DMCM Final Blog Post

Dmcm Final Blog

Northern Flower

Check out our friends at Helios! They have good taste in blog design.

Northern Flower

A Little Lesson on Behavioural Economics

Sorry for the silence. We've been hard at work here in the PIMMs office wrapping up our dissertations and juggling an exhaustive list of deadlines. Hopefully our absence hasn't been too eerie and we'll be back to our happy dapper selves after 21 March. I thought I would break the silence just for a bit though to write about something I've researched in my dissertation that has implications for marketeers and the world at-large alike.

The issue is something that annoyed me no end the last week and I was suddenly reminded of it as I got off the bus this morning and saw a poster that reminded me of my personal boycott of the Manchester Evening News (it might bear disclaiming that this doesn't reflect the views of the rest of the group or our client).

In my building, residents have to lock their bikes to the stairwell railing for lack of a better place to put secure them. The other day, I saw that the management had attached a card to one of the bikes stating that it was a fire hazard to leave the bikes in the corridor and that if the owner didn't comply they would remove the bike. The argument wasn't unjust but the simple fact is that the building management has given the residents a better place to put their bikes and there are no lifts to help that would make it easy for them to bring it into their flats. The obvious question is what then are they meant to do? I'm sure management would argue that it's not their problem.

In most decisions, purchasing or otherwise, people lack motivation to search for information. Even when they do have high motivation, they're still usually confined to the realms of their resources, opportunity. "How much time do I have. How much money can I spend? Where can I find information". The MODE model is a simple guide for predicting how a person will make a decision. Pop a comment into the comment box if you'd like me to explain further.

If you want people to make a decision in your favour you need to give them the resources or the information that will make their decision easier. So if management doesn't want people to lock their bikes in the corridor then give them a bike rack, install a lift, or offer some other alternative. Although this hints back to the blog I posted about user experience a few weeks ago the implications should be apparent for everyone. If you don't want you child to eat sweets after dinner then keep the sweets somewhere they'll have no chance of getting into, maybe lock them up or hide them somewhere clever. Simply putting them on the highest cupboard wouldn't be good enough because a determined child with a sweet tooth has the motivation to find them, so instead deprive them of resources.

Manchester Evening News deprived me of resources when they adopted their wacky payment schedule. The MEN used to be free and I would always take one when they were handed to me even though I seldom ever read it. A few months back I reached for a paper and was told I had to pay that day. Apparently, the new system demands that 4 days of the week the paper must be paid for but it's not every other day like Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. That would at least be easy to remember in a nemonic device since it would be days that begin with the letters S and T. Instead, its something more along the lines or Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. I'm not even sure if that's right but the point is that I can't be bothered to find out if I'm picking up the paper on a pay or non-pay day. So as a result, I just avoid the MEN-men altogether.

So next time you want someone to change their behaviour consider how motivated they are. If they're likely to very motivated ask yourself if you're providing enough information and are you making it easy to find. If they're not motivated how can you make the choice easiest for them?

Getting the Full Manchester Experience!

Manchester is a (relatively) small city with a lot packed into it! Canal Street is only one of the many cultural hubs located in the city. Check out these blogs by our colleagues doing digital marketing communications managements project for other areas around Manchester.


Deansgate Locks
Northern Quarter
Salford Quays
Spinningfields

#SASCHOOL11 - Digital, Search and Social Media Marketing Event

Our DMCM (Digital Marketing Communications Management) group attended Search and Social School Manchester yesterday at MMU Business School where we learnt lots of interesting information about digital, search and social media marketing.

James Hanson and Simon Alexander from MediaVest spoke about PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - Below are some of the points they mentioned:

Google currently holds 70% US market share and 90% of the UK's market share. With other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN holding less than 10% between them but slowly growing their share is set to rise with the future merge of MSN and Yahoo.

A quote from Eric Schmidt (Google) "Microsoft, not Apple or Facebook, is the biggest rival Google has right now" - even though Google hold the largest search engine market share they still feel threatened by the smaller search engines as they are all constantly bringing out new tools and competing against each other to gain bigger market shares.

They also talked about how mobile is going to be big in 2011 - this was very useful because one of the aims for our Digital Marketing Communications Management project, based on Canal Street Manchester's LGBT community is to create a mobile friendly website.

All in all the event was very useful to help with our current Gay Village Manchester project and it has also given us an insight into how PPC, SEO and Social Media Marketing work within companies which will be useful for us once we have graduated and hopefully start working for a Digital Marketing agency.

Company Bar, Canal Street Manchester

Company Bar
Originally uploaded by PimmsMMU

Company Bar, Canal Street Manchester

Company Bar
Originally uploaded by PimmsMMU