Influential Marketing Blog

FinnAir, Republic Day & Why Celebration Is The Best Marketing Strategy

A few weeks ago it was my birthday. The day before on a Saturday morning, my two boys came leaping into our room very excited to wake me up. It wasn't so much about my birthday, unfortunately, as it was about getting ready to do their favourite thing on a Saturday morning: going to IHOP for pancakes. And when there is a birthday involved, it is an even bigger deal. Your birthday is a celebration there. They bring over at least 6 of the wait staff to sing their own version of the birthday song to you. You get ice cream for breakfast (what kid wouldn't love that?).

People love celebrations - and they love to be at the center of attention. Birthdays are easy. Probably any restaurant would do something special for your birthday. But what about the moments that people forget to celebrate? 3 days ago was the first day of the Chinese New Year. It is the Year of the Dragon. What did your business do to celebrate? Unless you happen to be Chinese, probably nothing. 

Life and culture gives us plenty of moments to celebrate, but often we let them pass without doing anything. If we could, however, it would be an unexpected delight. Today FinnAir offered a perfect example of that - as they filmed and posted a video on YouTube of their cabin staff performing a surprise Bollywood dance on a flight from Helskinki to India in celebration of India's Republic Day:



South Asians and anyone with a passion for India (or marketing) have been sharing this on Facebook and talking about it all day today. It is going what you might call "micro-viral." In other words, it is going viral among the exact small target community that a marketing team should care most about - people highly likely to travel to Southeast Asia. The timing is perfect too, as one of the things that many South Asian families start to think about at the beginning of the year is planning their travel for the rest of the year. And flights to India get booked far in advance.

So this surprise dance has a potentially beautiful marketing payoff - to get people who are considering travel to India later in the year to consider using FinnAir to get there. As of now the video only has a few thousand views. Perhaps it will never get a million or more. But by offering an unexpected celebration, they have positioned their brand as one that offers a connection to India (literally and figuratively). My guess is that it is already paying off.

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

Marketing From Hell

Tomorrow I am going to Hell ... literally. There is an area on Grand Cayman Island nicknamed "Hell"  thanks to some black limestone formations that (as legend has it) caused a local at one point to explain that "this is what hell must look like!" As you might expect, the area has been turned into a tourist destination, where the star attraction is a Post Office which specializes in letting you send a postcard home directly from Hell (with official postmark included).

Imagine for a moment that you had the challenge to create a destination based on a normal natural phenomenon like these limestone formations. Sure, a catchy name like "hell" would certainly help ... but your real goal isn't just to create a memorable experience - it is to create a shareable one as well.

How many tourists do you think visit Hell and DON'T send a postcard home? Not very many. Part of the fun of going there is sharing it with friends and family back home. In Hell, they don't have signs asking visitors to please join a neglected Facebook page or follow them on Twitter. Their marketing is built into the experience itself - and it works because of it.

The next time you are considering some method of desperation marketing to get your customers to talk about the experience you offer, remember that the ideal solution might be to find a way to make word of mouth an inherent part of how people interact with your business. The result could be creating something as shareable as going to hell and back in an afternoon.

Why The Future Of Travel & Destination Marketing Is All About Curation

Life is good for the traveller who knows where they are going. There are dozens of great and useful sites online where you can see everything from reviews of hotels to side by side comparisons of airfares from one destination to another. Planning a trip to San Francisco was never so easy ... but what if you haven't answered the first and most important question of where you want to go? All of a sudden, life is a lot more difficult. Finding out about destinations is a labrynth of government sponsored tourism sites, linkbaiting sites promising information about a destination but only delivering a long list of pay-per-click links, and individual attractions within a destination.

For a traveler still trying to decide where to go, life isn't so simple ... but curation can help.

A hot topic among those who work in social media is the idea of curation and how individuals can share their knowledge and passion on any subject not only by creating original content about it, but also by scouring the web and curating the best content into a single location. Back in 2009, popular travel writer Rick Steves spotted the potential of this idea early when he wrote a blog post about the "Travel writer as curator" - sharing his view of what the guidebook of the future might offer.

Today content curation is rapidly finding roots in the highly immersive world of travel as more people share their personal experiences as a way to influence others on not only where to stay and what to do ... but also where to go in the first place:

1. Jetsetter

A part of the hugely successful online luxury retailer Gilt Groupe, Jetsetter is a private online community filled with curated deals on what the site calls "the world's greatest vacations." The site features up and coming travel bloggers like "monkey connoisseur" Farryn Weiner and former hospitality industry workers to hand select travel locations and experiences which are then offered to members. You need to be invited into the network, and all deals are only offered for a limited time. (Note: the links in this post include a $25 joining incentive). Popular deal website Living Social is also offering similar curated experiences on a more local (and less costly) level at their Living Social Escapes feature.

2. Trazzler

A community built from submissions by travel writers, Trazzler now presents those experiences with a focus on those which are within driving distance of your home as opposed to exotic locations around the world. The smart model used by the site encourages people to share local experiences that they are passionate about in exchange for the chance to win local trips. You don't need to be a travel writer or prolific blogger to participate, just a person with a great story and recommendation to share. It is a curated content model at its best, because they are encouraging writing and content creation from those who have a passion but don't necessarily have a place to share it ... until they find Trazzler.

3. Offbeat Guides

A site that has been around for a few years, Offbeat Guides specializes in letting you create and print your own guides to destinations on demand. A key unique factor for these guides is that you can enter your dates that you will be travelling to a destination and where you are coming from to customize information such as the weather reports for that time period and currency conversion rates. Bringing together curated content from across the web, the guides offer a collection of information that is updated in real time and generally more reliable than travel guides which can be months or years out of date. If only the site allowed you to include multiple destinations in one travel guide (ie - London & Oslo) so you wouldn't have to carry around two guides if you are hitting two destinations, the idea is being partially duplicated now by a few other sites like Stay.com.

The Bottom Line: Curation is already transforming the way that people answer the all important question of where to go, but so far innovations are coming more from technology based startups rather than destinations themselves. In the near future, we will start to see more local, state and country tourism boards as well as convention and visitor bureaus using curation to better promote their destinations to all kinds of travelers. 

How Coke Is Reimagining The Future Of Social Events

It is easy to complain about the trivial nature of the majority of social media content, but it is rapidly becoming a fact of life that the socially connected among us can't help sharing our lives as they happen with our virtual networks. One place where this sharing behaviour becomes particularly accelerated is at live events. People tweet more often, take more photos and generally become more social both online and off.

At Coca-Cola Village in Israel recently, Coke tried an interesting experiment in social sharing by offering over 600 teenagers a wearable wristband that contained their Facebook profile details. Then throughout the weekend, these teens could automatically tag themselves in pictures, check in to various locations and generally post and share to Facebook without needing to use a mobile device or computer ... which was a good thing since the Village looks a lot like Spring Break. Here's an interesting promotional video:



While the photo tagging gets a lot of attention in the video, the biggest idea for me was the "wave your hand to like something" feature that these RFID tags allowed the teens to do. Imagine if this could be recreated on a larger scale at all kinds of events or even retail locations. Just wave your hand/wristband to like a page on Facebook, or join an email list for promotional offers. No lists to add your email address to and no URLs to remember. When following, friending or finding a brand becomes as easy as a flick of your wrist, that would really be something for marketers to get excited about. I can already see the signs: wave here to join our community.

How A Curated Competition Helped Find A New Logo For DC

If you come to Washington DC as a tourist at any time of year, chances are you will spend at least a part of your trip visiting some of the most iconic museums and national buildings in the city. Outside of most of them are a collection of street vendors selling an assortment of life-sized cardboard cutouts of Obama and tacky shot glasses with the Presidential Seal on them.

One of their best selling icons is a t-shirt which is a simple copy of New York's well known logo - "I Love New York" - with the city name replaced. It is just one symbol of what I have seen spending most of my childhood growing up in DC area: that it can be a difficult city to adopt as your own. Many people live in neighboring Maryland or Virginia, the vibe of the city can shift based on who gains political power and there has always been a large expat population working 2-5 year stints at NGOs or embassies locally.

Back in August of this year, at the start of the Fall tourism season for Washington DC, two young D.C.-based artists Brandon Bloch and Justin Young thought the city needed a stronger identity, and felt that the solution to this challenge could be design based. So they invited their design friends to participate in a "curated competition" to create a logo that could better represent the city.

The competition resulted in several designs, and the winner was a designer named Alex Slater who had a simple but elegant design that felt uniquely right for DC. They have been sharing this logo at local events throughout the fall and have been featured in media both locally and nationally. While many of these "crowdsourced logo competitions" awaken the ire of designers for their focus on getting design thinking for free ... the DC Love Project was different because it was a curated competition. All the designs were shown at a public event and the voting element offered a real time feedback method to help select one design to focus on promoting.

This campaign certainly helped to start defining a logo identity for the city that all of us locals would love to see ... but the bigger idea to take away is that sometimes crowdsourcing misses the chance to really value every contribution you get - a curated competition might inspire much more passion among those who participate, as well as those who will see the final result.

How To Take A Journey Instead Of A Trip

I used to hate slideshows. Not Powerpoint as many people call slideshows today, but the old style of slideshow. The one where you set up a carousel projector to show lots of little negatives encased in small cardboard frames to unwilling family and friends. If you are under a certain age, you probably won't know what I'm talking about - but that moment of having to sit through someone's vacation photos with the narration of "and this is us in front of the <insert random place name here>" is unfortunately familiar. The problem isn't that the trip itself was boring, or that you're a cold unfeeling person because you struggle to sit through the shared holiday experience of someone you usually care about. The real problem is that the way the story was told left much to be desired. A trip is something no one cares about except the people who took it.

A journey, on the other hand is more significant. It is something that invites you to take part. Something that has a destination or vision in mind for where someone is headed or what they are trying to do. A journey is a story that matters. This was my thought when I came across Monisha and Harald's journey. They are travelling across India on 80 trains in 3 months and are in the midst of their journey right now. As their site describes,the chaotically efficient Indian railway system is "the largest civilian employer in the world, featuring luxury trains, toy trains, a hospital on wheels, the steepest, the slowest, and the second longest train journeys in the world." Chances are, you're already intrigued by their journey as I was when I first read about it. 

Yet, I don't actually know Monisha or Harald. They aren't personal contacts of mine, and though I might hear back from them if they read this - it is not necessarily about having a personal connection. You might watch a slide show from a family member who you love and find it difficult to get involved in their story, yet reading Monish and Harald's journey is interesting. You can follow them in real time on Twitter at @80trains and share it with others. That is the power of having a journey - it lets others get involved. How many travel brands could inspire this kind of content? Or what about small businesses sharing the story of the evolution of their business? When someone cares about the outcome of any story, they are more likely to try to help and be part of it. So what journey are you taking?

Credit: Thanks to Arun Rajagopal for sharing this link to the 80 Trains Project.

7 Destination Marketing Tips For Selling Your "Experience"

What if what you are selling is neither a product or a service? Most marketing advice is distributed based on the assumption that you fit one of these two categories. The unfortunate gap between them is the large category of organizations or businesses that provide an experience - which are often left out. If you were marketing a destination such as a city or country, for example, would that be a product or service? What about a hotel?  Or a conference? Or a sporting event? What these examples share is that might be described as both a product AND a service - or at least a collection of other products and experiences. They are all experiences.

For marketers who are focused on promoting an experience, the traditional product or service model doesn't work. When it comes to promoting an expeirence instead of a product or services, here are a few tips and examples that may help:

1. Create a comprehensive starting point. One of the toughest things about travel information online is that it is so spread out. To combat that spread, the country of Sweden created a single hub for everything about their country. From tourism to environmental belief to culture to migration. By putting all this information in once place, Sweden makes it easy for someone to learn about their country and culture. They offer a place to start.

2. Find your best ambassadors. When it comes to most destinations, the power of the experience usually comes most from the people who have already been there and talk about it. The benefit of social media is that you can find these people more easily. They are the ones that upload hundreds of great photos, or comment on message boards or write blog posts. If you can use these tools to find them, then you are in a much better place to think about how you might help them share their positive experience with your destination with even more people.

3. Offer an exclusive and talkable experience. El Bulli is the best restaurant in the world according to several food magazines, and has won that honor for multiple years. It is situated off the Costa Brava near Barcelona in Spain, and the cuisine is so unique the restaurant is closed for 6 months out of every year just so the chefs can develop and practice it. You simply cannot go to El Bulli without telling someone else about the experience - and you have to book far in advance to even get a reservation. That is a unique and exclusive experience.

4. Highlight your best stories (even if you didn't create them). In New Zealand, you can dine in a tree restaurant. You may have seen photos of it - but it is a restaurant that is built entirely in a tree in a New Zealand forest. The interesting thing about this restaurant, though, is that it was created as part of a marketing campaign for Yellow Pages to prove that it was still useful. The end result, however, was a destination that the entire country of New Zealand and the surrounding region could promote as part of their experience.

5. Translate one experience to another. Let's say you are trying to promote a skiing destination. In the winter time, your marketing is obvious. The problem is, you still have half the year when you need to drive people to come even though you don't have your best natural asset ... snow. What Keystone Lodge in Colorado does, is they change their marketing to use related experiences. For example, you may not be able to ski down their mountains, but why not mountain bike down them instead? By translating one experience to another, they can successfully give their customers another reason to visit, even without snow.

6. Focus on letting people share their experience LIVE. When it comes to travel, most people inherently WANT to share their experience. The main problem is that there is not always a way to share that experience as it is happening, and later they may not remember. What if you let people upload digital photos of themselves online directly from your museum? Or gave people free postcards with a picture of your store and free postage to mail them? The easier you can make it for someone to share the experience they have with you as they are having it, the more likely they will take you up on it.

7. Build engaging itineraries instead of listing of attractions. The normal way to promote destinations is usually from creating a big list of attractions and letting people select what they are interested in. Everything comes a la carte, and the only alternative is typically to take a guided tour. Instead, what if you were to create itineraries for people based on interests? The ultimate day for Clock Enthusiasts in Switzerland, or the Influence of Indian Culture Guide to London. These are itineraries that people could choose based on their interest - and do more than simply listing attractions.

 

Passport Marketing At The Berlin Wall

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and people across the world are focusing on this momentous day. Last week I was in Berlin and spent an afternoon looking at remnants of the Berlin Wall and its defining place in German history. As the German chancellor from the time (Helmut Kohl) said, "we [Germans] don't have many reasons in our history to be proud, but as chancellor I have nothing to be more proud of than German reunification."

Seeking to see if an experience I had written about some time ago still existed, on a free afternoon in Berlin I headed to a place called Checkpoint Charlie, a highlight among the tourist destinations that commemorate (and commercialize) the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the war there were 300 of these "checkpoints" spread out across the perimeter of the wall. They were manned by soldiers whose job was to make sure that people did not try to cross the wall - often using deadly force to carry out their duties. Estimates range in the hundreds (or thousands, depending on whom you talk to) for the number of people who were killed by this checkpoint squad during the 28 years the wall was up. As is often the case with some of humanities worst moments, today the three remaining checkpoints are all tourist destinations.

At Checkpoint Charlie, the most frequently visited of these checkpoints, outside of the main museum on the street is a guy who will put a stamp in your passport celebrating the former separation of Germany. You usually carry your passport with you for ten years, and through that time you collect stamps from countries you visit, visas from exotic places, and a living record of where you have been and what you have seen. Most international travellers use their passports as the ultimate travel keepsake. For those travellers, getting a unique stamp from a now defunct destination is an appealing idea. For some, it may even be their sole reason for visiting.

Which leads to my marketing observation, that even in the midst of historic celebration of something as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall ... people are always looking for a way to capture their experiences and share them with others.  This is true of travel, or any other type of experience. When you travel internationally, your passport becomes your record of the places you have been and moments you have had. Stamps in that passport are usually official, and always significant. Sometimes the most important thing you can sell to someone is a memory they were there.

See the rest of my gallery from Berlin on Flickr >>

Note: If you recognized this post, it's because I wrote about Checkpoint Charlie two years ago. This post has lots more pictures and is based on a real experience (and today is the 20th anniversary!), so I thought it worthwhile to share a revised version of it again today. If you liked this idea, you'll probably enjoy my post on philatelic marketing too. And I promise tomorrow will an all-new non-recycled post!

Why Your Business Needs A Concierge

Adrian Moore is the best concierge in the world. At least, according to British travel magazine Monacle, he is. He works at the Four Seasons in Paris, knows all the best spots and restaurants, is intimately aware of any festivals or special events in his city and is, by any account, an authority on all things about Paris. As a business traveller, I appreciate a concierge like this. Unfortunately, the majority of hotels never have anyone like Adrian. Instead, they staff their "concierge" desk with someone who was checking people in at the front desk just the week before.

In those empty cases, the so-called concierge is no better than an Internet enabled computer with access to city resources, a few travel blogs and Yelp (or another restaurant review site). The most interesting thing about Adrian Moore that I didn't mention, however, is that he also happens to be a blogger. And his blog allows him to explore his city and publish his thoughts about it. Which leads me to an interesting question - what if all concierges were bloggers?

Or, put another way to broaden this question beyond the hotel industry, what if the person who was most directly responsible for interacting with your customers used social media more often? This idea works out well for the Four Seasons in Paris with Adrian, but also has worked well for Comcast with Frank Eliason using Twitter as his tool of choice to actively and proactively help customers. Social media can help amplify the voice of any individual to help them bring a personality to a business. The concierge is a term recognized for hotels, but it is a role that many businesses could use in some way. If you had to point to someone within your organization who could be your "concierge" - who would it be?

Once you answer this, you can also answer one the biggest questions that many companies ask before starting to actively use social media -- who is the person (or people) within our organization that should start blogging, tweeting, conversing and responding on our behalf online?

It's the concierge, and if you don't have one ... go find one.