Big Data, Big Deal (part 2)

Big Data, Big Deal (part 2)
big data

Alex Batchelor, COO of BrainJuicer and former chairman of The Marketing Society, writes the second chapter of his story of data, taking us back to the first days of picture messaging and what they teach us about how to use data.

I have already written a blog on this topic and came to the rather bland conclusion that no matter how much actual data you have, you still have to have a view about human behaviour.  Indeed, what adds value to any business is combining the two – and no matter how much data you have you can still make terrible strategic mistakes.

Rather than talk in glowing terms about our successes, we all know that many of our best lessons come from failure – so let me share one of mine.  When I was at Orange we introduced a great new service called MMS, the picture version of SMS.  Sadly more than a year after the launch of the service, usage of this service was woefully low, and a measurable and depressingly large percentage of the pictures being taken and sent on our network came from our own employees.  

This was all playing out against a backdrop of significant increases in the number of minutes used for calls and almost exponential growth in SMS usage.  Why weren’t consumers using this great new service?

Only 25 clicks to go

If we look through the lens of Behavioural Economics, then one of the key reasons for this was a series of environmental factors. Taking and sending pictures on a phone in those days was far from fun, fast and easy. Indeed many phones had a separate attachment that was the camera, which you had to connect first before you could even take a picture.  

In many other phones the process of linking an email address to a picture and sending it was far from the intuitive experience it is today.  We did a correlation of how many clicks it took to take and send a picture, and for most phones it was still in the 15-25 range. We surmised that wider usage would not happen until we
could get this down to fewer than five clicks, and until it was easy and obvious how to do it.

Are you reading me?

The other environmental problem was that there were so many different formats and phones, which didn’t communicate well with each other. Often all the recipient of the picture actually received was an SMS with a number and a security PIN directing you to a website. This meant you had to get to a computer, find the website and put in a code and PIN in order to be able to look at the picture – which was then, after all that, very hard to save and share.

The problems weren’t just in the user experience of taking and sending a picture.  One of the more fundamental reasons was social – and indeed we had most of the data available on that already. For a while at Orange we had been doing studies into calling patterns and communication circles. We had asked: how many people do you call and SMS, and how often?  In the graph below I show the number of people in a calling circle based on the number of calls made in a month. You can see it rising to about 40 in the UK (blue), 35 (green) in France and 30 (red) in Switzerland.
 

What the data showed was that you would send SMS to a far smaller group of people than you would call. It also showed that for most people, no matter how many SMS they sent, their SMS circle was a more intimate group and tended to plateau at no more than 10.  

It is easy to look at these issues through the lens of hindsight, but when estimating how many pictures someone might send we had assumed that people would share them widely, with lots of different friends. A better guide would have been the much smaller social circle who they would send text messages to. It is mildly ironic that people now often do share their pictures widely, with an extended group of friends, and via their mobile phones, just using things like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – and not using MMS!

Best friends

It wasn’t just the size of your social circle that mattered. We had also analysed “top contacts” – the people you called or text messaged the most frequently. This next graph plots the Swiss data, and shows that your top contact represents around 40% of all the calls you make, but that in the case of SMS this is 60%.

A simple conclusion would have been that if your top contact did not have an MMS-enabled phone, and so couldn’t receive your picture message (or send you one back), then you were extremely unlikely to send a picture at all.  

This was illustrated by the evidence from those who did use the service. In a despairing roll of the dice, Orange a couple of years later sold pairs of phones with photo messaging capability. One for you, one for your top contact.  This might have been an effective strategy at a time when lots of people were still getting new phones and upgrading for the first time – but the price of all the 3G licences (and the cost of building networks that would enable data and pictures to be sent in larger number) weighed heavily on the service.

Pricing pictures

The last factor that was preventing uptake of the service revolved around personal biases relating to price.  People like to know what they are going to spend.  People who are anxious about price don’t spend much.  Indeed, to the credit of the mobile phone networks, a lot of work was being done around creating bundles that removed the worry over what you were going to spend.  The only problem with picture messaging was how to price it.  

To avoid all the confusion over how big a picture was and given that the whole idea of data was a relatively new one, the choice was made to price picture messages at 50p each – which was roughly five times the cost of a text message at the time.  This was quite a high barrier to trial and repeat, as the perceptions of price were anchored to the relative price of a text message.  

A few years after launch, some half-hearted efforts were made to introduce picture messaging bundles, but uptake of these was even smaller and slower than the use of picture messages. Indeed it is only with data packages offering all you can eat (within reason) that usage of pictures is growing significantly. Again, things like Facebook are much more efficient than sending a picture to lots of different people .

So what have we learned? That starting habits and maintaining habits among consumers – which is what marketing is about, isn’t it? –  requires us to look at data through the lens of human behaviour.  No matter how much data you have, you still want people to start, stop or keep doing things, and that requires understanding, testing, failure, humility and not just data.

Read more from Alex Batchelor.

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