Tag Archives: new york city

Amazon’s Customer Strategy: New HQ Edition

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At the beginning of the summer, I posited that Amazon bought Whole Foods not as part of a distribution or merchandising strategy but rather because they wanted to cater to the mass affluent consumer.

Now that Amazon has begun the great HQ2 competition, I’d like to take a moment to extend the mass affluent factor to geography.  In other words, where would Amazon build its second headquarters if they wanted to keep the mass affluent consumer in mind?

At first glance, this question seems irrelevant.  After all, Amazon already sprawls across this country with major offices in places like Newark, NJ and Grand Forks, ND.  Myriad distribution centers fill spaces in between.  They once got me a router the same day I ordered it in NYC from Kentucky.

That said, companies often relocate to get in touch with an audience or a workforce.  Many car manufacturers have design HQs in Southern California to take advantage of the region’s car culture.  GE recently announced a move of their headquarters from Fairfield, CT to Boston to attract workers interested in a more cosmopolitan environment (or maybe because GE likes Harvard better than Yale).

So where would Amazon put HQ2 if they wanted to immerse themselves in mass affluence given that they want to avoid the West Coast and such wealthy citadels as Silicon Valley, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs?

Don’t try to make it here

I’ll cross New York City and environs off the list first.   Continue reading →

Data Laziness

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Ridership on the New York City subways declined last year because, well, they’re not sure, really:

The [Metropolitan Transit] authority’s acting chairman, Fernando Ferrer, said on Thursday that several factors could be contributing to the decline: rising subway delays, the popularity of Uber and other apps, and weekend maintenance work that disrupts service.

“It may be all of the above,” Mr. Ferrer told reporters after an authority board meeting. “I’m very glad that our ridership is at historic highs. If it declines a little bit — and I’ve seen those numbers, and it’s a little bit — there is no reason for alarm.”

You want “reason for alarm?”  I’ll give you reason for alarm: the MTA’s chairman can’t be bothered to run a simple Excel spreadsheet.  Let’s call this “data laziness” and show you how easy it would be to get a more definitive answer.

Actually, Excel is a much more useful tool here

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Book Review: The Fires

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I’m going to recommend that you read a book I hated.

More accurately, I want you to read one chapter of the book I hated: The Fires by Joe Flood.  So don’t buy it; instead, borrow it from the library or find it in a Barnes & Noble and just read chapter 12, “Quantifying the Unquantifiable.”  Apart from the awfulness of the rest of the book, chapter 12 gives a master class in how not to use data.  The lessons therein pertain to anyone using data, although of course I find it most useful to apply those lessons to marketing data.

The book covers an interesting point in New York City history, the late 60s through the mid 70s, when fires ravaged poor neighborhoods despite the city’s best efforts to stop them with better management courtesy of management consultants (what could possibly go wrong?).  Yes, the book covers the “Bronx is Burning” era (a much finer book with a broader perspective).

Dino fire engine

Today, FDNY is well-integrated with the neighborhood.  Note the dinosaur skull on the truck that serves the American Museum of Natural History.

Why I hated the book

Before getting to the good part, I should explain why I hated the book overall.  Author Flood rehashes mid-20th-century New York City through a highly distorted lens.  How distorted?  Let me put it this way: he attributes the failure to the efforts of arch-liberals Mayor John V. Lindsay (who was, in fact, a liberal) and the RAND corporation (which grew out of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, those filthy hippies who built the AC-47 gunship for the Vietnam War).  He also intimates that Tammany Hall maintained a strong grip on city politics into the 1960s, which would have come as a surprise to Tammany Hall, had it existed in more than name only at the time.

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It’s Not Me, It’s My, Um, Friend (from “Building a Better BS Detector”)

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As part of a promotion for my two new ebooks, I’m sharing selections from “Building a Better BS Detector” parts 1 & 2 about market research.  Interested in reading more? Email me at ben@plannerben.com.

Respondents fail to tell the truth in market research to prevent misconceptions of others about themselves

This issue can wreck any research project, qualitative or quantitative, online or person-to-person.  Very often, the first person to sound off about a given topic in groups will set the agenda for the rest of the group, since sometimes people prefer to be polite and not disagree (also known as the dominant respondent problem).  Moreover, many participants feel pressure to look acceptable in the eyes of the other respondents.

Even in something as anonymous as an online survey, people feel judged or at least tracked in this era of NSA wiretapping and Google omniscience.  So it’s crucial for the moderator or the research instrument to give people permission to look misinformed or unglamorous or whatever.  Some common tactics:

  • Put yourself in their shoes.  In person-to-person interviews and focus groups, you can put respondents at ease by saying “I sometimes do that myself.”  For instance, instead of saying, “Does anyone have trouble finding the right app on a phone?” you can ask “I don’t know about you, but I fumble with phone when I need to find an app.  What about you?”
  • Gently encourage disagreement.  Sometimes you can read someone’s body language well enough to know that they don’t agree with something that someone else has said.  Other times, you can take a shot in the dark.  In either case, you can get mileage out of asking a respondent “Joe, can you think of a reason to disagree with what John just said?”  Alternately, you can do your all of your groups in New York City, where people rarely feel constrained to agree about anything.
  • Hell is other people.  Remember the old sitcom gag about someone whose “friend” is in trouble?  This ruse works in focus groups.  Maybe respondents won’t give their honest opinion, but they might say what they think other people think.  So ask something along the lines of “what might other people say about…”

    Note, however, that you as the researcher need to keep an eye on the line between what the respondent thinks and what the respondent thinks other people think.  Make sure you know when the respondent is really talking about himself.

  • Confront them with evidence.  You can sometimes get people to be a little more honest with you by giving them a chance to look smart.  Or you can also play bad cop with them.  For instance, you can say to a respondent “67% of women in their 30s watch reality shows.  You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
  • This same evidence-focused approach works in quantitative research as well.  Merely by prefacing a question with a fact can give respondents a sense of not being alone.

    Naturally, marketers can abuse this use of facts.  Political candidates employ this approach in push polling, a tactic designed not to understand constituents’ feelings about an issue, but rather to cast their opponent in a negative light (“would you agree with the 89% of the electorate that Candidate A is wrong when he says…”).  Use with caution.

  • While surveys allow respondents a certain license to speak negatively of other people and brands, they still run the risk of making respondents themselves feel scrutinized.  As a result, respondents may feel reluctant to indicate honest information about themselves.  One way to counteract that reluctance entails leaving personal questions (gender, age, family composition) to the end.  Think of it this way: if the first question someone asked you was “how old are you?” how might that color your perceptions of subsequent questions?

Get your copies of “Building a Better BS Detector” by emailing me at ben@plannerben.com.