Consumers try so you know what they'll buy

At Sample U, Consumers try so you know what they’ll buy.

I have spent the last 20 years shaping the brands of Fortune 500 and start-up companies. The more successful companies share many things in common. One thing in particular is the subject of this article: Research. The more successful designers, advertisers and marketers know you have to go to your customers for feedback on usability, price and suggestions for improvement. Today, this practice is proving even more essential as consumers have become guarded of their hard earned dollars.

Tryvertising is the future of advertising. It combines market research and advertising by putting products and creative ideas in the hands of the people who will be buying them. Sample U, a research laboratory on the campus of Alliant International University in San Diego has put Tryvertising into the spotlight. The company places products from well known and soon to be well known companies in a retail test environment and asks you, the consumer (whom they now call their Trysumers) to give your opinions about the products you test. Trysumers move through this mock retail store, answering survey questions about the products and leave with a bag full of free gifts for their work! Its a win-win for everyone. The companies get valuable information about their products directly from Trysumers, and the Trysumers get free stuff!

The advertising aspect comes into play since Trysumers develop a natural affinity for the companies of the products they test which results in sales after the Sample U experience. Consider that the Sample U TryStore can move 10,000-30,000 Trysumers through it’s doors every month and you can see the value of this kind of experiential marketing and advertising.

Advertising and marketing agencies have gotten into the game as well by placing their creative concepts in TryStores to get evaluations from Trysumers before they present to their clients. This way, they can validate their concepts before spending their client’s dollars which increases the campaign’s success. We at Deal Design Group have been using Sample U and Tryvertising in all our creative development since October of 2009. It has totally changed our world! Instead of participating in the battle of egos that breaks out when you try to justify creative concepts to a room full of type-A personalities, we simply show them how the concepts tested with consumers, and the discussion is over. I tell them “we went to customers, we asked them what we should do. they told us, so let’s do that.” I know, its a revolutionary idea: Validating your ideas before you spend dollars. And its amazing how many companies don’t simply because old fashioned market research is too costly and takes to long. Now, Tryvertising through Sample U gives us feedback in as little as 48 hours, is crazy cheap,  and makes us smarter designers and marketers. I don’t know about you, but I can always use a little more “smart” on my side.

Check out www.sampleu.com.

America's Royal Family by David Patrick Deal. Part of the Fragile Pop series. Assemblage on canvas. 2009.

Pop artist including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauchenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Keith Herring elevate the ordinary image and manufactured product to art status in their commentaries about America’s obsession with beauty, popularity and tragedy. Pop art is born.

Today, Pop lives and morphs into electronic media. Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In build social media into a new way to relate to one another.

Recently, I held an opening of my art for friends in a recreation of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory: The studio and playground for the New York elite underground scene in the 1960’s.

Pop art challenged our views about what is art worthy. The Pop artists elevated ordinary products and images to the status of high art––blurring the lines between pedestrian and artistic. Through their commentaries on force feeding of repetitive imagery, they reveal how media desensitizes us to the beautiful, ugly and tragic. Our culture’s obsession with beauty and fame drives our buying decisions, celebrity fascinations and fashion sense. The Pop artist’s work imitates art which, in turn, imitates life in an endless dance of reality and fantasy. The next time you look at a soup can, or celebrity photo, or dollar bill, consider how many people have seen the exact same image, and how their need for this object drives their decisions every day. Everyone is longing for love, beauty and their 15 minutes of fame. And, if they get them and lose them, they become obsessed with getting more. Its an insatiable American hunger that the rest of the World loathes and admires simultaneously.

Newest Thriller Author on the Scene. Watch for his novels The Ark, Palmyra Impact and Adamas Blueprint

A relic from Noah’s Ark gives a religious fanatic and his followers a weapon that will let them recreate the effects of the biblical flood, and former combat engineer Tyler Locke has seven days to find the Ark and the secret hidden inside before it’s used to wipe out civilization again.

Not a bad pitch line huh? That’s my good friend and creative brother Boyd Morrison. I have known Boyd since 1997 when we met during a department-wide Quake game, back in the day when Quake WAS the hands-down best first person shooter on the planet! Boyd was a program manager for the New Media division of Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA and GE brand consumer electronics). I was the Creative Director for Brand in the Americas Design Organization of Thomson. We quickly became friends and built a strong  friendship on a shared love for all things manly: Firearms, The Smiths, video games, and explosion movies. Ok, I added the Smiths in there to make us feel better about liking them. Boyd likes them too, and he’s plenty manly, so there.  Boyd is the perfect example of doing what you love, and never giving up on your dream. After writing 4 novels over 15 years, Boyd and his epic thriller The Ark have been picked up by Simon and Schuster for a 2-book deal! And so far, he is going to be distributed in 10 countries. Even though he was a successful New Media Designer,  NASA Usability Engineer, Microsoft Xbox Director of Game Testing, Jeopardy Champion, he never stopped writing and chasing his true dream. Look for his novel in the Spring of 2010. It will be quite a launch party. All friends and family are invited to come!

BoydMorrision.com

The Ark, by Boyd Morrison