Emotional branding means customers stay loyal for the long haul!
Every marketer knows that branding is incredibly important – it enables customers familiar with your brand to distinguish it amongst a sea of competitors. The success of all these brands is about much more than the logo, it's about forming an emotional connection with their customers.
Image credit: Top 100 brands in 2011 according to Interbrand
With this much emotion involved in decision making, it’s easy to see how creating an emotional bond with customers makes a direct contribution to building profitability.
Emotional branding clearly differentiates companies from their competitors and helps to create deep intrinsic relationships between brands and consumers. Relationships with an emotional dimension are more likely to resist the temptation to defect than comparatively superficial price or convenience-based ones.
Only an insight-based, personalized marketing approach can form a strong enough bond with a brand,…
An interview with Katy Andić, European Web Marketing Manager at Misco
Our articles by Emma Durant on the challenges of managing international marketing online have been popular, so when I recently connected with Katy Andić of Misco on LinkedIn, I thought it would make an interesting case study of how these challenges are managed in practice. Misco provides a range of over 25,000 IT products via online and direct mail channels across Europe. A big thank you to Katy for summarising the approach Misco use to manage international online marketing in an interview with me.
Resources for managing local markets
Q. How many different European sites do you co-ordinate at Misco? What resource do you have available in each country for managing the site content? What are the biggest challenges in managing across all these sites?
There are marketing resources in each country UK, DE, NL, FR, ES, IT and SE. In addition, there is…
If we agree that engaging with brands in social media is a good thing, then how can we do it better? With participation in social media being a key area to in building brand reputation, Weber Shandwick offer their nine tips to build brand sociability. Anything that you would add?
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5 contrarian Steve Jobs quotes all marketers can learn from
“Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?"
Just one of many great quotes from Steve Jobs and one that sets the scene for my post.
For me Steve Jobs is/was/always will be a marketing genius. His untimely death has got me thinking about what I have learned from his approach to marketing.
The growth of Apple and popularity of its brand has to make Steve Jobs one of the best, if not totally counter-intuitive, marketers that ever lived. After all, from a marketing perspective Apple goes against a lot of conventional marketing wisdom. So here's what I think we can
1) Be original, unconventional and unfashionable, even: Though the prolific buy-cycle of Apple products by its raving fans seem to reflect the worst element of the waste of the Western consumer, it…
6 key questions to ask about how a brand uses social media
I work in the travel industry which, most of the time, seems like a great place to be for a digital marketer. It lends itself to rich, original content and has allowed the pioneering (but not always dominant) brands to develop online in ways never before possible with traditional media (think of brands such as Travel Zoo and Trip Advisor).
On the other hand the travel industry is being squeezed from all sides, (costs are rising almost everywhere let alone in travel) whilst the industry becomes increasingly fragmented and even more competitive. It’s also an industry which has had the way it does business entirely turned on its head thanks to the wide scale adoption of the internet.
In this post, I share my experiences from our initial work with social…
Google ROPO study provides a great way to visualise customer behaviour
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google-GfK-Vodafone study
ROPO is a term coined to describe research published by Google in this study meaning “Research Online Purchase Offline” (although it Research Offline-Purchase Online is another behaviour which can also be important.
This study reviewed the role of the internet in the decision process for mobile & broadband contracts involving the Vodafone website and stores in Germany based on a panel of 16,000 web users and questionnaires about their intent and purchase.
For both of these services, the contract was signed online by around a third of the audience. However, a significant proportion signed the contract offline.
Marketing implications of ROPO visualisation
The matrix presented above is a great framework for evaluating and summarizing multichannel behaviour since it also shows…
Actions speak louder than clicks
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Starcom MediaVest SMBI Study
Starcom MediaVest reveal how social engagement benefits the brand
I thought it would be useful to share this new research in our alert since unusually it shows what outcomes different types of social media interaction lead to:
The SMBI study essentially measures actions that indicate future involvement with the brand, they did this by monitoring user's social media behaviour and then follow up dialogue with those users.
The Social Media Behavioural Index (SMBI) is the result of a Starcom MediaVest Group study of brand engagement. Working with over 6,000 Twitter, Facebook and YouTube users across 29 brands.
Several sectors were researched, including finance; food and drink, health and beauty; retailers; media and entertainment; and technology & telecommunications.
The study offers several key take-aways
The most engaging social media action revolves around commenting and sharing content
The deeper the interaction with social media the…
How do you really approach your marketing planning?
After my recent post on marketing with the human factor, I've been thinking that most marketing today is still very product or category orientated - based entirely on what the business has to say or sell... typically it’s very features orientated and competitor obsessed as opposed to what the customer is wanting to find, learn, decide or buy? This isn't so much a criticism but a reality of pressured organisations today where marketers (including digital) are focussed on sales in its most direct sense.
There’s potentially a huge gulf between the marketers and customers which is where customer-centric marketing came in to the fore 10 years or so back and Philip Kotler inspired a new generation of marketers. Customer-centric marketing was born from the information age and where CRM’s over took corporate structures broadcasting information en masse, it typically adds to product based…
Master Marketer Seth Godin on marketing today
"The internet is not TV 2.0". You gotta love Seth Godin - considered, candid and rich with insight. I found this video yesterday and thought it was worth sharing. Why? A lot of my conversations I have with other marketers follow similar themes...
"PPC ads does not work like they used to, I can't scale it up"
"Banner ads don't work for us at all, we don't get the clicks"
"How do we get social media marketing right"
This video resonated with me, not just because I've learnt from Seth for over 10 years, but because he succinctly addresses the bigger problem that marketers face and then outlines the solution in only 10 minutes.
What are the take-aways?
Revolution not evolution
Revolutions are initially perceived impossible - Seth reminds us about Henry Ford and how the first…
An 11 step process to review your international marketing effectiveness
Following on from my first post on Understanding your Global Customers, in this post we look at how to conduct a Global Digital Marketing Audit within your business before creating a Global Digital Marketing Strategy. This includes the following areas:
Review global website and digital inventory
Regional Campaign activity
Mobile activity
Regional Social Media Activity
Regional Digital Marketing Plans
Regional Search Engine Marketing
Measurement tools
Regional content
Global digital agencies and suppliers
Regional team structure and skills audit
Communication and information sharing
1. Review global website and digital inventory
How many websites does your business ‘own’, and who looks after them on a day-to-day?
Pull together a list of all active domains and main contacts. This sounds obvious, but if you have marketing teams or even individuals based in several different regions, you can often find the odd microsite/campaign…
