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Dear Friends: Summer has truly made it’s August presence. The heat truly is on. And since the issue has to keep up with the mercury, here is a bucketful of actionable intelligence through our features, articles and interview. Ever heard of a ‘Super Consumer‘ ? Consumer surely but Super Consumer? Well, you heard it right and you would want to know more in our conversation with Eddie Yoon, the creator of the term and the writer of the book by the same name. In the days of data breach, fake news, ad blocking and fake accounts, how does one walk the fine line between data and trust. The feature on this topic puts forth an explanation. For all the entrepreneurs in waiting or even for the ones who has been there and done that, the article on How To Launch a New Brand is a fulfilling commentary. Yesteryear brands and businesses yearned to be creating communities and seemed to care for them. Have things changed? An introspection has been carried out and the deep dive has been proven a point or two. It’s all going vertical and with the emergence of IGTV, the Vertical Video orientation is taking a new momentum- understand more with the feature on how brands can speed up their temp using vertical video marketing. Originality and Strategy need not be mutually exclusive. Soak in the talk on how advertising agencies can achieve that. As is always the case, there is loads more and I urge you to discover all that relevant content in this issue of BrandKnew that will aid your every day branding and marketing efforts. Till the next… Best
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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Senior Hustler-Digital Marketing & Brand Development: Nikhil Thekkumkoottathil Creator: Brand Stories: Salindu Sadishan Brand Research & Creative Engagement Specialist: Anushka Kartha Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Business Development Director, India: Kenneth Extross Brand Growth Architect: Ashutosh Deshpande Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep:
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CONTENTS
What happened to social communities? Do brands and businesses still care? How Ad Men Invented The Future How agencies can balance originality and strategy The future of marketing belongs to hybrids, but don’t call them unicorns Are Influencers Overrated? Data and trust – can we find a line between benefit and Big Brother? Orchestrating brand voice: Lessons for marketers The Super Consumer Hero! 3 ways to engage advertising-weary consumers Retail is alive and well: How brands are evolving for today’s consumer ‘We had to crack the code by being disruptive’: Behind the IHOb ‘rebranding’ How to Launch a New Brand: Five Tips for an Unforgettable Debut Are Your Benchmarks Up to Date? How Digital Advertising Performance Standards Are Changing Brands Can Speed Up Their Digital Tempo With Vertical Video Marketing Book, Line & Sinker
What happened to social communities? Do brands and businesses still care? By Michelle Goodall
Do brands and businesses really care about creating communities in social media? I posed this purposefully provocative question to our contributing social media experts from client, vendor and agency side whilst compiling the newly-updated Econsultancy social media report bundle. The question of communities, and whether companies are giving them due attention, was met with thoughtful reflection: “You’re absolutely right to ask this question. Every organisation should be clear on their answer,” BBC’s head of social news, Mark Frankel responded.
Why do we need to address the ‘community’ question? Recent Facebook algorithm changes to favour friend, family and local posts followed Facebook’s adapted mission statement to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Facebook’s definition of ‘community’, and the impact of the changes, are being felt by many brands and businesses. The cynical suggest that a ‘demotion’ of brand social media content and communities is a thinly-disguised ploy to ensure an insurance budget against the decreased visibility of Facebook Page organic posts. I’ve spoken to a number of marketers from small businesses who have felt the effects. Many said that their Facebook focus is now on reaching audiences through paid media only for upper awareness and lower-funnel conversion activity. They are allowing their Pages to ‘drift’, spending less time on crafting organic posts, and dealing only with issues rather than proactively managing their Page. With that said, many marketers from all sectors feel that the ‘Facebook Zero’ algorithm changes are welcome, and that they have forced organisations to rethink their relationship with audiences - redressing the broadcast content vs meaningful engagement imbalance. Those of us who have been social media strategists since the turn of the century (wow, that makes me feel old) have always guided organisations using community strategy principles in social media - after all, a social media presence = the creation of a community.
Stephen Waddington, Chief Engagement Officer, Ketchum has been working with organisations for long enough in social spaces to feel that the word ‘community’ in both digital and social media needs clarity. It’s a term that has been misused by many. He makes the case that core PR skills, as well as a clear community strategy are key to developing and maintaining active and effective communities. ‘Community’ is a much abused and maligned word in this social media era. Create a Twitter hashtag, or build a Facebook or LinkedIn group, and people will come. Except they don’t. The internet is littered with failed community building efforts. Successful communities, online and offline, are co-created around a shared purpose. They coalesce around people with shared interests and value, and those in these communities rely on information from those they trust. The skills of public relations in listening, storytelling and content, can make communities vibrant.
What happened to ‘social communities’? Social networks were simply an extension of the early community spaces of the internet, such as forums and Usenet. Creating communities required an understanding of audience motivations, group dynamics, communication theory, transactional analysis, crisis communications, effective moderation practices - essentially a solid community strategy and community management skills. As social platforms grew and features changed in the mid 2000s, many marketers threw funds at delighting their audiences with apps, competitions, content and experiences. The core principles of developing and nurturing a community, however loosely that community was connected, were often forgotten in the pursuit of fans, followers and likes. Social media became a space for many to spew out interruptive clickbait - low friction ‘which type are you’ ‘hot or not’ ‘tag yourself’ posts, competitions and memes - rather than focusing on providing a community space to nurture a group of thinkers, makers, shakers, doers, fixers and fans. This, of course, is a highly reductive and simplistic view. Let’s not forget that this approach to low-value social content
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was also rewarded by the social networks, until they publicly announced that the days of rewarding low level brand/ audience engagement were well and truly over. There are also many amazing communities out there using social networks as their platforms. Communities of purpose, principle, action, local communities and even branded communities connected by little else than a love of a particular brand, tv series or celebrity, for example. Do use the comments below to highlight yours. So what did some of our expert report contributors have to say when asked the question:
“Do brands and businesses really care about creating communities in social media?” First up, Kerry Taylor – EVP, MTV International & Chief Marketing Officer Viacom UK at Viacom. Given that Viacom’s brands include MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon with programmes that have large active fan bases on social media, her response to the question was perhaps unsurprisingly emphatically positive: We do! It is our biggest connection to our audience, and helps us get the most immediate sense of how we are doing and where we need to go. We don’t have tonnes of data points and so our community is everything – our fan base, our immediate source of insight, where we test new ideas and get inspired. Ros Lawler, Digital Director at Tate, agrees: It is essential in the museum sector as a means of reaching and growing new audiences. Particularly when trying to engage young audiences. Focusing on business objectives, understanding the interplay between organic and paid media in social and working to the strength of each is the secret to building and gaining value from communities, states Jeff Semones, Managing Partner, Head of Social Media, Mediacom. “For brands that enjoy a strong, active relationship with their customers who choose to engage on social, great value can be realized through loyalty and advocacy. For these brands, the answer is yes. “However, a marketer’s appetite for long-term commitment to creating communities very much depends on the individual brand, the business they’re in, and most importantly, the brand’s relationship with their customers. “With that, ‘customer-centric marketing’ has emerged as a term that often applies to brands that prioritise communities in their social strategies. “It’s important to recognise the skillsets and resources required to garner maximum value of social media through the interplay of organic and paid disciplines in support of a brand’s social media strategy. “Customer-centric marketers understand the limitations of organic reach but still see great value for their brands through community-inspired tactics. They also understand
that paid media is a must-have to deliver meaningful reach. Additionally, the latest ad products from the primary platforms enable marketers to leverage impressive targetability of specific audience segments that can drive more measurable outcomes. “However, brands still need to deliver on the day-to-day expectations of their social media audiences, which is the primary role of the organic discipline. This is where the potential power of community can be leveraged. “Brands that fully commit to fostering collaboration, integrating paid/owned/earned strategies and maintaining their communities, can inspire naturally occurring advocacy that drives word of mouth and earned media value. “The best brand marketers in social media understand how to synthesise the strengths of both organic and paid tactics that create great experiences for audiences, while delivering strong results against business objectives.” So, there is clearly an appetite to continue to invest in social media communities.
The rise of Facebook Groups for communities? Some organisations, like the BBC, are testing out the efficacy of Facebook Groups, arguably a better place to develop genuine communities of interest and purpose on the world’s largest social network. Groups are one of the most active and loved community elements of Facebook with over 1 billion users. The BBC are experimenting by supporting specific programming which encourage high levels of community engagement. An example of this is the Death in Ice Valley Facebook Group from BBC World Service and Norwegian broadcaster NRK. But others are not so keen to put their eggs in the Facebook Groups basket. One anonymous contributor said, It feels like if we jump to Facebook’s tune and develop Facebook Groups, then the algorithm will change again. We’ll go back to reduced visibility, and have to spend significant sums on advertising. Another big question for strategists is: will Facebook monetise Groups? Will they extend ad placements or create a new ad formats specifically for these community hubs that Facebook publicly cherishes? Facebook will certainly have to proceed with caution as they develop new ad inventory. It’s a time of uncertainty, but it’s certainly a a good time to reflect on the question: “Do you really care about creating communities on social media?” What’s your answer?
Michelle Goodall specialises in digital transformation, communications, content, community and social media strategies.
How Ad Men Invented The Future
POST-WAR ARTISTS SOLD US A VISION OF A LUXURIOUS, AUTOMATED SUBURBAN LIFESTYLE By Darren Garrett
In 1945, the United States was a very different country from the one that had entered the Second World War four years earlier. The drive to victory had sparked innovations in medicine, materials, computing, and, of course, weapons. And as the war’s end became an inevitability, minds began to turn to how these innovations would shape peacetime — and in the process, an unlikely industry was booming. Life for most Americans during the war was one of sacrifice to support the war effort: strict rationing, limited consumer choice, and minimal leisure time. It was a world that should have been inhospitable to the advertising industry — items companies sought to sell were often unavailable to average consumers. Advertising agencies were left with a tricky question to answer in campaign briefs: how to sell to the consumer when they often had nothing to sell? The answer lay in the future. Both ad agencies and their clients could see the war’s end on the horizon—with peace they saw a future of prosperity, and consumers ready to spend. While the war continued, brands were keen to stay in the public consciousness, giving Americans hope for the future; they promised a peacetime world of leisure and relaxation, thanks to fantastical-time saving devices. They were selling the American future — and, in turn, selling themselves and their products as key parts in the foundation of that future. The prime medium for advertising was print. At its high point in the 1940s, Life magazine had a staggering circulation of 13.5 million readers every week, and it was through this and similar publications that brands broadcast their role in shaping the brilliant glorious future. The cynical and satirical portrayals of technology seen in an earlier age were gone: this was a future that was both aspirational and achievable,
something within the grasp of the average American. Capturing the imagination of the American public would involve reaching them through the common element they all shared: domesticity, placing recognizable products in a desirable domestic environment. Readers of Life and The Saturday Evening Post saw Motorola’s “House of the Future” campaign, which aimed to sell luxury electronic items: hi-fi systems and televisions. The homes were painted by artist Charles Schridde, who landed the account through an in-house competition, which asked artists to create “a neat place to watch TV.” The abodes he devised are closer to a Ken Adams-designed Bond villain lair than anything most Americans would live in, but then who wouldn’t aspire to have an underwater living room? The most current televisions, and hifi systems in wooden cabinets, are the focal point in every living space. As real products in these exotic-looking spaces, they now look anachronistic in their futuristic setting. Their positions as desirable objects are dated by their futuristic surroundings, which are untethered by practical product design, engineering, or real estate restrictions.
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in the labor-saving machines of the nearfuture. Time spent preparing meals would be next to nothing when “SUPER CHEF” took your favorite ingredients from a vast freezer and zapped them onto a conveyor belt with an infrared ray. Companies with fewer consumer-facing products didn’t have to place them in everyday settings. Instead, they tried to carve out spaces for themselves in the future, suggesting where their materials could help the next big thing become real. If Motorola had real televisions to sell, Hughes could focus on the evolution of the TV screen — if we could hear each other at a distance with telephones, surely the next step would be to see who we were talking to?
Laundry that washed, dried, and folded itself would leave so much more time for socializing and leisure.
If Americans were to enjoy more time with their new televisions, they would need to be liberated from the drudgery of domestic tasks. Tedious work such as mowing grass or trimming shrubs could be taken care of without leaving the lounge chair, using a microphone to instruct your mechanized labor force while you kicked back, drank, smoked, and read magazines.
How that would be achieved depended on what was being sold. Steel alloys could play a key role in powering the home with solar energy. Privatized power could help mechanically lower beds out of walls — or create summer indoors all year long.
New Departure Ball Bearings (“Nothing Rolls Like a Ball”) started out making ornate door bells in 1888. By the 1950s, their ball bearing components played an important part
Every image is a domestic utopia: rolling green hills outside the windows, bright colors, everything new and clean. Who wouldn’t want to live in this shiny new future after years of “making do” through the war and its aftermath? For companies that made unglamorous products like metal, power, and electronic components, it was vital to predict a future in which they would play starring roles. This strategy also consolidated many brands’ positions as integral to forging tomorrow; these companies had the longevity to deliver on their promises.
“…make your home of the future a house of marvels!” America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies, October 1956. Detroit-based Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation started a long-running futuristic campaign in the 1940s. Their mission was to make Americans “remember the name Bohn — headquarters for light alloys and their
many advanced applications.” Light alloys were the miracle material that would open the gateway to a revolution in everything from farming to basic living standards. Many of the images were created by artist Arthur Radebaugh. Everything is smooth lines and bulging curves, bright materials and science-fictionlike settings — even kitchens seem to float miles above the ground, dwarfing nearby skyscrapers. Nothing symbolized American postwar prosperity more than the rise of the automobile: the archetypal status symbol of American wealth and luxury. For Bohn, Radeburgh mixed ideas of domestic life and industrial design to create glass-roofed, self-driving cars. Radeburgh was also behind a first-person perspective 1964 RCA advertisement in which the viewer could, “slide behind the wheel of this dreamboat. Push the button. Then sit back and let the transistors take over.” It wasn’t long before ideas about the car took to the air — futurists refuse to stay grounded for too long — and America’s Independent Power and Light Companies would be powering the transport revolution. Car companies like Ford’s Advanced Styling Studio gave artists “complete freedom of expression” to explore new shapes and ideas free from standard conventions. Luxury and leisure are still a big part of the sell, but the specifics on how this technology would work took a backseat. “This car is quite obviously powered by some unknown propulsion system as yet undiscovered on Earth,” Alex Tremulis, 1955 studio chief, said. “There is no doubt in our minds that most of these designs can be readily refined and developed into successful automobiles.”
One of the Advanced Styling Studio’s most famous graduates was Syd Mead. Known for his iconic concept designs on Blade Runner, he started his career under Elwood Engel at Ford, where he worked until 1959. His ideas about automobile design remained a strong theme throughout his career, but it was his holistic approach to presentation that dropped these ideas into a fully-formed, often aspirational world. He created worlds of sleek lines, exotic futuristic sports cars, and life inside glass “residential city modules.” Though his futures strived to be “bright, functional, well-conceived, and consistently elegant,” his description of the creation process was far less hi-tech: “I put pen on board with animal hairs on the end of a stick.” He imagined not just the vehicles but the roads they’d be driven on: “In the strange world of tomorrow — a world sometimes difficult to imagine — changes will be dynamic….Tendril-like highways will bridge primordial bogs, tap resources in the savage heat of the desert.” In the early 1970s, Knut Yran brought Mead on to help Phillips answer the questions, “How can we make the world more livable?” and “How can we improve and re-humanize the things and environments around us?” They sought answers untethered from engineering and manufacturing considerations, through a process they referred to as “wild-cat dreaming.” Some of the resulting
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in industrial spaces in the era. Looking at these living spaces, no artist could envisage how ubiquitous the game console would be, side-by-side with the television in our leisure hours. And in the majority of these images, the future is almost entirely white, with clearly-enforced “traditional” gender roles. Most of these ads, like many ads in general, wanted to offer an aspirational vision of a future America — and, for the advertising industry at that time, that typically meant white, suburban and middle class.
ideas were inspired by contemporary real-life concerns like illiteracy and teacher shortages. The multimedia center depicted in the next picture aimed to solve that by allowing students to access stylish hanging learning modules — all while dressed in the height of 1970s fashion, of course. Living spaces remained an important focus, and Phillips envisioned futuristic domestic scenes, with clean, minimalist lines.
But these images served a purpose: as Mead put it, “what we do now actually invents the future.” Each new concept had a potential audience of millions, and they offered ideas about the small and large ways in which everyday American lives could change for the better. It’s difficult to prove direct links from these images to our present, but it’s undeniable that they helped contemporary American consumers think about the world to come.
The future of home entertainment would be holographic, wall-sized 3D technology and “swivel-out wall cabinets producing a dense linearized screen of ionized air particles between two aligned cabinet slits.” After World War Two, artists and advertising agencies wanted to sell a bright and hopeful future. But they were also working to produce something that their audience would recognize and find plausible. As H. G. Wells said: “Anyone can invent human beings inside out or worlds like dumbbells or gravitation that repels. The thing that makes such imagination interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and rigid exclusion of the other marvels of the story. Then it becomes human.” Of course they couldn’t anticipate all possibilities. Some objects are notable by their absence: computers don’t really feature as part of everyday life, despite their rapid growth
BAFTA-winning creative director for digital things, games, animation & storytelling in general. Part of team https://howwegettonext.com & http://i-love-hue.com
How agencies can balance originality and strategy By warc.com
Striking the right balance of creative originality and strategy requires agencies to consider a variety of structural factors, according to a study published in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).
reconfigured to facilitate a flavor of creativity suitable for objectives and market conditions. It appears, for example “that increases in creative personnel drove increases in originality”.
Huw O’Connor and Mark Kilgour (Hamilton, New Zealand), Scott Koslow (Macquarie University Sydney, Australia) and Sheila Sasser (Eastern Michigan University) argued there has been “a surprising dearth of research that investigates the effects of structural elements on creative outputs in an advertising agency context.”
Boosting account-team size, it was also found, “improves campaign originality but not strategy. When service levels are increased, strategy development is exposed to social judgment processes at a cost to the advertising outcome.”
In response, their paper – entitled Drivers of Creativity within Advertising Agencies: How Structural Configuration Can Affect and Improve Creative Development – involved a survey of executives at 31 agencies in Australia and New Zealand, and yielded a dataset covering 554 campaigns. And the authors identified an important “dependent variable”: namely, the “flavor” of creativity as it “relates to the relative levels of originality (i.e., having a measure of novelty) and appropriateness (i.e., being on brand strategy) of an advertisement.
Elaborating on these themes, the paper argued that “agencies may better serve their clients through the use of fewer specialists and instead increase creative staffing when brand differentiation is required”. Additionally, the authors reported, “agencies need to manage proactively rigidities that emerge as the client–agency relationship endures or when clients are sizable”. While perceptions often diverged in line with different agency systems, the study ultimately argued that “in the majority of cases, the most preferred creative ideas were viewed as having made it through evaluation processes.
“There is often a trade-off,” they allowed, “between originality and strategy, in that some ideas may be more original and less appropriate, or less original and more appropriate, and still be considered equally creative.”
“This indicates strength in the overall agency model in integrating the requirements of the client with those of the agency. In this respect, the structures largely appear to be working.”
Agency structures, the study further asserted, can be
Sourced from Journal of Advertising Research
The future of marketing belongs to hybrids, but don’t call them unicorns By Scott Brinker
I’ve grown to dislike the label “unicorn” in martech. In the early years of the marketing technology revolution, marketing technologists — hybrid professionals who applied technical skills in a marketing context — were sometimes called unicorns. Partly because they brought seemingly magical capabilities to marketing. But mostly because finding the perfect blend of marketing and technology talent was incredibly rare. “Oh, you’re looking for a unicorn,” was HR’s way of saying, “Good luck, Don Quixote.” Today, the supply problem has eased a little bit. There are now tens of thousands of bona fide marketing technologists in the world, and it’s become a recognized profession. They’re not so rare anymore, and that’s a good thing. Yet you still hear the term unicorn bandied about. Here’s why that’s a deceptive label.
Debunking the Martech Unicorn Myth The big reason the “unicorn” moniker doesn’t sit well with me anymore is that unicorns are, well, just too damn conceptually perfect. The expectation is unrealistic. Most hybrid professionals have a rather messy career background — they’ve built websites or business plans, done sales or product development, studied engineering or the arts, learned finance or SQL, become self-taught designers or programmers, etc. There’s a high degree of variance in their experience and education. (This drives HR recruiters absolutely bonkers, because these kinds of candidates are hard to pattern match with a simple heuristic.) As a result, the strength of their different skills and how they’ve blended them together also varies significantly. This is actually a feature, not a bug. That high variance in experience and skills enables these hybrids to bring fresh and imaginative ideas to an organization, to reveal insights from different points of view.
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But then how do you determine which of those variants is the perfect one? Even if you didn’t consider all that wondrous variety a plus — which would be like buying a cupcake, but not eating the frosting — you’d have a hard time defining a cookie-cutter set of martech job requirements that every hiring manager would agree on. The range of skills associated with martech roles themselves are insanely diverse. Just consider the kaleidoscope of technologies across the full marketing technology landscape, and you can appreciate the jaw-dropping extent of different kinds of expertise that marketing technologists can be asked to bring to the table. On top of that, you mix in requirements for a candidate’s marketing and management skills, which come in a rainbow of Technicolor flavors, and there are more possible combinations than atoms in the universe. Now, that’s not to say it’s impossible to hire a great marketing technologist. But if you insist on the martech incarnation of Vitruvian Man, you’re going to miss out on the amazing in the quest for the perfect. There is no universal unicorn template. And even if there were one today, let’s face it: it would be out of date by next year. The marketing industry — heck, the entire digital world — continues to evolve at a breakneck pace. See Martec’s Law. The best marketing technologists continually learn and experiment, driven by their curiosity to explore new ideas and rethink old ones. Their adaptability is far more important than a theoretically perfect combination of skills at a particular moment in time. They’re more of a shape-shifting lycanthrope (who, ironically, are skeptical of “silver bullet” solutions to hard problems). Okay, that’s the end of my unicorn rant. I’d like to propose a different metaphor.
Instead of Unicorns, Recruit and Develop “Chimeras” A chimera is a mythical Greek creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. And I think this is a much better metaphor for the kind of hybrid talent we need in marketing and business today.
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technologists”) • marketing, IT, and product (“growth hackers”) • marketing, sales, and IT (“revenue technologists” or “revenue operations”) • marketing, sales, and customer service (“customer operations”) • marketing, customer service, IT, and legal (“chief privacy officer”) • marketing and finance (“your best friend during budget season”) These cross-disciplinary superpowers aren’t only for marketing either. For example, sales tech and sales operations bring sales, IT, operations, and finance together. Combinatorial innovation in business springs from innovative combinations of talent. We can seek out these hybrids in our hiring. We can help create them by encouraging moves between and collaborations across departments. But most of all, we should celebrate them. They’re not perfect unicorns. But they are fantastic creatures. P.S. Like the concept, but not crazy about the chimera metaphor? Wikipedia has a long list of mythological hybrid creatures to choose from — feel free to nominate your favorite.
Disciplines across business are intersecting, overlapping, and converging at an incredible rate. This is the essence of digital transformation: harnessing technology to connect and orchestrate customer experiences across marketing, sales, customer service, product, operations — the whole enterprise. In this Great Convergence, hybrids who bring gifts of knowledge and wisdom from several different disciplines together can serve as guides for the rest of the organization, leading us from the Old World of rigid, hierarchical silos to the New World of a fluid, networked digital fabric. They can be translators, teachers, and ambassadors. They can connect the dots between cross-departmental operations that on the surface seem unrelated but in truth are deeply entangled. They can identify and correct misaligned processes, metrics, and incentives. They can help find globally optimal solutions where previously suboptimal, local maximums constrained what an organization could achieve. This isn’t limited to marketing technologists either. Almost any fusion of marketing with other disciplines produces powerful combinations: • marketing and IT/software development (“marketing
P.P.S. Had enough of these fantasy creatures and want a realworld image of a hybrid animal you can use as a metaphor? Fair enough. I leave you with a picture of a zonkey — just one of many kinds of zebroid. (Who knew zebras were so indiscriminate at their local watering hole?) P.P.S. Want to meet other chimeras? And learn the tricks of the trade of leading marketing technology hybrids? Then plan to come to MarTech East October 1-3 in Boston. We promise, these fantastic creatures don’t bite. Scott Brinker is the president & CTO of ion interactive, a leading provider of post-click marketing software and services. He writes the Conversion Science column on Search Engine Land and frequently speaks at industry events such as SMX, Pubcon and Search Insider Summit.
Are Influencers Overrated? A NEW STUDY QUESTIONS THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TARGETING “HUBS” AT THE CENTER OF SOCIAL NETWORKS. By Dylan Walsh
How does information spread? How do you encourage its spread? These are fundamental business questions. If you introduce a new product or service, how will customer word-of-mouth travel? And they are questions of equal importance for policymakers and nongovernmental organizations. How do you get entrepreneurs in small villages of developing countries involved with microfinance? Or how do you best spread HIV awareness among homeless youth? Convention and intuition point to one solution: Find people who hold the most influence, typically those who sit at the center of a social network — the hub in a wheel — and “seed” them with the new information. From there, the idea will efficiently reach new ears through word-of-mouth. Unfortunately, finding these hubs can be a lengthy and expensive process. Picking the five best seeds in a 200-person network requires checking 2.5 billion variations. Consider, then, a network of 1,000 people, or 1 million people. Does a simpler approach to spreading information exist? While tackling this question, a team of Stanford researchers found a remarkable result: Simply seeding a few more people at random avoids the challenge of mapping a network’s contours and can spread information in a way that is essentially indistinguishable from cases involving careful analysis; seeding seven people randomly may result
in roughly the same reach as seeding five people optimally. (The results are available in their online working paper, “Just a Few Seeds More: Value of Network Information for Diffusion.”) “Network information can be super expensive to collect, and finding precisely the right people to help something go viral is unpredictable,” says Mohammad Akbarpour, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and one of the paper’s authors. “You might be better just ignoring the network altogether and seeding a few more people.”
Questioning Convention When they set out on this project, Akbarpour, along with Suraj Malladi, a PhD student in economics at Stanford GSB, and Amin Saberi, an associate professor of management science and engineering at Stanford, knew from random graph theory that random seeding might perform well in getting a piece of information to go viral. Curious about how it compared to targeted seeding, they built a model and ran it alongside three past experiments from development economics that used deliberate seeding methods. “These earlier studies describe how, from a statistical
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somebody sits at the center of a network. They look for the people who are most highly connected and thus best positioned to spread information. But this approach can create redundancy that leads to rapidly diminishing returns. “The interesting thing is that if you use an algorithm that targets people with the most friends, then you are going to pick people who are likely connected to the core of the network,” Saberi says. “And once you’ve talked to a few of these people, the next one will not be as valuable, since you’ve already saturated the core.” In the meantime, you’ve ignored a bunch of so-called “small communities” — satellite networks on the periphery that are loosely connected to the main network. “This is not to recommend random seeding as a universal policy,” Saberi says, “but to show that central individuals do not always maximize diffusion.”
Virtue of Randomness: The Rule or the Exception? The effectiveness of random seeding with a few more seeds depends on the nature of the network. And how information spreads depends on what is being talked about. For instance, how farmers decide whom to speak with about new corngrowing techniques may be totally different from how they decide whom to gossip with. “Careful seeding may matter for reasons not captured in our models,” Malladi says. “If, for instance, farmers adopt a new technology only after a sufficient number of their friends adopt it, then you are probably better off being strategic with whom you seed.”
perspective, central individuals in a network help diffuse information, but they don’t necessarily tell you whether this is economically meaningful,” Network information Akbarpour says. “They also often assume that can be super expensive you can perfectly observe to collect, and finding the social network of precisely the right people who talks to whom about to help something go some particular piece of information. But suppose viral is unpredictable. you have some noise in the You might be better just data, which is always the ignoring the network case.”
altogether and seeding a few more people.
When the authors compared the results of their model, Mohammad Akbarpour which used random seeding, to results that relied on careful network analysis, they found that random seeding with one to three additional seeds performed nearly as well as targeted seeding, both in terms of speed and extent of diffusion. In some cases, their results proved even better.
Why Randomness May Be Better Deliberate seeding efforts rely on the degree to which
Or consider the problem of stanching, rather than encouraging, information flow. For this “vaccination” problem, understanding the structure of the network and its most influential components — who is infected and who is likeliest to spread the infection — is essential for effective intervention. “If someone attacks a network with a virus or a piece of fake news, random vaccination is unlikely to stop the spread, and vaccinating central individuals — or informing them about the truth in the case of misinformation — is absolutely necessary,” Akbarpour says. “In some sense, this is troubling, because the attacker does not need the network data, but the defender does.” Finally, if the process of seeding is expensive — for example, seeding requires extensive training in how to use a new technology with the hope that the trainees subsequently teach their friends — then it makes sense to find the most influential people within a social network. “In the end, the main tradeoff that companies or policymakers face is in costs — whether it is more expensive to seed a few more random people or to collect and analyze the network data,” Akbarpour says. But when uncovering the structure of a network is expensive, as it very often is, “then you may as well just forget network theory and pick more people based on common wisdom — go talk to the village shopkeeper, the teacher, or a random person in the street.”
By Fiona Killackey
Warren Buffett famously said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” In the last 12 months, society has witnessed a mammoth rupture of reputations – from the #metoo movement and its perpetrators, through to an ever-increasing army of young workers standing up to global employers in the wake of wage rorts. In the world of marketing, the breakdown of brand reputation has resulted from massive data breaches that appear to happen when companies put profits ahead of ethics. But is it really a case of good versus evil when it comes to data mining for marketing, or is it simply that we have not yet mastered how to make sense of – and use transparently – the insights technology enables? Before diving into the answer, first we need to understand the matchstick responsible for reigniting the 2018 debate on data.
Facebook fallout? On 2 April 2018 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, apologised in court for his company’s role in the FacebookCambridge Analytica data scandal that included the collection of the personally identifiable information of up to 87 million
Facebook users. “It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these [Facebook] tools from being used for harm… That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it and I’m responsible for what happens here.” Since the scandal broke a month earlier (after hints at it in The Guardian in December 2015), critics took to social media and marketing forums, pronouncing the ‘end is near’ for Facebook and its associated entities. The hashtag #deletefacebook took off, reaching more than 400,000 tweets in the month of March 2018 (Inc.com). Yet, the apparent backlash appears to have had little impact on the business itself. On 26 April 2018, Facebook posted its quarterly earnings to 31 March 2018, showing an advertising revenue of US$11.79 (AU$15.91) billion (up 50% from the same quarter in 2017). It also revealed user behaviour of its platform, with the social network boasting 1.45 billion daily active users and 2.2
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Data and trust – can we find a line between benefit and Big Brother? HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH WHEN IT COMES TO DATA IN MARKETING? CAN WE FIND A MUTUALLY AGREEABLE LEVEL THAT’S BENEFICIAL TO BOTH BRAND AND CONSUMER?
billion monthly active users for March 2018 (both up 13% year-on-year). It would appear – from the figures at least – that the backlash was more hype than fact. While Facebook may have tweaked its back-end to seemingly safeguard users’ information, its billion-strong audience hasn’t made that many adjustments to their own behaviour. Upon the release of its Q1 figures, Zuckerberg stated, “Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018. We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities and bring the world closer together.”
The need to trust Zuckerberg’s words balance on the idea of trust between the social media giant and its billions of consumers. It’s this trust that Dr Linda McIver, executive director at Australian Data Science Education Institute, says is waning as consumers aren’t absolutely sure on how or where their personal data is being used. “Like any technology, data science can be used well or used
really badly. Ideal applications of data science enhance the story and make it much more personal. For example, personalised medicine can tell me a much more detailed story of how patients just like me respond to particular drugs, rather than giving me averages and probabilities spread over the entire population. And marketers have a better chance of connecting with their audience if they already know a lot about what we like and dislike.” It’s this latter aspect though that “worries” McIver. “The more companies know about what makes me buy something, or just click on a link, the better they can manipulate me. I’m really uncomfortable with the implications of that,” she says. Patrycja Slawuta, founder and CEO of SelfHackathon – a boutique behavioural consultancy that merges science and humanity to create campaigns that benefit brand and consumer – agrees that when it comes to a way forward, the first step is figuring out how to build trust. “Trust is a twoway street. Do the brands and companies trust the consumer enough to let them know they are gathering their data, tracking their movements and behaviours so that they can sell better?” Slawuta believes that we are entering an age of “moral outrage, one where global levels of trust are the lowest in the last 40 years, when fake news travels faster
(and deeper) than real news… Given that this behaviour on the part of companies seems so pervasive, perhaps the next evolution of marketing will be a versioning of ‘permission marketing’ that is truly a two-way bilateral trust dynamic between the consumer and the marketer to use data in a conscientious and intentional way to deliver the product and services that are just right for the end consumer.”
Hype or happening? While there may be a collective moral outcry against the use of data, the question posed by many in the industry is: ‘are we actually using that much data for marketing purposes?’ While brands like Amazon, Google and Facebook employ thousands of data experts, for many companies their marketing team may only house one or two data scientists. According to Adam Ferrier, founder of Thinkerbell – an agency of ‘thinkers and tinkers’ that have extensive experience in the worlds of research, strategy and creative execution – “Most consumers think marketing is much more scientific and precise than it really is. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, marketing is still a relatively blunt instrument. Matching context, consumer needs, messaging and product rarely happens with surgical precision. In fact, I think most consumers would be somewhat relieved to understand how ‘intuitive’ the process still is. The days of Minority Report, where people walk past ads in shopping malls that call out to them by name, are still a long way off.” Ferrier also suggests that the data solution platforms, apps and companies popping up at an ever-increasing rate, aren’t necessarily what people – consumers or marketers – want. “There is also an assumption by those peddling data solutions that personalised advertising is desired by the consumer and will sell more stuff. Both of these are just that: as-yet-unproven assumptions.” It seems statistics would back up Ferrier’s point. According to the 2017 CMO Survey, while spending on marketing analytics is set to increase (from 4.6% to 22% of total marketing budget), the majority of marketing decisions are not made by reviewing or utilising data. In fact, the survey found only 31.6% of decisions are made following data analysis, the rest are made with little or not data involved. According to McIver, while every marketer may not be fully exploiting data available, the fact that it is so easily accessible warrants a review of how we use it, today and well into the future. “We’d be hopelessly naive to believe that companies will self-regulate their transparency and ethical behaviour when it comes to data. They will always tend to act in favour of profit, rather than in favour of public good. As consumers, it’s essential that we become data-literate, so that we can have intelligent debate about what is and is not OK, and enact legislation to hold companies to account. Marketers can help this process by being completely open about what they do and why. [The TV show] Gruen does this brilliantly, explaining the reasoning and techniques behind particular marketing campaigns, but that tends to be focused on mainstream media advertising. We are way behind the eight ball when it comes to data collection, digital media and their impact on this industry.”
Self-management and education Dr Damian Cotchett, a consumer and organisational psychologist at Changing Behaviours, believes that changes to policies, along with one’s ability to self-manage, will be crucial for individuals to thrive in a data-led society. “As the concept of online marketing becomes considerably more impactful, the perceived responsibility of those driving and influencing the new direction will have standards applied to them. Currently, this is limited in terms of rules except for things like ‘do not contact me’ rules and the ability to unsubscribe. The social media area will establish ‘fit for purpose’ rules that will demonstrate a higher level of transparency, but this is primarily as a result of pressure applied by consumer action groups. As with most areas of marketing for adults, the principle of self-management underpins consumers’ decision-making and transparency of actions… The best way to ensure a mentally healthy society is to encourage people to be self-managing.” McIver agrees, “We like to think we are rational creatures, but countless studies have shown that we are really easily manipulated, even by things we’re not paying conscious attention to. The more skilled companies become at using that, the less our behaviour is actually under our conscious control, and the more we are prey to being controlled by others… Data has so much potential to change our lives for the better… But it can also be used against us. And, because that’s so profitable, it seems like that’s the aspect of data science that’s currently winning. We can change that, but we have to work together and prioritise data literacy and critical thinking skills.” US author and businessman, Stephen R Covey once suggested that, “Trust is the glue of life… It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” For many, the FacebookCambridge Analytica data scandal has brought to the surface just how important trust is for business today. While it may have shocked many consumers, it has also opened up the conversation on how and why we use data and how we can begin to build more trust between marketers and their audiences. “It’s important for agencies and marketers to get involved in discussions such as this,” says Ferrier, “as ignoring the issues surrounding data and consumer rights is inauthentic, and potentially destructive. As an industry it’s great to see so many organisations working through these types of questions – not pushing them aside.” For Slawuta, the conversation we’re having on data may well result in a positive shift for society. “If we want to sell more products, data definitely helps. If we want to create a better world – we need to be better storytellers. Data looks at what is, stories create what will be. I think the world today is starving for narratives of hope. Technology is multiplier of human psychology. The ever-increasing computational power of machines is just that – raw computational power. What makes it potentially powerful is the underlying human psychology – and, as such, technology will neither save nor doom humanity. It will multiply what is – our fears, frustrations and anxieties or our dreams, hopes and aspirations. The old Greek maxim ‘know thyself’ has never been more appropriate. The social fabric of societies based on trust and fairness is arguably being torn by fake news, populism and masterful fear-management. Awareness of how we are being hacked will make a difference whether we collectively upgrade or downgrade as humanity.”
Orchestrating brand voice: Lessons for marketers By Alan Siegel
Sadly, the vast majority of brand communications today fail to achieve their objectives for several reasons. They lack clarity. They present conflicting messages. They often don’t even pay lip service to themes and messages integral to their communications.
rather than seeking answers from customers about positioning, messaging, architecture and narrative. Try this inside-out approach to shake things up by inviting storytellers, investigative reporters, artists and even poets to participate in brainstorming sessions.
The most effective brand voices are the result of a singular and powerful vision that is nurtured in environments that encourage innovation and excellence in communication.
4. Authenticity is critical to voice. Projecting a vision of the corporation with a conscience is paramount. People want organizations to live up to values while owning up to mistakes.
The digital challenge to voice Over the last 20 years, the digital revolution has raised the din of marketing communications exponentially, radically altering the messaging environment with its speed, novelty and noise. Every marketer needs to recalibrate his or her brand voice to find the right pitch and tone, and the ideal volume to be heard. This dynamic has forced organizations to: • move from one-way communications to a dialogue • incorporate personalization, flexibility and simplicity • react instantly to rumor, speculation and criticism on the Internet • convert brand communications to proliferating digital platforms • build social responsibility into brand voice • appropriately translate English for multi-national markets Brand voice becomes a strong bond in shaping the strategies behind identity. A well-developed brand voice drives all communications to project a consistent personality and reinforce the customer experience. It’s the “red thread” running through every touchpoint and new media to reputation management.
Brand voice lessons The following are 10 lessons that can provide a roadmap for brand stewards. 1. Create a clear, concise statement defining identity lays the foundation for building a sustainable voice throughout company communications. 2. Develop a short, overarching brand purpose — the reason for being in business and the calling your company follows in the market and society — should replace lengthy, generic mission / vision statements. 3. Leverage the intellectual power of the organization
Take CVS’ decision to stop selling tobacco products, which sent a purposeful message - at an expense of $2 billion in tobacco products sales. CVS has maintained profitable growth due to strong performance in its pharmacy services. 5. Always expect the unexpected. Today, anyone can inflict lasting damage on a brand within seconds, forcing businesses to have organizational voice programs in place with digital experts empowered to quickly and effectively respond. 6. Suppot meaningful conversations. Audiences are no longer passive. 7. A brand’s master narrative needs to incorporate stories that create emotional connections and promote loyalty. 8. To connect with audiences, brands must humanize, personalize and bring clarity to their voices. Clarity is the ultimate sophistication in an age of dissonance. 9. Virtually all organizations with a distinctive voice have a visionary leader who is unwilling to compromise the brand’s core values; one who creates a culture that encourages employees to live the brand voice. Courageous business leaders recognize the most powerful instrument for them to communicate is to live their brand. They must strive to reinforce their purpose, positioning and messages that drive their culture. 10. AI is rapidly creating a voice-centric world where virtual assistants will become the preferred communication platform. As more people use bots to gather information, to review and order goods and services, they will revolutionize how consumers interact with the marketplace. Today, as marketers focus on migrating brand voice to new platforms, maintaining the essential personality of an organization will require new ways of dealing with consumer interactions. And, while the future poses many challenges, a coherent brand voice, supported by a pro-social brand purpose, will become even more important to success.
The Super Consumer Hero! By BrandKnew
Eddie Yoon is a growth strategy expert who has helped drive US$5B+ in profitable growth for brands, companies and categories. He is the Founder of EddieWouldGrow, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and author of ‘ Superconsumers ‘ in which he shows you how to find, listen to, and engage with your most passionate and profitable consumers, and then tailor your decisions to meet their wants and needs. Here is a freewheeling conversation with Eddie straight from Chicago. BK: Tell us a bit about yourself and what makes you go ‘ Wow, another day at work ‘ EY: The main thing that makes me excited to work is the opportunity for epiphany about a consumer and how a customer can take that insight and innovate such that 1 + 1 = 11. To me an epiphany is an idea that is sharp and stops you in your tracks because it not only overturns conventional wisdom but reshapes your worldview about the category. For example, at the superficial level most people would say processed cheese is unhealthy. But what happens if processed cheese bought at lot to pour over vegetables, served to kids who won’t eat their vegetables otherwise? In the consumer’s mind, it is healthy and processed cheese was an integral part of that. And this makes the processed cheese worthy of a price premium typically reserved for organic/natural products.
Humans are impossibly complex, innovative and are interesting to no end. And this is something that most companies often underestimate. BK: What triggered your interest in consumer insight and customer behaviour? EY: Going into college, I thought I would be a philosophy major. Then I ended up studying economics and political science, since I went to the University of Chicago and it seemed like a wasted opportunity to not do that. And I am glad I did so, as economics and political science seemed so useful at predicting and preparing for the future. Many of my classes started out with the assumption, “assume a rational consumer with perfect information”. It was a necessary assumption, but an impractical one if you think about yourself as a consumer or any normal human interaction, which is intermingled with emotion and aspiration. But the real truth is that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I stumbled into consulting. A colleague of mine left my first firm to join The Cambridge Group, where I spent 18 years and was a senior partner there. It was there that I fell in love with understanding consumers and saw its power to help companies grow. BK: The business eco system has migrated from a ‘ caveat emptor ‘(buyer beware) mode to a ‘ caveat venditor ‘ (seller beware): what in your opinion is the cause and effect of such a shift?
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EY: Most of the great technological innovations have benefited businesses, but provided even more value to the consumer. The internet provides perfect information, so now consumers can easily review and pick truly the best product versus just relying on a brand. Productivity innovations make things cheaper for consumers, so they have more buying power. Social media gives consumers a mega-phone to complain and the whole world can see it. Finally, there is an abundance of capital and in general barriers to enter a business have gotten lower. So you have more competition, with lower cost structures ready to compete on price vying for more powerful consumers than ever, which leads to caveat venditor. BK: There has been a lot of talk about the emergence of ‘customer segment of one‘ and how today’s tools like AI and Machine Learning and the emergence of Data Science is helping brand owners and marketers. What are your thoughts on this? EY: That is certainly the trajectory of where business is headed, but certain categories and companies will get there first. Netflix is a great example, but not just because of their technical prowess, but because of inherent category dynamics. Movies and TV shows reveal a lot about consumer demand. If you watch one Fast & Furious, you’ll likely want to watch the next. If you watch a movie with a particular actor over and over again, then it tells you a lot. And because their category moves fast--the average American consumes over 40 hours per week of media--they get even more data. Their recommendation engine is getting to a customer segment of one. But slower categories where the products purchased and consumed are not revealing will get there much slwoer. BK: What was the big motivation for you to write a book like ‘Superconsumers‘? And do you see some bit of Love Marks that Kevin Roberts spoke about in his book by the same name some years ago? EY: The more senior and experienced I got in growth strategy, the more I saw some common patterns. I’ve been fortunate where eight clients of mine have doubled or tripled their businesses in a 5-10 year time span. When I saw the same patterns and themes there, I realised that knowing how to grow your business the right way was a lot easier and that it was my obligation to share that with the world. Second, I love hearing about a great growth story. Opening my ideas and insights up, would increase the number of stories I got access to.
Finally I wanted to see if my hypotheses were correct. So I figured if I open sourced these ideas, more people would try them and I’d get more data and stories about growth. BK: As you convey in the book that Superconsumers are agnostic to any industry (you find them even in the ‘ Office Supplies ‘ category isn’t it?) and they exist across verticals, what do brand marketers have to do to identify and make the most of them? EY: To me the best way is to work backwards. Start with what key decision do you need to make? Second figure out what data you need to feel confident about your decision. Finally, figure out how you can ‘superconsumerise’ the data you trust the most. Superconsumerising your data is simply identifying the distinct buying patterns, emotions and benefits sought by the people who buy the most and care the most about the category. Not your brand, but the category. With that approach, there are an infinite number of ways to figure this out. But my goal was to provide a compass, not a GPS, because I think people learn more that way and get better results. BK: In an era of deep discounting and perennial promotions, how challenging is it for marketers to distill the Superconsumer from the vast majority who prefer biting into the forbidden fruit? EY: Ironically, supers are far more likely to buy both the most premium brands and the cheapest, private label brands in a category. The reason why is that they are smart enough to have figured out multiple use cases or jobs for the category. Consider cream cheese. They might use very premium cream cheese when it is a spread and the star of a breakfast, but use cheaper private label when it comes to baking as an
ingredient, where it’s just a supporting actor.
situation.
The best marketers will use price discounts like a precise surgeon, where you are crystal clear on what incremental value--both economic and strategic--you are getting in return for your discount. Are you blindly discounting whenever and to whomever? Or are you strategically discounting at key parts of the year when your manufacturing plants are not fully utili
For the customer is always late, I’d say it’s the case that many customers are late, but nearly all Supers are far ahead of you. This is particularly true of larger organi
sed? Or to increase purchase frequency and trips down the aisle? Are you strategically discounting at key price points that trade consumers up from the very bottom to the top tier? Are you not discounting the tier right below a new innovation, so that supers are enticed to try it? Are you promoting across categories in a clever way, because a super of 1 category is a super of 9? Loyalty is an entirely different question and I think is not always the most helpful way to run a business. Supers are smart and very high standards. Given that, they are loyal to the best performing product or service that best fits their need at that right moment. If you are the best for that situation, then you’ll win their loyalty. If you are good enough for a situation that warrants only a ‘good enough’ product and have the best price, they will switch. To me, loyalty is not something you hope for from a consumer. What you really want, is a clear and compelling articulation of ‘what must be true’ for a superconsumer to stay loyal to you the next time. The true value is honesty and clarity on willingness to pay. Supers can do that because they are so smart and articulate. Regular consumers will tell you to make it better and cheaper at the same time and won’t give you honest or usable advice on what you need to do for them to pay more, because they simply don’t care enough. BK: Which are the brands in your opinion that have mastered the trend of developing and aligning with Superconsumers? And which are the ones you think have missed out despite being in the best position to capitalise on the trend? And why? EY: Netflix as I mentioned. Tesla is another one, seeing how Elon Musk spends a lot of time interacting with consumers on Twitter and taking suggestions for optimising the brand. Starbucks is another great one, especially via their app. Domino’s is another great one. BK: How important you think is culture in an organisation especially in the context of recognising, respecting and rewarding Superconsumers? EY: Culture is extraordinarily important, starting with how many executives are themselves superconsumers of the category? My anecdotal experience is the bigger the company, the fewer the superconsumers are in the company. Without superconsumers working for you, it’s harder to have a culture that is oriented towards and deeply understands supers. BK: Where do you stand in the debate between ‘ The customer is always right ‘ and ‘ The customer is always late ‘ ? EY: It depends on the organisational function and I’d probably add nuance to the statement. For customer service, marketing, innovation and sales, the statement should be all customers always feel they are right. And since customers deserve our empathy and respect, we should treat them as such in nearly all circumstances barring an ethical or abusive
sations where most employees and executives are themselves not superconsumers of the category. In that case, the organisation is always late. Smaller, fast growing companies or startups tend to employ and be led by more supers, and thus perhaps they are not as far behind. But the reality is there is always one super who will be far ahead. Said differently, if you think the customer is always late, then you haven’t found the right customers yet. BK: What do you enjoy doing most; Consulting, Writing, Speaking? Or being in Hawaii? EY:I’d love to do all three...while in Hawaii! :) I’ve come to realize all three areas are deeply synergistic. I write and speak about what I’ve learned from consulting, otherwise it’s just theory versus real results. But I need to write to know what I think. And I need to speak to hone my writing and whittle it down. BK: Do you see brand extensions for ‘ Superconsumers ‘ in the form of a Podcast series, a TV show, a book sequel? EY: Yes! I’ve long thought about a podcast and potentially a book sequel. TV show is one I haven’t thought of yet (unless it is shot in Hawaii). But I’m working on a “productized” version of superconsumers designed for entrepreneurs and angel investors to make a better match if possible. Stay tuned on that. BK: Which are some the books that have inspired you? EY: I’m excited about Nichedown, by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy. It’s about solo-preneuers and other entrepreneurs and has all the key insights for what has helped me be confident now at EddieWouldGrow. I can’t wait for Dolly Chugh’s book, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. She’s a prof at NYU, super smart and a wonderful person. This is an important book I can’t wait to read. Otherwise, I love Creativity Inc, by Ed Catmull. Barbarians at the Gate and Liars Poker are books I love to re-read. My favourite books on growth strategy are by Chris Zook, like Profit from the Core.
3 ways to engage advertising-weary consumers By Kerry Lyons
According to recent research by the American Marketing Association, consumers are bombarded with up to ten thousand brand messages daily. According to a 2015 Microsoft study, our attention span has been reduced to six seconds – which also happens to be that of a goldfish. Add to this declining trust in traditional advertising and what’s a brand to do? In a world filled with bots, ad blockers and a bleak consumer regard for advertising, how can brands truly break through and connect with consumers? Well, the good news is that while trust in traditional advertising is declining, trust in user-generated content (UGC), recommendations & reviews is on the rise. According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers trust the recommendation of a friend or family member over any other form of advertising. And research from Great Shopper magazine confirms that 88% of shoppers say that if they enjoyed an experiential interaction with a product away from a store, they would add it to their shopping list. Additionally, a recent article in the Huffington Post noted that 76% of consumers view UGC as more honest than traditional advertising and suggests that marketers should strive to insert UGC into all phases of the purchase cycle, from discovery to point of purchase to post purchase. All this research suggests that to connect with consumers, brands need to deliver unique experiences, provide a platform for UGC and bridge the gap between online, at home and instore. It starts with building an emotional connection between the consumer and the brand. It used to be that a standout :60 spot with a sappy soundtrack accomplished this but that’s no longer the case. Today, a proven way for brands to build that lasting emotional connection is to engage with consumer influencers and provide them with a unique, relevant, and shareable experience that will attract their friends and followers. How?
Identify and activate everyday, real consumer influencers Find the people who are passionate about your brand and
loyal to your retail partners. Why consumer influencers instead of a celebrity, notable YouTuber or Instagrammer with thousands of followers? For starters, they are more authentic, trusted and credible. In fact, an Accenture study confirmed that consumer influencers have twice the impact of paid influencers. As consumers, we’re far more likely to trust the mom next door or the review our friend shared on Facebook than any message from a paid endorser.
Give them a reason to talk about you Provide a compelling, memorable, content-generating experience that can be shared. Maybe it’s a sample. Maybe it’s some branded swag. Maybe it’s a piece of exclusive, entertaining content. We crave these experiences – especially Millennials, 75% of whom say that they also “crave real content when making a purchase, meaning a selfie taken while wearing or using a favorite product could be more influential than traditional marketing.” (Huffington Post)
Get them to spread the word, online and off So much of what we do today –and where marketers invest today -- is online, but don’t forget that those physical brand experiences and offline conversations matter too. It turns out that 90% of brand conversations are still happening offline and that one in five sales is impacted by social conversations online and off (Engagement Labs). So, if you can get a real consumer to spread the word on your behalf, you’re likely to see the results at the cash register. We can’t control the “goldfish effect” but we can find ways to deliver memorable, shareable brand experiences – and when that happens, everyone wins – consumers, brands and retailers. Kerry Lyons is senior vice president of marketing at Ripple Street (formerly House Party, Inc.), an influencer marketing platform that connects brands with their biggest fans. She is a vocal proponent of influencer marketing and a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
Retail is alive and well: How brands are evolving for today’s consumer By Jamie Crespi
In the past decade, we’ve seen a huge change in retail with the emergence of new approaches to shopper engagement, such as mattress retailer Casper’s experience outposts and fashion retailer Club Monaco’s coffee shop and bookstore integrations. The traditional place of purchase (“old retail”) has been rebranded to entice consumers to spend more time -- and money -- in physical brick-and-mortar environments. Even the most traditional of big-box retailers have joined the movement: Target opened a slew of urban “micro-stores.” More often found in sprawling suburban shopping malls, the family favorite retailer had to learn how to entice and engage with a newer, younger and much more brand-promiscuous shopper. The new store format’s highly-curated and limited collections offer in-the-moment buying “opportunities” -- a winning customer service combination of availability, ease of accessibility and well-timed promotions to sway consumers. Before e-commerce, and the tightened wallets of the past 10 years, consumers tended to spend with the brands they knew and, once the consumer-brand relationship was established, it was trusted and long-lasting. In a role reversal, today’s new “conscious” consumers want choice, value and convenience as they continue to carve out their own individual paths to purchase. While they might be willing to invest dollars in brand relationships, their fickleness means brands have to work harder than ever to earn their loyalty. Competing with each other for consumer attention, while simultaneously figuring out what the new customer experience should look like, today’s brands need to constantly build and reinforce the relationship by anticipating needs and catering to the customer. Online darling Dollar Shave Club and the experience-first community favorite Sephora have excelled in this area through their attention to providing a great customer experience. Experience and excellence, both in product and service, characterize the offering, but data is what makes the
engagement stick. Visibility and accessibility both online and offline are fundamental in a world that requires brands constantly build and rebuild the consumer relationship. This is where location can become a game changer. By utilizing mobile location data, not only can retailers gain a much clearer understanding of consumer behavior, but they can also provide the level of one-to-one customer service experienced in mom-and-pop stores. Leveraging location data allows brands to better target potential buyers at key points in their shopping journeys with helpful content. For instance, the new mother who is planning a her weekly trip to the store would greatly appreciate a last-minute coupon from a baby formula brand. Through contextual analysis and location data, marketers can understand where actual consumers are in their journeys to purchase and help them with offers or useful content when they are most receptive. This not only sways last minute decisions but also strengthens the brand-consumer relationship to keep consumers coming back. Target’s micro-stores seem purpose-built with this new consumer in mind, and provide hope that what we’re seeing on Main Street is less a slow death, and more a retail renaissance. The renewed customer service will drive this retail renaissance, making winners of those brands that evolve to meet the in-the-moment decision-makers on their terms. While the new wave of digital-first retailers who are succeeding against this new construct quickly adapted to these changes, it’s exciting to see more traditional retailers like Target start to rewrite the retail playbook too. Jamie Crespi is the vice president of marketing at Blis where she leads the US marketing efforts by providing creative market planning and execution that maps to the sales and product strategy.
‘We had to crack the code by being disruptive’: Behind the IHOb ‘rebranding’ IHOP IS NOW IHOB, FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY. BUT ITS CMO SAYS NOT TO EXPECT A SEQUEL TO THE BLOCKBUSTER CAMPAIGN. By Diana Bradley
IHOP CMO Brad Haley is a fan of the “crazy and bizarre.” It’s why he’s taken his son to San Diego Comic-Con International for 16 of the last 20 years. It might also be why he gave the go-ahead to change IHOP’s name to IHOb.
“The brand didn’t pursue it in a very concerted, aggressive, or interesting manner,” he said. “The IHOb campaign was deliberately designed to be disruptive because we had to change paradigms in people’s heads.”
The “b” in IHOb stands for burgers, and the name change is part of a campaign to promote the pancake chain’s new grilled offerings.
Even the brand’s pre-campaign research confirmed its reputation as just a breakfast joint. In the days leading up to the big reveal, IHOP ran a teaser campaign asking what people thought the “b”’ in IHOb represents. It found that few respondents associated the brand with anything other than breakfast, with most answers citing brunch, biscuits, and bacon.
IHOP, which is celebrating its 60th birthday this year, has made other attempts to promote its lunch and dinner offerings, but they all fell flat as a pancake, noted Haley. The chain has included lunch and dinner offerings such as burgers and sandwiches on its menu since its founding, but few people have seen the restaurant as anything other than a breakfast stop.
IHOP president Darren Rebelez, to whom Haley reports, had the final call on the extreme makeover, and he made the call with no hesitation.
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“[Rebelez] realized we had to crack the code by being disruptive and getting people’s attention,” Haley said.
‘We couldn’t only talk about pancakes’ When he stepped into IHOP’s CMO role last August, Haley’s first priority was to rejuvenate the brand’s image. IHOP’s marketing had been stale for so long that its relevance was starting to wane, he said. The seed for the IHOb idea was planted last November, when the chain held a creative review. The eventual winner, Droga5, and other agencies participating in the pitch were asked to promote a non-pancake dish from IHOP’s menu. “To maximize our full sales and traffic potential, we couldn’t only talk about pancakes; we had to talk about our other offerings,” said Haley. Droga5 presented the first idea for IHOb, which evolved into the campaign the chain revealed this month. When the agency came on-board, it went through consumer insights with the chain. “People see the brand as a fun, quirky place where everyone is welcome and you can come as you are, but that wasn’t being played back in the brand’s comms,” said Haley. The chain has worked with Droga5 to ensure its marketing is more “entertaining, engaging, and quirky” to reflect how people view the brand. It also created a new brand purpose in concert with the quirky theme, which Haley defined as “giving all folks a place to pancake together.” The chain is using “pancake” as a verb because it “represents more than just the physical pancake: it includes all the wonderful, warm emotions and good feelings people have when they think about and eat pancakes,” Haley said. Droga5 also developed IHOP’s tagline: “pancakes, pancakes, pancakes.” But what if customers were confused by an emphasis on burgers as well as pancakes? Asked if he was afraid the pancake message would be lost in the temporary burger rebrand, Haley said IHOP has a real-time social media community management team, led by MRM McCann, working to dispel the notion that the restaurant no longer serves pancakes. “Anytime we see a comment that asks, ‘Why have you stopped selling pancakes?’ or ‘What are you doing to my IHOP?,’ we say, ‘Don’t worry, the pancakes aren’t going anywhere,’” said Haley. Not every customer thinks the rebrand is clever. Some have pushed back on social media to say the restaurant should keep the “P.” In response, IHOP is reminding fans that it isn’t really changing its name and although IHOb branding is on menus and posters, it’s only a three-month campaign to promote hamburgers. When it ends, the chain will return to “good old IHOP again,” said Haley. The chain is also planning similar campaigns to promote other, non-breakfast menu items. IHOP could make other periodic pushes – once or twice a year – to remind people they can also have lunch and dinner offerings.
Should fans of the brand be ready for another rebranding to something like IHOs, promoting sandwiches? Haley isn’t ready for a repeat performance. “I think we happened to catch lightning in a bottle this time around, so any attempts to do something similar in the future would just be viewed as derivative,” explained Haley. “We’ll just have to come up with something that is equally fun but completely different. No pressure.”
Recipe for success Since the launch of the teaser campaign on June 4, the IHOb push has been featured in more than 15,000 earned media stories. The total potential reach of social media conversation has hit 3.4 billion people, with 1.2 million tweets. That is a 7,000,000% increase from the previous week’s conversation volume, with 92% of the conversation taking place on Twitter, according to DeVries Global, IHOP’s PR agency partner. Consumers are sharing IHOP’s earned media stories across their own social channels. During the tease phase from June 4-10, IHOP saw an average of 23 shares per earned media story. This increased to an average of 92 shares per story after Monday’s “burger” reveal. Instagram posts from both paid and earned influencers who attended the IHOb launch events reached more than 8.1 million followers in the two days after the name was unveiled. On Monday, the brand saw 432,000 visits to ihop.com. The site typically averages 80,000 a day, meaning a 440% increase or 5.4 times higher than the daily average. Major brands roasted IHOP over the name change, and celebrities engaged with the brand on social media, helping the brand in its quest to remain relevant. “That helped propel this brand from where it was viewed as a stodgy, 60-year-old brand to a brand people want to spend more time with and engage with because it’s more fun and contemporary than they had expected or remembered,” said Haley. He attributed IHOb’s success to the gamification aspect of the campaign, with the brand asking people to guess what the “b” stood for. “We had reports of offices having pools to guess what the ‘b’ could be; radio stations held contests,” he said. “People clearly got into it in a big way and had fun with it as we had hoped. That fed on itself, more people got involved, and then the media picked it up organically.” The next step for the IHOb campaign: getting out the quality message. “We want to make sure when people have our burgers, they aren’t just pleasantly surprised, but shocked IHOP can make a burger this good,” said Haley.
Diana Bradley, Consumer reporter, PRWeek US
How to Launch a New Brand: Five Tips for an Unforgettable Debut By Stewart Hodgson
Building a brand for your company is one of the most important things you can do as a marketer. A brand allows you to differentiate yourself from industry competitors with a unique image, a memorable voice, and an identity that resonates with your target customers. But establishing and launching your own brand from scratch can be difficult—particularly when you’re a startup with limited resources. It can be tempting to rush through the process of market entry and start selling products as quickly as possible, but the way you introduce your company to your customers could have a huge impact on your potential for future sales. After all, you really do have only one chance to make a first impression. Adopting a forward-thinking mindset, establishing a strategy, and fully prepping your rollout will help take your launch into the success stratosphere. All it takes is a commitment to five simple steps.
Step 1: Start as early as possible Founding father Benjamin Franklin told us that when we fail to prepare, we prepare to fail. There’s a lot more to launching a brand than simply showing off a new logo or telling people that you’re open for business. The quicker you get started, the sooner you’ll be able to identify potential problems before they damage your company’s reputation. For instance, we all remember the fateful spring morning when Instagram rolled out its brand new logo, sparking a public outcry and leaving the business wondering where it went wrong. Instagram is just one example of a spectacular failure to launch, but its experience provides insight into the importance of giving your team plenty of time to make sure that your strategy makes sense before rolling it out to the masses. Just
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a few extra weeks devoted to consumer research would have been enough to save Instagram months of damage control.
not sure about the new chapter in your tale, or what it means
Step 2: Know your audience ecosystem
Step 4: Have a timeline for your launch
Your brand is your reputation, your identity, and your soul as a business. The most successful brands are those that resonate with their customers on a deeper level, sharing unified values, beliefs, and goals.
Timing is important in business. Write a blog at the wrong
The more you know about your audience ecosystem, the more you can design a brand that both generates buzz during your launch and continues to establish long-standing relationships for the life of your company. So, how do you plan a rollout around your target market? •
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to them, then that could lead to holes in your new identity.
time, and you could risk incurring the wrath of an unhappy consumer base. Create a product too late, and you could miss your chance to transform the market. When you’re launching a brand, timing is all about making sure that you share the right information with the right people at the best times. Establishing a rollout schedule might seem simple enough,
Bring back the user persona. Your buyer persona will always be an important resource in your brand strategy. Data-driven insight into your perfect customer will teach you how to speak the language of your audience, where to find them, and how to improve engagement.
but it becomes far more complex when you consider the
Create channel consistency. Your personas should tell you where your customers spend most of their time— your blog, your social media pages, or somewhere else. And create the same seamless experience on every touchpoint, maintaining consistent tone of voice, imagery, and timescale. Don’t show off your new logo on Instagram in April and then announce it on your website in August!
will help you unveil a clear and consistent brand to the world,
Get your audience involved. Finally, don’t just tell your customers about your new brand: Ask them what they think about your logo, how they like your name, and whether they’ve had any problems using your new website. Engaging your audience from the beginning is a great way to start building a community for your business.
Step 3: Make your launch just one chapter in your story Successful brands create an affinity with their audience that gradually transforms one-off customers into loyal consumer advocates. As today’s customers search for new ways to develop stronger relationships with their favorite brands, the easiest way to set yourself up for success is to position your launch as an important chapter of a larger company narrative. If you’re introducing a new company, what caused you to approach this specific marketplace? If you’re rebranding, what trends in your industry pushed you to adopt a new image? When Airbnb launched its new identity in 2014, it inspired its customers with a story about how the new logo was all about “belonging.” Make sure your employees know your story inside and out before you share it with the world. After all, your employees are your most important ambassadors and the frontline storytellers responsible for sharing your message. If they’re
number of touchpoints you use to connect with your audience every day—signage, marketing collateral, social media channels, email signatures, and so much more. Making sure you dot the i’s and cross the t’s at the perfect time instead of a brand that seems still “under construction.” Avoid leaking information about the brand before its official launch date, too. Brand media taken out of context could prompt negative conversations about your company before it has even had a chance to introduce itself.
Step 5: Stay the course A well-executed launch is just the start of your brand strategy.` The rollout is your first step into your new identity, and the path ahead involves endless options for engaging, sharing, and communicating with your customers in ways that allow your message to spread to new people and partners. Although your launch sets the stage for marketing campaigns, content creation, and social growth, it’s up to you to invest in all of that. To improve your chances of success, put a system in place from day one that you can use to collect feedback and important metrics about how your brand is perceived. For instance, try measuring social media engagement, sending out surveys, and speaking to customers to get more information about what they like and dislike about the brand. That will help you avoid any confusion around your reputation. Never rest on your laurels after a launch. A brand isn’t just a name, a logo, or a website—it’s a dynamic, versatile entity that requires constant nurturing to survive.
Stewart Hodgson is a co-founder of Fabrik Brands, a brand strategy and digital design agency based in London.
Are Your Benchmarks Up to Date? How Digital Advertising Performance Standards Are Changing By Oren Langberg
The standards for advertising performance benchmarks are getting higher and higher, forcing many marketers to reconsider how they measure their online efforts.
still have fairly high CPCs ($6.40 and $6.75, respectively) but overall, advertisers are getting more bang for their buck than ever before.
According to Magna Global’s latest year-end advertising forecast, digital media will account for 44% of all ad spend in 2018, a 13% increase over last year. While all digital ad channels are expected to garner increased investment in 2018, paid search will continue to dominate the space, accounting for $113 billion of the $237 billion global digital advertising tab.
In fact, according to the Search Engine Journal research, only the advocacy industry has an AdWords conversion rate (CVR) below 2%, and the cross-vertical median is rapidly approaching 4%. Similarly, the cross-vertical median for display ads sits at 0.77%, driven largely by high CVRs in dating and personals (3.34%), legal services (1.84%), and employment services (1.57%).
To stand out in this crowded digital landscape, marketers need to reevaluate what constitutes success — and as more companies put more money into digital campaigns, that’s only getting harder to do. New data published in Search Engine Journal suggests that the industry standard for good performance in digital advertising is only getting higher as leading firms get better at reaching internet users, building awareness, and driving conversions.
The Need for Personalization
Digital Advertising Performance Benchmarks on the Rise The data — which provides benchmarks for search ads purchased through Google AdWords and display ads purchased through the Google Display Network (GDN) — shows a median CTR of 3.17% for search and 0.46% for display across all industry verticals. Companies in the dating and personals and travel and hospitality verticals enjoy the most success on the paid search front, with CTRs of 6.05% and 4.68%, respectively. Unsurprisingly, verticals that benefit from engaging visuals like real estate (1.05%) and dating and personals (0.72%) enjoy the highest CTRs on display advertising. While these CTRs are significantly higher than in previous years, digital advertisers generally haven’t had to pay a premium to secure these improved results. The median costper-click (CPC) currently sits at $2.69 for AdWords and $0.63 for GDN, only slightly higher than the $2.32 and $0.58 benchmarks from two years ago. Industries like consumer services and legal services, where people tend to do extensive research before making a choice
Consumers’ growing comfort with online advertising has certainly played a part in this cross-vertical elevation of traditional advertising KPIs. Still, much of the credit must go to the marketers who are simply getting better at their jobs — particularly those working on behalf of industry leaders. Modern marketing is becoming especially good at personalization, as more and more marketers are realizing that creating “audiences of one” is the most effective way to boost CTR and CVR without inflating CPC. According to McKinsey, “Personalization can reduce [customer] acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5 to 15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30%.” What’s more, analyses conducted by HubSpot found that personalized calls-to-action have a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than boilerplate calls-to-action. For many marketers, delivering 1:1 messaging is a daunting task. Fortunately, cutting-edge tools like Albert™, the world’s first fully-autonomous artificial intelligence marketing platform, offer marketers an easy, intuitive way to achieve the hyper-personalization needed to keep pace with climbing digital advertising performance benchmarks. Albert offsets the complexities of marketing personalization by handling many of the time-consuming, computationallyintensive tasks that humans are simply unable to execute at the requisite speed and scale. By pairing in-house marketing expertise with Albert’s powerful machine learning algorithms, an organization is well on its way to far surpassing the benchmarks of yesteryear.
Brands Can Speed Up Their Digital Tempo With Vertical Video Marketing By Meenakshi Krishnan
The dynamics of marketing need to change with the changing velocity of customers’ preferences. Customers are the lifeline of any business. Building stronger connections with potential customers are imperative to the success of any business today. One of the prime strategies that several brands adopt in these years to build connectivity with their customers is video marketing. Brands are broadening their scope quickly with social video marketing.
It is a full-screen video creating facility; mobile first; super simple and intuitive and vertical. Above all, there is no limitation to one type of content or format. IGTV is the new vertical canvas video app available both as a dedicated standalone app and accessible from a button inside the Instagram app.
Platforms you can consider for social video marketing
As soon as you open the app, just like a TV, videos start playing right away and there are channels created by the creators. Interestingly, anyone using the app can be a creator! Facilities to comment, like and share videos with friends are available too. Users have the facility to access four different categories for the videos: For You, Following, Popular, and Continue Watching. Also, users can get callouts from the IGTV button alerting them to new content.
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YouTube
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Snapchat
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But, the latest to talk about is vertical video canvas which Instagram is offering by the name of IGTV. With 1 billion users, Instagram is rightly tapping this opportunity. The company’s IGTV is all set to capture a massive and powerful draw. Businesses can take total advantage of this facility to boost their precision. “IGTV is yet another advanced video marketing science that can shape the substance of your business”
What is a Vertical Video?
How does it work?
How can you decode this opportunity? For businesses, the potential of vertical video is going to be endless as there is huge space for your creative possibilities. Once you create your channel and upload videos, you are set to connect with and inspire your community. Before you post a video to IGTV, you need to create your own channel which you can do either from the Instagram app or IGTV app. By tapping “Create Channel” from the app, you can create your channel by easily following the onscreen instructions. You can also create your channel from
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the web. Once your channel is ready, you can easily upload Video, add description, title, and also choose to share to a Facebook Page. Your video length can be anywhere between 15 seconds to 10 minutes to even 60 minutes long. Creators have to just ensure that the videos they create are in MP4 file format with a minimum aspect ratio of 4:5 and maximum of 9:16. Videos can be up to 3.6 GB.
Businesses need to Prioritise this Space Approximately, 90% of consumers say video can assist them towards making buying decisions. With no clear horizon for content, directing your audience towards this interesting and emerging space is going to be so simple. So, go ahead and make use of this facility to create new perspectives for your audience to engage with your brand. Kris Merc, Illustrator and Animator believe this facility as a new set of challenge and a different way of looking at things. Vertical makes more sense according to Kris. •
You can create a grid to show different angles of a product
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Split the screen to tell two separate yet connected stories at once
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Guide viewers attention to any specific part of your video
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Use Overlays
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Add texture
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Add depth to your content
The possibilities are endless.
Tapping the younger generation of
consumers is going to be just easy Smartphones and vertical video are capturing a huge segment of the video-watching population these days. Several subscription services like Netflix now engage their audience with vertical video from mobile devices. The younger generation of consumers is explicitly consuming mobile videos. Reports indicate that 47 per cent of the millennials and Gen Xers do not watch TV these days. Instead, they consume video content from apps and smartphones. Marketers have to think to make the most out of this as this category of consumers plays a greater role in the future business. Brands can easily take off with video facility from apps like IGTV. Building engagement is going to be quick and easy with such conversational content.
To Wrap Right from building customer relationship until product promotions, video stands as a powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal. Mobile video consumption is rising and nearly 96% of B2B organizations are using video in their marketing campaigns. Video content published by brands on social media apps drives better engagement and huge response rates. One minute of video content has great potential to influence buyers. YouTube, Twitch, Amazon’s live-streaming service are some of the other options for brands, but they are still horizontal. Instagram’s IGTV stands as the new and attractive entrant into this space with vertical canvas. Go for it brands! Meenakshi Krishnan works for OpenXcell, a pioneering Blockchain and Mobile App Development Company in India and USA. A techie at heart, Meenakshi is passionate about the start-up ecosystem, entrepreneurship, latest tech innovations, and all that makes this digital world.
Book,
&
Line
Sinker
Lean Branding: Creating Dynamic Brands to Generate Conversion (Lean (O’Reilly)
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be: The world’s best selling book
By Laura Busche
By Paul Arden
This practical toolkit helps you build your own robust, dynamic brands that generate conversion. You’ll find over 100 DIY branding tactics and inspiring case studies, and step-bystep instructions for building and measuring 25 essential brand strategy ingredients, from logo design to demo-day pitches, using The Lean Startup methodology’s Build-Measure-Learn loop.
The world’s top advertising guru, offers up his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem solving, responding to a brief, communicating, playing your cards right, making mistakes and creativity, all notions that can be applied to aspects of modern life. This book provides a unique insight into the world of advertising and is a quirky compilation of quotes, facts, pictures, wit and wisdom, packed into easy-to-digest, bite-sized spreads.
Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld
Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World’s Most Influential Business Thinker
By James B. Twitchell
By William Cohen
Branded Nation uncovers a society where megachurches resemble shopping malls (and not by accident); where a university lives or dies on the talents of its image makers -- and its ranking in U.S. News & World Report; and where museums have turned to motorcycle exhibits and fashion shows to bolster revenue, even franchising their own institutions into brands.
Drucker on Marketing is the first comprehensive look at the marketing wisdom of one of modern history’s most influential business thinkers. A former student of Peter Drucker, William Cohen has sifted through Drucker’s huge body of work, singled out his most salient ideas on marketing, and constructed them into a framework that not only outlines Drucker’s marketing philosophy but provides practical advice...
Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers
The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Financial Times Series)
By Bernadette Jiwa One of the biggest challenges we face as entrepreneurs and innovators is understanding how to make our ideas resonate. We tend to have no shortage of ideas, but we struggle to tell the story of how they are going to be useful in the world and why they will matter to people. Marketing is the way we communicate how our ideas translate to value for people in a marketplace.
By Matt Watkinson
All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works--and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All By Seth Godin As Seth Godin has taught hundreds of thousands of marketers and students around the world, great marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story—a story we want to believe, whether it’s factual or not.
Customers are powerful. They have a loud voice, a wealth of choice and their expectations are higher than ever. This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers’ experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are. For managers, leaders and those starting a new business, the book shows that making improvements customers will appreciate doesn’t need to be complicated or cost a fortune.
Non-Obvious 2018 Edition: How To Predict Trends And Win The Future (Non-Obvious Series) By Rohit Bhargava In this all-new eighth edition, discover what more than a million readers already have: how to use the power of non-obvious thinking to grow your business and make a bigger impact in the world. In total, the Non-Obvious 2018 Edition features 15 all-new trends across 5 categories including Culture & Consumer Behavior, Marketing & Social Media, Media & Education, Technology & Design plus Economics & Entrepreneurship.
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The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising Kindle Edition By Brian Meert In The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising, Brian Meert teaches you how to advertise on Facebook. He walks you through step-bystep guides filled with illustrations and easyto-understand explanations. Additionally, he provides free resources and tips on how to create the perfect Facebook ad. Small business owners with learn how to run successful Facebook ad campaigns.
The Language of Branding: Theory, Strategies, and Tactics By Dawn Lerman, Robert J. Morais, David Luna The Language of Branding: Theory, Strategies and Tactics will teach marketing students how to use language successfully to improve brand value and influence consumer behavior. Luna and Lerman are among only a few researchers who take a multidisciplinary perspective on the ways language influences how consumers act.
Brands and BullS**t: Excel at the Former and Avoid the Latter. A Branding Primer for Millennial Marketers in a Digital Age
Get to Aha!: Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition
By Bernhard Schroeder
Andy Cunningham has been at the forefront of tech and innovation since day one, and she’s been helping companies create new product categories ever since. Now she reveals the winning framework she uses to transform markets and industries. Get to Aha! shows how to establish the kind of foundation world-class brands are built on. Too many business leaders fail to ask the most basic questions about their company. Who are we?
Brands and Bulls**t is the first book written exclusively for Millennial marketers and entrepreneurs to provide insights and tools on how to purposely create a digital brand. The kind of brand that ultimately creates such a powerful “feeling” in a customer’s “mind and gut” that they feel there is no substitute for your product or service. Brands and Bulls**t.
Building Strong Brands By David A. Aaker In this compelling work, Aaker uses real brandbuilding cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald’s, and others to demonstrate how strong brands have been created and managed. As industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper. In David Aaker’s pathbreaking book, Managing Brand Equity, managers discovered the value of a brand as a strategic asset and a company’s primary source of competitive advantage.
By Andy Cunningham
Advertising, Branding & Marketing 101: The quick and easy guide to achieving great marketing outcomes in a small business Kindle Edition By Dixie Maria Carlton This book will help you to understand the basics of business and marketing plans, branding, image, customer service and public relations so that you can grow your business through simple and smart marketing practices. Getting the basics right can make such a difference to the outcomes.
Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future Kindle Edition
Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior Kindle Edition
By Dorie Clark
By Nick Kolenda
A step-by-step guide to reinventing you Are you where you want to be professionally? In Reinventing You, branding expert Dorie Clark provides a step-by-step guide to help you assess your unique strengths, develop a compelling personal brand, and ensure that others recognize the powerful contribution you can make.
Using principles from cognitive psychology, Nick Kolenda developed a unique way to influence people’s thoughts. He developed a “mind reading” stage show depicting that phenomenon, and his demonstrations have been seen by over a million people across the globe. Methods of Persuasion reveals that secret for the first time. You’ll learn how to use those principles to influence people’s thoughts in your own life.