The Evolution of Digital Strategy

The business of marketing has become an ever-expanding sprawl of options and complexity. There are multiple partners with niche expertise rather than truly broad- based integrated offerings.  Moreover, the traditional Advertising and Public Relations agency model’s are dead and competitors from unexpected quarters are moving in, forcing us all to work harder: whatever it takes to stay relevant – and valuable – to our clients.

To succeed today clients need broad-based, integrated offerings – not one individual agency’s niche area of expertise.  Therefore the role of the Brand Strategist has never been more valuable.  Today’s Brand Strategist must be a polymath. Their expertise must span a significant number of different subject areas and draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.  Today’s Brand Strategist must also have a solid understanding of all media past and present: specialists and authorities in any number of disciplines.

We would further argue that if everything is digital, then nothing is.  And now that our "old media" as well as our modern channels are digital, the very term has perhaps outlived its usefulness. "Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence," as technology guru Nicholas Negroponte put it. So, by definition, today’s Digital Brand Strategist is simply a Brand Strategist.

The task may appear Herculean, but the goal has not changed.  Today’s Brand Strategist must understand the complex world we have come from, the world we are in, and also be forward-thinking to anticipate future trends and create a path that ensures the success of a product or service. 

Being an on-trend, relevant, inspiring, purposeful, innovative and community-centric brand are the things that will make people pause, listen and pay attention.  Customers want to identify with a brand they can grow with, that earns their trust and makes them feel valued.   People want to evolve with a brand whose products and services help give their business or life meaning and significance.  End to end, a brand must become a consumer’s best friend.

After well over a decade of constructing digital strategies on behalf of clients, one thing has become abundantly clear: most are often confused about what digital strategy is and how to develop one.  When defining and developing any strategy, it’s imperative that clients understand that strategy follows structure, people and an idea.  Second, clients must understand that profit and return-on-investment (ROI) are outcomes, not the strategy itself.

There are numerous approaches to conducting digital strategy, but at their core, all go through similar steps:

• Identifying the opportunities and challenges,
• Developing a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and external stakeholder needs, goals, and  
• Prioritizing a set of initiatives/tactics that can deliver on this vision.

It goes without saying that within each of those stages, a number of techniques and analyses may be employed. 

IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES

First, you have to define what you’re hoping to achieve for the brand, product, or service. Start by analyzing the following five factors:

• Presence: Measure of the brand’s digital footprint,
• Influence: Branded message adoption,
• Perception: Emotional reaction to the brand,
• Engagement: People organically participating in conversations,
• Resonance: Reaction to the overall conversation about the brand.

You need to define your business’ overall mission/objective first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan.  Therefore it’s imperative that you ask the right questions and that you understand the brand objectives that most closely align with those key business opportunities and challenges.  You also need a very clear understanding of your brand truth. You should also answer this question: what is the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve? 

Once you’ve benchmarked the brand’s current equity and position, you must segment your target customers. Customer segmentation allows marketers to connect all customer touch points and identify what motivates a brand’s core consumers in a multi-channel environment.  

VISION AND CLARIFICATION

Once you have a clear understanding of the target, their path to purchase, goals, opportunities and challenges, it’s time to formulate your message and positioning. Positioning is a marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy a distinct position (relative to competing brands,) in the mind of the customer. 

The idea is to identify and attempt to “own” a marketing niche for a brand, product, or service using various strategies including pricing, promotions, distribution, packaging, and competition.  Ultimately, as we have previously explained, this power resides in the marketers' ability to cloak their product in the universal dreams, fantasies, and values of the masses.  We are therefore creating and selling modern myths that leverage the collective pool of cultural, psychological and mythical elements to create a "brand mythology."

Now look at your brand's story/positioning and ask yourself:

• What is the story/positioning telling my target customer?
• Why does my target customer care about this story/positioning?
• What sort of emotions does my story/positioning evoke?
• How does my story/positioning connect to the emotional needs of my target customer?
• How will that story/positioning incite action on behalf of my brand, product, and service?
• What is the source of competitive advantage for your digital business model?
• How can you manage business complexity in the global digital economy?
• How do you create digitized platforms that enable new and evolving digital opportunities?
• How can you simplify your customer experiences without creating burdensome organizational complexity?
• How can you create new information offerings that generate bottom-line value?

The resulting narrative enables the use of social channels, for example, as a means to convey a product, service, or brand’s benefits.  Brand stories are what drive interactions with customers.  If you need further assistance in refining your brand's positioning and subsequent messaging, we would suggest reading through the wealth of information provided by Beloved Brands.

You now should ideally have an intimate understanding of your brand’s current positioning, goals, objectives competitors and challenges. From here you should be able to ascertain where a winning brand message and position can be found in the future. 

You also now should have a clear understanding of your target consumers demographics, psychographics, and technographic profile keeping in mind that you may have multiple target segments within any target group.  Note:  At any number of agencies we have worked at (or with) in the past, many have also employed the use of detailed Buyer Personas, which can be a helpful exercise – as the better understanding you have of your target(s), the easier it is to engage them.

TECHNOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION

As your target consumer base varies, the technologies and social networks you utilize to reach them will naturally vary, too.  Imagine you’re a retailer and based on your research and planning you’ve discovered that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and a variety of social retail oriented platforms such as Pinterest or Fancy are best suited to help reach your brand’s target audience.

Let’s say that you’ve also discovered that more than one-third (33%+) of the activity surrounding your brand is based on your target consumer’s mobile behavior. You’d naturally want to define the experience that consumers will have with your brand’s products by channel, across multiple platforms, based on their behavior patterns. This exercise is also known as User Experience (UX) Mapping but the most important things you must ask yourself prior to creating any map are:

• How do customers search and find information about my product, service, or brand?
• What social platforms do they favour (Technographic Segmentation)?
• What’s the purpose of the specific social platforms and technologies we’ve chosen to utilize?
• How do these mediums play into our mobile strategy?
• What is going to differentiate me from my competition?

As the world has shifted to digital and social media specifically, consumers look to fellow consumers to inform any purchasing decision.  Influencers are therefore a critical part of the digital market success as we move towards the new marketing models that make up social commerce and consumer experience.

Another helpful exercise at this stage is to create a Marketing Calendar that shows your brand’s marketing efforts across the channels you are leveraging in your marketing programs. Use it for benchmarks related to your digital strategy.  What are important dates for your brand's success?  This could be based, for example, around a Holiday, trade show, product release or any other points in the year that align best with sales. A social media content calendar can also be developed to support your Marketing Calendar.  Always keep in mind that when it comes to engaging prospects or customers that quality is far, far more relevant than quantity.

Creating benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) by channel and platforms is also extremely important during this phase.  This is imperative in order to estimate your brand’s expected return per channel — and whether this return is measured based on awareness, engagement, online sales, or any number of other components.  From an agency standpoint this stage is also imperative to setting realistic expectations with clients.

The ultimate goal of engagement is to create a feedback loop that allows you to meet the goals you set forth in the strategy development phase. In order to be successful, you must continually evaluate and alter your digital strategy based on the information that you gain from your campaigns and digital initiatives. As marketers, it’s important that we measure everything.

Throughout every campaign, you must also utilize social listening tools to get insights into campaign performance, variances in brand health, and language cues that are indicative of purchase intent and overall brand performance.

ENGAGEMENT/ EXECUTION

Extending consistent on-brand, on-message content and collateral across all selected channels is imperative and the cornerstone of brand building.  Approach your constituents with the goal to engage their personal lives and experiences. Be authentic, honest and try not to increase friction or decrease participation. Execution is what brings the strategic plan to fruition. Sounds simple, right?

With a clear understanding of the elements above you’re in a strong position to frame and articulate a winning digital strategy for your brand.  Keep in mind we’re discussing digital strategy versus tactics. The terms tactic and strategy are often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational patterns, activity, and decision-making that lead to tactical execution.

OVER TO YOU

This framework/overview is based on our experience (and is a work in progress) however, what would you adjust based on your experience?  What do you think about it? Is there something irrelevant? Is something missing?  Looking at the sector you are working in, would you approach this differently?

Digital Strategy 101 

Written by Andrew B. Giles. Andrew is the head of digital innovation and strategy at Goodbuzz Inc. You can follow him @Goodbuzz and on Facebook.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada. We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future - and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or if you have any questions contact us directly.

Examining the Consumer Path to Purchase

Buyer decision processes are the decision-making processes undertaken by consumers in regard to a potential market transaction before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service.

More generally, decision-making is the cognitive process of selecting a course of action from among multiple alternatives. Common examples include shopping and deciding what to eat. Decision-making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can never "see" a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore we conclude that a psychological event that we call "decision making" has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to effect the action.

In general there are three ways of analyzing consumer buying decisions. They are:

Economic models - These models are largely quantitative and are based on the assumptions of rationality and near perfect knowledge. The consumer is seen to maximize their utility. See consumer theory. Game theory can also be used in some circumstances.

Psychological models - These models concentrate on psychological and cognitive processes such as motivation and need recognition. They are qualitative rather than quantitative and build on sociological factors like cultural influences and family influences.

Consumer behaviour models - These are practical models used by marketers. They typically blend both economic and psychological models.

Neuroscience has become both a useful tool and a source of theory development and testing in buyer decision-making research, and using neuroimaging devices in order to investigate consumer behavior developed under the name of Neuromarketing. What is going on inside the head of the consumer as measured by various neuroimaging and biological correlates like genes and hormones can provide new insights and new ways to test theory, so this is a great opportunity for the decision-making researcher.[1]

There are 5 stages which a consumer often goes through when he/she around their Purchase. These stages also exist because of normal human psychology. These 5 stages are:

1. Problem/Need Recognition- This is in general the first stage in which the consumer recognizes that what essentially is the problem or need and hence accordingly a consumer can identify the product or kind of product, which would be required by the consumer. Page text.[2]  
2. Information Search- In information search, the consumer searches about the product, which would satisfy the need, which has been recognized by the consumer in the stage previous to this one.[2] 
3. Evaluation of Alternatives - In this stage, the consumer evaluates the different alternatives which the consumer comes across, when the consumer was searching for information. Generally in the information search the consumer comes across quite a few products and thus now the consumer has to evaluate and understand which product would be properly suited for the consumer.[2] 
4. Purchase- After the consumer has evaluated all the options and would be having the intention to buy any product, there could be now only two things which might just change the decision of the consumer of buying the product that is what the other peers of the consumer think of the product and any unforeseen circumstances. Unforeseen circumstances for example in this case could be financial losses, which led to not buying of the product.[2] 
5. Post Purchase Behavior- After the purchase the consumer might just go through post purchase dissonance in which the consumer feels that buying the other product would be better. But a company should really take care of it, taking care of post purchase dissonance doesn't only spread good words for the product but also increases the chance of frequent repurchase.[2]

Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon sees economic decision making as a vain attempt to be rational. He claims (in 1947 and 1957) that if a complete analysis is to be done, a decision will be immensely complex. He also says that peoples' information processing ability is very limited. The assumption of a perfectly rational economic actor is unrealistic. Often we are influenced by emotional and non-rational considerations. When we try to be rational we are at best only partially successful.

Models of Buyer Decision Making

In an early study of the buyer decision process literature, Frank Nicosia (Nicosia, F. 1966; pp 9–21) identified three types of buyer decision-making models. They are the univariate model (He called it the "simple scheme".) in which only one behavioural determinant was allowed in a stimulus-response type of relationship; the multi-variate model (He called it a "reduced form scheme".) in which numerous independent variables were assumed to determine buyer behaviour; and finally the "system of equations" model (He called it a "structural scheme" or "process scheme".) in which numerous functional relations (either univariate or multi-variate) interact in a complex system of equations.

He concluded that only this third type of model is capable of expressing the complexity of buyer decision processes. In chapter 7, Nicosia builds a comprehensive model involving five modules. The encoding module includes determinants like "attributes of the brand", "environmental factors", "consumer's attributes", "attributes of the organization", and "attributes of the message". Other modules in the system include, consumer decoding, search and evaluation, decision and consumption.

Some neuromarketing research papers examined how approach motivation as indexed by electroencephalographic (EEG) asymmetry over the prefrontal cortex predicts purchase decision when brand and price are varied. In a within-subjects design, the participants were presented purchase decision trials with 14 different grocery products (seven private label and seven national brand products) whose prices were increased and decreased while their EEG activity was recorded. The results showed that relatively greater left frontal activation (i.e., higher approach motivation) during the pre-decision period predicted an affirmative purchase decision. 

The relationship of frontal EEG asymmetry with purchase decision was stronger for national brand products compared with private label products and when the price of a product was below a normal price (i.e., implicit reference price) compared with when it was above a normal price. Higher perceived need for a product and higher perceived product quality were associated with greater relative left frontal activation.[3]

Cognitive and Personal Biases in Decision Making

It is generally agreed that biases can creep into our decision making processes, calling into question the correctness of a decision. Below is a list of some of the more common cognitive biases.

Selective search for evidence - We tend to be willing to gather facts that support certain conclusions but disregard other facts that support different conclusions. 

1. Selective perception - We actively screen out information that we do not think is salient.  
2. Premature termination of search for evidence - We tend to accept the first alternative that looks like it might work.  
3. Conservatism and inertia - Unwillingness to change thought patterns that we have used in the past in the face of new circumstances.  
4. Experiential limitations - Unwillingness or inability to look beyond the scope of our past experiences; rejection of the unfamiliar. 
5. Wishful thinking or optimism - We tend to want to see things in a positive light and this can distort our perception and thinking.
6.  Recency - We tend to place more attention on more recent information and either ignore or forget more distant information.   
7. Repetition bias - A willingness to believe what we have been told most often and by the greatest number of different of sources.  
8. Anchoring - Decisions are unduly influenced by initial information that shapes our view of subsequent information. 
9. Group think - Peer pressure to conform to the opinions held by the group.  
10. Source credibility bias - We reject something if we have a bias against the person, organization, or group to which the person belongs: We are inclined to accept a statement by someone we like.  
11. Incremental decision-making and escalating commitment - We look at a decision as a small step in a process and this tends to perpetuate a series of similar decisions. This can be contrasted with zero-based decision-making.  
12.  Inconsistency - The unwillingness to apply the same decision criteria in similar situations.
13.  Attribution asymmetry - We tend to attribute our success to our abilities and talents, but we attribute our failures to bad luck and external factors. We attribute other's success to good luck, and their failures to their mistakes.   
14. Role fulfillment - We conform to the decision-making expectations that others have of someone in our position.   
15. Underestimating uncertainty and the illusion of control - We tend to underestimate future uncertainty because we tend to believe we have more control over events than we really do.   
16. Faulty generalizations - In order to simplify an extremely complex world, we tend to group things and people. These simplifying generalizations can bias decision-making processes. 
17. Ascription of causality - We tend to ascribe causation even when the evidence only suggests correlation. Just because birds fly to the equatorial regions when the trees lose their leaves, does not mean that the birds migrate because the trees lose their leaves.   

Cognition

In science, cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory & working memory, judgment & evaluation, reasoning & "computation", problem solving & decision making, comprehension & production of language, etc. Human cognition is conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.

These processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, and computer science.[1][page needed] These and other different approaches to the analysis of cognition are synthesized in the developing field of cognitive science, a progressively autonomous academic discipline. Within psychology and philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind and intelligence. It encompasses the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts), and states of intelligent entities (humans, collaborative groups, human organizations, highly autonomous machines, and artificial intelligences).[2]

Thus, the term's usage varies across disciplines; for example, in psychology and cognitive science, "cognition" usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. It is also used in a branch of social psychology called social cognition to explain attitudes, attribution, and group dynamics.[3] In cognitive psychology and cognitive engineering, cognition is typically assumed to be information processing in a participant or operator’s mind or brain.[2] Cognition can in some specific and abstract sense also be artificial.[4]

Group Dynamics

Group dynamics is a system of behaviors and psychological processes occurring within a social group (intragroup dynamics), or between social groups (intergroup dynamics). The study of group dynamics can be useful in understanding decision-making behavior, tracking the spread of diseases in society, creating effective therapy techniques, and following the emergence and popularity of new ideas and technologies.[1] Group dynamics are at the core of understanding racism, sexism, and other forms of social prejudice and discrimination. These applications of the field are studied in psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, education, social work, business, and communication studies.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

REFERENCES

1. Yoon, C.; Gonzalez, R.; Bechara, A.; Berns, G. S.; Dagher, A. A.; Dube, L.; Huettel, S. A.; Kable, J. W.; Liberzon, I.; Plassmann, H.; Smidts, A.; Spence, C. (2012). "Decision neuroscience and consumer decision making". Marketing letters (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012) 23: 473–485. doi:10.1007/s11002-012-9188-z. 
2. Kotler, Philip. "dl.ueb.edu.vn/bitstream/1247/2250/1/Marketing_Management_-_Millenium_Edition.pdf". Pearson Customer Publishing. Retrieved 28 December 2012.
3.  Niklas Ravaja, Outi Somervuori and Mikko Salminen (2012) Predicting purchase decision The role of hemispheric asymmetry over the frontal cortex, Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics 

• Carlyn, Marcia. “An Assessment of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.” Journal of Personality Assessment. 41.5 (1977): 461-73. 
• Cheng, Many M., Peter F. Luckett, and Axel K. Schulz. “The Effects of Cognitive Style Diversity on Decision-Making Dyads: An Empirical Analysis in the Context of a Complex Task.” Behavioral Research in Accounting. 15 (2003): 39-62. 
• Gardner, William L., and Mark J. Martinko. “Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to Study Managers: A Literature Review and Research Agenda.” Journal of Management. 22.1 (1996): 45-83. 
• Henderson, John C., and Paul C. Nutt. “Influence of Decision Style on Decision Making Behavior.” Management Science. 26.4 (1980): 371-386. 
• Kennedy, Bryan R., and Ashely D. Kennedy. “Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Career Counseling.” Journal of Employment Counseling. 41.1 (2004): 38-44. 
• Bettman, James R. (1979). "An Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice." Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers. 
• Yang, Haiyang and Ziv Carmon (2010), “Consumer Decision Making,” in Jagdeth Sheth & Naresh Malhotra (eds.), Wiley International Encyclopedia of Marketing, New York: Wiley. 
• Myers, I. (1962) Introduction to Type: A description of the theory and applications of the Myers-Briggs type indicator, Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto Ca., 1962. 
• Nicosia, F. (1966) Consumer Decision Processes, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1966. 
• Pittenger, David J. “The Utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.” Review of Educational Research. 63:4 (1993): 467-488. 
• Simon, H. (1947) Administrative behaviour, Macmillan, New York, 1947, (also 2nd edition 1957). 
• Volkema, Roger J., and Ronald H. Gorman. "The Influence of Cognitive-Based Group Composition on Decision-Making Process and Outcome." Journal of Management Studies. 35.1 (1998): 105-121.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Goodbuzz is your source for the ideas, trends and technology behind the world's most innovative digital marketing strategies.  Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada.  We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.