Feb 18, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Strategy
Marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the ways they leverage understanding of how the brain works to build competitive advantage.
20 years ago most marketing positioning, segmentation and communication was based around demographic factors, but we have been increasingly understanding the linkages between a whole range of factors and individual behavior in a rang of circumstances as we have been able to collect and analyse data. This understanding has evolved to the point where the old fashioned demographic segmentation and positioning now looks like a Model T in the 2012 Paris motor show.
The evolving marketing skill is understanding how the brain works in order to gain commercial advantage, work that is based on academic medical research. But this research is just conforming what good marketers have known for some time, albeit intuitively. Simon Sinek’s simple “Why What How” presentation that has garnered almost 10 million YouTube views is just a marketers interpretation of Neuromarketing being applied.
Feb 16, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I opined previously that it appeared to me that Facebook had cracked the challenge of monetising their site by applying semantic search to their billion users and their networks with the introduction of the “Graph Search” feature.
This post on the Social Media Examiner site goes into some detail about the way Graph search works, and when you think about it a bit, the value is huge to marketers, as it offers highly targeted search capabilities.
I am a tennis player, a member of a local club that has the almost unique distinctions of retaining its grass courts, being a century old, and having many truly great players as former members. Funding the maintanence of the grass is an ongoing challenge, one that threatens the future of the club as membership declines with the lessening popularity of tennis, and the changing demographics of the local area.
There are a series of semantic searches I, and my fellow club members (assuming they use facebook, which many do not), can now easily undertake. Using these connections, through the “friends” networks, we can identify potential visitors and members, and market to those “friends” networks the joy of the game on grass, (particularly on a hot day), the value of membership based on the availability of grass, the heritage of the club, and the social aspects of the great game. The searches would look something like this:
Friends: who like tennis,
who like tennis and live in the Sydney inner west,
who like playing tennis on grass,
who would like to try playing tennis on grass,
and so on.
As those searches are employed, ads by sellers of tennis equipment, marketers of sporting brands, tennis coaches, even lawn care equipment would benefit from the highly targeted, and empathetic environment.
Potentially a gold-mine for marketers, as the value of Graph search to those networked on facebook is substantial. Suddenly Facebook looks like it has the potential to pay a dividend to those donkeys who got sucked in by the IPO, and did not get out fast enough, unlike young Mr. Zuckerberg.
Feb 14, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
20 years ago you could block book advertising across three TV channels, a few newspapers, and radio stations, and be pretty sure you would catch almost everybody.
Not now.
No matter how much you spend, you simply cannot block book all the channels that now attract our attention. The last 20 years has created communication channels inconceivable a generation ago.
Like time, attention is a non renewable resource, there is only so much of it, and unlike 20 years ago, there are almost infinite opportunities for us to spend our attention.
Marketers therefore have to reverse the order in which they approach gaining your valuable attention, as no longer can they easily access mass attention by intrruption. Now they have to earn the right to communicate, person by person, as just turning up and interrupting you will not work. Even if we happen to be there to be interrupted, we will ignore you without a very good reason to give you some of our valuable attention.
Feb 12, 2013 | Change, Communication, Innovation
The next big wave of innovation just may be co-ordination services.
When you think about it, the web has given us huge amounts of data at our fingertips, but created the problem of dealing with all the options we have. Usually we want only a very few options from which to make a choice, the more tailored those options are to our needs, the better, but we are now being deluged.
Think about the co-ordination of travel needs of inner city residents and transport. Often they do not need a car much, but when they do, a standard rental is not always convenient. Enter Zipcar. Travel planning is made easier by the on line room booking systems, AirBnB co-ordinates those plans with the needs of owners of non hotel facilities that people may like, and a bit of extra cash. The list goes on.
The current “scandal” of horsemeat in Findus products in Europe, and the Jindi cheese Listeria recall in Australia highlight the frailties of food safety sensative supply chains. We have the cpability to make the whole chain absolutely transparent, every product traceable, and if we used it, the problems would be gone. The challenge is the collection, analysis and delivery of the data, co-ordinated with the need for the data.
Co-ordinating and organising all this data, seamlessly, instantly, across all your devices and locations should be a fertile field of innovation.
Jan 17, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The value of Facebook has tanked since the IPO last year, largely because after the hype, people wondered how the returns would be delivered when the obvious source, advertising, does not really work on Facebook.
However, Facebook is in the throes of launching an extensively re-engineered search facility, “Graph Search“. This facility will enable placement of extremely focused advertising in situations where the search being conducted is for things other than friendly e-conversation. This change potentially removes the barrier to successful adverting on Facebook, the disinterest in anything commercial when interacting with friends.
This Wired article on Graph Search offers detail, but essentially, the new search facility reflects peoples networks as a graph, or network chart, and the search capability can interrogate the network, and answer questions, with extensive auto-complete suggestions based on your previous activity.
Google cannot get at the data held by Facebook, that is a huge resource of people, networks, preferences, links, and reviews that can now be leveraged in searches conducted from within the Facebook community.
Similarly, the power of Linkedin is the connections between people and their work. Want to see who is connected to someone at a competitor, supplier, potential customer, and so on? now Facebook will be able to do it, perhaps better than Linkedin, particularly for the under 35’s.
An underutilised aspect of Twitter is the search capability, when used well, it is an enormously valuable addition to a Google search, and contains links that enable a deeper dive from any starting point in a topic. Other services like Pinterest also now chase the available advertising dollars, making media choices a complex nightmare.
Graph Search makes the battle for on line advertising even more interesting, and will add some extra lead into the saddlebags of newspapers as they try to monetarise their offerings. News Corp is in the middle of splitting their operations, separating newspaper film and television assets globally, restructuring to enhance revenue generation options, already having paywalls in place for their newspapers. Fairfax is expected to introduce some level of paywall sometime in the next few months in an effort to stem the bleeding.
As the search capabilities improve, and paywalls emerge, the attraction of free sources of information will increase, with the minor irritation of the presence of advertising. Facebook now appears to not only to be in a position to cash in on their huge network, but to potentially extensively disrupt the current web and remaining legacy media advertising options.
Dec 17, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Sales
Everybody, well almost everybody, uses Powerpoint. Some use it well, many use it poorly, and some are just appalling.
We have all sat through that presentation by somebody we thought had something to say, and they said it all on packed, almost illegible slides, which they then read to us!
Sigh!
So here are three simple, practical steps to take to make a boring presentation engaging, assuming of course that what is to be said has merit in the first place. No way to make a silk purse…………
- Use big fonts, the bigger the better. You therefore cannot get much on a slide, so need to distill the information down to the idea you are trying to convey. If you cannot distill the verbiage down to a few words that is the core of the message, work on your message, not the presentation.
- Use photos, drawings and graphics that convey a message, one per slide. As above, plus it gives you a visual hook onto which to hang a story. There are millions of images on the net, there will be many that convey the core message in a memorable way, you just have to find it.
- Do things in threes. For some reason my psychological friends can probably recite, our brains work in threes, we can remember three, and sequences of three, using this innate ability helps to organise your thoughts and presentation, and creates a flow for the audience.
If Powerpoint no longer does it for you at all, eventually the world does move on, then something like Prezi evolves, and simply makes the old stuff look, well, old.
