Pulling from logo warehouses or crowdsourcing design may sound tremendously appealing for filling in the blank spot on the top of your letterhead.
You want something trendy and cool, even if it’s just to check off a task on your to-do list.
It doesn’t make sense for a company to use a logo that has an immense lack of understanding. A logo alone isn’t the solution to developing a strong brand. Strength comes from understanding company culture, which is a giant part of a larger brand strategy. Understanding provides an opportunity to develop cohesive and consistent messaging. This requires customization, knowledge and skill. RED has acquired all the skills needed to build you a solid foundation that is not hollow and inauthentic.
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.
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.
How can a small company compete against industry giants? The best way is to make a lot of noise. This year, one of the smallest advertisers on the Super Bowl is attracting lots of attention as it strives to break through against Coke and Pepsi.
SodaStream (NASDAQ: SODA) has had a bumpy ride over the past year. The $562mm (FY2013 preliminary revenues) Israeli company makes in-home carbonators that allow consumers to transform tap water into sparkling water or soft drinks. Sodastream has already made significant inroads in Europe (the company estimates that it has 19% household penetration in Finland, 9% in the Czech Republic and 6% in France), and has a small-but-dedicated following in the U.S.
Last year’s Super Bowl helped SodaStream achieve a threshold level of awareness, particularly when its aggressive Super Bowl spot was rejected by CBS (an edited version ultimately aired during the big game).
This year’s spot is tamer, but it has attracted even more attention. Not only was it again banned from the big game, but the choice of Scarlett Johansson has attracted both positive and negative attention. For the moment, though, it’s helping tiny SodaStream gain enough attention to make a big investment pay off.
And it can’t come a moment too soon …
Challenging 2013 Results
SodaStream’s revenue growth for 2013 was around 30%, which sounds great until you consider the 50% growth the company experienced in 2012. The preliminary 2013 earnings report undercut analyst estimates by $5mm and sent shares tumbling by 20% in mid-January.
“We failed to deliver our profit targets and are disappointed in our fourth quarter performance,” CEO Daniel Birnbaum wrote in the earnings release. “These preliminary results reflect a challenging holiday selling season in the U.S. and several factors, mostly from the second half of the quarter that negatively impacted our gross margin.”
Translating this into marketing language, Birnbaum is suggesting that the company many have discounted heavily to increase market penetration and that the results were not what the company had hoped.
Using Rejection To Gain Acceptance
And yet, from a brand standpoint, SodaStream has made some smart moves in the past few years.
Around four years ago, the company created an art installation that dramatized the empty soda bottle waste created by a single family. Thirty of these installations travelled around the world until 2012, when a South African installation attracted the attention of the local Coca-Cola bottler, which issued a cease-and-desist letter to SodaStream. Instead of desisting, SodaStream fought back, and got lots of mainstream media attention with an environmental version of the David & Goliath story.
Also in 2012, the brand forged a partnership with legendary adman Alex Bogusky, who had collaborated with the Center for Science in the Public Interest to launch a spot attacking soft drinks called “Real Bears”.
That rejection helped the SodaStream get noticed during the Super Bowl last year.
An Unexpected Sponsorship
SodaStream planned to pursue a more conventional path for its second Super Bowl appearance this year. A chance encounter changed the strategy. SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum described it to me this way:
I’m sitting in my office in Tel Aviv and we get a phone call that there’s an American in Paris looking to find a gas replacement for her soda maker. I contacted my Paris office and I asked them to get the replacement to this consumer. A week later I get a handwritten thank-you note from S.J. It turns out S.J. was Scarlett Johannsen. She drinks only sparkling water from SodaStream and travels with it wherever she goes, etc. She just loves the brand. We were on a path to do a different commercial for the Super Bowl, but when this happened we changed directions.
Birnbaum previously worked on celebrity sponsorships for Nike, so he had a very clear idea of the potential risks and rewards of engaging a celebrity for SodaStream. Unlike the typical paid endorser, however, Johansson was already a brand enthusiast. She travels with a SodaStream and has bought them for her friends and relatives. The Johansson partnership quickly propelled SodaStream into the limelight of the SuperBowl, getting breathless coverage from celebrity media outlets.
SodaStream also managed to engineer another mini-scandal that helped goose the coverage: rejection of its proposed Super Bowl ad from Fox. Here’s the spot they submitted, which has just been released online today:
Three words caused the rejection: “Sorry, Coke and Pepsi.” So the SodaStream spot that actually runs on the Super Bowl won’t call out the competition. But the rejection has created news.
Unexpected Problems
The Johansson partnership also created an unexpected controversy, because of Johansson’s status as an Oxfam ambassador since 2005. Oxfam supports the BDS movement, which boycotts businesses in the Israeli settlements/occupied territories. SodaStream has a manufacturing facility in the settlement of Maale Adumim with 1300 employees. The boycott supporters used Johansson’s partnership with SodaStream to push Oxfam to drop her – and to make headlines.
BDS calls SodaStream “part and parcel of this system of oppression“. Birnbaum counters: “we are part of the Palestinian economy and we’re employing 500 Palestinians who support families and we pay them Israeli wages and give them health insurance. There can be no peace without jobs.”
Oxfam believes that businesses that operate in settlements further the ongoing poverty and denial of rights of the Palestinian communities that we work to support. Oxfam is opposed to all trade from Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law.We have been engaged in dialogue with Scarlett Johansson and she has now expressed her position in a statement, including stressing her pride in her past work with Oxfam. Oxfam is now considering the implications of her new statement and what it means for Ms. Johansson’s role as an Oxfam global ambassador.
I remain a supporter of economic cooperation and social interaction between a democratic Israel and Palestine … SodaStream is a company that is not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbors working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights.
The question of what will actually create peace in the Mideast is thankfully beyond the scope of this column, but it’s clear that this controversy holds some danger for SodaStream. Until the Johansson partnership raised the profile of this issue, it was not headline news for SodaStream. Now it has generated headlines in mainstream news and disapproving commentary from some of the New York media.
SodaStream has most often been cast as the spunky upstart in media stories of the past few years, so this is the first time the company has found itself on the wrong end of a media narrative. It’s too early to tell whether this story will fizzle away or take hold and cause real problems for the Israeli soda maker. But it is already a concern in the U.S. because the very small community where this story is gaining traction overlaps with the strongest supporters of the brand.
If the story fades, SodaStream can move on unhindered. If it gains momentum however, SodaStream may need to decide whether it feels more passionately about its environmental mission or its approach to the Israeli/Palestinian question.
Can SodaStream Break Through?
Looking past the controversy, can the Johansson partnership and a second Super Bowl spot can help SodaStream break through? On one hand, the company has gotten lucky again: they’ve kept themselves in the news throughout the coverage of Super Bowl advertising building up to the game itself. They’ve already generated millions of impressions that will lead to new users. It’s still a short spot during a long game, and the creative itself probably won’t break through. So we’ll have to wait until Sunday to see whether the viral effect propels SodaStream through the uprights.
The brand needs to ensure that the issues being raised by Oxfam and BDI don’t take hold in the US. SodaStream has one clear mission as a brand: to present an environmentally friendly, less expensive alternative to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Its single-minded goal should be to force Coke and Pepsi to make their branded drinks available on its machines. Anything that distracts from this mission dilutes SodaStream’s strength.
People’s taste for shiny stuff might be rooted in a very basic instinct.
The evidence that people are drawn to shiny things is all around us: from the pages of lifestyle magazines to the page stock of lifestyle magazines. One logical explanation for this cultural affection is that we’ve come to associate gloss with wealth and luxury. If the story ended there, though, we wouldn’t expect very young infants to enjoy shiny things as much as they do, nor would we expect remote tribes like the Yolngu of Australia to celebrate shimmering aesthetics as much as they do. There’s clearly a bit more to glitter than gold.
Recently a group of marketing scholars considered the question from an evolutionary angle. They were intrigued with some earlier research showing that “children who were presented with glossy objects licked them,” one of the scholars, Vanessa M. Patrick of the University of Houston, tells Co.Design. In that work, published several years ago, infants seven to 12 months old put their mouths to glossy plates much more than to dull ones. Children had also been seen lapping shiny toys on the ground, the way an animal might drink from a puddle.
Patrick and her fellow collaborators, from Ghent University in Belgium, wondered if there might be something more to these reports than kids just being kids. Maybe the connection between drinking and shiny design was an evolutionary artifact–a sign that our crush on glossy is rooted in a primitive desire for water as a vital resource.
So they designed a series of six experiments to test that idea. First they had to demonstrate that preference for glossy is a natural reaction rather than a learned association with the good life. That wasn’t too tough. In two simple surveys, they established that both adults (via leaflets) and four- to five-year old children (via pictures of Santa) preferred glossy to matte finishes. The kids were too young to appreciate marketing efforts connecting bling with wealth; to some degree, their preference had to be innate.
The appeal of glossy might not be entirely linked to wealth, but it might still reflect a basic enjoyment of pretty things. To study that possibility, the researchers blindfolded 46 test participants and handed them a piece of paper. Half received a glossy sheet, half a matte sheet. Participants who held the glossy sheet rated it as higher quality and more attractive than those in the matte group–even without getting a look at it.
The tests suggested there’s more to glossy than cultural connection or visual appeal. Those findings alone didn’t mean a biological urge for water played a role, but the researchers did collect some clues to that effect. In the blindfold test, for instance, participants envisioned more water when asked to imagine a landscape depicted on the page–showing a perceived link between shiny and wet. In another test, this one without blindfolds, participants rated aquatic images as glossier than desert ones, although in truth there’d been no difference.
As a final experiment, the researchers divided 126 test participants into three groups. One group ate a bunch of crackers without any water. Another ate the crackers but also drank some water. A third did neither. Afterward, each group looked at eight photographs, half on glossy paper and half on matte. All three groups preferred the glossy pictures, but the groups that had eaten crackers rated them as much more attractive. And the thirstier participants got–in other words, the greater their desire for water–the more they preferred glossy.
Taking all their findings together, the researchers argue in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology that an instinct for water may indeed play a role in fondness for glossy. “First and foremost, this paper shows that our preference for glossy might be deep-rooted and very human,” says Patrick. “It is humbling to acknowledge that despite our sophistication and progress as a species, we are still drawn to things that serve our innate needs–in this case, the need for water.”
There’s a great deal to like about this study. The researchers crafted their experiments carefully, tried to eliminate alternative explanations, and presented a theory for others scientists to explore further. At the same time, there’s a lot to question. People may associate shiny stuff with wealth, for instance, but they associate water with wealth, too. Parsing out how much of the glossy-water connection is socialized and how much might be instinctual is a great challenge that no study can hope to conquer on its own.
Beyond that, any explanation for why we prefer glossy to matte must also account for the fact that we don’t always prefer glossy to matte. Sometimes glossy interferes with readability (say, a sign that reflects bright light). Sometimes it conveys the wrong message (say, a glossy food ad that conjures up thoughts of grease). And sometimes it’s just enough already and we want something different. Evolution might drive some preferences, but preferences evolve, too.
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!
The digital seduction of communication was quick and intense; marketers didn’t just walk away from print, they sprinted. We are all guilty of having jumped onto the digital bandwagon and for a while the consumer was just as thrilled about it as we were.
For the past 15 years we have been surfing the crest of a technological tsunami that has not only forced us to rethink the way we interact with consumers but, more significantly, has empowered consumers in a way we haven’t seen before. The consumer is now firmly in control; he decides what he sees when he sees it, and what he does with it.
Digital is here to stay and rightly so—it’s fantastic—but the novelty has worn off. Technology is now so deeply integrated into our lives it’s almost invisible. Consumers have long since stopped feeling flattered and rewarded by personalization, it has become an expected minimum. Today we’re all busy weaving marketing automation into our strategies and letting behavioral tracking drive recommendation engines. Stalked by abandoned shopping carts, the poor consumer is starting to feel like the digital equivalent of a gazelle on the African plains; hunted rather than served.
So, what’s the problem? If the technology is working and the consumer expects it, why are more and more companies finding it harder to sustain engagement through their digital channels?
The reality is that technology has moved on but our brains haven’t. You can’t tweet your way around evolution. Memories, particularly brand memories, don’t come easily. It can take up to two years for a memory to propagate into our long-term memory and at any time during that process our emotional brain can reject it. It isn’t our logical brain (the neocortex) that drives decision-making and memory formation; it’s our emotional brain (the limbic system). The emotionalcore of our brain rules the roost and the simple facts of evolution can’t be disputed. When it comes to forming a memory, repetition is vital, definitely, but repetition of the same flat digital message is pointless.
Digital lacks the things we need most to quiet our unconscious, highly suspicious emotional brain—a presence in the real world. Just seeing or hearing something isn’t enough. We need to touch, smell, taste; we need to really ‘feel’ it. Memories are associative and without the qualification of more tangible emotional inputs to balance emotionally deficient experiences, the brain finds it super easy to reject a concept—no matter how many times an individual has received a message.
Smart marketers are putting print back in the mix. But, really smart marketers are using print in ways we haven’t seen before because the technology wasn’t there. Print serves an incredibly important role in the mix. Not only does it stick around when the power goes out, it feeds neural activity in a way digital alone simply can’t match. You can feel it.
Most printers have some form of digital capability these days, but very few have the technology or expertise to integrate with digital channels at an immersive level. Print is an emotional medium and thanks to digital technology we can use it in ways that ignite experiential strategies. If you want your brand experiences to be cognitively sticky, you need to put print back on the agenda. Period.
I got wind that Hudson Printing (based in Salt Lake City) had installed an HP T350 Digital Web Press—this machine is setting a new standard in digital printing, it’s very exciting stuff. As a neuromarketing geek, I had been desperate to see one of these machines up close. One of the biggest gripes we neuromarketers have is that applying the full spectrum of behavioral adaptations has always been prohibitively expensive; consequently, most clients scale back and do the bare minimum. When I say adaptation I’m not talking about adding a name to the headline or swapping out a picture here and there, I’m talking about real adaptation; cognitive fluency, gender fluency, priming, variable content etc.
Hudson Printing has a long, distinguished history with web printing and its offset, digital and fulfillment capabilities are impressive. With over 100 years behind them, you can feel the commitment to service in the air; the place buzzes with it. Their diverse and very stable client base allowed them to not only weather the economic downturn, but pop out of it stronger than ever. Good to know, but I’ll be honest I was expecting the standard tour of their new ‘publishing’ capabilities with the usual rhetoric about customization of print and the benefits of large-scale digital printing. I wouldn’t have been disappointed either, but I was totally unprepared for what I actually got. Mind officially blown.
Hudson has been quietly ramping up their immersive capabilities and digging deep into the digital world. Paul Hudson, president and descendent of the Hudson family, is a man on a digital era mission—immersive integration, true flexibility, with a tiny environmental footprint. Hudson has customized its installation of the HP T350 in a truly unique way—even HP is excited about it. Their vision for this installation is to provide a seamless bridge between traditional offset and digital printing. Paper technology is rushing to catch up with digital, but this press can handle traditional as well as digital stock. Long and short of it, you can run a web job on the traditional press and finish it up on the digital press; or you can just use the T330 to run sophisticated variable jobs in quantities that were previously too large for most companies to afford.
The T350 has many outstanding features, obviously the implications for complete behavioral adaptation got me excited, but as a lover of all things printed, I have never been ok with the some of the limitations of digital in terms of finish. This inkjet printer has got that licked. State-of-the art bonding techniques and a killer drying system means that the finish off this press is as close to off-set as you’ll ever get. An added bonus is that because the inks are aqueous, they are virtually VOC free. It’s an outstanding installation (which includes some killer first-in-North-America finishing solutions), which I’m sure will be copied as word gets out, but right now this company is doing something amazing with this technology.
The new press was impressive enough, but it’s their vision for the future that really blew my mind. Paul Hudson has gathered together a team of people who have deeper expertise in key strategic areas than any printer I have come across. Paul Gardner, director of Media & Publishing Solutions is obsessed with aligning printing and digital media—his enthusiasm is infectious and his expertise is really impressive. Chris Ross, Chief Marketing Officer, is a ‘proper’ marketer who really knows his stuff. The Hudson team is made up of people you can talk strategy with; they get it and they’re driving it.
Paul Hudson is passionate about adding value at every stage of the process, but his commitment to adding value to the ultimate consumer really stands out for me. This is a guy who is determined to create an amazing future for his company and his customers. What he probably doesn’t realize is that he is creating a new standard for print shops. I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next out of this group. One thing is for sure, when I need full-blown adaptation, immersion and integration of print into a multi-layer program, this is the place I will be going to achieve it.
I literally walked out of that building and thought, “Wow, I just met an industrial
pioneer.”
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.
R[E]D - Research : Emotion : Design 