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Archives for 2010

Color Makes a Difference to Cadillac Customers

According to Cadillac, 50% of new car buyers are willing to upgrade and pay more for Cadillac vehicles that have special color options. There is no doubt that color plays an important part of emotional branding and marketing as well as brand differentiation, but this statistic demonstrates that luxury brands might want to take a closer look at their color strategies because it could be a differentiator and a moneymaker.

JDSU has worked with Cadillac for years, developing special luxury colors for the luxury brand.  For example, have you ever seen a Cadillac that seems to change colors when you look at it from different angles?  That’s a JDSU effect that Cadillac markets as “subtle and sophisticated.”

To showcase its collaboration with Cadillac, JDSU has created “JDSU Revs Up Car Colors with Cadillac,” a look into how choosing the right colors can help differentiate a brand.  The site includes interesting videos with color experts and offers insight into the color trend analysis services JDSU provides to help Cadillac determine what colors will be popular on its vehicles several years out.

jdsu_cadillac

Interestingly, this level of color analysis isn’t used by Cadillac or the automotive industry alone.  JDSU color services are actually used by a wide variety of companies to help differentiate their products and brands.  For example, color analysis is an important part of brand strategy for companies in the consumer electronics, sporting goods and cosmetic industries, too.

Color marketing isn’t a new area of marketing and branding strategy, but it’s certainly one that’s gaining attention as companies look for any conceivable edge in consumers’ minds and wallets.  Dell’s Inspiron Mini 10 netbooks are offered at a base price in black, but if you choose your netbook in another color such as (Product) Red, Promise Pink, Ice Blue, Jade Green, or Passion Purple, you’ll have to pay more.  Other brands haven’t jumped onto the premium price for color bandwagon, such as Apple whose iPod nano, for example, is available in ten color choices — all with the same price tag.

The interesting point to analyze is which products consumers would actually be willing to pay more for enhanced color options.  50% will for Cadillacs.  I wonder what the statistic is for Dell.

What do you think?  What other industries or products would you be willing to pay extra for cool color choices?

Image: JDSU.tv

Spring Cleaning

Duster

It’s that time of the year again.  The time when sunlight streams through open windows—and illuminates the dust bunnies that gathered over a long winter.

So in honor of Spring, check those job postings and see if any of them are covered with cobwebs.

If there are closed jobs still lingering on the corporate site or on job boards, it’s time to make a policy decision.  Keep ‘em or toss ‘em?

That may seem like a surprising question.  So nip over to Recruitment Directory and read Cut the Fat. Expired Job Ads Should Not Be Displayed.  In this short post, author Thomas Shaw opens a conversation about the practice of leaving old ads up in order to improve SEO for the site.  Worth noting:  Even if a corporate site is kept scrupulously up to date . . . there may still be old jobs from the company posted elsewhere.

As Shaw points out, expired ads and ads for filled positions are an aggravation to job-seekers.  They waste time, raise false expectations, and leave a poor impression of the company’s HR practices.  But commenter Peter offers an alternative interpretation, pointing out that older ads can be used by job-seekers for research into the company’s rates of job growth and staff turnover, as well as to compare jobs among various employers.

The key is transparency.  If older ads are plainly marked as filled or expired, and they can be easily eliminated by a search filter, then there may be some value to making them available.  Or it might be interesting to create a research library for job seekers on the corporate website, showing past ads and position descriptions along with statistics on number of applications, number of interviews, time to hire, etc.  I haven’t seen this anywhere, but that doesn’t mean no one is doing it—and it could be an attractive candidate service.

In the spirit of Spring cleaning here at my own desk, I’ve dived into the Inbox and come up with an interesting white paper on Onboarding from Aberdeen Research.  In case you’ve been searching for a good definition of onboarding (also called “induction”) Aberdeen offers this one:  “the strategic process designed to attract and engage new employees, reaffirm their employment decision, acclimate them into the organization’s culture, and prepare them to contribute to a desired level as quickly as possible.”

The report provides some useful insights on obtaining employee engagement–well worth a download.  One highlight:  “Companies with a formal onboarding process are 2.5 times more likely than those with an informal process or no process to experience employee performance improvements within three months.”

Here’s another great thing about having a defined onboarding process.  If there is a process, it can be described on the Careers site.  And that will be attractive to a lot of candidates.


(Thanks to entheta for the flashy “feather” duster!)

Quantifying the Online Video Opportunity for Brands

The word among marketers for quite awhile has been that online video represents a significant opportunity for brands to deliver content in a format that consumers actively seek.  In other words, online video presents the opportunity to connect with consumers and engage them in branded experiences that they might not have access to elsewhere.

Still not sure if online video should be part of your brand’s marketing strategy?  Consider the numbers for a moment by reviewing the chart from Nielsen below.

nielsen_online_video_statistics

According to this chart, Google’s YouTube is by far the dominant player in the online video channel.  In the United States alone, over 100 million unique viewers watched nearly 6 billion online video streams in February 2010.  Clearly, people are watching online videos!  However, YouTube is a crowded and cluttered site.  How do you get noticed on YouTube against the viral sneezing kitten and Justin Bieber fan videos uploaded by teenage girls?

The key to getting noticed is not relying entirely on your online video destination to grow your video audience.  Online video should be an integrated part of your broader social media marketing strategy.  Yes, online video is an effective form of social media marketing when you create share-worthy videos and actually allow people to link to, embed, email and share your videos with their own audiences via blogs, Twitter, social networking, and so on.  Even your offline marketing should be integrated with your social media marketing and online video efforts.

As an example, Samsung created a unique marketing initiative that tied into the 2009 Super Bowl — one of the biggest annual sporting events in the United States — where consumers were invited to create their own videos explaining how they enjoy watching the Big Game.  The campaign leveraged traditional advertising as well as social media marketing with online videos, fan voting for the winning video, and more.

In other words, if you create an online video and publish it to YouTube, that doesn’t mean consumers will find it, watch it, or share it.  Your job as a marketer is to drive the audience to your online videos by creating integrated marketing efforts and creating amazing content that people actually want to see.

Here Comes the Future: Changes Loom on Employment Horizon

Shortened_Horizon_-_geograph.org.uk_-_176661

Labor shortage ahead! Well, maybe . . .

A recent report from the MetLife Foundation and San Francisco-based Civic Ventures (a boomer-issues think tank) projects that as employment ramps up again, spot labor shortages will begin to appear.  And in ten years or so, there won’t be enough new workers to replace the large number of retiring boomers.

Of course there may be off-setting factors.  More and more boomers are delaying retirement, either because they can’t afford to quit working or because they’d rather work than loll around.  In addition, productivity increases and automation continue to reduce the number of workers actually needed to make the wheels go round–at least in some parts of the world, and some areas of the economy.

On the other hand again, an aging population will require an enlarging pool of health care workers and other service providers.  The MetLife report expects “social sector” jobs (which includes education, non-profits, the arts, and other activities in addition to health care) to provide nearly half of all non-farm job growth in future.

Takeaway? Organizations need to start thinking today about talent management strategies that will work for tomorrow.  For example—some companies will benefit in the long term by encouraging their older employees to stay around, while others need to bring in larger numbers of young workers.

“A Seismic Shift Toward Contingent Labor”

Another warning shot comes from Jeb Evans (AVP of Resource Management at the TriZetto Group) in a presentation at the 2010 Human Capital Summit.   Evans sees contingent workers comprising 20-30% of the labor market over the next few years—and that may well be an underestimation.   This “new norm” has both advantages (contingent labor can be a cost variable when times are lean) and challenges (such as protecting intellectual property).

Takeaway? Many companies consider contingent labor as a necessary evil, and fail to integrate this area into their talent management strategy.  Get a detailed view and some excellent ideas of this topic from Dr. John Sullivan at ere.net.

The Virtues of Virtual Work

In recent remarks at a forum on Workplace Flexibility, the U.S. president praised trends and technology that support  telecommuting—certainly an important factor in the morphing of the labor picture.  Telecommuting, which lets workers in conventional companies do some or all of their work without physically coming to an office, has been limited in the past to only a few types of workers, but the practice is rapidly expanding to a wider variety of jobs.  And there is a continuing increase in the number of purely virtual  companies that have no centralized office at all.

Takeaway? Recruiting virtual workers presents some new challenges, as well as new opportunities.  Conventional job applications and evaluations are designed for onsite workers and may miss some of the important considerations in hiring people that will make good offsite workers.  So far, the only specialized tool I’ve found for hiring remote workers is LIMBRA’s Virtual Worker System, but I’ll keep looking.

 

(Thanks to Michael Patterson for the photograph, taken near Heath, Derbyshire, Great Britain.)

Putting Hard Numbers to the Value of Social Media Connections

computer_hand_moneyThe company that develops an accurate way to measure the value of social Web connections would etch its place in marketing history, but is it really possible to put hard numbers to the value of social Web connections and conversations?  One company, Vitrue, is trying to do exactly that and with new research reveals that one million social Web connections translates into $3.6 million in media over the course of a year.

According to an article on BrandWeek, Vitrue developed its valuations by researching Facebook impressions and updates and discovered that connected people deliver more impressions overall.  That means, if you have an audience on the social Web, you should actively interact with them.  They are listening to you.

Vitrue is quick to point out that not all brands are created equal on the social Web.  “Sexier” brands have more engaged audiences and get more impressions than less exciting brands.  It’s all about perception though.  How can you make your brand more like the brands that are having success in engaging their audiences on the social Web?  That’s just one opportunity for you to find added success in your own social media marketing efforts.

Vitrue’s research also didn’t analyze the value of the engagements and relationships that develop between brands and the people who connect with them on the social Web — just the variance in brand impressions that those connections experience was analyzed.  Clearly, the more interactive and engaged the audience is and the deeper relationships grow, the greater the value of those connections.  That means the $3.6 million value is probably much higher.  However, like measuring brand value, measuring the value of social media connections still alludes companies.  The point to take away from this research is that social Web connections do impact brands in the long-term and social media marketing should be an integral part of any marketing plan.

Image: Flickr

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 15: Blogs

For the most part, corporate investor relations sites have stayed away from social media in all of its forms. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from overly protective attorneys to lack of resources, but at the very least I think that blogs should be considered as a way to make your IR site more effective and interesting. Twitter might be an application too far, but a blog is very much something that can be useful in telling the company’s story in plain English.

There are very few companies that have investor relations blogs. In fact, I know of only one: Dell. They use it for a variety of purposes, ranging from interviews to discussion of business lines and telling people what the IR department is up to. I’ve included a screenshot below.

Dell IR blog

When you think of the number of repetitive questions a typical investor relations officer answers in the course of a year, it would make sense for IR departments to write out the answers and post them on the blog. That way, rather than answering the same question for the thirtieth time while going brain dead, an investor relations officer can point people to the blog for the complete answer. Further, if you take the time to sit down and write out your answer, everyone will get the same information. My experience in this area is that in new situations, the quality of the answer an investor gets is principally the function of two factors: When they ask the question and the completeness of the questions they ask. If an analyst is too early in the question queue, many times the answer has not been fully formulated by the IR practitioner and valuable information may be left out. Secondly, if the analyst is not an astute enough questioner, valuable information may also be left out as many IR officers only answer the questions asked, figuring that it is not their job to school the analyst. The result is an inconsistent spread of information. The act of writing out the answer forces a more complete answer to be formulated.

Over the course of many years the amount of plain English text investors receive about their investments has steadily declined. In the U. S., most annual reports today are what are known as 10-K wraps, with no more than 12 pages of free form textual discussion about the company. Shareholder newsletters are few and far between and quarterly reports have disappeared entirely. Why not use the relatively costless printing press of the web to deliver more information about your company in a reader friendly format such as a blog?

In this series:
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