Search results for: “trends”

Gamification trends
I am doing some part-time study at the moment and teamed up with some of my fellow students to look at gamification trends. We had a grand total of just over 2 1/2 hours to score sources for information about gamification and its use in marketing.

Gamification from Ged Carroll

From the research we had some key takeouts.

Gamification is only new in respect to the way one looks at the problem rather than a new, new idea. When one thinks back to the early days of the web and the way AOL chat room moderators where incentivised this employed gamification before the concept was discussed. In it’s present form however there hasn’t been that much research done about it.

Gamification the way we now understand it from a digital marketing perspective probably goes back to the work done at Carnegie Mellon University about Games With A Purpose.

The incentives that seem to work best are in order of priority:
- Status
- Access
- Power
- Stuff
Interested surged in the concept of gamification from the second half of 2010, but the body of literature about it is only a small fraction of that about digital marketing AND the bulk of the literature about gamification is focused at how it can be applied from a technological or business process point of view. From a mainstream media perspective the level of interest has surged since the beginning of the year.

In terms of research, Gartner seems to have led the way in terms of predictions about the growth of gamifying activities within enterprises, this is probably why it is getting so much attention around business processes rather than marketing.

Measurement of engagement according to M2 research revolves around four aspects:
- Engagement: unique visits, time spent on site / page views
- Loyalty: repeat visits, invite a friend
- Virality: sharing, appearance on social channel communications
- Monetisation: conversion rates, purchase of virtual goods, registration
Of these four categories the few successful case studies that we found focused on engagement and loyalty. Social networks were used as a conduit and a platform for gamification layers. For instance, allkpop.com used Badgeville to drive increased engagement and sharing of their site content.

Since this is a relatively young area of digital marketing we found some serious gaps in available information about gamifying campaigns including:
- Project failure rates
- B2B case studies
- Examples of commerce / conversion
The critical factor in planning a programme based on gamifying an action seemed to be in the selection and fine tuning of the game mechanic and how it was applied.

The presentation is on Slideshare so may not be available to all readers. More related content here.

More information
- 2015 gamification predictions from Gartner
- Gamification in 2012 – M2 Research – free to download upon registration
- Metrics of Savannah Morning News gamification activity – Business2Community
- Gamification case study allkpop.com – SEOMoz
- Pete Sigrist sent over a link to 33 Digital’s take on gamification, which I wasn’t able to reference at the time. But there you can read it over at Scribd.
May 12, 2012
CES 2012 trends

Early January means CES 2012 in the tech calendar as the media gives its full attention to the consumer electronics sector. With some 2,600 exhibitors there was a lot of news coming out of the event. But I was more interested in some of the more macro trends that you could see from the coverage and hear from friends that attended the event. Here’s my three big things:

Size zero design

Size zero design – Motorola was responsible for move towards size zero design with its original SLVR and RAZR feature phone designs and Apple has turned it into a must-have design feature across both smartphones and computers. It was only natural that up and coming young Turks like Huawei with their Ascend P1 smartphone should attempt to demonstrate their technical prowess and superiority with the current thinnest phone.

I also found it interesting that Fast Company wrote an article pointing out the design rabbit hole that size zero design is for device manufacturers and consumers. Pretty good, and only almost two years after this blog (^.^)

Austerity designs

Austerity designs – a general observation from a couple of the people I knew had gone to CES 2012 was that manufacturers generally had a lower average ticket price on the items that they were displaying. In the past manufacturers would bring different ranges into different markets, for instance Sony would bring higher end hi-fi products into France and Germany that they wouldn’t bring into the UK. There was less aspirationly priced items than in previous years, probably as manufacturers look to deal with the current economic climate. CES products are not only about drumming sales for the coming year, but also setting the tone for a next few years ahead. This pricing strategy indicates that many of the manufacturers probably aren’t expecting a huge economic bounce back in the West.

Smart everything

Smart everything – one of the things that struck me about CES 2012 is the way that technology was been shoehorned into every facet of life from the car, to the wall thermostat and the wall plug. The only thing is I am not convinced that the electronics will last as long as the useful life of the car or the electro-mechanical Honeywell wall thermostat that would have been used previously. This phenomenon has become its own meme: the internet of (shit) things. Secondly do you really want your home heating or your car dashboard to need rebooting every so often so that it keeps working? I have even heard of the volume disappearing on Sony TVs until they they were updated

January 17, 2012
Microtrends:The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne

Microtrends is one of them must-read books if you want to recognise where your peers get some of their slideware and buzzwords from. Author Mark Penn has a rich pedigree with this, having been the political wonk who was partly responsible for popularising the ‘soccer mom‘ phrase during the late 1990s; this was to US politics what ‘white van man‘ was in the UK in terms of zeitgeist.

So with a bit of reluctance I gave it a read. I was not looking forward to reading what I assumed would be a book that tries to do for market research what Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics did for the dismal science and obsesses about US demographics, I mean part of my job is explaining to my colleagues eight time zones away in Portland and Seattle how different and diverse Europe is, rather than a homogenous mass like the congealed contents of a used fondue set.

Penn to his credit make at least some of his observed groups relevant to an international audience by discussing implications for international audiences.

The value of Penn’s book however is not in the segments it digs up, but in the way that it allows the reader (even for a short while) to see the world through different peoples eyes. Having learned the lesson the hard way at Yahoo!, I try to see beyond my own early adopter web 2.0 otaku nerd world view and think about the man in the street. Penn’s book is a useful device to do this.

Would I use it as a way to find niches to target in client campaigns? Probably not, as soon as the niches were committed to paper in Microtrends they were probably running out of date as the zeitgeist is a fickle and illusive beast. If you want to read a copy, grab it whilst its hot or not at all. More book reviews here.

March 30, 2008
Piper Jaffray trends
US investment bank Piper Jaffray put out some of the smartest publicly available thinking about the internet space at the moment: last week they issued a new detailed report called The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium. Piper Jaffray customers can get a copy from their representative, I am on their email list because of my long-term interest in this area.

Reading it at first, my initial reaction was that I thought that it was quite patronising, but then I realised that the document has to assume little to no knowledge because its main audience is going to be fund managers of all ilks.

The Piper Jaffray report has some great industry data points and articulates many of the key concepts that are shaping this market in an easy and articulate manner. In the accompanying industry note the technology analyst team pulled out those key points as an executive summary; some of which I expect to see being incorporated into PowerPoiint presentations at a meeting near you:

The User Revolution

The User Revolution – consumers taking control of content consumption and branding. User-generated content as well as user indent driven services (like Amazon, Last.fm and Yahoo! Music’s Launch radio stations).

Communitainment – The three areas that historically drove demand for internet services like Yahoo! and AOL of comunity, communication and entertainment are being directly addressed all at once by new services acting as an accelerant for for the market

The Golden Search – ’search as the new portal’. When I used to work at Yahoo! search was described as the front door to the web. A much quoted statistic was that over seven out of every ten internet sessions was started from a search enquiry. Piper Jaffray thinks that search will be increasingly used in branding campaigns (marketers really need to crack this as contextual and search adverts have encouraged brand disloyalty – Kelkoo’s whole business was built on the back of Google ads with pretty much zero brand marketing, and you have a generation of online marketers who use quantative data from search marketing without any regard to brand value, instead focusing purely on transactional data).

Video ads

Video ads will be the next thing – this is kind of counter-intuitive as ads have moved from banners and animation to text ads, but then services like YouTube facilitate in-programming ads a la television.

I found the following section of the report executive summary particularly pertinent, and as a PR consultant it is the concept that clients I have spoken to find the most difficult to grasp: The Revolution Is About Control. The uprising by the users is over control – control of the type of content users want, control of the place and time content is delivered., control of the advertisements that the users are willing to take, and control of the brands they want to create. Unlike most revolutions, where the masses revolt because of major hardship and grievance, the User Revolution was largely driven by the proliferation of media options, the emergence of the Internet, and the growing sophistication of consumers.

I find the last point of particular interest, particularly when I think of the adverts that run on UK television for products like the now defunct Courts Carpets or Cillit Bang – perhaps there isn’t that much wisdom in marketing.

And finally just a couple of the business risks that I through of interest:
- The loss of confidence by advertisers in the effiacy of online advertising and emerging business models.
- A decrease in efficacy of online advertising including display and search advertising
Media fragmentation

I particularly like how they show the fragmentation of media over the past 40 years!

More related content here.
February 25, 2007
Duracell toy trends
Battery supremos Duracell have conducted a Europe-wide survey on the most popular toys this Christmas. Full details can be found here. The report is available as a PDF, the most interesting part of the report is the survey insights section which highlighted some cultural trends amongst children and the differences across Europe. I have summarised Duracell toy trends below:
- Action is the strongest draw for boys with radio controlled cars and race tracks. This goes against everything that we’re told about ‘generation playstation’ and the move to mobile and online entertainment
- Fashion and beauty is the big draw for girls – the Smoby Star Party CD which allowed girls to become a singer a la Pop Idol or Fame Academy was a winner in this category
Both of these findings in the Duracell toy trends research

UK:USA
- The UK was considered to have consumption patterns closer to the US than Europe
- More toys were bought and more money spent in the UK than other European countries
Northern versus Southern Europe
- Northern European children prefer being outdoors taking part in sport
- Southern European children prefer to play indoors with computer games and watching television. I was surprised by this given the football culture and better weather
- Southern European children receive a higher amount of pocket money than Northern European children. But Northern European children start receiving pocket money at a younger age
- Northern European children discover new toys through multiple channels: word of mouth, television, magazines, print advertisements, retail displays and catalogues
- Southern European children primarily discover new toys through television
- Southern European parents put a greater emphasis on educational value when purchasing toys
December 5, 2004

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