I’m sure most of you have heard about the eye-opening stats from the Super Bowl by now around social media – a couple of the most popular:

• The highest single event tracking ever at 2.1 million people streaming the game
• The new Twitter record of 12,223 tweets per second)

Here’s some that may not be as familiar:

• Half of the Super Bowl ads were Shazam-able (that is, you could download associated songs and content with the Shazam app)
• Over 1 million people Shazam-ed those ads!

It’s no news that brands are increasingly using social to leverage interactivity – we’re all familiar with facebook applications or twitter campaigns.  However, only a few innovative companies have begun leveraging social TV.  (Strictly defined, social TV is the convergence of social media and TV.)  This topic took center stage at the 2012 ANA TV & Everything Video Forum.

The key takeaway: if brands don’t seek to engage TV audiences in conjunction with other media and devices, they will lose.

Ready to start getting on board?  Well, there are two main ideas that every marketer should keep in mind: Read More »

Marketing has some basic rules no matter what is being sold, and some might argue that successful political campaigns are waged along many of the same lines and the battles for dish soap dominance or soda superiority.  While there are definitely some commonalities, there are also key differences in the marketing of consumer products and presidential hopefuls.  First let’s look at what is the same: Read More »

When it comes to small budget items, people usually shop in one of two ways: they buy what they always buy because they’re used to it (shampoo, coffee) or they buy whatever is on sale because they can’t tell the difference (toilet paper, sandwich bag). In fact, our Decision Simplicity work from last year would show that a whopping 51% of consumers only consider one brand when buying items under $10 and 37% are buying more store brand items than they did a year ago. The room for substantive differentiation is often so small that all one can do is changing how consumers perceive your wares – like the hugely successful Miller Lite vortex bottle (> 1.4 million results when I search for “does it work?”). Fluid dynamics doesn’t usually get this exciting.

Recently, we’ve been doing our own bit of probing of what’s on consumers’ minds when making small purchases. We used salad dressing as the stand-in for all things CPG – the assumption being that you buy most of these items with a similar mindset. Through a conjoint exercise, we test consumers’ implicit preferences on several different dimensions, from price to taste, to brand, to who recommended the item to them. Read More »

Social and digital media have been around for a few years, but it’s now reaching the point  - according to our own benchmarking and that done by other consultancies and research organizations – where it’s a key, indispensable element of the marcomm mix. According to most estimates, social is nearing 20% of total marketing spend, and the impact and fallout from mistakes in the channel is correspondingly much higher.

We’ve recently put together a list of members’ most commonly asked questions in social media, and the results run the gamut from strategy development to content production all the way to regulatory and legal compliance. Based on this, here are four key ways members complain about social media efforts failing: Read More »

In the last few months, Facebook, Tumblr, and other social media sites of the likes have all taken a back seat in popularity to the new kid on the block: Pinterest.  In fact, not only does the site attract an average of 11 million visits per week, but in January of this year, it officially became the fastest standalone site to reach 10 million unique visitors—not too shabby considering it launched its beta version in March 2010 (by comparison, the same feat took Facebook 852 days!)

What is Pinterest, exactly?  According to the company’s website, Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that “let’s you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” With options built into the site that let you “repin” others’ items, subscribe to peoples’ or companies’ boards, and comment on specific pins, it is no wonder why the interactive site is attracting so many people.   It’s also attracting companies at an alarming rate, putting to rest the notion that this site is just another internet fad.

So should your brand invest in Pinterest?  Here are a few reasons you might consider it: Read More »

As consumers begin to tentatively emerge from the recession, we expect lots of brands to begin repositioning to capture additional wallet share in the coming months and years. There are countless examples of rebrands that haven’t gone well.  Brands find their current personality and values to be tired, outdated, or no longer accurate, so they go to extreme lengths to get back in the game (and back in the hands of consumers).  Sometimes, though, these efforts pay off.

In looking at successful rebrandings, we’ve found four keys to making a rebrand successful.  MLC members, visit our branding topic center to access more resources. Read More »

Last week I attended the ANA’s annual “TV & Everything Video Forum” in New York City.  The conference explored the use of video across screens and devices, including mobile, internet, traditional TV, and more, between promotional spiels and a blazing performance of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (yup, Cyndi Lauper made an appearance, and clad head-to-toe in black leather).

The general consensus?  TV is back on track. There are two things that traditional TV still does incredibly well: it brings together sight, sound, and motion to engage customers on a large screen, and it creates unmatched real-time reach (after all, we don’t TiVO the Oscars or the Super Bowl!).

The proof is in the numbers: video consumption is rising, and TV still attracts twice as many viewers as the next medium (internet).  Advertisers are well aware of this – although they’re still not completely satisfied with traditional TV placements, 21% believe that TV ads have become more effective (up from 7% just two years ago).  And more than a third of marketers are planning to spend more in TV advertising in 2012. Read More »

So, we’ve heard a lot about gamification in the past year or so. It’s nearly at buzzword status, with all kinds of consultants and vendors out there promising a magic bullet and, judging from MLC’s search traffic, a not-insignificant number of marketers hoping that embracing game platforms will lead to better message resonance and improved sales. And while they may well do that, our advice for marketers regarding the hottest new trends stays the same: proceed with caution, and keep end goals in mind.

While gamification might not be for everyone, one very exciting emerging field is health-related games. Relying on a host of newly-popularized insights from psychology about human motivation and thought, as well as social and digital tools that enable users to track all kinds of outcome metrics from their own body, health games are developing nicely into powerful platforms by which thousands of people are taking control of their health.

Here are some great examples of this in practice:

• Fitocracy is a gamified platform for exercise. When users complete certain workouts, they enter them into the game, which awards them with points. You can “level up” – similar to the progression mechanism in a lot of online games – and compete directly with friends. The platform also provides “quests” – rewards for completing certain kinds of new exercise, like hiking or Olympic lifts.
• Nike’s Fuelband – a biometric device similar to the Fitbit – is designed to measure daily activity. Users can set goals, share them with social networks, and compete with friends.
• Run or Else is a site that allows users to enter in a weekly running goal, and put money on the line if the goal isn’t met.

In each case, the technology leverages a key insight from psychology – small achievements, social pressure, and loss aversion, respectively – to spur users to do better things with their health and bodies.

So, what’s so important about this? Well, I think the best answer is that our healthcare system is excellent at treating big, acute conditions. If I get cancer, for instance, I want the power of modern Western medicine brought to bear on my condition. But for more common conditions, especially ones with complex and multi-disciplinary causes (obesity, back pain, general fatigue and diabetes come to mind), we don’t have as many answers and doctors can only do so much. Any advancement in general health and physical preparedness is a good one.

What’s the upside to this trend for healthcare companies? The most obvious one is customer information – each time a customer interacts with a game platform, information is exchanged and over time, brands can build up a profile of individual customers, including health risks. That information could theoretically (subject to regulation) be used to target marcomms, develop new products and spot market opportunities before competitors.

How is your company using gamification and digital/social tools to reach consumers in ways that deliver value? Let us know in the comments.

(this is a guest post from Anastasia Milgramm of the Customer Contact Council, MLC’s sister program for customer care organizations. We thought our audience of marketers would like it, too.)

By now, we have all heard about Netflix’s infamous 2011 blunder. When the company announced a 60% price hike last July, customers were furious. Many voiced their frustrations on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; others called customer service to complain and flooded the corporate website with comments. The company faced a huge cost spike (increased call volume) and an even greater hit to revenue. In fact, more than 800,000 subscribers left completely in just three months.

The message of the Netflix example is clear: in today’s world, companies are more vulnerable than ever. Netflix probably didn’t do itself any favors by announcing the price increase abruptly – with little forewarning or customer outreach to cushion the blow.

So how can companies stay head of the game to mitigate customer frustrations in risky situations? And specifically for service teams – how can companies proactively address customer concerns to avoid call volume spikes that often accompany these situations? Read More »

Sometimes life made simple trumps life made fabulous – when you’d rather come home to a clean sink and kids in bed instead of to a candle light dinner. I suspect the same goes with banking. Personally, I’d prefer a bill with no surprise charges that gives a clear, categorized view of my spending to a new app allowing me to bank via iPad. Stack the frustration of spending an hour getting bounced around customer service against the joys of a new reward program and no wonder “Bank Dumping Day” exists.

What I want in a bank essentially comes down to the good old KISS -“Keep It Simple, Stupid”- and the 1000 or so banking customers we recently surveyed agree. To tease out their real preferences, we had them go through a conjoint exercise in which they are presented sets of banking products with different attributes and asked to choose their favorite one from each set. We then ran market simulation based on that information to see which offerings will sink or swim. Turns out that consumers flock to “straight up”, clean and hassle free banking solutions that make their lives easier. MLC’s Decision Simplicity research from last year would also suggest longer banking relationships and higher recommendation rates as a result.

Yet simple is easier said than done, because the highest form of simplicity is letting others do things their own way, some call it “Natural Pathing”, others call it following “Desire Lines”.  It is the idea that instead of designing paths as you see fit and tell people to stay off the grass, you build paths where the grass is worn by footfall. You’ve got to go with the flow because if you don’t, customers will circumnavigate, or worse yet, quit.

If you look at the chart above, most traditional banks are only scratching the surface when it comes to achieving “simplicity”, sometimes going no deeper than changing the tag line. Bank of America launched a 40 million ad effort in 2009 touting “simple, clear banking”, which Adweek considered to be “rather generic — educational, almost” and could just as easily have the names of other big banks like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase slapped on it. Bottom line is, customers don’t care how much effort you expanded, they care about how much effort you’ve saved them.

Compare that to the likes of Mint or Simple.com. Mint positions itself as “Your financial life, all in one place” which I personally like for the fact that it gives me nice little pie charts of where I’ve spent my money. On my regular bank accounts I’d have to do that by downloading my transactions into Excel and doing the summation myself which is a drag. Simple.com lets you ask questions in normal English like “How much did I spent on taxis in New York last month?” and have real people (often the same one) answer your call at first try instead of tossing you around making selections. That’s almost Zappos-ish. I’d like to see real banks make customer service the bedrock of their business, but they seem to lack the vision, the will, or both.

Does simplicity make you invincible? No, but getting there will put you a long shot ahead of competitors. The only thing that kills simplicity in our simulation is fees – even if it’s just $3 or $5 a month. Customers said no to debit card fees, I think they mean no to basically any kind of fee.