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MIKE: Of Winning at the Zero Moment of [INAUDIBLE] joining
him today is John Ross [INAUDIBLE]
Shopper Sciences Macro Research Study [INAUDIBLE]
on shopper behavior explores how the changing world of
media to digital media is empowering shoppers and
impacting the decision making process.
Everything from grocery, over-the-counter medication,
to automotive and financial services.
Today, we will explore the growing trend of digital
pre-shopping and the implications for marketers.
Quick notes before we begin.
You'll see a chat window and a Q&A window on your screen.
Use the chat window to report any issues you may be having
[INAUDIBLE] and engage in discussion on today's topic.
But please use the-- section to direct your questions to
today's [INAUDIBLE] welcome to submit questions at any time
and we'll be fielding [INAUDIBLE] questions will not
be visible to other attendees and we'll get to [INAUDIBLE]
one final note, we will have the deck and a recording of
this session available.
Now my pleasure to introduce today's presenters.
JIM LECINSKI: Thanks Mike.
Good afternoon everyone.
This is Jim.
It's a pleasure to be with you all today to talk to you about
the concept of the Zero Moment of Truth.
I will start to set up the concept.
John will share some data with you in the middle third of the
presentation.
And I'll come back and share some specific action items or
suggestions and recommendations as to how you
can start thinking about implementing Zero Moment of
Truth in your businesses.
So John, if we can go to our Max Weinberg slide.
I will start by telling you a little bit of a personal story
about how buying behavior in my life has changed.
We have a big office in New York City.
I'm based in Chicago but I travel to New York, like many
of you, pretty frequently.
And there's a small hotel across the street from our
office in New York called the Maritime Hotel
where I often stay.
And one of the neat things about this hotel is down in
the basement, there's a ballroom where they have
entertainment, and bands, and concerts, and the like there
on a regular basis.
It's called the Hiro Ballroom.
H-I-R-O. And on this particular Tuesday earlier
this year, when I walked into the lobby of the hotel, I saw
these little kind of--
I guess the hospitality industry calls these table
tents or tent cards displayed all throughout the hotel lobby
for a performance that was going to happen that night by
Max Weinberg and His Big Band.
Now, I think everybody knows Max Weinberg.
Some of us older folks know him as Bruce Springsteen's
drummer on Born in the USA album with the heavy backbeat,
right foot, and right hand.
Other folks might know him as the band leader from Conan's
NBC Tonight Show.
So I was really excited about this because yeah, I'm
certainly a Bruce Springsteen fan, but I'm a big jazz fan.
And Max Weinberg and His Big Band sounded like a perfect
event for me.
And so I look at this as a consumer but also as a student
of marketing as like a really targeted good placement of an
ad to an interested prospect, a jazz fan, me, who's in the
hotel with some time that evening.
Now, the way we've all practiced marketing for years,
you would have gone from that stimulus to the expected
consumer response, as well all call it, and that is for me to
go downstairs with my Visa card and buy a ticket to the
show at the ballroom box office.
But I didn't do that actually.
And this is what becomes interesting when we talk about
the zero moment.
Instead of doing what I was supposed to do as a consumer,
that the marketer behind this event wanted me to do, I did
something very different.
If you go on the next slide, please.
What I did was open up my laptop and typed in to
YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the
world, three words.
Max Weinberg Hiro, the name of the ballroom.
And using the hotel Wi-Fi in the lobby on my MacBook,
instantly, I pulled up dozens of videos showing Max Weinberg
playing downstairs.
Now, the reason I did this is because I wasn't
quite ready to buy.
I wasn't quite ready to commit.
I had all kinds of questions.
What type of music would he play?
What should I wear?
What's the seating arrangement?
Is it cocktail tables or auditorium theater style
seats, et cetera?
And so as a shopper, this was a great way for me to get
those questions answered after being exposed to the
advertising stimulus but prior to actually making the
purchase at the point of sale.
And this little story sort of represents the sea change in
consumer behavior and therefore in marketing plans
that we're going to talk about today, what happens in between
stimulus and response at the so-called
Zero Moment of Truth.
So in the next slide, please.
This is a challenge to our existing mental model as
marketers, right?
We all sort of have a sense of what marketing should be.
And if you haven't read this great book by Wharton
professor Jerry Wind, throw that onto your
Kindle or your iPad.
Making Better Sense: How Mental
Models Define Our World.
And as marketers, if you go on to the next slide, we
certainly have strong mental models.
He talks about Roger Bannister in the book as a mental model
that was broken, how the four minute mile
was a mental model.
And as soon as we challenge the mental model, great
things, new levels of performance can happen.
So next slide.
What's our mental model as marketers?
Well, I think from my Max Weinberg story, you can tell
that our mental model starts with brand managers, marketing
managers, that we are building a great product.
Then on the next slide, we build a great marketing
campaign behind it--
E-Trade baby or whatever to tell the target about this
terrific product that we've built.
And then on the next slide, as P&G taught us about five years
ago and moving forward, not only do we have to build a
great product, not only do we have to then communicate it or
advertise it, but we also have to win at the point of
decision, the point of sale.
That's that moment when, in this instance, mom is standing
in front of 64 feet of boxed cereal, which
one does she pick?
Does she remember your ads?
Does she feel good about your brand?
And does she put it in the cart?
P&G called that winning the first moment of truth when
you're standing at the shelf.
And so on the next slide, using Professor Wind's mental
model analogy, this has kind of been our mental model for
50 plus years of marketing.
Stimulus, drives to the first moment of truth where we win
at the shelf.
Consumer then takes the product home, uses it, is
either satisfied, dissatisfied, repeats, or
doesn't repeat.
And then next slide, there were only a few moments, a few
interception points, where this model didn't hold.
In cars or cameras or travel or restaurants, after seeing
your stimulus, after seeing an advertisement, the consumer
might not go to the camera store to
buy your Nikon camera.
They might look it up in Consumer Reports and see if it
was rated highly.
If you advertised a hotel in Colorado Springs, before
people just called the 1-800 number to book the hotel, they
might look it up in the mobile travel guide.
And the same, they might see a restaurant on the side of a
bus on Fifth Avenue for Mario Batali's new place.
But before showing up or booking, they might have a
look at Zagat, or maybe you say the
"Za-got" Restaurant Guide.
But those things for us as marketers in most categories
were kind of the exceptions rather than the rule.
For the most part, the model went stimulus,
to shelf, to usage.
And those were the moments, if you think as brand marketers,
that we would spend our time trying to optimize.
That's what we would have on our to-do lists as marketers.
And so if you go to the next slide, what my Max Weinberg
story tells us, and what John is about to show you using
some proprietary research and data that Shopper Sciences and
Google conducted, is that that mental
model has in fact changed.
Shopper behavior, how they choose, how they buy, how they
make decisions has moved from a so-called three-moment model
to a fourth moment model where, prior to the first
moment of truth, all these kinds of behaviors of ratings
and reviews and research and search and recommendations and
social networking online, just like I did to look up the Max
Weinberg concert, is now the norm in
category after category.
And so the question for us as marketers is
are we aware of this?
And what are we doing to win the zero moment?
So I'll now turn it over to John who will walk you through
some proof points and research and data
around the zero moment.
And then I'll come back and show you how to win.
JOHN ROSS: Good afternoon, all.
I'm glad to be on the call.
So I wasn't always an advertising agent.
In fact, most of my career, I have been a client and
specifically a retailer--
retailer by DNA.
And I've done all kinds of--
basically every leadership job at a retailer in merchandising
and operations and eventually in marketing.
I've probably sat in that chair at one time or another.
And when you look at the world through the retailer's
[INAUDIBLE]
they're very proud of the three-moment model, because
that first moment of truth, the experience of the consumer
with the product makes the retailer quite powerful.
The retailer owns the relationship with the shopper.
They're able to dictate the terms of that relationship.
And they can use it to increase their co-op and
sliding fees from manufacturers.
They're able to develop brand strategies which make the
manufacturers spin around them in order to earn more space,
more share of ads, and all the other things that
manufacturers wants.
And by owning the shopper, they can introduce loyalty
programs and mechanics to allow them to protect that
shopper interest, keep it close to their vest, and
therefore to continue to maximize the profitability of
their business.
I spent a lot of my career maximizing the opportunities
of our ownership of that shopper because that was the
first moment of truth.
But the secret, the dirty secret from retailers, is that
for a long time-- not just this year, not just last year,
but for a long time, we'd been having a crisis of faith, that
as we actually look and dissect what it takes for a
shopper to go from undecided to decided, allowing them to
make the choices in our stores or even the choice between our
store and the competitor's, what we were seeing is a new
kind of shopper behavior, one in which the role that our
store played, one that which roll that stimulus played was
under change.
Specifically driven by technology, by the ability to
learn as much or more about the
product than the associate.
And then increasingly, the ability to connect with other
shoppers who've had the same experience in that retail
store, shoppers were becoming very, very powerful.
In fact, they were dictating the terms of the engagement.
And their ability to connect directly to the manufacturer,
to connect with each other, and to come in and to set the
terms under which they want to engage with their store, it
harkens to a whole new era of how consumers become shoppers.
Now shoppers become buyers.
So ZMOT, Jim Lecinski's idea, this Zero Moment of Truth,
Shopper Sciences, an entire data driven company completely
dedicated to understanding shopper behavior--
not consumer behavior, not buyer behavior,
but people in progress--
applied this discipline to it and let's look at the data of
what's really going on.
Now, Shopper Sciences, we worked across every potential
industry you can imagine.
Pharmacy, medical, retail banking, restaurant, QSR,
online dating, automotive.
All of these different industries.
And we're always fanatical.
We're trying to understand what's it actually the
influence marker that allowed a shopper to go from unknown,
undecided, unconvinced into confident and ready to hand
someone cash or a credit card.
And we go out and we ask a series of questions to try and
understand what's really going on because across large, large
audiences, thousands of shoppers were able to reveal
some pretty interesting results.
Statistically significant results that show where
influence is coming from in a purchase journey and what's
noise in the system.
And we feel that this study in March-- it's brand new.
There were 5,000 shoppers.
Shoppers engage with us in an interactive experience to help
reveal to them what was influential in their path from
undecided to decided.
For every category, whether it was automotive or retail
banking or it was a traditional CPG or health and
beauty products-- for all the categories that we studied,
every shopper went through the same assignment.
When did you start purchasing?
Where did you go for advice or information?
Was it influential?
And why?
Why was it influential?
And by asking a standardized set of questions-- and there's
others too-- but a standardized set of questions
across multiple industries, we're able to look at the
world the way shoppers do because that shopper begins
their day with a journey that may include a grocery store,
it may include a Best Buy, it may include a pharmacy, and it
may include an order of a mobile phone or an investment
in a new financial product through their bank.
Shoppers moved through their environment making purchasing
decisions within the realm of their available
spend in their wallet.
And so we need to be able to look at different industries
in conjunction with each other to see the way that shoppers
see the world.
And if we do this, we're going to reveal the effects of
emerging media like search, and digital, and display, and
mobile, and social media, and more overt ways.
But we're going to reveal them in the way that they affect
shopping, purchasing, buying.
So this is a timeline.
And the average purchase cycle across any
industry can vary radically.
For choosing a fast food restaurant for lunch, your
purchase cycle may be measured in hours.
From the moment you're hungry, need generation, to the moment
that you choose the restaurant and order your food--
that's the completion of it-- that may be
a very short cycle.
Automotive may be measured in months.
We go into these timelines and we're looking for the
intersection between early purchase behavior, middle of
the road purchase behavior, and tail-end purchase behavior
because it often reveals very different
needs on the shopper.
Across all the studies that we did, all the industries they
did, whether they were short cycles like [INAUDIBLE]
long cycles like pharmacy, or mid cycles like consumer
electronics, one common thing emerged in the study, and that
is shoppers today are using significantly more sources,
almost double the number of sources that they used even
this time last year, in every purchase that they make.
Let me say it differently.
Shopper Sciences doesn't go in looking with a presumption
about what an influencer is.
We let the shoppers reveal it.
An influencer could be the packaging, it could be the
shelf wobbler or a sales tag.
It could be a sales associate.
It could be their kid whining at them in the cart.
It could have been the radio DJ in the
morning on the way in.
It could have been an ad that they saw over the weekend.
It could be friends and family advice.
Shoppers will identify what are influencers.
We call then media nodes, but they're not media in the
traditional sense because shoppers don't make
distinctions between traditional advertising on TV
and radio and digital in search and in-store, it's all
one seamless continuum of shopping to them.
And influence can often come from unexpected places.
But regardless of which industry you look at, from
toys to pharma to consumer electronics, the number of
sources that shoppers used last year versus this year
have almost doubled.
And their engagement, the amount of time that they're
using with them, their usage has gone up
significantly well.
It's almost doubled as well.
The average usage will vary widely across industry.
So obviously people are using more sources before buying an
automobile--
18.2--
than they do, say, choosing where they're
going to have lunch.
But no matter which of these columns you look at, if you
were to see the same data from last year, they would be about
half as low as they are today.
And what we think it happening is shoppers
are becoming educated.
They're becoming experienced with pre-shopping behavior
helping them to be smarter on a future purchase regardless
of where that purchase takes place.
If I'm using Amazon to help me be smart about the purchase of
a book or a DVD, I can use previous purchaser reviews.
I can compare prices.
Makes me pretty smart.
I feel fairly confident even if I end up buying it in a
traditional bookstore or I buy online, doesn't matter.
I am smarter as a consequence of having had those
experiences and sought out that information.
And if I could have that for a DVD, why can't I have that for
a TV or a financial instrument or where I
choose my next broker?
And in fact, we see shoppers in general applying
Amazon-like expectations to physical bricks and mortar
[INAUDIBLE]
in ways we've never seen before.
We split up where shoppers are going.
We say, OK, across all these industries, where are they
spending their time?
Where do they begin their journey?
Where are they spending their most time during
their shopper journey?
You could see it splits out into three column.
So you see stimulus there, things like TV, and radio, and
newsprint, and the kind of traditional things we used to
call advertising.
And you see first moment of truth, things like packaging,
and in-store brochures, and the sales associate in the
store, and everything that would've been the
first moment of truth.
And then you could see all these blue bars, ZMOT.
And of course, search is the number one answer in the
entire study.
Now, we've seen search coming on strong for some time.
But what's amazing is to see the relative strength of the
blue bars in comparison with the red and the gold.
The new news here is that pre-shopping, shopper reaching
out and connecting with manufacturers' websites, with
retailers' websites, with each other electronically before
making a purchase decision--
and this is regardless of where the transaction takes
place, online or in-store, it does not matter--
that the blue bars have been the significant growth engine
in this whole matrix.
One hypothesis you could have as an ex-retailer, one thing
that could keep you up at night, would be if digital
comes on strong--
not just e-commerce, but the shopper's ability to learn
about your products, know your dealer cost, understand your
policies and formulas, get information from previous
buyers and come in and basically set their own terms
with you, that the role that your store will play will
decline over time.
That in the future, you may not be trusted advisor, you
may only be a distribution source.
And distribution sources tend to have very low margins.
In fact, we're not seeing a whole lot of reduction in
influence of the first moment of truth.
Those gold bars have been holding pretty steady.
We've seen some erosion in the red in a couple of categories,
but not all.
But what we're seeing is a growth.
We'll go for the blue.
Shoppers are becoming increasingly confident using
first moment of truth media.
They're incorporating into their decision and they're
becoming more multi-channel themselves as they become
multi-channel in their purchasing habits.
Search and social media top out the list but also
comparison shopping online, and then the manufacturers'
and retailers' websites are all playing a much more
important role and specifically for shoppers that
begin their journey online and end up in the physical store.
Across all segments [INAUDIBLE] is right there up
at the top.
But first moment of truth, wow, very interesting to think
about the physical retail store.
And given the shopper's expectations--
previous purchaser reviews, more information on the
product, the ability to connect with the manufacturer
directly within the store--
it harkens to a transformation of retail in the future and be
one of the things that we might talk about on a future
study is how shoppers view the future of retail.
Now, they're not using ZMOT at the same levels across all
industries.
Certainly ZMOT-like activity in something like consumer
electronics or technology or actually in the selection of a
political candidate which we do consider to be a shopping
assignment.
There's a product, there's a series of products.
You have to weigh your choices and make a risk versus award
assignment.
When you go into the voting booth, you're pulling a lever.
That's your purchase moment.
So things like ZMOT and voters and consumer electronics and
investment, showing a really, really strong.
But we still see FMOT experiences in the grocery
store, health and beauty, in over-the-counter health as
still holding strong as well.
So there will be variances within the
space, within each industry.
The full version of the study allows us to go in deep.
And if any of the members on the call have questions or
want to look at one of these industries in-depth, Google's
empowered us to share the data widely and there'll be
opportunities for you to see it in-depth.
But so far, I've only shown you just usage, media usage,
so the things they're using in their journey.
It doesn't necessarily mean they're influential.
We also look at what actually influenced their final
purchase, the thing that kicked the shopper over from
no to yes, from undecided to decided.
And you can see here that things like the physical
packaging in the store and the sales associate still show up
in the number one and the number two slots here.
Shoppers are still expecting the retail store to deliver
them practical experience with the products and services
they're going to buy.
And they're still holding strong.
But comparison shopping online, search online, sought
information from a manufacturer website have
jumped way up in our mix to where they are now in the top
five and we have not seen that before.
For products that are shopped online and bought in store,
the ZMOT experience is becoming an expected part of
the shopping cadence for shoppers.
And it is growing faster than any of the other media nodes
that we study.
Online social and mobile.
I talk a little bit about this.
So online social and online showed up as both high usage
and high influence.
Mobile did not.
Mobile did not show up with high usage.
But it's showing up with pretty high influence.
And you can see the percentage growth here in influence from
the 2010 version of this same study to the one
that we did this year.
We think shoppers are just now beginning to discover their
mobile phones and the roles that
they can play in shopping.
It's still exceedingly new with only 50% penetration
coming this fall now in the US.
Shoppers are just now downloading applications.
They're experiencing what it's like to do a search in-store.
It's not become a common appliance as part of their
normal shopping process.
But for those who are using it, it's showing up with the
same level of influence as other traditional advertising
like TV and direct mail.
And that's really, really fascinating.
We have not seen that before.
One of the things that's important as a marketer is to
understand the intersection between time, so where are
they using this medium.
How influential it is.
And why.
What's the content that drives it.
And I just pulled a random one from the study.
This is automotive.
And for Jim's benefit, for the Google folks, I pulled search
online just to show you what this looks like.
So there's a timeline running across the bottom.
There's influence running up higher.
So the higher the color blobs, the higher the influence.
The bigger the blob, the more people.
And what you see here is that buying a car online about a
month in advance, ranging from a period of three months to
just a few weeks beforehand, there's a high degree of
search activity as shoppers try to use search to learn
more about the automotive process.
I'll show you in a second how we can compare these heat maps
with other industries and other media strategy so that
you can get a quick glimpse of what's really going on in
behavior change.
This is an example of a really high influence node.
And up at the top, you'll see a number, 86% repeat usage.
We often think of shoppers in the purchase funnel using
media discreetly.
Like I used the print ad and then I used the TV and then I
did a search and then I win a coupon and into the store as
if each one was an independent and discreet trial.
It's not what we see.
We see shoppers go back to the same medium over and over and
over again.
Search is the highest repeat usage of
anything that we study.
They're incorporating search in these ZMOT experiences, not
just search, but also manufacturer and the
retailer's website, comparison shopping sites.
They're incorporating them at multiple [INAUDIBLE].
It's not just awareness, it's not just trial.
It's everything that they go through the journey.
And how they're using it, these color bars on the right.
This is the automotive example again.
They're looking for everything from pricing information to
style and looks and financing.
It's interesting that ZMOT is not just a where is the lowest
price experience more so than many of the other stimulus or
the in-store experiences.
ZMOT tends to be multi-threaded.
Shoppers have high expectations for lots of kinds
of learning from these experiences.
It's not mono-dimensional.
Interesting if you take these heat maps and you compare them
across all different kinds of experiences.
And again, I used the automotive example here.
You can see over time, the experience in the dealership
lot versus search versus the manufacturer's website.
As marketers today, we need to think like the shopper does.
That seamless continuum of whatever influences shoppers
operating in cadence with each other, what role they're
playing, what the influence levels are how they compare.
It allows is to not just do media planning, but it also
allows us to think like the shopper in terms of their
content needs because that looked at the dealership lot
content bars, those colored bars on the top left, might be
radically different for what they were seeking from the
dealership website or the TV ad.
Thought it'd be interesting for you to see how just one of
these-- so I chose search online looks across multiple
industries.
And not all industries are as advanced in every media node.
Search, for example, plays a much higher role in things
like travel and banking decisions and insurance than
it does in, say, where I'm going to go to lunch today.
But what is fascinating to see that across multiple
industries, shoppers are embracing ZMOT at
significantly higher levels than they were
even just a year ago.
Now, there's this moment, there's this really precious
thing that happens when a customer says yes.
There's a very short period of time where having just made a
purchase decision, had the confidence to say yes and hand
someone cash, behavior extends out of that.
And in some industries, shoppers become quite
extroverted.
They want to tell their friends and family about it.
And across all of the study, we are seeing a large
percentage of shoppers who are harnessing new technology to
make telling their friends and family about what they just
bought, talk about their purchase experience more wide
ranging and more powerful.
We see blogs up about double from last year.
We see Facebook posting up.
And then we see all the social media things growing as well.
Shoppers are using social media not just in their
purchase journey leading up to it, but as a way to explain
and get validation from their friends and family about the
purchase that they just made.
I think that brings my formal section to an end.
So I'm going to turn it back over to Jim to bring us home.
JIM LECINSKI: Thanks John.
Some terrific data there.
Hopefully you all saw the power of the zero moment, how
it's reshaping how consumers make their purchase decisions.
And how for us as marketers, it needs to reshape how we
think about marketing and our marketing plans.
So I want to, at this point, share with you seven tips as
to how you can implement ZMOT in your organization with your
brands in your business, how to win at the zero moment.
So let's start with the first one on the next slide, which
is put someone in charge.
If I were to ask you guys, who in your organization is in
charge of winning the first moment of truth?
You might say, oh, we have a VP of shopper marketing.
We have somebody in charge of the retail
experiences or our stores.
We clearly know that.
If I were to ask you, who is in charge of stimulus?
You might say, that's my VP of national advertising, work
with an agency, et cetera.
But if I were to ask you who is in charge of really
understanding and winning the zero moment of truth, would
you have a specific answer?
When Lee Iacocca took over in the '80s at the Chrysler
Corporation, he called all his top lieutenants in and
Chrysler of course had a very poor quality
reputation at the time.
And he looked around the table and he said, which one of you
is in charge of quality?
And they looked at each other and they said, well, we all
sort of are.
Quality is everyone's job.
We all keep an eye on it.
And that was one of the first changes he made was to put
someone in charge of quality and that started the rebirth
and turnaround of Chrysler in those days.
And so that same story applies here.
If you were to look at your staff--
good looking staff like the Muppets here--
and say, which one of you guys is in charge of zero moment?
Can you point to someone?
Do you have a ZMOT evangelist or someone
in charge of winning?
So that's the first tip.
On the next slide, the second tip that we have is to really
understand what are the zero moments in your category.
Start by finding your zero moments.
And a good way to do this is to use the auto complete
feature on Google search.
So you can type in your brand and stop and see what Google
fills in in the rest of that search box for you.
Put in your brand and the word review, or your brand and the
word rating, or best and your category.
Best kid's bike, best cough medicine, best home
improvement store.
And another good tip is to put in your brand name and the
letters V-S period.
So L.L.Bean canvas tote versus--
and stop typing.
And see what Google completes for you.
Now, those are not editors or hand selected
completions by Google.
That's what the world is typing and searching for.
So you can get a good sense for what are those decision
points, those comparisons, and those zero moments just by
typing those in.
And so that brings us to the third tip on the next slide,
which is once you have someone in charge and once you know
what your zero moments are, you can then make sure that
you are there to answer the very specific questions that
people are asking.
So for example, if you have-- to John's point, people might
not always be at the zero moment looking for a deal.
They might be looking for reassurance, or ratings, or
specs, or quality, or whatnot.
Make sure that what you answer--
in this illustration, we use Google search as an answer,
but it could be in Facebook or Yahoo or Bing or wherever.
Make sure that what you're answering back answers it.
If they did not ask a price, coupon, cents off, savings
question, you don't necessarily need to offer them
a dollar off.
You can answer the specific question they're asking at the
zero moment.
Like in my Max Weinberg story, I wasn't looking for a deal.
I was plenty happy to pay the $20 cover charge.
I just wanted to know whether or not the concert was good
and he was playing the type of music I like.
Answer the question.
And if you don't answer the question, then it will be
somebody else who's out there answering it on your behalf to
your prospects.
So for example, in my Max Weinberg story, there was no
official answer from the Hiro Ballroom.
I relied on homemade videos, user-generated
videos by other consumers.
So these kinds of decisions and interactions are happening
millions of times a day as John showed you with or
without you.
And a good way to know what the volume is and what some of
these are is to use the keyword tool in AdWords.
That's a tool that's free to Google users where you can
just sort of look at what is the rough estimation of the
number of volume for these kinds of queries.
Best kid's bike.
Is that typed in by one person, 1,000, 100,000, or 1
million people?
And we can talk more about that in
the Q&A. OK, next.
The fourth tip that we have is to remember, as John said,
while mobile might not yet be as prevalent, it is highly
influential and rapidly growing.
So make sure you recognize that some zero moments are
going to happen on the mobile device.
Are you optimized and ready to do that?
In a study we did that we talk about in the book, only 21% of
top advertisers actually have a mobile optimized website.
So if your prospect is sitting on a couch and sees your TV
commercial and types in is Brand X any good into the
mobile phone, what do they get?
Are you there to answer them on mobile at the zero moment?
All the way through the fact they might show up in the
store and scan a barcode with the mobile phone looking for a
review of your product while they're at the
retail store shelf.
So optimize for mobile.
And then that obviously needs to continue into desktop
search as well.
Make sure that you take advantage of all of the
different social tools that are out there.
For example, at Google, we recently introduced Google+ or
+1 which now allows a social functionality.
So if I typed in what is the best hotel to say in in Madrid
and I see my friend, Brian Walker, in this example,
stayed there, that's very powerful and motivating to me
because I know Brian and I trust his recommendations.
Again, the same happens in lots of other social networks
and social spaces, Facebook, et cetera.
So make sure you're there to optimize.
The fifth tip is to be fast. ZMOT happens in time that you
didn't always plan.
ZMOTs happen all day long, all month long, all quarter long,
not just according to your annual media planning cadence.
So here's an example where on his show one night, Colbert
decided to poke a little fun at a new Miracle Whip campaign
that Kraft had recently put out.
And he sort of did a jab back from mayonnaise,
mayo's point of view.
And so that was obviously not something Kraft knew about,
but it was a stimulus.
And they recognized that that stimulus, Colbert poking fun
at their new ad campaign, would
drive zero moment behavior.
People looking for the video on YouTube the next day of
Colbert, people emailing each other about it, talking about
it on Facebook, and searching for it.
And so Kraft, literally from the time it went on air until
the next morning, put up a zero moment campaign to say,
hey Colbert, you can't handle the zippy
taste of Miracle Whip.
And so they were ready to receive that zero moment
traffic, if you will.
So again, this sometimes happens in real-time.
And the point is that you often
don't control the stimulus.
It might be press.
It might be a Colbert.
It might be good news, it might be bad.
But you need to be ready for things that aren't in your
annual marketing plan.
Sixth tip is, as we mentioned here and started with our Max
Weinberg story, don't forget the power of video.
Often what people will want is they want to see
your product in use.
They will want to hear someone else talking about it.
And so, for example in this case, it's a
B2B example, right?
Commercial jet engines.
Beth Comstock is in the book talking.
She's the CMO at GE talking quite a bit about how this is
not just a B2C phenomena, that commercial buyers do things
like this too.
They type in business process outsourcing into YouTube and
see what videos come up of other businesses talking about
who they use and how they solve their B2B challenges.
So don't forget about video, B2B or B2C.
And then our seventh tip of course is to jump in.
Your consumer is already there.
I know often, John and I talk with marketers who are
concerned that they're a bit behind the technology curve.
Don't worry about the technology curve.
Worry about the consumer curve.
Don't ask are you behind the technology.
Ask are you behind your consumer.
And capitalizing on ZMOT, making sure you have a plan to
win it is a great way to jump in and get started because as
we talked about today and as John's data showed you, your
consumer is already there.
So we'll leave you, before we take some questions, with the
key thought on the last slide, which is ask yourself, ask the
rest of your organization, especially those of you doing
2012 marketing planning right now, what are your plans to
win the zero moment of truth because as this data shows,
those marketers who understand the zero moment intimately and
have plans to win it can definitely achieve a
competitive advantage versus those who don't.
So with that, Mike, back to you.
MIKE: Jim thanks.
That's great.
And John, thank you as well.
A wonderful job today guys.
Really good presentation.
Thank you for leaving plenty of time for questions.
So we'll get into those right away.
But real quick, just want to remind everyone to feel free
to continue [INAUDIBLE]
via the Q&A pod on your screen.
And also a final reminder that the slide deck and the
recording of the event will be available and sent to you in a
follow-up email-- post those materials
online for you to view.
So with that, let's go jump right into questions.
This is for either one of you or both.
A couple questions coming in about mobile.
And you kind of-- folks are wondering about future
projections and the idea when you expect this to spike and
is it a 2012 thing?
Is that coming down the pike soon?
JOHN ROSS: How about if I start on that one?
So you have to look at mobile by industry.
So when you go into the ZMOT data and look at, say,
restaurant, fast food, and then especially in
full-service dining, mobile shows up as one of the top
four or five media nodes already in terms of usage.
Not so developed in other categories like consumer
packaged goods.
And we think this is a function of the development of
the applications themselves, an applet helps you find a
location to eat dinner or to look at reviews of a
restaurant.
It's a lot simpler application than something that helps you
shop 40,000 SKUs in a local grocery store.
We also think it's just a function of experience.
So while the usage varies widely across all different
industries, they all share one thing in common is that
they're growing at significant double digit
growth in terms of usage.
And for those who are using them, small numbers or large,
it's amongst the most influential of any media
source out there, including many traditional ones.
JIM LECINSKI: Yeah, I would echo John's comments and maybe
just add two data points from what we see here at Google.
One is keep in mind that we are lighting up several
hundred thousand new Android smartphones a day in the US.
Several hundred thousand a day.
So what John showed you in the data from the middle part of
this year is only going to grow at that rapid adoption,
that rapid pace, more and more of these devices get into your
target audience's hands.
And then the second is that from the search data that we
see, though again, vary category to category as John
mentioned, but a general rule of thumb is something like an
incremental 15% more searches beyond your desktop base level
of searches are now additionally happening in
mobile every day.
So that's an extra 15% happening in mobile.
And that in most all product categories is a, as we say,
nontrivial number.
That's a big number of mobile searches happening.
So thus our point, like are you ready to receive that
traffic, answer their questions, and win at the
mobile zero moment of truth.
JOHN ROSS: Those heat maps that show those brightly
colored heat maps, it's fascinating, if you look at
them on a tracking basis rather than just a slice of
time, they actually move and animate like a weather map.
And you can watch that mobile one brewing like the
hurricanes that grazed the northeast United States.
And I use that as a parallel because it really is moving
faster than anything that we've seen so far across the
movement up or down in any medium.
MIKE: I just follow up on mobile with another question.
And it's related to what shoppers really want the most
out of mobile.
And are they looking for utility primarily, things that
are going to help them with their shopping trips, that
kind of thing as an example?
Or are we talking like Foursquare and badges and
rewards and recognition?
What do you think is most important for shoppers?
JOHN ROSS: Want me to start, Jim?
JIM LECINSKI: Yeah, go ahead, John.
JOHN ROSS: So within traditional retail, we're
seeing a significant amount of price comparison, price
validation, and social media purchase validation.
We also see just a lot of general location navigation,
who sells it, where is it activity going on.
So it's pretty basic stuff.
It's where is it?
Who's got the lowest price?
Are there any discounts that I should be entitled to as a
consequence of my purchase?
And what did other people who bought it say about it?
A lot of the social media things, the ability to post
reviews, the ability to interact with additional
content at the shelf, and some of those things you would
think would be a lot more higher usage are lagging.
But then again, the smartphone penetration themselves and
shopper's experience with these utilities is starting at
the basics. where is it?
How can I find it?
How can I get a great deal?
And is it a great item?
MIKE: OK, question about Speed And you talked about how
important it is to be fast, Jim.
Now, how do you balance speed versus precision?
And aren't their risks in a corporation deciding that
we're going to react to the ZMOT immediately?
JIM LECINSKI: Yeah, no doubt.
And certainly in regulated categories, pharmaceuticals,
banking and investments, insurance, obviously a lot of
those categories have some strict idiosyncratic social
media guidelines that obviously must be followed.
So when we say fast, we clearly do not mean skirting
or taking any shortcuts on what needs to be done.
We also, by the way, don't mean doing anything other than
being wholly transparent, paying bloggers to pose as
someone else, et cetera.
That's not what we're talking about here.
But there's great examples from everybody from Comcast to
Southwest Airlines and JetBlue, Kodak, others, who
are able to on a near-real-time basis engage
their consumers in a real-time dialogue, answering those
questions that they have at the zero moment of truth.
And so again, the only way that you can sort of be fast
is if it's someone's job to figure out what the zero
moment is and how to own or at least win it in your category.
MIKE: Another question.
You mentioned insurance in your-- question we get a lot
is for a low involvement category, so to speak, for
like insurance, how do you get into the ratings and reviews
and really take advantage-- folks are not necessarily
researching an insurance company like they would--
JIM LECINSKI: Well, yeah.
I'll start, John, and you can chime in on this one.
But I mean that that's kind of the point of the book here,
right, is that this is not just for cars and TVs and
Hawaiian vacations.
It's that consumers in all categories have now taken the
behavior that they learn, yes with cars and TVs and Hawaiian
vacations five years ago on the web-- they've now taken
that and transferred or translated that behavior to
every product category including some that might be
generally referred to as lower emotional involvement.
Though of course, as a buyer, we all know that when you're
in that purchase cycle, those things do matter.
If you go to an interesting site called viewpoints.com--
it's not a Google property by any means.
It's an independent site based here Chicago--
you will see, for example--
I don't know what they're up to--
something like 5,000 reviews for Bounce dryer sheets which,
last I checked in my store, was about a $3.99 product.
So consumers now learn that behavior.
They expect content and ratings reviews in all
categories.
And especially with the onset of the recession, they're
using ratings and reviews as a way to better manage their
constrained household budgets.
I have less money.
I want to better manage the money that I have. So a great
way to do that is to make sure I make the right
choice every time.
And the best way to do that is ratings and reviews.
So John, you can maybe talk to a couple of category
differences on that behavior, but we see it in all
categories including insurance.
JOHN ROSS: Yeah, in fact, the insurance does not show up as
a low ZMOT engagement in this.
It was up there ahead of some traditional
retail kind of products.
I think what Jim says is exactly right.
Now, finding a rating review for Charmin or for Bounce
tissue or the new LG plasma TV, that may actually be
easier than finding a location that will do reviews on
service-based businesses.
And the shoppers are suffering as a consequence.
In the absence of a place for them to congregate and share
their experiences and what they've learned in the process
with service-based businesses, they're generating those
experiences on their own, and those are wild and wooly
spaces in which one dissatisfied consumer's voice
can have a lot more import than one dissatisfied
consumer's voice would have on say, the ratings
and reviews on Amazon.
Fascinating though, shoppers are going to the
manufacturer websites.
And we look at it and say this.
Wow, if you could facilitate the conversation between your
best customers, to you can create an environment for
their sharing their experiences and talk to each
other and develop a mechanism for listening when shoppers
have a problem and responding appropriately, yes, they have
a huge opportunity to create the locus of a lot of the
conversation that's probably pent up demand.
JIM LECINSKI: I think not in the insurance space, John, but
a good example of that is the Craftsman tool website,
craftsman.com.
Hundreds of thousands of hand tools, ratings and reviews on
most all of them, discussions between sort of light users
versus expert, professional tradesmen using those tools.
And like you said, that becomes the locus of dialogue
for what's the best hand tool that I need for the job.
MIKE: Jim, maybe this question for you.
And John, feel free to jump in as well.
What about innovation?
You talked about how fast you can react in this environment.
Can you use Zero Moment of Truth to innovate and discover
new products, new services?
JIM LECINSKI: Certainly can.
You can use the feedback that you're seeing and monitoring
and hearing in that zero moment to both market or
position your current products more optimally as well as to
create new products.
So probably famous example of this is the Dell IdeaStorm
where in that zero moment between when people saw Dell
advertising but before they actually bought the laptops,
there were a lot of questions about--
do Dells come with lighted keypads?
I work in a dimly lit office.
I work on the airplane when they turn the lights out on
the evening flights.
I'd like a lighted keypad.
Does it exist?
And as a result of Dell monitoring those things that
were consumer to consumer conversations and dialogues,
after the ads were out there for Dell laptops, everybody
certainly knows where to buy a Dell laptop.
But in between monitoring that dialogue led them to launch a
product line with lighted keys.
MIKE: OK.
Great example.
Appreciate that.
And one question here about resources, internal resources.
Anything, either of you guys, about time and budget for ZMOT
versus FMOT?
Any figures, percentages you can share?
JOHN ROSS: If you set budgets aside in terms of internal
resources, I think it's more of a philosophy shift.
Only the advertising industry segments human behavior into
these discreet steps like this.
So we talk about TV advertising and print and
digital and social and in-store and the associate.
We just talk about those as discreet kind of channels.
And we often put discreet advertising research
techniques against them.
And yet the shopper doesn't.
Human behavior isn't that way.
They are moving seamlessly between those experiences
because it's all shopping to them.
It's all [INAUDIBLE].
What's happening, however, the new connectivity that ZMOT
presents is making that shopper more powerful and
smarter as a consequence.
And that puts the onus of responsibility back on us as
marketers in our own organizations.
I would say it's not necessarily incremental
resources but it's a blending of responsibility.
As Jim said, who's responsible for ZMOT?
Or I might say differently, who's responsible for shopper
satisfaction?
And if the manufacturer's pointing the finger and saying
it's the retailer downstream, they're missing the point.
Shopping's taking place over this entire conduit.
And the shopper marketing people are responsible for
digital just like the digital and the branding guys are
responsible for in-store.
It's a blending of responsibilities in a way
that's got to make us all smarter or the shopper will
disintermediate us.
MIKE: OK.
And a quick question about the study and the data.
Have you or are you able to break out into categories such
as ethnicity?
JOHN ROSS: Great question.
Yes.
In fact, the ethnic data is quite fascinating.
Let me just say it this way.
First off, from different demographic splits.
Walk into ZMOT and check any preconceptions you might have
at the door.
If you think this is all just say early adopters or high
income general market shoppers, no.
That's not what we saw all.
In fact, younger people are embracing ZMOT kind of
technology more.
But it's not like this the spread between older and
younger generation is something huge in which you
look at it and say this is an age wave issue.
And the same thing on ethnic.
And in fact, any score that you saw in the study that you
just looked at, if we were to do a repass on that for Asian
American, African American, or Hispanics, with almost no
exceptions, the ZMOT scores would be stronger
than general market.
And then on income as well, yes, higher income folks tend
to have more access to digital technology.
But in the current economy, the people who are more
hard-pressed to make their budget dollars work, they're
having to be smarter and smarter and smarter shoppers.
And they're seeking out that ZMOT at rates that you
wouldn't expect necessarily based on traditional
demographics.
MIKE: OK, great.
That's about all the time we have questions today.
So I just want to give you guys a chance to
say any final words.
Jim, you want to go first and then John?
JIM LECINSKI: Just thanks, everyone, for participating.
Hopefully you found this information useful, helpful,
and relevant.
And the full ebook is available at
zeromomentoftruth.com as well as iTunes and Amazon and
Barnes & Noble digital bookstores free.
MIKE: John, any final words?
JOHN ROSS: No, I'm proud to represent the data.
And anyone who's got additional questions or wants
to know more information about any of the individual
categories, they're certainly welcome to raise their hand
and we'll walk you through.
It's our job to help make the data--
to make Google's data easy and easy to
understand and to access.
MIKE: All right.
Well, we really appreciate it.
Again, everyone, we'll be sending out follow-up
materials and we'll include a link to the book.
It's a great read.
I'm about halfway through it myself.
So definitely check that out.
And also, quick reminder to join us next week for ANA
Webinar Wednesdays, Living with the Internet: New
Research on Shifting Behavior with Microsoft Advertising And
that'll be again at 1 o'clock Eastern, 10:00 AM Pacific.
And as always, you can see the full schedule and register at
ana.net/webinar.
That concludes our programming for today.
Thanks again for coming, everyone.
Thanks, John and Jim, for taking time with us today.
Look forward to seeing everyone at the next Webinar
Wednesday broadcast.