Aug 15, 2010 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
How do you compare prices in a range of stores when standing in the aisle of your local supermarket?
The easy answer now, is “on your iphone“. A crowd called Red Laser have an app that scans the code, compares the product/price to others scanned (presumably there is a data base somewhere out in the cloud) and using google maps is able to compare prices in your general location.
This development has the potential to re-write the equation between brands, the value of things like location and parking, and price in the retail space, and with effectively an FMCG retail duopoly in Australia, it will consume some headspace in Co-op castle in Melbourne, and the Taj in Sydney.
It is a “pity” we wasted millions on a “Grocery Watch” white elephant, a technology/populist bet in the early days of the Rudd government, when a couple of years down the track, a similar thing can be done better on your phone. We now have the same sort of thinking making a 45 billion dollar bet on the NBN, a bet that will impact on generations. Hope they get it right this time!
Aug 5, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Many businesses are sorely tempted to drastically reduce marketing expenditure during a downturn, it is often the most visible, and usually the least understood item in the P&L.
The evidence indicates that you should be keeping spending up.
Time and time again we see businesses that keep their marketing expenditure going during a downturn are in a much better position when the cycle moves up again. A dollar spent in a tough environment (assuming it is intelligently spent) is of far more long term value than the same dollar spent in the flush.
Now we appear to be in the recovery stage of the cycle, although anecdotally all bar mining appears to be pretty flat, opportunities will emerge to leverage the better circumstances, but discipline is needed to retain the focus that usually is heightened during a downturn. Below are three of rules of thumb:
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- Have a “Sku spring-clean”. Now things are improving, it is tempting to keep that small volume Sku, the “homeless” small brand, the small subsidiary acquired by accident, better to manage out of them to free working capital and enable management focus, and now times are a bit better, the cost of exit will be reduced.
- Don’t just push growth for growths sake, because it seems possible to get some, use the freed up resources to strengthen existing business before you chase growth for the sake of it.
- Don’t take the pressure off the cost cutting initiatives, the next downturn is somewhere just ahead, and your competitors will keep reducing their costs.
The cycles of economic activity appear to be getting much quicker, and competitive activity more aggressive and reactionary, so it is becoming even more important to have a firm view of the long term positioning. Define the brand development program, set long term performance measures, and stick to them as it will now take several economic cycles to get any meaningful result. Rather than being able to invest and make the return in the one cycle as has been the case in the past, it will now take several cycles to generate any long term depth .
Aug 3, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Social network marketing is a fundamentally different beast to “traditional “marketing. When talking to marketers, they usually see social media as being in effect free, the challenge is to get the message spread, often by being outrageous, generating awareness for little money compared to traditional media.
To my mind, it is much more complicated than that. “Word of Mouse” on social media has to be earned, and that is really challenging, requiring intimate knowledge of the marketplace, customers, their behaviour, and what is likely to positively engage them. Traditional marketing makes it easy to gain a general level of awareness, you just have to pay for it, but like most things that are easy, the return is very low.
Jul 22, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
It will be fascinating to watch how Apple, the masters of digital marketing, handle the latest hiccup with the antenna problems on the iPhone4.
Apple has now stumbled twice in a short time, the first was the furore over the wages paid to employees at Foxconn, one of their major suppliers factories in China, leading to an unusually high suicide level, and now the dodgy antenna story, furiously being stirred by Apples grateful competitors.
The speed that such problems emerge and are all over the user communities has outstripped the response times of even the most sensitive and paranoid of businesses, and now it appears that Apple is going in to defiant mode by using Steve Jobs to front the problem and say, in effect, “all smart phones suffer from the same problem, we are no worse than the others.”
Apple has grown in an extraordinary way for the last decade, tapping in to the mindset of the early adopters to become apostles for their brand and products, and by being consistently first out there with a product that delivers a highly differentiated proposition. The Apple brand is now a very tall poppy indeed, and attracts attention, so they had better be careful that the legions of fans who have fed the myth do not turn around and bite it, because their hero shows themselves to be fallible, and therefore not worthy of being their hero, in fact, it becomes a source of satirical comment that speeds the process of brand erosion.
Such loyalty scorned can turn nasty very quickly.
Jul 11, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Sales
It is often pretty easy recognise marketing hyperbole when we see it, particularly in a category where we have some knowledge. However, in a category where we have no knowledge, it probably is not as easy to pick the fact from the flummery, so even some of the more extravagant claims made may get through the mental fence.
Therefore, hyperbolic claims extolling the virtues of a new small car for example, are more likely to be rejected by the men who may engage with the ad, because they largely believe they know a bit about cars, rather than women, who believe they know little about cars, and are therefore less able to pick the BS from the facts.
This becomes very relevant when marketing a product to a category of consumers who know a bit about the product, and are therefore going to be more critical of the message based on what they know, or believe they know about the category, so be careful of the hyperbole, it will almost always turn off potential buyers, rarely persuade them.
