After a long winter and a grim recession luxury-faucet maker Brizo wants to give consumers “a license to dream.” Online videos and print ads created by Young & Laramore for Brizo’s high-end, touch-sensitive Talo, Venuto and Virage faucets feature vivid colors that morph into butterflies, flowers, mermaids and fish.

New ad campaigns suggest marketers are eager to shake off the gloom of tough economic times–and they hope consumers will do the same. While some economists aren’t sure the tough times are history, advertisers don’t seem to care. Companies are rolling out carefree ads that use humor, colorful images and upbeat language to get consumers to lighten up–and open up their wallets.

“What you make people feel is as important as what you make,” goes the voice-over in a commercial from BMW of North America’s “Story of Joy” ad campaign, which includes print ads featuring happy-looking adults, kids and dogs with headlines that lead off with “Joy is …” The campaign was created by GSD&M Idea City.

Procter & Gamble even seems to thumb its nose at money-pinching buyers of personal care products in ads for Old Spice. In TV spots, Isaiah Mustafa taunts women with recession-induced goodie withdrawal by offering “two tickets to that thing you love,” before the tickets turn into diamonds. Spots featuring Mustafa and his treats have racked up more than 8 million views since they broke in February.

Fun and games? Those are reappearing in ads. Interpublic agency Deutsch L.A.’s playful campaign for Volkswagen  “Punch Dub,” invites consumers to play an updated version of the game “Punch Buggy,” in which the first person to spot a VW slugs his or her friend on the arm. Stevie Wonder and 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan even get in on the game in ads.

Microsoft even promotes the idea of carefree travel in ads for the launch of its new mobile phone brand, Kin. In “The Journey,” by AgencyTwoFifteen, Rosa Salazar, a lollipop-loving Brooklyn comedian, hits the road to meet as many of her 824 social networking friends as possible.

Consumers and marketers were in the dumps last year when total U.S. advertising expenditures fell 12.3% in 2009 to $125.3 billion, compared with 2008, says ad tracker Kantar Media in New York but some agency executives say marketers are willing to spend again.

“There is a market turn toward the positive,” says Deutsch N.Y. Chief Creative Officer Greg DiNoto. “That’s a smart marketing strategy for any brand when you’re emerging from a recession.” Brands need to be associated with winning.”

A few advertisers hope upbeat taglines will do the trick. Amway’s latest campaign, one with an estimated $25 million behind it, features the tagline “The Power of Positivity.” Ads, created by Omnicom’s Element 79, feature friendly farmers and helpful neighbors and suggest that Amway is a company doing its part by creating jobs for those affected by the recession.

More here.

The Nielsen Co. said Monday that people who multitask this way spent an average of three and a half hours doing so in December. That’s up sharply from the two hours, 29 minutes that Nielsen reported only six months earlier.

The percentage of TV viewers who do this isn’t going up that fast. That increased by 57 percent to 59 percent during the same period. But those who are doing it spend much more time at it.

Television executives have pointed to this trend to help explain why big events like the Oscars, Grammys and pro football playoffs have been doing so well in the ratings – people watching and making comments to their friends through social Web sites like Twitter and Facebook.

More about TV, computer use multitasking up sharply:  Nielsen here.

By Steve McKee

Do a quick exercise: Take a minute and jot down three types of customers your company doesn’t want. Oh, and this is important: You can’t choose people like shoplifters or “sale-hoppers”—the kind of customers that no business wants.

If you’re like most business leaders, identifying customers you don’t want isn’t easy, especially in times like these. But it can be helpful to consider which of your customers are least important, if for no other reason than to help you focus on the most important ones.

We’re all familiar with the old saying, “you can’t be all things to all people.” Yet in business, too often that’s what we end up trying to be. General Motors is a prime example (and look where it got them). There was a time when each GM nameplate was narrowly targeted toward a certain demographic, leaving other company brands to serve their own slice of customers. But over the past several decades, as each GM brand expanded its lineup to serve as many different customers as possible—sports cars for the sporty, minivans for young families, trucks for working people—they ended up stepping on each other’s toes.

Consider one of those famous brands now slated for the scrap heap: Pontiac. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, Pontiac was defined by drool-inducing muscle cars such as the GTO, Firebird, and TransAm. The Pontiac brand meant power, styling and cool. Its appeal wasn’t for everyone, but it was powerful for some. Since that time, however, Pontiac has introduced a host of new models like the Trans Sport (a minivan), Sunfire (a compact car), Aztek (an SUV crossover), and Vibe (a hatchback). It’s unclear who, exactly, Pontiac has not been trying to serve, which is another way of saying it’s been aiming to please too many masters. And soon Pontiac will be gone, as will several other once-proud brands in the GM stable.

It could be that Wal-Mart (WMT) will learn from the GM example. The company has been attracting a lot more upscale customers of late, for obvious reasons. In the first quarter of 2009, 17% of Wal-Mart’s retail visits were from new customers, and they spent 40% more in the store than the average shopper. Will the company accept their business? You bet—branding is about whose business you’ll seek, not whose you’ll take. But if Wal-Mart begins catering more to those customers’ needs at the expense of its core target of “people who live paycheck to paycheck,” it will be making a mistake.

More about Customers Your Company Doesn’t Want here.

]]> http://truecreek.com/2010/01/13/customers-your-company-doesnt-want/feed/ 0 http://truecreek.com/2009/11/10/googles-holiday-gift-free-airport-wi-fi/ http://truecreek.com/2009/11/10/googles-holiday-gift-free-airport-wi-fi/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:32:51 +0000 truecreek http://truecreek.com/?p=1404 By Stephen Shankland

Google said Tuesday it will subsidize free wireless network access in 47 airports from now until January 15–and indefinitely in the airports of Burbank, Calif., and Seattle.

The promotion, in cooperation with Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, and Airport Marketing Income, is the latest effort to use free Wi-Fi to boost a brand. Among others: Yahoo is sponsoring Wi-Fi in Times Square in New York, and Google is sponsoring Internet access on Virgin America flights during the holidays.

Among the larger participating airports are those in Houston, Boston, Miami, Las Vegas, Nashville, San Diego, Baltimore, and St. Louis. A full list of the airports is at Google’s free holiday Wi-Fi site.

The move, though not cheap, is probably smart. Plenty of business travelers have a laptop and time to kill, and today’s consumers are increasingly likely to be equipped with laptops, iPod Touches, or other devices that can use wireless Internet access. Google is spending some money for an opportunity to give a lot of people the warm fuzzies when they encounter the Google brand.

And in the big picture, Google gets to show people what the world might be like if there were more high-speed wireless Internet access–something the company has been aggressively lobbying for in Washington, D.C. Many people are used to wireless networking in their homes, but it’s a different matter on the road.

There are downsides, though, too. Having been to dozens of conferences where the wireless Net access collapses as soon as the keynote speech begins, I’m acutely aware that providing large-scale wireless Internet access is technically demanding–and people get unhappy when a promised benefit evaporates. And public, anonymous places such as airports and urban population centers are great spots for hackers to launch main-in-the-middle attacks by offering “Free Wi-Fi,” so exercise caution when logging on to these networks.

Marketing Casts Verizon Device as Antithesis of the Ubiquitous iPhone

By Rita Chang

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — Verizon’s droid is pitching itself as the anti-iPhone, and nowhere is that more evident than in the look and feel of its campaign — a blanket push you won’t be able to escape.

The integrated campaign, the largest in Verizon history, will receive an estimated $100 million in support, most of it spent before the end of the year. Within it, the new phone is touted as the robotic do-it-all antidote to the Apple handset’s shortcomings.

The TV spots set to hit airwaves Monday night are about as far from the iPhone’s cheery spots as possible. Visually somber and testosterone-packed, they could be mistaken for ads for “The Terminator.” But, like the iPhone spots, they also demonstrate what the device can deliver, such as voice-activated turn-by-turn directions, fast web-browsing and video viewing. The tagline: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.”

More here.

By Matthew Boyle

Stuart Frankel isn’t what you’d call a power player in the world of franchising. Five years ago he owned two small Subway sandwich shops at either end of Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital.

After noticing that sales sagged on weekends, he came up with an idea: He would offer every footlong sandwich (the chain also sells 6-inch versions) on Saturday and Sunday for $5, about a buck less than the usual price. “I like round numbers,” says Frankel, a brusque New Yorker who moved to Miami in 1972 and owned a drugstore before opening his first Subway outlet in 1988.

Customers liked his round number, too. Instead of dealing with idle employees and weak sales, Frankel suddenly had lines out the door. Sales rose by double digits. Nobody, least of all Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway’s performance. “There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them,” says Jeffrey T. Davis, president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman & Associates. “It’s huge.”

In fact, the $3.8 billion in sales generated nationwide by the $5 footlong alone placed it among the top 10 fast-food brands in the U.S. for the year ended in August, according to NPD Group. That puts the $5 menu’s success just a notch behind KFC and ahead of Arby’s and Domino’s Pizza. It helped privately held Subway, of Milford, Conn., lift U.S. sales 17 percent last year at a time when most restaurant chains, save for industry leader McDonald’s, struggled.

Read more.

]]> http://truecreek.com/2009/11/06/5-footlongs-turbocharge-subway/feed/ 0 http://truecreek.com/2009/11/05/use-of-cloud-computing-applications-and-services-a-pew-study/ http://truecreek.com/2009/11/05/use-of-cloud-computing-applications-and-services-a-pew-study/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:52:20 +0000 truecreek http://truecreek.com/?p=1379 By John Horrigan.

Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web. Online users who take advantage of cloud applications say they like the convenience of having access to data and applications from any Web-connected device.

However, their message to providers of such services is: Let’s keep the data between us.

Download the report here.

]]> http://truecreek.com/2009/11/05/use-of-cloud-computing-applications-and-services-a-pew-study/feed/ 0 http://truecreek.com/2009/11/03/play-in-the-media-sandbox/ http://truecreek.com/2009/11/03/play-in-the-media-sandbox/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:11:58 +0000 truecreek http://truecreek.com/?p=1354 By Cat Moriarty

Sure, your brand message is consistent across all channels. But you haven’t truly integrated your marketing efforts unless you’re putting those channels to work together.

Mixing media — especially print and digital — is not only a smart idea, but with a little creativity, it can be a highly profitable one.

If your company depends on offline purchases, for example, improve direct mail conversions by e-mailing your audience before a drop, like True North did during a campaign for a New York–based credit union. The print-digital combination quickly produced 5,543 new members — 122 percent above expectations.

And with personalized URLs (PURLs), you can use direct mail to help drive online purchases, too. It’s what office machinery and consumer electronics company Ricoh did (with some pretty impressive results) when promoting its new high-end production print equipment

Retailer W.L. Gore had similar success when it included PURLs in its “Take Me to Everest” campaign. Not only did PURLs strengthen the company’s direct mail–Web connection, they also helped build brand awareness and generate shoe sales during the coveted holiday season.

And as this holiday shopping season soon gets under way, don’t underestimate the power direct catalogs — and their hybrid cousins (magalogs and catazines) — can have over online sales. With so much online competition, sending catalogs and other direct pieces is helping brands like mark and Zappos.com motivate customers to visit their sites more often, stay longer and get to know them better.

By Allison Linn

The recession has dramatically changed many Americans’ shopaholic habits, at least temporarily and perhaps forever.

Now the question is whether the nation’s retailers have kept up.

“The answer is no,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst with NPD Group.

He’s not alone in that assessment.

Although it’s still early days of the holiday shopping season, some analysts are already worried that too many merchants are taking a business-as-usual approach to an era that is anything but usual. Any miscalculation could be disastrous for retailers, who typically expect up to 20 percent of annual sales and a bigger share of annual profits during the critical holiday season.

“Retailers still don’t have a full grasp of reality,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of  Strategic Resource Group, a consulting firm.

Flickinger thinks many of the nation’s retail executives don’t completely understand how severely the Great Recession has affected the millions of Americans who have lost jobs, had their wages cut or are living in fear of a job loss.

That, he noted, is on top of other financial concerns many Americans are facing, including a steep drop in home and investment values.

Retailers have good reason to fear such financial jitters, having only last year endured a disastrous season in which holiday retail sales fell 3.4 percent as Americans, rattled by the financial crisis, held onto their pocketbooks.

This year, Flickinger said, consumers are facing the reality of a sky-high unemployment rate and growing concerns about credit card debt.

“Shoppers are more scared going into this holiday season than any time in the last 50 years,” he said.

In the new era of tight budgets, consumers are looking for good value on the items they want and need. But instead, many analysts say retailers seem to be taking a different approach: offering ever-more extreme discounts on items they want to get rid of.

The super-low price method of offloading excess inventory has become so commonplace, even among higher-end retailers, that shoppers are coming to the conclusion that many products are just worth less, said brand analyst Robert Passikoff.

“It isn’t just that you learned that there will be sales — there will always be sales — but what it’s done is it ultimately affects the value perception of the product,” said Passikoff, president of the customer loyalty research firm Brand Keys.

More here.

By Marsha Lindsay:

What does the worldwide, technologically enabled drive for conversations mean for marketers? It means you’re no longer marketing products or services — you’re marketing conversations. It means marketing-communication planning should be driven by a conversation strategy.

The right conversation strategy answers two big questions: What meaningful content will attract sufficient conversations with the right people? And, how will you jump-start conversations and keep them alive?

When people are starved for time and already engaged in many conversations, jump-starting new and meaningful conversations is the big challenge of marketing today. Just building a website, writing a blog or posting videos on YouTube doesn’t mean sufficient numbers to impact ROI will find them organically, much less take the time and energy to converse with you. By definition a conversation requires others to be present and participate — otherwise you’re talking to yourself. Perhaps therapeutic, but no way to make a living.

Even if people know there’s an opportunity to have a conversation with you — on Twitter or your blog, for instance — you can’t expect them to engage given all the other demands on their time. You’ll need a strategy that both gets them to know you exist and care so much that you exist, they’ll become intrigued about conversing with you. This requires a strategy that integrates search optimization, media, message and contributions of content from consumers.

The right strategy begins with the end in mind: What message can work across multiple platforms and be scaled so quickly and broadly it can drive sufficient revenues to support a business model?

Very few companies have the luxury to let conversations build slowly over time. And no business can afford to risk a high-waste and low-impact effort. More often than not, high-impact campaigns with reasonable returns don’t materialize solely from online ads and social media. Traditional media must be a major component of the mix.

Stefan Olander, Nike’s global director of brand connections, noted at Lindsay, Stone & Briggs’ Brandworks University 2009 that many of Nike’s online campaigns received overwhelming response at launch. Colleagues at Nike were excited about the prospect of dropping expensive traditional media campaigns in favor of these successful digital campaigns. Olander reminded them that, despite how well-known the Nike brand is, to optimize online conversations they still must jump-start initiatives with traditional media.

That’s because traditional media can do what social media cannot: aggressively interject messages into people’s lives in a socially acceptable way. Research conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation indicates that messages delivered by TV may, in fact, be the fastest and most cost-efficient means to jump-start productive conversations in the digital and real worlds.

Experts at the World Advertising Research Center have also studied what it takes to optimize engagement in a conversation economy. They recommend this media priority:

1. Mainstream media.
2. Open networks such as blogs and websites.
3. Closed networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

A multimedia mix framed to spark conversations requires a compelling message concept that can work across a multimedia platform. Its foundation has to be far more than a one-time promotion or product attribute; it must be a message strategy that connects brand meaning with search habits and accommodates ongoing contributions that can range from casual conversations to consumer-generated content.

This is a tall order, but not impossible. That’s because the solution can be found in the motivations of the conversationalists themselves. Some psychologists say that people subconsciously come to a conversation with a desire to be changed by them. This makes sense. Conversation is mankind’s natural search engine.

By Nancy Trejos

The recession has cooled the American ardor for living on credit. After years of saying “Charge it,” consumers are more often paying with their debit cards instead.

Worry about jobs, fear of fluctuating interest rates on credit cards and wariness about spending too much are contributing to the change.

“People are managing their money in a different way,” said David Robertson, publisher of the Nilson Report, which tracks the credit card industry. “You clearly have a situation where those people who have jobs are exhibiting recession anxiety and they are making more debit transactions.”

Nine months ago, Alyson Chadwick, a public relations representative for a nonprofit organization on Capitol Hill, got a debit card with a MasterCard logo so she could use it anywhere for purchases. Carrying cash was unsafe, she thought, and a debit card would help her manage her spending better.

“I use my credit cards hardly at all,” she said. “I don’t even carry them with me.”

Trish Preston, head of U.S. debit for MasterCard, said the changing fortunes of debit and credit tell the story of how the recession has transformed consumer spending.

“Think about what’s happening in the economy,” she said. “Appliances, furniture, jewelry: Those are very sensitive to the economy, and those have generally been credit spending categories.”

Debit cards, meanwhile, tend to be used for routine necessities such as groceries and gasoline. “Those kinds of expenditures are happening,” she said.

The Federal Reserve said that revolving credit, primarily credit cards, dropped by $6.1 billion in July, or 8.1 percent on an annualized basis. Debit card usage, meanwhile, had been steadily growing over the years but has surged in this recession.

Credit cards draw on money borrowed at often high interest rates; debit cards withdraw money from the cardholder’s bank account.

Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company’s history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion.

“Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they’re going to shift their behavior in a way that fits with their current economic situation,” said Scott Strumello, an associate with the Auriemma Consulting Group, a Long Island-based payment card advisory firm. “They’re thinking more seriously about it, and many may decide, ‘I’m going to use debit where I can and reserve credit for larger purchases.’ ”

For three decades, credit cards, which emerged about 50 years ago but were not in widespread use until the 1970s, have reigned as the preferred mode of payment, mostly on big purchases, for baby boomers and their children. Before that, people used cash, bank loans or the installment plan.

Baby boomers typically charged responsibly. Their children, who grew up in the mostly prosperous 1980s and 1990s, became dependent on cards from an early age, partly because card issuers marketed heavily on college campuses. Unlike their parents, they tended to see credit cards as long-term loans. And they charged too much.

“An awful lot of kids grew up in a very big house and they grew up with pretty much everything they wanted, and then they became adults and their parents, rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly, conditioned them to a set of conditions they cannot afford,” said Lewis Mandell, professor of finance and business economics at the University of Washington and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Industry executives said much of the debit card growth is fueled by a growing disdain for carrying cash and writing checks. But they also acknowledged that credit cards have fallen out of favor with consumers who want to save more and limit their discretionary spending. In July, the personal savings rate reached 4.2 percent, up from about 1 percent of after-tax income early last year, according to government data.

“The real question is: Is consumer behavior permanent?” Strumello said. “And that’s something where the jury is still out. Consumers have made moves in other downturns.”

Mandell said the next generation might reject credit after seeing their parents struggle with money. “I think the next generation may be self-correcting depending on the duration and magnitude of the downturn,” he said.

There is some indication that the shift to debit is partly a visceral reaction to credit card industry practices in the past few months. Since a law was passed in May that will limit the industry’s ability to raise rates and fees, many issuers have cut credit lines and increased rates, forcing borrowers to look for other modes of payment.

By Stuart Elliott

Since 1907, United Parcel Service has been delivering packages ordered by consumers. Next week, the company plans to deliver packages they have not ordered, in a test of an effort to expand into direct marketing.

Beginning on Monday, U.P.S. will experiment in five major markets with a service it calls Direct to Door, giving advertisers and retailers a chance to provide offers and product samples to U.P.S. customers. The marketing materials will come inside small boxes labeled Direct to Door Paks, and will be delivered to customers along with merchandise they actually ordered.

The test, to run through Oct. 2, is intended to gauge whether there is interest in having U.P.S. serve as an alternative to marketing mail delivered by the United States Postal Service or by companies like Valpak.

If Direct to Door goes forward, the added revenue could help United Parcel offset declines in demand for its mainstay package delivery service since the recession started.

In July, U.P.S. reported its sixth consecutive quarter of lower package volume in this country. The decline in the second quarter was 4.6 percent compared with the period a year earlier, which Bloomberg News described as the worst result since United Parcel went public in 1999.

“I wouldn’t say it was developed as a result of the economy,” said Lisa Lynn, marketing director for new-product research and development at United Parcel in Atlanta.

Rather, she said, it stems from “some opportunity we saw at the heart of what we do every day working off our delivery network.”

The test is also meant to see if U.P.S. customers welcome unsolicited packages or dismiss them as some new type of junk mail.

One effect of the economy is that “people are very receptive to offers right now,” Ms. Lynn said.

An experiment in figuring out how to better aim traditional, tangible marketing materials at consumers may seem quaint when so much of the buzz along Madison Avenue is about aiming virtual pitches at them online.

But direct marketing remains a lucrative business. According to the Direct Marketing Association, it accounted for $176.9 billion in ad spending last year in the United States — 52.1 percent of the total, by the association’s tally.

“We did some focus-group research and it really indicated that people were receptive to receiving offers from U.P.S.,” Ms. Lynn said. “What we heard was, ‘If U.P.S. brings it to me, it’s not junk.’ ”

Still, the company is taking several steps to try to ensure that a Direct to Door Pak is received more like a gift than another application for another credit card.

For one thing, the offers inside each box are intended to be special rather than “mass offers distributed through other channels,” Ms. Lynn said.

For another, no Direct to Door Paks will be delivered unaccompanied by packages ordered by that household, she said.

And the boxes will not bear the addresses of the recipients, Ms. Lynn said. Rather, they will carry phrases like this one: “Inside are premium offers from some of America’s best-known brands.” They will also include a photograph of the familiar brown United Parcel truck next to the words “Delivered to you by U.P.S.”

About a dozen companies — advertisers and retailers that use United Parcel to deliver orders to customers — are taking part in the test, Ms. Lynn said. They include the Finish Line; Men’s Wearhouse; Sephora; two Williams-Sonoma home furnishings brands, Pottery Barn and West Elm; and Zappos.com, the online retailer of shoes and housewares recently acquired by Amazon.

“It’s an interesting way to reach out to our customers and partner with one of our closest business partners,” said Aaron Magness, director for business development and brand marketing at Zappos.com in Henderson, Nev.

“We are an online retailer,” he added, “but we want to maintain a high-touch relationship with customers, constantly trying to find different ways to interact with them in whatever means they’re comfortable with.”

Mr. Magness said he liked the idea that the boxes would not arrive “out of nowhere, from random people knocking on your door.”

The offer to be made by Zappos.com during the test will invite recipients to “become a member of our V.I.P. program,” he added, entitling them to “free next-business-day shipping on every order.”

United Parcel plans to deliver about 250,000 Direct to Door Paks in about 150 ZIP codes in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Phoenix and Washington.

Those chosen to participate in the test are “high-opportunity consumers,” Ms. Lynn said, meaning that they often order merchandise delivered by United Parcel Service.

“Our drivers have relationships with these people because they deliver to them frequently,” she added. “There’s a lot of trust in the driver and the brand.”

Mr. Magness also cited the trust factor as a reason Zappos.com was interested in the test.

Ms. Lynn described the customers to receive Direct to Door Paks as ages 35 to 54 in households of two persons or larger and living in single-family, owner-occupied homes.

As for what the service will cost marketers, “I can’t go into specific pricing,” Ms. Lynn said, “but the pricing model is similar to other media.”

The goal is for the cost to reach each 1,000 consumers — a common media measurement known as cpm — to be “comparable or less than an equivalent piece of direct mail,” she added.