Tag Archives: Brand Experience
Traveling last week, I found myself immersed in the busiest travel season of the year – the pre Christmas rush. And while I moved from one line to the next, I found time to catch up on a backlog of recent articles on the incredible growth of tablets. Standing amidst a myriad of travellers had me pausing to think back a few months ago to when my wife and I packed up the kids and headed out for a late summer holiday, and the trials and tribulations of traveling with, in our case, an iPad.
My set and practiced packing of technology routine underwent a fundamental, and I suspect over the last few days oft repeated, change. DSLR Camera—check; iPhone—check; baby monitors—check; laptop… And that’s where I stumbled. For the first time in decades, I (gasp!) left my laptop at home.
Though I still remember the days where dragging my ThinkPad required the shoulders of Superman to carry through the gate-to-gate dash that so much of my travel has comprised of, I looked back and forth between my so-much-lighter MacBook Pro, and the family iPad and asked: do we really need the laptop? Read More
We’ve gotten beyond the idea that brands using social media is more than just a trend. This year, social media has reached a critical mass at which we must handle the audience playing in that space with intelligence and strategy – It is not a “B” platform to follow your “A” platforms.
A recent Emarketer piece reinforced this. The article titled US Social Network Usage: 2011 Demographic and Behavior Trends outlined the slowing, and projected continued slowing growth of unique new social network users. With the knowledge that growth is slowing and the assumption that less new users mean more seasoned or savvy users, does this mean that consumers will start to tune out attempts to market to them in social media? If we’re in this stage of saturation and tune-out, what is the next chapter in community management? I’m going to focus the remainder of this post on Facebook and Twitter, but a future post will detail other opportunities to evolve social media marketing for your brand.
With the advent of social media, it has never been easier for consumers to interact with companies. An Experience Matters post a few weeks ago by Jeana Anderson showed how a couple simple tweets turned into an extraordinary experience. However, companies must be careful when using social media, because while good personal interactions can become extraordinary, bad personal interactions can become disastrous.
Curious’ recent research using our online community ShopTalk touched on why people choose to boycott companies. We found that boycotts which stem from bad personal interactions with companies are far more powerful than boycotts that arise from social or political scandals, as the case with BP or Nike.
About half of our members boycotted a company based on the company’s social practices or political views. Members talked about boycotting companies like Wal-Mart, based on their employment practices or Citgo-gas because of its ownership by “enemy of America” Venezuela. The other half boycotted a company based on a bad personal experience, such as terrible customer service. It was the first time I’d heard of Denny’s, Barnes and Noble, and Suave being boycotted.
The newest Apple Store that just opened in Austin on March 11 will be closing in 2 weeks… as planned.
It’s no surprise that the company that ‘thinks different’ thought differently about how to position themselves (and the new iPad 2) to the 13,000+ temporary SxSW residents of Austin. Once again, they did what now seems obvious… they found a great retail location, installed hardwood floors, painted the walls white and put oversized product hero shots in the windows… and they created this ‘pop-up’ store in 3 days.
What resulted was what we’ve now come to expect from the launch of any new Apple Product (read as slight upgrade): long line-ups, sold out product and lots and lots of conversation. The interesting part however was being there to witness the process of how that conversation radiated. From pre-opening tweets about a possible store (due to unusual amounts of Apple hooded employee sightings) to the posts and critiques about how Etsy had an even better temporary store, the conversation about the Apple Pop-Up moved like a wave into the presentations of keynotes and material of stand-up comedy and podcasts.
Photo Credit: Richard Tseng
No one argues that games are a huge part of our culture (especially here, btw), but I’ve been hearing something you don’t often hear; we as marketers ought to be integrating the principles and qualities that make games enjoyable into our brand experience.
In yesterday’s keynote, Seth Prietbatsch showed how the mechanics of game play are being used successfully in some unexpected places. From the classroom to loyalty marketing programs, game mechanics can improve poorly designed systems. For example, “Grades are a naïve implementation of a status mechanic,” Prietbasch said.
After a few other examples, he used a crowd participation exercise to illustrate the power of a large group to achieve surprising results. Each of the 2,500+ members of the audience was given a card with different colors on each side. There were 5 or 6 different colors in all. He issued a challenge to the audience; organize each row into holding up the same color, by trading cards with neighbors in front or back if needed, within 90 seconds.He said that he’d only tested the exercise on a group of about 25 prior to this, and in the end it worked. Through cooperation, we were able to self-organize without the benefit of a leader and without being able to communicate to people beyond just a few feet from us. This exercise was used to show how large unorganized groups could overcome complex challenges.
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The last session of the day was chosen solely on its ballsy, provocative title: “Brand Consistency is Killing Digital Advertising.” Now this just seemed intentionally inflammatory. And even up to the moment the guy started talking I was ready to bolt in case it turned into overly cerebral planner talk.
Then the guy started talking, Justin Cox, a planner from Pereira & O’Dell.
And I dug it
Methodically, he challenged everything I’ve been led to believe in the last 5 years about how integrated marketing should work, ye ol’ hub and spoke, the 360° campaign, every channel serving the same big idea. He showed a slide of cross channel pieces from a recent Gillette campaign. From the print, to the TV, to the display banners, everything looked exactly the same, sharing the same art direction and assets and messaging. And it was easy to see. It all added up to crap. Consistency did not, as I’ve espoused to many clients, amplify their message; rather it seemed pointless and trivial.
Repetition diluted any possible hope of more meaningful engagement.
And then he made his big, bold claim. Across channels, brands don’t need to look the same, they just need to feel the same.
