Passing the Research Baton to the Consumer
When I saw the new Tempur-Pedic commercial on TV just now I thought it was fantastic. From Anderson Analytics’ research on social media I know that today’s consumers get their product info from social media. Discussion boards and social networks are valued even more than friend and family opinions.
Enter Temour-Pedics commercial. Basically, “don’t trust us, do your own online research”. Great! In the near future perhaps the market for blog mining tools etc. will not be corporate PR departments, but end consumers?
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.tomhcanderson.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
11 responses so far ↓
1 Tom H C Anderson // Jan 30, 2010 at 11:43 am
Why bother doing the research at all? Why not nearshore it to the customers?
Really does speak to the importance for comapnies to understand how consumers use social media to make decisions I think.
2 Adam Henderson // Jan 30, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Hey Tom - when you say “advertising is at the bottom of the list” what do you mean? Are you surprised? Consumers would tell have told you the same thing “I don’t pay attention / I’m not influenced by advertising” if you’d conducted a focus group in the 1970s - long before the advent of social media. I’ve heard it in literally hundreds of focus groups. Did consumers rank “Advertising” at the bottom of a list of sources in a questionnaire? Do tell!
3 Tom H C Anderson // Jan 30, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I have to dig up the stats by age demo from our more recent studies, but here’s a report we have here on the blog from one of our genx2z studies. See slide 51. I believe we asked where they got their product info. TV ads are on there, but websites were #1.
http://www.tomhcanderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/andersonanalyticsmiamiadfedfinal-1.pdf
This was from a couple od years ago. The trend has contuniued.
4 Moe Muise // Feb 1, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Great blog, Tom - came across it for the first time today.
As someone with a combined passion for market research and Internet marketing, I think text analytics is incredible - but where are the solutions for the small business owner?
I see that agencies are getting into the game, but haven’t come across an affordable application that can be used by entrepreneurs on a small budget.
Are you aware of anything?
5 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 1, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Moe, What specifically are you looking to do with the text software?
6 Sandy Rosenberg // Feb 1, 2010 at 7:25 pm
“…today’s consumers get their product info from social media.” “Advertising is at the bottom of the list.” This is exactly why your premise is completely wrong. It’s a perfect example of why business needs professional, trained, and experienced marketing researchers. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of marketing research would know not to take data like that about the importance of advertising at face value. Even more important, this shows how foolishness can easily come off as wisdom in social media. Experts and gurus? This is worse than reality TV “celebrities”!
7 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 1, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Wow, easy Sandy,
Yes, thank you, you’re absolutely right. The advertising is really a separate issue, and we have ways of measuring that, I shouldn’t have mentioned it, and have fixed it.
The point of this post though, and slide 52, was not about where advertising falls, but rather where information sources fall in terms of self reported believability/importance. Specifically, the point was that “from websites I visit frequently” was higher than “friends and family”!
Also, if looking at the total circle here, several other parts are also social media related.
I’m not going to argue about the perceived vs. actual relevance here. We could go on forever talking about whether or not any decision is made based on information or everything is based on subconscious emotion.
That isn’t the point of this post though, it’s that obviously Tempur-Pedic, to their credit, has caught onto this belief and is selling it in their ad.
Who knows if anyone will do their own research after seeing the ad. They may well just believe it must be the most comfortable because Tempur-Pedic said it was. I have not done enough research about mattresses specifically to tell you whether or not its an emotional purchase or if it’s something someone compares. I’m thinking it may be more the latter. Price, comfort, medical advice etc. I bet it’s something many would research.
8 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 6, 2010 at 10:07 am
The P90X exercize program seems to be using a similar strategy in their advertising
9 Lorena Sanabria // Feb 7, 2010 at 11:08 am
Or maybe they did do the research and just linked the positive “attempt to recommend” answers with their “uses and habits” answers to the popular social nets like twitter, facebook, etc. to get attention.
Anyway, It would be great to hear the voice of Media Tempur team or the ones at the agency that came out with the idea.
10 Dan Quirk // Feb 11, 2010 at 11:30 am
Isn’t it ironic that they are using traditional advertising to promote the value of non-traditional social media. To me it says that even they see there are limits to what social media can accomplish by itself.
11 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 11, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Interesting point Dan
Leave a Comment