Category — Media

Five tips for connecting with a branded app. By Richard Swain. Much research is being published around technology and emotional engagement, specifically with smartphones. For consumers, the smartphone is a ubiquitous companion that provides a gateway to the digital universe. For brands, it’s an opportunity to get closer to those consumers than ever before by way of branded apps.

Obviously, it should be personalized and easy to use, as well as work seamlessly across all devices. In addition, here are five basic tips that can help your app not only get downloaded, but be used time and again, building a stronger relationship with your customers … read >>

Every day is Cyber Monday for packaged-goods brands. By Jason Katz and Angela Edwards. Sales jumped 18 percent on Cyber Monday, according to a USA Today headline this past holiday season. Clearly, online shopping has arrived and it’s here to stay. Purchasing books and electronics online is now the norm and recent trends suggest that packaged-goods categories, with compound annual growth rates at 20 percent, are the next to explode online.

Amazon has capitalized on its first-mover advantage, featuring strong consumer value-propositions to gain market share and lock-in loyalty. In many packaged-goods categories, Amazon has more than 50 percent market share of US online sales. This poses a significant threat to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, especially for “center store” items … read >>

Barry Judge of Best Buy re-imagines retail in 140 characters or less. By Tim Manners. With some 18,000 followers on Twitter and more than 2,000 tweets to his name, few marketing chiefs have embraced emerging media as personally as Best Buy’s Barry Judge.

As music and movies migrate from discs to downloads, and consumer-electronics devices grow ever smaller, the acres of retail that once were so formidable suddenly may not be so desirable anymore. As a big-box retailer, Best Buy has no choice but to figure out how to make digital media part of its solution, and Barry is thoroughly absorbed in that challenge … read >>

What a long, strange trip it’s going to be. A roundtable on social media and shopping featuring Dennis Maloney of Domino’s Pizza, David Sommer of Facebook, Kevin Biondi of Staples and Tim Austin of TPN. What is the largest lesson you’ve learned about social media? Dennis Maloney: The biggest thing we’ve learned is that you cannot bucket social media into one department. Social media needs to be interconnected between public relations, communications, marketing and customer service. That is a huge mental leap for a lot of people. I know it was for Domino’s.

The next thing is that we should never underestimate how engaged our consumers really are. We’ve done projects in the last year where we’ve asked consumers to send us pictures of their pizza and we’ve gotten more than 25,000 responses in an incredibly short period of time. When your customers are engaged, they are really engaged. And that has value … read >>

New and old media work best when they work together. By Kevin French. Emerging media. Traditional media. They’re both relative terms, right? There was a time when those refrigerator-sized televisions were considered “emerging” relative to the just slightly smaller radios sitting next to them on the orange shag carpet. No threat … they eventually learned to co-exist in an integrated marketing world along with the newspaper.

I remember being the guy from “the web shop” sitting in the back row at client meetings watching brand agencies scoff at all things digital … and that was only four years ago! Today, above-the-line and below-the-line offerings are more blurred than ever before. And there’s an equally respected presence at the table between digital and traditional disciplines. As a result, the chins of all of the emerging-tech folks are now at least parallel to the floor … and sometimes slightly north … read >>

Do what’s right for today’s digital shopper — not just what’s on-trend. By Ken Barnett. Any marketer would be excited about the overarching potential benefits that emerging media provide. We can’t help but be enthusiastic as we contemplate the what-ifs.

On top of that, add the benefits of being both green and cost-efficient. There are, however, some alarm bells reminiscent of the irrational exuberance of the dot-com years when we hear people speak of “the digital path-to-purchase” — implying that this is a strategic foundation … read >>

The more things stay the same, the more they change. By Beth Ann Kaminkow. As a kid, I always wondered what was meant by the expression, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Looking around, I couldn’t come up with many examples. It seemed like just another quaint expression adults threw out when they wanted to sound insightful.

Looking at the world today, however, through the lens of technology, I think I see the truth behind the cliché. And I think that, as marketers, this truth deserves our closer inspection. My first observation — see if you agree — is that the adults may have gotten the phrase backwards. Perhaps it should be: The more things stay the same, the more they change … read >>

Shoppers are evolving amid rapid environmental changes. By Randi Moore. With online retail currently growing at rates three times faster than overall market and supercenter rates, the path to growth has clearly shifted from new store openings to e-commerce. According to a report by MasterCard Advisors, e-commerce sales increased 15.2 percent year-over-year in June 2011 — the eighth straight month of double-digit growth and the 23rd month in a row that online purchases have grown.

Such rapid change can lead to extinctions. So what will go the way of the dinosaur — the mall, the supercenter, the big-box category killers? Perhaps only vending machines are safe from the digital onslaught. It is important to remember, however, that shoppers are shoppers, and that while the number of online transactions per buyer is increasing, the number of online sites visited and the average dollar-value of an online purchase has declined. This confirms that shoppers are still cautious and surgical in their approach to shopping, both online and in-store … read >>

A personal social-media strategy is essential to career success. By David Hollingsworth. The other day, I was at the checkout stand and I asked myself: “Do I need a pack of gum?” I didn’t really need the pack of gum, but I thought it would be nice to have one — not to mention that I would save 10 cents if I used my rewards card. It always feels good to save money.

Granted, most of us hate the idea of looking at ourselves as a product, or object — and that’s a good thing. However, you have to face the facts: If you don’t sell yourself as well as the next person, you won’t get the job — especially in today’s job market. In the “store” of job candidates, you want to make sure your information is easy to read and points prospective employers to your relevant experience … read >>

Retailer websites are surprisingly strong as a shopper marketing tool. By John Kuendig. Retailer websites … love them or hate them, they still matter. Although retailer websites are one of the most mature digital shopper-marketing tools, brand marketers would do well not to ignore them as an “outdated” technology.

According to Compete.com, Walmart.com attracted 49 million visitors during May, 2011, while Target.com pulled in 39 million. Best Buy had 23 million visitors, Kroger saw 3 million and Publix 1.4 million. Meanwhile, brands are busy building their own presence on the web — mainly to serve the shopper’s need for product and usage information or to engage them in the brand experience. However, these sites don’t generate anywhere near the traffic that store websites do … read >>

The shopping list establishes preferences and influences behavior. By Sara Manke. Get on the shopping list.” It’s an imperative for nearly every shopper-marketing program we tackle because the brands that get on the list are the ones that get in the cart. The creation of a list represents an opportunity to influence the choice of where to shop and what to buy at a critical turning point in the shopping cycle. Getting on that list means making the cut. So, how do brands earn the right to be listworthy? How can brands take advantage of that critical moment of influence?

We recently designed and executed a study to understand how shopping lists are created and how to get on them. We first recruited a qualitative sample of shoppers to conduct blogs for a week to monitor their listmaking and list-using habits. We then followed up with a quantitative study to determine how prevalent and penetrated these thoughts, behaviors and patterns really are at the retailer-specific level for 20-plus top customers … read >>

Putting social media to work for packaged-goods brands. By Martin Bishop. Just as superbugs have become resistant to antibiotics, consumers have developed immunity to standard marketing approaches, rejecting them as commoditized and unappealing. Social media, by contrast, offers tantalizing new possibilities. But it’s not been all fun and games for marketers. Chasing social-media opportunities has often turned into a frustrating and fruitless endeavor; brands and their spokespeople find themselves unwanted guests at the party.

Nowhere is the frustration more acute than for those marketing consumer-packaged goods. Packaged-goods brands, created in and perfectly tuned for the mass-marketing era, are struggling to adjust to a new world that’s all about relationships and customer experience. What is the most effective way for packaged-goods brands to approach social media? What are its real opportunities? The answer starts with a realistic and honest assessment of where a brand stands in its relationships with its customers … read >>

Friends don’t let friends drive sales. What’s your Klout score? Mine is a paltry 25 out of 100. A Klout score is a measure of one’s online influence, an alchemy of the extent to which Facebook friends and Twitter followers listen to, and act upon, your musings.

I have no idea why there’s such disparity across my scores, and have only begun to consider why any of this matters, of course, attempting to quantify how much what we say online affects other people — and causes them to take action (like buy something) certainly could be the next big thing in commerce … read >>