January 06, 2014

4 Hot Marketing Topics for 2014

A new year means new budgets, new priorities, new alignments and new worries. Here are four critical issues my clients are working on for 2014. 

Leveraging Loyalty. People with strong connections to favorite brands buy more, buy more often and influence others to buy. Identifying, engaging and motivating these people to serve as vocal advocates are high on every brand’s wish list. Incenting loyal customers to talk up a brand, especially in social media, is an incredibly efficient way to go to market. A strong base of loyalists gives brands added flexibility in allocating trade and media resources. 

The challenge is that loyalty is a fleeting psychological state not just a points, rewards or coupon scheme. The heartiest brand advocate can be eliminated with a single bad experience or an incredible price offer. Today’s tout can be tomorrow’s critic with one click. Consumers are fickle and are constantly being offered new and different deals in the hope to enroll them as loyal customers. The archetypical programs, like air miles, have been consistently devalued and complicated. 

Getting loyalty right is a matter of understanding the customer mindset, in the moment and over time, and mapping an appropriate series of stimuli and responses to intersect customer behavior and attitudes. Ideally brands can enhance existing consumer behavior by focusing on the most profitable prospects by combining triggered surprise and delight experiences with escalating incentives that can be tracked and quantified. 

The ultimate solution is a combination of customer intimacy and smart segmentation, regular genuine two-way conversation and feedback and a data infrastructure for continuous measurement and improvement. This sounds much easier than it is to execute well. 

Making Sense of Measurement. Brands have gone statistics crazy. Everybody counts everything. Each silo reports numbers weekly, monthly and quarterly. Each agency produces a colorful graphic dashboard. Marketers have mountains of data that they can’t make sense of.  Brands are missing the big picture and lack actionable intelligence. The search is on for standardized key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Generally there are two critical metrics questions. Are we meeting our business/profitability goals or forecasts? And are we using our resources as efficiently as possible? 

Getting the answers requires brands to break down silos and share sensitive business data with key partners. Centralizing analysis of disparate data with one team, preferably a team without media buying responsibilities, provides dispassionate insights.  Developing a reporting cadence that is long enough to see developing trends and short enough to respond to marketplace or competitive developments is critical. 

Synching Social Media.  The role, value and ROI of social networks have been a mystery since they came on the scene. Now that many brands have considerable followings and social networks are morphing from purely word-of-mouth to paid advertising vehicles, marketers are eager to understand how the channels fit together and how they map to and impact consumer buying cycles. 

Brands are asking tactical questions. Is Facebook an awareness or lead generation tool? Will carefully crafted or sponsored celebrity tweets impact the top or the bottom of the sales funnel. Can Pinterest drive brand differentiation and preference or accelerate the buying process? Should brands run simultaneous or sequential email, Facebook ads and broadcast or cable spots to introduce a new product? 

Independent data is hard to come by, though online retailers know that multi-channel buyers are their best customers. Media mix models rely on assumptions and very fuzzy math when it comes to social networks. Social network sales reps are eager to find numbers or conduct research to justify buys. Trial-and-error is the current state of the art.

Maximizing Mobility. Mobile users, the majority of our population, expect to access brands on many devices whenever and wherever the mood strikes. Consumers expect content and sites, no matter what device or form factor is used, to be easy to see or read and easy to interact with. 

Unique patterns of behavior by segment, device, task and time-of-day are emerging. Brands must be aware of and respond to these trends and produce content that meets consumer functionality and graphic expectations. That means scan-able and snack-able content, rendered quickly and clearly with easy-to-use buttons and links that require the minimum number of clicks. Similarly mobile advertising, while still in the early stages, is much more dependent on mood, timing and device than its digital and traditional counterparts. Understanding mobile usage by brand and by audience is a key research need. 

Jan 6, 2014 11:48:16 AM | Marketing Strategies

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4 Marketing Predictions for 2014 It’s the end of the year and every pundit, yours truly included, has an open opportunity to predict the future. So here’s my best guess at four critical factors that will be driving innovations, insights and interactions for brands, advertisers and marketers in 2014. Mobile Matters Most. A majority of searches, email opens and Internet access either is, or will soon, be via mobile devices. On-the-go is the new normal. Brands need to create assets that are easily rendered, clear and easy to use on smartphones, phablets and tablets. Consumers have zero tolerance for broken images or links or microscopic unreadable copy. UX design of brand assets for mobile devices is mandatory. So is design that synchs with all the mobile operating systems. Different devices are used for different tasks. Tablets are dominant for shopping and entertainment, often used at home on the couch while channel surfing or multi-tasking. It will become increasingly important to develop variations of campaigns aimed at different devices and different mindsets, since each segment uses devices with different intentions, at different times and with different agility. Hand-eye coordination is a big differentiator. Teenagers and old ladies won’t share the same expectations or the same content. Follow-Me Media. We now have the technology to track behavior across channels. We know when you open and click on an email and this data triggers the banners you see as you surf the web or scroll through your Facebook timeline. This works in reverse and in several other novel variations, which will get increasingly granular, personal and sophisticated. Some consumers find this intrusive and creepy. But as a marketing tool this version of pixel tracking allows us to efficiently follow up on the slightest expression of interest. It also allows products you looked at or clicked on to follow you around until you take a desired action. For the most part the high conversion rates that result from this re-targeting outweigh the small numbers of opt-outs. Social Goes DM. Social networks are artificially limiting viral reach in favor of pay-for-play. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and everybody else are splitting platform functionality between editorial posts and paid advertising. Increasingly, the networks are manipulating the algorithms to favor paid advertising and monetize their huge audiences. They are becoming hardcore direct marketers. Social networks are developing and evolving ad units and targeting channels designed expressly to collect opt-ins, generate leads and eventually sell products and services directly. They are positioning themselves against online publishers and are becoming savvy database marketers and eager collaborators with high spending brands. They have a direct financial interest, large segment-able audiences and considerable technical resources to easily trump sites selling both classic banners and rich media units. Expect lots of content, cadence and contextual experimentation and significant shifts in spending from online display ads to social network ads. This will dramatically alter editorial social strategies for building audiences, generating likes and using content to engage followers and fans. Brands will have to finesse network greed to reach and interact with audiences they’ve already paid to aggregate. Native reach or virility for posts and tweets will fall significantly. Engagement Gets Real. Bombarded by commercial messages, busy multi-tasking, anxious about money and either empowered or distracted by technology, consumers are skeptical, demanding and not easily manipulated. Changing behavior is almost impossible. So brands and marketers are working harder to develop segments, understand natural behaviors and find credible ways to intersect and intercept customers and prospects doing what they normally do. This requires a keen understanding of how brands are perceived and what standing brands have to enter the conversation. What we’ve learned about gaming, channel selection, devices and preferences is being fit into patterns of creature behavior and attitudes. Moms, caregivers, gamers or college students have distinct routines, behavior patterns and common perspectives, which can be identified and mapped to communications goals and activities. This emerging science of engagement strategy is being married to traditional insights about brand awareness, positioning and preference. The creative executions or campaigns that result will be measured and monitored with an eye toward validating the assumptions or models and/or optimizing consumer interaction and response. Grasping the motivations, the mental and the mechanical aspects of consumer behavior will separate the successful brands from the also-rans.
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Meeting Customer Expectations At the dawn of a new year there’s lots of talk about new devices, new technologies, new tactics and new trends. But there’s not much talk about evolving customer expectations, which, to a large degree, determine how all these new things are perceived or received. Consumers hold fundamental attitudes about brands that don’t change much over time, even while the channels they use to interact evolve. Consumers have existing brand relationships and are generally willing to trade data for convenience, utility or deals. They expect the brands they care about to care back. Brand loyalists insist that the relationship must be two-way, respectful and interactive. Consumers have a point of view and expect to be heard -- explicitly when they choose to act and implicitly when they call, click, visit or buy. To meet and capitalize on these baseline expectations, focus on these 3 fundamental expectations. Always be Available. Sam Walton was right. Brands need to be there whenever and however customers want to buy. This means having a 24/7 presence in the channels or on the devices your customers use most. And while not every channel or medium makes sense for every brand, being available, offering several contact options, making it easy to click, download, print, chat or buy are table stakes. Understanding what each segment needs and providing an 800# or other retro, but highly effective tools, is part and parcel of this expectation. Enable Preference Setting. Customers want it their way. A nation of gamers is used to setting the level and choosing from an array of options. Brands need to abandon the one-size-fits-all super cost efficient model in favor of giving customers the option to specify the content they want, the format they want it in and the delivery channel and frequency they prefer. All the research shows that brands that deliver against variable customer preferences drive significant spikes in customer satisfaction, incremental sales and brand loyalty. Once set, customers expect brands to adhere to preferences and use them to personalize relevant messages. Your best customers, like your best friends, assume that the relationship is dynamic and cumulative over time. They expect brands to pay attention and to use cues from the conversation or their actions to advance intimacy. They expect that purchase and activity history will inform branded communications and become filters to curate the messages and offers they receive. This assumption makes re-targeting tolerable and even appreciated. But the flipside is equally true. Sending irrelevant, untimely or out-of-context messages will sour things quickly. Listen & Respond. Loyal customers pay attention to and care about favorite brands the way family members care about each other. They have opinions about brand posture, products, services, prices, competitors and people. And they aren’t bashful about expressing them to the brand directly and by broadcasting them in social media. Consumers expect brands to celebrate and shout out positive feedback and to jump on complaints and customer service issues quickly and efficiently. Everyone is a critic or a consumer advocate in two clicks. Understanding consumers’ need to have a say is as important as providing them with the best possible product set. So, before you get carried away with the latest social or mobile trend or ad unit, recalibrate your marketing plan to align with these fundamental expectations. The investment will pay off in spades.

Danny Flamberg

I am a veteran marketing consultant working with leading and emerging brands

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