Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As Big Data matures beyond the hype, organizations are re-evaluating how they approach it. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO at Mozilla, describes an interesting strategic shift from “Big Data” to “Lean Data”:

“For growth-minded companies, collecting customer data for the sake of collecting data is more risk than the rewards can usually justify. Instead, we should be looking for ways to collect less data and go lean. Why? Because our collection tools create expensive overhead and risks that are impacting the trust of our customers in a negative way…

“For the most part, compiling bigger and more complex sets of customer data will not lead to the big profit and marketshare breakthroughs that Big Data promises. Instead, we marketers must learn to live and think lean. The twin false gods of Big Data and MarTech will continue to encourage thousands of marketers to gather all the data they can wielding an ever-expanding arsenal of tools to sift through it all, with little discussion about whether the mad scramble to vacuum up customer info is worth the trouble, expense, and risk…...

People are moving to mobile in droves, but market researchers haven't followed. GetFeedback and SurveyMonkey want to change that.

The days of lengthy online surveys are numbered, and the startup GetFeedback and online survey leader SurveyMonkey are both poised to benefit.

Countless millions of dollars are spent validating the mobile revolution with adoption statistics and usage metrics. Ironically, the field of market research itself appears to have overlooked this shift, relying on outdated technology and techniques that are increasingly at odds with mobile attention spans.

According to Forrester Research, just 17% of researchers had taken their survey processes mobile as of December 2012. The most obvious side effect is falling response rates. But businesses also risk alienating existing or prospective customers by seeming out-of-step with their communications preferences. There's a lot of money at stake: A staggering $18.9 billion on a global basis is spent annually on telephone polls, online surveys, questionnaires, and other market research, says the Council of American Survey Research Organizations. Roughly $2 billion is spent on online surveys in the United States alone, according to the market research firm IBISWorld....

Some 58% of consumers in the United States say they have shopped online while watching TV, according to a recent report from Blackhawk Engagement Solutions.

The report was based on data from an April 2015 survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,608 adults in the United States.

The most popular time for online shopping is between 4 PM and 9 PM, local time, with 48% of respondents saying that's when they do so.

Some 37% of consumers admit to shopping online while at work; 18% say they do so often, and 19% say they do so sometimes.

In-Store Behavior

-  40% of respondents say they use their smartphone camera to demo, share, and compare products they find in-store.

-  19% have purchased a product from a competitor on their smartphone while being in-store.

-  38% say Amazon.com is their first choice for comparing prices on their smartphone....

To be truly successful in marketing and advertising, we need to understand human motivation and behaviour at a deep level so that we are more able to influence it. Yet the marketing industry has clung to the same frameworks for modelling the ways that people evaluate information and make decisions for decades.

That picture is changing quickly as thinking from the worlds of economics and psychology creep into marketing. A discipline called behavioural economics, in particular, is challenging many of our old assumptions and helping us to think about how our customers behave in totally new ways...