Professional Documents
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John Cain
VP, Global Lead, Emerging Analytics and Data Sciences, SapientNitro Chicago John co-founded Iota Partners, an instrumentation-driven consumer research consultancy, before it became part of the SapientNitro family.
Todd Cherkasky
VP, Consumer Intelligence, SapientNitro Chicago Todd leads a global team of design researchers, ethnographers, social insights analysts, user experience researchers and strategists who generate insights to support SapientNitros global clients.
Rick Robinson
VP, Marketing Analytics Iota, SapientNitro Boulder Rick co-founded Iota Partners, an instrumentation-driven consumer research consultancy, before it became part of the SapientNitro family.
Sixty years ago, the world experienced a shift as important as the industrial or the agricultural revolutions.
Shortly after the Second World War, the digital revolution ushered in the information age, and with it a huge number of changes in the way we just plain folk experience everyday life. The digital revolution also forced a move from a push-driven traditional brand-centric view of the world to an economy of connected experiences that are co-owned by company and customer. This symmetric, multiexperience world is triggering new questions and informing new perspectives on marketing investments. For instance: In this changed environment, how do we begin to measure effectiveness? Where, when and how should companies invest in order to most effectively connect their brands with customers? Do we need to measure value and the return on experience-led investments differently than we have evaluated more traditional metrics? Marketers need a measurement approach that blends art and science, story and technology, and that looks more deeply at experience. We need a new model: Return on Experience (RoX).
products and services. People are using the things companies make and sell to tell stories to one another about who they are. And in that telling, people get other ideas, they discover new things to be, new ways to be who they are they are always looking for ways to make those stories new, better, more compelling. This is why we need to understand them, their frames of reference, their language.1 In short, we must view people on their own terms. Static models of consumer merely surrounded by new media and channels can no longer guide a business focused on the needs of the always-on, connected consumer. Putting the consumer at the center of the experience changes everything.
Rick Robinson, Uncertain Answers: Research, Risk, and Brands Retail Marketing Institute Annual Conference,August 2002.
Innovation changes. Business value creation now begins with the person and radiates to other parts of the organization as a reference. For example, Stefan Olander, VP of Digital Sport at Nike, explains: We dont start with technology or the potential profit; we always start with the athlete. I think thats an important distinction because when you do that the other things follow. Brands and products change. They are now tools that enable people to live their stories. A persons story is larger than the brand itself. The new goal for marketing? How to get customers to incorporate company products/services/brands into their stories to develop the brand story inside the consumer story. Measurement systems and intelligence platforms change. A different view of product and brand requires a new system to measure and understand whats meaningful in everyday experience. We need an approach that blends art and science, story and technology, and that looks more deeply at experience. Such an approach should be sourced by multiple data types and should value the role of human intelligence and interpretive skills. The desired outcome: actionable models that affect business metrics and initiatives.
Fig. 1 New Communication Methods: Beyond Push and Pull Goal Connect with consumers Be relevant and meaningful
YOur StOry
THEir StOry
How Engagement platforms + an Organizing Idea Company as story enabler, extender Company creates the conditions for experience Persistently viral, always-on Evaluate and Measure The experiences of people, places and things Interactions AND perceptions
Yields aggregate business ROI Quantitative and qualitative techniques for optimizing consumer experience Measure consumer engagement within channels themselves
We must measure marketing effect outside of traditional advertising and sales channels and take on a broader and more inclusive denition of marketing itself. And revenue. This type of execution, which is co-created, data-rich and deeply motivational, requires new kinds of descriptive and prescriptive tools.
EXPERIENCE OPtIMIZAtION
The Return on Experience model is composed of three parts: 1. Brand & Marketing ROI: Aggregate measures to assess the return on storytelling and experience initiatives. 2. Return on Media & Channels: Next-generation marketing mix and cross-media analytics provide a more detailed and accurate picture of channel impact and effect. 3. Experience Optimization: A measurement framework to more precisely assess experience with a new frame of reference and new measurement tools, like sensor technology, which produce new forms of consumer-behavior data at a level that can be mined for insights. RoX shows how businesses create value across connected experiences and how that value can be followed and measured down into individual moments themselves.
Contribution Margin
Marketing Spending
% $
$
Marketing Spending
ROMI
Return on marketing investment originally coined by Gary Lilien and Philip Kotler in their 1992 book Marketing Models is based on the formula shown previously.
Brand and Marketing ROI The first element of the model focuses on ROI of brand and marketing itself. The model uses a variety of business analytics to evaluate return and efficiencies at the aggregate, corporate level. Some examples include ROI analyses, marketshare, cost/ benefit, or the balanced scorecard. Return on Media and Channels The second element of our model addresses return on media and channels. Recent developments in the field of media mix modeling use sophisticated next-generation algorithms (mathematical models) to quantify cross-media effects of marketing. Traditionally, media mix modeling measures a given channels direct effect on sales. Yet today, during an average day for many, people experience several hundreds of touchpoints across a huge variety of media and channels. Brands often tell their stories in blended media, and new analytics tools help attribute the return on media and channels more precisely. The major advancement is in predictive forecasting models, which now can reveal cross-channel impacts, or assist rates, taking into account the interplay between traditional media (radio, print and TV) and digital (search, display, social, and mobile) at a brand and category level. This approach enables marketers to continuously measure and calibrate marketing investments and generate incremental ROI.
Experience Optimization and Experience Assessment The techniques that marketers use to assess experience dont do justice to the nuance and range of how people act, connect with others or sense (and make sense of) their world. But three major advances: sensor technology, information processing and experience dimensions are changing the way organizations instrument and optimize experience. To begin with, we need better sources of data and ways to harvest it. Sensor Technology: For the first time, sensor technology has things talking. Everyday consumer products homes, offices, and retail spaces; civil infrastructure; and even the natural environment all have the capacity to communicate and to deliver huge volumes of real-time data at a level of detail never before possible. Such data can be used alone, or correlated with other quantitative or qualitative sources, to deliver a powerful new kind of business intelligence. Information Processing: That information, combined with advanced consumer intelligence processes and platforms, turns information pathways into real business value. Marketers benefit from a richer, dynamic and more efficient consumer understanding with greater depth and detail that changes as the world and people change.
The latest media mix models track not just the direct impacts, but also indirect impacts, to optimize media buys. For example, while TV delivers the most direct assistance, it is very expensive, making it just part of the optimal portfolio.
Fig. 5 Four Types of Sensor Technology Used to Assess and Optimize Experience
PEOPLE
PLACES
THINGS
INTERACTIONS
PERCEPTIONS
Experience professionals are applying technologies, methods and techniques of market and consumer research to build a richer, always-on instrumentation of the key aspects of experience contexts, social structures, the material world, etc. We can now for the rst time use sensors to directly measure everyday consumer products, homes, ofces, retail spaces, and even natural environments. These data, combined with processes and platforms, enable a new, much richer view into the wants and needs of consumers, and how the experience is delivering or not for major rms. Clockwise from top left: Opt-in retail mobile app with location and activity tracking, ultrasonic sensors in retail environment, hidden motion-activated video camera, networked prescription pill bottle, circuit board of a motion-activated sensor, digitally connected thermostat, analysis output of multiple weeks of person-tracking video.
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CONTROL
ACCESS
FIT
SENSE
CONTINUITY
The extent to which people feel they are empowered to accomplish the things they want or need to do. How well do the interactions support a users expectation of directing their experience?
The extent to which content, functionality, products, services and people are made available to, or can be shared, by a person. How easy is it for a person to become part of, or affect, the brand story?
The extent to which a person receives the right content and functionality at the right time. How usable are the interactions? How well are environments designed for context of use?
The extent to which a person discerns a meaningful, emotionally relevant story. How much does the interaction leave an impression, or enable expression?
The extent to which a person perceives that one interaction builds on the next. How well does one interaction pick up from the last interaction, and previous ones?
Measured
Target
To more precisely characterize customer ecosystems and describe customers experiences, SapientNitro has developed a new, proprietary model of experience originally developed for urban planning by Kevin Lynch in Good City Form, and modied by our teams for use within brand strategy and experience design.2
But what are the dimensions of the scales themselves? Experience Dimensions: The third part of experience optimization is developing a new, proprietary model of experience. Weve identified five experience dimensions that are used to assess how well a particular campaign; design, interaction or environment performs in terms of experience. Those dimensions are Control, Access, Fit, Sense and Continuity. These experience dimensions are used in our approach to experience design and strategy. For example, we conducted primary research over the course of three months analyzing 28 different leaders in delivering superior experiences.3
2 3
Originally developed for urban planning by Kevin Lynch in Good City Form, and modified by our teams for use within brand strategy and experience design. This research is featured in Insights 2014 as the article Evaluating Real-World Experience: A Study of Leading Brands.
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