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“Short Posts about Marketing & The Future of Engaging Global Cultures Online”

September 20, 2011 New Do China’s Consumers Want “Green” Products?

China Sustainability - Green Consumers

YES!

There is a general perception among Americans that China is a wasteland of polluted air permeated by their commitment to an economy driven by manufacturing. Yes, manufacturing in China makes up a significantly large percentage of their economy but one should not be so quick to presume that a country’s economical makeup is in accordance with a country’s consumer habits and preferences. According to a GfK Roper China study 40% of urban Chinese respondents said that social responsibility is an important guiding principle in their life.

NO!

According to the popular Chinese Blog The Chinese Observer article Green Consumption in China - the country is a long way from caring whether or not a product is “green”. The author argues that the majority of consumers are first starting to realize the progressive consumption habits experienced by their western counterparts for the last few decades and these habits are driven status and personal gain. This kind of consumer mindset typically ignores “green” marketing and responds positively to value focused marketing. While the argument is valid – there are still many signs that point to a rich abundance of consumers who think otherwise.

Chinese Consumers Embrace Recycling

48% of respondents in the study said that they recycle on a regular bases and another 19% took it a step further, claiming that they sought out products with recyclable packaging when shopping for goods. Keep in mind, this study was done in the urban area of Shanghai which accounts for a significant portion of the proliferate consumer base in the country. However, it does not account for the millions of non-urban consumers that are first realizing the benefits of middle-class consumption. The rural consumer base in China is most likely to represent the assumptions The China Observer has about “green” consumerism in China.

Bye Bye Plastic Bags

In 2008, the Chinese government made a bold move and ordered a ban on plastic bags from all the major supermarkets and department stores. The idea grew out of the growing concern the country had for its image leading up to the 2008 Olympics, held in Beijing. The government figured if they could cut the use of plastic bags down there would be less pollution on the streets and in turn make for a cleaner looking city.  The project worked and not only did the city appear to be more clean it allowed the country to squander the use of 37 million barrels of crude oil that were used years prior to aid in bag production.

Some say that this project peaked the curiosity of Chinese consumer population and altered the way in which most of them thought about environmental conservation. There have been programs in other countries (like the USA) that have attempted to place a tax or ban on plastic bags to reduce their use but all attempts have been stagnated by lobbyists and supporters of petroleum based corporations like Exxon.

The Future of Green in China

Companies looking to gain a leg up in China should consider the growing trend of sustainability that is taking place in urban Chinese cities. Stick to three key product features when selling to the new Chinese consumer – even if you believe the contrary, all features apply to pleasing the culture.

  1. Showcase efforts your product/company has to preserving the future of China. People care about their country and easily sniff out an exporter that is only looking to turn a quick profit and care less about the future of the country
  2. The family is of utmost importance in China but the roles of care and sustain are not quite like western nations. Children are supported educationally and are expected to become independents at a young age. It is the elderly that are dependent and thought of when speaking to sustainability. Because of this notion, speak to preserving the family as a whole and not just for FUTURE GENERATIONS
  3. Green is Luxury – If you’ve done your homework on the consumer mindset in China you already know that luxury products are hot sellers in the country. Why? Status of the individual and family is supported by the quality of what they have. Market “green” as luxurious, couple it with the care for the future of the country and you will be set to sell to the new Chinese consumer

June 30, 2011 A Corporate Culture Built for Analytics

web analytics culture

Web Analytics WANT More Attention

For the past few years web analytics have been underutilized. While some businesses have maximized the potential use of their analytics (if that is possible), most have been mediocre at collecting insights and forming multiple conclusions to drive the business goals forward. Web analytics have been responsible for quantifying direct conversion events and advanced traffic profiles so that marketers and web analysts can create monthly reports detailing website performance. It is a rare occasion when web performance reports are linked up with business goal reports.

Lately, web analytics are getting more attention and benefiting from the data-intensive transformation corporate culture is experiencing. Data is the past, present and surely the future of business decision processes. Decisions made based on intuition still exist but are being challenged by opposing contenders that have data in their hand to support their argument. Ironically, corporate culture is intuitively understanding the importance of data and a new culture is on the horizon. One driven by data-centric decisions.  Web analytics can drive that cultural transformation by instilling the following practices and concepts:

Locate and Address the Problem(s) in the Process

Organizations that fail at generating actionable conclusions can primarily attribute their failure to one of the 3:

  1. Inadequate Resources
  2. Flawed Processes
  3. Incomplete/TOO “High Level” Strategies

All of the setbacks listed can be eradicated with the right culture in place. It is not simplistic to formulate a culture that      can overcome all of these but it can be done with time. The trick to building a culture that supports progressive analytics  is about preaching the practice of numbers and celebrating milestones. For every idea that comes to a manager’s desk,  ask employees for mathematical evidence to support their intuition AND provide goals for everyone in the organization  to meet that are numbers based – exclude financial numbers. These numbers are more humanistic by nature. They tap  into the emotional curiosity of the people within your organization. When “x” amount of customers visit store “A” they  are greeted 2 times when they walk in the store and when they leave – we want to ensure 90 greetings are shared before  lunch hour. This example may seem far fetched but it is another spin on counting the number of customers that you have  come into the store. It taps into the emotional experience for that customer and therefore your employees relate.

Don’t overdue it. Overwhelming yourself with creative KPI’s that represent a number that can be extracted more easily will cause you to lose direction of the goals in place. When your company exceeds expectations or produces a figure that stands for success, celebrate that success with more than a mass email. Be creative with how you celebrate milestone achievements and provide numbers alongside the tag lines and throughout your conversations.

 The Cultural Transformation
Overtime, web analytics will naturally mesh into the operations of your business. Of course, you will need someone to monitor the web analysis process, but they will inherently be prepared to ensure your new culture is effectively visible throughout the collection, analysis and reporting process. The people of your organization no matter how over-staffed or under-staffed will seek to garner insight from the numerical data found in web  analytics because they will live a culture of numbers accompanied by actionable insights.

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June 29, 2011 How Google+ Can Avoid a WAVE of Mistakes

google+

Google+ Should Not Go Surfing

The last time that Google accrued my interest was when they released the “email-killer” Google Wave. As all of us know by now, that product has been buried among the ever growing graveyard of dead products at Google. Now, Google+ has surfaced and I want to be enthusiastic, but I have made that mistake in the past. I am not a Google hater – I love Google and I understand that for every 10 dead products, 1 success can make all 10 lifeless efforts worth the trouble. I still believe that had the market been ready and the right marketing strategy in place, Google Wave would have succeeded in creating a new way of doing email. I foresee the future of email leveraging a lot of the features Wave brought to the table. Unfortunately people were not ready. So are people ready for another social network? Twittter, Facebook and Linkedin have established their thrones in their respective niche. What can Google do to ensure Google+ garners some market share and doesn’t go surfing with Wave? Here’s a list:

Top 5 Tips to Prevent Google+ from Sinking

  1. MARKETING! – Google has a large marketing budget that runs with compelling TV spots and hypnotizing billboards. Wave lacked the support it needed from marketing to pitch the idea to the mass public and convince them that the product was the next wave (pun intended) – more on marketing in step 4.
  2. HAND-HOLDING – Another wall up in front of Wave’s success was user confusion. There was an ample amount of directional video for users upon access. Thus far, reviews of Google+ have been positive in regards to ease-of-use.
  3. LEVERAGE Gmail CHAT – gChat has significant market share in the IM market. If they brand the gchat experience as a Google+ tool – it could be the gateway experience users need to understand and leverage the other Google+ features.
  4. TEST + MARKET MORE – Google proclaimed Google+ as a “project” and not a “product” meaning a lot of analysis and testing will be conducted that will allow the product to evolve over time. If the “Hangout” feature is overwhelmingly popular throughout beta testing – dump a lot of your marketing budget into promoting that feature within the tool. It only takes one feature to make the whole product sexy and desirable.
  5. PERIPHERAL VISION – Keep an eye open to up and coming social environments like “likealittle” and others. Why? They are tapping into wants and needs consumers are NOT getting from giant social machines Facebook and Twitter.

An Introduction to Google+

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June 24, 2011 The Web Analytics Landfill

web analytics landfill

Accountable for Your Actions – Web Reports

Sprawled across a web analyst’s hard drive, you will find a variety of web analytics reports for businesses, large and small, from a variety of industries. Much of this collection was probably submitted to the stakeholders with actionable steps that should be taken to influence the numbers found within them.

Did stakeholders act on all the suggestions…of course not. As in any consulting report, there are a lot of proposals that are never used. Usually, a stakeholder reviews all the proposals closely and considers the potential each of them has. Any of the unused ideas are put aside as potential ideas. Today, over 80% of retail businesses say they need more insight and understanding through web analysis. Why? The web is becoming a retail goldmine if done right and while web analytics has been around for years – the majority of reports have been disposed of and dropped off at what I like to call the: WEB ANALYTICS LANDFILL.

The Web Analytics Landfill is the compilation of wasted web analytics that are lost and forgotten after the end-user has reviewed the top level data, never to be acted on.

The web has become the new storefront for businesses, yet most businesses are not analyzing it like a store. If customers walked into your physical store and had three aisles to walk down, aisles 1, 2, and 3 and in a week’s time, only 2 customers walked down aisle 3 you would notice. Not only would you notice, but you would begin to investigate and test out your hypothesis. However, prior to your initial realization that aisle 3 was absent of visitors, you would have no study or numbers outside of purchases to show the how or why your customers didn’t walk down that particular aisle. You would have no data on WHICH customers walked down that particular aisle and you would have no data on the customers that did and the actions they took in aisle 3.

If that same store layout was on the web, you would be able to track all of what I just described. The power of web analytics is heavy and the tracking results can be overwhelming. Because of this, very few companies are actually taking the time to leverage web data from top to bottom. Most of the monthly reports are being skimmed over for high-level insights and charts and the organization of shareholders in the process is halting the potential to find gold among the massive accumulation of information available to them. Instead, this information is simply thrown into the Web Analytics Landfill. Because store owners can work with more data from online shopping experiences they are starting to realize it is vital information in regards to understanding their customers.

Web Analytics Littering

When I call out the organization of stakeholders, I am referring to the people involved in the collection, analysis and review process. They are all stakeholders and have a specific role to fill but the 3 segments of roles I just listed are not communicating effectively for most businesses. The engineer team may be responsible for data collection and they share that data with the analyzer, who tries to sift through the clutter, who creates a final report to share with the manager, who needs insights from the data to take action. However, each team/individual has their own responsibility and for a lot of companies there is no eye-in-the-sky overseeing the process, ensuring that the right data is being collected, analyzed, and acted on. They may have 2 of the 3 steps working efficiently, but I am willing to bet most companies don’t have all 3 running seamlessly to maximize analytical advantages.

Along the way, some data is littered. Useful data is disposed of and ignored because one of the roles determined it invaluable or was unaware that it existed. This littered data doesn’t make it to the landfill, instead it disappears into the world of web waste.

Save Your Company and Waste Less

Organizations need to have a manager overseeing the web analytics process to ensure that the reports generated are dynamically changing to maximize positive actionable outcomes. It is important that each part of the process communicates effectively with all parts involved and that relationship is also dynamic as technology advances. Most importantly, it is time for web analytics to generate more action. The manager is essentially responsible for putting the proposals into practice but every team member needs to realize they have the power of data in their hands and that data can be manipulated in “story-form” to influence action.

It’s time to stop skimming over web analytics reports and throwing the deep insights in the trash. Web data from the past, present and future will prove to be beneficial if you create a productive and seamless organization of the moving parts that participate. How do you start to make these improvements? Here are the steps:

  1. Start by having the end-user form Key Performance Indicators based on your business’s web objectives. What is it that the web does for you and what measurements will determine if your web strategy is working and what insights can you pull valuable consumer information from.
  2. Appoint the “analyzer” to oversee the entire process from start to finish. They should understand the collector’s duties, the own duties and the end-user’s (manager) duties. The analyzer is ideal for this eye-in-the-sky role as they are inherently in control of producing a report that forces action. As long as they have the bandwidth and understand each role beyond the high-level they will be a good fit.
  3. Have the appointed analyzer talk with the end-user and agree upon the KPI’s. The analyzer shares these KPI’s in tech terms with the collectors and they setup the coding to track the appropriate data in an appropriate manner so that it is friendly to the analyzer and all the information they need is there.
  4. The analyzer develops the reports and shares them with the collectors so they can see the end result and understand it in non-tech terms.
  5. The analyzer and end-user have a monthly review of the reports in which they talk about steps to take in order to influence the web results or retrieve additional data (if needed). It is important that the analyzer develops a report for the manager and consistently voices the importance of ACTION to the end-user. If actions are not taken, continue to include the proposal, backed by new data, in future reports until an action is taken. UNLESS the end-user determines the action is NOT right for the business.
  6. During your meetings and conversations with the end-user and collectors, encourage innovation and new methodologies so that your analytics process remains dynamic by nature.

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June 21, 2011 Weibo’s 140 Character Limit in Plain English

Twitter weibo character limits

Weibo’s Character Limit Coincidence

Weibo is a micro-blogging platform in China that is almost always referred to as the “Twitter of China.” Twitter and Weibo are very similar in that they promote micro-blogging on list-driven platforms that report user posts in real-time. One of the most prominent similarities between the two is the character limit cap placed on posts. Weibo allows space for up to 140 characters…sound familiar? Forgive me for sounding egotistical but as an American, I would suspect that Weibo copied this part of the Twitter model. I am not implying that the “copycat” formula is wrong in any regard, I am simply pointing out the high probability of the notion. Why do I think Weibo copied the 140 character limit?

Mandarin Characters are Not English Characters

What’s weird about that particular character count of 140  is that the Mandarin language does not need as many characters as the English language. An English user could post a sentence that is 130 characters long and in some cases a Chinese user would be able to post that same message in as little as 2 characters. In comparison to English, Chinese phrases are much shorter when it comes to character count.

With the recent announcement of Weibo’s intention to launch an English version of the site in the near future, expect American businesses to take notice and attempt to tap into the large population of Weibo’s audience.  As companies continue to formulate their global social strategy they will have to adhere to linguistically separated trends. Weibo and Twitter posts in Mandarin have the power to essentially tell more of the story with less space. Perhaps, Weibo will offer English users more characters to mimic the longevity of its Chinese counterpart? Either way, the successful brands will implement a strategic separation of content generation for the two when posting to the similar networks.

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