EqSim

I am in the process of thinking how to collect into an e-book or something what I’ve been observing regarding product simulations in advertising.

I’m not thrilled with the term ‘degrees of closeness’, but the idea is to have some measure to evaluate a product demonstration or exposition with respect to a real experience with the product.  Today, there seem to be a number of product advertising sites that simulate the experience in a somewhat static way, stitching together product photos (or 3D recreations) with selections such as color.  For example, I came across the 2011 Ford Explorer’s site, which, in the 3D view, lets one navigate from position-to-position, and change the exterior and interior colors.  Done in a professional way, it doesn’t give any interaction with the car.  Maybe the ‘degrees of closeness’ would have various categories, two for example, might be functionality and physical presence (the Ford example being closer in the physical presence category).

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Rick Braddy’s post about storytelling for product launches, “Psychology of Social Product Launches — Part 3, Storytelling” is a quick and interesting read about using stories as part of presenting a product, rather than the typical verbiage we develop.  The article immediately made me think about the power of case studies for marketing, which seems to me to be a more acceptable formal term than a “story.”  I made a post a few months ago about using product simulations to enable viewers to participate in their own success story.  As Rick highlights, “Crafted properly, stories don’t sell – they simply tell and teach by example.” I would take this a step further with an interactive simulation woven into a story by saying that they can tell and guide by example.

Another key sentence in his post is as follows:

By allowing people to make up their own minds (instead of coercing them through slick offers and time-limited deals that everyone knows are lies concocted by marketers to get them to buy), people are much more willing to listen to what you have to say when conveyed as an interesting story.

What better way to help them make up their own minds than by evoking them to interact to solve their problem(s)?

In “Study finds customer engagement hard to measure,” B-to-B Magazine’s Kate Maddox posts some high-level findings from a recent study from Forbes Insights about measuring customer engagement.

“Customer engagement is a top priority for CMOs, but many companies are struggling to implement strategies and measure customer engagement, according to a new study from Forbes Insights and George P. Johnson.”

A majority (67%) of marketers polled view customer engagement as very important, but a good percentage feel their companies do a fair or poor job engaging their audiences. They view retention, sales, and revenue per customer as key metrics for customer engagement.

I hypothesize that “product engagement”  — using tools and methods to present products in a more interactive and engaging way, such as via product simulation marketing — would be a big contributing factor to overall customer engagement.  Furthermore, it may be easier to measure product engagement because of the direct relationship between what is presented and how the viewer/customer interacts with it.

Over at Get Elastic, they had an interesting post about research from Invodo (a company focused on using videos for product marketing, not coincidentally) regarding improving conversion rates using videos.  I think when mainstream marketing get around to seeing the benefits of product simulation marketing, many of these same observations will be relevant.

In my mind, product videos share some effects with simulations, except that videos are fixed and uninteractive (is that a word?).  Videos illustrate points, they try to get the viewers involved in the product, but there’s no flexibility, or really “owning” the product.  I believe that the more diverse product videos a manufacturer produces, the better the results will be, because it is almost like making the marketing interactive — the viewer chooses which aspect of the product or message to observe.  This will bring the retailer or manufacturer closer to the point of realizing that product simulation will take the positive effects of videos to the next level — truly engaging the prospect or customer.

Back to the points.  Linda Bustos summarizes the report finding in 4 hypotheses tested, and specifically calls attention to improving a metric called “View Through Rate” (VTR), or how many videos are watched per impression with a video.  She comes up with a nice list of interesting questions one might ask in testing to improve VTR, such as thumbnail images, showing video length, captions, text, headlines, etc.  Each of these sounds like they would call attention to why the viewer should be interested.  In the comments, I added something about looking at how long a person watches the video, to see about correlation with conversion.  My thinking is that the video is a crude way of seeing how much it takes before the viewer has satisfied himself or herself that the product has the elements they want — something I think could be done more effectively if the options are laid out for them (such as through a simulation, or interactive product demo).

I was explaining to a friend today about my ideas regarding “simulation-based marketing,” and he said that in his (IT) line of work, they demonstrate their software to potential customers, using fake data.  The question becomes, “is simulation-based marketing” just another term for doing product demos?

I think that at the heart of product sales and marketing is a product demo, since the point is really to tell prospects what the product is and why they should want it.  However, simulation-based marketing is a broader concept, encompassing not only the product demo itself, but also the context in which the demo is presented.

For example, he does his demonstrations live (via the Internet, through WebEx or GoToMeeting), as well as at conferences.  The kind of simulations I originally thought about were more of the variety where there is no live element to it, i.e., it is self-running.  Clearly, though, that is only one possible mode for presenting demonstrations, and our work in the past few years has expanded to build out the other components for online product demonstrations, namely SimTracker (for behavioral metrics), and LiveDrive (our own term, not the online storage site), for synchronous meetings around specific products.

In my head, I’ve always thought about marketing as about generating awareness, where it goes over to sales to do things like conduct product demos and close the sale.  However, especially in today’s markets where access to product information is so readily available (people making buying decisions virtually completely on the basis of what they find on the Internet), it makes sense that companies use product demos even as first-exposure to prospects so the prospects are aware of competitive or unique features.

Bottom line is that I think one could tease apart a product demonstration meant for marketing, from one meant for sales.  They may have a great deal in common (and also have a lot in common with product demos used for training or customer support, for that matter), but I could see someone making a distinction between a product demo meant to generate awareness of capability, versus a product demo for the actual sale that is more comprehensive.

I would love to hear from marketing people about where this fits into traditional marketing (or sales).

I just ran across an interesting blog post entitled “Measuring and Improving Cross-Sell and Upsell” at GetElastic.com.  It gives fascinating numbers and insights about existing online retailers’ current abilities to cross-sell and up-sell products.  What struck me is how well product simulation covers all of the take-away messages:

1. “we think you’ll also love…” — by putting products in real-world situations, you can expose customers to related products they may not have considered, just like the “we think you’ll also love…” items currently tagged onto shopping cart items.
2. Quoting Mike Svatek’s webinar of effective merchandising on Elastic Path, the post says cross-selling works well for “considered purchases”, the ones with higher cost and higher involvement.  The consumer who uses simulations to evaluate products will almost certainly be ones prepared for higher involvement in the procurement process (whether in B2B or B2C) — natural candidates for cross-sales (and the consumer will likely be appreciative of the relevance of related products or services).
3. Again quoted from Mike Svatek’s webinar, the post says up-sells work best when there is “a small difference in dollar value or a small nominal percentage difference – 10-20% max. You need to show some incremental value for the increase in price.”  Including optional product features in the simulation is a great way to lead consumers to the complete product they need.