There have been two groundbreaking pieces of work that give insights into the consumer’s path to purchase: P&G’s FMOT, (The First Moment of Truth), and then revised with Google’s ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth). In planning 2012 campaigns with an eye on opportunities to engage messaging with consumers, we have identified two incremental and important steps in the path. We also believe that understanding them can create even more engaging messaging and opportunities to connect.

FMOT (The First Moment of Truth)

In FMOT, there were two Moments of Truth: first at the shelf (impulse purchases and brand decisions made at the point of purchase), and second in the experience when the consumer is delighted with a product.

 Google’s ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth)

ZMOT added the Zero Moment Of Truth or what we call the research stage: search, reviews and reaching out to your network before purchasing (prior to shelf).

The Moments of Truth (TMOT) 

In what we’ve dubbed The Moments of Truth (TMOT), we see two additional steps: in-store (opportunities while customers are actively in-store and shopping, (“showrooming” and “scan and scam”): along with the step of after marketing, rather than simply a happy or dissatisfied customer. Today we have an opportunity of turning negativity into positivity, while also starting an on-going relationship  (e-mail acquisition, Facebook, Twitter, etc).

Having a strategic and tactical media team to integrate elements from this consumer path, allows you to broaden your communication palette and create more opportunities for a sale. These elements will add ROI and justification to many social elements as well.

In Part 2 of our The Moments of Truth, we’ll take a deeper dive into 10 elements that can lead to a stimulus.

Chris Beck

Chief Vision Officer @ #26dottwo

chris [at] 26dottwo [dot] com

What were they thinking? It must have been a pretty “interesting” focus group that led them to this creative conclusion. In case you missed it.

 2.) Netflix (Qwikster): If you received the original e-mail about Netflix’s DVD-rental spin-off, you were probably left thinking, “This must be a joke!” Customer satisfaction, stock prices and brand equity are all in the tank. Really, QWIKSTER? And to top it off? Qwikster’s Twitter handle was already registered to someone with a profile picture of a weed-smoking Elmo puppet. Classic.

3.) HD Radio:

Our bet is that an HD Radio wasn’t on anyone’s Holiday gift list. Terrestrial radio has invested tens of millions of dollars in radio airtime to promote Digital (HD) Radio. Perhaps radio isn’t the best venue to promote this superior technology to consumers. Is it possible that a better, strategic solution would have been a video and social media campaign to create buzz, awareness and understanding of this new technology? Just sayin’.

4.) Ya-Bing! (Yahoo and Bing partnership): This is a case of when a bad idea gets worse. Although they are investing major sums in buying traffic, search results using the combo of Yahoo! and Bing are dismal compared to Google and Facebook targeting. The results versus effort were so poor that we cancelled a recent campaign and put the money back into Google and Facebook.

5.) Republican Party:

Faced with huge wins and an unpopular President and Congress, the Republican Party seems totally out of touch and unable to capitalize on the Nation’s sentiment, due to their move to the extreme right. Since winning control of the House, they are doing everything they can to upset even those in their own party. This is serving to bolster an unpopular President and set themselves up for 2012 losses. You read it hear first; Obama will get re-elected and they will lose several House seats.

6.) Groupon’s Super Bowl Commercial:

The Groupon spot in the Superbowl made the Go Daddy commercials seem almost palatable. The irony? A company based on social shares misses how easy it is to crowdsource feedback BEFORE you launch a concept.

Chris Beck

Chief Vision Officer @ #26dottwo

chris [at] 26dottwo [dot] com

Rather than looking at traditional, broad based demographic groups, such as “women 25-54,” consider focusing your media strategy on specific key consumer segments. You’ll get very different outcomes if you look at the media consumption of a “single, 24 year old female”, a “38 year old working mom,” or a “54 year old empty nester.” Although they all fall into the “female 25-54” demographic, you will want to connect with them in entirely different ways.

Have a Deep Dive Understanding of Each Media

Here are some key questions to ask yourself when trying to gain a deep understanding of media: How are people engaging with it? What is their time spent and frequency of use? What are the differences in web versus mobile or tablet? This deep dive just resulted in us doing the first campaign on Evite.com, where the messaging was segmented for the hosts and guests. We recognized entirely different opportunities for commercial engagement and, as simple as that sounds, it had never been done before

Take Risks

If you are studying your consumer segments with a focus on how they are consuming and engaging with the media, and understand the media being invested in, the “risk” will more often than not generate higher results than your previous “safer” strategies.

Taking a risk isn’t “dabbling”, which in itself often just proves that the new strategy and tactics “don’t work.” Invest enough to achieve high reach and frequencies with your targets and understand how optimize.

Thought Economy

Just because you have 60 seconds or 140 characters, doesn’t mean you need to use them. Shorter, more precisely targeted ads can generate much higher performance.

Consumer Attention is a New Success Metric

The more money you spend and the more mediums you purchase doesn’t necessarily translate into a better connection with your audience. A true focus on the 5^th P (people) will position your brand for both increased visibility and commercial engagement, which is the next benchmark for success. As long as your marketing strategy isn’t siloed, it will serve to open up new creative messaging options to better connect with your specific consumer segments.

Don’t Let Your Agency Partners Outsource Your Future

Your agency either embraces, studies and invests in the usage of digital, social and search…or they don’t. It’s a good time to evaluate whether any of these critical communication strategies and tactics are being outsourced to freelancers and “white labeled” by outside agencies. We believe your agency should own it!

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!

It’s often the creative that you feel “so-so” about that actually generates a connection with your target. You don’t truly know until you try. Managing AdWords, social and digital campaigns give you amazing insights into what messaging is actually connecting and with whom. Consider multiple pieces of creative, even when using “traditional” media. Don’t forget that great creative becomes bad creative once it hits a frequency level of 5 to 9 times; this can happen with social in a matter of days or traditional in about a week.

Think Mobile

The first part of your mobile strategy should center around a truly mobile enabled website and e-commerce solution, optimized for smartphones. The function and design of your mobile enable website should be based on a real understanding of how consumers are using mobile

Don’t Just Buy It. Live It!

You can’t really understand the digital and social consumer if you aren’t living it. There’s a lot to be said for walking the walk, (or umm…typing the tweet). If you are an actual Pandora user (versus someone who simply learns about its functionality), you understand the different environment of Pandora web versus mobile. Use your smartphone for research and commerce; it will give you a hands-on approach to best practice.

Have a Happy, Successful New Year! If you’re looking for an agency that truly embraces these resolutions, connect with us.

Chris Beck

Chief Vision Officer @ #26dottwo

chris [at] 26dottwo [dot] com

Marketing strategists invest a great amount of time debating the percentages of media to allocate in new media versus traditional media. However, to the consumer there isn’t a distinction between “old” and “new” media; it’s all just media to them.  While we will always be responsible for delivering “top down” messaging and ROI, we can do this with respect to learnings gained from the social and digital consumer.

The next generation of strategy is all about meeting consumers in the middle, in a mash-up of “bottom up” and “top down” messaging. The old adage of, “We have two ears and one mouth,” is apropos to marketing today. Listen twice as much as you speak. Understanding what your segmented consumer groups are talking about, searching for and even the syntax they use when speaking, can all be extremely valuable in connecting your messaging and identifying tactics.

A significant stumbling block to capitalizing on this mash-up, as well as a source of client frustration, is siloed marketing organizations and the increasing use of outsourcing/”white labeling” digital and social strategy. Understanding social conversations and search analytics is crucial to developing “top down” creative and strategy. Everyone on the team should understand the segmented consumer groups, brand objectives and have a deep dive understanding of how and what media the consumer is consuming. Buyers and negotiators should have a clear understanding of campaign objectives and creative approaches, not just “old school” commoditized target goals of GRPs, CPPs and CPMs. If not, you’ll never meet the consumer in the middle.

Chris Beck

Chief Vision Officer @ #26dottwo

chris [at] 26dottwo [dot] com

In an age of geo-, contextual, behavioral and re-targeting, why can’t Arbitron’s radio ratings service provide something as simple as demographic data at the zip code or embedded city level? Even more baffling is that in the age of commercial “engagement,” are we supposed to believe that being included in ten minute plus commercial break is somehow “engaging”?

The answer to both questions is Arbitron’s move to Portable People Meters, from a diary methodology. There is no argument that PPMs are more accurate, but due to the cost of implementing PPM, there are roughly 50% fewer actual people being surveyed. Furthermore, broadcasters have opted to create fewer “tune out” options, thus piling all of the hours of commercial messages into two stop sets.

PPMs are a pager-like device that select people agree to “wear”. The device picks up embedded codes to ascertain a real time analysis of signals you are actually exposed to, versus stations you wrote down in a diary.

No doubt it’s a better mousetrap, but the by-products of so few PPMs in the field and the 8+ minute commercial breaks, (not including promotional announcements,) is shooting radio in the ear.

Strategically, it has become impossible to get meaningful, discrete listener data by zip code or even city data.  An example: in 2008 in the San Francisco Metro area, there were a total of 7,176 dairies. The current number of those surveyed with PPM meters is 3,771. But what if you want to ascertain discrete demographic listenership in an embedded city the size of Napa, California? Not possible. There are only 30 people meters in the entire County of Napa, thus any discrete demographic data is unstable.

Meanwhile, terrestrial radio usage is suffering a slow drain and advertisers who are not first in the set are all but guaranteed their message will not be heard. Ironically, Pandora (terrestrial radio’s nemesis) is the poster child for targeting geographically, demographically and by platform.

Chris Beck

Chief Vision Officer @ #26dottwo

chris [at] 26dottwo [dot] com