Audience Engagement

From my own personal experience – engagement starts with an individual experience – I think in order for engagement to formulate in our brains there has to be an intrinsic or altruistic source from which engagement would flow.  Certainly you could say that altruism would support perhaps the idea that engagement can be “infectious,” but even altruism serves the ego.  

As Gambetti alludes to, it is the person’s mental and emotional feelings about the product that illicit an engaging response.  Gambetti also expands on this by saying it is how the individual perceives the personal value of a product that engenders engagement (Gambetti & Graffigna, 2010) – so in a sense it has to have an intrinsic or altruistic value.  Further Gambetti goes on to discuss how it is that through these experiences engagement is promoted by involving the senses (Gambetti & Graffigna, 2010).  

I think the idea that in order for engagement to occur there has to be more to the experience of product that reaches the person.  Nakamura and Cshikszentminalyi (2002) argue that there has to be a connection to the product or idea – one that transcends the products material value and appeals to our inner “self,” or our sense of there being an altruistic value to the products – a value that a person can attach themselves to, thus forming the basis for engagement.  

I do a lot of marketing for issues and causes – where it is all about changing minds.  For example, we rep a coconut water company.  We spend almost no time marketing the value of the product in terms of its nutrition as its 99.9% water – but we market the idea that drinking coconut water makes someone feel closer to nature and perhaps that they are making a difference in the world by buying a product that supports local growers.  If it was not for this type of appeal and engagement we would just be pitching sweet water.  

The trend in engagement these days is how it is measured – Bjimolt et al do a great job at exploring the metrics by which engagement is measured these days.  I use Google Analytics frequently and audience engagement (i.e. what pages are visited in what order, etc.) is becoming a valuable tool for practitioners to measure the appearance of audience engagement.  

By Ari Morguelan

References:

Bijmolt, T. H. A., Leeflang, P. S. H., Block, F., Eisenbeiss, M., Hardie, B. G. S., Lemmens, A. l., et al. (2010). Analytics for Customer Engagement. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 341-356.

Gambetti, R., & Graffigna, G. (2010). The concept of engagement. International Journal of Market Research, 52(6), 801-826. doi: 10.2501/S1470785310201661

Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). The Construction of Meaning through Vital Engagement. In C. L. M. Keyes & J. Haidt (Eds.), Flourishing (pp. 83-104).

Why Do We Buy - Cognitive Biases - An Interview with a phone buyer

Interview:

Item purchased: Sansumg Galaxy S5 phone

• What research preceded the purchase?

“I compared specs side-by-side to the Iphone 6 to see how the specific features stacked up to each other.  I also wanted to look at pictures of the two phones to see their relative size and weight.  It was important to me to feel like I was getting the best phone for the price I wanted.  I also wanted a phone that was cool, trendy and small.”

• How does the consumer use the product?

“I use my phone every day, for everything, I am on it all the time and I need to have the best phone possible to keep pace with my work.”

• What type of relationship does the consumer have with the product?  (i.e. emotional, practical.)

“I would say my phone knows more about me than my girlfriend, I would acquaint my relationship to my phone like that of a mother and son.”

• What things have gone wrong or been surprisingly good?

“I would have to say that so far I am pleased with my phone, however, I do notice that the overall hardware quality is not as good as the Iphone 6.”

• Is the consumer satisfied or unsatisfied?

“I am very satisfied, having a new phone is like having a new way to connect with people and they get better every year.”

 

In our fast-paced world we inevitably encounter multiple forms of cognitive process as an after effect of being able to process tremendous amounts of information.  For example, errors in memory can affect how someone might think about a particular event. This in turn influences how someone may think about an associated event, which can lead to cognitive bias. Cognitive biases can cause us to make fast and incorrect judgments, decisions, and interpretations of information.

            When evaluating the new phone my interviewee used a metaphor or representative based bias by using another commensurate phone to compare it to. In Jansson-Boyd, (2010) a cognitive metaphor or representativeness is understanding of one idea, in terms of another or in this case one phone in terms of another.  Also, Iphones are considered the best phones on the market so in order to create a benchmark, my interviewee used the Iphone to establish the relative value of the Sansumg phone. 

I also found that my interviewee used predictive heuristics when deciding to purchase his phone.  While there was a ton of data on the internet, including reviews and tech break-downs of the two phones In question my interviewee only considered what he saw in the specs – which are generally written by marketing staff.  Jansson-Boyd (2010) says that “Typically consumers only consider a small part of all the information available to them about a specific product or service and not all the information is attended to and processed, (Jansson0boyd, 2010, P.132).  This may have led to his slight dissatisfaction with his choice. 

            Another factor at play in my interviewee’s decision making process was cognitive dissonance.  My interviewee described wanting to have the best phone but not pay as much for it.  This is a great example where we have conflicting internal desires (Jansson-Boyd, 2010) and the result was that my interviewee bought a phone that was good, but not as expensive as the Iphone.  He has noticed that the quality is not quite that of the Iphone, so he did pay less, but did he get the best phone?

 

 

            Another type of bias that I noticed was the bandwagon approach or consensus approach.  Jansson-Boyd (2010) say that the consensus bias is the credence we give to others peoples decisions.  In this case my interviewee wanted a phone that was “trendy,” which based on my own experience, it is.  So he gave a lot of credence to what other people were buying and overruled his previous experience as Iphones being better. 

What surprised me the most was how much data is left on the table when people make decisions.  Most people would like to think that we are always making the best consumer decisions based on un-biased empirical data but this is just untrue.  It seems we more often make emotional rather than reason based decisions. 

 By Ari Benjamin Morguelan

References:

Jansson-Boyd, Cathrine. (2010). Consumer Psychology. New York, New York: McGraw Hill

 

Using Peronas In Marketing

         I think the most convincing argument for the use of personas from a psychological perspective is given by Mulder et al (2007) in that when designing personas one is required to think outside of themselves and obtain an understanding of who is going to be interacting with the persona.  It is through this process that people can gain a psychological makeup, if you may, of who their audience is and how likely they are to interact with the personas.  Jacobson et al agree with Mulder saying that “he main advantage of working with personas is putting one’s self in someone else’s shoes, (Jacobson et al, 2008, P.3) 

            Mulder et al (2007) suggests that the biggest challenge to creating personas is the fact that it is often hard for us to step outside of ourselves in order to get a clear picture of who we are creating the persona for.  Also, Mulder suggests that research is needed to develop a clear picture of who the audience is and how they will interact with the persona. 

            In the Persona Concept, Toth talks about personas and security, and how personas can be used to assist people with organizing their offline and online personal profiles in one place.  However, this can be fraught with problems – while personas may allow for easy access to multiple platforms however, they are vulnerable to being taken over and if they do, then someone can have access to all of your data.  Toth says “the Persona will need strong tamper resistance, access controls and intrusion detection mechanisms,” and I agree that this is an issue when adapting and deploying personas. 

            Jacobson et al (2008) also discusses how a major pitfall of personas lies within its ability to really relate to the actual user and whether or not it is based on actual research or just intuition.  Also, Jacobson et al (2008) suggests that personas inherently have a drawback in that while they try to represent the user it is often very difficult to represent a user “vividly,” because it is hard to know what is or not important to include. 

            A good example of this give and take is the Enzyte (male enhancement) persona, Smilling Bob, used to sell the supplement.  The upside – he does resonate with people who may actually have those issues.  But the downfall – is that while he may appeal to some people he is also stereotypical and misogynistic and because of that some people will never resonate with the persona. 

 By Ari Benjamin Morguelan

References:

Mulder, Steve, & Yaar, Ziv. (2007). The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web. Berkeley: New Riders.

Toth, K., & Subramanium, M. (2003). The Persona Concept: A Consumer-Centered Identity Model. Paper presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Emerging Applications for Wireless and Mobile Access (MobEA), Budapest Hungary.

Jacobs, A., Dreessen, K., & Pierson, J. (2008). "Thick Personas": Using Ethnographic Methods for Persona Development as a Tool for Conveying the Social Science View in Technological Design. Observatorio (OBS*), 2(2).

SeanBaby. (2009, August 9). Behind The Smile: The Horrible Truth about Bob from Enzyte. Retrieved January 30, 2015, from http://www.cracked.com/blog/behind-the-smile-the-horrible-truth-about-bob-from-enzyte/