Tag marketing

Entries 2 Total

Win-Win Warrantee

Aug 17, ’10 1:15 PM

Square TradeI recently got an iPhone 3GS for my wife. Since she is prone to breaking things easily, I needed to find her an insurance that covers accidents. This is how I found out about SquareTrade. For $99, they have a pretty good warrantee service (if it breaks, there is a $40-50 deductible and they will either cover the rest to fix or provide a new phone).

Yesterday, I received a gift in the mail from them – a SquareTrade branded iPhone case. True to my cynical nature, my immediate thought was, “Ahh, they want to do whatever they can to make sure they never cover it,” as I did some quick calculations of how much it costs to make this rubber case and what a small amount this is compared to the $99 I paid – of course, this was all done in less than 10 seconds. I’m a little sad that my thoughts ran to the politics/business of this product. Was this a business decision? Most certainly. But, it also functions as a marketing tool (i.e. the big logo on the back) as well as provide the customer a usable product (to protect the phone) and service (to remind customer of who to call if/when device breaks).

This reminded me of a project I did while I was at frog design. It was a healthcare client desiring to engage with the ~90% of their customer base that is healthy. Many insurance companies have initiated well-being programs that desire to provide health coaches and tips to those who are not yet in the risky categories. How do you engage with an audience under such circumstances? In the healthcare industry, is sending a customer a bottle of vitamin C the equivalent of an iPhone protective case? That sounds absurd, but then providing call center services, health coaches, and financial incentives to promote health isn’t. Or in the auto industry – is providing maintenance check-ups for insurance holders the equivalent of an iPhone case? What other industries could benefit from such a “win-win warrantee” model?

I’m curious if my wife will use this case.

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From Clean to Dirty Toilets

Jul 15, ’08 10:05 AM

There was an excellent article in the New York Times this past Sunday, July 13, 2008 titled, “Warning: Habits May Be Good for You.”

In the US, marketers and big corporate companies have always been creating products and trying to get them to be part of our lives. Febreze, the perfumed water used on couches, is one of the most successful examples of habit-creation campaigns.

Basically, when Febreze was first introduced, the company thought it would be in the context of removing odor from smelly clothes. Makes sense. However, researcher at P & G (makers of Febreze) discovered that bad smells simply do not happen as often in consumers’ lives. Here is what Dr. Berning, a P & G psychologist said,

For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed. But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.

Dr. Berning, in these three sentences, has captured the essence of interaction design. It’s not just about the entity of the products, but the whole context of human activity and behavior – the big picture environment (please note that this is different from surrounding – will have to post on this some other time).

Interaction design is also about creating products that do not yet exist as opposed to “bettering” products that are already out there. In the words of Herb Simon, design is the activity of devising “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” that is, dealing with the contingent, not necessary -”not with how things are but with how they might be.”

P & G’s realized that habits have specific prompts. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories:

  1. a specific location or time of day
  2. a certain series of actions
  3. particular moods
  4. the company of specific people

According to a Dr. Wood from Duke, “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are so sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”

P & G’s solution: The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room – a physical and emotional cleaning ritual. This is totally opposite to the original purpose/intent of the product. Hence, the artifact has stayed the same, but the activity of the product was turned upside down, changing the nature of the product (see post on topoi).

Now what does this have to do with toilets? As noted in the NYT’s article, such tactics surrounding the creation of Febreze offer enormous promise in a country like Ghana.

Here is the problem according to the article,

Almost half of its [Ghana's] people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed.

They could talk all day about germs, but this was not going to change the behavior of people in this African country.

An important insight: a sense of bathroom disgust is natural for us living in the states, but in many other parts of the world, toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replace pit latrines. The solution in Ghana was to show ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched. They played up perception.

I find it interesting how products play a role in creating habits and perception. A century ago, people did not brush their teeth three times a day. But thanks to manufactured habits, this has changed. And products like mouthwash, gum, and toothpaste are all integral parts of our day … at least, for most people ;)

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