Buzz around biz

Brainstorming techniques: Wishing

I wanted to test leading a divergence session with friends who haven't done a lot of brainstorming before. I tried to find an easy to understand technique that would also be easy to do with nearly any group. I opted for a technique called wishing.

In short, in wishing you write down wishes about the subject on a piece of paper in order to expand thinking, disregarding what's realistic and practical. Simply write down things that would be really nice, structured in sentences starting with "I wish..." or "Wouldn't it be nice if...". The wild ideas gathered can be used by thinking how they could be achieved in practice.

We did the brainstorming in a group of three on the topic of "How do you wish long-distance trains would change". I explained the method and tried to emphasize that practicality or reality play no part in this.

While everyone had the usual "I wish trains were free"-wishes, they also managed to come up with some out of the box stuff in a relatively short time with minimal prepping. Here are a few examples of wishes and their practical counterparts:

I wish trains were hovercraft
-> Less noise and movement in the cabins

I wish trains were on time
-> Pure fantasy, no practical counterpart

I wish trains only had cabins with different music genres playing in them
-> Somewhat realistic as is

 

The method might have been a bit too simple to get completely out of the box, but it seemed to work at least adequately in a quick setting like this. Wishing is definitely an improvement over simply telling people to write down ideas if you ever need to come up with a bunch of ideas quickly.

 

Links:

 http://creatingminds.org/tools/wishing.htm

Reaction paper 3

Market-Oriented Ethnography and Ethnography in Strategic Consumer Research 

Turns out people are pretty bad at predicting what they'll do in the future. That's why it's not necessarily the best idea to go around asking people just that without taking it with a grain of salt. Even if they did do what they say they would, how easy would it be to communicate all the nuances properly in a verbal answer? That's why you need to watch people and interpret meanings from larger pieces of the puzzle. Good ethnography is about revealing tacit knowledge and documenting it.

Arnould et al. present three different orientations in ethnography: micro, macro, and meso. Essentially these orientations try to dig into different aspects of consumer culture.
Micro-oriented ethnography is about discovering the relationships between the consumer and a resource. This is the approach taken when seeking out how something is used, or how people think about a product. It doesn't dig into any deeper meanings or why consumption takes a particular form, which means that the results are very context-dependent.

In macro-oriented ethnography, the main goal is to identify templates in the consumer culture. Moving to an abstract level, results can provide guidelines on how to utilize those templates. The major problem in a macro-oriented approach is the deep focus into the minds of individual; everyday relations can be overlooked and meanings can be lost.

A meso-oriented ethnography is about watching people and asking about their goals instead of their actions. To understand things that really matter to consumers, you must focus on what goes on around the interesting actions. It's about watching people use resources in everyday life, and interpreting all the complex relationships around that.

While all these approaches can yield intriguing results, that's not enough in a business environment. Elliot et al. suggest pairing ethnographers and strategists to get the most value out of the knowledge gained from ethnographies.

I think it's useful to realize that there are different approaches to ethnography, and knowing what kind of information you want is quite essential in first choosing the preferred approach and then the actual method.

 

Based on the following references:

Elliot, Richard and Nick Jankel – Elliot (2003), "Using ethnography in strategic consumer research", Qualitative Marketing Research, 6(4),215-223.

Arnould, Eric. J. and Price, Linda L. (2006), "Market-Oriented Ethnography Revisited", Journal of Advertising Research, Sept. 251-262.

Idea report 2

Know your enemy

So my idea has morphed from a catalogue into a geolocation app with the main goal of finding your friends real-time. I'm also trespassing on very unfamiliar ground here, since I'm carrying a phone designed circa 1642.

Last time I focused entirely on the idea itself and didn't really have any time to do research on apps similar to the reformed idea, so this time the point was to explore the unknown (to me at least) and see what comes up.

Turns out I'm not the only one with similar ideas. I'm also about three years late with them.

I took a closer look at existing check-in and tracking apps. Foursquare is one of the more popular services, and Gowalla has been around since 2007. There are also big players on the field: Facebook Places has launched in some countries, and Google Latitude has been out for a while.

 

Foursquare

Foursquare is an application where you form networks, check in at places, see where your friends have been, where your friends are now, and what they've written about places.

From a quick poll on IRC it seemed like most of the people that did not use Foursquare did not have any idea what it's even about. A few of my acquaintances were familiar with it though, and two had the pleasure of filling me in on how they use the service.

The first user was mainly interested in observing other peoples' behavior in the long run; checking what services friends use, and what kind of people hang around at the same places. On the run usage was mostly about checking who has been to a particular place before, and what they thought about it. This acquaintance was also quite into the "game" side of Foursquare.

The second user used the service quite differently; real-time use was the key. The most important information was where friends are right now, whether it be for company for shopping or for a bar night. Foursquare was apparently slightly lacking in this department, since the only updates come from manual check-ins at different places, and there was no "map view" way to see your friends on a map that the user knew of, while it was possible to navigate to the places through check-in notices. The user mentioned that Google Latitude would serve these needs better, but hardly anyone uses it, so Foursquare was still the service of choice.

Also of note was that neither user was using iPhone; Foursquare apparently provides a check-in popup in their iPhone app, making real-time tracking slightly less of a hassle.

 

Gowalla

None of my friends knew of Gowalla. It takes quite a different approach, turning exploration and travelling into a game of sorts. You stamp your virtual passport at physical places, collecting a portfolio of travels. You can take trips or courses made by others in the physical world if you want suggestions on what to do. Of course there's also a networking element involved, with sharing photos and comments.

Gowalla is all about discovery. Quoting their guided tour: "We make discovering the world around you both fun and memorable". It looks like a very interesting concept, and there's certainly a lot that could be... intelligently borrowed. All in all it doesn't look like there's much overlap.

According to Wikipedia, Gowalla had 150k users to Foursquare's 500k users in March 2010, so it's still quite a big service. I might have had better luck asking about a travel-centric service from people who can actually afford to travel instead of my mostly poor student friends.

 

Facebook Places

As far as I could gather, Facebook Places is not actually yet available in Finland, but it's out in some places. From their blog posts and videos, it seems like Places is combining day-to-day-centric features and discovery & traveling oriented stuff.

There might not be much social candy involved, but do they really need any? Facebook has over 500 million users. That's three orders of magnitude more than Foursquare. They already have an absolutely huge community in the other parts of their service, and getting them to use Places too should be relatively easy.

As the second Foursquare example tells us, the community is the key in these services (too). There's no point going at it against Facebook Places with essentially the same service but a slightly better UI. You have to differentiate.

On a side note, it looks like Facebook is only offering the service for mobiles as an iPhone app or through their mobile site for touch screen phones. This means users with non-touch screen phones (all three of them!) are screwed.

 

Google Latitude

Out of the four, Google Latitude is the only real tracking service. You opt-in to let the service track and show your location to other users with the accuracy you decide.

In a very Google-ish manner, as far as I can gather, the service does just that and very little more. It seems more like a tech demo than a money making scheme. However, it's very close to the core of my reformed idea, which is simply to show your friends on the map.

 

Thoughts

None of the services quite encompass everything I had in mind:

• Foursquare is tailored more towards "sequential" use as opposed to real-time
• Gowalla is about travelling and discovery, not real-time tracking
• Facebook Places lacks social hooks and that extra thing
• Google Latitude gets close in tech, but not as a social service

Overall though, the existing services do come very near what would ideally be my turf. I think the biggest problem here by far is Facebook Places. It doesn't need to be that special because it's sitting on 500 million users. Others need to be different.

It would be plausible to be different from Foursquare by simply focusing more on the real-time features and not forgetting about the social side. Something like Google Latitude meets Foursquare would be close. I just don't think that would be enough to attract people away from Facebook en masse.

On the other hand, if Facebook Places completely blows, but manages to introduce geolocation apps to the masses, there's a good opportunity for a user grab. I also do think it would be possible to differentiate and use niches wisely to stay alive, but is it worth it going there? I'm not entirely convinced at this point.

Reaction paper 2

Ethnographies and Netnographies 

Since all of the articles overlap considerably, this time I decided to simply write my thoughts about all of them in a single text.

It's very hard to gain insight into other cultures and the way their actions and interactions are fundamentally affected by that culture. The study of groups of people and their culture is called ethnography.

In practice, It's usually a good idea to take a very close look at what exactly is happening in a qualitative manner. The traditional approach is to send a researcher into the field and having him either watch or participate while taking field notes. Observing like this takes a considerable amount of skill and time, which means that the research is expensive, and that it takes time for results to come in.

On the other hand, the results are hard to get to by other means. Quantitative approaches don't tell much about the complex interactions and culture; information that can have considerable impact on business with aware marketing.

Fortunately for those seeking knowledge in this area, the world is going virtual fast and so is ethnography. Virtual ethnography, or "netnography" as Kozinets calls it, is the same practice in a virtual environment.

The fact that no physical presence is required already makes virtual ethnography that much more accessible, but information is also quite readily available for those who are willing to study it. This also means that virtual ethnography can easily be completely unobtrusive while traditional physical studies might have trouble with it. Doing "invisible" research online does raise some ethical questions, however.

Kozinets brought up five different types of online communities:

1. Boards and newsgroups
2. Web pages and rings
3. Email lists
4. MUDs, now evolved into MMOs
5. Chat

The best results from a marketing point of view come from targeting communities formed around specific brands and products, which generally are one of the first three types. Also online games and chat communities tend to gather similar-minded people together, so they are also useful if you're looking for data from specific types of people.

The age of the articles is evident with the lack of talk about social media and social gaming platforms. They pose and interesting dilemma when viewed through the model presented here, since they can combine multiple, if not all, aspects of these communities. Services like Facebook have also gathered a lot of users, which means that newsgroups and such might not be the most fruitful target anymore.

Particularly when formulating and developing ideas, I thought that autoethnography, i.e. the practice of studying one's own experiences to reveal things that are usually taken for granted, is interesting. It's of course not a new concept by any means, but encountering and deepening the topic in the articles had me thinking. It's not easy to do, for me at least, but noticing things that usually just happen can leads to revelations and new ideas.

 

Based on the following references:

Moisander, J. & Valtonen, A. (2005), Qualitative Marketing Research: A Cultural Approach, Sage: London. Chapter 3

Arnould, Eric. J. & Wallendorf, Melanie (1994) "Market-Oriented Ethnography: Interpretation Building and Marketing Strategy Formulation", Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XXXI (November 1994), 484-504.

Kozinets, Robert, V. (2002) 'The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities", Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (1): 61-72.

Idea report 1

Reflection

For the first meeting session I had prepared a few ideas for presentation. One of them was an online bar catalogue that was supposed to help you decide where to spend your night off with social features influencing the decision.

The idea received quite a mild welcome – no surprises there. It was actually the idea I had spent the least time thinking about, but it became evident rather quickly that it was the only one I had prepared that might eventually have any actual potential.

Even before reading more into the comments I received I knew that the idea was a mess – a lot of the stuff I said during the presentation were ideas I had had on the spot that I thought improved the concept. No wonder I didn’t convince most people – I certainly didn’t convince myself with that.

The main problem is that the idea completely lacked focus. What did I want to do? Did I want a desktop bar catalogue with prices, social mobile functions, mobile maps, or perhaps something else?

Giving it some thought, that’s not how to come up with great ideas. Features are nice, but they are really a bit further out there. The center of an idea should be simpler – if you can’t really squeeze the essence of an idea into a very brief description, odds are it might not be very good. That’s not something I could do with this “online bar catalogue”, not outright at least.


Comments

I wrote down some of the comments I received and gave them further thought from a more general perspective, since it was clear my idea was going to transform.

Must be very, very easy to use
The little engineer in me (and the multiple usability courses probably didn’t hurt either) initially shrugged this off. Of course it has to be easy to use, what’s the point in making it hard? Then it hit me like so many times before – people aren’t mind readers. Certainly not busy people you’re trying to sell ideas to. It’s also very important to be aware that some ideas really do depend entirely on good execution.

Premium content
It brings in revenue and it makes users stay. It also means there must be some free content that gets people hooked. It’s no wonder it’s a very widely used model.

Users need a “push”
Having a good service doesn’t hurt, but getting users to try it out can be a challenge.

Social status or competition
It's amazing how many of my friends chase "achievement points" with no utility whatsoever in games. The mayor example that came up is virtually the same thing. This was a very good subject to discuss, because these kind of social status symbols really do motivate people, and I totally had not thought about it at all.

Globality
Not everything has to be applicable globally to be successful, but maybe this is a good sanity check – if the generalization of the idea doesn't have anything going for it on a larger scale, perhaps it isn't all that kosher.


Take two

I didn't want to dismiss the subject entirely, because it still felt like there is potential there. The whole idea was simply unfocused. Where was the potential? When thinking about it, I always seemed to come back to this image I had of a map on your mobile's screen that shows where your friends are:



This is the essence of what I think would be a great service to have around – knowing where your friends are by simply glancing at your mobile. It doesn't even need to have anything to do with bars, although I still do think that a Friday night's dilemma of where to go is one of the more straightforward applications of something like this.

The concept is to have this local mobile friend finder of sorts at the core of the service, while also providing related services through the web. It would be cool to see where your friends are around the globe even if you're spending the night at home. For now the extra features are just that though, let's test the main point first.

But how to get the users to broadcast themselves? I initially saw this as a problem – who would want to broadcast to the world where they are? I only have to look at the plethora of social media out there to see that people *want* to broadcast themselves, as long as there's a network of people. The comments suggest special offers to get people started, free premium trials to get them deeper, and social hooks to get them addicted. Maybe you'll break 100 hours of broadcast time this week to get an achievement and free premium features, including a customizable marker color, for the next week?

I'm not entirely sure yet what would be the best way to monetize the idea properly. Premium memberships would bring in some revenue, but that's only limited. I've heard people say that the worth of a social service is in its user base. Sounds sensible, but how exactly do you turn that into revenue (especially as advertising is banned)? Preferably something other than selling it to someone who knows. I need to do some research and more thinking on this.

I don't know if any geolocation apps like this exist. The technology should easily be there, but I haven't really heard of any similar service. Unfortunately I didn't have time to delve into existing applications this week, but that's something I'll be looking into. If you know of any outright, let me know so I can check it out!

Reaction paper 1

Qualitative Marketing Research , A Cultural Approach

Johanna Moisander and Anu Valtonen write about the shift towards cultural analysis in marketing in their paper Qualitative Marketing Research, A Cultural Approach. Purchasing events aren't simply transactions, the always involve cultural exchange.

By analyzing the marketplace and events, we gain insight into how people use products and services, and how they both if into and shape the consumers' culture. It's not all about the what, it's very much about the how as well. How do things affect the consumers' lives?

As academic marketing research was losing relevance, papers which took a cultural approach were gaining it. Interpretive marketing and qualitative methods seemed to fit reality better.

The way to get insight into culture is focusing on the actual customers during their interaction with products and services. Culture is not easily reducible to simple variables, so you absolutely need to take a qualitative approach.

Marketers themselves also have a role to play. If the link between them and consumers works, they are more of cultural mediators than passive information feeders. As such, it is a good idea to study marketers and consumers together, because the interaction between them is also a part of the culture.

The important lesson from this is that consumers aren't simply about numbers. Everything can't be reduced to variables, you need to watch the consumers and qualitatively look at what the culture is like, and how the products and services affect it. I like this approach.

One thing that came up and is quite evident, but important to realize, is that products and services are not simply passive objects to be interacted with in specific states. They can also produce states. While you might mainly use a mobile friend finder when you're going out, you might get an urge to go out while using a service like that. Consumers' behavior might determine what products and services they use, but it's a two-way street.


E-Tribalized Marketing?: The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption

Robert V. Kozinets makes the very important point in his paper, E-Tribalized Marketing?: The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption, that when dealing on the Internet, there is no longer such thing as a one-on-one relationship. People talk with each other and they form groups. Inside these virtual communities news travels fast, and the effect it has to traditional one-on-one approaches is not pretty.

Consumers should not be treated as a passive party, especially in an online environment, because they are in fact very active in different ways, and understanding the different types of users and activities leads to successful marketing.

When encountering a new community online, users gradually move from simply watching to participating in the discussion. The generalization is that categorized between social ties within the community and the subject's self-centrality to the user, there are four archetypes of users: tourists, minglers, devotees, and insiders.

Devotees and insiders, who feel very close to the subject, are the so called heavy users in online communities. They form the minority that has the potential to consume the majority.

Being a community, opinions and images propagate inside these groups. The loyal users can influence the others inside their community very efficiently, because they are active and influential. You really want to take care of your most loyal users, because they are both heavy consumers and the get others to become loyal users as well.

There are also different ways of interaction between individual users and a community. Subgroups within form more or less separate factions. Understanding the interaction is complex, but it also provides great opportunities the better the community is understood.

It's a very interesting topic, as nowadays it's all about communities. Virality for example has tremendous power on the Internet. I think the main points to pick up are to be conscious that communities are very powerful and an active party in online dealings, and they definitely have to be taken into account. Preferably you should aim to somehow ally yourself with them, and get the community leaders on your side. That's the key to leveraging the whole community.

Important note though: it works both ways. Don't get caught in a backlash, it's not pretty.

Hello World!

!dlroW olleH