Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Brand

Google and Motorola – Perfect Match or Mistake?

Motorola DroidThe Internet has been buzzing this week about Google’s announced $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola. Most analysts believe that the deal will eventually get regulatory approval and the two brands will come together under one company — Google. However, financial analysts are split on how they feel about the acquisition and how they think the acquisition will affect Google.

According to AdAge, on the pro Google-Motorola merger side, analysts cite the following positives:

  • The acquisition of Motorola is happening as a result of patent battles between Apple, Microsoft and Google. Therefore, Google needs to protect and increase its own intellectual property. Motorola has a portfolio of 17,000 patents and 7,500 pending. The merger will protect Google’s Android ecosystem that includes 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers in 123 countries.
  • The acquisition of Motorola better enables Google to compete in the mobile space where Google CEO Larry Page explained during an analyst call on August 15th web usage is increasingly moving towards. The acquisition gives Google a stronger position in the mobile market where they can distribute more Google products and services.
  • The Motorola acquisition better positions Google to directly compete against Apple with their own device and marketplace

On the opposite side of the debate are analysts who cite the following negatives about the Google-Motorola merger:

  • The acquisition is Google’s most expensive ever and will negatively affect Google’s stock and balance sheet. Standard & Poor’s already downgraded Google from “buy” to “sell” just two days after the acquisition was announced.
  • The acquisition will alienate Google’s other handset partners, including HTC, Samsung and Sony who will likely look for new opportunities and options.
  • There is no guarantee that the Motorola patent portfolio can protect Google from the patent battles its facing from Microsoft and Apple.

One thing is certain — the Google brand and company has been growing significantly with bumps in the road easily navigated along the way in recent years. It’s safe to assume that Google scrutinized this acquisition long and hard before the decision to pay $12.5 billion for Motorola was made. Will it be the right decision in the long-run? Only time will tell. What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on Google’s intended acquisition of Motorola.

Image: Flickr

QR Code Consumer Scanning is on the Rise

qrcodeAccording to research by comScore, 14 million U.S. consumers scanned QR codes (Quick Response codes) from their mobile devices during June 2011.  That’s just 6.2% of the total U.S. mobile audience, so there is still a lot of room for growth.

The research provides some interesting demographic statistics about the people who scan QR codes. It appears that young, wealthy men are the most frequent QR code scanners.

Check out the statistics below:

  • Gender: 60.5% are male.
  • Income: 36.1% make $100,000 per year and above. Another 18.6% have incomes between $75,000-$100,000.
  • Age: 36.8% are between the ages of 25-34. The next biggest QR code scanner group is the 35-44 age range at 19.6%.

Now that you know the best audience to currently target with QR codes for maximum response, let’s take a look at the sources where people are scanning QR codes according to the comScore research:

  • Printed magazine or newspaper: 49.4%
  • Product packaging: 35.3%
  • Website on PC: 27.4%
  • Poster on flyer or kiosk: 23.5%
  • Business card or brochure: 13.4%
  • Storefront: 12.8%
  • TV: 11.7%

Another insightful part of the report tells us where people are primarily scanning QR codes. Surprisingly, most people in the study scan QR codes at home. Here is the breakdown:

  • At home: 58.0%
  • Retail store: 39.4%
  • Grocery store: 24.5%
  • At work: 19.7%
  • Outside or on public transit: 12.6%
  • Restaurant: 7.6%

It’s important to remember as you review these statistics that QR codes are still very new to most consumers. Early adopters are primarily young, wealthy men who scan QR codes from magazines while at home. However, if you base your future QR code strategic planning on those statistics, you’ll be selling yourself short.

The key to QR code success in the future is to move beyond these early adopters and motivate your target audience to scan them. That means you need to find the right motivational offers to encourage them to actually do the scan. For people who aren’t already scanning QR codes, you need to educate them about how easy it is to do so and what they get when they take a second to do the scan.

In other words, there is still an important education phase related to QR codes, and there is still much to be learned. As with all marketing, if you teach consumers the value of scanning QR codes first and then provide offers that are actually meaningful to them in places where they’re likely to see them and have an opportunity to scan them, you’ll boost your chances of success. These aren’t new marketing rules. They’ve been around for a long time. You’re just applying them to a new medium.

Have you used QR codes to promote your brand yet? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: MattsLens

13th Street Creative Ambient Media Advertising – Bowlingheads

If you’ve been reading the Corporate Eye blog for a while, then you might already know that I’m a big fan of creative ambient media. It’s such a great way to bring a brand to life where consumers already spend time — within their daily lives and activities.

To advertise German television’s horror channel 13th Street, Jung von Matt/Elbe, Germany developed an ambient media campaign that would bring the horror show to bowling alley patrons in a way no one expected. With famous spraygun artist Oliver Paass, the agency designed a variety of bowling balls painted to look like cut-off heads. In addition, a number of black balls with the message “13th Street – Scream your head off!” were added to the mix (painted in German of course). The special bowling balls replaced standard balls in a number of German bowling alleys. You can see what happened in the video below.

I like this ambient media campaign because it does an excellent job of piquing consumers’ interests about the brand and television channel. The bowling balls aren’t intrusive to people’s lives, but they do make people take a second look and ponder them for a moment. In other words, the bowling balls give consumers a way to engage with the brand in a new way that might lead to further interest in the brand. For 13th Street, hopefully that interest turned into viewers. Let’s face it. If these scary looking bowling balls are intriguing enough to you that they motivate you to check out 13th Street, you’re probably in the right target audience and will like what you find on the channel.

I’m going to assume that the agency did some research or had access to data that showed its target audience spends a lot of time in bowling alleys. If so, then the campaign is brilliant. I’m also going to assume that the spray-painted balls replaced the standard balls at appropriate times of the day when the target audience frequents bowling alleys but most small children do not. It wouldn’t look good if kids saw these scary bowling balls and went screaming in terror out of the bowling alley.

What do you think about the 13th Street ambient media campaign? Love it or hate it? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Is Apple the Most Valuable Company in the United States?

Wall StreetSince 2005, Exxon Mobil has held the top spot as the most valuable company in the United States. As the Associated Press reported, for the first time since 2005, Exxon Mobile was ousted from the top spot on August 9, 2011 when Apple surpassed Exxon Mobile as the most valuable U.S. company.

These two companies are close when it comes to being crowned the nation’s most valuable company, and considering that other companies have quite a gap to fill in order to catch up to Exxon Mobile and Apple, it can be assumed that the battle will continue between just these two powerful companies at least in the short term.

However, this activity brings some interesting considerations about the value of the Exxon Mobile and Apple brands as well as the products they offer.

Exxon Mobile is an oil company. Oil is a necessary evil to many consumers. Exxon Mobile makes a lot of money — earnings grew by 41% to $10.68 billion during the second quarter of 2011, and the company posted its biggest profit ever of $14.8 billion during the third quarter of 2008, when most consumers were struggling through a difficult recession. This is a company that provides a product people need. Many consumers don’t like that they need Exxon Mobile’s product, but their hands are tied. Furthermore, the brand’s perception is tarnished by the fact that consumers would prefer not to be dependent on Exxon Mobile’s product and the fact that the company is doing extremely well while individuals are struggling economically and the country is in massive debt. It’s hard to have a positive perception about a company like that.

On the other hand, as the Associated Press points out, Apple offers a product people want. The brand isn’t perfect and it has its detractors and gets a fair share of deserved negative publicity, but at the heart of the company is innovation. Apple develops products that people don’t need. However, they want Apple products and gladly pull out their hard-earned money to pay for them. As a result, the brand’s overall image is far more positive than negative as are consumer perceptions of the brand.

It’s interesting to see these two businesses with extremely different business models, products, and brand promises battle it out for the top spot as the most valuable company in the United States. It’s a battle many people will be watching. Will you? Which brand do you think will win? In the short-term? In the long-term? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Alex E. Proimos

From Direct Response to Direct Like – More Brands Direct Consumers to Social Media

Are the days of online display ads that direct consumers to buy now coming to an end? These days, more and more brands are directing consumers to like the brands’ Facebook pages or follow branded Twitter profiles, and companies like Flite are allowing brands to do it with unique interactive display ads.

Remember when online display ads were static images or animated gifs? A consumer clicked on a display ad and would be taken to the brand’s website to learn more or make a purchase? With ads like the ones offered through Flite, brands can engage consumers and those consumers never have to leave the originating website if they don’t want to.

Andrew Adam Newman of the New York Times described a recent campaign created by Flite for Mrs. Meyers, a cleaning brand. The display ad used in the campaign looked like a standard ad until you hover your mouse over it. That’s when the ad becomes engaging. The Mrs. Meyers ad expands to show several interactive options. Click to see real-time Facebook wall posts from the brand, Twitter users posting about the brand, or a video about the brand. Consumers don’t leave the website where they saw the ad unless they click on specific buttons or links within the ad.

Many brands use these interactive ads as tools to increase Facebook page likes, Twitter followers, and YouTube brand channel subscribers. Tracking data shows that these types of ads are excellent at increasing consumer brand engagement and click throughs. According to the New York Times article, consumers spent an average of 30 seconds interacting with the Mrs. Meyers ads, which is significantly more than the average time spent with other online ads of just 11 seconds. Furthermore, Google reports that click-through rates for display ads that lead consumers away from a website typically average one in a thousand. For the Mrs. Meyers ad, 35 out of every 1,000 users clicked through to the Mrs. Meyers site destinations.

Moving from a static online ad to an interactive ad that has the opportunity to engage people enough that they willingly click through to learn more and engage with the brand further is incredible and more brands are sure to jump onboard with this trend. When these interactive ads lead to additional interactive and engaging destinations such as branded Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, brands have an opportunity to deliver more meaningful content and deepen relationships with consumers who have indicated that they want to learn more by interacting with the original ad and clicking through. What’s not to like from a brand perspective?

What do you think about interactive display ads and the shift from direct response to direct like or direct follow? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Facebook Targets Domain Squatters with Brand Name Misspellings for Copyright Infringements

Domain squatting, buying domain names close to well-known brand names, buying domain names that are misspelled versions of well-known brands — these aren’t new things. It’s a problem that brands have had to deal with for decades. Unscrupulous people and organizations buy these domain names with the hope that they can use them to drive traffic from poor people who type the wrong domain name and end up on the wrong site. These domain owners make money through ads and other unethical behaviors.

One of the things I always teach brands is to protect your brand name online by securing your branded domain name, Twitter profile, Facebook page, and so on. Of course, you can’t fight everyone who uses your name or a name that’s oddly close to yours for unscrupulous reasons unless you have extremely deep pockets. Instead, you need to target those that could cause the most harm and the biggest problems.

Facebook is looking to change all that. The company is suing 20 owners of domain names that are misspellings of Facebook.com citing trademark infringement. Owners of domain names like ffacebook.com and facefook.com have been named in the lawsuit, the outcome of which could create a powerful precedent for brands looking to stop unethical use of names similar to their trademarked property.

Typically, trademark infringements occur when there is the potential for consumers to be misled into thinking the accused is the actual company that owns the trademark. For example, if ffacebook.com led you to a social networking site, you could be confused into thinking it really is Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook site. When it comes to cybersquatting, and in this case – typosquatting, trademark violations aren’t quite as crystal clear. There is a fine line between unethical behavior and illegal behavior.

Whatever the courts ultimately decide (and it’s unlikely the case will actually get that far), it’s a problem that brands face every day. With the growing number of domain extensions and the popularity of sites like Twitter and Facebook, more and more fake branded profiles pop up all the time. Celebrities face this problem continuously. Twitter has created its “verified account” feature, but it doesn’t solve the problem of protecting brands on the social web. There is currently very little recourse that brands can easily pursue when these types of trademark infringements or unethical behaviors occur.

What do you think about the Facebook lawsuit? Is it warranted or not? Should there be laws in place to better protect brands and trademarks online than currently exist? Leave a comment and share your thoughts and your own experiences protecting your branded trademarks online.

Image: stock.xchng