In the midst of finishing my presentation and also putting the last edits together on my second book, the timing was perfect for the interview ... which perhaps explains why I've spent the last hour procrastinating on finishing my presentation and writing this post instead. But if you aspire to write anything from a book to a great blog post, I guarantee that some of Coelho's tips below will help. Here are his frequently "tweetworthy" quotes that I wrote down from his audio podcast:
On Inspiration:"I procrastinate, check some emails ... then I start. I write my books very quickly because I cannot stop."
On Confidence: "You cannot sell your next book by underrating your book that was just published. Be proud of what you have."
On Simplicity:"What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple." On Trust: "Trust your reader. Don't try to describe things. Give a hint and they will fulfill this hint with their own imagination."
On Writing:"I write the book that wants to be written. Behind the first sentence is a thread that takes you to the last."
On Expertise: "You cannot take something out of nothing. When you write a book, you use your experience."
On Critics:"Writers want to please their peers. They want to be recognized. Forget about this. Who cares? You should care to share your soul and not to please other writers who will write a review that nobody is going to read."
On Overcoming Stagnation:"If I don't feel inspired, I need to move forward. You need to have be disciplined."
On Research:"If you overload your book with a lot of research, you are going to be very boring to yourself and to your reader. Books are not there to show how intelligent you are. Books are there to show your soul."
On Notetaking:"I use notes to take them out of my head. I will never use them the next day - they will be useless."
On Story Arcs:"There are only four types of stories: lovestory between 2 people, lovestory between 3 people, a struggle for power, and a journey."
On Style:"Don't try to innovate storytelling. Tell a good story and it is magical. I see people trying to work so much in style, finding different ways to tell the same thing. It is like fashion. Style is the dress, but the dress does not dictate what is inside the dress. What counts is the person."
On Notetaking:"If you want to capture ideas, you are lost. You are going to be detached from emotions and forget to live your life. You will be an observer and not a human being living his or her life. Forget notetaking. What is important remains, what is not important goes away."
On The Alchemist:"I wanted to write a story about my life. But I don't know why I chose a shepard. I've never been a shepard. When you write a book in one act, it is not such an effort to write it."
Thanks to Tim for offering up access to the mind of one of the most prolific and inspirational modern fiction writers - and to Paolo Coelho himself for taking the time to sit down and take all of us behind the scenes on how the magic really happens.
Let me tell you a little secret. I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked. This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year. I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday.
A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:
Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and strong ability to use design to engage people.
People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.
Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com. Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...
Yesterday I spent the day at the Corporate Social Media Summit, a big gathering of some of the best minds in leading social media efforts on behalf of large corporate brands. The event was put on by the team at Useful Social Media - and that indeed was the theme of the day as panelists offered real case studies, answered tough questions and generally demonstrated that there is real hope for large corporate brands to actively use social media to generate real business value in multiple ways. Here are some of the biggest lessons that 10 brands featured on Day 1 of the event shared in their presentations:
1. American Express* - "Altruism has a long tail."
Uniquely qualified to talk about the impact of altruism, American Express Open Forum VP of Social Media Laura Fink went behind the scenes of the hugely successful "Small Business Saturday" campaign that American Express launched back in November of 2010 to create a day where consumers could get rewarded with a $25 statement credit for shopping at a small business location. According to Fink, the campaign engaged more than 1.2 million small businesses around the country and also helped those businesses to see a 28% sales lift on the day of the promotion. Perhaps more importantly, it showed that doing something good can generate a real business impact for customers as well as for the big brand putting on the campaign.
2. Union Pacific - "Never underestimate local communities."
One of the largest railway companies in the United States, Union Pacific has also been around for nearly 150 years. To celebrate this heritage, Senior Manager of Media Technology Tim Mcmahan shared a case study of a crowdsourced competition that Union Pacific held to get people to vote on the ideal route for one of their old steam engines to take on the "Union Pacific Great Excursion Adventure." The voting was split into several rounds, with some fierce competition from unexpected locations. Through each round, Mcmahon shared that the consistently surprising result was that smaller towns like Tuscola, IL were routinely outpacing big metro markets like Chicago. The point, he noted, was that sometimes the most passion for a campaign like this can come from smaller local communities for whom winning may be a bigger deal. Across the campaign, there were nearly 200,000 votes recorded, over 100,000 email addresses captured and the brand plans to reprise the campaign next year.
3. Coca-Cola* - "The most important number in social media is 360."
Through the brilliant video below, Coke's Director of Digital Communications Ashley Brown told the story of a big ambitious PR idea which turned into the largest social media campaign the brand had ever done. The mission was to send three lucky travelers on a journey to all 206 countries around the world where Coke was sold. The trio embarked on their journey on January 1, 2010 and anyone could choose to follow their travels and adventures on the website Expedition 206 (which sadly doesn't seem to be available online anymore). Their goal in each country was to find what made people happy - which Brown noted was perfectly on strategy for Coke to build on their existing brand platform and marketing campaign centered around the idea to "open happiness." The answers they got ranged from family to music to dancing to soccer (yes, they made it to the World Cup in South Africa). Through the lens of this beautiful social experiment disguised as marketing, the team managed to reach what may be the most profound conclusion of all ... that happiness is always simple, whatever form it takes.
4. Best Buy - "Nobody owns social media."
In one of the most eye-opening talks of the day, Gina Debogovich shared some big lessons learned from her time over the last 3-4 years building up the Best Buy customer service and social care center to what is now called the "Twelp Force. As a former customer care person herself, she talked about how Best Buy uses the overarching mission of "creating meaningful communications in the virtual world" to guide all of their efforts. They have an inner circle of about 26 team members dedicated to social media at their team, and then an extended 3000 employees who are actively encouraged to use social media and offered lots of different forms of training on how to do it. Her team is a resource that individual stores can use for advice on such tasks as how to effectively use Facebook specifically for their store. In addition, their team is the only customer care team in the world who currently has their own production studio for creating content such as their Best Buy Unboxing feature. In one case, Gina shared the unheard of stat of how they managed to reduce the volume of one "call driver" (customer service lingo for a top reason that people call a contact center) by 50% simply by producing a video to answer that question.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Gina spoke.
5. Samsung - "Negative experiences are our biggest opportunity."
Samsung is a brand that has made lots of strides recently in integrating social media into their customer service, and has been very active in joining conversations about their brand online. One of the leaders of this, Jessica Kalbarczyk (@samsungjessica) shared her insights about how her small team of four colleagues manages to engage people online about Samsung, and help solve their problems. For Jessica, coming from a marketing and PR role into one more focused on customer service was a fulfilling role because every day she manages to address real problems and change consumers experiences one by one. Anyone in a marketing role who has suffered through never ending meetings about social media without a real vision or tangible outcome will easily be able to imagine how nice a feeling it much be to actually solve real problems and the sense of accomplishment that would offer on a daily basis. As part of that, she shared a point of view which is common among customer service pros ... that they would much rather find negativity and have a chance to fix it and change that consumer's perception. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to run scared in the opposite direction from any negativity. There is clearly a lesson here about the necessity of integrating marketing and customer service more closely.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Jessica spoke.
6. Dell - "Forget ROI and focus more broadly on business value."
At the top of most analyst's lists of brands that have managed to integrate social media into their operations in a real and tangible way would likely be computer maker Dell. During his talk, Richard Binhammer from Dell shared a historical perspective of how social media became integrated into the organization, and one of the most powerful points in his presentation was where he shared the six business areas which have fully embraced social media for different business reasons - marketing, product development, sales, online presence, customer service and communications. While other brands focus on one of these at a time, Dell has reached a point where they can "inhale and exhale at the same time" as Richard shared in his talk. Ultimately, his biggest point is that "ROI" is such a restricting term when it comes to describing what social media can offer and there is a much stronger way to describe the real value behind it that we need to think about including in more of our discussions.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Richard spoke.
7. Southwest - "Have fun and be human."
Fun and airline are not two words that anyone would typically use in the same sentence, yet Social Media Manager from Southwest Airlines Alice Wilson devoted a good part of her talk about how Southwest creates a more human brand by using an irreverant voice. The questions that keep many other large brands up at night in terms of making sure they have backup for employees who are running social media channels, or mapping everything back to some specific campaign or column on a spreadsheet don't seem to matter as much for Southwest. They have guiding principles around their social voice, yet Alice shares that most people who speak out for the brand "just get the hang of it." Without that formalized training or overly bureaucratic approach to managing every aspect of Southwest, the brand succeeds because they have such a strong culture that people start to take it on as their own from day one and this translates into social media.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Alice spoke.
8. Kodak - "Real time listening pays off."
Kodak is a brand that has won a lot of respect for how forward thinking they have been in moving into social media over the past several years, even publishing a guidebook which was available for the attendees on how to use social media and what they had learned. In his talk Tom Hoen, the Kodak Director of Interactive Marketing, shared a number of examples demonstrating the power of listening. In one example, the brand awoke to a barrage of negativity from fans of a Nickelodeon TV show called Degrassi because there was a rumor that the brand had pulled all their advertising due to the show's sometimes adult themes. Fairly rapidly, they were able to use social media to diffuse the rumor (it was actually just a natural pause in flighting for their ads) and engage those angry voices - leading one person to share on Twitter "Now I feel bad. I told the Kodak people to eff themselves sideways, and they sent me a tweet being all nice." Aside from the newly found good feelings, Degrassi and Nickelodeon offered up 2 free spots to Kodak during their season premiere. Not a bad ROI for engaging a few irate teens.
9. New York Life - "Brands need to trust their people."
An unexpected voice at the event came from Gregory Weiss, the AVP of Social Media for New York Life. He started with an entertaining look at the hypcritical nature of business, and how many large brands are afraid of what their employees might do with social media even though they let those same employees have phones and use fax machines and talk to people outside of the company. His main point was that if you can't trust your employees to do the right things and make the right choices, then maybe you need to hire better people. He offered several real tips for using social media in a corporate environment, including supporting your existing sales force, getting on the agenda of new hire initiations so you can tell them about social media, and even simple things like encouraging people to add your social media properties to the end of their email signatures. A point I took away as well, though he didn't mention it was about the importance of picking your battles. Apparently, New York Life also has a vetting process they use internally before any social media property can link to an outside website. That might seem like overkill for many brands, but Greg manages to work around it without making it a big issue.
10. Pepsi - "Reward people for everyday behaviour."
The last presentation of the day came from Josh Karpf, who focuses on an area that more brands should consider having as part of their marketing efforts ... digital research and development. His group runs many forward thinking experiments on how to use social media to engage consumers, and he shared some real examples and hard data from a few of their efforts around trying to offer couponing as a layer on top of geolocation and encouraging people to check in. For one campaign with Hess convenience stores, they found that using a Foursquare promotion in a particular location offered a 47% boost in volume of purchase over previous weeks where the campaign was not running - a great result for the retailer. On the Pepsi side, they interesting learned that coupon redemptions were much higher when offered to people as a reward for some type of behaviour, which seems to offer the logical conclusion that people are more likely to follow through a claim the discount or product from a coupon if they feel they had to "earn" that coupon in some way such as by checking into the gym for 10 days in a month.
*NOTE: Several of the brands mentioned in this post are current or previous Ogilvy clients. In particular, Coca-Cola and American Express are both clients and some Ogilvy team members may have worked on both of the campaigns mentioned. In both cases, I did not work in either campaign and also have not been compensated or encouraged in any way to write about these two brands or these campaigns. I am also a contributor to the American Express Open Forum website.
The morning after the Academy Awards celebrated everything about movies, the one underappreciated ingredient that every winning film had was a champion that helped that film to get made. Usually that person is the producer, who could easily be described as as a cheerleader with vision. The producer is the one who needs to believe in a film and be willing to put their reputation on the line to help it get made. Peter Guber is one of the most well known producers in Hollywood and the former Head of Sony Pictures. The first time I met Peter Guber was over breakfast in Beverly Hills. The legendary producer of iconic films like Gorillas in the Mist and Rainman shared with me the philosophy that carried him to success during his unusually long career in Hollywood (a place notorious for encouraging short-lived careers). It was one of the most enlightening conversations I've had, and it was not because of filmmaking but rather because of Peter's belief that the power of storytelling is the secret at the heart of his success.
Peter has spent his lifetime actually becoming a master marketer, which is why I am thrilled that his first book called Tell To Win is coming out tomorrow. He was kind enough to share an advance copy, and here are just a few of the marketing lessons that I took from spending a short hour talking with him and having the chance to read his book (which I will review in my Influential Marketing Book List for March):
Arouse Your Listener's Curiosity. One of my favourite science fiction movies is the film Contact with Jodie Foster. It turns out the first moment when Carl Sagan sold the movie rights to that book happened before he even wrote it. At a backyard lunch session, he described the vision for a story where an alien race made contact with humans and sent a message with instructions on how to build something that might enable more direct contact. The story of what would be built, and who would get to take the one seat it contained was the story of Contact - but the way Sagan sold the idea was by planting the seed of the story and asking Peter whether he would want to know what happened next. Of course he would, as we all would - and the movie was sold on the spot and made into an award winning film.
Make Your Customer The Hero. In 2005, entrepreneur Richard Rosenblatt sold his company Intermix Media, the parent of MySpace.com, to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp for $580 million. It was one of the largest deals at the time for an online media company, and speaking to students at UCLA, Rosenblatt shared that he had made the sale in just 20 minutes. How did he do it? When he talked to Murdoch, he had done a masterful job of painting him as the hero of the story. He shared how Murdoch had been forward thinking in every other aspect of media except for the Internet and that he was overdue for making a big statement on the web. Buying Intermix could be that statement, and at the close of the meeting Rosenblatt shared an almost impossible prediction: "One year from today you will be on the cover of WIRED magazine." One year later, Murdoch was indeed on the cover and sent an autographed copy to Rosenblatt.
Know Where The Drama Is. Iconic music legend Michael Jackson may well have been one of the greatest entertainers who ever lived, but in 1991 when Peter described meeting him - he had only one thing on his mind ... getting into movies and television. His philosophy that he shared with Peter that day was all about drama, and he brought it to life by showing Peter the massive glass terrarium in his home where he kept a huge snake. He placed a mouse inside and talked about how he needed to feed "Muscles" live mice because the snake enjoyed the game of catching the mouse. "What will happen next?" Michael asked. The drama was in watching the game unfold and understanding that dramatic tension as much as the power of his music or the fluidity of his dance moves made Michael Jackson the amazing performer that he was.
Visualize Your Data. There was a time back in the 70s where directors and stars for films were chosen based solely on relationships and very unscientific guesswork about who was available at a particular time. When Peter started his career, he created something that he called his "board of directors." It was literally a board that he put on the wall of his office which mapped out every recognized director, what types of films they had made, what their current project was, and when they would be available. It wasn't long before stories of this corkboard covered in pushpins and rope became a legend around Hollywood and movie execs as well as stars like Sidney Portier stopped into Peter's office to take a look. More than any other aspect of his career, Peter credits this board and his dedication to visualizing the hearsay-style data that existed around Hollywood into his "board of directors" with helping him to accelerate his career within Hollywood.
Imagine The World You Want. When Pat Riley, the legendary coach of the LA Lakers in the 1980s was coaching the Miami Heat in the 2006 Championship Game, he gave his players some rather odd instructions. Game six out of seven was at home in Miami, and the Heat had the chance to win the championship outright with a win in that sixth game. Going to seven games meant they would have to travel to Dallas, which historically meant that winning would be much tougher. So Riley told his players to pack for just one day. Not two or three, but only one change and one uniform, because the Heat would be champions after that sixth game - and it worked.
Prove Your Sincerity. David Copperfield is the most recognized magician in modern history, and also one of the most highly paid and frequently seen celebrities in Las Vegas. His mastery of magic is clear - but as Peter shares in Tell To Win, it was his ability to tell stories in a sincere way that really allowed him to connect with his audience. In one particular show, he shared the story of his grandfather and his personal quest to connect with him but inability to do it because his grandfather never understood him or the draw of magic. As he shared this personal frustration with the audience, they connect with him and his story on a human level. It wasn't about the magic alone. After the show, what most audience members talked about apart from floating cars and other amazing tricks, would be the way that Copperfield was able to bring everyone watching into the show with his personal story.
In 2001 Apple launched what would be one of the most iconic products of the 21st century's first decade. The iPod changed music and consumer electronics - but it also led to one of the most counterintuitive marketing strategies of the modern age as well. As the iPod grew in popularity, Apple began to sell $1000 computers as accessories for a $200 gadget. The ecosystem of the iTunes store and the ability to manage your music easily and seamlessly with your iPod started a revolution that led millions to consider (or reconsider) getting a Mac as their primary home computer. By locking customers into their ecosystem (and shutting other brands out) - Apple grew using a basic strategy of cross-selling to get customers to buy multiple devices and making sure that they all worked easily together.
Aside from a few minor examples like synched remote controls between televisions and DVD players or shared external memory card platforms (like SD or Sony's MemoryStick), the rest of the consumer electronics industry was very slow to realize the value of this strategy. As a result - buying gadgets became a very individualized experience. It simply didn't matter that much whether you stuck with one brand for all your gadgets or not. If there was one theme to emerge clearly from CES this year, it is that those days are over.
Nearly every manufacturer of large scale consumer products is investing in the value of selling an ecosystem instead of a single product. LG, Sony and SHARP all have launched their own App stores for mobile devices and (now) smart connected televisions as well. The early leader, Sony's Qriocity, features a large content archive and integrates both music and video together. LG's smart home appliances can be accessed through multiple other devices.
Samsung's latest wirelessly enabled digital camera, called the Samsung SH100 can also be synchronized with the Samsung Galaxy smartphone and then operated remotely by the phone as a remote control. The vision for more and more of these products is to make them work together at the touch of a button and finally demonstrate a real value for consumers to motivate them to choose to stay with a single brand for multiple purchases.
This is the locked in world we are headed for - where brand name will do more than just reinforce consumer confidence in the product. The brand will be the ecosystem that consumers buy into, just as they have for years with Apple. Most likely it will work for consumer electronics, and we are already seeing other industry segments start to follow. Financial services organizations want to lock you into banking, credit cards and mortgages. GE wants your home lighting and security to work with your home appliances.
In this new future, the brand you choose will determine the products you consider buying. The barrier to switch will be the inconvenience of having a device that no longer fits the ecosystem of your life.
Last week on December 1st to support World AIDS Day, a small group of celebrities with millions of fans led by Alicia Keyes decided to sacrifice their digital lives to try and save real ones. The campaign, cleverly called "Digital Death" was supported by posters, online ads and a well branded microsite. The premise was simple: a group of celebrities forego using Twitter or Facebook until $1,000,000 in donations are raised for their cause. Anyone involved with the idea might have guessed that this would last for a day or two before the target was met. It has been five days and the donations still haven't even hit $300,000.
This idea isn't bad. The celebrity support is top notch. And the branding is really strong. So why did a campaign like this which has all the individual pieces it should need for success fall flat? Here are a few reasons:
Inherently egotistical idea. The premise of this entire campaign was built on what is a fairly egotistical idea: that fans care so much about the tweets of their favourite celebrities that they would be willing to donate money to a cause in order to get them back. For core fans - this premise likely holds true ... but there are likely many fans of the celebrities who just don't care THAT much.
Asking for too much. When I first saw this campaign last week, they had a minimum donation of $10. Immediately that struck me as a huge strategic mistake. Currently it has been reduced to $1, but this choice likely cost them many supporters who might have given a buck or two at the beginning of the campaign when the buzz was highest, but would never give $10. Even the American Red Cross raising money after the Haiti earthquake had a minimum of $5. The initial minimum of $10 was a big hurdle, and even though they corrected it - it likely was too late.
Unclear connection to cause. The campaign was understandable for what the celebrities were doing, but the connection between stopping the use (or overuse) of social media and helping keep kids fighting AIDS alive was a very thin one. The best campaigns are ones where the themes work together, and in this case they didn't.
Going against cultural trends. There is a big cultural trend today towards feeling overloaded. People are bombarded with marketing messages, tweets, updates, followers and friends. Most of us just want a bit more simplicity, so when a group of relatively prolific celebrity Twitter users decide to "go dark" - more than a few fans likely breathed a sigh of relief. For those folks, paying to bring back the noise would be like writing a check to someone to punch you in the nose. The money might go to a great cause, but I still like my nose too much for that.
How could this campaign have worked and still made a big impact? One core thing I would have changed is to use the power of all these celebrities Twitter accounts for something more than silence. What if they all chose to spend 24 or 48 hours ONLY tweeting about Keep A Child Alive? Or how about donating some of their own money for everyone who asks them to stop their digital death?
This campaign had a chance to be something great - but now the only thing left for us to see is how the celebrities participating will come "back to life" online and quietly leave this behind them.
Update #2 12/6/10 9:02pm - Looks like the campaign miraculously went viral and raised over $700k in less than 24 hours so they are now at over $1 million raised. Either that or some of the celebs put up some cash to get their own digital lives back.
This morning as most Americans will wake up after the busiest "Black Friday" shopping day of the year, a weekend of buying and saving is likely to continue as people start to catch up on buying things they need and things they don't. This year, however, Black Friday will be followed by the newly named "Small Business Saturday." Heavily promoted by American Express* along with thousands of partnering small businesses, this is an integrated effort to get more Americans to choose to shop at smaller establishment on one day. Aside from being exactly the kind of promotion anyone should love to see from a big company like American Express, there are a few other points that make this a marketing effort that could easily be one of the most inspired from a company who has some of the best marketing and communications of any brand in any industry. Here are a few things I love about this concept (and lessons you can take away from it):
Put your money where your marketing is. Instead of just promoting this day as a feel good moment in time, Amex is also offering a $25 statement credit to anyone who registers for the promotion and then shops at a participating small business. In addition to the emotional incentive of helping a small business in your area, this credit demonstrates that Amex is willing to put some real money behind helping small businesses and giving back to those which use and accept American Express.
Integrate your promotion. Though I heard about Small Business Saturday quite some time ago, I also saw TV ads for it, full page print ads, Facebook advertising and heard about it on the radio. Of course, this is advice that any marketer would love to follow if they had the same budget as Amex has to spend on all these channels - but taking this type of integrated approach really helps to cement the idea in the minds of Americans and make sure as many people as possible know about Small Business Saturday.
Create a social hub. All the materials and information for Small Business Saturday exist on a Facebook page that gained well over a million fans in less than three weeks. From this page, you can not only learn about and register for the effort - but also download signs and banners for your business to use online or in real life to show that you are participating, and also get access to extended tools and information to help your small business (such as the Open Forum website which I am also a contributor to). In another effort to put their money behind this promotion, Amex also offered free Facebook advertising credits for small businesses as well.
Stand for something bigger. Perhaps the most important lesson from not only Small Business Saturday, but also all of Amex's efforts to connect with and support small businesses is that it allows a brand that could be just another credit card company using Vikings in TV ads to try and sell their latest credit card to stand for something bigger. Amex is the champion of small businesses, and small businesses are the "backbone of the US economy" (as the often repeated cliche in business goes).
Demonstrate real results. While Small Business Saturday is just happening today, the last piece that will complete this promotion will be Amex reporting back to the country and media on the impact that the entire effort made on the US economy. How many dollars people spent with small businesses, how many times their statement credit offer was redeemed, and how many small businesses participated. With this last piece of the puzzle, this campaign could turn out to not only be among the finest that Amex has ever done - but also be converted into a marketing case study that business school students will study in the future.
* American Express is a client of Ogilvy, my employer, and I have worked on marketing campaigns for Amex in the past as well as contribute to their Open Forum website. I did not work on the Small Business Saturday program, however, and this post was not solicited or paid for in any way.
To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.
What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:
1. Featuring amazing imagery. The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.
2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.
Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.
3. Focusing on the backstory.
Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.
4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.
Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.
5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.
Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.
6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.
Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.
7. Selling items that are sold out.
As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.
8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.
Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.
9. Creating a daily ritual.
Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.
10. Customizing to platforms.
Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.
Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.
The day that Michael Jackson died, I turned to MTV for the first time in several years. Like others in the so-called MTV Generation sandwiched between the youngest of Generation X and the oldestof Generation Y, I remembered growing up in the 80s with the battle cry of "I want my MTV!" On that day, however, I was greeted not with news coverage about Michael Jackson's death - but with a reality TV series about teen pregnancies. Confused, I shared in a tweet what many of my generation had felt for years:
"MTV is officially irrelevant. Michael Jackson just died and they are airing 16 and Pregnant."
In a time where services like VEVO are taking the role of offering 24 hour music video on demand, MTV has certainly had to reinvent itself. Others have written about how the brand has evolved (changing to a newly transparent logo) - but in that evolution the connection to the music has been almost completely lost. MTV is not about music anymore and this is a disregard for brand heritage that we see often in the world of television and entertainment. TBS was once a "superstation" offering all kinds of programming and sports and now is trying to focus on comedy and being "very funny." The Food Network, dealing with its own growing pains will be launching launched a cooking channel to separate the how-to cooking style programming from other food related programming. You could be forgiven for thinking that having a consistent brand really doesn't matter much in the world of entertainment.
Today the USA Network is launching a group contributed blog tied directly to the network's overall brand positioning focused on celebrating characters of all types. This blog, called Character Approved is featuring 10 voices in a variety of categories from Art to Food and I have been invited to write the Technology/New Media category.*
While the blogging project focuses on sharing stories of individuals, products and organizations that are having a positive impact on American culture - the marketing lesson worth repeating from this is how it is the latest effort in a branding campaign that essentially started more than 5 years ago where the USA Network created a vision for their brand that still exists and drives the brand today.
The tagline of "Characters Welcome" that you may have seen on the cable channel guides the programming decisions and recently has taken form outside of the network through programs such as the Character Approved awards and now this new blog. What I love about this guiding principle is that it allows the network to stand for something and extend beyond just the current programming of the moment. As of now, the strategy seems to be working - with USA currently placed as the #1 network in all of basic cable, with its programming being seen in 98.5 million U.S. homes. For me, focusing on sharing the stories of characters that are having an impact on the culture of America through technology and new media is a powerful idea and one that I am very excited about exploring and writing about over the coming year. Check out some of the initial posts now live on the blog and let me and the rest of the writers on this project know what you think!
*Disclaimer - I am compensated for my participation on the Character Approved blog as a contributing writer, however this and any future posts about the USA Network that I share on my blog are not compensated or scripted in any way and represent my own true opinion.
You might have seen a randomly bare chested and very good looking guy doing a bunch of short videos that look suspiciously like a funny commercial that has been on TV for months for Old Spice. Starting from a series of ads, over the last 48 hours the advertising team for Old Spice has created more than 200 short ads which are essentially video responses from the actor in the ads to comments and questions posted on Twitter. The real time nature of these videos has become huge online, driving millions of views of essentially what are branded ads and spreading the creative of the TV spots to a much wider audience online.
It is a good idea and the creative is funny, but there are several things that make this campaign stand out as a way to refresh the tired and sagging Old Spice brand. They come down to the basics of good marketing - from strategy to creative, but most importantly, the level of integration between television, online and social media in this campaign stands out. Unlike many other consumer goods campaigns that fall short when it comes to everyone collaborating, this is one of those few campaigns that seems like it was actually approached holistically by one team that didn't just chase the trend of the month, but used the platforms of TV, Twitter and YouTube primarily in the ways they were best suited. Here's a short summary with some key marketing lessons I will be taking away from this effort:
Smart Strategy - The marketing strategy behind this campaign is simple - show a great looking guy and tell women that he is "the man their man could smell like." Everyone knows that when it comes to bath products for guys, a huge purchaser is likely women - so instead of turning women into sex objects as Axe does to reach the single guys, Old Spice set their target as including and even speaking directly to women.
Creative Execution - The creative execution of the "Old Spice Man" using actor Isaiah Mustafa has been a hit, from his funny rapid paced TV spots and offered an instantly memorable pitch for Old Spice that people remembered and even mimicked. The campaign started with a strong creative execution that spoke directly to mostly women and while many men didn't quite "get" the commercial initially, it was all many women could talk about.
Cross Media Integration - Moving from a TV spot, the team at W&K behind this integrated social media in a way that is often lacking. Even with brands that have significant followings through one type of social media (such as Champion with over 100,000 Facebook fans and a great current campaign all around sportsmanship) are falling flat when it comes to translating that audience to a different platform and type of conversation (their Twitter page has only 45 members). For Old Spice, they are responding to tweets directly through videos, letting people create their own versions of the ad, engaging on Facebook and it is all paying off. As of the time of writing this post, their YouTube channel has nearly 7 million views, nearly 600,000 fans on Facebook and more than 70,000 followers on Twitter.
Personal Investment - This is a relatively intangible piece, but the advertising agency team behind this is clearly personally invested in the campaign. They love it, and are actively sharing their excitement about it. On the Interactive Creative Director Ian Tait's blog are photos of the line of employees waiting to meet the Old Spice Man and also a personal response to a negative tweet someone shared and more details about the team behind the campaign. While most consumers won't see this dialogue or probably even care, I happen to know as a fellow agency guy that when the team working on a project loves it - it comes through in the campaign.
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
