Chapter 5

Confirming and Fine-Tuning Your Ladders

The only relevant test of validity of a hypothesis is a comparison of prediction with experience.

—Milton Friedman

WE MAY NOT consciously realize it, but we move through our days testing hypotheses that we believe to be true. We awake each morning to the hypothesis that the sun will be in the sky, that we will have air to breathe, and that there will be water when we turn on the faucet. This reliance on hypotheses is how we are fundamentally wired from the days when we had to survive as cavemen (and cavewomen). Our prior experience drives our belief of what will happen in the future. Therefore, it often takes a dramatic change in our experience to alter our hypothesis about the world around us.

Take, for example, the refrigerator in my kitchen. I had lived in my current home for almost 10 years when the filtered water built into the refrigerator door stopped working. I drink many glasses of water every day and cannot break myself from the habit of getting ice from the door and then attempting to get water from the neighboring compartment. My experience of getting water from the refrigerator door is so ingrained that my brain won’t give up the hypothesis of also going to the refrigerator for water.

This kind of internal wiring is part of why we have a problem with looking at the world around us in a deeper and more meaningful way. It is what limits marketers’ and product development groups’ thinking. They continue to use what has worked for them in the past to create new marketing messages, products, and experiences—and who can blame them? Those old ways worked for more than 100 years. But they’re attempting to use the old techniques in a changed economy with a changed consumer. It’s like trying to use a telegram instead of sending a text message to deliver important news.

To prove that you have gathered relevant and actionable information during the laddering process—that you have identified real clusters—you need to reverse the equation. You must start with some hypothesis about how the clusters you have uncovered will react to an idea, product, message, or experience, and then do some work to find out if this is true. Once you can predict how your consumers naturally react you can train your teams to the idea of thinking from the consumer’s point of view instead of their own (called leasing).

Once you have completed your initial round of interviews and established your core groups, you’ll probably get the feeling that you “know something” or that you are catching on to some kind of pattern. You should move your laddering work forward by making assumptions about the type of stimulus to which these groups will react and why.

This stimulus can come from a wide range of sources: something you have created, something from your competition, or even an example from far outside of your existing scope. This is a great time to get other team members involved in the process and do some blue-sky work with them to generate ideas.

Blue-Sky Brainstorming

In blue-sky work, you throw out a theme, idea, or category and blue-sky—or brainstorm—ideas around it with a cross-functional team. So, for example, let’s say that you are building a website for new mothers. One of your categories might be pregnancy. If you want to build a new digital experience for planning for college, you might use a topic such as savings or even ones as simple as planning and then college. Be careful not to narrow the topic too much from the outset. You can always overlap the ideas and narrow them down, but it is very difficult to broaden an idea.

I recommend a cross-functional team, members of your marketing department, development, customer service, quality assurance, and even human resources for this process, because they bring different perspectives and interactions with your consumers to the table. They are experts at potential ideas because they have seen a wide scope, not only of what the company has attempted to do in the past, but also about what competitors might be doing in the space. When doing a blue-sky activity, there are some rules that are important to follow to keep the creative juices flowing:

  • There are no bad ideas.
  • Every idea gets written down and put up on the board or the wall.
  • Discussion about why an idea or solution won’t work is not allowed.
  • No one is permitted to judge an idea.
  • Everyone must contribute.

My favorite way to do this type of activity is to use a blank wall or whiteboard and then write each idea down on a sticky note. I often use different colors to represent things we have done, things our competitors have done, and/or things from other places.

I was working with one particular client to build a product that focused on people who typically fell in a lower income bracket. I brainstormed some of the constraints that these people faced using the overall topic of stress relief. One concept that someone suggested was gun ranges. I was tempted to break my rule of don’t judge an idea but am glad I didn’t. Although gun ranges didn’t become the thing included in the offering, it did lead us to understand that, at their core, this group was driven by access. When this lower-income cluster was presented with the concept of gun ranges, they would talk about how they had never been to one before.

Once we learned this, we were able to create a way for these consumers to access spa packages and other experiences that were usually beyond their reach. We unlocked newfound knowledge by developing a true understanding of one of the groups’ core issues: access to experiences or ways to relieve stress.

This revelation also clarified an aspect of the study that had previously confused us. Although many of these lower-income respondents lived in houses with little or no furniture, they did have a large flat-screen TV, Blu-ray player, and the latest gaming system. We began to understand that what many see as frivolous spending was this lower-income group’s attempt to relieve stress. It was far cheaper in the long run to buy an at-home entertainment system than it was to go out to the movie theater or bowling alley on any given weekend.

Once your group has created its wall of ideas, sort them by the initial cluster sets, putting ideas under the clusters that the group believes is most appropriate for the proposed idea. For example, if you have created a list of ideas for a new vacation package, sorting the ideas by cluster will help you decide what you want to show each cluster. It’s not a problem if an idea seems to fall into two clusters; just make another sticky note and put it under both clusters.

The final step in the blue-skying process is to make your cross-functional team vote. A good rule of thumb is to give each team member votes equal to 10 percent of the ideas; that is, if you generate 100 ideas, everyone gets 10 votes; 150 ideas means that everyone gets 15. I use stars or dots to make this process interactive, and it provides a strong visual impact. The surviving ideas will stand out under each cluster and become the concepts and ideas (artifacts) you will try out with the clusters as you begin confirmation.

Talk to the Expert—the Consumer—to Confirm the Clusters

After you have a prioritized list of artifacts to try out with your clusters, now is the time to talk with your consumers once again.

This second round is when you really start to fine-tune your groups, prove or disprove that they actually exist, and understand more completely what’s driving their behavior. This stage is important; it’s where the consumers are reacting to concrete concepts. As a result, you’ll start to see how those reactions relate to your hypotheses about the groups.

Don’t stop learning at this point. Make sure you still have very broad discussions. You should wait to present any and all artifacts until the conversation’s end. As you are talking with the consumer, you should be thinking about which group of artifacts you are going to present based on the conversation and in what cluster you believe the consumer fits. The reaction to the artifacts will distinctly divide the groups into one cluster or another. You need to be able to explain why two groups that you believe to be distinctly different from each other both react to a given artifact positively.

Although I always start by testing with the things I think will most likely fit the cluster I believe the consumer fits in, I purposefully continue by presenting content or artifacts that I believe will work with other groups to see how far I can push the cluster one way or another. While making sure that I really understand my clusters and their core drivers, I am also trying to figure out if there’s a way to transition them across from one set of artifacts to another. For example, we know that Showless Joe claims to not watch television or use social media that often. By talking with him about some of the artifacts that are more appropriate to the other clusters, we started to learn about Singular Sam and understand under what conditions he would participate in these more engaging experiences.

It’s important to pay close attention to both what your consumers tell you and what they leave out. A good clue to whether or not an artifact is relevant to a given consumer is to watch for answers such a, “I might do that one day” or “I have thought about doing that.” These are dead giveaways that an artifact isn’t for that person and doesn’t fit within his or her current or even future behavior. Make sure you are really listening to what the consumer is telling you beyond the spoken answers to your questions. A good follow-up is, “Have you ever done this before?” or “Under what circumstances would you do this?”

Recall the earlier example in Chapter 3 about extreme couponing. A response of “I am thinking about doing it” clearly indicated a lack of sincerity by one of our clusters to perform serious couponing—or even their likelihood to participate in a sweepstakes or giveaway. They wanted to do it, but they never really would; it was just too much trouble. Unless the coupon was in the checkout line or on the grocery store aisle, it was not something that fit within this cluster’s core behavior. But because a core component of this group’s consumer DNA was a strong desire to be liked and affirmed, it was important to them to save face with me during our conversations.

Create Targeted Questions

After undergoing the second phase, you should be able to come up with questions that will peg your clusters. This is the time to take your clusters into a controlled or lab environment and then see if you can recruit based on behavioral and motivation questions you have created.

This part of the screener usually has between three to five questions. We had one study where we only had to use one question—and the response allowed us to determine to which of four clusters a consumer belonged. You will need to ask other questions to see if they are a good candidate for the conversation, but these targeted questions could (should) really replace the standard ethnicity, age, gender, income, and life stage questions that are the cornerstone of most mass media/mass production work. I still include the standard demographic questions; however, I do so to help prove the point that these demographic markers are not important to the consumer’s decision-making process. I always love it when we have one session with a 60-year-old female followed by a session with a 25-year-old male providing the same responses and reactions because they are part of the same cluster.

Once you have your participant in the room, you want to start with the same broad conversation you used before. You should be able to predict their answers and reaction to what you are going to show them at this point—even before you show it to them. This process provides powerful confirmation that your clusters are holding true.

Often, companies see these confirmation rounds as a wasted step. However, it’s just as important to know that you have something right as it is to learn something new. You should view a clean study, in which you recruit people, predict how they will react, and send them on their way, positively, because it indicates that you are on the right track and ready to move forward with putting an artifact or experience out to a larger group. How do you know that you have learned something new? When you can do it with precision. Take advantage of the opportunity to watch consumers react to and adopt without having any issues with something you have built.

This is also a good time to consider going back to focus groups. Because you now know why you are putting a group of people in a room together, you can start using them in these defined clusters to do ideation or evaluate concepts. Make sure your recruiting questions truly address the clusters properly and form your groups around the clusters, not the demographics. A word of caution: pay attention to your clusters. Because some of them do not play nicely with one another, putting them in the same group might be a bad idea. Don’t forget that their core behaviors and drivers will carry over to any research effort or initiative you attempt with the clusters.

Quantifying the Clusters

Once you have confirmed your clusters, you can now move to the stage of quantifying them. It’s crucial to wait to take this step until you are confident that you’re using the right questions—questions that recruit people accurately and put them in the right cluster. Your questions should be based on behaviors or attitudes; don’t try to get your consumers to self-select into a cluster by defining it. Recall the cruise line example in Chapter 3. The question you would ask to put consumers into their cluster could be as simple as asking them to choose the statement that best matches them. For example:

  • I primarily take a cruise to visit a new destination I have never visited before.
  • I like the laid-back aspects of a cruise and enjoy spending time relaxing and being taken care of while on board.
  • I cruise the same route every year with my friends because I enjoy hanging out with them and meeting new people.

Include a few more similar questions just to make sure there is no confusion. Then you can use these questions to divide and look at the sizes of your clusters.

The quantification step is great, because it’s where you start to confirm some of the things you believe about your clusters—and learn additional knowledge about their overall ecosystem.

For example, let’s say that you have a cluster that you know primarily relies on mainstream media for their news and information. You can confirm this hypothesis and start to identify their preferred mainstream channels for ad and product placement opportunities.

My best advice, however, is: don’t get too hung up on quantification. This usually becomes the biggest stumbling block for a brand or company in our work with them. Laddering starts with what you know, so your existing quantification stands true. Laddering helps you understand more clearly how to target the clusters that have a propensity to be aligned to your company already and determine how to attract new groups.

Another important point to remember here is that size really doesn’t matter. For example, you might have a small but influential cluster. In the old mass media world, it wouldn’t make sense to target a group of that size. But as evidenced by the Pinterest story I shared in Chapter 2, one person can dramatically affect your brand or brand message.

There’s a danger in ignoring some of your smaller groups, who most likely require a different level of interaction or authenticity to pique their interest. If you provide something to the masses merely because they are larger, but your brand is well aligned to this smaller group, you may completely miss out on the opportunity to reach them at all because of their refusal to participate in mass media. If this cluster sees something where everyone else sees it, then they will be unwilling to participate. It’s not that they necessarily want exclusivity; they are simply motivated by the chance to try something out before others do. The opportunity to participate first and authentically with an experience or product is what really drives them. There’s no notoriety necessary, and they will gladly spread your message for you. This cluster is just like the first domino in the series: you must knock it down first to get to the rest (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 Understanding a Clusters Influence Is More Important Than Its Size

image

There is also the risk of performing what I call a rinse and repeat. I often talk with a marketing group, product group, or ad agency after a successful campaign and find that they’re geared up for a repeat performance. Their plans will include sending an almost identical message to a group of people who successfully picked up their message or cause before. This completely misses the point, because they haven’t taken the time to understand why it worked the first time. This is a dangerously expensive approach both in time and money, but it explains the proliferation of sequels and copycat programming we see in television, movies, advertising and other entertainment.

Listening to and Learning from the Clusters

The introduction of social media has made it easier than ever to watch your clusters in action—that is, of course, if they use social media. Social media can provide a more authentic and measurable reaction than almost any other research technique available for certain experiences; however, it has to be done correctly to reap these kinds of benefits.

You just need to reverse the way you listen. Instead of focusing on what is being said, focus on who is saying it. Again, it’s not about the what. You can tell by the tone of the message (positive/negative), the perspective (whether it’s coming from I/you/we), and the information being shared via profiles how these groups are reacting to your campaigns or experiences. You will have a special insight into why they are speaking the way they are.

The Super Bowl provides an annual opportunity for you to easily separate your different clusters by viewing how they participate in the game. For instance, Chatty Cathys talk to other Chatty Cathys throughout the game primarily about the commercials. They use this unique opportunity to promote themselves and find interesting people to follow.

During an awards show, Passionate Penny will be glued to the Twitter feed or Facebook Fan page of her favorite actors, characters, or shows to experience the award show from that perspective. She will retweet or like a comment that highlights an accomplishment or receipt of an award. She will also be actively engaged on platforms from movie and television show databases such as IMDb or any other experience that provides her with additional content or exclusive information.

Granted, there are some groups whose members don’t participate in social media at all. This is just as important; it lets you know where to put the best placement to reach them. Thanks to the research you’ve done, you know that you’ll simply have to collect data from this group in a different way. It must take place in front of them, during their experience—not by trying to modify their behavior.

View every time you talk to a consumer in the future as an opportunity to test a concept or create an experience—to mark them into their defined cluster and to learn more about them. By doing so, you will begin to learn more and more about who they are and how they are going to react. By paying careful attention, you will learn when your clusters are changing or when there is a new marker that makes it important to potentially split them more granularly.

Thanks to this approach and continually learning, your consumers become almost as predictable as an old friend or one of your kids. You can forecast what they will say or do even before they do it. Don’t make the mistake of viewing your conversations with consumers as a singular event.

Back in Chapter 3, I highlighted some work we did with the telephone company BellSouth. You might recall that we ended up with a panel for this project. Because we had recruited the panel members based on their core differences and motivations, we could predict and continue to learn from these consumers, even after that initial project was done. Without the ability to do this, the data we uncovered would have been confusing and nondirectional. Thanks to our background work and deep understanding of the different clusters, we had a relevant foundation from which we could work going forward.

The Importance of Transitional Clusters for Reach

I talked briefly about a cluster called Singular Sam in the previous chapter’s study regarding social TV. You should never underestimate the importance of transitional clusters like this. Although Sam generally considers social media and television to be a waste of his time, there is one unique period of time during the year—his favorite sport’s season—when he is not only willing but excited to participate in both. If you provide Singular Sam with something he considers valuable during this period (a Fantasy Football app, perhaps) and then add some elements that will hook him during a nontransitional time, you have the opportunity to establish a longer-term relationship with him outside of football season. You can therefore transition him from a singular user to a more permanent one.

For example, let’s say Singular Sam is an Auburn fan and Auburn is having a great season. You can take this even further during the off-season if your station replays old Auburn games. This gives you the opportunity to promote to him within the Fantasy Football construct as a way to fill his precious TV time when football isn’t on. Or perhaps you are an advertiser who knows that Singular Sam prefers in-person communication but uses a Fantasy Football application for the football season. This is a time when in-person ad placement, promotion, or partnership makes sense and achieves additional reach.

The great thing about laddering is that once you understand the factors that are important within the clusters—the DNA—you are able to find where the DNA overlaps. This knowledge allows you to create a lattice, just like the lattice you see on a trellis, that shows the overlap of groups and allows your brand, just like the branches of a rose bush growing across the trellis, to gain additional and solid reach. As we move into the next chapter, I will highlight what makes up the core consumer DNA of different clusters and discuss how to capitalize on their overlaps to really communicate with them.


Key Points
  • Use a cross-functional team to do some blue-sky brainstorming and come up with concepts to test with your clusters.
  • To confirm your clusters are accurate, you have to talk to the experts: the consumers.
  • Once your clusters are strong, you can create simple questions that will identify your clusters in future studies.
  • You can quantify the size of your clusters at the end of the process; however, it’s something you should undertake with caution.
  • Once you understand your clusters’ behavior, you can create ways to listen to and learn from them. Use every opportunity to add to your knowledge.
  • Identifying and understanding your transitional clusters will assist with gaining reach to more consumers.


The Social Media Family Case Study
Once I began analyzing how one can use social media across multiple industries and contexts, I realized that social media, unlike any other disruptive technology, is a manifestation of who we are at our core. We use it (or choose not to use it) as a way to express something about ourselves that goes well beyond what we choose to post, like, tweet, pin, or share.
This can be a difficult topic to explain to others. So in order to do so, I created a fictitious family that I call the TweetFaces. I am going to introduce you to this social media–loving family and give you an idea of what really makes them tick and why they do what they do.
It’s important to understand that although the behaviors and motivations are all true in this example, gender, age, and other demographic components play no part in why these family members use social media the way they do. I have simply used likely representatives for each of them to make them more real.
Traditional Terri
Let’s start with grandma.
When you sign on to your Facebook wall, you probably see Terri’s posts more than anyone else.
She loves Facebook. In fact, she uses it more than her kids do and will probably be using it long after everyone else has abandoned it. She has collected as many friends and family as possible—all the way back to her days in kindergarten.
However, Terri never posts anything original; instead, she typically shares something she has found on someone else’s wall that she thinks is cute or even potentially shocking and untrue. She has no problem expressing her political opinions during election season and arguing about it with others via the comment stream. If chain letters still existed, Terri would be the one sending them along to others and making you feel guilty for breaking the chain.
Why Does She Share the Things She Shares?
The number one reason behind Terri’s actions is that she wants you to remember her. She shares as an attempt to stay connected with those around her. You’ll notice when you look closely at her posts that they are rarely about her. They’re far more likely to be pictures of her grandkids, a breaking story she thinks everyone else must know about, or the latest “hilarious” cat video.
And although it may not initially appear so, you will see upon closer inspection that she carefully cultivates what she sends—and to whom. She is ultimately seeking some type of confirmation from her network of friends and family to assure her that they haven’t forgotten her.
What is of Interest to Her?
Terri loves nostalgia: songs, people, and experiences that remind her of her past. She appreciates predictable humor, and although she can be a little edgy, she won’t share anything that contains swear words or vulgarity (think PG-13-level humor). She is not the most technologically advanced; although she’s recently adopted a smartphone, she uses only one or two applications on it (most likely Facebook for her phone and FaceTime) that primarily support her desire for connectivity to others. If technology doesn’t support her longing for connection, she rarely has any use for it.
Terri wishes she could have her family around the dinner table at least once a week. However, she realizes that times have changed and that this isn’t always possible, so she’s willing to adapt to new ways of “getting together” in order to stay connected.
Ambitious Amber
Amber uses Facebook pretty regularly, especially to keep up with her friends from college. They are all at a stage where they are sharing information about their kids, what’s going on in their lives, and where they went on their last vacation. She limits her network to her actual friends and family and rarely connects with people from work or other aspects of her life. To her, that’s just creepy.
Amber is not interested in engaging in a Facebook battle with anyone else. She’s very cautious about what she posts, especially during a political season or regarding divisive topics like religion.
She prefers to post things she has said, original content, not something canned or that she has found elsewhere. If she does post something she finds, she wants to be able to add her own twist; it won’t just be something others have already posted or stated. She likes to think she finds new things, but she’s really capitalizing on something someone else has found for her.
Amber uses Twitter but primarily for getting news. She follows a few celebrities but that’s not her primary driver for its use. However, Amber absolutely loves Pinterest. She can keep up with her favorite things and organize them in a visual way. She probably uses Pinterest more now than any other network. Although she’s not sure she would call it social, it does give her an idea about what’s going on in other’s lives and gives her a place to dream.
Why Does She Share the Things She Shares?
Amber wants others to perceive her as being successful. She wants people to think that she has her life together and that her family is doing well. She protects her public persona very carefully.
She cares a lot about what people think about her—but not, she thinks, in a needy way. She’s merely concerned with keeping up appearances. She is establishing herself in the world and therefore wants to appear professional. She knows that everything she puts out into social media could help or hurt her in the future, because it’s going to be there forever.
What is of Interest to Her?
Amber enjoys smart humor, something that is current and unpredictable. She loves to be the first (or think that she is the first) to share new ideas, trends, recipes, or links. She relies on pop culture and mass media outlets to get her news and to develop an understanding of the world around her.
She loves her iPad and smartphone. She feels that they keep her connected to the world while she is on the go or sitting on the couch snuggled up next to her husband.
Everyman Eddie
Eddie is married to Amber and has a limited interest in social media and technology—but in general, he doesn’t get the appeal. He believes that people share too much and that social media sites pose a privacy risk. He also thinks that technology should support your life, not be the center of it, and that many people use it as a substitution for or way to avoid real life.
Eddie prefers to have conversations with others in person. He talks about all the same topics that others discuss via social media—funny commercials, videos, sports, or other current events—while hanging out with his close buddies. He’s been friends with these people since high school and college and feels lucky that he still lives close enough to most of them to catch a game, play golf, or meet up for happy hour after work.
Eddie only has a few friends within social media, a total somewhere between 10 and 25. He pays attention to Facebook when Amber points something out, when there is something going on with someone very close to him (a new baby in a friend’s family, for example), or if others are discussing a topic he cares about, such as sports or hot news. But other than that, he usually stays off these sites.
Eddie recently traded in his flip phone for a smartphone. The only reason he did it was because he felt that he needed to learn to text to stay connected with his teenage daughters. He also realized and there were a couple of applications that could help him out with his golf game.
Why Does He Share the Things He Shares?
The fact is that Eddie rarely shares. His refusal to use social media is a silent plea for times gone by when people gathered and spent time together in person. Although he might like someone’s posts, he will rarely respond to a post another person makes on his wall. He is most likely to share something he learned online while talking with his friends offline. However, he does watch streaming video of news stories or the big game if he can’t catch them on television in real time.
What is of Interest to Him?
Eddie is the great lurker. He uses social media to keep up with what his close friends and especially his family are doing. He does use technology to have conversations with his friends about his favorite sports teams, but he does so via private methods such as text messages or e-mail. He doesn’t see the appeal in sharing his opinions in the open, and because he likes to trash talk a bit, he worries he might offend others who don’t understand. Any application that gives him access to more information about his favorite team or sport is appealing.
Vice Vicky
Vicky is Eddie and Amber’s oldest daughter. She was living on her own but had to move back into her parents’ house when her roommate split. Her job at the local coffee shop is enough to let her pay her bills and have some fun but not enough for her to live on her own. She takes the occasional class at the local technical college and hopes to be a paralegal or work at the front desk of a doctor’s office.
Vicky wants to appear independent and edgy. She wants what she says, wears, and even does to have an element of shock value. She has no problem associating herself with vice brands—Skyy Vodka, Marlboro cigarettes, Jack Daniels Whiskey, for example—on social media and often talks about alcohol or the clubs where she and her friends hang out.
She uses Facebook to keep up with some friends but loves the instant and short bursts of banter she can create on Twitter. She is a friend collector and needs to meet a person only once or communicate with them via social media to add them to her pool.
She often uses her personal brand and network of friends to promote her favorite new band or club. Vicky wouldn’t admit it out loud, but it’s very important that others respond to what she posts. She will even take a post down if it doesn’t garner the response she expected.
She is turned off by goofy humor and looks for what she would call authentic comedy. She loves reality shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and was very sad when MTV cancelled Jersey Shore.
Why Does She Share the Things She Shares?
Vicky shares mainly to have other people notice her. She wants/craves the attention that comes with being different. She doesn’t care if what she shares is offensive; in fact, her exact intention is often to stir something up. She stays away from mainstream pop culture because she is too cool for that. She loves to talk about her favorite reality shows, especially those that involve high drama between the main characters.
What is of Interest to Her?
Vicky is interested in vice brands or activities: alcohol, cigarettes, clubs, tattoos, piercings, and alternative, edgy bands. She likes crude humor, especially humor at others’ expense, or anything that lets her look like she is better than someone else. She uses Twitter because she thinks it makes her cooler but hasn’t abandoned Facebook and doesn’t see the draw of Pinterest.
Cool Cade
Cade is Vicky’s on-again, off-again boyfriend.
He is naturally curious and constantly seeking a new experience. It’s not enough for him to see others doing something; Cade wants to try it for himself. He also likes trying new technology or products before everyone else. It’s important to him that he adopt these devices after finding them on his own through an obscure blog or StumbleUpon (a website that allows users to stumble upon new information by following tags) not because someone else told him about it.
He likes things to be a little difficult or unique but not overly complex. He knows and watches shows such as Lost and Mad Men before anyone else. But once others start watching a show and it becomes popular, Cade moves on and begins looking for the next obscure show.
Cade primarily uses Twitter and Google+; Facebook is of lesser concern to him. He uses it mainly to keep in touch with a close group of friends. Yes, he has been to the DragonCon conference with his friends that are into comic books and superheroes; he didn’t dress up, but some of the friends in his circle did.
Why Does He Share the Things He Shares?
Cade shares very quietly. He might see something new and buy it, but he won’t tell others about it unless they ask or he will tweet a picture without much explanation. He is equally balanced between interaction online and in person. He expects technology to enhance his experiences in life, not replace them.
What Is of Interest to Him?
Anything new, different, or unique appeals to Cade. He craves knowing what’s next but doesn’t want anyone to tell him this; he wants to find it on his own. Cade is the most connected of all people but represents one of the smallest clusters. He enjoys meeting new and diverse groups of people.
Careful Callie
Amber and Eddie’s younger daughter has just started high school.
If asked, Callie will say that she is very careful about what she shares, but in reality, she tends to share too much about her feelings. She might post something about how badly her day is going or that she just broke up with her boyfriend.
Callie knows that both her parents and her friends are using social media to watch and judge her, so she keeps her content PG-13. She occasionally shares or says something that she feels is shocking. It’s usually not as scandalous as anything her sister Vicky posts, but Callie feels as though she has crossed the line.
Callie craves interaction from others, not just a confirmation or a like from them. She is disappointed if she posts something to her wall and no one responds—and like her sister, she may actually take the post down if this happens. In addition, Callie’s posts usually start with “I.” She talks about herself, what’s going on her life, how her day was, or that studying for her test is just too hard.
She has lots of friends on Facebook and is not above starting and engaging in a Facebook war on various topics. Callie rarely uses Twitter and enjoys sharing pictures of her animals and clothing on Instagram.
Why Does She Share the Things She Shares?
Callie’s primary motivation is a desire for attention. She needs affirmation from others and uses social media as a way to enhance her self-esteem. She is more likely to share when a friend encourages her or assures her that what she is sharing is interesting or okay. She’s also more likely to post a funny video or picture that she sees others sharing than to comment within another feed because she wants the credit for having found it.
What Is of Interest to Her?
Callie prefers messages that let her talk about herself—how she is feeling and what’s going on with her. She keeps up with more mainstream pop culture like American Idol, The Voice, or the new Hunger Games movie and what’s going on with pop/country singer Taylor Swift. She likes more juvenile, safe humor and would never intentionally hurt someone else’s feelings or make fun of them, even though her comments sometimes come across that way.
Now that you have met the TweetFaces, you will recognize the why behind their social media use much more readily. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of social media clusters, and there are certainly groups that do not participate in social media at all. Their why for not participating is as important and interesting as understanding the why of those who do participate. Understanding your consumers’ why is the first step toward building products, services, and experiences in a way that is meaningful to them.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.136.234.127