Branding
Go mobile if you want to reach travel-minded consumers
Earlier this year, eMarketer noted more than 12 million travel-minded consumers used a mobile device to book a trip (2011); mobile consumers booking trips via mobile are expected to triple over the next four years, making the mobile channel an important one for travel brands. But how are travel-minded consumers engaging with mobile content? A recent article by Kristina Knight of bizreports.com explains.
Research shows the mobile channels (app and mobile browser) most valuable for travel brands include Travel, Entertainment and Games.
“By creating campaigns for both tablets and smartphones, advertisers can take advantage of the strengths of both devices to appeal to consumers booking travel. Tablets offer a larger form factor perfect for displaying photos and in-depth travel information, while smartphone campaigns capture on-the-go consumers looking for click-to-call and location-based features,” writes Jumptap.
Data from comScore shows one in five smartphone owners booked a trip through their mobile device. Four in five consumers access air and hotel content through a mobile device. Other popular travel-related activities included:
• Checking airfare prices (26%)
• Checking flight schedules/status (25% each)
• Receiving price alerts for flights (19%)
• Cancelling a flight (10%)
“The on-the-go convenience of smartphones has facilitated their emergence as an essential companion for travelers,” said Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of mobile. “We all know how hectic a travel experience can be, but smartphones have really stepped in to meet a variety of needs for travelers, such as coordination of schedules, locations, trip itineraries and transactions.”
While men and younger demographics are more likely to consume travel content via mobile, if you are trying to bring travelers to your property, it’s time to add mobile to you mix if you haven’t already.
Who knew facial mapping technology could be so funny?
So, when I first checked out Nike’s Japanese Freeface.jp site, promoting their Free flexible sneakers, my first reaction was, “Ok, so they’re borrowing the mid-2000′s ‘hot or not’ social voting idea”. THEN, I actually played with the facial mapping technology that tracks your facial expressions real-time and mirrors them in the shape of the sneaker. WHAT!?!
Scruchoriffic!
I admit it…I was skeptical of the concept; but once I tried it, I was happily sold. It’s a really cool idea that at it’s core is super simple, super solid on paying off what the product can offer, and engages the audience to sell it for you. And on the flip side, it’s mega-robust on the experiential & tech factors.
OHNO-U-DI'INT!
Make sure your webcam is working and check it out for yourself. It’s pretty hilarious/fun/engaging, and I might even buy a pair of the kicks after all. Nicely done, even if whoever came up with the idea are b!tches for thinking of it before me 
Innovative marketing that changed the marketplace.
When I saw this video about Tesco on YouTube, I immediately thought of Peter Drucker, one of the most respected business thinkers of the late 20th century. He wrote: “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two – and only two – functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation create value, all the rest are costs.” So imagine what he’d have to say about this innovative marketing solution to the business problem of achieving greater market share withOUT increasing physical store locations. Totally cool.
Microloan Foundation’s Pennies for Life Campaign
The Microloan Foundation is one of the most genuinely philanthropic organizations, helping young women in sub-Saharan Africa learn new skills and start up businesses of their own; when they pay back their loan, it’s recycled back to another recipient so she can get a start.
This interactive digital billboard set up in London’s Westfield Shopping area, as a part of the Pennies for Life campaign, is one of the smartest PR/awareness-generating work I’ve seen in a long time, not to mention an actual live facilitator for donation generation. You can quickly donate 2£ via a simple text message, and a visual is constructed of a real woman that the money will go to help. Not only is it a really cool piece of interactive functionality, but it really makes it incredibly simple for a potential donor to contribute, and incredibly real with a tangible result almost immediately in front of them.
Buying Your Brand
Incorporating a pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising campaign into a strategic media plan is important to many organizations’ marketing objectives for a variety of reasons.
Research findings from Google initially released in 2011, and updated last week, make a strong case that “clicks from organic results on the search results page [do] not substitute for the majority of clicks from ads on the page when the ad campaigns are turned off.” In fact, Google estimates that anywhere from 50% – 96% of ad clicks are incremental to organic results, with the range largely dependent upon the associated organic result’s rank on the page. Undoubtedly, a prime advantage of search advertising is that any click on an ad is 100% incremental when there is no associated organic result. That last bit is an important qualifier, though: WHEN there is no associated organic result. What happens when there is an associated organic result? Is it still worth purchasing keywords that may show up in organic results anyway? Inevitably the question leads to branded keywords. We are often asked by our clients, “Should we purchase my brand name as a keyword even though my website shows up in the first page of organic results?”
What this translates to is advertisers could see great success with a branded search campaign, as we have seen in strategically managing PPC on behalf of clients. The key, as is often the case with digital media, is to test, experiment and test again.
For more detail, read Google’s blog post, “Impact of Organic Rank on Ad Click Incrementality” or the full Google study.
Design Does Matter
I’ve always had a thing for bikes, cool old bikes. In college, I once convinced a friend of mine to give me this amazing vintage electric-blue one-speed that was gathering dust in his garage. I was so excited. This would be my bike for getting around town. Quick, easy, fun. Turns out, riding a one speed is a lot of work, and as much I clung to my vision of zooming all over Burlington, VT, on my super cool ride, it pretty much sat on my porch, and eventually turned into more of a piece of art than a mode of transportation. And although I admit that I do have a mountain bike, it’s just not the same. So one day about a year or so ago, while checking out @issue, The Online Journal of Business and Design (http://www.atissuejournal.com/), I found a post on PUBLIC Bikes and was immediately smitten.
First of all, Rob Forbes founded this San Francisco-based company. He is also the founder of Design Within Reach, another secret love of mine, which is a furniture design company. So, I knew PUBLIC Bikes would be cool. When I clicked the orange bicycle and found myself on the PUBLIC website (http://publicbikes.com/), I was immediately in love — the colors, the design, the clarity, the simplicity, the bikes — so timeless, so great. These European designed bicycles are fantastic. They come in different sizes and multi-speeds — ha, no more one speed madness.
I love that PUBLIC bikes are designed for city riding. They’re comfortable, lightweight, utilitarian and chic. They have fenders to protect your clothing, and you can sit up straight while you’re riding and see the world in front of you. They also have kickstands and awesome baskets, lights, and other stylish accessories.
The thing is, I totally get this company. And all I know of them is from their website. It so clearly represents the PUBLIC brand and what it stands for. It is easy to navigate and the use of color is fun, fresh and engaging. Not to mention that they use video really well. In fact, watch this video PUBLIC Bikes: Design Matters, and you’ll see what I mean. But they also include videos on how to find your PUBLIC bike and how to assemble your bike after it’s been shipped to you. PUBLIC’s message is clear: style and function can go hand in hand, and you can feel like a kid while getting where you need to go efficiently and economically. And everything from their logo to the people who work there, tells that story.
Ok, enough. I just think these guys are clever, fun and smart, and they love design. Check it out. I’m saving my pennies for a Public C7, in orange, with a basket on the front. Just you wait and see.
Facebook Timeline Goes Live March 30 – Are you ready?
If you have a business, it’s more than likely you have a business Facebook page. Which means changes are afoot that you need to know about. First – if you’ve been using the new timeline (well, not so new anymore, really), you know you get to have a big beauty-shot for your cover photo. True for business as well. But, when choosing this image, you do need to remember, Facebook is about social networking – not sales – so they have some rules around this. Specifically, cover images should be 851px x 315px and may not contain:
- Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
- Contact information, such as a web address, email, mailing address, or other information intended for your Page’s About Section
- References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
- Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.”
If you want to see how some of the big-boys are managing this, take a look:
http://www.facebook.com/cocacola
http://www.facebook.com/target
Again, when you remember how social media got started, this new look makes lots of sense. It really does contribute to making a connection – not a sale. Here are some of the other changes…
Page admins will be able to choose which posts will display at the top using pinned posts. A pinned post always appears in the top left of a Page’s timeline and has a flag in its top-right corner. A post that has been pinned will remain there for seven days. After that, it’ll return to the date it was posted on the Page’s timeline. To pin a post, simply click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner of your Page’s post and then select “pin to top” in order to pin a post.
In the past, as a business page, you couldn’t send private messages. With the new changes, now you will be able to privately message any contact details or private information without posting it to the whole world.
Currently, any apps that you created for competitions or the like can be switched to feature as your default landing page, meaning that you controlled what visitors saw first. Unfortunately, with the new timeline, you will no longer have the ability to set a default home page. Your timeline wall will always be the first thing any visitors see. The only real way to direct fans to a specific page will be through the use of ads.
If you are looking for help with these changes or any social media concerns, don’t hesitate to get in touch …
How horseback riding is like managing a business
As the president of hmc2 advertising, I spend as much time managing our business as I do developing marketing strategies for our clients and us. I usually like to keep my posts about marketing and branding, but I had such a great ride on both my horses last night, I wanted to share more about that.
The thing I really love about being with horses is this: horses are mirrors. If I show up lackadaisical, then I get a poor performance. If I consistently show up anxious, in a hurry, or thoughtlessly, more likely than not I’m going to end up with a problem, like a horse that is hard to catch, or resistant to pressure, or just plain grumpy.
However, if I show up calm, confident, and mindful, with the expectation that I’ll get the very best from my horse, usually, that’s what I’ll get. Not perfection, but their best at that moment in time. Even if I’ve been showing up poorly and created a problem, if I change my behavior and try to see things from the perspective of my horse, within a very short period of time, things get better.
I try to remember this in all my relationships. If I show up in a manner that reflects what I hope to be the best possible outcome, from my perspective and the perspective of whoever I’m interacting with, I always get a better outcome than if I show up all prickly. And that’s how horsemanship is like managing relationships: try to see it from the other person’s perspective, make the goal a mutual one, and then help make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. Of course, it’s easier said than done. Horses take you at your word and their motivations are always pretty much the same; move away from pressure and get whatever needs to be done, done, while expending the least amount of energy. People are way more complicated. Still, if you can keep your part of the relationship honest and true, it gets a whole lot easier.
Happiness from a Bottle
This is another of Coke’s “Happiness Machine” experiences for Valentines Day in Turkey. To get a free Coke, all people needed to do is prove that they were a couple in a romantic way (but only 1st base). It’s just one in a string of pretty cool awareness generating and brand building experiences from a Happiness Truck in South America to a college campus rec area.
And the added bonus, documenting them leads right into a viral video & defacto case study vids for the campaign. Not my personal idea of a “bottle of happiness” but I could def mix a Coke with it 
Either way, it sounds pretty delish to me.
Brand evangelism
It occurs to me that my favorite topic to speak or write about (besides horses) is brand. Which is fascinating because branding, if you break it down to the very simplest of terms, is all about relationships. That’s it: your company’s relationship to management, staff and customers is your brand – your logo and your name and all the other brand things you do – should represent that relationship. Simple, right?
Then why is it so many businesses, across all categories, don’t seem to get it. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh, but riddle me this, Mr. Businessman, how much money have you budgeted in 2012 for branding? Not marketing, not sales, not advertising, but branding. If you aren’t a fortune 500 business and you even have this as a line item, well, maybe you are on your way. But if you are like most small business owners, your brand is likely incidental to what you do and who you are, and at worst it is completely accidental. Here’s the good news: branding doesn’t have to be expensive. But it does have to be intentional. And that’s the focus of this blog, to get you to be intentional about how you create and care for a meaningful brand for your business.
But, before going too far down that road, let me tell you the best reason to care about this topic. The biggest driver of profitability is NOT controlling cost, it is NOT improving process, and it is NOT sales volume. The single largest driver of profitability is the ability to influence pricing. What is the purpose of a strong brand? The purpose of a strong brand is to create a valuable relationship and loyalty with the target, right? And if you have these things, typically, you can command a premium price for your product or service, right? So, what’s the most important thing you can do to improve your profitability? Spend some time focusing on your brand, that’s what.
