Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

February 23rd, 2010

See how business can use Twitter

Whilst most of the social media world is theorising about “social media strategy”, it can pay to follow those who lead by example. Here are three links to three companies who are using Twitter to sell product to a defined community of customer/followers:

  1. Dell Outlet - see one of their twitter pages here - Dell have Stephanie@Dell offering customer support on their page
  2. Misco  - see their twitter page here - Misco have added a deal of the day to their background.
  3. Viking Direct - see their twitter page here

I think these are great uses of Twitter. Each company can add or remove offers by the second. On the basis that “birds of a feather flock together” it’s highly likely that these offers will be re-tweeted to friends of colleagues of each first generation follower.  Links can be tracked,  sales can be measured, sales ROI can be calculated. On that topic if you go to the Dell Outlet page you can see that it has 1.5m followers which makes it the 89th most popular page globally (twitterholic). That gives Dell more followers than Paris Hilton, Stephen Fry or Sarah Brown.

To cut a long story short the Dell Outlet page offers these things: Utility, Relevance, Value.  If you can’t score more than 7/10 on each of these three measures, and you’re not a celebrity, then you will struggle to make twitter work for your business.

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November 14th, 2008

The Big Issue: To buy or not to buy

There’s a guy who sells the Big Issue on our street corner. Sometimes I buy it, sometimes I don’t. What interests me is a consumer behaviour question about myself. Why is it that I buy the Big Issue on some occasions and not others?

The vendor’s product is always right; I like it and it’s consistent in its quality. His targeting is good; he’s always in the right place. He has a good position; he’s right where I expect to see him. He’s delivers his message at the right frequency; two or three times a week. He even secures engagement with a smile that reflects that fact that I’m one of his regular customers.

And yet sometimes I don’t buy, even worse, I consciously avoid exchanging glances, preferring to stare at the pavement or my Blackberry. So what is it that makes me either buy or not buy? I see two reasons: The first is what I’m doing and the second is my mood. If I’m rushed I simply don’t have time to stop and respond; mentally I’m in the next place. The problem for him is that he can’t anticipate what I’m doing and how rushed I’m going to be. Time is a precious commodity. Perhaps if he said ‘take it now and pay later’ he might get more sales. If I’m in the wrong mood I won’t respond, even if perhaps on some level I might want to. It’s unlikely that he’ll alter that mood no matter what he does. If he smiles at me and I’m in a grump that only makes a connection even less likely. But if, instead of smiling, he empathised with me and said “What a shit day!” I might consider making a purchase because he’s tuned into something that’s stopped me purchasing; my mood.

I recently worked on a financial services pitch. Tricky stuff at the moment. Consumers are jittery and avoiding big commitments. They’re nervous that the institutions they’ve trusted for years can collapse like a house of cards. As a result, product claims are a falling currency when it comes to differentiation. Under these circumstances it may be interesting to test creative work that reflects the mood of the target audience rather than the attributes of the company, brand or the product. That’s an approach that is rarely used in financial services; they much prefer talking about savings rates, investment performance or service. But empathy with a collective mood of confusion and fear may be an interesting route for a financial services institution wanting to engage in these unstable times.

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September 27th, 2008

Dairy Milk gets the gorilla, but Galaxy gets the growth

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So, Dairy Milk with its Drumming Gorilla TV ad campaign has posted a sluggish 2% market share growth whilst ‘run of the mill’ Galaxy has romped home with a 12% growth. Research has shown that the Gorilla ad is more memorable than Galaxy activity, but clearly this success in recall does not seem to have translated into success in sales. Quite rightly, this result immediately ignites a discussion about the sales value of creativity. You can get into some of that here.

Not entirely unconnected to this is the debate that took place on the 4th August at the IPA - “Who makes better planners? Planners or creatives?” Veteran creative Dave Trott and planning sophistocrat David Golding battled it out with Trott arguing that it’s time planners got back to building sales rather than using advertising “to provide a window on a brand’s soul and to build the brand’s ‘equity’ in people’s minds”. Golding defended the principle of using the brand as a source of insight, and quite valiantly by all reports.

I’ve worked on projects with both of these characters, with David Golding on an existing client account at WCRS and Dave Trott on a creative pitch at WTCS (as was). Dave Trott worked in an interesting way. He did his own planning in his own mind, based on very considerable experience. His approach was intuitive - he visualised the target audience as people he knew (in this case his mother and her friends) and asked himself what type of message would engage her. Then he wrote those messages down and turned them into a visualized campaign for TV and press. Trott’s campaign was a distillation of the communication problem, solved, simplified and then visualised. Dave Golding on the other hand was measured, considerate, analytical and logical. He’d be as likely to base a campaign on what his mother thought as a judge would be to discuss a legal technicality with a courtroom security guard. The work that resulted was memorable and strong. So here’s the question - if the insight for the Dairy Milk Gorilla campaign were to have originated from the grey matter of either Golding or Trott, which would it be?

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September 18th, 2008

Is Google Marketing’s new Yellow Pages?


For many years Yellow Pages had an interesting, if not pole, position in marketing performance reports. Whilst many communication and media channels would deliver a cost per sale of £X, the Yellow Pages always topped the report, often with a CPS of a 10th of £X - or even less.

Why did it do so well? Not because it had any magical qualities as an advertising medium but because it because it was the first calling point for many consumers wanting to find out more about an advertised product. When calling a call centre, the operative might ask, “And where did you hear about AB Financial services?” to which the caller would respond, “In the Yellow Pages”. This Yellow Pages source would then be duly logged in the call data for future agency evaluation. Let’s call this “Yellow Pages Syndrome”

Google is now increasingly performing this “first port of call” function in marketing activity, particularly in non-retail services marketing. The result is that when brand terms are measured in pay per click campaigns they can perform extremely well. Conversions on PPC brand search terms for product X can come in at less than 10% of the cost per conversion on generic category terms. Think “Atco lawnmowers” versus the generic “lawnmowers” for example. “Atco lawnmowers” may deliver a cost per conversion of less than £10, whilst the generic “lawnmowers” may produce a cost per conversion several times higher.

Informed marketers always knew that Yellow Pages was only the “receptacle for response” not the originator of the response itself. The problem was that Yellow Pages was very difficult to measure, all we had to go on was the circulation or distribution volumes in each book’s catchment area. This figure was flat over the whole year and no daily or seasonal readership reporting was available. As a result is was almost impossible to form robust causal linkages between advertising activity and Yellow Pages response. But Google’s daily level reporting across all purchased PPC terms including factors such as response, conversion and key page visits (through Google analytics) means that we have enough data variation to examine those linkages. And, lo and behold, the data clearly supports the idea that advertising drives brand searches.

The fact that advertising and direct marketing drive Google brand term searches means they now have a new metric against which they can be judged. Advertising and direct marketing that produces Google searches can be driving some of the lowest cost sales a business is likely to make - -provided Google searches driven by these channels are correctly attributed. So whilst online and offline, Google and other techniques may appear to be competing against each other, they are in fact enjoying a harmonious and synergistic relationship.

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August 8th, 2007

Why marketers can’t let Facebook jitters put them off Web 2.0 / Web 3.0

This week marketers have discovered that sites like Facebook etc cover the whole socio-political spectrum, not just the fun, funny and socially acceptable bits. Let’s hope this doesn’t divert attention away from the significant opportunities that genuine Web 2.0 / 3.0 applications can offer marketers.

Marketing in the 21st century will be about search and find, that is pull rather than push. It will be about solving personal needs with customised solutions i.e. one to one rather than mass marketing. This is why Google is worth $160bn; it has cornered the search/pull side of this equation. Success for many brands will be defined by their ability to be found by consumers. Using a standard ad to sales ratio of 1:10 Google’s annual revenue of $10bn could put the value of the sales resulting from these searches at $100bn.

Many Web 2.0 techniques will be at the core of this new ’search and find’ marketing philosophy. Blogs are an excellent way to align brands to important content and generate good search returns. Forums likewise offer marketers the opportunity to be found whilst buyers attempt to research, build and refine customised solutions to specific needs.

Web 3.0 will develop this theme further. Web 3.0 will be about applications which use the information to construct solutions to consumer problems. Here’s an example: Today you have to look through holiday sites to build your itinerary based on the information you find. Web 3.0 applications will tell you what your itinerary should be, on your PC or your mobile, in a few seconds. You’ll like it so much, you’ll pass it on to your friends. It will spread virally because the effectiveness of the applications will be so appealing.

Advertising on social networks is a Web 1.0 technique in a Web 2.0 world. What’s happening with sites like Facebook is a slip on the stepping stone between the two. It may be the case that running ads on these networks is not a sustainable route for all advertisers. But we must not lose sight of the opportunity before us. Whilst Web 2.0 is about being found, Web 3.0 will offer opportunities for marketers to customise information, product and service delivery in ways that have never been seen before.

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March 29th, 2007

How can brands use MySpace and YouTube?


Looks like the election campaign of a young Liberal Democrat candidate has nosedived after pictures of him drunk out of his mind were posted onto his MySpace and Bebo sites by his ‘mates’ ….and then picked up by a local Scottish newspaper. Curtains too for the biker who filmed himself doing 170 mph and pulling wheelies on the A1 with a bike mounted camera and posted his antics on YouTube. Unluckily for him, he’s been identified by police and faces prison for reckless driving. No doubt if the ‘Angel Tube Skier’ (pic) is identified, he’ll get six points on his Oyster card.

While all this is going on, brands aspire to get their message out onto social media sites like YouTube and MySpace. Just as building a meaningless brand website was all the rage in the late 1990’s, so it seems a presence on YouTube is now de-rigeur - or worse still - “cool” and “in touch” with young web users.

Recently, I took a look at the YouTube channel of a reasonably well known FMCG drinks brand. It featured some short films about the product and a selection of TV ads. Launched in 2006, the channel has 95 subscribers and the best ranking film has had around 6,000 views. If we accept that these numbers represent a low level of interest, then the challenge for FMCG brands is firstly to understand how consumers use sites like YouTube and secondly, to understand how it can work as a communication channel for brand owners.

Simply showing brand or product film is not compelling. As John Bell, Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy PR in Washington points out, “Nobody wants to watch a long TV commercial filled with brand messages. A simply clever :90-1:00 TV spot does not make for compelling video in the YouTube universe. Period.” He argues that the current vogue of simply uploading content onto YouTube is an easy way of appearing to be “involved with ’social media’ without having to actually enter a two-way conversation.”

So how do brands crack YouTube as a communication channel? Chad Hurley, CEO and cofounder of YouTube gives us some advice: “Advertisers now have a highly targeted opportunity for aligning their brands alongside the entertainment experience people are enjoying on YouTube.”

We have to accept that the content coming from brands is generally less rewarding to consumers than de-facto entertainment. So, even though we are in the Web 2.0 environment, the best way for most brands to communicate may well be something akin TV advertising’s good old fashioned “ads/sponsorship around content” model.

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