Wash your hands please

I love seeing how some companies are fast to identify a cultural movement and quickly transform an opportunity into a business proposition.  

With growing public awareness and concern around swine flu, it's amazing to see the proliferation of hand sanitizing units.  For the past few weeks I've been seeing them all over.  Only today, I saw one in a parking garage, next to the elevator in my office building and coming out of our cafeteria.

For marketers it's a reminder of how any cultural manifestation creates opportunities for new products, services or the comeback of an old idea.

Experimenting with an online collaboration panel

Marketers all over the world are debating, re-thinking and identifying more effective ways of gathering consumer insights on an on-going basis, instead of using traditional research methods that gather input at specific moments of the marketing process.  About a year ago, inspired by a conversation with some people at IBM Brazil on the boom of web 2.0, I came back to the office and asked my team how we could adopt a more collaborative approach to brand management using the learnings from social networks.  Millenials already use social networks to interact on an infinite number of themes from the indie rock scene, to what's hot in tech gadgets, to discussion boards on video-gaming.  

Could we create a social network-type environment with college kids that have an interest for marketing to help us craft the future of our brands that target Brazilian millenials?

After talking to one of the country's hottest consumer research company, we found out the answer was yes.  Last month we launched an exciting initiative that has the potential of transforming the way we engage with one of our toughest demographics.  We put together an online consumer panel with 40 college students from around the country, carefully selected.  It has been an amazing lab into better understanding how these kids react to the weekly brand stimulus we post for their evaluation.  A much deeper and engaging experience versus focus groups or qual studies.

The Voting Booth and the Cash Register

Last Friday, I read this brilliant article in the New York Times from David Brooks called 'How Voters Think'. The article talks about how the press and political pollsters are having a hard time trying to anticipate each primary in this year's election. Read this...

"The truth is that many of the theories we come up with are bogus. They are based on the assumption that voters make cold, rational decisions about who to vote for and can tell us why they decided as they did. This is false. In reality, we voters - all of us - make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness."

I immediately thought that the very same process happens with consumers in relation to brands.  Why would someone purchase a German import when an equivalent Korean vehicle with the same features costs $15,000 less?

The article goes on...

"After seeing a candidate for 100 milliseconds, voters make certain sorts of judgments based on expressiveness, facial structure, carriage and attitude. Then, having formed an impression from these thin-sliced appraisals, voters rack their memory banks. Decades ago, Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued that human judgment is less a matter of calculating probabilities and more a matter of trying to fit new things into familiar patterns."

Doesn't the same happen in consumer behavior?  The perception we have on brands is also a collage of hundreds of different impressions.  From the basic visual stimulus from packaging, an ad, to the memory of who was consuming it the first time we saw that brand.  Maybe a certain product or even the comeback of an old jingle reminds us of good feelings we had in our youth (is that why I bought a Converse All-Star® the other day?) or maybe we unconsciously choose comfort food to help cope with stress from a busy day?  

Like selecting a candidate, there are many emotions that go through a purchasing decision that may have nothing to do with a rational choice. I'm having fun watching the political theater unfold... and it's quite interesting to see that there may be more similarities between the voting booth and the cash register than we think.