Marketing from a Market Research Perspective

As frequent travelers, we already love Hotwire for its extremely affordable rental cars from only the most reliable rental car companies. Well they’ve just given us another reason to love them. Through a partnership with TerraPass, Hotwire will now pay for half of the cost of offsetting customers’ carbon emissions for travel booked through the site. Through the program, offsetting your share of the carbon emitted from a domestic flight would only set you back six bucks.

So far, this is the only carbon offset matching offer we’ve seen from a travel company. But considering the impact that travel (and air travel in particular) has on carbon emissions, it seems like a good fit. Travel-intensive businesses can negate the impacts of their jetsetting in an easy, affordable way and individuals concerned about their ecological footprint can offset some of their CO2-related guilt. If marketed well, this program could be a significant draw for Hotwire. We’ll be watching to see what creative concepts they come up.

For a long time now, we’ve been waiting to see some advances in the area of consumer-related healthcare technology. We’ve heard of a few cool ideas but nothing has really entered the mainstream or started changing the way people interact with their healthcare professionals.

Gizmodo is reporting today that Nintendo has teamed up with a few other technology companies to launch a system in Japan that will transmit information collected by the Wii Fit system to a user’s healthcare professional. It will allow doctors to track and monitor a patients’ activity and progress over time and has some pretty interesting implications for the role they might play in the health and fitness habits of their patients. Although, I have a feeling that many people will have reservations about giving their doctors’ access to that type of personal information. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.

We talk a lot about how important it is to have a clear and distinctive point of view, and we love seeing someone embody that. At an event last night at Red Bull’s headquarters in Santa Monica for women who work in youth and action sports marketing, the moderator asked the panelists what inspired them, and Amy Stettler, Global Director of Communications for OMD/Apple, said, “We live in a big bureaucracy with a lot of rules. We need more people in marketing who are willing to blow shit up.” Indeed.

We’ve been doing a lot of marketing communications work lately and thinking about the process of creative development. Rodin said that the task of a sculptor is to remove what is unnecessary from the stone, and in some ways a marketing campaign requires the same approach. Simplicity and clarity are important, but ultimately we aim for “stickiness” - messages that stick in people’s minds and affect their behavior. In an interview with McKinsey Quarterly, Stanford University’s Chip Heath says, “A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes something about the way they think or act. That is a high standard. Think back to the last presentation you saw. How much do you remember? How did it change the decisions you make day to day?” It’s a high standard, but a good one, and Heath offers some excellent advice on the discipline of messaging (luckily, it’s not about being a born genius like Rodin).

We recently started working on a public health campaign for the California HealthCare Foundation that has a high stickiness imperative; the “product” we’re selling could save thousands of people from blindness. It’s an important message, and it’s tempting to throw a lot of words at it, but the real challenge of marketing is to tell a good story and know when to put the chisel down.

During the run-up to the holidays this year, we’ve heard friends and colleagues working in the non-profit sector voicing concerns about the effect that the economic downturn is having (and will continue to have) on non-profit organizations and the people that depend on them. United Way estimates it will raise about $110 million this year, down from $117 million last year. Washington Mutual was one of United Way’s largest contributors before its collapse, giving $2.1 million last year through employee donations and matching gifts. We spoke with a friend who works for a prominent arts institution in San Francisco about how they are suddenly missing the masses of smaller donations they receive from regular people who, unlike larger donors, generally don’t have any input or information about where their money goes within the organization.

In interviews we recently conducted with non-profit donors and non-donors we saw a clear pattern - people want to be able to see where their donations are going and the impact they are having. Our hunch is that as consumers tighten their belts, it’s easy for them to cut non-profit giving to larger organizations out of their budgets because they don’t see the tangible impact of their donations and conversely, what they are taking away by not donating. Microlending organizations are an example of a type of non-profit which connects donors directly to the real people they are helping (Kiva is one we like). In this case, lenders can see the difference they are making in people’s lives through online profiles of borrowers. Their personal connection to the people they are helping means that lenders will likely think twice before cutting that money out of their budgets.

There are a few ways that larger non-profits can develop mechanisms for creating that personal connection for their donors. [Read more →]