A Taxonomy of Competitive Intelligence

I’ve been using a lot of mind mapping tools to develop Competitive Intelligence knowledge taxonomies lately, and I thought it might be fun to make a taxonomy of CI as a discipline. Attached here is my first, down and very dirty first pass, one that took all of 15 minutes, so don’t expect to be blown away by my penetrating insight

Taxonomy of Competive Intelligence

I developed this mindmap with input from colleagues on the Ning competitive intelligence community in this thread including Alan S. Michaels and Babette Bensoussan.  Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Jesper Martell and Daniel Thomasson at Comintell who taught me a great deal about the practical use of mind maps.

I created this map with the great SaaS app, MindMeister, but I’ve also been using a more robust commercial app called MindJet Mindmanager for actual client engagements.

The public URL for this is: http://www.mindmeister.com/18753652?password=editme with the oh-so-secure password being, “editme.” Feel free to mash/mix this as/if you like.

Personally, I think it would go well with a deep dub remix of Chaka Khan’s, “I Feel for You.”

“You’re innocent when you dream”

Sorry (to all five of my readers) that I’ve been away.  I’ve been off building a Rube Goldbergian Babbage Engine to generate project leads automagically.  It’s slower than I’d thought it would be; I didn’t factor in Antarctica.

Anyway, trolling metafilter today, as is my wont, I came across this post about new developments in recording cognitive processes, which is of course catnip to this faithless correspondent.  The thrust of the mefi post (containing many excellent links and MeFi’s always-stellar community commentary) is that researchers have been been able to recreate the actual imagery from “inside” a subject’s visual cortex.  Essentially, they reconstructed and viewed what the subject saw “inside their head.”  That is awesome in the true sense of the word.

There are, of course, no practical applications for this – yet.  But I’m concerned about the intersection of cognitive technology and ethics, particularly in security/law enforcement and marketing/sales.  Science like this gets misunderstood – this development in particular has been reported as a “dream recording machine” in the popular press .  I think, slowly, over time these sorts of misconceptions engender a kind of confidence in the technology itself that’s unwarranted.  And that faith in the technology itself can lead to abuse, as was the case in India where a person was convicted of a crime based on fMRI “evidence” or the TSA’s using microexpressions to “identify” potential terrorists.  People put up with this sort of thing because it’s science-based, but people don’t understand the difference between a validated and proven use of science and, well, essentially pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain stuff.

In terms of marketing and sales, we’re not at the point yet that technology can directly discern or mediate our cognitive processes (although there’s a few nascent attempts out there).  However, most of the barriers to employing technology to more directly influence our consumption – or even political opinion – are essentially scaling problems.  And if there’s one thing the history of technology teaches us, it’s that scaling problems are rarely insurmountable.  Already, a good qualitative researcher or CI practitioner can elicit astoundingly personal thoughts from a respondent, and advertising campaigns can sway opinion in entire demographics.  As market researchers, we’re already dealing with the ethics of probing people’s inner lives and using that to our client’s advantage; the ethical problems exist now.  But throwing cognitive technology into the mix- especially considering the public’s trust in technology and the dubious history of how such technology has been deployed – raises the stakes to truly Orwellian (or perhaps Huxleian?) heights.  As the distinction between our public and private actions becomes even more blurred, perhaps we should start thinking now about a potential blurring between our public and private thoughts.

(Apologies to Cheap Trick)

Surfing the Inflection Point

Yesterday I called USAA to cancel the auto insurance on a car I recently sold. As expected, my customer rep tried to interest me in another product near the end of the call. What was curious was that the product was called a, “Starter Emergency Account,” and it was so new (he said USAA rolled it out only this week) that it wasn’t listed on their website yet. Given that USAA is available only to active duty and retired military personnel and their dependents….

Is this the part where we all panic?

I’m joking, but certainly there is a a lot of unease here in New York, sharp for those in the financial sector, vague and undifferentiated for the rest of us. Despite my stint at Standard & Poor’s, I’m not really a financial services guy and don’t pretend to understand the present situation any better than any other layman. Still, most people seem to agree we’re at an inflection point, as Mr. Gibson would put it, and I think a lot of the unease comes from there being no clear resolution to our present set of economic, political, and military challenges. The fact we’re about to have an election doesn’t seem to be helping either.

Still, there is one meta-trend I’m betting will provide opportunity for marketing folks like me if we can get out ahead of the curve. That is this: American Exceptionalism, if not dead, will take a very long nap for the next few years, and our national identity will shift accordingly. Bigger will not be better, greed will not be good and competition will not be king. Rather, sustainability, community and cooperation will underly the coming zeitgeist. That may sound a little hippy-trippy, but I don’t think people will associate these values with progressive politics. I think they will adopt them partly out of necessity and partly because it’s a natural and perhaps cyclical reaction to the last 20 years. The change will be subtle, and I think few will alter their actual political opinions. But how, where and why people spend their money will change.

For example, whatever the outcome of the banking crisis, I think we’ll see a renewed emphasis on savings (here is a good example ) rather than on high yield investments. Likewise, with consumer products, rather than selling big-ticket items based on their sex appeal, I’m betting companies will do well to emphasize how durable, cost efficient or easily repaired they are. And above all, the trend towards people connecting through – and relying on the advice of – online and mobile communities will accelerate as people will become more risk adverse and seek trusted opinions on purchases and investments.

And I think we market researchers are uniquely posed to start highlighting the beginnings of these trends for our clients. So while the current issues we face are certainly serious and the future uncertain, I believe market research will come though this current period renewed and just as vital as ever.

Product Placement and Subtlety

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Sound Opinions, and the topic of product placements in pop songs (show #144, I think it was) came up in the context of some other discussion.  I found it interesting, and filed it away as something to look into another day.  Well, that’s today.  I just read this article in Wired (via boingboing) discussing how a “brand dropping” company, the Kluger Agency, accidentally offered to place the imaginary product of an anti-advertising organization in an upcoming CD release from a “major artist.”  Oops.

And indeed, much hilarity ensued.  Clearly, this was a mistake on several different levels.  The company Kluger Agency was pitching wasn’t a real company and the “company’s” product was imaginary.  But that made me wonder:  is it really that implausible to do a type of product placement for a product which doesn’t exist or in a format that wouldn’t ordinarily support it?  Could there be benefits to it?  It’s kind of been done before in reverse with the “I Love Bees” campaign and other well known viral marketing campaigns using “fake” games or video clips for an ultimately real product.

One of my favorite shows is the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. (OK, I’m a geek, but come on! Monotheistic cyborgs trying to kill or convert polytheistic humans with a neo-Steampunk aesthetic?  Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.)  I noticed recently on one episode the first instance of “product placement” I’ve ever seen in the series. There were two shots framed and timed exactly like a traditional product placement shot clearly showing the branding and logo of some imaginary weapons manufacturer on the telescopic sight of an assault rifle.  Then there is the shaving…bear with me…all the men are shown using brushes and traditional wet shaving techniques.

Sure, all of that is part of the show’s hyper-realist vibe.   But I can imagine that logo on the gun being the logo for a product yet to be launched, or perhaps just being very similar to an existing but largely under the radar logo.  And I can imagine some cool-hunting product managers at Giant Corporation X convincing their bosses to pay to show fictional men wet shaving because they are about to cash in on this recent trend by launching a new line of shaving cream designed for brushes.  That sort of back-to-the-past thing has worked before.

A show about people who have literally no contact with familiar brands seems like the last place to promote a product – although if you’re looking for subtlety and street cred, it might also be the best place.  Is that really any more far-fetched than product placements in main stream pop music or hiring models and actors to cruise upscale bars in big cities trying to be superinfluencers?

I suppose the question is:  is there a point where the subtlety of a product placement provides diminishing returns versus a more prominent placement?  Certainly, with pop music, artists are often very sensitive of selling out, and they should be:  it often makes their brand less valuable.  Likewise, most companies and especially “hip” or cutting edge ones are very careful with balancing their image against gains in mindshare.  But as advertising and product placement fades ever more into the background of our cultural gestalt, the most subtle approach may become the most effective, especially if recent findings in neuroscience indicating we make many decisions largely unconsciously are born out in the real world battlefield of sales and marketing.

Return of the Son of Freewill Part IV (in 3D): Synesthesia’s Revenge

Well, it’s not synesthesia per se. Oh…ok, it’s nothing like synesthesia at all (being a synesthete myself I’ll take any old excuse to expand people’s awareness of the phenomenon.) But this is just as interesting . Researchers have discovered that primates can “see” with their ears and “hear” with their eyes. Essentially, neurons responsible for “forwarding” visual or auditory information can send information to either the visual or auditory processing systems depending upon the circumstances. This gives the brain an edge in situations requiring a very fast response or in situations where one or the other sense has been compromised (or is absent).

Of course, we’re not normally aware of this happening. This is yet another example of how much we still have to learn about how the brain processes information, and how counter-intuitive some of the recent finds are. Another interesting example of these counter-intuitive findings is the recent research suggesting that people who self-identify as being undecided on political issues have, in fact, often already made up their minds; they are just not consciously aware of it yet.

I’ve written previously about how market research will advance as we understand more about how the brain works and how the “mind” makes decisions. Although a few companies are building business around this nascent field, I think it’s inevitable that qualitative research will become more empirical as our understanding of our internal and largely unconscious processes grows. The challenge is going to be boosting the signal to noise ratio so clients will understand what kind of research is valuable – and what is not.

Open Source Market Research

Time for another installment of (perhaps) interesting ideas that are (probably) not ready for prime time….

Open Source Market Research

An oxymoron, non? Actually, people have tried to monetize this concept, but I’m not talking about reselling old, sometimes public domain, market research reports or traditional syndicated research. Moreover, when I think of open source, monetization is not top of mind. In fact, I’m not even thinking of giving people access to actual market research reports. What I am considering is this: is it possible to construct a type of searchable database containing non-proprietary outputs (and ideally meta-outputs; more on that at the end) from actual industry quantitative and qualitative research?

Let’s say, for example, that your company has a new product, Liquid X. Your industrial design people (or more likely some ambitious brand manager) wants to put Liquid X into an “upside down” container that stands on its cap. You’ve seen this done many times with toothpaste, ketchup, shampoo, etc, but your company has never done it. What are the basic parameters and constraints that affect usability? How best to handle copy? Should the new upside down packaging cannibalize the existing line?

Now imagine that you are in charge of doing the market research for Liquid X, except that you can log onto a site that will let you search for pieces of market research that someone else has already conducted on upside down packaging. You might be able to see right away that height is a limiting factor, for example, or that there is a particular consumer segment who just won’t buy anything upside down-ish. You would not be looking at full market reports – only discrete bits of them that you can use to jump start your research, to narrow the parameters of what you do need to research and save you time and possibly money. Naturally, you might be able to find some of this information through traditional syndicated research, but that process is itself often difficult and time consuming. I’m imagining a Google-like, or perhaps Del.icio.us-like front end serving up extensible results.

There are, of course, a couple of big problems with the idea of Open Source Market Research: how would it actually work and how could you participate without giving away your competitive or trade secrets?

The first problem is actually the most difficult. Thinking about open source and this system, something wikipedia-esque is top of mind. But obviously, that would require far, far too much work on the part of those who could contribute; they would have to scrub or anonymize their own data and possibly edit the format itself (e.g., extract bullets from PowerPoint slides). Perhaps a better idea would be some kind of industry or foundation operated site (perhaps supported in part by ad revenue) to whom you could submit reports. This organization would scrub and anonymize the data, index and tag it, and provide the search engine front end. In this scenario, you might have to find a way to incentivize companies to part with their dearly bought research, perhaps by offering ads or referrals. Naturally, the hope is the inherent benefits of open source will be enough to sway doubtful IP holders.

The other – surprisingly simple – problem is competition. Simple, but with one big caveat: whomever is anonymizing and scrubbing must be trusted beyond reproach and some research might be too topical or too sensitive to share for a period of time, no matter how well anonymized and scrubbed. Competition, in general, wouldn’t be an issue with such a system, as the results are analogous to lego building bricks rather than to someone’s fully built model. Moreover, as everyone has access to the same building bricks, competitive advantage lies in how you assemble them, not in “possessing” the bricks. This is, essentially, the ethos of the open source movement

Less abstractly, except in the case of highly proprietary processes or data, you can argue that increasing overall awareness of different types and outputs of market research will increase demand for market research. In fact, some companies, like Aurora WDC are betting on it. A system like the one I am proposing would effectively grow the pot for everyone involved in MR. Even in the sometimes esoteric and often secretive world of competitive intelligence (where I often work), people like August Jackson are leading the discussion about the value of, essentially, open sourcing currently proprietary conference talks and materials. Although this link is an extreme example, Bruce Schneier makes a compelling case that openness inherently solves many more problems than it creates.

Finally, one far-off but potentially interesting benefit from open source market research would be in allowing average Joe or Jane market researchers to construct their own MR meta studies a la the healthcare industry to gauge the effectiveness of their own MR initiatives and processes.

Eldery Care and Urban Cores

After my last post, I got to thinking about other industries/trends that may defy any economic downturn. Elderly care is perhaps one of them. Much has been written of late about the Boomers retiring, and I won’t rehash that except to say that -having first hand experience with our current middle class elderly care system – I don’t think the Boomers are going to be happy with it.

So what might future elderly care look like? Current trends revolve around the resort model Hyatt and other major players have taken. Some elderly but still able folks are returning to city cores in order to be withing walking distance to culture, food and public transportation. I’m wondering if anyone has considered studying how to match up current real estate “opportunities” with managed care facilities. I would imagine that many Boomes in the US might prefer something more along the lines of a bed and breakfast rather than the large suburban hotel model that dominates now. No matter how luxurious a retirement “center” is, I suspect your stereotypical Boomer might begin to find it, well, boring.

But I wonder how many seniors in the US would refuse to consider the advantages of retiring to an urban center out of hand because of how our culture frames the expectations of retirement – and of what living in an urban core is like. Perhaps qualitative studies designed to probe how people feel about non-conventional retirement and care facilities might uncover untapped and potentially scalable new business ideas that use the existing infrastructures of city cores as their foundation.

Do It Yourself

If we are indeed headed for a recession, which industries or segments are going to be the most resilient? What new or unusual market research opportunities might arise? One trend that will almost certainly continue and deepen is the do-it-yourself (“DIY”) aesthetic. The recent housing bubble brought DIY to the fore for homeowners (and earned companies like Home Depot and Ace Hardware a lot of money). Moreover, the DIY trend has itself become, well, trendy, with events like Make Faire, the renewed interest in gourmet cooking at home and online mashups. Many small businesses have already made a partial leap into DIY with SaaS allowing them “roll their own” phone and CRM systems and PayPal enabling small scale transactions. Some small businesses are even doing their own market research!

Although the DIY trend seems to be part of our changing zeitgeist, consumers eager to save money and squeeze more use out of things and skills they’ve already acquired are likely to drive the change. I doubt we’ll see the level of ingenuity on display at blogs like the excellent Afrigadget, but some of these extreme DIY examples point to some interesting possibilities for businesses, for example:

• Are consumers buying more or less of your product based on its modifiability or durability? (e.g., early VW Beetles and microbuses)
• Are consumers re-purposing your products for other, unanticipated uses? (e.g. the iPhone as GPS)
• Does it matter whether or not you have a reputation as a “hack” friendly company (e.g., the Roomba)

So an interesting question is how do you measure and qualify whether and how consumers are reusing, re-purposing or otherwise relating to your brand in a DIY context? You might address this question with traditional MR methods like surveys and focus groups, but perhaps those approaches yield more actionable data after you’ve identified what consumers are actually doing. Maybe a more interesting approach would be to gather together several companies who have an interest in the topic and initiate a sort of neo-syndicated ethnography project to collect data on what consumers are actually doing when they re-purpose or reuse products in novel ways. After a bit of more traditional MR, business could fine tool their messaging – perhaps not overtly – to emphasize how their brand is DYI friendly.

Super-Influencers and Memes: Useful Explainations or Vodoo?

This long and interesting post from the Neuroanthropology blog showed up on one of my friend’s shared RSS feeds recently. Essentially, the post eviscerates several talks on memes at the recent TED conference, demonstrating how inappropriate it is to ascribe evolutionary mechanisms to ideas (memes). Although we love us some Dennett around here, I must say Greg Downey’s criticism that there’s little empirical basis for using memes to explain human behavior and social development is hard to dispute.

Outside the world of academia, others are beginning to doubt the related “super-influencers” explanation of how trends spread and products become popular. In this model, super-influencers are more fit “hosts” that allow memes to propagate further and faster than than the same ideas would through “regular” people. It’s sort of a disease-vector model of marketing success and failure.

And this model has made sense from a marketing point of view for a while now as it seems to explain in part why some products and trends catch on while others don’t. But just as there’s little falsifiable evidence for memes, it would seem that there is equally little evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of marketing to super-influencers. Which is not to say that super-influencers and memes aren’t useful metaphors for how preferences and ideas spread – it’s just that we have to recognize the limits of these models. That’s kind of a shame: they were neat models.

Privacy, Convenience, and Why I’m Still Buying an iPhone

Since this is a business blog, I try to keep my tone neutral and to dance around any politically loaded issues. That said, in my personal life, I tend to be wary of trading privacy for convenience. So why am I buying an iPhone from AT&T, the ISP who assisted the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program?

A little background is in order. Most people who know me would be shocked to learn I don’t already own an iPhone. I’m a typical early adopter of almost every kind of technology. I played on the Sierra Network, stored my contacts in a Psion 5 and listened to mp3s on a Rio long before AOL rose to prominence, before Palm stormed the market and before white iPod earbuds become ubiquitous. But with cell phones, I’ve been a deliberate laggard. Initially this was because I moved back to the States from Europe in 1999 and missed the initial wave of cell phone adoption in the US (a wave that would soon crash into Europe with such force as to impact beer sales!). Later, although I used SMS, I didn’t see the value in maintaining a convergence device like a Blackberry, especially as I almost always had my laptop with me.

However, several things have changed, and now I feel compelled to take the plunge. First, many of our critical applications at Sorgenfrei are SaaS based, like our phone, CRM, and project management systems. I often find myself making multiple, short entries during the day or quickly checking on the status of a contact or a project. With a convergence device I can do that where ever I am, whether or not I’ve got my laptop with me. And since many of our meetings take place in New York City, I’m increasingly missing not having mobile email and Google search. Finally, and probably most importantly, the iPhone’s careful design and deep compatibility will make the learning curve much less painful than, say, with a Blackberry or N95.

But if you want an iPhone in this country, you have two choices: jailbreak it, or sign a two year contract with AT&T. While it’s true that most U.S. telcos went along with the NSA (with T-Mobile and – in part – Verizon being the exceptions), AT&T actively helped the NSA tap the backbone. Certainly in the public mind, AT&T is the company most closely associated with the wiretapping program. I’ll admit: I’m reluctant to reward AT&T with a contract. I could stay with Verizon and buy a Blackberry, but I’m not crazy about RIM’s form factor, and Verizon’s CDMA based system is useless in Europe, and I travel there frequently. I could buy some other convergence device and use some other carrier, but the iPhone is so convenient, so seductively easy to use and maintain…and when I think about it, none of my email or phone calls are (potentially) private or secure anymore anyway. So why not go with what’s easiest and best?

I’ve written about the trade-offs between privacy and convenience before. Although I believe consumers will become increasingly savvy about their personal data, in the end, people are still going to choose to trade privacy for convenience. The challenge for business is to strike an acceptable balance between the two, as Google has now learned the hard way with the YouTube/Viacom debacle. Clearly, video as a medium struck a chord that wiretapping didn’t, and the businesses that can predict these type of reactions are the ones who will do well navigating our ever-interconnected marketplace.