The Hub Magazine

Walmart Life

The Hub — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:17:59 +0000

Marketing chief Stephen Quinn taps into Walmart’s past to shape its future. When you get right down to it, everything — and nothing — has changed about Walmart in the 50 years since Sam Walton built his first store. Stephen Quinn, Walmart’s marketing chief, appears determined to keep it that way.

“What we’re really selling to people,” says Stephen, “is that they can count on us for their everyday needs at the lowest price. Keeping that interesting is tricky because it will be the same promise three years from now.”

It was also the same promise 50 years ago, which is why Stephen drew on something Sam Walton said a long time ago to arrive at Walmart’s modern-day tagline: “Save Money. Live Better.”

“Sam Walton talked about how Walmart would help the world save money and have a better life,” says Stephen. “We had reams of research and tested all these different taglines and then we just looked at what he had said and thought, hey, that’s pretty good.”

Living up to that deeply rooted principle is very much at the heart of Walmart’s past, present and future. Stephen is convinced that Walmart’s growth depends on “keeping that promise to more people.”

Such fidelity to the past requires changing with the times, too. It means navigating the vagaries of today’s fragile economy while pioneering the frontiers of social media and the newly empowered shopper.

These and other realities has Walmart launching a Facebook page for each of its more than 3,500 US stores, as well as tweaking the role of its famous greeters and communicating “low prices” in new ways.

It also has Walmart realigning its merchandising and marketing operations, so it can better integrate the two and keep the focus where Sam Walton always said it must be — on the shopper … read >>

Got Smarts?

The Hub — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:16:21 +0000

A roundtable discussion on consumer and shopper insights, with Stephanie Cota of Mattel Brands, Hermann Deininger of Adidas, Sally Grimes of Newell Rubbermaid, Alfredo Martel of Caribou Coffee and Kevin Lane Keller of Dartmouth College.

What is the hardest thing to get right with consumers today?

Stephanie Cota: One of the hardest things to get right with consumers today is message authenticity. Consumers are very smart, and they are very pressed for time. They are increasingly intolerant of messages that are over-complicated or over-clever.

As a consumer, I also become challenged when watching a clever commercial but can’t necessarily tell you what the brand or product was. That said, some brands have done a great job of staying true to their message, both at a mass and a class level.

From a mass perspective, Campbell Soup and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese do a really great job of staying true to who they are. In the class space, Louis Vuitton and Manolo Blahnik are authentic with their messages. Staying true to your message, but delivering it in fresh, compelling ways, is one of the more challenging things that we do as marketers … read >>

The Hub Top 20

The Hub — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:15:12 +0000

Growth and diversity power the next great phase of shopper-marketing excellence. By Dan Flint. Welcome to the 2012 and fifth annual Hub Top 12 report on shopper marketing excellence that, thanks to industry growth, has now become the Hub Top 20! We want to thank all who participated in the survey this year and especially those who took the time to add insightful comments.

The University of Tennessee is pleased to continue the tradition of tracking shopper-marketing excellence, initiated and created by Hoyt & Company and The Hub Magazine in 2008. The intent of this study is to allow brand marketers and retailers to evaluate working relationships with agencies on 13 criteria and to let agencies evaluate working relationships with brand marketers on 13 criteria, as well.

This year we had 990 usable surveys — up 224 from 766 in 2011, or up 29 percent! That’s great! This speaks to the attention being given to shopper marketing in the industry. Brand marketers and retailers named 153 agencies while agencies named 144 different brand marketers … read >>

Test & Learn

Catapult Marketing — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:14:10 +0000

Packaged-goods brands must change their culture to capitalize on digital. By Seth Diamond. Much to the contrary of current belief, there is little connection between shopper influence and “liking” a brand on Facebook. Even when you entice with a coupon, or throw in a branded, exclusive piece of swag to “buy” a like, the consumer experience pretty much stops there. Frankly, it’s unknown whether any of the tactics like Foursquare, Pinterest or QR codes are really moving your business.

If that’s the case, why invest in them without understanding if and how they will enhance purchase behavior? Culturally, packaged-goods brands need to change how they approach digital marketing. Facebook is not a magic bullet for all of your marketing experiences; it’s tougher than that. Chasing a new digital tool just because a competitor is using it doesn’t work either — not without insights, analysis and an understanding of how that tool is used by shoppers.

To fully embrace digital marketing, packaged-goods marketers need to change their organization’s culture to one of test and learn. Secondly, they must position digital tools to be a solution to a program and let the metrics guide them to those marketing approaches that have earned the right to scale up for success … read >>

Digital Empathy

G2 USA — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:13:51 +0000

Listen closely to real people to develop emotional insights. By Whitney Browne. I recently sat through a series of focus groups in which a broad cross-section of consumers in Atlanta and Los Angeles spoke about their relationships with technology, particularly their mobile devices. The participants ranged in age from early twenties to late sixties, and they came from a wide array of socio-economic backgrounds.

While the various groups were organized by demographics, I noticed a startling theme that wended its way through all groups. This theme manifested itself in varying ways — depending on who was sharing — but the message was quite clear: we have an uneasy relationship with the new marvels of technology that more and more have come to dominate our time and attention.

One woman in particular said something that struck me. We were talking about mobile devices and she said, “I had a touchscreen phone for two days. I loved it but I saw myself going down a dark path, so I returned it and went back to BlackBerry” … read >>

Divining Insights

TracyLocke — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:12:48 +0000

Let your creative people take a bath in data. By Beth Ann Kaminknow. Data, and its sister, analytics, are the new sexy in advertising and marketing. Every agency and company now has an in-house data and analytics practice. It is blasphemy even to think of making any business move without the aid of sifting through mounds of data, given its ability to lead to better (more accurate) decision-making.

In today’s technologically-advanced environment, the ability to capture and report data is much more accessible. With increased data-processing capabilities, we can build more complex models that can churn out more complex data. Both descriptive and predictive analytics can now do an exceptional job of uncovering the answers to “who, what, where, when, how and why.”

So, with all of this data at our fingertips, you would also expect that we are becoming smarter, more efficient, and productive marketers. Perhaps in some instances this is true, but in many cases we have yet to optimize a data-driven creative process. We are overflowing with data, but there is a critical missing link … read >>

Little Big Data

Insight Out of Chaos — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:11:50 +0000

Don’t confuse digital dialing for dollars with building brands. By Spencer L. Hapoienu. The last days of a very warm winter brought new heat to the digital frenzy when Procter & Gamble announced it would cut $1 billion from its traditional media spending and replace it with digital marketing over the next few years. It used to be as P&G goes so goes the marketing and advertising industry. P&G isn’t as omnipotent and prescient as it once was, but it still creates at least a 5.4 on the industry Richter scale when it announces a radical change, especially one with so many zeroes.

Is P&G simply responding to the digital hype and the pressure from the finance department to move more marketing into digital? Or, has P&G decided that even if it doesn’t have a good digital plan, the $1 billion was not generating a good return using traditional media anyway? Obviously, traditional broadcast and print media are reaching fewer people and doing so with less frequency … read >>

Follow the Money

TPN — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:10:59 +0000

An insight is only as good as the money it makes. By Sharon Love. Henry Ford said: “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘a faster horse’.” Steve Jobs famously echoed that sentiment when he said: “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Sam Walton took a related view with his 10th Rule: “Swim upstream. Ignore the conventional. Think differently. If everybody’s doing it one way, there is a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

Others, meanwhile, offer a more “quantitative” perspective. Dr. Oz says, “The major part of good heart health is in the metrics,” and W. Edwards Deming advised: “In God We Trust; all others must bring data.” Peter Brand, of Moneyball fame, said: “It’s about getting things down to one number. Using the stats the way we read them, we’ll find value in players that no one else can see” … read >>

80/20 Insights

Marketing Drive — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:09:17 +0000

Demand-cycle research reveals the 20 percent of insights that make the difference. By Randi Moore. We all know that great shopper marketing begins with shopper insights — the same way a great day starts with a healthy breakfast. More often than we would like to admit, we start without either. The common obstacles cut across both situations: time, money, and inspiration.

An insight is like a jigsaw puzzle, in that the picture only becomes clearer as more pieces are put together. Brands often have limited time and money to conduct specific research on their shoppers, but have great research that provides insights into consumer motivations and purchase barriers. However, to create programs and communications that drive demand, we must first understand the fundamentals of how our target consumer shops and where in the process we need to focus our efforts.

To help close this gap, we developed a quantitative research tool that helps us better understand the foundations of the shopper’s behavior, identify outages and translate that knowledge into informed activation that creates brand demand. This tool helps us understand the demand cycle, rather than simply tracking and recording the shopper’s interactions with a brand along the path-to-purchase … read >>

Cellular Levels

Ryan Partnership — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:08:20 +0000

Digital tools offer new clues into shopper behavior. By Kim Finnerty. Shoppers have long put effort into researching high-involvement and expensive purchases like cars and electronics before heading to the store. Suddenly, because of technology, it is now also worth the “effort” to research toothpaste, canned tomatoes and laundry detergent.

According to the Wall Street Journal, more than one-fifth of shoppers research food and beverages online, nearly one-third research pet products and 39 percent research baby products. Almost two-thirds (62%) say they search for deals online before at least half of their shopping trips.

Ryan Partnership’s multi-year study of digital shopping confirms the widespread — and still growing — use of digital tools to gather information, select retailers and make brand decisions well before the shopper ever sees a product on the shelf. In fact, this past month, 58 percent of the 5,000 shoppers in our survey told us they are more likely than a year ago to “typically” decide what they want before visiting a store. To do this, their usage of all kinds of digital shopping tools is growing. read >>

Play Ball!

Mars Advertising — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:07:10 +0000

E-commerce is threatening in-store, but it ain’t over ’til it’s over. By Ken Barnett. The start of the baseball season always seems to bring with it the sense of the possible. Whatever happened last year is past and we have the luxury of a clean slate.

As we envision how this year’s slate will be written for the consumer packaged-goods industry, and particularly supermarkets, another baseball memory comes to mind: Yogi Berra. Who better to call on than the master of absurdity to help us fix a system that is, quite simply, broken?

“You can observe a lot by watching.” — Yogi Berra

Around 20 years ago, supermarkets were at the top of their game. They were the dominant outlet for food with 100 percent penetration and 83 percent share. Households were averaging close to 110 trips to supermarkets per year. Retailers had recently wrested information control from suppliers when scanners achieved 70 percent of ACV in 1988 … read >>

Stay in Touch

Landor Associates — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:06:15 +0000

Analyzing the experience is the key to measuring what’s meaningful. By Susan Nelson and Kara McCartney. You’re a CEO sitting in your boardroom while the directors of human resources, advertising, merchandising, digital and marketing each present their funding requests for this year’s brand-building initiatives.

Human resources wants to retrain public-facing employees to better communicate your brand’s image. Advertising wants to launch a new broadcast campaign supported by print. Merchandising presents a proposal for new display cases and better in-store lighting. Digital insists on a redesign of the website to better accommodate social brand initiatives, and marketing wants to mirror what your main competitor, the category leader, has done. How do you decide which of these many customer-facing, brand-building initiatives to fund?

Thanks to the internet and social media, building a brand is now so much more than creating award-winning advertising and designing packages, logos, and environments. Now it’s about experiences, and experiences are the sum of thousands of touchpoints … read >>

First Things First

Tim Manners — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:05:22 +0000

The Hub Top 20 sets new records. This is the fifth year we’ve published our survey of excellence in shopper marketing in the Hub, but it is also a year of several firsts.

Most notably, this is the first year we’ve published a Top 20 of brands and agencies — not just a Top 12. We did so because, quite simply, shopper marketing is growing. Heck, if Fortune can recognize 500 excellent companies, then the Hub should honor at least 40!

This is also the first year that our rankings have included a brand from outside the packaged-goods realm — LG Electronics (#11). It’s the first time a niche player — Mike’s Hard Lemonade — made the list (#8). On the agency side, it’s the first time a multicultural agency — Mass Hispanic — is represented (#12). We also have a new, number-one on the brand marketer side: Nestlé, up from number-five last year … read >>

Your Own Beeswax

Tim Manners — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:04:46 +0000

Your Own Beeswax

How much do you trust Facebook and Google with your personal information? An executive summary of a Hub Magazine survey. If trust is the bedrock of a great brand, then some of today’s hottest brands seem to be built on pebbles. The latest Hub Magazine survey detected considerable doubt among readers that the online brands they know and use can be trusted with their personal information.

We listed eight popular online brands — Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, Bing, Amazon, Zappos and iTunes — roughly an even mix of social media sites and e-commerce leaders. We simply asked readers to indicate whether each brand was “trustworthy” or “not trustworthy.”

Zappos and LinkedIn scored highest by far, with Zappos earning the trust of 82 percent of respondents and LinkedIn trusted by 80 percent. Amazon, at 73 percent, was next highest on the trustworthiness scale, followed by iTunes at 63 percent and Twitter at 58 percent … read >>

Cool News

Tim Manners — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:03:02 +0000

“Improvement merely lets you hit your numbers … creativity is what transforms,” says JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson. That was the main lesson Ron says he learned while he was at Target after gambling on introducing Michael Graves designer products.

“The math was simple,” says Ron. “If I didn’t sell one piece but people looked differently at the other 96 percent of products we’d win. It’s always about mind share, not market share.” Ron is now bringing a similar sensibility — which of course he also brought to Apple stores — to JC Penney.

The essential vision, once again, is to create “a place where the experience (is) as important as the products themselves.” This apparently was as much Ron’s vision at Apple stores as it was Steve Jobs’s … read >>

Cool Books

Tim Manners — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:02:15 +0000

Nobody knows how our brains "recall the past, perceive the present and imagine the future," but scientists are getting a handle on it, reports Daniel J. Levitin in the Wall Street Journal (2/4/12). What makes each of us unique is rooted in the "different genes that influence brain development, and accordingly, behavior."

But that’s not the whole story. "Genes alone cannot explain how your brain got to be the way it is," writes Sebastian Seung in Connectome. "As you lay nestled in your mother’s womb, you already possessed your genome but not yet the memory of your first kiss."

In other words: "Neuroscientists posit that all of our hopes, desires, beliefs and experiences are encoded in the brain as patterns of neural firings … A new approach to studying brains and individual differences involves making maps of how neurons connect to one another … read >>

The Hub 48

Tim Manners — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:01:42 +0000

The Hub Magazine, Vol. 8, Issue 48. The entire issue of May/June 2012 edition of The Hub Magazine, centered on consumer and shopper insights, featuring a cover story interview with Stephen Quinn, CMO of Walmart

Also featuring the 2012 Hub Top 20 of Excellence in Shopper Marketing as well as a roundtable on consumer and shopper insights, with Stephanie Cota of Mattel Brands, Hermann Deininger of Adidas, Sally Grimes of Newell Rubbermaid, Alfredo Martel of Caribou Coffee and Kevin Lane Keller of Dartmouth College and 13 other articles … download pdf >>