Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

In my Marketing class this evening, we took up the topic of re-branding. Here is a look at how some of the world’s best known brands have morphed over the last few decades.

It looks like the folks at the City of Kelowna have read up on their marketing literature. Or at least had a stroke of creative genius while trying to tailor a message for their intended audience.

An observant colleague of mine, Ian Everdell, came across this sign at a local bus station the other day.

I’d like to send out this call for b2b survey participants. Enquiro Research works tirelessly to put out excellent B2B focused research. Now is your chance to be a part of it.

We would like your input in an online survey, in order to understand more about your experiences when making business purchase decisions, and/or going through the process of short-listing vendors and business solutions. By completing the survey you’ll be adding valuable insight into an area of business that is undergoing tremendous change.

The survey will take you 15 – 20 minutes to complete and you could win a $25 Starbucks card to thank you for your valuable time.

Also, you’ll be able to register to be invited to Enquiro’s 2009 B2B webinar series, consisting of six high-powered free webinars delivering cutting edge insight into what’s happening in the world of online business-to-business marketing.

Click here to go directly to the survey and thank you for helping us to create world class research.

In this interview with Eric Schmidt, Charlie Rose asks the Google CEO a range of questions, from the origins of Google’s advertising model, to the monetization of YouTube, to whether the search giant would consider buying Twitter.

The interviewer turned to the concept of the digital divide, and the role technology companies have played to bridge the gap. Schmidt pointed out that, “In our lifetimes, we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate, to almost everyone being able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having information and any kind of access to libraries, to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is an enormous accomplishment for humanity. ”

Schmidt describes the future of mobile search, giving an example of how someone interested in history, walking down a street in New York could be delivered a “narrative stream that’s highly personal and highly entertaining.” He added, “Why can’t my phone generate the searches I should have been asking [based on my interests]?”

TechCrunch has posted a complete transcript of the 56-minute interview here.

It wasn’t easy but he did it.  Here’s a shout out to a fellow blogger, Mike Volpe, for sticking with his pledge to write a blog post a day for February.   From his Marketing with Mike blog, here are my three favorite posts from his one-month string of posts just completed:

3 Big Mistakes You Make When Talking to Reporters

Why Routines are Good

MC Hammer Says You Can’t Touch Twitter

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams spoke at a recent TED conference about the founding of what has become today’s most exciting social networking tool. Williams, who was also involved in the founding of Blogger, describes how Twitter arose as a side project at start-up company Odeo.

What struck me is how much of Twitter’s current functionality has come about through user involvement. For example, the @username syntax for responding to a tweet started and spread from within the Twitter user base and was only later incorporated as a standard.

The TED video notes other examples of user-generated applications with Twitter such as the Summize, a real-time search engine which has since been purchased by Twitter,

Skittles, a candy produced by Mars Incorporated, created a bit of an online uproar on March 1 when they made a dead simple, yet effective change to their web home page, www.skittles.com. Instead of a rainbow-colored product site as one would expect, users saw a Twitter feed for the search term Skittles.  The page was superimposed by an intercept survey asking users for their age, and acceptance of a simple terms and conditions statement:

“Just a heads up: Any stuff beyond the Skittles.com page is actually another site and not in our control. This panel may be hovering over the page, but SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for what other people post and say on these sites. Click the box below to acknowledge that you know SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for that stuff.”

Tweets containing the word ‘skittles’ automatically appeared on the new Skittles homepage, along with any tweets making reference to the change as they contained the same keyword.  The buzz on Twitter grew to a point where Skittles became the number one trending keyword in buzz monitoring tools such as Twitscoop.

Several Twitterers used the opportunity for creative expression:

Incidentally, this user claimed that Skittles look like a Rick Astley YouTube video.

Users quickly caught on to what Skittles was trying to achieve with the campaign, but were also having fun in being part of the action.

Others gave in to the urge of turning a new found brand awareness into actual consumption.

With this social media marketing campaign, Skittles effectively held up a mirror to the Twittersphere, a mirror which reflected and amplified whatever ‘skittle’ was thrown into it.

It will be interesting to see if and how others brands follow suit.

What does it mean to be totally focused on a target market? And what is Bryan Adams doing on a marketing blog anyway?

Admittedly this song brings back memories of my university days, to a time before I had even considered a career in online marketing. But let’s take a closer look at the title and message here.

Think about the market you’ve chosen. You may call it your target vertical. It may even be a niche market. Now picture the individual, or persona that will benefit from your product or service. How well aligned is your product or customer service to that person’s needs? What is your customer trying to achieve anyway?

Moving over to before the relationship begins: is your marketing message what that persona needs to hear? And why do they need to buy from you? Are you sending your message to that right person or is it missing the mark, i.e. hitting someone else? Is all your energy focused on that singularity?

A lot of successful companies do it intuitively. They win over, one person at a time. Listen to this slightly overplayed 90′s hit and send me your marketing thoughts!

“Meaningless statistics went up 2% last week.”

Thanks to John Favalo, Managing Partner at the B2B Group of Eric Mower and Associates, for referencing this smirk-evoking quote at a recent conference. I unfortunately missed where it came from and haven’t been able to find the original source.

Isn’t it interesting how numbers can add perceived importance to something even though they may be irrelevant? In my recent post on strategy vs. tactics, I talked about the importance of having a big picture view, whether you’re a traveler or marketer. This is just as important in web analytics.

Now don’t get me wrong. Online marketing has truly benefited from measurement tools. These range from Google Analytics, a free yet robust web analytics service, to competitive intelligence tools such as Hitwise, and marketing automation software from the likes Marketo and Eloqua. The question is, what to do with all the data?

The key is measuring what you need to measure, getting the data you need to make the important decisions. Granted, it isn’t always easy to know what important means. But if your strategy is clear, it becomes a whole lot easier.

I’d like to thank Paul Sherman, Principal at Sherman Group User Experience for the following analogy.  It came up in a recent session at Online Marketing Summit ’09 and presented a glaringly simple way of looking at how strategy and tactics relate to one another. Here goes:

Strategy:
Go from the San Diego Airport to the Westin in the Gaslamp Quarter.

View Larger Map

Tactics:

1. Starting at the airport, head west 387 ft
2. Take a slight left toward N Harbor Dr. Go 0.2 miles.
3. Take a slight left toward N Harbor Dr. Go 0.2 miles.
4. Turn left at N Harbor Dr. Go 2.0 miles.
5. Turn left at W Broadway. Go 0.6 miles.
6. Turn right at Broadway Circle. The destination will be on the right

Is this too simple? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

In my field of work in marketing, a strategy will usually show the path between where the company currently is and where they want to go. The tactics required to get there will be numerous, some more detailed than others – things like increasing web page conversion rate, developing the right messaging, finding the right events and publications for your market, and hitting the targeted audience with effective ads.

It is normal that tactics change frequently, especially in online marketing. This is because technology changes so rapidly. The tactics you used five years ago were good then, and won’t be nearly as effective today.

But when you do embrace a new tactic such as the latest, world-changing, high-octane social networking tool, try to put it in perspective of your overall marketing strategy. Does it fit into the big picture? Does it lead to the end goal? Tactics are very important and must be carried out well. But if your strategy is off you have a bigger problem. To quote Seth Godin, “The right strategy makes any tactic work better. The right strategy puts less pressure on executing your tactics perfectly.”

Let’s have a bit of fun with the original map analogy to demonstrate how tactics can change over time, given the same strategy.

Getting from the airport to the Westin in the year 2049:

1. Starting at the airport, get on your rented hover board
2. Head southeast across the water 2.5 mi.
3. Enter W Broadway and proceed down the street 348 ft
4. The destination will be on the left

How about 2109? Assuming we’d still even use airports for long range travel, it might be:

1. Proceed to the short-range transporter beaming station at the airport
2. Enter the destination code for the Westin Gaslamp Quarter: WGQ42
3. Five seconds later, proceed from the arrival station straight ahead to the check-in desk (40 ft)