Adscovery

We live in an irrational world. Everything from the stock market and consumer buying habits to people’s beliefs and their voting choice is irrational. As a marketer you have to navigate through this irrationality and fit your product in the mix. In other words, you have to accept the irrationality and make sense of it. And that’s where we come in picture.

At an individual level its complete chaos. Even looking at a few dozen maintains the chaos. The chaos normalizes when you take tens of thousands of consumers and their hundreds of thousands of conversations. What emerges out of this exercise is something really beautiful. You get strong patterns that define your consumers, what matters to them and influences them to make decisions in their lives.

The basic idea is to understand your consumers. Develop products that they want. Speak to them in the language they speak. That’s how you will decode the irrationality and become a part of their world.

MavenMagnet conducted a study in partnership with The Economic Times published on February 27, 2016. Here’s the link to the study.

I recently spent a lot of time in an airplane coast to coast. While typically it is a great way for me to catch-up on my sleep, this trip happened to be a day time thing and I was not very sleepy. So while counting hours to land and thinking of better ways to convince prospective clients to use MavenMagnet services, I realized how being in this box makes doing research outside the box (read use MavenMagnet) such a no-brainer.

Before I talk about the parallels, let’s set the landscape. Day trip flying for 4 hours, no entertainment set in the plane and no wi-fi. So what did this lead to? About 150 people in the plane with nothing to do but either sleep or read or talk. So while having a light conversation with a good looking girl sitting next to me, I was listening to people sitting around me. People were talking about everything from who will be the next president to what they will do if Donald Trump become the President to when will Apple have a new product that is not just a newer version of iPhone or iPad to why season one of House of Cards was so much better than season two.

This was nothing but a minuscule of what conversations on the Internet are and what MavenMagnet scrapes to do market research. No one was asking anyone to talk about a specific thing. The conversation on next president was triggered by a Time magazine cover. The Trump comment was courtesy of the last night Republican primary debate and polls following that. The Apple conversation was triggered by Apple stocks falling down. House of Cards came up as one of many TV shows as a reaction to Golden Globe nominees list.

The Internet is this times millions. People talking among themselves. People talking with people they probably don’t know but have common interests. The kind of insights you can get out of scraping human conversation in an unbiased and unobtrusive way has no parallel out there. What we have developed at MavenMagnet is a set of tools and techniques to parse, dissect and understand these conversations, products in these conversations and people having these conversations. Market research cannot get better than this!

Article as published in The Economic Times.

Standards is another great way to create a foundation for something that is sustainable and dependable. In simple words, standards is something that can provide a universal way to understand, measure or use something. Standards have been around for ever. Currency is a standard for doing monetary transactions, kilogram is a standard for measuring weight and meter is a standard for measuring distance. In technology industry, standards are basically Key Performance Indicators or KPI. The popular ones are Google page rank to measure the popularity of a website or Nielsen TV rating to measure the success of a TV show (or MavenMagnet Magnet Score to measure the impact of the elements of your campaign).

The most fundamental element of standards is trust. The way you are measuring something should be fair for mass adoption. Just like it takes a while to build trust, it takes a while for a measurement to become a standard. Another key property of standards is that it should be easy to understand, test and use. The way you calculate the KPI can be as sophisticated as you want, but it should be transparent enough to test and easy enough to report.

Like platforms, standards depend on adoption. The success and failure of standards is dependent on how widely it is adopted. For good or for bad, displacing a well established standard is as hard as anything can be creating yet another competitive advantage for the business and a great barrier to entry in the market.