Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Connecting Brands and the Mobile-Only Audience

iphone mobile consumerMarketers are quick to ask each other if they have a mobile-first strategy in place. Although we’re getting closer to widespread adoption of mobile-first strategies, most companies are still trying to catch up with a mobile-always strategy (comScore reported that we had a multi-platform majority last year). Now, there is data from comScore that suggests brand marketers also need a mobile-only strategy for a growing segment of the consumer population.

Using the comScore MMX Multi-Platform tool, comScore analyzed the mobile-only audiences of the top media properties and found that brands which only advertise through traditional display advertising are missing tens of millions of consumers each month. These are people who never visit websites so they never see ads displayed via desktop. For example, comScore found that each month 73% of Pandora’s audience, 54% of Buzzfeed’s audience, and 49% of Apple’s audience are mobile-only.

The demographic profile of the mobile-only consumer audience might not be what you expect. According to comScore, an analysis of Amazon.com mobile-only visitors revealed that more than 25 million of those visitors are between the ages of 35-64. If you thought only young audiences of tech-savvy millenials are mobile-only consumers, you’re missing a very large number of people across all age groups. However, it’s important to point out that the majority of Amazon.com mobile-only visitors are actually between the ages of 18-44. Here is the breakdown:

  • 18-24 = 10.8%
  • 25-34 = 14.4%
  • 35-44 = 12.1%
  • 45-54 = 7.8%
  • 55-64 = 6.1%
  • 65+ = 1.6%

Statistics support the development of a mobile-first strategy. For example, did you know that global mobile data will increase 11-fold by 2018? In the United States, one out of two online consumers made mobile purchases in 2013, and in the United Kingdom, nearly one in five smartphone users have made mobile purchases. These are trends that are not going to change. Once a consumer goes mobile-only (or mobile-dominant), it’s unlikely that they’ll go back to being desktop-only (or desktop-dominant) ever again.

Are you measuring your mobile-only audience correctly? If not, you might be allocating your digital advertising budget ineffectively. It’s no longer a matter of if you need a mobile-only strategy for a segment of the consumer audience. Today, it’s a matter of when you can develop it and roll it out, because every day that you don’t prioritize mobile marketing is a missed opportunity.

Image: Karola Rieger

Happiest Brands Understand How to Build Emotional Connections

happy-brands-2014-infographic
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A new study by Isobel and Cog Research, Happy Brands, reveals that the happiest brands build emotional connections with consumers. The study defined happy brands as having four core characteristics: playfulness, happiness, trustworthiness, generosity, and optimism. A total of 1,250 U.K. consumers ranked one hundred of the largest brands from the biggest market categories on those five characteristics as part of this study, and you can see the winners and losers in the infographic to the left.

The happiest brands according to this study are Cadbury, Andrex, and Google while the least happy brands (excluding political parties) are The Royal Bank of Scotland, Ryanair, and The Daily Express. The most trustworthy brands are Nivea, Andrex, and Fairy, but the least trustworthy brands (excluding political parties) are Daily Star, The Sun, and Ryanair.

Isobel found that there is a clear connection between emotions of happiness, perceptions of trust, honesty, and generosity, and brand affinity which grows proportionally with consistency of brand messages and brand experiences. In other words, an ad campaign that tries to position a brand as happy, trustworthy, and honest won’t get the desired results if the ad is inconsistent with the audience’s existing experiences with and perceptions of the brand.

The results of this study aren’t surprising. In 2008, I wrote here on the Corporate Eye blog, “Perhaps the single most important aspect of developing customer loyalty is emotional involvement in your brand. Customers who feel an emotional connection and response to your brand are inherently loyal to it.” I also shared the three steps to build emotional involvement in your brand: stability, sustainability, and security. These are not new concepts. However, what is surprising is that brand marketers still have to fight to get executive buy-in on the importance of investing time, resources, and budget dollars to building emotional connections between brands and consumers.

It’s not just conceptual, visionary marketers calling for the strategic prioritization of emotional branding. Analytical, data-driven marketers understand its value, too. In 2011, I shared results of a study that showed emotional brand advertising is more impactful than logical brand advertising.

In 2012, I wrote an article about the critical importance of consumer emotional involvement in brands. I wrote, “Who says emotions don’t matter? Not brand managers. When consumers are emotionally involved in a brand, that brand has reached an important point of success. Emotional involvement in a brand leads to brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and brand guardianship that money can’t buy. Word-of-mouth marketing by consumers who are emotionally connected to a brand is extremely powerful. Don’t believe me? Ask the marketing team at Harley Davidson or Apple. They’ll tell you how important emotional involvement in a brand is.”

Brands that rank as the happiest understand the importance of consumer emotional involvement in brands. Google uses storytelling to build emotional connections between consumers and its tech brand—a type of brand that is not typically viewed as being inherently emotional. Google started its push to build emotional connections in 2011 with the launch of the first Google Chrome offline ad campaign. AT&T was a brand to benchmark for building emotional connections with consumers when its “Reach out and Touch Someone” ad campaign was a television staple. Today, AT&T is trying to regain that emotional connection through a new “It’s Complicated” ad campaign. Red Bull builds emotional connections with consumers in all of its marketing initiatives and brand experiences. Remember the Red Bull Stratos event? That was a perfect (and successful) example of emotional branding.

Consumers are innately emotional human beings. Trying to work against those emotions is useless, yet marketers still have to fight for the resources and money they need to build emotional connections between their brands and their target audiences. I started writing for Corporate Eye about branding and the importance of building emotional connections between brands and consumers in 2008. That’s seven years ago. I wonder if we’ll still be having this conversation seven years from now in 2020. What do you think?

Guidance, Part 2 – Thinking Through the Process

pros-consIn my last post I wrote about the uncertainty surrounding the thinking about whether or not companies should engage in the practice of giving guidance to investors. Of course what it boils down to is a careful examination of the factors surrounding each company’s situation. And while this sounds like a bunch of waffle language coming from a cautious lawyer, I believe there are some general guidelines that can help companies think through the process.

Here then are reasons a company should consider giving guidance to investors:

  1. You are a small cap company and have low sell side analyst coverage. One of the big issues for small cap stocks is simply getting on the radar screen of analysts and getting coverage. Anything a company can do to improve their chance of coverage (read: make life easier for the analyst), including issuing guidance, should come into play in order to gain the increased trading volumes, liquidity and visibility that come with increased sell side coverage.
  2. You are in a predictable business with good insight into near term revenues and profits. Companies with recurring revenue streams or large backlogs of orders to be fulfilled in the near future are an example here.
  3. You are in a predictable industry that is not prone to large swings due to economic factors or trends where virtually everyone else issues guidance and you would stand out like a sore thumb if you did not also give guidance.
  4. You don’t want to give continuous updates on your business in between quarters. The more transparent you can be on a continuing basis, the less you need to help the street by giving guidance.
  5. Management has the intestinal fortitude to run the business to plan and not manage the earning to hit guidance. Accounting is full of subjective judgments and timing issues. It is possible to move revenues into the current quarter or fiddle with loss reserves to make earnings look better in the quarter so you hit your guidance. This is almost never a good thing, but the pressure to “hit the numbers” can be overwhelming at times. Don’t issue guidance if it is going to warp the way you run your business.
  6. You recognize that occasionally you will be wrong with your guidance and are willing to make the necessary corrective announcements.
  7. You figure that the market is going to make a forecast anyway, so why not take control of the process.

On the other hand a company is not a good candidate to issue guidance under the following circumstances:

  1. Don’t give guidance if you are in an unpredictable business. This should be obvious, but you see it all the time. For example, property and casualty insurance companies are in the business of underwriting uncertain risks. They don’t know when the next natural disaster will wreak havoc with their earnings, so it makes no sense for them to be giving guidance on earnings.
  2. Don’t give guidance if you are not very good at it. If your company has given guidance in the past, but you find that you have to constantly revise the numbers downward, or you are wrong more than you are right, guidance is more trouble than it’s worth. Find a better solution.
  3. Don’t give guidance if it will cause management to engage is short-term practices that are not in the best long-term interests of the company. Jiggling things around to “hit the numbers” is a slippery slope at best and the road to perdition at worst.

In my next post I will talk a bit about alternatives to guidance a company can give.
 

5 Hats of a Social Leader

hats social leaderLeading in a world where social media touches every part of people’s lives is challenging, and marketing leaders need to develop social leadership skills in addition to traditional leadership skills in order to effectively manage their teams and champion their brands.

The days of just leading a creative and/or analytical team of marketers is over. Today, marketing touches every part of an organization because social media makes everyone a catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing. Harnessing the power of that reach to effectively build the value of your brand is a challenge, but the potential rewards make it worth fighting to get those extra budget dollars for social media and content marketing initiatives.

To help you start thinking like a social leader, following are five hats that successful social leaders wear every day. Add these hats to the six hats of a chief brand officer, and you’ll be on your way to leading a strong brand marketing team for your company.

1. Strategist

As a social leader, not only do you have to define the strategies for your brand marketing team, but you also have to talk about them. You need to share your vision and make sure your team, other members of the company, consumers, and the broader online audience understand that vision, too.

2. Collaborator

In addition to communicating your strategy, as a social leader, you’ll need to understand the interests and priorities of all stakeholders, including employees, consumers, business partners, shareholders, and so on. Social leaders seek out like-minded people who share their vision and build relationships with those individuals which can lead to organic word-of-mouth marketing. They also know how to interact and collaborate with people who don’t share their vision. Balancing these relationships and navigating disparate opinions is an art and a science, and social leaders have mastered both.

3. Adviser and Educator

A social leader isn’t a talking head. As a social leader, you must truly be invested in providing knowledge internally and externally. That means you need to create content, share content, discuss content, join conversations, and be active, vocal, and visible. After all, if you’re not social, you can’t be a social leader.

4. Communicator

Building brand trust through honesty and transparency is a business imperative today, so a social leader must set an example for employees to follow by openly and honestly communicating internally, externally, and via social media. These activities and behaviors should be closely aligned with the company’s code of ethics and core values (discussed in more detail in #5 below).

5. Decision-Maker

There will be problems, and their will be social media and public relations fires to put out. The result of open communication (and there is no fighting against open communication today) is the potential for people to publish and share damaging and/or false information about your brand that can spread to large audiences around the world in seconds. It’s critical to have a social media policy that aligns closely with your company’s core values and code of ethics, so you have a decision-making process to guide you and your team to make the right decisions. Social media training should become a core component of employee ethics training, so they feel comfortable advocating the brand across the social web but understand they are expected to do so within a set of guidelines.

Image: Luke Renner

What the New Gmail Unsubscribe Button Means for Brand Marketers

gmail googleEmail marketers got another big surprise from Google last week at the M3AAWG conference in San Francisco when Google’s head of anti-abuse initiatives, Vijay Eranti, announced the launch of the unsubscribe button for Gmail users.

Zach Miners of PCWorld reported that the unsubscribe button will appear in most promotional messages that offer an unsubscribe option. Instead of scrolling and searching for a way to opt-out of receiving those promotional messages, Gmail users can now simply click on the unsubscribe button that will appear at the top of the message right next to the sender’s name and email address. Without leaving Gmail and with a single mouse click that requires no scrolling or searching, recipients can quickly unsubscribe from promotional email messages.

While email marketers might initially react negatively to the Gmail unsubscribe button, as some did when Google rolled out Gmail tabs last year, the launch isn’t as bad as you might think. Google claims to be launching the unsubscribe button to reduce the number of email messages that are marked as spam by recipients. Eranti explained that consumers might subscribe to promotional emails from a company and later decide they don’t want to receive those messages anymore. It’s faster to flag those messages as spam than it is to open the messages, find the unsubscribe link, click the link and follow the instructions on a separate web page to complete the unsubscribe process, and then return to their email account. However, flagging those messages as spam is bad for the senders, because over time, Google will start to identify all of the messages from that company as spam. That’s a big problem for a company.

Rather than view the unsubscribe button as a problem, view it as a positive change that will reduce the number of times your messages are flagged as spam but also ensure that only the people who really want to receive your promotional messages are getting them. The quality of your list will improve as you work to attract more targeted subscribers while letting the non-interested individuals choose to unsubscribe easily.

Of course, the new unsubscribe button, like Gmail tabs, is just one more way that email marketers are challenged with reaching potential customers. However, it’s also a motivator to ensure you create the most compelling subject lines, offers, content, and calls to action. Useless messages are more dangerous to brand marketers than ever. Instead, you need to add value to recipients’ lives with every message your brand sends, and you need to make it extremely clear how each message will deliver real value to consumers in every subject line.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts on the Gmail unsubscribe button and email marketing.

Image: Cairo – FixtheFocus