Wide Angle

My New York Giants didn’t play this weekend – that’s one way to end a losing streak. I hadn’t enjoyed four consecutive losing Sundays of gesticulating wildly at my TV to no avail. But Fox, CBS, NBC, or ESPN didn’t quite care – I was watching.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover. Read More »

Last time, I wrote about how marketers should choose the right social experience—one that accentuates unique strengths—to put at the center of integrated communications.  We’re now at a spot where we can structure and assign roles to our other touchpoints so we can scale that social experience.

To get started, break touchpoints into two categories: secondary touchpoints (the outer circle in the graphic below) and supporting touchpoints (the middle circle):

Click Image to Enlarge | Secondary and supporting touchpoints establish a mental link and then drive the target audience to the social experience focal point.

1.  Secondary Touchpoints link the social experience to your brand for the target audience.  They’re often mass in nature—TV, out-of-home, print, and so on.  Best Buy’s TV ads showcasing Twelpforce are one example of such a secondary touchpoint.

2.   Supporting Touchpoints drive the target audience to the desired social experience.  Targeted banner ads, paid search, and direct marketing often do well here.  Best deployed, these touchpoints will:

• Engage a target audience at moments when they are susceptible to or desirous of the social experience
• Enable easy entry to the experience. Read More »

Last week, I wrote about marketers putting social experience at the center of their integrated communications.  I referred to Best Buy and Twelpforce.  Just this weekend, I caught a flurry of Honda TV spots promoting a particular Honda Facebook experience.

One of the open questions for marketers: How should one go about identifying the right social experience?

Answer: Identify an imprinting experience that best highlights your brand’s differentiating attributes or benefits. Read More »

Intriguingly, Best Buy is putting Twelpforce at the center of its big communications initiative for the holiday season.  Looking at data from the 125 companies that have taken the Council’s social media maturity diagnostic, we know that only 11% of marketers have built social media into their integrated communications planning processes.  That got me to thinking…

Most B2C marketers take the “tonnage” approach to touchpoint planning.  They work back from growth goals and volume targets to plan their touchpoint mix—their mix models tell them how much money they need to dump into broadcast, out-of-home, print, promotions and the like, to hit those volume targets.  Social and experiential touchpoints play second fiddle, at best.  Read More »