THE FOCUSED MIND » Advertising

Process Over Products

Inferential Focus — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 21:39:36 +0000

As we have been discussing, consumers now trust their shopping “process”, which includes things such as comparison shopping, blog reviews and friend queries more than they trust any specific product or brand.

Yabbly is a new community-based question and answer Website and app which allows consumers to receive feedback on potential purchases from others who have recently been in the same situation. A consumer can ask a question from the general community and Yabbly will then match the questioner with others who have recently made similar decisions.

This Website has the potential to be another tool in the quickly expanding consumer-shopping toolbox and as a result, brands will have to work even harder to get their message across.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3002609/buy-or-not-buy-yabbly-ask-someone-whos-been-there-bought

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Data Is Valuable, But Don’t Expect Anything For It.

Inferential Focus — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:45:41 +0000

Personal, a website that launched last November, encourages members to upload information (ranging from the trivial to the sensitive, including items such as student loan records, medical prescriptions and retirement accounts) into a “vault” and then grant access to other people or companies as they choose. Later this year, Personal plans to add a marketplace where people will be able to sell access to their information. An organization call the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium formed in 2010 to encourage similar efforts and now has 30 members.

We’ve written in the past that individuals are willing to give up their information, or at least look past privacy concerns, if they were getting something in return, and companies such as Personal would appear to be well positioned to take advantage of that perspective.

However, as we have discussed recently in a context we call the Data Arms Race, companies are now swimming in information, and many have successfully gained valuable consumer data without paying anything to the consumer.

Additionally, as cyber-criminals well know, something as seemingly valuable as a credit-card number now sells for only a few cents on the black market because so many have been stolen that the market for them has collapsed. That is, information is easy to get.

It would appear to us that while companies value data more than ever, they likely won’t pay the consumer much for it.

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The Next Tobacco?

Inferential Focus — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:25:04 +0000

Two thousand former professional football players recently consolidated their 80 separate lawsuits into one mega action against the NFL, charging the league knew of the effects of concussions in the game, kept the information private and did nothing to protect players.

Some outside observers are suggesting an analogy between this suit and early suits against the tobacco industry, suits that also claimed the industry knew of damage their products caused but chose to do nothing. Last year, Sunday Night Football outperformed American Idol to become the country’s most watched television show of the year. If this lawsuit brings results, what will advertisers and even the networks do to avoid being seen as contributors to the damage? General Motors has already pulled out of the Super Bowl because the cost was too high. What kind of impact could this lawsuit have?

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