ResearchTalk

Here are some hastily written notes from today’s interesting Gaming NewMR online conference. Hope you find them useful.

Some of the notes may only make sense when seen in conjunction with the slides which should be available from the above website shortly after the event.

Game Theory – using gaming to improve online surveys
Jon Puleston (GMI)

What r&d has shown us:

• making questions more game-like increase response

Results:

• less straight-lining – up to 80% less
• lower neutral scoring – avg 25% lower
• higher enjoyment
• lower dropout
• good cross compatibility vs trad grid questions

Simple changes can have real impact:

• change std round buttons to star-shaped
• re-wording questions – more playful/less formal (more vernacular)
• particularly valuable for more creative tasks
• make things more competitive – add a time limit for response
• use games at start to get ppl in right frame of mind, encourage creativity, and do subsequent surveys
• turned ppl into a judge on a panel show called ‘New Product Factors’ – appealing to their inner Simon Cowell!

In development:

• snowboarder going down hill, crashes through flags showing multiple choice responses
• words scattered on a screen, ppl can shoot ones they like
• create word clouds, allow ppl to re-arrange into their own clouds and to change the relative sizes
• guessing games: change ‘what brands can you think of?’ to ‘can you guess the 5 most popular brands of deodorant?’
• currently working with one client to make insight dashboards more fun to look at

Q&A:

• is there a risk of non-gamers mis-playing games? overcome this by training ppl with a few initial questions to train and gauge their ability to respond
• do surveys take longer? yes. but ppl have more fun in the process
• will gaming approach lead to ppl looking to ‘win’? use to your advantage as are trying to push ppl to answer as best they can
• bernie malinoff: the more interesting the question, the more likely it is to change the answer. this presents an issue? would always go with most engaging question
• comment: good to see ppl worrying less about survey length and more about its engagement
• are incentives for gamified surveys less or more? lower financial incentive needed

Play for a High Score – understanding gamers and gaming
Erica M. Ruyle (anthropologist)

3 G’s of gaming: gamers, games, gaming

• Erica refers to herself as a ‘fan scholar’

Gamers – a diverse bunch:

• data below is for US pop
• avg age = 34 (Atari generation)
• most freq age of game purchaser = 40
• 42% of US pop play on a wireless device/console
• 67% of US h/h play consoles/games

Games – key ways to engage users:

• 1. decent graphics
• 2. intuitive playability
• 3. award/achievement system
• 4. story/rationale
• 5. music
• get away from reality – ppl play games to escape reality

Gaming – importance of:

• work/fun – best games require a lot of work but are punctuated w/ fun – get ppl to reach a zen-like state so that they behave emotionally

Ideas for gaming in MR:

• mobile gaming/GPS
• virtual gaming community
• video game rewards
• choice analysis

Q&A:

• definitely diffs between cultures – above data is US-centric
• ppl not likely to disguise their identity in games

Game On! – a semiotician’s view of gaming and MR
Stefania Gogna (Head for Brand)

Gaming = a new way to get insight

Ten principles that make video games so interesting

• 1. participation: ppl take an active part in a peer group environment
• 2. exploration: ppl free to explore information w/out researcher
• 3. expression: ppl feel more free to express themselves
• 4. exchange: exchange ideas, sharing
• 5. simulation: ppl can reconstruct patterns of what they would like to see in the real world
• 6. close attention/scan ability: ppl pay strong attention to all important details
• 7. collaborative problem solving: ppl find new and unexpected ways to resolve problems
• 8. active thinking: more creative problem-solving
• 9. insider: active participant not passive consumer, in charge of their own experience
• 10. amplification: players generate a lot of output from little stimulus

Q&A:

• comment: issue for MR is need to share more w/ respondents
• comment: need to allow player to control some aspects, uncomfortable for some in MR

Research Through Gaming – opportunities for change
Betty Adamou (Nebu)

What is RTG:

• where a company gains data from a resp while they play a computer game and about the way they play the game itself

Fun theory:

• c.f YouTube video of VW piano stairs
• ppl started using stairs rather then escalators purely because of the fun element incorporated in the stairs

Entertainment snacking:

• ppl playing apps while waiting to do something/while travelling (on mobile device, via email, thru consoles)
• 1. avatar-based research games (ABRGs)
• 2. gaming as the incentive (GATIRGs)
• 3. questions as mini-games (QAMRGs) – e.g. flash app
• 4. social-media based research games (SMRGs) – e.g. farmville

Classification:

• video content would need to be classified by official industry/regulatory body

Q&A:

• some stuff you won’t want to gamify, e.g. if questions are sensitive

Let’s all Play the Game – applying game playing to qualitative research
Arthur Fletcher (Blauw Research)

Design Game:

• been working for 5yrs with a product called ‘Design Game’ – co-creation tool for design
• a game from beginning to end
• typically played in a focus group facility
• resps play for 2 hrs
• two phases: 1.identify issues; 2.synthesise solutions
• has generated some successful products
• a completely different way to gather info
• all tasks against the clock – highly productive
• clients absolutely love it as can observe
• really hard work for resps

Better than a discussion guide:

• 50% more content by volume
• 75% more content by topic
• no opportunity not to participate
• no opportunity to get bored – cognitive focus

Not suitable for all qual:

• fine for majority of assignments
• lacks scope for detailed probing
• more expensive
• purists wouldn’t like it

Game vs discussion guide:

Example 1:
• dg: “what sort of things frustrate you when shopping online”
• game: “in the next 60 secs, list as many things that frustrate you when shopping online”
• game: can refine importance by asking for top 3 reasons

Example 2:

• dg: “ok, so you mentioned security is a big issue, how to overcome?”
• game: “security has been identified as a major issue – in next 2 mins design a new security system and name 3 reasons why better”
• game: this works well in practice

Q&A:

• reaction to being told it is a MR exercise rather than a game? resps told it is a MR exercise from the outset – the game element is a pleasant surprise
• how sell into clients? need a good client relationship, they need to trust you. tough sell. have evidence that it works, and this helps to convince

Trust, Identity, Reach and Reward – the implications of social media
Nigel Legg (Trevanian Legg)

Trust is 2-way:

• ppl must trust researcher
• and vice versa

Trust based on identity:

• ppl invest time in identity
• social media relies on real world relationships w/ real world ppl
• twitter is old fashioned by allowing ppl to post under pseudonyms

Reach:

• getting the right sample
• hard to do/expensive with trad MR
• platforms only valid when critical mass of users

Reward:

• ppl must have a reason to press the share button – e.g. prizes
• different rewards for different types of participation (e.g. voting, giving ideas)

Coffeemat challenge:

• rcv prizes for submitting business ideas
• animation for voting

Other applications:

• crowd-sourced idea generation
• survey design
• SMM (social media marketing) campaigns
• SM (social media) platforms

Q&A:

• if rewards vary by activity, might this influence/game their response? fair comment

Mobile Social Games for MR – challenging boundaries
Leonard Murphy (Brandscan 360)

Mobile ecosystem:

• smartphone penetration growing to ubiquity
• ecosystem expanding rapidly
• real-time anywhere access to apps and functionality

New frontier for gaming and MR:

• 73% of US engaged in social media
• 32.7m ppl play social games daily
• 75+m ppl play farmville monthly
• foursquare, yelp and getglue engage millions daily
• morgan stanley: mobile device will be the primary web interface within 5 yrs

Using gaming in MR – engagement:

• reward users for returning in a short time
• reward users for helping friends
• allow users to create w/out typing
• offer increasing levels of complexity and mastery
• have surprises and limited time events

Revolutionary approach:

• web partners encourage users to download mobile app
• members earn badges for survey participation
• badges promote online reputation and influence, interests, brand affinity
• consumers rate brand perceptions, awareness, experience
• surveys received via LBS, push notifications, check-ins, can share w/ friends

Starts with the community:

• best way to engage consumers
• gaming driven by making it fun, social esteem, rewards

Badge benefits:

For users:
• users build reputation
• creates instant value
• users share badges

For brands:

• drop-in reputation across web
• define new rewards easily
• social analytics for brands
• new way to engage with customers, members, fans

Brandscan 360 rating:

• community members provide thousands of daily ratings
• based on brand touchpoints/interactions
• data mapped to location

Apps – the new currency:

• in-demand and WoM driven
• consumers earn points for participation

Q&A:

• since not everyone is interested in badges, does this create a source of bias? no
• location-based angles? opportunity to use for shelf testing

Prediction Markets for Fun and Prophet – putting gaming to work
Jeffrey Henning (Vovici)

Prediction markets:

• been around for a while
• became popular in 2004 w/ wisdom of crowds book
• hsx – hollywood stock exchange – given virtual dollars to invest in movies and stars – chance to be a movie mogul
• used by spread betters cantor fitzgerald to establish odds

Other pred mkts:

• simexchange – for games
• betfair
• iem – iowa electronic markets – politics – oldest pred mkt
• bet2give: wide range of topics

Why pred mkts work well:

• we see others better than we see ourselves

Combe case study:

• hair care products brand – just for men, grecian…
• traditionally used surveys for concept testing
• tried pred mkts due to low incidence rates (i.e. ability to use a general pop sample = cheaper)
• pred mkt ‘traders’ allocate virtual dollars to preferred concepts
• no sample selection – general pop
• ppl like the exercise, more entertaining

Benefits of pred mkts:

• ask ppl what would the market do (not what they would you do)
• variable incentives
• 3-4 days vs 3-4 wks
• half the price

Reasons for limited client adoption:

• companies reluctant to abandon normative databases
• failure has many fathers
• early adopters have expensive-to-reach mkts

Q&A:

• not had any papers refuting pred mkts so why are clients reluctant to adopt? idea not been sufficiently evangelised. forrester research just blogged that they are about to bring out a new paper on pred mkts shortly. stuff takes time to get adopted
• pred mkts is a different slant on gaming. are there other examples of different takes on gaming? gaming usually means simulations. lesson from today is the need to take inspiration from games to make things more fun and entertaining
• comment: trendspotting/cool hunting are examples of engendering a competitive instinct to encourage responses

We’re just back from the excellent two-day European Customer Experience Event where folks from Zappos and Harley-Davidson talked about how they build their ‘wow’ experience.

It’s our first time there and, to be honest, not the usual beat for us. But it should be – both for us and the insight community in general. Researchers who do anything related to loyalty or customer service should be attending this type of event because they get to meet the folks who actually put their work into practice – customer experience and service heads from major organisations, public and private.

We’ll blog more with some things that caught our eye. But first, in what’s becoming a tradition, here’s a wrap-up chat with three fellow delegates in which we talk highlights, learnings, customer experience in the public sector, digital natives vs. immigrants, behavioural economics, engendering loyalty by charging people (!), transparency and authenticity, convergence, and improvements for next year. Enjoy!

STARRING:

• Brian Koma, VP Research, Vovici
• Sharon Bayliss, London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham
• Toni Blumeris, MD, Harding & Yorke (S. Africa)

European Customer Experience World event

A lot of folks are drinking the Zappos kool-aid these days. And it’s easy to see why. Because every now and then you come across a company that’s so contrarian in its thinking and execution that it leaves most observers bewildered. Before it was Google with quirky initiatives such as 20% time, something we now know powers its innovation funnel.

Online retailer Zappos is the latest purveyor of contrarian thinking, all in the pursuit of its happiness business model. For example, staff can spend six minutes or six hours on the phone with a single customer – there’s never any pressure to hit productivity quotas. New staff are paid to leave to gauge their commitment. And customers can return shoes up to a year after purchase, postage free, for a full refund. The list goes on.

The result? Booming sales – a couple years ago they broke the $1bn mark. And they were recently acquired by Amazon for – insert Dr. Evil voice – one billion dollars!

Harley-Davidson needs no introduction. It’s an iconic brand that, unlike Zappos, has been around for decades. And for many of us it conjures up distinct emotions such as freedom even if we’ve never experienced their products.

So, why are we telling you all this? Because you’ll learn more about how these companies are building strong cultures which drive profitability in the short podcast below (15 mins). It’s a discussion with the COO of Zappos and a senior marketer from Harley-Davidson, both of whom will be speaking at the upcoming European Customer Experience World event in May – check out the website for tickets and details.

Kindly hosted by Dean van Leeuwen, TomorrowToday’s intellectual adventurer and scholar of the new world of work. He focuses on customer loyalty and talent engagement.

In the chat we learn about…

• The genesis of Zappos quirkiness
• How Harley-Davidson is managing to stay relevant today
• Whether the ‘humanizing the organisation’ movement has staying power
• Examples of initiatives to build a sustainable culture of positive experiences/behavioural economics
• The evidence that these deliver topline and bottom-line results

STARRING:

• Alfred Lin, COO, Zappos
• Markus Kramer, director of marketing operations, Harley-Davidson
• HOST – Dean van Leeuwen, intellectual adventurer, TomorrowToday

Music by Amber Ojeda.

In the final of three audio podcasts recorded live at ARF Re:think ‘10, we chat with Conquest Research’s David Penn about his new tool, Infexious, which he says better predicts the likelihood that a campaign will go viral.

More precisely, David is interviewed by Rob Gotti and Robert Hall, both from the Boston Beer Company and who were intrigued by the tool and had a few questions.

David founded and runs the London-based quantitative outfit Conquest Research. The invention of Infexious, which uses visual metaphors to get a more emotional, pre-cognitive measure of consumer reaction, follows the earlier development of Metaphorix, a tool using a similar approach to measure how engaging a campaign or execution is.

We chat about…

• What the tool does
• Pre-testing the Cadbury Gorilla ad. failed – would Infexious be any better?
• The difference between an individual and a social response – and which is best measuring
• Is this tool really measuring pre-cognitive responses?
• Validation – Evian & Compare the Meerkat ads.
• Do clients always want their ad. agency to develop ads. that go viral?
• Persuasion in communications without being rational – the Carling campaign

(Pic c/o rooreynolds on Flickr)

In the second of three audio podcasts recorded live at ARF Re:think ‘10, we chat with anthropologist Grant McCracken.

Grant trained as an anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Chicago), has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show. He started the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, where he did the first museum exhibit on youth cultures. He has taught anthropology at the University of Cambridge, ethnography at MIT, and marketing at the Harvard Business School.

He recently published his third book, Chief Culture Officer, in which he argues that the time has come to elevate cultural understanding within organisations as part of both an offensive and defensive strategy.

We chat about the key themes in the book and are kindly joined by researcher Steve Gentile of Think Tank NYC, someone who I roped into the conversation once I heard that he had actually read Grant’s book

(Pic c/o hyku on Flickr)

In the first of three short audio podcasts recorded at ARF Re:think ‘10, we chat with Pete Blackshaw, EVP of Digital Strategic Services Online Division at Nielsen.

Pete was one of the early advocates of CGM and started a firm that eventually became part of Buzzmetrics, itself later bought by Nielsen. An author and prolific tweeter, we chat about…

• The implications for an organisation’s structure and culture as it grapples with responding to customer issues in real-time
• Which department should manage and own social media conversations
• The importance of ensuring that consumer trust is never ‘violated’
• Nielsen’s new algorithm for blending the potency of paid- (advertising) and earned- (social) media
• What CMOs are looking for from media measures
• The next challenge for social media: data integration, segmentation

Neither the BA strike nor the motley crew above could stop our first visit to the ARF Re:think annual confab in New York (a special thanks, btw, to Joel Rubinson and team for providing access).

Key themes this year were neuroscience, biometrics, social media management and measurement, integrating offline with online behavior (as advertisers and marketers look to link a stimulus on one with resultant behaviour on the other), and the increasing value of understanding cultural influences through ethnography. It was good to see a conference confidently devote so much of its agenda to the new MR, or ‘the new normal’ as the ARF referred to it.

Specific highlights for us include

• A marathon 2-hour session from various folks at Nielsen on ‘Thinking How Consumers Watch, Listen and Buy’. Led by Paul J. Donato, CRO, we learn, among other gems, that high search term prices was the reason for the bizarre but ultimately successful UK ad. campaign Compare the Meerkat. Donato also referred to big data sets – data abundance and mining was a clear theme, particularly among the big boys in audience and shopper measurement
• A panel discussing the new ways to understand influences on consumers, by looking through a social lens (Larry Friedman of TNS), a cultural lens (anthropologist Grant McCracken) and an emotional lens (Carl Marci, Innerscope). The different perspectives showed the value of diverse information sources and subsequent need to integrate or synthesise the data into a coherent, persuasive whole
• A lively debate among client-side folks on ‘How to Bring the Voice of the Human Into the Boardroom’. Some interesting ideas came out the debate moderated by Joel Rubinson: Stan Sthanunathan of Coca-Cola says they are slowly shifting to a pay-performance model for their MR agencies; John Forsyth of McKinsey says that his clients are looking for people with good synthesis skills; Susan Wagner of Johnson & Johnson talked of having shifted 15% of their MR budget to so-called new MR tools (she didn’t specify what these were). Stan also talked of ways to stimulate his internal clients’ thinking using more than just conventional research – for example by getting them to meet with folks in the army to share challenges and strategies

We managed to record a few short audio podcasts, do have a listen

• Nielsen’s Pete Blackshaw on a new algorithm for measuring ‘blended media’ (paid + earned media) Listen here
• Anthropologist Grant McCracken on why companies can’t afford to continue without a Chief Culture Officer Listen here
• Conquest Research’s David Penn on his new tool for predicting the virality of communications Listen here

It was a pity we couldn’t stay for the final day when neuroscience and biometrics were covered in earnest. But we have recorded video chats with some of the key players and plan to bring the completed film to you later this year.

A big thanks again to ARF folks Joel Rubinson, CRO, and marketing director Heather James for giving me access to an event I look forward to attending again.

See here for the introductory article.

Here’s a couple of panel discussions from the event.

     
Paul Berney of the MMA probably said it best: giving the keynote at the Globalpark-sponsored 2010 Mobile Research Conference, he said that 2009 turned out to be the year that mobile became a serious consumer internet access device. But then he also said he wasn’t going to be held to that proclamation given how premature the prediction turned out in previous years!

Around 100 folks turned up for the two-day, well-organised event in London for what I believe was a meaty feast of the useful and practical. And there was good Wifi so lots and lots of tweeting (apparently nine tweets/min at one stage).

We took advantage of the Wifi to post these five podcast chats in almost real-time – hope the many hundreds who listened to these on the day felt the speedy upload was useful.

See here for audio from two of the panel discussions.

In the next few days we’ll add links to blogger commentaries: