Pinterest infographic

I just ran across this infographic showing some of the demographics of Pinterest.  The most surprising one to me: only 68% women.  I'd bet that most of the men on there joined but don't frequent it as much as the females.  I constantly hear of pinterest addiction stories...from women 25-34.  Maybe my guy friends are just not as open about it. 

Week 12: Community Relations 2.0

Social media is an important part of many brands future and many brands are taking the opportunity to build strong community through avenues such as facebook, twitter, google+ and recently pinterest.   Pinterest is of particular interest to me since my wife’s business, uVinyl is getting a lot of traffic from the site.  The social bookmarking site has taken off in recent months and is now the 60^th most visited site on the internet.  This is particularly impressive because site visitors are generally a limited demographic (savy, stylish females).  This provides marketers a unique opportunity to segment and target customers based on what they are interested in (“pinned”).   Pinterest links commonly point to handmade items on etsy.com or home items on Target.com or items on Amazon.com.   The people that spend time on pinterest are shoppers, not just lookers and has driven more traffic to company websites than google+, linkedin and twitter combined according to this study.   A great article about how Pinterest can be used by businesses explains that businesses on the site must not only provide pins of its own product, but must also be an active participant to have impact.  This means the business must focus on providing community benefit and not just seek to publish a catalog of its own items.

Pinterest has recently passed facebook to become the third highest source of traffic to my wife’s etsy uvinyl store (behind google and etsy searches). 

Another site that is similar to pinterest but with a more marketing focus is thefancy.com.  This article explains that thefancy is more brand friendly with an active approach to marketing.

I found 6 Compelling Reasons You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing from hubspot.com to be very informative and useful. 

Learning Journal Considerations

1. Does your firm use social media in its communications effort? How?  Is it effective?
1. The company I work for (Avery Dennison) recently invested heavily in an internal social media site similar to facebook or google+ where employees can create communities (wikis, discussion boards and file sharing), maintain profiles and blog.  It is marginally successful already and is very promising.  As more of my colleges begin to use it regularly it will become a more valuable resource.   I don’t think we participate in any public social networking communities. 
2. What types of messages do you think work best in Social media? Why?
1. Some messages don’t work well in social media and others do.  Bragging or touting one’s own accomplishments are not received as well as real customer interactions.  Seeing a customer’s complaint and the company response can be a strong brand building interchange if the company handles it correctly.  
3. Will social media make other Marketing Communication forms obsolete?
1. This is definitely a possibility.  When a company has an announcement to make, I could see them focusing on social media outlets as opposed to other forms of communication.  Instead of announcing something by calling a newspaper, companies could just post the announcement to their facebook site and let the newspapers find it in their feed.

Week 11: Customer Lifetime Value

I hope this post makes it to blogger.  The great firewall of China will be preventing me from accessing blogger for the next week, so I am posting via the nifty blogger email feature.  

CLV

The customer lifetime value concept seems pretty intuitive but I hadn't thought of it until learning about it this week.  I read through an article that I found through Reddit Business about a blogger who is applying the CLV thinking around his newsletter reading. It is interesting to hear his take on the lifetime value of his readers.  

Learning Journal Questions

1. Does your company explicitly know the value of its customers?
1. Looking at my wife's uVinyl business, the value of our customers so far is just their initial purchase (little repeat business so far).
2. If not could your company utilize CLV?
1. I think we could utilize CLV, especially with regard to the marketing costs of different aspects.  I am gaining a better understanding of google analytics and can see where traffic is coming from to see where the costs are.  As we gain more repeat customers, we could drill down to find out which customers came from which marketing activity (blog, pinterest, facebook, ads) and how many repeat purchases per year they make and what the drop off rate is.   So far our costs are mostly time and energy, but we plan to look at using google adwords as well.  I haven't found a way to see the direct impact of the $0.50 per click though. 
3. What are some of the practical issues of implementing the use of CLV in a firm?
1. It could be difficult to know the precise numbers (retention rate, the acquisition costs for specific customer/group).  
4.  What are the major issues in the Rosewood Case?
1. The major issues in this case of whether or not (and how) to strengthen the Rosewood brand are around what would happen to individual brands if the Rosewood brand was pushed.   The unique properties' brands may be cheapened if Rosewood stamps their name on each one.  It may look like it was bought out or under new management or the Hotel is somehow different.   They expect some increase in multi property stays (5% boost, I think) so there seems to be some money in this. 
5. What recommendations do you have for the management of Rosewood.
1. I didn't run any numbers, but it seems like it would be overall more beneficial to have a unified front by adding the Rosewood brand to each of its hotels.  Although it may take some time to reap the benefits as customers become aware of the brand and what it stands for, in the long run it seems like a good choice.  From a quick look at their website and their properties, it appears that is the path they went down.  
2. 
   
6. Which Rosewood property would you like to visit?
1. I'm sure any of them would be great.  I'd like to go to the Jumby Bay one...looks like a nice island and maybe there would be good diving!

Marketing Lessons From RIM's Failures

I just read an article about learning from the mistakes of RIM's marketing failures over the last few years.  I have seen the Blackberry's brand value plummet in the last few years and this article outlines the cause as 7 marketing failures and explains how we can learn from those failures.  RIM did not do a good job of STDP their product.  It seems they were trying to straddle the fence between corporations and consumers. They were THE phone for corporations for a while, due to their ineffective targeting, they have lost serious foothold in the corporation world to iPhones.  
Their marketing mix also struggled recently.  They no longer have cutting edge products that were developed how the customer wants them due to a poor NPDP.  They were not getting appropriate voice of customer and turning that VoC into critical to quality aspects of the product.  A combination of poor strategy and ineffective tatics may have been the downfall of RIM.  We'll see how this plays out in the next few years...

Week 10: Brand Valuation

This week I read the course pack articles, watched the recorded videos, and listened to a couple iTunes U marketing lectures (while driving). 


Here are the learning journal considerations for this week. 

1. What makes a brand valuable?
1. Brand value is all about customer perception and feelings. The Coke brand is so valuable because customers perceive it to be quality, refreshing, cool, and happy.  All of the Coke ads are trying to convey feelings to people...feelings that you should feel when you participate with the brand.  A brand is valuable when it effectively conveys the intended message to consumers at the buying decision moment and results in sales over a competitive product. 
2. What do brands do.  How do they create value?
1. Brands communicate perception and influence purchase decisions.  You can't have all the information about competing products when making a decision, so people use heuristics or shortcuts in making purchase decisions.  Brands help convey the basis of those heuristics.  For example, when I show my resume to someone or someone looks at my LinkedIn page and they see "Kelley MBA" they don't know every detail about my education.  All they know is what they perceive about the Kelley brand.  Maybe they know some Kelley grads or they know that it is a top ranked school and that is what they have to base decisions on. 
3. What are some of your most favorite brands?  Why?
1. I really like Google.  Google products to me represent sophistication and simplicity that I can trust.  I can trust signing in to all the Google products I use and letting them track my internet behavior because I see the benefits of it.  I know they could use that information to invade my privacy, but I trust that they wont "be evil" or jeopardize anything that could result in tarnishing their "don't be evil" brand in the public eye. 
2. I also like Mazda.  I own a Mazda 3 because they are about quality, design and driving fun.  The design of my car, the smooth manual shifting, and functional space (hatchback) provide me with positive feelings when I drive it.  I probably wont always own a Mazda, but I definitively have positive feelings about the car because of the brand. 
4. Should Brands be on the balance sheet?  Why?  Why not?
1. Brands absolutely add value to businesses by having a major influence on sales.  This can influence sales more than anything else about the product so they should be quantified and valued as an asset.  Valuing a brand as an asset would take a lot of work and may be difficult to scale at all levels, but it is an asset that should have visibility when analysts value a firm.  Right now stock value and P/E ratios seem to be a good indicator of brand value perception for US traded firms. 

Superbowl Marketing

Submitting case memo this week (team 5). 


If I were spending millions of dollars for a few seconds in front of over 100 million people, I'd want to be sure that those dollars will be well spent.  Edmunds.com tracks in real time, how effective the ads are by correlating the "considerations" for specific vehicle or make at the exact time that the ad runs. This type of effectiveness measure only represents how well an ad will cause someone to look up the vehicle immediately, so only those watching who have access to the site where they are (access to a second screen).  
  Forbes put an article up discussing last year's results here. 


NBC has a very slick online streaming site this year that could be very effective at getting not just impressions, but solid click throughs allowing immediate customer interaction (for banner type ads). Those that are just in it for the commercials, can watch them on demand.  I wonder if the commercials will also be different online?  Other cool features: live camera selection, twitter interaction (votes), fans can ask questions and get them answered. 


This week I also read an article about the 4 aspects of effective advertising from the James Group.  The Forbes article above mentions that "The analysis found that the secrets of winning Super Bowl car ads are compelling story lines and engaging characters maybe with some catchy music thrown in, but, most important, life beyond the game – before and after."  Interesting to see the relationships with the James Group article (character/story).  The repeatable theme seems to be prevalent in most car and beer ads (VW- Star-wars, Budweiser-Clydesdales). 

Week 8: Pricing/ Channels and IMC

This week I read chapter 8 in the Handbook, watched the lectures and listened to the bean cast.  The bean cast had some interesting points about pinterest.com.  This site is making huge waves as a marketing tool.  It has driven a lot of traffic to my wife's website and I think we have a lot of room for growth through it.  

1. Reflect on a firm or product you like which you believe is highly effective in bringing all the elements of the Mix together to create beautiful symphony for their consumers.
1. TurboTax.  Taxes are a huge hassle that most people have to go through each year.  It is by far a sexy product that is the envy of product development people and marketers, but Intuit has done a great job with the marketing mix on this.  The product is very easy and error proof from my experience and held true to their promotion of getting your biggest tax refund, when I tested it out against taxact (took back $2k from the gov't). The place is very convenient, of course by having it online and via an iPad app.  They follow a freemium model giving some basic features away for free, while charging for more in depth features.  Of course you don't pay until the very end in a try-before-you-buy sort of way. Another aspect about place, is that I see ads for turbo tax with bank of America and Mint.com which are key areas that its target market frequent.
2. Who are the target audience for the company's market offerings? 
1. Individuals or small businesses that need to file taxes and are slightly computer savvy. They want to save money/time over going to a place like H&R Block. 
3. What are the tangible products the company offers?
1. A very slick web interface with links to help and support about each topic.  They also have partnered with payroll companies to import W-2 information. A very thorough yet simple process that they walk you through. 
4. How does the company utilize price, and place to enhance the value of its offerings and why do you think there choice work well together?
1. They let you have the basic product for free on their website which can be done at home or anywhere you are. It works great together because there is very little risk (time being the main one) to doing taxes this way.  The also offer several discounts based on links.  The best I found was from BoA for 35% off. 
5. Does the company have a unique approach to communications with their target audience?  How is the approach well suited to the other elements of their mix?
1. They do some very common things such as web advertising, email reminders to past customers (CRM is pretty good) etc.  Not sure if they are doing anything unique, but they are doing things very well.  They use mint.com (another intuit company) to advertise in a very integrated way, but they should be doing this...nothing novel.