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Is your favorite search engine a “tell” to what your shopping habits and brand preferences are? According to a recent study by a collective of marketing agencies, Wunderman, BrandAsset Consulting, Zaaz, and Compete, what you type into your browser’s address bar says a whole lot about you and your personal habits.

As a Microsoft agency partner, Wunderman’s research has a definite preferential tone. Regardless it provides interesting observations toward users personal habits. The study also broke down certain market verticals, like travel (shown below), separating the users into three types: visitors, shoppers, converters.

Based on that data Wunderman compiled the following assumptions can be made about the users of these different search engines when it comes to automotive, travel, retail, and wireless:

• Google: users tend to gravitate to Target and Amazon for shopping. Other characteristics included leading conversion for services like Hotwire, a preference for JetBlue, and a propensity towards a Lexus. Oddly enough, Google users were described in the study as the average Internet Joe – conventional but open to new ideas.
• Yahoo!: users were described as older, and lacking in imagination, with a strong preference for Sprint and AT&T over Verizon and T-Mobile. They were also considered to be skeptical and cautious of new or untried ideas.
• Bing: users were called the early adopters of technology and innovators. They were more likely to shop at Wal-Mart and Toyota was their automobile of choice. The report also described them as middle-aged, highly educated, tech-savvy individuals who considered themselves to be average and spent more than 10 hours a week online.
• AOL: users felt less intellectual than their peers, are often 55 and or older, spend their money more conservatively, want to blend in with the crowd, feel like they’ve gotten a raw deal out of life, expect less from their future, and still use a dial-up modem.

So what does this mean for marketers? David Sable, vice chairman and COO of Wunderman explained it by stating that, “Search begins with the choice of search engine. What this means if you are managing a brand is this: you need to know how consumers relate to Bing, Yahoo! or Google and how that reflects on you.”

To me, it’s no surprise that Wunderman would hold Bing users in such high esteem. Calling them the early adopters and most tech-savvy of the group lends to their audience being perceived as fearless when it comes to Internet shopping. Sans the finding that Google users tend to prefer Amazon, the other three search engines were made to look like their users are hesitant to make online purchases. Adjectives like conventional (brick and mortar), skeptical and cautious (afraid), responsible spenders (bargain shopping) plant the seeds of doubt when it comes to marketing through these channels.

I agree wholeheartedly with Sable’s comments, and I would like to think that the study holds some merit, however I can’t help but feel it would be more effective had it not involved a firm influenced by any of the search engines involved.

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Search Engine Preference Lets Wunderman See Users Hand

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Remember part 1 and part 2 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster Smith? It’s been a while and I’m back to wrap up sharing what I was able to learn from this pioneer of e-commerce video.  I probed Gordon for details on the strategic, long-term approach he’s using to drive multi-channel sales with video.  In all honesty I did NOT learn of the rigid, measured direct-response strategy that I had expected. What I did uncover was how important trust is to a company that is, yes, financially precise and metrics-driven.  Trust, as it turns out, appears to be the main driver in the company’s early, yet large, investment in video.

Uh oh, is this “branded entertainment”?

Now as many of you know I’m not a big fan of traditional, mass media “branding” advertising.   In fact, I view most of it as a poorly executed, glorified art form — not a science.   It thrives on waste.  How many times have you been in a meeting and fallen back on the comfortable excuse of, “well… it did help brand us.”  Unfortunately, many marketing failures are labeled “branding wins” when, in fact, the man or woman running the show (CEO, CMO, COO/CFO) knows better.

In many cases, a campaign’s tactics failed to produce a tangible, strategic business output.  It failed.  You can call it a win but they won’t when you leave the room.

I mention it because most use of video on the Web has been rather gratuitous.  They call it “branded entertainment.”  It has a tendency to be aimless eye-candy that marketers hope gets passed around and… and… and well… create attention/awareness, interest, desire and action (with the action piece being completely un-tracked and rather blindly assumed).

In this tough economy we need new, improved (ie. trackable, reliable, PROVEN) strategies not glorified tactics.  Some call it marketing science and it’s time has arrived.

Now I’m not suggesting Gordon was or is wasting his marketing budget.  What I AM suggesting is that the direct response metrics were left unclear to me and, perhaps, with good reason.  Maybe DrsFosterSmith.com is too early on to really use them or — heck — reveal them to the world.

Increased trust as a valid goal

Let’s assume “better trust” or “more trust” among customers (new and old) is a valid business output.  How tangible is it?  How measurable is it?  Heck, should it even be measured at all?  Now we’re getting into dangerous guru territory where some believe ROI to be a silly pipe dream.  But what if we could assign some tangible behaviors that customers demonstrate to “increased trust?”

Even more wild — what if we just assumed that part of a holistic marketing strategy was a foundation that must be built without expectation of measurement?

Gordon says…

“… we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Why so much content?  Trust.  When it comes to pets and doctors (veterinarians) it’s not about price.  It’s not about color, flavor, speed, accuracy or anything that would be desirable (aspirational).  It’s about TRUSTING someone to help you take care of your pet’s health, well-being or a disease.  Trust matters — in this case perhaps more than anything else.

Measurement: The details

Says Gordon, the future is all about…

“… a blending of a branding relationship development type strategy along with an ROI measurement.  The ROI will be much more difficult to measure in some respects. Certainly we can use analytics tools to find out what people are clicking through on and if they have watched a video and what they did and so on. But frankly some of that gets so granular, you can have data overload, that you’re better off looking at the larger picture to determine what’s going on.”

Now typically these kinds of comments fly red flags with me… but I’m starting to wonder at this point.  Gordon continues as I push him for details on WHAT he measures, why and what it proves…

“Are our sales moving up? Are people spending more time on the site? What’s actually happening? If we then try to drill down to every little item — at some point it becomes impractical apart from what some speakers will tell you at the Internet Retailer or show.

The first thing I study when I want to find out how we are doing is… what did we sell yesterday? What were our overall sales? What products were selling?”

Now at this point I was really starting to wonder, I’ll admit.  This sounds like a BRANDING campaign and perhaps so… one aimed at creating or fostering trust.  Gordon continues…

“Yes, we will look at email returns. Did this email do well? etc. Are people clicking through? What’s our click through rate? Those high level metrics are important so you have got a clue. But at the end of the day, if you have got all kinds of clever little analytical measurements that are telling you what people are clicking through and where they are going… well if you’re not selling anything that doesn’t matter.”

So I think you work from the other end of the pyramid, the sharp point of the pyramid being, ‘Did we sell stuff?’ Then drill down as far as you need to, to find out how you got there. Then stop before you drive yourself crazy.”

Ok… Gordon seemed to come back to measurement as being a worthwhile strategy at the end but it left me scratching my head a bit — but in fairness to Gordon and the company that’s just fine.  It sets us up to ask more questions later

User / customer generated video

And what about user generated content (UGC) — specifically video?  It would seem ripe for opportunity in the pet realm with all those cute cuddly little creatures of all sorts out there.  To my surprise Gordon said no.  His reasoning was remarkably sound and, not surprisingly, all about TRUST.

“Jeff, we will likely not get too much involved in that.. and part of the reason has to do with us being owned by veterinarians and people having that trust relationship with us regarding the information that they get.

We want to make sure that there are no misunderstandings about the veterinary pet care information that we provide. A misunderstanding could happen if we would have, let’s say, a customer quote something that isn’t the latest veterinary information from research and so on… have another customer read that and go, ‘Oh yeah, I should feed my dog X because customer Y said that’s the right thing to do,’ and maybe they didn’t read three entries later our analysis of, you know, ‘That’s actually not a good idea,’ kind of a thing.

I’ll give you just a quick example of something simple. We were on television here a few weeks ago. We brought pets down to Chicago’s In the Loop with iVillage. Had our veterinarians on, the question came up, ‘Is it OK to give milk to my cat?’  Of course, I’m from Iowa.  We grew up doing that. And one of the vets said, ‘Actually, you know, it’s really not a good idea because they can have digestive problems. It’s really not what you should be feeding them.’

So little things like that that seem to be so common knowledge but incorrect are the kinds of things that we would not want to have on the website.

So we probably won’t do that. Our goal is to brand us… and not the other customers. We may at some point have a forum… where people can interact with us, but the scale of that, at times, it becomes so huge that management becomes a challenge. We just started a photo contest this past week. Right now we’ve got 5000 photo entries already in one week, and we’ve got to manage those and determine the winners, and so on.  And I think ditto would happen with a forum.

Now, sounds like a really good marketing message to say, ‘Gordon, did you just hear yourself? If you can bring that many people to your site, wouldn’t you want to do that?’

Well, we do want to have them come but we want to have them be provided accurate information and not just have a cool Web 2.0 interaction with them . We want them to interact with information. At some point we might do the forum so they can interact with each other — I would say there’s some merit to that — but management’s part of the issue for us.

Candidly I think DrsFosterSmith.com’s approach is either a little from the hip or he is just holding back a bit.  In either case I hope Gordon might share more details with us in months ahead.  We marketers are living in historically difficult times where new tools are needed for marketing in the new economy.  As my loyal followers know, I have a decent nose for sniffing out marketing waste and I’ll continue to share my research moving forward.

Still not got your fill of Gordon?  Check out this short interview he was good enough to give me recently while in Chicago.

Excerpted from:
Using Video to Drive Sales in a Down Market

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Trust toward business has reached a new lows:  10% of Americans now say they trust big business (Financial Trust Index). 77% say they refuse to buy from a company they distrust (2009 Edelman Trust Barometer). But the truth is that before the current economic crisis people had already lost faith in business.  Contrast this with the mid-1950s, when about 80% of U.S. adults said that big biz was a good thing for the country and believed that business required little or no change.

Remember part 1 and part 2 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs Foster Smith? It’s been a while and I’m back to wrap up sharing what I was able to learn from this pioneer of e-commerce video.  I probed Gordon for details on the strategic, long-term approach he’s using to drive multi-channel sales with video.  In all honesty I did not learn of the rigid, measured direct-response strategy that I had expected. What I did uncover was how important trust is to a company that is, yes, financially precise and metrics-driven.  Trust, as it turns out, appears to be the main driver in the company’s early, yet large, investment in video.

Uh oh, is this “branded entertainment”?

Now as many of you know I’m not a big fan of traditional, mass media “branding” advertising.   In fact, I view most of it as a poorly executed, glorified art form — not a science.   It thrives on waste.  How many times have you been in a meeting and fallen back on the comfortable excuse of, “well… it did help brand us.”  Unfortunately, many marketing failures are labeled “branding wins” when, in fact, the man or woman running the show (CEO, CMO, COO/CFO) knows better.

In many cases, a campaign’s tactics failed to produce a tangible, strategic business output.  It failed.  You can call it a win but they won’t when you leave the room.

I mention it because most use of video on the Web has been rather gratuitous.  They call it “branded entertainment.”  It has a tendency to be aimless eye-candy that marketers hope gets passed around and… and… and well… create attention/awareness, interest, desire and action (with the action piece being completely un-tracked and rather blindly assumed).

In this tough economy we need new, improved (ie. trackable, reliable, proven) strategies not glorified tactics.  Some call it marketing science and it’s time has arrived.

Now I’m not suggesting Gordon was or is wasting his marketing budget.  What I am suggesting is that the direct response metrics were left unclear to me and, perhaps, with good reason.  Maybe DrsFosterSmith.com is too early on to really use them or — heck — reveal them to the world.

Increased trust as a valid goal

Let’s assume “better trust” or “more trust” among customers (new and old) is a valid business output.  How tangible is it?  How measurable is it?  Heck, should it even be measured at all?  Now we’re getting into dangerous guru territory where some believe ROI to be a silly pipe dream.  But what if we could assign some tangible behaviors that customers demonstrate to “increased trust?”

Even more wild — what if we just assumed that part of a holistic marketing strategy was a foundation that must be built without expectation of measurement?

Gordon says…

“… we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Why so much content?  Trust.  When it comes to pets and doctors (veterinarians) it’s not about price.  It’s not about color, flavor, speed, accuracy or anything that would be desirable (aspirational).  It’s about trusting someone to help you take care of your pet’s health, well-being or a disease.  Trust matters — in this case perhaps more than anything else.

Measurement: The details

Says Gordon, the future is all about…

“… a blending of a branding relationship development type strategy along with an ROI measurement.  The ROI will be much more difficult to measure in some respects. Certainly we can use analytics tools to find out what people are clicking through on and if they have watched a video and what they did and so on. But frankly some of that gets so granular, you can have data overload, that you’re better off looking at the larger picture to determine what’s going on.”

Now typically these kinds of comments fly red flags with me… but I’m starting to wonder at this point.  Gordon continues as I push him for details on what he measures, why and what it proves…

“Are our sales moving up? Are people spending more time on the site? What’s actually happening? If we then try to drill down to every little item — at some point it becomes impractical apart from what some speakers will tell you at the Internet Retailer or show.

The first thing I study when I want to find out how we are doing is… what did we sell yesterday? What were our overall sales? What products were selling?”

Now at this point I was really starting to wonder, I’ll admit.  This sounds like a branding campaign and perhaps so… one aimed at creating or fostering trust.  Gordon continues…

“Yes, we will look at email returns. Did this email do well? etc. Are people clicking through? What’s our click through rate? Those high level metrics are important so you have got a clue. But at the end of the day, if you have got all kinds of clever little analytical measurements that are telling you what people are clicking through and where they are going… well if you’re not selling anything that doesn’t matter.”

So I think you work from the other end of the pyramid, the sharp point of the pyramid being, ‘Did we sell stuff?’ Then drill down as far as you need to, to find out how you got there. Then stop before you drive yourself crazy.”

Ok… Gordon seemed to come back to measurement as being a worthwhile strategy at the end but it left me scratching my head a bit — but in fairness to Gordon and the company that’s just fine.  It sets us up to ask more questions later

User / customer generated video

And what about user generated content (UGC) — specifically video?  It would seem ripe for opportunity in the pet realm with all those cute cuddly little creatures of all sorts out there.  To my surprise Gordon said no.  His reasoning was remarkably sound and, not surprisingly, all about trust.

“Jeff, we will likely not get too much involved in that.. and part of the reason has to do with us being owned by veterinarians and people having that trust relationship with us regarding the information that they get.

We want to make sure that there are no misunderstandings about the veterinary pet care information that we provide. A misunderstanding could happen if we would have, let’s say, a customer quote something that isn’t the latest veterinary information from research and so on… have another customer read that and go, ‘Oh yeah, I should feed my dog X because customer Y said that’s the right thing to do,’ and maybe they didn’t read three entries later our analysis of, you know, ‘That’s actually not a good idea,’ kind of a thing.

I’ll give you just a quick example of something simple. We were on television here a few weeks ago. We brought pets down to Chicago’s In the Loop with iVillage. Had our veterinarians on, the question came up, ‘Is it OK to give milk to my cat?’  Of course, I’m from Iowa.  We grew up doing that. And one of the vets said, ‘Actually, you know, it’s really not a good idea because they can have digestive problems. It’s really not what you should be feeding them.’

So little things like that that seem to be so common knowledge but incorrect are the kinds of things that we would not want to have on the website.

So we probably won’t do that. Our goal is to brand us… and not the other customers. We may at some point have a forum… where people can interact with us, but the scale of that, at times, it becomes so huge that management becomes a challenge. We just started a photo contest this past week. Right now we’ve got 5000 photo entries already in one week, and we’ve got to manage those and determine the winners, and so on.  And I think ditto would happen with a forum.

Now, sounds like a really good marketing message to say, ‘Gordon, did you just hear yourself? If you can bring that many people to your site, wouldn’t you want to do that?’

Well, we do want to have them come but we want to have them be provided accurate information and not just have a cool Web 2.0 interaction with them . We want them to interact with information. At some point we might do the forum so they can interact with each other — I would say there’s some merit to that — but management’s part of the issue for us.

Candidly I think DrsFosterSmith.com’s approach is either a little from the hip or he is just holding back a bit.  In either case I hope Gordon might share more details with us in months ahead.  We marketers are living in historically difficult times where new tools are needed for marketing in the new economy.  As my loyal followers know, I have a decent nose for sniffing out marketing waste and I’ll continue to share my research moving forward.

Still not got your fill of Gordon?  Check out this short interview he was good enough to give me recently while in Chicago.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read the original:
Using Video to Drive Sales in a Down Market with Trust

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You’ll recall part 1 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster Smith.  I’m back to continue learning of his strategic, long-term approach to using video to drive multi-channel sales — and answering your specfic cost questions. After reading part 1 a good number of you wrote to me privately expressing hunger for information on cost.  Gordon didn’t get into the specific cost numbers with me but I can share some of his early struggles and “production / cost migration path” with you.  I wasn’t planning on it so thanks for asking.  I need to know what YOU need to know so keep comments coming please.

I’ll return to the overall measurement and “user generated content”  (use of video supplied by customers) questions in a few days.

Let’s first start by understanding the company’s multi-channel approach to advertising…

Gordon Magee: “This past year we decided we would go into television in a larger way. The owners decided to work on a broader campaign strategy for advertising. We have always done print media and that kind of thing as well but we kind of bundled print media and radio advertising. We haven’t done a lot of radio, but television as well.

So we created a television program. Then about a year ago or so I put in a proposal for us to get video on our website and create our own video studio. That got approved and we started building the studio this fall.”

It may be helpful for you to compare this kind of environment to your own when considering approaching cost and budgeting for ecommerce-focused video.  Next, Gordon shared the evolution of his company’s approach to Web video — specific to how they decided to build (invest internally) rather than lease (outsource).  It’s interesting to note that they were already “in video” by creating TV ads.

Gordon Magee: “We outsource in the sense that we use the production company, one in Los Angeles, one in the Twin Cities when we made the last, more recent commercials. We have used a California production company in the past. But the internal decision to create the video studio was definitely Web related as opposed to TV commercial related.

So they really were separate entities in terms of the business case. I think with the advent of higher speed Internet connections for most people these days – there are a smaller and smaller number that are still on dial-up – and then the infrastructure capabilities that the Internet has that’s going to make video just very, very common, even more so than it is now.

It seemed to be that it was the right thing to do. Our company’s ethos, Jeff has always been to do things internally and develop the expertise internally so that we are not dependent on outside sourcing whenever that’s possible. Because we are a catalog company and have essentially a pretty huge creative department, doing our own photography and that kind of thing forever since the advent of the company, the idea to move into video wasn’t a hard decision.”

So as it turns out Gordon’s approach was driven by the company’s traditional, long-standing belief in “owning” the creative production process and a realization that the distribution channel (the Web) WAS going to explode opportunity.

Gordon Magee: “Script development of course was helped greatly by our creative department who wrote script and art direction terms and then we tweaked those. So we had the internal expertise to try it and not be afraid to do it. So we just decided that we were going to go ahead with that.

I think it (the decision to outsource versus build your own competency) really has to do with people’s expectations. As you know, being in the Internet business, expectations on the Internet continue to rise for the consumer. I think the average consumer probably doesn’t realize the effort that goes into making a website very easy for people to use and all of the other things that are on there, ancillary things like video and articles and so on.

But I think with those expectations arising, we know that video is going to be huge. And certainly with things like YouTube and other sites like that, people are going to those sites. We wanted to be part of that for the educational side of the company.”

Yet there’s more to the company’s history that plays into it’s decision to invest in a PUBLISHING company within their direct response/ecommerce selling infrastructure…

Gordon Magee: “When the company started 25 years ago – this is our 25th anniversary literally this year – when they started we were owned by two veterinarians, Dr. Ray Foster and Dr. Marty Smith. When the company started, one of the things they wanted to do was educate pet owners to be able to use products better and to care well for their pet. That came out of their veterinary background.

Certainly that’s a good marketing strategy as well. But the primary thing was let’s make sure pet owners know what they are doing. They can make better buying decisions and so on.

When they started their catalog they went to catalog conferences. They were new at all this. The catalog experts said, ‘You know you guys are devoting way too much space to education in your catalog. You can’t do that on a square inch analysis basis and have it come out in a cost-effective way.’

They decided very early on to ignore that advice. They dedicated I think 10 to 15% of every catalog to educational articles. That really became our niche for the customer. It also provided a good marketing tool in that people kept the catalogs because the articles were in them.

Over time, that trust relationship developed with the customer. So we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Like many pioneers, the founders were told “don’t do THAT!” when it came to innovating.  Much like Buy.com cut against the grain with its approach (proven successful by now?!) to mixing “media company” with “lowest price e-commerce company.”

What say you, Revenews readers?  I hope this may help clear up questions regarding costs and how to approach them in strategic terms.  I’ll return shortly to wrap up with final thoughts on Gordon’s measurement approach and use of user generated video content.

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Case Study: Video Publishing to Drive Sales (PART II)

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What is an acceptable payoff in terms of time investment put IN and the return taken OUT (actual sales) of social marketing?  What’s reasonable to expect and how soon?  I’ve begun to crack the nut that is this question by talking with people who have direct experience. 

Let’s be honest — when people start talking about marketers becoming publishers in a ’social marketing’ context it can quickly begin to smell like Web marketing snake oil or ‘branded entertainment’ hogwash.  One way of fighting this is to get, as Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice said to me, “operational, not conceptual” — consider less and do more.  But before we start doing it’s critical to justify and plan investments in what amounts to online publishing-with-a-purpose.

Picking up from my prior story, Rok Hrastnik of Direct TV marketer, Studio Moderna (and speaker at the next eComxpo) believes that “the content is your way in … your bargaining chip to win consumers’ attention.”

He says it’s the first step in a relationship (with prospective customers) that, someday, may result in profitable sales.

“The emphasis being on ’some day.”

To me this was beginning to sound a lot like branded entertainment.  Someday?  Yet these are big questions and I knew Rok to be an experienced guy so I pressed him for more.  In fact, I’ll share a couple of examples — focusing on Studio Moderna’s Dormeo.com brand (mattresses and bedding) and Wisconsin pet goods purveyor, DrsFosterSmith.com.  Both companies report steady sales streaming in as a direct result of publishing efforts.

Setting Expectations

How fast have each of these companies managed to track back sales to efforts?  In a matter of months — and make no mistake these are direct response marketing companies that have been around for a good while.  They know how to get things done on the Web (built for direct response).

Ok — so I’ll make quick work of how this gets done. First, this “marketing as publishing” model is not a short-term vehicle as evidenced by companies like Drs. Foster Smith who’s PetEducation.com site produces audio-visual content internally (they don’t outsource).  That takes time to build and get good at (production value) yet Drs Foster Smith have decades of content creation to lean on (they pioneered “magalogs” — content-heavy magazines).

On the other side, the Dormeo brand leverages outside writers to create e-mail newsletter content that establishes continuous, often viral relationships with ’someday customers.’  When I say ‘viral’ (another voodoo word) I’m referring to customers who love to pass Dormeo’s content to family and friends under promotional incentive.

“Content creation and publishing is the long term thing you do to gradually convert your prospects into customers in ways they may actually welcome,” says Hrastnik who’s busy selling products that consumers don’t exactly purchase frequently or on impluse — mattresses!

Yes, “It Depends”

Sure how fast you’ll see results and what those results look like will vary… but be assured the metrics are not “videos viewed” and/or “e-mail open rates.”  They’re far more serious — metrics that please CFOs and CEOs.  No, they’re not always focused on the immediate sales transaction.  Think “actions taken” that involve interaction with the brand itself (sign-ups, registrations, downloads etc.).  Things you’re doing that help prospects move forward along their “chronology of purchase intent” — toward purchase.

Nobody expects immediate results these days.  They just expect you to have a plan that can be measured and adjusted as you execute it.

Don’t forget the most important aspect — making *occasional* calls to action.  Pitching content-lovin’ prospects what you’ve got to sell.  What’s the proper mix of content + sales pitching?  Again, that depends on what you’re pitching to a degree and Hrastnik only tends to talk about it “offline”

Talk Talk

What to talk about?  Stated plainly, Hrastnik suggests if you’re selling things like mattresses, don’t limit yourself to talking with customers about sleeping or your brand — “talk about sex, relationships, health, productivity, motivation, success and other things that people actually care about.”

How do you say it?

Although Bazaarvoices’ Decker is invested in the concept of customer-generated content, he admits, “Customers won’t create content in all the places you need to reach the market and at the times you need to hit your goals.”

“The key is to leverage their voices, either in the creation of your marketing or by using their words directly, to make your ‘talking-at-them’ more authentic, credible and relevant,” says Decker who recommends a listen-and-react model to creating content that could be published as text/email or video.

Aagin, Hrastnik outsources to a team of external writers and graphic artists to get the job done but holds on to the promotional and database marketing aspects.

Just Do It

“Get operational, not conceptual,” says Decker who worries that too many marketers invest time planning and not executing.

He also suggests creating an internal “council” focused on forward-thinking ideas — working to drive them forward across multiple functions and make them happen.  This, he says, fosters the required cultural shift that crosses multiple departments.  Essentially, “it takes a company” to plan and execute a content-driven lead or sales generation strategy.

In the end all of this can be a little scary.  Yet by tying even the smallest of “baby step” trials to their impact on sales — and ultimately profit and loss — progress can be made.  Marketers simply must take a little risk and definately take a note from the book of direct response marketing.

See the original post here:
Justifying Social Marketing: From Publishing to Sales

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The value of brands diminishes during times of recession. People tend to be more focused and interested in value, properties, features and benefits of a product, meaning that buying decisions are more driven by logic than impulse or feeling.Branding in B-to-C means often to spend money on feel-good images and aspirations, rather than on highlighting actual benefits and useful properties of a product at least since the 1920s when Edward Bernays invented Public Relations.  This type of “branding” is usually not done in the B-to-B segment, because feel-good images tend not to solve actual business problems and fulfill business needs.Customer service, sales support, technical support, supply chain compliance, distribution are the things that are focused on, the things that B-to-B customers actually care about. Nothing of that is called branding, but the matter of fact is that it is. If people say about your company that it has great technical support instead of they made good experiences with your tech support when they had issue X, then it is branding. Your name is associated with a good property that is important to your customers. This increases the likelihood to finalize a deal. If an important aspect for a B-to-B transaction is not brought up by a potential customer, it is a good sign that your brand or reputation answered this question for the customer already.

Often is there no practical advice to extract from it, because it is hard to give advice on something that you have never done or experienced yourself. Okay, here is now the example that is based on my own experiences.

Gateway Computers is a consumer brand and used to be a business brand as well. They sold computers to individuals and corporations until 2007 when they sold off their business segment to a company called MPC Corp (which I never heard of before).

I bought in 2006 a tablet PC from the Gateway business unit via their web site Gateway.com. With that computer I purchased a 4 years warranty, which includes second business day on-site support, parts and labor cost covered. I just got a case now, which was the reason for me to get the expensive warranty in the first place. I bought the computer and warranty directly from the brand and manufacturer Gateway, because I felt sure that I will be covered in the case that I need it. I was obviously mistaken.

On the Gateway.com website is a news article published about the sale of their business unit to MPC and a FAQ for Gateway clients about what that means for them. There it states:

The person who I finally got on the phone could not help me at all and seems to me just a person whose job it is to pick-up the phone at all, because nobody else who could help me is left. I got an email to contact, what I did, where I didn’t receive an answer since I sent my email last week on Friday.

The computer is still a Gateway and has the Gateway logo all over it. So I decided to contact Gateway, who was the manufacturer after all. They also make PCs today. I also got the warranty from them and not some third party.

The automated system sent me to a pre-recorded message telling me what I already knew, with the difference that I knew already more than that system, for example the fact that I won’t get support by dialing the proposed phone number.

I played stupid and did not provide any IDs to be able to get through to a person. That person was not much of help of course, because the first level of customer support is not authorized to do any decisions of their own. The supervisor was not much of help either, but that’s not the supervisor’s fault, since he does not understand the dynamics of branding, customer satisfaction and their impact on sales and the company’s overall business success. I was diverted to the Gateway support site, where I am currently attempting to break through the initial line of defense to get to somebody with a better understanding of the underlying issue of this case.

I also wrote a snail mail letter to corporate headquarters and management here in California where I tried to illustrate the problem that they, company/brand Gateway now have on their hand since they seem to have sold it to the wrong company who is not only having problems itself, but causing active damage to the Gateway brand  as well.

If Gateway cares about its own brand image at all, they should step in and actively protect it by delivering what they promised themselves to former customers of them. I don’t care about MPC and consider it a Gateway problem that Gateway can only solve in two different ways.

Option one would be to provide the support that they promised and restore their brand image that they are providing excellent support and service for their hardware.

Option two would be to go out of business themselves or stop making computers and make something else instead, like dish washers or toasters or something like that.

Any other option would be killing their brand, at least for me and maybe the people who encountered the same issues like I did, plus probably a number of people who just heard about those cases and now also don’t trust the Gateway brand anymore.  Gateway still sells PCs to consumers, but there is no technical difference between my tablet-PC purchased via Gateway business than to the one that was sold via Gateway for consumers.

Does Gateway expect me to trust the consumer brand Gateway after this or making any recommendations to get a computer from them to friends, family members or any other person I know and talk about where to buy a computer and which make?

Unfortunately is it not that easy for notebook computers to simply go and buy a spare part yourself elsewhere and replace the faulty one yourself or with help of a friend or independent technician. The part is not much more expensive though and should not matter to you, if you have it flying around anyway, as they do in the case of Gateway. If it would be a desktop PC, I’d go to Best Buy, which is 2 blocks from here and buy a new card for $100 bucks and the problem would be solved.

Then I could spend all the time needed in the world to discuss the reimbursement of my cost, which should have been covered by the warranty. I don’t have this option and the cause in damage because of impact on my business is getting much higher than the cost for the part and labor to install it.

That was the reason for me to get the warranty and to choose a trusted brand like Gateway. They are now proving that this trust was ill founded.

In a time where product and service properties and especially qualities and flaws of them become more relevant even in the consumer market, companies should be twice as careful to avoid any damage to their name, or brand values. Values that were created via hard work of their staff in the real world and not by selling feel-good images. Those values are becoming invaluable in times of recession, because only if those values still exist, does your business have a cutting edge over the completion, when nothing else separates you from them, including the price.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger
Cumbrowski.com Internet Marketing Resources

See the original post here:
The Value of Branding During Times of Recession

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This post is about marketing, online and offline marketing and relevant for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumers (B2C) as well. It also relates to affiliate marketing, specifically affiliate recruitment. It is more for affiliate managers and advertisers, but affiliates might also find some of the stuff useful or at least interesting.
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After having some fun with the video for my interview with the guys from the PepperJam Network in June, I did decide to play around with it a bit more.

I am an amateur when it comes to producing and editing video and I also have no professional video recording equipment. However, I tried to do the best with the resources and experience that I had available to produce a short seven part mini-series, which is only about 27 1/2 minutes in length total.

Since I am using video, my blog post did remain unusual short (compared to my regular posts here at ReveNews.com). Transcribing might becomes an option one day, but as for now a summary of the video content has to suffice.

…

Virtual marketing online is simple and cheap compared to marketing offline and using traditional media. However, the online space is crowded and it will only get worse in the years to come.

Getting attention is not so easy anymore and making a personal connection with customers or business partners in the virtual world was always hard to impossible.

Especially businesses that are literally virtual-businesses only often forget about the power of real world marketing. I present to you some real world examples that are intended to function as reminder and inspiration for you. Something likes case-studies if you will.

I picked a few specific real world marketing campaigns that illustrate how you can not only get attention and new business from it, but also improve customer retention and loyalty.

Here is the first video of the series…

I created a playlist that you can easily access the remaining videos here.

If you have high-speed internet access and prefer better quality videos, you can download the high resolution version (640×480 pixels) of those seven videos among older videos of mine in .AVI or .WMV format via Mediafire.com (free, no delays, no need to sign-up).

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger

See more here:
Making the Connection to the Real World

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What’s the secret sauce of Threadless.com — one of the country’s most innovative small companies? Read on! Inc. Magazine says it best: The Customer Is the Company. Congratulations to my Chicago brothers in customer empowerment!

If affiliate and search marketing is NOT enough then what must marketers be doing? What is it that Jake and Jeffrey are doing “so right?”

Multi-channel marketers need to engage in more experiential-based tactics to woo new customers and increase sales (or leads). But what does that mean? I’ll go further this week. It means a complete re-thinking of the term “marketing.” It means being willing to embrace a bold, new mindset. Why would they? Because they must. Marketing decision-makers and creative strategy developers at the highest level must address new market dynamics that hyper-connectivity is creating.

Specifically, consumers don’t care anymore. They’re busy either tuning out marketing messages or entertaining themselves. Not much else!

The Mindset
Before all else, the key to success in today’s digital, multichannel shopping world is the mindset that Threadless has embraced and run like blazes with. The essence of this mindset is rooted in new, non-traditional concepts. No it’s not some kind of slick voo-doo from a social marketing “expert” but it IS radical. It IS, some say, not marketing at all.

Bottom line: This customer-centric framework is being forced by a hyper-connected, always-on interactive digital ecosystem. Success in this brave new world is about recognizing and acting on this shift. Sooner or later we ALL need to get in the game… at some level.

The Doctor is In
“Advertising is about supply finding and ‘creating’ demand,” notes Doc Searles, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “[There is] nothing wrong with that. At its best, it’s good and necessary stuff. But think about what will happen when demand can find and create supply.”

Searles wrote about this concept years ago (that makes him rather smart!). Today, the vision is becoming reality. Search engines, described as “databases of human intentions,” quickly birthed search engine marketing (SEM) to capitalize on human gestures communicating commercial intentions. Masses of customers created and articulated their demand in the form of search queries. What did affiliates do? I don’t think I need to really discuss that… they, obviously, monetized the livin’ daylights out of the situation by getting in between customers (demand) and marketers (supply).

SEM quickly was followed by reverse online auctions such as Hotwire, Priceline and LendingTree. Here, customers create demand and go further: they actively negotiate pricing. Marketers compete for their business. When taken to an extreme the idea of allowing customers to create demand and bring it toward supply can be… well, scary. It’s called “crowdsourcing”, and it’s not for the faint-hearted. (sssh… here’s a cool, Canadian crowdsourcing company flying under the radar with big dreams)

Art Project Gone Wild: Community Style
Just the same, Threadless customers are communicating their demand… yet the company is going even further. Jake and Jeffrey are allowing the community at large to create supply (highly artistic tee shirts) and then “voting up” that supply (creating true demand) based on the uniqueness of the product. It’s totally market driven.

“Threadless was built as an art project,” says founder Jake Nickell. “It was really just a hobby for us. We were just two members in the community trying to help people find a way to express themselves and get their work shown to a large audience.”

Again, supply creation — namely, product design and production — is driven entirely by customer/artists. For example, customers of Threadless.com band together (create demand) and design their own clothing (supply/inventory). Product is then sold to the group of buyers.

Most marketers, for now, aren’t quite as experimental. Yet elements of crowdsourcing’s power are catching on and should be kept in mind by marketers. Why? How? More on that next week but what about YOUR thoughts, fair readers? Is crowdsourcing just too much for most marketers to contemplate? It IS more of a business model, after all. Am I crazy to think that the elements within crowdsourcing are EXTREMELY valuable to “traditional marketers” running traditional businesses? (that may never use a crowdsourcing biz model)

Go here to see the original:
Secret Sauce: Most Innovative Company in America

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