Imagine the powerful business insights you could gain from an organic form of market research where the focus group was made up entirely of people already engaging with your brand or your industry...
Is social listening the answer?
Stream On
Spotify: One of the handful of monthly subscriptions I don't mind dishing out a few bucks for. While most on-demand video-streaming services rely on new content to draw viewership, the consumption of music on the Spotify platform relies on its back catalog, hence its significant marginal costs - the royalties it pays the music industry.
The music-streaming company filed to go public last week. With competition like Amazon Music and Apple that have an overwhelming amount of financial backing, in addition to the cost of revenue that Spotify has to pay to record labels, it's going to be interesting how Spotify navigates the music-streaming seas. At the same time, there's potential to leverage the data acquired from their platform (I recently saw a tweet that mentioned that Metallica was adjusting their concert playlist in particular cities based on local Spotify listening data) and for the company to launch its own record label. Whatever the case, Spotify's expected to make a big splash when its shares begin trading.
In light of the upcoming IPO, I thought it was worthwhile to share a bit about the business.
Building Trust in a Digital World
I had the chance to attend an American Marketing Association event last night. Leveraging digital tools, Paolo Parigi (Lead Trust Scientist at Uber and Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University) gave a presentation on the topic of trust - an important psychological factor in business, specifically within the sharing economy. His methodology, referred to as an online field experiment (ofe), in assessing how interactions and user experience creates, increases, or decreases trust and how to discover which is happening and what might be causing it, involved the usage of investment games. Below are a few snapshots I managed to capture during the presentation. Parigi addressed certain scenarios when it would be best to use ofe's and, taking into consideration how varied trust can build across different cultures, acknowledged that ofe results would vary across countries. All in all, an insightful presentation.
Creepy = Relevant?
Someone in my graduate program shared this with the rest of our classmates in a WhatApp group we have going on (shout out to the IE MRCB Class of '18).
Nowadays, the usage of acquired data by marketers can come off a bit creepy. But, in order to create relevant products & corresponding ads & messaging, the question arises: is being creepy the only way to produce ads that'll capture the attention of potential customers? This reminds me of this Cost Plus World Market ad campaign I came across recently.
Let's Get Baked
I LOVE TABLEAU. I just submitted my final data visualization project for a Marketing Intelligence course I've been taking at UC Berkeley Extension and I thought I'd share it on here as well.