Springing Into Life: Does Your Brand Need to Revitalize?
In the Northern Hemisphere, the spring season is upon us. Spring is known as a time of rebirth. The brand world is not all too different from the world of living organisms. Like all living things, brands need to be cared for in order to demonstrate signs of vitality. This is the essence of the product life cycle, a fundamental marketing concept. Brands are developed, grown, and reach the state of maturity. A challenge comes in the latter part of the maturity stage, which is avoiding the onset of a brand decline. Through revitalization, brands can extend the spring like Read More
Bridging The Advertising Trust Gap
A report from Forrester Research, based on survey responses from 58,000 respondents, indicates what could be perceived as a severe advertising trust gap. The data indicated that 70% of consumers trust brand recommendations from friends but only 10% trust advertising messages. At first glance, this may seem like a significant deficiency for brand advertisers and a substantial knock of the process of advertising itself. While there is relevance in this snippet of data, it does not spell doom for advertising. I expect advertising to be around in some form 100 years from today. Certainly, this is nothing new. There’s often Read More
Why Multi-Channel? 5 Places Where You Need To Be
Visa ads once had a famous tagline of “It’s Everywhere You Want To Be”. So where is the everywhere that brand marketers want to be? Simply everywhere, or as close to everywhere within reason. One of the key challenges of the present era in marketing is changing the mindset from single channel to multi-channel. Brand marketers need to stop thinking about marketing communications efforts in a single setting and think more fully about how the efforts are going to integrate holistically. How will the pieces of the puzzle fit together? Here are the 5 basic components of a multi-channel digital Read More
The Newest Pheeding Frenzy
Have you heard of Pheed? Are you on there? The answer to both of these questions is becoming yes more frequently. So what is Pheed? Pheed is the newest, hottest social media network. It launched in October 2012. It has been growing in popularity, and has earned its way to the top of the list of free apps downloaded. Pheed is positioned as a combination of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr, taking some of the best features of those networks and adding its own twist. In that way, it is developing its own brand authenticity. Some of the features of Read More
Brand Authenticity in a Distributed Marketing Environment
A recent AdAge article highlighted the plans Miller Lite announced with a new ad campaign that will soon launch, emphasizing brand authenticity. I like the idea of brand authenticity, and I think it serves all brands well to develop an individual, authentic approach to marketing communications that will resonate with an audience. The Miller Lite marketing communications approach in this campaign serves as a great case study for a number of elements that compromise the promotion element of the marketing mix. There are applicable elements to brands in many industries, including brands leveraging distributed marketing management style operations in highly Read More
Distributed Marketing Management: Targeting & Reaching Baby Boomers
Earlier this week, the AARP announced a new effort in social media marketing, a YouTube series called “Movies For Grownups.” In the 50+ market, the AARP has significant brand awareness, which makes sense as the 50+ market is their specialty. If the AARP is making inroads in the social media space with senior marketing initiatives, I interpret this as the latest signal that the 50+ market is becoming more and more digitally aware. There’s a lot to be impressed with from the perspective of many brands with regard to the 50+ market. Many brands that operate using the distributed marketing Read More
Can Distributed Marketing Management Brands Have Fun With Their Ads?
Legendary ad agency executive Jerry Della Femina once said that “advertising is the most fun that you can have with your clothes on.” While I am not sure that I fully agree with agree with his sentiment, the fact of the matter remains that advertising and marketing related work has the potential to be fun. I’ve had some fun times in my own work in marketing. The reason I’m asking this question is because of the nature of many distributed marketing organizations. Distributed marketing companies are often in the insurance and financial services. A common perception of insurance and financial Read More
How to Take a Distributed Marketing Management, Multi-Channel Approach to a Brand Crisis
Talking about crisis management is never a fun topic for most marketers to consider. It is something that can keep someone who works in marketing awake at night. Brand crises can take on many forms. They can be product related, a problem with a celebrity endorser, the way customers are treated, or pretty much anything that will cause negative perceptions of the brand. In a distributed marketing organization, there are significant customer interaction touch points that are unique to this form of organization. If a brand crisis happens within a distributed marketing management type organization, there’s a different type of Read More
Why People Think Mobility = Survivability
Every day, there seems to be some sort of new stat that amazes me about how relevant smartphones are to the population at large. The latest evidence of this comes in the form of an article on Mashable entitled “85% of Smartphone Users Would Rather Give Up Water Than Mobile Apps.” In the article, we learn that Apigee conducted a survey of 762 smartphone users in 5 different countries and apparently 85% of this sample indicated that high degree of importance the smartphone has in their life. This seems astonishing to me because any junior high life science class tells Read More
Distributed Marketing Management Software: What’s the Point?
Distributed marketing management software has the potential to tremendously benefit an organization. But what are the benefits? What is the point of distributed marketing management software as a marketing automation solution? Marketing automation works well in an organization that is structured via a distributed model. In a distributed model, there is corporate marketing structure that centralizes brand management. In essence, this does not differentiate a distributed model organization from a company like Procter & Gamble, the company that truly defined the modern concept of brand management back in the early 20th Century. Distributed marketing organizations would diverge from Procter & Read More
