June 25, 2008
The other day, I learned the hard way how dangerous it is to rely on people’s prior conceptions to deliver a new concept.
I presented HiveSight as a new kind of tool for market research. Unfortunately, the "new" part was lost on the person in front of me, and instead he chose to focus on the "market research" part. The term "market research" conjures in people’s minds images of surveys, questionnaires, and the all-important representative sample. HiveSight has none of those.
Naturally, it doesn’t matter that HiveSight has none of those, because it’s a very different kind of tool. We’re not in competition with surveys. Surveys require you to arrive with preconceptions and compel you to look right under the lamppost. That’s perfectly alright of course – if you know what you’re looking for. We’re not in the business of providing a representative sample of the population either. Why bother with such samples when you can cover over 50%, and in some cases over 80% of a population?
Note that I said a population, not the population – if you’re marketing diapers for the elderly, HiveSight can’t help you. If you’re in electronics, entertainment, fashion, food & beverages, beauty products, or any other industry where younger people, or social network users in general are your target market, then you’ll want to check us out.
Back to my protagonist, I just couldn’t get him to leave behind his preconceived image of what market research must be and see how we could provide value for marketers via different methods.
The takeout? I don’t refer to HiveSight as a market research product anymore. We’re a consumer exploration tool – we help marketers discover new insights about their consumers. Same meaning, different image.
June 20, 2008
A guiding principle of HiveSight has been a pet peeve of mine with many websites. A company builds some online application, puts up a site that explains all about it, along with video or flash tours and lots of marketing blah blah, but you can’t touch the actual goods and see for yourself. It’s like looking at the promised land from afar, knowing that you’re unable to reach it. You have to contact sales first.
Why?
I’m here. I got this far. I’m almost convinced, and ready to try your product out, I just don’t feel like contacting anybody, or explaining anything. I want to see for myself!
Well, in HiveSight, if you got as far as our website, that’s all you need. You can learn something new about consumers right away. No commitments. No "contact us to learn more". No hassles.
Of course, there’s the occasional "register to receive updates", and you might even have to pay to unlock some extra value (we are a business after all), but all of that comes after you tried us out, and know for yourself that the investment is going to pay off.
So go ahead and give it a go.
June 16, 2008
The Long Tail phenomenon – the fragmentation of markets into many small niches, creates exciting new opportunities for smart marketers.
Your first problem though is coming up with the data you need - traditional market research methods fail to deliver that data.
Surveying merely thousands of people is not enough since niches, by definition, would be represented by too few of the survey respondents. You need either a huge panel, or a standard one whose members are also members of some niche. In both cases, costs soar.
But hold on a second – how did you learn about the existence of that niche in the first place? You only asked the questions that you thought were important, so if you didn’t know of a niche, respondents wouldn’t be able to tell you about it. Even if some of them somehow did, then surveyors may not realize (or care) that the information is noteworthy.
So, in order to recognize new market niches for your current or future products, and to profile their members in order to position, place, price and promote your products correctly, you’ll need a different kind of market research. It will have to be based on huge panels, to make sure that niches are well represented, and it will have to somehow point niches out to you, even though you didn’t know that you needed to ask about them.
HiveSight is a uniquely Long Tail-friendly market research solution. First, our panel is huge, encompassing millions of Americans, so every odd niche interest is well represented. Second, our data is composed of what people tell the world of themselves, in their own words, so all those interests you’ve never heard of and would never have thought to ask about, come out.
Here’s how it works: Our system automatically flags terms that are not yet recognizable. Our analysts then categorize those terms – giving them meaning. They have so far painstakingly categorized hundreds of thousands of such interests, and they’re adding more each day. The result is a huge database of all the things that people do, care about, buy, listen to, watch, read, eat, drink, smoke, wear, play, drive and worship. In short, all that is human. It is all connected in intricate ways, and it’s all laid out for you to learn from.
What will you learn about consumers today?
June 15, 2008
It is with tremendous excitement, and a healthy dose of trepidation, that I announce the launch of HiveSight in public beta. Our site is now open to any and all.
It took us 14 months of hard work, longer and harder than we’d ever expected, and it’s time to find out if we got it right.
We’re still in beta, which means that the product still has many bugs and glitches that need solving. Nevertheless, I belive that it’s good enough to bring before the public for some serious critical judgement.
So if you want to learn more about consumers, I hope you’ll find HiveSight is useful, and that you’ll leave a lot of feedback too – let us know what we got wrong and what we’re still missing.
January 6, 2008
What happens when you set a creative mind free?
You can never tell in advance, but you can bet that it’ll be something beautiful.
So how do you set a creative mind free?
You make it easy to be creative. You supply inputs that spark new ideas, and tools that make it easy to shape those ideas into a new reality.
The internet is the greatest platform for creativity. It provides us with a plethora of channels for information and knowledge, endless sources for new ideas, and a multitude of tools to help us mold those ideas into works of art.
The keys here are ease, speed and affordability. Everyone and their grandmother can use a search engine (I know my grandpa can…), you get your results instantly, and the only cost to you is (mostly relevant) advertising that attempts to grab your attention. The same goes for the tools that let you edit your work, publish it, and again watch others’ works that seed further creativity in you.
When no-longer necessary frictions are removed, and the tools of creativity are made available to everyone and easily accessible, we witness the explosion of creative power possessed by humanity.
But what about business creativity? We, the marketers, are most certainly the creative types, what wonderful new achievements will we reach when unnecessary frictions are removed and the tools that seed our creativity become easy to use, fast and inexpensive?
In a few weeks, HiveSight will launch a Market Research Engine.
It’s a new kind of tool for marketers that makes the task of understanding their consumers fast and easy. We hope to make market research, sometimes a chore, fun and conducive to new insights and boundless creativity.
Stay tuned…
