Filed under: Hot List Clients, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth, research | Tags: 2010, art of the trench, burberry, chanel, charlotte russe, community, dolce & gabbana, Facebook, fashion, gilt groupe, louis vuitton, luxury, marketing, prizes, social media, topman, Twitter, you tube
Channel Chanel
User-generated content is key to social media and fashion. From blogs to Facebook photo contributions to product reviews, the user-generated content is at its apex. One of the most notable and consistent campaigns that are built around user-generated content and social media has been from the brand Charlotte Russe, The brand’s weekly trivia contest on it’s Twitter channel or virals from their YouTube channel, drives the consumers to their website with the high hopes of snagging some great prizes.
Another great example of user-generated content used is Burberry’s Art of the Trench site. The people are encouraged to upload photos of themselves wearing Burberry’s signature style, the trench coat. Burberry is on a roll when it comes to online advertising to showcase their goods.
Moving into 2010, brands and retailers will be delving deeper into social media to reach online audiences. Digital and e-commerce launches of new products have also been a popular way for brands to keep costs low in a tough economy for luxury products. A variety of mobile platforms have taken off as brands, magazines, and web sites to develop apps with the goal of extending their online presence and widening the distribution channels.
When it comes to developing apps, fashion brands are some of the fastest out of the blocks. Chanel shows its runway collections via iPhone app, and the Gilt Groupe app allows users to shop sample sales and receive alerts as to when sales are starting. Guilt free apps to download for the stylish brand hunter! We’re currently developing iPhone and Blackberry apps for fashion brands around London Fashion Week.
The future of fashion is in digital marketing, not only have these brands started to win over the consumers through social media campaigns, but are starting to create their own niche groups. Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and other major league heavy hitters in the fashion industry have launched their own social networks or added social components to their existing web sites. Or in the case of TOPMAN, we’ve worked to build their community over existing social networks and channels to lighten the load on the brand and keep things relevant to their audience.
It’s been a tough education, but we start to see less one-way discount promotions, and more genuine interaction between the brand and the people, it makes everyone happier and allows sales to boost, with satisfaction of personally acquainting yourself with who you are purchasing your new outfit from.
Filed under: Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: czech, illegal, Illegal downloads, marketing, permission, piracy, prague, smiths, social media
In the stampede to embrace all things social we have to understand that in the same way it enables people to expose more of their life to their friends, people are exposing more of their lives to strangers.
Meet the Smiths.
This is a photo they took for their family Christmas message that was sent out to friends via Christmas cards and a blog message.
Now look at this advert for a local grocery in Prague, Czech Republic.
It seems someone Googled something like ‘happy family’ , saw the Smiths and thought it made a great image.
Fortunately for the Smiths, they have a well-traveled assortment of friends, one of whom saw them in Prague and let them know. You can read the rest pf the story on the BBC site but the question here is one about permission. Increasingly, ‘copyright’ as a subject is being assaulted by the ‘democratisation’ of the web. Whilst many of us sit home and steal music, video and game entertainment at the expense of the large (and sometimes very small) corporates, suddenly we feel very unhappy when the shoe is on the other foot.*
Here’s a thought, instead of suing everyone, the corporations who are victims of piracy should download photos of the pirates and then use them for free in their advertising. 
*my legal disclaimer: I’m not implying the Smiths illegally download any content.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, News, Our team | Tags: brand, budget, consumer, consumers, Deloitte, digital marketing, marketing, neoco, newmediaage, NMA, Online Marketing, trade press
Our Co-Founder Benn Achilleas, recently commented about the Deloitte report and it was printed in newmediaage (nma), read it below.
Understanding online
What are your thoughts on Benn’s idea’s?
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Coffee Break, Events, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: Branding, breakfast, buzz, Buzz Monitoring, Facebook, marketing, Nielsen, Nielsen Online, Online Marketing, social media, Social Net, WOM, WOM-UK, WOMUK, word of mouth, YouTube
How does it relate to you?
Social Media/”Consumer Generated Media”, although fairly new compared to other forms of online communication is the third most popular way to spend time online, in fact 1/5 of all time spent online, in the UK is spent on Social Networks. Added to this is the perception, among the more traditional among you is that Social Networks are there just for younger audiences that just spend most their time on Facebook/Myspace/YouTube. Yes these are key sites, and yes young people are still in these spaces, but there is a huge space online that is inhabited by all ages, in fact between April 08 – April 09 18-34 age group lost a 8.3% share of online user composition, in community member sites. There is almost an equal share between 18-34 and 35-49 age groups, if you then add in 50-64 group, the share held by 18-34’s is looking rather small.
Once you take away the big sites I have mentioned above, naming another 7 Social Media sites which reach over 3m unique users (in the UK) per month might be a bit of stretch and no Twitter isn’t one of them! But this just points out there is huge untapped market, where you can interact, it doesn’t have to be through the initial channels that you would think of.
So basically, pretty much all age groups are using Social Media, you know their interests, age group and where they live. For Marketers, this is a dream, as all over the internet users can be talking about your brand, doing some of the leg work for you.
Who rules online?
This would be fantastic if everything being said was positive, however as we all know, this is not the case! What has happened is that control has been taken away from brand’s and instead given to the public. A scary thought indeed, but you can help even the balance through buzz monitoring, such as Neoco’s PoNo service. But added to this you can interact with disgruntled consumers in a very public place and can in fact turn negative publicity into a very positive outcome. Toyota did this in the states with one of their best selling car’s, the Camry. They opened a dialogue with key bloggers who were unhappy with the product, helped improve the product and in front of a huge audience of readers solved the problems for them. This was great PR, and was widely praised in blogs. For organisations who do latch on to this new approach to marketing, that sometimes you do make mistakes, but you are happy to rectify them, its a huge step forward and can forge trust in a brand that cannot be repeated elsewhere.
One thing you need to think of before approaching the world of social media is planning. With both negative and positive outcomes in mind, knowing how to react to them before they come. Having key set of objectives and KPI’s in place so you can track how well your campaign is doing, whether this is brand awareness or ROI. When it comes to planning and experience Neoco are digital experts, so please drop us a line to find out how are tools and services can help you.
Thanks to the guest speaker Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Our team | Tags: bad, email, Euro Anthems, Eurovision, How fit was the bird from No Limit, karaoke, late, Lucky Voice, marketing, missed opportunity, Playstation, PS2, PS3, Singstar
Singstar Euro Anthems was released without most of the audience knowing
We LOVE Singstar on the Playstation. Get the drinks in, friends around and sing along to the original music video. Now Singstar are not stupid (although they seem deaf to some of my emails requesting songpacks) and they know their audience. They know the chances are that if you like your karaoke then you will likely be in to your Eurovision. So, with great delight to fans and in a very smooth move, Singstar released the Euro Anthems pack with a collection of hits from previous Eurovision winners. Spot on. I promise you this would have been downloaded within seconds at my house… If we’d have known.
Sing-along with Singstar
The problem is that I’ve only just received the email telling me the pack is live and ready for my Eurovision party… would that be the one that happened over 6 days ago? What an awful mistake to make. All marketing relies on understanding your audience and timing communications. Despite all my love for their brand and the games this gets a big thumbs down from us – and likely their Financial Director too! Give us a call guys and we’ll hook you up with an email campaign that works.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Industry news, News, research | Tags: ad spend, behaviour, consumer, Coronation Street, Deloitte, Hovis, I only ever watch Sky+HD so I can skip ads, influence, integrated, magazines, marketing, media, news article, newspaper, online, Online vs TV, report, Sarah Johnson, Thinkbox
one dimensional chart showing media influence on consumers
A Marketing article from last week covered the new Deloitte report on media influencer on consumers. Unsurprisingly TV is listed as the most influential media for consumers. Even less surprising are the old school media people scoffing at online ‘scraping in’ at third place – after magazines. The sad fact is that a lot of (but thankfully not all) marketing and brand people will look at these results and not consider the following:
- Cost of Online vs TV
- Potential reach of Online vs TV
- Indirect support benefit of Online with TV
- Consumer awareness (how many times do you remember Googling a brand? It’s just part of web life now and does not have the recall value of an advert)
The sad thing about this is that despite the fact there has never been a more exciting, dynamic and interesting time to be in Marketing, to many budget controllers believe it’s ‘business as usual’ and pour money in to TV without applying a contextually relevant figure to Online.
I loathe stats like this. Sales increase of £12m thanks to ad spots on Coronation street - what about the other activity? And how much did it cost to get amonth of ad spots on Coronation Street! I appreciate Thinkbox is TV focused but come on.
At Neoco, we’ve been saying for years that Online/ Digital is not a silo and should not be treated as such. Don’t look at these media in isolation; Digital works best as part of an integrated campaign. Integrated campaigns work best with Digital.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing | Tags: advertising, Coca-Cola, Innocent, marketing, McDonalds, News
Not so long ago, I was still a grubby student studying Advertising and Marketing Comms at Bournemouth University. Innocent was a brand we’d all use to demonstrate our conceptual understanding time and time again. The only explanation for this I can think of is that, as a bunch of lively late-teens, we had a close affinity and understanding of the brand already (well, we wouldn’t have picked anything hard now, would we?!). This is more pertinent given that I’ve been to the Innocent Summer Fete two years on the trot, and am planning to go back this year.
It all begs the question: what is it about the Innocent brand that builds such subconscious salience amongst my demographic? I’d put money on it being the very ‘Innocence’ of the brand – the fact that it brings out the kid in everyone by building such an idealistic experience around what is essentially still, just a drink. But unusually, I don’t mind feeling duped by the powers of Innocent’s marketing comms – having spent so many years studying it, I appreciate that I’m harder than most to be sold a product, let alone a brand’s ideology. So when I buy into something enough to let my guard down, I’m really quite impressed.
The thing about Innocent is that there’s a fair trade – you hand over your otherwise cynical, sarcastic and close-minded attitude to sales messages, and in return they offer a unique and truly engaging brand experience that is as real at their Summer Fete as the images they paint in your mind. I’d put it down to their marketing strategy being as synergetic as any depicted in a textbook, which I think owes as much to the unified vision of the founders as good marketing practice. The wonderful thing about Innocent has been the consistency of it’s touchpoints with consumers – from the summery nature of the product, to it’s links with live music, to the bunting, knitting and welly wanging – it’s a return to the quintessential English traditions that time has otherwise forgotten about.
So it was with horror that I found out that Innocent has now sold a minority stake worth £30m to Coca-Cola. If anything could be further from Innocent’s links to all things traditionally quaint and British, it’s one of the biggest corporate bloodsuckers on the planet. And this is on top of Innocent’s flirtation with McDonald’s a while back, trialling Innocent smoothies with kids’ Happy Meals.
Honestly, I feel pretty confused. I feel cheated by an otherwise loyal and trustworthy friend. It just goes to show what can happen when you build such a close relationship with your consumers – they expect you to stay true to the brand vision they bought into, even if macro-economic factors make it hard to achieve.
Everyone’s feeling the pinch of recession, but Innocent’s decision to ally with an American multinational could prove far more damaging in the long term than the short term cash flow problems it will address. I really hope not – but in the meantime, I’ll be sticking to my fizzy water.
Coxy.
