Browse by Tags

We humans tend to fall in love pretty easily. But it takes some work to get the objects of our affection to fall in love with us. The same is true for brands. Marketers really, really, really want us to love their products. Because then they know we'll be there (with our credit cards) when they need us. Researchers at USC''s Marshall School of Business recently published a study of consumer relationships with brands in the Journal of Consumer Psychology . Fast Company 's Jennifer Miller does a nice job of summarizing the paper. Here is a key takeaway: the three things that make buyers fall in love: 1. Enticing Self Benefits. Park says that products must entice consumers through the senses. Is it aesthetically pleasing to look at it? Does it sound good, smell good, feel good? 2. Enabling Self Benefits. The product should make people’s lives more comfortable and convenient. "It’s about functional pleasure and letting consumers know what kind of life they can live by using a brand," says Park. 3. Enriching Self Benefits. This is the most important. "The consumer relates to the brand through shared values or principles," says Park. In other words, the message must resonate deeply with the consumer’s sense of self. Park points to Nike’s slogan, "Just Do It" and Apple’s "Think Different." The former is about not making excuses. The latter is about ingenuity and creativity. These are ideals that connect with consumers; they create a psychological bond. Read Researchers Explain How Brands Make You Fall in Love here .

Living in the age of digital disruption, we are finding it hard to keep up with how the interaction between consumers and businesses--not to mention the interaction between different businesses--is changing. At the McKinsey Quarterly , Peter Dahlström and David Edelman try to prepare us for the very nature of marketing will change over the next few years. They write that the driver for change will be the user, the consumer, and how she engages digitally. The developments pushing marketing experiences even further include the growth of mobile connectivity, better-designed online spaces created with the powerful new HTML5 Web language, the activation of the Internet of Things in many devices through inexpensive communications tags and microtransmitters,1 and advances in handling “big data.” Consumers may soon be able to search by image, voice, and gesture; automatically participate with others by taking pictures or making transactions; and discover new opportunities with devices that augment reality in their field of vision (think Google glasses). As these digital capabilities multiply, consumer demands will rise in four areas: 1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time. 2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things as disparate kinds of information (from financial accounts to data on physical activity) are deployed more effectively in ways that create value for them. 3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what they experience. 4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy. Dahlström and Edelman provide a nice storyboard to illustrate the way they see marketing working in the near future. Here is an excerpt: View the full visualization, and read the article here .

One often overlooked aspect of digital disruption at large companies is the extent to which various departments have had to engage more with IT. No longer does it make sense to see IT workers as servants to the people who are doing "the real work" to build up an organization. In an interview with McKinsey Quarterly , Coca-Cola CIO Ed Steinke speaks of getting his staff and marketing more integrated. Here is an excerpt: McKinsey : How is the role of IT changing at Coca-Cola, and, with it, your role as CIO? Ed Steinike : IT and marketing are very close partners at Coca-Cola today—more so, I think, than at most other companies—and that’s the way it should be. Coke is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on digital marketing, and that number will, no doubt, continue to rise. Almost all of that spending is IT-related. This development calls for a broader CIO role. It’s not enough to be an operational back-office CIO running the systems. It’s also not enough to be a process CIO reinventing the supply chain and transforming support functions. Important as those two roles are, they need to be complemented by what I call the revenue-generator CIO or business-level CIO. McKinsey : What were the beginnings of the strategic partnership between marketing and IT at Coca-Cola? Ed Steinike : Our marketers started to think more seriously about digital channels five years ago or so. As mobile adoption expanded, they started to build a direct connection with our customers by pushing mobile applications for social-media sites and our loyalty programs, such as My Coke Rewards. Marketing was driving a lot of it through its own advertising and digital agencies while IT, at the time, was struggling to be relevant. We were viewed as a back-office function, not as one of the strategic leaders and partners in our digital-marketing efforts. I believed we should be bringing ideas to marketing instead of marketing coming to us for creative solutions and more often than not getting the answer, “Sorry. We don’t have the people to do these things.” Our first step was simply to offer traditional operating, hosting, and security for the sites and platforms the agencies were building. We did that quite well and now have over 600 consumer sites hosted in one platform environment with great data protection. Read the full interview here .

Americans watch a lot of television. But our addiction to our smartphones may be cutting into our quality tube time. According to eMarketer (off of data from Flurry Analytics ) time spent with mobile apps rose 35% over the last year. So mobile apps have leapfrogged time spent on the web. Which suggests that the shift in ad dollars to digital will end up in the mobile space. Even when consumers are spending time on the web, more and more they are using a phone or tablet to do so: Read Time Spent With Mobile Apps Rivals TV here .

With new tablets on the market and smartphones all but taking over the phone market completely in the U.S., Americans' commercial interface of habit is only getting more mobile. So while this year desktop web traffic remains king, it is down to 71.5% of all web traffic and falling. Falling because mobile is rising at incredible levels. Take a look at the time-per-day growth in this chart from eMarketer : Time is not the only way to measure this shift. A growing portion of internet traffic is coming from smartphones and tablets. Net Marketshare put mobile’s share of global browsing traffic at 10.3% in October 2012. This was the first time mobile had topped 10% of all browsing for the web analytics firm, and its advance might even be greater, as the figure “actually underestimates the total amount of browsing share on mobile devices, since [Net Marketshare’s] sample does not contain data on apps, like maps.” In markets such as the US with high indices of smart device penetration, an even greater portion of internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. Online and mobile ad network Chitika estimated mobile’s share of web traffic in North America at 28% as of June 2012. Read Trends for 2013: Making Mobile-First a Priority here .

In the digital age, with the flow of information speeding up all the time, managers of large companies seem to have less control over the behavior of their employees and their customers. This can be rather daunting, but Tim Leberecht , chief marketing officer at frog , says it should not be. As a marketer, he learned long ago that he could not control how consumers thought of products. "Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room," says Leberecht. But thanks to "hyperconnectivity," marketers and brand strategists have "more control over the loss of control than ever before." In this Ted Talk , Leberecht gives advice on how to design for this "loss of control," and benefit in the end.

Shama Kabani , CEO of The Marketing Zen Group , went to a gathering of some of the top entrepreneurs under 30 years old, and she came back with some important insights. Namely, Kabani realized that she, and all of us, have a lot to learn from young business leaders. At Inc. , she shares five lessons she took away from the experience: 1. There is no "they." 2. Hustle is a muscle. 3. Timing is everything. 4. Entrepreneurs have 99 problems, but money ain't one. 5. We still need greater diversity. Here is more on #4: If you ask non-entrepreneurs what one of the greatest challenges to starting a company is, many might answer with an obvious one: funding. But, out of all the colorful stories and stumbling blocks I heard about from the 99 other Empact100 entrepreneurs, a lack of funding wasn't mentioned a single time. In fact, the general consensus was that there is plenty of funding available for the right ideas. And much can be accomplished just by bootstrapping and making smart choices. Entrepreneurship certainly has a lot of challenges, but a lack of money rarely ever hinders a great idea. Read What 99 Gen-Y Entrepreneurs Taught Me About Business here .

As global companies work to connect with consumers in emerging economies, they have to be more cognizant of different buyer behavior in countries like India and Brazil. At McKinsey Quarterly , Yuval Atsmon , Jean-Frederic Kuentz , and Jeongmin Seong point to a few areas where these companies may need to shift their approach. The emerging consumer classes in the BRIC nations, for example, are influenced much more widely, the author's argue, by word of mouth: An important explanation for word of mouth’s outsized role is that in a land of consumer “firsts”—more than 60 percent of Chinese auto purchasers are buying their first car, and the comparable figure for laptops is 30 to 40 percent—few brands have been around long enough to ensure loyalty. Seeing a friend use a product is reassuring. Indeed, the less a consumer knows about a product and the more conspicuous the choice, the more the consumer is likely to care about the opinions of others. “The more people I know who are using a product,” consumers reason, “the more confident I can be that it will not fall apart, malfunction, or otherwise embarrass me.” The presence (or absence) of that confidence shapes the group of brands that consumers choose to evaluate. It is particularly influenced by the postpurchase experience of friends and family, along with their loyalty to a brand. Often, word of mouth is a local phenomenon in emerging markets, partly because of the simple reality that emerging-market consumers generally live close to friends and family. In addition, word of mouth’s digital forms, which transcend geography and are growing rapidly in emerging markets, still have more limited reach and credibility there than in developed ones. According to our annual survey of Chinese consumers, just 53 percent found online recommendations credible—a far cry from the 93 percent who trusted recommendations from friends and family. That same survey showed that only 23 percent of Chinese consumers acquired information from the Internet about products they bought. For food, beverage, and consumer electronics consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom, that figure is around 60 percent. Word of mouth’s relatively local nature means that companies in emerging markets are likely to reap higher returns if they pursue a strategy of geographic focus than if they spread marketing resources around thinly (targeting all big cities nationwide, for example). By attaining substantial market share in a cluster of cities in close proximity, a company can unleash a virtuous cycle: once a brand reaches a tipping point—usually at least a 10 to 15 percent market share—word of mouth from additional users quickly boosts its reputation, helping it to win yet more market share, without necessarily requiring higher marketing expenditures. The authors go on to outline two other key factors in emerging market consumers' behavior. Here is a look at how they interact: Read Building brands in emerging markets here .