Surely you’ve seen the TV ads. Ex-football player Isaiah Mustafa, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” taking his audience from a bathroom, to a sailboat, to a beach scene on horseback, all the while spouting an absurd, deadpan hyper-masculine monologue. It’s great advertising, a campaign that I think has helped shift Old Spice’s image away from “little white bottle in my grandfather’s medicine cabinet” to “cool, masculine scent that [young] women love.”

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”. Read More »

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for nominations for MLC’s 2010 B2B Marcomm Campaign Awards is fast approaching. July 30 is the deadline to recognize the work of your peers (or maybe even your own!). If you know of a standout B2B marcomm campaign from the last year, please consider nominating it. Details, including entry guidelines and other fine print, are below the fold: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

B2B marketers spend a lot of time churning out content—white papers, collateral, podcasts, online tutorials, etc.—but production is only half of the equation.  Marketing also needs to consider how customers actually consume the content it generates.  The goal isn’t to just provide product information; it’s really a balancing act between this and setting the buying cycle in motion.  Sequencing becomes critical in that the consumption of materials needs to gradually lead customers closer to the point of sale.

We typically see three modes of content delivery: Read More »

By Laura Morris

Susan Wassel, PR Manager at Sharpie, launched a social media campaign with the help of a single fellow employee and now manages the project singlehandedly – with a $2,000 budget.  Her work exemplifies how your team can move forward even if you lack the resources necessary to bring on external support.

Video: Social Media on a Shoestring

Slidedeck: Social Media on a Shoestring

“Sharpie Susan’s” goal was increase brand loyalty by leveraging brand advocates they termed “bold expressionmakers,” who are Sharpie uber-users that gravitate toward new media.  To achieve this objective, Sharpie decided to showcase content from these “bold expressionmakers” that demonstrated creative ways to use Sharpie pens in daily life. Read More »

Social media enables any employee in any function to interact directly with consumers.  This makes employee engagement more important than ever – both to limit reputation risks and capture new opportunities for employee advocacy (i.e., employees promoting the brand online).

As a very first step, companies should limit downside risks by implementing a social media policy (MLC members, click here for tips and examples).  In addition to defensive guardrails, companies should also offer simple guidelines or training to help engaged employees make the best use of social media.

Beyond this, now is a good time to redouble efforts to measure and boost employee engagement. Indeed, 46% of executives agree that surveying employee satisfaction and acting on the results is the best way to protect online reputation. Read More »

One of the most common social media questions we hear is “How do I build global capabilities?”  The challenge is that each market has a unique manifestation of social media (different platforms, levels of uptake, user habits), while each marketing team has different strengths and weaknesses.  With such varied needs and opportunities, attempting to standardize capabilities globally simply doesn’t work.

The best companies embrace heterogeneity instead of aiming for global consistency.  They assess each region’s individual needs in order to tailor capability goals and training accordingly. Read More »

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much? Read More »

So perhaps the title here is a bit harsh, but something needed to catch your eye. We’ve long known retailers to be a unique beast, managing more products than any CPG marketer could imagine, focusing on category-specific merchandising strategies (often to the detriment of cross-sell), and most recently, managing the tradeoffs between brick-and-mortar stores and online sales.

But frankly, this too often turns retailers into myopic, proximity-biased incrementalists in their customer strategy (too harsh again?). Imagine my encouragement when I see retail CMOs begin to tout the very elements of customer-focused strategy their CPG peers have long known. Read More »

Source: youtube.com/nikegolf

Now that the frenzy over the Masters is winding down, let’s take a look at the Tiger ad from Nike.  Smart move by Nike, or not?  More importantly for the Wide Angle readership, are there lessons here for marketers more generally? (Beyond be careful which superstars you get in bed w—sorry, bad choice of words) 

If you look at numbers released Monday after the tournament, it certainly doesn’t look good for Nike.  Confusion, skepticism and other negative emotions reign. Read More »

By Laura Morris

Want your brand to “go viral?”  Get in line.  With marketers lining up to create the next “Subservient Chicken,” it’s becoming increasingly difficult to create attention-grabbing content that will get your target customers talking.

The smartest brands are taking a more scientific approach, thinking deliberately about how they can engineer a social experience that sparks positive word-of-mouth.  Here’s how Purina thinks about using social media to spark advocacy. Read More »