Experiate Blog: How to make the store employee care
How does digital signage content affect the rank and file? Are they left apathetic or motivated? Paul Flanigan explores this topic, drawing on his experience with one of America’s largest minimum-wage employers, Best Buy.

Sociological images: A historical look at the changes in work type
In 1850, over 50% of U.S. workers were farmers. Today? Barely over 1%. Meanwhile, office-related jobs have grown from nearly nothing to being the dominant form of employment. If you like demographics, be sure to check out this interactive graphic.

Gartner: 2009 Hype Cycle Special Report
Still kicking yourself for missing the boat on the World Wide Web? Well, there’s still time to cash in on emerging technologies. But you’ll need a guide, like Gartner’s “Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009,” which indexes key technologies and trends, plotting them along a linear path through such territories as “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” “Trough of Disillusionment” and “Plateau of Productivity.” To wit: according to the recently released report, electronic paper is on the “Slope of Enlightenment,” which is to say that we’re past all the hype and the technology is nearly ready to offer some tangible business benefits.

Businessweek: Borrow from Home Depot’s “Free” Expertise Strategy
Since the publication of Chris Anderson’s book (Amazon | free on Scribd), there’s been a lot of chatter about the concept of “free.” Businessweek contributor Carmine Gallo describes Home Depot’s take on the concept: more than 100 short videos on YouTube, teaching you how to install fixtures and do home repairs. “When you don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing, giving away free advice can help build your brand by establishing you as a trusted expert in your field,” he writes.

Wall Street Journal: Using the lottery effect to make people save
Jason Zweig uncovers an innovative financial product that comes from some credit unions in Michigan. These financial institutions are offering an account that is a “cross between a certificate of deposit and a raffle ticket.” The one-year CDs reward regular savers with a chance to win raffle prizes, up to $400, as well as a chance to win the grand prize: $100,000.

Of the two lists, the “don’t” list seems the strongest, so here are the highlights:

• Don’t rely too much on cold data to know your customer. Get out and spend time talking to brand users.
• Don’t underestimate consumers, particularly their ability to make or break your brand via user-generated content on the Internet.
• Don’t focus on cultural details or try to make your brand look Hispanic. Instead, focus on being relevant.
• Don’t try to be pan-Hispanic. (Example: Tecate, which is clearly Mexican but has an authentic voice and therefore has broader appeal.)

Read Hispanic Shopper Marketing Do’s and Don’ts

Read the interview

If you’re new to The Financial Brand, here are some recent articles that give you a sense for the depth of this online publication (I’d call it a blog, but it offers more meat than most blogs):

• Branches refuse to die

• Datahead: Brand more important than rates, products (Some great, presentation-worthy statistics in this post.)

• Notably Quotable: Anger, blame and dynamite

• Women vs. men: Two different perspectives on money

• Caja Navarra: Pioneers in Civic Banking

• Results 2.0: Social media for financial institutions

• Agricultural lenders see opportunities in the local foods movement – Today’s boutique and specialty growers may be big business tomorrow.

• Apple’s cool matrix-style app wall – A great example of data visualization.

• It’s not who your customers are, but how they behave - Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path opens up his Harvard Business Publishing blog post with this killer statement: “Businesses cannot exist without customers, so it’s sadly ironic that many, if not most, businesses, actually understand so little about them.”

• Data as seductive material – A presentation by Matt Jones given at the Umeå Institute of Design Spring Summit 2009. Among the ideas Jones introduces is the idea that we are all generating personal “data shadows,” comprised of data that is generated by…our everyday behavior (see previous link) and sharing.

A number of services are now available that will help marketers not just identify what is being discussed online, but how people  feel about products and services (and whatever else one wants to monitor).

Alex Wright highlights this trend in an article in NYT and lists a few services that are giving it a go:

Scout Labs
For as little as $99 per month, this SFO startup offers real-time monitoring of “sentiment, trendspotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves.” At first blush, the interface seems fairly robust. The “sentiment” interface is shown below:

Jodange
Billing itself as the world’s first  opinion utility, Jodange “automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media. The NYT article describes some interesting features:

“…the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.”

“Jodange…is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.”

Twitteratr
As the name suggests, this free service focuses just on Twitter. While the interface is fairly simple, it seems they still have some work to do in order to avoid false positives, negatives and neutrals. In the capture below, you can see that what’s clearly a negative comment “don’t ever go to Chase/JP Morgan…” has been identified as a neutral.

Tweetfeel
This free Twitter-based monitoring service attempts to boil things down even further, providing you not only with the relevant tweets, but a ratio of happy faces to frowns. Again, one has to wonder how sophisticated the filters are that run behind the scenes. The English vernacular is a tough nut to crack.

Related articles:

• Digital Signage Today: The convergence of digital signage and Twitter
• John Ryan Blog: How to use Twitter and social media to fuel your offline marketing
• John Ryan Blog: Can user-generated and commercial content coexist? Thoughts on the future of digital signage
• John Ryan Blog: On the Internet, it’s “caveat venditor” (seller beware)

• How tech is changing banks – Depositing checks using an iPhone? Making mobile-to-mobile money transfers? It’s all coming your way and bound to have an impact on branch banking.
• Design for Social Engagement: Pointing at Exhibits – Nina Simon of the Museum 2.0 blog wonders what makes museum exhibits social and offers some suggestions for making exhibits that encourage interactivity among viewers.
• The Perilous Tradeoff in Branch Efficiency – Ready to “right-size” your bloated branch network? Not so fast, say Robert Vokes and Kevin Travis, in their article in the August BAI Banking Strategies.
• Why a Loyal Customer Isn’t Always a Profitable One – And before you embark on the customer retention campaigns, consider the premise of this WSJ article: that 50% or more of customers are simply not worth keeping.
• Scenarios For Banks in 2020 – Idris Mootee of the creative consultancy Idea Couture is not impressed with the banking industry’s track record on innovation. He predicts three banking innovations that may happen with or without the banks’ consent.
• This is Your Buyology (summary) (PDF) – Ever wonder why Apple fans try to convert you? That’s because, as Martin Lindstrom discovered by studying brain scans, there is little difference between brand loyalists and the religiously devout. It’s a finding that has big implications for branding and customer experience.

Have you heard about Starbucks’ new retail experiment? The coffee chain that spent the last decade stamping out carbon-copy store locations is “de-branding” a number of locations, starting with a Seattle location, now called “15th Ave Coffee & Tea.”

Gone is the familiar green and white mermaid logo. So, too, are the automated espresso machines. In their place is a “no-name” logo and an old fashioned La Marzocco espresso maker, a beer and wine list, and a whole lot more.

Is the world’s largest coffee retailer experiencing a mid-life crisis? A case of branding remorse? Back in 2007, a memo from Starbucks founder Howard Schultz regarding the “commoditization of the Starbucks experience” was leaked to the press. Some changes were made right away across the Starbucks empire, but not on the scale of what the company is attempting at 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea.

John Moore at Brand Autopsy, a noted observer of the Starbucks saga, suggests that this is all part of the company’s effort to reclaim its soul:

This is clearly an experiment, a four-wall enclosed retail petri dish. It’s a way for Starbucks to RE-learn some of the personal touches it has lost due to making so many compromises in order to grow to over 16,000 locations in 40-plus countries around the world.

As part of its laboratory experiment, Starbucks is introducing some new ingredients to its retailing mix, including:

• serving alcohol
• roasting and brewing coffee in small batches
• conducting coffee cuppings
• hosting live entertainment.

This experiment brings up some vital questions that many retail chains ought to consider, especially as they find that their carefully-coiffed customer experience no longer brings the foot traffic it once did.

• Is there an inherent limit to the appeal of a globally consistent customer experience?
• Is it possible to “engineer” what we hope customers will perceive as an unscripted customer experience?
• Can large retail chains, which live and die by highly refined processes, large-scale supply-chain managment and thin margins, successfully incorporate non-scalable merchandising techniques?
• Or, to put it more directly, can a mega-chain create a mass-customized customer experience?

Perhaps Starbucks isn’t even asking these questions. Pilots are meant to be just that: experiments that help us understand what customers do or don’t respond to. Scaling up, rolling out is another artform altogether.

What do you think of Starbucks’ latest incarnation? Have you visited the new store?

Learn more:

• Starbucks Newsroom: Fact sheet: 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea
• Starbucks chairman warns of “the commoditization of the Starbucks experience”

If you are introverted, shy or self-conscious (or know someone who is), then you can probably relate to Rob Horning’s comments in a recent blog post:

“I just started to ride my old bike…and..realized that I need a few things for riding in New York City—mainly a helmet and new handle grips. Even though there is a local bike shop five blocks from my apartment, I find myself procrastinating about going over there. Maybe I spent too much time in record stores as a teenager, but I have this unshakable paranoia that the people in the bike shop will laugh at me. They will see that I am not a “real” biker; riding a bike around is not my lifestyle, it’s not my brand.”

I doubt that any large retailer ever set out to cater to the introvert demographic, but it makes clear that the anonymity provided by the big box (and big bank) retail experience suits some people just fine. But how many people? Enough to constitute a valid target market?

Perhaps there is a segment of the population that doesn’t want a personal relationship with you and your brand. For them, an impersonal relationship with your brand is right on the money.

Via Murketing

Photo by: {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}

We’re definitely in a moment of transition. A moment where an old media system is dying and a new media system is being born. An era when spectatorial culture is giving way to a participatory culture.

So begins this video thoughtpiece by Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program:

Although Jenkins describes the political and educational implications of this media shift, the thrust of his message should not be lost upon us marketers. If you develop content for digital signage, you need to realize that the rules are changing. Visual language is changing. What people find interesting and credible is also changing. And quite possibly, peoples’ desire to influence and affect the content they see in malls, train stations and banks is going to change as well.

Questions abound:

• As participatory culture continues to grow online (and in the increasingly interrelated realm of mobile), how will it begin affect the content we produce for our clients?
• How will user-generated content become part of — or even drive — commercial content?
• How will our content-creation tools need to change?
• How does this fit with the trend toward individualized (i.e., Minority Report) digital signage content?

Please tell us your thoughts! This could be a whole conference unto itself (or at least a meaty panel discussion).

The results of a recent study of by JCDecaux Airport and Eyetracker suggest that people don’t take in their surroundings (and the advertising within) in the manner we think they do.

As marketers, some of us might be tempted to think there’s a simple cause and effect at play when people encounter our ad messaging.

1. The ad gets the customer’s attention.
2. The customer pauses to watch.
3. The customer absorbs the message.
4. The customer moves on (hopefully with the goal of acting on the message).

Wishful thinking, it turns out.

This study — which had test subjects walk through an airport terminal wearing eyeglasses that monitored their field of vision and precise point of focus — actually demonstrates that people do not absorb the sights around them in any seemingly rational order. In fact, their eyes dart about somewhat haphazardly, flitting and resting for just fractions of a second on faces, moving people and objects and, yes, digital signage. This is called saccadic viewing.

Indeed, the Eyetracker study gives new ammo to those who have advocated for the ability of digital signage to capture the attention of people in indoor environments. The test subjects registered 1,985 unique screen views (a view was measured as 0.3 seconds). Divided by the 20 test subjects, that comes out to nearly 100 impacts per individual. Given that there were only 89 screens in the test environment, we can conclude that some subjects viewed the same screen more than once.

But for those of us who have been working with digital signage for some time (John Ryan, for instance, has 18 years of experience), none of this is surprising. We’ve known for some time that the medium works. The true art lies in how one goes about integrating digital signage into unique environments. That’s what makes the other finding in the Eyetracker study so interesting.

Perhaps you remember or have heard about “Burma Shave” signs? Burma Shave was a brand of shaving cream sold in the U.S. from the 1920s through the 1960s. The company had great success posting clever ad slogans along highways on signs that were meant to be read in sequence as drivers rode past them.

Similarly, one might think that digital messages could be staged sequentially, with a introductory message at the entrance of a store, a follow-up message partway along the shopper’s path, and another message (the call to action, perhaps) yet deeper in the store.

The Eyetracker study doesn’t shoot down the idea of sequencing, but suggests that the order of messages is not what you might think, at least not in an airport terminal. In what they term as the “Cascading Effect,” the study’s authors found that users viewed screens in the following order:

• Middle-distance screen
• Far-distance screen
• Near-distance screen

The Eyetracker report goes on to suggest ways that this Cascading Effect can be harnessed:

“By combining luminenscence and movement, such as moving the creative focus to mirror the way passengers view the screens, advertisers can increase the impact of their adverts.

Further augmentation can be obtained by putting more detailed messages in the first screen of the Cascade, and using flashes of animation to bring the focus of attention to them.” (pp. 8&9)

Airport photo: n0nick
Burma Shave photo: Ken Koehler