CATEGORIES : News
17 March 2015

Apple n’est certainement pas la première compagnie à s’intéresser à votre poignet. C’est possiblement par désir de capitaliser sur cette fascination répandue pour les bracelets futuristes que des compagnies comme Fitbit, Polar, Nike et Samsung, pour ne nommer que celles-ci, ont voulu allier d’une part la mise en forme et d’autre part la continuité du téléphone intelligent à la bonne vieille activité de regarder l’heure.

Le poignet, semblerait-t-il, n’est pas si facilement conquis. En février 2014, un rappel massif frappe la dernière innovation de Fitbit, le bracelet Force suivi par Nike qui discontinue son Fuelband en avril 2014. En ce qui concerne la Galaxy Gear de Samsung, elle en est maintenant à sa deuxième itération et connaît un succès mitigé. Est-ce qu’Apple saura vous convaincre que son interprétation d’un produit qui est loin de faire l’unanimité est celle que vous attendiez pour vêtir vos poignets?

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My wife and I recently purchased a new car. On the whole, I would call the process uneventful. We had done our research and quickly identified the car we wanted to buy. It was just a matter of going to the dealership and closing the deal.

What really struck me about the process was what happened after we bought our car, more specifically the day we went to pick up the car at the dealer.

As we were getting ready to leave with our brand new car, our salesperson approached us and politely asked to speak to us privately. We gladly obliged and followed him to his desk.

What ensued was a classic case of marketing research losing its way.

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CATEGORIES : News
17 February 2015

THE INFLUENCE OF MARKETING ON BRAND IMAGE
As a semi-recent immigrant – coming up on five years now; Go Habs Go! – I find myself having different perceptions of certain brands than those around me.

Take the beer Stella Artois, for example. Even after all of this time, it still makes me giggle when I see it advertised as “Premium” Belgian Beer.

Back home, in the land of beer, chocolate and waffles (or Belgium, as some like to call it), Stella Artois has been around for centuries. But in Belgium, there is nothing premium about it. It’s one of the five mass-produced lager brands and is, quite frankly, perceived on the lower-end side of the quality spectrum (think Colt 45).

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Imagine if sending an email would require as much thought and mental preparation as sky diving. Imagine that if every time you came across a piece of information – be it familiar or new – you would have to start from scratch. Talk about a waste of brain power!

Thanks to Cognitive Schemas, a set of processes defined by psychologist Jean Piaget in 1926, you can save precious brain power for other endeavors.

Cognitive schemas in action

The idea behind cognitive schemas is that the manner with which we receive, interpret, integrate and judge the value of new information is fundamentally automated to accelerate the whole process. If you’ve learned to hate a certain type of music, you’ll need only a second to recognize its first notes and get away from the shop playing it – this without even being conscious of it.

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Plus que jamais, les choix offerts aux consommateurs sont innombrables. Combien de types de pains ou de yogourts parmi lesquels pouvons-nous choisir? Combien de modèles de téléphones cellulaires? Combien de formules de prêts hypothécaires? Même le lait, produit basique s’il en est un, n’échappe pas à cette multiplication.

Aujourd’hui, le consommateur a donc l’embarras du choix. Or, le choix est une bonne chose, mais pas l’embarras qui l’accompagne. C’est ce que Barry Schwartz appelle le paradoxe du choix (voir son excellent Ted Talk : http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice). Car l’acte de choisir paralyse plus qu’il libère : il complexifie le processus, exige du temps et de l’analyse et réclame parfois de la connaissance. Et plus il y a de choix, plus le risque de ne pas faire le bon est grand…

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