Archive by Author

Jan11

Gord Hotchkiss

0

High Risk & Low Reward: Buying with the Brakes On

After a brief detour last week (thanks for the many heartfelt messages for my Uncle Jim) I want to return to my exploration of the role of risk and reward in our online consumer behaviors.  We looked at the low risk/low reward and low risk/high reward quadrants. Today, we’ll continue by exploring the high risk/low reward quadrant. As a brief recap, our brains tend to apply brakes or step on the gas when steering through a buying decision based on the degree of risk and the promise of reward inherent in the decision. This dictates the nature of the consumer [...]

Jan04

Gord Hotchkiss

1

Uncle Jim: My Information Highway

For my last column of 2010, I’d like to take a little detour from my usual subject matter and tell you about someone very special to me. I’d like to introduce you to my Uncle Jim, who passed away on Christmas day. He was, in many ways, a precursor to the connected world we write about constantly in this column. Uncle Jim was a long haul truck driver. For most of his life, he delivered bricks in Eastern Canada and the United States. Over the last several years of his career, he hauled specialty vehicles for the rich and famous [...]

Jan04

Gord Hotchkiss

1

Risk, Reward and the Buying Matrix

Last week, I explored how two parts of our brain, the Nucleus Accumbens and the Anterior Insula, are key in driving our buying behaviors. I compared them to the gas pedal and brake of our buying “engine”. The balance between the two is key to understanding how we are driven towards our ultimate decisions. The Nucleus Accumbens drives our anticipation of an emotional reward, and the Anterior Insula creates anxiety around areas of risk. As it turns out, you can plot the two as the axes of a matrix on which, theoretically, you could plot any purchase. The four quadrants [...]

Dec17

Gord Hotchkiss

0

The Insula and the Accumbens: Driving Online Behavior

One of the more controversial applications of new neurological scanning technologies has been a quest by marketers for the mythical “Buy Button” in our brains. So far, no magical nook or cranny in our cranium has given marketers the ability to foist whatever crap they want on is, but a couple of parts of the brain have emerged as leading contenders for influencing buying behavior. The Nucleus Accumbens: The Gas Pedal The Nucleus Accumbens has been identified as the reward center of the brain. Although this is an oversimplification, it definitely plays a central role in our reward circuit. Neuroscanning [...]

Dec13

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Search Breaks Out of the Box in Park City

Wow! The Search Insider Summit is in full swing in Park City, Utah and for the first time in 6 or 7 Summits, I’m not there. I don’t mind saying, it’s feeling kinda weird. Laurie Sullivan and the team, including your emcee Aaron Goldman, did a bang up job putting the show together. I did have some limited involvement, looking on from the sidelines as they lined up the speakers and nailed down the agenda. They’re touching on all the hot topics: the convergence of display and search, social and search (pretty much everything and search), new platforms to allow [...]

Dec02

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Baring Your Corporate Soul Online

Web presence is taking on a whole new meaning. I’m having more and more conversations with companies that are in the middle of redefining who they are online. In that process, they’re just not sure what they expose and what they keep hidden behind the kimono. Their website started as a marketing channel, but the explosion of potential customer touch points online makes the whole idea of a website seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet, there’s a limit in scope and complexity that makes websites an easily grasped online concept. Here are some selected snippets from those conversations: 1. “Is blogging really [...]

Nov24

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Google: Caught in the Act of Balancing

In last week’s column, I talked about the number of changes I was seeing on the Google results page, and, in particular, how they might maintain the delicate balance between driving revenue from the page and maintaining user trust. No sooner did the digital ink dry on the column than I received an email from an old friend, Chris Knoch, formerly of Omniture and now VP of Marketing at Ready Financial. In his email, Chris included a screen shot of a rather interesting beta that Google is running: It’s hard to say, given Google’s love for beta testing, how widely [...]

Nov18

Gord Hotchkiss

1

Google’s Recent Changes: Here There Be Monsters

Something’s brewing in Mountain View. Google’s geared up the SAR (Screwing Around Rate) of their results page to unprecedented levels. We have Google Instant, Place Search and Google Previews all rolling out in the last few months. And from around the blogosphere, there’s rumors of testing that allows users to show 11 sponsored ads on top and also the telling switch of the label “Sponsored Links” to simply “Ads.” So, what does Google have up their sleeves? The recent changes with Google prompted me to dig out a research paper we wrote a few years ago called: Search Engine Results: [...]

Nov06

Gord Hotchkiss

1

Google Defines “You” on the Fly

Google’s ramping up of local results last week made me realize something – our web presence is rapidly being taken out of our immediate control. Case in point, the Place Page. Beyond the Walled Garden… For over a year now, I’ve been pushing a mind shift to our clients, asking them to stop thinking of their online presence in terms of a “website” and more in terms of a portfolio of digital assets; some under their control and others either completely or partially out of their control. For every entity that lives online, there is a ripple effect. At the [...]

Oct29

Gord Hotchkiss

0

A Tale From The Trenches: 14 Years In Search Biz

Maybe you’ve heard the news. I’ve got a new gig. This week, the Yellow Pages Group in Canada acquired the company I co-founded. As I said to my partner, Bill, as we walked out of the office Monday, “Today is the last day we worked for Enquiro.” Although we’ve been ear lobe deep in the deal for the past several months, for some reason that’s when it hit us. Tuesday, we came to work for a new company: Mediative. The deal is interesting in a number of ways that I’m sure I’ll expand on in future columns. It’s a pretty [...]

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