Aventine Partners

Are you a Pragmatist? Traditionalist? Curious?

As part of our continuing Culture Graphics project we've released a public version of our Culture Graphics survey.  One of the insights developed in this effort is the ability to categorize individuals' worldviews into five basic groups:

• Traditionalists
• Modernists 
• Progressives 
• Communitarians 
• Pragmatists   

While we continue to collect data, the academic work in this field and our initial results support the validity of this approach.  We invite you to take the survey yourself (click on the image below) to learn more and share your reactions.

 

Measure Everything

Like many, I follow and enjoy Seth Godin’s marketing blog.  Most of his posts only tangentially relate to the work we do, but his recent post, “The scientific method” coincided and lined up with an interesting comment from a client.

Godin argues for a critical approach to thinking about your business and challenging the status quo.  “If you enter a conversation,” he says,  “looking for something to test, measure and ultimately change, it's likely you'll find it. That change makes you more competitive, and you continue to cycle past your competitors.’

Motherhood and apple pie, perhaps, but more often than not it isn’t done.

Corporate politics and fear are often reasons why managers and decision makers hesitate to measure what’s going on and confront what they learn, wherever it may lead.  But so is the lack of confidence that the important things can actually be measured.

We recently completed some work for a health care provider whom we helped assess retention rates for different groups of patients.  The CEO came from outside of the health care industry and was determined to  look at patient retention, though this had never been measured.  Now they know the characteristics of  patients that show better- or worse-than average retention behavior.  The next step is to identify and measure the actual reasons for patient attrition.

The Next Google?!

"I'm telling you, this company is getting hot . . ."

So began a pair of insistent emails from a friend and colleague about a company in the area I needed to check out.  It turns out there's a Google-killer right down the road in Champaign, home to the University of Illinois and the start-up website, Wolfram|Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com).

I say start-up "website" because this venture is the offspring of the 20+-year-old company Wolfram Research, which publishes the well-respected analytics software package Mathematica.

Though I am not a Mathematica user (like it, but I'm addicted to free), Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a web-based portal for accessing the Mathematica analytic engine and applying it to a large library of data.  The interface is designed to take natural language queries and return results in a format that will span a presumed range of intentions and levels of sophistication of the user, as well as allowing for further drill-downs where appropriate.  Hard to describe, so check out the easy-to-use site to get the drift.

The mission of the site/business is "making the world's knowledge computable".   Bold mission, that, and appropriately so for a Google-killer (not that I've seen these guys calling themselves that).

This seems like a great concept, and it makes sense as a true leap ahead in what a "search engine" does.  It will be interesting to see how it develops with more data and more users pointing it in unexpected directions.  

IVR Polling and Analytics in Elections

We recently had the opportunity to apply market research and marketing analytics techniques doing some pro-bono work for a local political campaign.  Apart from the satisfaction of being able to contribute our professional skills to a local cause we were enthusiastic about, this was a great example of how the availability of low-cost, online services are making analytics more and more available to a wider range of applications and budgets.

Situation

We faced an election for a village president and three village trustees.  Often these races in this small town of 18,000 people are not even contested, but this year three candidates were running for the president position and five were running for the three trustee positions.  We were working for four candidates who were running as a slate for the four open positions.

To our knowledge, formal voter polls and surveys had never been done in this community.  Campaigns were shaped by candidates’ informal sense of the community and local issues and outcomes, while often easily guessed at, were not really known until election night. 

However, the number of candidates in this election created some interesting campaign strategy questions and issues that led us to conduct a poll and analyze the data because the large number of candidate combinations voters could consider.  Specifically:

To Cut or Not to Cut?

As has been in the case during every downturn I've lived through as a professional (this is my third), many observers of the marketing discipline are quick to remind us that "studies show" successful companies increase advertising spend during downturns and reap great rewards from having done so during recoveries.  Of course, those most emphatic in offering this counsel are those peddling media and marketing services.

One of many possible examples can be found in a September blog post by John Quelch offering advice on "How to Market in a Recession".  Quelch is a director at WPP, so there may be some bias when he counsels: "Maintain marketing spending.  This is not the time to cut advertising.  It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times."

Even though we also peddle marketing services, I question the wisdom of this line of thinking.  More to the point, we need to be mindful that what was true in the past may not longer hold.

What's different now?

Adults on Facebook

A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project documented the rapidly increasing participation rates of older adults in social media such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as a range of other online activities.

Much of the information from the study is captured very nicely in the chart of online activity be age group:

(Pew Internet and American Life Project, Generations Online in 2009, Sydney Jones and Susannah Fox, January 28, 2009)

As a quick aside from the significance of the data presented here, this chart does a very nice job of communicating the degrees of penetration that various forms of online activity have made among the generations, from Gen Y to the G.I. Generation.