I am the founder and CEO of Argus Insights, a leader in Experience Analytics. Argus was started in stealth mode in 2008 to answer the question, "How can Market Research be improved and help drive innovation instead of validation?"I was the Executive Director of the ME310 Global Design Innovation Course at Stanford University. The course has a forty year history of developing tomorrow’s innovation leaders.Formerly I was the Chief Technologist for SK Telecom America’s R&D Group. In this role I was responsible for understanding how the rapidly changing technology landscape would enable SK Telecom to craft new business opportunities in the Americas. My areas of responsibility ranged from NGN wireless technologies (LTE vs WiMaxx, etc), handheld experiences & the interface technologies that enable them (multitouch touchscreens, haptic feedback, smartphone operating systems), as well as evolving influences on the telecommunications market (cloud computing, femtocells, CDN’s, LBS, SNS, etc.) I also supported SKTA’s internal Business Development & Corporate Venture Capital organizations.Prior to my role at SKTA, I led Synaptics efforts for developing next generation capabilities for handheld devices from within the marketing organization. I was responsible for developing a comprehensive competitive landscape for the various handheld markets, with specific focus on the mobile ecosystem, driving the product & technology strategy, in partnership with the engineering organization, to architect & execute our roadmap of future capabilities.I was also the architect of the Onyx Concept Phone, the world’s first multitouch mobile experience. I worked with the top handset manufacturers on the creation of tomorrow’s handsets, ensuring the right marriage of technology & user experience takes place as we see an industry transformation take place around multitouch technologies.
BlackBerry has finally been taken off the market, almost… Question is, does the consumer market care? What does it bode for BlackBerry to be taken private. Our analysis of social buzz surrounding recent events show that although the Fairfax offer is incredible important, the recent launch of BBM on iOS and Android products is still driving the most buzz for Blackberry faithful.
Buzz for BBM exceeds discussion of BlackBerry Fairfax deal.
We believe this shows the market is hopeful for the deal and what it means for the BlackBerry faithful regarding the future of their favorite handset manufacturer. The rapid adoption of BBM across the mobile ecosystem also signals the extension of the BlackBerry experience by growing roots under the walled gardens of Apple and Google. In the wake of Dell’s recent privatization, these trend signals willingness by members of the private equity community to place bets on opportunities that the market refuses to see.
Our friends in Finland are moving to Redmond. What will be key is what baggage Nokia is bringing over in the shipping containers. Beyond the obvious war chest of intellectual property, patents, insanely good supply chain management, Nokia is also bringing the highest performing Windows handsets with them. Will it be enough to push Microsoft’s hardware game into the extra innings they need?
Microsoft is buying a mixed bag of niche winners and marginal players.
Nokia’s flagship phones are doing well in the battle for mindshare against Samsung, Apple and the like. For the consumers that are seeking an alternative to the Sam-pple hegemony, Nokia is second only to the HTC One. Our analysis at Argus Insights has shown of the falling fortunes of RIM, LG, and dynamic fluctuations of HTC, have opened opportunities for Nokia. As you can see from the chart above, the low end handsets have similar consumer responses as the low end handsets of LG, Samsung and the rest, while the high end, even the much maligned 42 megapixel Lumia 1020, have solid footholds in the hearts and minds of consumers.
What does this mean for Microsoft? How can they capitalize on Nokia’s strengths? With Googl-Rola finally marching out the Moto X (and despite the gadget community being excited, early consumers, not so much) and Apple’s continued dominance, Microsoft has to deploy a competitive hardware play. While the Surface Pro continues to see uptake by consumers, it has consigned Microsoft hardware to “serious” enterprise users that are trying to get work done. The acquisition of Nokia’s consumer hardware business has the chance to soften Microsoft’s corporate edge for consumers. And Nokia knows hardware. Their supply chain is almost without parallel. Their challenge since the launch of the iPhone has been to understand how to blend software and hardware experiences into a seamless whole. This is the biggest opportunity for the new entity, and if executed correctly, could build out a bright future for both Microsoft and consumers.
Some investor has had the audacity to file Class action lawsuit filed against Microsoft over Surface RT claims, saying that reports that the RT was selling well were patently false. Our demand analytics show that the Surface RT chugged along at the same rate as launch. If anything, recent discounts have raised demand for what might turn out to be an orphaned branch of the Windows family tree.
Surface RT did not have a drop in demand in July, supporting Microsoft’s claims that it was selling well.
What companies haven’t built a huge inventory expecting insane sales only to learn the hard way that markets take time to absorb new experiences. Even the vaulted iPhone only sold a few million during the first year. I am surprised the same investors are not suing Samsung for their gaff over the Galaxy S4 demand. To be fair, all of the RT tablets have seen anemic demand with only the Surface RT standing out at all. As you can tell from the graph above, consumers that bought the Surface RT held it in higher regard than the early iPad Gen 4 users. The Surface Pro only recently was eclipsed by the iPad Gen 4. While sales of the Surface RT did not match the hopes and dreams of Microsoft and the Windows faithful, it has successfully carved out a good niche in the tablet market and did not see a drop in demand in July as the case would have you believe. If Microsoft is guilty of anything, it is enthusiastic optimism.
Let us know if we can help you dig deeper as to what parts of the Surface RT experience delight and disappoint consumers.
The Guardian continues their recent line of hard hitting bits of investigative journalism on How low-paid workers at ‘click farms’ create appearance of online popularity. Imagine if you’re Coke and you’ve spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars to garner over 70 million facebook fans, only to find out not only is there little to no correlation to buzz and sales but that many of your fans are fake, figments grown at the many click farms cropping up to game page rank algorithms and the push by brands and the agencies that serve them to show performance gains.
Imagine if we could train chickens to click on Facebook like buttons…
We see the rotten fruits of click farms in the data we collect and the insights we cull for our clients every day. We continue to find new ways to distinguish real people from bots, sort the farms from real fans. Part of what we find is disturbing. Some brands are paying click farms to boost their results, justifying chat rooms filled with posers saying that if the party isn’t big enough real consumers won’t show up. Challenge is, real consumers are smarter than everyone realizes. They sniff out staged buzz bonanzas and shift their time, attention, and hard earned cash somewhere else. We see fake reviews voted down by consumers routinely in our analysis of consumer purchase behavior.
Many consumers click the like/fan button only for a quick hit, a free can of syrupy sweetness or mp3 download of the latest BeiberPerryLake song. This isn’t a relationship, its a drive buy. But for how brands measure their effectiveness in social today, it works. Likes go up, follower counts soar and the balance sheet doesn’t budge. Like spam, click farms only exist because it works, there’s a market for it, at times the very brands that loose the most from the actions of these farms, brand trust by consumers.
With the advancing tide of social engagement sweeping through Madison Avenue, Main Street and Wall Street, there is a rise of a particularly destructive disease, Brand Blindness. Brand Blindness occurs when brand blindly leverage these low cost, broad reach platforms to drive the wrong message to the wrong audience for the wrong offering. I recently received an email from Samsung offering an enticing dorm bundle for their back to school promotion. Given the ad, you would like I was a 19 year old college bound woman rather than an over forty male that hasn’t lived in a dorm for almost 20 years.
Samsung though to entice me to buy the dorm bundle even though it’s been almost twenty years since I lived in a dorm.
I’m sure you all have received posts like this and not just the endless spam for little blue pills, but ads from reputable Global 1000 companies that show how little they know of our habits, interest, or context. When our daughters will just born, I bought a box of Pampers baby diapers from Amazon.com. Price was good, usage at home was high, everyone wins, right? Except for the next six years I got ads from Amazon for diapers. Not bigger diapers, the same size diapers, for six years…
The brands are blind to context, blind to who we are and what it means to live our lives. Most companies have spent millions trying to create recommendation engines that tell what offer retailers should shove in our face next, predictive analytics to determine which path through the maze of offers and coupons is mostly likely to get us to buy, endless scenarios of A-B testing, all devoid of context. A-B testing does not help find C. Recommendation engines are based on what others bought not what consumers enjoy. And predictive analytics can only optimize the road most traveled.
This Brand Blindness hit AXE Body spray in a big way in early 2012. They had just launched their unisex scent (odor) Anarchy with a huge ad splash, interactive web comic on YouTube, and met with one of the worst launches that year. Argus Insights was doing a social campaign best practices project with Butler, Stern, Shine and Partners where AXE and Old Spice were one of the brand pairs we were studying. AXE stuck in our study of over 10 brand pairs in that it had the highest percentage of negative mentions, including twitter memes like “Dear Axe Body Spray, Please put a suggested serving size on your bottle. Sincerely, Choking Girls Everywhere.”
Hmmm, this is supposed to make women feel engaged with the AXE Anarchy Brand?
AXE launched the Anarchy the way they had launched all of their other products, videos of attractive women losing it over hopeful young men just after drenching themselves in product. Now, they were launching a product targeted at the 50% of the population missing from their sales but using an approach and brand story proven to annoy the target. Blind as a bat with it’s ears plugged…
Brand Blindness is effecting us all. We’re working on a cure at Argus Insights so that branding/product disasters like this do not continue to bleed resources from companies or drive increased distance between brands and their consumers. Help is on the way.
