Welcome To The Decade Of Games

Game dynamics are fast becoming a critical currency of motivation. Their power lies not in connecting us to our friends, but in directly influencing our individual behaviour. More and more of these dynamics are being cleverly leveraged in real-world scenarios to influence your behavior. Smart companies will take this time to look at their product portfolios and community behaviors through the lens of game dynamics.

For those of you still trying to wrap your head around the meteoric rise of social networking over the past decade, this post might hurt a little bit. Because just as you and most of the world were getting a handle on it, the decade of social abruptly ended.

I don't mean that we will stop using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to share with our friends, colleagues and families. In fact, quite the opposite is true, our combined usage of these social networks will continue to increase. Rather, the decade of constructing the social layer is complete. The frameworks that we'll use to share socially are built, defined and controlled. Construction on the social layer ended with the launch of Facebook's Open Graph protocols over the last several months. All the interesting social stuff that will occur over the next decade (and there'll be lots, I'm sure), will exist within this predefined framework built and controlled by Facebook. In short, the decade of social is over.

What's taking its place? The decade of games.

When you hear games, you probably immediately think about things like World of WarCraft, the Nintendo Wii and Farmville. And while those are huge (and will get even bigger) I'm talking about the underlying game dynamics that are the core building blocks of those games. And in this decade of games, these game dynamics will move far beyond your computer screen and into decidedly non-game like environments, like the way we court customers, engage with others at work, discover where to hang out on Saturday nights and what, when and how we choose to purchase. More and more of these dynamics are being cleverly leveraged in real-world scenarios to influence your behavior. While the last decade was all about connections and integrating a social fabric to every facet of our digital and analog existence, this next decade is all about influence.

Game dynamics are fast becoming a critical currency of motivation. Their power lies not in connecting us to our friends, but in directly influencing our individual behavior.

The decade of games is starting now because cultural and technological shifts have led us to a perfect convergence of reach, relevance and demand. We're able to reach people anywhere at any time thanks to the powerful mobile devices that now travel everywhere we go. Facebook's Open Graph enables us to provide relevance to anyone with instant access to the social graph of connections. And there's the demand. Traditional forms of entertainment (movies, television... remember books?) are in a rapid decline. The demand for entertainment hasn't decreased, it's just shifted to a more interactive, pervasive form of entertainment. It's shifting to games.

I've been playing games for at least half of my life (granted, I'm only 21) but that's still a long time. And, I'm currently the Chief Ninja (that's the non-game company equivalent of CEO) of SCVNGR, aGoogle Ventures backed mobile gaming company. Needless to say, I tend to think of life as a giant game. A somewhat poorly designed for sure, but one big game nevertheless. I enjoy watching how game dynamics subtly, often invisibly, influence almost everything that everyone does.

At SCVNGR, we've been able to examine the statistical effects of introducing game dynamics into situations that are decidedly not games. We've seen simple game dynamics increase traffic to locations 4X over a matter of days. We've seen others extend the average amount of engaged time consumers spend at a business by upwards of 40%. This propagation of game dynamics into the real world via the social graph and mobile devices will have powerful business consequences for those who understand how to leverage them.

At SCVNGR we like to joke that with any seven game dynamics you can get anyone to do anything. So with that, I'll present three of our favorites here:

The Appointment Dynamic

The appointment dynamic is a famous game mechanic in which to succeed a "player" must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action. It's simple and immensely powerful.

The appointment dynamic is powerful enough to alter the behavior of an entire generation — "happy hours" are appointment dynamics, as is the pervasive game "Farmville" by Zynga. But we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Imagine companies like Vitality leveraging this dynamic to improve the adherence rate to often less-than-pleasant medicinal regimens, or the government creating a large scale game (with financial incentives as rewards) to alter traffic patterns to decrease highway congestion in the mornings.

The Progression Dynamic

In the progression dynamic, a "player's" level of success is displayed in real-time and gradually improved through the completion of granular tasks. Somewhere deep-rooted in the human psyche we have this desire to complete any progression dynamic put in front of us as long as the steps to do so are itemized and clear. With this as a known dynamic, it's not hard to envision the ways that this can be leveraged even further in the real-world.

The canonical "game" example of the progression dynamic exists in Blizzard's World of WarCraft, the most popular immersive online game with over 11 million monthly players. In WoW players follow a well-defined progression dynamic as they level-up from a weak paladin level 1 to an unbelievably powerful paladin level 60 by completing missions and tasks.

But like most game dynamics, real-world implementations of this mechanic are not hard to find. Coffee shops regularly use this dynamic with their "buy nine cups of coffee and your 10th is free" cards. Next time you log into LinkedIn, check out how complete your profile is. If you're one of the lucky ones who's figured out how to have a complete LinkedIn profile, then you've won this specific game, but for the rest of us, you'll see a now familiar looking progression dynamic, urging us to take a couple more steps to move that blue progress bar from the left edge of the screen to the right.

Communal Discovery

Communal discovery is a mechanic which involves an entire community working together to solve a problem. The reason I've saved the communal discovery dynamic for last is that it, perhaps more than all others, presents incredible opportunities to positively influence the world as we enter this decade of games.

In an effort to illustrate the immense data-collection power of the now mature social layer (and incidentally the burgeoning game layer), DARPA launched a challenge late last year. They hid 10 red balloons at different locations all across the continental United States and offered $40,000 to the first team to correctly identify their locations. The winning team (a group from MIT) constructed a strategy that in many ways mirrored a pyramid scheme. It was a cleverly constructed waterfall of incentives that encouraged massive cooperation. Essentially everyone to give them data about any balloon's location won some portion of the prize money based on how many other people also submitted the location of that balloon. This created positive communal incentives across what rapidly became a large and self-propagating network. Their strategy managed to accurately identify all locations in less than 9 hours.

This communal discovery mechanic is immensely powerful and, as DARPA so elegantly displayed, can be used to solve immensely difficult problems in record time.

These are just three out of a myriad of game dynamics that will act as the core building blocks used to construct the game layer over the next couple years. We're right at the beginning of this decade of games and so now is the time for everyone to learn about these game dynamics and discover new ones. Smart companies will take this time to look at their product portfolios and community behaviors through the lens of game dynamics. Where could you employ progression or appointment dynamics on the existing social graph or through mobile to encourage upsells or repeat visits? The time is now to map out your game dynamic strategy. The more people that help in the construction of these frameworks, the better they will be. So, go play some games. Then start building.

Source - Harvard Business Review

Five Ways Big Brands Are Using Foursquare

Unlike other more mainstream social networks, the business potential of Foursquare may not be immediately apparent. At present, the location-based network is less about conversations and resource sharing, and more about tying your social activities to physical places.

For brick-and-mortar businesses, a Foursquare strategy makes a lot of sense. But what about brand promotion in general, say in the entertainment or publishing worlds? With Foursquare, it’s not about linking users back to your site or products, but creating a new location-based product that has value for fans and followers. Here’s how five big brands are attempting to connect location to their online social presences.

1. Recommendations with Personality: Bravo

In the television industry, Bravo was one of the first networks to get on board with Foursquare, and 50,000 of its fans have followed so far. The network’s programming is a mix of food, fashion, and reality drama, and the TV personalities and hosts that viewers love are the ones making recommendations on Foursquare. Restaurant, shopping, and hotel suggestions reinforce Bravo’s image as a network of culture experts, and the personalities who leave tips through the brand add that bit of personal flavor or sass that draws viewers to the shows in the first place. Fans don’t follow for Bravo per se; they’re following to see where Top Chefs andMillionaire Matchmakers spend their time in New York and LA.

2. Restaurant Reviews: Zagat

If there was ever a brand made for Foursquare, Zagat is it. The 30+ year-old publication is the go-to guide for restaurant and hotel reviews, and their embrace of numerous social media channels is noteworthy. Zagat uses Foursquare the way many individual users do — by leaving food-related tips about locations. And Zagat is not city-specific. You’ll find foodie tips from Los Angeles, to New York, to Cambridge, MA. Zagat’s Foursquare account is an obvious way to reinforce everything the brand is known for, and perhaps tap into a new demographic of diners who may be reluctant to carry around a paperback guide in addition to their smartphones.

3. Celebrity Sway: MTV

While we may not yet live in a world where celebrities want fans to know their locations in real-time, filtering their favorite places through an over-arching brand is a good start. Fans can keep tabs on the favorite haunts of stars from Jersey Shore and The Hills, driving the social connection to these personalities beyond the TV and into The Real World (pun intended). Not only can users see where the stars have been, but what they did, enjoyed, and recommend. And there’s always the possibility that visiting a bar frequented by a celeb increases your chances of meeting him or her. That aspect is certainly part of MTV’s Foursquare appeal.

4. Urban Exploration: New York Magazine

New York Magazine uses Foursquare to drive home its coverage of city-specific culture. This account is about much more than just food. It targets the social New Yorker with tips on retail stores, bars, and public spaces. The tips not only offer details on pricing and goings-on, but provide links back to the magazine’s website for deeper coverage. In this regard, New York Magazines’ approach to Foursquare is akin to the Twitter strategy of many publishers, with the added value of location.

5. Edutainment: The History Channel

Staff at The History Channel know what their viewers are into — it’s fairly obvious, given the namesake. So while Foursquare doesn’t offer much in terms of driving traffic to a program or website, locations are fostering an interesting kind of brand engagement here.

The account leaves tips at various sites, including interesting historical background on the locations. It’s trivia, but with a real-world and educational context. For instance, did you know that the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul, MN are man-made sandstone mines that date back to the 1840s, and were opened as a restaurant and night club in the 1920s?

This is a clever use of indirect marketing. The History Channel doesn’t have to promote its shows or link back to content to remind fans why they enjoy the programming. More than 47,000 followers are already enjoying the historical tips left by the account, since its launch in April.

Conclusion

The trouble with emerging networks like Foursquare is that users and big brands alike are having difficulty sticking with it. In all of the examples above, you can see that brand representatives jumped into the checkin game with vigor early on, but eventually updated the accounts less and less — some have not added tips for months. For now, location services are still an ancillary part of many social media strategies, but they won’t be forever. Many predict that when cultural acceptance, mainstream social integration, and business value finally coincide, location sharing will be as common and natural as updating your Facebook status. When it happens, will your brand be ready?

Source - Mashable

Fantastic Service through the Lens of Maslow’s Hierarchy

People who work on the customer service end of your business are some of the most important marketing touch points. Even if your organization believes “the customer is always right”, there are number of additional practices that are necessary for amazing service that your customers will tell others about. The following is a look at customer service through the lens of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. And yes, the devil is in the details.

At the heart of the intersection of brain science and marketing lie customers’ needs and motivations, right? After all, the customer experience is essentially the laboratory where companies’ theories about consumer psychology are tested. If a company understands what motivates customer behavior, it has a better shot at influencing that behavior by meeting their customers’ needs. This became clear to me as I navigated through three different reads about customer service in the past few weeks.

Simple Promises, Strong Delivery
The first tidbit appeared in last month’s Harvard Business Review. Some Corporate Executive Board researchers issued a provocative point of view based on results from a study they conducted. Their research shows that “Loyalty has a lot more to do withhow well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be… When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.” (emphasis mine) This is a distinct departure from the “surprise and delight” aspiration which many companies hold when it comes serving their customers.

Getting Emotional

In the same HBR issue, there was another article that seemed to counter the point. Tony Hsieh the CEO of Zappos and the author of the recently released book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, described his company’s customer service philosophy:

"We don’t have scripts, because we want our reps to let their true personalities shine during every phone call, so that they can develop a personal emotional connection with each customer, which we refer to as PEC. When one of our reps found out that because of a death in the family, a loyal customer had forgotten to mail back a pair of shoes she’d planned to return, the rep sent her flowers; now she’s a customer for life.” (emphasis mine).

Hospitality

What helped me understand the juxtaposition of these two points of view was this quote from Susan Reilly Salgado, managing director of Danny Meyer’s learning business, Hospitality Quotient: “What many people refer to as ‘great service’, we call hospitality. Service is all about the technical delivery of the product, while hospitality is about how guests feel during that transaction. Hospitality happens when guests believe you are on their side. For people to rave about their experience and become repeat customers, you need to have both – but what surprises customers and makes them feel genuinely cared for is the hospitality.”
(The quote appeared in a release from American Express, announcing their new Global Customer Service Barometer, a survey conducted in the U.S. and 11 other countries exploring attitudes and preferences toward customer service.)

Maslow, and a New Hierarchy of Service

It helped to distinguish between service as “technical delivery” and service as “fantastic experience.” And the distinction reminded me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which suggests that people have different levels of needs which need to be met — and needs at the bottom of the hierarchy must be fulfilled before needs higher up can truly be met.

The points of view I had been reading suggested that a similar hierarchy exists when it comes to meeting consumer needs and motivations with customer service. There are different levels of service which companies may provide, but the ones at the bottom of the service hierarchy need to be delivered before the ones higher up can be meaningful and have impact.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

If Maslow’s level 1 = physiological needs — literal requirements for human survival. Then Service level 1 = basic delivery – simply delivering the requirements. For a fast food restaurant, this would mean the food is hot, the drinks are cold, the service is fast and accurate.

If Maslow’s level 2 = safety needs – needs that express a yearning for a predictable orderly world in which perceived unfairness and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare. Then Service level 2 = commitment and consistency – This is about doing what you say you do (no brand promise:reality gap) and doing it consistently.

If Maslow’s level 3 = love and belonging — emotionally based relationships – friendship, intimacy, family. Then Service level 3 = personal and personable service – Calling people by name, showing appreciation for their patronage, attending to their personal needs are some examples.

If Maslow’s level 4 = esteem – needing to be accepted and valued by others. Then Service level 4 = making customers feel accepted and valued – By rewarding high value customers, offering ways to connect with others in the brand community, and being transparent, companies deliver this service level.

If Maslow’s level 5 = self-actualization – needs to realize a person’s full potential — to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. Then Service level 5 = helping people feel good about who they are – This last area is a little of a stretch but I do think this is where the right kind of service can make the most difference. This is about making people feel smart rather than stupid because they had to ask for help; helping them feel like they’ve made a good choice by supporting their purchase decision with added-value services; making them feel like they’re important, not only to you, but to others in their lives or in the brand community.

With Maslow’s theory as a model, the Service Hierarchy explains why a company can’t expect to truly fulfill its customers’ service needs if it skips over the fundamentals at the bottom of the hierarchy and only focuses at the top – e.g., giving me a special “thank-you” gift is pretty meaningless if my order was incorrect in the first place.

Resolving Problems – The Hierarchy

This is particularly true when it comes to resolving problems, which was the topic of the Conference Board’s HBR article. Their findings make a lot of sense when viewed through the lens of the Service Hierarchy: you can’t compensate for the lack of basic service resolution by “wow-ing” the customer.

So in regards to resolving problems, I’d suggest the Service Hierarchy looks something like this:

Level 1 (basic delivery) – delivering a sincere “I’m sorry” (yes, that’s a basic) and a quick and easy resolution to the problem

Level 2 (commitment and consistency) – honoring the promises you made(e.g., “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back” means just that – it doesn’t mean your money back less a service fee, nor only if you jump through hoops, nor let me try to fix it first.)

Level 3 (personal and personable service) – tailoring the problem resolution and the way in which it’s executed to the customer and what’s convenient to him/her.

Level 4 (making customers feel accepted and valued) – showing your regret for the problem by doing something extra

Level 5 (helping people feel good about who they are) — demonstrating your appreciation for them bringing the problem to your attention and your commitment to addressing that which caused the problem in the first place.

Levels 4 and 5 are truly satisfying and fulfilling to customers when Levels 1 through 3 are being delivered. The reason why Zappos can concern itself with making a personal emotional connection when people contact their serve reps is because they’ve got the basics down – they offer free and easy returns, and they pay the shipping costs. The basics may not be exciting, but they’re the basics nonetheless – so companies should deliver on them brilliantly before moving on.

An understanding of the Service Hierarchy is important now more than ever. According to the aforementioned American Express study, a majority of Americans report that quality customer service is more important to them in today’s economic environment (61%).

Source - Neuromarketing

Why Your Ideas Suck

Advertising isn’t a creative industry, it’s a commitment industry. What separates those who sit in the corner office and those who just sit on the corner is their willingness to see an idea through. The following explains the non-creative components which go into success in the creative industries – and why your buddy may actually have had “the best idea ever” at the bar last night.

I hear it all the time. In fact, I’ve even done it myself and just recently a good friend of mine said it to me over a beer: “man, I had this great idea the other day but I didn’t write it down.” Sounds like a pretty shitty idea to me…

Sorry, KF but you know I’ve done it too. What about this one: “Oh man, we had the best idea but the client wouldn’t go for it”. Sounds like a pretty shitty idea too.

Here’s the thing: coming up with an idea is a very small part of what we need to do to create great work. I look at this way - you should spend about 20% of your time coming up with an idea and the other 80% making it happen. We all know, if you don’t make it happen it doesn’t exist. It’s that simple. That’s how great ideas get shitty. I was thinking about this this morning on a flight and quickly wrote out the steps I believe are taken in order for something great to take shape. It looks something like this:

The first thing I realized was that I may have left something out: luck. Or timing, or as some would say: the alignment of planets. Yeah, I think that should be in there somewhere, but that’s the one thing we’re not in control of. Everything else on the list we are.

At the very top of the list, you’ll see that I’m not sure if the need for an idea always comes before the idea. Actually I’m pretty sure that’s not always the case, so let’s keep that part loose. We know at some point there is a need for an idea or an idea presents itself and we find a need. Either way, that’s when the real work begins. And this is the place where I think most juniors struggle…

You have to sell it. And I’m pretty sure at this point I can say, this is often the hardest part. Sell the damn idea! Sell the shit out of it and spend a good amount of time preparing to do so. There are all kinds of tactics and techniques used to do this and in many ways, that’s what makes some agencies and agency folks better than others: their ability to sell the work. And if that’s not the hardest part, then keeping it sold is.

Between focus groups, internal politics, someone’s fear of the colour blue or what their spouse will think, this is always a challenge. You need to try as much as possible to keep the idea in tact. Yes, you need to be open to evolving it and making it better, but always try to stop it from getting worse.

Craft. I remember judging an awards show one time when I was faced with the best example of why craft is important. Two ads were on the table. Both were for a shopping centre. Both were for shopping there at Christmas. Both were the same idea. One was well crafted, the other not so much. Can you guess which one won an award? Me neither….

You have to deliver. If you can’t execute what you promised - forget it. Game over. And finally you have to flexible enough to monitor whether your idea is working and be ready to refine it and get it back out there. Gone are the days, of sending an idea out there and hoping for the best.

So, after all this, I’ve tried to make one point clear: the idea is not the only thing that matters, and isn’t always what makes brilliant agencies or agency employees. Now that I think about it, there really is only one thing that does: commitment.

Advertising or not - you really need to be committed to make great things happen. If you think about it, it really doesn’t matter what it is - your work, your relationships, your therapist - commitment. So, are you committed?

Source - I Have An Idea

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky is an extremely well respected anthropologist and writer who has some very interesting thoughts on society and culture in our digital age. He released the book “Here Comes Everybody” and has recently released a new book called the “Cognitive Surplus”. Here’s a really neat fifteen minute (but it’s all good) video that summarize his findings on the Cognitive Surplus.

Go HERE to watch the video.

Fashion Cycles

Like the ocean’s tide, fashions ebb and flow. Whether it’s an indie band, a type of beer, a style of facial hair, a cut of jean, or t-shirt with obscure references, all trends come and go. (And then come and go again with each new generation, so keep those keffiyehs somewhere safe for your future children.) The infographic above deconstructs the natural cycle of hipster fashion, using the example of a hat. Do our findings line up what you’ve seen?

Source - Flavourwire

The Purchase Funnel - A Different Lens

Purchase models are always a little flaky because they assume the purchase cycle is a linear process. As we know, everybody behaves differently and context plays a critical role in any decision. The following article suggests that looking at the purchasing funnel from a different angle (literally) can have a profound impact on your marketing efforts.

Enough already with the arguments about the death of the so-called Purchase Funnel and its relevance or not, for the digital age. Because maybe the real issue is not whether the funnel is obsolete – but that agencies and marketers have been looking at the funnel the wrong way?

So, take a deep breath. Take a different view of the funnel. And think about it this way.

In a consumer-controlled world, where it’s less about taking the brand to the consumer and more about taking the consumer to the brand, behavioral patterns are less likely to be linear – or sequential. And therefore it’s hard to imagine a consumer who seamlessly transitions from a state of awareness to purchase, by smoothly sliding down the funnel as they consume media. But knowing this doesn’t mean that the funnel is no longer relevant. There’s more to consider. And let me explain why:

1. What we know from our work behind the 7 Modes of The Mind is that consumer behavior in a digitally-powered world is increasingly shaped by their mood, mode and mindset.

2. We’ve discovered that mode of behavior and potential brand receptivity is shaped by a confluence of consumption – based on how a consumer interacts with categories, brands, technology, content and media.

3. We’ve found that the consumer journey towards a brand experience begins at one of seven primary modes: entertainment, share, learn/research, task/transact, socialize/connect, play and information mode.

4. We’ve also studied how the consumer jumps from one mode to another as they make their way towards the path to purchase – based on what frame of mind they’re in while consuming different media, devices and content.

By connecting these dots together in this way it then becomes apparent that the consumer mode of behavior and the “gravitational-pull” towards the bottom of the funnel are highly inter-related. And what’s amazing is that when you take a peak inside the purchase funnel you can begin to see all this unfold.

Go beyond a two-dimesional view of the funnel, dig deeper inside, and with the benefit of a three dimensional perspective it’s fascinating to actually see this modally driven form of behavior unfold. Far from being a linear sequential series of steps, what you’ll likely see is a meandering path to purchase towards the center of the funnel – that’s akin to a journey through a twisting-turning labyrinth, with trap doors and blind alleys, trampolines and pitfalls. But because this journey is fraught with distractions along the way, it also means the consumer may or may not make it down to the bottom of the funnel – depending on when and how a brand engages them.

So far, what’s clear from our initial work in this area, is that knowing how and when to intercept the consumer within the funnel and understanding what mode they’re in at a particular moment, increases the odds they’ll take the chute to purchasing your brand and become an advocate. Using a snap-shot of the three-dimensional view from above the funnel as an integrated modal connections framework can also be helpful, as a way to potentially mapping-out the journey a consumer might embark on as they make their way through the complicated ecosystem within.

So in short, don’t be mistaken. The funnel is far from dead – because on the inside, what we’ve found is that it’s very much alive. Dare to dive in, and what you may discover might initially scare your brand to death. But equally, don’t be surprised if this new perspective of the funnel provides you with a better understanding of how to give your brand a new lease on life.

Source - Mullen

What Makes A Great Planner

The role of a Planner has always been tricky to define. Sure, Planners are strategist & problem solvers but what characteristics do great Planners have in common? In an attempt to answer this question, PSFK interviewed a number of Planners and combined their findings in a series of videos. Take a look and make sure you are getting the most of our your Planner.

Link to the first video here.

Create or Aggregate?

Here’s how a content strategy works: “I (the brand) provide you (the audience) with engaging and relevant content in the hope of building affinity by establishing a reason for an ongoing relationship.” Some brands are in a position to create their own content; others aggregate existing content. There’s a ton of content out there to herd, here’s one example of a form of content aggregation. It’s also a nice way to see what videos are buzzing in real time.

Click to get to Zoofs

The Power Of Perception

There’s something to be said about the power of belief. According to a recent study, the simple belief in luck can have an impact on how we perform. Superstitions are a fascinating because they suggest that abstract perceptions can have tangible outcomes. We’re not saying you should pull out that old rabbit foot but this article is worth a gander.

Can luck really influence the outcome of events? That question has captivated otherwise rational people for centuries—and challenged scientists to somehow prove whether lucky charms, special shirts or ritualistic behaviors hold special powers.

They do. (Sometimes.) New research coming out in June suggests that a belief in good luck can affect performance.

In a test conducted by researchers from the University of Cologne, participants on a putting green who were told they were playing with a "lucky ball" sank 6.4 putts out of 10, nearly two more putts, on average, than those who weren't told the ball was lucky. That is a 35% improvement. The results suggest new thinking in how to view luck and are intriguing to behavorial psychologists.

"Our results suggest that the activation of a superstition can indeed yield performance-improving effects," says Lysann Damisch, co-author of the Cologne study, set to be published in the journal Psychological Science. The sample size, just 28 university students, was small, but the effect was big enough to be statistically significant.

Believing in their own good fortune can help people only in situations where they can affect the outcome. It can't, say, help people watching a horse race they have bet on.

While the findings have not been published, this study could prompt psychologists to explore ways to tap into people's belief in good luck. "Simply being told this is a lucky ball is sufficient to affect performance," Stuart Vyse, professor of psychology at Connecticut College and author of "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition," says of the new study.

When Anthony Overfield rides his motorcycle, he carries two passengers on board: so-called gremlin bells. The 46-year-old runs a Web site, New York Biker, and sells merchandise at bike shows statewide. Gremlin bells are his best sellers. Many bikers believe these small brass bells, mounted near the back of his bike, help ward off accidents. "My bike's in good shape," he says. "I'm healthy. I haven't been involved with any altercations with vehicles." In short, his good-luck charms seem to be working.

Still, people often overestimate how much control they have over a situation. For a 2003 paper, researchers in the U.K. enlisted 107 traders at London investment banks to play a computer game simulating a live stock index. They were told that pressing the letters Z, X and C on the keyboard "may have some effect on the index," when in fact it didn't.

Nonetheless, many traders had an illusion of control. This characteristic could have detracted from their job performance. Traders in the study who held the strongest false belief in control had lower salaries in real life, suggesting that excessive belief in their own control of "luck" may have hurt their trading decisions.

"The idea that wearing a red shirt, saying some sort of incantation or prayer or carrying a lucky charm will bring good luck is very appealing because it gives people the illusion that they have some degree of control over future events in their lives," says Peter Thall, a biostatistician at the University of Texas. "The painful truth is that we have little or no control over the most important events in our lives."

Mathematicians have demonstrated the role that randomness plays in life—"there are no long-term successful craps players," says Harvey Mudd College mathematician Arthur Benjamin.

But don't tell that to the people who believe they can shape their own luck. They're well represented in games of chance, such as lotteries and casinos, and will be out in force at Saturday's Kentucky Derby, in which a favorite is named, what else, Lookin At Lucky.

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens, N.Y., Dennis Canetty was wearing a brown suit. Not an everyday, run-of-the-mill, ordinary brown suit. The retired Wall Street trader, age 61, was sporting his lucky brown suit to help the horse he co-owns, Always a Party, win the second race. The power of the suit is real and proven: Mr. Canetty was wearing it at the Preakness Stakes two years ago when Macho Again, another horse he co-owns, finished second as a 40-to-1 long shot.

"It's silly," he said a few minutes before race time. "My wife thinks I'm nuts."

Even some otherwise calculating mathematicians hold irrational beliefs about luck. "I tell my class, 'Don't bother entering sweepstakes; it's so unlikely you're going to win," says Joseph Mazur, a mathematician at Marlboro College and author of the book "What's Luck Got to Do with It?" coming out in July. But then his wife entered him in a sweepstakes and he won $20,000.

There I was for months afterwards, entering every sweepstakes contest I could find," he says. It was futile—he never repeated.

Investors also are prone to superstitions. For example, during an eclipse, which many cultures view as a bad omen, major U.S. stock-market indexes typically fall, according to research conducted by Gabriele Lepori, assistant professor of finance at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. This effect persists even after controlling for economic news and long-term trends. And the indexes usually bounce back soon afterward.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, known for basing personnel decisions on statistics, notes with bemusement the superstition of some of his highest-paid employees. "Every locker room has a comical procession of superstitions," he said in an email. "We have things based on time, on speech intonations and on specific conversation exchanges. If you look at the introductions of any NBA team and what the players do, you have an anthropologist's dream."

But Mr. Cuban is sticking with his stats. "When it's all said and done, it's about performance and data," he said. "Guys will change their superstitions, but the numbers don't lie."

Still, he says he has some superstitions of his own to give his Mavs a boost, "but there is no chance I tell you; that kills them." These may not have helped his team in the playoffs: Dallas trails San Antonio, three games to two.

And did Mr. Canetty's lucky brown suit prove to be lucky? His horse, Always a Party, was bumped early in the race and jockey Channing Hill went flying. "I threw the suit away," Mr. Canetty said on Tuesday. "I'm not wearing that suit anymore." For the next race, "I'll try out a new suit, and see if it brings better luck."

Source - Wall Street Journal

10 Points For Brushing Your Teeth

Social gaming has made a big impact this year. On one hand the massive adoption of social games such as Farmville can be linked to the entertaining and social properties of gaming. On the other hand, companies, governments and marketers are leveraging the foundations of video game design to alter behaviour. This fascinating video that explains how social gaming could be a part of every aspect of our lives.



If you are interested in checking out the entire video.

The Evolution Of Game Based Marketing

Advergaming is a video game experience brought to you by marketers. It’s been around for ages but recent tactics are now blurring the lines between entertainment and unconscious persuasion. The evolution of advergaming strategy is Funware, which describes the use of video game mechanics in everyday, non-game applications. Funware is an intuitive concept: If you turn work into game, people willingly participate.

Gabe Zigermann coined the term Funware to describe the use of video game mechanics in everyday, non-game applications. It was a big idea that has now become a rallying cry for the spread of video games beyond their traditional borders into industries that seem remotely related to games.

What Zichermann, chief executive of beamME and a 12-year game industry veteran, realized was that games motivate people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do. The book (subtitled “Inspire customer loyalty through rewards challenges and contests”) debuts this week and is a must read for marketers, including the folks who are attending the MI6 game marketing conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

Funware is an intuitive concept. If you turn work into game, people willingly do it. If you make a tedious school assignment into a game-like competition, kids will become engaged with it. If you add a rewards-based loyalty program to your product, people will choose it over rivals. The time has come to “game-ify” all of the boring industries so that users will be motivated to use products and services because they want to, not because they have to. In fact, the authors argue that just about any task can be designed so that it can be more fun.

Over the past couple of years, the idea has gained steam. Venture capitalists such as Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts and Kleiner Perkins partner, believe that Funware has the potential to change all of advertising.

Game-based marketing is one of those things that has been around forever, but is only now getting recognized for what it is. Games have grabbed a bigger share of the entertainment market because they’re sticky. They get people to come back over and over in a way that ordinary ads or marketing programs do not. (Pictured right: Zichermann).

The book begins with a couple of telling anecdotes. One relates how one of Zichermann’s former bosses in the ad industry just didn’t understand the point of marketing to gamers. Another shows how the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates commercials — advertising the launch of Windows 7 — failed horribly in winning over audiences. The authors say that the failure of these commercials harkens the death of traditional ads.

Brands are starting to catch on. The old way of reaching people through 30-second commercials isn’t working anymore because people are skipping commercials with their digital video recorders. And a new generation of young people isn’t watching TV at all. About 80 percent of these youths are playing video games, so they are naturally amenable to game-related motivations, such as competitive leaderboards, enhanced status in a community, or achievement points. They are a generation that looks at things like and wonder why it wasn’t designed more like a game. One example: a leaderboard inspired Brazilians to boost their usage of the Orkut social network so their country could be the top of the leaderboard. As a result, Google’s Orkut is the No. 1 social network in Brazil, not Facebook.

Some of this is basic psychology. If you put up a velvet rope and create a VIP area in a bar, people will want to get into it. They will be nice to the host and offer bigger tips if they can get the better service and status associated with being a VIP. The bar makes more money and can charge higher prices in the VIP area. The fundamental product, alcohol, is still the same. The marketing of the product is what changes, and that’s what companies should realize, says Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners. (Pictured right: Linder).

Part of the problem with today’s marketing is that marketers grew up thinking that brands should be inserted into games as commercial breaks. And game companies grew up thinking that their games were only for hardcore players. But now the growth of the mass market for games means those lines are blurring. Zichermann and Lindner say that the marketers should realize that the BRAND CAN BE THE GAME. In this melding, game experts can lend their expertise to the brand marketers, who in turn can help the game companies reach the non-gaming masses.

An example is the NBC trivia game, iCue. For years, NBC wanted to find out how to make money from its archive of videos. No one was watching them. Then NBC created a video trivia game where players had to guess a movie’s details based on watching a clip. The result was a sticky application with 100,000 users per month.

This book rests on the shoulders of others that have come before it, such as Changing the Game by David Edery and Ethan Mollick, and Total Engagement by Bryon Reeves and J. Leighton Read. Both of those games argue the same case as Game-Based Marketing, though with different examples about how to turn work into fun.

One of the common examples that comes in all of the books is America’s Army, the online combat game created by the U.S. Army as a recruiting tool to reach young people who grew up playing video games. America’s Army costs very little to run, but it has had a huge impact in educating youths about the ways of the Army. Nike, Coca-Cola, Mary Kay Cosmetics and lots of other companies are sharing in the fun by designing Funware.

The fact that other books have come before this one suggests that thesis of the book is part of a larger movement. The ideas that were once considered radical are now becoming an accepted canon. Bunchball, founded by entrepreneur Rajat Paharia, is actively helping brands to game-ify their web sites.

But Zichermann and Linder point out out that some of the pioneering ideas behind Funware are, in fact, really old. They were embedded in the old Green Stamps program where you could earn stamps by making purchases at participating stores and then redeeming the stamps for merchandise. The germs of the Funware idea were also in the first frequent flyer program created by American Airlines in 1981. And they were part of addictive nature of slot machines in Las Vegas and sweepstakes contests as well.

That gets us to the good thing about this book. People who know games should read it because they’ll learn about other industries which have already done what the game marketers want to achieve. And people who know brand marketing should read this for the new tips that the game companies have created to hook users. I must admit I got sleepy when I read so much about frequent flyer programs, but I also learned a lot that I didn’t know.

Game makers may think that they have learned all of the ropes, but the research in the book shows they would do well to study the effects that rewards programs have on users. The Boy Scouts, for instance, figured out that giving out low-cost badges instead of big monetary awards was more than enough to keep young boys motivated. Indeed, in everything from sweepstakes to reality TV, it is a fact that large prizes are not required to encourage continuous engagement and loyalty. And the game makers may have to watch out. As the designers of social networks have figured out, it is possible to create an experience such as Facebook that is possibly more fun than games. It’s also worth noting that gamers will try to game any system; just ask Las Vegas casinos why they have huge security staffs devoted to cracking down on cheaters.

Meanwhile, the creators of loyalty programs at institutions such as McDonalds would do well to modify their contests to be replayable, as most games are, to inspire long-term loyalty. Why can’t the Internal Revenue Service create some incentives so that filling out your taxes is fun?

If the game makers and the brand experts get together, figure out how to create long-term brand loyalty through engagement, then everybody is going to make a pile of money.

Source - GamesBeat

Marketing To The Other Senses: Sound

Consider this: 83% of all the advertising communication we’re exposed to daily focuses almost exclusively on the sense of sight. So what about the rest of our senses? In the 70s, marketers we’re fixated on jingles and it paid off considering most baby boomers can hum a brand tune from their younger days. The following is a look at some of the most addictive sounds in the world, both branded and unbranded. The question is: do jingles and “sound marketing” have a role in today’s marketing landscape?

You're probably among the millions who have experienced it: driving in a car, listening to the radio, and suddenly this song comes on. It is not just any song--this was your favorite song when you were a teenager. As the first few notes strike up, you're transported back in time. Everything is so vivid, and your mind wanders to parties, first kisses and sweaty palms. It's as if time stands still and you suddenly realize that for the entire duration of the song, you haven't seen a single thing on the road.

There's no doubt about it, sound is immensely powerful. And yet 83% of all the advertising communication we're exposed to daily (bearing in mind that we will see two million TV commercials in a single lifetime) focuses, almost exclusively, on the sense of sight. That leaves just 17% for the remaining four senses. Think about how much we rely on sound. It confirms a connection when dialing or texting on cell phones and alerts us to emergencies. When the sound was removed from slot machines in Las Vegas, revenue fell by 24%. Experiments undertaken in restaurants show that when slow music (slower than the rhythm of a heartbeat) is played, we eat slower--and we eat more!

Is this just coincidence, or does sound make us buy more, want more, dream more and eat more? Any 50-year-old American can sing a whole range of television jingles from the 1970s--they are all well stored in the recesses of our brain. Yet if you were to ask the same of those who have come of age recently, you will find them stumped. Has the magic of a television tune disappeared, or has the advertising world lost sight of the fact that people do indeed have speakers at home? I decided to put these questions to the test.

Buyology Inc. and Elias Arts, a sound identity company in New York, wired up 50 volunteers and measured their galvanic, pupil, and brainwave responses to sounds using the latest neuroscience-based research methods. We learned that sound has remarkable power. This may not be surprising for many, but it was certainly surprising to realize just how many commercial brands over the past 20 years have made their way into the world's 10 most powerful and addictive sounds--beating some of the most familiar and comforting sounds of nature.

---

Quiz: Can You Guess The World's Most Addictive Sounds?

---

Forget the sound of the waves or the songs of birds, they didn't even make the top 10. But the jingle advertising a computer chip, and object which most of us have never even seen, took the prominent second spot in our brains in terms of addiction. We strongly respond to the sound of Intel! This tells us that repetition is the key, since most of us can't even sing it. What this tells us is that there's no limit to this phenomenon, because a computer chip doesn't really have a sound.

The third most powerful sound is just over 10 years old, and yet it had such a profound effect on our volunteers that as soon as they hear it, they remove their headsets and check their bags for their vibrating cell phone. When we switch our phone into silent mode, we think it cannot be heard. But the vibration has its own sound, and almost immediately the test subjects stopped whatever they were doing to attend to their phones. It's hardly surprising that the Blackberry has been dubbed a CrackBerry--even President Obama is hooked.

Psychologically speaking, this is not a happy discovery. Recent studies show that the first thing we do when we wake is check our BlackBerry. Going to the bathroom, brushing our teeth and eating breakfast takes a back seat. Increasingly people sleep beside their phones--that message that arrives at 4.00am, is now a priority! Even though the sound of a vibrating phone has taken second place to a baby's giggles, it seems that in just over a decade technology now provides the predominant sounds of daily life.

As marketers become more aware of the power of sound, it will be used to increase brand recognition in increasingly sophisticated ways. It's just a matter of time before our brains hear sizzling steaks, newly lit cigarettes and sparkling sodas, and immediately register them as Outback, Marlboro and Dr. Pepper.

THE MOST ADDICTIVE SOUNDS IN THE WORLD

Non-branded and branded sounds:
1. Baby giggle
2. Intel
3. Vibrating phone
4. ATM / cash register
5. National Geographic
6. MTV
7. T-Mobile Ringtone
8. McDonald's
9. 'Star Spangled Banner'
10. State Farm

Top 10 Branded sounds:
1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald's
7. State Farm
8. AT&T Ringtone
9. Home Depot
10 Palm Treo Ringtone

Top 10 Non-branded sounds:
1. Baby giggle
2. Vibrating phone
3. ATM / cash register
4. "Star Spangled Banner"
5. Sizzling steak
6. 'Hail to the Chief'
7. Cigarette light and inhale
8. "Wedding March"
9. "Wish Upon a Star"
10. Late Night with David Letterman Theme

Source - Fast Company

TMI

Strategists love data for the simple reason that it generates insights based on fact. Despite being a creative industry, marketers root their strategies on very objective elements. The digital era has provided marketers access to a level of information never imaginable only a few years ago. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into human behaviour and hold governments to account but what happens when there’s just too way much? The following is a look at the macro and micro changes resulting from data overload.

When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry,” he says.

“We are at a different period because of so much information,” says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.

Epistemologically speaking, information is made up of a collection of data and knowledge is made up of different strands of information. But this special report uses “data” and “information” interchangeably because, as it will argue, the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart. Given enough raw data, today’s algorithms and powerful computers can reveal new insights that would previously have remained hidden.

The business of information management—helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data—is growing by leaps and bounds. In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

More of everything

There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools. For example, there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world’s 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.

Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information. Between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class. As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information growth, notes Mr Cortada. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well. “Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement,” says Sinan Aral, a business professor at New York University. Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down, he explains. Researchers are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level.

The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore’s law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months. The software programs are getting better too. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, reckons that the improvements in the algorithms driving computer applications have played as important a part as Moore’s law for decades.

A vast amount of that information is shared. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.

People have long groused that they were swamped by information. Back in 1917 the manager of a Connecticut manufacturing firm complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent.” Yet what is happening now goes way beyond incremental growth. The quantitative change has begun to make a qualitative difference.

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. “What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level,” says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. “Every day I wake up and ask, ‘how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?” says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.

Sophisticated quantitative analysis is being applied to many aspects of life, not just missile trajectories or financial hedging strategies, as in the past. For example, Farecast, a part of Microsoft’s search engine Bing, can advise customers whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 225 billion flight and price records. The same idea is being extended to hotel rooms, cars and similar items. Personal-finance websites and banks are aggregating their customer data to show up macroeconomic trends, which may develop into ancillary businesses in their own right. Number-crunchers have even uncovered match-fixing in Japanese sumo wrestling.

Dross into gold

“Data exhaust”—the trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted—is becoming a mainstay of the internet economy. One example is Google’s search engine, which is partly guided by the number of clicks on an item to help determine its relevance to a search query. If the eighth listing for a search term is the one most people go to, the algorithm puts it higher up.

As the world is becoming increasingly digital, aggregating and analysing data is likely to bring huge benefits in other fields as well. For example, Mr Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, sit on a presidential task force to reform American health care. “Early on in this process Eric and I both said: ‘Look, if you really want to transform health care, you basically build a sort of health-care economy around the data that relate to people’,” Mr Mundie explains. “You would not just think of data as the ‘exhaust’ of providing health services, but rather they become a central asset in trying to figure out how you would improve every aspect of health care. It’s a bit of an inversion.”

To be sure, digital records should make life easier for doctors, bring down costs for providers and patients and improve the quality of care. But in aggregate the data can also be mined to spot unwanted drug interactions, identify the most effective treatments and predict the onset of disease before symptoms emerge. Computers already attempt to do these things, but need to be explicitly programmed for them. In a world of big data the correlations surface almost by themselves.

Sometimes those data reveal more than was intended. For example, the city of Oakland, California, releases information on where and when arrests were made, which is put out on a private website, Oakland Crimespotting. At one point a few clicks revealed that police swept the whole of a busy street for prostitution every evening except on Wednesdays, a tactic they probably meant to keep to themselves.

But big data can have far more serious consequences than that. During the recent financial crisis it became clear that banks and rating agencies had been relying on models which, although they required a vast amount of information to be fed in, failed to reflect financial risk in the real world. This was the first crisis to be sparked by big data—and there will be more.

The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. At the turn of the 20th century new flows of information through channels such as the telegraph and telephone supported mass production. Today the availability of abundant data enables companies to cater to small niche markets anywhere in the world. Economic production used to be based in the factory, where managers pored over every machine and process to make it more efficient. Now statisticians mine the information output of the business for new ideas.

“The data-centred economy is just nascent,” admits Mr Mundie of Microsoft. “You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now.” This special report will point to where it is beginning to surface.

Source - The Economist