Entries tagged with: Marketing
Lucky Number 7
Uwe Gutschow from SaatchiAtPlay, in his presentation in the Nomadic marketing course at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business , outlined 7 rules for success that most successful marketing campaigns are using:
Valugram - The Algonquin Hotel
A hotel in New York once frequented by literary greats has reinstated its literary heritage, with a modern touch. The Algonquin Hotel has partnered with Amazon to offer a free service to guests.
Guests can look forward to a free loan of a wireless reading device called ‘Kindle’. The device comes pre-loaded with a guest’s choice of book and is also available with a list of reading classics for the undecided.
The venture allows Amazon to sample its product, while providing The Algonquin Hotel with an exclusive offering to guests.
Website:
www.algonquinhotel.com
Bright New Thing - Idea Bounty
Idea Bounty is a recent concept within the marketing/design world initiated by Quirk eMarketing.
The process behind it is rather simple. Clients post a brief, describing the creative requirements for a particular project and in turn offer a reward for the wining submission (a bounty). The brief is displayed on the Idea Bounty site together with the “bounty” that is up for grabs.
Submissions are open to the general public, both professional and amateur. In doing so the client is broadening its scope for fresh, new ideas from a number of creative minds, and creatives get to present their work without the pressure of long-term commitments.
Websites:
www.ideabounty.com/
www.quirk.biz/
Bright New Thing: Video Ads in Magazines
Likened to the “moving pictures” concept in Harry Potter, video adverts will soon be appearing in magazines.
September 18th will mark the first video-in-print ad which will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.
The technology uses chips which are able to store up to 40 minutes of video, and is activated much like a musical greeting card. The first advertisers are the US TV network CBS and pepsi.
According to an article by CNET, the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320×240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged with a mini USB cord—there’s a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate.
The IkamvaYouth Careers Indaba
iKineo was invited to speak at the IkamvaYouth Careers Indaba, in Khayelitsha, on the 4th of July.
The Indaba serves as a part of an initiative to educate young minds on their career options and saw a host of top educational institutions and companies either exhibit or host talks.
Kyle was there to educate those interested in a career in Marketing on its basic principles.
For more information on IkamvaYouth visit: http://www.ikamvayouth.org
Marketing in the New World - Bemes, clouds and MySpace
This is some edited ideas laid out by Tom Hayes and Micheal Malone in an article in the The Wall Street Journal
While the authors were specifically talking about marketing for online retail, their ideas have relevance to a new mindset that all marketing today requires. The authors conclude that very few of the traditional techniques of classical marketing (call them Marketing 1.0), or even of eCommerce (Marketing 2.0) will work in the world of social networks. A very different set of tools, concepts and practices is needed. Call it Marketing 3.0. Here are five:
- From loyalty to attention. Before you can win consumer loyalty, you have to capture and reward consumer attention. Old propositions – network television’s tired offer of 22 minutes of canned sitcoms in exchange for eight minutes of untargeted commercials – won’t cut it. Consumers are demanding a better deal.
Some brands are starting to flirt with better exchange rates: Virgin Mobile gives a minute of free phone time for every minute of advertising a customer accepts. Ryan Air recently announced it would offer $15 coach tickets from the U.S. to Europe, subsidized by passenger attention to advertising and in-flight sales pitches.
Smart marketers will of necessity become obsessed with customer attention in the way they once obsessed over customer loyalty. The shrewd brands will create elaborate attention-rewards programs, and incentives to break through the noise and make that critical initial connection.
- From crowds to clouds. Once you get that attention – once you generate heavy traffic to your site, gather a large league of “friends” on MySpace, or spawn a dedicated following on Twitter – how do you monetize the crowd?
Smart brands are turning their crowds into “clouds”: organic, self-forming and often self-governing communities of interest. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Frito-Lay and Harley-Davidson use their clouds as feedback loops to get better faster by obtaining good, timely, often brutally honest customer insights. And the members of clouds can become true believers; they don’t just watch your commercials, they make them.
Right now, few companies are emotionally equipped to wring the best benefits of a cloud, because the most valuable voices out there usually belong to the malcontents. In the old model, customer-service departments aimed to placate or jettison disgruntled customers. In the cloud model, the idea is to cultivate and reward them. That’s not an easy transition.
- From places to spaces. Consumers are increasingly organizing themselves into new communities – not just the big generic social communities, but myriad idiosyncratic slices of narrow, passionate interest (i.e., BlackPlanet, Inpowr and MomsCafe).
These new market spaces, or “meganiches,” may seem small, even strange at first. But when they’re efficiently targeted, they can be highly responsive, lucrative and loyal. Well-established meganiche Web sites include Gamefaq.com for video gamers, Dpreview.com for digital photography aficionados, and Howardchui.com dedicated to mobile phone zealots.
With this shift toward self-organization by consumers, national advertising campaigns as we know them will increasingly become a waste of time and money for many companies. The trick for brands is to cohabit social spaces with these consumers. Social media, and its verb form, “friending,” requires entirely new forms of advertising: bottom up instead of top down, personal rather than public, and subtle rather than full frontal.
- From memes to bemes. In the Age of Broadcast, good advertising could occasionally manufacture memes of tremendous social impact. Think of “It’s not inside, it’s on top” or “We be doing it.” If you can’t recall an irresistible or effective turn of phrase of late, it’s because it is exceedingly difficult to spread a meme in today’s
fragmented media environment. Marketing 3.0 is now the science of devising and managing directed business memes: call them bemes. Bemes are sent by members of social communities to each other and typically contain a reward or exclusive offer, which, when redeemed, also results in a reward coupon for the sender. This encourages members of social communities to propagate a “viral” ad. One well-documented beme was “The Subservient Chicken” from Burger King.
Brute force marketing won’t work inside social networks. The best online marketing now takes place among people who know and trust each other. Consider how rumors work. Like a rumor, a beme is a bit of useful information that rewards each person who passes it along. Want to be a sensation? Create a beme that consumers willingly accept and share with others.
- From silos to simultaneity. Too many retailers today persist in believing that online shopping is merely a virtual extension of real world shopping. That is a big mistake.
Rather, online and offline need to coexist, and we need to rethink how they relate. For example, to their surprise, companies like BestBuy (which even encourages customers to shop the aisles but buy online from in-store kiosks) and Macy’s are discovering that physical retailing is a perfect way to move units online. That is, the physical world has become the showroom for the virtual realm.
Retailers now must reimagine a world where consumers experience products in stores but ultimately buy them on the Web – Stores are for experiences, the network is for inventories. And what in turn prepares potential customers for what to look for in stores? Online communities.
All of this suggests that Marketing 3.0 is not only different from its predecessors, but actively undermines them. If your marketing program fails to adapt to this new world, it won’t just become irrelevant – it will actually work against you.