Yahoo Life Series search marketing event is a half-day event hosted by Yahoo and is the first of a series dedicated to taking a look at the relationship between life-altering events and search behavior.Topics : ‘Having a baby’ and ‘going off to college’ (though not necessarily in that order).
Erin Bradley was there and has keynotes and thoughts. [Go Read]
- The current decision-making process is fundamentally flawed.
“Identify problem, conduct extensive research of solutions, make decision” is not really the way people do things. Similarly, the way people use search is much less straightforward than marketers might think – they bounce from search to search and site to site and result to result. - The decision-making process is mysterious and most often unconscious.
The best tennis coaches can quickly and accurately identify a good shot from a foul but cannot pinpoint exactly how or why they know this information. Applied to search this means that traditional methods of study, such as focus groups, are limited in what they can tell you about search behavior. - Our decision-making skills are fragile and emotions get in the way.
A person’s ability to make appropriate decisions decreases when factors such personal bias and an overwhelming number of options get in the way. In search this means that it’s important not to confuse or mislead the consumer, lest the “noise” negatively impacts the purchase/conversion decision. - Frugality is a virtue.
Maybe not in a date, but with major decisions people typically assume that the more time and effort put into making one, the better the results will be. Gladwell says false. For search marketers this means it’s best to create as few variables possible in order to speed the pathway toward a successful decision.
Additional key findings from the research include:
- 86% of new parents-to-be said they use the Internet to search about information on pregnancy, as compared to books (68%), friends/family (53%), and magazines (37%).
- 54% of new parents said search simplified their lives more so than magazines (17%) or TV (10%)
- 81% of college students rate search as their best source of information, followed by friends and family (64%), newspaper (36%) and TV (24%)
via [SearchEngineLowdown]
Mena Trott, Founder & President of Six Apart wrote down some notes of the time she’s spent at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco
“The most enjoyable panel, by far, was the teenager consumption panel moderated by Safa Rashtchy, of Piper Jaffray. In watching these kids talk, I realized how infrequently we come in contact with teenagers — [...]
They were candid and honest with their answers because they weren’t on message or thought that there might be a “right” answer. [...] we need to see more people from the non-technical world talk about what they do with the Internet. Someone suggested that a panel just like this one, but with mothers and fathers, would be incredibly insightful. [...]”
This Teenager Consumption Panel is quite the thing :)
Here’s an excerpt of the conversation (where ‘Q’ is Safa Rashtchy) :
Q: Want you to buy a new phone online, where would you go?
Sean: Verizon, I want the one with Vcast, “I don’t watch much TV but watching it on your phone is pretty cool.”
Steph: Sprint because of her friends and family use it.Q: Let’s say you want to buy a CD player, where would you go?
Sean: ummm, a CD player…? (laugher) [- Coolz0r : heheh, research... ain't that great :) ]
Q: OK, how about a digital camera
Sean: Froogle is awesome.
Steph: no idea, because I have one, maybe go to Best Buy.
Sasha: search, go to ebay or amazon to do comparative shopping.
Jake: Amazon, Best Buy, CompUSA, I’d search using Froogle (“Froogle rocks!”)[Ed: setting context for making a purchase is key here. I'd bet that what these teens say they'd do isn't what they'd actually do, so drawing conclusions from their answers probably isn't the wisest.]
Q: What would you like to do with the web that you can’t do now?
Jake: “Get rid of all that spyware, Ad-Aware doesn’t do it for me, so get on it please!” (laugher)
Sasha “The more free stuff you can come up with.”
[Ed: this illustrates that quantum leaps in innovation are hard for an end-user to imagine.]
Taken from [Kareem Mayan's Blog] who lives in LA and works for FOX Interactive Media.
Read the full transcript overthere and learn from it.
Also read :
Young Consumers – Understanding them and cracking the code, on [Customer World]