Marketing News: November/December 2018

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

AMA.ORG

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018

If You Don’t Have It,

Buy It–Then

Flaunt It Why we may not be as evolved as we think when it comes to shopper marketing

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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

3-8 10-18

20-21

24-34

73-78

SEEN ON AMA.ORG ANSWERS IN ACTION • Snapshot • Core Concepts • Ethical Marketing

SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS • Larisa Ertekin, Alina Sorescu and Mark B. Houston

EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Michael Krass • Daniel Burstein • J. Walker Smith • Russ Klein

CAREER ADVANCEMENT

• Personal Brand •Jobs

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#OFFICEGOALS

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 Alpha Males and Subconscious Sales

Research suggests that men still shop with their instincts, compensating for inferiority by flaunting their buying power.

 Have Marketers Made Us Fat? Years of diet culture and unfounded marketing messaging have left consumers often confused and rarely slimmer.

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AMA .org

OR FIND US ON

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NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2018

VOL. 52 | NO. 10 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Bill Cron Chairperson of the AMA Board 2018-2019 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

Phone (800) AMA-1150 • Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org David Klein, Chief Content Officer dklein@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor-in-Chief msoat@ama.org Michelle Markelz, Managing Editor mmarkelz@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Staff Writer ssteimer@ama.org Bill Murphy, Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Michael Gay, Account Executive mgay@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4421 Nicola Tate, Account Executive ntate@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4437 Jordan Berthiaume, Media Sales Representative jberthiaume@YourMembership.com (727) 497-6565 x3409 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December (pending) by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

Circulation: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 Tel: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Marketing News, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, 60601-6320, USA. Periodical Postage paid at Chicago, Ill., and additional mailing offices.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Marketing in a Global World

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he term “global marketing” is a bit like “digital marketing” anymore—it feels too ubiquitous, too obvious, too on the nose. We live in a world that’s informed by countless cultures, instant mobile connectedness and the ability to fly across the globe in less than a day. Customers want a local and global experience all at once, and it’s up to marketers to deliver it.

There are certain truths about consumers that marketers can count on in every country. In this issue, Hal Conick explores how perceptions of masculinity affect men’s purchase behaviors all over the world. While considered controversial by some, evolutionary psychology is increasingly used to better understand how multiple environmental factors influence purchase behavior across nations and cultures. “Now, a larger number of researchers bring together evolutionary psychology and marketing research in search of why consumers spend, how they compete and what motives for consumption bubble under human consciousness,” Conick writes.

“Evolutionary psychology is another tool to examine marketing, a way to make

predictions about how consumers behave.”

This issue is filled with insights, case studies and next practices that speak to marketers across the globe, rather than global marketing as a practice. How have you seen the global perspective influence your work?

MOLLY SOAT

Editor-in-Chief @MollySoat

Canada Post Agreement Number 40030960.

Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff.

Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.

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Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for all content (including text, representations and illustrations) of advertisements published, and also assume responsibility for any claims arising therefrom made against the publisher. The right is reserved to reject any advertisement.

Copyright © 2018 by the American Marketing Association.

All rights reserved.

Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org.

CONTRIBUTORS

ZACK BROOKE

CHRISTINE MOORMAN

Zach Brooke is a former AMA staff writer turned freelance journalist. His work has been featured in Chicago magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, A.V. Club and VICE, among others.

Follow him on Twitter @Zach_Brooke.

Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, founder and director of The CMO Survey and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Marketing.

Printed in the U.S.A.

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7 Golden Rules for Crisis Communication

‘I

’m the guy you don’t want to talk to,” says Andy Liuzzi, executive vice president of crisis and risk management at Edelman.

Liuzzi works with brands when there’s a crisis beyond their control,

which he says keeps him busy. Crises are events such as Elon Musk’s tweets, Facebook’s account breaches, BP’s oil spill or Uber’s former CEO getting caught on video yelling at a driver.

Word of crises spreads over social media, and brands have mere

moments to respond. “In short: Issues escalate more quickly, they’re more polarizing and they have the potential to disrupt business,” he says.

There’s now a greater risk to reputation, a stronger network of activists, more judgment of whom companies work with, an increased focus on what companies or their employees post on social media and a new reality where no scenario is too far-fetched.

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Incidents happen once and go away. Issues are smoldering and should be addressed; they are not a surprise. Crises often pop out of nowhere.

How can brands survive? Liuzzi offers his seven golden rules of crisis management.

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Assign Accountability

There may be multiple people in a business who believe they should own the brand’s reputation, but Liuzzi says that companies must decide who owns the reputational risk for a brand.

If there’s a cybersecurity breach, the IT chief should take responsibility.

If it’s a hiring problem, HR needs to step up. The CEO can’t take responsibility for everything, he says.

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Understand the Issues

“There are incidents, there are issues and there are crises,” Liuzzi says. “They’re not all the same.”

Incidents happen once and go away.

Issues are smoldering and should be addressed; they are not a surprise.

Crises often pop out of nowhere, but Liuzzi says that issues can also become crises if left unattended.

He says that he can figure out 80% of a company’s potential crises, but 20% will always be a surprise. CrockPot, for example, never envisioned taking a stock hit for being a part of an emotional story line in the NBC show “This Is Us.” “Learn while the water is calm,” Liuzzi says.

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Prepare and Be Proactive

When a crisis happens, Liuzzi says that it’s ineffective to debate what happened and more important to determine what the company is doing to move forward. If there’s a

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cybersecurity breach, the cause doesn’t matter as much as figuring out how the brand will win trust back from consumers who feel betrayed.

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Respond Immediately

Action often takes a long time in an organization, but organizations in crisis must move quickly.

Liuzzi used Sully Sullenberger’s landing in the Hudson River as an example; a user immediately posted about it on social media, U.S. Airways responded within 25 minutes.

“That’s how quickly we have to respond,” he says.

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Find Allies

Liuzzi says that companies should have other organizations willing to vouch for them when possible.

Starbucks spent years building up a network of partners on social issues. When two black men were arrested in one of its stores in 2018, and customers were angry, Starbucks shut down all of its shops for a day of training. Liuizzi believes few other brands could get away with doing this as Starbucks did; a lot of thirdparty organizations believed in and supported Starbucks, he says.

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Minimize the Response

CEOs often respond emotionally to crises, Liuzzi says.

They feel vulnerable but tend to overcommunicate. It’s a bad idea to put the CEO in front of a media camera to answer questions. Instead, use data to bolster responses and control the message.

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Have One Message

“If you’re not saying the same thing to all people, you’re going to get yourself in trouble,” Liuzzi says.

He gave an example of two Chipotle executives responding two different ways to the company’s e-coli outbreak. One executive gave a genuine-sounding apology on TV while another blamed the media for the controversey at an industry event.

“He made the mistake of forgetting smartphones exist,” Liuzzi says.

The Second Act: Recovery Liuzzi says that recovery is the second act of any crisis. Target took 12 months to recover after its massive data breach. Equifax took 13 months to recover 90% of its stock price after its massive data breach.

“You’ve got to act your way to recovery,” Liuzzi says. “You can’t spin your way out of this.”

United Airlines took corrective action after it used police officers to pull a passenger off an airplane. The company communicated to the public that it let its policies get ahead of its values and that it was working to change. Then, the company changed its policy for removing passengers from flights.

To recover, Liuzzi says that there must be a transformational remedy, recovery efforts must be sustained and effective and there must be a human face to the recovery.

Tracking recovery will be the best measurement of success. Some companies focus on social media; Liuzzi says that he focuses on sales, brand tracking and customer service calls.

Companies will be judged by their competency, transparency and guardianship. Did they hide behind PR or attorneys instead of owning up? Did they have empathy, care or concern for others? Consumers will be watching.

—HAL CONICK

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4 Takeaways from ESOMAR Congress 2018

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SOMAR Congress 2018 convened in Berlin in September, bringing together more than 1,000 market researchers, data scientists and marketers. They discussed how the data, insights and analytics industry is moving forward; new technologies; and successes of the past year.

For those marketers that didn’t make it to ESOMAR Congress this year, here are four takeaways to inspire you in 2019 and beyond:

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Research Is Attainable — Even for Small Business

Without the benefit of insights, many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are potentially making poor decisions.

A lack of experience in research, a need for demonstrable ROI and low budgets can be big barriers to the use of insights in SMBs. Many SMBs attempt to conduct some form of research themselves, but often they do not have the expertise to interpret

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and apply those data to make the right choices.

All of that is changing. It is now possible to acquire data for almost nothing and use the skills of insights professionals to understand and leverage data. Many insights companies have honed their services to be agile and available to the SMB sector.

One example of this at Congress was boutique insights firm Northstar and its client Metfriendly, a mutual society supporting London police officers with financial products.

Metfriendly membership was declining, and the society needed to understand what new offers it could include in its portfolio and how to communicate them. With Northstar, Metfriendly was able to reverse its decline and prove the ROI of its research program.

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Research Optimizes Nonprofits for Good

Nonprofits presented some of

the most compelling stories at Congress. Forcier Consulting spoke of encouraging girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo not to miss school due to a lack of sanitary protection.

Surgo Foundation told of saving babies and young children in India by encouraging use of rehydration salts. And Kantar Millward Brown and Our Better World, Singapore shared stories of supporting women who had miscarried. These stories prove that research saves lives.

Because of the intense scrutiny on nonprofit funds and the need to demonstrate clear ROI for every penny spent, these stories were fully focused on the outcomes of the projects, not only on the research process and the insight. Often, research prevented money from being wasted by ensuring the money that was spent delivered the best result.

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Data Protection Is an Opportunity, Not a Threat

During Congress, news broke of Facebook’s recent data breach and a potential $1.63 billion fine, hot on the heels of General Data Protection Regulation’s debut earlier this year.

Many marketers perceive data privacy as a necessary nightmare, but perception depends on where you’re standing. Researchers from insights firm Buzzback and HERE technologies, a locationbased data company, wanted to better understand the intersection of consumer attitudes and data protection in digital apps. They found that 91% of respondents were concerned about sharing their personal information digitally, while 75% stated, “sharing my location makes me feel vulnerable or stressed.”

Their study also found 44% of consumers realized after inspection that they share data with far more apps than they think they do. It paints a now-familiar picture of the lack of consumer understanding of how data are stored, an aspect of data

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protection for which businesses must take responsibility.

This was reinforced by the findings of a study by ESOMAR and Kadence International, which showed that most companies are either unaware of their data obligations or too lax in implementing them.

Buzzback and HERE shared that if consumers can withdraw access to location data, have the opportunity to delete it or can easily change their permissions and preferences, then more than two-thirds of consumers would be more likely to willingly share their location data. In a world where data breaches are now a weekly occurrence, consumer data transparency and control can provide companies consumer data and drive increased trust in the brand.

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The ROI of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has grown apace in recent years. Even B2B marketers now see influencer marketing as a key channel. However, understanding the ROI of the influencer has been a difficult proposition. Respondi and its client Drogerie-markt (Germany’s largest over-the-counter healthcare and cosmetics retailer) shared findings from their work in influencer marketing.

Respondi recorded and analyzed internet use of 2,453 participants and discovered that influencer reach is huge: 23% of internet visitors have already seen an influencer video with product placement, and 60% of 14- to 29-year-olds have visited an influencer’s YouTube channel.

They also found that reach is not necessarily a good metric

for influence. Followers do not indicate high impression rate, and influencers with big followings are less convincing than microinfluencers.

A campaign launched with several smaller influencers compared to one well-followed influencer suggests an impression rate 50% higher for the smaller influencers.

Marketers should also consider video quality when engaging in influencer marketing. Quantity may drive initial engagement, but quality ensures consumer retention. With any content marketing channel, there needs to be the right balance of commercial and noncommercial content — influencers are most influential when they find the right balance between engaging noncommercial content and brand and product content.

—FINN RABEN

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Market Research Is up in the US but Down in the EU

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he global market research industry is worth $46 billion, growing 1% in 2017 after inflation, according to the “Global Market Research 2018” report

by ESOMAR, a global organization for the data, research and insights industry.

“Promisingly, growth is recorded both within the traditionally defined research sector, as well as the newer, expanded definition of our industry — continued evidence that the demand for actionable, evidencebased insight remains strong amongst research buyers,” Finn Raben, ESOMAR director general, wrote in the introduction to this year’s report.

This growth was affected by two opposite forces: On one side of the Atlantic Ocean, the U.S. research market grew by 1.6%, but on the other side, markets in the European Union declined by 0.7%. These two markets

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represent 75% of the world’s research market, according to ESOMAR. In North America, the U.S. research market has thrived, but Canada’s market has remained flat due to the variation of its exchange rate and the increase in its inflation rate.

ESOMAR reports that growth in the U.S. was lower than market analysts had predicted. There’s no one reason why growth was lower than expected, but the report says that the country has a “strong commitment to web, text and data analytics, as well as an across-the-industry interest in understanding and responding to the research industry’s expansion and transformation.”

The EU is the only market whose net growth rate declined in 2017, the report finds. Other markets that grew include the Middle East (up 2.9%), Asia Pacific (up 2.6%), Africa (up 1.4%) and Latin America (up 1.4%).

ESOMAR reports that the EU markets may be dropping due to the potential effect of Brexit and the increasing tendency to bring research in house due to data-hosting laws contained in Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation.

However, there are many European markets that are doing well, including: Russia (up 7.6%), Bulgaria (up 7.3%), Romania (up 5.9%), Hungary (up 5.8%) and Poland (up 5.6%).

The five largest markets in this year’s report are: 1. The U.S. at 44% of all markets.

2. The U.K. at 14% of all markets.

3. Germany at 6% of all markets.

4. F rance and China at 5% each of all markets.

The rest of the world took 26% of the research market.

ESOMAR says that it has yet to see how new realities — Brexit, populism and political discontent — will truly affect the market research industry across the world. This year was but a preview.

—HAL CONICK

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SNAPSHOT

L.L. Bean Helps Workers Escape Cubicle Culture for the Great Outdoors with an Experiential Campaign How the outdoor recreation retailer convinced consumers their best work happens outside

BY ZACH BROOKE zcbrooke16@gmail.com 

Goal Outdoorsman Leon Leonwood Bean developed his now-famous waterproof boot, so he could fully enjoy the tranquility of Maine’s fertile freshwater shorelines. In 1912, he lent his name to a new company, L.L. Bean, formed to market the innovative footwear to likeminded naturalists. For years, the brand was synonymous with camping supplies, wilderness gear and top-of-the-line quality. But by 2017, internal tracking suggested that the brand’s original message had become garbled.

“We were founded 100-plus years ago as an outdoor brand, but we sell a lot of casual apparel as well,” says Kathryn Pratt, the company’s director of brand

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engagement. VIA, the agency L.L. Bean hired to bring clarity to the message, agreed; VIA CEO Leeann Leahy told Adweek the brand had fragmented and “lost its clear path.”

L.L. Bean struck out to reclaim its roots by marketing the rewards of time spent in nature. The company underscored its “Be an Outsider” campaign with clever and cutesy investments, such as an ad in The New York Times fully viewable only when basked with sunlight.

But this was no one-off affair. “We’re really calling it a creative platform more than a campaign because it’s a customerfacing message that we intend to stick with for the foreseeable future,” Pratt says.

“We are on a mission, as a brand, to get

people outside.”

Pratt pushed harder this year. Rather than producing the same all-outdoorsall-the-time ads, Pratt wanted to develop more contextual messages. This change already pervaded the initial marketing, which omitted the extreme exploits of weekend warriors. The outdoors, the ads implied, weren’t just for steep-grade mountain climbers and certified divers.

L.L. Bean depicted nature as belonging to all people—even those who enjoy simple strolls through parks with a picnic basket.

But telling customers to fill more of their leisure time with the splendor of the outdoors would not be enough.

Some quick calculations suggested an employment-based pitch was needed.

Most of L.L. Bean’s core customers worked at traditional desk jobs where they presumably averaged 40 hours a week cooped up in cubicles, not counting transit time. No amount of weekendfocused escapism would change that fact.

L.L. Bean decided to focus on the idea of incorporating more of the outdoors into work. Its still-fresh tagline was appended to “Be an Outsider at Work,” and the brand set out to change attitudes about doing business in nature.

Action L.L. Bean hired two more partners— brand experience agency Jack Morton and workspace provider Industrious—to construct outdoor workspaces.

But before the team put hammer to nail, they decided to ballast the effort with some intellectual heft, something that would give workers permission to step outside and metrics to make their bosses feel smart for allowing them to do so.

Workplace design specialist Leigh Stringer produced a handbook on how America spends its time and the benefits of working outdoors. Citing a report by John Spengler of the Harvard School of Public Health, Stringer wrote that most people spend 95% of their lives indoors, with half of that time confined to an indoor workspace. L.L. Bean’s original research found that 96% of employees supported working outside more often.

Stringer culled facts on the business

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SNAPSHOT

benefits of working outside in spurts to add to the reports, finding that 92% of people are happier working outside rather than inside.

“We would be better at our desk jobs if we got outside more during the work week,” says Ben Grossman, L.L. Bean SVP and group strategy director, who led the project.

“When we go outside during the work day, we end up being more productive. We also get fresher ideas. … Obviously, happiness is a huge part of corporate culture. We’re better at everything when we’re in a positive state of mind.”

Armed with research supporting its mission to bring more of the outdoors to office life, the team created a microsite dedicated to the “Be an Outsider at Work” campaign. The website included the handbook and a set of tips workers could use to fit more nature into their day while maintaining, or even increasing, productivity.

“We wanted to give people little ways to work outside every day, and that can be as simple as taking something like an interview and making it an outer-view,” Grossman says. “Or if you’re going to host a brainstorm session, consider it a freshair opportunity to bring fresh ideas.”

All this was a prelude to the campaign’s piece de resistance: a tour of pop-up outdoor coworking spaces in select cities.

Led by Industrious, L.L. Bean set up fully operational offices in urban parks with high foot traffic. The offices were complete with docking stations and whiteboards for group strategizing.

The initial event kicked off in New York City’s Madison Square Park on June 21, and despite early reports of uncooperative weather, the sun shone brightly throughout the day.

The pop-ups were replicated over the summer in neighborhoods of Boston and Madison, Wisconsin—both cities where L.L. Bean recently opened new stores—as well as Philadelphia.

Equally illustrative of L.L. Bean’s goals in this campaign was the omission of a traditional marketing action: hawking merchandise. Rather than tie the campaign to specific apparel, executives decided to make no direct mention of L.L.

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COMPANY

L.L. Bean FOUNDED

1912 HEADQUARTERS

Freeport, Maine PARTNERS

Jack Morton, Industrious RESULTS

200,000 digital engagements and 2.5 million views of digital videos

Bean products.

“We thought about ways to integrate product, but we backed away from that pretty quickly,” Pratt says. “We felt confident we had other marketing channels to focus on the products and that the goal of this campaign, in particular, was at a higher level. It was about getting people outside.”

Results L.L. Bean built it, and people came. By the end of the tour, employees from Google, IBM, McKinsey, Superfly, Blue Apron and Pinterest all booked space in the outdoor offices, along with several other people who passed by the outdoor offices. Some spaces accommodated 25 employees, others closer to 50—all performed at near capacity.

The campaign became a media darling and social media sensation.

Viral sharing—powered largely through a partnership with social news site NowThis—reached more than 200,000 digital engagements and digital videos were viewed 2.5 million times. Along with steady coverage in trade publications, the campaign wound up on the front page of USA Today, the most-circulated newspaper in the country.

“USA Today was a huge win,” says Pratt, who drove around to convenience stores to buy as many copies as she could

find to distribute to L.L. Bean leadership.

“Knowing the reach that USA Today has and the alignment their readership has with our target audience, we knew our message was going to get to the right people.”

The traction created by the experiential campaign overperformed a small media investment. “We actually didn’t have significant paid media against it,” Pratt says. “The primary metric that we set going into this campaign was earned media, and we delivered above and beyond.”

L.L. Bean’s push for outdoor working has continued even after the pop-up tour ended. The mircosite remains live, and partner agency Jack Morton even created a permanent outdoor workspace in its own headquarters.

While the future messaging of “Be an Outsider at Work” is uncertain, L.L. Bean will surely continue to align itself with spending time in the outdoors. The brand is partnering with the National Parks Foundation and brainstorming ideas on how to bring the partnership to life.

Future action will likely complement L.L. Bean’s already up-and-running outdoor discovery programs, paid clinics where customers can learn outdoor activities and survival skills.

These actions, brand strategists believe, can help the company develop an intense following that surpasses the devotion of people just shopping for quality products.

“People are no longer looking for brands that are in the world just to sell us things,” Grossman says. “Our expectations of brands are increasingly that they have a point of view and that they’re creating a positive change in the world. It’s an important lesson for marketers to learn that the way to get the register to ring is not always necessarily by saying, ‘Buy this product.’ Sometimes it’s by saying, ‘Believe in this movement.’ That’s what L.L. Bean has exhibited.” m ZACH BROOKE is a former AMA staff writer turned freelance journalist. His work has been featured in Chicago magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, A.V. Club and VICE, among others. Follow him on Twitter @ Zach_Brooke.

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CORE CONCEPTS

How to Design Strong Case Studies A well-crafted case study can showcase a mindful marketing strategy

BY SARAH STEIMER | STAFF WRITER steimer@ama.org 

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eflection is hip right now. Personal and professional mindfulness trends hype the benefits of contemplating and celebrating. For some, the act of reflection might mean meditation or journaling. For marketers, reflection often means building a case study.

The goal of case studies may be to attract new customers, present a new idea or promote yourself to a potential employer. Whatever the purpose, these structured reflections can have major implications. For example, Marketing Charts found that case studies help convert the most leads for B2B companies.

But where to begin a case study can seem overwhelming—and what works for one won’t work for all. Sometimes, the best-designed reflections come from good preparation, with wiggle room to be surprised.

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case,” says Sam Balter, senior marketing manager at HubSpot.

Balter uses website building and hosting company Squarespace as an example. The company tapped wellknown actors Keanu Reeves and Jeff Bridges to draw attention in its commercials, but then highlighted the actors’ stories to mimic how regular customers would use the product. The average Squarespace user hasn’t starred in a cult classic movie, but, the ad suggests, if Squarespace is good enough and simple enough for Bridges to make a website for his spoken-word and ambient sounds album, it’s good enough for the average user’s small business.

“You probably want to focus on people who are slightly above average in terms of name recognition,” Balter says, but those high-profile spokespeople should still have a use case that will resonate with the most common customers.

What Projects Are Worth Turning into Case Studies Kristie Ritchie, VP of marketing at Upshot, says that case studies should be crafted anytime a marketer or company tries something new or innovates the brand, product or its approach. Case studies can be crafted for product launches or when project results are outstanding. “Really, anything can be turned into a case study if you have the right infomation and story,” she says.

Case studies are being used to attract new customers, so they should include examples that are relevant to the audience.

“Case studies are meant to mirror the diversity of customers to make it easier for customers to see themselves or their use

When to Begin Working on a Case Study There are at least two schools of thought on case study writing: Start as soon as the spotlight project or campaign ends, while the details are still fresh, or start even sooner. “Work on it throughout the process by having someone document milestones, program changes and results,” Ritchie says.

There’s also an argument for postponing case study creation. Balter says that the hiatus depends on the type of project you’re highlighting. For example, a website redesign intended to improve traffic won’t show results for at least a few weeks. Balter argues that marketers should consider case studies to

be evolving pieces of content that receive occasional updates rather than static pieces set in stone.

When to Use a Template Reflection is nice, but when time is short, a prepared template for case studies can keep work on schedule. Ritchie suggests preparing different templates for different types of campaigns. “A brand campaign case study might look totally different than a shopper marketing case study,” she says. Many templates will include similar elements, such as business challenges, insights, strategy or tactics and results.

Some may flow better as a story than a formatted report.

Just as the same format shouldn’t

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CORE CONCEPTS

answers in action

“Anything can be turned into a case study if you have the right infomation and story.”

to learn more.’ Start with something that allows you to get that information without promising too much.”

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GATHER THE BASICS.

Have a team member track core information as the project progresses.

You’ll also collect final data and results— anything quantifiable. “It’s good to keep this information factual, so you can take a journalistic approach to writing case studies—find out what’s valuable to the reader and adapt the story to that,” Ritchie says.

be used for every type of project, Balter cautions against jamming a case study into an inappropriate template and missing what makes each project unique. Marketers should leave room for flexibility, as special stories can be the difference between a forgettable study and a memorable one. Marketers should include details that may only seem important to an individual client or company, Balter says, because they inject interest into the case study and provide relatable content.

Steps to Build a Case Study

1

DETERMINE ITS PURPOSE.

Is the case study intended to lure new customers? Is it for an industry

presentation? Determine the criteria that will make it successful. Knowing the target audience and what questions they need answered will drive the content and choice of template.

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FIND THE EXAMPLE THAT BEST FITS THE GOAL.

Use a case study from a particularly compelling client (especially one that is recognizable). If the case study requires reaching out to a company for approval or to learn more about the results, start with a pre-interview. “You don’t necessarily want to set expectations,” Balter says.

“You want to reach out and say, ‘I’d love to hear about your story. I work on our customer success team, I’m just looking

4

PRODUCE IN A COMPELLING FORMAT.

Some case studies will lend themselves best to video, particularly if the subjects are well-spoken. Don’t push a format that doesn’t fit the content.

A technical-heavy case study won’t be visually interesting, and the important pieces may be best communicated with a chart anyhow.

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LEAVE ROOM FOR SOMETHING UNIQUE.

As Balter suggests, a subject may give you a one-of-a-kind story. If the case study is internal, Ritchie recommends including lessons learned. Whatever the purpose of the case study, there’s an opportunity to inject something memorable. m NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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answers in action

ETHICAL MARKETING

Are A/B Tests Ethical?

A/B testing may seem harmless, but many consumers don’t like how easily companies can test them without their knowledge.

Should marketers change how they test?

BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER hconick@ama.org 

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hat ethical questions could a simple A/B test raise?

What could be wrong with testing how people react to two different campaigns or website colors?

Michelle Meyer would tell you: not much. She’s an assistant professor and associate director of research ethics at Geisinger’s Center for Translational Bioethics & Health Care Policy and says that she doesn’t see the bounds of A/B testing so differently from the bounds of business ethics. “Selling? Yes. Upselling? Hmm. Advertising? Yes. False advertising? No,” she says.

But as the amount of data online grows, the line between research and business gets thinner. Companies can now A/B test large groups of consumers, and social media platforms can test even larger numbers of users. Large corporations, including Google, Amazon and Netflix, undertake many A/B tests

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every day, unknown and unseen by the users being tested. This is unsettling to some; many consumers have loudly— sometimes angrily—spoken out when they realized that they were part of A/B tests undertaken by companies that wield large pools of data. In March 2014, Facebook tested about 700,000 of its users without telling them. The social platform gave some users a positive newsfeed and others a negative newsfeed, publishing the results of its study in collaboration with researchers from Cornell University in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The resulting paper, titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” found that users with negative newsfeeds posted more negative words, and those with positive newsfeeds posted more positive words.

Many users decried Facebook’s use of “human experimentation.” The chorus of

complaints grew so loud that Adam D.I. Kramer, one of the Facebook researchers who worked on the study, apologized.

“The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,” Kramer wrote in a Facebook blog post. “I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused.”

Meyer found the kerfuffle to be distasteful—not for what Facebook and Cornell researchers studied, but for what she thought was a misled, overheated response by many angry media members and Facebook users. The sample size of the study was huge, but the results were minimal—viewers who saw negative newsfeeds, for example, only posted four more negative words for every 10,000 words they wrote. What was reported by many as a giant wave of emotion was more of a minor blip.

“People were wrong on the internet and it was annoying,” Meyer says. She wrote a blog post on why Facebook’s testing could have feasibly been approved by the Institutional Review Board, an administrative body that regulates research performed on human subjects, if Facebook had practiced slightly better informed consent—notifying potential subjects of active tests and alerting them to potential side effects. Her post was quickly picked up by Wired and shared thousands of times. “We can certainly have a conversation about the appropriateness of Facebook-like manipulations, data mining and other 21st-century practices,” Meyer wrote in the post. “But so long as we allow private entities freely to engage in these practices, we ought not unduly restrain academics trying to determine their effects.”

A year later, Meyer wrote a column for The New York Times with Christopher Chabris, an associate professor of psychology at Union College, which editors provocatively titled: “Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us.” Meyer and Chabris wrote that the

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ETHICAL MARKETING

outrage against Facebook’s testing was a “moral illusion,” a false choice between releasing a product or atmosphere and experimenting with different products or atmospheres.

“Companies—and other powerful actors, including lawmakers, educators and doctors—‘experiment’ on us without our consent every time they implement a new policy, practice or product without knowing its consequences,” they wrote.

“We aren’t saying that every innovation requires A/B testing. Nor are we advocating nonconsensual experiments involving significant risk. But as long as we permit those in power to make unilateral choices that affect us, we shouldn’t thwart low-risk efforts … to rigorously determine the effects of those choices. Instead, we should cast off the A/B illusion and applaud them.”

B

ut others disagree and see A/B testing as an ethical risk, no matter if researchers run tests in a lab or corporations run tests atop shared desks.

Ehud Reiter, a professor of computing science at the University of Aberdeen and chief scientist of Arria NLG, teaches the Facebook study to his students as something to avoid. It was unethical, he says. “I would certainly never accept that as an academic research project,” Reiter says. “It’s not acceptable to me to manipulate people’s emotion. That is not acceptable without informed consent.”

Informed consent is the heart of modern research ethics, Reiter says.

In 2017, he struggled with an A/B test proposal for this reason. He was asked to approve a project by a researcher who was working with a real-world service provider; they wanted to test different strategies on different clients, then evaluate the results. Reiter wrote on his website that he knew these real-world tests can be helpful, but he also knew that they exist in ethical gray areas. He wasn’t quite sure how to ask participants for informed consent. If researchers were transparent, they might bias the participants and ruin the test; if the researchers weren’t transparent, he didn’t believe that the testing would be ethical.

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“We decided to go with allowing [participants] to opt out and be transparent after the fact,” he says, meaning the study was explained to participants after they were tested.

“Academically, I think that it’s the right thing to do, and I think that companies might also consider going down that path because, otherwise, it’s a danger to blow up in their face.”

Most companies solve this issue by avoiding it. They don’t ask for informed consent from the users whom they A/B test; at most, they inform users of potential tests in agreements users sign when they join. These agreements are filled with fine print and legalese; no one reads them, Reiter says. Users click away without even glancing at the fine print, thereby allowing companies to test their data and send it along to third-party aggregators. Reiter says that researchers need to hold themselves to a higher standard than this, but he believes that businesses should, too. Most companies decide their testing policies in terms of what will or won’t get them sued, he says, but to not account for ethics is to activate a ticking time bomb that he believes will destroy a company’s reputation.

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thics don’t lend themselves to binary choices, Meyer says. Ethical marketers, like researchers, will always be faced with tough choices. The Common Rule—the U.S. rule of ethics that oversees biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects— guides researchers toward more ethical choices, but situational standards may be applied differently on each test. And even so, the Common Rule doesn’t apply to corporations. Companies that can afford ethical consultants might hire them for tough decisions, but those without the budget should also consider the ramifications of their testing.

There are obvious fault lines of A/B testing that marketers will encounter: A/B testing an alcohol brand on the Facebook fans of Alcoholics Anonymous is unethical to its core, whereas A/B testing two different headlines on the same marketing email is as benign as a

single drop of rain. As Meyer noted, this is Business Ethics 101.

There are many reasons why consumers might object to A/B testing, Meyer says: objections to randomization, a feeling of unfairness or inequality, an assumption that businesses already know what will work. But she doesn’t believe that it’s logically consistent to be against A/B testing just because it tests two different things. CEOs often decide to launch one product to market without testing— essentially a “B test.” Meyer says that she doesn’t believe anyone would be angry at the CEO of that company for giving consumers a B test without consent.

“So why is the moral world shook upside down if half of people get A and half of people get B?” she asks. “That’s a bit of a mystery.”

What would be a change is more transparency, similar to what Reiter opted for in his academic A/B test.

Meyer, like Reiter, says that companies should assuage consumer concerns by creating a landing page that explains the ongoing A/B tests to them. This page would be a simple explanation about why the company is showing users multiple versions of the same page. Reiter says that users should also be given the right to opt out if they don’t want their data to be used as part of an A/B test, and he says that they should be informed as to how their data is being protected.

The alternative, of course, is to do nothing. This is what most companies do, save for a note when users sign up for their services. If users find out they’re being tested, they may be angry or they may not care. “It’s a dilemma,” Meyer says.

Reiter says that much of this dilemma can be solved with transparency, to inform users of the test. If users complain, then he says that the company should change its future tests.

“If you don’t do it then it’s going to blow up in your face sooner or later,” he says. “As an academic, we tell people, ‘You’ve got to [test] properly. And if you try to hide that you are doing it, you’ll eventually get found out, and it will be a lot worse.’” m

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scholarly insights

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Should You Sue? How Filing Infringement Lawsuits Financially Affects Brands

BY LARISA ERTEKIN, ALINA SORESCU AND MARK B. HOUSTON

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ompanies often turn to courts to protect their trademarks from imitation, counterfeiting and false claims. Large companies know that brand erosion can lead to consumer mistrust and revenue losses. Researchers Peggy Chaudhry and Alan Zimmerman reported in their 2013 article, “The Global Growth of Counterfeit Trade,” that brands

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lose $250 billion to counterfeiting each year in the U.S. and as much as $1 trillion globally.

Each year, businesses file more than 3,000 trademark infringement lawsuits in U.S. district courts, and it is expensive: When litigation advances to trial, the American Intellectual Property Law Association says that court fees range

from $375,000 to $2 million per case.

Clearly, companies are willing to take swift action to protect their brands, but these cases also signal to stakeholders that the brand is being attacked, and the attack is significant enough to require expensive intervention. In this scenario, investors read limited publicly available information and make inferences about a company’s future, including potential revenue loss, damage to brand equity and any relief that may result from the lawsuit.

Our research team evaluated how investors respond to these conflicting signals when they learn about a new lawsuit and how investors react when the lawsuit is either settled—typically confidentially—or ended by court verdict.

We are the first researchers to categorize all the major types of trademark infringement that brands face in the marketplace and the first to quantify

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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

the financial consequences of a brand protecting itself in court. We reported our results in an article titled “Hands Off My Brand! The Financial Consequences of Protecting Brands Through Trademark Infringement Lawsuits,” published in Journal of Marketing.

Using data from Lex Machina, a comprehensive database of legal cases that has information on all intellectual property lawsuits filed in U.S. district courts, we analyzed 1,918 trademark infringement cases filed between 2009 and 2014 by 540 publicly traded U.S. firms across 214 different industries.

We focused on U.S. firms because many of these brands are high-value targets for infringers, and the U.S. has a welldeveloped legal system that has statutes to help trademark owners defend their brand assets.

Our research​ finds seven threat categories: counterfeiting, gray markets, brand misappropriation, brand imitation (copycats), false advertising, crossindustry brand misappropriation and cross-industry imitation. In our study sample, the two most common threats were brand misappropriation (38.7%) and counterfeiting (31.1%). The most common litigation outcomes were settlements (51.62%), plaintiff wins (46.19%) and defendant wins (2.2%). Businesses won most lawsuits involving counterfeiting and gray-market goods while the majority of false advertising, copycat and brand misappropriation cases ended in settlement.

When companies file a trademarkinfringement lawsuit, it negatively affects stock price. This is because investors put greater weight on the negative signal of the lawsuit, which reveals the problem to the market, than they do the potential relief of the lawsuit. The average cumulative abnormal return (CAR) at the time of filing was between -0.12% and -0.13%, which corresponds to an average loss of $33 million in firm value.

Firms that filed five or fewer cases saw worse CAR—between -0.18% and -0.19%.

Firms that filed five or more cases did not experience significant shifts in their stock prices at the time of filing, as investors

expected that firms would take legal action to protect their brands.

Counterintuitively, investors react negatively when companies win trademark cases and are awarded damages. For investors, the case confirms the validity of the threat and causes them to downgrade their expectations of the firm’s future cash flows or discount rate, at least in the near-term. But after settlement agreements, stock prices don’t change; investors have no clear information about how the case was resolved or how future infringement will be prevented, as the settlement terms are kept confidential.

After settlements, the average excess returns were -0.24%, which corresponds to an average loss of $69 million in firm value. After companies are awarded damages, average excess returns drop to -0.52%, which corresponds to an average loss of $119 million in firm value.

But winning solves everything. Brands that win infringement lawsuits perform well in the long-term, suggesting that stopping a threat pays off despite the short-term losses. We predict that is because investors update their analysis of a firm’s prospects as more information— such as earnings releases—becomes available. If a lawsuit stops the threat, a company’s earnings should eventually recover from decreases that occurred because of the infringer.

In our research, we revisited the CARs of plaintiffs six months after the end of litigation. We found that winning firms experienced positive average monthly abnormal returns of 0.38%, which corresponds to average monthly gains of $112 million. Firms that settled or lost a case saw returns close to zero.

The positive net effect suggests that managers should use legal action to protect trademarks. But they should also educate investors that losses stemming from these lawsuits are temporary. In the long run, legal actions are beneficial. m

scholarly insights

Counterintuitively, investors react negatively when companies win trademark cases and are awarded damages.

LARISA ERTEKIN is a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University, ALINA SORESCU is a marketing professor at Texas A&M and

MARK B. HOUSTON is a marketing professor at Texas Christian University.

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executive insights

AT C-LEVEL

Hit Makers Explores the Rise of Cultural Phenoms

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

 michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com

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hy is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction a must-read for marketers? It deconstructs popularity into rational elements you can act on. It explains in thoughtful and persuasive terms why some products and services become sensations. That knowledge is crucial for all marketers who want to succeed. (Plus, the book earned the AMA’s 2018 Berry Book Award for the best book in marketing.)

Author Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a weekly news analyst for NPR, provides an array of clear, cogent and concise examples of hits, explaining why and how they were successful. He explains why Claude Monet and Edgar Degas hit it big while their contemporary Gustave Caillebotte is an unknown.

Yet without Caillebotte, the leading impressionists—perhaps impressionism itself—would be unknown.

Thompson tells another story about song writer Savan Kotecha, who received 160 rejection letters while trying to break into the music business. Kotecha eventually landed a job as a writer and producer for other songwriters, such as Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Usher, Maroon 5, Carrie Underwood and One Direction. Kotecha’s journey to sell more than 200 million

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copies of his songs worldwide is instructive whether you are in entertainment or industrial products.

Thompson studied political science and law at Northwestern University. He says he wrote Hit Makers with two questions in mind: “What is the secret of making products that people like—in music, movies, television, games, apps and more, across the vast landscape of culture?” and “Why do some products fail in these marketplaces while similar ideas catch on and become massive hits?”

If you read Hit Makers, you’ll learn that “going viral” may not be as accurate a term as we think— or at least, it may be rarer than we think. Success may be due to largescale broadcast distribution rather than infectious word of mouth.

That’s not to say that things can’t take off in a contagious way akin to biological genes, but there is more to it than we typically consider.

Reading Hit Makers, I realized that innovation requires more than a unique product or service.

Successful breakthroughs often transcend the product itself. How the product is distributed may also be far more important. P&G and General Foods had the coffee business under their thumbs with the Folgers and Maxwell House brands until Starbucks entered the market in a new way.

I found Thompson’s discussion of uniqueness and familiarity in song writing particularly powerful. For a new song to be a hit it must balance familiarity and novelty. Thompson backs this up with scientific research.

Many executives like to compare business success with baseball success, Thompson writes. “In both activities, one can fail 70% of the time and still be an all-time great.

But the difference between baseball and business is that baseball has what [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos called a ‘truncated outcome distribution.’ Home runs can only be so big,” Thompson writes.

He quotes Bezos: “When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. The longtailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.

Big winners pay for so many experiments.”

Thompson explains how the success of cable television shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” have changed their networks and their industries.

“Some hits save their company.

A special few revolutionize their business. They score 1,000 runs,” he writes.

The story I enjoyed most in Hit Makers was the tale about Walt Disney and Herman Samuel Kominetzky, who became known as “Kay” Kamen. “In the beginning, Disney was not the profitgushing king of entertainment,” Thompson writes. “His company rarely operated with strong and steady earnings in the 1920s, and those were the boom years for the U.S. economy. Then the Great Depression hit. To go from artist to empire in the Depression, Walt Disney needed a heroic sidekick.”

Kamen asked Disney for what we would now call the merchandising

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AT C-LEVEL

executive insights

Reading Hit Makers, I realized that innovation requires more than a unique product or service. Successful breakthroughs often transcend the product itself.

rights to his ideas. “Let me sell your cartoon mouse,” he said to Disney.

Kamen went on to introduce the Mickey Mouse watch, which debuted at the Chicago world’s fair in 1933.

“Disney might not have been a born businessman, but he absorbed

Kamen’s lesson: The art of film is film, but the business of movies is everywhere,” Thompson writes.

“Disney described the strategy as ‘total merchandising,’ and the Disney empire was established.”

If you want to understand why “Star Wars,” “Rock Around the

Clock” or Mickey Mouse were all hits—or if you want to create tomorrow’s hits yourself —you should read Hit Makers. m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.

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executive insights

EXPERIMENTATION

at the center of marketing design and delivery.”

Accurately measuring the effects of your changes on customer behavior requires rigorous experimentation, but experimentation doesn’t necessarily come natural to most marketers. We’re creatives and businesspeople, not scientists.

To squeeze the most value and customer discoveries from your marketing technology, you need to think in a radically different way and overcome the three biggest hurdles that brands struggle with in marketing experimentation.

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How to Overcome the 3 Biggest Hurdles of Marketing Experimentation

BY DANIEL BURSTEIN

 daniel.burstein@meclabs.com

T

he best relationships have a give and take. Likewise, the best tech stack for your business should be a two-way street. Companies get value from being able to microtarget, personalize and automate with martech, but like going to lunch with a friend and telling them a good story, you don’t get up and walk away when you’re done talking. You sit and listen to what your friend has to say.

That’s why technology solutions and services that facilitate customer discovery—social media marketing, web analytics and optimization—are this year’s top investments for high-

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revenue companies, according to a Target Marketing magazine survey of 350 organizations.

Behavior data is one level of customer discovery, but an even more effective practice is influencing what customers will do and seeing how the changes you make affect real customer decisions. This practice can lead companies to better serve their customers. As Lynn Hunsaker wrote on Customer Think, “Thankfully, many companies have been migrating away from product-centric, month-/ quarter-end-centric and competitorcentric marketing toward putting the individual or most profitable customer

Getting out of a Rut Marketers often fall into a checklist mentality with their testing. Testing technology is quite simple at its core: It splits traffic to a brand and measures visitor behavior. Even advanced multivariate technology that tests multiple combinations can limit experimentation to changing many similar variables (for example, button colors, headlines or images). If you don’t test the right things, experimenting won’t change much. If you test what you already know, you will not discover anything new. What matters most is what you decide to test.

Marketing experimentation is the perfect time to “have no respect for the status quo,” as Apple’s “Think Different” ad said—to see things differently.

Simple heuristics (thought tools) can help you see different elements of your marketing message in a new light by breaking down the factors that influence conversion. For example, a heuristic we shared in the September issue of Marketing News is the MECLABS Institute conversion sequence heuristic.

C= 4m + 3v + 2 (i-f) - 2a C = Probability of conversion m = Motivation of user (when) v = Clarity of the value proposition (why) i = Incentive to take action f = Friction elements of process a = Anxiety about entering information

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EXPERIMENTATION

One brand that broke out of its box is HealthSpire, a startup within Aetna.

HealthSpire wanted to use a landing page to generate leads for its call center.

Its goal was to keep the landing page concise and avoid confusion. This isn’t unique to HealthSpire—it’s an assumption I’ve heard from many marketing departments and advertising agencies: Customers want short landing pages.

But HealthSpire decided to experiment with the conversion heuristic and test a longer page. HealthSpire hypothesized that the customer would be willing to deal with the increased friction from the longer page in exchange for decreased anxiety and increased clarity of the value proposition. The result was a 638% increase in call center leads.

You’re not likely to see a big increase in performance if the messaging and creative you test is boxed into what you’ve always done. Experimenting is your chance to challenge the status quo.

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Having Too Many Answers We have to change not just our opinions on what will work, but our resistance to new ideas as well. We need to approach our jobs in a new way. Like many of you, I’m a professional marketer.

Marketers have big personalities and are great at arguing persuasively in pitch meetings, but arguments and guesswork will only get us so far. To be good experimenters, marketers will need to change their thinking; they’ll need to ask more questions and be less sure of their answers to a marketing messaging problem.

Here’s a perfect example: 15 minutes before the start of an event, I got an email from a junior marketer about a recent A/B test. The results had just come in, and his headline beat our CEO’s headline. Our CEO, Flint McGlaughlin, was just about to get on stage and present the opening session for this event. I grabbed him and showed him the results just to tease him.

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Flint was humble enough to say, “That’s great. Let’s open the event with it,” and proceeded to share the test results from the stage.

Society tells us to act as if we know everything, even if we have to bluff our way through. But the scientific method tells us that true strength lies in forming a testable hypothesis and taking a systematic approach to draw conclusions from evidence.

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Accurately Answering Your Own Questions Answers with evidence are very powerful, but you have to ensure that your evidence is accurate. Validity threats can skew the data gathered in your experiments, causing you to (very confidently) make the wrong decision.

A validity threat makes it impossible to isolate the variable you’re changing— such as a headline or an entire landing page approach—to measure its effect on customer behavior.

One example of a validity threat applicable to martech is called an instrumentation effect. An instrumentation effect might be a page that took longer to render because of something erroneously loading in the background, problems with the testing and analytics software or emails that don’t get delivered because of a server malfunction.

You can’t be certain that it was the change you made to the messaging that caused different results or if it was something in the instrumentation you used to deliver and measure the message.

Another challenge can be the rigor of your experiments. For example, journalist Brett Dahlberg recently reported on NPR about the questionable practices of Brian Wansink, head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.

Dahlberg writes, “When his first hypothesis didn’t bear out, Wansink wrote that he used the same data to test other hypotheses.” Dahlberg quotes University

of Pittsburgh statistician Andrew Althouse, who explains that studying lots of data is fine, but “p-hacking”—when researchers play with data to arrive at results that look like they’re statistically significant—is a problem.

Biases don’t disappear the moment we decide to run an experiment. If we really want to find something, it’s human nature to find it. I drive a Nissan LEAF, and before I owned one, I never noticed LEAFs on the road. Now, I see them everywhere. I could conclude anecdotally that electric vehicle adoption is really taking off, but the likelier explanation is that the data didn’t drastically change, what I was looking for did.

That’s why it’s not enough to experiment; the way we run those experiments is critical.

“For scientific testing, it’s very important to remove all possible bias that could occur during the experiment. The goal of an experiment is to prove/disprove a hypothesis, not to find a statistically significant result within the data,” says Cameron Howard, data specialist at MECLABS Institute.

Make Data-Driven Decisions with Well-Run Experiments Experimenting is powerful. It’s the engine that drives our technological revolution.

But it’s not enough to just run any marketing experiment and hope to get a result. You have to test elements that will truly affect conversion, take a questionbased hypothesis approach and make sure you run a valid experiment to get reliable results. m DANIEL BURSTEIN is the senior director of content and marketing at MECLABS Institute. He oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the marketing direction for MECLABS .

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GROWTH

Looking for Growth in Uncomfortable Places

BY J. WALKER SMITH

 jwalker.smith@kantarfutures.com

G

rowth is found now in uncomfortable places.

The literature on growth is vast, but almost all of it presumes that growth is a matter of following wellknown principles of business as usual.

This succeeds when growth is found in comfortable places. For decades, this has been the case, but it is true no longer.

Growth has not been squeezed out by adverse conditions. Rather, growth has shifted to places beyond the reach of companies unable or unwilling to get uncomfortable.

Growth in uncomfortable places is the clarifying lens that companies must bring to planning for the future.

Thus, it is critical to know more about uncomfortable places. Five key facts about the global marketplace bring this into sharper focus.

Fact No. 1 is that real income per capita grew 43% from 1980 to 2016 for the middle four income deciles of the global population, according to the “World Inequality Report.” Essentially, this is the traditional middle-class. Contrast this with the bottom half of the population, which enjoyed 94% real income growth over that same period. In other words, the strongest growth is outside the

traditional comfort zone. It’s true that incumbent brands have doubled down on this emerging middle class, but it’s not the same consumer.

Moreover, the top 10% of the income distribution grew 70% over this period. So growth is strongest at the top and the bottom. This idea of an hourglass economy is not new, yet the disappearance of a robust middle-class mass market is something that many brands have yet to adapt to.

Economic bifurcation is emblematic of the broader splintering of the mass market into niches of all sorts, including economics, culture, religion, identity, social engagement and—especially nowadays—politics. Every splinter requires a different strategy, and this is uncomfortable because it means grounding the economics of scale in a conglomeration of distinctive niches rather than the efficiencies of mass production and mass marketing.

Fact No. 2 is that in the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, for the first time ever, global trust declined year over year for all four of the institutions tracked— government, media, NGOs and business.

The 2018 report was more of the same. Over the past decade, there has

This idea of an hourglass economy is not new, yet the disappearance of a robust middle-class mass market is something that many brands have yet to adapt to.

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been an inversion of trust globally from institutions to individuals, from the status quo to reformers, from official statements to leaked information, from data to personal experience, from politeness to bluntness, from advertising to social media.

Consumers have lost connection with a broad, shared narrative and are turning instead to smaller worlds of influence and guidance. The worst of this has been described as post-truth, but it’s actually post-trust because truth requires a trusted authority to validate it, and that’s what has drifted away.

The issue is not so much corruption and incompetence as it is a lost sense of shared interests. People have come to understand that experts and institutions have their own agendas that don’t always protect or prioritize what matters to people, so they are turning to more intimate connections that offer a greater assurance of shared interests. Influence is now found in intimacy, not authority.

Brands must find more intimate ways outside the comfort zone of traditional practices to convey transparency and honesty about shared interests.

Paralleling the shift to smaller worlds is an evolving view of digital technologies.

Typically, the future is envisioned as more and more digitally immersed.

However, the paradox is that the future is both more digital and more analog.

Just as companies are getting comfortable with digital technologies, consumers are demanding more human-scale engagement as well, and not simply as a respite from digital technologies but as the very essence of digital engagement itself. In effect, consumers want an analog upgrade to their digital lives.

Voice technologies are deepening the appetite for analog interactions.

Inherently, voice technologies require a conversation at human scale, thus with the rise of voice technology, analog engagement is the coming interface for digital systems. Consumers are responding in human ways already. Half a million people told Alexa “I love you” in the year after it was introduced. A JWT Intelligence/Mindshare study of

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GROWTH

U.K. consumers found that 36% love their voice assistant so much they wish it were a real person—context for fact No. 3: 26% of consumers admitted to having had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant. Nothing is more human-scale than that!

Human touch is everywhere. Sales of vinyl LPs, printed books and Moleskine notebooks are up. Board games, specialty magazines and Fujifilm’s Instax instant cameras are hot. Greenways are the new byways. Podcasts are skyrocketing as are farmers’ markets, food trucks, cafés, festivals and coffee shops. Anxious pushback about technology is accelerating these trends.

Not only do brands have to operate more at digital scale. They have to operate more at human scale, too, and that paradox is uncomfortable.

The growing interest in analog engagement is part of the broader change in spending reflected in fact No. 4.

Services accounted for 65.1% of global GDP in 2017, according to the World Bank. In the U.S., services accounted for 77%. In China, 56.1%, up from 44.1% in 2010. In India, 48.9%, up from 45.2% in 2010. Services dominate in trade, too.

This is uncomfortable for companies that must figure out how to turn goods into services or add services to goods. Service companies must stave off new competitors by inventing new kinds of value.

Nor will services in the future be the same as before. In its study of U.S. consumer spending on services, McKinsey split growth into experiencebased and nonexperience-based services.

Far and away, experiences were fastestgrowing. It’s not merely services; as the

executive insights

marketplace pivots from experiences as a point of differentiation to table stakes, spending will continue to grow for services that deliver experiences. Add in voice technologies and augmented and virtual reality, and none of this is within the comfort zone of business as usual.

The final fact is best described by the title of one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of psychology, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” A literature review of studies on short-term memory, this paper pointed to a convergence of research on seven, plus or minus two, as the maximum number of things people can keep in their heads at any one time while deciding. In other words, human cognitive capacity is fixed at seven, plus or minus two. Yet the amount of information washing over consumers has skyrocketed.

Marketing overload is nothing new, but within the comfort zone of business as usual, marketers have consistently misinterpreted it. The prevailing view is that overload is an opting-out problem of resistance that necessitates stopping consumers from leaving. This overlooks the evidence that consumers love advertising and shopping. Consumers don’t want to opt out. In fact, they want to opt in more, but the ways in which companies force them to engage make it challenging because of finite cognitive capacity. As a result, WPP/ Kantar MillwardBrown BrandZ tracking shows brand clarity declining even as brand awareness is up. In other words, consumers are opting in more, but they can’t keep up.

Instead of battling resistance, brands should rationalize and temper what consumers must do to opt in. This is tied to experiences, human scale, intimacy and personalization. All of these dynamics are interwoven and mutually reinforcing.

What they add up to is a future of growth in uncomfortable places. m J. WALKER SMITH is chief knowledge officer for brand and marketing at Kantar Consulting and co-author of four books, including Rocking the Ages. Follow him on Twitter at @jwalkersmith.

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GLOBAL MARKETING

Effective Global Marketing Understands Culture

BY RUSS KLEIN

 rklein@ama.org

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ll of the various tensions around the world regarding nationalism versus globalism will do little to stop the continued connectivity on this network-based planet. In fact, I see no reason why a nationalistic agenda can’t coexist with a globalist perspective.

Cesar Chavez once said, “Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.”

Industry sources estimate that of the 8 million passengers in the air every

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day, 3 million are international travelers.

Thanks to the internet, the many cultures of the world are now meshed inextricably, creating an even more complex mosaic for marketers.

I often refer to certain words, such as “strategy,” as “suitcase words”—words we all carry around whose definition is rarely consistently understood by the many people who use them. “Culture” is a suitcase word. It comes from the Latin term “cultura,” and its importance has

been described by many great minds.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the souls of its people.”

Lev Vygotsky, the founder of culturalhistorical psychology, said, “A mind cannot be independent of culture.”

Albert Camus, known for giving rise to the philosophy of absurdism, said, “Without culture … society is but a jungle.”

French philosopher Jacques Derrida said, “Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.”

Devdutt Pattanaik, an Indian author and interpreter of ancient scripture, said, “Mythology is a subjective truth. Every culture imagines life a certain way.”

Novelist Joanne Harris said, “If you want to know what’s important to a culture, learn their language.”

And University of Reading professor of evolutionary biology Mark Pagel said, “Having culture means we are the only

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GLOBAL MARKETING

Culture is what creates the institutional context that marketers must understand as the first step to any business or marketing plan for a brand.

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animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.”

There is no more powerful force than culture in shaping perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and, ultimately, behaviors.

Culture is one of those zoom-in-zoomout topics that ranges from organizations and cohorts to towns and nations. I think of culture as comprising unwritten rules that underlie widespread beliefs.

If right, that makes it nearly impossible to be certain about insights into any given culture. Culture is what creates the institutional context that marketers must understand as the first step to any business or marketing plan for a brand. Will the world ever become truly borderless resulting in a new world citizenry in which national cultures have effectively converged into one blended, homogenous construct? Not in our lifetime.

A well-written book titled Navigating Global Business: A Cultural Compass by Oded Shenkar and Simcha Ronan is a great how-to for any sales or marketing executive with international or global responsibilities. The authors used an initial database of 115 countries over a 13-year period to take the reader slowly from foundational elements to complex maps of “country clusters.” They aptly point out that most globalization literature is aimed at finding common threads across countries to rationalize a more simplified, seemingly more efficient—and let’s not forget tidy— approach to global brand management.

But the institutional contexts that distinguish nation-states are deeply rooted.

As much as many believe there is a culture war going on in the U.S., there is a strong case to be made that values and social norms associated with national identity and the cultural differences between national cultures are significantly larger than the differences within nations—yes, including America. One of my favorite portions of Shenkar and Ronan’s book compares nations based on their tolerance or intolerance for

ambiguity. These differences impact trust.

In cultures less tolerant of ambiguity, for example Latin America, the typical employee tends to dislike working for foreign managers and is suspicious of them. Moreover, employees are pessimistic regarding the organization’s motives while managers are equally pessimistic about employees’ ambitions and leadership capacities. Conversely, in places where there is high tolerance for ambiguity, as in Eastern Europe, the opposite is the case.

Journalist Thomas Friedman is still correct in his take that the global playing field is becoming more level, but some legacy boundaries and barriers persist.

The world today remains divided by cultural fault lines that nothing short of an intergalactic quake could smooth out.

I’m a sucker for well-thought-out organizing principles, and Navigating Global Business provides them superbly.

The authors have developed maps reflecting three layers of culture clusters: 11 global clusters, 15 regional clusters and 38 local clusters. These maps make sense of the myriad marketplaces around the world from an anthropological perspective.

Ideally, a brand could appeal to all people, without adaptation, no matter the place around the world. Realistically, it’s far more important to understand the culture of a nation than to look at its market size. A hundred million consumers with the right institutional context may represent a larger addressable and accessible market than one with 1 billion consumers. Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your cultural fit. m As CEO for the American Marketing Association, RUSS KLEIN is charged with the transformation of the AMA to become an essential community for marketers. Klein is a five-time award-winning CMO who has quarterbacked teams for many of the world’s foremost brand names—holding top marketing and advertising posts at Dr Pepper/7UP Companies, Gatorade, 7-Eleven Corporation, Arby’s Restaurant Group and Burger King where he also served as president from 2003-2010.

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ALPHA MALES AND SUBCONSCIOUS SALES Research suggests that men still shop with their instincts, compensating for inferiority by flaunting their buying power

BY HAL CONICK

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A SWEDISH PROFESSOR with sandy hair and thick-rimmed glasses sprays the scent of coffee in one shop, bumps a customer in the back in another and tells customers in a third shop that they can’t touch the merchandise. Across Sweden, he creates offbeat atmospheres—at gas stations, retail stores, telecom companies, furniture dealers—and studies how customers react, watching for a pattern.

Did customers spend more time in a store if it smelled like coffee? Did a bump make shoppers tense? Does the inability to touch an item make them want to buy it? As the answers to these questions pile up, the professor hopes to find a signal, a measurable effect of the atmospheric manipulation.

The professor—Anders Gustafsson, a research professor of marketing at Sweden’s Karlstad Business School— reports the results to the businesses he’s studying. If the signal is strong, he writes about the results and submits his research to an academic journal. His work has been cited thousands of times.

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Gustafsson has earned unique access to businesses by visiting with dozens of decisionmakers each week; “It’s like hanging out with friends,” he says. He’ll push his friends on their beliefs: “Do you really think that what you’re doing is effective?” is a common question, he says. Sometimes his friends ask him to prove them wrong. They ask him to study their stores.

In 2010, managers at a furniture dealer in Karlstad, Sweden—Gustafsson carefully avoids referring to the company by name, as store managers didn’t want their store to be attached to the resulting study—asked him to study whether sales can be affected by store greeters.

Most U.S. shoppers are familiar with greeters.

They can easily recall the image of a smiling, aged face at the front of Walmart, offering help and sometimes an eye of suspicion. But greeters have been largely unknown in Sweden, a low-theft country populated by people averse to small talk. In 2010, the furniture dealer— like most businesses—was trying to escape the chomping maw of the Great Recession. If front-line employees are one of the first jobs to disappear amid flagging sales, do customers miss seeing them? When they disappear, do sales also disappear? Gustafsson set up an experiment to find out.

He recruited three other researchers for the experiment: Nancy Sirianni and Christine Ringler, consumer behavior doctoral students whom he met while teaching as a visiting professor at Arizona State University, and Tobias Otterbring, a research assistant and soon-to-be psychology doctoral student whom he met at Karlstad University. Going into the field study, the researchers were all excited by the prospect of watching how atmospheric manipulations affect the behavior of customers.

The results from field tests are more convincing than data gleaned in the controlled setting of the lab, Otterbring says. Field results feel more real.

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esearchers began their field test early on a Saturday by watching customers walk into the furniture dealer. There was no greeter in place yet; customers came and went, surveyed by research assistants as they left. The assistants asked simple questions: How old are you? How much did you spend? Later in the day, graduate students—some male, some female—would dress in store-branded yellow shirts, stand just inside the front entrance of

the store and welcome customers. “Hej,” they’d say. On Sundays, the greeter stood in front of the store early—researchers switched times to control for any changes caused by passing hours. Again, research assistants would stop these customers and ask them about their age and how much they spent. But they also asked about the greeter—did the shoppers notice the greeter on the way inside? The research assistants asked to photograph shoppers’ receipts; most shoppers obliged and were given a coupon to the furniture dealer’s food court.

Shoppers didn’t know what researchers were studying, Sirianni says, only that they were asked questions and received free meatballs.

Though the customers were happy, the initial results frustrated the researchers. They put the data through a statistical program and found little of significance. But an odd signal peeked through the noise. Never mind, Gustafsson thought—it was just field noise, the ghost of a busy atmosphere howling through the data.

Data culled in field tests are often complicated by noise, which could be unexpectedly heavy foot traffic on a random Wednesday, a flickering overhead light or pouring rain that keeps customers at home. Noise could even be something ineffable—the way people feel, the mood of a store, the attitude of a city.

The atmosphere, which Gustafsson carefully tweaks, will always be noisy. Despite the noise, researchers can find unexpected signals during field tests. If they measure carefully, they can find bits of information that would have never been found in a lab.

In those cases, Gustafsson says that he must follow the data.

At the front of the furniture dealer, the noise seemed to come from male shoppers’ reactions to a specific greeter, a skyscraper of a man with thick thighs and muscular shoulders. In the name of following the data, the researchers ran more tests; they outfitted greeters with eye-tracking spectacles to watch where customers looked. Researchers noticed that the presence of the muscular male greeter affected men in a strange way: The eye trackers showed that the men gawked at his chest and shoulders, then spent more money in the store. When this greeter was present, men spent 131% more than women, researchers found. Women looked at his eyes and moved on with their shopping.

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From the paper “Ovulation, Female Competition, and Product Choice: Hormonal Influences on Consumer Behavior,” by Kristina M. Durante, Vladas Griskevicius, Sarah E. Hill, Carin Perilloux and Norman P. Li in the Journal of Consumer Research “In three experiments, we show that at peak fertility women nonconsciously choose products that enhance appearance (e.g., choosing sexy rather than more conservative clothing). This hormonally regulated effect appears to be driven by a desire to outdo attractive rival women. Consequently, minimizing the salience of attractive women who are potential rivals suppresses the ovulatory effect on product choice. This research provides some of the first evidence of how, why and when consumer behavior is influenced by hormonal factors.”

men spent an average of $165.05. When the dominant greeter wasn’t present, the spending evened—on average, women spent $96.93 and men spent $92.23. “This is crazy,” Sirianni remembers saying when seeing the results.

But why was there such a big difference?

Gustafsson wanted to ensure that the hulking greeter’s good looks weren’t the reason why men were spending more. Gustafsson says that they tested a similarly attractive but less-dominant male greeter, one who was shorter and thinner— the signal died. They moved to a different store and tested the effect of a dominant female greeter on women shoppers—the signal died again.

The signal from the dominant man became impossible to ignore.

“That’s when we started to get the notion that this is about something else than we thought it was,” Gustafsson says. Just as he had feared, the study belonged in the domain of evolutionary psychology.

All four researchers were familiar with evolutionary psychology—in marketing and psychology research, it was becoming impossible to ignore—but none of them were experts.

They started digging into the existing research; one study told them that men sometimes use consumption to show off, even when there are no women around to impress. Another told them that men often compete through flashy purchases, another that men are far more likely than women to use consumption to show off their status. But the researchers didn’t find any papers that spoke to the intrasexual competition they had seen at the furniture dealer. Gustafsson knew that an evolutionary psychology framing would make the study harder to publish—it’s controversial, he says—but the signal was too strong. They had to follow the data. The signal in the numbers was the ghost of human history, they now believed, the ghost of humanity’s progression from instinct to intellect.

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n the late 1990s, Kristina Durante felt disappointed by her career. She was undeniably successful—she worked as a publicist at RCA Records and Planet Hollywood—but she had no idea how to persuade people, a key function of her job. She felt poorly equipped for work.

Durante wanted to learn more about human behavior, so she took night classes in psychology at a local community college. The teacher assigned books about evolution, such as Richard

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STATS FROM THE FIELD CUSTOMERS STUDIED

369 GENDER BREAKDOWN

68% FEMALE 32% MALE AVERAGE AGE

49.4 YEARS

Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal. She was rapt; reading those books made her feel like someone had turned on a bright light in a dim room.

Durante soon quit her job and went back to school, first to study behavioral endocrinology, then social psychology. By 2009, she had earned a Ph.D. in social psychology and had published an evolutionary psychology paper titled “Changes in Women’s Choice of Dress Across the Ovulatory Cycle: Naturalistic and Laboratory Task-Based Evidence.” In that paper, which would be cited 250 times, she and two co-authors found that signs of ovulatory cycles are often obvious in ways even a stranger can observe—the type of clothing worn, the amount of skin exposed. After years of research, Durante became an associate professor of marketing and the marketing Ph.D. program coordinator at Rutgers Business School.

Now, a larger number of researchers bring together evolutionary psychology and marketing research in search of why consumers spend, how they compete and what motives for consumption bubble under human consciousness. From 1998 to 2018, Google Scholar lists 9,620 results when searching “evolutionary psychology” and “marketing,” compared with 131 results from 1978 to 1998. In an oft-cited 2000 paper— “Applications of Evolutionary Psychology in Marketing”—Gad Saad and Tripat Gill, two prominent researchers of the applications of evolutionary psychology in marketing, write that

applying evolutionary psychology to marketing research can be “illustrated by comparing the evolutionary predictions with results obtained from previous studies, by supporting these predictions with market-level consumption data and by proposing new hypotheses based on this framework.” Evolutionary psychology is another tool to examine marketing, a way to make predictions about how consumers behave.

“That’s where the study that you’re talking about comes in,” Durante says of the dominant male greeter study. “When you think about intrasexual competitiveness and look at some of the theories of selection about how human mating systems evolved, you’ll see how males, especially male mammals, are really competitive with one another.”

Although male mammals compete through physical altercations and displays of status, Durante says that female mammals compete indirectly with one another by trying to look younger, healthier and more physically attractive. When selecting a mate, females look for males who can acquire resources, according to R.L. Trivers’ influential 1972 parental investment theory. Thus, the theory goes, males flaunt, showing that they can provide resources, and women pick the best male of the lot. In human behavior, this may mean that men subconsciously want to show that they can outspend more dominant males even if they can’t physically overpower them. It’s costly signaling, Durante says; “Look at all the costs I can incur.”

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“You’re going to self-present just as you would in an interview,” Durante says. “If you interview for a job as a construction worker, you present all of the abilities you have that are related to that job. And the same is true for mate choice.”

This is where the controversy Gustafsson worried about seeps in: Researchers who study humans as an evolving animal often leave onlookers angry and perturbed. To many feminists, evolutionary psychology locks humans in a genetic patriarchy where men are the eternal breadwinners, destined to compete for resources, while women are destined to compete through passive traits like youth and beauty. To many philosophers, evolutionary psychology locks humans into genetic determinism, a world where free will never existed, and our choices are not our own but the outdated desire of long-dead relatives. Many religious people, fundamentalist Christians in particular, have complained about evolution since Charles Darwin released his landmark study of evolution, The Origin of Species—they refuse to believe in a world where physical biology matters more than the metaphysical soul. As Bernard Crespi, professor of evolutionary biology at Simon Fraser University, wrote in a post on The Evolution Institute’s website, many people feel as though the study of evolution is an attack on human goodness and human purpose.

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And then there’s the scorn from the academic community. The earliest and perhaps best example of academic vitriol against evolutionary psychology scholarship can be found in 1975 at Harvard University, when biologist and ant expert E.O. Wilson released his book, Sociobiology, cited by many as a foundational text of evolutionary psychology.

In the book, Wilson explained how evolution by natural selection affected animal—including, controversially, human—aggression, morality and care for young, among other traits. Many demurred, believing that Wilson put too much emphasis on nature and not enough on society, selling short the effect of our parents and environment. Academics attacked Wilson in print; Richard Lewontin, a critic of Wilson’s work and his colleague in Harvard’s biology department, wrote that biologists like Wilson were “ideologues” who see modern Western culture as natural because they are “privileged members of such societies.” Protestors began haranguing Wilson at his lectures, accusing him of rationalizing genocide by associating Sociobiology’s biological heredity thesis with eugenics and Nazism. The most public example occurred at a 1978 speech that Wilson was scheduled to give at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Protestors stormed the stage, threw a cup of water at Wilson and chanted, “racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

Decades later, researchers who study evolutionary psychology still feel the pressure, the social taboo. “It’s like a minefield,” says Otterbring, the lone member of Gustafsson’s team who now specializes in evolutionary psychology research. “You have to be careful. But if you find something, from my point of view, it’s better to show people and to make people aware that we, as humans, sometimes have these superficial biases. I don’t think it’s fair to just put all these findings under the carpet and pretend that they don’t exist because then we won’t learn anything.”

The taboo also spawns the biggest misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, Durante says, as many onlookers believe that researchers are testing evolutionary theories directly on humans. On the contrary, she says, researchers are using evolutionary theory to form hypotheses about how the human mind works, searching for the underlying psychology behind consumerism. “Sometimes, the ultimate

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function of behavior doesn’t match up with the proximate-level cognition that we have,” Durante says. In evolutionary lingo, the proximate level deals with the story of the function, the “how” of what happens; the ultimate level deals with the function itself, or the “why” of what happens.

A proximate-level reason for eating a piece of carrot cake instead of an actual carrot may be that the cake tastes sweet and makes us feel good, for example, while the ultimate reason is our desire for the cake’s fat and sugar—formerly scarce energy resources, now wildly abundant.

“Those are risky things because we have them now at our fingertips,” she says. “But we still have the brains that can’t stop getting it if it’s in front of us because we don’t have a stopping mechanism. It wasn’t at our fingertips, and in special environments we had to work for it.”

Over many centuries, the human brain has evolved better stopping mechanisms. Humans have evolved a larger and more effective neocortex, the part of our brains associated with language, conscious thought and sensory perception. We’re aware that we make choices and that our choices have stakes; these are complexities that make studying humans difficult for marketers, Durante says. We can know our ultimate reasons for eating carrot cake and still believe in the story of our proximate reasons, telling focus groups that we ate the cake because it was so tasty. We’re inquisitive and thoughtful, yet we’re often driven by our bodies and the muted parts of our minds.

Researchers must study humans carefully, as we’re noise-creating machines with scores of outliers and individuals in our ranks.

But amid the noise, Durante says that humans give off signals. Evolutionary psychology offers a tool to find those signals.

From the paper “Blatant Benevolence and Conspicuous Consumption: When Romantic Motives Elicit Strategic Costly Signals,” by Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Robert B. Cialdini, Douglas T. Kenrick, Jill M. Sundie and Geoffrey F. Miller in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The authors write that “blatant benevolence” and “conspicuous consumption” are signaling displays that can attract and retain mates. While this could seem to confirm the worst suspicions of Puritans and Marxists, knowing about blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption could “shift such behaviors from workaholic, shopaholic, or planet-wasting consumption to more pro-social forms of display.”

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he researchers now had a number; 131% more money spent by men in the presence of a dominant male greeter.

They had surveys confirming that the dominant male greeter was, in fact, considered dominant.

In evolutionary psychology, males are considered dominant—and thus perceived as having higher status and income—when they’re athletic, have a strong upper body and an imposing stature.

When researchers surveyed people by showing them photos of the dominant greeter, people responded that he looked like he worked out and was good at sports.

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From the paper “Applying Evolutionary Psychology in Understanding the Representation of Women in Advertisements,” by Gad Saad in Psychology & Marketing “Gulas and McKeage (2000) have shown that the depiction of financially successful men and women in advertisements had an adverse effect on men viewers. On the other hand, viewing physically attractive men and women in the ads did not have any negative effects on men’s sense of self-worth. This is exactly what [evolutionary psychology] would predict, for in terms of male intrasexual rivalry, financial resources are much more important than physical attractiveness.”

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the managers of the furniture dealer, he says that they were intrigued by the efficacy of greeters but wary of being associated with a study on the effect of dominance on male shoppers. They asked not to be named in the research, he says.

But the researchers had a potentially publishable signal and had to keep digging. Their finding was a new piece of information for the evolutionary psychology canon, the researchers say—most studies had focused on what effect attractive women have on male spending. And it was counterintuitive; the researchers surveyed 380 people and found that the majority believed that women shoppers would be more affected by dominant men. Their study spoke to an intrasexual competition. “We propose that this heightened drive for same-sex competition transforms the [greeter] into a rival and results in an increased propensity to buy status-signaling products among male customers,” they wrote.

The researchers deepened their research; they needed more evidence to ensure that the signal wasn’t created by the noise of the field or the presence of the greeter. In a second study, they set up in labs in the U.S. and online to find out whether people would prefer products with larger logos after being shown a photo of a physically dominant male employee. Researchers showed 114 undergraduate students, 51% of whom were women, photos of dominant or nondominant male employees, then asked them to imagine that they were shopping for a piece of clothing. How visible did they want the brand logo to be? The male participants who were shown the dominant male preferred shirts with logos about two-thirds bigger than men shown images of nondominant employees or women shown images of either type of man.

In a second part of the study, the researchers showed 292 undergraduate students, 45% of whom were women, photos of a male model.

They believed that if men were affected by photos of nonemployee dominant figures, they could be coaxed into a purchase by advertisements, commercials or in-store displays. A graphic designer edited the model’s photo two ways, making him appear dominant and nondominant.

The researchers randomly assigned the two versions of the photo to participants, who were then given an image of a blank t-shirt and asked to draw a logo at the size they’d prefer.

Researchers found that short men (defined in the study as five feet, five inches or shorter, which is one standard deviation shorter than average)

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READ “THE ABERCROMBIE AND FITCH EFFECT” ONLINE AT AMA.MARKETING/ABERCROMBIE-ANDFITCH-EFFECT

who were exposed to images of the dominant model drew logos that were 4.36 square inches— more than five times bigger than logos drawn by tall men exposed to the image of the dominant model (0.86 square inches) and other short men exposed to the image of the nondominant model (0.82 square inches). Women, as researchers expected, were unaffected by the model’s dominance.

In a final study—of 473 undergraduate students, 53% of whom were women—the researchers wanted to prove that intrasexual competition was the psychological driver behind the dominance signal. They scanned participants’ hands to measure the distance between their index and ring fingers—the larger the 2D:4D ratio, as the measurement is called, the lower the testosterone, according to a 2001 study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Then, researchers showed participants images of dominant or nondominant models and asked them how much money they’d personally pay for luxury items, such as new cars, European vacations and dates to fancy restaurants. The result: Men with lower testosterone reacted with stronger competitiveness and were more willing to spend money on gaudy items after being shown images of the physically dominant male model.

At the end of each study, the researchers asked participants if they had any idea what the study was about. They didn’t, Ringler says.

“Even though we’re asking about employees and spending, they have no idea that it’s about dominance and how it’s going to impact [buying] behavior.” As in the field test, the signal from the lab studies bubbled under the participants’ consciousness.

The researchers compiled their findings and submitted them, but not before they thought of a catchy title, a wink to a retailer known for using dominant male greeters: “The Abercrombie & Fitch Effect: The Impact of Physical Dominance on Male Customers’ Status-Signaling Consumption.”

The editors of Journal of Marketing Research approved the paper in 2017 and published it in 2018. In all, the researchers poured eight years of work into the paper. Now, Sirianni and Ringler have their doctorates and are, respectively, associate and assistant professors of marketing at Culverhouse College of Business at the University of Alabama; Otterbring, not yet a doctoral student when the study started, also earned his doctorate and is an assistant professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University. Gustafsson still works as a professor at Karlstad Business School, visiting his friends’ businesses and manipulating the atmospheres in their stores.

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t wasn’t long after Durante started her career as a researcher that she began hearing from corporations. Many hired her as a consultant, including a $62 billion consumer goods company. She consults mainly on women’s products for companies that are attempting to figure out how they can persuade women by using evolutionary psychology-based marketing research. Durante says that some companies want to find ways to create a sales forecast model from a women’s ovulatory cycle. For example, if women are more likely to buy pizza at a certain point in their cycle, she says that a brand can build a marketing communications cycle around each customer’s cycle and send her a marketing message 28 days later instead of 60 days later.

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From the paper “Conspicuous Consumption, Relationships, and Rivals: Women’s Luxury Products as Signals to Other Women,” by Yajin Wang and Vladas Griskevicius in Journal of Consumer Research “Findings showed that activating a motive to guard one’s mate triggered women to seek and display lavish possessions. Additional studies revealed that women use pricey possessions to signal that their romantic partner is especially devoted to them. In turn, flaunting designer handbags and shoes was effective at deterring other women from poaching a relationship partner.

This research identifies a novel function of conspicuous consumption, revealing that luxury products and brands play important roles in relationships.”

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as a way to compare evolutionary predictions with market-level consumption data—if the evolutionary psychology prediction works, its efficacy should be apparent.

This is controversial, Durante acknowledges, especially among academics.

“It’s seen as perhaps confirming that women have mood swings or drastic swings in behavior preferences and attitudes that happen within a short time span, and they can’t be a rational decision-maker,” she says. “I have, in the past, got pushback on that particular area of my research.

But companies want to find out [more]. Their motivation is the bottom line.”

Companies are curious about whether evolutionary psychology research can improve sales, Durante says. If companies can ethically use this research in a way that doesn’t jeopardize consumer welfare, she says that they’re interested in testing it. Studying evolutionary psychology may give companies an idea of how humans will behave, but Durante says that the research isn’t powerful enough to dupe anyone into buying something they don’t want. And if the research does become too powerful for customer comfort, she believes that customers will let companies know, and the companies will change. After all, she says, the goal of any marketer is to win long-term business, not trick customers into purchases.

Dawkins—the famed zoologist and one of the authors who flipped the lights on for Durante— has said for years that evolution by natural selection is the reason we exist, but it shouldn’t be a guide to how we live. “Study your Darwinism for two reasons: because it explains why you’re here and … to learn what to avoid in setting up society,” Dawkins told a crowd at Kennesaw State University. If we’re all mammals courting one another and impressing potential mates by collecting resources or showing some skin, what are our proximate-level choices as consumers?

Our ultimate choices? Humans aren’t usually aware of their ultimate choices—the reasons why they want to buy a Ferrari or an Oscar De La Renta dress are always bubbling somewhere beneath consciousness—but Durante says that there’s value in studying why we make these choices, whether you’re a consumer, scientist or marketer. But what about the Abercrombie and Fitch effect? The authors believe that their studies can influence sales in real businesses. In the managerial implications section of the paper, they write that companies selling jewelry, luxury cars

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or designer clothing could assign “tall, athletic male sales associates to manage the accounts of shorter male customers.” The effects of the study extend beyond face-to-face interactions and into ads, commercials and in-store displays, they write, as even a picture of a dominant male seems to trigger men’s competitiveness and increase the amount they spend. “Thus, because the effect is not limited to face-to-face interactions with dominant male employees, our findings should have broad and important implications of marketing and advertising,” they write.

But Otterbring says that luxury shops might not want to switch their hiring practices to employ only hulking males. There are discrimination laws to worry about, he says, but also that dominant males don’t seem to affect other dominant males. And while it’s true that many human actions aren’t done consciously, researchers can only explain pieces of the human subconscious. Most of our psychology, subconsciousness and ultimate reasons for action are still unmapped.

Even so, Gustafsson says that marketers should study this paper and other marketingfocused evolutionary psychology research.

Marketers are very good at the big-picture items—competing, building a new market or a new business—but he says that they often miss the small details, the signals that appear in the noisy atmosphere of the store. “These things that are more experience-based or emotionally connected that are more difficult to capture and grasp, they have a big impact,” he says.

People often ask Gustafsson about the ethical and philosophical concerns of driving sales by manipulating consumers, but he points to the dominant greeters already being used at high-end stores across the world. Think about the beefy security guards who stand at the front of Tiffany’s or Michael Kors; they likely weren’t hired to make male customers spend twice as much money, but the store’s intentions don’t change the results. For Gustafsson, these manipulations are a research opportunity, a way to find out how consumers shop and how the world works.

“We are all manipulated,” he says. “All of these things—scent or music or letting people touch products—they are out there. You need them in the stores. People like these environments better, so they come more frequently. It’s about building an environment that people might spend more time in.” m

From the paper “Fear and Loving in Las Vegas: Evolution, Emotion, and Persuasion,” by Vladas Griskevicius, Noah J. Goldstein, Chad R. Mortensen, Jill M. Sundie, Robert B. Cialdini and Douglas T. Kenrick in Journal of Marketing Research “The present findings have theoretical and practical implications for advertising practice and the strategic placement of ad and products.

For instance, although television advertisers have traditionally relied on viewer demographic information to determine where and when to purchase airtime, our model suggest that they might consider the content of the specific program during which their ads will air—and to consider such issues in a more textured and less obvious way. For example, while touting the uniqueness of a product might be effective during a program that elicits romantic desire, the same ad aired during a fear-eliciting program such as the grim local news might actually make the product unappealing. A related intriguing possibility is that ads themselves might be used to elicit specific emotions (rather than general positive or negative effect) in a strategic way. For example, the first 15 seconds of a TV spot could be strategically crafted to elicit a specific emotion; this emotion could be used to make the persuasion appeal in the ad to be more persuasive.”

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Have Marketers Made Us

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rs s

Fat? Years of diet culture and unfounded marketing messaging have often left consumers confused and rarely slimmer

By Sarah Steimer

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The trial and error of weight loss can feel like a bad relationship.

People get their hopes up, then a setback dashes them. A moment of reconciliation rekindles the optimism. But just when it starts to feel like it’s going to work, it collapses, leaving them to start all over again.

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Cyclical ebbs and flows have a name in weight-loss parlance: yo-yo dieting.

There are 93.3 million obese adults in the U.S., home of a $66 billion weightloss market. With that many potential customers and so much money at stake, a lot of diets are bound to fail. Like searching for a soulmate online, finding a weight-loss solution can mean wading through many offers that seem too good to be true—because they are. Others— legitimate products—can be overlooked in a crowded market. Effective weightloss products must juggle standing out, being transparent and remaining engaged throughout the user lifecycle. It’s a lot to ask, but a committed brand-user relationship can be a beautiful thing.

Too Many (Bad) Fish in the Sea Vintage weight-loss ads are an easy laugh. Today, it’s hard to imagine being convinced to swallow a waisttrimming tapeworm or chew an appetitesuppressing gum. It’s great comedy—until you see ads in 2018 hawking waistreducing belts and appetite-suppressing lollipops. With a low barrier to entry, the weight-loss industry plays like the Wild West.

“This is a difficult area to enforce,” says Richard Cleland, assistant director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Unlike drugtype products, weight-loss products don’t have to be registered. They don’t have to have any prior showing of efficacy. It’s a post-market enforcement mechanism.”

Delayed oversight and an overweight nation make the field fertile for scams.

The FTC’s 2011 survey on fraud,

published in 2013, found more consumers were victims of fraudulent weight-loss products than of any other fraud covered in the report. The agency estimated that 2.1% of consumers, or 5.1 million U.S. adults, purchased and used fraudulent weight-loss products in 2011. That’s a lot of lollipops.

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lose a substantial amount of weight or to lose weight without diet or exercise.

“When consumers purchased and used the product, they lost less than half of the weight they had expected to lose, if they lost any weight at all,” the FTC reported. Weight-loss products as defined by the report included nonprescription drugs, dietary supplements, skin patches, creams, wraps or—wait for it—earrings.

The commission can’t review every weight-loss product. As Cleland explains, it can be difficult to track the products after they’ve been set free on the market.

Prior to 1994, weight-loss products were considered to be drugs and required approval by the FDA to be sold. But when Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, it reclassified weight-loss products as foods that do not require any type of registration and approval, which unleashed what Cleland calls “a torrent of fraudulent and deceptive weight-loss claims.”

In the early 2000s, the FTC assembled a workshop on weight-loss advertising, which included a science panel, industry panel and media panel. “The panelists recognized that deceptive weight-loss advertising was a growing problem, despite increased FTC law enforcement and consumer education efforts,” a report on the workshop reads. “To address the problem, the weight-loss industry expressed a willingness to strengthen selfregulation, including the development of more effective weight-loss advertising guidelines and the exploration of a larger role for the NAD (National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus).”

Aside from this summary document, there’s little else to show for the workshop.

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There were suggestions of writing ad guidance, but industry groups showed resistance. The National Nutritional Foods Association was concerned that a list of what it called “presumptively false claims” would be too narrow, “and that marketers would interpret any claim not specifically listed as being allowed.”

There may be another reason the results from the workshop were limited: The problem would soon grow too big. The summary document only mentioned the internet twice, suggesting the impact of this platform wasn’t yet realized.

“If the fraud in this area is going to be effectively addressed, there needs to be some kind of regulation that would require companies to get prior approval of their weight-loss products,” Cleland says. “There are some self-regulatory organizations—particularly the Council for Responsible Nutrition on the industry side and the National Advertising Division on the advertiser side—that have tried to make an effort to engage in selfpolicing. I think this problem is too big for them as well.”

CRN did not return a request for more information on the topic. A spokesperson for the American Herbal Products Association, one of the groups involved in the FTC’s 2003 workshop, pointed to voluntary guidance published by the Partnership for Healthy Weight Management, but that guidance was published by the FTC in 1999. A spokesperson for the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus says the group focuses on investigating individual cases brought to its attention, rather than overarching recommendations.

For its part, the FTC is working to

combat fraudulent weight-loss products.

The agency launched an initiative in 2014 called “Operation Failed Resolution,” a strategy aimed at cracking down on fraudulent products and marketing campaigns and educating the media on how to identify false claims. The weight-loss industry mostly supported this operation, which included fines of approximately $34 million paid by Sensa, L’Occitane and LeanSpa for consumer redress. The FTC also levied the largestever penalty against an ad agency— $2 million—to settle a false-advertising complaint related to weight-loss claims. “[Consumers] have a mentality of, ‘I just want something that will do it for me because I’ve tried it myself and it didn’t work’,” Cleland says. “It’s partly in desperation that consumers want to believe that somebody will come up with the magic pill. Marketers understand the desperation of their clientele, as well as how to play to that market. Consumers that have heard the health messaging understand the risks of being overweight and obese. And they really are vulnerable to those types of claims.”

Cleland says even legitimate companies sometimes join the race to the bottom, becoming susceptible to exaggerations of product effectiveness because of the competitiveness of the market. “The consumers are the first line of defense,” he says. “This is not a criticism but a statement of fact: We can only devote so many resources to a particular area.”

So many dishonest players can give the entire industry a bad reputation, making it imperative for the legitimate products to stand out. “Many industries face the challenge of bad actors who taint the industry through unethical marketing NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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practices,” says Lindsay Carnett, president and CEO of Marketing Maven. She emphasizes the need for proven results, ideally through clinical studies on the formulation of the product. “Responsible marketing is imperative. In the world of social media, this means appropriate influencer disclosures and still utilizing approved structure/function claims from an FDA/FTC attorney.”

Another way to look out for the consumer is to report false claims by other brands. Marketers who intentionally break the rules, Carnett says, are harmful not only to consumers, but to the space in general.

Maybe It Was a Misunderstanding Even for products with proven efficacy, not every customer’s story ends with triumphantly holding out the waistband of too-big jeans. Legitimate weight-loss products do not produce results without lifestyle changes by their users.

“You can lose weight yourself by just managing your caloric intake and energy output, but you can also do it with the assistance of an aid or remedy,” says Lisa Bolton, marketing professor at Pennsylvania State University. “From the consumer’s point of view, the hope is that the remedy will resolve the problem, and the consumer won’t have to do much else.

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I can take this fat-fighting pill and I don’t have to worry now about healthy eating or exercise.”

Bolton’s research, published in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, set out to test the theory that marketing weightmanagement remedies may have unintended consequences. Remedies are defined in the paper as products or services designed to reduce risk and offer solutions to consumer challenges. “In the health domain, weight-management remedies reduce the health risks associated with obesity and purport to help consumers reduce or maintain their weight,” the authors wrote.

The authors had 134 people read a warning about the health dangers of highfat diets. Some of the people were shown additional text: “Until now! Introducing Chitosan Rx Ultra,” a weight-loss aid that claimed to absorb as much as 60% of the fat in food. The entire group was then told it would participate in a taste test of a new snack. Half the people were given marketing materials that said the product was “delicious yet guilt-free,” and the other half read that the product was “rich, sinful.” Those who had seen the message about Chitosan took significantly more of the snack than participants who only saw the general nutrition advice.

“Put simply, why make healthier food choices to manage weight if a weightmanagement drug can manage your weight for you?” the authors wrote. Bolton says that the knowledge of available remedies may actually encourage people to engage in riskier behavior or make them less mindful about their diet or exercise.

Though marketers may not intentionally mislead users, consumer perception thwarts the results.

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Portion-control products pose similar issues. Hundred-calorie snack packs, all the rage in the early 2000s, became many a dieter’s midnight snack-mare. Maura Scott, a professor of marketing at Florida State University, studied the relationship between packaging and restrained eaters in a 2008 Journal of Consumer Research paper. “Restrained eating is basically a definition of consumers who tend to have a relatively more complex relationship with food,” Scott says. These consumers are hyper-aware of the weight they gain and how they approach eating in a social context. The report authors found that restrained eaters tended to consume more calories overall when eating smaller foods in small packages, compared to unrestrained eaters. “The irony there, from a marketing standpoint, was the smaller food in the smaller packages tends to be designed to facilitate weight loss among restrained eaters, or people who are on a diet,” Scott says. “It was very surprising to us that those were the people who didn’t exercise as much restraint.”

The 100-calorie packs appear as diet food, an innocent option for consumers trying to eat in moderation. Instead, their target consumer feels license to consume more. Bolton also noted consumer license—the permission to consume— in her research as it relates to remedies: “Erroneous remedy beliefs seem to reflect motivated reasoning: The more consumers want to believe that a remedy obviates the need for healthy eating, the more they feel licensed to indulge in unhealthy eating.”

The knowledge of available remedies may actually encourage people to engage in riskier behavior or make them less mindful about their diet or exercise. Though marketers may not intentionally mislead users, consumer perception thwarts the results.

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Even legitimate companies sometimes join the race to the bottom, becoming susceptible to exaggerations of product effectiveness because of the competitiveness of the market.

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loss field, the scientifically proven pharmaceuticals, have struggled to gain market share. The five drugs currently approved for weight loss by the FDA all face skepticism from many doctors and patients because of their safety concerns and limited efficacy. Additionally, few health insurers cover the products.

One weight-loss company, Orexigen Therapeutics, maker of FDA-approved Contrave, filed for bankruptcy in spring 2018. It was a move that The Wall Street Journal emphasized the difficulty of marketing weight-loss drugs, as patients and doctors struggled with the product’s safety risks and costs. It flies in the face of experts who claim the best advertising is backed by clinical trials: Those results aren’t always impressive.

The weight-loss industry could consider looking at obesity as an ongoing challenge, staying involved throughout the consumer’s health journey, beyond the onboarding stage. “We’ve categorized [weight loss] under this category of health inertia,” says Lindsay Resnick, EVP of Wunderman Health. “How do we get people to face a personal health challenge, stick with a plan of action and then continue to stay motivated to be involved?”

Resnick says that healthcare marketers are grappling with a two-fold problem: They’re offering a single message to everyone, despite the wide range of consumer personalities, and the messaging is product-focused, describing benefits but not the work required to get them. “What’s often missing and what you really need to change behavior is more motivational, more personal, more gut-level inspiration,” he says. What’s needed is a better understanding of how to get more audience participation, how to be engaged and how to do so on the appropriate channel.

The messaging needs to be as varied as the audience. Whereas improved energy levels from weight loss may appeal to some consumers, messaging about self-esteem may work better for others. “Smoking is a great parallel,” Resnick says. “I’ve seen these ads on TV recently that show people with horrible

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disfigurements from smoking. Absolutely no teeth, or they’re talking through a little tube in their neck. That scare tactic works for some; but for others, show a happy message of people who quit smoking, like spending more time with grandkids.”

Healthcare companies have learned to dig into claims data, but they need to explore more customer data to find which ad angles resonate.

Even with the right messaging, the side effects and the cost of weight-loss remedies can be rather unsexy. “It’s an advertising nightmare, really,” Resnick acknowledges. There’s really no magic answer here, it’s mostly a matter of emphasizing that the benefits are far greater than the risks.

For benefits to emerge, though, marketers need to stay with the user beyond the initial buy-in. This is where technology could play an interesting role.

For example, a company could gamify the weight-loss process or develop a mobile app that pushes out notifications to the user. Healthcare marketers have focused on medication compliance in recent years, and their lessons could drive some weight-loss product solutions.

The healthcare industry tends to take a B2B approach to marketing, having long focused on securing uptake among providers and insurers. A B2C, or usercentric, mindset considers how to engage the customer and better ensure compliance. Consider WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers. The brand is more than 50 years old and is famous for its user engagement, including the point system, food options (recipes for the cooking-inclined and premade items for others) and in-person meetings.

The trickier aspect of a B2C approach is being clear about the science, much of which is highly technical and indecipherable to the average consumer.

Bolton’s research also underscored this problem: Consumer health literacy was not being considered in weight-loss marketing. “A lot of companies tend to talk above the market and the people don’t understand,” Resnick says. “How do you break that down into a more common denominator that Joe and Jill Consumer

can understand?” The simplest way is to temper the reading-comprehension level of the messaging.

Although consumers are in the habit of searching through product reviews, ingestible products amplify the need for comprehensive marketing literature, Carnett says. Using layman’s terms and communicating via YouTube, social media channels and owned media are above and beyond what many do today, she says.

Such improved marketing can be the difference between another bad weightloss remedy and a real relationship that changes a consumer’s life. The stakes are high for everyone involved with weight-loss products, and it can feel like a minefield. The brands likely to stand out can’t simply tell consumers what they want to hear, they need to be honest about what’s necessary—and remain with them every step of the way. Even the best relationships require work. m NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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There are nearly 5,000 higher education institutions in the United States, and they are all trying to convince prospective students, and their parents, that they are the right choice. With the cost undergraduate and graduate degrees at an all-time high and increased competition from non-traditional and overseas universities, higher education marketing departments are more pressed than ever.

Finding the right higher education marketing partner can mean the difference between success and failure. Whether you are looking for an agency to create and plan your next marketing campaign, a software company to manage your social media efforts, or a research company that specializes in the higher education market, AMA's Higher Education Marketing Services Directory is the perfect place to start your search.

AN ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO THE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF MARKETING NEWS. COPYRIGHT 2018 BY THE AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

Acquia 160over90 160over90 is the unparalleled leader in higher ed branding, setting the bar for authentic storytelling and results-driven strategy. Anticipating the emerging needs of top institutions, pro sports teams, non-profits, and lifestyle brands, 160over90 is constantly evolving its capabilities— from research and planning through execution and activation. http://160over90.com/

5HD 5HD is a full-service digital agency that doesn’t subscribe to the old agency model.

We go beyond ads. We design user experiences where every interaction matters, from branding to search, website, social media, and more. With expert creative, strategy, technology, and data teams, we’ll help you convert more of the metrics that matter. https://www.5hdagency. com/

Advantage Design Group

Adobe Only Adobe gives everyone — from emerging artists to global brands — everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. www.Adobe. com

With the Advantage Orientation®

by Advantage Design Group, schools across America are transforming the orientation experience to engage new students and reach new enrollment goals. Our cloud-based platform presents students with interactive and video-rich content; a digital resource, accessible any time on any device. Educators gain a suite of powerful and time-saving content management, analytic and reporting tools, all within one application. Features include interactive quizzes, checklists, FAQs, auto reminders, surveys, and more, all wrapped in a customdesigned and Branded interface.

Easily manage it all with seamless integration, robust reporting functionality, and limitless training. https://www. advantagedesigngroup.com/

Acquia is the open source digital experience company that empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. Whether it’s matching you with the best resources, or partnering directly with your team, we’re committed to your success. From onboarding to launch to ongoing support, we’re here to ensure you get results. Building and testing without strict roadmaps is crucial for innovations like conversational interfaces, chatbots, beacon technology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Acquia Labs balances future tech and customer needs. https://www.acquia.com/

Augurian Helping leaders in higher education have confidence in their digital marketing investments.

Our clients are digital believers, and together we grow enrollment and understanding.

https://augurian. com/ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

BarkleyREI BarkleyREI is a full-service digital agency with a long history in higher education, successfully managing & delivering large-scale website redesign projects + digital marketing campaigns.

Our clientele includes University of Texas, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Virginia, University of Indiana, Michigan State University, UC–Irvine, as well as over 100 additional higher ed institutions. www.barkleyrei.com

Capture Higher Ed Campus Sonar is a specialized social listening agency that empowers colleges and universities to find and analyze conversations that matter, seize engagement opportunities, and develop data-informed strategies. We draw on thought leadership, higher education expertise, and modern technologies to provide actionable insights and ignite campus strategy.

Capture Higher Ed is the world’s best at using big data and cutting-edge technology to attract, engage, and recruit mission-fit students.

Capture maximizes engagement at the most influential times, delivering a better ROI to its partners. Capture’s technology provides highly customizable, ondemand data, to easily measure outcomes in real time.

http://www. campussonar.com/

https://capturehighered. com/

Campus Sonar

Carnegie Dartlet Carnegie Dartlet is the only communications firm that generates unprecedented human connection through psychometric marketing and team integration. We apply original methods and tools in the areas of research, strategy, creative, digital, lead generation, and team building to create clarity and connection inside and outside organizations. https://www. carnegiecomm.com/ 60

Collegis Education CCA is the nation’s leading fullservice marketing communications & branding agency, specializing exclusively in higher education. From the Ivy League to large public universities to small private colleges to specialty schools, CCA’s 35 years of strategic and creative expertise has built some of the best brands in higher education today.

At Collegis Education, both our approach and our industry-leading technology are rooted in knowledge that can only come from deep experience in higher education. We understand the challenges institutions face to reach students, grow enrollments and, most importantly, improve student outcomes. We understand them because for decades, we have helped a diverse range of schools across the United States overcome those same challenges. What we learned along the way has shaped where we are today — and we want to share that knowledge with you.

http://www.ccanewyork. com/

https://www. collegiseducation.com

CCA

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

Consolidus Consolidus is a branded materials management best practice company offering custom program stores for promotional products, branded apparel, print material, and banners & displays. We ensure that every product is produced according to your approved brand standards. https://www. theamashop.com/

Digital Pulp For us, the brief is just the beginning. We combine our team with yours to ensure we include every voice and priority in our process—from stakeholder to customer to brand-new user. An elegant site is a great calling card. We want more for your users: an effortless, rewarding user experience that sings on every platform. Our work isn’t done until your story is clear and beautiful across every channel, from logotype to social media to print collateral.

Our developers, systems architects, and project managers are dedicated to the integrity of every line of code and every user action, every step of the way. https://www.digitalpulp.com/

Converge Consulting CONNECTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEARNERS WITH BEST-FIT INSTITUTIONS AND PROGRAMS. https:// convergeconsulting. org/

Education Dynamics EducationDynamics is the industry leader in helping colleges and universities find the highest quality student prospects to achieve their enrollments goals. As the trusted partner to more than 900 higher educational institutions, EducationDynamics has earned a reputation for providing the resources and expertise required to meet today’s recruitment challenges, delivering inquiry generation and agency level admissions, marketing, retention, and technology solutions to universities across the country. For more information, visit: http:// www.educationdynamics. com.

Digital Media Solutions There are no short cuts in life. To make a difference you need to have the willingness to struggle, fight and persist. DMS is a team with grit. We’ve got the guts, the courage, the passion and the motivation to create change. We are redesigning the win, transforming the game and revolutionizing the marketing of tomorrow.

DMS is on track to become known as the most innovative and hardest working provider of end-toend customer acquisition and retention solutions that power results. https:// digitalmediasolutions.com

Eduvantis Eduvantis provides digital marketing agency services such as search engine (SEO and PPC) and social media strategy and execution, exclusively for higher education clients. As part of a consulting firm, we specialize in helping business schools increase enrollments through improved marketing effectiveness and alignment with market demands. www.eduvantis.com NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

Emma Emma’s email marketing platform makes it easy for teams of all sizes to create and collaborate on beautiful campaigns across all departments or locations, delivering a seamless brand experience that increases engagement and drives more revenue from email. https://myemma.com/

Epicosity Epicosity is an ideas company that specializes in finance, higher education, healthcare, agriculture and outdoor marketing, blending traditional services with a strong digital footprint. We’re thinkers. We’re dreamers. We’re storytellers, with a digital edge. We excel in creative development, digital strategy, video production, website development, PR and media buying and planning.

With clients in 23 states and five countries (and counting), we’re not a mega-agency. And we’re proud of that. We’re a tight group of creative, idea people that can execute nimbly and effectively. And our work is driven by client need. http://epicosity.com/

Ethode Ethode is a software and web programming company that codes, designs, and hosts websites, scalable content management systems, ecommerce stores, mobile apps, SaaS and custom software applications for business, education, healthcare, manufacturing, government, and nonprofit clients. Our technical specialties are dotCMS, Joomla, Magento, PHP, Java, JavaScript, and C#, among many others. We have helped companies bring new digital products and services to market, launch new websites, and solve business challenges with innovative software solutions. Ethode is a global implementation partner of the dotCMS Partner Network, and was one of the first partners of dotCMS. Founded in 2003 and adopting its current brand in 2010, Ethode is a privately-owned U.S. company with offices in Medina, Ohio and Fayetteville, Georgia, and complemented by a remote team located throughout the U.S. Ethode has also started a subsidiary, LightSpeed Hosting, to provide clients with data center services including application hosting, cloud servers, virtual desktop service, server colocation, and cryptocurrency mining services. https://www.ethode.com/

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Fathom Fathom, serving marketing departments of the future by combining operational and data skills with a strategic view to enhance the customer experience. http://www. fathomdelivers. com/

ESM Digital Data-reliant and resilient, ESM Digital uses integrated digital marketing strategies, in-depth analysis and constant evolution to produce and prove results that often exceed our partner schools’ expectations. We are higher education experts and passionate marketing professionals who tell the stories of our partner institutions to connect with students, alumni, future students and relevant stakeholders. We constantly plan for change and are never satisfied with the status quo. https://esmdigital.com/

Finalsite Colleges and universities choose Finalsite for our award-winning designs, best-in-class web software, easy-touse CMS, and integration with a wide range of third-party data providers to provide a scalable, custom solution to meet each school’s unique needs. And with password-protected Portals and tools to help volunteer management, we provide a complete solution for alumni relations to help reach your goals. Learn more at www.finalsite.com.

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory FindAUniversity Ltd FindAUniversity are experts in everything postgraduate. We started way back in 2001 (was the internet invented then?), and we’ve been passionate about the higher education sector ever since. We now work with hundreds of universities across the globe to help them achieve their postgraduate recruitment targets. We combine our reputation for excellent customer service and innovation with an integrated approach to delivering effective student recruitment campaigns. We’re genuinely very proud of what we’ve achieved so far, helping many thousands of students to find their perfect postgraduate degree. Our vision to develop our platforms and build an engaged online community, whilst continuing to grow our portfolio of study events, puts us in a strong position to build for the future. https://www.findauniversity.com/

Funnelback Funnelback for Higher Education offers an intelligent site search solution built upon a decade of experience with the world’s top colleges and universities. Deliver tailored results focusing on the courses, staff directories and events when and where they are most relevant. Improve the user experience and functionality of your site with a unified search and actionable insights for your team. https://www.funnelback. com/

HannonHill Hanover Research Hanover is a leading research and analytics firm that helps higher education institutions of all sizes and types tackle critical academic and administrative challenges. Our expert analysts develop a customized plan for each partner, using multiple research methodologies to deliver the insights institutions need to make informed decisions. https://www. hanoverresearch.com/

Our customers are changing the world.

Each and every Hannon Hill customer is doing something extraordinary, and we are humbled to be their partner. We want to ensure that our customers achieve maximum success with regard to their content, which is why we strive to provide them with the best products and the best service in the industry. www.hannonhill.com

Furman Roth Advertising In the ever-evolving higher education landscape, it is crucial to stay out in front. As a full-service, higher educationfocused advertising agency, Furman Roth understands the need for innovative solutions in branding, student recruitment, and alumni engagement.

For over 20 years, our winning strategies have driven results.

Our intelligent optimization, ever-present eye on ROI, and keen understanding of multichannel media synergies allow us to maximize every marketing dollar.

801 Second Avenue New York, NY 1001 jfriedman@furmanroth.com www.furmanroth.com

High School Counselor Connect High School Counselor EMail Lists The most comprehensive and thorough email lists available with unlimited yearly usage. Proprietary lists built and maintained by our own staff. You control the data!

High School Counselor E-Directories: Emailed quarterly directly to over 59,000 + High School Counselor’s with full page color ads available https:// highschoolcounselor connect.com/ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

HigherEdJobs HigherEdJobs is the leading source for jobs and career information in academia. More colleges and universities trust HigherEdJobs to recruit faculty and administrators than any other source.

Each month our site is visited by more than 1.5 million higher education professionals who rely not only on our comprehensive list of jobs, but also on our news and career advice. https://www. higheredjobs.com/

Infutor Infutor is the expert in Consumer Identity Management. We are 100% focused on enabling higher education marketers to instantly know what they need to about potential students and school alumni. Infutor helps marketers find an edge with robust technology that verifies and scores their best leads faster while enabling more personal interactions.

Knowing more about prospects at the point of contact significantly improves lead qualification and conversion, reduces cost of buying leads and streamlines lead servicing costs. https://infutor.com/

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Hotcourses Hotcourses Group offers the leading education marketing and enrollment solutions in the industry. We provide over 47 million prospective international students annually with unique online tools and informative content, from the early stages of research, right the way through to securing a place at an institution. Our partner institutions benefit from market intelligence to help them better understand prospective students and domestic and international student trends. We then provide platforms for them to influence and connect with prospective students, all the way through to enrollment. https://www.hotcourses.com/

InMotionNow inMotionNow is a leading provider of creative workflow management solutions for marketing and creative teams, facilitating efficiency and productivity from project kickoff to final approval. inMotion ignite, the company’s flagship SaaS product, simplifies every phase of the creative workflow process, delivering measurable value to enterprise clients across the globe. The application allows project stakeholders to manage, track, and collaboratively review their print, video, and marketing email projects in a centralized online environment. With a user-friendly interface and dedicated customer success team, inMotionNow helps creative and marketing teams of every variety do the work they love, and automate the rest.

https://www.inmotionnow.com/

Image Relay We believe we’re a lot like you. We know time is precious.

We want businesses and services to be transparent. We think things should be simple and intuitive, especially user experiences.

And we only want to invest our resources in applications that are reliable, secure, and make our lives easier. https://www.imagerelay. com/

InSegment inSegment is a fullservice digital marketing agency, established in 2007 and based in Boston, Massachusetts.

We specialize in demand generation programs for Colleges & Universities, leveraging innovative digital tactics to drive leads and new students.

We drive quantifiable marketing results through SEM, SEO, social media and website design & development. www.insegment.com

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

Inside Higher Ed Inside Higher Ed is the leading digital media company serving the higher education space. Born digital in the 21st Century at the height of the Internet revolution, our publication has become the trusted, go-to source of online news, thought leadership, and opinion over the last decade.

Our mission is to serve the entire higher education ecosystem individuals, institutions, corporations, and nonprofits - with the best editorial and marketing solutions in our space. As a truly mission-driven organization, we are proud to have earned the trust and loyalty of our readers by speaking as a fiercely independent voice on the pressing issues of the day. https://www.insidehighered.com/

Liaison International Our admissions management and automated enrollment marketing solutions and services help you reach prospective students and streamline administrative tasks to deliver exceptional inquiry and application experiences across the full enrollment cycle — from your prospective student’s first interest to their first day on campus. https://www.liaisonedu. com/

Keystone Academic Solutions Keystone Academic Solutions is the leading expert in higher education web marketing, working with 3600 universities, colleges and other higher education institutions in over 90 countries. We match your school and programs with the right prospective students and help you achieve your enrollment goals. Keystone Academic Solutions has over 4.2 million student visitors each month. We generate this traffic and deliver it to you through our highly optimized websites in English and more than 40 other languages.

As a result, you receive the maximum exposure in the markets where you look for prospective students. https://www. keystoneacademic.com/

Leigh Stowell & Company We are an experienced group of research professionals providing organizations of all kinds with custom research strategies that effectively address their challenges and help achieve success. We provide the tools and knowhow that help you find the answers you need and translate results into actionable plans and recommendations.

We call it The Stowell Advantage. https://www.stowellco. com/

Libris By Photoshelter Libris is the simplest and fastest digital asset management platform built for visual media. It’s a powerful media library that will centralize your team’s assets and change the way you communicate visually.

With 13 years in the cloud and more than 500 million assets managed, our cuttingedge software helps over 800 top universities, pro sports teams, travel brands and organizations of all sizes easily organize, collaborate and share their photos and videos.

To request a demo, please visit http://libris.photoshelter.com/.

Lipman Hearne Lipman Hearne is a full service, fullyintegrated marketing and communications agency for organizations on a mission. And we go WIDE. Wide is where you find brilliant solutions and achieve unexpected results. https://www. lipmanhearne.com/ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory Lucidpress Lucidpress empowers your university’s faculty and staff to create their own marketing and educational materials in a controlled environment. Lockable templates protect your university’s brand while allowing faculty to make small design tweaks and customizations, easing the workload off your creative team. Cut down on wasted time and keep your brand consistent with Lucidpress — the brand templating platform trusted by over 5 million users worldwide. https://www.lucidpress. com/

MindMax, LLC

Magellan Productions Magellan Promotions is a promotional product marketing company with a collegiate expertise. Our focus is on a mission to make your college memorable through creative and engaging strategies. To learn more, go to www. magellanpromotions. com.

Modern Tribe Modern Tribe develops custom solutions for some of the world’s top companies, higher education institutions, government agencies, and startups. We pride ourselves in our ability to bridge people and technology, bringing the passion and dedication of an entrepreneur to every project. In addition to specializing in large-scale WordPress deployments, we’re also committed to open source and excellent product design. https://tri.be/ 66

MindMax was founded with the intention of bridging the gap between universities and this new adult learner — from professionals who need to add credentials to their resume to baby boomers looking to pursue an interest. We specialize in connecting students with the universities and programs that fit their professional and personal goals. We work directly with universities, tailoring our services to communicate each partner’s mission, brand, and programs to potential students. https://mindmax.net/

Mongoose Research

Mogo Interactive We work digital advertising magic!

We design and deploy custom media solutions that help you capture the power of digital and realize exceptional results. With our advanced advertising tools and marketing expertise we drive unmatched performance to make you look like a marketing rock star.

Mongoose publishes content including industry insights, webinars, case studies, and best practices focused on one goal: helping colleges and universities continuously improve the ways they communicate with students.

We also developed Cadence, higher education’s preferred texting platform. Our software helps over 400 campuses create instant, meaningful connections with students — and in doing so, achieve remarkable outcomes.

https://mogointeractive. com/

https://www. mongooseresearch.com/

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

NRCCUA

NewCity NewCity is a fullservice consulting, design, and development firm specializing in digital strategy, user experience, and responsive websites for higher education.

We don’t just design websites — we shape strategy, processes, and platforms that put the power in your hands. www.insidenewcity.com

Now part of ACT®, the National Research Center for College and University Admissions™ (NRCCUA®️) is a data science and research organization with four offices across the U.S. For 45 years, ACT | NRCCUA has been a leading provider of data, technology and programs serving students, high school educators, colleges and universities. These solutions represent the link between students making important life decisions and those providing the resources and information they need to succeed in their post-secondary lives. In 2017, NRCCUA launched Encoura™ Data Lab to enable institutions to make real-time strategic and operational decisions to meet their unique enrollment goals. For more information, visit https://encoura.org/.

OmniUpdate Ologie Ologie is a branding and marketing agency. We’re a team of strategic thinkers, creative problem solvers, and great storytellers.

Together, we help organizations define their purpose and tell their story in powerful ways.

We’re passionate about making brands clearer, more compelling, and more consistent, so that they’re better known, better understood, and truly unique. We create brand experiences through all forms of media: print, digital, environmental, photography, and video. https://ologie.com/

OmniUpdate is the definitive partner of choice among web content management system (CMS) providers in higher education. Backed by award-winning training and support, OmniUpdate’s OU Campus™ CMS is the easiest to use with features and modules designed to meet higher ed’s unique needs. When you partner with OmniUpdate, you become part of the OmniUpdate community, a nationwide group of hundreds of likeminded higher ed professionals and industry experts. For more information, visit www.omniupdate.com.

OHO Interactive Our Boston-based team is an evenly blended group of strategists, researchers, project managers, designers, developers, and engineers.

We’re a talented and personable bunch that love collaborating with clients to create exceptional digital experiences. https://www.oho.com/

Pantheon Pantheon is a website operations platform for Drupal and WordPress, running more than 200,000 sites in the cloud and serving over 10 billion pageviews a month.

Pantheon’s multitenant, container-based platform enables educational institutions to manage all of their websites from a single dashboard. Customers include Arizona State University, Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and Penn. For more information, visit www. pantheon.io/edu.

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

Paskill, Stapleton & Lord Our goal is the longterm enrollment health of our client institutions. We provide full-service, higher education enrollment marketing to help them achieve that goal. https://www.psandl. com/

Platinum Marketing Group Platinum Marketing Group is a media planning and buying agency focused on results. We develop multi-platform strategies for media and continually optimize the plan until we achieve your goals.

PMG . . . your partner in navigating today’s media landscape. https://thinkpmg.com/

Primacy Primacy is the digitalfirst agency that solves marketing, branding and technology challenges.

In a world where data, technology and ideas combine to form new opportunities every day, we’re devoted to helping our clients bring “what’s next” to the business at hand. Our core competencies include: Strategy, Digital Experiences, Analytics, Marketing and Media, Creative, Programmatic Advertising, Accessibility and Emerging Technologies. https://www.theprimacy. com/

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PPAI In an era of digital everything, marketers everywhere are turning to promotional products to connect with clients and consumers to cultivate passionate brand advocates through brand experiences. Promotional products, the only medium invited into spaces and places other media can’t touch, deliver the best reach, recall, response rates and return on investment for marketers and advertisers.

This session will feature evidence-based strategies, proven tactics and a fresh using to create brand experiences, build communities and earn the trust and loyalty of clients and consumers. https://www.ppai.org/

QCA

Printi Printi is a Bostonbased online printer that caters to creative professionals, from graphic designers to small businesses and marketers.

We specialize in cost-effective, custom-printed products in varying sizes, materials, and finishes that will help our customers make a visual impact. https://www.printi.com/

QCA provides industry suppliers with the tools to consistently provide safe, high-quality, socially compliant and environmentally conscientious merchandise that enhances brand safety for users of promotional products.

We work with suppliers and manufacturers in the promotional products industry to elevate the standards by which they import, decorate and manufacture products, to ensure safe, high quality, socially compliant and environmentally conscientious merchandise. http://www.qcalliance.org/

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory ReachLocal R2i R2i is a forwardthinking team of digitalsavvy strategists, technology architects, and boundary-pushing creatives. Doing more for brands is not an option, it’s our passion.

Because in these digital times, delivering more is the only fuel powerful enough to accelerate business outcomes and create meaningful connections between brands and customers. https://www. r2integrated.com/

ReachLocal, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, possesses expertise in online enrollment marketing.

With a presence in 14 countries, we work with colleges worldwide. We are a pioneer in digital marketing — for well over a decade we have combined awardwinning technology with experienced people and industry knowledge. www.reachlocal.com

When you work with Sextant Marketing, you do so with the confidence that you have engaged a team of industry professionals with unprecedented experience in brand management in today’s performance based digital marketing landscape; and who, most importantly, are dedicated and focused on partnering with you to achieve your mission and have a positive impact on the greater community that you serve. Embrace our philosophy where the right strategy creates success, driving higher engagement with your key constituents while empowering your brand and creating a uniquely differentiated position that will allow you to CHART YOUR OWN COURSE https://www.sextantmktg.com/

Stackla

SimpsonScarborough In higher ed, creative ideas need to be inspirational and motivational — but also grounded in research and vetted by stakeholders.

Our integrated approach to market research, strategy, and creative services brings together your people, vision, and values with our recognized knowledge and partnership to build brands that inspire and endure. www. simpsonscarborough. com/

Sextant Marketing

SME Branding Founded in 1989, SME Branding is the most trusted strategic branding firm for colleges and universities.

We believe that a brand must derive from emotions to form meaningful, human connections with their audiences. This conviction is our roadmap for building and strengthening brands. It is the heart of what we do. For over three decades, we have infused higher ed brands with the distinct values and culture that make them unique. Our work galvanizes communities, invigorates bonds with alumni and transforms people into lifelong supporters. https://smebranding.com/

Stackla is the world’s smartest visual content engine, helping modern marketers discover, manage and display the best earned and owned assets across all their marketing touchpoints.

With an AI-powered usergenerated content (UGC) platform and asset manager, Stackla sits at the core of the marketing stack, actively discovering and recommending content from across the social web to fuel personalized content experiences at scale. Trusted by 450+ brands, nonprofits and universities, Stackla is designed to meet the content needs of enterprise organizations like McDonald’s, Heineken, Expedia and Toyota as well as universities like MIT, Stanford University, Wellesley College and UC Berkeley. For more information, please visit www.stackla.com and follow us on Twitter at @stackla.

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

Stamats From research and strategy to branding and demand generation, every service we provide is enriched by what we’ve learned over the past six decades and a restlessness drive to always know more. It’s a way of doing business perfectly adapted to the dynamic world of higher education.

It’s a way of serving clients that creates a special sort of energy—a current that powers every now, every new, and every next. https://www.stamats.com/

StudentBridge StudentBridge is the world’s leading provider of student engagement and lifecycle solutions. We drive increased student conversions by delivering highly engaging, personalized touch points & actionable insights across all phases of the student recruitment cycle.

In short, we provide the engagement layer between the institution and the prospective student. We are a group of dedicated, funloving student engagement specialists — and we all want to improve the experience for prospective students at every stage of the journey. https://www.studentbridge. com/

TerminalFour TERMINALFOUR is a digital marketing and web content management platform for Higher Education.

TERMINALFOUR’s software enables Universities and Colleges to drive student recruitment, retention, alumni fundraising and research promotion by maximizing the effectiveness of their digital channels using modern digital marketing techniques. https://www.terminalfour. com/

University of Florida

TextAim Easily engage thousands of students with one-to-one text message conversations.

We’ll handle the heavy lifting so you can focus on building relationships. http://www.textaim. com/ 70

The Thorburn Group For our nation’s colleges and universities, the challenge to recruit and retain students, engage and delight donors, and rally a vibrant campus community has never been more important, or more challenging. For 30 years, The Thorburn Group — now the full-service branding division of Stamats — has been helping colleges and universities discover, define and deliver their brand stories to the people who matter most to their success.

Stories that people relate to, remember and share. Stories told authentically, creatively and consistently. Stories that help colleges and universities stand up and stand out in an increasingly cluttered competitive marketplace. http://thethorburngroup.com/

At UF, our students utilize more than 200 research, service and education centers, bureaus and institutes. With some of the most future-focused facilities led by some of the best minds in their fields, it’s no wonder UF is consistently ranked among the nation’s top universities.

Rankings like second among Forbes “Best Value Public Colleges” (2016) and second in Kiplinger’s “Best Values in Public Colleges” (2015) are a result of UF’s commitment to provide the highest quality education at the best value. http://www.ufl.edu/

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Higher Education Marketing Services Directory

University Business UB provides cuttingedge coverage of education news, technology, academics, facilities management, security, financial services, policy, profiles, opinion — and more — to this exclusive audience across print, digital and in-person event platforms. https://www. universitybusiness. com/

VisionPoint Marketing

Up&Up We are a higher education branding and marketing agency.

Through strategy, creativity, and innovation, we partner with colleges & universities to find the heart of their stories and tell them in clear and compelling ways. Our core service offerings include brand platform development, marketing campaign strategy, and digital experience execution. https://www.upandup. agency/

VisionPoint Marketing is a marketing agency that helps colleges, universities and community colleges meet their admissions, branding, fundraising and communication goals. Our commitment to strategy, diverse understanding of all marketing disciplines and ability to build consensus across scores of stakeholders enables us to form deep, long standing client relationships. https://www. visionpointmarketing. com/

YOUR AD HERE! WayBetter Marketing We believe the most effective way to enroll more students is to talk to them in the most personal, most authentic way possible. To truly have a conversation with them about the biggest decision they’ve had to make in their lives so far. The whole process looks something like this: Attract – Listen – Respond!

We attract students by sending them relevant, personalized communications. When they show interest, we ask questions. (What are they interested in? What are their concerns? What are their hopes for the future?) Then, we tell them your answers. That’s it.

No trick. No magic. We just say the right thing to the right person at the right time. https://www. waybettermarketing.com/

YouVisit YouVisit help schools increase inquiries, physical campus visits, and applications. YouVisit creates interactive virtual campus experiences that connect colleges & universities with prospective undergrad, transfer, graduate and international students across mobile and the web. YouVisit interactive campus tours are trusted by 800+ clients.

Find out how YouVisit interactive experiences can accelerate your business today youvisit.com.

Advertising in the AMA's award-winning publication, Marketing News, is a sure way to connect with your audience and boost your visibility.

AMA's dedicated sales team will help you plan an advertising schedule that works for you.

Contact us to learn about advertising opportunities in Marketing News in 2019.

Email sales@ama.org for more information. ama.org/mediakit NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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PERSONAL BRAND

Self-Promotion Doesn’t Have to Be Selfish

BY DAVID HAGENBUCH

 dhagenbu@messiah.edu

Y

ou’re settling into your airplane seat as the flight attendant reviews the safety procedures—seat belts, emergency exits, then: “In the event of a

loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling. Put on your own mask before helping others.”

Have you ever thought about how self-

career advancement

centered that instruction is? You probably haven’t because you realize that you’d be no good to anyone if you’re passed out in your seat due to lack of oxygen.

Sometimes we need to help ourselves before we can help others.

As personal branding has become popular, many of us feel the need to own our image and strategically promote ourselves. At the same time, we wonder if it’s right to spend time advancing ourselves or if our time would be better spent helping others.

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AMA Recruitment Classified Advertising Need to hire qualified, skilled marketing professionals? Looking for qualified marketing or business professors for your University?

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Column widths for display ads: 1 column = 1 1/2˝; 2 columns = 3 1/4˝; and, 3 columns = 5˝

ORDER INFORMATION To place a classified ad in Marketing News, please contact Joseph.Petit@ communitybrands.com or call Joe at (727) 497-6565 x3706. To post your job on AMA's online job board, go to http://jobs.ama.org.

POSITIONS OPEN SENIOR ANALYST, CHEVROLET GLOBAL MARKETING BUSINESS & MARKET INTELLIGENCE, General Motors, Detroit, MI. Communicate with GM Research team creating internal owner, automotive sector syndicated, & public surveys, aggregate & analyze business/market data incldg automotive sector global sales reports; auto industry & vehicle segment forecasts; future product planning portfolio; vehicle sales planning volumes; Global Brand Tracking Study (GBTS); advertising effectiveness tracking (AdTracker); New Car Buyers Study (NCBS); automotive sector competitor intelligence incldg vehicle launches, for key Chevrolet markets incldg NA/SA, Korea/China. Perform deep-dive review, define, clean & organize big data using Excel PivotTable, &Microsoft PowerBI, & analyze, assess & evaluate advertising production & media buying & planning effectiveness incldg how media

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(TV, online, print, outdoor, & radio) messages are perceived by target audience, overall opinions, brand consideration (will you consider brand), & image attributes (qlty, dependability, reliability, price, aspirational image) as delivered by global advertising & media sources, GBTS & AdTracker, & recommend to Senior Leadership psgr vehicle brand (car, truck, SUV) marketing strategies. Use external media/ advertising agencies to provide market intelligence data & service to define & refine market & data information & improve generation of insights that will lead to informed decision making & improved business results for Chevrolet Global Marketing organization.

5 yrs exp as Advertising Analyst or Manager, Media Service Analyst or Manager, or related, performing deep-dive review, defining, cleaning/ organizing big data using Excel PivotTable, & analyzing, & evaluating advertising production effectiveness incldg how media (TV, online, print, outdoor) messages are perceived by target audience, overall opinions, brand consideration, &image attributes (qlty, dependability, reliability) delivered by AdTracker, & recommend to leadership psgr vehicle brand marketing strategies for country or global market. Mail resume to Ref#296, GM Global Mobility, 300 Renaissance Center, MC:482-C32-C66, Detroit, MI 48265.

POSITIONS WANTED FREELANCER AVAILABLE: SPSS programming, survey mailings, report writing, data entry, online surveys, comment coding. MR firm overflow or corporate MR firms are typical clients. Can pick up work or meet with you in Atlanta, Savannah or Jacksonville. UGA Grad, 18 years experience & references, call Jeanne Eidex 770.614.6334 or email jeidex@ eidexgroup.com.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018

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PERSONAL BRAND

I recently read an article by fellow professor Jeffrey J. Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Williams lamented that college faculty members are now expected to be promoters. They are asked to push their institutions, their departments, their courses, their books and themselves.

The notion that self-promotion can become narcissistic and overshadow other priorities is valid; egos easily grow out of control. However, Williams’ argument relies on the same dubious assumption others often make: Personal branding is solely self-serving.

Like the oxygen mask example, the best personal branding is not a decision between helping ourselves or helping others; it’s an opportunity to do both.

By helping ourselves, we can better help others.

The idea of altruistic personal branding becomes more plausible when we recognize that good branding involves more than just communication. When we build our brand, we develop character and gain competencies. We are most valuable to others when we offer real reasons for trust and confidence.

Throughout my education and career, I’ve often benefitted from the strong personal brands of other people. I also believe the investment I’ve made in personal branding has helped at least a few others.

I met Dan, an alum of my college, many years ago when my instructor invited him to speak to our advertising class. Dan had an MBA and was a marketer for a well-known packaged food company. He gave me advice when I was considering an MBA and later lent me instant credibility with one of my MBA program’s leading professors, whom Dan had impressed on a consulting project.

When I mentioned to the professor that I knew Dan, he enthusiastically replied, “Any friend of Dan is a friend of mine.”

Years later, the professor remembered me and my connection to Dan when I

asked him to recommend me to doctoral programs.

Now that I’m older and more experienced, I believe that others benefit from my personal brand. I do things for them, such as write letters of recommendation and serve as a reference for job applications. Just as I leveraged my mentors’ qualifications, credentials and connections, they use mine to help them advance in their careers. The time I’ve spent building my personal brand has increased my equity and paid dividends to others.

Interestingly, Dan is now the vice president of marketing for a large retail chain, and he calls me when he’s looking to hire for his marketing department. He probably never imagined that using his brand to help build mine would one day directly benefit him. That’s the nature of enlightened self-interest and airplane oxygen masks. Sometimes we can help others more by first helping ourselves. m

career advancement

When we build our brand, we develop character and gain competencies. We are most valuable to others when we offer real reasons for trust and confidence.

DAVID HAGENBUCH is a professor of marketing at Messiah College, the author of Honorable Influence and the founder of MindfulMarketing.org, which aims to encourage ethical marketing.

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career advancement

JOBS

The 2019 Marketing Jobs Outlook Is Bright Find out what employers want and what they have to offer candidates as marketing budgets expand and demand for marketers rises

BY CHRISTINE MOORMAN AND LAUREN KAHN

L

ooking for a job in marketing?

The CMO Survey can help. The latest survey, conducted in August, involved 324 marketers at the VP level or above across 13 industry sectors. The survey revealed much about the kinds of companies that aspiring marketers might consider, the skills they should emphasize in their applications and the areas of marketing they can pursue.

Marketing Hiring Trends Companies are eager to hire marketers.

The number of marketing hires is estimated to increase by 6.4% in the next year, according to the survey. The percent change in the number of marketing hires planned over the next year has been positive since the metric was first

measured by the survey in February 2012 (Exhibit 1).

The biggest percent change in planned marketing hires in the next 12 months is in B2C product companies (9.7%), followed by B2B product companies (7%), B2C services (6.3%) and B2B services (4.1%). Transportation and retail/wholesale companies expect to have double-digit growth (14.5% and 13.3% respectively), whereas consumer packaged goods, healthcare, banking/ financial services, communications/ media and consumer services companies expect to grow between 6 and 9.4% over the next year. Marketing hiring growth is expected to be comparatively limited for technology/software/biotech companies (1.9%).

EXHIBIT 1 Percent change in marketing hires planned in next 12 months 8.0%

7.3%

7.0% 6.0%

6.6%

6.5% 5.4%

5.2%

5.5%

6.4%

6.4% 5.1%

5.4%

4.7%

5.0%

3.8%

4.0%

3.7%

3.5%

3.0% 2.0% 1.0% 0 02/12

08/12

02/13

08/13

02/14

08/14

02/15

SOURCE: THE CMO SURVEY

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08/15

02/16

08/16

02/17

08/17

02/18

08/18

Over the next year, companies without e-commerce sales are expected to increase their marketing staffs at a greater rate than companies where e-commerce composes more than 10% of sales (7.4% versus 4.7%). On average, smaller companies (less than $500 million in annual revenue) expect to increase marketing hires at a greater rate over the next year than larger companies (more than $500 million in annual revenue).

In addition to in-house opportunities, aspiring marketers also have ample opportunity to work in agencies and marketing consultancies. Nearly 22% of social media activities are performed by outside agencies, and B2C product companies outsource almost 40% of such activities. Marketing outsourcing was expected to increase by 1.6% in 2016 and has steadily climbed to a 5.5% expected increase in 2019. Aspiring social media marketers should consider working for agencies.

How Much Influence Does Marketing Wield at Your Potential Employer?

Many marketers prefer to work in companies where marketing plays a powerful role. To gauge the amount of power marketing holds within an organization, you might look at whether the company has a CMO and whether there are marketers on the company’s board. The size of a firm’s marketing budget as a percentage of the firm’s overall budget is also an indicator of the power marketers hold within the company. As a reference point, marketers report that spending on their department as a percent of the company’s total budget is 10.8% on average and has fluctuated between 10 and 12% for the last six years.

Comparing sectors, B2C product companies have the highest marketing budget as a percent of firm budget (17.2%). B2B product companies budget less than half that (8.5%), and B2B services and B2C services budget in between the two (9.6% and 11.6% respectively). The industries with the highest marketing budgets as a percentage

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JOBS

career advancement

There is more opportunity in digital marketing than in traditional advertising.

Look for jobs in social media, mobile marketing and marketing analytics—all areas of marketing with expected budget growth. of firm budget are communications, consumer services and consumer goods.

The mining/construction, energy and manufacturing sectors have the lowest marketing budgets as a percentage of firm budget, suggesting that the marketing function has limited power within these types of companies. Larger ($10 billion and more in revenue) and smaller (less than $100 million in revenue) companies allot a larger percentage of budget to marketing, as do companies that make more than 10% of their sales from e-commerce.

Types of Marketing Jobs to Consider If you consider spending as a proxy for opportunity, survey results indicate that companies expect to increase spending on digital marketing by 12.3% on average in the next year while they expect to decrease spending on traditional

advertising by 1.2% on average. These metrics clearly suggest that there is more opportunity in digital marketing than in traditional advertising.

Marketers should look for jobs in social media, mobile marketing and marketing analytics—all areas of marketing with expected budget growth. Social media spending as a percentage of marketing budget has grown since August 2013 and grew more in the last year than any other survey year since this metric was first gauged in 2009. Spending on mobile marketing is also rising and currently composes 9.4% of the marketing budget, up from 3.7% in February 2017. The percent of marketing budget spent on mobile is expected to increase to 18% on average in the next three years, with B2C services companies dedicating the highest portion of their marketing budget to mobile (26.1%). For marketing analytics, the percent of marketing budget has NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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stayed relatively flat since the first time it was measured in 2012, but the amount is expected to increase from 6.7 to 21.3% over the next three years.

The responsibilities of marketers vary across companies, however marketers are most likely to lead activities related to brand, digital marketing, advertising, social media, public relations, promotions, positioning, marketing research, lead generation, marketing analytics and competitive intelligence.

They are least likely to lead activities related to stock market performance, distribution, customer service and sales (Exhibit 2). Identify which of these marketing activities appeal most to you and research which companies have marketing organizations that spearhead those activities.

EXHIBIT 2 Percentage of companies in which marketing leads activities Brand 91.4%

CRM 42.0%

Digital marketing

Market entry strategies 38.9%

82.7%

Advertising 79.6%

Revenue growth

40.1%

Social media

82.7%

New products

34.0%

Public relations

69.1%

Pricing 30.9%

Promotion 71.6%

Innovation 30.2%

Positioning 71.6%

e-commerce 25.3%

Marketing research

67.3%

Market selection

Lead generation

61.7%

Sales 22.6%

Marketing analytics

68.5%

Customer service

25.3% 17.3%

Competitive intelligence 58.6%

Distribution 8.6%

Customer experience

Stock market performance 2.5%

45.7%

SOURCE: THE CMO SURVEY

Skills Valued by Marketers To know what skills to emphasize in your application look to the responses from marketing leaders: Across industries and economic sectors, most value creativity in their hires. When marketing leaders were asked to rank the importance of seven skills, creativity was ranked in the top four for all industries and in the top two for most industries. After creativity, natural leadership abilities and martech platform experience were ranked as most important (Exhibit 3). Martech platform experience is more important for B2B firms than B2C firms.

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EXHIBIT 3 What skills will be prioritized in hiring marketing talent (% of companies reporting the skill as most important)

Data science background 14%

Financial acumen 2%

Creativity 25%

Martech platform experience 18%

Curiosity 10%

Natural leadership abilities 21%

Emotional intelligence 10% SOURCE: THE CMO SURVEY

Nearly 50% of marketing leaders reported a “lack of people who can link marketing analytics to practice” as a key factor preventing their companies from using marketing analytics more. When marketing leaders were asked what is most important for driving organic growth in their organizations, more than one-third of participants said,“having the right talent.” This was followed by “having all stakeholders aligned.” These results suggest candidates should emphasize creativity, leadership abilities, martech platform experience, marketing analytics knowledge and the ability to engage stakeholders effectively.

Marketing Training and Development Job-seekers can also consider which employers will offer them the most formal training to teach new marketing knowledge and skills. To gauge this, ask what percent of the marketing budget is devoted to training and development; if the number is below 3.9% (the average across all companies), you might want to rethink the job opportunity if training is important to you. Interestingly, B2B companies tend to offer more marketing training than B2C companies—a likely byproduct of the weaker marketing in B2B companies. Companies with no

e-commerce train the least. We suspect there is less to learn about new marketing methods in these companies.

Beginning Your Marketing Job Search Whether you are looking to work in-house or at an agency, in a large company or small, in B2B or B2C, it’s an exciting time to pursue a job in marketing. With an increasing demand for marketers, the opportunities are many.

Use our insights from The CMO Survey to guide you in your job search. Best of luck!

Conducted biannually, The CMO Survey is sponsored by the American Marketing Association, Deloitte and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. It is the longestrunning survey of its kind. To participate in the next survey, visit https://cmosurvey.org/ participate/.

CHRISTINE MOORMAN is the T. Austin Finch Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, founder and director of The CMO Survey and the editorin-chief of Journal of Marketing.

LAUREN KAHN is an MBA student at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

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advertisers’index

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the November/December 2018 issue of Marketing News.

2018 AMA Training Series .............. inside back cover URL: h ttp://ama.marketing/ts

AMA White Papers ................................................. p. 72 URL: http://www.ama.org/whitepaper

2019 AMA Marketing Winter Academic Conference ............................................ p. 13 ttp://ama.marketing/winter2019 URL: h

AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory ........... p. 74, 79 URL: http://marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org

Annual Higher Education Marketing Services Directory ............................................. p. 58-71 AMA Digital Marketing Bootcamp ....................... p. 19 ttp://ama.marketing/DMbootcamp19 URL: h AMA Foundation / Giving Tuesday . ..................... p. 7 ttp://ama.marketing/givingtuesday URL: h AMA Marketing Management Bootcamp . ......... p. 29 ttp://ama.marketing/MMbootcamp URL: h AMA Podcast / Answers in Action ...................... p. 33 ttp://ama.marketing/podcast URL: h AMA Professional Certified Marketer® Content Marketing Program . ............................... p. 35 URL: h ttp://ama.marketing/PCM-CM AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education / ConnectEd / Thank You to Sponsors . .............................................................. p. 9 URL: h ttp://ama.marketing/highered2018

Collegis Education ...................................... back cover URL: http://www.CollegisEducation.com Customer Lifecycle, LLC . ........................................ p. 6 Email: info@customerlifecycle.us URL: http://www.customerlifecycle.us Edelman ..................................................................... p. 5 URL: http://www.edelman.com/ Lipman Hearne .......................................................... p. 11 URL: http://www.lipmanhearne.com/ Marketing News ....................................................... p. 71 Email: sales@ama.org URL: http://www.ama.org/mediakit Mongoose Cadence . ............................................... p. 17 URL: http://www.Mongoose Research.com/AMA18 Stun SalesTech ................................................ pp. 22-23 URL: http://www.stunsalestech.com Salesforce ......................................... inside front cover URL: http://www.sfdc.co/ConnectedCustomer_AMA Simple Strat ............................................................. p. 27 URL: h ttp://www.SimpleStrat.com/Madness

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#OfficeGoals

Marketing software company ACTIVECAMPAIGN needed a new employee-centric office with flexible open workspace, social meeting areas and quiet work rooms to give employees options for how and where they work.

ActiveCampaign aimed to avoid the monotony of a large corporate office, so it sought a new headquarters in a 52,000-square-foot office in the 100-year-old One North Dearborn building in Chicago. Original crown molding and large windows hint at the history of the building while new elements combine rustic, industrial materials with references to ActiveCampaign’s fantasy and sci-fi-loving nerd culture (such as conference rooms, named by ActiveCampaign employees after fictitious locations including Gotham, Gondor and Winterfell). In the aptly named “Knowhere” room, one bookshelf doubles as a revolving door, hiding a speakeasy-style lounge for happy-hour strategy sessions.

Interiors: Eastlake Studios

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PHOTOS: STEVE HALL AND KENDALL McCAUGHERTY AND HALL + MERRICK PHOTOGRAPHERS

A peek inside the marketers’ offices that make us drool

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