The Personal Values report explains the why behind people’s everyday decisions by uncovering what makes us the most human. Watch our video to learn how to use these insights to inform everything including your go-to-market strategy, your customer segmentation strategy, your content strategy, and more.
The way people shop is changing and nowhere is it more evident than in the mattress business. Mattress Firm recently declared bankruptcy to get out of leases that were no longer tenable and will close as many as 700 stores before year-end. At the same time, Casper, a direct-to-consumer mattress company founded in 2014, posted over $300 million in revenue in 2017 and has plans to open hundreds of brick and mortar stores.
Over 100 mattress startups have launched and grown quickly in the past several years, replicating first movers like Tuft & Needle and Casper’s bed-in-a-box concept. They understood something was broken in the mattress business and were able to solve several customer pain points. But the industry has become incredibly crowded, and it’s time for mattress brands and retailers to figure out the next wave of mattress buying and product innovation. Nearly 21 million people plan to buy a mattress in the next six months, so the market opportunity is gigantic.
Upstarts like Casper, Leesa and Purple entered a market where consumers were tired of the mattress-buying process. Advertised sale prices are often a lure to get a shopper in the store and then they face a hard sell by salespeople incentivized to unload the most expensive products. Deliveries are slow and costly and return policies are rigid or non-existent. Some consumers were stuck for 8-10 years with a mattress they don’t love.
The upstarts introduced a bed-in-a-box business model in the last five years where they developed their own mattresses and pillows. Purchases are made online, shoppers rely on genuine customer reviews, pricing is transparent and lower, shipping is free and returns are hassle-free.
Consumers were thrilled as the headaches of buying a mattress were erased. It showed in the financials as well. Many of these new players are posting tremendous growth numbers, and traditional players like Mattress Firm are scrambling. These bed-in-a-box retailers understand a fundamental need of consumers and have been quick to capitalize on that need.
Given the low barriers to entry, many new players have entered the market. Just a few years ago, there were only a handful of bed-in-a-box companies. Today that number is over 100. Each new bed-in-a-box option seems to come equipped with thousands of five-star reviews, free shipping, the best foam and a free trial. Behind the scenes, all these operations come fully equipped with an easy-to-use website and accounts for Facebook Business and Google Ads.
Unfortunately, launching your site and paying bloggers affiliate fees isn’t enough anymore. The industry has become crowded, and the large number of entrants are bidding the relevant search terms higher and higher. The initial customer pain points have been solved and are no longer differentiators. Even Mattress Firm has adopted some of the tactics of the newer players.
Casper is now branching out from its ecommerce roots by opening 200 stores to reach the 86% of consumers who aren’t comfortable buying a mattress online.
So what should traditional retailers and bed-in-a-box brands rely on to engage and convert 21 million people who are being hit from every angle?
The key to winning customers in this type of business , where purchases are made as seldom as once a decade is having a fundamental understanding of who these consumers are, what they want, when they want it and WHY. What types of insights drive engagement? There are many questions to answer:
1. Why are they buying a mattress?
2. What’s their plan?
3. How should you engage with them?
Combining these insights will create a holistic view of your customers and prospects and lead to a better understanding of the best strategy, messaging, creative and channels to engage and convert more of these customers than your competitors.
The final piece of the puzzle is making sure all the information is fresh. There is nothing worse than wasting money trying to engage someone who already purchased their mattress and has no intention of returning it. Mattress shoppers are in market for a short period of time, and their preferences change often. Marketers need to understand these dynamics and be able to monitor changes quickly, so a strategy can be optimized as consumers change their preferences.
If you’re an online or brick and mortar mattress or furniture retailer, the only way to keep your brand from losing to the newest disruptor is by having a deep consumer understanding of who is in market, why they’re in market, where they shop, why they shop there and how you should engage with them. This deep consumer understanding also helps establish a long-term emotional bond for customer retention and loyalty.
Want to see Resonate’s consumer insights in action? We’d be happy to show you more.
Learn more about creating loyalty in Resonate’s Marketers’ Guide: How Deep Consumer Insights Improve Loyalty Program Performance.
Imagine this: Your target consumer is browsing your website in an airport lounge. She finds products she likes and ADDS them to her shopping cart. Then, her flight is called and, now in a rush, she leaves the site and forgets to complete her shopping. Abandoned once again!
Does this sound familiar?
Online retail marketers are consistently challenged with online shopping cart abandoners. Nearly 80% of online shoppers abandon their virtual carts, according to Statista.
Resonateʻs consumer intelligence platform solves this problem for marketers through dynamic person-level insights that provide a deep understanding of consumers to turn shopping cart abandoners to returning customers.
There are two easy steps in the Resonate Platform for converting shopping cart abandoners. Let’s walk through them by looking at a hypothetical online Retailer A, which has a persona group named “Jenna.” Using the Resonate Platform, Retailer A can determine the percentage of “Jennas” who are shopping cart abandoners and uncover insights that will enable them to connect with non-converting Jennas.
With the Resonate Platform, marketers can tag their digital properties, including landing pages and conversion pages to run analyses. In this case, Retailer A focuses on the relationship between its tagged home page and purchase page to run an analysis.
After running the analysis, Retailer A switches to the Measurement tab at the top of the screen and selects RealSegments from the drop-down menu.
Then they are prompted to add their segments to their analysis and check the boxes next to the segments they want to include—in this case Jenna. They then click on the Add Selected button to add the segment to their analysis.
The percentage of shopping cart abandoners can be determined by subtracting the composition of those who landed on the home page from the composition of those who visited the purchase page. For Retailer A, 15% of their target persona “Jenna” does not convert on their purchase page.
With this insight, they can dive into the profiles of these consumers to understand why they don’t convert.
The next step is to navigate to the Audience Builder to create an audience of Retailer A’s Jenna segment.
Under the My Tags tab, they find their Home Page and Purchase Page tags and add both to the audience definition.
The default audience definition will incorrectly be “people who visited the home page AND the purchase page.” They actually need to update the audience logic to create the audience of non-converting Jennas. So, they click on the OR next to the Purchase Page tag and select Exclude OR so the definition reads as “people who visited the home page but did not visit the purchase page.”
They click Add to Analysis, then click Run Analysis. This brings up Resonate’s curated reports, which help better understand the Human Element of these consumers and why they didn’t convert. For instance, in the Personal Values Report, they learn that this audience values pleasure over safety and tradition. New creative focused on themes of enjoying life’s pleasures will be more successful in converting them.
View a short video to see what Retailer A uncovers about their non-converting Jenna persona.
Want some help figuring out your shopping cart abandoners? Contact us today.
Undecided voters can decide elections. If your campaign’s in a close race down the stretch, you understand the importance of putting dollars behind identifying and targeting known swing voters well before they head into the voting booth. With just three weeks remaining until Election Day, engaging this critical segment with a message worthy of their vote needs to be a part of any savvy campaign strategy.
At Resonate, we put our dynamic artificial-intelligence driven models to work to find and target swing voters – from the national to local level – with surgical precision. With just a few clicks in our voter insights platform, we’re ready to analyze swing voters across thousands of the most relevant political persuasion insights and target them wherever they are online. This is how winning is done.
Let’s take a quick look at what’s driving the 2018 midterm swing voter on the national scale and in a couple of key 2018 election battlegrounds.
Audience size: 16M
Compared to the average registered U.S. voter, national swing voters are:
Bonus insight: at least 50% of this audience will vote in the midterms primarily because they feel it is their civic duty. 12% will vote because of state-level concerns.
Audience size: 743K
Compared to the average registered Pennsylvania voter, Pennsylvania swing voters are:
Bonus insight: 50% of this audience voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Audience size: 387K
Compared to the average Wisconsin voter, Wisconsin swing voters are:
Bonus insight: 25% of this audience voted for a candidate besides Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016.
If your campaign needs to engage and win swing voters in the final 3 weeks, contact Resonate’s Campaign Hotline today to get started immediately. Don’t leave the swing vote to chance, start engaging and winning now!
Did you know that 20.5 million people are buying apparel from Amazon’s Essentials, the online giant’s clothing brand. It’s not surprising given that 44% of them say they choose where to shop based on convenience. So what else do we know about Amazon’s apparel shoppers?
View the infographic below to learn more about these consumers. Want to learn more about Resonate’s insights on today’s consumers? Let us give you a quick demo.
How many times have you cringed at a marketing or ad proposal that targets “moms who want to delight their children”? Or can there possibly be one more article on how to market to “today’s millennial”?
In marketing and advertising, personas help us define who we’re selling to and in turn, guide us in creating the right kind of messaging to reach our target audiences. But many personas are based on a handful of vague attributes like age and marital status. “Soccer mom” emerged during the 1996 presidential election when Bill Clinton was accused by his opponent, Bob Dole, of targeting busy moms who cart their children to their sports activities. But personas like this don’t really help us understand and connect with consumers on a deeper level.
It’s time to throw out personas we’ve been using for the last 20 years that are simply based on vague demographics like gender and number of children, and start fresh with personas that are more detailed, accurate and paint a more complete picture of the consumer.
We’ve all been guilty of using generational personas. The whole idea that people born within a certain date range could have all of the same traits is a fairly new thing, perpetrated by advertising, marketing and media.
We often think of millennials as being uber tech savvy and loyal sharing economy consumers. We label baby boomers as being leery of online shopping and loyal consumers of traditional media. We think of Generation X, once referred to as “slackers,” as being heavily focused on finances as they juggle children headed to college and aging parents. And finally, there’s generation z, who has completely grown up with technology and is heavily guided by online influencers.
The danger in creating messages geared to a whole generation is that you ignore people in this same age bracket who don’t have the same traits. For example, the common misperception about millennials is that they’re all single, young, unmarried and only rent apartments. But this misses a whole segment of people who fit in this same generation but are actually married with children and own a home.
A consumer insights platform can serve as an important tool for agencies in developing a deeper understanding of their client’s customers. Resonate distills what we call the Human Element. This is a holistic understanding of a person that starts with what makes us the most human—our values and motivations.
Personas are brought to life with the Resonate Human Element. It helps agencies provide dimension to their personas and ensure engagement that delivers performance for clients. For example, let’s look at the person who buys North Face products, which are geared to “athletes and the modern-day explorer,” according to the company’s website. We can assume that the North Face consumer’s top hobbies are hiking, camping and other outdoorsy activity. But Resonate’s dynamic insights paint a different picture. This segment actually spends their free time trading stocks, visiting spas and resorts and going to the movies. And they’re only 12% more likely than the overall U.S. population to spend their time hiking and camping. So when you’re developing messaging for a brand that sells outdoor active gear, think twice about turning to the traditional “hiker” persona—these folks are more indoorsy than outdoorsy.
Now let’s look at the working mom. You might assume her personal decisions, including working outside of the home, are driven by a desire to prove her competence and skills and getting recognition from peers. But Resonate’s consumer insights show working moms care even less about those attributes than the average U.S. consumer. Their everyday decisions are actually driven by living an exciting life and creativity.
Modern personas are about connecting with consumers in more meaningful ways. Connecting with people starts with understanding them at a personal level. Creating more accurate personas based on these actual person-level insights brings tremendous value to agencies in a number of ways:
Agencies are competing against more players like consulting firms and smaller, more nimble shops and dealing with major industry shifts like new pay structures and more privacy regulations. Being able to offer clients a new view of personas can be the key differentiator.
Resonate’s easy-to-use SaaS platform provides a unified view of the consumer. It’s continuously updated, so personas evolve to adapt to peoples’ dynamic lives.
With this level of accuracy and timeliness, agencies can build personas that consist of real-time attributes, rather than static demographics. The Resonate Platform also helps provide insights into the several layers that make up a human, from the top actions they take every day to their psychological drivers.
So yes, it’s not surprising that a working mom buys most of her groceries online to save time and prefers retailers with loyalty programs. But there’s a lot more to her shopping behaviors. For example, they’re also 32% more likely than the average consumer to shop online and then pick up in store. And they’re big Black Friday shoppers but stay away from Cyber Monday and Amazon’s Prime Day.
There are several layers to humans, making it vital to tap into the Human Element to help frame more relevant personas. So can we once and for all stop with the “soccer mom”? She’s moved on and we should too.
Hear more on relevant and fresh personas in my recent webinar with AdWeek: “Uncover the Human Element of Data Targeting: Go Beyond Cardboard Personas.”
Want to wow your clients at the next pitch meeting with a better understanding of their actual personas? Let us show you how.
In December 2017, Democratic candidate for Senate, Doug Jones, implemented a revolutionary targeting tactic that influenced the online behavior of tens of thousands of voters a week before the election.
During the lead up to the election, Resonate’s data science team identified 250k voters who predominately engaged with news and reporting from conservative sources. Collectively, the constellation of sites and publishers comprising this conservative media bubble proved to be a formidable shield, and prevented the Jones campaign from courting the non-traditional voters necessary to win in too-close-to-call elections.
That reality changed when the Jones campaign took action and leveraged Resonate data to infiltrate the conservative media bubble and deliver a message to voters that was otherwise completely absent from their digital lives. These voters were served a pro-Jones video in the week leading up to Election Day. Amongst the 80,000 video engagers, we observed a 30% increase in liberal news browsing relative to untargeted voters inside the media bubble.
Fast forward – we’re 4 weeks out from the midterms and Resonate data scientists have identified targetable media bubbles (conservative and liberal) in districts and states throughout the country. This is voter targeting 2.0. Launch a sophisticated targeting campaign with Resonate that puts your messaging right in front of these voters. Impact the recommendation algorithms of just 2% of voters and you can drastically influence the actions they take now and on November 6.
Let’s take a look at some real life examples of digital media bubbles in battleground Ohio. Specifically, we’ll look for voters trapped in these bubbles who are sympathetic to the opposition based on relevant insights in the Resonate platform.
Ohio Conservative Media Bubble
Full audience size: 1.9M online adults
Ohio Liberal Media Bubble
Full audience size: 1.2M online adults
The above audiences identified, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are receiving the majority of their election-related news from partisan sources that dominate their feeds. A sophisticated digital campaign that moves a small percentage of these voters could be a major difference maker in races throughout Ohio and other key states and districts this cycle.
Are you ready to incorporate this strategy into your voter targeting efforts and begin driving real, impactful changes? Contact our Campaign Hotline today. Our models are pre-built, dynamically updated, and ready to launch immediately.
Merriam-Webster defines a “frenemy” as “one who pretends to be a friend but is actually an enemy.” It may sound like something out of the movie, “Mean Girls,” but really it emerged in the 1950s to describe the complicated U.S.-Russia relationship.
Many retailers and apparel brands describe their relationship with Amazon on frenemy terms. For any B2C company, the adversarial relationship with Amazon is understandable—the online giant has been disrupting the retail industry for the last two decades. But to be fair, Amazon has also allowed brands to use them as another sales channel by creating branded stores within their ecosystem. Brands are stuck between loving the revenue that comes from selling through Amazon’s platform and hating the fact that Amazon is contributing to a reduction of foot traffic in their brick and mortar locations, as well as shrinking revenue per square foot.
The question then becomes: How do I conquest Amazon’s customers without cannibalizing the people who are buying my products on Amazon? The answer: Understand Amazon’s customers as well as they do.
Snapshot of 20.5 million Amazon Essentials apparel customers.
Amazon sits on a treasure trove of consumer data that helps them retain customers by staying relevant. Nearly 166 million people have shopped on Amazon within the last six months, and 105.4 million of them are Prime members. Nearly 10 million people are Subscribe and Save users (2.5 million of which don’t have Prime); 9 million are Amazon Pantry users (2.3 million of which don’t have Prime); and there are 2.3 million Amazon Fresh users (900k of which don’t have Prime).
Amazon knows what products and brands people are buying on the site. Any brand that plans to go after Amazon’s customers without stealing customers from their own Amazon store should also know what products and brands people are buying from Amazon.
For example, let’s look at people who buy Amazon Essentials apparel—Amazon’s clothing brand. If you knew who was buying Amazon Essentials apparel and understood why they chose to buy this brand, you could create a strategy for how to conquest these consumers. By conquesting the people buying this apparel and not the people buying your brand’s products, you can ensure that you’re acquiring new customers and people already buying your products. With the right information, you can determine how to connect with these consumers on an emotional level and give them the offer that’s most likely to get them to engage and convert.
In looking more closely at people buying Amazon Essentials apparel, you’d expect bargain-basement shoppers who buy solely based on price. The data paints a different picture: They’re busy professionals who value convenience and saving time and enjoy wearing luxury apparel. These shoppers are predominantly women with children and 29% of them have an annual income above $100k. Unsurprisingly these professionals like directing people, being in charge and maintaining a good public image. They also want to be seen as an individual. If you’re looking to find them in the morning, they’re reading the New York Times. In the evenings, they’re watching The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and spending the rest of their free time on Instagram.
Want to learn more about Amazon’s customers? Or is there another competitor whose customers you’d like to conquest? Reach out for a demo of how our insights can help.
Learn how you can woo customers from Amazon and other retailers this holiday season. Check out our new Holiday Guide: 3 Trends Marketers Need to Know This Season.
Speed is everything in technology. The performance of enterprise tools effects everything from crucial business decisions and growth strategies to new product development and customer acquisition.
That’s why in the Fall of 2016, the Resonate engineering team started exploring how we could make our consumer insights platform much faster and more robust. We knew the platform at that time ran slow and limited the number of users at any given moment. Thankfully those days are over.
The engineering team spent the better part of a year revamping our analytics engine using Apache Geode, a distributed in-memory cache and query engine used in data management. It was a unique way of using Apache Geode’s technology, so my colleague, Sharif Ghazzawi, and I were chosen to present our approach at the recent SpringOne Conference in Washington, D.C. We’ll spare you the gritty tech details, but here is a quick summary of how we had transformed the Resonate Platform to make it even more robust and unique in the market. It was truly the most complicated and exciting engineering project of our careers.
The Resonate Platform computes 10,000+ attribute values for over 200 million cookies. That means we’re looking at 1.7 trillion individual records of someone hitting one of our client’s digital touchpoints. To provide the analytics on these interactions, we examine every single data point. Yes, it’s as daunting as it sounds.
To understand the old way we processed analytics for clients, picture a large spreadsheet with over 200 million records. Every answer would need to be found in that spreadsheet. For example, say you want to know how many men drive Subarus. In that monster spreadsheet, you’re having to go down 200 million rows to filter out all the males. And then you’re going down the row of car owners to filter out who drives a Subaru.
We went from that very manual and slow process to probabilistic counting, where you have a piece of data that resembles the parts of that spreadsheet. It doesn’t take up as much space and allows you to do the same operations but much faster. With the new approach, we’re able to have a data structure that represents the set of people who drive a Subaru. We also have another data structure that represents the set of people who are men. We then take the two data structures to create a third one with our answer. As you can imagine, it’s a lot more efficient than having to go through 200 million rows of data. With this probabilistic approach, we’re able to estimate these counts and control the amount of accuracy on our platform.
Before the move to Geode, the Resonate infrastructure was expensive to operate, with 40 nodes running to power the solution. Not to mention, it took far too long for a client to receive an answer to their query. Going from 40 machines to 10 means we can now provide the same precise answers but much faster to our clients. We can also support a higher number of customers—the user experience slowed down considerably in the old infrastructure when a certain number of people were using the platform at the same time.
Now our clients can run queries faster, which means they can run more queries than ever before. They’re also getting the most updated consumer insights now that we’re able to update the data in our platform nightly. One of the biggest challenges in the market is that data is stale by the time it gets to the marketer.
Using Apache Geode also lets us add more insights to the platform. We now have a system of bringing in new data, modeling it and representing it in our solution. So it’s much more scalable and allows us to provide more data points to our customers.
When embarking on a project of this scale, there was the early question of whether we buy or build this solution. We did explore the buy option but realized there was nothing out there to serve our needs. What we developed is a one of a kind solution to a one of a kind problem.
One of the most satisfying aspects of this project was how Resonate had all of the skills it required in-house. It involved engineers of different expertise, everything from critical thinking and database structures to design, data science and Java skills. No one person has all of these skills, so the completion of this project speaks to the willingness of the team to collaborate, bring in new perspectives and talk through the best solutions. Throughout the process, we were challenged with mysterious outages, multiple stress tests, working through weekends and exercises where we stayed in a room until all the problems were fixed. In the end, we have a platform that provides better numbers, faster than anyone else. Nobody has the data we have at the scale and scope that we have it. It was a real feat of engineering.
You should really see it in action. Reach out for a demo of what the Resonate Platform can do, specific to your industry.
Do you really know who your best consumer segments are? We do! Imagine having incredibly deep insights on who’s purchasing your products in various channels and why. This is what Resonate is doing at massive scale for our CPG clients.
One frustration I often hear from fast-moving consumer goods companies is the lack of easily accessible information and insights on WHY consumers do what they do. Most brands have plenty of sales, distribution, market share, brand health and consumption patterns data, but not much actionable information on the Human Element – the psychographics, motivations, daily habits and values on the people within their most important segments.
Companies that leverage relevant and actionable Human Element insights are 23x more likely to acquire new consumers and 6x more likely to gain new ones, according to McKinsey.
The best way to achieve similar results is to have the best consumer-centric insights at your fingertips. This empowers brands to create content and creative that makes a difference in consumers’ lives and begins to build a lasting and deeper relationship with their products and company.
Let’s look at some of the insights in Resonate’s consumer insights platform for guidance on the ever-changing organic consumer. The Resonate Platform has insights on 37 million people who buy organic food.
At a high level, we start to see an interesting picture of this consumer:
By looking at their demographics in more detail, we see that 44% of organic consumers are between the age of 25 and 44. Diving deeper into these 16.4 million consumers reveals unique insights that help drive more meaningful segment level insights, ultimately leading to higher engagement, loyalty, consumer acquisition and sales.
One of the many unique insights revealed was that these consumers are significantly less likely to purchase based on price. This insight could have a significant impact on the brand’s trade strategy and save the company millions in unneeded price promotion.
Deeper Human Element insights are available to help organizations move beyond sales data or static custom research to a dynamic world of real-time consumer insights that help define the WHY behind consumer actions and dramatically increase engagement.
Want to learn deep insights on several other consumer segments? Check out our new State of the Consumer Report Q4 2018.
Ready to get started? Reach out for a demo.
