
hacen.

La gente de negocios empieza a detectar esta tendencia. Hay una agencia en

Nueva York que se dedica a realizar los sueños más exóticos, por ejemplo:
convivir una semana con monjes tibetanos en Dharmasala, India o con los
indígenas en Chiapas; compartir los ritos de bizantinos en un monasterio en
Meteora, Grecia; o vivir con los pocos Aborígenes nómadas de Australia.

También empiezan a aparecer los personal & career coaches, que como
aquéllos que se pusieron de moda entre los ricos y famosos para su condición
física, pero llevado a la parte profesional.

En México las cosas cambian menos rápido pero los psiquiatras, consejeros,
religiosos y hasta brujos de Catemaco, nunca habían tenido tanto trabajo,
como si el mundo buscara orientación.

El hogar empieza a apreciarse como zona de trabajo, de descanso, de escape.

Si la situación económica lo permite, está equipada con todo: computadora,

acceso a Internet, cable, asador, brincolín, terraza; casi como si fuera un
refugio del mundo. Faith Popcorn, le llama Cocooing, refiriéndose a nido.

Se ve una explosión de servicio a domicilio y de llevar la tienda, el producto,

la experiencia, al hogar.

La gran pregunta de la humanidad: si estamos de acuerdo que sólo se utiliza

el 10% del potencial humano, ¿dónde quedó el otro 90%?

Quién sabe, pero por lo pronto hay que empezar a explorarlo. No se vale no
cuestionarse, no hacer introspección, no tomar decisiones porque la corriente
nos lleva.
 Tampoco tenemos que cambiar de estilo de vida ni de trabajo; pero hay que
estar conscientes y con un grado saludable de cuestionamiento e innovación.

Como dijo Jorge Luis Borges:

“Yo fui una de esas personas que vivió sensata y prolíficamente cada minuto
de su vida. Claro que tuve momentos de alegría, pero si pudiera volver atrás
trataría de tener solamente buenos momentos.

Por si no lo saben de eso está hecha la vida, sólo de momentos. No te pierdas el ahora.
Pero ya ves, tengo 85 años y sé que me estoy muriendo”.

Es triste morirse sin haber vivido, pero se podría empezar en cualquier momento,
incluyendo este.

How Much Is Our Behavior Worth?

MediaPost
Looking to add to your summertime reading list? I recommend the new report from Harvard
Business School professors John Deighton and John Quelch and Hamilton Consultants, "Economic
Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem" (full disclosure: John Deighton was my
marketing professor). The report was created for the IAB to explain the online advertising sector to
public policy makers, and literally calculates how much the Internet is worth to the U.S. economy.

In an attempt to solve this seemingly Sisyphean task, the report asserts that the Internet is simply
worth what we pay for it, which is roughly equivalent to 2.1% of the U.S. gross domestic product.
Due to the commercial diversity of the Internet and its far-reaching socioeconomic impact on
American consumers, the authors rely on three different approaches to triangulate their answer:

1.     From an Employment perspective (jobs created), the Internet is worth $300 billion;

2.     From a Sector GDP perspective (money paid to the Internet sector), it's worth $444 billion;

3.     From an Attention perspective (consumer time online), it's worth $680 billion.

As well-structured and comprehensive as this report is, I can't help but conclude that it overlooks
another valuable contribution the Internet has made to the economy: behavioral data as a source of
consumer insight that can radically improve how companies go to market. Yes, I am probably biased
because I am a market researcher (and an online market researcher to boot), but the lack of
attribution to these Information/Insight benefits in the report's value calculation certainly
shortchanges the Internet. And, while I haven't crunched the numbers, I'd assert that the
information that the Web creates about consumers exceeds the commercial value of Internet
advertising (nearly $25 billion in 2008). In other words, what we can learn about consumers' digital
behaviors is worth more than what companies pay to reach them online.

This may be a provocative view for publishers and their ad sales teams, but it should ring true for
the rest of marketers.  Part of the challenge is that digital data has been pigeon-holed as only
useful for online advertising decisions: simple Internet audience measurement on one end, and
highly addressable, behavioral targeting on the other. So as Internet marketing grew up, we
became obsessed about the near-term impact of banner ads at the expense of more holistic
Internet research. Many marketers, influenced by this CPA-mania, still view the Web as just a
direct response medium and a cheaper channel for surveys.  We now need to broaden the
applications for digital research by measuring people and their behaviors, not just the ads. We have
an opportunity to re-define what behavioral research is, so that marketers can more easily access
and act on it.

In order to unlock the new value that behavioral research offers, it's first useful to point out what
makes online consumer behavior data unique. Panel-based online behavior data is: 1) observational
(passive collection mitigates bias); 2) dynamic (updates in real time as behaviors occur); 3)
longitudinal (measures how behavior changes over the course of time); and 4) extremely
comprehensive (measures behavior across all sites a person visits). And when combined with other
data -- in particular, attitudinal information collected via surveys from the very same online panel
-- it creates the most holistic view of consumers in history.

So what can we do with this new, combined data asset that we couldn't do before? Here are three
ideas that can create new insights -- and value -- for marketers immediately:

1.       Holistic Brand Trackers. Large consumer brands often rely on survey-based tracking studies
to assess their brand equity. These tools are an effective means for measuring brand health over
long-time horizons, but they don't serve as an effective early-warning system. Combining traditional
brand measures with new behavior-based metrics, such as "share of search activity" or "online churn
indicators," will add a new dimension and actionability to brand trackers.

2.       Integrated Purchase Funnels. Understanding how advertising creates demand, and how this
converts into sales, is at the core of marketing effectiveness. But marketers frequently face a
methodological gap between upper, middle and lower funnel measurement. An integrated view of
the funnel that measures self-reported purchase intent, plus the ensuing online consideration and
purchase behaviors across the same consumers, will pinpoint the exact opportunities and threats
marketers need to act on.

3.       Digital Segment Profiles. Segmentation studies help marketers profile discrete customer
groups and track their share of wallet among these segments over time. Conducting these studies
on an online consumer behavior panel can complement the standard information collected in a
segmentation study. By incorporating a comprehensive view of the entertainment, commercial and
social media sites that garner segment attention and influence their attitudes, marketers can
quickly become more responsive and differentiate from rivals.

The three ideas above are good examples of how marketers can augment their existing market
research with new online consumer behavior data, making the combined information more
actionable and therefore more valuable. As marketers, we've just started to scratch the surface on
how to use this new digital research in how we run our businesses. We're poised to move beyond
the basics of audience measurement and advertising research. And when we succeed in unlocking
this new value for our brands (and our consumers), let's hope we can count on Professors Deighton
and Quelch to help us measure it.

Scale: The Importance of Cafe-Shaped Experiences

FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE

From the 1950s until the early 2000s, advertising and marketing followed along
the path of the industrial revolution. Mass marketing followed mass production.
Bigger supermarkets beat tiny markets. Chain restaurants replaced cafes. But
the thing is, people's tastes seem to be changing. We don't enjoy the same beer
anymore, an all-American Budweiser, like everyone else does. Instead, we like
what the place down the street makes. It tastes better, it's local, and there's
something cool about being able to talk to the guy who brewed it. And that does
not just apply to beer, it applies to everything.

Report after report is coming out in favor of mass customization, the ability to
"skin" products, to design them with us in mind. We want our own mark on
everything. And with this desire for personalization in our product selection, our
taste for mass communications is shifting back to a desire for more personal
interactions.

Now that email overload has crushed us, long after fax marketing came and
went, with mainstream newspaper and magazine advertising in decline, and
with television ads being deleted by digital video recorders, new methods are
being tested all the time. Social media is one of these methods, and its intimacy
is hitting a core group of people. They're sick of being pandered to, so they've
stepped out of that line because the product at the end isn't interesting to them
anymore. But it turns out they do love something else: the ability to connect with
new people, share real experiences, and work toward a common goal, the
same human interests that have meant a lot to us throughout human history.

We talked earlier about how the Web creates democracy, and it's important to
think again about this as it relates to scale. The Web allows us to work within
Dunbar's number. It means that we can build business relationships in different
ways: Instead of just locally or in a specific vertical, we can channel and stripe
and slice in many different ways.

It is vital to understand, though, that this medium has limits. There's a risk once
you start thinking about mechanizing your online presence. Think of the
difference between writing a personal message (in email or on paper) and
sending out an e-mail newsletter. The language changes. The personality
changes. It shifts to what we're all trying to avoid.

To that end, think hard when planning. Think about this whole Build an Army
concept with intention. This isn't about capturing the "most." It's the difference
between passionate home-brewed beer aficinados and mass-produced
mainstream beer. You're angling for the former, not the latter. Some quick
advice on this front: If you scale, be sure to keep these details in mind:

 Simple gestures matter. Saying a few words back to everyone you can
touch in a given hour is a nice way for people to feel heard and seen.
 Remember to visit other people's sites, to participate in other people's
things, and to make the conversation about them.
 Give as much as you can to your loyal community. Empower people
within it to lead in their own ways. Promote people within your community
to help them feel part of the core experience.
FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE

Brand Marketing: Guinness

By: Scott KirsnerApril 30, 2002

How do you refresh a 243-year-old brand? By brewing a modern experience

that combines the power of history with the allure of contemporary design.
Guinness Storehouse, in Dublin, reimagines how a brand can perform for
customers, employees, and the community.

When Guinness set out to replace its outmoded visitors' center in Dublin,
Ireland, the celebrated brewer knew that it wanted to build more than just a
shrine to stout. Sure, capturing the company's colorful 243-year history and
serving the millions of thirsty pilgrims who travel to the holy mecca of Irish beer
were important. But it was even more important to set the stage for the future: to
use an ultramodern facility to breathe life into an aging brand, to reconnect an
old company with young (and skeptical) customers, and to use the past to
prepare employees for what comes next.

That was the design brief behind Guinness Storehouse, which opened in late
2000. Storehouse features exhibits that recount the company's history and
explain how the black stuff is made. But the facility also has conference rooms
and a training center for employees, an art gallery, restaurants, cafés, bars, and
event space. Housed in an imposing seven-story brick building that was erected
in 1904, Storehouse serves as a giant mixing bowl for tourists, Guinness
employees, and thirsty Dubliners. It represents best practice in the experience
economy -- and a reimagination of how a company can connect with its core
constituencies.

"Guinness as a brand is all about community. It's about bringing people together
and sharing stories," says Ralph Ardill, director of marketing and strategic
planning at Imagination Ltd., the edgy London design firm that helped create the
structure. "And Guinness stout is a great social catalyst." In designing
Storehouse, Imagination tried to re-create the magic of a pub full of strangers
getting to know one another. "It isn't a corporate cathedral for worshiping
Guinness," Ardill says. "It's a place for interaction among tourists who are
traveling around Ireland, for the people who live there, and for new Guinness
employees who are undergoing training."

Talk about a mixed-use space. Bartenders from all across Ireland come to
Storehouse's specially designed, publike classrooms to learn "how to pour the
perfect pint," says Mary Clarke, the facility's head of sales and marketing.
Groups within the St. James's Gate Brewery complex, which Sir Arthur
Guinness began building in 1759, use Storehouse for meetings and training.
"We did a lot of sessions about how the changeover to the Euro would affect
us," Clarke says. Even genealogical researchers descend upon Storehouse's
archives, looking for information about ancestors who once lived in Dublin. (The
Guinness archives are a good place to start, since so many Dubliners have
worked for the company over the years.)

Storehouse is also the physical manifestation of a serious marketing challenge:

to reconnect Guinness with younger drinkers in Ireland. While the brand has
conquered the world (the stout is brewed in 50 countries and sells an estimated
10 million glasses a day), Guinness has gone a bit flat at home. In the second
half of 2001, sales of Guinness in Ireland actually fell by 3%. Why the slip?
Because Guinness, like so many other well-loved but old-fashioned products,
had come to be perceived as the choice of the senior set. Ireland's
twentysomethings were switching to lighter drinks: lagers such as Heineken or
high-intensity cocktails such as vodka with Red Bull.

Part of the solution, Guinness executives felt, was to make Storehouse a

magnet for the Dublin pub-and-club-crawling crowd. After dark, there are
special events that attract both locals and executives: awards ceremonies,
concerts, corporate parties, fashion shows, and gallery openings. "We hung our
first art show in December 2001," Clarke says proudly, "and 600 people turned
up for the opening." The evening events make Storehouse a kind of community
center. And by bringing people in their twenties and thirties to the brewery, the
events help Guinness connect with the brand's future. "Guinness Storehouse is
a way to get in touch with a new generation," says Ardill, "to help young people
reevaluate Guinness." And to rediscover Guinness's history. Clive Brownlee,
the company's assistant managing director for Guinness Ireland, worked closely
with the designers to ensure that the facility's focus on the future also reveled in
the past.

Guinness Storehouse is located in what had been an old abandoned

fermentation plant within the main Guinness brewing complex in a gritty,
industrial part of Dublin. The building's design is like a candy with a chocolate
shell and a creamy filling: It has tradition on the outside, tomorrow on the inside.
A brick exterior gives way to a modern glass-and-steel interior that is illuminated
by a dramatic combination of natural and artificial light. When sightseers arrive,
they climb a short, narrow set of stairs before emerging into a cavernous atrium.
It's shaped roughly like a pint glass, with a circular pub, the Gravity Bar, at the
top that glows white at night -- like the suds atop a freshly poured Guinness. Set
into the floor is the contract that Sir Arthur Guinness himself signed for the
brewery site -- a 9,000-year lease for the price of just 45 Irish punts a year.

After paying an entry fee of about $10, visitors receive "the pebble," a palm-
sized Lucite token with a globule of Guinness stout inside. The pebble grants
entry to Storehouse, its displays, and -- of course -- its well-stocked gift shop.
And once visitors have slowly risen to the top floor, like bubbles in a glass, the
pebble acts as a drink ticket at the Gravity Bar, which boasts panoramic views
of the city. A bartender scans the pebble, deactivating a metal strip inside it,
serves you a pint (cold or extra cold), and returns the pebble as a souvenir.
"The pebble is important," says Ardill. "It's not just a ticket. It starts
conversations."
Storehouse is already a top tourist destination in Ireland. It bumped off the Book
of Kells at Trinity College in its inaugural year, during which it drew 570,000
tourists and hosted 45,000 people for special events and training. The old
visitors' center, the Hopstore, drew 470,000 tourists annually before it began to
burst at the seams. (Located about a hundred yards from Storehouse, the
Hopstore has since been sold to the MIT Media Lab, which runs its European
research center there.)

But Guinness and Imagination aren't declaring victory yet. Clarke says that
some visitors have been asking for guided tours, which aren't currently
available. Brainstorming is under way regarding how to make one of the bars a
bit "warmer and more exciting," in Clarke's words.

"The goal was for Storehouse to evolve, adapt, and grow up," Ardill says.
"Places like Storehouse bring consumers and employees together and open the
doors to the community. They're a way to make a company's vision tangible.
But that doesn't mean everything should be set in stone."

Scott Kirsner (kirsner@worldnet.att.net) is a Fast Company contributing editor

based in Boston. He agreed not to submit his pub bills as research expenses for
this story. Learn more about Guinness Storehouse on the Web
(www.guinnessstorehouse.com).

The Power of Small Ideas

The initial schematic for Guinness Storehouse was sketched out -- where else?
-- on a cocktail napkin. Adrian Caddy, napkin artist and creative director at
Imagination Ltd., the high-profile London firm that worked with Guinness to
design the facility, believes that the best ideas rarely bubble up in conference
rooms or formal brainstorming sessions: "Asking a creative person to produce a
good idea in a big meeting," he says, "is like meeting someone who's a
comedian and saying, 'Okay, say something funny now.' "

At first, Guinness executives didn't think that they needed to devote the entire
Storehouse building to the new visitors' center, and no one had the slightest
intention of turning the structure into a subtle-but-stunning icon of the Dublin
skyline: a massive pint glass topped with an illuminated circular bar. On a plane
ride back to London from their first meeting with Guinness about the Storehouse
project, Caddy and Ralph Ardill, Imagination's director of marketing and
strategic planning, started scribbling.

To launch Storehouse, Imagination designed a live show that ran for three
consecutive evenings. The firm worked with Jean-Pascal Lévy-Trumet, creative
director of the opening ceremony of the 1998 World Cup in France. The series
of events attracted some 4,000 people, featured a cast of 20 performers, and
made use of the entire building. Not bad for an idea that began on a napkin.

"Most good ideas are born out of a little sketch," Caddy says. "A crudely drawn
doodle has the power to communicate an idea to a really huge audience without
much backup explanation. And the best ideas probably don't occur when
everybody is sitting around a table, but rather when you're having something to
eat or having a talk in a bar. I always just grab the first thing I see to sketch on --
a book of matches, a little notepad, a bar mat -- and try to take advantage of
those spontaneous moments. You can capture a lot of passion and energy in a
small space."
FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE

Battle of the Brands

By: Jennifer ReingoldApril 30, 2001
John Hancock's outspoken CEO names names and points fingers at some high-
profile brand offenders in his new book. He also offers some good advice on
not screwing up your own company's brand.

David D'Alessandro, CEO and president of John Hancock Financial Services

Inc., isn't afraid to name names. Boston Brahmins cringe at his loud mouth and
loud ties. And he doesn't care much about toeing lines, gaining backroom
consensus, or acting like CEOs of most major public companies, who shy from
making a stink about anything. After all, making a stink is bad news for any
public company, let alone a life-insurance company. It's bad for the brand,
right?

Right, says D'Alessandro. Unless you're making a stink because something

really does smell out there. Then you do what's right, not what's subtle. And if
you do what's right, your brand -- which is all about trust and integrity anyhow --
will come out smelling like a rose.

That's what happened in 1998 when D'Alessandro, who had made Hancock
one of the primary sponsors of the Olympics, publicly took the International
Olympic Committee to task for their slow-footed response to bribery scandals.
After threatening to withdraw his sponsorship -- estimated at between $40
million and $50 million for four years -- if changes weren't made, D'Alessandro
was attacked personally and professionally. But he stuck to his guns and made
the IOC implement an ethics clause (now called the Hancock Clause), which
allows any sponsor to pull out of the games if a committee-related scandal
erupts.

"Our motives were very simple: Don't splash mud on our brand," he says.
Today, John Hancock is still a sponsor of the Olympics, and its own brand is
one of the most respected in the country.

D'Alessandro, one of the only public-relations executives ever to make it to the

corner office of a major public company, thinks that a company's brand is its
single most valuable product -- something that few, if any, executives realize. In
his new book, Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand (McGraw-
Hill, 2001), D'Alessandro shares his very public experience with the Olympics
and other entertaining, brutally honest brand success stories. The book is
plainspoken, opinionated, often hilarious, and smart. It's got a fair bit of piss and
vinegar, as well as boundless common sense. So, unsurprisingly, does the
author, who, at age 50, became the youngest CEO in John Hancock's history
last June.
Although D'Alessandro is a trained "spinmeister," what comes out of his mouth
can be surprisingly raw. Just listen to him talk about the life-insurance business,
something that those in the industry usually mention only in hushed tones.
Brand is critical in this business, he says, because life insurance is a commodity
product and because it's about death, a topic no one really wants to discuss.

"Life insurance is a wonderful business if you know what you're doing,"

D'Alessandro says, betraying a trace of an upstate New York accent. "Why?
People, on average, die right on time. They pay you money because they're
afraid that they might die earlier. It makes the people here insane when I say
that this is the bookmaking and loan-sharking business. And we're the house.
We know the odds. So we win every time."

Hancock's ads, which have won numerous awards, are not about gambling,
however. They're about the one critical emotion for anyone in the death
business: empathy. The company has run memorable black and white ads
commemorating a baby's birth and a college graduation -- events that celebrate
the passing of time. More recently, the company has drawn attention with a
notorious spot in which two women go to the airport to adopt an Asian baby --
which has been interpreted by some as a subtle endorsement of lesbian
families. Whatever characters are displayed, the message, says D'Alessandro,
is always the same: We care.

The branding extends to the ads' placement -- at wholesome events, such as

the Olympics and Major League Baseball games, but never at NASCAR races.
"We're a life insurance company," D'Alessandro writes in the book. "We don't
particularly want to attach our brand to a violent death on the racetrack."

Here are four of D'Alessandro's most important rules for building a killer brand.

Never forget that you are your brand.

D'Alessandro first experienced the power of the brand as a child in Utica, New
York, when he helped protect the family delicatessen's reputation with a rather
unusual skill: licking meat. When he was six, his family discovered that he had
inherited his grandmother's ability to determine if meat was going bad by licking
it. "My tongue tingled," he says. So, much to the chagrin of the owners, his dad
would bring him and his tingling tongue to the slaughterhouse when it was time
to buy meat. "The owners hated me. They didn't want to give bad meat to a
supermarket because they were afraid that they'd lose those huge orders. But
they didn't care about us," he says.

Once he'd given the goods the thumbs-up, his dad would stamp the
D'Alessandro name onto the flank to make sure that the meat David had
approved was what the delicatessen actually got -- and that the meat sold under
the D'Alessandro name was of good quality. The lesson: Keep brand front and
center in all decisions, and know that it is the boss's responsibility -- and
everyone else's too -- to protect it. You only have one name.
Know how easy it is to destroy a brand. Don't.

It takes time and care to construct a brand, but it can be destroyed in an instant
when scandal hits. If trouble strikes your company, deal with it. When
D'Alessandro threatened to withdraw from Olympic sponsorship in 1998, other
companies berated his public approach. But D'Alessandro says that he has no
regrets: His brand was in danger of being found guilty by association. "As
sponsors, we risked being criticized for supporting an organization that clearly
condoned corruption. There was a pig in the middle of the table oinking, and
nobody was willing to talk about it because of the IOC's and other sponsors'
holier-than-thou attitude."

But what if it happens to your own company? In 1995, John Hancock was sued
over deceptive sales practices. At the time, D'Alessandro was in the hot seat as
head of retail: "I said, 'There's only one problem: We did these things, and we're
going to pay. So how do you want to handle this? Do you want to litigate, get
five years of publicity exposing hundreds of depositions, incur the wrath of the
public and the media, and still have to pay $2 billion? Or do you want to admit
that we did it and pay?' " In 1997, the company settled the suit for approximately
$350 million. "I made that call," D'Alessandro says about the decision to settle
rather than litigate."

Obscurity is not smart branding.

D'Alessandro is a major sports fan. His office boasts such top-flight sports
memorabilia as Michael Jordan's shoes and Muhammad Ali's gloves and silk
trunks encased in glass showcases. He has built his company's brand around
sponsoring events like the Olympics and the Boston Marathon.

But his face registers disgust and he gets agitated as he talks about watching
the past two Super Bowls. The games were fine, he says, but the dotcom
advertising and branding were horrendous. "The ads were dreadful!" he says.
"Companies were trying to out-subtle each other."

What, exactly, was subtle about Cyberian Outpost.com's ad, which showed a
gerbil being shot out of a cannon? The ad itself was, simply, gross. But
D'Alessandro said Cyberian Outpost and others made a fatal flaw when they
decided that it would be cool to separate the brand from the product entirely.
Sure, people remembered the gerbil. How could they forget? But they had no
idea what Cyberian Outpost actually did, so how could they know whether to
care about it?

"It was almost a badge of honor in the dotcom business to be remote from the
message. Many dotcoms took a page out of Apple Computer's book,"
D'Alessandro says, referring to the famous 1984 Big Brother ad that ran only
once and never referred to computers. The difference was that people already
knew the Apple brand and what it stood for. D'Alessandro says that the
dotcoms should have built brand awareness before deciding to get cute during
the Super Bowl, when a raft of very expensive messages is diluted by dozens of
other cute ads anyway. The rest, as we know, is history.
The best brand doesn't remove the need for a good product.

If you manage to create a great brand, says D'Alessandro, the last thing to do is
relax. The pressure to sell a product that protects and enhances brand
reputation has only begun. The worst thing is to become arrogant and removed
from your customers.

One of the most biting stories in the book concerns D'Alessandro's experience
working at Citibank, where people started pushing products because those
products were from Citibank, not because customers needed or wanted them.

He relates the story of a senior executive who delighted in intimidating his

underlings by telling them to "put the cup up" when he thought that they said
something stupid. Each infraction cost the offender a nickel. Once a junior
executive tried to explain why a product wasn't launching as planned; logistical
problems were delaying the rollout. After making him "put the cup up," the
senior executive said, "We're Citibank. This is a marketing problem, not a
product problem" and ended the meeting.

For D'Alessandro, the anecdote illustrates what can happen when you let a
brand become too powerful. "You can have the best advertising in the world,
but once you turn off a customer, he won't want to come back to you. The best
thing that you can do for your brand is to execute well. Customer service is our
biggest struggle -- that and making good products and answering the phone on
time."
FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE

Driving Innovation
By Anni Layne Rodgers

Raised on Total Request Live, wireless phones, and generous allowances, generation Y
is driving enormous, recession-proof sales for brands like Pepsi, Sony, and
Abercrombie & Fitch. So it's not surprising that the nation's 18- to 24-year-olds are
attracting the attention of all sorts of brands -- young and old, hip and stuffy alike. One
unlikely suitor: the old-line car company.

Earlier this year, both DaimlerChrysler and Toyota announced plans to court the youth
market that's currently infatuated with rivals Volkswagen and Honda. The new Chrysler
Crossfire and Toyota Scion series -- sleek, unconventional, and decidedly strange -- aim
to attract first-time car buyers with comparatively low prices and high technology. Hook
'em while they're young and impressionable, and you've got a lifelong fan. Or so the
saying goes.

But how can a 78-year-old brand like Chrysler, best known for its family-friendly Town
& Country line, entice a 2002 college graduate to consider its latest model over a VW
Beetle? Increasingly, the challenge of winning over generation Y is falling not to
traditional ad shops and 30-second TV spots, but to hybrid branding agencies with
integrated marketing schemes -- not to mention super-fly names like Hypnotic, Fresh
Machine, and Critical Mass.

"Young people are suspicious about marketing -- as they should be," says Rick Bolton,
founder of Los Angeles-based Fresh Machine, the "next generation consultancy" that's
helping Toyota launch its young, urban Scion brand. The skepticism and distrust of
young consumers is driving marketers like Bolton to reconsider and reinvent the timing,
placement, and goals of branding initiatives.

As Maxim would say, Sexy: Online driving simulations, branded films, over-the-top
customization. Stodgy: Celebrity endorsements, closed-track demonstrations,
showrooms. Nothing is sacred.

It's too early to measure the success of these unconventional branding campaigns -- their
ability to convert pop-culture cachet into car sales. But it's not premature to say that
traditional car companies are taking some formidable risks along the way to wooing a
new generation of drivers. Here, we examine three crucial, revolutionary branding
campaigns spearheaded by aging automobile manufacturers that are seeking the
fountain of youth: Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, and Toyota.

Crossfire, Cross-Sell

DaimlerChrysler has a lot riding on the Crossfire, its polished concept coupe scheduled
for release in mid-2003. The first love child of Germany's Daimler-Benz and Detroit's
Chrysler Corp., the Crossfire represents the potential and profitability of a momentous
automobile-industry merger. Can this mega car company successfully combine sleek
European engineering with classic American stylings? In many ways, DaimlerChrysler
hopes the Crossfire will convince critics that it can -- and will.

But no matter how Euro-cool, the Crossfire will surely fail if it doesn't make a huge
consumer splash. That's where Hypnotic comes in.

A Los Angeles-based startup, Hypnotic [1] is an entertainment production company that

uses independent films to market a variety of brands. Its challenge from Chrysler:
Create a marketing campaign for the Crossfire that balances brand and entertainment,
that will outlive competitors' flash-in-the-pan gimmicks, and that can extend into movie
theaters, magazines, television, radio, and dealerships. And launch it a full year before
anyone can buy the car.

Charged with "younging" the brand, Hypnotic pitched the Chrysler Million Dollar Film
Festival [2] (MDFF), a nine-monthlong competition for aspiring filmmakers to win a
production deal with Universal Pictures, which is a minority investor in Hypnotic.
Launched at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the MDFF will ultimately produce
one feature-length film and nine runner-up short films that incorporate the Crossfire or
PT Cruiser.

"We are extending an automobile brand into a lifestyle," explains Doug Scott, vice
president of marketing for Hypnotic. "We're deconstructing the brand's attributes and
integrating them into the main characters of these action-adventure and romantic short
films. The on-screen heroes will communicate the personalities of these new automotive
nameplates."

Though Hypnotic's competition resembles the wildly successful BMW films series [3],
it's no me-too branding scheme. By inviting any and all independent filmmakers to
participate in the contest, Chrysler is allowing its consumers -- or prospective
consumers -- to participate in the formation of the Crossfire brand. It's handing power to
the people.

"We chose to focus on art rather than commercialization," says Jeff Bell, vice president
of the Chrysler brand. "We give BMW credit for breaking outside of the standard
advertising medium, but Chrysler is less intrigued with the $100-million-budget projects
and more interested in seeing true innovation, inspiration, and creativity come to play
with the emerging filmmaker. We're interested in ideas, not special effects."

At last month's Cannes Film Festival, Hypnotic set up a Chrysler Villa at the Hotel
Martinez and kicked off the extreme filmmaking phase of the MDFF by challenging
each of its 10 semifinalists to write, cast, shoot, edit, and premiere a five-minute short
film in just 10 days. A star-studded panel of judges then chose 5 finalists to move on to
the Chrysler Summer House in Los Angeles, where they will develop a million-dollar
production package alongside an industry mentor on the Universal Studios lot. In
exchange for funding the feature-length film, Chrysler will claim partial-equity
ownership of the final product.

"Here's a marketing program that's paying you on the other end," Scott says. "All you
need is one diamond in the rough to make this program worthwhile."
We're Really Huge in Japan

While Chrysler aligns its Crossfire and PT Cruiser with film lovers, Toyota is placing
all of its chips on music. Last year, the maker of the Tercel and Camry lines announced
that it would launch an entirely new line of cars for first-time buyers. This entry-level
line, called Scion, won't debut in the United States until June 2003, yet the brand is
already alive and kicking thanks to Fresh Machine [4], a two-year-old design shop with
absolutely no experience in the automotive industry and just 10 full-time employees.

"Toyota decided it wanted to go outside of the envelope entirely with the Scion launch
and to work with an interactive shop rather than an ad agency. That was a huge, critical
difference," says Rick Bolton, who was previously the director of broadband and future
TV at Razorfish. "They were glad we'd never worked on a car account before because
they didn't want the same old thing. They wanted a branding launch that wouldn't fall
into expected patterns."

And, by all accounts, that's what they got when Fresh Machine partnered with the Rebel
Organization, the marketing arm of a Los Angeles-based music magazine called Urb
[5]. Together, they created the Scion brand from the ground up, starting with the actual
silver-coated badge that appears on every car and ending with a cutting-edge Web site
that screams youth and exuberance.

Aimed specifically at an urban crowd interested in house, dance, electronica, and trance
music, Urb helped Toyota narrow its focus on a specific youth demographic that would
exploit the customization potential of the bbX and ccX -- the first two Scion models.
(The boxy bbX model actually resembles a giant cruising speaker and boasts a custom
audio system.) Fresh Machine stepped in with the technical and design expertise to
build a high-tech brand for that target customer. And the result can be sampled at the
Scion Web site [6], which houses music downloads, Urb stories, and fresh graphics, all
of which combine to communicate the brand message.

"Authenticity was absolutely important," Bolton says of the Scion site. "We didn't want
to overhype the cars, so we concentrated on narratives that weren't condescending or
canned, and we emphasized the experiential notion of the brand. In the end, a car is
really a lifestyle choice. You buy a car, and it becomes a reflection of you for many
years. That means successful car brands must have lifestyle credibility."

That is an important departure from traditional thinking, says Danish branding guru
Jesper Kunde. "Choose your values and define your soul," says Kunde, author of
Unique Now ... Or Never: The Brand Is the Company Driver in the New Value Economy
[7] (Prentice Hall, 2002) and Corporate Religion: Building a Strong Company Through
Personality and Corporate Soul [8] (Prentice Hall, 2000). "Soul and authenticity are
essential. Consumers today have all the power, and they will challenge companies to
communicate their vision in new and dynamic ways. If your brand has no soul, it has no
personality and no compelling message. Consumers will see through that."

That is part of the reason why Toyota, which has failed to create a stir with its youthful
Echo, began building the Scion brand so far in advance of the car's launch dates, Bolton
says. "Toyota wants buzz and word of mouth to take hold and help build credibility for
the brand. And they have the time to do that."
All Your Car Are Belong to Us

Just as the Internet helped make the nonsensical phrase "All your base are belong to us
[9]" a well-recognized piece of the gen-Y lexicon, Mercedes-Benz hopes the Web will
entice young car buyers to rave about the brand. Currently, about 60% of households
conduct online research before buying a car. In the 18-to-34-year-old category, that
percentage is significantly higher. Mercedes let those statistics steer all marketing
initiatives for its C-Class Coupe, the first Mercedes priced around $25,000 and aimed
specifically at twentysomethings.

In a cluttered market segment aimed at an overstimulated demographic, Mercedes knew

that it needed to transcend the flash and fizzle of traditional automotive sites. So it
brought on board Critical Mass [10], a marketing and media-services company that's
based in Calgary, Alberta to build the C-Coupe Web site [11]. The integrated site
needed to communicate a more youthful vibe, while remaining mindful of the high-
caliber Mercedes brand. Respect your elders, but don't follow their rules, Mercedes told
Critical Mass.

"We aimed to create a destination, not just an online brochure," says Jerry Johnston,
president and CEO of Critical Mass. "The Web site informs and educates, but it also
gets consumers to the next level in the buying process by exciting and engaging them.
Mercedes wants to empower its consumers from the beginning."

And putting buyers in charge means arming them with a variety of interchangeable
tools. The toolbox -- the C-Coupe site -- links users to an online sweepstakes
promotion, a PDA application with detailed specifications and images, and a viral tool
that allowed users to craft and share their own C-Coupe movie. Elegant and
streamlined, the site was recently ranked best in online convenience by J.D. Powers.

It wasn't shocking or particularly groundbreaking in design and execution, but the C-

Coupe site got the job done for the roughly 1.4 million users who visited during the
sweepstakes. And now Mercedes hopes to keep those gen-X and gen-Y consumers
invested in the brand by giving each one of them an individual Web site when they buy
a Mercedes.

"The owner Web sites will keep track of service records, leases, loans, and insurance,"
Johnston says. "Eventually, you'll be able to identify where your car is parked by
turning on your computer. You'll be able to have your car diagnosed remotely.
Technology is going to broaden Mercedes's relationship with its consumers well beyond
the car-buying experience."

Even the best technology can't help Mercedes, Chrysler, or Toyota quantify the success
of the new, innovative branding campaigns. How many click-throughs translate into
actual sales? What lasting impression will a branded feature film leave on potential
consumers? Can music really define a brand personality? With a little luck, these three
companies will find out.
FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE
December 19, 2007

Can TiVo Go Prime Time?

By Scott Kirsner

Inside the Silicon Valley headquarters of TiVo Inc., there's a fantasy living room where
meetings with visitors often begin. The furniture is pristine and the oval coffee table is
free of magazines and bags of chips. The only objects on its surface are a telephone and
TiVo's distinctive peanut-shaped remote control. The sofa and chairs all face an
entertainment center containing a big-screen television that is linked to several TiVo
boxes (a few are available; a few are works in progress).

This living room, the company's executives hope, will be a prototype for 100 million
living rooms across North America. The VCR will be replaced by TiVo's $399 flagship
device, the personal video recorder, or PVR, which allows couch potatoes to more
easily record their favorite shows, pause live TV, get suggestions about programs that
they might enjoy, and fast-forward through ads. "We don't view our market as being just
the early adopters or the $150,000-plus households," says Morgan Guenther, TiVo's
president. "If we can make the product easy to use and get the price down to somewhere
around $199, this is a mass-market opportunity."

Alas, the real world is messier than TiVo's perfect living room. The company is
experiencing firsthand the brutal realities of introducing a disruptive technology into a
marketplace filled with obstacles. Customers are usually slower to embrace new
products than forecasters predict. Investors, initially flush with excitement, become
skeptical and demand immediate results. (TiVo, which has accumulated losses of more
than $400 million since it was founded in 1997, has watched its share price fall from a
peak of nearly $79 to a valley as low as $3.) Me-too competitors vie for customers who
are prepared to buy. (The company is locked in a nasty patent dispute with another
entrant in the PVR market, SonicBlue, which makes ReplayTV. That device allows
users to trade shows over the Internet.)

And yet ... TiVo has genuine strengths. The company's executive team, led by CEO
Mike Ramsay, has been quick to change course in response to changes in the market
and on Wall Street. Its engineers have been upgrading the product and refining its
performance since its debut in March 1999. The TiVo Series2 launched in February,
and the company continues to innovate on virtually every facet of the viewing
experience -- even on elements as mundane as the remote control.

Most important, TiVo has struck a chord with customers. The company has amassed a
base of devoted users who practically foam at the mouth when they talk about how
TiVo has changed their TV-viewing experience. The company's name has become a
verb: The phrase "Did you TiVo that show?" is rapidly gaining on "Did you tape that
show?" in the pop-culture vernacular. TiVo has garnered favorable mentions on such hit
programs as Friends, Sex and the City, and Live With Regis and Kelly. Indeed, the
product is so promising that TiVo has become a four-letter word on Madison Avenue, a
symbol of dire threats to the television networks and the advertising business.
Right now, TiVo's base of paying customers is about 422,000. Ramsay is on a mission
to push that number to 1 million. "At 1 million users, our business model will generate
significant free cash flow," he says. "At that point, we'll be able to sustain ourselves and
reinvest in future growth. We do think of 1 million as a bit of a magic number."

In short, the TiVo story is about more than TiVo. It is a case study in the promise -- and
perils -- of innovation in an unforgiving market. TiVo has a killer product. But can it
become a great company? Will it become a big name in the future of technology and
pop culture? Or will it go down in business history as yet another casualty of first-
mover disadvantage? Will it be to PVRs what Sony Betamax was to VCRs, what the
Altair was to personal computers, what Atari was to video games?

"There are lots of cautionary tales," concedes Guenther, "where the inflection point
came, the technology went mainstream, and the company that was there first couldn't
take advantage of it. We know that we have to focus on execution if we want to stay on
top of the market that we created. What does it take to get the mass market to adopt this
technology?"

Here is TiVo's four-point program to answer that question.

Step One: Make Claims That Connect

A quick primer on TiVo: It's essentially a giant hard drive in a box that hooks up to your
TV, a cable or satellite feed, and a phone line. Using the phone line, TiVo dials in to a
server to collect information about what shows are on when. Then, from the couch, you
use the TiVo remote control to navigate the schedule, selecting shows that you'd like to
record. You can even tell TiVo to record every new episode of The Sopranos that airs
over the course of a season. Unlike a VCR, certain versions of TiVo can record two
shows that happen to air simultaneously.

You can also use TiVo to put a show "on pause" while you answer the door -- and
return to it without missing a thing. And if you let TiVo store the first 15 minutes of a
show before you start watching it, you can skip through the commercials. On its lower-
quality setting, the Series2 can record up to 60 hours of programming. There are
countless auxiliary functions as well. TiVo can track what types of shows you watch
frequently and suggest others that you might enjoy.

But here's the rub: There's a big difference between what TiVo can do and what even
the most accomplished couch potato has the energy to learn how to do. Most people
aren't really itching to change their viewing habits -- even if there's no doubt that new
habits would vastly improve their experience. "There's tremendous inertia associated
with watching TV," explains Brodie Keast, a TiVo senior vice president who spent 10
years in product marketing at Apple. "There's no other human behavior that's as
entrenched. We've been watching TV the same way our whole lives."

Convincing consumers that there is, in fact, a better way to watch TV is a big part of
Keast's job. "When I first started here, people would say, 'Oh, TiVo. They make those
great sandals,' " he recalls. Since then, he has been trying to hone how TiVo tells its
story and explains what its product can do -- all without the multimillion-dollar
marketing budget that was slashed in deference to Wall Street's demands for financial
performance. "We're trying to build a new category and brand and change human
behavior on a mass scale. We're also trying to do those things on a shoestring budget,"
Keast explains.

Initially, the company tried to avoid comparing its product to a VCR. "People don't like
their VCRs, because they don't know how to use them," Keast says. "They don't
understand why they should want another VCR, even if it is a glorified VCR."

TiVo's original position was that the device was like having your own TV network
where you get to decide what's on and when. "But there was no context," says Keast,
recalling the shortcomings of that message. "People said, 'What the hell are you talking
about? Personal TV network? Huh?' "

Keast caved in on the VCR comparison. Now the positioning statement says that TiVo
is like a VCR, except that it digitally records your favorite shows on a hard drive, letting
you watch them whenever you want. "There were questions about using the word
'digital,' " Keast says. "We worried that people might envision their TVs crashing. But
our market research found that people were comfortable with it. They figure that if it's
digital, it's good."

TiVo doesn't have the money to shout its carefully crafted message from the rooftops,
so the company has decided to focus instead on strategic whispering campaigns. Keast
has worked to put TiVo sets into the hands of Hollywood celebs and sports stars such as
Jay Leno, Joe Montana, and Rosie O'Donnell. "These are people who are influential
with consumers and who have a big impact on pop culture," Keast says. "It's incredibly
valuable to have them talking about TiVo in a positive way." In exchange, the company
sometimes asks celebs for photos or endorsements, some of which appear on its Web
site.

TiVo also tries to foster word of mouth among its less-renowned users. The company
encourages TiVo owners to host what might be dubbed "TiVo-ware parties," bringing
together friends for an event like the Grammys, the start of the NFL season, or the
season opener of a hot show. TiVo-ware parties give nonusers the chance to experience
some of TiVo's features, such as pausing the show or rewinding it for an instant replay.
TiVo sometimes creates special content around a big event, such as the Super Bowl or
the Oscars, that only TiVo owners can watch.

"We want our prospects to get to experience the product in a comfortable environment
from people they trust," Keast says. TiVo-ware parties are more low-key than their
Tupperware-oriented predecessors, however. "The TiVo owner doesn't have a sales
quota," Keast says. "The evening doesn't end with, 'Can I take your order, please?' "

Keast says that seeing TiVo in action at a friend's house is one of the company's best
sales strategies -- but it's one that the company has a hard time controlling.
Occasionally, TiVo-ware parties can go awry, as happened earlier this year during the
Oscars. TiVo's program guide listed the awards ceremony as running for three hours,
and when the show ran long -- nearly an hour and a half long -- many people using
TiVo to record the show and watch it later (after serving dinner, for example) found that
they had missed some of the most important awards.

It was a frustrating experience for TiVo users, who may not have known that the device
has the ability to "pad" up to three extra hours onto a show that might run long. It was
also a learning experience for TiVo's executives. "In the future, we'll remind our
subscribers that for big live events, they should probably pad them at least a little bit,"
Keast says.

Step Two: To Get Ubiquity, Distribute Selectively

TiVo executives have rethought how they sell their product's virtues to potential
customers. They have also rethought where they sell the product. Initially, TiVo
recorders were available at many stores that carried consumer electronics, including
"big box" retailers, such as Target and Wal-Mart. "We probably had TiVo
overdistributed," Keast says. "Nobody was moving a huge volume on a per-store basis,
so they weren't excited about building our business." TiVo was everywhere, but it was
getting nowhere.

Earlier this year, the company abandoned ubiquity as an objective and decided to
concentrate on one retailer: "Best Buy gets more velocity," says Keast. "And we both
have incentives to make things work." TiVo promotes Best Buy on its Web site and on
the service, and Best Buy promotes TiVo in its stores. Best Buy salespeople get special
training in how to use TiVo. They also get discounts on purchasing a TiVo set. "You
can train them until you're blue in the face, but when they use the product, they really
understand it," Keast says.

Not every distribution wrinkle has been ironed out, however. Some Best Buys have a
legion of well-trained salespeople, but no TiVo recorders in stock. Balancing demand
with supply has been a constant challenge. "We had a supply shortage earlier in the
year," CEO Ramsay explains. "We are working through that. Then, when we started the
Best Buy relationship, the demand was higher than anticipated. They didn't order
enough product because, frankly, neither of us knew that there would be so much pent-
up demand."

It will be crucial for TiVo to solve such issues if the company hopes to become a staple
of the home-entertainment center. It will also require more-inventive marketing. "We're
trying to be quick and nimble," Keast says. "Nobody can come up with a quantitative
assessment of what it's going to take to grow this market. It's too complex. We need to
try lots of things faster than our competitors."

Step Three: Simpler Is Better

Sitting in the company's fantasy living room, Jim Barton, TiVo's cofounder and chief
technology officer, recalls the first time he got a computer to store a live TV signal and
play it back, in 1998. "That's when we knew it would be cool. We spent 13 incredibly
frantic months developing it," Barton says.

Now, when he goes out to restaurants, he's often buttonholed by waiters who have TiVo
sets at home and want to suggest new features. "A lot of the time, they want a feature
that's already built into the TiVo," he says. That's why simplification is such an
important crusade for TiVo these days. That doesn't necessarily mean paring back
features. It means making TiVo easier to set up, reducing the number of parts that go
into the device, and making the internal architecture less complex.

Barton realizes that he's not a typical TiVo user. His own device has been hacked using
open-source tools that let him add a huge 120 gigabyte drive to the 40 gigabyte drive
that came standard. For the less technically inclined, one key goal has been to reduce
the number of steps required to get a new TiVo hooked up to the user's TV and phone
line, at which point the device dials up to a main server to configure itself and download
the latest program guide. Ramsay says that the setup time is down to about five minutes,
followed by an hour of configuration that the TiVo does by itself through the phone
line.

Barton's team is still at work, though, to streamline the internal design of a TiVo box
and to reduce the number of components that go into it. "Our ongoing challenge is, How
do we get the cost of the hardware down?" he says. "We're always trying to use fewer
chips and get the size of the power supply down. Our big goal is to have a disk drive
with a single chip, and we're headed in that direction." (Today's TiVos contain three
main chips.)

The simplification crusade, combined with the decreasing cost of disk drives, will help
TiVo hit what it thinks is a magic price point: $199. "You really need to get to an
average selling price of $199 to drive the category," Guenther says. "That's probably the
point where volume would really take off."

But there's a chicken-and-egg problem standing in the way of $199 TiVo sets. In order
to gain the economies of scale in manufacturing that are necessary to reach a $199 price
point, TiVo needs high sales volume. To get that high sales volume, it needs a lower
price point. In the days of cheap money from Wall Street, the strategy was obvious: Use
investor capital to subsidize hardware sales. That is no longer an option. Hence, the
fourth element in TiVo's new strategic program.

Step Four: It's All About the Software

Mike Ramsay is just back from a trip to Japan, where he conducted meetings and
seminars with consumer-electronics makers in an attempt to convince them to embed
TiVo's software in their products. "There was a huge level of interest," he says. The visit
was an important one, since Ramsay knows that TiVo's success does not hinge on TiVo
selling a lot of its own boxes but on cultivating a community of consumer-electronics
makers and cable and satellite providers who want "TiVo inside" their boxes too.

Sony, for example, recently licensed TiVo's software for use in a PVR that it is
marketing in Japan. And AT&T Broadband and DirecTV offer TiVo-enabled set-top
boxes. Eventually, Ramsay envisions all kinds of devices with TiVo inside, such as a
combination DVD burner and TiVo recorder that would enable users who want to
archive shows for their own library to transfer them from TiVo's hard disk onto a DVD.

TiVo's task at hand is to preserve its lead and its premium brand as its competitors
improve their offerings. "When companies come into a market second or third, they can
see what works and what doesn't," says Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff.
(Bernoff has two TiVo sets at home.) "Later entrants can go for volume, which means
that they can do it cheaper. They can turn the business into a commodity business,
which favors big, well-funded companies, not startups."

Ramsay is so focused on partnerships that he's rarely in his office. More often, he's on
the road talking to companies that can build TiVo's software into their products and help
build TiVo's subscriber base. But even 1 million devices embedded with TiVo's
software, all generating $12.95 a month in subscription revenue for the company, won't
mean that TiVo is home free.
Ramsay knows that many of the dynamics that he was able to control when TiVo was a
first mover in the world of PVRs are now out of his hands. So he's pushing his team to
control the things that they can control: marketing, the cost and simplicity of the
product, and partnerships. "Those things are all really important to us if we want to stay
on top of this trend as it takes off," he says. "And we do intend to stay on top."

Contributing editor Scott Kirsner (kirsner@att.net [1]) writes from Boston's North End.
Learn more about TiVo on the Web (www.tivo.com [2]).

Sidebar: A Remote That Clicks

For such a revolutionary product, TiVo's appearance is pretty unremarkable. So the

company's design team, led by Paul Newby, seized on the idea of developing a unique
remote control that would set TiVo apart. "We knew early on that we needed something
iconic, something that would embody TiVo's friendliness and ease of use and stand out
among the coffee-table fray," says Newby, who earlier in his career designed bicycle
helmets for Bell Sports and computer workstations for Silicon Graphics.

One of the signs that Newby and his team created a distinctive clicker: He recently got a
photo in the mail from a TiVo user who had built a soapbox-derby car in the shape of
the TiVo remote. Here are three of the principles that guided Newby through the design
process.

1. Cut through complexity. Too many buttons make a remote unfriendly to users. "We
wanted people to be able to figure out what every button does without referring to the
instruction manual," Newby says. "We also wanted to make sure that the buttons were
big enough so that people could feel them in the dark." Newby adds that "Braille-
ability" -- being able to use the remote in the dark or without glancing down -- was an
important objective.

2. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Newby says that he collaborated with industrial designers at
Ideo to find a shape that would set the TiVo remote apart. They ended up with a peanut-
shaped remote. They went through more than 40 foam mock-ups to get the shape just
right. And the iteration didn't stop even after the product started shipping in 1999: The
TiVo Series2 includes a remote that is slightly longer than the original, making it easier
for users' fingers to reach the number keys on the bottom and rendering the remote
cheaper to make.

3. The genius is in the details. No problem was too small. When beta testers reported
that the keys on the remote were sticky, Newby and Ideo decided to add a silicone
coating that made them feel smoother. They also opted for an unobtrusive, sliding
battery door -- which is less likely to tempt users to fiddle with it until it breaks. "It's
easy to have a lot of energy and momentum at the start of the design process," Newby
says. "But success is about maintaining the vision even through the most grueling
details."
FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE
December 19, 2007

Hilary Billings and the creation of “lifestyle brands”

By Ron Lieber

You are one of them, though You may not know it. You fly Virgin Atlantic to London,
not British Airways. You buy Your makeup at Sephora and skip the scene at the Saks
counters. You wear Patagonia when L.L.Bean would do fine. You cried on the day that
Webvan went under. you are one of them, and Hilary Billings is onto you. She's been
onto you for a while, actually. In the early 1990s, Billings helped save Pottery Barn by
crafting an approach to design that conquered upscale American malls. In the mid-
1990s, she served as one of the chief design brains behind the launch of W Hotels. Now
she's at RedEnvelope, the Web site and catalog that offers one-stop shopping for
frustrated gift givers.

These companies operate in different segments of the economy, but they share the same
customer: upwardly mobile people in their thirties and forties whose needs and desires
will be familiar to readers of psychodemographic treatises such as Bobos in Paradise or
The Cultural Creatives. The companies also share a strategy: the creation of something
called a "lifestyle brand."

Billings, having built three of them, probably knows as much about how lifestyle brands
work than anyone, and she defines them in two ways. First, lifestyle brands resonate
with people who expect to live increasingly stylish lives. "People who once ate only
meat and potatoes and had plastic slipcovers on their sofa are traveling more, and they
have a much wider range of influences," she says. "At the same time that they're
figuring out what's great about balsamic vinegar and cotton sheets, there's a lot more
style and innovation in such everyday goods as furniture for the home or the pitcher that
pours your water."

For a brand to rise to lifestyle status, however, it must also appeal to consumers who
want to lead a particular style of life, who want their homes to feel comfortable and
their chain hotels to feel like their homes, who want to mark occasions with a great gift,
but who don't want giving to become a chore. "I don't know where I picked up the
phrase 'lifestyle brand,' " she says. "But when people started lining up at parties to talk
to me about Pottery Barn, I knew I wanted to devote my career to building them. With
lifestyle brands, it's not just about serving another consumer need. It's about reaching a
higher level in terms of the kind of connection you make with the customer."

The Billion-Dollar Concept

Back in 1991, when Hilary Billings signed on with Pottery Barn, there weren't many
people lining up to do much of anything. The company had (and has) a lousy name.
Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn's parent, was quietly trying to sell the brand after a
couple of years of slow sales. The catalog, where Billings went to work as a buyer, did
only about $14 million in sales the first year she was there.
But there was room to maneuver. People who wanted to furnish their entire homes in
one place didn't have too many options. "You could go to a department store and get a
generic choice of furniture," Billings recalls. "Or if you wanted any style in your home,
you could use an interior designer to go direct to the trade and spend exorbitant amounts
of money." Billings, who spent her childhood in Tanzania surrounded by her parents'
collection of African masks and designer furniture, sensed an opportunity.

Because the catalog business was so small, Billings was free to test new merchandise.
First, she expanded the line of coir rugs (made of coconut husks), and they became one
of the catalog's most successful products. Simple cotton curtains with iron rods were
also a huge success. After working around the perimeter of the living room for a year,
Billings put a sofa on the catalog cover in 1992 -- before Pottery Barn had even
attempted to sell one in its stores. "That was the signal that we were serious about this
new strategy," Billings says.

But to consumers, it may well have signaled something more. "A sofa isn't just a thing
in your closet," Billings says. "It's often the first piece of furniture you buy, and you
spend a lot of time engaging with it. It should have more meaning than just a wood
frame with cushions. And when you come home, you should feel more deeply about it
than you do about something that's simply functional." To drive that point home,
Billings and her colleagues shot the catalog pictures of the thousand-dollar sofa in
million-dollar homes. "Reading the catalog, you could imagine what your world would
be like with that collection of furniture," Billings says. "Compared with the offerings at
the time from other merchants, the Pottery Barn sofa was nowhere near as stiff and
predictable." Perhaps the lives of the buyers wouldn't be either.

"What Hilary and her team did with the catalog was to tap into some core values that
people have in relation to their homes," says Pat Connolly, a 22-year Williams-Sonoma
veteran who has long been a mentor to Billings and who is also a RedEnvelope investor
and board member. "The new image of Pottery Barn was contemporary but casual, and
it spoke to the whole idea of a home as a place of refuge and a private retreat." Catalog
sales surged over the next few years, and the company eventually started selling many
of Billings's picks in the new, larger stores that are familiar today. By the end of 1999,
three years after Billings had left, Pottery Barn helped push its parent company past the
billion-dollar sales mark.

Rooms With A (Point Of) View

Billings, 38, wasn't born with the soul of a retailer. In fact, she was an art-history major
at Brown and was on her way to graduate school when her father warned her off of the
monastic existence she was likely to find there. So she entered Macy's heralded
executive-training program, where she realized that her eye for detail could serve her
well in an entirely different industry. From there, she went to Pottery Barn, and after her
success, she longed to see what it might be like to build a brand outside of the retail
business.

Right about that time, she heard from Barry Sternlicht, the style-obsessed chairman and
CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., now the parent company of
Sheraton and Westin, among other brands. "I wanted to find someone who could
execute great design at a great price," he says. "At the top of the list was the product
offered in the reinvention of Pottery Barn. I wanted to know who had done that." One
call to a headhunter turned up Billings, and Sternlicht hired her: "She quickly
understood and embraced what I was trying to do."

What he was trying to do was split the difference between stodgy chains that served
business travelers well and such stylish boutique hotels as the Mondrian and the
Royalton, which Ian Schrager made famous. "The same consumer that was identifying
so strongly with Pottery Barn was having a fairly dismal experience with business
hotels," Billings says. "If they could get excited about home furnishings, maybe they
could get excited about a similar environment inside a hotel." Sternlicht's wife
christened the brand "W," which stands for nothing in particular but suggests a question:
What took the hotel industry so long to think of this?

Billings's job was to help oversee every detail of the design of some of the first W hotels
-- and to do it on a budget that would allow Starwood to charge prices comparable to
those at a decent Hilton or Marriott. The W brand essence sprung from some of the
choices that she and the other designers made, from each room's chaise longue and
feather bed to Aveda toiletry supplies and the cushy cotton robes. "Everything had to fit
the brand image," Sternlicht says. "My instructions were to find things that would
surprise guests."

The biggest surprise for many of those guests was that the room actually looked like the
bedroom they might have in their homes -- if only they could figure out how to achieve
the W's offhandedly glamorous yet utterly comfortable look. "The W had to be
affordable yet equal to or better than what people experience in their own bedrooms day
to day," Billings says. "Only then, we figured, would people want to book it in another
city, to make it an extension of their lifestyle, to buy into it."

She means that literally too. Rather than putting a sign on those robes alluding to the
fact that they are for sale, the W now has catalogs in the rooms so that you can buy the
robe, the bed, the linens, whatever. The new W Lakeshore in Chicago even has a store
that sells the stuff straight out of the rooms.

Many people in the hotel industry thought that the dreamers at Starwood were nuts. The
first time that Billings spoke at an industry conference, only a handful of interior
designers showed up. Now everyone is paying attention. There are five W hotels in New
York today, with others in cities from Atlanta to Sydney. Occupancy rates are nearly the
same or higher at W hotels than they are at either Sheraton or Westin, Starwood's other
business hotels.

The Gift Of Uniqueness

Today, Barry Sternlicht has a high-class problem with many of his W hotels: how to
make the lobbies welcoming for guests when so many locals want to hang out and have
drinks there. Creating a door policy isn't a part of Billings's skill set, so she decided to
get back into retail when she heard about an effort to create a company that would sell
unique gifts.

"I was at a point in my life, as were many people in my peer group, when I had a
laundry list of people on my gift list," she says. "My children, my in-laws, as well as
business associates. It was such a hassle to go to my five favorite specialty stores in the
hopes of finding something, then buy a card, then go to Mail Boxes Etc. to get it all
wrapped. Forget it. And as a result, no one was getting gifts.
"Then I wondered, Why am I approaching this as a problem to be solved -- as one of the
things I least enjoy -- rather than as a wonderful part of my life? And how many people
were in the same position that I was in because there was no great gift brand?" Billings
focused further on these questions after she received a call in 1999 from Scott
Galloway, the founder of 911gifts.com, who was in need of a merchant who could
transform the site and its offerings.

Billings was sure that she could do it, and in return for joining the team, she got a
significant equity stake in the company. She soon realized just how challenging the task
would be. "Most specialty retailers aren't focused on gifts," she says. "You can get a
dozen roses here or a box of chocolates there, but the choices are pretty standard. For
consumers who give a lot of gifts in a year -- and who give them to people who can
afford to buy a lot of the necessities in life on their own -- the gift has to say something
about you, the giver, as an individual."

One thing that Billings realized a gift ought to say is that the giver took the time to find
something unique. But for a merchant, it's enormously complicated to provide such a
service. You have to offer gifts for every occasion, from birthdays to bereavements, and
from every category: games, gadgets, food, and flowers. This can create serious
inventory problems, so Billings and her staff of nine buyers edit and update their
choices mercilessly. They also seize on universal sentiments, such as good luck, that can
apply to many gift-giving occasions. The "lucky bamboo" plant has been a big seller at
$48, as has a real-life four-leaf clover. More than half of the products are unique to
RedEnvelope, and Billings hopes to raise that to 70% within a year or two.

Another thing that a gift ought to do is make the givers themselves feel sophisticated.
"We're not servicing trendsetters, the ones who find items six months before we do,"
says Kristine Dang, the vice president of merchandising, who reports to Billings. "We're
looking for status seekers, people a step behind the trendsetters. They want to impress
people, to look as if they have a higher income than they actually do."

Dang dreamed up the name RedEnvelope herself: It recalls the Asian tradition of
enclosing gifts for special occasions inside a scarlet paper pouch. But it also serves as a
nice contrast to the famous blue box. "Tiffany is the American model of a perfect gift
business, and there's a lot of brand experience wrapped up in that blue box," Billings
says. "But the reality is, it's a luxury experience. The average price point in Tiffany's
catalog is more than $500. Ours is $70."

Already, RedEnvelope claims to be ringing up more sales than Tiffany's catalog

operation. Company officials figure to sell more than $50 million worth of gifts this
year, turn a profit in the fourth quarter, and break permanently into the black next year
-- all without raising another cent in venture capital.

Now that Billings is running up on three years of working at RedEnvelope, it might

seem like the time for her to get antsy and begin looking for another brand to build or
fix. But with a potential RedEnvelope IPO looming in two years or so (yes, companies
still do this), she'd be crazy to leave right now. Still, what might be her next lifestyle
move? "Buying clothes can be impossible for petite women," Billings declares. "I'd love
to create a lifestyle brand around clothing and accessories for women like me."

Ron Lieber (rlieber@fastcompany.com [1]) is a Fast Company senior writer based in

New York. Contact Hilary Billings by email (hilary@redenvelope.com [2]).
What's Fast
So just what is a lifestyle brand? Hilary Billings has made a high-impact career out of
asking and answering that question. According to her, a lifestyle brand has the
following attributes.

It makes life easier. RedEnvelope, with its unique gifts for any occasion, is a classic
lifestyle brand, since it takes away the need to shop for the gift, shop for the card, shop
for the wrapping paper, and stop at the post office to send it. In a world in which lots of
people have plenty of money, what they really crave is simplicity and convenience.

It makes your world more stylish. From the sneakers on our feet, to the computers on
our laps, to the potato peelers in our kitchens, we expect the products we use to look
good. Old-style chain hotels for business travelers had (and still have) polyester
curtains, paisley bedspreads, and deserted echo chambers for lobbies. W hotels have
velvet curtains, down comforters, and locals having drinks at the ground-floor bar.

It is an orchestrated strategy that is fully formed at a brand's launch. This is one

area where first-mover advantage matters. Once a consumer brand gets big, it's difficult
to transform it into a lifestyle brand. Target is a notable exception, but it took the
company years to achieve lifestyle status. Saturn built its lifestyle brand from scratch,
but most long-standing automobile brands have little hope of becoming anything more
than a nameplate.

Published on Psychology Today

This Is Your Brain On Holiday

Shopping
By Kit Yarrow, Ph.D.
Dec 6, 2012

As evolved human beings, we’re rational, in-control shoppers. We weigh costs

with benefits, compare prices, and never buy on impulse or more than what we
need. Right?

In the past 20 years I’ve interviewed hundreds of shoppers — and I’ve yet to
find one immune to (at least occasional) emotional or impulsive purchasing.
A peek in the recesses of our closet and cabinets is proof of our fallibility. Who
among us hasn’t thought to themselves, “what was I thinking when I bought
that?”

Most likely you weren’t thinking. Or at least not as clearly as usual. The fact is
that nearly every shopper is influenced by environmental cues they are never
aware of.

We so greatly value our brains that we underestimate — even ignore — the

influence of the rest of our body on what we buy. But physiological signals
work around our rational brains and they greatly influence our shopping
behavior.

While shoppers, sure of the rationality of their purchasing behavior, might

ignore the powerful influence that our senses have on our moods, desires and
willingness to spend money — retailers are not. When you’re shopping, you’re
the subject of a multi-pronged sensory campaign.

We’re in the busiest shopping season of the year. And while online shopping
will play a major role, 98% of shoppers still plan to visit stores. Before you head
out there, explore this mini-guide of a few of the ways our body influences
what we buy.

Eyes

Colors create more than a scene. They’re loaded with symbolic associations and
influence our moods and perceptions. With red and green being the
predominant colors of the season, here’s how they affect us.

Red stimulates and energizes — even our spending. Waitresses wearing red
receive 14 to 26% higher tips than waitresses wearing any other color uniform.
Another study found that shoppers on eBay bid more aggressively for products
shown against red backgrounds than blue backgrounds.

Green is an optimistic color associated with luck and wealth. It’s also been
shown to have a positive effect on creativity. A possible explanation for some of
the more unusual gifts found under the tree.

Nose

Smells make a direct hit to emotional centers of our brain. They have a unique
ability to evoke moods and memories. It’s no surprise that Bloomingdale’s,
Jimmy Choo, Hugo Boss, Victoria’s Secret and scores of other retailers use
scents to stimulate positive and associative moods and enhance our perception
of their brands and products.
Studies have shown that the right scent can increase our perception of the
quality of a product and get people to shop longer.

That quintessential holiday scent, pine, can evoke a feeling happiness, earthy
wholesomeness and nostalgia. Just the right mix to get early holiday shoppers
in the mood to buy. Another holiday favorite smell, peppermint, increases
physiological arousal and engagement and creates more alert shoppers.

Ears

If you’ve ever watched a movie without a soundtrack, you know the power of
music to create moods and intensify emotions. Classics like “Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas” get people into the holiday spirit, which for most is
also a spending and gifting mood.

More importantly, classic holiday music evokes nostalgia. Recent research

shows that nostalgia elevates positive moods and helps people feel better about
themselves. They feel more connected to others and find continuity and
meaning in their lives.

Nostalgia evokes the past in a rosy haze. Particularly in uncertain economic

times, nostalgia transports people from the present back to a time that feels
more positive and in their control. After all, no matter what your past was like,
you know what happened next and that makes life feel more certain.

Feeling more connected to others, positive and loaded with holiday spirit is a
recipe of on-the-spot bumps in gift budgets.

Heart

Jeannie seemed out of breath when I spoke with her recently at an outlet mall.
“I think I’m kind of hyped up. There are so many people here and so many
bargains. I feel like I’m going to miss out or that they’ll get the deal before me.”
Jeannie was able to articulate what many feel when they’re shopping during the
holidays — pressure, competition and anxiety. These emotions cause our bodies
to react — in ways that interfere with calm decision-making. Any marital
therapist will tell couples to wait until they are calm before discussing a hot-
button issues. People tend to overreact and then regret. The same mechanisms
are in play when shopping under pressure, often with a similar result: over-
purchasing and buyer’s remorse. Whether it’s the stress of crowds, time
pressures, fears of missing out or physical exhaustion and thirst — we think
less clearly when our heart starts racing.

Touch
We’re significantly more likely to buy what we touch. Which is why retailers
carefully design stores with merchandise roadblocks and tactile displays.
Several recent studies show that the sensation of what we’re touching can even
alter our perception of an unrelated product that we’re viewing. For example,
in one experiment people who held a warm pad invested 43% more money
than those holding a cold pad.

We’re naturally drawn toward the center of displays, where retailers often place
pricier items. But the second most alluring placement is just to the right of
center, the item most right-handed people are most likely to touch first.

Combating the budget-breaking allure of the sights, sounds and sensations of

holiday shopping is as simple as being aware of their effects. Further
reinforcement for the rational mind comes from lists and shopping breaks.

TIME MAGAZINE – junio 2013

Plated Palates:
How Cutlery Influences Food Flavor

Food flavors are not only determined by tastebuds, but also the size, weight and color of
plates and utensils, according to researchers at University of Oxford.

Adding to an already growing body of research, a new study in the journal Flavour found
that meal utensils can alter perceptions of taste just as much as the cuisine or plating. In
three experiments designed to examine whether food tastes different by varying the color,
weight and size of spoons, forks and knives, the study shows that generally food is perceived
as more tasty when eaten with heavier cutlery on heavier plates.

The study’s co-author Vanessa Harrar tells TIME that color and weight are just examples of
how we generate expectations, which the brain creates by learning from previous
experiences and allowing it to sort of run on auto-pilot. “This is good because it’s less energy
for the brain if it’s just relying on the past experience of what you learned,” she said. “But
it’s not so good for eating because you’re not really experiencing or tasting the food in that
moment.”

For instance, by removing expectations of how a consumer eats food the researchers found
that the color blue as well as eating cheese off a knife cues saltiness. Also, yogurt is
perceived to be denser and pricier when tasted from a lighter plastic spoon. While the
research behind food perception is still new, Harrar says her study’s findings could help
individuals with eating healthier.

“If we can bring people out of their habits or automatic behavior, they’ll have an
opportunity to change their behavior,” she says. “Whether that’s using blue cutlery or eating
off of funny plates, it’s something that really makes you pay attention to the situation.”
This new study adds to a growing body of research indicating that people’s perceptions of
flavor and fullness aren’t just related to what they’re putting in our mouths. Co-author
Charles Spence contributed to another study published in Food Quality and Preference in
2012 that found that the color of a plate can significantly change the way people perceive
the food on top of it. A group of 53 subjects thought that the same strawberry mousse was
on average more intense, sweeter and more enjoyable when placed on a white instead of
black plate. And it’s not just the color that matters.

According to another study, published in the May 2013 issue of Pediatrics, if the plate is
smaller, consumers will take and eat less food. Even the size of the utensil can reduce eating
because using an over-sized fork makes diners feel like they are making a bigger dent in
their dinners with each bite.

If just using a different utensil can curb an appetite, this body of research might give
countries struggling with obesity a shortcut to slimming down.

“Marketing Myopia”, artículo publicado

en 1960 en el Harvard Business Review:
http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/managementstudies/Courses/bus2010s/2007/Nicole
%20Frey/Readings/Journal%20Articles/Classics/Marketing%20Myopia.pdf

'Marketing Myopia' Revisited: Perhaps a

Narrow Vision is Better Business
Turns Out Some Train Companies Survived -- by
Narrowing Their Niche

December 04, 2013

Fifty-three years ago, the Harvard Business Review published what went on to become
one of the most-quoted articles ever to appear in any magazine or newspaper: "Marketing
Myopia" by Theodore Levitt.

Perhaps it's time for a marketing person to point out the myopia in management thinking.
A myopia that has undermined companies like Kodak, IBM, Sears, Xerox, Dell, Hewlett-
Packard and many others.

Management has fallen in love with brands without realizing that every brand has a
potentially fatal weakness. A brand stands for a category. Once a brand becomes strongly
embedded in consumers' minds, it's almost impossible to move that brand into another
category.

Yet management continues to focus on pushing their beloved brands into more and more
categories. That's the myopia that afflicts top management.

What marketing myopia hath wrought

One of the ironies about Ted Levitt's article is that the strategy he recommended may
have contributed to today's management myopia.

Here is the most-famous quote from the article: "The railroads did not stop growing
because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The
railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks,
airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves.
They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be
in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business."

Let me repeat: "They assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in
the transportation business."

Do you know of any successful "transportation" companies?" I don't.

 There are successful airline companies: Southwest and JetBlue.

 Successful package-delivery companies: FedEx and UPS.
 Successful pipeline companies: Kinder Morgan and Magellan.
 Successful container-ship companies: Maersk and MSC.
 Successful cruise-line companies: Carnival and Royal Caribbean.

And oddly enough, there are successful railroad companies. But how they became
successful is a story worth telling.
Saving the railroad business 
Ted Levitt was certainly correct in his assessment that the railroad industry was in trouble.
Back in 1960, the year "Marketing Myopia" was published, one of the largest railroads in
America was the New York Central.

In 1968, the New York Central merged with its rival Pennsylvania Railroad to form Penn
Central, which went bankrupt in 1970.

It's been my experience that companies are eager to jump into any new category that
seems to threaten their own business, when a better strategy might be to do just the
opposite.

Which is exactly what the railroad industry eventually did. Instead of being in the
passenger-and-freight railroad business like Penn Central, today's successful railroads are
focused on freight. And they are very successful.

In the past decade, the four largest railroads in America (Union Pacific, Burlington
Northern Sante Fe, CSX and Norfolk Southern) have never had an unprofitable year.
Together they have had revenues of $502.1 billion and net profits of $66.2 billion, or a
net profit margin of 13.2%. (Not too far behind Procter & Gamble's net profit margin over
the past decade of 14.1%.)

In 2009, the business community was shocked when Warren Buffet's Berkshire

Hathaway group bought the 78% of Burlington Northern Sante Fe it didn't already own.
But the investment has done extremely well. Revenues are up 49% and profits are up
96%.

When you narrow your company's focus, two things happen, both of which are good. (1)
You become more efficient at what your company is doing. (2) You strengthen your brand
because it now has a better chance of standing for something.

The "information" business

One company that bought into the marketing myopia doctrine early on and decided to
expand its vision was Xerox. In 1969, Xerox spent nearly a billion dollars to buy a
mainframe computer company, Scientific Data Systems, which it promptly changed to
Xerox Data Systems. Ted Levitt would have been pleased.

In a 1970 Business Week article entitled "Two gee-whiz giants go at each other,"
Xerox President C. Peter McColough said: "Xerox and IBM are the two big companies
exclusively in the information business. IBM owns the manipulative data processing part,
and we own a part that puts things on paper."

"But the lines of separation are getting blurred, and it will be harder and harder to
distinguish them. Sometime in the 1970s, we intend to be able to say to any big
customer, 'We can handle all your information needs.'"

The "office automation" business

By the time the 1980s rolled around, Xerox's mainframe computer business was long
gone and the company had narrowed its thinking from "information" to "office
automation."

It had high hopes for the 820, its first personal computer. "We think the 820 could
accelerate the move to office automation," declared a Xerox vice president.

"Team Xerox" was the advertising campaign that launched the company's office
automation effort. "We'd suggest talking to a company that offers more than just
typewriters. Or just copiers."

"Only Team Xerox can offer you a complete line of copiers, of Memorywriter typewriters,
of electronic printers, of facsimile machines, of computers and professional workstations
and an Ethernet network that can tie most of these machines together right now."

By the 1990s, reality had set in. Team Xerox was disbanded and the financial-services
firms Xerox had bought in the 1980s were sold off.

Once again, Xerox was a copier company.

The "computer" business

For decades, IBM dominated the mainframe computer business with a market share in the
70% range.

With the company's 1981 introduction of the first 16-bit business personal computer (the
5150, commonly known as the IBM PC), the company was on a roll.

Within two years, the IBM PC was the best-selling personal computer in America. And the
media lavished praise on the company and its strategies.

Time magazine, July 11, 1983: "The colossus that works. Big is bountiful at IBM."
The following year, IBM had profits of $6.6 billion, the largest any company anywhere in
the world had ever achieved. That same year, Fortune magazine selected IBM as "the
most admired company in America."

By the 1990s, however, IBM was in deep trouble. In 1991, IBM lost $2.9 billion. In
1992, $5.0 billion. In 1992, $8.1 billion.

What a great case for another marketing myopia article. "IBM is in trouble today because
they assumed themselves to be in the mainframe business rather than in the computer
business."

But that's a myth. By the 1980s, IBM was into every aspect of the computer business.
Mainframes, midrange, personal computers, copiers, telephones, satellites, software, you-
name-it. Ted Levitt would have been pleased.

Saving IBM
Why did IBM get into trouble? Conventional wisdom faulted IBM's "mainframe mentality"
and their failure to follow the computer development into other categories.

But I think it's the opposite. The company only made progress when it got out of the
computer hardware business, except for its dominant position in mainframes.

Over the years, IBM has sold its copier business to Kodak, its Lexmark printer business to
an investment firm, its networking hardware business to Cisco, its disk drives to Hitachi,
its personal computer business to Lenovo and its digital printer operations to Ricoh.

Which left the company with mainframes.

What's a mainframe anyway? It's the electronic nerve center of every major corporation in
the world. Companies may not be buying a lot of mainframes, but they certainly depend
on them to keep their companies running efficiently.

In order to serve the needs of these mainframe-dependent companies, IBM has made a
major push into services and software. In 2002, IBM bought the consulting and
technology services unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Last year, services and software accounted for 80% of IBM's revenues. And the
company's net profit margin was an astonishing 15.9%.

The "communications" business

Did advertising agencies decide they were in the "communications" business and start to
publish magazines and newspapers? Or operate radio and TV stations?
Actually the opposite happened. Most advertising agencies are more successful today
because they got out of the media-buying function and focused on their core strength:
Creating the strategies and messages that build brands.

FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE

Why People Don’t Buy Products—They
Buy Better Versions Of Themselves
Examining some of the best--and most human--marketing strategies and products,
that make you think about, well, you.

There is the famous story about Steve Jobs when he invented the iPod and everyone in
the news and the rest of the tech industry scratched their head a little. MP3 players
had been around for quite a while, what was so different about the iPod?

Of course, people argued many things were different, but one of the key aspects was
how Jobs marketed and presented it:

“1,000 songs in your pocket”

When everyone else was saying “1GB storage on your MP3 player,” telling people
about the product, Apple went ahead and made you a better person, that has 1,000
songs in your pocket.

Our friends over at User Onboarding wrote an incredible post and graphic, showcasing
how this framework looks on a higher level:
In particular, the image itself proved to be popular--understandably. It’s a great way to
describe clever marketing that focuses on benefits rather than features.

I’ve heard people talk about using benefits instead of features in marketing, but I’ve
always struggled to understand the difference. For this post, I explored this in a bit
more detail and dug up some examples of companies who do this well.

Features vs. benefits--how to grasp the difference

Here’s how our friends at User Onboarding explained features vs. benefits:

People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves. When you’re trying
to win customers, are you listing the attributes of the flower or describing how
awesome it is to throw fireballs?

It also included this Tweet from Jason Fried on the topic:

When I read about this some more, I found some great blog posts that broke it down
even further. One from the ideacrossing blog describes features as “what your product
or service has or does” and benefits as “what the features mean and why they are
important.” In fact, oftentimes products contain features, that are absolutely unused,
which can be a big source of waste.

So, it seems like features are the “what” of your product or service, while benefits are
the “why” behind it.

I also found a really neat, old marketing quote that’s often attributed to Theodore
Levitt (he attributes it to Leo McGinneva in this paper), on why people buy quarter-
inch drill bits:

They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.

So, the customer wants to make a quarter-inch hole for some reason. They buy a
quarter-inch bit for their drill in order to achieve this. Marketing the drill bit based on
its features (it fits into your drill) wouldn’t be as successful in this case as marketing it
based on the benefits (you can create a quarter-inch hole).

So after all of this reading, I finally distilled the difference into a sentence that I think
makes it easy to distinguish between features and benefits:

A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your
product.

But hey, enough the theory, let’s dig up some amazing examples from some of the
best companies out there:

Some great examples of companies making you a better version of yourself

To get a better idea of how this works in practice, I thought it would be useful to take a
look at some well-known companies who use benefits in their marketing strategies.
Here are a few that I found:

Evernote: Remember Everything

Evernote can’t remember everything for you. In fact, it can’t remember anything--it’s
software. What it does is offer features to let you save and organize things.
Remembering everything is what you can do with Evernote--the benefit!

Twitter: Start a conversation, explore your interests, and be in the know.

Twitter has used a few different benefits in their tag line on the homepage but they’re
still focused on benefits. Each of these three things is something you can do with
Twitter. Not a feature of the product. Of course, for saving time on Twitter with
scheduling your Tweets and seeing analytics, I hope you’ll still find Buffer useful.

Nest Thermostat: Saving energy is a beautiful thing.

I love this one, because it’s so clever. In just six words, the Nest Thermostat tagline
tells you what the biggest benefit is (you’ll save energy), and something about what
makes the product unique (it’s well-designed; it’s “a beautiful thing”).

LinkedIn: Be great at what you do.

LinkedIn has gone even further by referencing the customer in their tagline. Saying “Be
great at what you do” makes it clear that the idea is you’ll be great at what you do if
you use LinkedIn. It’s very customer-focused, rather than pushing features of the
product or company mottos front-and-center.

Github: Build software better, together.

Another super simple, but clear tagline. Github has a really obvious benefit to sell to
customers, and features don’t even play a part in the tagline.

I’m sure there are lots more companies doing this well. Do you have a great example?
Share it in the comments below.

What are some products that have amazed you in the past? I’d love your insights on
what makes for a great experience with a product or service according to you:

Don’t Persuade Customers — Just Change Their Behavior

Art Markman, February 10, 2014

Most businesses underestimate how hard it is to change people’s behavior. 

There is an assumption built into most marketing and advertising campaigns
that if a business can just get your attention, give you a crucial piece of
information about their brand, tell you about new features, or associate their
brand with warm and fuzzy emotions, that they will be able to convince you to
buy.
On the basis of this assumption, most marketing departments focus too much
on persuasion.  Each interaction with a potential customer is designed to
change their beliefs and preferences.  Once the customer is convinced of the
superiority of a product, they will naturally make a purchase. And once they’ve
made a purchase, then that should lead to repeat purchases in the future.

This all seems quite intuitive until you stop thinking about customers as an
abstract mass and start thinking about them as individuals.  In fact, start by
thinking about your own behavior.  How easy is it for you to change?

Consider your own daily obsession with email and multitasking.  Chances are,
you check your email several times an hour.  Every time you notice that the
badge with the number of new emails has gotten larger, you click over to your
browser, and suddenly you are checking your emails again.  This happens even
when you would be better off focusing your efforts on an important report you
are supposed to be reading or a document you should be writing.  You may
recognize that multitasking is bad and that email is distracting, but that
knowledge alone does not make it easy to change your behavior.

If you are a company, you might think it would be easy to sell this person a
solution to their problem. However, it’s not as easy as that – there are deeply
ingrained habits here that won’t just go away.

Let’s go through some of what is required to create different habits.  The point is
to recognize how much work goes into changing behavior.

First, you have to optimize your goals. Many people err in behaviors like email
by focusing on negative goals.  That is, they want to stop checking their email
so often.  The problem with these negative goals is that you cannot develop a
habit to avoid an action.  You can only learn a new habit when you
actually do something.

For marketers, this means focusing on how to get consumers to interact with
products rather than just thinking about them.  As an example, our local Sunday
newspaper often comes in a bag with a sample product attached that
encourages potential consumers to engage with products.

Second, you need a plan that includes specific days and times when you will
perform a behavior.  For example, many people find that they work most
effectively first thing in the morning, yet they come to work and immediately
open up their email program and spend their first productive hour answering
emails (many of which could have waited until later).  So, put together a plan to
triage email first thing in the morning and answer the five most important emails
and leave the rest until later in the day.

Now that many people have calendar apps that govern their lives, it gets easier
to put things on people’s schedule to keep them engaged with a business.  For
example, services from hair salons to dentists can schedule appointments and
send an email that links to Outlook and Google calendars.
Third, you need to be prepared for temptation. Old behaviors lurk in the
shadows waiting to return. If you have an important document to read, and you
know that you will be tempted to check your email, find a conference room in
the building and use that as a home base away from your computer to get your
reading done.

To keep customers from falling back into the “bad habit” of stopping off at the
drugstore for oops-we-ran-out-of-it products like laundry detergent or diapers,
Amazon makes it easy to schedule regular shipments right to your home. You
never need to stop at the drugstore again – or even to remember to check how
much laundry detergent is left in the bottle.

Fourth, you need to manage your environment.  Make the desired behaviors
easy and the undesired ones hard.  If you want to avoid multitasking, then
remove as many of the invitations to multitask from your IT environment.  Close
programs (like Skype) that have an IM window.  Only open your email program
at times of the day when you are willing to check email.  Shut off push
notifications on your phone when you have an important task to complete.

Marketers need to work with their designers to come up with packaging that
encourages consumers to put the product into their environment. As I discuss in
my book Smart Change, Procter & Gamble helped increase sales of the air
refresher Febreze by redesigning a bottle that originally looked like a window
cleaner bottle (and cried out to be stored in a cabinet beneath the sink) to one
that was rounded and decorative (and could easily be left out on a counter in a
visible spot).

Finally, you need to engage with people. Many people feel pressure to
accomplish important goals alone, but there is no shame in getting help from
others.  Find productive people within your organization and seek them out as
mentors to help you develop new habits.

The “positive peer pressure” technique is frequently used in service companies

and organizations like Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous, but can be
used by any business that’s trying to encourage repeat visits. For instance, a
fitness center might offer a few free or discounted personal training sessions to
new members to help them get in the habit of working out – and making them
less likely to quit.

None of these factors works by itself.  You need to create a comprehensive plan
to change your behavior.  Otherwise, the constant temptations to multitask will
sap your productivity despite your best intentions.

This same set of principles applies for marketers.  No matter how motivated
consumers may be to try your product or service, or how unhappy they may be
with their current situation, if you do not focus on a comprehensive plan for
changing their behavior, then you are unlikely to have a significant influence on
them.
Your business will not succeed just by trying to change attitudes and
preferences.  You will succeed by helping people to develop goals, create
plans, overcome temptations, manage their environment and engage with
others.  You will influence your customers only when you give them as much
support as you would need to change your own behavior.

**
University of Pennsylvania, Wharton

‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different

Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles
When it comes to shopping, women are from Nordstrom’s and men are from Sears.

Women are happy to meander through sprawling clothing and accessory collections or
detour through the shoe department. They like to glide up glass escalators past a grand
piano, or spray a perfume sample on themselves on their way to, maybe, making a
purchase. For men, shopping is a mission. They are out to buy a targeted item and flee
the store as quickly as possible, according to new Wharton research.

In a study titled, “Men Buy, Women Shop,” researchers at Wharton’s Jay H. Baker
Retail Initiative and the Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm, found that women
react more strongly than men to personal interaction with sales associates. Men are
more likely to respond to more utilitarian aspects of the experience — such as the
availability of parking, whether the item they came for is in stock, and the length of the
checkout line.

“Women tend to be more invested in the shopping experience on many dimensions,”

says Robert Price, chief marketing officer at CVS Caremark and a member of the Baker
advisory board. “Men want to go to Sears, buy a specific tool and get out.”

As one female shopper between the ages of 18 and 35 told the researchers: “I love
shopping. I love shopping even when I have a deadline. I just love shopping.” Compare
that to this response from a male in the same age group who described how men
approach retailing: “We’re going to this store and we buy it and we leave because we
want to do something else.”

Price says women’s role as caregiver persists even as women’s professional

responsibilities mount. He speculates that this responsibility contributes to women’s
more acute shopping awareness and higher expectations. On the other hand, after
generations of relying on women to shop effectively for them, men’s interest in
shopping has atrophied.
According to Wharton marketing professor Stephen J. Hoch, shopping behavior mirrors
gender differences throughout many aspects of life. “Women think of shopping in an
inter-personal, human fashion and men treat it as more instrumental. It’s a job to get
done,” he says, adding that the data has implications for retailers interested in
developing a more segmented approach to build and maintain loyalty among male and
female customers.

Feeling Important vs. Checking Out Fast

“Men Buy, Women Shop” also found that women are more likely to experience
problems while shopping than men — 53% vs. 48%, with women over age 40 reporting
more problems than men in the same age group.

For women, “lack of help when needed” is the top problem (29%). It is also the likeliest
reason that stores lose the business of women shoppers. Indeed, according to an analysis
of the study’s data, about 6% of all female shoppers could be lost to stores due to lack
of sales help. Men, however, ranked “difficulty in finding parking close to the store’s
entrance” as the number one problem (also 29%). The problem most likely to result in
lost business from men is if the product they came to buy is out of stock; about 5% of
all male shoppers could be lost to stores for this reason.

Male and female shoppers also have different reactions to sales associates. For men, an
associate’s interest in helping them find an item is most important, followed by the sales
associate’s effort in getting them through checkout quickly. For women, store loyalty is
related to sales associates’ familiarity with the products in the store and an ability to
determine what products best suit the customer. Women shoppers also value sales
associates who make them feel important, according to the survey.

In an interview with researchers, one woman in the 18 to 35 bracket described the

employees in a favorite store. “The sales associates are always great. They always show
me different styles. They will show me something new that’s come in.” Meanwhile, a
man in the same age bracket said this: “I haven’t had much interaction with most sales
people. I don’t really need them — as long as they’re at the checkout.”

Paula Courtney, president of the Verde Group, suggests that the attitudes expressed
toward sales associates reflect subtle, but important, differences between men and
women. When asked what problem would make respondents so angry they would never
return to a store, women cited employees who “acted like you were intruding on their
time or their own conversations.” Men were most miffed by employees who were “lazy,
i.e., would not check for additional stock or take you to the item you were looking for.”

Courtney points out that for women, it’s more personal. For men, problems with
associates are still linked directly to getting the item they need. “Women are more apt to
be angered by a lack of engagement behavior from the sales associates. For men, while
engagement is still important, it’s not as important as the product and getting in and out
quickly.”

Retailers can use the study findings to tailor services to build sales, she said. “In a
highly competitive market, where people are price-sensitive and there are tons of
choices, if you can get one more strategy up your sleeve that gives you that edge, then
why not?” she asks. “If we treat men and women differently, then we are going to be
more successful.” Erin Armendinger, managing director of the Baker initiative, puts it
this way: “Men and women are simply different,” she says. “It’s important for retailers
to remember it’s not only what they’re purchasing, but how they’re doing it.”

Price suggests that retailers who want to improve their ability to reach shoppers based
on gender can take some concrete steps. First, however, they must be sure that their
operations are running as smoothly as possible in order to avoid irritations, such as out-
of-stock merchandise or a lack of advertising circulars that diminish the shopping
experience for men and women both. He also says that efforts to reach out to women
shoppers cannot be superficial, such as simply putting up signs or changing the color of
uniforms.

Communication is critical to reaching women shoppers, Price adds. Sales associates

need to understand whether the shopper is looking for a product that will come out of
disposable income, such as cosmetics, or a more essential and difficult to understand
product — such as an over-the-counter drug or first aid treatment. Helping shoppers in
those two different categories requires different styles of communication. Sales
associates must be trained to recognize and react to shoppers’ cues.

Retailers hoping to appeal to women shoppers also need to devote attention to editing
their assortment of items, Price says. Managers may be tempted to offer a wide swath of
products, but he cites research showing that women who have to balance many
responsibilities prefer stores with limited selections, such as Coach, Trader Joe’s and
Sephora.

Finally, he says, hiring women throughout the ranks will bring retailers more in touch
with what women want. At his company, women make up the majority of sales
associates and are heavily represented in the marketing department. No idea gets floated
too far before a woman can reflect on how it might impact her own life, he notes.

The Many Faces of the Sales Associate

Women spend $4 trillion annually and account for 83% of U.S. consumer spending,
which makes up two-thirds of the nation’s gross national product, according to
WomenCertified, a women’s consumer advocacy and retail training organization
headquartered in Hollywood, Fla., which also worked on the study.
The “Men Buy, Women Shop“ study is based on a random, national sample of 1,250
shoppers who were asked about a recent shopping experience in telephone interviews
conducted from October 20 to November 4, 2007. The sample was dominated, two to
one, by females.

While many of the study’s findings do not come as a surprise to retailers, the hard data
may help companies focus better on some of the problems cited by men and women,
according to Delia Passi, founder of WomenCertified. She says retailers have long
sensed the differences between men and women as shoppers. “It goes back to gatherers
versus hunters. Women are gatherers. Men are hunters. Women walk into a store and
scan. Men look for a specific aisle.” Scientific research, she notes, shows women have
better peripheral vision than men, which would benefit them as gatherers.

Passi says the underlying attitudes that frame the shopping experience for men and
women — with women more focused on the experience; men on the mission — do not
necessarily play into sexist stereotypes of women as more emotional and weaker.
“When it comes to the retail experience, men and women both go into the store to buy
something, only she wants more. She wants more interaction. She wants more eye
contact. He wants quick answers while she’s looking for support and collaboration in
the buying process.” Passi acknowledged that many of the observations revealed in the
survey still reflect generalities and that many women and men do not fit into the broader
patterns. Indeed, as the owner of her own business, she is pressed for time and often
behaves more like the survey’s male respondents when shopping.

According to Hoch, the recent study, along with other Baker research, indicates that
sales associates are critical to retail operations because employees are one way
competitors can differentiate themselves from one another to gain market share. “It’s
hard to do anything about parking or the mall being too crowded, but they can do things
about the sales associates,” he notes. “What I found interesting is how women tend to be
more focused on people while men act almost as if they are dealing with an ATM
machine. In fact, they want to deal with an ATM machine. They really don’t want to
deal with a person.”

Courtney acknowledges that responding to the study’s findings adds another

responsibility for sales associates who are often already juggling many different
priorities on the retail floor. “At the end of the day, a sales associate has to be
multifaceted,” she says. “They have to be an engager, an expediter and an educator.
They must be authentic, but what this study tells us is those buttons have to be turned on
and off — or turned on more or less — depending on whether you are dealing with a
man or a woman.”

She says retailers need to step up and deliver more sophisticated, segmented service, not
only taking into account gender, but also age, ethnicity and regional differences.
“There’s no such thing as customer homogeneity. We’re not a homogeneous bunch at
all. Yet as organizations, we end up treating customers as one big happy family. You’ve
got all sorts of demographic and psychographic forces at play.”
Gender, she notes, is one of the easier customer attributes to address in a strategic
fashion. Truly sophisticated marketers could get into attempting to differentiate services
by gender and age or between professional women and those who manage households
full-time. “At some level, what is practical and ideal start to diverge, but I think gender
is a pretty simple segment to do differently.”

USDA Suggests Changes

to Grocery Stores to
‘Nudge’ Consumers to Eat
Healthy

AP
July 15, 2014

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is suggesting major changes to grocery

stores to “nudge” Americans to purchase healthier foods when they shop.

The agency commissioned an “expert panel” to make recommendations on how to guide

the more than 47 million Americans on food stamps into spending their benefits on
fruits and vegetables.

The group released an 80-page report this month presenting their ideas, which include
talking shopping carts and a marketing strategy for grocery chains that would feature
better store lighting for healthier items.
“Most Americans, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
participants, do not purchase enough whole grains, dark green and orange vegetables,
and legumes, and purchase too many items with excess calories from fats and added
sugars,” the report said.

“At the same time, the food retail environment is saturated with food marketing
messages, including health and nutrition claims and information, advertisements, and
promotions for many unhealthy food items,” it said.

Initial suggestions from the USDA on how to alter the grocery environment include
stores offering “SNAP-Ed cooking classes” and consultations with dieticians.

“In this approach, the supermarket is the classroom and shoppers receive support on
how to maximize their healthy choices using products retailers promote via the weekly
store circular,” the report said.

Another idea included a point-based system where food stamp recipients could receive
movie tickets in exchange for healthy food purchases. Grocery store staff could also be
used as “ambassadors” for the USDA’s agenda.

“In this role, floor staff has the ability to re-direct consumer purchase towards more
healthful choices by explaining the incentive or the nutrition labeling system,” the
report said.

The USDA said the ideas are “intended to change the choice architecture of the food
retail environment to make healthier choices more prominent,” which is in line with first
lady Michelle Obama’s stated second term agenda to “impact the nature of food in
grocery stores.”

“These strategies, in particular, draw on principles of behavioral economics to nudge

consumers towards healthier choices,” the report said.

The panel came up with six preferred strategies: discount coupons for SNAP recipients;
rebates of up to $60 for healthy purchases on EBT cards; buy one get one free deals for
SNAP recipients; a targeted marketing plan to promote healthy food; a USDA loyalty
card; and new specialized shopping carts.

The “MyCart grocery cart” would provide dividers for shoppers to make sure they are
selecting enough items in each “MyPlate” category, the USDA’s food icon.

“MyCart is a nonfinancial approach that would use behavioral economics to encourage

healthier purchases by any consumer, including SNAP participants,” the report said.
The cart would be color-coded, physically divided, and have a system installed so that
when the shopping cart reaches its healthy “threshold” it would congratulate the
customer.

“The algorithm would group the purchases to classify them using the MyPlate
designations and to provide consumers with a message of support or encouragement
(e.g., “You achieved a MyCart healthy shopping basket!”),” the report said.

The panel based this approach on a $999,891 government-funded study entitled

“Nudging Nutrition,” arguing the research “suggests an intervention of this sort might
be successful in modifying consumer shopping behavior.”

“To accompany the approach, a MyCart shelf tag could be created to identify healthier
items on shelves,” the report said. “Consumers could be guided to healthier choices
through the use of visual displays and other signage, including ceiling banners,
refrigerator and freezer door clings, and shelf talkers.”

The report estimated that implementing the new carts would cost roughly $30,000 for
every store. The change would be costly. For instance, Safeway, Inc. would need to
spend $40.05 million to introduce the carts at its 1,335stores in the U.S.

The panel concluded that it was “somewhat unlikely” that SNAP recipients would not
be able to easily understand the new shopping carts.

Two approaches the report cited as the most promising and easy to implement were
offering discount coupons for food stamp recipients and creating a targeted marketing
strategy for groceries to promote healthier items.

The marketing approach would change how groceries stock and display their items.
Retailers would use “signage, lighting, and placement” to make fruits, vegetables, and
healthy fare “more appealing to consumers.”

“The principle of self-attribution suggests that when an individual perceives they have
the ability to freely choose between options, they are more likely to be satisfied with the
choice they make,” the report said. “Using this principle, positioning healthier items for
increased salience can support consumers choosing healthier options.”

Supermarkets would be encouraged to create “healthy aisles,” and place foods with
higher healthy ratings in “more visible retail space.” The report suggested that stores
change their healthy promotions over time so consumers do not “become bored” or
ignore them.
The USDA also recommended standards for how shelves should be stocked. For
example: “at least half of all shelf space in the dairy case should be allocated for low-fat
or skim milk.”

Following the report, the two preferred strategies—offering discount coupons for
healthy food and changes to store marketing—will be examined in pilot studies. The
USDA envisions that supermarkets, superstores, small grocers, specialty stores, and
farmers markets would adopt changes in the future through an agency program.

REVISTA FAST COMPANY, DICIEMBRE 2014

HOW THE DEEPEST, DARKEST

SECRETS OF MOMS SHAPE THE
PRODUCTS IN AISLE 6
MOMS DON'T WANT WHAT YOU THINK THEY WANT, WHICH IS WHY PRODUCT
DEVELOPERS AT SOME OF THE BIGGEST BRANDS TURN TO THE MOM COMPLEX.

To hear Katherine Wintsch describe it, the most important people at some of the biggest retail companies
know nothing about one of their biggest demographics: moms. "When I sit in meetings, the way people
talk about mothers, it's like it's the 1950s," said the founder of The Mom Complex, which works with the
likes of PlaySkool and Unilever on product development and marketing research specifically geared
toward America's 80 million moms. "They think we're all June Cleaver, and happy all the time, and
baking all the time."

As a mother of two, Wintsch however knows the truth about raising kids in 2014, and it's certainly
nothing like Leave it to Beaver.

While working in advertising for 12 years, Wintsch witnessed the creation of campaigns depicting the
most idealized version of moms based on outdated (and incorrect) notions of motherhood. "It's really
outdated. It's archaic," she said. "It really bothers me—it bothered me so much that I created a company
to fix it."

In 2010 she started The Mom Complex with the hopes of giving retailers a better understanding of the
people buying their products. The case for her services isn't hard to make: the global spending power just
of millennial-aged moms is on track to hit $2.45 trillionnext year, according to Oracle. In the last four
years she has attracted some of the biggest names in retail including Kellogg, Discovery, Kimberly-Clark,
and about 15 other clients.

The misguided conceptions of moms come from focus groups, which don't elicit the most honest
responses from participants. "If you take eight moms who don't know each other, plop them down in this
lab-rat like focus group facility, and ask them what are their challenges, they're going to sit up really tall
and say they're a great mom," Wintsch says. Moms want to look like good moms in front of other moms,
probably because of all the advertising out there depicting perfect moms.
The Mom Complex, in contrast, attempts to provoke real talk from a variety of moms. Instead of focus
groups, Wintsch runs what she calls "innovation sessions." The difference between the gatherings,
mainly, is that the participants and execs sit in the same room, rather than separated by a one-way
mirrored wall. That alone does not result in useful and productive conversations. To get the women
comfortable with sharing, the sessions start with a spiel from Wintsch about the importance of their
honest feedback, which is so valuable that senior executives took time out of their busy schedules to
attend.

Next, Wintsch and the moms educate the execs about the reality of motherhood. "We don’t hold anything
back. It's the raw, real ugly truth about being a mom," she says. Floor to ceiling banners on the walls
project the "deepest, darkest secrets" of moms, such as pictures of stretch marks, quotes from mothers
about they hate how the entire house looks like a preschool because of all the toys, or disheartening
statistics like the one that a mom gets thanked once every 20 days, on average.

That tends to ease the tension, after which the executives work with the women to solve whatever
problem the company needs to address, like the rebranding of a lagging product, for example. By the end
of the two hour session, for which the moms receive $100 compensation, the group has at the very least
enlightened the company's leadership. "Several of our clients, mostly grown men, have been moved to
tears in a lot of these sessions because they will come back and say, 'I didn't realize being a mother was so
hard,'" says Wintsch.

For some projects, in addition to the sessions, Wintsch has moms use a "passion and pain research app"
for 10 days. Any time during the week a user has a high "passion or pain point," she can send texts,
pictures, or videos of the moment—could be a cereal box exploding all over the floor, or an unwieldy
grocery cart too difficult to maneuver. That way, the research reflects the actual problems moms face in
their daily lives. The best product development and marketing research comes out of solving problems,
says Wintsch.

Indeed, the Mom Complex's research has uncovered surprising truths about the way families operate now,
which has led to real products sold and marketed to real moms. Here are some of those insights:

The Rise of Two Dinners. To this day, a lot of companies still have an image of families sitting around
the table each night to eat dinner. Wintsch's research has thrown that ideal out the window. "Our app
revealed that dinnertime is the number one pain point of mothers in America," she says. One in five
dinners happens in the car, and most dinners only last around 18 minutes. But most interestingly, Wintsch
found that many families have two dinners. Many kids eat on the way to soccer, and then again after
practice. Others will have one meal at mom's and another later at dad's. The question Wintsch poses to
companies, then, is: "How do you innovate around two dinners, or make something filling before sports?"
That might mean more grab and go options, or more filling snacks.

Money Doesn't Matter. Of course moms are price sensitive. But money isn't the most important factor a
lot of the time. Unilever found that a certain segment of moms view time as more important, for example.
"This was a very important insight, as we had developed plans around a marketing plan that would have
featured a key message on the cost of a product, instead of the time it could give them back with their
families," said Jim Breach, vice president of customer development for Unilever. Even at budget end of
the spectrum, moms don't purchase products just because they're cheap.

A Culture of Doubt. A global research study found that the single emotion all moms have in common is
doubt. "I thought it was going to be love, or joy, or just this unconditional love for your children," said
Wintsch. "But it was actually self doubt." Despite having that intel, not too many companies have
changed their marketing, branding, or advertising strategies to appeal to or improve that sentiment.
"There is a long way to go," said Wintsch.

***

Why We Like Food That Makes Noise: What

your food 'sounds' like affects how good it tastes
March 26, 2015

The crunch of a chip, the snap of a carrot, or the fizz of a freshly opened beverage may greatly influence
just how good we think those foods taste, according to new flavor research.

Flavor perception is multi-sensory. “The flavor of food is reduced to a mere whisper when its scent is
lost,” chef Molly Birnbaum once said. In a new report published in the journal Flavour, researcher
Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University reviews a wide variety of
research related to sound and flavor perception, and comes to the conclusion that what a food sounds like
is incredibly important to the experience of eating it. That sound, he says, is the “forgotten flavor sense.”

“Our brains are all the time trying to pick up correlations in the environment,” says Spence. According to
his research, people use sounds to assess how tasty food is, even if they don’t realize it. In one of the
studies he highlights, consumers used the word “crisp” more than any other descriptor when they were
asked to evaluate 79 foods. Another study completed in 2007 by University of Leeds researchers to
determine just how important bacon crispiness is to a BLT, the lead researcher concluded: “We often
think it’s the taste and smell of bacon that consumers find most attractive. But our research proves that
texture and the crunching sound is just—if not more—important.”

Science has also shown that changing the sounds a food makes can influence a person’s perception of it.
In his own prior research, Spence showed that people give carbonated beverages higher ratings when the
sound of the bubbles popping becomes louder and more frequent.

But why is the way food sounds important to us? For one, Spence says it could be that sound is an
indicator for texture and therefore quality. Texture can reveal how fresh food is. If an apple cracks crisply
when it’s bitten into, instead of yielding without a snap, you know that’s a good sign.

Even soft foods, like bread, bananas or mousse can make subtle sounds when they’re bitten, sliced or
plunged into with a spoon, and Spence says he believes the commercialization of sounds in the food
industry may soon be growing in a big way.

“It’s going to start out with modernist chefs,” Spence predicts. Food modifications could also be used to
help make food more pleasurable for the elderly whose overall senses may be decreasing, he adds.

Outside sound can also influence perception, and it doesn’t require much effort. “If I’m having Italian
food and I’m hearing music of that region, it may make me perceive the food as more authentic,” he says.
Even the ice cream company Häagen-Dazs launched an app where customers can scan their ice cream
carton and listen to a violin concerto timed to allow the ice cream to soften.

Still, Spence says he largely feels like sound isn’t being considered in the food industry as often as it
could be. A 2003 survey of 14o food scientists showed they rated sound as the least important attribute
contributing to flavor. But as research continues to emerge and the industry continues to experiment, we
may be listening to our food more often.

**

TIME MAGAZINE
Feb. 12, 2016
How ‘Textual Chemistry’ Is Changing Dating
The complex emotional interactions between two people
over text message can make or break a relationship
My friend and I had just seen a play and, like everyone else in the theater, I took out my phone as the
curtain came down. Waiting for me were five lengthy text messages from a guy I had been seeing for
two months.

“Oh my God, he’s so desperate,” my friend said when she saw my screen.

“This is totally normal for us,” I explained. “See?” I scrolled up to show her my seven unanswered text
messages before, his three blocks of text before that and so on. My friend, who lived strictly by the rule
that you should not double text for fear of looking too “thirsty,” as the kids call it, was aghast. “It’s kind
of wonderful,” I said.

My now-boyfriend has been teased for “texting like a girl,” but it was immediately one of my favorite
things about him. I am an effusive texter, and in past relationships I would get frustrated when my multi-
text theses would be answered with “yeah” or “sure.” I needed someone who was just as willing to give
themselves carpal tunnel as I was.

I’d heard similar complaints from friends: potential dates who texted too much, too little; used too many
emojis, didn’t seem to understand emojis at all; were too serious, used to many “lols” when they clearly
were not laughing out loud. Each text was carefully analyzed for hidden meaning. It’s no wonder, then,
that text message miscommunications were a daily source of stress and anxiety. It was yet another box
to check as we sought a significant other: textual chemistry.

These discussions aren’t all that different from those of generations past: pick up lines have always been
picked apart and the art of the voicemail analyzed by singles long before the advent of texting. And
many of the old, gendered traditions of who reaches out to whom and when have (for better or worse)
persisted.
But unlike the phone call, which has been around for decades, texting and messaging are new enough
that no one can agree on what the hard and fast rules are, which means a typo might doom a future
relationship. A winky face may be creepy to one person and friendly to another. Long texts can
demonstrate care or reek of desperation. That’s why 58% of singles think texting makes dating more
ambiguous, according to a recent study from online dating sites Christian Mingle and JDate.

And yet the importance of texting grows with each passing Valentine’s Day. As more and more couples
meet online or through dating apps, texting has become not only a means of seduction, but also the
foundation upon which a future might be built. Whether a witty repartee is established in those first few
messages on Tinder or Bumble could be the first step to a lasting relationship.

And the problems persist among long-term couples for whom texting and emailing have in many ways
supplanted face-to-face conversations. In a 2015 poll by the Gravitate Research Group, 80% of
Americans said they prefer texting to voice calls, and the average American spends 26 minutes texting
every day.
So texting compatibility can be an important signifier of how communication would work in a long-term
relationship. A 24-year-old friend and medical student living in Chicago, Madeleine Boesche, says texting
issues convinced her to break things off with an older man she was seeing.

“He was usually very prompt in his replies, but the way he phrased his messages was always stilted, dry
and emotionless,” she says. “When we would hang out he was funny and charismatic and a great
conversationalist. But anytime I made a joke over text he would respond seriously, killing the witty
banter vibe and ending the conversation.”

Lara Levin, a 27-year-old living in San Francisco, says she met a man on the dating app Hinge and saw
him for over two months before deciding their texting habits were incompatible. “We went on a couple
of great dates, but he wouldn’t respond to texts for over 24 or 26 hours, and when he did, he was just a
horrible communicator,” she explains. She said that any potential partner must be able to maintain witty
banter as well as respond in a timely manner “so as not to induce panic on the recipient’s end.”

The texting delay led Levin to end things with the man. “He told me that I sounded, ‘kind of insane,’ to
which I responded that I know myself well enough to know when something won’t work,” she says.

The ever-frustrating text delay has even impacted the likes of Aziz Ansari. In his book Modern Romance,
the comedian tells of a time a woman he had recently seen was slow to respond to texts, leading Ansari
to wonder whether he had done something to turn her off or even whether she had died.

In all these cases, one person thought the other was violating what they perceived to be best texting
practices. Though not everyone agrees on what those guidelines are, people feel strongly that their view
is the right one.

“In texting, the concept of rules is strong, much stronger, I think, than the rules we do or don’t adhere to
in actual in-person encounters,” lifestyle writer and friend, Raisa Bruner, says. The most stringent rule:
play hard to get. If it takes him 20 minutes to respond, you wait 40. Don’t text after 10 p.m. And never,
ever double text.

Though these rules apply to both genders, outdated mores still tend to guide them. Loquacious women
are pressured to limit their responses. “Women are still subjected to the implicit assumption that we
will be ‘clingy’ and ‘needy,’ and in order to project ‘chillness’ it’s necessary to curb our own propensity
for chattiness,” says Bruner. “But it’s unfair to men too. As a woman talking to men on dating apps, if
the pickup lines are uninspired, the emoji game is weak or the conversation doesn’t break any new
ground, I’ll stop responding immediately. Text chemistry is no guarantee of in-person chemistry, but it’s
the only indicator we have.”

And sometimes a poor indicator. That’s what a 24-year-old friend I’ll call Jane found after falling for a
guy she met on dating app Coffee Meets Bagel after weeks of messaging. “As we texted, I was becoming
more and more convinced that we were truly compatible. We liked the same movies, books, television
shows, music. In fact, we were reading the same book at the time, and he just consistently made me
laugh and smile a lot,” she says.

But when they met in real life, things fell flat. “I am more extroverted and emotional. He is more
reserved and judicious. We communicated very effectively, but there was never an in-person spark,” she
says. “I actually think the reason we dated for as long as we did was that I was hoping he’d become the
guy I fell for via text.”

The transition from texting to reality can be tricky. “We focus on texting as part of the seduction. It’s
game theory, figuring out how best to intrigue the other person,” says Sherry Turkle, whose book
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age advocates for a return to face-to-face
communication. “The danger is you extend ‘the game’ into the relationship, and that game becomes
normalized. It’s very hard for single people to know when they’ve gotten out of that ‘game’ stage.”

In her book, Turkle writes about a man she met who thinks the time he takes to carefully structure text
responses makes him a better person, communicator and mate. Predictably, his relationship falls apart
when he’s confronted with in-person conversations that demand equally thoughtful, emotional or witty
responses as those he would take 10 minutes to craft over text message, but which he cannot replicate
in the split seconds of live conversation.

“When two people are comfortable in their relationship, they just talk. You’re not worried about losing
him. He’s not worried about losing you. So you just share with each other in a way that makes sense
without worrying about looking desperate or not, anxious or not,” says Turkle.

Or they don’t. One New York couple I know that’s been dating for four years limits their texts strictly to
logistics. Every real conversation happens face-to-face. “It often weirds people out that we just aren’t in
contact that much, but we have a mutual inability to text-converse,” the woman says of her significant
other.

And it’s kind of magical when it happens: finding someone who understands the way you communicate,
whether it be in person or over text. Like the Prince finally matching Cinderella to her glass slipper—
except the glass slipper is an emoji, and the Prince and Cinderella haven’t actually ever seen each other,
just profile pictures of each other.

AI's Biggest Danger Is So Subtle, You

Might Not Even Notice It
February 8, 2016
Mark Rolston

The rise of artificial intelligence has been met with reactionary fears of robots taking
over. We’ve all seen the movies. What’s left out of this conversation is a more practical
threat. We should be concerned that AI will be hijacked, not by rogue computers out to
destroy mankind, but by people with ulterior motives.

A basic form of AI already here is called decision support. It helps us make decisions
based on our behavior: Recommendation engines suggest just the right items for us to
buy, and navigation systems tell us the best way to drive home. As AI advances, it will
embed itself even deeper into our social fabric, shaping everything from how we do
business to how we receive medical care.

So what happens when AI-powered assistance is so commonplace that we become

dependent on it?

Fear of Deciding Alone, aka FODA. When deeply quantified support is readily at hand,
we may grow to doubt many of the decisions we make without support. There is an apt
parallel in FOMO (fear of missing out), a silly meme with serious underpinnings: Social
media has warped our human instinct for recognition from our peers, creating a
landscape in which we present the best versions of ourselves. Life looks like one big
party, and if we don’t keep up, we miss all the fun. FODA is borne from the same
human desire, only in this case we look to machines, not each other, for validation.

Behind every computer algorithm is a programmer. And behind that programmer is a

strategy set by people with business and political motives.
Our growing dependence on decision support is where artificial intelligence is most
immediately dangerous. Behind every computer algorithm is a programmer. And behind
that programmer is a strategy set by people with business and political motives. It would
be easy enough for the people who design AI systems, motivated by greed, self-interest,
or politics, to train computers to manipulate our lives in subtle and insidious ways,
essentially lying to us through the algorithms that guide our thinking. And because we
are so terrified of making our own decisions, we go along with it. The coming tidal
wave of decision support threatens to give very few people a phenomenal amount of
suggestive power over a great many people—the kind of power that is hard to trace and
almost impossible to stop.

This is the butterfly effect, wherein tiny differences in the world can cascade into
massive changes over time. In the case of artificial intelligence, it plays out through
subtly corrupted software algorithms. For example, a computer programmer can make
the smallest tweak to a search algorithm to direct people to one type of content over
others. A subtle, undetectable change in one system can alter the outcome for billions of
people. Such power is priceless to a motivated politician or business. And it is the most
pressing, worrisome challenge we face as we move toward a world in which computers
make more and more decisions for us.

Weirder still, the technology may pit us against our own human nature: With our
decisions increasingly based on probability and statistics, how can we be anything more
than normal, more than an average? What happens to risk, or the humanistic notion of
what is true, when everything is based on everyone else? As humans, we are imperfect
social creatures. We misread faces, misunderstand emotions, and display emotions
(Jealousy! Anger! Envy!) that are deeply antisocial. The chinks in our perspective, the
mistakes we make, and the happy accidents are what build up our armor. When our
digitized advisors aggregate, average, and assuage, are we even autonomous beings
anymore?

Decision support is becoming infrastructure. In the same way that roads have paved the
way for cars instead of horses and buggies, decision support will deliver the next level
of medicine, retail, way-finding, and more.

A few people could exert power over a great many people—the kind of power that is
hard to trace and almost impossible to stop.

There is hope. This form of artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be something we fear.
Our world is full of situations in which we react with our most animalistic instincts.
Political positions, financial decisions, attitudes toward social justice—our biggest
decisions are often fueled by poor logic and misinformation. In the best circumstances,
artificial intelligence could save us from ourselves, by helping us understand each other,
see the world more clearly, and collectively make better decisions. But we will have to
be very careful. And the onus will be, in part, on designers to develop human-centered
solutions that resist corruption. If we care about the world we live in, we should think
long and hard about the interfaces, rules, and policies that will govern artificial
intelligence and our new way of life.