Brandview World
Jan
Nonprofit Marketing Basic and Advanced Strategies
jerry9789 0 comments Brandview World, Burning Questions
What is Nonprofit Marketing?
Effective marketing allows businesses to thrive and profit, but it is just as important for nonprofit organizations. You could even say that coming up with a strong marketing strategy is even more crucial for nonprofit organizations, given their limited resources and manpower.
With competent and dynamic nonprofit marketing, a nonprofit organization can promote its cause, ideals, and services; at the same time, it can raise funds or recurring donations as well as call the attention of would-be volunteers, sponsors, or supporters.
What are the Types of Nonprofit Marketing?
Nonprofit marketing campaigns come in a variety of types ranging from email, social media, video, website, content, digital, and even in public speaking form. Investopedia highlights the following three nonprofit marketing campaigns:
- Point-of-Sale Campaign – A donation is solicited during the checkout process for an online or in-person purchase a customer is making.
- Message-Focused Campaign (Event Marketing) – This type of strategy promotes a nonprofit organization by utilizing in-person or online events, most especially the trending or high-profile kind. Aside from focusing on the mission of the organization, they also use the opportunity to raise funds as well as encourage volunteerism for and support of their cause.
- Transactional Campaign (Partnership Marketing) – The nonprofit organization teams up with a for-profit business (or businesses). The corporate partner promotes the nonprofit organization’s cause by pledging to donate a portion of certain purchases towards the latter’s fundraising efforts. In some cases, the business utilizes social media wherein they pledge to donate to their nonprofit partner for every like or share of their promotional post. This campaign also allows the business to underscore its corporate values and in turn, generate positive publicity.
Copyright RDNE Stock Project
Advanced Forms of Nonprofit Marketing
Forbes.com has noted that nonprofit organizations function differently from traditional businesses so some online marketing strategies may not work well with nonprofits. Recognizing this disparity, online giants like Google and YouTube have come up with customized options to help with nonprofit marketing.
- Google Grants for AdWords – This program gives a nonprofit $10,000 per month in AdWords credit for advertising in Google. However, there are strict eligibility requirements, such as a current 501(c) (3) status for valid charities. There are also rules to follow to keep the grant like your ad must be focused on sending people to your website and prohibiting displaying ads from Google AdSense. The application and waiting process takes time, too. You can also visit the Google for Nonprofits page for more information on Google Apps for nonprofits.
- YouTube Nonprofit Program – Instead of money, this program provides additional features and benefits for your YouTube videos such as a donate button, live streaming, and call-to-action overlays (which send viewers to a website or specific webpage when clicked). Members of the program can also apply separately for production resources which allows you to get production access to shoot or edit your video at YouTube’s Los Angeles studio. The eligibility requirements for the program are identical to Google Grants, but you need to already have a YouTube channel with some good videos uploaded before applying.
- Facebook Nonprofit Opportunities – While they don’t offer a program for nonprofits, there are a lot of different apps you can add to your Facebook page to support your nonprofit cause. DonateApp and JustGiving are a couple of apps that can help add a “Donate Now” button to your Facebook page, allowing a supporter to donate at their convenience here instead of heading over to your website to make the same.
Copyright Gustavo Fring
How to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Plan
- Set Marketing Goals – Are you looking to raise funds with your next campaign? Or maybe encourage more volunteers or supporters to help? Perhaps you want to drive more people to visit your website. You’ll need to know and understand first what you’re trying to achieve to determine the focus and direction of your marketing plan. Define your marketing goal with the SMART method– it should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.
- Identify or segment your audiences – Once you have clear goals, you’ll then need to identify your target audience. You’ll want to optimize your nonprofit’s limited resources by customizing your marketing messaging to resonate with your intended audience. Or if you’re looking to target different groups, you’ll need to segment your audience into different personas so you’re able to adjust your campaign for each type.
- Define Your Marketing Message – With your goals and audience(s) set, you’ll now be able to craft the central messaging or theme of your campaign. This is especially important if you’re segmenting your audience- you’re customizing your messaging per persona but the central theme remains the same throughout. Your messaging must convey not only the importance of your cause but also why your audience should care about your efforts. It also must be inspiring and compelling enough to convince them to take action or at the very least, make a memorable impression.
- Choose Your Marketing Strategies – You now have the what, who, and why of your nonprofit marketing campaign; it’s now time to establish the how. Aside from email and social media, are you planning to do video or content marketing? Are there any businesses you can partner with maybe? Would an event work as well for this campaign? Depending on your target audience, your marketing plan may involve utilizing more than one platform for delivering your message.
- Analyze results and make adjustments – The goal and campaign type you’ve chosen come with clear key performance indicators to assess your progress. Sometimes you won’t get your intended results the first time but you can use the data or insights you’ve gained and use it to finetune or set baselines for your next campaigns. Just keep tracking and reviewing your data, making adjustments here and there or perhaps even dropping elements that don’t work.
Copyright RDNE Stock Project
Cascade Strategies can help you and your nonprofit organization create and develop your marketing plan. With over three decades of market research experience and top-of-the-line services that include Segmentation Studies and Qualitative Research, let us assist you in heightening awareness about your cause as well as finding the ideal volunteers, sponsors, and donors to support your ideals.
Nov
The Importance of Psychographic Segmentation in Brand Building
jerry9789 0 comments Brandview World, Burning Questions
What Is Psychographic Segmentation?
So you’ve completed your research on the demographics of your online perfume store and you’ve seen that women in their twenties in Seattle were your top buyers. That’s great, you thought as your mind started to work on the outlines of your next campaign targeted towards these women. However, you discovered upon going through the data one more time that your perfumes are just as popular with forty-something-year-old women in Las Vegas. And when you went to double-check again you discovered another group of women around 25 years old being ardent supporters of your perfumes, but this time they’re from New York.
Now how do you go about your marketing given that you would need to adjust it to target your top demographic? Sure, you’ve identified your best patrons as women between 20 and 50 years old but aside from the different locations, you’re not quite sure now what else sets them apart, which could poke holes in your messaging and cause it to fail to resonate with a number of them.
This exercise shows you the limitations of demographic-based marketing. Demographics answer the question “Who are your buyers?” but in order for your efforts to become more effective, you need to go deeper by answering “Why are they buying?” And this is where psychographic segmentation comes in.
Psychographic segmentation is the process of grouping consumers according to their motivations, goals, attitudes, opinions, beliefs and other psychological factors. It helps you better understand what drives purchase decisions. Not only does psychographic segmentation allow you diversify your marketing and reach out to different groups of consumers, it also allows you to create or customize products or services to cater to the varying needs of your buyers.
Copyright Elf-Moondance (Pixabay)
Why is Psychographic Segmentation Important in Brand Building?
Going back to the earlier scenario, you decided to reach out to your target demographic through an online survey, explaining it would help you understand them and serve their needs better. Based on the responses you received, you discovered that these women between 20 and 50 years old from different states appreciated the sweet-smelling but unique line of perfumes you’ve been selling at cost-effective pricing with efficient delivery times. Thus, the messaging of your next campaign highlighted the popularity of your sweet-scented perfumes, competitive pricing, and quick delivery. And the next time the opportunity presented itself, you even went as far as offering free delivery for a limited time.
Because you’ve used psychographic segmentation to break your market into different groups, you’ve also become aware of your other customer segments, which opened up marketing strategies you could leverage towards these subsets. Let’s say one of these groups was composed of regular clients who — although they didn’t buy as much as the earlier group we’ve discussed — you discovered frequently bought a certain perfume. Upon further research, surveys, and interviews of some of the members of this segment, you found that you’re the only online perfume shop that carried this fragrance. This then allowed you to branch out with new marketing which put a spotlight on the fact that this hard-to-find scent could only be bought at your online store, tapping into more potential customers falling under this segment. This also opened up more research on what fragrances your competitors didn’t offer but which your brand carried as well as the development of new unique perfumes that one wouldn’t find anywhere else online.
Psychographic segmentation not only gave you an understanding of the “why” behind purchases, it also granted you actionable insights on selling more of your products. With this data-driven approach, your brand is able to create different marketing playbooks for your various customer segments. The buyer’s journey would be different per customer, but in their minds there is only one brand that’s on top when it comes to a selection of unique scents at great prices and fast turnaround time for delivery.
Copyright Mohamed_hassan (Pixabay)
What Are Psychographic Segmentation Variables?
So how do you group your market according to your psychographic segmentation data? While there are several types of psychographic data on which you could base the customer segments you’ll be forming, indeed.com listed the following as the five main psychographic segmentation variables:
1. Personality – This variable refers to the beliefs, motivations, behaviors, and overall outlook of your target audience. You can group your customers based on personality traits like creativity, sociability, optimism, empathy, etc.
2. Lifestyle – This variable focuses on the daily habits and preferences of a customer, including how they spend their time and things they consider important.
3. Social class – This variable assumes preferences based on income level and spending power. It can also influence how a product is priced or whether it should be marketed as a luxury.
4. Attitudes – This variable considers the behavior of a customer based on their background and values. An example would be an animal lover who leans towards perfume brands that are known to be cruelty-free, meaning they don’t test their products on animals.
5. AIO (Activities, Interests and Opinions) – This variable groups consumers based on what they similarly enjoy or are passionate about. The second scenario earlier where you discovered the subset of regular customers purchasing the hard-to-find fragrance is an example of this variable.
Copyright geralt (Pixabay)
Personas vs. Psychographic Segmentation
While it might be easy to confuse psychographic segmentation with personas, these two concepts are subtly different. Psychographic segmentation groups your markets according to similar psychological traits and can therefore present a whole-market picture of consumers, spanning the range from those who passionately love your market offering to those who dislike it or resist it. This whole-market look also gives you the ability to attach real numbers to the data, enabling you to do things like demand forecasting, market sizing, receptivity studies based on counts of prospects, and the like.
Personas, on the other hand, are profiles — portraits of individual persons. They are more specific, detailed, and focused. Think of a police profile of a crime suspect (just the format of it, not the content.) A well-drawn persona presents a fictionalized representation of your ideal buyer, with information about key traits of that person. You might describe these traits by saying something like “likes to splurge on expensive vacations,” or “typically employed in middle-echelon white-collar jobs like administrative staff, etc.” The persona provides a vivid description of that individual, so you can better understand how to appeal to that kind of person with marketing campaigns and other forms of brand outreach. A good persona description humanizes the data and gives it a relatable face.
Please click here to find out more about segmentation studies, including some interesting case histories. Cascade Strategies has for over three decades been assisting top US and international companies with high quality market research and superior thinking in identifying and focusing on their most profit-optimal consumers. If you would like to find out more, or learn how Cascade Strategies can help provide brand development research for your specific marketing needs, feel free contact us here.
Aug
Nursing Homes Close as Need for Care Grows
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World
Nursing Home Challenges
According to a report by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL) in April 2022, more than 1,000 nursing homes have closed since 2015. This breaks down to 776 closures before the COVID-19 pandemic and 327 closures during the pandemic.
The same report also projected 400 nursing homes to close in 2022 based on financials at the time. While the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported 135 nursing homes closing in 2022, it is believed the number could be higher. This is due to possible discrepancies between the time a closure plan is submitted by a facility and its full execution to be listed in the federal database.
Staffing shortages and low reimbursement have long been recognized as factors for nursing home closures even before the pandemic. Rising wages and increased operation and maintenance costs in recent years exacerbated the situation, especially in rural areas.
The Impact of Nursing Home Closings
These closures resulted in former residents transferring to another facility, which in most cases, was farther from home. Some even must move twice after the first nursing home they transferred to subsequently closed. The process could also take weeks as social workers look for placements so a patient might find themself staying in a hospital in the meantime. Conversely, some nursing care facilities are keeping beds vacant because they don’t have enough workers.
Amidst these challenges, the need for long-term care grows with baby boomers joining this group.
Copyright Kampus Production
Nursing Home Alternatives
While the pandemic put a spotlight on the difficulties faced by the nursing care industry, it also opens opportunities for reforming and improving nursing homes. It also paves the way for exploring nursing home alternatives, such as in-home care for seniors. However, home care may prove to be the more expensive option and while it offers more personal and tailored assistance, you might have a senior who prefers or thrives more in a group setting like the one offered by assisted living communities.
Then there are group homes and family-style nursing homes, which are both small-scale options for assisted living. While a typical nursing home holds over 100 resident beds on average, a group home can house between five to 10 people (or 20, depending on the state) while family-style homes host 10 to 20 beds. These setups allow for more personalized care and a higher staff-to-client ratio in a sociable, homelike setting with home-cooked meals.
Due to being smaller in scale and not as advertised as regular nursing facilities, most group homes might slip past the radar of older adults or their loved ones seeking assisted living. With well-developed branding, however, smaller-scale assisted living communities can stand out even from the shadows of larger facilities and get their message across better to the seniors most suited for the living arrangements they offer.
Cascade Strategies can help you develop your branding, thanks to an array of services such as Brand Development Research and Segmentation Studies backed by over three decades of experience. Whether you are a smaller residential care home trying to get the word out or a larger assisted living community looking to reach the ideal senior or even the skilled nurses you need, we can help you find the right market research solution for your branding needs.
Jul
How to Market Your Software Company in 5 Steps
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
According to Investopedia, only 80% of startups survived after one year, with reasons for failure ranging from money running out, being in the wrong market, lack of research, bad partnerships, ineffective marketing, and not being an expert in the industry. As a counterpoint, they cite activities such as setting goals, accurate research, loving the work, and not quitting as ways a small business can avoid failing.
Is it really that simple? Maybe not, but here at Cascade Strategies we believe it’s at least reducible to a clear step-by-step process. Here are our ideas — 5 steps on how to market your software company effectively.
1. Identify brand, goals and what makes your company unique
The first step in marketing a software (or company in general) is to determine your strategy by identifying and building around your goals. In addition to generating revenue, are you planning to establish a niche in your market? Is it also in your plans to continually develop your software through organic user feedback? You will also need to come up with a brand that not only aligns with the goals you come up with, but also helps you stand out from the competition. With thousands of software companies in the market, you’ll need to highlight what makes your software unique and what new or different property you bring to the table. A clear identity not only makes your brand more recognizable, but also makes it more strongly connected to the values you represent, leading to the formation and promotion of your reputation.
2. Identify target audience, especially the decision maker
Part of a marketing strategy is recognizing not only who you should be selling to but also who will most likely convert to a loyal customer. Through demographics, psychographics and segmentation, you’ll be able to form or identify your ideal customer and thus focus your marketing efforts on this particular client type. However, it works a little differently with Software as a Service (SaaS), since you will often need to appeal to a specific decision maker at a company (i.e., a specific title) who will have the strongest hand in choosing your particular software over competitors. You can confront this problem by not only flaunting what your software does best but also extolling the benefits it brings to the workplace in terms of productivity and efficiency.
3. Create a strong online presence (website, social media, SEO, email marketing, influencer marketing, video marketing)
As a software company, it’s vital that online marketing be part of your strategy. You can utilize traditional marketing, but online marketing offers more advantages when it comes to product promotion and customer engagement. For starters, it’s more cost effective and gets faster results. Webfx.com goes into detail regarding the advantages online or digital marketing possesses over traditional channels here.
Your website will need to be optimized for both SEO (so you rank in search pages) and function (so you effectively represent the quality of your brand). A slow or glitchy software company website won’t bode well for the performance of the product you’re selling. Keep your websites and social media pages up-to-date and active as much as possible to make them welcoming and inviting for customer interaction and feedback. Try to maintain your online presence on more than one social media page. Teamdeck said it best on the importance of social media: If a company doesn’t exist on social media, it looks suspicious.
Collaborate with influencers with similar values who have a following matching your intended audience. Reputable influencers can greatly help boost product sales and trust by lending their credibility to your offering. And don’t forget coming up with relevant and appealing videos: the essential message of lengthy prose literature can be delivered just as effectively and in lesser time with a well-made video.
4. Personalize or be relatable (origin story, client success stories, face-to-face meetings, events or interactions, what common problem you want to solve and how your product solves it)
Software companies can run the risk of employing too much technical jargon in their marketing, so why not try the more personable, relatable approach? Develop a simple but well-written account of how your company started or an entertaining retelling of the original question or dilemma that you sought to resolve through the development of your software. Even better if this question or dilemma can be framed in a common or everyday situation that most people can relate to.
Client success stories are just as effective as direct customer testimonials might be in similar situations. Potential customers might be encouraged to use or continue to use your product knowing it can be instrumental in the resolution of the problems they’re facing. But these are not the only places where you can be relatable. Face-to-face meetings or events to promote your product or engage with your customers can bring your company out of any cold, impersonal impression they might otherwise have.
5. Let prospective clients experience your product (demos, Freemium, free trial/limited time offers)
And to tie into the last point, personal events also present the opportunity for demos. Just imagine all those prospects you can convert by giving them firsthand experience with your product while offering them real-time assistance with any questions or problems they might have. Live demos are one of the best ways to show off what your software does best while forming a connection to a prospective client. Of course, you’re not only limited to demos, as you can also let customers experience your product with free trial/limited time offers and Freemium subscriptions. The latter allows prospects to enjoy some basic features of your software without the time pressure of the former. This way, they’re able to get a good feel for how they can benefit from your software and perhaps edge closer to a Premium subscription to unlock more features.
Copyright Mohamed_hassan (Pixabay)
These 5 steps should help get you out the door in creating a good marketing strategy for your software company. But as pointed out by feedough.com, once people start using your software, you need to keep them engaged so they renew their subscription and recommend it to others. Maintain the relationships you form with your customers by continually following these outlined steps, making reasonable adjustments every now and then as the market and trends shift.
Some further reading:
https://www.webfx.com/industries/tech/software/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-effective-marketing-strategies-software-companies-shahmeer-khan
https://teamdeck.io/toolbox/marketing-strategy-for-a-software-house-what-should-it-include/
https://www.feedough.com/software-marketing-strategy/
https://blog.tmetric.com/7-marketing-strategies-for-software-development-companies/
Jun
Great Research Can Help Assisted Living Facilities Attract the Right Clients
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
Is your loved one’s home not as clean and tidy as before? Do they have an empty refrigerator or is it filled with spoiled food? Frequent bruises? Same clothes every day? Do they appear to become forgetful, depressed or exhibiting strange or inappropriate behaviors?
These are just some questions that HelpGuide.org has gathered when looking for signs that an older adult might need assisted living. And when these questions start crossing the minds of their loved ones, they are likely at the point they’ll begin discussing and considering this option with them.
How to properly brand your ALF
As a healthcare professional specializing in assisted living, how do you ensure that you clearly brand yourself, the services you offer and the demographic that you’re serving? How do you differentiate yourself from retirement communities designed for seniors who can generally care for themselves or nursing homes with round-the-clock medical care and supervision? How do you reach out to the right audience, the active and social older adults needing help with daily living?
The first step towards attracting the attention of the right people is making a distinction from the other types of senior living. According to Forbes.com, assisted living facilities can be freestanding communities but also part of a retirement community, nursing homes or hospitals, so it’s certainly understandable why some would be confused and lump these services together. Hence the importance of highlighting that you cater to older adults who — while independent — need assistance doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, going to the bathroom, managing medicines, or even traveling to appointments.
As noted by HelpGuide.org, assisted living offers the safety and security of 24-hour supervision. However, you will need to point out that help requires a phone call since assisted living encourages privacy and independence. In fact, some good assisted living facilities can develop a personalized plan that keeps in mind the needs, challenges and disabilities of an older adult, while still allowing enough freedom for them to do as they please with their time.
You’ll also need to be clear about the type of assisted living facility that’ll be hosting the client. Will they be moving into a residential type that’s either a converted home, apartment complex or even a renovated school? Or do you offer apartment-style living with scaled down kitchens? And if you just provide bedrooms, do they need to share a room or have the option to pay for their own at a higher cost? Does your facility host a group dining area and common areas for socialization and recreation?
How market research can help you attract the right clientele
These are critical questions that can be answered by well-designed and executed market research. And there are even more questions that you’ll discover as you develop your brand and identify how to best reach out to your ideal clients.
Copyright Marcus Aurelius (Pexels)
You’ll need to be ready to answer questions about staffing, or proactively make information like this readily available for anyone looking into their options for assisted living. How many staff do you employ that are responsible for residents’ care? How many of them are working at any given time? Do you have enough members to cover one that goes on leave? Is staffing different at night? What are their duties? Do they interact with residents? Do you have registered nurses on site? Are they able to handle or trained for emergencies?
The same goes for questions about the facility. What is the housekeeping schedule? How do you ensure the safety and security of residents? Are the bathrooms easy to access and do they have grab bars? In case of an emergency, how do residents contact the staff? How good and nutritious is the food? Can you provide information on menu options? Can a resident eat at their room? What hobbies or activities are offered onsite? Is there transportation available? What amenities are included?
More importantly, people looking into assisted living facilities are most likely going to value an environment that seems friendly, safe, and comfortable. The facility is also expected to be clean and well-maintained. And while what feels like home is subjective, being able to answer as many questions or provide pertinent information as you can puts you closer to the ideal resident.
Copyright Cottonbro Studio
Otherwise, you can help those that weren’t a good fit at the very least to understand better what they are looking for or what they need to help them in their search to find the best facility for them. They might even realize that another type of senior living might be better for them.
How Cascade Strategies can help
Cascade Strategies has been helping healthcare companies sort out issues like these for over 30 years. Thanks to an array of services such as Brand Development Research and Segmentation Studies, we are able to help healthcare companies make their brand stand out and become more profitable in addition to enlightening them on their customer types and how to best address their needs. Please see our website and case histories.
Here are some suggestions for further reading:
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/senior-housing/assisted-living-facilities.htm
https://www.seniorliving.org/assisted-living/
https://www.forbes.com/health/senior-living/how-to-find-the-best-assisted-living-facility/
Jun
Appropriate Use of AI
jerry9789 0 comments artificial intelligence, Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
The Rise Of AI
Believe it or not, Artificial Intelligence has existed for more than 50 years. But as the European Parliament pointed out, it wasn’t until recent advances in computing power, algorithm and data availability accelerated breakthroughs in AI technologies in modern times. 2022 alone made AI relatively mainstream with the sudden popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But that’s not to say that AI hasn’t already been incorporated in our daily lives- from web searches to online shopping and advertising, from digital assistants on your smartphones to self-driving vehicles, from cybersecurity to the fight against disinformation on social media, AI-powered applications have been employed to enable automation and increase productivity.
The Woes Of AI
However, the rise of AI also brings concerns and worries over its expanding use across industries and day-to-day activities. Perceived negative socio-political effects, the threat of AI-powered processes taking over human employment, the advent of intelligent machines capable of evolving past their programming and human supervision- that last one is mostly inspired by the realm of science fiction but a plausible possibility nonetheless. A more grounded and present-day concern, however, is the overreliance and misuse of Artificial Intelligence.
Copyright geralt (Pixabay)
Sure, AI is able to perform a variety of simple and complex tasks by simulating human intelligence, efficiently and quickly producing objective and accurate results. However, there are some activities requiring discernment, abstraction and creativity, where AI’s approximation of human thinking falls short. Cognitive exercises like these not only need high-level thinking but also involve value judgments honed and subjected by human experience.
The Expedia Group Case Study
This brings us to our case study for the Expedia Group, whose brand has around a million hospitality partners. Their goal is to increase engagement with their partners. For five years, Expedia grouped their lodging partners, which at the time were mostly chain hotels, with a segmentation model that helped guide their partner sales teams on how they should prioritize spending their time. This “advice” Expedia provides comes through marketing, in-product or through the partner’s account manager. When a partner takes advantage of Expedia’s advice, they usually receive the booking over their competitor.
Copyright geralt (Pixabay)
Now you can imagine that Expedia has thousands of advices or recommendations to give their partners. So how does Expedia determine which recommendation will most likely push their partner to act accordingly and produce optimal revenue?
If you answered “Use AI,” you’re on the right track. With thousands of possible decisions, Expedia just wants AI to filter the bad choices and boil it down to a few but good recommendations optimizing revenue. Expedia wants to use AI to help with decisions, but it doesn’t want AI to make that decision for them or their partners.
Copyright Seanbatty (Pixabay)
But now things are different- Expedia’s partners have grown to also include independent hotels and vacation rentals. So what if Expedia adds additional dimensions to the model allowing them to target partners with recommendations that would be best for their way of thinking and feeling, as well as appeal to their primary motivations as a property?
So that’s exactly where Cascade Strategies stepped in. We followed a disciplined process where — just to name a few things we’ve performed — we interviewed 1200 partners and prospects across 10 countries in 4 regions, converted emotional factors into numeric values and used advanced forms of Machine Learning to arrive at optimal segmentation solutions. Through this five-step disciplined process, we built them a psychographic segmentation formed into subgroups based on patterns of thinking, feeling and perceiving to explain and predict behavior.
Copyright Pavel Danilyuk
It “conceived the game anew” for Expedia Group (in a way suggested by Eric Schmidt and company in their book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future). Now seeing their partners in a different light, they needed to evolve their communications to reflect the new way they view them with the end goal of targeting which segment with which offer. The messages they would deploy should be very action-oriented based on what compels each segment.
Cascade Strategies then created an application called Scenario Analyzer to make this easy for people at Expedia. Its users could just ask the Scenario Analyzer what’s the optimal decision for certain input conditions. Basically, a marketer selects a target group and a region then the Scenario Analyzer answers by saying “You could do any of these six things and you’d make some money. It’s your call.”
If the partner does nothing, Expedia still makes about $1.5 million from these partners during a 90-day period, which is part of their regular business momentum. However, if the partner acts on the top-ranked recommendation which carries the message “Maximize your revenue potential by driving more groups or corporate business to your property,” it would result in about $140,000 more during the same period, which is about a 1% gain. While we couldn’t reach all partners with the same message, causing us to lower our expectations a little, we did slightly better than we expected to do in the end.
The “Appropriate Use” of AI
So what did we did do? We made “Appropriate Use” of AI. It neither made the decision nor guaranteed the money. It warded off the worst ideas and told us which recommendation was best in comparative terms.
Many people in marketing are treating AI as the next cool thing, so they want to jam it in wherever they can, whether it’s helpful or not. “Appropriate Use” stands against that, saying the best way to apply AI to marketing is for Decision Support to remain under human discretion and judgment, instead of letting AI actually make choices.
We think AI can at times be a very poor decision maker but a very good advisor. And we’re not alone as many others share our concern; to illustrate, 61% of Europeans look favorably at AI and robots while 88% say these technologies require careful management.
Another example to consider when thinking about just how important human intervention is when it comes to the “Appropriate Use” of AI is the topic of health care. As noted by frontiersin.org, the legal and regulatory framework may not be well-developed for the practice of medicine and public health in some parts of the world. Throwing artificial intelligence into the mix without careful and thoughtful planning might underscore or aggravate existing health disparities among different demographic groups.
And this is part of the reason why we believe in shaping AI with human values, including the dignity and moral agency of humans. The “defining future technology” that is AI is already proving to be a powerful tool for providing solutions and achieving goals, but it can only unlock levels of excellence, innovation and integrity when guided appropriately by human values and experience.
Other interesting reads:
https://www.wgu.edu/blog/what-ai-technology-how-used2003.html#close
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/artificial-intelligence-ai.asp
Jun
How Great Research Produces Great Campaigns
jerry9789 0 comments artificial intelligence, Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
Can AI Produce Your Marketing Campaign?
If you were given the task of developing a global communications campaign for a technical products company, would you let ChatGPT do it?
You might, especially if you noted that ChatGPT could churn out dozens of ads like the one above without paying art directors, copywriters, media professionals, or users of a Demand Side Platform.
But we wouldn’t. This is because it’s hard for AI to produce at the level of excellence, and excellence is what should be sought.
Seeking Excellence in Marketing Campaigns
The ad below is part of an award-winning and profitable “Mentor” campaign for HP. To arrive at this level, HP had to commission very perceptive researchers to spend time with worldwide HP engineers as well as engineers from other companies.
The researchers stretched the intuitive, interpretive, and synthesis-building capacities of their right brains to arrive at a subtle insight that AI would have great difficulty seeing: that HP engineers showed greater qualities of “mentorship” than other engineers. They thought it was important not only to conduct their own technical work, but to impart to others (typically younger people) what they were doing and why what they were doing was important.
It would be very hard indeed to stretch an AI chatbot (or other AI engine) to that deeper level of understanding about what a truly extraordinary ad should do to express the true meaning of a brand to people.
An example from the world of sunglasses
If you were given the job of developing a campaign for a line of sunglasses, you could probably get ChatGPT to produce a large number of ads like the following at little or no cost (with the exception of the cost of the talent).
But AI-produced ads fall short of excellence. AI simply cannot do the incisive interpretive work that humans can do to produce something better.
Researchers working for the Gargoyles brand of sunglasses spent time with those who preferred this brand and made a discovery about them that AI engines would have great difficulty seeing: that many Gargoyles wearers were upward strivers who were at first destined to fail, then turned things around with drive, verve, and strenuous effort.
They had a “storyline of life” worth admiring. To gain this insight, the researchers had to stretch the intuitive and interpretive powers of their brains. They could not simply rely on a summarization of prior human experience in producing ads about sunglasses.
Higher powers AI cannot reach
AI cannot stretch to this level of excellence. It cannot see broader levels of human experience that may be required to produce excellence, such as “how could sunglasses have anything to do with striving?” or “how could a life story of struggling ever be associated with sunglasses?” Hell, generative AI wouldn’t even think to inquire about a storyline of life. But humans can do that when their right brains are performing at a very high level.
The researchers in this case had to sweat the details a little more, spend quality time pondering the higher thematic levels, and drive their brains well beyond summarization to a more sublime expression of the true meaning of a brand to people.
This is the kind of work Cascade Strategies does on a daily basis. Please have a look at some other examples of higher thinking for clients at https://cascadestrategies.com.
People are catching on and speaking out
More people are seeing the chasm between the summarization of human experience that AI can provide and the excellence provided by the greater intuitive powers of the human brain, and they are speaking out about it. One example is Po-Shen Loh, a charismatic math coach who directly confronts AI, challenging his students to attack complex math problems at higher levels of understanding and interpretation than AI could ever provide.
But there are even more people who are discovering this excellence gap, and their voices will grow stronger.
Jun
How Great Research Helps Tech Companies
jerry9789 0 comments artificial intelligence, Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
How Well do you Understand Your Customers’ Needs?
As a Tech Company, how well do you know your customers? In most cases, identifying who has an affinity for your brand and focusing on the needs of that customer type can spell success for your products, especially the launch of your new offerings.
Sure, you might think you can have AI go over your customer database and hope it’s able to recognize customers and prospects most likely to purchase your product. However, AI shortcuts are unable to approach the intuitive and interpretive power of human thinking, let alone the kind performing at a high and excellent level.
The Story of HP Test & Measurement
The case of Hewlett Packard’s “Mentor” campaign is instructive. HP commissioned our researchers to spend quality time with worldwide HP engineers as well as engineers from other companies, learning about their daily lives – how they think, feel, and behave. The researchers stretched the intuitive, interpretive, and synthesis-building capacities of their right brains to arrive at a subtle insight that AI would have great difficulty seeing: that HP engineers showed greater qualities of “mentorship” than other engineers.
The result was a highly successful, award-winning global campaign. Conversion rates soared as HP logged higher equipment sales in virtually every world region. The campaign also produced significant financial gains for HP and won an ADDY Award for creativity.
The Squaresoft Video Games Story
We also conducted primary market research for Squaresoft Video Games to determine affinities for their products. They had been sending out about 200,000 mail pieces per month to key metros across the US. By giving us extracts of their file of purchases of similar games, we appended characteristics and modeled affinities for prospective buyers.
We called those most likely to respond “Videobrats.” The model reduced the number of markets to 4 key metros which had the highest concentration of “Videobrats,” concentrating their marketing on high-affinity households in these markets.
Our researchers spent a great deal of time with Videobrats in these markets, exploring their daily lives, discovering how they think, how they interact with others, and how they spend time with entertainment and gaming software. This hard work produced a key set of insights that could be perceived only through the intuitive and interpretive power of the human mind. It’s not something AI could touch.
The result was a campaign of extraordinary power and great marketplace success. Squaresoft reported dramatically increased sales of the two game titles in the specific geographies in question, ranging from 20% to 200%. Not only that, the “Videobrats” campaign won the KPMG Award of Merit for ROI performance and the Ernst & Young Most Effective Marketing Campaign Award.
The Lessons for Marketing in the Tech Sector
Many people conducting marketing campaigns in the tech sector believe you just need to tell people on the web what you have (e.g., software, hardware, systems), and the magic of internet targeting will take care of the rest. They’re wrong. It’s as important in tech as in any other category to tell people why they should want the software, hardware, or systems from your brand instead of another brand. That requires you to express something about what psychologically or emotionally binds your customers to your brand.
Discovering the root of these deeper connections requires more complex layers of understanding and perception than AI can provide at present. Hard-working humans driving their minds to higher levels of interpretation and synthesis can do it.
When market research is used not just as a means to an end but as a way to gain a deeper understanding, Tech Companies are able to produce outstanding results because they are able to come up with inspired and creative solutions addressing the needs of those who value their brand the most. AI is unable to unlock these sophisticated types of solutions because it’s unable to relate on an intuitive and interpretive level the same way excellent human thinking does.
If you’d like to see this kind of magic brought to life for your brand, please reach out to us here.
May
How Great Research Helps Financial Services Companies
jerry9789 0 comments artificial intelligence, Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
From maintaining loyalty and fostering customer relationships to focusing marketing messages on the most profit-optimal consumer, great research is helping Financial Services companies identify not only their best customers and prospects but also their needs and why they prefer their brand over others. This is done through a high-quality segmentation study and persona development, which break a company’s market into different groups so that different strategies for marketing to these groups can be leveraged. The main reason a company wants to complete market segmentation research is so they can gain actionable insights, like how to sell more of their product or services.
Take for example, Banner Bank for whom Cascade Strategies developed a brand model which identified “Strivers” as the primary segment they should focus on. The bank initiated special promotions and appeals featuring the products of greatest interest to Strivers. A Striver-specific ROI program was developed to measure the degree of program success. Modeled indices were used to set Striver product targets by branch. After 2 years of activity, Banner Bank exceeded all key Striver product targets system-wide.
Read about our approach to high-quality brand development research here.
Another example is the case of Capital One where they needed help trying to identify the “persona” or psychographic type most interested in adopting a certain mobile app for personal investing. We conducted in-person depth interviews with “mobile-minded consumers.” We also conducted an unpacking session with Capital One staff where individual staff members were given assignments to review videos and be prepared to discuss key traits and behaviors of respondents, such as outlooks, investing styles, goals, worries, needs, plans, and so forth.
We identified that the “Empath” is the most interested in adopting a certain mobile app for personal investing. The “Empath” persona is fairly immersed in pragmatic thinking and probably best understands the possibilities for “thinking” or guidance apps, allowing Capital One to focus their brand campaign effort on the needs of this psychographic type. The net result was a highly successful new product introduction.
Read about our approach to segmentation studies and the development of brand personas here.
Copyright Cottonbro Studio
“But wait, can’t AI do this?” you may ask. While there is a faddish and hype-driven tendency to turn quickly to AI for short-cuts in market research, AI cannot yet fully replicate the deep interpretive and intuitive skills of the human brain, especially the right brain (the nonrational side). Moreover, effective AI deployment requires human supervision and involvement as final arbiter of how the outcomes will be leveraged.
As you can see, market research results as good as the examples above come from human-centered thinking, the kind that allows brands to break past ordinary bounds and achieve true excellence. It’s this kind of extraordinary thinking that Cascade Strategies has consistently provided a long list of US and international clients for 33 years.
Feel free to reach out to us to discuss your needs at https://cascadestrategies.com/contact-us/
Apr
How healthcare people can help underserved populations
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
There’s no shortage of knowledge about the healthcare needs of underserved communities in the US such as the Hispanic, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander subpopulations. What may be lacking are workable and effective efforts to address these needs.
There are two main parts of this problem:
- Communication issues
- Lack of practical programs.
Communication issues
The recently-released National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report points out that certain racial and ethnic groups that coincide with the underserved subpopulations are the most severely uninsured. See Figure 1. (Please note that the term American Indian/Alaska Native is shortened to AI/AN, and the term Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander is shortened to NHPI.)
These disparities should not exist by definition, largely because of the availability of Medicare, Medicaid, and low-cost or no-cost insurance from state insurance exchanges. As the report points out, they exist largely due to communication and access issues. Many members of the underserved communities either have coverage but avoid seeking care or don’t know they’re eligible for coverage in the first place.
Avoiding treatment
Having coverage and avoiding care is a solvable problem, if healthcare organizations and the society in general have the will to do so. People in the underserved communities often miss planned appointments for certain medical purposes such as wellness exams, follow-up appointments, and scheduled appointments for priority services such as prenatal care and maternal wellness, causing them in the latter case to pay a high price in terms of maternal morbidity and neonatal health. (See “Lack of Practical Programs” below.) Some of this is due to language barriers, transportation issues, or unease in the interaction with healthcare personnel; but a great deal is due to a misunderstanding of the extent of their coverage, especially what remains due from the patient in the form of copayments, deductibles, etc.
Healthcare organizations can ease these problems by providing more and better-trained navigators as well as interpreters and translation services. They can build more outreach programs to the underserved to make them aware that in many cases they have little or nothing to pay for wellness services and planned care for medical purposes such as behavioral conditions, substance use treatment, chronic conditions, routine wellness care, and priority areas such as the above-mentioned prenatal care.
Not knowing about eligibility
The same potential remedy applies to lack of awareness of eligibility. Members of the underserved communities often don’t know that they’re eligible for coverage in the first place, and this leads to avoidance of treatment as well. More and better-trained health navigators supported by outreach programs can also go a long way toward alleviating this part of the problem.
Lack of practical programs
If communication with the underserved can be improved, it stands to reason that well-structured programs must be established to accommodate them. In other words, they have to have a place to go. Not enough imaginative or careful thought has been put into the development of these programs for underserved communities. Programs, personnel, and training are lacking in the areas of behavioral health, substance use treatment, dental care, prenatal/postpartum care, and more.
While the AHRQ report clearly identifies significant disparities in each of these areas for underserved communities, nowhere is the disparity more painful than in the area of prenatal care. See Figure 2.
The AHRQ data show that the level of care is well below acceptable levels for each of the four main underserved communities. This has unfortunately led to higher rates of maternal morbidity among these members of the underserved communities due to such conditions as eclampsia/preeclampsia, severe postpartum hemorrhage, venous thromboembolism, and other complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
While this is just one significant area of disparity in quality of care for the underserved, it appropriately points out the need for practical programs. Health care organizations can respond with energy and creativity by developing doula/monitrice services, transportation services, language/interpretive services, and structured prenatal and postpartum care services in tandem with the improved communication and health-navigator programs mentioned above. There’s also evidence that the provision of team-based, interprofessional, central location care centers can often lead to improved medical outcomes for underserved populations.
Information-gathering is an important first step
Clearly, different approaches will be required based on geographic, cultural, linguistic, and sociodemographic issues that pertain to your organization, but the journey always begins by gathering information. Cascade Strategies has a great deal of expertise and experience in helping healthcare companies assemble this knowledge, and we stand ready to assist you. Please tell us about your information needs at contact Cascade Strategies, and we’ll be pleased to serve your needs.
info@cascadestrategies.com
2032 Newport Way NW,
Issaquah, WA 98027
(425) 677-7430