Confusing Questionnaires

The new Disney movie Chimpanzee is out in theaters, and it got raves from CinemaScore, a market research firm that rates films based on feedback from opening night viewers. This approach ostensibly helps the studio decide how much additional money to put into advertising.

I saw a funny quote in a news article recently about the film:

On a curious note, 5 percent of CinemaScore participants said a main reason for attending the film was its "lead actor." Were they referring to the film's two lead apes? Or narrator Tim Allen? Even stranger, 1 percent listed "lead actress" as their reason for buying a ticket -- and that 1 percent gave the movie a harsh "B-" grade. Clearly those individuals were upset by the documentary's lack of actresses.

My take is this: this is a questionnaire problem, not a viewer confusion problem. Take a look at the CinemaScore questionnaire card as shown at Wikipedia. It reveals a very simple, paper-based form, the major features of which is a grade from "A" to "F" a la a student report card. From this card, I conclude the following things:

• The focus of the card is on the overall rating, suggesting that the other data will be less than perfect. This approach is appropriate for the purpose of the card but also subject to misinterpretation by uneducated interpreters. Conclusion: always be wary of the potential misinterpretation of your data once it gets out of your hands.
• The form of questionnaire and sampling technique (paper-based intercept survey) does not allow much flexibility for the interview, resulting in some strange question choices--hence the problem in the quote above about "lead actor." Conclusion: take survey results through the lens of how well the survey actually matches the customer behavior.
• The CinemaScore system purportedly does a good job of its primary purpose: predicting the box office success of films. Conclusion: don't necessarily change your market research approach because the data look skewed.

I learned this last lesson in spades when I helped to revise the Paint Consumers Research Program questionnaire a few years ago. The previous questionnaire had asked "brand purchased" as an open-ended question, resulting in some people saying they purchased Behr paint at Lowe's, where the brand is not currently available. We tried to fix this problem by prompting respondents to answer the store first and then showing only brands that were available through that store.

The new approach helped, but I only realized after we launched the survey that we failed to add a "don't know" option to both the store list and the brand list. Thus, if you chose "Lowe's" when you really shopped at Home Depot, you would not see "Behr" and potentially have some of the same confusion the original survey had. My take-away was to take care in the future not to dismiss automatically the results of a survey just because some of the results were skewed. Because sometimes the "fix" can cause new problems as well.

De Facto Standard

What do Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Xerox and Vocollect have in common? At some point in their brand history, each of these companies have become the de facto standard in their industry. Achieving this goal requires having a vastly superior product and/or some major network effects.

What can you do with this market position? One excellent strategy (shown at left) is to remind your prospects that you are the industry standard. This strategy works effectively in part because any customer, especially in the B2B setting, wants to mitigate risk. Customers are risk-averse for human reasons, not just business reasons. The average individual wants to be a hero for picking the right solution rather than a goat for picking the solution that doesn't work.

In essence, reminding customers that you are the industry standard is not inwardly-focused marketing (which would be a bad idea). Rather, the idea is to remind prospective buyers that nobody ever got fired for buying Vocollect Voice(R). That's not something our competitors can say, by the way.

Sometimes, the de facto standard occurs because there were not other options to choose, but I have found more often that the de facto standard is, frankly, better.

International Brand Names Redux

What did I say about careful international brand naming?

Powergen...a great name in the United States. Not so great in Italy.

Visionary Thinking

Roger Byford founded Vocollect 25 years ago. Today, we look at the Talkman(R) device and think, "It's just another wearable computer." We have smart phones that do 100 times more than this little thing, cost less (albeit for much less rugged use) and work in such a user-friendly way. But imagine what it took to start this company 25 years ago.

Just to remind you, this was the age in which Steve Jobs was just leaving Apple to start NeXt Computer. In which Robert Tappan Morris was just unleashing the first major network-crashing virus. In which people were jazzed about IBM's new Silverlake line of midrange computers. In other words, not an era in which many people were thinking about wearables and the future of the supply chain.

In fact, I told Roger today that if he had come up to me in 1988 and described his business, I would have probably thought him a complete crackpot. "You're going to design a computer that you wear that listens to the worker in the middle of a noisy distribution center, understands what he says, and then tells him what to do and where to go on the basis of that speech recognition?"

The success of this company just shows me what "future vision" really means. I stopped by the third floor display case today that contains one of those first Mercury wearable device models. It's impressive, both because of its size and because of the audacity of its vision. And here we are two decades later talking about the shrinking market in our grocery business... because Vocollect already has 80% of the Supermarket Top 75 using our product.

What's your vision of the future? Automated guided vehicles that pick full truckloads and then drive them (driverless) to the store? Self-guiding packages that move themselves into position in the supply chain? Because if you're thinking about something like recently purchased Kiva Systems, I believe you that may be looking too near into the future. The big winners are going to be products from the visionaries like Roger who see the possibilities more than two decades ahead and then have the audacity, persistence, skills and sheer guts to fulfill those possibilities.

Category Management Bonanza!

I have had an unbelievable number of headhunter calls recently looking for category managers. It seems a lot of companies, especially in the B2B space, have finally gotten serious about getting the right portfolio of products set up at the right prices in the right channels.

If you're looking for someone like this, I have news for you: it's gonna cost you. My former employees are almost all making six-figure salaries or close to it, and they have 8-10 years less experience than I do. Talent in this particular category is just getting hard to find, and the value they bring is commanding some serious cash.

Another One Bites the Grass

Title of today's post comes from one of my favorite books from business school, Another One Bites the Grass: Making Sense of International Advertising by Simon Anholt, a former advertising exec. One of the points he makes in the book is the danger of problematic brand names in the international sphere. He mentions many famous stories such as the idea that Coca-Cola meant "bite the wax tadpole" in Mandarin and was therefore changed to sound more like "makes the mouth happy." But he also mentions a few I had never heard such as the Chevy Nova, which means "Chevy doesn't go" in Spanish.  A nice cold Pschitt, anyone?

I thought of this problem today when I saw a travel post including the product to the left. Wash your clothes in Barf! Smells clean and fresh!

We face this problem at Vocollect due to a name someone chose many years ago. Voice...collect...Vocollect. Makes sense in English, right? But in Spanish "colec" means "collective" (not bad) and "colect" means "garbage collector" (not so hot). In French, the sound is like "collection of calf" (also not so hot). Then there is the Talkman device. In Norwegian, the word "tok" means "building," which is not bad I guess considering that our product is used in large buildings.

When naming a product, some basic research on Google Translate might be in order. I personally favor made-up brand names. Google is a good example, an easier-to-spell bastardization of the number "googol." Alternatively, consider a brand name with positive associations in major romance languages if you ever plan to expand to Canada or Mexico, our largest trading partner in the U.S. The brand name "Liberto" would sound a little like "liberty" in English, Spanish, and French, and it would be fairly defensible trademark because it's a made-up word.

When I run the zoo, that's just what I'll do.

Employment Branding

Fortune magazine's most admired companies list for 2012 is out. Ever wonder why Disney is #13 on "most admired" but does not even appear on Fortune's list of best companies to work for in the United States? The reason is a gap between the corporate brand and the "employment brand."

Just as a brand helps make positive associations for the product for potential consumers and a corporate brand helps make positive associations for a company's products under the corporate umbrella, an employment brand makes positive associations for the consumers of the company's jobs. In this case, the "consumers" are potential employees, and the "product" is the jobs they are advertising at the time.

Just like a regular brand, your employment brand helps you with the four P's of marketing, in this case the product being the job itself and company culture, the price being pay and benefits, the place being the realms through which you promote jobs such as LinkedIn Jobs and Monster.com, and the promotion being the materials you use to talk about the company (e.g., Website) and even ways you talk about the company during the interview process itself. Each item has a potentially significant impact on the talent you can attract.

Changes to these four areas don't just happen by accident. At Vocollect, for example, we have an innovative way to interview prospective candidates on the "visit day" that makes the process smoother and faster for applicants. This process helped me understand our collaborative and innovative culture and helped attract me to the company. Other elements of the "product" such as the game room with pinball and ping-pong tables helped position the company as still a cool tech company despite our relative maturity.

Employment branding is a critical consideration for HR in an era of competition for some of the most skilled positions. If you disagree with me, someday try hiring a skilled product manager with a degree in computer science and experience in a full cycle product development process from concept to launch. You'll find it's not as simple as just paying more than the competition. In fact, I know some engineers who just ignore the recruiter calls these days because, despite the potentially better pay, they just "can't be bothered" given how well-paid and happy they are right now.

Understanding where HR falls short requires some serious market research among the target hire population. To my amazement given this talent shortage, in my experience there are only a few research companies thinking seriously about this topic.  One is Gallup, the polling-organization-turned-consulting-firm, which has devoted an entire practice to employment branding. Another is Kenexa, a consulting firm that specializes in the topic. Global firms such as Ipsos seem to have pockets of interest in employment branding worldwide, most notably in the UK office.  Maritz Research has clearly done work in this area but doesn't highlight it very well.

So here's my challenge to some of the "big guns" out there: trumpet your employment branding market research better on the Web, in articles and even in the comments below. There is a latent market out there waiting to improve companies' hiring processes. And improving the interview processes and the jobs themselves for all of us who are occasionally in the job market.