"Buy the Way…" Insights on Integrated Marketing Communication

I subscribe to the Social Media Examiner, which calls itself the world’s largest online social media magazine. The Examiner sends out tips designed to help businesses discover how to best use social media tools. I find it interesting and helpful because it gives me some tips I occasionally use, but more importantly, it helps me think outside the box a bit.

One recent issue had a link to an video interview with Greg Swan, VP of Digital Strategy at Weber Shandwick, one of whose clients is the U.S. Army. That’s right: the U.S. Army uses a PR firm! The idea of the U.S. Army employing a public relations firm (Weber Shandwick says it is a global public relations and communication leader) is not surprising but it IS intriguing. Before I watched the video interview, I had all kinds of thoughts: when did the Army decide it needed to hire a PR firm? Isn’t the Uncle Sam imagery enough? And perhaps most important: who is paying for this? Me – as a taxpayer? And you…and you….and you?

I put those thoughts aside to watch the video. I was impressed to find out that the Army also blogs. Though its “Army Strong Stories” program (a Weber Shandwick idea), 800 U.S. Army soldiers blog. Relentlessly. Their blogs are unfiltered and unmoderated and, according to Swan, always will be. “The authenticity and transparency of soldiers blogging about a terrible day, or that they regretted their decision to join the Army lend credibility to the posts,” Swan notes.

The strategy (which was important to me, given the fact that we’re all about strategy this year in CMGT 502 and 541) is simple: the Army Strong blogs engage prospective soldiers in conversations – honest, real, transparent conversations – about joining the Army and what it’s like to be a soldier. The prospective soldiers can comment about the blogs and make connections with the enlisted men and women who are blogging. And that can lead to…more soldiers to blog (not to mention to defend our country and our freedoms).

“There’s no direct correlation between the blogs and enlistment, but the Army met its recent recruitment goal,” Swan says.

The Army has taken this concept a few steps further: they’ve developed an iPhone app for Army Strong Stories and other apps are in production. (I’ve stopped wondering if taxpayer dollars are paying for this – I think it’s a pretty cool idea.)

I checked out the blogs and, while I didn’t find anything that was really negative and raw in terms of an “I hate the Army but I am stuck until my hitch is up” tone, there are lots of blogs about waiting around, missing loved ones, being bored and being hot (depending on the deployment). There are also lots of wonderful blogs about being proud, working hard and being happy. (Or maybe I just read them that way because I was scoping out the site on July 4!)

I had never heard about Army Strong Stories…but I love the idea of the Army being proactive enough to understand the need for quality public relations, for honest and transparent communication, and for using social media tools to get their message across.

Check it out: http://armystrongstories.com/

Have you ever wondered why Starbucks decided to start selling yogurt parfaits, prepared sandwiches or the fruit and cheese bento-style boxes as snacks? Well, all of those great ideas came from everyday people like you and me. Having recently celebrated its fourth anniversary, My Starbucks Ideas is an online extension of Starbucks that encourages consumers to submit ideas they believe will make their Starbucks experience even better. Through the use of crowd sourcing, My Starbucks Ideas has generated over 150,000 ideas to date that range from offering patrons a free drink of choice on their birthday to using mobile payments at drive-thru windows (Adamson, 2011). Customers are encouraged to visit the My Starbucks Idea website to learn more about the initiative, but also submit their own ideas. Hundreds of ideas are submitted daily, where customers can vote (once) on each idea they think Starbucks should implement. Every vote counts as 10 points, and the ideas with the most points move to the Popular Ideas section where a team of skilled professionals reviews the selected ideas. Consumers who are fortunate enough to have their ideas selected and launched do not receive monetary payments, but instead recognition for making Starbucks better.

My Starbucks Ideas has created a new type of customer engagement that is free, creates brand awareness and most importantly, gives customers a place to be heard. Customers get what they want while seeing change happen! In a 2011 Forbes article, Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer, Annie Young-Scivner said the goal of Starbucks has always been and continues to be about the customer experience.  Starbucks want to “talk to customers, not at them” and by doing so they can create a memorable experience for each of the 60 million people (in 55 countries) who visit Starbucks each week (Adamson, 2011).  So next time you visit Starbucks – whether for coffee, tea or a snack, take a moment to check out what’s new. You never know if the person next to you was responsible for the new seasonal drink or even better, submit your own ideas.

Reference

Adamson, A. (2011, June 7). Starbucks wakes up and smells the coffee – and buzzes back up the leader board. Retrieved on June 8, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/allenadamson/2011/06/07/starbucks-wakes-up-and-smells-the-coffee-and-buzzes-back-up-the-leader-board/

Farfan, B. (2012, June 30). My Starbucks ideas customer loyalty, profits and employee engagement that U.S. restaurant chains can’t afford to ignore. Retrieved on July 8, 2012. http://retailindustry.about.com/b/2012/06/30/my-starbucks-ideas-boost-customer-loyalty-profits-and-employee-engagement-that-u-s-restaurant-chains-cant-ignore-sbux.htm

My Starbucks Ideas. Retrieved on July 2, 2012. http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/apex/ideahome

Word of mouth has long been one of marketing’s strongest tools. The internet helped spur this along with the advent of blogs and, to a degree, user reviews located on e-commerce websites like Amazon.  Now there is a new approach apparently taking the web by storm, digital scrapbooks! More to the point, pin boards, as they are called, created by users on a new social media website called Pinterest.

(Source: www.pinterest.com)

Pinterest has blasted onto the scene garnering over 10 million users between its March  2010 launch and January 2012(Crook, 2012). What’s even more impressive is that the site grew over 50% from January 2012 to February 2012 (Grove, 2012). This new medium was not intended to be a marketing tool but when you generate this much traffic, companies take notice. So how does Pinterest work exactly and how will it change marketing?

Essentially, users create a collage, or several, using images that capture their attention while surfing the web or by uploading their own. At this time, the majority of the site’s users are women, so , understandably, the majority of pin boards relate to topics of interest to women.

(Source: Alexa.com)

These collages are themed, with topics ranging from architecture and places to visit to weddings. The collages users create from web surfing are composed of images that track back to the original website; this is the key for marketers.

Let’s illustrate using the wedding pin board theme as an example. A woman planning her wedding can now, rather than leaf through mountains of wedding magazines, browse Pinterest for collages assembled by other users. Some of these users may be friends of hers who have already compiled favorite images of their own and whom she “follows”. One of the collages includes a picture of the perfect wedding dress. The bride can right click on the picture and select to open the link in its original web page, which in this case may be the store or designer’s website. And there you have it, word-of-mouth advertising without the words. Basically, Pinterest refers traffic back to the image owner’s website. For a quick video intro see A Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest

The impact of this new medium could be a boon to merchants and a disruption to established bloggers who monetize their sites via affiliate marketing. Using Amazon as an example, shoppers who create Pinterest boards around Home Decor items could potentially drive considerable traffic to Amazon. If Amazon finds that it can generate as much revenue from this traffic, or more, without paying affiliate marketing commissions, it may end this sales channel. Alternately, if Amazon makes the affiliate links available through Pinterest, bloggers may no longer need to spend time crafting informative review articles and simply let the pictures tell their thousand words.

The one caveat to Pinterest, and it’s a big one, is the potential for copyright infringement. One Pinterest user, a lawyer named Kirsten, recently closed her Pinterest account after reading the fine print in Pinterest’s Terms of Use (Shontell, 2012). In a nutshell, Pinterest won’t be held liable in any suits brought forth by the owners of images pinned on a board. The user is in fact solely responsible for obtaining permission to use copyrighted images; failure to do so exposes users to lawsuits and they may find themselves having to repay any damages and/or legal fees incurred by Pinterest as well. This is probably not a big problem for pinning images from an e-commerce website with affiliate marketing programs, but “pinner” beware. It may be best to stick with images that have clear creative commons licensing or pictures you took with your own camera. In any case, Pinterest is likely here to stay, so happy digital scrapbooking to all…

References:

Crook, J. (2012, March 14). This Is Everything You Need To Know About Pinterest (Infographic). TechCruch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/this-is-everything-you-need-to-know-about-pinterest-infographic/#

Grove, J.V. (2012, March 21). Pinterest grew 52% to 17.8M unique visitors in February. VentureBeat. Retrieved from http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/21/pinterest-uniques/

Shontell, A. (2012, February 28) A Lawyer Who Is Also A Photographer Just Deleted All Her Pinterest Boards Out Of Fear. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image

I learned I was a girl because when I looked at my mother, I looked like her. As a result, boys were people who did not look like she or me, but like he—my father.  As I went through school, I began to realize that girls and boys were supposed to behave a certain way.  For instance, girls were people who wore pink dresses with bows and liked to play with dolls and dance.  They wore pantyhose’s and had ruffle socks, and carried around a purse to put things in.  Boys were people who wore blue and red, and wore pants or suspenders.   They played outside, climbed trees, and got to play sports and wear bow-ties when they went to church.  Continue reading →

“If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises” (Heath & Heath, 2008, p. 69).

According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, over $6.3 Billion dollars are spent on outdoor advertising annually. Out of home advertising has evolved from slapping up an old Billboard on Route 66 to extensive interactive installations conceived and produced to engage viewers as well as entertain or educate them.  “In the star-filled universe in which we drift, out-of-home (OOH), is a galaxy unto itself, vast and sprawling” (Sanders, 2012, p.57).

Two advertising campaigns for two recent movie releases recently displayed unique examples for us to consider when thinking about advertising outdoors.

Photo by Glen D’Souza, Retrieved from http://laughingsquid.com/billboard-grows-bacteria-mold-cultures-to-promote-contagion-movie/

The first unique outdoor advertising campaign was a promotional interactive event/installation for the movie Contagion. Advertisers filled a large, empty, rectangular petri dish with various bacteria and mold in the shape of the movie’s moniker, inoculated it, and hung it in a storefront window.  Over the next two weeks, passersby were witness to an ever-changing moldscape as the petri dish went from a blank slate to being filled with a living mold in the forming the word Contagion.

The first groups of people to figure out what the words were received free screening tickets or other prizes related to the film. The campaign itself garnered Over 100,000 twitter and Facebook mentions, and over 530,000 Youtube views.  The video link below shows how microbiologists and advertisers teamed up to make this one of kind Movie poster made of germs, penicillin and live bacteria.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LppK4ZtsDdM

The second unique outdoor advertising campaign was a promotional interactive event/installation for the movie Coraline. By taking over a vacant storefront and using up to the minute technology, to showcase the film, the advertisers turned unused window fronts into “Storescapes.”

The 3D interactive technology set up in the window and allowed passersby to superimpose their faces into screens with buttons superimposed over their eyes to simulate what it would look like to be a character in the film.  This unique campaign drew attention to and created a buzz around the film in a memorable way. The following link shows gives an introduction to the campaign.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A16Fc8a2KkU

With consumers being bombarded by so many messages and advertisements on a day-to-day basis, advertisers and marketers may want to consider using unexpected campaigns like the two referenced above.  One piece of advice: if you are thinking of working with live bacteria, don’t forget to put on a Hazmat suit over your thinking cap!   Safety first.

References:

Heath, C., & Heath, D., (2008). Made to Stick Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: Random House

Sanders, J., (2012). The Four Dimensions of Out-of Home, The International Journal of Media Marketing, Promotion and Design, 4(1), 56-67

http://www.oaaa.org/

www.curbmedia.com/case-studies-warner.asp

In today’s marketing communications, all the stops have been pulled out. Marketers use word of mouth, social media, guerilla marketing, and many other methods to get attract business. I recently came across an article that explored yet another method –one of tracking consumers.

An article in the Wall Street Journal explores a tactic that Orbitz (a well-known travel booking website) has recently put into use. The website now tracks whether a user is searching from a Mac or PC computer and displays different options for each. The company believes that Mac users are willing to spend more for hotel stays than PC users, ending with search results that are a little more expensive if you are shopping on a Mac.

Orbitz Website

This is an interesting tracking system, but I question how likely it is to work. The few Mac users interviewed in this article stated that they did not mind this tracking as long as they were still given the option to search for hotels by price –meaning Mac users would never only be shown the more expensive options.

As a Mac user myself, I feel like this is an unfair tactic. Had I not stumbled across this article, I might have never known that Orbitz was automatically generating search results that are a bit more expensive. If users are unaware that they will need to change the settings of the search (to list hotels by price) and just assume that what is listed is what is available, Mac users might be unknowingly spending more because they are not presented with all of the options.

It is hard to see how much this could affect travel booking since this process of tracking what kind of computer a user is using is still in the beginning stages. Orbitz may also start tracking Mac preferences in flights and car rentals.

From Popular Mechanics

But I cannot help but wonder, does it really matter whether someone uses a Mac or a PC? People who use these sites are looking for a deal on travel. If a user is constantly steered toward more expensive hotels (or less expensive hotels that they are not satisfied with as a PC user) wouldn’t they get fed up with the site and try the competitors?

It will be interesting to see how this works out.

http://online.wsj.com/articl/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882.html