It’s officially 2012, and, again this year, we’re hearing “2012 is the year of mobile commerce“. We heard it in 2011 too. Did we hear it in 2010? Yep. In fact, as far back as 2007, pundits and observers have been prophesizing that the days of whipping out our phones to pay for all sorts of retail sundries are just around the corner.

First, I think it’s probably important to get some definitions right. As the Forbes link above says, I think it’s fair to say that mobile-enabled e-commerce does not equal mobile commerce, at least strictly speaking. When you buy a book from Amazon on your iPad, you’re not engaging in mobile commerce per se – you’re using an e-commerce portal adapted for your mobile device. “Mobile commerce” is probably best described as shopping that takes advantage of unique properties of mobile devices.

So, why doesn’t it ever seem to happen – and when it does, why does the development in the space seem to happen so slowly? Read More »

If previous “ages” of marketing could be described as eras of Big Brands, or Madison Avenue, this age of marketing can probably just as well be described as the era of New Channels – a time when one of Marketing’s principal jobs is to navigate new communications technologies and the shifting consumer behavior that results. It’s something that lies at the heart of what marketers tell us about agility – the subject of this year’s B2C research – marketers and their organizations need to be prepared for what’s next at all times.

It’s the organizational part that’s more difficult, though – people naturally get stuck in routines, are averse to change, and executives are loath to take risks on projects that have uncertain chances of success. We’ve collected our best practices in getting organizations to adapt in our Make the Case to Invest in Social Media challenge center, and most of the lessons there hold true for channels like mobile, as well.

With that in mind, we also thought we’d take a second look at an interview we did a few years back with Susan Lavington, former SVP of Marketing at USA Today. She was at USA Today during the heyday of social adaption, and led that paper – a progressive one, by print journalism standards – through a difficult transition to social.

MLC members can read the interview in its entirety.

Marketers are getting more personal. Not only do they anticipate my needs on Amazon, invite me to sign in with Facebook, they also peek at my browsing history and plant “cookies” where I can’t find them. As much as I like being delighted with right-on-target recommendation, I, as do most consumers, remember most clearly the times we’ve been annoyed. I mean all the time spent deleting and junking emails, unsubscribing, getting rid of cookies, adjusting privacy levels, putting certain numbers on the “no-call” list or just giving up.

Usually, when the customer has an issue, customer service is there to help. But in this case, the reps are often as confused as the customer. As a rep at a national retailer recently told me when I called, the personalized ad “is not on our site so it’s Pandora’s ad not ours”. With personalization being a relatively new and under-regulated phenomenon, the chance to be exactly right is often counter balanced by the chance to be completely wrong. Sophisticated algorithms running in the background don’t guarantee success – any financial firm can tell you that.

As marketers rightly understand it, personalization is on their turf. While they are positioned to take the lead in delivering greater relevance to consumers, marketers can’t hope to ace it on their own. Here’s why:

• Personalization calls for inter-departmental coordination. Your interactive marketing vendor isn’t the only party you’ve got to work with. Not letting your left hand know what the right is doing when it comes to targeting customers is inviting trouble. At the very least, sales and customer service need to know what personalization is and be able to give a informed explanation when customers call with questions/comments ranging from “Why am I seeing this?” to “Stop spamming me!” To consumers, anything with your logo on it is your ad and hence your responsibility to explain / fix / make disappear. Having a short, scripted FAQ beforehand on how personalized ads work and how settings can be adjusted could save reps from coming up with their own explanations. For sales, integrating the detailed customer data your use for personalization into the CRM system could help them gain valuable context before each conversation and more willing to track additional consumers metrics for you next time around. The simple fact is, if you don’t talk to other departments beforehand about what’s going on, they’ll come back to you later about what’s going wrong.

• Personalization calls for coordination within marketing itself. In the same vein, marketers involved in personalization shouldn’t be allowed to sit in their own niche while keeping the rest of the department in the dark. Digital and social marketers can tell you who is poking around on brand’s Facebook and campaign pages; product managers can help you zoom in on purchase motivation in a particular segment; and market research analysts have primary research and tracked metrics that would add another layer of do’s and don’ts.

Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm.” Embarrassed or annoyed consumers aren’t likely to be loyal – they said as much in our recently concluded consumer survey on personalization and privacy. The bottom line: consumer data can be bought but consumer trust cannot. We’ll talk more about how you can get personalization done right in your segment so stay tuned for more insight.

With social media moving towards the maturity phase in a number of big companies, we’re finding that more and more members are looking for formal plans from their social media teams – detailed ideas about what the team will do in a channel in a given year.

That might work (and be necessary) for TV, a channel where ad buys have to be coordinated months in advance and audience preferences don’t change too much. But for social media, where channels change near-daily and audience behavior is still in flux? We think companies should be focused primarily on experimentation and flexibility – and that plans should optimize to those goals.

Our Social Media Plan on a Page will help get you there – it’s a five-step method for creating a world-class social media experimentation strategy, one that’s grounded in enterprise priorities and audience preferences. Here’s what you’ll do:

Ground strategy in business objectives. Pick – and fully understand –  your company’s 2-5 growth priorities for the year. This guards against wasting time and money by choosing projects that don’t mesh with enterprise-wide priorities.

Assess your audience dynamics. Dig deep, and understand how and why your target audience consumes social media. Make sure you have an idea of where consumption might be headed in the future by identifying your lead users and examining their behaviors.

Identify your strategic opportunities. Explore how social media can help your company accentuate its strengths, as well as meet customer needs in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Select the highest-potential experiments. Determine which near-term experiments in social media will help position your company to take advantage of longer-term strategic opportunities in social media.

Measure your social media efforts. Use a “Return on Objectives” approach to assess if and how your social media efforts are driving business results.

MLC members, you can download the full Social Media Plan on a Page template and get started on your social plan today.

As detailed in our decision simplicity work from last summer, using trusted brand advisors can help build a brand.  These brand advocates help consumers relate to the brand, and they have much more credibility than other branded communications.  This trusted advice, along with helping consumers learn about your brand and weigh their options, simplifies decisions for consumers; these simpler decisions make them more likely to have brand intent, to follow through on that intent, to repurchase, and to recommend the products to their friends.

But many brands struggle with the risk involved when using consumers to market the brand.  After all, giving consumers the license to share their thoughts on your brand allows them to share the bad along with the good.  In addition, it can be hard to select the right people to represent the brand.

Ford tackled these challenges to launch the U.S. model of the Ford Fiesta by using consumer advisors, or “agents.”  To ensure that both consumers and the brand could trust the agents, Ford implemented a rigorous selection process to ensure good brand fit and social media reach.  Ford selected a very diverse group of agents, so most consumers in the Fiesta’s target demographic can find agents like them.

A larger struggle for most brands, though, is giving up control over what the consumer advisors say.  Ford knew it needed to balance the need for some brand control with the need to generate authenticity by giving agents uncensored speech, so they assigned monthly missions to give some structure to the agents’ experiences. Ford then allowed the agents to use their own blogs, tweets, and YouTube channels to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, and videos.

In addition to providing structure for the agents, Ford further leveraged these missions by selecting some that highlighted the car’s features.  For example, one mission had one agent drive until his car ran out of gas, showcasing the car’s high gas mileage; other missions included turning the car into an ice-cream truck (showing off a large amount of trunk and storage space) and taking a road trip (to demonstrate its comfort over long distances).

Using the agents to tell the brand’s story had really positive results: Ford generated the same name awareness for the Fiesta as the Ford Edge and Flex had after two years of traditional advertising at just 10% the cost of a traditional media campaign.

After seeing such great success in the United States, Ford adopted the campaign for India.  MLC members, click here to read about how Ford used the agents to generate brand interest in an emerging market.

The main benefit of mass media –its broad reach– is also its downside: a high percentage of wasted impressions on non-target customers. The precision that marketers can now achieve in targeting has far outgrown traditional media planning and media buys.

Marketing at Kimberly-Clark found a way to generate more effective communications by making principled shifts in media spend.  The secret?  Rather than beginning with mass media and then making other investments if budget allows, they plan media touchpoints outward from the consumer first.

Kimberly-Clark begins by identifying a clear overarching creative concept called an “Engagement Idea” that drives touchpoint selection.  A well-developed Engagement Idea also provides necessary support and rationale for initial budget allocation into nontraditional media channels.  It develops the “Engagement Idea” through four steps:

1. Understand the brand – Ensure comprehensive knowledge of the brand’s positioning and the consumer-centric rationale behind it.
2. Brainstorm ways to drive engagement around the brand– Use consumer feedback to find potentially resonant ways to represent the brand.
3. Screen potential ideas for flexibility – Test the Engagement Idea for flexibility (i.e. it can last for two to three years’ worth of campaigns) and breadth (i.e. it doesn’t directly prescribe specific touchpoints)
4. Identify touchpoint roles – Determine which touchpoints are best suited to conveying the Engagement Idea as well as any others needed to drive people towards those touchpoints.

To get Marketing to accept this new approach and the ideas produced, Marketing also takes an aggressive sales approach to convince internal audiences to accept nontraditional touchpoint mixes.

In Jack Johnson’s first US hit, he sang “I want to turn the whole thing upside down… I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found.”  Turn your media planning upside-down, and maybe you’ll find a more efficient media mix.

MLC members, read more about this process here.

The most dangerous assumption in relationship marketing:

Most consumers are open to entering a relationship with my brand.

They aren’t.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that, at most, somewhere between 20% and 30% of consumers are willing to engage in a “relationship” with a brand.   The vast majority of consumers simply aren’t wired to enter into brand relationships.

When we asked 7,000 consumers via a global survey earlier this year whether they have a relationship with any brands, only 23% said yes.  The rest said “no”, and when we gave them an opportunity to elaborate on their response in a free-text field, we got lots of comments like “It’s just a brand, not a member of my family.” Read More »

One of marketers’ top priorities next year is digital integration, or – more specifically – adapting to the increasingly central role of digital in the marketing mix.  In a recent MLC poll, B2C marketers rated this their second highest priority.

Despite several years of slowly shifting mindsets, Digital is too often still treated as its own stand-alone function, separate from Promotions, PR, Direct Marketing etc.  It should, by contrast, be treated as a part of all marcomm efforts.  Here are a few reasons why: Read More »

This might sound like a sort of pedantic question, but it’s one worth asking: why do we use social media? We know that people do use it, and we have a general idea of what they’re doing during that time, but what do they describe as the value from the time they spend socially networking?

Pew Research recently took the time to ask people that question directly, and here’s what they found: Read More »

It’s a refrain we hear often from B2C marketers: their customers are just not engaged enough with the brand. “If only we could cook up the perfect e-mail subject line – that would really wow them!” or “What channel is our demographic flocking to these days? Maybe if we’re the first brand there, that’ll really drive sales!” are how these laments typically go.

But take a step back. Marketers have been on the “engagement” treadmill for probably close to 10 years now, ever since e-mail became a viable commercial channel. Yes, in the interim, we’ve gotten a good deal closer to our consumers – in some cases, giving them a seamless, cross-channel experience both in marketing communications and customer service. We can reach them via e-mail, we can reach them via SMS, we can reach them via Facebook, we can reach them via Twitter. And the cost of hitting those touchpoints is much, much lower than in the old-media world of radio, televisions, and newspapers. But at what cost?

This year, MLC’s key B2C research effort focused on how customers have responded to the barrage of branded information marketers are throwing at them, and the results aren’t pretty: rather than feeling closer to brands, and rather than feeling more sure about their shopping decisions, they’re more confused than ever. The barrage of messages and product choice has led to all kinds of indecisive behaviors, such as endemic brand-switching and “decision spirals” in grocery aisles and retail sales floors. Customers still buy, but many make sub-optimal purchases (and, subsequently, aren’t loyal to the brands they buy), and many put off buying because they’re oversaturated with brand information. Read More »