Disruptive CMO Marketing

Live your brand values: Amplifying customers reviews

Domino's is posting online customer reviews - positive and negative - on a Times Square billboard in Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's latest high-profile stunt for the brand.

It's all part of a promotion for its Domino's Tracker service, which lets customers track their pizza order at all stages of the delivery process, even down to which member of staff is dealing with it. A new feature of Domino's Tracker is that consumers now have the chance to post their feedback.

During the campaign, customers will also be able to upload photos if they choose, and if their feedback is posted on the 4,630 square foot billboard, they will receive a link to a video clip of their comment as it appeared.

 

Advertising platform: Family and technology

These are ads that do a good job in portraying technology in a compelling way and leveraging family related insights to make the technology relevant for family situations.

Windows 7 Asus Slate PC "Drawing" Commercial

This one combines a cute/ sweet theme with the advanced capabilities of the Asus slate. Very relevant for women.

 

6 marketing challenges that require courage contributions

I have seen my share of re-org across various companies and its impact on the teams. Here are 6 marketing challenges that require a special form of courage (courageous contribution). It requires you to step  forward despite these challenges and draw upon your inner strengths as well as your social network to navigate and overcome these challenges.

It involves taking action to give your best at work even when you feel as if you cannot succeed.

1. Mastering a new roles that requires new skillsets
- moving from marketing to sales

2. Working with high demands and dramatically different job expectations across groups
- everybody up to the CEO want to provide input and express an opinion on your marketing initiative

3. Shifing project scope or goals that undermine your sense of what is expected in your work
- your marketing budget got cut to fund a short term volume driving initiative

4. Going through a reorg that shift your role and responsibility
- mergers, new roles

5. Handling a difficult interpersonal relationship with a manager or a peer who puts you on the defensive
- your boss makes bad comments about you in public

6. Feeling excluded
- you notice that you are not invited for key meetings and feel left out.

SEO: from Search to Landing Page to Consumer journey

Social search is critical to ensure social assets are gaining increased search share of voice.

Here are 4 ways to evaluate your social search results:

- which of your branded social channels (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) appear on page 1 in Google or Bing?
- How many rankings are showing up in Twitter search?
- How are your YouTube videos showing up when searching for videos?
- How visibile are your tweets in real-time Twitter search results over time and for what terms?

Once people have arrived on your landing page, the consumer journey begins.

Here is a strategic framework to think about your click-through journey.

Raise your game at generating INSIGHTS

Potential for change is the reason great innovators get goose bumps from great insights, which hurl open the gates to new possibilities that weren’t viable before.

One of the most powerful thing is to listen for the thing that is normally not being said. Occasionally it is being said. Usually the best insights come from mixing a consumer truth, a brand truth, a commercial truth and a marketing truth. For technology brand you can add user experience truth. For advertising it might be a storytelling truth.

So, lets start with a definition?

Various ways to portray Product Features in TV advertising

The dilemma is simple: the more a TV commercial emphasis the product features the less interesting the TV ad becomes and the less effective the results with consumers. Here are a few ways to talk about product features.

1. Using Font Type/ voice over to enhance product features

Ford F150: EcoBoost

 

2. The storyline: wrapping the feature in a compelling story

Spot PDA Simply Palm

 

Advertising platform: The use of animals

Ok, animals work in advertising and is a very common technique. Here are a few examples of how they work.

Kia Hamster commercial

In this one, animals are used as personification of people. Gives a cool vibe.

 

2012 HYUNDAI SONATA HYBRID: Easy On The Eyes.

Cute animals. Check. Catchy soundtrack. Check. This one has all the component parts and pulls them together masterfully. The ad does a great job of keeping the viewers attention, while keeping them guessing what could have the animals of the forest so interested. Jeff Bridges’ familiar voice tells that it is “as easy on the eyes as it is on the environment.”

 

Aflac Dancing Duck TV Commercial (New Voice Revealed)

 

5 Best 3D Video Projection Mapping Magic - It will blow you away

What is "3D Mapping Projection"? It projects specially manipulated content onto 3D surfaces such that the illusion of depth, objects and light appears. It is an illusion using standard projectors.

Ok, I am a fan of these and have applied some of these on a smaller scale at our brand activations.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Lexus CT, projected on the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles

 

Target: Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular at the Standard Hotel NYC

 

3D Projection mapping in the city of Sugarland, Texas for New Years Eve 2010

 

3D video mapping can also be done indoors. Here is The Living Room by MR Beam. They created a unique physical 3D video-mapping experience by turning a white living room into a spacious 360° projection area.
This technique allowed them to take control of all colors, patterns and textures of the furniture, wallpapers and carpet. All done with 2 projectors.

 

Nokia Lumia Live ft deadmau5 lights up London with amazing 4D projection

Launch of Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows phone in London. I was scheduled to attend but had a last minute cancellation. Bummer.

 

Marketing concept testing for new product development

Concept testing allows you to take some of the risk out of new product development by assessing consumer reactions to a fundamental idea or design at its early stage. The objective is to identify which new ideas have the most potential and are worthy of further development.

Here is a video on the well known example of how New Coke failed with consumers:

 

It is clear from this video that the full brand experience is an important part of concept testing.

One of the objectives of concept testing is to forecast the likely sales take-off in year one, to estimate the repeat purchasing levels and to clarify the profile of potential users.

Concept testing and product testing are particularly suited to the online medium because a wide variety of visual and audio stimuli can be displayed and evaluated. By using images and sound files to provide a ‘near-real-world’ test environment, online testing provides you with actionable information about how your concept is perceived by your target audience, and how it compares with others on the market. Even at the pre-concept level, online testing enables large numbers of potential concept ideas to be prioritised and reduced to a manageable number that can be taken to the next step in development and research.

Benefits of concept testing online    
* Cost effectiveness - No need for expensive, physical prototype construction or fieldwork costs.    
* Reduced development cycle - Allows you to bring your product to market sooner.    
* Interactivity - Respondents can interact with high quality images or logos if required.    
* Speed of turnaround - Questionnaire can be distributed and results collected in real-time.    
* Richness of responses - Results show that people tend to be more honest and responses are ‘richer’ in content when completed online.    
* Reduced bias - There is no interviewer bias online.    
* Respondent convenience - Respondents can complete the questionnaire when and where it suits them. They can suspend the interview and come back to it later. This has a positive impact on response rates.    
* Geographical reach - For nation-wide and multi-country research, respondents can be located anywhere.    
* Automated questionnaire delivery - Exact skip and flow control and accurate rotations when multiple concepts are being shown.    
* Time and click-based interaction data - Respondent’s behaviour and level of interaction with each of the concepts can be monitored.    
* Online reporting - real-time results can be provided via our online Snapshot software, allowing percentages and simple cross-tabs to be produced whilst the study is ‘in field’.    
* Verbatim responses - Responses to open-ended questions can be provided directly to the client.    
* Evaluation control - Respondents view concepts from a consistent position and in the required order.    
* Flexibility - Variations on a concept can be tested without incurring significant costs.

For information on how to write a proper Product Concept click here

Advertising platform: Brand History

Showcasing the historical achievements, success, milestones and emotional connections across generations is a great way to continue to build one's legacy. Here are a few examples.

Chevrolet

This one shows how Chevrolet remains connected to its iconic moments, locations, and Chevy vehicles.

 

Mercedes-Benz

 

Do you have the Creative Discipline and the Creative Courage?

The Cleverness of Brilliant Logo Design

The Meanings Behind 37 Corporate Logos

Check this video out, to see clever design approaches to Logo Design.

 

It is interesting to look at the logo designs by Paul Rand.

Paul Rand says in A Designer’s Art that “ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting." His American Broadcasting Company trademark, epitomizes that ideal of minimalism while proving Rand’s point that a logo “cannot survive unless it is designed with the utmost simplicity and restraint.”

Defining Consumer Influence

How to make creative decisions for high tech products

In general it is already difficult to make consistent great creative decisions. I believe in a number of ways to ensure this happens:

1. Provide ownership and autonomy to the leaders of the creative projects
This allows for a vision to come through without it being watered down. It allows for a cohesive piece to be developed

2. Involve a number of different people in making important decisions.
This is not contrary to #1  but rather a feedback mechanism. No one has all the answers and there are so many different scenarios that are possible that it is necessary to expose creative work to a wide variety of people. It is still up to the leaders to decide what to do with the information.

3. Ensure various processes are being used to evaluate the work.

4 ways to win in the high tech world

7 Ways to Better People Management: How to Engage, Develop and Retain Talent

 I’ve seen the good and the bad things that companies do in relation to talent management. I have heard from my team, experienced good and bad policies, spoken about this topic with HR, my peers and managers and done the odd training. Here are seven practical things you can do to create employee engagement. They seem easy but are hard to implement consistently.

1. Manage with a personal touch
- People can only deliver their best when they are emotionally connected to the business and their leader. Be personal, know them
- Provide private and public personal recognition. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Writing "great job" and "thank you" emails go a long way.
- Take an employee to lunch once a week.

2. Understand what motivate your employees
Tell in your 1:1s that you value your team and that he or she is critical to you and you would like to understand better the motivations that drive them. Yes, they might say a salary increase or a promotion and it might be that is not possible but it gets more interesting when asking the next question: What else? They will come up with drivers that you can give. There are a number of questions you can ask. Here are a few:
- What could I do a little more of or a little less of?
- What makes for a great day?
- What can I do to make your job more satisfying?
I keep a project sheet for each team member and review regularly the motivation drivers of my team.

3. Make the ambition, vision and strategy clear and understood
- If you have a clearly formulated ambition, continue with communication where the company is heading, what this means for your department and how this translate to the subdepartments. Keep this direction simple and clear and ensure it combines the hard numbers with the projects and products that will deliver it, what it requires from the people and how it will effect cost and top line.
- I have seen dramatic swings in strategic choices and each time they cause upheaval. It is difficult for top talent to be successful if the goals and the measurement of success are constantly changing.

4. Set expectations
Be clear and direct what you expect people to do. Ensure that your managers meet regularly with their teams to update them on what has happened in the last month.

5. Seek out different opinions
Visit customers, invite people for lunch with whom you have never had lunch, go to dinner and connect with your people

6. Energize the job
Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process). Enrichment structures ways for employees to find the growth, challenge, and renewal they seek without leaving their current job. The key to enrichment is this: what enriches one employee is different from what enriches the next. Sometimes asking a few simple questions is enough to find possibilities of enrichment:
- In what ways would you like your job changed?
- What talents do you have that you don't use but would like to use more in the future?

7. Create career opportunities
- Have a clear career path in place with due dates for next moves, criterias to distinguish between high and poor performers, and be actively involved in peoples careers.
- If your best people know that you think there’s a path for them going forward, they’ll be more likely to hang around.

Here is a model or framework to think about the various factors influencing talent engagement, development & retainment.

 

The power of marketing your brand believes

 A lot of brand messages come across as not believable. Why because they feel like a hook to sell something. If you stand for something, if you truly believe something and consumers feel that, then it will feel genuine. If you care about Freedom and you make Harley Davidson, you will make different choices. If you are about the quality of beer, you will make different choices. This approach goes deep to the core and showcases your brand soul.

 

Here are some examples of marketing brand believes.

1. Harley Davidson

   

2. Honda - The Impossible Dream

 

How to Improve Sponsorship ROI?

I want to share my own unique sponsorship ROI model. It combines many of the different frameworks I have come across while managing several different types of sponsorship territories. I have seen different evaluation models as well. The below model can be applied to varies types of sponsorships but zones in more to sponsorship where a direct investment is made into an event. Broadcast sponsorship might be just a media tactic that has different criteria.

The first step in enhancing ROI is to be very clear on the sponsorship objectives and the role that sponsorship plays in the marketing mix. The objectives can be very different and depend on sponsorship area, industry and type of brands.

One of the main goals is increasing awareness. There are typically 5 factors influencing recall: conditions of exposure, product, message and target characteristics and sponsorship integration. Increasing brand image is often another goal. Here, specific image values are transferred to audiences.

 

1. What is the Sponsorship Platform that Fit the Brand?
When determining what types of events/properties a brand should sponsor, there are a number of factors which should be taken into consideration. The list of which criteria to aplly to choose a sponsorship activity is long and could range from how easy is it do work with the property to geographical reach to the type of rights received. Here is a general framework to think about.

 
2. What is the best portfolio of sponsorship events?

 
 

 

The funny side of marketing

These are some funny marketing related ads or (fake) compisitions. A light hearted approach to brands.

Some Marketing Jokes:
The optimist says, "The glass is half full."
The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty."
The marketing consultant says, "Your glass needs re-sizing."

 

Reach and Impact of media channels

There are various tools out there to measure how consumers are impacted by advertising messages in a broad array of communications channels that go well beyond traditional media like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, including things like search, word-of-mount, public relations and the personal recommendations of friends, families, colleagues and even doctors.

What it shows is that many non-traditional media platforms have far more impact with consumers than the traditional ad-supported media, insights that could lead to profound shifts in media spending over time.
In fact, such personal experiences as "recommendations by friends/family," product sampling, coupons/promotions, professional recommendations, and examining products in stores, have significantly greater impact than any conventional media buys. The most powerful communications medium overall, , is print--albeit editorial content, not advertising. "Print articles" were deemed the most persuasive media channel, suggesting a bigger role for public relations in the future.
Television advertising ranks next, followed by in-store advertising, newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, company Web sites, online search, radio advertising and free customer magazines. Such traditional media as radio, outdoor, direct mail, cinema, branded Internet advertising, and transit ads ranked far lower in the study.

The problem is that a lot of high impact media vehicles have low reach. So the real question is how can we amplify these things?