A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to actually attend a lecture by a Wharton professor - Peter Fader - at the Marketing Modelers meeting down at the ARF in NYC. The topic of conversation was "The Paradoxes of Interactive Media". Peter Fader is a professor at the Wharton school of business and is actually on the board of A-list journals such as Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research. He has built his reputation on his research on trial and repeat in the CPG industry, while also doing some mean research in the field of electronic commerce. Most notable was his testimony during the Napster trial. Based on that testimony it was clear that the man is a rebel and revels in lateral thinking. The talk just confirmed it.
Even though I - or most other people in the room - didn't agree with everything he said, but his approach prompted me and everyone in the room to question our beliefs and conventional thinking. In today's blog I am presenting one of the points made in the session.
Professor Fader iterated that cross-group differences across different demographics like ethnicity are often meaningless. Now this may be true from a total category point of view (he used the example of DVD purchaes by hispanic vs. non-hispanic consumers). But if you get down to the brand or attribute level, this actually leads to way different consumer behavior - and since marketing is brand-driven rather than category driven, I would have to say that distinct differences do exist and can be leveraged by marketers to drive sales differently among different demographic groups. However, his essential theory that people are the same (or distributed similarly/ normally, if you want to be statistical) everywhere is pretty solid. However, as soon as you start breaking down a category by its attributes (brand, size, flavor, feel etc.) ethnic differences come into play. I would love to hear other points of view on this. I will deal with a couple of other interesting points made by professor Fader in my next posting....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
The Conference Board forecasted a record US Real GDP growth of 9.0 percent (annualized rate) in Q2 2021 and 6.6 percent (year-over-year)...
-
As the #adtech universe digests Google 's decision last month to give a reprieve to the third party cookie until 2023, here's som...
-
Let’s face it- given the poor performance of most innovations, that new product you are working on doesn’t have the averages in its favor. ...
Professor Fader's normal distribution would be more applicable if we lived in a world where one could still effectively mass-market to everyone. However, the world today is such that most marketers are not trying to sell to the statistical mean. Everyone is carving out different niches in that spectrum and offering a better product/service/message/distribution match for his targeted niche. This is enabled because of technological and societal changes. Therefore, anyone who ignores these niches and mass-sells to the statistical mean will always find himself up against an array of better competitors in each of the sub-niches.
ReplyDelete