When you factor in people’s natural variety-seeking behaviour, and the simple fact that for many people, pulling out a screen and tapping away is actually pretty efficient, voice search might not be worth spending money on…at least not yet.
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Shopping is something we all do, albeit some more reluctantly than others. But whether your shopping experience is a child-free challenge done with fierce determination, or a more leisurely occurrence seemingly done on autopilot, every shopper is at the mercy of the purposely designed shopping landscape ... or are they?
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If you want to know about actual word of mouth recommendation, ask about that. But don’t ask ‘would you recommend’ – for all the reasons outlined above. Rather, ask ‘have your recommended that company to others in the past week or month’. That way you’ll understand how much actual positive word of mouth is occurring for your brand.
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Marketing consultant Kevin Gray asks Professor Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute about key mistakes many marketers are making in an interview for ESOMAR online magazine RW Connect.
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Professor Byron Sharp is interviewed for Impact magazine, MRS members quarterly magazine. He discusses consumer behaviour, loyalty, big data and marketing myths.
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Advertisers want great ads, ads that generate lots of sales that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Exposure to a brand’s advertising should increase the viewer’s propensity (likelihood) to buy that brand.
Yet this isn’t what’s measured, hardly ever.
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I was recently asked for a causal explanation of marketing’s Double Jeopardy pattern.
This is discussed in How Brands Grow (e.g. table 3.3 and surrounding text). Also see page 113 of my textbook. Though the most complete explanation is in the forthcoming How Brands Grow in Emerging Markets.
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There is far more trade between countries today than ever before. And it has allowed countries that were terribly poor, with awful rates of childhood mortality, to transform themselves.
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Here is a short critique of: Bongers, M. & Hofmeyr, J. 2010. ‘Why modeling averages is not good enough – a critique of Double Jeopardy.’ Journal of Advertising research, 50:3, 323-33.
A longer explanation of the mistakes made in the above article can be read in:
Sharp, B., Wright, M., Dawes, J., Driesener, C., Meyer-Waarden, L., Stocchi, L. & Stern, P. 2012. ‘It’s a Dirichlet World: Modeling individuals’ Loyalties reveals How Brands Compete, Grow, and Decline.’ Journal of Advertising Research, 52:2, 203-13.
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Early this year I attended an excellent, thought-provoking presentation by the very lovely Professor Sheena Iyengar from Columbia Business School on her (small-scale) choice experiments. The results seemed to suggest that consumers could easily experience choice overload. And the implication for marketers was to beware of offering lots of choices because this can actually depress sales.
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