How can behaviors be changed?

Marketers’ goal is to convince the consumer to choice his product or brand, to like it and become a fan of it, a loved brand. What can a marketer do when he needs to convince the consumer to change his behavior and change his favorite brand or change his daily routines? How can he reach his goal?

For once you can try doing it online. While all of us spend a great deal of time online,  the digital world has become a convenient gateway to the audience a marketer needs to reach. And because behavior change happens over a period of time, digital is an affordable way to stay in front of your targeted audience. “Behavior change marketing, also known as social marketing, involves adapting the principles of traditional marketing in order to effect a positive behavior change. It involves a deep understanding of an identified target audience in order to better understand the barriers that exist and what might be helpful in motivating them to change,” wrote Vont Performance Digital Marketing.

Moreover, according to the website, the message needs to be fun, easy and popular. Targeting is key and enables you to more closely reach your specific audience. Social media platforms offer you good targeting capabilities, ads are not targeted based on a keyword being searched, but rather on rich demographic and psychographic data known about social media users. Ads can promote content designed to inform and engage the target audience and, therefore, “capture” the wanted audience.

You can also do programmatic digital advertising and use Landing Page/Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).”Targeted ads with calls-to-action that lead to specific landing pages work in tandem to lead your audience to you – and to the specific action you wish them to take. Optimizing the landing page (CRO) further increases the likelihood that the action will be taken,” added Vont.

“Your target audience is (usually) not you. You may think you know them – but do you really? One of the most important pieces of Behavior Change Marketing is having a deep understanding of your target audience. How they think, feel, act…where they hang out, how they talk, who they trust, etc. Don’t assume – do your research. In-depth quantitative and qualitative research is critical in developing an effective behavior change campaign,” explained Ethos Marketing on its blog.

Moreover, the blog shows that when it comes right down to it, Behavior Change Marketing isn’t entirely different from traditional marketing, in which we attempt to convince people to buy a product or service. Behavior Change Marketing is also transactional, but instead of goods we barter with behaviors. “Before you can make someone change their behavior, you need to uncover what’s in it for them. What matters to them enough to change the way they act? Research tells us that this is different for different audiences. In order to affect behavior change you need to alter the perception of the desired action (or inaction). If the goal is to recruit those teenagers back over to Facebook (or away from social media in general), we need to convince them there is a fun, easy, and wicked cool reason to do so.”

Start step by step and keep it up.  Be in continuous connection with your target, follow it, research it, interact with it, use an integrated communication to make sure the consumer feels you are with him all the way.  Don’t just use digital and PR, digital, use traditional and interactive tools as well. Social media, video, direct mail, and experiential marketing all play a part in giving the target audience the knowledge, will and skill to change.

Moreover, make sure you are measuring all the time, in all the campaign’s stages. It’s the only way you can actually see if your process has results or not.

15 Things you might not know about Seth Godin

Seth Godin is one of the world’s most renowned marketing experts and a bestselling author. He was a keynote speaker at BRAND MINDS 2018.

BRAND MINDS is The Biggest Business Event in Central & Eastern Europe.

Seth Godin is the author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books  Linchpin,  Tribes,  The Dip and  Purple Cow.

More things about him that you might not know:

1. He received degrees in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University, followed by an MBA in marketing from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

2. From 1983 to 1986, he worked as a brand manager at Spinnaker Software. After leaving Spinnaker in 1986, he used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment in New York City. He then met Mark Hurst and founded Yoyodyne. After a few years, Godin sold the book packaging business to his employees and focused his efforts on Yoyodyne, where he promoted the concept of permission marketing.

3. In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth founded both Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world.

4. He was recently inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, one of three chosen for this honour in 2013.

5. Godin once again set the book publishing industry on its ear by launching a series of four books via  Kickstarter. The campaign reached its goal after three hours and ended up becoming the most successful book project ever done this way.

6. In April 2016, Godin’s book, All Marketers Are Liars, was selected by Forbes contributor Carine Alexis as one of six essential books every marketer should have on their shelf.

7. His newest book,  What To Do When It’s Your Turn, is already a bestseller.

8. “Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age,” Mary Kuntz wrote in Business Week nearly a decade ago.

9. “We need to care enough to connect, care enough to put ourselves at emotional risk to touch other people and play one note that’s worth hearing,” Godin said for TEDx.

10. According to entrepreneur.com, Godin has one of the most-loved marketing blogs on the internet.

11. In 2005 he launched Squidoo, a website that helps hobbyists publicize and monetize their personal passions and now attracts more than 53 million unique visitors a month.

12. Still, according to entrepreneur.com, he is not a Facebook fan or Twitter and has no publicist. Books from his publishing venture The Domino Project, launched in conjunction with Amazon, did not have major publicity pushes or wide releases at bookstores.

13. As a child, Seth Godin played the clarinet.

14. Godin is aiming to connect with should-be, almost-are or want-to-be artists. 

15.  He created a ten-book series for children titled ‘Worlds of Power’, which was written by various writers and in each series a plot of a video game is explained.

Are you a #worldchanger?

Come to BRAND MINDS 2023!

How is the digital changing the retail experience

According to “The new digital divide” report created by Deloitte, digital influence has grown from 14% of all sales in 2012 (USD 0.33 Trillion) to a whopping 49% in 2014. That’s USD 1.70 Trillion worth of sales influenced digitally. And the number is rising steadily. Moreover, in 2016, digital influence continued its rapid growth, although at a slower rate than we’ve historically seen. At the time of the last study, USD 0.56 of every dollar spent in a store is influenced by a digital interaction. And when we include the primary source of growth in retail—online sales—the impact of digital influence is even greater.

This survey was commissioned by Deloitte and conducted online by an independent research company April 25–May 5, 2016. The survey polled a national sample of 5,014 random consumers. Data were collected and weighted to be representative of the U.S. Census for gender, age, income and ethnicity. The national random sample, sample of device owners and sample of smartphone owners have a margin of error of plus or minus 1-2 percentage points. Additionally, subsets of randomly assigned respondents were asked to provide information about how they use a digital device to shop for a product subcategory (such as cosmetics or perishables) with a margin of error of plus or minus 7-8 percent. Specific digital behavior data represent consumers who use digital devices to shop.

But even as digital influence has risen, retailers’ ability to influence the purchase journey has decreased. Why? Because the large e-commerce players, as well as digital platforms such as Pinterest, are operating at such scale now that they are shaping customers’ definitions of what a great customer experience is. Not only that, but they are also simply more connected to the customer’s needs than the typical brick-and-mortar retailer.

How did this happen? It’s quite very simple. A single retailer, doesn’t interact very often with its customer more than several times a year and the amount of information it gathers is not very profound in order to provide a meaningfully personalized experience for the consumer. That creates a big contrast to the kind of relationship, trust, and understanding of preferences and purchase intent that a digital platform like Pinterest can create when they interact with that same customer for several hours a day. Therefore, in most of the situations, the customers’ preferred method of locating, buying, and receiving products in-store has been redefined by their online experiences.

In addition, customers today can go to their Internet browser, have it search the broad, fragmented marketplace, and get exactly what they want. No longer do they have to settle for something that is close to what they want; the browser curates the exact assortment they are seeking, far more quickly and easily than a visit to the mall. According to the Deloitte specialists, this dynamic has led to a significant increase in the shift of market share as nimble small and mid-level players collectively steal share from larger, more traditional, at-scale retailers. This fragmentation and volatility in the market is reflected in Deloitte’s Retail Volatility Index. The competition is no longer coming from the big box across the street, but rather from a numerous newer, smaller competitors, most perhaps too small to capture the attention of the big players, but each eating away at market share.

Despite the impact of digital influence continually increasing, the ability of retailers to influence the purchase journey is decreasing. Digital platforms such as Facebook and Google are already hosting real-time interactions with customers for several hours each day. As a result, they are shaping and redefining the customer’s definition of a great experience through constant real time connection.

“Any retailer who thinks they can build their own personalized experience to interact with customers anywhere near the extent of major digital platforms and find success may be disappointed with their results” said Jeff Simpson, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and co-author of the study. “Their limited interaction with customers – about six to eight transactions per year – limits their understanding of the ‘moments that matter’ in a personalized experience such as purchase intent and preference. Instead, retailers should more aggressively embrace integration and the native capabilities of the major digital platforms where their customers have already chosen to interact and transact.”

Deloitte’s main advice for stores: Further integrate with those digital platforms. The report states, “Retailers should embrace the native capabilities of their digital touchpoints and integrate with platforms where their customers are already interacting at scale rather than trying to build such platforms themselves.”

According to the study, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of non-millennials are now using digital devices either two or three times throughout their shopping trip. Mobile device usage is no longer as heavily skewed toward millennials. Data shows that the age gap is shrinking as now – across all age groups – customers are turning to their mobile devices before and during the shopping journey.

“The important thing to remember is that most of today’s buying power still remains with non-millennials,” said Lokesh Ohri, senior manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP and leader of customer engagement, content and commerce offerings in the retail practice. “A better idea is to consider all the verifying types of customers, determine how they use digital differently in the purchasing journey and create a broad range of customized experiences for each.”

“It isn’t just what retailers do, but when they do it.  Research has also revealed that there are limited windows of opportunity to engage shoppers, with men getting bored after just 26 minutes and women after two hours, so engaging with purchasers has never been more important. By offering a variety of in-store engagement opportunities, mobile users open to an enhanced or incentivised visit will start to feel like their in-store experiences are able to offer them a similar one to those they enjoy online,” wrote Amy Keen for Extreme Creations UK. She also expressed the fact that many major high street players are actively seeking out solutions to this challenge. “Marks and Spencer has adopted ‘browse and order hubs’, Nordstrom has included ‘top pinned’ items in store to show retailers what social users are highlighting as key pieces. See more examples of technology being used by retailers,  here. By increasing personalization, retailers are not only nurturing their customers’ interest in their brand, but developing their loyalty. The better the experience, the greater the conversion into purchasing and return custom,” concluded Keen.

Moreover, according to 27% of senior executives, digital transformation is  “a matter of survival”, shows Shayla Price on Session Cam.  Customers are shopping on multiple digital devices. They learn, compare, and purchase products without leaving their homes. An  Altimeter report notes that “digital transformation represents the quest to understand how disruptive technology affects the customer experience.” With increased competition, businesses must differentiate themselves beyond product offerings. And that means mastering how to provide the best  online shopping experience to their customers.