Fruit of the Loom is ‘Pretotyping in a Pop-up’ to Concept Test Premium Brand
Shoreditch, London – home of hip. That’s where t-shirt brand Fruit of the Loom is concept testing (or ‘pretotyping*’ to use the jargon) a new premium brand – ‘Seek No Further‘.
Pretotyping: Testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money.
Pretotyping In a Pop-up = Awesome Concept Testing
Renting an unused retail space just for four months, Fruit of the Loom is testing for consumer appeal with a very limited run of garments. There’s one in Shoreditch, and one in Berlin – and a pop-up website.
This is concept testing done right – there’s a world of difference between seeing words on a page and experiencing the product – so could pop-up + pretotyping be the future of concept testing?
Last year I wrote a Year in Review article that mainly focused on Facebook: 20 Changes Facebook Made In 2012 That Impacted Marketers. I mentioned, “Facebook was all about refinement in 2012.” If “refinement” was the word of 2012, “streamlined” was the word of 2013.
And this year I want to focus on the broader options that social marketers have at their disposable now.
An influx of new top tier social networks spread user attention thin in 2012 and required a renewed emphasis on key features and functionality.
In 2012, Facebook was on top of the mountain.
It was still the 800-pound gorilla in 2013, but a variety of other networks took their shots at prominence and deserve our attention as well.
Here are the top social media changes and trends introduced in 2013 and the last 12 months.
The Growth of Short Video
Twitter started the year off with the launch of Vine, a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Twitter noted on its blog that, “the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspired creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound.”
Vine saw 403% growth between the first and third quarters of 2013, making it the fastest-growing app of the year. And then Instagram launched video…
Instagram added fifteen-second video functionality on June 20. The number of Vine video links shared to Twitter dropped nearly 40 percent that day. Vine sharing on Twitter continued to drop over the following week, resulting in a roughly 70 percent drop from the nearly three million links shared on June 15. Instagram jumped on the video hype by announcing sponsored ads on October 3.
Facebook learned from the success of Instagram’s video ad integration by rolling out auto-play video ads on December 17, 2013. According to Facebook, the social network began testing auto-play video ads in September and the changes resulted in a more than 10 percent increase in video views, likes, shares and comments.
Twitter Jumpstarts Monetization
In 2012, Facebook’s IPO helped fuel an increased focus on revenue generation. Following a similar course in 2013 Twitter launched their IPO and subsequently increased advertising options.
On May 22, Twitter introduced Lead Generation Cards to help B2B brands drive highly qualified leads. According to Twitter, “These cards makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form. When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.”
Twitter also integrated previews of photos and Vine videos directly into users’ streams on October 29. Users see more of the photo or play the video by tapping the preview.
As a result of Twitter’s focus on advertising, the platform saw a 22 percent increase in small business usage.
Pinterest Gets “Rich”
Pinterest helped marketers answer the question, “What are people pinning from my websites?” by launching Web Analytics for verified business accounts on March 12. The free Web Analytics platform helped marketers see Pinterest metrics in categories including Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Pinned and Most Clicked.
Pinterest introduced Rich Pins on May 20. Instead of linking back to the pin’s origin, each new Rich Pin provides users additional information about that item aimed to better put them in a position to make a purchase. There are three different types of Rich Pins, each with its own unique set of characteristics and opportunities for brands: Product, Recipes, and Movies.
For items like clothes and furniture, the new Product pins offer real time pricing, availability, and where to buy the item. Recipe pins allow brands to provide information like cook time, ingredients, and servings to help foodies and food bloggers create new creations using branded pins. Movie pins contain content ratings, cast members, and more designed to provide a new layer of information about these movies.
On September 19, Pinterest announced it would roll out Promoted Pins as its first advertising product with select partners. Promoted Pins allow businesses to insert pins into search results and category feeds similar to sponsored advertising options offered by social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Promoted Pins started to appear in users’ feeds in early October.
LinkedIn Grows as a Content Portal
LinkedIn expanded its business offerings through the launch of Showcase Pages on November 18. Showcase Pages are dedicated content hubs enabling businesses to extend their Company Page presence, effectively segmenting audiences and enabling businesses to deliver the best message to the right audiences. Somewhat similar to LinkedIn s existing company pages, Showcase Pages are designed to give individual brands and business units within corporations the ability to create their own segmented marketing channels on LinkedIn.
In order to amplify the reach of its marketers messaging, LinkedIn continued 2013 2s sponsored advertising trend by rolling out Sponsored Updates on July 22. Sponsored Updates appear in a native format as a natural part of a target audience s feed and can be used to promote thought leadership content, to generate leads, or even as a PR tool.
Facebook Redesigns its News Feed
On March 7, Facebook revealed a News Feed redesign that featured larger visuals, a mobile-first user interface and more opportunities to filter by specific types of content.
The changes made good photos look even better in the News Feed, but also made lousy photos look even worse — reemphasizing a need for marketers to invest in quality imagery.
Facebook Focuses On Quality Images, Not Marketing Images
Facebook’s 20% Rule required text to appear on less than 20% of Cover Photos (and Promoted Posts), another attempt by Facebook at ensuring a quality visual experience for its users.
Not all features made it to December though. Facebook quickly backed away from automatically placing image captions and descriptions on top of photo page posts, preferring to keep text and image separate in the News Feed.
Facebook Page Tweaks
Facebook continued its redesign the following month with a new layout for Pages. The new Pages layout changes included a simplified look, easier ways to connect with businesses and streamlined page management.
Facebook Loosened Contest Rules
With a greater push for mobile and more real-time content, Facebook simplified its contest promotion guidelines. Its new set of rules allowed pages to run contests in the news feed without a third party application, ask people to submit answers in exchange for chances to win a prize, and to use Likes as a method of entrance into a contest.
Facebook Became A Mobile Social Network
In 2012, Sheryl Sandberg predicted a future of more ads in Facebook’s mobile News feed… and she was right. Facebook’s mobile-first emphasis in 2013 resulted in more users embracing the social network on the go. 54% more users logged into Facebook on a daily basis in Q3 2013 as did in Q3 2012, an increase from 329 million to 507 million in one year.
Mobile-only users doubled during that same time span, from 126 million in 2012 to 254 million in 2013. Significantly more user activity results in significantly more mobile advertising inventory available for marketers.
Confidence In The Newsfeed Wained
While mobile users swarmed to Facebook in droves, not all marketers were thrilled with the social network’s changes. A set of late 2013 News Feed algorithm changes resulted in an extreme drop in organic reach for many Pages, as much as 44 percent in many cases. The algorithm changes were intended to place more relevant news stories into the News Feed, especially from sites that Facebook deemed as “high quality” sources.
Facebook did little to quell marketer concerns when it put out an announcement recommending that they could make up the difference in reach with advertising.
Facebook Ads Got Simpler (Kind Of) And Better
To further emphasize this, Facebook rolled out a series of ad changes in 2013, eliminating at least 13 ad units and increasing ad-targeting opportunities.
Marketers told Facebook that its ad products were too complicated and redundant, which led to Sponsored Stories shifting from a stand-alone product to integration into most ads, which would “automatically add social context to boost performance.”
Facebook added Partner Categories to connect together online and offline user data. Partner categories use data from select third parties, including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon, to target ads to more categories of people.
For example, a local car dealership could show ads to people likely in the market for a new car who live near their dealership. Facebook also simplified Interest Targeting by combining Precise Interest and Broad Categories into a single step, making it easier to select the audience most relevant to what’s being advertised.
Advertisers looking to target customers who considered a purchase on their site but didn’t complete the transaction gained a new Facebook alternative to FBX in October. The new retargeting tool, “website and mobile app custom audiences,” works when marketers affix tracking software to their websites and create corresponding custom audiences based on user activity data.
Search Got Easier on Facebook
Facebook started 2013 with a bang by announcing its long-awaited advanced search product, Graph Search.
Graph Search provided users the opportunity to easily search and examine trillions of relationships that live within Facebook’s ecosystem. Facebook also added support for searchable hashtags in June, thereby acting as a new connective thread for users to share their thoughts to a larger audience on social networks.
Graph Search has a lot of potential and is just the beginning of opening up the massive amount of social connection data that Facebook controls, and charges for. We can’t wait for LinkedIn to do the same.
Many political conversations today focus on the rapid, immense multicultural population growth in America. However, what about the business implications? How much does an increasingly diverse America effect direct marketers? Quite a bit, actually, according to a recent report from Geoscape.
Geoscape, a business information and services company, found that 88% of America’s population growth is composed of African American, Asian, and Hispanic consumers; particularly Hispanics, who comprise about 18% of the total U.S. population. Hispanics are the fastest growing segment, having grown 11% since the 2010 census to more than 56 million. Multicultural groups now account for 35% of the American population.
“Some companies just aren’t bringing this growth into focus,” says Geoscape CEO César Melgoza. “Companies that aren’t prioritizing this growth are essentially investing is flat or shrinking markets. That’s probably not acceptable to their constituents,” he says. This leaves marketers with an interesting challenge, or rather, opportunity; one that has little to do with political correctness and everything to do with furthering business growth.
Many businesses struggle with prioritizing or realizing a multicultural marketing strategy. Here, Melgoza offers seven tips that will help keep marketers and their organizations remain relevant to the ever-changing face of their target consumers.
1. Understand the level of urgency
“Understand that business is about growth and growth is multicultural. If you invest heavily in general markets, then that may not be the best use of budget.”
2. Measure everything
“Start with a benchmark. Identify your penetration into a segment now, monitor that penetration, and use that data to improve it.
3. Build a robust business case
“Link this growth with what the company is doing now to differentiate itself and use it to plan how the company will continue to differentiate itself in the future.”
4. Develop a sound strategy
“Walmart is an example of a company that absolutely cannot ignore multicultural marketing. They know their growth is coming from these segments and they’ve positioned their company and products around this.”
5. Address all touchpoints in the operation.
“It’s not just about marketing communication, or having cool ads. Develop all channels. How is the call center experience and does it direct consumers to where they need to go? Does the in-store experience match what’s been advertised? Does the product itself match what’s been advertised?”
6. Scale these efforts according to the opportunity
“Sure, your multicultural efforts are great in Austin, but what about everywhere else? Businesses like Kroger are scaling multicultural marketing across their retail network because they’ve seen how successful it is.”
7. Evangelize the organization
“A lot of the people resistant to this type of change are middle management. The executives get it. The stockholders get it. Some people may think this is a political or ‘do-good’ issue. They may not understand that their growth hangs on this. You need to grow, and growth is multicultural.”
It’s a simple question: Do you need a style guide? And it has a simple answer: Yes. Any brand, company, blog or webpage that wants to create and maintain consistency and a professional feel should have a style guide.
Style guides are a must for any publisher with multiple employees. This is especially important if more than one person will work on any brand elements (from the website to printed materials), and to ensure that transitions between employees are seamless in the eyes of users. Today, we take a look at well-documented style guide from MailChimp, and highlight things you can take away in creating your own document for the first time.
What Is a Style Guide?
A style guide is the ultimate resource for visual and writing tone for your brand. The guidebook is not intended to be read cover to cover (and should not be written that way), and should be organized as a simple resource manual.
Style guides cover two big areas: visuals and writing. For website or app development, a style guide may contain a third area, defining how the user interface should work or coding specifics.
A style guide is a fluid document and once written should be updated regularly. When creating this document, consider how it will look and be used during the process. Your style guide should follow the styles defined. Use your brand’s color palette and the same writing style that you would like to be associated with the brand.
MailChimp’s “Voice and Tone” style guide follows this concept. The tone is simple and the guide looks and feels like the website. In addition, MailChimp also has a “Brand Assets” guide for how visual elements are used.
Getting Started
Creating a style guide from scratch is not a task that you can complete in an hour. It will take some planning and time. But once the document is created and if updated regularly, it can be a time-saver in the long run. Before you write the first word of instruction, gather (or create) this list of materials to make compiling your guide that much easier.
Branding definitions, styles and logotypes: This includes examples of how logos can and can’t be used, as well as fonts, sizes and color swatches.
Font palette: List all the typefaces, sizes and colors that are acceptable. Include specs for how each is used from styles for body type, headers, quotes, labels, captions, navigation elements and so on.
Images, icons and buttons: Define style, color, size and placement of each.
Styles for forms or calls to action: Define what type of information can be collected and how data collection works. Write and include disclaimer information.
Basic layout: What is the basic template for your design? Include a few examples for how your letterhead, printed materials or web pages should look.
Visual Style
The visuals section of the style guide includes several key parts: acceptable fonts and use, including normal, bold, italic and special styles; color and size for typefaces; settings for bullets or lists; color palette; and image guidelines, such as size, border specs and uses such as text wrap or image and text combinations.
These styles should be written in simple and clear language and include technical specs, such as complete font names, color mix swatches (in RGB, CMYK or Pantone) and usage guidelines for web and print (if applicable). Some brands have both a print and web style guide; other brands opt for one document that covers both.
MailChimp’s style for typography is direct and shows each font and usage. The style guide should include HTML specs as well for website styles. What elements use an H1 versus H2 versus H3 tag. (We’ll go into more detail about web specifics in the HMTL section.)
In addition, visual style guidelines should include a full description of when, how and where branding and logos can be used. This includes how the logo looks, if colors or fonts can be altered (typically not) and in what instances use is acceptable.
Writing Style
Just as important as your visual style is the tone of the writing. It can be jarring for users to come see your brand material and it read light and silly in one instance and cold and sterile in another. How the words come together can help clients or users associated with your products, making a writing style vital.
Key parts of written style include tone; spelling and language; reader level or jargon; voice; structure; use of symbols, numbers and lists; branding or trademark usage; and overriding style guide of choice.
There are a handful of generally accepted written style guides for English-language publications. Most company style guides direct you to use one of these for questions on matters of usage and style.
AP Style: The Associated Press Stylebook is used by journalism and writing professionals in print and online. The style focuses on consistency and brevity and is common because of these attributes.
Chicago Style: The Chicago Manual of Style is used by academics and for scholarly works, businesses and includes the basics for a more formal style of writing.
MLA Style: The Modern languages Association style guide is most commonly used in academics, liberal arts and humanities.
MailChimp’s writing style guide includes great examples of press releases and how the site should read as well as how the brand interacts with customers on social media, the blog and how the company’s trademark jokes should be handled.
User Interface and HTML
If you are creating content for the web, you need rules for digital publication as well. While text, color and tone guidelines will be outlined in other guides, you should also note how the website and user interface should work. (The PRL guide is an excellent resource.)
Text: Explain HTML markup rules. What type of headers are used and how? What’s the difference in usage between an H2 or H3? In addition to usage, what markup does your site use? This is the part of the guide that details every usage.
Images: The rules for image use should be just as clear as for text. Do you have a specified width or height for every image? Is there a standard text wrap or border size? How should alt tags be used. Make sure to answer each of these questions clearly.
Naming and saving files: In addition to how things should look, consider a little web housekeeping. How should files be named and saved in the CMS? Set clear guidelines so that your file maintenance is clean and files are saved at manageable sizes and are easy to find.
Coding practices: Determine and set forth coding standards for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Include examples.
User Interface: If you did not include a visual guide for user interface elements and workings, include it here. What types of inputs are used and how are they labeled? (Do you use words like “Continue,” “Submit,” or “OK?”) Include a “kit” of your site’s user interface elements and usage.
In Conclusion
The best way to get started with creating a must have style guide is to contact:
Advertising is a complex process; the idea is to build a creative that connects with potential buyers. It must be creative while staying grounded in the real world. It is expensive, so it has to produce measurable results. It must be conventional, yet imaginative. Companies are increasingly under financial strain and the result is the advertising business is in trouble worldwide. Agencies are becoming heavily dependent on their campaigns being led by metric this is zapping the creativity from today’s campaigns and fewer ads produce the desired result. Thus, new ideas are needed.
Your Ads must work in an increasingly noisy world. Too much new information is being exchanged. The key to standing out is being simple – this is not easy nor as instantly admired as being complex. Yet, a good ad must be simple, though not stupid – and it must be subjective enough to be credible.
Be Consistent
Consistency builds brand equity or loyalty among all audiences. Nurture customers by keeping them interested in your brand’s activities and development. To maintain your message consistency, the same team that helps build the brand should approve the ads.
Be ‘Salesy’
Advertising has many functions, including selling. But what exactly should be sold? Often ads place too much emphasis on building products, not brands. The result is that too many products have similar brand values. This produces confusion. To break this cycle, ask: What does the advertising want to achieve? Who should be targeted? How can the goal be achieved?
Research shows that people make decisions based on emotions, political beliefs, spiritual leanings and, least of all, rational factors. However, most ads mistakenly are very rational and only stress product benefits, not the emotional aspects of buying. To build the idea of the brand, sell the emotions around it. This makes for stronger campaigns. The challenge is to find the right emotion.
Be Experienced
The most powerful advertising creativity stems from actual experience and culture. Sometimes one culture’s perspective resonates with a client and a product, and that eventually creates ripple effects worldwide.
Be Relevant
To get noticed, ads must be more interesting than their surroundings. Great ads must make an impact, but they also must be accountable for the emotions they create. Strong ads should be likeable, meaningful and relevant. The dominant theme in developing good relevant ads is to focus on the human truths associated with using the product or service.
Be Humorous
Humor is powerful; it can help make people actually like a product. Most ads are rational and present a product’s benefits. But logic is not as powerful as laughter. Humor, which should be based on truth, comes from actually observing ordinary people. Being contradictory is one way to create humorous situations.
Big idea stems from a dramatic change in conditions, a vision, a revolution in approach or thought that creates something new. To produce a creative disruption, follow a three-step process. First, identify the company’s conventional thinking and the basic assumptions behind its operations. Next examine the components of the brand. Then comes the challenge: find the right disruption, the one that can actually benefit the company’s position. This disruption can serve as the platform for a new vision or challenge a brand category or market.
Be Nice
The culture of a creative organization provides the framework for its output. A sick organization will not produce great work. Confident agencies generate good work, since they nurture creativity even in a viciously competitive and subjective industry. Those characteristics do not normally foster support and co-operation, so avoid them. Seek inspiration from talented people and support their efforts. Be a team player.
Body builders and gym rats are fond of a mantra-like motivational phrase – “no pain, no gain” – that can be equally applied to the approach smart marketers take in keeping their brands fit. Successful marketers are well aware that consistent investments in their brand equities (the pain, as it were) can deliver future business gains. The tension comes from the need to deliver consistent profitability in every financial quarter and not merely to boost awareness and attribute ratings over the long haul. To do both, it takes a truly healthy brand and a wise marketer who understands the levers to pull in balancing this dynamic effectively.
When a healthy brand and a wise marketer come together, consistent investments in long-term brand value can be made efficiently, thus creating the virtuous cycle that pays bottom-line benefits, as well. What once seemed like an impossible ambition has now become a widespread and expected business imperative. I’ll elaborate.
The increased focus on short-term profitability has come into new light as the US economy emerges from recession into recovery. Cautious investors, especially the fund managers and bankers driving the stock market, have become both more discriminating and less patient with their investments. As a result, public companies are under greater scrutiny to deliver sustained, profitable revenue growth each quarter and, therefore, from the C-suite down to the cube farm, corporate targets have become imperatives. There is a justifiable lack of patience, or call it tolerance, for focusing solely on the long-range plan.
And unfortunately for brand managers, creating long-term brand equity can be at odds with generating immediate cash flow. It is tempting for a young marketer, especially one who knows he will be rotated to a different brand in a few months, to focus on the bottom line in order to secure a bigger bonus, rather than to invest in winning the hearts and minds of consumers two years out. In fact, the pendulum has swung so far from the “head-in-the-clouds” marketers of old, so motivated by creating beautiful films and winning awards, that it’s worth appreciating those marketers making bold choices to keep their equity in good stead for the future fitness of their brand.
One of the most extreme examples of bold decision-making in the interest of long-term brand health is the recent decision of a wine brand to sit out an entire vintage (and a year worth of sales) because it felt that that season’s grapes were not of sufficient quality to produce a product worthy of their brand name. Chateau d’Yquem is one of the most valuable, sought-after Bordeaux wines, and likely the most famous brand of sweet wine in the world. Their reputation has garnered a cultish following among well-heeled wine enthusiasts around the globe. Unfortunately, the 2012 growing season was so poor that Chateau d’Yquem’s grapes did not fully ripen. As a result, the company took a tough stance in favor of the brand: If it could not make a great product from those grapes, then it would make no product that year. While Chateau d’Yquem might release stocks of prior vintages to ensure cash flow, the overall decision was for huge short-term “pain” to protect and promote long-term equity gain.
Few brands have the financial freedom to sit out a year, but as an extreme case we can learn and be inspired by the position taken at Chateau d’Yquem. To be clear, their decision was a marketing investment. Within the world of CPG, we should be reminded that even the most famous brands – from Coca-Cola to Tide to Dove – continue to invest heavily in the value of their brands, when it might be tempting to drop more dollars to the bottom line. The winning formula is to generate awareness, affinity and preference via inspiring brand mixes delivered consistently and efficiently.
A brand that stands for something meaningful and can deliver that message through every touch-point, every pack, even every business decision, is positioned well for long-term health. Delivering this message consistently over time reduces churn, consumer confusion and, more importantly, the cost of marketing investments, which benefits the bottom line. It’s a virtuous cycle – perhaps in the same way that consistent trips to the gym make each workout a bit easier and the cumulative effort all the more effective.
Branding is a process that is continually ongoing. A brand that is not flaccid cannot be created in an afternoon of decisions regarding your brand identity, messaging, logo, corporate colors, web design, and packaging. Rather, we all know that a successful brand is built from a huge number of logical decisions that grow out of powerful customer research and a brand strategy. If your goal is to own and managing a leading brand you must follow these 10 researched rules brand leaders survive by.
1. Be willing to share! Don’t hold back. People respond kindly to the most generous people so you will be rewarded by your open-sharing policy.
2. Be prepared for serious competition and your new brand strategy. Adjust to your new reality and do it with so much style everyone will think you planned it that way.
3. Be a greater listener than a talker. Brand leaders show they are more interested in learning about your customer’s needs and wants more than explaining their services. Remember, people are interested in telling their story, not necessarily listening to yours, at least not until after they’ve told theirs first.
4. Realize that you need to be a team player. Be confident and get down to business.
6. Be a friend! Always be willing to do better each day so you can help others do better. Apply this to your everyday life and it will never let you down professionally or personally.
7. Be a pursuer of big ideas and dreams. Don’t put them on your shelf to sit year after year. Try them out and see if you can make something of them. You’ll never know if you don’t try.
8. Stand out, be and industry visionary. Steve Jobs was always out in front of his competition and customers and offered something new and different. A capability of coming out with something new served Apple very well as a brand leader for years.
9. Be someone who knows the details. Be known as a person that follows through, finishes every item they start. Every single opportunity that comes your way regardless of how large or small be the one that is determined to tackles it full heartedly.
10. Don’t sit around waiting for an idea or opportunity. Instead, get up and make something happen!
Your business succeeds or fails based on the connection that you share with your customer. Borrowing a few tricks from Hollywood will help you strengthen that connection.
Story is the secret ingredient that makes an emotional connection powerful and lasting. A show about a high-powered political “fixer” doesn’t immediately sound interesting. But a show about a fixer who finds herself at the center of the biggest political SCANDAL of the century because she’s sleeping with the president–that’s something you can’t stop watching. In my twenty years as a Hollywood story analyst, I’ve learned a few storytelling tricks you can use to add emotion to your brand and build a connection with your customer. Here are four basic building blocks of great stories you can use with your brand:
1. Trigger Point 2.Dilemma 3.Action 4.Goal
Trigger Point
Michael Hauge, author of Writing Screenplays That Sell, said that a story begins when an undeserved misfortune happens to your lead character. In other words, stories start with a problem, or trigger point. For example, in the show The Good Wife, the trigger point is when Peter, Alicia’s husband, goes to jail for his involvement in a sex and corruption scandal.
When you’re creating the story of your business, start with your customer. What will their trigger point be? What will make them want to use your service or buy your product? Then consider the story of your business came to be. What was thetrigger point that provided the inspiration for the company?
For some entrepreneurs, the two triggers will be the same–you may have experienced the same need your potential customers are facing, and created your business to solve that problem. For example, in 1970 Tom and Kate Chappell had a hard time finding wholesome, natural personal care products for their family. That trigger point in the story of how they came to found Tom’s of Maine is the same trigger point that leads customers to buy their products. Tying your brand to this kind of personal story will help you appeal to the consumer emotionally.
Dilemma
In story, the dilemma is what happens after the trigger incident, the moment when the central character gets stuck between a rock and a hard place. The trigger incident happens to the character, but the dilemma sets up the moment when she makes a difficult decision that sets the plot in motion. In the FX show The Americans, the trigger incident is when a married Russian spy team, Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, fail to get a former KGB Colonel to escape on time. This leads them into the dilemma: do they let him go or kill him?
What dilemmas do your customers face? When Kraft developed Lunchables, they tapped into a key consumer dilemma: do I pack lunches for the kids or get them to school on time? According to Michael Moss, author of the book Salt Sugar Fat, the real marketing genius that drove Lunchables’ success was the ability to connect emotionally with both parents and kids. They told a story about not only a working parent’s stressful morning, but a kid’s boring lunchtime. Understanding their customers’ dilemmas helped them forge emotional connections by offering possible solutions to real problems.
Action
Once you’ve created a story for your brand, you need to make sure that all your actions help advance that story and lead the customer towards achieving their goal. Don’t let your story get bogged down or take a sudden, unexpected left turn like X EXAMPLE. Dove has been very successful at connecting their brand to an emotional story about women finding confidence in their own natural beauty–which is why it was so damaging when consumers began to complain that their ads were appearing on Facebook pages that contained violent, sexist content. Every interaction with your company, whether it’s seeing an ad in an unexpected place or speaking with customer service, is part of your brand’s story. When your actions align with the customer’s goal, you get results: you strengthen your connection with the customer and improve your chances of repeat business.
Goal
In story, the resolution of a plot links back to the opening dilemma because the goal is the answer to the initial problem. In the story of your brand, you want the consumer to feel that by hiring you or buying your project, they’ll achieve their goal. Clarifying this intent in your messaging and your actions will help you connect with your consumer.
Staples understood this when they introduced their “That was easy” marketing campaign. They identified a problem their customers faced–shopping for office supplies is often tedious and complicated–and offered a solution. They backed up the slogan with action, revamping their stores so that the shopping experience would actually be easier. And they even created a physical button customers could push when they achieved their goals. The fact that they’ve sold millions of Easy Buttons underscores how powerfully people crave resolution–and how warmly they’ll embrace a company that helps them achieve it.
The global e-commerce industry is expected to generate $1.2 trillion in sales by the end of this year, driven largely by the changing shopping habits of consumers, as they increasingly browse and buy across mobile, tablet and even social networks. Despite this predicted growth, 2014 will not be a year for retailers to rest on their laurels.
Retailers will have access to more information about their customers’ preferences and shopping habits than ever before and retailers must take steps to better understand the purchase journey. This insight will give retailers the understanding they need to develop relevant content and personalize deals, and ultimately help to generate more sales. Shoppers are looking for a richer, more personal shopping experience and retailers must reassess both how they sell and what they sell if they are to thrive.
Here are 5 top tips for those retailers wanting to stand out from the crowd next year using personalization:
1. Content shopping will be king The lines between entertainment and shopping are blurring further and 2014 will see more retailers offer shoppers a richer, content-led shopping experience. Driven by the media, which have become retailers in their own right to bolster dwindling revenues from advertising and subscriptions, savvy retailers are using multimedia content to make the shopping experience more engaging. Retailers recognize that shoppers are no longer satisfied by the vending machine model of the last decade; they want to be entertained and informed as they browse the web and make purchasing decisions.
2. Social will steer retailers’ stocking decisions Social media’s power to influence what people buy is widely recognized and in 2014 it will also influence what retailers sell. The rapid growth of social curation communities like Pinterest, where consumers curate their own collections of products that they like, offers retailers access to invaluable insights in near real-time, something that traditional market research simply cannot compete with. Savvy retailers will use social shopping communities as a temperature check for popular product trends and use this insight to inform and refine stocking decisions.
3. Omni-channel will require a single customer view In any given day a shopper could interact with a brand on multiple devices and through multiple platforms, from mobile browsing in the morning, to lunchtime shopping on a work laptop. In 2014, a top priority for retailers will be to join-up the dots between these channels so that a more comprehensive customer profile can be developed. Insight garnered by analyzing the purchase journey of shoppers will help retailers to streamline the channels through which they sell and personalize the shopping experience, helping to boost bottom lines.
4. Hyper targeting will take the online personalization in-store The long-held dream of being able to target shoppers in real-time, with relevant and personalized location-based offers took a big step forward in 2013 with Apple’s launch of iBeacon, which allows precise, low-cost indoor tracking in stores. There has been much excitement about the prospect of hyper-targeting shoppers on the go and in 2014 retailers will begin to take this proposition more seriously. We expect to see a number of high profile trials of hyper-targeting technology as retailers grapple to deliver the highly personalized experience that shoppers now expect online in their high street stores.
5. Mass customization will make products feel personal Consumers today want something that’s unique and reflects their personality. Retailers understand this and we are seeing more companies offer personalized products, from custom engravings to the ability to select bag zip or pocket colour in advance. There is a huge opportunity for small to medium enterprises to carve out a market niche against bigger retailers, while adding value to existing products through customization. Furthermore, the concept of customization should extend beyond the product itself; retailers need to look at how they can offer a more customized shopping experiences online by using insights gathered in customer profiles.
Big Data is one of the latest phenomenon to hit tech news. This is no surprise as experts in the industry are constantly abuzz about the benefits of Big Data on marketers and any business trying to get deeper insights about their consumers. Yet, for many this new idea of data collection remains a mystery.
So what’s the big deal about Big Data?
Big data is the hottest method for businesses to target their audiences, analyze their outreach, and understand how to craft the most effective marketing effort possible. For the tech world, the devices get smaller, but the data keeps getting bigger.
As we learned to incorporate targeted emotional research into each project, we see more success for our clients, and design that is more than aesthetics or decoration. –
R[E]D – Research : Emotion : Design
Think ‘Big’ — no, seriously
It’s important to first understand exactly what Big Data is. The first thing to consider is that Big Data is made up of the three V’s: Volume, Velocity, and Variety.
Volume is the large amount of data that can be stored. Advances in technology allow us to store a lot more information into smaller amounts of space. As hard-drives get larger, and languages like Hadoopallow programmers to cram more information into smaller code, we are able to store giant data sets that are far larger than any in the past.
Velocity is the rate at which this data is collected. Rather than hand-recorded information, computers are able to constantly record online activity as it happens. This allows for rapidly expanding amounts of data to be stored. Today, computers continuously collect data at a consistent rate from anywhere at anytime.
Variety refers to the vast, diverse types of data that the computers can track. Where humans were once limited to only knowing a small set of information (the information voluntarily given by the subjects), businesses now have a much deeper look at everything a person is doing—from how long they stay on a webpage to what purchases they make online, with minimal error.
Farming social media
So how does social media play into the phenomenon of Big Data?
When you think about it, social media is one of the largest data farms out there. No, I’m not talking about Farmville. Through social media, people are publicly stating their opinions on products and services, checking into businesses, and providing deeper insight into every facet of their lives. This becomes a huge opportunity for businesses to collect and analyze all of these preferences. This provides a sample size of hundreds of millions of people across a handful of social networks all feeding personal data.
With a larger set of information to draw from, businesses get a stronger understanding of how consumers behave. They can analyze broader trends based on what people are doing with a higher accuracy rate because everyone is contributing unfiltered information.
This constant stream of social data allows companies to discover new, creative ways to showcase and analyze consumer behavior. The only limit is how they connect all the data together.
Connecting big data and social
So how is this data shaping tech? The possibilities are endless.
At its most basic, companies can now effectively monitor everything said across different social networks. With this virtual omnipresence, companies can quickly respond to a customer complaint, suggest a purchase, or promote their product to their audiences.
Machine Learning allows businesses to engage with users and garner the most reach possible. By collecting heaps of data from previous posts and user activity, computers are able to analyze what is the best time to post to social networks.
Digital storytelling is also an interesting way to break down all the information in a fun and informative way. By now, majority of people have seen a compelling infograph, but some content creators are going deeper. SGI, a digital graphic and computer solutions company, made a video showing the evolving conversation around Hurricane Sandy. Through the video you can see the GPS locations of tweets regarding the hurricane as it travels across America.
The most popular (and perhaps creepiest) example of effective use of Big Data was by Target. By tracking consumer purchasing patterns and ‘likes’, Target’s predictive analytics were able to accurately determine that a teenage girl was pregnant before her family knew.
Big Data is still a bit of a mystery as there are new ways of use being developed every day. If you’re interested in diving into this new phenomenon there are different ways you can get your hands on Big Data including: collecting it yourself with low-cost programs, buying the data from database companies, or collecting it from social media monitoring suites.
Either way, don’t sleep on this new concept — it’s an invaluable asset to finding and understanding your audiences. When it comes to data, bigger is better.
R[E]D - Research : Emotion : Design 