Northern Flower

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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.

How can marketers make the most of mobile search?

A new study provides more evidence of the growth of mobile, with the use of search on mobiles growing by 247% over the last 12 months. In the same period, desktop search fell by 15%.

The Tamar Mobile White Paper shows a rapid increase in mobile search use, especially among the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups with 14% of both searching on mobile every day. Last year the figures for the same groups were 5% and 8%.

The stats from the study show an overall increase in search usage, but the growth of mobile search shows how rapidly mobile internet adoption is growing:

While mobile search is still relatively small, at 3% of total search traffic, the data shows how rapidly it is growing.

So what can marketers do to make the most of mobile search?

• Take note of Google changes. For example, the introduction of Google Instant on a mobile could have a significant impact. It could be very useful for mobile users since fewer keystrokes would be required, and marketers would need to target 'early words' in search terms.
• Since many mobile searches are likely to revolve around local specific phrases, marketers need to incorporate this into keyword research and SEO strategies.
• Make sure you have mobile optimised landing pages. The hard work on attracting mobile search traffic will be wasted if you send users to a desktop site which provides mobile users with a poor experience. These pages should also be optimised for a range of mobile devices.
• Add a phone number to PPC ads, and prominent numbers on landing pages. This way mobile users can easily make contact for bookings etc. A freephone number would also help.
• Add prominent store locators / directions to local businesses. Multichannel retailers can drive customers into local stores by making it easy to find the nearest outlet.
• Separate mobile and desktop search campaigns. The data learned from desktop search campaigns will not necessarily transfer to mobile search, so campaigns need to be tailored to mobile users.
• Target local searchers with mobile AdWords. Restaurants and other local businesses can pick a location and target a radius around it to take advantage of local searches.
• Retailers need to follow mobile commerce best practice, including simplified navigation, nice big call to action buttons and, crucially, a checkout that has been optimised for mobile users.

Source: e-consultancy by UK editor Graham Charlton (2010)

As one of the objectives we set out at the beginning of our Digital Marketing Communications Management (DMCM) project was to develop a mobile friendly website for Canal Street Manchester we found the above report useful for us to gain an insight into how Canal Street can make the most of mobile marketing.

Purple Papers

Less dressed up than white papers, but with all the information you need. For those that like to have the full story

View it here on Scribd Canal Street

Merging Convenience and the User Experience

When we first met up with the client he was eager to discuss implementing a mobile strategy for the Canal Steet website, which is justified as 91% of users in the UK have a mobile phone that can access the internet. Furthermore, the LGBT community as a whole tend be early adopters of new technology.

What was troubling for us though, was that there were some critical problems for the usability of the main site that we needed to avoid in the development of a mobile strategy. We wanted to give the client a strategy that would be easy to amend and easy for the user. From that we decided that a modular layout would be a great option. Each module holds a summary of information and can be expanded, collapsed, or moved. This has great implications for the end user and their experience as well as for the client and the future progression of the Canal St website offering.

Market Segmentation

Segmenting by needstates and moodstates isn't exactly a new idea but it's definitely becoming more relevant. Food and beverage brands have been doing it for years.

Instead of being loyal to one single brand in a category consumers now adopt a portfolio of brands based on different moods or needs. This report sums it up best by saying:

"...A young beer drinker might have been loyal to just one brand 20 years ago, now he may consider one brand to be his “cool night club beer”, another brand to be his “watching the game on TV beer” and another his “just cut the grass, refreshing beer”."

I'm exploring how to implement this into a digital marketing communication management strategy and how I can use this to segment the very broad LGBT community.

Blog Post 1

Canal Street Manchester

Canal Street’s website, canal-st.co.uk, is a portal providing information to Manchester’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community with an eye towards the LGBT community at-large. Canal Street’s internet presence has already experienced a sizeable amount of success. The site currently generates a weekly e-newsletter for 4100 subscribers and the Facebook page has already amassed 12,000 followers in just over a year with 90% of them being active users!
The client is now looking to capitalise on the success of the Facebook page to draw more users to utilise the website and its services in the hope of generating more traffic to monetise the website. The client also feels the brand would be served well with a mobile strategy but isn’t sure how to proceed.

From here, we came up with n objectives:
• Increase eNewsletter subscribers by 40% within 1 year
• Develop a mobile-friendly website
• Improve usability of the current site

After meeting with the client and receiving feedback from questionnaires we felt the best digital marketing approaches to Canal Street would be social media, mobile browsing, and creating a blog.

From our feedback we learned that LGBT community are keen to adopt new technology. More than 60% of respondents said they used Android, BlackBerry, or iPhone mobile devices. Despite that fact, the current Canal Street website is not friendly to mobile users.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to generate a dialogue with consumers to improve the portal’s current offering and tailor it to provide content that’s more relevant to the audience. An improved social media integration strategy may also generate more traffic by means of ‘shared’ content.

A blog was considered as a means on enhancing the user experience by providing a personal and more authentic tone. Blogging also create another opportunity for user to generate shared content. It’s ability to be self-archiving was viewed a comparable advantage to the e-newsletter. Despite its advantages, we feel that the client doesn’t currently have the resources to actively monitor and update a blog. The client was also concerned about potential negative comments.

Minaxee Prajapati
07129623

Jamal Mon Desir
09262253

Claire Isbister
07296182

Andrew McLoughlin
0629564

Why We're Here

Digital MarComms are the future! Don't believe us? Watch this video...

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

The Ball is Rolling...

Things have started kicking off for us this week! We met the client, Iain, at the bar he co-owns on Canal Street.

We discussed the history of the Canal St website and it's future and where Iain would like to go on holiday! We've amassed pages on pages of notes and currently sifting through them to figure out how to get from here to there with the information we've got. Ironically, all of our note-taking has left us with more questions than answers and searching to define a clear set of objectives to move our project forward.

What makes Canal Street unique is that it's not just a geographic district like The Castro in San Francisco, or Greenwich Village, NYC, but its also very symbolic of  the LGBT community-at-large and the website acts also as a resource. This make devising an inclusive strategy a bit more complicated than we first thought.

It's a laborious process, but if when it gets Iain onto a white sandy beach in the South of France then we'll know that we've done a good job!

Welcome!

We are The PIMMs Group (or PIMMs for short). We're a group of four final year students in the Marketing & Retail division of Manchester Metropolitan University's Business School

As part of our Digital Marketing Communications Management (DMCM) module we are working on a project to develop the online presence of Manchester's famous Canal Street.

Watch this space as we'll be updating it weekly as we progress. It will be like Big Brother but with out the guilty sentiments after.