As brands go global, translating the name of, say, Coca-Cola or Marriot, into another language can be a confusing minefield. Without a high degree of cultural literacy, you can unwittingly adopt an inappropriate connotation, especially in a marketplace like China, where names hold deep significance and the phonetic Chinese alphabet makes literal translations of western names very, very complicated.
For example, the phonetic Chinese character for Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, means, "disease," "defect," and "virus." Probably not exactly what the boys and girls in Redmond had in mind. Or Peugeot, the French auto manufacturer, which means "prostitute."
Increasingly, big consumer brands are faced with two options when entering the Chinese consumer goods market (which is growing 13% annually): literally translate your brand's name or come up with a Chinese brand name.
Coca-Cola, in Chinese, still sounds a bit like what you hear in the West (kekoukele), but other big consumer brands have opted to find a genuine Chinese name that can say more about their product than a few homonyms ever could.
After a hard day's work, do you like to slip on a pair of Enduring and Persevering, start up your Precious Horse, and head down to the bar at the 10,000 Wealthy Elites for a tall, frosty glass of Happiness Power?
(after all, who doesn't like to wear Nikes, drive a BMW, and drink Heinekens at the Marriot bar)
One of America's iconic consumer brands, Ivory Soap, is getting a new packaging design and a supporting ad campaign, thanks to the sharp minds out at Wieden and the decision by the shot-callers at Proctor & Gamble to spend a few marketing bucks on one of the oldest brands in their stable.
The new Ivory packaging, which features bright colors chosen to contrast with the soap’s pure white, replaces the old, more subdued packaging.
The overall campaign is intended to promote the Ivory brand’s “value and simplicity,” Procter & Gamble said in a statement, while “focusing on giving busy moms and families a product that delivers what they are looking for.” Along with Olay, Gillette, Old Spice, Safeguard and Camay, Ivory is one of six soap brands sold by P.& G.
Obviously, competition in the soap category has changed radically since Ivory was introduced in 1879, with the biggest trend in recent years being the genderization of the category from a shopper marketing perspective, which has seen soaps specifically for men or women. Ivory, on the other hand, bridges this genital divide by appealing to both men and women, with half the brand’s users male and half female.
Directed at mothers ages 25 to 49, the ads, which run through December, include humorous 15- and 30-second TV spots that show how complicated soap use has become. One depicts a group of unusually shaped soaps, including a soap that resembles waffles with syrup and powdered sugar, and asks, “At what point does soap stop being soap?”
If you've never heard of Martin Lindstrom, then you probably don't work in shopper marketing (like the folks here at birdsong gregory). He's the author of six highly insightful and well written books about consumer behavior and retail branding, including one of my personal favorites, Buyology - Truth and Lies About What We Buy. He also recently made Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" list.
He wrote a great shopper marketing article recently for Time based on one of his invaluable blog posts. The big premise?
The next time you go grocery shopping, take a look at the signs, the type of flooring, and even the carts. Everything has been designed with an eye towards getting you to grab those three cans of something that was not on your list.
Martin spent some time at a huge "shopper research" facility outside of Chicago (run by a big consumer goods company), where test shoppers spend hours pushing carts through what, to the untrained eye, looks just like a real grocery store. Of course, to the shopper marketers, consumer anthropologists, and other pointy headed brand geeks back in the control room hovering over a bank of glowing video monitors, every detail is carefully analyzed and tweaked. From the type of flooring (people move more slowly over parquet than linoleum) to how special deals are formulated on in-store price signs (using an actual dollar sign decreases the probability of purchase), it's a fascinating look at what goes on behind the shelf.
There’s a hot new site making the rounds this Halloween season that mines your Facebook account and inserts your photo and other information into a creepy video - playing right into our biggest fears about privacy and the information we share online.
The mysterious site is called Take This Lollipop and it works like so: after you give the site permission to connect to your Facebook account, it begins playing a video featuring a sweaty, twitchy man, sitting in a darkened room, using a computer to nose around Facebook. But he’s not browsing through just any random page – he’s looking at your account and getting increasingly agitated by what he’s seeing.
In the first 24 hours of the site being open to the public, more than 300,000 people have given it access to their Facebook accounts. And I'm sure with Halloween rapidly approaching, that number has already increased exponentially. So check it out!
Want to market your brand better? Then tell a story. That’s the top finding from an intensive three-year study that was recently released by the Advertising Research Foundation and American Association of Advertising Agencies, both based in New York.
The researchers set out to measure consumers’ emotional responses to TV advertising. What they discovered is that advertisements that tell a branding story work better than ads that focus on product positioning.
The report contends that in many ways, advertising is stuck in the past. The 20th century was dominated by a one-way transactional focus where ads were pushed at consumers. Today, consumers interact with ads to “co-create” meaning that is powered by emotion and rich narrative.
Thirty-three ads across 12 categories, from brands like Budweiser, Campbell’s Soup and MasterCard, were analyzed by 14 leading emotion and physiological research firms. The research tools varied from testing heart rate and skin conductance of the ad viewer to brain diagnostics.
After reading a recent article in The Times about Google Goggles, I was struck by how rapidly the world of digital shopper marketing is evolving. Google Goggles is a mobile app that uses image-recognition software to decipher landmarks, text, book and DVD covers, artwork, logos, bar codes, wine labels. etc.
Comparison shopping has never been easier, now that you can snap a quick pic of a book’s cover while in store and almost instantly check the price and reviews on Amazon, but the mind races to fathom all the opportunities a good image recognition app could offer a retailer or consumer brand. Here are a couple:
• Massively successful European billboard advertiser JCDecaux is launching an image recognition iPhone app called U snap. Users can take pictures of JCDecaux posters and billboards – which the app will recognize, and provide access to extra content. Several major brands including Orange and Lancome have already signed on, and the app is planned for Android and Windows launches as well.
• Amazon Mobile includes the “Amazon Remembers” feature, which allows you to take a picture of any product, and (using the Mechanical Turk service identify the product and put it in your wish list. This isn’t real-time yet, but several product categories (movies and books) are already automated.
• Layar is one of many popular augmented-reality apps on the AppStore which allow you to see the iPhone’s camera output in real-time, with supplemental data overlaid on it. For example, take a picture of street you’re walking down to see what stores lie ahead.
1. Visibility Contrast is key, which is why a strong logo and lots of white space work (think Special K) – especially when shelves are filled with a visual cacophony of slogans, logos, and CTAs.
2. Shopability Consumers can easily be overwhelmed by the breadth of a category, so making your product easy to find and, most importantly, easy to understand, is critical. If you have different products for different applications, the layout should be consistent and facilitate comparison. For example, colored caps on similar colored bottles can bring branding and product differentiation into harmony.
3. Differentiation Since purchase decisions are often intuitive and emotional, packaging needs to embody or represent key aspects of your brand. If you're selling health food, your packaging needs to look healthier than the competition. If you're selling high end auto care products, you should make the rest of the shelf look downright proletarian.
4. Simplicity Consumers don’t spend a lot of time studying the items they throw into their shopping cart, and accordingly, the package needs to convey a clear message. Adding more claims, for example, won’t increase the time the shopper spends reading the package and can even dilute the message.
5. Consumability Smart packaging design can increase sales and help anchor your shopper marketing strategy when it makes a product easier to store (think fridge packs) or to readily consume (think "on-the-go” packaging).
6. Sustainability We are all increasingly concerned about the environment, and packaging design needs to address our collective need for greater sustainability. Fortunately, it’s increasingly easy to align a product’s marketing needs with those of the world around us. For example, eliminating secondary cardboard packaging can make a product more visible (and more unique).
Dunno. But it's a good question. And Ogilvy has certainly jumped on the bandwagon with the launch of its new unit OgilvyCulture – which specializes in a hot new marketing trend called cross-cultural marketing.
Cross-cultural marketing is, as the term suggests, aimed across demographic groups to appeal to consumer similarities rather than differences. By contrast, traditional multicultural marketing tends to be directed at specific demographic groups like Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, female, or LGBT consumers.
Given the slowly emerging results of the 2010 census, the changing demographic makeup of the American consumer market is increasingly a topic of interest among advertisers and agencies. In fact, here at birdsong gregory, we often discuss how to best help our clients communicate with and market to our increasingly cross-cultural world. Given the big mash-up we now live in, does an agency's payroll need to reflect every ethnographic strata of society, or does it make more sense to hire employees based on the diversity of their worldview, not their DNA?
I don’t buy 10 cartons of Yoplait because I can’t (won’t) eat 10 cartons of yogurt before they go bad. I’m lucky if I can eat my way to the bottom of one carton. So when my local Food Lion has a great deal on yogurt, I tend to pass. From a shopper marketing perspective however, such outlier behavior is generally atypical of how middle America reacts to a ten for $10.
The Times had a good article about multiples this morning, and here’s a quick birdsong gregory exegesis.
Using buying patterns detected from loyalty cards, receipts, and other research, grocery chains are searching for the multiples sweet spot. For example, Kroger currently has lemonade, socks and Kroger gummi bears candy on sale at 10 for $10. And, to the chagrin of right-brained finger counters everywhere, the old gimmick — buy one, get one free — has been expanded to include some pricing equations based on complex NASA-inpsired algorithms – or at least it appears so to my mathematical challenged mind.
Most grocery shoppers make a list before going to the store, according to two recent studies, In one, Acosta Sales and Marketing, which advises clients like Nestlé on pricing, found that 84 percent of shoppers make a list, 23 percent make fewer grocery trips than a year ago, and that, over all, shoppers are spending less per trip than a year ago.
Then, throw unemployment, rising gas prices and more expensive food into an already meager stew, and you get consumers who have become extremely value driven, budget minded, list minded, less impulsive, and very deal oriented. So in order to get someone to buy something that wasn’t on their list (or more of what was), grocers like our client Bloom need incentives to nudge shoppers outside their typical behavior. And it’s working.
Well advertised, relevant multiples push customers a little higher than their typical purchase rate. People tend to buy the amount, or buy in increments, that are advertised – ten boxes of tortellini for $10, for example. According to John T. Gourville, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School who studies pricing strategies, even though shoppers usually do not have to buy the suggested amount to get the discount, they do anyway. “It is all about the power of suggestion,” he said.
At least that's what Zappos, the online shoe and apparel retailer, hopes its new advertising campaign will accomplish. Featuring naked models doing everyday things like jogging, hailing a cab and playing Frisbee in public, the campaign is intended to highlight both the company’s merchandise as well as its quirky culture.
Created by Mullen, the new campaign will incorporate a heavy dose of digital ads, videos and QR codes, as well as print ads in magazines. Zappos is hoping consumers will keep looking at the campaign’s print ads long enough to notice the quick response codes that, when scanned by a smartphone, will take the user to a mobile site featuring fictional videos of what happens to the naked women in the ads. Users can also select outfits for the model to wear and can enter the Zappos mobile site to buy the items on the smartphone.
Ads will begin running in the August issues of magazines like Lucky, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, and Harper’s Bazaar. The target audience is what Zappos calls “happy hunters,” or women who are fashion conscious and heavy consumers of online media.
But if you're a feminist, don't get angry. Women who may feel slighted by the lack of a naked man in the campaign will have to wait until the end of July, when Zappos will take over the home page of a major search engine portal with an interactive ad introducing a male character, Arthur. In the ad, Arthur asks the user to help him dress while he makes his way to the Zappos Web site.
It's been fun to watch companies of all shapes and sizes scramble to win the hearts and minds of shoppers through a bevy of evolving new media channels like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and YouTube.
But far more companies are struggling to navigate the singular paradox inherent in social media marketing: it's not about your company – it's about the shopper.
So with that in mind, here are few broad guidelines to consider.
1. Focus on the needs of your audience or the community as a whole by showing that you care about your customers and the public. This can be accomplish in a variety of ways. Use community boards, comment on prospect and customer pages and/or blogs. Or, take a page from Mountain Dew's playbook and provide a forum where customers can show off their creativity.
2. Give shoppers multiple paths to purchase and connect. For example, let them use Twitter as another customer service option or a smart phone app to order groceries.
3. Provide useful content by contributing to an informational blog, creating useful infographics, or giving away a free e-book. The key is to tailor your content to meet your shoppers' needs. If you’re not sure what they want, ask them!
4. Ask your community how you can better satisfy their needs. Starbucks has a community board to collect suggestions where the community votes on them.
Hope this helps, and if you'd like to find out more about ways we've helped our clients connect with shoppers via social media, give us a buzz.
Because we're social animals. That's why. And no matter how fast a network we have at home. Or however many QVC channels. Or how convenient it is to order a kayak while wearing pajamas, just because it's increasingly easy to shop online, doesn't mean we'll stop going to the mall.
Indeed, for most retail sectors, a physical store can serve a fundamentally different function, giving consumers the ability to see, taste and touch the products in a way that is impossible online. Think of prime retail spaces like an Apple Store. Or Nike Town. Or the Disney Store.
The shopper marketing challenge for retailers in the future will be to figure out a way to play up the strengths of a bricks-and-mortar store while incorporating new technology and consumer trends into the experience. From interactive video screens to a smaller, carefully cultivated selection, here's an interesting article from The Streetabout ways that retailers can remain relevent as online commerce continues to grow.
Sort of. All I really know is that when I watched this 17 times on Friday it had approximately 9 million hits. Three days it later it now has 12 million – and it still makes me smile.
No, this isn't about how to sell more Chivas Regal to a business traveler in an airport duty free shop. It's about acknowledging that the basic principles of shopper marketing – relevance, convenience, understanding what consumers really want – also apply to many B2B environments.
Take conferences for example. If you think of the attendee as the shopper and the conference organizer as the retailer, how can a host organization make the experience better for their guests?
How about taking that 300 page conference program (with its two keynote speeches, seminar schedule, speaker bios, restaurant guide, etc., etc.) and turning it into an app I can download to my tablet? Think about it: no heavy tome to lug back home, instant engagement through live updates and twitter feeds, and a huge savings in printing costs for the folks putting on the event.
The NYT had an insightful article about this exciting trend recently. Check it out.
Type in "shoes" and you can easily be overwhelmed by the the avalanche of options that Google returns. Retailers have noticed, and are now offering a more tailored online shopping experience. At a dozen new sites like Just Fabulous, JewelMint, or ShoeDazzle, shoppers first take a short style quiz, agree to pay a monthly fee, and then start receiving exclusive offers on items cultivated to match their fashion sensibilities.
At JewelMint, users pay a monthly fee of $29.95 and are presented with a limited selection of merchandise at periodic intervals. And according to Kate Bosworth, the celebrity face of the site, "the idea of harnessing search for different, sought-after things on the Internet is really the new frontier."
Of course, using algorithms to better understand consumer preferences is nothing new, but this growing breed of online shopping club combines the reoccurring revenue model with private e-commerce sale sites like Groupon with a dash of old fashioned personalized attention.
Remember the saleswoman who always knew what color of lipstick your grandmother preferred? I do.
Like a circus clown, this is funny and frightening at the same time.
"Filling in time sheets. Getting another coffee. Playing foosball. Ad agencies were carrying on as they always had, ignorant of the great change going on all around them that would soon destroy them all . . . now the consumer could choose what he or she wanted to see - not what an ad agency forced them to."
Interested in how mobile, social media, and geolocation are changing the way we shop – forever? Then take 3 minutes to watch this powerful video from Resource Interactive shown at the 2010 Shop.org Annual Summit.
Most shoppers look for the iconic cigar chomping Vlasic stork in the pickle aisle, but lately, thanks to a new instore ad campaign for one of America's most popular pickle brand, you can find the stoutly billed Groucho Marx-imitating bird in other parts of the your supermarket. Like next to ground beef in the butchers case. After all, what goes better with a hamburger than a nice crisp dill pickle? Research shows that a majority of burgers are served with pickles, and as grilling season gets underway the timing is good.
Along with shelves and grocery carts, vinyl ads also will appear on supermarket floors, while displays near the pickles themselves will dispense coupons and recipes. Along with this in-store advertising, which will run through September, the new Vlasic campaign includes recent ads in print magazines like People and Dash and on websites including FoodNetwork.com.
Vlasic, a brand of the Pinnacle Foods Group, spent $7.9 million on advertising in 2009 and $8.4 million in 2010, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Eric Hintz, vice president for marketing at Pinnacle, declined to reveal the exact cost of the new campaign, but said marketing expenditures in 2011 would increase by double digits over last year.
As a Charlotte based shopper marketing agency, birdsong gregory is experiencing this trend firsthand and is excited about how retailers and product brands increasingly understand the importance of being relevant at the shelf.
According to a recent survey by the GMA and Booz, 55 percent of brands plan to increase spending on shopper marketing by more then 5 percent annually over the next three years, which is more than those intending to increase spending on social media (52 percent), Internet advertising (41 percent), print media (14 percent) or television (7 percent).
Some other examples of fun instore marketing juxtapositions:
To promote its soy and teriyaki sauces, Kikkoman dispenses recipes for marinades and coupons from a shelf display in the meat section during grilling season and places turkey brining recipes in the poultry section before Thanksgiving.
In an instore Valentine’s Day promotion to encourage using M&M’s in recipes, the Mars brand recently placed displays in the bakery aisle at supermarkets with cupcake recipes featuring the candies.
Powered by Compendium