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focus on research
USI - Faculty of Communication Sciences
Diversity and similarity:
when marketing turns creative
How do we classify products, especially when these are hybrid, innovative, and modified for
apparently unusual purposes? In more general terms, the moment we puzzle out how man
categorises reality we can develop marketing strategies that help us place a product correctly and
make it a success. Categorisation is the focal issue of a project funded by the SNSF and conducted
by the Marketing Institute of Università della Svizzera italiana.
«What is more similar: a sofa and
a Starbucks coffee or an energy
drink and a Starbucks coffee?
In my research I show new
products to potential consumers;
I manipulate those products and
observe people’s reaction.»
Graphics: Meliciani Fabio - L’ideatorio © 2012
Prof. Michael Gibbert, IMCA, USI
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Faculty of Communication Sciences - USI
Institute for Marketing and Corporate Communication (IMCA)
The Institute for Marketing and Corporate Communication runs research
and teaching activities on issues of communication related to economic
organisation. Its disciplinary areas range from marketing to corporate
communication, from organisational communication to knowledge
management. Besides providing teaching in its special fields, the
Institute coordinates two Master’s degree programmes, in Corporate
“Show a child under the age of six – Michael Gibbert, professor of
Marketing USI, explains – the picture of a woman watering her plants with a
coffee pot; ask this child what object the woman is holding in her hands: the
immediate answer will probably be ‘a watering can’. Ask an adult, and you
would get quite a different answer: they would say that the woman is simply
using a coffee pot for the wrong purpose”. We struggle to get rid of a mental
image that we have built around an object and its use and purpose; and this
considerably impoverishes our creativity in our search for new functions for
existing products. Behind all this there hides a broader problem: how do we
classify products? Based on which characteristics? Deciding in which department a simple pair of trainers should be displayed is a no-brainer: it is much
Communication and in Marketing, and jointly coordinates the Executive
harder, on the other hand, to decide where a new model of jogging shoes
Master of Science in Communications Management (MScom). It is also
with an mp3 reader incorporated should go: “Where do we put it? In the
responsible for USI’s participation in the International Master in
sports department – Gibbert wonders – or in the electronics department,
Management, Law and Humanities of Sport, a FIFA initiative. The
between the computers and the Hi-Fi? It is a matter of understanding in what
Institute is headed by Professor Ivan Snehota.
way we detect the similarity behind the apparent dissimilarity of given prod-
web:
www.imca.com.usi.ch
podcast:
www.ideatorio.usi.ch
ucts”. This is what Professor Gibbert is seeking to explore in one of his latest
projects, “When do different category formats influence mass customization
decisions?”, a two-year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), and carried out in collaboration with the Center for Customer
Insight of St Gallen University, directed by Professor Andreas Herrmann.
USI - Faculty of Communication Sciences
Thematic or taxonomic classifications:
a consumer-oriented world
What do apples and oranges have in common? Both are fruits, they
may be eaten for dessert at the end of a meal, although, if we look at other
think it over, the product with a very dissimilar brand extension strikes us as
a loser”. The reason for it can be found in the way we categorise a product,
especially a new product, resulting from a brand extension or from combining products that are taxonomically different, in other words belonging to different categories.
characteristics, apples, for instance, unlike oranges, may also be seen as a
snack, easy to eat at any moment of the day, also while driving. The ‘apples
and oranges’ example is one of many that Professor Gibbert uses in order
explain in simple and intuitive terms the nature of the problem of categorising all sorts of products, from snacks to web services. “Let’s take another
example; tired of spam mail, users have recently begun to use Facebook as a
means of communication across the board, and not only as a social network;
so much so that its email services are so similar to those provided by Google
that Facebook has become a competitor of the well-known search engine.
This conversion has in turn driven Google to add new services, and so to join
the world of social networking and occupy a market niche which had been
foreign to it until very recently”. This is one example (and there are many)
which illustrates how the difficulties of categorisation and consumer choice
contribute to a re-collocation of a product, thus influencing its evolution and,
ultimately, its success.
In this regard, it is worth getting to the bottom of the two types of
classification we use. Professor Gibbert proposes this further illustration:
“Let’s ask whether there exist more similarities between a dog and a bone,
or between a dog and a cat; those who answer that a dog and a cat are more
similar tend to classify according to taxonomic schemes – indeed cats and
Prof. Michael Gibbert
«I think that
marketing is one
of the most creative
disciplines in
business economics.»
swer that there are more similarities between a dog and a bone will tend to
apply a thematic classification scheme”. “Oddly enough – Michael Gibbert
continues – the sample surveyed was split down the middle: according to
50% of them there are more similarities between a cat and a dog, while the
other 50% tends to choose the dog and bone pair. This tells us a lot about
the way people steer their choices while also providing some guidance for
marketing specialists: people who select the dog and bone pair are likely to
“In our experimental work – Michael Gibbert continues – we have
also looked into how the public tends to react to a so-called ‘brand extension’.
Starting, among famous trademarks, with Starbucks, in which many recognise for its association of coffee and relaxation, we speculated how a consumer might react when faced with an armchair or an energy drink bearing
the Starbucks logo, both being unusual products for that brand. So, we put
the question to two samples, which of the two products they might choose
and which of the two they expected to succeed”. Contrary to expectations,
the armchair, the most dissimilar to any of the products sold by Starbucks,
turned out to be more appreciated than the energy drink, the more conservative extension. When, however, the same sample of consumers were
asked what elements the two products had in common, and which of the
two might prove more popular, most people were unable to come up with
any characteristics linking the armchair and any typical Starbucks products,
while they did detect some continuity between the latter and the energy
drink. “This is an interesting finding – Gibbert comments – because it shows
that we can, intuitively, identify the connection between Starbucks and the
No. 18 - 2013
armchair (the notion of ‘relaxation’ is the link, ndr), but as soon as we try to
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dogs belong to the ‘domestic animals’ category – whereas those who an-
appreciate an even more curious brand extension, say an armchair bearing
the Starbucks trademark, where the link is thematic”. This kind of analysis
also gives us an insight into why some marketing strategies work better than
others: “In its previous incarnation, the iPhone was the iPod touch – Professor Gibbert comments – an object which on the outside looked remarkably
like the iPhone. So, from a taxonomic point of view they may be classified in
the same category, with the one difference that the iPod cannot be used to
make phone calls. And that’s the extraordinary thing: Apple has managed to
sell a product identical to the iPhone, but for the fact that it does not have a
telephone function. Should I ask my students, is there such a thing as a telephone that cannot make phone calls, they would answer that no such thing
exists … and yet this example shows how, by removing or adding features,
one can re-categorise, re-collocate a product and, lo and behold, a totally
new market springs to life”. The clever move was to have placed the iPhone
and iPod touch in separate categories, one under smartphones and the other
under mp3 readers.“A stroke of genius in marketing – concludes Gibbert –
whereby, if you are familiar with the dynamics of categorisations, you will
be able to sell to the same customer two iPhones, one that functions as a
telephone and the other with no such function”.
Referente:
Michael Gibbert
Graphic design, pictures and text by [email protected]
English version by Prof. Simona Cain Polli
Focus on research can be downloaded from:
www.ideatorio.usi.ch
Full professor
Faculty of Communication Sciences
Università della Svizzera italiana
phone: +41 (0)58 666 4727
e-mail: [email protected]