She calls it an “educational GPS” and a CRM for LeapFrog.

The service, which is planned to launch this summer, focuses on 8-13 year olds.

Learning Path automatically collects data from devices and produces reports that get emailed to the parents. It allows the parent to see first hand what the kid has been doing, how engaged they are, where they are on the Learning Path and what LeapFrog product should be next.

LeapFrog is increasing its investment into the LeapFrog website. They now have an educational content advisory board and are working on building community aspects into the site. They are also working on how to mobilize the millions of moms out there who love LeapFrog. They want to increase the strength of connection between the moms and their children by giving them information about how the child’s learning is progressing.

Nancy was asked about what LeapFrog is doing about the kids graduating from LeapFrog to Nintendo and she described their new Didj product as their competitive offering. (Editors note: Seems like Nintendo and LeapFrog should merge. It would be a good fit.)

Nancy was asked about multi-player games and she said that they have a secret product called Maestro that will be a multi-player product for kids and will launch next year.

[tags]LeapFrog, Learning Path, Forrester[/tags]

In part 3 of Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement we take on the issue of how to design for engagement. Two presenters at the conference provided us with a couple of frameworks for how to design for engagement.

In the first session, Aaron Oppenheimer, from Continuum, introduced the concept of “resonance testing”. They figured out that clients were too often measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. Aaron argues that the product that tells the story best wins. He says that what he calls resonance design defers the design decisions until we know what works. In a word, wait. Wait until you know what’s going to work.

He suggests the following process:

Find the story

• Figure out what the consumer needs to hear to make a connection

Try the story

• Model the system in different ways because the context is a large part of the emotional design

Test the story

• Find out what works

Tell the story

• Build the product

Aaron provided an example of resonance testing that was used for designing and marketing garbage disposer units. The question is why should someone spend more on the most expensive versus the cheapest one? Horsepower means nothing to consumers and warranties don’t work as customers think all the units will last for ever.

They identified two needs segments:

• quick, unobtrusive clean up;
• eats everything

They then gave potential customers pictures of designs and let them place the designs along a spectrum, where the spectrum was defined by cartoon images of people and the use case. The potential customers then placed the pictures closest to where they thought the product fit relative to the following statements: does a good job for the person who wants quick clean up, does better for the person that wants it to eat everything, does both.

They then identify what about the design signals meaning to customers? Specific attributes were identified and linked to what they mean. Size, texture, look etc all have meaning that can be used to tell different stories.

Once they understood the language of garbage disposal design attributes, they could then design products that would convey the story in the retail environment.

The same principles can be applied to just about any design process. Setting clear objectives up front, finding stories that work to convey those messages, testing the story before designing, finding the specific design elements that convey the story and then translating that into final design is a process we all can learn from.

In the second session, Ron Rogowski, a principal analyst at Forrester, spoke about how to create engaging online experiences. His focus was on how to make your site more engaging. He tells the story of his wife getting an ultrasound, they found a cyst, called a CCAM (congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation), in the babies lung during the ultrasound. The doctors gave them some information, but he quickly went to Google and searched for the term and found a special treatment center at UCSF.

The treatment center has a website with videos of doctors talking about the disease and the treatment procedures. Ron played one of the videos where the doctors speaking about fetal intervention. He says he got more out of 8 minutes on the site than he had from hours of research elsewhere.

Ron found the videos to be very engaging. The site had the three key elements of engagement built. The videos were useful, usable and desirable.

The online engagement imperative is based upon the expanded ability to do new things with your customers and differentiate from others.

Engagement is hard to define and measure. It can be very subjective. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was engaging about an experience. The means of engagement depend on the company and the audience.

With an engaging design, the focus is on what’s there, not on how to make sense of what’s there. There is an incentive to explore and there is a visual and operational appeal.

Functional elements of the site can be combined with branding efforts to create engaging experiences. Ron points to engaging examples that include Mini USA’s car configuration tool, Google Maps, Zillow.com. He points to Blue Nile’s build your own ring application which mimics what customers were doing with data to select rings as an engaging site. Nike is another site that’s engaging. The site allows you to set individual goals and make challenges to others.

Ron highlights Panasonic’s site that allows you check out how a TV will look in your own room by uploading pictures of your living room and then dragging a picture of different TVs onto the picture.

Discovery Channel’s EarthLive is another site with an engaging experience. They use a movable globe as a navigation tool for users to find content.

Humana One’s Plan Pointer application to help guide people to health plans based upon only questions. The application is useful, easy to use and provides a rich UI for the user.

The New York Times pop-art quiz as creating engaging experiences around their stories.

NetShop’s built an application Shop Together. It allows two people to shop together. One person can see what the other person is looking at. They can look at the same page and chat about the page.

Jeep has lots of content about off road driving and a Jeep community.

History.com has an interactive universe application that explains the planets.

How to create and measure these engaging experiences?

Ron’s framework of useful, usable and desirable is the guide for making engaging experiences.

Tools of engagement

• Useful: Design personas to uncover latent user needs through ethnographic research.
• Usable: Embrace a user centered design process that follows known usability practices and test for flaws.
• Desirable: Brand personas to allow your brand to shine through.

Ron’s Recommendations

• Uncover latent needs through ethnographic research
• Define interaction paradigms consistent with brand
• Engage agencies early in the process
• Conduct user and brand reviews before (and after) going live

Links to the rest of this series:

• Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 1
• Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 2

See more about the Forrester Marketing event at Digital Podcast and at Jeremiah Owyang’s blog.

[tags]design, engagement, marketing, Forrester[/tags]

Realizing Your Return on Empathy (ROE)

Steve Kerho, VP Analytics, Organic
Mark Kingdon, CEO, Organic
Creating effective online (and offline) marketing solutions starts with a deep, emotional understanding of your customer segments and their needs – in other words, “empathy” for your customer “personas”. This empathy serves as a critical guide in designing online and other touchpoints, and the personas also support breaking down how you measure and respond to online performance.

Mark led off the sessions with the observation that as marketers, we have a lot of data about customers, but we need to get beyond the data to “touch” our customers.

He then solicited audience feedback on the importance of understanding customers in marketing through a uniquely engaging technique. When we sat down in the conference room, a pad and a branded pen were keeping each of our seats warm. The pens were laser pointers, and Mark gave us a brief tutorial on turning them on and aiming them without blinding our neighbors.

Mark walked us through a series of slides filled with questions and multiple choice “answer” targets; the volume of laser points bouncing around each target quickly illuminated audience response. The survey responses told us that collectively, we thought it important to find an edge in our marketing and to develop and understand customer personas to refine marketing approaches, but that we had a way to go in implementing these techniques.

Organic believes that getting to personas is so fundamental to their work that each year they send staff down to Vegas for “persona work”. The group breaks down into seven teams that are each assigned one of seven sins. Each team is tasked with observing people indulging in their target sin, and then developing a campaign for that persona. The exercise is all about getting to empathy, getting everyone on the same song sheet around what’s driving the consumer, their behavior and their needs.

Organic sees four steps in order to take advantage of empathy:

(1) Know your consumers well enough to develop detailed personas,
(2) Design web experiences around those personas,
(3) Tailor all media and touchpoints to these personas, and
(4) Know and optimize against “Return on Empathy”.

To get to step 4, marketing needs to secure management commitment to overcoming the challenges of siloed organizations, to develop a process for optimizing efforts, and to connect campaign objectives to metrics.

Why go through all this effort? Because empathy pays off, as Steve demonstrated with three case studies:

Jeep Patriot. The business objectives were to create familiarity and purchase intent for this all new vehicle in a crowded segment, targeting younger, internet saavy buyers. The solution was a very interactive online experience, where they shot 40 or so minute-long video segments for about the cost of a traditional 30 second spot. These segments comprise an interactive film, which viewers could enter and then steer their experience and outcome. Consumers were introduced to the story starting with a TV broadcast spot, then rich online ads, targeted emails, and theatrical trailers. In total their was about an hour of content, and the vehicle and its features appear in every scene. Their campaign had great results – Jeep more than doubled its target for unique visitors, with 80% of them new to the Jeep brand, enjoying an average viewing time of 5 minutes with 40% of visitors staying for over 10 minutes.

Bank of America’s No Fee Mortgage Plus product. The business objectives were to create familiarity, awareness and sell-through. They identified one persona familiar with the mortgage process, and another unfamiliar with it, and customized the site experience accordingly after three very simple multiple choice pre-qualifying questions.

Coach. The business objective was to increase the sales of bags online. The empathy process highlighted a key “persona” issue around women’s discomfort buying bags unless they are sure that they fit. The solution was to create an online bag “sizer” that drove a substantial increase in sales and reduction in returns.

After the case studies, Steve walked us through an example of metrics supporting “ROE” on site design. The example showed how the measures were built up, and demonstrated the differential impact on return against identified personas versus non-personas.

The session was running late so there wasn’t much time to discuss the ROI calculations, below.  Deeper reflection reveals a number of interesting questions, for example, why calculate ROI based on revenue rather than contribution margin, why only amortize the redesign over one quarter, and whether the redesign impacted other drivers of value such as new customer acquisition and retention rates.  You might choose a different set of assumptions for your business, but in any case, the persona-level analysis of differential site performance provides an important basis for objectively evaluating ROI.

The bottom line: executed well, empathy pays.

Q&A Discussion

You mentioned that the Jeep example exceeded traffic goals, but how does one go about establishing those goals? You end up in the forecasting business, and need to use historical performance offline and online as the baseline that you are trying to meet or exceed, for example CPM through traditional media (even though may be lower engagement, more eyeballs) You can also look at search traffic and value as another baseline for the value of the consumers you bring in.

How difficult is it to sell-in the work of building personas to clients? Actually, doing so in increasingly easy, and we have had some clients asking only for personas, not the follow-on work.

What is the role of customers in participating in site design? Customers are an increasingly important part of the process. In fact, we are working with a client now to involve customers in their core product development process.

How are you developing personas beyond traditional observations? We have deliberately selected low-tech workshops versus high tech means to develop personas, which surprises many because so much of what we do is high tech. That approach may evolve over time.

Does all this work to actually increase sales? Our clients have realized a high correlation between engagement, purchase intent, and buying behavior.

Digital Podcast joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused heavily on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world. We’ll be writing about the conference over the next two weeks. Our first series of articles, like the conference, is focused on the topic of engagement. This article covers the first two presentations of the conference.

Setting the Stage
Harley Manning, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester

Harley introduces the conference’s theme by emphasizing that the imperative for marketing success going forward is customer engagement, and previews three case studies on the subject.

Traditional channels are shrinking – the 30 second spot is declining in reach and importance – yet the new channels, like YouTube, hold risk for marketers. The challenge and opportunity is to engage with customers and in return they’ll engage with your brand.

Harley shared three quick case studies of engagement:

Jordan’s Furniture: Is it a furniture store or an amusement park? Complete with a trapeze school, water display, café, IMAX theatre, and the backing of Berkshire Hathaway, Jordan’s engaged customers stroll past “finished room” furniture displays to get to lots of the good stuff. Along the way, they seem to buy a lot of furniture

Nike Running website: Articles, splashy photos, and aspirational content motivated Harley to drop a wad of cash on Nike’s best running shoes, begin running again after a lengthy hiatus, and then drop more cash on Nike apparel. Is Harley buying shoes or buying into a lifestyle?

LeapFrog: Toys that engage Harley’s son’s brain while he’s too busy having fun to notice that he is learning too. No wonder these toys sell like hotcakes.

Engagement: A New Approach To Understanding Your Customers
Brian Haven, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Two brands, two superfans, two very different reactions – one shove, and one embrace. If you want your fans to keep loving your brand, try hugging them back!

The Ikea Superfan

Brian starts by sharing a story of true engagement, and how gazing into the eyes of superfan love be hard for some corporations. Jen is an Ikea superfan from Ohio, and she singlehandedly started a movement to bring Ikea to her corner of Ohio. She started a website, scouted retail locations, and worked tirelessly to drum up support for Ikea to move in. How did Ikea management react? They warned her to stop using their trademark, were concerned when her Google rank approached that of the brand, and after actually building a store in her neck of the woods, Ikea didn’t even respond to her job application. While Ikea is a great brand that does many things right, they could have handled this superfan in a more enlightened manner.

What can we learn from Jen’s story? The traditional marketing funnel and message control is a thing of the past. Consumers can now chase down a spaghetti maze of paths to your brand, and marketers risk drowning in a sea of metrics – too often we don’t know which matter, what to do with them, and even if we did, how to track them technologically and across channels.

Even overcoming all these hurdles, the next challenge is how to make “engagement” actionable. What does engagement mean?

In simple terms, engagement is a person’s participation with a brand, regardless of channel, where they call the shots. Brian defines engagement as the 4 I’s, the level of Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence that a person has with a brand over time:

• Involvement: A person’s presence at brand touchpoints
• Interactions: A person’s actions while at the touchpoints
• Intimacy: A person’s affection for a brand
• Influence: A person’s advocacy for a brand

The Alli Superfan

Brian shares a contrasting example – Laura, who tries out GlaxoSmithKline’s “alli” weight loss system and community website. The system and site effectively engage Laura:

• Involvement through community tracking, forum tracking, registration data
• Interaction through product purchases, diet diaries, fridge photos, food journals
• Intimacy through product feedback, online ad opinions and shopping experience
• Influence through tools for advocacy.

As Laura worked with the system and the website (and lost a lot of weight!), GlaxoSmithKline decided to feature Laura, one of their most engaged customers, on the web site. This highly engaging system realized a very successful launch – in just the first six weeks, 1 million people tried product, and they rang up $155 million in sales on a $150 million ad budget.

Brian then discussed some of the steps for defining and measuring engagement (understand existing and outside data and metrics) and encouraging engagement (provide content, facilitate conversations, give customers a reason for sharing information). Engagement involves a fundamentally different relationship with customers.

And he reminded marketers to engage, embrace, and encourage the Jen’s of the world.

Q & A Discussion with Brian

How to address the fact that companies have many different departments involved in “engagement” and many different metrics are used? The marketing team needs to take lead with other parts of the company to share the vision of engagement, provide value to those groups, and bring the company together on goals and associated metrics.

How to identify and scale Superfans like Jen? Online is a great place to start. There are brand monitoring services, even Google search can be used to find the bloggers. To scale this group, first nail the customer insight, who the customers are, what they care about. Then the best way to attract, encourage and track them will depend on the answer to those questions.

How can companies engage around intangible, infrequent purchases such as insurance or other financial services? The purchase may be infrequent, but there is ongoing usage data that you can track and monitor. These customers may not be engaged Superfans like Jen, but the same principles apply.

How should Ikea have treated Jen? Not to pick on Ikea, but Jen wasn’t doing anything bad, everything she communicated about Ikea was positive. Ikea should have leaked her information about the store in advance, given her access to better technology to support the blog, talked about her on their own website. Reach out, embrace, and help your superfans! Very simple things would have meant the world to Jen, and would encourage others like her.

Are there examples where pursuing engagement has backfired? There is nothing negative about understanding who your customers are and what they care about. Overall there are negative things that can happen, but remember we’re in a different world now, and we don’t have the same control. We have to stop being scared of our customers.

What do you do about people who are negatively engaged with the brand? We call this disengagement, and it will happen whether you like it or not. The question is do you want it to happen where you can see and influence it, or spread out beyond your reach. Ultimately, brands need to pay attention to the reasons for disengagement and make their products better!