A Pricing Lesson From Restaurants

This post is short, sweet and provides a nugget of insight into pricing. Based on research by the folks at Neuromarketing, it turns out that the symbol/format used to communicate the price of certain good can have an affect on consumer behaviour.

My last Neuromarketing post, Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology, talked about various things restaurant menu engineers do to maximize sales and profits. I think it’s worth calling special attention to one aspect touched on in that post: how price presentation affects sales. Not, the price itself, which of course is very important, but the way the price is displayed to the diner.

A study by Sybil S. Yang, Sheryl E. Kimes Ph.D., and Mauro M. Sessarego of Cornell University, $ or Dollars: Effects of Menu-price Formats on Restaurant Checks, looked at several common restaurant price display techniques:

• Numerical with Dollar Sign: $12.00
• Numerical without Dollar Sign or Decimals: 12.
• Written: twelve dollars

The researchers expected that the written/scripted prices would perform best, but they found that the guests with the simple numeral prices spent significantly more than the other two groups.

To me, this seems to be consistent with research that shows the subliminal effect of currency symbols. Subjects exposed to subtle currency symbols (e.g., a poster or a screensaver while “waiting” for the experiment to begin) showed less willingness to help others and actually positioned their chairs farther apart from other subjects than those who saw neutral symbols like fish. (See Thinking About Money.)

For those in the restaurant business, the implication is obvious: get rid of the dollar signs. But other businesses might boost their sales by the same techique – simple prices, no currency symbols, and as little as possible to trigger the “money effect” in people’s brains.

Source - Neuromarketing

Not Another Article On Social Media

Well that’s a lie. The title should have been “the best article on social media we’ve read in a long time”. We realized we’ve shared a lot of content about building social media plans but this one is by far the best. This article provides a wealth of knowledge as it explains the ten steps towards integrating social media into business. Watch out, 2010 is a big year.

An overnight success ten years in the making, social media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. In speaking with many executives and entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment often hinges on corporate culture and specific marketplace conditions. Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike.

Here are the ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the road to full social media integration.

STEP 1: Observe & Report

This is the entry point for businesses to better understand the behavior of an interactive marketplace.

Listening: Employ listening devices such as Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Radian6 (), and PR Newswire’s Social Media Metrics to track conversations and instances associated with key words.

Reporting: Distill existing social media conversations into an executive report. This early form of reporting is merely designed to provide decision makers with the information they’ll need for continued exploration of social media and its potential impact on business.

STEP 2: Setting The Stage & Dress Rehersal

Once the initial intelligence is gathered, businesses will set the stage for social media participation. This is an interesting phase, as it often joins Stage 1 as a more comprehensive first step. Instead of researching the best ways to engage, many businesses create accounts across multiple social networks and publish content without a plan or purpose.

However, those businesses that conduct research will find a rewarding array of options and opportunities to target.

Presence: Create official presences across one or more social networks, usually Twitter () and possibly Facebook () (Fan Pages), YouTube (), and Flickr (). Early on, this is often experimental, and less about strategic engagement.

Analysis: Review activity for frequency (the rate of mentions), the state of sentiment allocation, traffic, as well as the size of connections (friends, followers, fans, etc.). Provide managers with a limited glimpse into the effects of presence and participation.

STEP 3: Socializing Media

The next stage in the evolution of a new media business is the proverbial step towards “joining the conversation.”

As companies take the stage, they will eventually pay attention to the reaction of the audience in order to respond and improve content, define future engagements, and humanize communication.

Conversation: Representative of an early form of participation, this stage usually evokes reactive engagement based on the nature of existing dialogue or mentions and also incorporates the proactive broadcasting of activity, events and announcements.

Rapid Response: Listen for potentially heated, viral, and emotional activity in order to extinguish a potential crisis or fan the flames of positive support.

Metrics: Document the aforementioned activity in order to demonstrate momentum. This is usually captured in the form of friends, fans, followers, conversations, sentiment, mentions, traffic, and reach.

STEP 4: Finding A Voice And A Sense Of Purpose

This is a powerful milestone in the maturation of new media and business. By not only listening, but hearing and observing the responses and mannerisms of those who define our markets, we can surface pain points, source ideas, foster innovation, earn inspiration, learn, and feel a little empathy in order to integrate a sense of purpose into our socialized media programs.

Research: Review activity for public sentiment, including negative and neutral commentary. Observe trends in responses and ultimately behavior. This allows for a poignant understanding of where to concentrate activity, at what level, and with what voice across marketing, sales, service, and PR.

Strategic Visibility: Introduce relevance and focus. You don’t have to be everywhere in order to create presence, just in the places where you would be missed. Understanding that the social web is far more extensive than Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, brand managers search across the entire web to locate where influential dialogue transpires.

Relevance: “Chatter” or aimless broadcasting is not as effective as strategic communications and engagement. This stage reflects the exploration of goals, objectives, and value implementation. Companies begin to learn that exchange is based on trust and loyalty.

STEP 5: Turning Words Into Action

Actions speak louder than words. Businesses must act. Once the door to social consciousness is opened, bring the spirit of your company through it to affect change.

Empathy: Social media personifies companies. It allows us to see who it is we’re hoping to reach, and what motivates them. Listening and observing is not enough. The ability to truly understand someone, their challenges, objectives, options, and experiences allows us to better connect with them.

STEP 6: Humanizing The Brand & Giving It A Purpose

As Doc Searls says, “There is no market for messages.” Indeed. Through the internalization of sentiment, brands will relearn how to speak. No longer will we focus on controlling the message from conception to documentation to distribution. We lose control as our messages are introduced into the real world. Our story migrates from consumer to consumer. This chain forms a powerful connection that reveals true reactions, perception, and perspectives.

The conversations that bind us form a human algorithm that serves as the pulse of awareness, trustworthiness, and emotion.

The Humanization of the Brand: Once we truly understand the people who influence our markets, we need to establish a persona worthy of attention and affinity. A socialized version of a branding style guide is necessary.

Experience: Our experience in dynamic social ecosystems teaches us that online activity must not only maintain a sense of purpose, it must also direct traffic and shape perceptions. We question our current online properties, landing pages, processes, and messages. We usually find that the existing architecture leads people from a very vibrant and interactive experience (social networks) to a static dead end (our web sites). As we attempt to redefine the experience of new customers, prospects and influencers, we essentially induce a brand makeover.

STEP 7: Community

Community is an investment in the cultivation and fusion of affinity, interaction, advocacy and loyalty. Learned earlier in the stages of new media adoption, community isn’t established with the creation of a social profile. Community is earned and fortified through shared experiences. It takes commitment. As Kathy Sierra once said, “Trying to replace ‘brand’ with ‘conversation’ does a disservice to both brands & conversations.”

Community Building/Recruitment: While we are building community through engagement in each of the previous stages, we will proactively reach out to ideal participants and potential ambassadors. We become social architects, and build the roads necessary to lead customers to a rich and rewarding network, full of valuable information and connections.

Purpose: The shift from simple response to purposeful, strategic communication will be mutually beneficial. It is in this stage that we can truly produce captivating content and messages. In order to hold it, we have to give the audience something to believe in — something that moves them.

Step 8: Social Darwanism

Listening and responding is only as effective as its ability to inspire transformation, improvement, and adaptation from the inside out. Survival does not hinge solely on a company’s social media strategy. The social element is but one part of an overall integrated strategy. It’s how we learn and adapt that ensures our place within the evolution of our markets.

Social Media as embraced in the earlier stages is not scalable. The introduction of new roles will beget the restructuring of teams and workflow, which will ultimately necessitate organizational transformation to support effective engagement, production, and the ongoing evolution towards ensuring brand and product relevance.

Adaptation: In order to truly compete for the future, artful listening, community building, and advocacy must align with an organization’s ability to adapt and improve its products, services, and policies. In order for any team to collaborate well externally, it must first foster collaboration within. It is this interdepartmental cooperative exchange that provides a means for which to pursue sincere engagement over time.

Organizational Transformation: The internal reorganization of teams and processes to support a formal Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM) program will become imperative. As social media chases ubiquity, we learn that influence isn’t relegated to one department or function within an organization. Any department affected by external activity will eventually socialize. Therefore, an integrated and interconnected network of brand ambassadors must work internally to ensure that the brand is responding to constructive instances, by department. However, at the departmental and brand level, successful social media marketing will require governance and accountability. Organizational transformation will gravitate towards a top-down hierarchy of policy, education, and empowerment across the entire organization.

Step 9: The Socialization Of Business Processes

Multiple disciplines and departments will socialize, and the assembly or adaptation of infrastructure is required to streamline and manage social workflow.

Social CRM (sCRM): Scalability, resources, and efficiencies will require support, resulting in a modified or completely new infrastructure that either augments or resembles a CRM-like workflow. Combining technology, principles, philosophies and processes, sCRM establishes a value chain that fosters relationships within traditional business dynamics. As an organization evolves through engagement, sCRM will transform into SRM — the recognition that all people, not just customers, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence.

Step 10: Business Performance Metrics

Inevitably, we report to executives who may be uninterested in transparency or authenticity. Their goal, and job, is to steer the company toward greater profits. In order to measure the true effects of social media, we need the numbers behind the activity –- at every level.

While many experts argue that there is no need to measure social engagement (much the way that some companies don’t explicitly define the ROI of Superbowl ads or billboards), make no mistake: Social is measurable, and the process of mining data tied to our activity is extremely empowering. Our ambition to excel should be driven through the inclusion of business performance metrics, with or without an executive asking us to do so. It’s the difference between visibility and presence. And in the attention economy, presence is felt.

ROI: Without an understanding of the volume, locations, and nature of online interaction, the true impact of our digital footprint and its relationship to the bottom line of any business is impossible to assess. An immerssive view of our social media goals and objectives allows us to truly measure ROI. Stage 10 reveals the meaning and opportunity behind the numbers and allows us to identify opportunities for interaction, direction, and action.

Conclusion

There is a great distance between where we are today, and where we need to be. Our work in 2010 will be dedicated to narrowing the social chasm.

The thing about social media is that it’s always new, and as such, these stages represent a moment in time. They will continue to evolve and expand with new technologies and experiences.

In the end, social media is a privilege and a tool — one more opportunity to run a more meaningful and relevant business.

Source - Mashables

R.I.P Corporate Website

Corporate website have always had a hard time. For some, it was a question of providing consumers with a reason for visiting their brand page. For others, it was too much work to maintaining their sites and content. The good news is that your corporate website is now obsolete. It’s official - now come find out why.

In the not too distant future static corporate websites will be replaced by their social equivalents.

This will happen because more and more consumers are engaged in daily conversations, often involving brands, across multiple applications, platforms and networks, wholly independent of these sites.

As these conversations become increasingly independent of these sites, falling traffic will render them ineffective in their current form. Instead, the online presence of each brand will necessarily expand out into the social space to stay in touch with their audience.

As a result, the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

Corporate sites will change in many ways:

1. They will be forced to constantly reconstitute themselves as a function of ever-shifting dialogue with consumers. (Have you ever noticed how every time you re-do your website, as soon as you’re done, you have to re-do it again because technology and conversations have moved on? It’s just like that and isn’t going to change).

2. The compass for a brand in this shifting marketplace will be its core values and purpose. The strict definition, execution and adherence to values allows for a brand to move and morph without cannibalizing itself.

3. Corporate sites will serve as launch pads for outreach rather than destinations for inbound interest. Their main role will be to constantly engage consumers in conversation (wherever that is occurring) and actively damage control any mishaps in brand messaging.

4. Information will no longer sit idly in corporate sites waiting for visitors. Rather, it will constantly flow through moving conversations in the social space.

5. Corporate sites will have no beginning or end. They will live, breathe and die in conversation. As such the online hub of a brand will be distributed rather than centralized in a site.

6. The focus of brand awareness at any given moment (specific to the brand at large, a product launch, or some larger conversation to which it is relevant) will be a moving target driven by conversation flow, engagement levels, technology tools and context.

7. Brands will no longer be places to visit but people you meet on the road. By this I mean consumers will intersect with brands at different points in the day, wherever they are, often indirectly and unexpectedly, rather than a destination they consciously visit.

8. A brand manager’s job will become that of the social officer, facilitating as many moments of authentic interaction with consumers each day as possible. As such, part of their job will be understanding where to find their customers and how to help them find the brand.

9. Control isn’t what it used to be. In a consumer-driven marketplace the tension between granular data/ROI and consumer-focused messaging will be greater than ever. Brands will have to rethink how they measure success for these new distributed sites looking to attention and engagement rather than number of visitors or click throughs.

10. As community becomes more mobile, consumers will increasingly be defined by where they are. As a result, brands will be everywhere all at once and constantly on the move to stay in touch with consumers.

Steve Rubel tweeted this weekend that his big takeaway from CES was that “wireless and social are getting embedded into every device”. To paraphrase Ben Harper, “When consumers lead, brands should follow” and this includes their websites.

How is your brand reaching out into the social space? What other changes do you expect?

Source: Mainwaring Blog

Where Digital Marketing Is Heading in 2010

In 2010, your efficiency as a marketer will be hindered if you aren’t fully committed to understanding digital environments. Whether you like it or not, you need to have a strong understanding of the ever-evolving digital space. Take a read through these insightful predictions about digital environments in 2010 and what brands need to do to have a meaningful existence.

In our discussions about what will happen in the digital marketing industry during the next 12 months, one overarching trend emerged: The basic rules of brand building are just as important for innovations in the digital space as they are for traditional forms of communication.

Using new technology won't in itself bring success; your digital communications still need to be creative, engaging and relevant if they are to cut it during the second decade of this century. Here are the first five of our top 10 trends for 2010.

Online display: Don't be blinded by the shiny and new.
In 2010, advertisers will experiment with new, larger ad formats. These formats may be initially attractive because they are different, but the basics of brand building beyond awareness shouldn't be ignored. Most of the new formats perform very well in the short term. Dynamic Logic has previously reported the high performance (brand impact) of video ads when they were first introduced. They found that video ad performance, relative to average ad performance, declined over a two year period following introduction as the novelty wore off. We'd expect this to be true for most of the new, larger ad formats and their progeny.

Ultimately, over the next several years only the fittest for these larger formats will survive. If they prove too intrusive, they may make people less favorable toward the advertised brand or the website on which they are served. Other advertisers and agencies will use these formats more cautiously, taking note of creative best practices gleaned from prior work.

Viral video will move from art to science.
As online video consumption continues to rise, advertisers increasingly value viral viewings as a clear and visible sign that their campaigns are engaging audiences. In response, viral video analytics are becoming sophisticated. YouTube has enhanced its video analytics offer, and companies such as Visible Measures and Unruly Media are providing comprehensive viral monitoring services across multiple online video platforms.

This information will fuel a more scientific approach to viral campaign planning. Rather than just place videos online and hope an audience will come, advertisers will invest in viral seeding strategies. They'll promote their videos via online influencers, Facebook video-sharing applications and targeted, paid placements. Advertisers will also become smarter about developing and selecting ads with the most viral video potential before they employ the seeding. A recent calibration exercise for Millward Brown's Link pre-test, for example, identified the creative factors which explain most of the variation seen in levels of viral viewing.

While there are likely to still be more misses than hits in the viral space, the opportunity of being next year's T-Mobile "Dance" or Evian's roller babies is something many marketers will plan for.

Gaming gets more social and mobile.
The ability to access Twitter and Facebook from the Xbox game system is one sign console gaming is becoming a lot more social. Games such as "Uncharted 2" already allow you to tweet your progress from within the game and we anticipate seeing these features implemented in more games. Microsoft's Project Natal promises to bring even more interactivity to gaming by supplanting controllers with your actual body movements, improving immensely on a model created by Nintendo. Perhaps the most promising and category-busting idea appears to be OnLive, a games-on-demand service that allows you to play any console or PC game on your TV or computer, without the need for a console at all.

Gaming's reach is already significant -- "Modern Warfare 2" is the biggest entertainment launch ever -- but the social elements are going to make the growth exponential. The proliferation of mobile games such as Doodle Jump for the iPhone, which allows the user to interact with other players, brings gaming to the masses.

Dynamic Logic's research has already shown that gaming can be very effective in increasing brand metrics. As interactivity increases and gaming becomes ubiquitous, we expect more advertisers to enter this space. For example, in the fall of 2010, Disney will launch "Epic Mickey" for the Nintendo Wii, the first major communication vehicle for a significant repositioning of this much-loved global brand.

Mobile takes a bite out of online.
According to the Mobile Marketing Association, total U.S. spend on mobile marketing will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010. Google's $750 million purchase of mobile ad network Admob reinforces that 2010 will be a significant year for mobile. We expect to see more consolidation in the mobile space.

With Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry platforms making the smartphone choices more attractive to consumers and cost of access slowly coming down, mobile web usage numbers will increase. The iPhone alone has now reached 57 million units worldwide, the fastest uptake in the history of technology. The real innovation will be increased adoption of the next-generation mobile browsers that will make the mobile web look and feel more like the applications we know today.

While web-based mobile, despite its growth, still only reaches a relatively small number of people, this niche audience can be particularly attractive to some brands and we've seen many targeting successes. Mobile provides the ability to target by site, phone model, demographics and location, all of which can be useful to advertisers. In addition, Dynamic Logic's normative advertising effectiveness data already suggests that mobile is two to five times better at driving brand metrics than online, and we expect this differential to remain consistent in 2010.

All of this means that mobile may well start to take ad dollars which would previously have been spent online. Since it's a new medium, there remains some consumer resistance to mobile advertising, so we advertisers will initially favor the soft-sell approach of providing useful content in this space, rather than pushing hard-sell messaging.

Here I am. Over here!
The promise that technology would enable automated direct-marketing messages to be pushed to consumers with GPS-enabled mobile devices has yet to come to fruition. Consumers are understandably reluctant to broadcast their location randomly or to be interrupted by unexpected messages without their consent. Instead we're seeing a variety of innovative solutions created to facilitate geo-targeting of marketing messages (when in-aisle, in-store or in-proximity) as the number of GPS-enabled devices continues to rise.

Services such as the mobile game FourSquare contain a social-media element that allows users to broadcast their location to a network of friends and other users in their respective cities. The social element of this voluntary disclosure has allowed marketers to tap into an engaged network of users and offer special promotions based on reported location. We expect FourSquare and other apps with a hybrid location/social-networking component to grow significantly in 2010.

We also expect to see utility-focused location applications gain popularity on GPS-enabled mobile devices during 2010. ComScore has reported that 11% of their mobile panel is currently using map or direction-based applications on their devices, representing 41% year-on-year growth and potentially stealing market share from standalone GPS devices. How these applications are eventually monetized remains to be seen, but the "Minority Report" scenario of "push" location-based advertising is starting to become a reality through voluntary user disclosure of location.

Even if consumers won't share their location with brands, brands can share their locations with consumers. In this vein, marketers will increasingly make location a feature of their campaigns, as the recent Levi's Twitter promotion in Australia demonstrates.

Search evolves, but not everyone notices.
As marketing budgets remain under intense pressure, search will do well thanks to its clear and measurable short-term ROI. In 2010 search will become more relevant and efficient for users. The arrival of Bing has intensified competition between the major search engines, who will develop and experiment with new features such as vertical searches and more visual integration. For example, Google may adopt Bing's handy "more on this page" hover-over feature. But most consumers will continue to prefer a simple experience, and so more complex new features will be used by just a small minority of users.

Social media will affect search in two ways. Firstly, search will become increasingly real-time as users take advantage of Google and Bing search results, including Twitter and Facebook updates, or use Twitter search as a standalone application. Secondly, the meshing of search and social will be embodied by the arrival of Google's Social Search option, where you can see the information posted by people within your online social circle.

Major search providers, including Google, MSN and Yahoo are all focusing heavily on the new .mobi search domain. Travel and hospitality brands in particular will be interested in this new development as it fits well with the behavior of their target customers. Rapidly improving mobile applications such as map-based search and Google Goggles' picture-based search will encourage more consumers to search on the move.

We also expect research to continue into the interaction between search and display advertising. The influences between them are well established, but we expect experimentation to increase as more advertisers appreciate the branding role of search and the search influence of display, and then try to optimize this relationship for their brands.

Brands will realize online video is not a panacea.
Online video advertising continues to grow at a high rate, and we expect this trend to continue into 2010. Beyond the PC, online video is increasingly being watched via gaming consoles (eg. Xbox360) and mobile devices such as the iPhone. Developments in the sector will be driven largely by competition among major industry players such as Hulu and YouTube. Hulu, the ad-supported premium content site, has been growing fast, and some analysts estimate it accounts for 20% of all online video spend. YouTube still has a far higher number of viewers, and is incorporating increasing volumes of premium, long-form content from providers such as MGM, BBC, CBS and Lionsgate.

YouTube is also increasingly embracing short (15 second) pre-rolls and skippable video ads. Learning from the latter suggests that creative content plays a greater role in online video success than we see on TV. Content in the online space faces competition for user attention, thereby increasing the importance of creative ad quality -- this should lead more smart advertisers to pre-test their online creative before investing in relatively high online CPMs. Dynamic Logic has found that effectiveness may be tapering off as the "novelty" of online video fades and advertisers realize that the platform in itself is not the answer.

Video advertising can be highly effective when used well, with strong brand integration and entertaining content. In an effort to maintain impact and drive further engagement, advertisers will continue to experiment with extra layers of interactivity beyond standard pre-rolls -- such as one-third clickable overlays, expanding, interactive companion banners and interactive in-video elements. As they do this, advertisers need to be sure they aren't using technology just because they can: It will only be effective when it is relevant to the brand or the message.

Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.
If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

Everyone has a social graph. In fact, the point of social networking has been to build one. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move away from the "destination web" towards a "social web" whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook's new "reconnect with" feature is one implementation of social graph data.

The social graph needs two kinds of tool to work. At the service end, it needs algorithms -- the formulae that use your graph to determine what information and connections you value most, which allows services to predict what information you're going to like (including, of course, which products and marketing communications you'll appreciate). At the user end, it needs filters -- the ability to group people and information more effectively to get the most out of a network. The effectiveness of both algorithms and filters are improving rapidly, and these will be a big factor in the continued evolution of social media.

In 2010 there will be a heightened need for brands to understand how to be more social in order to access these more segmented networks. There's increasing evidence that the ROI of social media is definitely worth the effort.

Integration trend stimulated by privacy concerns.
We are in the midst of a shift (powered by digital) where information flows side to side as much as from top down or bottom up. This means that the act of consumers talking to one other now has a rightful place within the circle of influential communications that shape brands.

There are some unique rules of engagement in accessing that communication. If marketers and researchers want to be able to tap into the huge amounts of rich, accurate, and timely information that consumers themselves generate, they have to think beyond traditional paradigms.

The next 12 months will continue the "privacy by design" movement whereby consumer privacy and user control will become more important for those seeking to understand consumer behavior. Privacy elements will therefore need to be integrated into consumer generated platforms. This will naturally lead to a land grab where parties join forces e.g. a market research company and a social network provider, so that the transition between the platform and the third party collecting data become seamless.

We will also see a continuation of media convergence. The aggressive nature of regulatory regimes means a global privacy standards framework will become vital. A global framework will allow for a more uniform application of notice and consumer consent regardless of platform. This should allow for greater transparency, but will place a premium on the key partnerships that are given permission to be part of reduced set of data collectors and processors.

Data integration enables insightful 'tradigital' learning.
During 2009, digital marketing became increasingly complex and marketers have been looking for more guidance about where to advertise, what size of creative to deploy and which tools to use, from display to CRM to search to social networks and mobile.

Moving forward, the definition will change from managing "digital" to managing "tradigital" as the lines of demarcation between traditional and digital media blur. Media consumption patterns are driving this blurring of the boundaries, as TV viewing is either delayed or online; magazines offer integration of content in print and digital form; and online activities are leveraged for both online and offline sales goals.

This means that data integration will remain at the heart of our measurement challenge and will require a research platform linking many data initiatives that mirror the integration of the technology that delivers the marketing messages.

Survey research will remain the primary tool for understanding branding effects and motivations across these platforms, but the deeper value-add to the marketer will be how the branding effects in surveys help explain the behavioral and sales information coming from a variety of sources including buzz monitoring, online behavior tracking, shopper loyalty databases, consumer sales panels and custom databases. While online listening techniques will continue to grow in importance, marketers will find this of limited value unless they also understand who is saying what.

Source - AdAge