Destination Emmett: Healthy Social Marketing

2012 Wish-List For Connected TV Advertising & Interactive Marketing

Including: “Extensive User Experience Research.  I can say this over and over and hear a room full of agreements when I speak/lecture.  Back behind closed doors though, we see folks who want to treat the television platform the exact same as mobile, tablet and PC. It’s not and the user experience is quite different. Then we hear how the value to the consumer is the most important aspect of creating…well anything really - Yet there are Apps being made that give these consumers incredibly little value. It takes research. Sometimes a lot of it. My thought to all marketers wanting to engage the platform in new ways is to invest some time into research and experiments  to  understand the psychological and sociological consumption patterns of the platform and it‘s audiences.  I’d love to see some intensive research come out about the short term and long term effects of truly “interactive television” and it’s accompanying factors.  Gift #1: Intensive research.”

Destination Emmett = User Experience (UX), Living The Brand

http://www.destinationemmett.com

Driving The Culture of Cool:

BMW Group furthers social discussion with limited-edition graphic design book…

BMW Group is celebrating its 40 years of global cultural engagement efforts with the launch of a limited-edition branded book called “Culture.” The back of the book contains a small remote-control car motor that lets readers “drive” the book on a hard, flat surface.”

The challenge was to come up with something that was not a vanity publication, in which companies position themselves in terms of what they do as good corporate activities,” said Thomas Girst, corporate and intergovernmental affairs and head of cultural engagement at BMW Group, Munich, Germany. “We wanted to come up with something that people would not throw away but that they would hold onto, cherish, feel happy about and not part with,” he said. The book was a joint project between the automaker and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister that uses photos to present the history of BMW’s corporate cultural and sponsorship efforts from the last four decades.

The back of the book contains a small remote-control car motor that lets readers “drive” the book on a hard, flat surface. “Our goal was to create something that was priceless and I think we have achieved it,” said Mr. Girst. The Culture book comprises approximately 100 pages and is divided in four sections that represent the various cultural groups that BMW aims to influence: contemporary art, classical music and jazz, architecture and design, and culture. Culture begins with a short introduction of the book itself, and another page explaining how culture is a driving force, and how BMW itself is a driving force in the auto industry. Every copy is also numbered, emphasizing the rarity and exclusivity of the BMW book. The images in the book include photos of the BMW Art Cars collection in various museums around the world, the BMW-sponsored male choir group in Munich, and other programs that BMW helps fund, such as the young Asian artisans group in Singapore. Overall, Culture contains more than 50 color photos of BMW-sponsored programs around the world.

Each book is also a remote-controlled car. Half of the book does not contain pages, but an actual model car motor and wheels. Culture comes with a special remote control that lets the book be driven around the room like a child’s remote-controlled car toy.The inspiration was that “culture really moves,” according to Mr. Sagmeister.

The book was presented to industry insiders and members of the press at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this week.

Culture Shock: BMW will only be producing and distributing 1,488 copies of Culture.

http://www.luxurydaily.com/bmw-group-furthers-social-discussion-with-limited-edition-graphic-design-book/

Destination Emmett (Planet Pickett Collection) = Healthy Social Marketing Results:

Brands may be surviving this new era of household austerity by increasing the number of coupons they issue. However, this is not a smart long-term strategy. Coupons and short-term promotions train customers to expect more for less, and do not cultivate brand loyalty — in fact, they may make customers even more fickle.

The couponing trend has even inspired a reality television show. “Extreme Couponing”, a series on the TLC cable channel that debuted last year, features shoppers making extensive use of coupons to save money on their grocery bills. In many cases, shoppers walk away with carts full of food and other staples, but pay only pennies on the dollar through the use of multiple discount offers. Although it makes for some entertaining TV, the boundary and actual reach of the more extreme forms of this phenomenon are not known. Is there “identity glory” to be had in saving as much money as you possibly can by using coupons?

A poll of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers conducted last year by Harris Interactive found that coupon use is highest among well-off, educated city dwellers. According to the survey, 61% of adults with annual household incomes of more than $100,000 said they had redeemed a coupon in the preceding six months. In addition, adults with college degrees were almost twice as likely to have used a coupon for a purchase in the previous half-year as those who did not graduate from high school. More than three quarters of those who redeemed a coupon of any kind during the previous six-month period lived in metropolitan areas.

There has been a significant change in the cultural meaning of coupons. Even just a few years ago, coupons weren’t hip. Coupons did not symbolize success or achievement; they were only a few levels above food stamps. But now, clipping coupons is a celebrated, cool, (even upper?) middle-class thing to do.

Technology is accelerating the movement toward couponing. While paper coupons still make up the bulk of coupons redeemed, Internet coupons and mobile phone coupons — usually in the form of a text message with an embedded discount code — are also growing. NCH, a marketing research firm, reported a 37% increase in the number of digital coupon offers last year. In addition, coupon aggregators and online group buying sites, such as Groupon, have proliferated. Technology is not only making it easier and more accessible to look for deals, but it is also amplifying and reinforcing the social reach of this phenomenon.

Have Americans made permanent shifts in the ways in which they shop, or have they merely made temporary adjustments in the face of a terrible economy?

Brands need to think strategically about how they use promotions and how they incentivize customers. When the consumer gets something at a deep discount, they might perceive the quality [of the product] to be lower, or attribute their choice to the price discount versus the inherent quality of the good or service. This is not a good recipe for long-term brand equity building. Moreover, customers become addicted to the discounted price. When you start playing the price promotion game, people feel that they’re being cheated if they then pay more than the discounted price in the future.

Destination Emmett: This is our win-winning hybrid convergence approach in real world action!  Hope this helps.

The New York Times has an excellent report on how online, t.v., and photo branding drives fast casual dining destination marketing and financial results. 

Few know their names, but tabletop directors, as they are called, create food ads that are seen by tens of millions of viewers each week.

Restaurant chains hire tabletop directors to turn their menu concoctions into objects of irresistible beauty on Americans’ television screens.

For example, Ed Fountain, who builds food-tossing catapult devices, originally constructed such contraptions for a Long John Silver’s commercial that featured colliding shrimp. 

Destination Emmett: Healthy Social Marketing (Planet Pickett Collection) presents:

ARE YOU REACHING RICHISTAN? How To Go Online Without Going Downscale…

Adweek has published a detailed article: Is Digital Killing The Luxury Brand? Some important highlights and insights to your bottom line benefit(s):

- Data from management consulting firm L.E.K. Consulting shows that those earning more than $150,000 are the only people spending more than they did before the so-called Great Recession — signs of which first appeared in 2007, now well into its fourth year! The broad American middle class as “aspirational consumers” are largely disappearing. Sales at WalMart are even down!

(The respected Albert Qian at AQ Quality Group, who is developing the AQQ indicator “beyond Klout scores,” and Destination Emmett (Planet Pickett Collection) have often discussed the urgent needs in this economy for businesses to better identify — and deploy (often by changing their) “intrinsic brand value(s)” through experiential and destination marketing of consumer empowerment through customer care “beyond 0s and 1s” alone, yet (not paradoxically) embracing both the clicks and the bricks.)

- High-end fashion brands have a problem. Let’s call it the “Kreayshawn quandary,” after the young Bay Area rapper made famous by the Internet and her hit song “Gucci, Gucci,” which has gotten over 16 million views on YouTube. Sample lyrics: “Gucci, Gucci, Louis, Louis, Fendi, Fendi, Prada…the basic b***ches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.”

- It may have taken a rapper to say it “in your face,” but the message has been clear for a while: Luxury designers are losing their cachet. And the problem is only being intensified by the medium that made Kreayshawn a star.

- Digital isn’t as easy to do as some brands would like to think. And if the brands do it badly, digital can backfire on them, further eroding an aura of exclusivity that could define them for generations.

- The reasons for going online are, as most other industries already know, compelling. Eighty percent of people with an income of over $250,000 are social media users according to Unity Marketing research, and 50 percent have used social media to learn more about a brand or see new products.

- From a revenue standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Many luxe fashion brands have huge beauty and accessories businesses, and make their real money not from couture but from shoes, handbags, jewelry, makeup, and so on. And what better place to advertise and sell a $23 nail polish than online?

- Demi Moore tweeted a picture of herself wearing a dress from Prabal Gurung’s first collection; her husband Ashton Kutcher retweeted it, and Gurung immediately had 500 followers (he now has 31,000). “I said, ‘Here’s the power,’” Gurung remembers.

- Anytime a brand’s “personality” is perceived to have changed for the worse, it’s quickly reflected in sales. This category, almost more than any other, targets a specific audience.

“We see brands fight over the number of friends on Facebook and judge their initiatives based on number of ‘likes,’ but who are those friends?” asks Ferdinando Verderi, creative director at WPP’s Johannes Leonardo, an agency whose clients include Chanel. “Are those people luxury brands ever wanted to talk to?”

Image still counts, and some companies aren’t navigating their dive into digital as carefully as they should be.

- The solution is to make brands live the same luxe life digitally that they do in print or on billboards.  For example, Chanel pulled off a sensational runway show for the jet set in Saint Tropez, which it streamed online at French social media fashion site Ykone.  Exclusive?  Mais Oui!  Most watching online could only dream of arriving at a French beach town (or anywhere else, really) in a speedboat while dressed head to toe in expensive ready-to-wear clothes, as the models did.  It’s the rarefied world of Chanel, brought to you by the rarefied world of Chanel.

- James Gardner, CEO of CreateTheGroup, says “Give consumers special privileges.” Burberry, he points out (a client), does this by giving inside access like its own live stream of its fashion show that will let consumers “sit” in the front row.

Other brands are also realizing the Web can actually help them maintain control over discounting and the dissemination of their product and look, which is why an increasing number of luxury fashion websites are pumping up their e-commerce and mobile offerings. Oscar de la Renta, for one, built exclusivity right into its website with its Backstage Pass, a members-only shopping destination that offers one-off items, private sales, and a boutique “curated” by guest editors.

“The luxury consumer really yearns to have this privileged access,” says Gardner. “They want to be there first, get it first, get something different than the (perceived) masses. It’s a combination of being invited and rewarding customers, which I think is important.”

- Social media can disseminate the information, but there are still only an elite few who can afford the high-end goods.

Derek Lam learned this, ironically, when it partnered with eBay earlier this year to create a less-expensive line that was actually crowdsourced: Users were given a selection of different garments and voted on which ones would be produced.  Derek Lam’s CEO, Jan Schlottmann, says it was an experiment to see “how we can use the immense traffic and technology of eBay to find out more about our consumer.”  Traffic to the company’s website increased, Schlottmann says, and e-commerce sales doubled.  But those sales still only made up 1.5 percent of the company’s total—and most of those sales were of discounted items or accessories.  “It’s still a harder sell to sell a $1,500 dress online,” says Schlottmann.

- If brands’ websites and social net offerings are geared toward less-expensive lines, is this hurting their exclusive images?  If they don’t decide soon, the people—the bloggers, the tweeters—will decide for them.  The important thing is for brands to make clear, “doable” decisions on precisely on whom to focus.  To paraphrase another rapper, Theophilus London, “The clothes don’t make the man (or woman); it’s the (woman or) man that makes the clothes.”

Destination Emmett (Planet Pickett Collection) = Healthy Social Marketing Results:

This morning we read an impressively honest Paul Carr report on TechCrunch (AOL), making a fairly succinct, direct, and honest case for Economist magazine being its awesome profitable print “self,” even as it also serves the iPad, tablets, Web, and other experiences, online and mobile — presumably same (our addition agreeing with Paul Carr) with The Colbert Report, but on t.v. on Comedy Central (though Stephen Colbert also needs an active Twitter account, for example), and many other, different properties and destinations. 

The take-away point for your survival is a newly revealed level of understanding that you must first survive-to-thrive by guesstimating certainty at which marketing platform and destination will be core for you, and which ones, plural, will be supportive to that profit model.  Too much money and marketing (and quality writing and not-so-stable jobs, Paul Carr’s points) are wasted in social media not thinking through a core Clicks AND Bricks, financially-integrated marketing strategy.

Disney and Apple, each perhaps with different core marketing “profit destinations,” have also figured this out well, yet ALL (including YOU) must continue to remain flexible and vigilant about the ever-changing landscape of where, how, and why profitability arrives (or doesn’t in this VERY challenging economic environment and marketing ecosystem), and what other marketing platforms must support the core, such as the back-to-basics reinvention Starbucks COFFEE company is undergoing with the comeback of Howard Schultz as CEO. 

His excellent book Onward states that the company lost its way (and profitability, at the worst possible time, no less, as broader financial markets and national economies imploded) just a few years back as too many Starbucks locations became more about selling stuffed animals to improve store sales comps even as customers were being lost from then declining coffee-drinking experiences.  The stuffed animals were not the problem, per se, and could still be sold.  The commoditization of the (increasingly negative) customer experience was THE problem.

THE problem was (and remains beyond Starbucks, Apple, and Disney) companies, executives, and teams that forget the financial numbers and core marketing strategy of exactly which core business they are really in, what can and should support that core, and therefore, achieving a deep, persistent, focused, yet ever-open-to-strategic change understanding of intrinsic brand value — and they (and you) must instead see, hear, touch, and feel value(s) across ALL marketing experiences of authentic, genuine customer care, appreciation, gratitude, and hum-bition, humility plus ambition, must be in that order for any enduringly net financial bottom line results for YOU.

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