Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Apple’s Advertising Advantage

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Like many people, I first heard about Apple’s new tablet from a friend.  Perhaps it was late January or early February when I joined a conversation about “the next big thing from Apple,” in which my buddy educated me about the iPad and all its cool features.  But how did he hear about the iPad when the first iPad commercial didn’t run until March 7th?

On January 27 Steve Jobs announced that their next big gadget was going to be the iPad.  Within one hour over 177,000 tweets (3,000 tweets a minute) were sent out on Twitter expressing people’s excitement for this new gizmo.  Later that night, every news station reiterated Jobs’ proclamation, adding fuel to the iPad fire.

Not unlike a virus, the buzz of this new Apple tablet quickly spread and within weeks, everyone in the world knew what the iPad was, what features it had, what it cost, when it would be released, etc.  Prior to March 7th, 61% of consumers were aware of the iPad and its features.  After the commercial aired, 78% of young consumers (18-34) were aware of the iPad.

The genius of Apple advertising isn’t in the commercials: it’s in the cult-like following they’ve created for themselves through the sale of high quality products.  Macoholics are so passionate about Apple that they do all the “advertising” themselves through excited gossip and geeky banter.  Apple relies on this word-of-mouth advertising to describe their product (as their TV ads convey very little information) while the commercials act merely as a reminder that you don’t have one yet!

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About Author: Kyle Macey is a junior at St. John Fisher College and a Research Intern at Dixon Schwabl.  “I love football (starting DT at Fisher), writing and making people laugh.  Working at Dixon Schwabl has been awesome: it suits me beautifully.  It’s the perfect balance of work and fun and when I start looking for a career, that’s going to be the first place I call.”

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Posted in Advertising, Brand Experience, Guerilla Advertising, Research | No Comments »

Before You Play in the Tournament, You Might Want to Hit the Driving Range

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

If you’re going to be successful at something, it’s going to take practice. A professional golfer like Tiger Woods knows that better than anyone.  Tiger has spent countless hours of practice and preparation, and because of that investment he knows exactly how to swing each club in his bag.

While Tiger may have a fundamental appreciation for the value of practice, it seems like last week his sponsor, Nike, decided to skip the driving range.

The latest Nike Golf ad – the first since the Tiger scandal surfaced– is a black and white spot showing Tiger dressed in a Nike vest and hat, staring into the camera while a voice over of his father, Earl Woods, plays saying to Tiger: “I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. Did you learn anything?”

It appears that Nike is using this ad to try to repair Tiger’s image, as well as get Tiger back into the advertising realm that he has been absent from for the past few months. The ad does not focus on any Nike products (other than the hat and vest Tiger is wearing) but instead focuses on Tiger himself, and his personal life which has been very public.

While the ad may have been well intended, it seems Nike forgot to ask a critical question:  What about the customers? How are they going to react to this ad? What will they think of Nike? Tiger Woods is Nike Golf, so testing the ad and understanding customers’ reactions should have been a key step prior to launching the ad. Now, some interesting research suggests Nike didn’t quite have their finger on the pulse of their customers.

According to a national study conducted by HCD Research, favorability of the Nike brand declined after seeing the ad. The number of viewers that rated Nike as “favorable” or “extremely favorable” decreased from 92% prior to viewing the ad to 79% after viewing it. Favorability for Tiger Woods also decreased after seeing the ad from an average of 3.7 to an average of 3.5 (based on a 1-7 scale, 7 being the most favorable). Additionally, 29% of viewers reported that they were less likely to purchase products endorsed by Tiger Woods after viewing the ad. The results of the study can be seen here.

The study shows the importance of testing an ad prior to launch. This information could have easily been gathered by conducting focus groups or survey research before releasing the ad to the entire nation. Maybe Nike wasn’t worried about their viewers’ reactions, or maybe they actually did the research and decided to run the ad anyway. Either way, the lesson is clear:A little research can turn bogeys to birdies and keep you out of the sand trap.

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About Author: Dave O’Neill is a senior at St. John Fisher College and a Research Intern at Dixon Schwabl. “I love hockey, lacrosse (it’s my senior season at SJFC), hunting and fishing. I can’t imagine there is a better place to work than Dixon Schwabl and I absolutely love being a part of such a great company.”

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Posted in Research, Sports | No Comments »

“You Get What You Pay For” Or Do You?

Friday, March 19th, 2010

We’ve all heard the saying “you get what you pay for.” Often times its true, higher quality products usually cost more, but sometimes it isn’t. Pricing can be a difficult decision to make when launching a new product. People often judge products based on price, without really knowing too much about that product. Researchers and scientists from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University discovered some pretty interesting results from a study they conducted in 2008.

The study had twenty volunteers taste five wine samples which they were told were identified only by their different retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90 each. While the volunteers tasted the wines and evaluated them, scientists scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f MRI).

The volunteers in the study consistently said that they like the taste of the $90 bottle of wine better than the $5 bottle, and the $45 bottle better than the $35 bottle. The funny thing is that they had actually only sampled three wines. For example, wine #2 was labeled as a $90 bottle and also as a $10 bottle. When they thought they were drinking a $90 bottle of wine, they loved it. When they thought it was a $10 bottle, it wasn’t as good. They also conducted a follow up experiment where the participants tasted five different wines but without any price information. This time they rated the cheapest wine as the best tasting.

Now, this isn’t the first time people have discovered that price can have an effect on consumers’ perception of products, but what is so interesting is that they found that changes in the price of a bottle of wine not only influenced how good the participants thought it tasted, but also increased the activity of a brain region that is involved in our experience of pleasure. According to Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at Caltech who was involved with the study, “prices, by themselves, affect activity in an area of the brain that is thought to encode the experienced pleasantness of an experience.”

It is unclear whether or not people actually physically experienced more pleasure from the higher priced bottle of wine, but they certainly thought they did. The study shows that prices directly affect consumer experience, even in pleasure centers of the brain. Not only is this good news for marketers, but also for consumers! Just think, next time you have a dinner party, just stick a $90 price tag on that $10 bottle of wine you bought and everyone will love it!

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About Author: Dave O’Neill is a senior at St. John Fisher College and a Research Intern at Dixon Schwabl. “I love hockey, lacrosse (it’s my senior season at SJFC), hunting and fishing. I can’t imagine there is a better place to work than Dixon Schwabl and I absolutely love being a part of such a great company.”

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Posted in Brand Experience, Food & Beverage, Research | No Comments »

Everyone Doodles

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a doodler. There’s scarcely a page of my school notes from middle school through college that doesn’t have some sort of text ornamentation, swirly lines, song lyrics, cartoon characters or other marginalia. Even now, in the real world with real responsibilities and things I need to pay attention to, I often doodle during meetings or while waiting for slow progress bars on huge files.

Doodling may carry the outside perception that I’m not listening or not soaking in the big picture, but on the contrary, it seems to help me remember what was said and what I need to glean from the meeting at hand. That client’s major competitors? They’re right here, next to this swarthy pirate guy. The soft and live launch dates for that website? Oh yeah, I wrote those down right here in the middle of this alien robot space battle.

A study performed at Plymouth University last year found that people who doodled while being fed names and places recalled 29% more information than a control group of non-doodlers. Perhaps it has something to do with people’s learning preferences, correlating the visual stimulus with the more dry or unexciting information. I tend to be in that visual learner category (as opposed to auditory or kinesthetic), so maybe that’s why it helps me out. According to Wikipedia, John Keats and Ralph Waldo Emerson were doodlers. Leonardo Da Vinci was a rampant doodler. Many US presidents were known to doodle, according to this (disappointingly photo-free) article from CBS News and this article from The Atlantic (which rectifies the situation). Other world leaders doodle as well, as shown in this recent photo of Vladimir Putin, showing him scribbling during a meeting.

So is doodling a sign of genius? A handy learning tool? Or simply an offshoot of being bored? I suppose it could be some combination of all three.

Now, if I’ve learned anything from researching doodles, I have to show some examples. So here you are, a bunch of the more significant doodles I’ve done since being hired. Yes, I have a tendency for lasers, robots, creepy skulls and blunt weapons. No, there’s nothing (seriously) wrong with me. You might notice I tried to create an ambigram logo for the company band, Job Order (as we were named before we had an identity crisis).


















Do you like to doodle? Does it help you in any cognitive sense? Would you like to share some of your doodles with me? I’m going to collect a whole bunch of doodles from people around here as well. If I get enough of them, I’ll make another blogpost and show ‘em off!

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Posted in Art, Inspiration, Logos, Research | 5 Comments »

Vancouver 2010 – A Gold Medal Research Opportunity

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The 2010 Winter Olympics are in full swing and what a truly great event the Olympics are. Top athletes from around the world are giving everything they have competing for medals, but more importantly the pride of their home country and some international bragging rights.

If I could, I’d be in Vancouver dressed as Uncle Sam, chanting “U-S-A” the whole time, but I have lacrosse practice and a few classes so I’ll have to settle for a 42” flat screen. Either way I’ll be rooting for our men and women as they hopefully dominate the rest of the world’s athletes.

Now there are a lot of things that Americans are good at but the two that I’m thinking of are sports and…research. Yep, research. This year it is unlikely that NBC will make any money from its broadcast of the Winter Olympics but what they will get is valuable research from the event’s massive audience that might generate additional ad revenue in the time shortly after the last of the medals are handed out.

NBC’s goal is to see how the same person uses both TV and the internet during the Olympics as well as what kinds of video they watch online. This research is building off of a similar project they started during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In one study during that project, NBC gave 41 Olympics enthusiasts a mobile-phone-based monitoring system that allowed them to track how each person was exposed to the Olympics and for how long. During the winter Olympics, NBC plans to examine how each person uses the internet and TV and what kinds of videos they are watching online. They even plan to track if the video is something being viewed for the first time or if it was a repeat view of an event already seen on TV. NBC hopes to be able to use this information to persuade advertisers to spend more money.

The Olympics provides NBC with millions of potential subjects to analyze because it attracts such a huge and diverse audience. The 2010 Winter Olympics could bring in as many as 200 million viewers, an increase from the 2006 Winter Olympics which recorded 184 million viewers. According to Alan Wurtzel, President of Research at NBC Universal, “Big events such as the Olympics often get viewers to test out new viewing behaviors, simply because the event has such a high water-cooler quotient.” The tricky part will be figuring out why people are watching what they are watching and why they are viewing it on TV, a PC or a mobile device.

NBC will also work with Google and TiVo to track additional data. So while we are all enjoying the greatness of the events that comprise the Winter Olympics, NBC will be hard at work trying to track and turn audience behavior into advertising Dollars. Let’s not lose sight of what’s really important though, and that is American gold medals! So let’s grab a beer and cheer on our fellow Americans, eh?

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About Author: Dave O’Neill is a senior at St. John Fisher College and a Research Intern at Dixon Schwabl. “I love hockey, lacrosse (it’s my senior season at SJFC), hunting and fishing. I can’t imagine there is a better place to work than Dixon Schwabl and I absolutely love being a part of such a great company.”

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Posted in Research, Sports, Television | 1 Comment »

A Twist on Cereal

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Everyone has their favorite cereal, but Canadians seem to take this a lot more seriously. “Shreddies” cereal, a Canadian favorite, is a 100% whole grain wheat cereal in a square shape, similar to Chex. The brand was considered “boring”, even though research showed that customers loved the taste of the cereal. Shreddies needed a face lift; something to get people excited about Shreddies again. Introducing Diamond Shreddies! Post Foods Canada Corp., the makers of Shreddies cereal, has put a literal twist on Shreddies and  consumers loved them! Many of them even thought they tasted much better than the original Shreddies.

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Focus groups showed how consumers felt about the new phenomena surrounding Shreddies. Apparently consumers felt that sure, Shreddies were good, but if they were turned 45 degrees and were now a diamond shape, they were that much better!

Change is good for Shreddies. Hopefully the people at Post aren’t big Huey Lewis fans – because in Canada it’s no longer hip to be a square.

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davidAbout Author: Dave O’Neill is a fall 2009 research & strategy intern at Dixon Schwabl. I’m a senior at St. John Fisher College. I’m originally from Binghamton, NY. I play lacrosse and hockey. I’m a big NY Giants and NY Rangers fan. I love hunting and fishing, and I also love being an intern at Dixon Schwabl! (But not as much as I’d love getting a pay check from Dixon Schwabl.) Enjoy the blog!

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Posted in Food & Beverage, Research | 2 Comments »