This will be my last post for the year 2006.
It's the right time to reflect on how advertising will have to adapt itself for the 2007 customer. NY Times has an article that captures the essence of what it will look like and what marketers have to get ready for:
CONSUMERS WITH A CONSCIENCE
Consumers want to know where products come from, how they were made and what companies and brands believe in.
Consumer interest in environmentally friendly products will grow, as will interest in the local stories of products, even those that come from halfway around the world, said Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer of JWT, a WPP Group agency, and co-author of “Next Now: Trends for the Future.”
“Every brand is going to now have to have a social conscience, and they’re going to be evaluated for their social consciousness as much as for their products,” Ms. Salzman said
LIFE ONLINE OR OFFLINE?
Consumers spend so much time online — working, playing, sharing personal details with the world and living out fantasy lives — that the online terrain is blurring with the physical world.
In 2007, more companies will start adding social networking and user-generated tools onto their intranet sites, predicted Clark Kokich, worldwide president of Avenue A Razorfish, an agency owned by aQuantive.
“People in the younger work force are going to look for an experience on intranets that looks more like the experiences they have on the Internet,” Mr. Kokich said.
PUSHING THE OFF BUTTON
Even as consumers are networked in and logged on most hours of the day, some ad executives say they think workers will be quicker to separate their work lives from their personal space. Some hotels are now offering to lock up guests’ cellphones and BlackBerrys to give them a break, said Kiwa Iyobe, trend manager at Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve.
USER-GENERATED ADVERTISEMENTS
Ad executives are not going to be quick to give up their paychecks for creating ads. Still, a growing list of brands — among them Converse, Chevrolet, Doritos and Dove — are asking consumers to design commercials for them.
“Consumers are demanding and getting a seat at the table and defining what the brand experience is about,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a WPP Group brand consultancy, and author of “BrandSimple.”
WHAT’S A BRAND TO DO?
Advertising executives said brands should focus on clear, simple messages that were consistent across consumers’ online and offline lives. Companies that scored the highest in a national brand study earlier this month were ones with well-known mass appeal, like Google, Las Vegas, the N.F.L., Sony and Amazon. YouTube, iPod and Yahoo also made the list of “top brands,” though they came in a bit behind Google.
On this note, Wish you a happy new year!
Offlate I have been observing the "entry by invitation only" bug that has hit a lot of web service sites. It seems to be cool to do it on the web now! I had this experience just a few seconds back at profitlinker. I think someone has to call the bluff. I find it very unfriendly as I know all I have to do is to register and get a confirmatory mail in a few seconds! Why then have it at all?
It was a fad at one time when google mail required me to get an invitation to access the service and sure there was a lot of buzz around it. But, now I think this is getting a bit boring and I find it adding no value at all.
If am interested and find the product/service interesting, I am sure I will anyway register myself for that service. Or send me an invitational emailer and/or make it really look like a privileged invitational offer that I will really miss. For example, allow me to access certain services in that site that I will not otherwise be able to access.
One needs to get customer friendly or let them come-up with something more interesting!
Toyota, Sweden has built a fantastic site.
http://demo.northkingdom.com/ihuvudetpatoyota/index_en.html
I think the asthetics of the design is just brilliant. I do have one reservation. After having created such a 'welcoming' home page, the pages linking the other pages could have been a lot more interesting.
Eric Friedman has an excellent post on how sees the future of advertising. I can't agree with him more. With the increasing number of devices that we have come to own as consumers, advertising is increasingly changing to 'discovering' and 'informing' continously, one customer at a time. Take a look at what he has to say:
I believe that the future of advertising is in providing real time information instead of real time interruption. This is the future of advertising, or what we call marketing 2.0.
Real time information is how advertising will work (and is working) for the next generation. We have been brought up on the idea of instant gratification and having information available to use 24×7 at our fingertips. It is no surprise that advertising is now more precise and targeted to our needs - this is a direct correlation to how we consume information in general today.
The difference between the two is a generic 30 second television spot that appears between segments of your favorite prime time show and a search query performed at 3:00am when you are looking to find some information.
In a world where optimization is not only needed but expected, every display of my ad and subsequent click results in a search engine learning about the relevance of showing it to each user. Engines such as Google and Yahoo use this information to help the user experience and provide the most real time and relevant information possible.
As companies learn that their dollars can be better spent placing their ads in front of people with questions, and understanding that their ad can actually answer these questions, the true shift in advertising dollars will occur. I know we have written about the fall of the television upfront and changes to advertising many times (1, 2, 3, 4) but now the knowledge exists to make these changes possible.
Greg pointed me to an excellent video on "An Economic Response To Unsolicited Communication" by Marshall Van Alstyne about e-mail spam. While this is about email spam, I believe this has profund implications on:
- How to build a next generation list marketing company
- How the marketing in the future will move from paying to media (to get audience attention) to sharing the monies with media and audience(by paying for audience attention)!
Take a look:
Consumer generated chatter is increasingly becoming an important source of purchasing decisions.
More than 50% of respondents to the Compete study said they used consumer-generated media to make or narrow their choices, 23% used CGM to confirm a decision and 15% used CGM to determine what their top choice should be.
Some key findings from the study:
* 71% of car and travel consumers are influenced by CGM
* Only 35% of the same consumers are influenced by brand
* Auto buyers prefer consumer reviews and ratings over company websites (32%) and car dealers (32%)
* 2/3 of travelers prefer consumer reviews.
Compete estimates that around $2 billion from the Travel Spend is influenced by CGM.
“CGM is money in the bank for marketers who know how to tap into the new currency around CGM,” said Cynthia Stephens, director of marketing at Compete, Inc (in a statement). “Marketers will need to go beyond buzz-tracking tools to analyze and connect with in-market consumers in a new landscape. Companies that follow this course have nothing to fear about losing control of the marketing message.”
Business Week has a great article on how customers can be involved and enagaged in every business, if only companies have the intent.
Passionate customers can transform your company. Here's how to make them your secret weapon:
Each week, Greg Selkoe, founder of streetwear retailer Karmaloop, and a handful of his employees gather in his office overlooking Boston Common to review new designs. The group votes on which, if any, of the T-shirts, jackets, and other clothing should be added to the line Karmaloop sells in its Newbury Street store and online.What's worth noting is that the designs are submitted by customers. Since October, 37 designs, out of about 1,000 that have been submitted, have been added to the 33-employee, $4 million company's offerings.
Selling clothing dreamt up by customers is just one facet of a business model that brings customers so far into Karmaloop's DNA that they have become, in effect, extensions of the company's sales, marketing, and product development teams. Karmaloop has an 8,000-strong army of customers who proselytize the brand and get discounts or cash when they, or someone they've referred, make a purchase. Members of this "street team," called reps, also upload images, photos, or artwork to Karmaloop's site to make company stickers or banners other reps can download. "The reps are evangelists for our site," says Selkoe. And they're doing their job: Fewer than 1% of Karmaloop's customers are reps, but their purchases and those they inspire account for 15% of sales.
CEOs have been talking about customer loyalty for years, but entrepreneurs such as Selkoe know that making people truly loyal to your company—to make them really, really like you—takes a lot more than a frequent buyer program. It means nothing less than getting people so jazzed about your brand that they become engaged contributors to your company's sales, marketing, and innovation efforts, and ultimately its success. How does that happen? By knocking down the walls between "you" and "them" and creating a larger, looser community that is inviting to both your customers and your employees.
TechSmith's Weber was such a fervent believer in the power of a customer community that three years ago she persuaded the company's president to create her chief evangelist position. She then built customer advisory panels by including customers so happy with products that they'd written "love letters" to the company over the years, as well as those she found on blogs and through customer referrals. But Weber didn't shy away from the company's critics. Among the panelists is Paul Pival, distance education librarian at the University of Calgary in Alberta, who had written on his personal blog that he found Camtasia Studio, a TechSmith product that records keystrokes and mouse movements made on a computer, slow and difficult to use. "I was surprised she sought me out," says Pival of Weber's overture. "It was a little bit gutsy, but ultimately successful." After getting involved with the company's customer panels, Pival says he realized the product had been improved.
On-demand customers are changing the way companies are transforming the workplace. Business Week has an interesting article on how Best Buy is responding to this challenge:
The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.
Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages. The Best Buy chief aims to keep innovating even when something is ostensibly working. "ROWE was an idea born and nurtured by a handful of passionate employees," he says. "It wasn't created as the result of some edict."
So bullish are Anderson and his team on the idea that they have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx, set up to help other companies go clockless. CultureRx expects to sign up at least one large client in the coming months.
Then again, the new work structure's proponents say it's helping Best Buy overcome challenges. And thanks to early successes, some of the program's harshest critics have become true believers. With gross margins on electronics under pressure, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) and Target Corp. (TGT ) shouldering into Best Buy territory, the company has been moving into services, including its Geek Squad and "customer centricity" program in which salespeople act as technology counselors. But Best Buy was afflicted by stress, burnout, and high turnover. The hope was that ROWE, by freeing employees to make their own work-life decisions, could boost morale and productivity and keep the service initiative on track.
It seems to be working. Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. Employee engagement, which measures employee satisfaction and is often a barometer for retention, is way up too, according to the Gallup Organization, which audits corporate cultures.
