This Week In Market Research: 10/19/15 - 10/23/15

This week I came across a very interesting article on Buzzfeed that discussed the gender gap in people who own and or buy drones. The article discusses the issue from a marketing standpoint on how the drone market, which is generating more than $5 billion in revenue, can reach the female audience. The author explains how, upon doing research on women and girls with drones, ''only 3 included images of women and girls engaging with drones, compared to 18 for men and boys. On Shutterstock, I found 4 girls, 28 boys, 12 women, and over 100 men. (The search terms I used were 'drone,' 'drone man,' 'drone woman,' 'drone girl,' and 'drone boy.' The numbers are taken from looking through the images ' discounting unrelated pictures and aerial shots.)' The article also points out that some attempts have been made to appeal to the female market, although they can be seen as a step in the wrong direction. Some drone booths, in their attempt to reach women, have women dress in revealing clothing to hand out T-shirts that say 'Chicks dig drone pilots.' However there are the few marketers that feature, in my opinion, more appropriate tactics such as strong women doing what they love and being featured on drone technology. Upon reading the article, however, I'm still not convinced that the majority of these tactics are moving the female image in the right direction. What do you think?

It's that time of year again, folks! The infamous Black Friday is approaching us and everyone is stampeding toward'their phones? That's right. In an article posted on Adage this week, Google is claiming that more consumers are actually using their smartphones to complete Black Friday purchases. 'More consumers are shelving the traditional, daylong Black Friday shopping experience for short, burst-like purchases made with their smartphones that are spread out over a period of time, or what Google is calling 'micro-moments.'' According to Google's blog, 'shopping moments' will replace the idea of a 'shopping marathon' where people spend the night outside of a Best Buy just to cram into the store and buy the latest gadgets for half price. The article presents compelling evidence and numerous studies that show consumers, more and more, are purchasing holiday items from their mobile devices. This comes as great news to someone like myself, who can't stand waiting in lines and being in a crowded department store. It will be interesting to see the numbers from this upcoming Black Friday as compared to last year to really see the decline as well.

Last week many Advertisers and Marketers ascended upon the Orlando World Center Marriott to attend the Association of national Advertisers' Masters of Marketing Conference. However, in an Adage article posted this week, many attendees did not find answers to some of their major questions. Questions such as, 'how does our company get around ad blockers'? received very few, if any, remarks. 'In Orlando, Mr. Liodice (The group's CEO) moved quickly off ad blocking, as well as brief mentions of ad fraud, ad viewability problems and a "degenerative and destructive" proposal in Congress to reduce the tax deduction for ad spending. 'With as many challenges as our industry has,' he said, 'we have a growing abundance of opportunities.'' Answers such as this one were not received well with companies hoping for a strong and absolute response. However, the article also suggests that perhaps the answer to this direct question lies within General Electric CMO Linda Boff's suggestion that the answer is as 'simple as creativity.' ''Ad blocking, viewability, none of it matters without great work.''