Google Wallet, the company’s near-field communications payment system, will open for business tomorrow [The Next Web]

In defense of raw volumetrics on Facebook (nb: we disagree) [AdAge]

Recapping the wildly successful first ten years of the Apple Store [All Things D]

The shift from desk to phone: Google Maps for mobile is expected to outpace desktop usage by this summer [TechCrunch]

An interesting (and long) profile of the father of modern infographics, Edward Tufte [Washington Monthly]

How Dairy Queen is targeting Generation X [WSJ]

The US Army is reaching out to potential recruits via social media [NYT]

Brands are finding ad platform AdMob good for business in the mobile and tablet space [TechCrunch]

Heineken has a new campaign for the digital set [NYT]

Groupon and Hulu are inspiring employee innovation via radical trust [Fast Company]

As brands start to recover from the recession, we’re noticing that many formerly-shelved plans to enter new markets are moving forward. Companies are targeting new segments and new geographies, challenging entrenched incumbent competition in doing so.

One of the biggest problems “challenger” brands face is that they lack the credibility to compete in the new space. After all, if you’re a maker of Product A, and decide to start selling Product B, your potential customers need a good reason to consider switching from the existing set of options. So, how do you bridge the credibility gap, and condition the market to consider your solution?

The key to this can be found in Cisco’s Market Dialogue Seeding program, a key element of any new product launch within the company. Using insight marketing as a lever to move tech-industry thought leaders and the broader market to their solution, Cisco goes through a four-step process to establish expertise around a new product offering, which ultimately lead to the company’s insights being received by the market. Read More »

By Ana Lapter

Effective touchpoint planning is based on marketers’ ability to turn insight into consumer-facing initiatives.  This is not easy thing to accomplish.  MLC research reveals that 96% of marketing organizations are largely unsatisfied with their ability to convert consumer understanding into an effective planning exercise.  One major reason is marketer reluctance to get out of the comfort zone of planning campaigns around favorite channels.  For many packaged goods companies, the dominating channel is TV.  In other industries, it might be direct mail or other forms of promotional channels.

Here are three tactics for jarring your team out of its favored touchpoint comfort zone: Read More »

My coffee of choice is Starbucks, but I still frequently dither in the beverage aisle wondering if I should give discount brands or new items a go. My lack of expertise and inability to predict whether I’ll like something new has led to both pleasant and unpleasant surprises.

So that makes me wonder, how hard do other consumers resist in face of similar temptations to switch?  In our most recent survey, we asked 1382 consumers to recall a recent purchase and how much we need to pay them in order for them never to buy that item from that brand again. Basically – what’s the minimum price they’d need to abandon a brand forever?

The data suggest that brand loyalty is very much a castle built on shifting sands. Loyalists are few and even customers who say they’d like to see your brand on the shelf mostly just want it there so they can choose from 51 instead of 50 kinds of fruit loops.

So let’s define our segments. “Switchers” are folks who would switch for less than half the item price. “Loyalists” won’t switch for anything less than the full price of the item. If you would switch for a price between 50% and 100% of the purchase price, you’re “In-Between”. Here’s the breakdown for $10 and $50 purchases: Read More »

Where are consumers headed next? It’s a question almost all of us have asked.  Brands that get the answer right often win, and brands that get it wrong find themselves playing catch up.  In recent months, Iconoculture has developed a series of roadmaps to help marketers shine a little light on where their target consumers are going.  To get there, we look at the challenge from a couple of different angles:

Categories: How will consumer behavior change in a given category?  What are consumers migrating away from?  Where is their attention (and wallet) headed next? (think media, technology, home, health, food, finance, etcetera)

Segments: How are the needs, motivations, and behaviors of specific demographic and lifestyle groups changing?  What do demographic groups have in common?  What makes them unique? (think Moms, Millennials, Xers, and so on)

Based on these perspectives, we’ve laid out where we see consumers headed in a series of “state of the union” summaries organized around the two lenses, categories and segments.  We call these overviews Consumer Outlooks—our one-page stories of where consumers are headed next.  For Council members, we’re providing a selection of these outlooks on our site to inform your marketing strategy setting and hopefully spark a few new ideas.  Check out the Consumer Outlooks for North America here:  Segments, Categories; and get a preview of our new global Consumer Outlooks here: Global. Read More »

If your brand or company is more than a century old, competing in a crowded consumer market, what can you do when growth slows down? Like many companies that have been around for awhile, the Clorox Company (established 1913) was facing low growth in several of its most mature brands.  It noticed, though, that some of its mature brands managed to yield high growth rates despite the challenges that come with managing this type of brand.  To get the rest of its brands on par with these high-achievers, it developed a “high-flying” brand development program (MLC members can find the whole case, as well as an implementation toolkit, behind the link). Read More »

We know a number of our retail and consumer banking members are intensely interested in the mobile payments space, and with good reason: according to a study commissioned by MasterCard, 63% of the coveted 18-34 demographic feel comfortable using phones to make payments and about the same amount feel like their phones are more essential than their wallets. Mobile phones – particularly smartphones – are increasingly indispensable for any trips outside the home.

Given signs like these of increasing customer demand, it’s no wonder why folks are jumping in. But it seems like there’s a lot of wisdom to tap into in the membership, here – so we’re asking: what do companies see as the upside of embracing mobile payments in a broader way? We’re asking this question on our Digital Media Discussions forum, and we’d love your input. Read More »

A new mobile commerce app, Zaarly, allows users to create location-based, ad-hoc digital markets [ReadWriteWeb]

Is it realistic to sustain market-beating growth, year after year? Probably not [McKinsey Quarterly]

Public interest groups call on McDonalds to drop Ronald McDonald [WSJ]

Singing shows are a common theme at this year’s American TV upfronts [NYT]

Want brand growth? Start thinking about earned media [AdAge]

In celebration of their 10th anniversary, the Apple Store is getting even more digital [Apple Insider]

New York Times editor Bill Keller wonders what always-on communication is doing to our brains [NYT]

How should you adapt brand health monitoring to an always-on age? [AdAge]

LinkedIn’s IPO is today, and the price is going up [WSJ]

A Twitter-based hedge fund, measuring sentiment, is launching in London [New Scientist]

Discovery sees Spanish-language TV growing in importance [NYT]

It’s an experience we’ve heard from hundreds of marketers in countless subdisciplines: they have a great, disruptive idea, an actionable plan to get there, a receptive audience with money to spend, and internal enthusiasm for getting something done.

Then comes the dreaded question: what’s the projected ROI? And instantly, all the air gets sucked out of the room or e-mail thread – and the great idea is never to be heard from again. Because for any idea that’s even remotely risky or disruptive, guessing the projected ROI is largely a fantasy, right up there with unicorns, leprechauns and a working office printer. (IT folks – I keed, I keed)

So when Philips’ Oral Healthcare, makers of the Sonicare electric toothbrush line, faced a mandate to double their rate of growth, they knew they had to find a way to neutralize the ROI question from the beginning. The result was the company’s Segment-Focused Innovation Roadmap, part of our revamped Product Management topic center. Read More »

The checklist is complete – you’ve created a heavy-duty advertising campaign, organized events, and rolled out promotional activities to generate buzz around your brand. But, for some reason, your consumers are not excited enough to talk about it. Since the average consumer is exposed to around 3000 commercial messages a day, is this really that surprising?

Facing this noisy marketplace, Procter & Gamble commissioned extensive research to find out the most potent way to get consumers talking about its brands. The results underscored the importance of word of mouth, prompting P&G to set up an internal division, Tremor, to create and manage word of mouth for its brands. Tremor tapped into cognitive science, and blended it with P&G’s marketing knowledge to charge up its advocacy efforts. Read More »