Category Archives: #SciCommChall

Using giveaways as a tool in science communication. Post #1: What the literature tells us

Many big research projects and institutions regularly spend a lot of money on things like pens, mugs, canvas bags, or even pool noodles (I kid you not, one of my former employers did that!), all typically branded with the institution’s or project’s logo, that they give away in large quantities. Many of those are certainly useful and others funny. But since they are already budgeted for, anyway, why not use them as a tool in science communication?

Part 1: What the literature tells us about giveaways — and how I think that applies to science communication

What eactly is a “giveaway”?

In the marketing literature, giveaways constitute the “low” end of the spectrum of corporate gifts, in contrast to high end gifts like holidays in the Caribbean or cars; “generally low value, high volume, less personal items that are used mainly to promote a company’s name” (Fan, 2006). They are used because verbal communication is easy to forget while gifts, branded for example with a company’s logo, serve as a reminder of that company, which may tip a business decision in that company’s favor (Axtell, 1990, in Fan, 2006).

Most research on corporate gifts is on very expensive gifts, like cars and Caribbean vacations, and therefore deals with legal and ethical concerns. I will ignore such concerns here because I am talking about the type of inexpensive giveaways that are customary in academia: Mugs, pens, hats, flash drives, stickers, all the stuff that you will be given at academic conferences, when visiting institutions, at open days or science fairs (it’s often the exact same items given to all the different audiences).

Goals of giving giveaways

Marketing literature tells us that depending on the stages of a customer relationship, giveaways typically serve different purposes. Arunthanes et al. (1994) describe business gifts as “means of promoting products and services by strengthening relationships with customers and suppliers“. They distinguish three categories of reasons for giving business gifts relating to a company’s relationship to their customers: initiating relationships, cementing relationships and quid pro quo.

Initiating relationships

When initiating relationships, the goal is to create a positive first impression in and relationship with potential new customers, extending a gesture of good will as basis for a positive future business relationship. Fan (2006) describes this goal saying that giveaways are “used mainly to promote a company’s name”, and Beltramini (1992) describes the goal as increasing positive customer perceptions toward key product attributes.

In a scicomm context, this could mean that you want to attract a new audience to your scicomm topic — kinda like I did when I used the opening of an art exhibition to talk about physics. I was first going to continue saying “… except we would be giving them some small physical object”, but we do not even need the physical component, even a social gift of spending time, building relationship, stimulating thought might be considered a giveaway.

Cementing existing relationships

When giveaways are used to cement existing relationships, they can be used to thank clients for positive past relationships, for placing a new order or for referrals to other clients. Marchand (2017) points out that sometimes repeated (instead of one-off) gifts for might be necessary to keep up customer loyalty.

In scicomm, this might mean keeping an existing audience interested in your scicomm topic, giving people who are already interested in your science something that reminds them of how interesting it is and that they can come back to you for more cool and fun and fascinating information and discussion and engagement. So anything that they will take home and that helps them continue engaging with your topic might be in this category, like the magnifying bug viewer that you showed kids how to use and that they continue using when out and about with their parents or kindergarden group.

Quid pro quo

In the quid pro quo scenario, a giveaway is given in the expectation that the favor will be returned by the customer through other means, for example increasing consumer’s in-venue spending through sports promotions (Yukse, Smith and McCabe, 2017), or because customers have come to expect receiving gifts.

This is what I would refer to as “buying attention” — I give you a giveaway, you give me your time. Maybe this is the really flashy gadget that you get so fascinated with that you don’t even realize you are in a scicomm situation? Or a booklet that captures people’s interest? In a way, the magnifying bug viewer is also a “quid pro quo” thing, I spend money to make you look at bugs (which is what I want you to do because it’s my area of interest and I want you to get excited about it).

Anyway. No matter the stage of the customer relationship, objectives of giving giveaways can be classified very broadly into three categories: Cognitive goals (you hope they will learn something, which could be evaluated by looking at reach of a campaign, awareness of a certain product, or knowledge), behavioral goals (you hope they will change their behaviour, which you would see for example in a number of hits or downloads), and financial goals (you hope they’ll give you money, evaluated for example by the return of investment, brand equity, …) (Cruz & Fill, 2008).

What makes a giveaway successful?

Since giving and receiving giveaways has become the rule rather than the exception, givers seem to evaluate giving giveaways as overall positive and worthwhile, i.e. the objectives seem to be achievable by giving giveaways. Investigations show that business gifts are generally effective in increasing positive customer perceptions toward key product attributes, especially in the case of the low-priced product lines (Beltramini, 1992). For sports promotions, Yukse, Smith and McCabe (2017) find that promotional giveaways increase consumers’ in-venue spending intentions. These effects are explained by the principle of reciprocity, which has its theoretical foundation in the exchange theory (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005).

Dimensions of gift design: gift type and gift relatedness

Marchand (2017) describes two critical dimensions of gift design: gift type and gift relatedness. Gift types can be described in the continuum from economic gifts (where the value of the gift is in the monetary value) to social gifts (where it is about the gesture, the connection, the feelings). Gift relatedness describes the closeness of the link between a gift and the gift-giver and their products and services. Gift-relatedness is high for a company’s own products, and low for other companies’ products.

Marchand (2017) recommends economic related (e.g., coupons) and social unrelated (e.g., unbranded chocolate hearts) gift designs over economic unrelated (e.g., coupons for products from other companies) and social related (e.g., exclusive events with company chairpersons) ones. However, even though social related gifts are generally not recommended, there might be goals for which they are still well suited. For example, if the goal is to learn the needs and problems of the client, to further client-seller relationships or to close a sale, lunch, evening meals, leisure activity or parties might help achieve just that (Arunthanes et al., 1994).

One example of a gift on the economic-related-to-economic-unrelated scale in a scicomm context are little business cards with key messages of a workshop that you hand out to participants (for example which fish to buy and which to avoid). If the card is branded with your institution, NGO, project, what have you, it would be a related. If you hand out a similar card that someone else made and branded, you might still be conveying the same message about what fish are good to buy, but you might at the same time be building up someone else as the trustworthy authority on fishing, rather than having people think of you as the authority because they saw your logo every time they were making decisions about what fish to buy.

On the economic-to-social scale, economic gifts in the sense that there is a large monetary value given are not common in academia (or at least I have never received or given any). Social gifts are more common — meeting with famous scientists, guided tours through famous institutions, that kind of stuff. But I feel like with scicomm giveaways, we’d be not in the extremes on either end of this scale.

Long-term effects

Depending on the goal, in order to achieve long-term effects, one-off gifts might not be enough. Repeated gifts for customer loyalty might be necessary, otherwise, the reciprocity process could wear out (Marchand, 2017).

For scicomm, I think this might not be the case as much. Giving people pens so they remember this one phone number for your taxi company might be helpful (I know it worked for me as a kid, when the pen next to the phone (which was still on a cord) had a taxi number on it, that was the one I would use), but for scicomm I would hope that people’s engagement would not depend very much on who gives the coolest gifts. On the other hand, occasionally reminding people of your cool topics would probably not hurt, either. But then it’s not so much about “loyalty” as of being on people’s minds, which can happen by means of giveaways, but also by many different means like for example a radio interview they happen to hear or a poster advertising your open house day.

Cultural context

Gift-giving is depending on cultural context, which can have a huge influence on how a gift is perceived depending on the timing, the monetary value of the gift, the way it is being presented, or even the colors used (Arunthanes et al., 1994; for a broad overview over gift-giving across cultures check out Giftypedia, 2013).

Cultural context is always important to keep in mind, especially working in international settings such as academia. So not surprising that it might be an important consideration when designing giveaways, but worth the reminder!

Giving through multipliers

Giveaways can develop both direct and indirect effects. In the same way that it often is a successful strategy in advertising to target children for products that parents will make purchasing decisions for (not only entertainment parks etc, but breakfast cereals, cars, …) it can be a strategy to not target an audience directly with your giveaway, but use other players to bring the message to your intended audience.

When the first level recipient is intended as multiplier, Berger & Schwartz (2011) find that while products that are cued more often were discussed more frequently, more interesting (or novel, surprising, original) products did not get more word of mouth overall.

This translates well to scicomm: If a topic is cued more often, it is likely that it will be discussed more. So make sure your giveaway is something people use daily and that makes other people comment on it!

The gift giver

Determining the “audience”, i.e. who you are giving your giveaway to, also includes determining who the gift-giver is (Cruz & Fill, 2008), since the same gift received by the same person can be perceived very differently on the context the gift-giver and the gift-receiver are in. It makes a big difference to the message a gift is sending whether the source of a gift are individuals or a corporation, i.e. whose relationship the giveaway-giving is supposed to influence. A paper clip branded with the logo of an institution might be taken as sign of appreciation when used on documents sent to a coworker at a different institution. The very same paperclip might not work at all when handed out as giveaway at a science day, even if the recipient is the same person in both these example

Design criteria for giveaways

Let’s assume you’ve gone through the three basic scicomm questions and know your goal, your audience and your message, which is what you should always do first:

1) Why do you want to give away a giveaway? Your goal.

2) Who do you want to reach and how will you reach them? Your audience.

3) What is it that you want people to take away from your scicomm? Your message.

Now how do you combine the message with a physical object? That’s a very good question that I will try to answer in my next blog post tomorrow :-)

Literature

Axtell, R. E. (1990). Do’s and taboos of hosting international visitors. Wiley.

Arunthanes, W., Tansuhaj, P., and Lemak, D. J., (1994) “Cross‐cultural Business Gift Giving: A New Conceptualization and Theoretical Framework”, International Marketing Review, Vol. 11 Issue: 4, pp.44-55, https:// doi.org/10.1108/02651339410069245

Beltramini, R. F. (1992). Exploring the Effectiveness of Business Gifts: A controlled field experiment. JAMS, 87-91

Berger, J., and Schwartz, E. (2011) ,”What Do People Talk About and Why? How Product Characteristics and Promotional Giveaways Shape Word-Of-Mouth”, in NA – Advances in Consumer Research Volume 38, eds. Darren W. Dahl, Gita V. Johar, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research.

Cropanzano, R., and Mitchell, M. S. Social Exchange Theory: An Interdisciplinary Review. Journal of Management, Vol. 31 No. 6, December 2005 874-900 DOI: 10.1177/0149206305279602

Cruz, D., Fill, C. (2008) “Evaluating viral marketing: isolating the key criteria”, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 26 Issue: 7, pp.743-758, https://doi.org/10.1108/02634500810916690

Fan, Y. (2006) “Promoting business with corporate gifts – major issues and empirical evidence”, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 11 Issue: 1, pp.43-55, https:// doi.org/10.1108/13563280610643543

Giftypedia (2013); http://www.giftypedia.com/International_Gift_Customs (last accessed on xxx -> print relevant pages to pdf!)

Marchand, A., Paul, M., Hennig-Thurau, T., and Puchner, G. (2016). How Gifts Influence Relationships With Service Customers and Financial Outcomes for Firms. Journal of Service Research. 1-15. DOI: 10.1177/1094670516682091

Yukse, M., Smith, R., McCabe, C. (2018) Reciprocal Intentions: Effects of Promotional Giveaways on Consumers’ In-Venue Spending Intentions: An Abstract. In: Krey N., Rossi P. (eds) Back to the Future: Using Marketing Basics to Provide Customer Value. AMSAC 2017. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham

Vernissage of water sculpture photography by Wlodek Brühl, with explanations of the physics behind the pictures by yours truly!

I am a huuuge fan of Wlodek Brühl’s liquid art: Pictures of water sculptures that are created with focus on the tiniest of details, that only persist for milliseconds, but that are captured forever in all their fragile beauty. And I think these pictures are an awesome tool in science communication — I see so much physics in them (some of which I wrote about here already), and even if you come to an exhibition for the art, who wouldn’t love to learn some physics while they were there, too?

Well, we are about to find out! There is a new exhibition being opened (with brand new pictures!) on March 3rd in Preez. And I will actually give the opening speech for the liquid art half of the exhibition! I haven’t seen all the pictures yet so I can’t tell you exactly what I will be talking about, but whatever I say will definitely have to involve lots of fun physics :-)

Click for pdf

My “GEO-Tag der Natur” elevator pitch

Yesterday on #scicommchall, I shared my elevator pitch.

Still not inside an elevator, but now that I have my elevator pitch down to short and sweet (it’s really only 30 seconds if you don’t watch the contact stuff in the end), maybe I will be able to manage to film it without being interrupted like I was the previous dozen attempts

What do you think? Does it make you want to learn more about GEO-Tag der Natur?

An attempt at an elevator pitch

I’ve been coming up with #scicommchall challenges for well over a year now, and I have always met them. Except for last November, when the challenge was to do an elevator pitch and post a movie of it. Since this is something I really want to do, I decided to force myself to it and repeat the challenge this January. And man, was this hard! For a lot of reasons: I don’t think what I am saying captures the essence of what my job is about, I hate seeing myself on video, I hate listening to my own voice even more, and wow is it difficult to get some alone time in the elevator at work! I’m really not satisfied with the result just yet. But I am sharing to maybe inspire others to join me in my efforts. Will you join me? :-)

So here are two versions, first one with English subtitles.

And then here a non-subtitled one that includes a couple of takeouts (because those are always my favorite part of every movie ;-))

But I am not done here, and my #scicommchall to myself remains: to write a better script, to film it in an elevator, and to upload it on the internet! :-) How is this #scicommchall working for you? Show me your elevator pitches!

My nine most successful Instagram pictures of 2018 #2018bestnine

Interesting year-in-review: despite amazing photo opportunities in Cyprus and Norway and other beautiful places, the Kiel fjord is clearly dominating my most successful Instagram posts of 2018 (only two are not from the Kiel fjord, one is from the Kiel Canal and another one from the Eckernförde bight, so still very close to home…). But I guess it shows the “Kiel” in my Instagram handle @fascinocean_kiel wasn’t an accident ;-)

Using social media in science communication — the Kiel Science Outreach Campus shows how it’s done

One of the 2018 achievements that I feel most proud of is developing a social media strategy for the science communication research project Kiel Science Outreach Campus, and implementing it together with the project’s 11 PhD students plus a couple more colleagues who we “entrained” along the way. And now an article we wrote about the whole social media has just been published! (pdf of the article and a link to the full issue No 4 of the IPN Journal). Check it out, as well as our Twitter @KiSOC_Kiel and Instagram @KiSOC_Kiel — both lead to the project’s central social media, which in turn often link to our individual scicomm social media profiles.

Click image to reach pdf of article

A big Thank You to Sonja Taut for the super nice graphic design and print setting!

Cool podcast about oceanography! Also useful if you were looking to improve your German! ;-)

Just in case you have not listened to Ronja and Maxie’s podcast Treibholz yet, you definitely should! Ronja and Maxie are learning about oceanography and taking everyone along with them. Educational and entertaining to listen to!

And then I also got to be part of it last year, which was great fun! Check out the episodes that include interviews with me:

  • In the first one (actually their episode 15), we talk about what made me want to study oceanography, what drives the gulf stream, the importance of eddies in the ocean, and a lot more.
  • In the second one, we talk about my favourite topic: Double-diffusive mixing!

And then there are three advent specials, each approximately 10 minutes long, talking about being at sea on research cruises (1. Advent on why it’s awesome to be at sea, 2. Advent on what is being measured on oceanographic cruises, 3. Advent on what it’s like at sea).

And now I am eagerly awaiting the new and exciting stuff that will happen on Treibholz in 2019, looking forward to listening to more oceanography with Maxie and Ronja!

Dipping my toes into podcasting: “Treibholz” with Maxie and Ronja!

Last month I got the super exciting opportunity to participate in a podcast! Maxie and Ronja are running the oceanography podcast Treibholz (“driftwood”) and I got to be in it! Very exciting for someone who tends to speak extremely fast and prefers writing over public speaking. But I had a great experience, Maxie and Ronja and their producer Freerk made me feel super welcome and at ease, and chatting to them was so much fun!

Treibholz producer Freerk, Maxie, myself, and Ronja

Since Ronja and Maxie had tons of questions, and I don’t stop talking once I’ve started, we ended up with two full episodes as well as some “advent specials”.

In the first episode, we talk about what made me want to study oceanography, what drives the gulf stream, the importance of eddies in the ocean, and a lot more. Listen to it here (in German).

In the second episode, we talk about my favourite topic: Double-diffusive mixing! This episode isn’t online yet, but I will let you know once it is!

And then there are the advent specials, each approximately 10 minutes long, talking about being at sea on research cruises (1. Advent on why it’s awesome to be at sea, 2. Advent on what is being measured on oceanographic cruises, 3. Advent on what it’s like at sea). I’m not actually sure what else I talked about, but there is probably a fourth one coming!

Cute gift I got from Maxie and Ronja, featuring their cool postcard

Maxie and Ronja were such amazing hosts, not only being super well prepared for the interview in terms of what questions they had, but making sure there were food and drinks available and giving me a cute gift: a bag decorated with their new merchandise! They have these super cool postcards, asking “Do you like the sea?”. Well yes, I do! :-)

This week I am taking over @IAmScicomm!

You might think that I’d be busy enough with my visiting fellowship at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen this month, and you would be right.

However, I’ve always* wanted to take over one of the rotating Twitter accounts (You know? Those accounts that tweet about certain topics, but are being run by a different person every week. People follow it for the topic and get to see a new person’s view on things every week. A very cool thing when you want to be exposed to a lot more people than you usually are and that are all interested in that topic!). And when I signed up for it in spring, October still seemed so far away that it seemed to be a good idea to do it then.

So this week, I am curating @IAmScicomm! Which I am super excited about, although it is also kinda scary. 18.6k followers is a little different from my usual couple of hundred… Anyway, this is what I am proposing to talk about:

Come join the discussion! :-)

Last week I already did a similar thing already for @geoscitweeps.”Only” 4.6k followers were slightly less scary, and I had the super cool surface drifters to tweet about. @geoscitweeps is another really interesting account you should be following!

*Yes, ALWAYS. It was actually pretty much on top of my list when I started my private #scicommcall, only at that time there were no vacant weeks available that suited my schedule, so I put it off. But now here we are!

A #scicommbookforkids for #scicommchall

I hope by now you have heard about my pet project of the moment: #scicommchall! For #scicommchall, I give myself (and quite a few other people by now) monthly challenges related to trying out new science communication formats. And this month, we are doing science communication books for kids! (For more instructions, see #scicommchall’s post. And everybody is welcome to join!).

My book deals with learning to observe where the wind is coming from (English version at the end of this post, too).

I think it turned out quite nicely!

I did struggle a little with the very short format — only six pages inside the book, plus a cover — but quite liked the challenge of having to come to the point.

The flag on the cover, in case you were wondering, is that of my hometown Hamburg.

I hope this book is actually useful and fun for kids (I did include some kids’ humor, or at least I tried ;-))

And I know what I would include if I wasn’t too lazy to re-draw the images: A question about on which side of some kind of structure one would sit down if one wanted shelter from the wind. Bummer I forgot to include that!

Anyway, here is the download (German & English). Please let me know what you think, I’d love to get some feedback!

Click to download