Where traffic is the most terrible …

Phillip Nones Social Commentary, Social Media , , , , ,

How many of us have attempted to travel around metro Los Angeles by car at 10:00 am or 2:00 pm, marveling at just how much traffic there is – “always and everywhere”?

If you suspect that LA has the worst traffic gridlock of any American metro area, you’d be absolutely correct.

And we have the data to prove it. INRIX, Inc., a transportation analytics firm, has released its newest annual “traffic scorecard” for 2017 that ranks the U.S. cities with the most traffic congestion.

The listing below shows the ten most “challenging” cities for commuters, ranked according to the average time wasted per commuter during 2017.

[“Wasted time” is defined as the amount of time spent in traffic above and beyond what would have been required had traffic been moving at the posted speed limits.]

#1. Los Angeles – 102 hours wasted per commuter in 2017 (average)

#2. New York – 91 hours wasted

#3. San Francisco – 79 hours

#4. Atlanta – 70 hours

#5. Miami – 64 hours

#6. Washington, DC – 63 hours

#7. Boston, MA – 60 hours

#8. Chicago, IL – 57 hours

#9. Seattle, WA – 55 hours

#10. Dallas, TX – 54 hours

Indeed, Los Angeles tops the list with more than 100 hours of time wasted in traffic. That’s the equivalent of two and a half work weeks.  Ugh.

Several other cities clock in at exorbitant rates as well, although not as high as LA on the “time wasted” scale.

Having driven or been a vehicular passenger in 9 of these 10 cities, none of these figures comes as a surprise to me personally — although I might have placed DC and Boston above Miami and Atlanta based on my own personal experience.

How about you? Which cities rank as your “personal worst” traffic-wise?  And are there any cities which you think should be in INRIX’s “worst of the worst” listing?

Consumer reviews are important to online shoppers. So, are more people participating now?

Phillip Nones Branding, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research, Media, Sales, Social Commentary, Social Media , , , , , ,

Based on new research, the time-honored “90-9-1 rule” may no longer be accurate.

The 90-9-1 rule states that for every 100 people active online, one person creates content … nine people respond to created content … and 90 are merely lurkers – consuming the information but not “engaging” with it at all.

But now we have a survey by ratings and reviews platform Clutch which suggests that the ratio may be changing. The Clutch survey finds that around 20% of online shoppers have written reviews for some of their purchases.

That finding would seem to indicate that more people are now involved in content engagement than before. Still, when just one in five shoppers are writing and posting customer reviews, it continues to represent only a distinct minority of the market.

So, the big question for brands and e-commerce providers is how to encourage a greater number of people to post reviews, since such feedback is cited so often as one of the most important considerations for people who are weighing their choices when purchasing a new product or service.

A few of the ways that businesses have attempted to increase participation in customer reviews include:

  • Make the review process as efficient as possible by requesting specific feedback through star ratings.
  • Provide additional rating options on product/service performance sub-categories through quick guided questions.
  • Offering incentives such as a contest entry might also help gain more reviews, although the FTC does have regulations in place that prohibit offering explicit incentives in exchange for receiving favorable reviews.
  • Providing timely customer service – including resolving products with orders – can also increase the likelihood of garnering reviews that are positive rather than negative ones.

This last point is underscored by additional Clutch results which, when the survey asked why online shoppers write reviews, uncovered these reasons:

  • Was especially satisfied with the product or service: ~33%
  • Received an e-mail specifically requesting to leave feedback: ~23%
  • Was offered an incentive to leave feedback: ~5%
  • Was especially dissatisfied with the product or service: ~2%

For companies who might be concerned that negative feedback will be given lots of play, the 2% statistic above should come as some relief. And even if a negative review is published, the situation can often be rectified by reaching out to the reviewer and providing remedies to make things right, thereby “turning lemons into lemonade.”

After all, most consumers are pretty charitable if they sense that a company is making a good-faith effort to correct a perceived problem.

Peeking behind the curtain at Google.

Phillip Nones Branding, Business, Employment, Human Resources, Manufacturing, Sales , , , , , , ,

A recently-departed Google engineer gives us the lowdown of what’s actually been happening at his former company.

Steve Yegge, a former engineer at Google who has recently joined Grab, a fast-growing ride-hailing and logistics services firm serving customers in Southeast Asia, has just gone public with an explanation of why he decided to part ways with Google after having been with the company for more than a dozen years.

His reasons are a near-indictment of the company for losing the innovative spark that Yegge thinks was the key to Google’s success — and which now appears to be slipping away.

In a recently published blog post, Yegge lays out what he considers to be Google’s fundamental flaws today:

  • Google has gone deep into protection-and-preservation mode. “Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather than the exception,” Yegge writes.
  • Google has gotten way more political than it should be as an organization. “Politics is a cumbersome process, and it slows you down and leads to execution problems,” Yegge contends.
  • Google is arrogant. “It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of “we”, not the “I”.
  • Google has become competitor-focused rather than customer-focused. “Their new internal slogan — ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’ – unfortunately, it’s just lip service,” Yegge maintains. “A slogan isn’t good enough. It takes real effort to set aside time regularly for every employee to interact with your customers. Instead, [Google] play[s] the dangerous but easier game of using competitor activity as a proxy for what customers really need.”

Yegge goes on to note that nearly all of Google’s portfolio of product launches over the past 10 years can be traced to “me-too copying” of competitor moves. He cites Google Home (Amazon Echo), Google+ (Facebook) and Google Cloud (AWS) as just three examples — none of them particularly impressive introductions on Google’s part.

Yegge sums it all up with this rather damning conclusion:

“In short, Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. I love being fired up by my work, but Google had gradually beaten it out of me.”

Steve Yegge

It isn’t as if the company’s considerable positive attributes aren’t acknowledged – Yegge still views Google as “one of the very best places to work on Earth.”

It’s just that for creative engineers like him, the spark is no longer there.

Where have we seen these dynamics at play before? Microsoft and Yahoo come to mind.

These days, Facebook might be trending in that direction too, a bit.

It seems as though issues of “invincibility” have a tendency to creep in and color how companies view their place in the world, which can eventually lead to complacency and a loss of touch with customers. Ineffective company strategies follow.

That’s a progression every company should try mightily to avoid.

What are your thoughts on Steve Yegge’s characterization of Google? Is he on point?  Or way wide of the mark?  Please share your perspectives with other readers here.

In survey research, money talks … but to what degree?

Phillip Nones Marketing, Marketing Research , , , ,

For anyone who has attempted to survey consumers and businesses, it’s pretty universally understood that in order to boost the response rate, you need to give people a “WIIFM” reason to respond.

And that WIIFM incentive is often money. But what kind of monetary incentive works best these days, considering all of the different ways that people are being asked to participate in surveys?

One thing’s for sure: the trend data on response rates isn’t encouraging.  In 1997, the average response rate on telephone surveys was around 36%.  As of 2012, the percentage had nose-dived to just 9%.

It can’t have gotten any better in the five years since.

Recently, the Gallup organization set about to determine response rate dynamics in relationship to the types of monetary incentives offered. To do this, Gallup took the alumni listing from a major American university and deployed online surveys to three target groups of names drawn from it.

Each group was made up of randomly selected names, and each group received the exact same survey. The only difference was in in the incentive offered for recipients to respond to the survey:

  • Group A: 10,000 targeted people received no monetary incentive
  • Group B: 1,000 targeted people were promised a $5 gift card after completing the survey (post-paid incentive)
  • Group C: 1,000 targeted people received a gift card as part of the survey invitation (pre-paid incentive)

The Gallup test revealed that, as expected, offering a monetary incentive had a significant impact on the survey response rate:

  • Group A: 13% response rate
  • Group B: 20% response rate
  • Group C: 19% response rate

But perhaps more interestingly, the results suggest that a pre-paid incentive isn’t quite as strong as offering a monetary reward that comes after filling out the survey. Albeit, the results are very similar, so no definitive conclusions can be drawn.

What is clear, though, is that offering a monetary incentive of some kind does dramatically improve survey results – to the tune of ~50% higher.

Moreover, the Gallup research found no behavioral differences between income groups, suggesting that the “psychology” of being offered a token of appreciation for the survey-taker’s time is something universally appreciated, rather than it being tied to particular respondent characteristics like financial status.

Additional information about the Gallup research can be accessed here.

Where in the world would you want to retire?

Phillip Nones Social Commentary , , ,
An American couple enjoying retirement in Costa Rica.

While the world may seem to be a pretty unsettled place thanks to the constant stream of negative news we hear from afar, in reality it’s never been easier to work and live overseas.

For one thing, digital communications have taken once-major barriers and turned them into nothing more than minor speed bumps.

Today, while Americans who have lived overseas for their careers may choose to return to the United States to retire, many others are moving in the opposite direction.

What countries are the best places for Americans to consider retiring to, all things considered?  It would seem that having a nice climate along with a vibrant culture and an interesting social scene are important factors. Personal safety ranks up there, too. Having an attractive cost of living would be another factor to consider – at least for most of us for whom budgets are important to follow.

International Living magazine has just published its newest listing of the “Top 10” countries for retiring abroad.  It’s the 26th annual list published by this magazine, which calculates a “global retirement index” by country and selects the best-scoring ones that are, as the magazine puts it, “outstanding destinations where you can live a healthier and happier life, spend a lot less money, and get a whole lot more.”

Which countries have made the 2018 list? Here are the Top 10, along with a quick wrap-up statement for each as to why:

#1. Costa Rica – “the world’s best retirement haven”

#2. Mexico – “convenient, exotic first-world living”

#3. Panama – “friendly, welcoming – and great benefits”

#4. Ecuador – “diverse, unhurried, and metropolitan”

#5. Malaysia – “easy, English-speaking, and first-world”

#6. Colombia – “sophisticated and affordable”

#7. Portugal – “Europe’s best retirement haven”

#8. Nicaragua – “the best bang for your buck in Latin America”

#9. Spain – “romance, history, and charming villages”

#10. Peru – “low-cost living, vibrant and diverse”

It’s interesting to note that of the countries on the Top 10 list, all but one of them are Latin American or part of the Iberian Peninsula.

I haven’t gone back and researched it, but I suspect that the countries on these lists were quite different going back 10 or 20 years prior.

For more information about the 2018 list and the 12 factors that went into creating the global retirement index for each country, click or tap here.

How about you? Which of these countries, if any, would you consider making your home in retirement?  Or is the notion of retiring abroad completely “foreign” to you?

QR Codes Live!

Phillip Nones Business, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , , ,

In marketing, QR codes have been the butt of jokes for years. The funky little splotches that showed up in advertising on everything from magazines to transit buses were supposed to revolutionize the way people find out information about products and services.

Except that … QR codes never lived up to the hype.

While a few advertisers stuck with QR codes doggedly, for the most part we saw fewer and fewer of them after their first initial years of splash.

But now, QR codes are making a comeback. It turns out that they’ve become central to mobile marketing tactics.

We’re talking about QR couponing, which is exploding.  Newly published estimates by Juniper Research, a digital marketing consulting firm, show that nearly 1.3 billion coded coupons were redeemed via mobile devices in 2017.

Moreover, Juniper is forecasting that the number of coupons with QR codes being redeemed via mobile devices will continue strong at least through 2022.

A big reason for the sharp increase in use is built-in QR functionality on smartphones – led by Apple which has begun including QR reader functionality as part of the camera application on its new iPhones.

This action takes away a huge barrier that once confronted users. The lack of in-built readers meant that consumers had to download a separate QR code scanner app.

We know from experience that one more action step like that is often the difference between market adoption and market avoidance.

But with that hurdle out of the way, major retailers are starting to take advantage of the more favorable playing field by finding more uses of QR code technology. Target for one has announced a new Q code-based payments system to scan offers directly to their device-stored payment cards, which can be scanned at checkout for instant payment.

Expect similar activity in loyalty cards, making their redemption easier for everyone.

The newly revived fortunes of QR codes remind us that sometimes there are second acts for MarComm tactics and technology – and maybe it happens more often than we expect.

Changing Cross-Currents in E-Mail Marketing

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , ,

Many marketers find it one of the easiest marketing tactics to execute … but also one of the least effective in terms of results.

In the realm of digital marketing, e-mail marketing has to be one of the most mature choices of tactics these days. It’s been around for a long time, and its relatively small hard-dollar costs make it one a natural “go-to” marketing tactic for many companies.

But today, a declining percentage of marketers see e-mail as one of their most effective tactics in the digital marketing arsenal.

So, what’s the problem?  Many companies have the technology and skills in place to perform e-mail programs using in-house resources. That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news is that more companies are seeing their e-mail programs becoming less effective — for a variety of reasons. Among them are these:

  • E-mail filtering technology is making it more difficult to land e-mails into inboxes.
  • Privacy regulations are becoming more stringent.
  • Overuse of this marketing tactic means more e-mail messages than ever from more companies are being deployed – and with that, more of them are being ignored by recipients.
  • While e-mail used to be the only digital direct marketing game in town, today there are a bigger variety of ways to engage with customers and prospects.
  • Building a high-performing e-mail list that also conforms to regulatory stipulations is more challenging than ever.

This last point is particularly nettlesome for marketers: Data quality and data management are considered among the most difficult challenges for marketers – and also among the least effective in terms of their success.

So, in some ways the factors affecting the use of e-mail marketing are working at cross-purposes. E-mail marketing is easier to execute than other digital marketing endeavors … but as for its effectiveness, many marketers rate other tactics higher, including content marketing and search engine optimization.

In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how attitudes and behaviors regarding e-mail continue to evolve. Will this time-honored tactic decline in importance, or find new life?  Stay tuned …

Fact Checkers: The “New-Old” Job in Journalism

Phillip Nones Content Creation and Content Management, Media, Social Commentary , , , , , , , ,

The topic of “fake news” is all over the journalism ecosphere these days. It’s the subject of charges and countercharges tossed back and forth between politicians, industry specialists, the scientific community and the media.

In the current environment, even the slightest mistake in the media – no matter how innocuous – can turn into a contentious social media debate, whereas in the past it might have merited just a quick corrective notation as a follow-up.

These days, more often than not everyone gets sullied in the process – even innocent parties caught in the crossfire.  So, it isn’t surprising that as the issue of “fake news” has risen in prominence, fact checking in journalism has taken on more importance than ever.

An IFCN global summit conference held in Madrid Spain in July 2017.

In 2015, the Poynter Institute established its International Fact-Checking Network to support initiatives aimed at ensuring better accuracy and journalistic best practices. In addition, over the past year the New York Times and several other prominent newspapers have brought more fact checkers on board – not merely to verify the information being reported, but also to work in “real time” with journalists – checking breaking news stories for accuracy as they are being produced.

These new fact-checking resources have been added without a lot of fanfare, but it’s a quiet acknowledgement that the “fake news” controversy is one that strikes at the heart of the press’s reputation.

But there’s a significant shortcoming:  The new emphasis on fact-checking is consequential in just one corner of the news universe.  The arena of “news” now extends well beyond traditional outlets to also encompass social media platforms, blogs and a myriad of informational websites that frequently offer a distinct “point of view” in their reporting.

So, while the fact-checking resurgence may help buttress the reputation of “legacy” news organizations such as high-profile newspapers, national TV networks and marquee online news sites, that doesn’t mean it’s reaching into the many other places where people encounter and consume news.

I suspect that the “fake news” phenomenon is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, despite all of the good-faith efforts to keep it in check.

New Car Technologies and their Persistently Bullish Prospects

Phillip Nones Business, Economics, Manufacturing, Social Commentary , , , ,

Let’s dip back a few years for a quick history lesson. It’s 2010, and various business prognosticators are confidently predicting that the number of electric cars sold in the United States in 2013 will be ~200,000 vehicles.

And in 2015, electric auto sales will reach ~280,000 units.

What really happened?

In 2013 total electric car sales in the United States were fewer than 97,000.  In 2015, the figure was higher – all of 119,000 units.

It’s worse than even these statistics show. The auto industry’s own expert predictions were off by miles.  In 2011, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn predicted that his company would have more than 1.5 million Renault-Nissan electric vehicles on the road.

That forecast turned out to be about 80% too high.

More recent sales forecasts for electric cars are much more realistic. As has become quite clear, many consumers aren’t particularly interested in shifting to a newer technology of automobile if they have to pay substantially more for the technology up-front – despite the promise of lower vehicle operating expenses over time.

Even more telling, a recent McKinsey survey found that of today’s electric car owners, only about half of respondents indicated that they would purchase one again. Ouch.

So, what we now have are projections that electric vehicles won’t reach 4% of the U.S. automotive market until 2023 at the earliest. That’s about a decade later than those first forecasts envisioned reaching that penetration level.

Is it all that surprising, actually? If we’re being honest, we have to acknowledge that the most lucrative markets for electric vehicles are in highly prosperous, population-dense urban areas with strict gasoline emissions standards – the very definition of a “limited market” (think San Francisco or Boston).

Thinking about the next technological advancement in this sector, the industry’s newest “bright shiny thing” is self-driving cars – also referred to as the classier-sounding “autonomous vehicle.” But it appears that this sector may be facing similar dynamics that made electric vehicles the “fizzled sizzle” they turned out to be.

Consider the challenges that autonomous vehicles face that threaten to dampen marketplace acceptance of these products – at least in the short- and medium-term:

  • The regulatory and legal ramifications of autonomous vehicles are even more daunting than those affecting electric cars. For starters, try assigning liability for car crashes.
  • Autonomous vehicles require sophisticated mapping and data analytics to operate properly. The United States is a big country. Put those two factors together and it’s easy to see what kind of a challenge it will be to get these vehicles on the road in any major way.
  • How about resistance from powerful groups that have a vested interest in the status quo? Of the ~3.5 million commercial truck drivers in the United States, I wonder how many are in favor of self-driving vehicles?

Not every new technology operates in a similar environment, and for this reason some new-fangled products don’t have such a long gestation and ramp-up period.  Take the smartphone, which took all of ten years to go from “what’s that?” to “who doesn’t own one?”

But there’s quite a difference, actually.  Smartphones were a sea change from what people typically considered a mobile phone, with oodles of added utility and capabilities that were never even part of the equation before.

By contrast, consumers know what it’s like to have a car, and even self-driving cars won’t be doing anything particularly “new.” Just doing it differently.

At this juncture, McKinsey is predicting that autonomous cars will reach ~15% of U.S. automobile sales by the year 2030.

Maybe that’s correct … maybe not. But my guess is, if McKinsey’s prediction turns out to be off, it’ll be because it was too robust.

Changing Buying Behaviors: Clues from Thanksgiving Weekend 2017

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Research , , , , , , ,

If there was any doubt that we’re in the midst of fundamental changes in consumer buying behaviors, the results from the opening days of the 2017 holiday season have put such questions to rest.

Movable Ink, a firm that enables content personalization within e-mails, has just published some insightful statistics it compiled from Thanksgiving weekend last month.  Movable Ink logged nearly 438 million e-mail opens between the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the following Cyber Monday. What did it find?

To start with, it found that recipients engaged with them.

Of the e-mails sent on Black Friday, nearly 50% achieved read lengths of at least 15 seconds. On Cyber Monday, the results were nearly the same (~46%).

Fifteen seconds may not seem like a long time to engage with an e-mail, but it’s light years compared to what is often experienced in consumer e-retail.

Movable Ink also found that the majority of the e-mails were opened on smartphones — far outstripping desktops and tablets:

  • Smartphones: ~53% of e-mail opens
  • Desktop computers: ~25%
  • Tablet opens: ~16%

An equal 53% of conversion actions happened on smartphones … but desktop conversions proved to be higher than their open stats, and e-mails opened on tablets were much less likely to experience conversions:

  • Smartphone: ~53% of e-mail conversions
  • Desktop computers: ~38%
  • Tablets: ~8%

Consumers were certainly in a buying mood over the holiday weekend, with purchases averaging between $120 and $140 on each of the four days of the long weekend:

  • Black Friday: An average of $124 spent
  • Saturday: $120
  • Sunday: $119
  • Cyber Monday: $141

However, while smartphones led in terms of e-mail engagement, when it comes to actual dollar sales smartphones come in last – by a country mile:

  • Desktop computers: ~$162 average holiday weekend total spend
  • Tablets: ~$107
  • Smartphones: ~$85

We can acknowledge that smartphones have become the most important method for reaching consumers with product content, coupons and special offers.  And yet, significantly more purchasing continues to happen on desktops.

One takeaway is that for all of the convenience smartphones purport to provide, the purchasing experience on mobile devices doesn’t yet match the experience on desktop computers.

It would also help if there was more similarity between the purchasing process sellers are delivering across all platforms. That continues to be a missing ingredient with some sellers, and it’s likely explaining at least some of the dampening effect on mobile sales revenues.