John Hingley, CEO, Andiamo Systems

Two years later-going on five or six months ago-after two years of straight development-we were finally ready for a launch. We soft-launched in late 2007. So far, even with virtually zero advertising, we’ve gotten most of our customers on word-of-mouth. That’s very powerful. We’ve seen just a huge market opportunity and need for a product that fits this need for the mid-sized business. You’re not going to get Bob’s corner store paying us to see what people are saying about them online-because frankly, people aren’t saying anything.

This mid-size market is typically underserved, especially with new technology. You’ve got the big enterprise folks at the high end charging 6 figures and up for social media analysis. Then at the lower end, you’ve got free tools. I advocate that some folks who don’t get much buzz currently should go ahead and use free tools such as Google Alerts.
But by the time you get any level of buzz-and most of our customers use us to track their brand, as well as 2 or 3 or 4 competing brands-that’s just too much data to assimilate and act on, and frankly make sense of in any type of reasonable timeframe.

MM
Let me set up a basic market requirement, and have you address that.

One of the things that we’ve tracked now for quite some time has been what I’ll call the implosion of the campaign. That is to say, campaigns as a practice and a mindset usually started with some big insight about an unserved market or an emerging market.

Out of this customer insights practice or whatever companies had in terms of their market research activity, it then led to a formulation of a strategy.

The way that I define a strategy is it’s simply a device or mechanism for marshaling available resources. So part of the strategy formation is this kind of quick-cycle iterative “What’s the opportunity? How do we unlock it? What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? What’s our go-to-market?”

Then in the course of a couple or several weeks or a month, it evolves into a marketing launch or a marketing platform and a set of creative briefs. These creative briefs go out to the appropriate creative partner. The direct-mail group. The online group. The interactive group. The promotions group. The in-store marketing group. The advertising guys and print guys. All of that.

They go off and do their things-which is really kind of a scheduling project-management review-and-approval, distribution process. Then it hits January. It’ll be June 21st and we paint the town red. Right? We do our launch, we light it all up across all of our channels. All of the major customer touch points, so as to get a maximum kind of echo-effect in our market. So the outdoor billboards are harmonized with in-store messaging-the direct-mail and the telecenters are all spun up with the right scripts and so on.

The challenge that we’ve seen in that particular program is that-first of all-customers aren’t just sitting around waiting to have someone market to them. They’re out there Googling out there. They’re surfing around. They’re looking at stuff. They’re actually taking the engagement to the marketer.

They’re not just sitting around waiting to be marketed to. They’re actually engaging marketers or potential marketers way before they’ve actually launched.

To your point, a lot of companies now today are doing a soft launch while they’re getting their marketing communications and corporate storytelling act together. Meanwhile, there’s all this activity in terms of social media, with the most viral and most explosive part of that being viral video and other forms of rich media sharing.

That has the net effect of forcing marketing strategists and marketing teams to think more in terms of an engagement strategy through a lifecycle of brand interactions-as opposed to a big-bang launch echo effect.

Does that more or less track to your experience as a leader out there or a pioneer, in terms of the marketing frontier? If not, how not?

JH
That does track with what I see and what I hear from our customers and other folks I speak with. The advent of social media, and the ease with which people can publish their thoughts and opinions online. Then the ease of which people can go and read all of this stuff, and start to share their opinions-or at least become more insightful about what other consumers like themselves think-turns a lot of this traditional campaign planning on its ear.

Nielsen is one of the larger entrenched enterprise competitors. They’re a great company. They did a study that showed 3/4 of consumers rate word-of-mouth as the Number 1 influencer of brand perception and purchase. So today’s most savvy or advanced customers and their agencies are using tools like mine and others to help them determine not even what the campaign should be, but what the product or product features should be prior to developing them.

Then, doing more iterative mini-launches. Whether it’s on blogs or whether it’s a viral video. We actually have a customer that dabbles in that area now and uses us to see what the comments on their videos are, and what the count of viewership is. If the URL of that YouTube video gets passed along and who it gets passed to, and then what the reaction to it is.

This paradigm shift is impacting marketers, I think, in a very positive way. It opens up a very rich and continually updated universe of unbiased consumer opinions and reviewsMM
I’d like you to speak to-again, as a practitioner and as an innovation leader.

You’ve said that you’re now able to monitor the conversation in a market. One of the things that this feedback loop that you’ve now provided entails is thinking not in terms of big-bang launches, but in several if not many soft or micro launches. They’re almost conditional value propositions and conditional offers, based on what’s getting traction. Did I get that right?

JH
Yes, you did.

MM
As marketers are beginning to rethink the very nature of a value proposition as being more of an open-ended collaborative conversation as opposed to a fiat or a dictate of, “Here’s what it is…” How have you seen customers-users of your technology-take the insights in terms of the voice of the market, the voice of the customer, the voice of the brand? How have you seen them take that feedback and one: change the product offer, and two: change how they interact with customers?

JH
Sure thing.

Well, from one side of the spectrum, you have the completely consumer-driven approach that Heinz 57 launched about 6 or 7 months ago, called, “Top This.” They invited consumers-users of their product–to put together a 30-second video commercial hosted on YouTube, with-of course-the winner getting their commercial aired during the Daytime Emmy Awards. And, I believe, a $50,000 prize. Of course you have some runner-up prizes and the like.

They received more than 5,000 entries of 30-second clips. They allowed people to vote on the best one. They also took some of their own needs into regard. They used consumers to basically deliver their entire campaign. That’s pretty major.

The flip side… We have an insurance company that’s always trying to break through the clutter of the boring insurance agency speak and offerings. They actually use us to mine what people are saying online about insurance as a whole. Different types of insurance. Their competitors and themselves. They’re big believers in short YouTube videos, using humor. Sometimes tongue-in-cheek humor. Sometimes over-the-top humor.

They’ll put these videos out every few weeks. They launch it with a little bit of promotion around the video. They’ve got a database and they’ve got some folks they notify with e-mail. But mainly, it’s just through YouTube.

They like to find out how people find a video. Where they come from. What they comment on. If they pass it along. What the pickup is. The overall impression of the short video.

They take this data and roll it back into all forms of their marketing and advertising campaigns - radio, print, interactive…even local TV. They’re doing the small screen and getting feedback so that they know what their marketing and positioning should focus on, and what the hot buttons for consumer are.

The rapidity by which you can get this feedback is changing not just their marketing, but changing their business. They’re able to be extremely relevant in what is perceived as a stayed industry. It’s actually a very fast-moving industry as far as chief concerns.

They have issues across different types of insurance. It’s really a very considered purchase. I think they have one of the most intelligent and cutting-edge uses of using viral video to help them create their overall advertising strategy.