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Dear reader: It’s that time when you both look back and look ahead. Looking back on what has been an incredible year for all of us at Brand Knew. And looking ahead to the year ahead filled with opportunities, new beginnings and new services and products from the Brand Knew stable. Little wonder that we end this year’s edition with a feature on the future of living. How brands are using music to reach out and connect would definitely be sweet music to a lot of SMEs. We also discuss a few worthwhile tips on how to boost your marketing efforts and how brands are using and leveraging social media to influence journalists. And you thought they never think about it- how designers think about money is something that will fascinate you just as the article on the Digital Evolution that we can expect in 2016. And for all those connoisseurs who worship the automobile brand Porsche, here’s a sneak, rare peek into a literal museum of Porsches! Lots more to bite your teeth into, so long and see you in the New Year full of happiness, prosperity and brand knowledge.
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Best always
21 Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran
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linkd.in/1dsjYaW bit.ly/1h95tgO suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital/Social Media Marketing: Loknath Swain, Vishnu Nath Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera
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CONTENTS
What digital evolution will look like in 2016 Cultivating Innovation Is a Direct Path to Profit Is Corporate Jargon Undermining Your Brand Message? Navigating Retail’s Last Mile 5 Simple Ways to Give Your Marketing a Boost Brand with atomic ambitions Three Future-Proof Tactics for Mobile App Marketers Peek Inside A Top Secret Collection Of Rare Porsches 16 Different Ways Designers Think About Money How brands are using music to win over consumers Marketers target journalists via social media Marketers must work with tradition to reach boomers: report The future of living! Book, Line & Sinker
What digital evolution will look like in 2016 By Marius Smyth
We only saw the start of programmatic video, contextual commerce and data pooling in 2015, but the evolution of the digital media landscape in 2016 will see these transform from concepts into tangible tactics. Here’s how we at AdRoll are predicting these developments will make for an even faster paced online ad space in 2016.
1. Contextual commerce will finally take off For a while now, we’ve heard the term contextual commerce being the next step in how consumers shop for new products. But it hasn’t quite taken off, despite the industry’s anticipation that soon transactions will occur within the context of another app, rather than on a brand’s own digital property. There simply haven’t been many great examples of companies bringing the contextual shopping experience to consumers – and there hasn’t been a strong consumer demand for it. But now we’re starting to see the development of better tools to make it happen. Facebook, for example, is coming out with new ways to get transactional experiences within the News Feed, making in-app shopping a more integrated and seamless user experience. Matching the right platform with the right products to the right people is still the big challenge, and this is where predictive algorithms will come in as the bridge to connect consumers to contextual shopping. As technology emerges to close the gap between what people are shopping for, what ads brands are showing, and where these interactions are happening, contextual commerce will finally take flight.
2. Programmatic video will bring mobile shopping to TV Advertisers are starting to find new ways to take advantage
of the two-way flow of information between television screens and connected devices. By using this information, advertisers are able to deliver more tailored, customised ad experiences that speak to the programs consumers are watching, as well as what they’re browsing on desktop and mobile devices. Programmatic video will hinge on the success of products like Apple TV, which bring the mobile experience to a stationary device. As programmatic video gains more adoption, there will be a proliferation of TV apps. By the end of the year, you’ll be able to watch your favorite show, and within the same screen, purchase the outfit your favourite character is wearing.
3. Quality and creativity will override ad blocking issues There has been much speculation around the impact ad blockers will have for advertisers. But as an industry, we need to acknowledge that there’s still a lot of room for improvement as far as privacy and irrelevant ads, to make the experience better for consumers. Next year, to help the entire industry fight the rise of ad blockers, we can expect to see increased efforts in easy options to opt out of entire network campaigns with one click, as well as improved cross-targeting solutions and optimised ad formats, especially on mobile. As the industry works together to beat the challenge head on and as publishers find ways to deliver a more seamless ad experience to users, ad blockers are unlikely to stand in our way.
Marius Smyth is managing director EMEA of AdRoll
Cultivating Innovation Is a Direct Path to Profit By Steve Sponseller
Do you have people in your organization who say they aren’t creative? Maybe you’re even one of those people. But don’t buy into this idea, because everyone is capable of developing innovative ideas, even those who say they are not “creative.” In my work with clients, I am frequently asked how to generate innovative ideas. And what I reply is that to identify seeds of innovation you can cultivate, you should examine the problems to be solved, and the unmet needs in your company or industry. Those seeds of innovation provide a powerful starting point for developing the valuable innovations that will increase your revenue and market share. Once you know how to recognize them, you can discover these innovation seeds in every part of your organization.
Your sales department Your sales team members should be able to identify seeds of innovation during their daily interactions with customers and potential customers. The salespeople can identify missing product features that customers request and that may already be provided by a competitor. Direct customer interaction by members of the sales team provides valuable feedback regarding desired features, favorite product attributes and other issues. This information can help your company develop innovative new features that
distinguish your products in the marketplace. An observant sales group also identifies how customers use products. I have worked with many clients who learned about customer actions from interactions between the salespeople and customers. In many instances, the customer actions showed inefficiencies in the product.
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These inefficiencies then became “innovation seeds” which, during brainstorming sessions, grew into product revisions that made the product more user-friendly and increased the product’s value to potential customers.
Your customer service Your customer service department is also capable of discovering a variety of problems through customer complaints and other customer feedback. Problems reported by one customer are likely to be experienced by many customers. Solving these problems can improve customer satisfaction and reduce product returns. Customer service representatives can identify common problems customers experience. These common problems provide valuable opportunities to improve the product, instructions for the product and product packaging to provide an overwhelmingly positive customer experience.
Your marketing department Your marketing team maintains a close watch on the markets for your organization’s products or services. By monitoring industry trends, as well as larger worldwide trends, the marketing group can identify potential problems (more innovation seeds!) these trends inspire. Early identification of these problems gives your company an opportunity to be first-to-market with a solution. The marketing team also watches for new developments in competing products and monitors market sentiment regarding product features. I have helped many companies develop systems for identifying and tracking this information, which provides innovation seeds capable of developing into product enhancements that strengthen the company’s position in the market.
Your product development group The team involved with product development is commonly tasked with developing creative ideas. As a product is developed and tested, team members identify potential problems or inefficiencies in the product design. Some of these problems or inefficiencies are handled during initial product development, while others become innovation seeds that grow into subsequent innovations incorporated into future versions of the product. The product development team is also instrumental in helping develop solutions to problems other groups identify in the organization.
Everyone else, from the CEO to the custodian Industry publications, news stories and trends are great sources for innovation seeds. Everyone in the company can keep watch for information regarding problems or unmet needs in the company’s market. Your employees should be encouraged to identify and record any news article or social media post related to the relevant market. Examples of sources include industry commentators, product review articles, and social media comments -- all of which provide critical information useful in developing new products or improving existing products. An unmet need in the market is a powerful innovation seed that can assist in developing market-leading products. In the end, every member of your organization can actively participate in the generation of valuable ideas. Start the flow of ideas today by showing people how to identify the seeds of innovation in front of them, and then use those seeds to develop profitable ideas that accelerate your business’ growth. Steve Sponseller Intellectual Property Attorney, Innovation Strategist, SteveSponseller.com
Is Corporate Jargon Undermining Your Brand Message? By Samantha Hayden
Today’s most distinguished brands are the ones with ownable personalities that come through clearly in every communication. Why then, are businesses so wildly “offbrand” when they’re not speaking to customers: • “Circle back on this.” • “Go after the low-hanging fruit.” • “Break down the silos.” If personality wins business, why do companies that use it effectively in the marketing world rely on staid drivel to express themselves in the corporate world? This misappropriation of language is harmful to building strong brands in more ways than one. For starters, it violates an essential brand practice that leaders often cite in communication strategies: Deliver a consistent experience, no matter the platform. A strong brand is effortlessly elegant across digital touchpoints, brick-and-mortar experiences, staff and sales training, and everywhere in between. Personality should permeate every inch of an organization. In-office communications—from internal emails and presentations to brainstorms and water cooler discussions— need to become part of the brand world. Companies that value ingenuity and knowledge shouldn’t encourage teams to “think outside the box,” just as brands that herald creativity and imagination should avoid discussing “core competencies to reach the bottom line.” In fact, unless an organization values homogeneity, corporate clichés and stale vernacular should be banned as heavily inside a company’s walls as they should be externally. With today’s brands competing against rivals’ campaigns and content, wholeness of action and purpose are what wins. It’s up to brands—and the people behind the brands— to execute this unified approach, starting well before the brand connects with customers. The daily work environment must also be true to its personality and ideals. It’s time for companies to consider the corporate office—the very place where brands are born—an equally valuable place for brand
personality to shine. Brands and businesses should also consider banishing management jargon from job postings. In a seller’s market, it’s essential to generate excitement around the position and company, and capture attention from the right candidates. Business jargon crushes both of these possibilities. By opting for buzzwords over the brand’s unique, ownable style, brands lose out on aperture moments to establish what they’re all about and distinguish themselves from other hiring companies. The simple truth is that job postings are also marketing touchpoints. Businesses looking for “results-driven self-starters” who are “comfortable in fastpaced environments” and “have an MBA in a related field (preferred)” are only engaging candidates looking for daily drudgery at forgettable corporate organizations. Savvy brands know that job postings are more than just tools for recruiting professionally qualified individuals—they’re instrumental in engaging candidates who share your brand’s vision, appreciate its values and celebrate its culture. Although it was once a fresh way of expressing common ideas, corporate lingo has since lost its impact and meaning. Leaders who want truly unique brands need to leverage their personalities from start to finish, and encourage others to do the same: • Banish overused statements. • Push teams to clarify themselves. • Applaud clear, jargon-free sentences. • Foster a workplace that weaves personality into its everyday experience. Creating the critical link between brand and brand behavior starts from within. Samantha Hayden is a New York-based brand consultant who’s hoping to elevate the discussion of corporate buzzwords.
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
Navigating Retail’s Last Mile By Tim Laseter, Matt Egol, and Scott Bauer
Nearly two decades ago, just as e-commerce was taking off, a group of players emerged to claim their share of the home-delivery market. Remember Webvan, Urbanfetch, Kozmo, and HomeGrocer? In 2000, in this magazine, we analyzed these and several other startups and found they faced insurmountable hurdles. Limited online sales, high delivery costs, entrenched competitors, and an unacceptable trade-off between speed and variety would combine to doom many of the early home-delivery companies (we called it “the last mile to nowhere”). And in fact, most flamed out in spectacular fashion. Many of the same challenges persist today, often with added complexities. By 2014, Internet sales in the U.S. had reached US$300 billion, an impressive growth rate averaging 18 percent for 15 years. Yet e-commerce accounts for just 7 percent of total U.S. retail sales — the physical store is still alive and well. Delivery costs continue to be driven by variable labor costs, delivery density, and average order size. The established competitors (UPS, FedEx, and the U.S.
Postal Service) have become increasingly dependent on e-commerce to replace the business lost from the digitization of letters and other documents. And their position has been further complicated by companies that use crowdsourced delivery models. But the most important change since our earlier analysis has been the evolution of the trade-off between speed and variety. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, home-delivery startups focused on speed at the expense of variety: They could get you a small selection of goods relatively quickly. Today, when retailers approach the last mile, they make more nuanced trade-offs among speed, variety, and convenience. The right combination entails a complex set of compromises that depend on the product type, consumer segment, shopping occasion, and retailer positioning. That said, the fundamental economics of the last mile haven’t changed. Companies have to offer a solution with costs equal to or lower than the customer’s willingness to pay (the “cost to serve”). It’s easy to delight customers with
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Retailers approach the last mile making more nuanced trade-offs among speed, variety, and convenience.
a free offering, and it’s not hard to cover your cost by charging a high premium. But finding the sweet spot that resonates with consumers and drives sales growth proves far more difficult. If retailers can get that right — admittedly, a big challenge thus far — they can make the last mile a competitive advantage.
To help companies better understand these complexities, we conducted a bottom-up analysis of the cost-to-serve for an array of retail models, including traditional store-based sales, curbside pickup, crowdsourced shoppers, “white glove” delivery, and pure-play e-commerce. We also surveyed 2,000 online U.S. shoppers to determine their willingness to pay for each of those last-mile options for a variety of goods purchased online. The results revealed some of the winning approaches in categories such as groceries, durable goods, and apparel.
Grocery Moves Online Until recently, the math for home delivery of groceries by brick-and-mortar stores didn’t seem to add up. The cost of typical items — for example, a can of soup — is on average far less than the cost of items in categories such as consumer electronics, or even books. As a result, the pick-and-pack costs (that is, the cost of an employee pulling an item off a shelf and putting it into a box) run disproportionately higher for groceries than for other categories. Groceries are also heavy and bulky, which makes shipping expensive. But recently, new models have emerged that are changing the calculus. For our analysis, we measured the cost-to-serve across a range of options for a sample basket of 23 grocery staples totaling $100. For the traditional retail experience — in which the shopper travels to the store, pushes a cart around, and then drives it all home — the cost-to-serve totaled $21. Overhead and labor to manage the physical store accounted for the bulk of the cost (more than $19), and the remainder was attributable to shipping truckloads of goods from a regional distribution center to the store. For click-and-collect models — in which customers order in advance items they will pick up themselves later — the cost-to-serve jumped to $32. The additional store employee labor to pick items from shelves adds roughly $10, which the customer needs to pay or the grocer needs to absorb into its razor-thin margins. This analysis assumes store employees have no free time for picking orders and that fixed costs in the store cannot be eliminated easily. But even on a marginal cost basis, stores face the question of whether the sales represent incremental revenue or mere cannibalization. The cheapest option eliminates the retail store entirely. In a pure-play e-commerce model, the customer orders online, professional pickers assemble orders from a dedicated fulfillment center designed for operational efficiency, and the order gets shipped to the customer’s home via twoday ground shipping by UPS or FedEx. Total cost-to-serve for $100 worth of groceries? Just $19, which is lower than
putting the goods out on the shelves of a physical store. As this model expands, grocers will see sales of many goods that make up the “center of the store”— shelf-stable items such as cereal and pasta — move online. Such a shift would have huge implications for the grocery category, particularly among established grocery chains, which compete primarily on price and the convenient locations of their stores. Most of the store labor costs stem from customer service for the perishable items around the edges of the store — produce, meat, fish, and dairy (for example, cheese). The self-service, “center-store” staples contribute incremental margin with little cost. But if those goods move online, the total store cost must be spread over a smaller revenue base, creating potentially unsustainable economics. The old “pile it high and sell it cheap” strategy will not work when a pure-play Internet retailer can offer the convenience of online shipping, home delivery, and lower prices. For example, Amazon’s Prime Pantry presents a significant threat to the center store. Members of Amazon Prime (who pay an annual $99 membership fee) pay a flat fee of $5.99 per box for ground shipping, and the items typically arrive within four business days. Each box can hold 45 pounds or four cubic feet of items — of which several thousand are available, enabling customers to put large or bulk purchases in the box and still take advantage of the flat shipping fee. Walmart is experimenting with a different online model. Rather than only shipping products to a customer’s home, the company is testing a click-and-collect model that features same-day, curbside pickup at a mini-fulfillment center located on a convenient commuting route or co-located at a supercenter. Similar to Prime Pantry, the Walmart offering includes several thousand items, but unlike Prime Pantry, it extends to perishable items such as bananas — which would not fare well traveling two days on a UPS truck. Walmart’s model is not only faster than Prime Pantry but also cheaper, because there’s no per-box shipping fee. Yet another model cuts out the retailer entirely. For bulky, cumbersome items that consumers go through at a predictable pace, a brand-loyal customer seeking regular replenishment cares little about the shipping lead time as long as the new order arrives before the last one runs out. Take Purina’s online offering of Just Right pet food. Consumers can create a custom blend of dog food unique to their pet and subscribe for auto-replenishment shipments directly to their home. For manufacturers of many product categories, it could be more profitable to sell directly to consumers online than to distribute products to the store shelves of a grocer — provided that the average order size is big enough to justify free shipping. And branded-products companies tend to be skilled at offering personalized content to complement the physical delivery experience.
“White Glove” for Durables Durable goods, particularly furniture and household electronics, are often heavy and complicated to assemble. As part of our study, we analyzed the cost-to-serve for a $399 flat-screen TV. For the standard retail model (in which the customer buys the TV in a physical store), the cost-to-serve
was about $22. As with grocery staples, store labor and overhead account for the bulk of the cost. However, the pureplay e-commerce model does not fare as well in comparison, because the cost of shipping a big TV adds around $15 to the cost, for a total of $39. (The potential for returns exacerbates the shipping cost differential for an online retailer.) Curbside pickup of online items was right in the middle, at $31. Part of our survey included a conjoint analysis, which uncovers the trade-offs that consumers make among competing variables such as speed and cost. Our analysis found that for large, expensive products such as TVs or furniture, customers value predictable convenience more than speed. For example, consumers had no problem waiting two days for so-called white-glove service — having a store employee deliver the TV, take it out of the box, and set it up. Furthermore, our respondents found the white-glove service option much more attractive than standard e-commerce. And customers indicated a relatively high willingness to pay for such service. For example, on average consumers would consider a $62 fee to deliver a $1,000 piece of furniture a “great buy” and indicated they would consider the option up to a charge of $108. These findings suggest a fundamentally different response to the problem of “showrooming” — the phenomenon in which customers check out products in person at stores and then buy online (at whichever retailer offers the lowest price). Most retailers fear showrooming, and it has hurt chains such as Best Buy that sell branded products that are easily searchable by model number or key characteristics such as screen size. Customers like seeing the product firsthand before making a big purchase, but there’s little advantage to buying in a store given the inconvenience of having to get the item home. Best Buy responded to this showrooming trend by price matching, which has minimized lost sales but also squeezed margins. An alternative approach would be to embrace the showrooming phenomenon, which Restoration Hardware is now doing. Between 2009 and 2012, Restoration Hardware scaled back the number of its retail stores by 25 percent by closing smaller locations in malls (typically less than 10,000 square feet). Then, starting in 2012, it opened new locations in much larger spaces, ranging up to 55,000 square feet spread over multiple stories, often in renovated historic buildings. Rather than the old model of a small, cluttered mall store stuffed with knickknacks arranged for self-service shoppers, the new “galleries” display the company’s products in room-like settings. Simultaneously, Restoration Hardware has simplified the supply chain to reduce complexity and shipping times and increase the level of in-stock merchandise ready to ship quickly. White-glove delivery is the default service option, with no surcharge. The company’s implicit message with these moves: We know you’re going to buy online. We want you to. But come to the store and see the products in person beforehand. Since the company began this strategy, its overall sales have more than doubled (from $600 million to $1.9 billion) and the percentage of revenue from online sales
has grown from 25 percent to nearly 50 percent.
Curated Convenience in Apparel Clothes are relatively light, and thus inexpensive to ship. In fact, our cost-to-serve analysis for a $120 apparel order that consisted of four shirts or blouses showed that it incurred $30 in cost-to-serve when sold through a traditional store — again, the costs were driven largely by labor. By contrast, a pure-play e-commerce retailer needed to spend only about $12 for that same order to be shipped to a customer’s home. However, apparel poses an additional challenge. It is unlike a can of soup in that customers worry about the fit, color, and overall aesthetics of apparel items, especially when they are expensive. Not surprisingly, apparel has a far higher return rate for goods purchased online than do other categories. Rather than trying to fight the problem of returns, Zappos (which is owned by but operated independently from Amazon) has differentiated itself by offering free shipping and free returns on everything for 365 days after purchase. Zappos got its start selling shoes, but by 2009 clothing represented 7 percent of its sales. Today the company offers more than 1,000 brands in categories as disparate as eyewear and wedding ensembles and racks up $2 billion in annual sales. Because returns are so straightforward, many customers buy multiple items in different colors and sizes. They keep the one they like and return the rest. Zappos can handle returns in such high volume because it allocates a significant portion of its fulfillment center to an extremely efficient returns operation and factors the cost of returns into its pricing. Its customers are willing to pay more for the convenience the company offers. Meanwhile, some startups have The average recognized that time-starved customers don’t necessarily online shopper want to sift through an endless considered a $9 product assortment, either online or offline, and are offering fee for curation of curation services in response. a $100 clothing For example, Trunk Club (which was acquired by Nordstrom in order a bargain. late 2014) and Five Four Club, both clothing services for men, allow customers to provide their measurements and clothing preferences through a conversation with a stylist (Trunk Club) or an online tool (Five Four Club). Trunk Club doesn’t charge for the curation service or for shipping, and allows the shopper to return any item free. Five Four Club requires a $60 monthly membership fee and does not accept returns. Both claim quality comparable to that of a high-end department store: Trunk Club features designer brands, and Five Four Club has its own private label (allowing it to price at a 50 percent discount to similar retail). It remains to be seen how mainstream curation will become. But in our survey, the average online shopper considered a $9 fee for curation of a $100 clothing order a bargain — and admitted that at $16 the curation fee seemed marginally
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expensive, but he or she would still consider the option.
Training Your Customers
Speed: Still the Holy Grail?
Back in 2000, when we predicted that early attempts to conquer the last mile would fall flat, we also offered a caveat: New models would likely emerge as companies attempted to find the optimal trade-offs to meet consumer needs. The solutions took much longer than the failures, but innovations by industry leaders are finally starting to show promise.
The pursuit of speed without an understanding of cost led to the demise of many of the early last-mile players. Yet consumers have come to expect greater speed over the years. Back in 2000 there were no smartphones, and only 38 percent of the U.S. population even had a mobile phone. Now, there are more wireless subscriptions than people in the U.S. — and 75 percent of the population have smartphones (and the Internet constantly at their fingertips). Of course, not all of them are willing to pay for speed, but in some niche areas, such a focus can be effective. For example, delivering directly to households within hours instead of days makes economic sense only in cities with high individual incomes and population density. Even then, however, retailers need to scale back the variety of goods they offer. For example, Uber recently launched a delivery service experiment called Uber Essentials, which offers a few dozen items, such as candy, beverages, aspirin, and eye drops. Because the drivers carry the inventory with them all day, Uber can deliver to customers in as little as 10 minutes. A similar experiment in selected cities called Uber Eats delivers takeout meals from restaurants. The incremental sales of Uber Essentials supplement the driver’s base business as a taxi replacement — and, of course, Uber takes a cut. The model costs almost nothing, in that the cars are already out on the road anyway, and they make deliveries between passenger rides. Another startup, Instacart, applies the speed principle to grocery delivery and has made some slight improvements to the same-day service models used by Kozmo and UrbanFetch. Instacart uses smartphones and crowdsourced shoppers, who sign up to shop for customers of various grocery chains in exchange for a fee. The service costs a minimum of $3.99, and goes up to more than $10 for small orders during busy periods. And it’s fast — deliveries come in just two hours. Crowdsourcing transfers the labor-utilization risk to the workers, and because these individuals pull goods off the shelves of existing grocery stores, Instacart is able to offer a reasonable variety. But as our grocery cost analysis demonstrates, this model still faces the challenge of inefficient, store-based picking (ordinary shoppers pushing a cart around a retail store, filling individual orders, and waiting in checkout lines), along with the incremental travel distance to the customer’s home. In March 2015, the Wall Street Journal quoted Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx, saying, “I think there’s just an urban mythology out there that the app somehow changes the basic cost input of the logistics business.… That’s just incorrect.” In other words, Instacart offers a unique trade-off among speed, variety, and convenience, but at a cost that most consumers cannot afford. Both Instacart and Uber Essentials represent niche offerings, which will remain limited to a narrow segment of high-income individuals in urban areas. They don’t solve the fundamental challenges of the last mile.
Given the various last-mile approaches at play, retailers — as well as CPG companies with direct-to-consumer e-commerce aspirations — need to be proactive. Consumer behaviors continue to evolve in response to new, dynamic offerings. Rather than reacting to those behaviors and trying to give people what they seem to want, companies should instead determine the right model for last-mile delivery of their goods, and create a value proposition that builds on their strengths. In other words, they should stop following customer behavior and start leading it, by “training” their customers in the behaviors that make economic sense using digital engagement that builds on their brands. Admittedly, training consumers is easier for startups, because their customers have not yet Companies need built up any preconceived notions or ingrained to stop following behaviors. Some companies customer behavior, may be hesitant to try to shape the behaviors of their and start leading it. customers, thinking that technology changes so rapidly that any model that works today could be obsolete in three months. And although it is true that behaviors and technology evolve quickly, the same can’t be said of fundamental economics. The underlying drivers of success in retail, and particularly in the last mile — speed, variety, convenience, and cost — still depend on the physical supply chain, not merely the ephemeral zeros and ones employed in the world of digital engagement. The physical elements of those trade-offs move far more slowly than the technological shifts. The bottom line for companies? Get the structural elements of your last-mile approach right, build digitally engaging technology to capitalize on it, and train your customers to behave to your advantage.
Tim Laseter is an advisor to executives for Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. He is a managing director with PwC US, a contributing editor of s+b, a professor of practice at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, and the author or coauthor of four books, including Internet Retail Operations (Taylor & Francis, 2012). Matt Egol is a thought leader on digital media innovation for Strategy&. Based in New York, he is a principal with PwC US. He works with clients across the marketing and media ecosystem to accelerate the development and build-out of new disruptive strategies and capabilities for marketing and sales effectiveness. Scott Bauer is a principal in PwC US, and a leader in retail and consumer digital services. Based in Atlanta, he advises clients on how to adapt and build a robust retail business with new capabilities for engaging consumers and optimizing operations. This article is based on a study by Strategy&, led by Tim Laseter, Nick Hodson, Mike DuVall, Steffen Lauster, Amy D’Onofrio, and Sid Singh.
5 Simple Ways to Give Your Marketing a Boost By Ricardo Trillos
Don’t sit back and wait for your customers to come to you. Get the sales you want by getting the word out there about your business. Coming from a background in both accounting and human resources, I’ve been able to witness a lot of business lessons firsthand. When I launched Cao Chocolates, I felt fortunate to take some of those lessons and apply them directly to my daily business life, channeling what I had learned in the corporate world into my small business life. One of the areas I’ve always had an interest in is marketing, and I work hard to find new and inventive ways to bring products and ideas to potential clients. Here are five rules I live by on my marketing journey:
3. Be kind.
1. Love your product and try to be the best in your industry.
You have to be creative. You can’t wait for the customer to walk through your door. When I didn’t have a storefront, I created pop-up opportunities via local farmer’s markets. When I didn’t have a commercial kitchen, I partnered with a local baker to rent space in her shop. We do wine and chocolate pairing events, special tastings and sell our product in more than 10 markets and coffee shops across South Florida. We connect with growers and clients via social media. We’re constantly thinking of new ways to introduce Cao to the world.
I was passionate about chocolate long before I made it my business, and I think that passion comes through in my work. I also channel my passion by investing money in my chocolate education. Even today, I often travel to meet and learn from the best chefs and chocolatiers in the world to be sure I am providing clients with the very best product.
2. Create strong partnerships. I truly believe that if you go by yourself, you won’t go very far. A strong group of people will get you there. I’m proud to partner with and support other local businesses and share in successes that we can all benefit from. I recently sent out corporate gifts for an attorney client of ours. We handdelivered chocolates to about 25 of his best clients and just a few days later he was on the phone, thrilled with how many referrals he had already gotten. At the same time we had other attorneys who had seen the gifts calling us, wanting to do the same. It was a great marketing opportunity for both of us.
It sounds simple, but it really is so important. We live in a big world, but it can be small when it comes to our business and industries. Be nice to everyone, make them feel great and make an effort to have exceptional customer service—you never know who you’re dealing with.
4. Find new ways to get your name out there.
5. Give back. It doesn’t matter how much you make, you always have to give back. If you make $100, you can give $10. If you make $1 million, you can give $1,000. Use part of what you make to help someone else. It will always come back to you.
Ricardo Trillos Chocolatier/CEO, Cao Chocolates
Brand with atomic ambitions ATOM FOUNDER: WE WILL BE THE WORLD’S FIRST TELEPATHIC BRAND By Sara Spary
Anthony Thomson the founder of online-only bank Atom said the brand will be “telepathic” in its prediction of customer needs, offering up solutions to problems before they are even considered. Speaking at the Marketing Society annual conference in London, Thomson, who announced yesterday start-up bank Atom had won £135m in funding, said he wanted Atom to be so close to customers’ needs it almost read minds.
operating model, was “everywhere” - accessible from any place. The charismatic Chairman, who also founded Metro Bank, joked he wouldn’t rub salt in the wound any further of marketers of traditional banking brands, he quipped, “by telling you how screwed your businesses are.”
The former marketer, who founded Atom with the mission of being the Uber of the banking sector, said the concept of Atom tapped into the proliferation of mobile and how embedded tech has become in daily life.
He said the pace of change over the decade, driven by digital enhancements, had been “extraordinary” and that traditional banks would be held back by outdated back of house IT systems. He said while traditional banks may develop attractive apps for example, “you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig.”
Citing figures which indicate that more than half of consumers think about their phone before anything else in the morning (though he admitted for him his first thought was his wife), he said the idea of Atom as “remote banking” should be flipped on its head.
“Our job is to look at big data and work out what you want before you need it,” he said. Saying where traditional banks would, for example, send customers last month’s statement, Atom would use data prediction and forecasting to send customers next month’s statement.
Instead, he accused traditional banking brands, such as Lloyds or Barclays, as offering a “remote” service by forcing customers to go to branches. Instead Atom, which he claimed had a strategic advantage because of its streamlined
He added marketers needed to wake up to the reality that digital transformation was on the cusp of a revolution, with technologies including brainwave computing and under the skin tech to be a reality in the not too distant future.
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Future-Proof Tactics for Mobile App Marketers
By Ina Toncheva
Once your mobile app is out in the wild, you begin to face limitations that make app distribution difficult.
Avoid app resubmission to and approval from app stores for certain marketing-related changes
Some of those limitations are rooted in the underlying structure of the world of mobile apps: Unlike the Web, where, inherently, content is linkable and websites are connected, mobile apps are usually gated behind the walls of their download pages in app stores and mobile content is hidden behind the apps’ homepages.
For some of these tactics you will need help from developers; others are purely marketing tools.
Having interacted with the Internet for years, we often take for granted the discoverability of content, websites’ interconnectivity, and our ability to update content on the fly. In the reality of mobile apps, those aren’t out-of-the-box characteristics. This article will give you practical advice on how to... Increase your app exposure on mobile search Make your app content more easily discoverable
1. Use Mobile App Install Ads to increase app exposure and downloads (Developer involvement not needed.) Mobile App Install Ads are served to mobile users on Google Search and Display Networks, YouTube, and Google Play. Users are directed to the download page of the app in the store, and the call to action is to download the app. These ads are quickly gaining popularity, helping marketers increase app exposure, on the right device, to an actively searching audience. Search volumes on mobile are quickly growing, and making your app visible to this audience of searchers is critical to your success. A recent announcement
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from Google AdWords is that mobile apps install ads are now also showing on Google Play. You can set up your Mobile App Install Ad in a few quick steps. The ads are created though the Google AdWords interface, as with a regular ad campaign. You should select Mobile App Installs from Type in Settings, and then follow your Google AdWords strategy for targeting, biding, budget ,and scheduling. By default, the campaign will target tablets as well as smartphones, but you can adjust the bids for mobile devices to make it relevant to your app. This is how your ad would look:
by various vendors. Overall, deep linking works best for re-engagement of your existing user base and makes in-app content more easily discoverable. Implementing deep links in your mobile app can be beneficial for your mobile ads, email nurture campaigns, and interconnectivity with other mobile apps or websites. There is no established standard for deep linking, but in recent months both Apple and Google have emphasized the importance of deep linking: This year, at WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference), Apple launched a search API for iOS 9 based on deep linking which lets developers index and link their apps, making their content discoverable through the native search experience on iOS 9. Earlier this year, Google started showing both Android and iOS users relevant content from apps they have installed on their phones and tablets. A number of third-party vendors are offering more advanced solutions, such as deep links analytics, deferred deep links, retargeting frameworks, and more.
2. Use deep linking to make in-app content discoverable (Developer involvement needed.)
3. Use Google Tag Manager to avoid republishing your app after every single change
To realize how important deep linking is to mobile apps, we must first acknowledge a major flaw in the mobile ecosystem. On the Web, hyperlinks can take users to a website homepage, to a specific page (e.g., About Us page) or a specific piece of content (e.g. ,video or an image). With links, you can immediately discover content on the Web.
(Developer involvement needed.)
That’s not the case in a mobile app—not without putting additional effort to achieve linking.
The Google Tag Manager (GTM) for mobile apps can save time and effort both for developers and for marketers, making it possible to push certain app updates yet avoiding app store resubmission. GTM helps abstract certain pieces of code from the app codebase, allowing you to edit certain content blocks and tracking codes on the fly through the GTM interface. The changes are applied immediately to the app, without having to resubmit it for approval to the store.
The app user journey includes looking for the app on the app store, downloading it on the device, opening it, and then searching for specific content. Mobile apps are hidden behind the walls of the app stores and their homepages. Let’s say you are looking to promote your app to mobile users using the Google Mobile App Install Ads we discussed earlier, but you want to take it one step further and promote your summer sale instead of your app homepage. You can so via deep linking. Mobile deep links use a document structure similar to that of the Web to create unique links for different app screens or items. Deep links help eliminate friction along your users journey: If you promote a discounted item to users who have your app already installed, the deep link sends them directly to the desired destination, just as if it were a Web page. To do that for non-users of your app, you need to use deferred deep linking, which is similar to deep linking and is offered
Mobile app content is all but frozen once it is installed on the user’s device, unless the user updates to the app’s latest version. Every change needs to be synchronized with the app release cycle and then be resubmitted to the store.
This article, “A Guide to Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps,” walks you through the steps needed to implement the GTM in your mobile app; it’s a good starting point for your developer colleagues. Are you already using any of these tactics? I’d be glad to hear how they’re working for you. Ina Toncheva is senior product marketing manager at software development tools vendor Telerik, with a focus on mobile. She also runs The Wall Today, a curated art space helping local artists promote their art.
Peek Inside A Top Secret Collection Of Rare Porsches BUT THE CRAZIEST RIDE WAS NOT TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED. By Mark Wilson
Steffen Jahn may have the best job in the world. He takes photos of fast things. Jets. Classic fighter planes. And cars. Lots and lots of cars. It’s a job that opens some intriguing doors, like when the curators of Stuttgart’s Porsche Museum invited him to visit their secret warehouse of rare Porsches that the public doesn’t get to see. It’s an embarrassment of riches, pinewood stacks on stacks on stacks of seldom-seen classics and track vehicles—enough to make me wish I were a bigger car nerd to appreciate the sight (though I’m pretty sure that’s the original 1946 Porsche 356 peeking under the cover in one shot). Of course, even these photos edit out some of the rarest jewels in the collection. “My favorite car in this collection was not to be photographed—as it’s a personal, one-off design for the Porsche family,” Jahn says. “A Cayenne, adapted for the needs of a hunter: the Jagdwagen. From a weapon-safe to integrated water-tank to clean off the blood, nice touches wherever you look.”
The “nice touches” are what makes it all worthwhile to Jahn, who tells me that, despite spending his days in wind tunnels and racing pits as a necessity of his business, he was still “happy as a kid” to get this chance. “I do see amazing cars every day—but I’m lucky enough to see unique, epic one-of-a-kind cars that stand out of the crowd. The best of the best,” Jahn says. “But it’s not about a cars monetary value, it’s all about the story, the drivers, the races, the history. A surfer’s Volksiebus that lived his life on beaches has more to tell then a boring Ferrari-trailer-queen. If you can read a car’s story in its scratches, the stickers, the smell in the interior . . . that’s what makes the difference.” [via designboom] [All Photos: Steffen Jahn] Mark Wilson is a writer who started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.
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Different Ways Designers Think About Money
By Meg Miller
WOLFF OLINS, GRAPHIC THOUGHT FACILITY, SPIN AND OTHERS GIVE THEIR TWO CENTS, IN POSTER FORM. A couple of months ago, London-based design studio SocioDesign was approached with a provocative fundraising challenge. Countess Mountbatten Hospice Charity would give the studio and other local businesses 50 pounds to see who could take that amount and raise the most money for charity. The studio’s solution was a challenge of their own: the London-based design studio asked 50 designers worldwide to create a poster that visually interprets the word “money” for them to auction off online. As with all of these types of collective poster projects (we’ve written about a few more here and here), it’s a keen reminder of the power of design to represent the same thing in near infinite different ways. “There were a few emerging themes,” says SocioDesign’s Mark Bloom. “People got around the idea of coinage and sterling,” as in Graphic Thought Facility’s depiction of the loose change found in their studio, or Give Up Art’s abstract interpretation of the U.K.’s coin currency. Some, like Wolff Olins and D8, took a critical approach to materialism and economic crises, while others focused on how currency is changing in the digital world. Take a look at our favorite 16 in the gallery above, and head over to SocioDesign’s site for the full 50. You can bid on a poster via the website until December 4, and all proceeds go to Countess Mountbatten Hospice Charity.
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Design by S-T
Design by Freytag Anderson
Design by Give Up Art
Design by Graphic Thought Facility
Design by Hawaii Design
Design by studio Hey
Design by HORT
Design by Hype Type Studio
Design by I want Design
Design by Moniker
Design by Mulitadaptor
Design by Rob Clarke
Design by Spin
Design by Studio Small
Design by Toko
Meg Miller is an assistant editor at Co.Design covering art, technology, and design.
Design by Wolff Olins
[All Images: Socio Design]
How brands are using music to win over consumers By Dennis Nishi
Small Businesses Use Audio to Build Their Brands Want to win over customers? Play them some songs.
making the most of online audio.
When it comes to making a splash on social media, video is clearly king—but audio is gaining fast. The audience is booming for content like podcasts and music playlists that can be shared online. One popular spot for hosting audio, SoundCloud, has an audience of 175 million unique listeners every month.
Let’s start with playlists—groups of tracks or even albums that can be created at a third-party streaming service such as Spotify or hosted as a music podcast on SoundCloud. Businesses can share lists through social media, e-newsletters, blog posts and their own website to build awareness with potential customers searching for music, or solidify relationships with existing customers, giving them reasons to come back to the site.
For the most part, small companies haven’t tapped these services as a marketing tool. But experts say audio represents a great opportunity for entrepreneurs as more people turn to these services to find content to pass the time while traveling or working out, or as a background soundtrack during the day. And in some cases audio involves a much smaller investment of time and effort than putting together a video: A playlist, for instance, can be set up and shared in minutes. Here are some strategies from experts and entrepreneurs for
Pros say this approach has many advantages. Along with the easy setup, they say, playlists don’t come across as marketing the way a status update about a new product might, so they are more likely to get customers to engage with a brand. Music is also a way to build a community of followers who share similar tastes in music. Small businesses can even set up playlists to be collaborative, so the community can suggest and add new songs, experts say.
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Some businesses have gone further and put together custom playlists of original music, like Frank & Oak, a Canadian menswear brand. Two years ago, the company’s co-founder, Ethan Song, wanted to create a soundtrack that embodied the character of the brand and would appeal to the musical tastes of his customers. He commissioned local DJs to create original mixtapes that he hosted on SoundCloud and played in his retail stores. The only advertising Mr. Song did was to mention the new releases in the customer newsletter and on social media, which drew hundreds of thousands of plays and comments. New mixtapes noticeably drove traffic to the company’s website every month. “Music helps us to connect with our customers,” says Mr. Song. (The company is working on a new plan for its music, so its mixes aren’t available on SoundCloud.)
Don’t be generic. When choosing music, it’s important to aim for a feel that matches the business. “An organic grocery store might choose subtle acoustic music over electronic. It would psychologically make people feel at home when in the store,” says Rich Jankovich, co-author of a book on brand building. “You want to choose music that fits the brand, tells the company story and is at the same time appropriate to the audience.” He also advises owners to add variety in genre and era. “There’s nothing preventing you from leading with ‘Ventura Highway’ by America and going into Treetop Flyers’ ‘Things Will Change.’ The two songs would live very well together because musically they sound similar. But they have different meanings to different generations,” says Mr. Jankovich. The America song offers a sense of warmth and nostalgia for older generations, while millennial audiences might associate the Treetop Flyers song with being mysterious and introspective. Owners should also consider offering listeners different selections that complement different activities, such as working, commuting or running. Mr. Jankovich advises getting playful, such as a playlist to have with your morning coffee that includes music about coffee. But avoid creating overly generic playlists, such as top 10 hits of the 1960s, he says, because they will get lost among the thousands of similar playlists. Another simple way to tailor a playlist is to ride the socialmedia coattails of events like local concerts or holidays, presenting offerings that feature Christmas music or music from the bands at the shows. Mark Partin, co-owner of B/Spoke, a spinning gym in Boston, recently had his instructors fill their playlists with bands that played at the Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival in Indio, Calif. “Many more people share the playlists across our social media when it can be linked to events like Coachella,” he says.
Stay on topic. Creating podcasts takes more work for small-business owners, but experts say they can be a powerful way to build customer loyalty. “The human voice is very expressive and you’re putting stories about the company directly into the ears of a captive audience that’s trying to escape from a long commute or a rote task at work,” says author and socialmedia expert Ann Handley. “That can be a powerful way to turn casual listeners into followers of the brand.” Obviously, the pros say, owners should focus on areas where they have expertise. During the show, speakers should maintain an easy banter but not digress too much. And it’s worth investing in equipment and expertise to keep production value high. It’s also important to maintain a regular production schedule so that listeners will get into the habit of visiting the business’s site regularly, recommends John Lee Dumas, who posts a new interview daily for his “Entrepreneur on Fire” business podcast. Mr. Dumas has built an audience of nearly 250,000 followers on SoundCloud, millions of plays and corporate sponsors that have made his podcast self-supporting. Mr. Dumas also notes that business owners should consider what platform to use for their podcasts. Although “Entrepreneur on Fire” is available on iTunes and Stitcher radio, he likes SoundCloud because of the commenting feature that allows listeners to post feedback for any specific point of the podcast. Mr. Dumas says he has used listener comments to help him fine-tune his show over the years.
Put old content to work. Business owners don’t have to start entirely from scratch when they begin making podcasts. If they’ve created blog posts or videos, they can repurpose that content—running the audio of an interview, for example, or transcribing and reading blog posts. Deejay Scharton, who runs a video-production company in Vancouver, Wash., has been producing a weekly video chat about the indie filmmaking scene that he live streams to his YouTube channel. He simultaneously records the show as a podcast on his SoundCloud account. “I got hundreds of requests from viewers that wanted something that they could listen to while commuting,” says Mr. Scharton, who also sends Snapchat videos to subscribers while doing the show and summarizes the discussion on his blog after each show is completed. “It doesn’t take much effort to do both.” He also suggests that small-business owners do podcasts where they chat with guests from blogs who have larger online followings than their own, to expose their work to a wider audience. Dennis Nishi is a writer in Los Angeles.
Marketers target journalists via social media Companies Target Journalists With Ads on Facebook
By Jack Marshall
The next time you see an article about a company or product, consider this: it’s possible the author heard about it through a Facebook ad.
What’s more, he thinks it can be a more elegant and effective way to get the attention of journalists and media professionals than bombarding them with emails and phone calls.
Marketers, public relations companies and advertising agencies are increasingly using social media to carefully place messages in front of journalists and media professionals, in the hope that doing so will “earn” them or their clients coverage, or at least keep them top-of-mind for a mention.
Targeting ads to people who work in media can be done in a variety of ways, the most simple of which is using the features now baked into the ad platforms of many social networks. Facebook, for example, allows marketers to target ads to people who work for specific companies or in specific job functions, based on the information they place in their profiles.
This concept of targeting ads to “influencers” in certain fields is not a new one, but marketers say the increasingly granular targeting tools being offered by companies such as Facebook and Twitter are allowing them to get more sophisticated with their efforts. It’s not uncommon for companies to target tailored messages to journalists at specific outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or USA Today, experts say. For example, Wall Street Journal reporters have recently found themselves targeted with messages from companies including phone sanitation company Phonesoap and dietary supplement firm Herbalife, specifically because they work for The Wall Street Journal, as noted by disclosures that accompany Facebook’s ads. “It works. You can get your messages out to incredibly specific people who you know can help you in myriad ways,” said Marty Weintraub, founder of digital marketing agency aimClear. Mr. Weintraub said his company has already been targeting journalists with ads on social media sites for a few years on behalf of its clients, but he believes the practice is growing.
A marketer might therefore choose to target ads only to those people who work at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Further, they might opt to show ads only to people at companies Facebook deems to have an interest in journalism or news. “I would imagine most public relations people who know what they’re doing would be doing this,” said digital marketing consultant Aaron Zakowski, who has also employed the tactic in the past. “To target journalists is pretty easy,” he said. Another method is to use the email address targeting features now offered by companies such as Facebook and Twitter. A marketer might compile a list of email addresses of journalists concerned with a specific subject and use it to target only those users with their ads. According to Mr. Weintraub, the tactic can be a good way for small companies that can’t afford expensive public-relations firms to compete for the attention of journalists and editors. “It’s an inexpensive amplification device,” he said. PHOTO: LUONG THAI LINH/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Marketers must work with tradition to reach boomers: report By Forrest Cardamenis
Traditional in-person experiences are still essential for reaching the wealthy baby boomer market, according to a new report by WealthEngine and Forbes Insights.
respecting the consumer’s right to privacy.
Baby boomers generate nearly half of the United States’ aftertax income, an amount of $3.6 trillion, and overwhelmingly prefer in-person to online purchases for all luxury products and services except for travel. Although much is made by marketers, brands and researchers alike about the significance of reaching the millennial consumer in digital spaces and according to her preferences, the boomer must not be forgotten. “It is critical [for brands to ensure they are not ignoring boomers in favor of millennials],” said Mike Lees, CMO of WealthEngine. “It requires a conscious decision to focus on this demographic because as marketers have skewed their spend towards digital campaign elements, they are potentially missing opportunities to get in front of this group.” “Engaging 50+ Consumers in a Digital World: How Luxury Brands Earn Trust Through Online and Offline” surveyed 462 consumers aged 50+ with at least $50,000 in disposable income and a net worth exceeding $1 million buying habits and preferences. The report also includes accounts from executives and marketing directors, who draw on their experiences to help apply the data.
When I’m sixty-four For luxury consumers 50 and older, in-person experiences with brands trump online experiences, but referrals, timely messaging and promotional offers all contribute to a purchase. Notably, however, consumers older than 50 years old care about privacy and respectful marketing, meaning brands must carefully negotiate the line between gathering personal info to deliver timely, personalized messages and
Belstaff Macau For baby boomers, those aged 51-70, quality and craftsmanship are the two most important characteristics of luxury, with authenticity, function, aesthetics, prestige of ownership and brand name all trailing far behind. This data suggests that brands must actively continue to court the boomer and cannot assume previous purchases indicate unending brand loyalty. Similarly, emphasizing the quality and uniqueness of the product is far more important than emphasizing brand authenticity or the location in which it was made, which only 3 percent of consumers named as the most significant attribute. Almost every respondent said he or she would consider purchasing travel in the next year, and 64 percent would do so online compared to just 35 percent who would do so in person. Travel is the only category where online eclipses inperson in this regard; electronic equipment is close, at 35 percent versus 42 percent, but in-person is overwhelmingly preferred in all other sectors.
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Mr. Lees said. “The one thing brands can’t do is market to this group as a demographic, assuming blindly that they all don’t care or they are all fans of ‘American Made.’ If ‘American Made’ is core to your brand ethos then stick to it and market to a micro-segment that values this and is willing to pay for it.”
Boomers will shop for travel online; image courtesy Rocket Fuel In terms of marketing preferences, word of mouth is king, as it is with all generations, followed closely by online search and visiting a Web site directly. Unlike millennials, however, boomers prefer print and direct mail advertisements to email at an almost 2-to-1 rate. Sixty-eight percent said that proper timing is what prompts them to buy, while 52 percent claim a specific offer or discount appeals to them. A comparatively small 27 percent cite personalization and a mere 4 percent accredit a marketing message appealing to the sense of wanting to belong.
Additionally, other preferences could make a focus purely on timing through geotargeting and beacon technology difficult. Forty-nine percent say they do not like retailers collecting data for marketing purposes, and an additional 39 percent have concerns or qualifications. When delivering properly timed and targeted messages, brand will need to reach those that are comfortable with brands using their data and also reach the 39 percent of skeptics that data is secure and being used properly. Consumers are more comfortable when they trust the brand and see the benefits of sharing, giving marketers a clear means to an end.
While the success of user-generated content initiatives among younger consumers shows that a sense of belonging is a crucial part, this data reveals that boomers must be reached through other means, namely through timing and appealing promotions. However, while millennials may openly desire individuality more, generalizing boomers is just as ineffective.
Boomers prefer print catalogs to emails “It is about resonating with their personal needs, aspirations and beliefs – it really does all come down to personalization,”
Many boomers see beacon messages as privacy invasions
“The dichotomy of balancing privacy and personalization is right at the heart of the data-driven marketer’s core challenge,” Mr. Lees said. “As a brand’s level of transparency increase, the consumers’ suspicion decreases.
millennials only now entering the market, brands need to find creative ways to engage both generations, according to a panel at the Luxury Retail Summit: Holiday Focus 2015 in New York Sep. 18.
“With this, consumers also have an improved experience,” he said. “Personalizing an experience in a face-to-face customer interaction is generally more acceptable than personalizing across a more detached digital format when the notion of the “creepiness factor” becomes an issue.”
The concept of “luxury” is alive and well, particularly among boomers who continue to associate it with value, quality and customer service, but with millennials looking for more experiential offerings and showcases of values, events and indications of culture are also becoming increasingly important. Still, despite apparently separate values and interests, it is important to remember that millennials are often the children of baby boomers, meaning that these generations are closer than they initially appear and that there are ways, such as family-oriented events, to appeal to both markets simultaneously rather than treating them as entirely separate entities (see story).
Travelin’ man The indication that boomers are more likely to purchase travel than any other luxury in the near future is in line with other reports. Increasingly, affluent consumers are foregoing luxury goods for travel, with 80 percent choosing an experience over an item, according to a November report from Martini Media. “The Martini Report, Volume 4: The Affluent Traveler” found that even from the year-ago, affluent consumers are 50 percent more willing to spend on leisure activities, and surprisingly, more women are interested in exploring than men. As one of the primary drivers of the luxury market, travel and hospitality brands can leverage this information to continue programming curated experiences for affluent guests in response to their behavior and preferences (see story). Despite some clear differences in effective marketing tactics, it can be helpful to attempt to reach boomers and millennials through similar means if the circumstances are correct. With baby boomers aging out of luxury consumption and
Although tactics such as geotargeting and beacons are gradually becoming the standard way of ensuring high conversions, it is better to reach boomers in their own element than try to force them to adapt to technologies and techniques that they dislike. “Ads, geotargeting and mobile marketing in general are clearly high growth, high conversion tactics, but for an audience that responds more to offline than to online, particularly in the latter stages of the luxury buying cycle, marketers should consider more traditional ways of getting their messages and promotions to these consumers,” Mr. Lees said.
Final Take Forrest Cardamenis, editorial assistant on Luxury Daily, New York
Forrest Cardamenis, editorial assistant on Luxury Daily, New York
The future of living! By John Brownlee
Inside Ikea’s Innovation Lab For The Future Of Better Living Ikea usually keeps a close lid on what it is working on next. But with Space10, an innovation lab recently opened in Copenhagen’s hip meatpacking district, Ikea is looking to change all that. The Swedish furniture giant is throwing the doors wide open to progressive thinkers who want to help solve the next couple decades’ biggest home design problems, all on Ikea’s dime. Located in a fishery building redeveloped by architecture studio Spacon & X in Scandinavia’s arguable design capital,
Space10 almost feels like Ikea’s answer to the artist-inresidence programs you see at companies like Autodesk and Microsoft, but with a typically Scandinavian twist: it’s independent of Ikea. Although Ikea foots the bill for Space10, and gets a first look at all the concepts that come out of it, the day-to-day operations are handled by Rebel Agency, a small Danish design firm founded by Carla Cammilla Hjort. It’s not just good marketing, it’s a way for Ikea to get an early look at bold new ideas that might eventually disrupt their business— and possibly bring them to market first.
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The seeds for Space10 were planted three years ago, when Rebel Agency helped Ikea design the Bråkig furniture collection. The collection sold so well that Ikea’s CEO invited Hjort and her colleague Simon Caspersen in for a six-hour meeting to pitch him what they wanted to do next. “Instead of just creating a better future for Ikea, our starting point was asking how Ikea could help create a better future for the world,” Caspersen says. “So what we suggested was, let’s get rid of the whole client-agency model, have Ikea pay the basic fees and costs of running a space, and then devote ourselves to looking 10 or 20 years down the pipeline, and how Ikea can be relevant in that world.” The mission of Space10 is to investigate the future of urban living through a series of labs. Each lab lasts three months, and has a certain theme—the first is Fresh Living, a collection of projects centered around health. During each lab, a dozen or so designers from around the world are invited into Space10 to give talks, explore concepts, and prototype ideas. After two months, the doors of Space10 are thrown open to the public. For the next 30 days, the public can come in and check out the prototypes. Then Space10 rinses and repeats
soon, but that’s not the point, says Göran Nilsson, Ikea Concept Innovation Manager. He says that Space10 is a way for Ikea to hedge its bets and ensure that the company can successfully innovate in the future. “There’s only so much innovation you can do behind closed doors,” Nilssen says. “In the old days, big companies would try to innovate internally forever. But being successful long-term is all about being transparent enough to be challenged by new ideas, and inviting enough to accept them.” The idea is to let outside designers work on possibly disruptive new ideas, right under their nose, with the hopes that these fresh voices and visions will help prevent Ikea’s vision from going stale. Or, as Space10’s Simon Caspersen IMAGINE A KITCHEN puts it, “If you try to create every new idea in-house, you TABLE THAT CONVERTS will eventually fail, because you A PAN’S HEAT INTO can’t compete with the entire ELECTRICITY OR A world forever.” SMART CHAIR THAT IS So from Ikea’s perspective, IMPOSSIBLE TO SIT ON Space10 is worth the expense, IF YOU’VE BEEN TOO even if no new products SEDENTARY. immediately come out of it. Ikea’s designers will still be watching, and the ideas that flow through Space10 may eventually inspire the Ikea catalog of tomorrow, if not by spring 2016, than by spring 2026. Even so, Ikea seems bullish on the notion that Space10 may pay for itself, sooner rather than later. “There could easily be more Space10s in the world soon,” Nilssen says. “There’s no reason to have just one.”
around a new theme, with all new designers. Space10’s first lab resulted in more than 15 prototypes. These include a kitchen table that converts surface heat (say, from a coffee pot or a pan) into electricity; a glowing faucet that encourages you to take shorter showers; a smart chair that is impossible to sit on if you’ve been too sedentary throughout the day; and an interactive work of art that visualizes your family’s health habits. None of these products are likely to hit Ikea’s shelves anytime
John Brownlee is a writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with two irate parakeets and his wife, who has more exquisite plumage. His work has appeared at Wired, Playboy, PopMech, CNN, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, and more.
Book,
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The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand
Welcome to the Funnel: Proven Tactics to Turn Your Social and Content Marketing up to 11
By Ekaterina Walter, Jessica Gioglio
By Jason Miller
Filled with full-color images and thoughtprovoking examples from leading companies, The Power of Visual Storytelling explains how to grow your business and strengthen your brand by leveraging photos, videos, infographics, presentations, and other rich media...
Raising brand awareness, building trust, establishing credibility, and ultimately driving revenue, that’s what the top of the funnel is all about. It can be a marketer’s “Paradise City”, but without focus, it can quickly become overwhelming...
Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing
What’s the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences
By Lee Odden Optimize is designed to give readers a practical approach to integrating search and social media optimization with content marketing to boost relevance, visibility, and customer engagement. Companies, large and small, will benefit from the practical planning and creative content marketing tactics in this book that have been proven...
What’s the Future of Business? will galvanize a new movement that aligns the tenets of user experience with the vision of innovative leadership to improve business performance, engagement, and relationships for a new generation of consumerism. It provides an overview of real-world experiences versus “user” experiences in relation to products, services, mobile, social media, and commerce, among others...
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
By Hugh MacLeod
By Matt Mason
When Hugh MacLeod was a struggling young copywriter living in a YMCA, he started to doodle on the backs of business cards while sitting at a bar. Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog-gapingvoid.com-and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures. MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity. How do new ideas emerge in a cynical, risk-averse world?
In The Pirate’s Dilemma, VICE magazine’s Matt Mason -- poised to become the Malcolm Gladwell of the iPod Generation -- brings the exuberance of a passionate music fan and the technological savvy of an IT wizard to the task of sorting through the changes brought about by the interface of pop culture and innovation. He charts the rise of various youth movements -- from pirate radio to remix culture -- and tracks their ripple effect throughout larger society...
The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle headon these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”
Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, largescale business-to-business solutions. The authors’ study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles...
By Brian Solis
By Chip Heath, Dan Heath
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The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers
By David Meerman Scott
By Jeffrey K. Rohrs
The benchmark guide to marketing and PR, updated with the latest social media and marketing trends, tools, and real-world examples of success The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 4th Edition is the pioneering guide to the future of marketing, an international bestseller with more than 300,000 copies sold in over 25 languages. It offers a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of modern marketing and PR to communicate with buyers directly, raise visibility, and increase sales.
Proprietary audience development is now a core marketing responsibility. Every company needs audiences to survive. They are where you find new customers and develop more profitable relationships. And yet, most companies today treat their email, mobile, and social media audiences like afterthoughts instead of the corporate assets they are. With AUDIENCE, Jeff Rohrs seeks to change this dynamic through adoption of The Audience Imperative.
Global Content Marketing: How to Create Great Content, Reach More Customers, and Build a Worldwide Marketing Strategy that Works
Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less
By Pam Didner
By Joe Pulizzi
Technology has virtually erased national borders, forever transforming the way we reach and engage customers, as well as the way we search for and consume content. Global Content Marketing takes you step-by-step through the process of creating and refining your strategies to meet this new reality.
“Epic Content Marketing� takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act--without actually telling them to...
The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits
Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
By Russell Glass, Sean Callahan
Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.
The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits makes the case that big data is for real, and more than just big hype. The book uses real-life examples-from Nate Silver to Copernicus, and Apple to Blackberry-to demonstrate how the winners of the future will use big data to seek the truth.
The Passion Conversation: Understanding, Sparking, and Sustaining Word of Mouth Marketing By Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, John Moore No passion, no conversation. No conversation, no word of mouth. No word of mouth, no successful business. If you think you are in the marketing business, think again. You re in the people business, and The Passion Conversation teaches you how to get people to fall passionately and madly in love with your organization or cause.
By Ann Handley
If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.
Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements By Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, Spike Jones Brains on Fire offers original, practical and actionable steps for creating a word-of-mouth movement for corporations, products, services, and organizations. It takes you step-by-step through the necessary actions needed to start your own authentic movement.