In the quest to build Buy•havior we identified different DNA strands which motivate shoppers.  In building the strands we hypothesized passion was a DNA strand.  We tested for passion, however, it turned out not to be a DNA strand, rather a primary catalyst in altering how a person shops.  Passion morphs a person’s DNA.

Passion is defined as the attention a person gives to a genre or activity. It is measured by discretionary time and/or money a person has at there disposal.   The amount of discretionary resources a person applies to the passion will give us an idea of passion strength.  This strength can run from an interest where a person spends a portion of their time engaging in a passion to an obsession where someone is dedicated an unrealistic amount of resources.

Passion Derivatives
The problem with assessing passion is the diversity of passions and how a passion may or may not relate to a product purchase.  Think of a low-involvement product like yogurt.  It is pretty easy to say that yogurt is not a core passion for people.  A person may prefer a type of yogurt or a brand but it is doubtful someone is tattooing “Dannon” on their arm to show off their passion for a brand.   However, yogurt can be linked to a passion like fitness.  If a marketer can successfully like the brand and passion, they will elevate the shopper’s decision process from a commodity to something more meaningful.

There are many passions to link brands.  Passions fall in a diversity of genres:  food, autos, tech, pets, home, fitness, family — not to mention many leisure activities like sports, hobbies, and entertainment.  Successful integration will permit inclusion into a consumer’s life based on their passion during their leisure time.

The Passion Path
Okay, so you link your brand to a passion  – nothing new here.  Marketers have been doing it forever.  However, you need to ask: Is the brand truly in the passion path?  Or is the brand hoovering in the periphery attempting to barrow the interest?  Personally, I am not a big fan of any marketing execution where the brand is a wallflower at the party — we need to make the brand center stage.

To engage in a passion requires a product synergy and an in-depth understanding of the passion.  Not easy for many brands.  For success a brand must determine if the opportunity size of the passion is worth the marketing investment and assess  the ability to integrate seamlessly into the passion.

An example opportunity can be found in mobile phone marketing.  If you haven’t noticed there is a cellular war out there with billions of ad dollars vying for market share.   The majority of advertising is about the handset.  I would argue the proliferation ads cause white noise making it difficult for a consumer to discern from Samsung, HTC, LG or Motorola.  There are many passion opportunities for mobile phone marketers: tech, entertainment, gaming, family to name a few.  The trick is to reverse the attention away from the product and to the passion to the person.

Beware of Love of Brand
A trap for many marketers is to attempt to assume everyone will share their passion for their brand.   Many marketers love their products and see the world through brand glasses.   Objectivity is necessary.  Many times in campaign brainstorming participants will find “plausible” ways to integrate a brand into a passion because they are viewing the world through brand glasses.

The reality to success is to to think passion first and understand the core motivations within the passion — the emotional underpinnings where we can build brand connectivity.

Can Lowes own the home?

With the Lowes campaign “Never Stop Improving”, Lowes is trying to own the home.  myLowes is a space where someone can store information about their home.  A place where they can keep track of dreams, projects, dimensions, to assist the homeowner in Never Stop Improving.

The concept is great.  By owning the home, Lowes can have a relationship with homeowners.  A relationship which creates a consistent presence and  puts money in Lowe’s pocket.  From a homeowners perspective, Lowes can be the go to guy in assisting them in fixing, improving, and dreaming their home into all that it can be.

Unfortunately in its present stat, myLowes falls short of a value added experience for my home.  The reality is myLowes contains an lackluster list of stuff.  It is missing emotion.  It is missing the dream.  To deliver the value promise Lowes needs to add the dream to the homeowner’s process ( i.e. Dream, Plan, Build, Enjoy).

The funny part is the “dreaming” apps and sites exist within Lowes grasp.  They exist with many of Lowes’ partners.  For example:

• Paint Olympic Paint Room ColorClix:  Like many paint sites, Olympic ColorClix allows a user to choose color combinations based on different types of rooms.  The application can be done free form or with preset color combinations.  The win-win for Lowes is to allow the homeowner to save their preferred color combinations and retrieve it in the paint department.
• Flooring: Pergo Project Planner:  The Pergo application lets the user choose a room, set the color for the room, and then play with different flooring options.  The opportunity for Lowes would be to first allow someone to retrieve their Olympic colors and add to a room, and then check flooring availability in local store.  It would be frustrating to go to a nearby Lowes and find out the Pergo had to be special ordered.
• Deck Building: Trex Deck Design Tool: Trex offers a deck design studio providing a homeowner different option in building their dream deck.  A user can either start from a deck design or build from scratch.  Similar to the Pergo opportunity, the user can check to see if their parts list is in stock at Lowes.

Lowe’s doesn’t need to go it alone – it can operate as a partner aggregator offering the best dream experiences to their customers.  Through integration with their partners, Lowes not only can own the home – they can own the homeowner’s dream and making that dream into a reality.

I find it interesting we ask all the right questions, yet the answers many times are too ambiguous to be actionable.  There are many reasons why we use these terms, however, ask yourself this question:  When was the last time you created successful marketing based on “value”, “price” or “quality”? 

Actionable answers lie in the grey recesses of these generic terms.  This truth is lost on many marketers.  Instead of decrypting an ambiguous term (to get to an actionable insight), we will sit around a conference room and debate the consumer intent of these ambiguous terms.  Since it is difficult to market to ambiguity the discussion tends to gravitate away from the consumer and to product attributes like price, quality or convenience.  Instead of creating marketing based on actionable insights, we repackage our current offering and expect different results.

The “Whys”
In the shades of grey lie the “whys” — the actionable insights to drive innovative marketing solutions.  It is difficult to get all the “whys” in one survey — in one focus group  — in one store visit.  The heterogeneity of consumer behavior dictates there is probably not a universal answer, probably not a perfect segmentation, and therefore not a perfect survey.

Knowledge driven organizations understand this and constantly peel back the layers of ambiguity — bypassing the “whats” and driving to the “whys”.  This requires an iterative learning loop constantly challenging the norm and surveying consumers in a myriad of ways to get to the truth – get to that relevancy point which will change attitudes and drive behaviors.

Honestly, as I interviewed the person it (the deal amount) was not what I expected.  When someone says they got a deal on shoes, my mind goes to lower prices, say $50 or $60 dollars, but a deal is relative.  A deal is within a price sensitivity range to the shopper. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a deal for one person will be an exhorbatent amount for another.

But the word “deal” goes much deeper for shoppers.  It is a way to shop for some and a social deflector for others.  A deal can be pennies in one category and hundreds of dollars in others.  By honing in on the truth behind the different definitions for a deal we are able to understand shopper attitudes and behaviors to better market to them.  Below are six different lenses to view a deal.

The Deal Seeker
Many people seek deals, but not all deal seekers are the same.  Two ways to bucket deal seekers are planners and hunters.  The primary difference between the two is their approach to deal finding.  The planner preps and identifies many of their deals prior to going to the store.  They will use many deal tools like coupons, deal web sites and apps.  Conversely, the hunters do very little prep and mostly confine their deal seeking to the retail environment.  Within a store or mall they will seek deals, however, since they don’t canvas the market like gatherers it is questionable if they got the best deal overall.

Sale as a Deal
Sales are always a deal, but deals are not always a sale.  By definition if something is on sale it is a deal, however, it is not always the best deal.  Since deals can be by category (shoes) or by brand ( e.g. Vera Wang, Jimmy Choo), the deal is relative to the percieved price and the shopper’s price sensitivitiy.  If you want the cheapest shoes you could go to Payless or a discount store.  If you want a deal on Jimmy Choo shoes you will need to do your homework, and most likely if the deal is too good to be true (say $600 shoes for $50) a shopper will question the deals authenticity.

Deal Believability
This brings me to another topic: deal believability.  Deal Seekers are a peculiar sort. While many seek deals, they question if a deal is to good to be true.  Cognitive paralysis occurs when the deal is out of whack, making the shopper wonder what is wrong with the product.  Examples can be found on NoMoreRack.com where you will find iPad 2 for $43.20 (98% off) or a 55″ Samsung HDTV for $59.96 (95% off).  These are extreme deals which make you wonder about product authenticity.  You wonder about what is the hook, the flow, the catch.  I am a user of Woot and often question the price of certain deals.  Manuy times upon further review I normally find out the product is refurbished.

The Deal with Passion
Passion is a lens that may distort a deal seeker’s normal behavior.  We all have passions, and most people spend their discrentionary resources (i.e., time and money) on their passions.  Passion can result in an emotive spending where we shift from mind to heart.  For example, I know a couple who I would classify as deal seekers — they are always finding ways to save pennies.  Pennies they will use to spend on their passion, which in thier case is water skiing.  While they maximize coupons and their membership to Costco, they have their eye on a new Malibu boat.

The Price Blind
The antithesis of a deal seeker is a shopper who is price blind.  The reason I bring them up is that many think they are smart shoppers or deal seekers, yet they are operate in the retail environment like they are price blind.  One reason for this misconception is many buy on habit — a habit may have been initiated by a deal, but at this point they just buy the same brand or go to the same store, assuming they are getting the best deal.  This is a common phenomenon with warehouse stores.  Some deals at Costco or Sam’s Club are true deals, while others not so much.  However, in the mind of the shopper they believe they are a smart shopper and are getting a deal on everything.  After all, they wouldn’t pay a membership to pay more on products.

Deal as a Social Deflector
The last lens I want to bring up is social.  We live in a marketing world where social dominates the conversation.  Groupon and LivingSocial are methods to group buy — get a great deal.  The flip side of social is after purchase, especially when someone made a socially questionable purchase.  An example today would be the purchase of a tablet PC.  iPad dominates the market and then there is everyone else.  Imagine a person who bought an Archos Arnova Tablet talking to a friend who owns an iPad.  Instead of disussing the features of the product, there is a very good chance the person just says “I got a great deal.”

Ad 1.o has been around about 100 years, but it has run its course.  Ironically, many ad people are clinging on to 1.0 — going through some sort of denial that the glory years will be back.  Well, they’re gone. 

Before I go on, let me define what Ad 1.0 is, and why it is dead.  Simply put, Advertising 1.0 is the marketing to a single target.  This is why I refer to it as “1.0″.  The target can be a demographic, a psychographic, or an aspirational mindset.  In Ad 1.0 the singular target is the fulcrum point for all advertising within a campaign, and all ads and media are geared to this target. 

How did we get to Ad 1.0?
Without rehashing advertising history, the idea of one target is an efficiency play, a channel play, and a simple play.  Advertising began in a far simpler channel landscape — for the longest time television ruled the roost and everything was good.  Also, this was BPC (Before PCs) and analytic capabilities today put the 1960′s NASA projects in the dust.

Ad 1.o is not a bad idea and it made all the marketing sense at the time.  When ratings were high, the competitors were limited and the only long tail you would find is on a monkey at the zoo.  But something happened in the 1990′s.  Sure the Internet was a part of it, but marketing became a lot more sophisticated APC (After PCs).   Both marketers and consumers became a lot smarter.  The rapid evolution continues today with the mobile culture about to put Ad 1.0 on its place.

Why is Ad 1.0 dead?
In a cluttered brand and media landscape a single brand message, a single brand experience is not enough.  First of all, creating an ad that will resonate with everyone (and sell your product) is extremely difficult.  Probably the easiest way to appeal to most is through humor (e.g. Super Bowl Ads).  It works.  It’s memorable.  But did it change consumer behavior?

I remember seeing a media presentation a few years back.  The media person was lauding the efficiency of the buy.  They had a graph of 100 people and highlighted 10, just ten, because this was their core target, and it was an efficient use of media.  This media savvant was telling the client, they are hitting a bulls-eye (the ten percent) and receiving a bonus: 90% additional coverage.  The problem with this logic is that the ad was designed for the 10%, not the 90% bonus coverage. 

Logically, it is very difficult to create one ad that will appeal to a product’s entire consumption target.  That is why a marketer should not.  Instead in today’s marketplace it is more about creating effective touchpoints for multiple targets.  This is counter to Ad 1.0 logic, because it is not efficient, not scalable, and not done in a single ad. 

What killed Ad 1.0 is not this blog entry, rather it is the myriad of experiential and messaging opportunities in social, mobile, and the web.  A campaign must shift from a 1.0 world of a series of messages to a more progressive view where the campaign is a brand sandbox containing messaging, experiences and conversations.  To do this we need to move to Ad n.x.

What is Ad n.x?
The next generation of advertising is not 2.0, rather it is n.x.

•  ”n” is the number of targets for your product. 
•  ”x” is the relevant touchpoints for each target. 

“n” is diverse.  It includes a population of consumers who have never heard of your product, shoppers currently buying within your competitive set, and people who own or have used your product.   Each of the three sets of people (product naive, shoppers, and owners) are also motivated differently:

• Breaking through the product naive consumer in their daily life will most likely require more than 30 seconds.
• A consumer’s shopping cloud includes numerous variables from price to expert opinion to risk to routine to brand reputation to social pressure.
• Owners/users seem like the easiest to target to convert, yet many marketers invest in “filling the funnel” not retaining the people passed through the funnel. 

“x” is everywhere.  Sorry to be so nebulous but brand communication is a fluid part of our everyday.  The consumer reality of a person’s day includes:

• Intrusive media trying to pry our attention to our everyday life.
• Information we discover on our own, either through a daily task or researching a product.
• Social input from friends and family — whether we ask for it or not.
• Product trial is an important ingredient in swaying future purchase habits, but how do we induce trial?
• And prior ownership is a positive predictor of future ownership — for better or worse.

Given the dynamics of today’s marketing, you can see  why solving for “x” is not easy. A campaign must address all aspects of persuasion. 

Do I have x.n figured out?  Nope.  However, I believe it is the right path for the future of advertising.  It is not easy, because for a marketer it is very complex.  For an agency it is doubly daunting, because most agencies either live in the 1.0 world or in a channel specialty.  The future agency will figure out how to think x.n.  To generate ideas in x.n. And to deliver ads in x.n.

Usually it starts with the funnel conversation.  You know the funnel is a spiral, dead or in some cases a Yellow Brick Road (see Making the Purchase Funnel Fixation Personal).  To be honest I am tired with the funnel debate.  It seems to have turned into some zealous endeavor to find the next consumer thing — like digital people incessantly talking about Web 3.0.  Okay, enough of the funnel.

My focus lately is on the path to purchase.  For the sake of this blog, let’s call it the consumer journey.  The theory I am working under has several dimensions:

• Not all purchase paths are created equal.
• It starts with the consumer’s shopper mindset.
• Shopping scenario affecting the mindset.

For brevity purposes of this blog entry, I am focusing this blog just on the first dimension: not all purchase paths are created equal.  This seems logical — shoppers  will take more time researching a high-consideration like a large screen TV for the man cave, a new car for yourself, or remodeling your home than a low consideration purchase like a restaurant to eat dinner, an oil change place for your new car, or can of pork and beans in aisle 3 at the nearby Kroger.  And from a macro perspective this is somewhere between “duh” and a “no-brainer”.

Even though this is obvious, it doesn’t explain why some people will go up and down the aisles at Kroger tossing items into their cart until they reach a certain food category where they pause and contemplate their purchase — say choosing a cut of meat for family dinner, a personal care product like deodorant or shampoo, or in my case a nice six-pack of beer.

The same “pause” can be found for your daily life.  You may find yourself on auto-pilot when you fuel your car, drop of your dry cleaning, or getting a morning cup of coffee.  However, you may deliberate with the family on where you will go to dinner on Friday night.

Predisposition drives your auto-pilot.  This predisposition is a built in mechanism we have in our purchase behaviors to avoid revisiting every purchase decision throughout the day.  While you can consider it “loyalty” to a product or service (it is), it can also be a routine.  Many are choices that  conveniently fit into our daily routine.  For example, I like Caribou Coffee better than Starbucks, however, the Starbucks is on my way to work, and I am not willing to exert the extra effort to be loyal to Caribou and drive 2 miles out of my way.

Breaking a person’s predisposition or routine is difficult.  They aren’t looking for a reason to switch and therefore are not seeking out information to rethink their predisposition.  Therefore a marketer is limited to intrusive methods.  The most obvious one is media — promoting a compelling reason why their current decision is incorrect (i.e., my product is better so you need to try it).  This may work but the product differentiators better be pretty damn compelling.

Another popular intrusive method hits the wallet — giving them a deal.  Coupons, deals, sweepstakes, and group buying are pervasive (just ask Groupon) and a compelling deal has the potential to induce trial.   The objective of the deal is to disengage someone from their predisposition and establish a new predisposition — a new routine.

The interesting aspect of product trial, is if you remove the stimulus will the behavior persist.  For example, Shell has partnered with Kroger to offer a cross brand loyalty program — if someone spends $100 at Kroger the shopper will get 10-cents off per gallon on their next fueling at Shell.  The program is a great example on how to redirect one loyalty program (Kroger’s) to another brand (Shell).  The question at hand for Shell is: will people frequent Shell without the 10-cent per gallon incentive?  If the program goes on perpetually, this is a non-issue.  However, Shell is normally priced higher than nearby stations, and removing the 10-cent per gallon incentive may result in a reduction in fuelers as they go back to their previous routines.

For many purchases consumers lean on their Circle of Trust to assist them in making the right decisions.  The Circle is not limited to friends and family members.  It can also include people who are perceived as experts or have experience with the product category.  By and large these people are grouped into three categories: owners, experts, and brand governors.

• Owners: People the shopper trusts because they have some experience with product or service.  This may be current ownership, past ownership, or they may own a competitive product.
• Experts:  Sources the consumer acknowledges as a trustworthy source within the product industry.  This could be a knowledgeable person they know who has a passion for the product category, or a source that reviews the product category (e.g. Consumer Reports, cNet).
• Brand Governors: People who don’t have any experience with the brand or product at all, but express an opinion.   Brand governors define a brand’s social relevancy, and they are difficult to affect because they address brands emotionally not logically.

So how can a marketer get in the circle of trust? 

Well, first you need to begin with an understanding of how much a person’s social circle influences their purchase.   You need to look at this on two levels: brand and product.  In most low consideration categories, social has little to do with the purchase  (think about most groceries, many household products, and frequent retail experiences).  In these cases, social is more about aligning the brand with the consumer.  Creating social equity by becoming relevant within their lives, their passions.

Many marketers address social with this strategy.  Think about Kingsford Charcoal’s desire to own Tailgating or Mountain Dew’s desire to own gaming (even so far as to refer to their product as gaming juice) or Dove’s desire to be aligned with Real Beauty.  The goal of of these social initiatives would become an accepted brand within the social group for a given activity.

With many high-consideration products the social circle influences the purchase in several ways.  Some people within a person’s social circle may influence intrusively by lauding or complaining about their product experience, or the shopper may request or seek out information as a part of their purchase process.  Either way, social influence could play an important role in their final purchase.

Generating social influence is difficult for many marketers because it is not a channel they control.  Actually, social is more like a cloud than a channel.  We all are surrounded by opinions, advice, and recommendations.  Some of the social conversation is a result of an experience.  Some is from product news or an expert’s review.  And some buzzworthy stories are relayed through the cloud like lightning quickly passing from person to person.

For a marketer to be successful in the social cloud, they need to be worth talking about, and not in catchy “ad speak”.  Rather, true authentic buzz is relayed through memorable stories.  Stories worth hearing.  Stories worth sharing.  Stories that are easy to remember.

Given the diversity of a a targets’ attitudes and motivations, there needs to be a variety of stories, coming from everyone in contact with the product — with the brand.  Think about your story sources:

• Customers:  What are the product stories worth telling?  Is there a way you can fuel the conversation?  Are there interesting ways to recognize advocates or create advocates?  How are you converting dissatisfied customers into advocates?
• Experts:  Do you know the experts within your category (people who influence product purchase either directly or indirectly)?  How are you engaging them on a regular basis?
• Employees: How are your employees embracing their role in the company?  How can you genuinely fuel their passion?  A passion for the products they create?  A passion for the post-purchase or service experience?
• Shoppers:  How are you impressing shoppers within your category (even if they don’t purchase)?  How do you get shoppers to talk about their shopping experience?  How do you invite the shopper’s social circle into the process?

These sources are just a start of your social cloud.  To figure out your social cloud listen to the conversations, understand the motivations and attitudes of advocates and customers, and then fuel the conversation through persistent engagement.

Just Google (or Bing) it.  Any topic.  Any person.  Any thing.  It is all at our fingertips, but is the info helpful?

If I want get up to speed about Lady Gaga, Lebron James, or current unemployment conditions, the web delivers.  If I want to plan a vacation, buy a HD camcorder, or optimize my stock portfolio, the web becomes a dizzying array of facts, opinions, and data that is rarely helpful — and often misleading.

This is the conundrum of the web.  Plenty of information is sprayed around cyberspace, but it is one size fits all.  We leave it up to the user to interpret the data – the information to meet their needs.  Some can interpret the information into knowledge, most cannot.

In the past decade we have failed in many respects to create an online dialogue a conversation to assist people.  Sure there are pockets of hope out there like Click to Chat technology which thankfully humanizes many online shopping processes.   However, like an unseasoned salesperson, click to chat is hit or miss based on the competency, the experience of the person on the other side of the keyboard.  Click to chat provides the intelligence of the person or company.  It does not bring to bear the collective intelligence of the web.

Is there a better way to take advantage of the collective intelligence on the web and personalize it?

Web 2.0 is all about the social web.  Sometimes social connections can lead to valuable assistance in making a purchase decision.  Many times it is social white noise — opinions without basis.  Not any better than the inexperienced salesperson.

The vision I see is the  conversational web.  A human engine which can engage people in a conversation.  A conversation that leads to knowledge — quickly and efficiently.   I believe we are very close to someone cracking the code and creating an inference engine which can decipher and disseminate knowledge based on who we are, how we shop, what we need, and what we aspire to be.