News You Can Use

Google’s Alphabet Restructuring

• Posted: August 24, 2015

According to Knowledge@Wharton, the school’s online business analysis journal, Google’s move to restructure itself under a new holding company named Alphabet will help protect its core brand. In addition, this reorganization will provide greater independence for its riskier investments, such as driverless cars and human longevity, and it will also bring greater accountability and transparency to those investments.

Google, as an Alphabet subsidiary will retain the Internet products, which represent about 90% of the company’s 2014 revenues. Google’s non-Internet subsidiaries will  include Calico, a research and development biotech company, Google Ventures, a venture capital subsidiary, and Google Capital, a growth equity investment fund.

This new organizational structure will allow Alphabet to build these non-Internet brands, which have high potential but are riskier, without damaging the Google brand.

Additional benefits of the restructuring according to this article:

-Innovation at Google could get a boost.

-Opportunities for greater internal competition, which can benefit all the brands.

-Encouragement of entrepreneurship.

-Retention of top talent.

Wharton management professor David Hsu suggests that in the near term ”the main challenge will be to have the two parts of the organization work well together.” The new Google and the rest of Alphabet may need different staffs, human resource incentives, cultures, etc., which may represent management challenges for the new holding company.

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Marketing Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

 

 

Individual-Centric Digital Marketing

• Posted: August 24, 2015

Marketers now have the ability to reach consumers with targeted and highly personalized marketing across devices. The rise of individual-centric digital marketing has transformed the way in which marketers address their audiences according to David Williams, CEO, Merkle, writing for iMedia Connection.

Marketers are able to blend the data and insights from both offline and online data. As a result, the targeted consumer can receive personalized recommendations and contextually relevant information.

Individual-centric marketing will drive additional sales and have provable ROI.

Successful individual-centric digital marketing will involve:

-Consistent targeting of users across devices.

-Less waste to ad fraud.

-The ability to bridge online and offline targeting.

-Better accountability and measurement.

-Respect for consumer privacy.

Individual-centric digital marketing will benefit both the consumers and the marketers. Consumers will receive more relevant ads and offerings, and marketers will be able to achieve higher measurement standards and overall accountability.

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Media Tab in Morning Coffee

 

 

Customers as Ethnographers

• Posted: August 24, 2015

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Julie Wittes Schlack, co-founder and Senior Vice President, Innovation and Design, C Space, discusses the value of insights gathered from consumer mobile self-ethnographies. Bringing consumer experience to life for clients can be extremely valuable for a variety of purposes, including product and service development, package design, promotional strategies, as well as revealing shopper behavior and in-store behavior.

Companies are equipping consumers with mobile ethnography apps to enable these customers to upload photos or videos, provide narratives and reflections, record sounds, provide multi-media diaries, and provide brief responses to questions tailored for each project. Valuable GPS location data can also be generated by ethnography apps.

As a result of these ethnographies, marketers can immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, thoughts, experiences, and emotions of consumers. These customers become more than data points to the marketers. Self-ethnography can yield a deeper understanding and a more intimate profile of the customers for a specific product or service. In addition, well-designed mobile self-ethnographies can result in rapid, highly actionable insights.

Schlack concludes, “Ultimately, the outcome of consumer-conducted ethnography is not just to reveal unmet needs and innovation opportunities, but to humanize customers for the brands that serve them.”

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Marketing Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

Turning Social Media Influencers Into Brand Advocates

• Posted: August 24, 2015

Companies are challenged by the need to locate the right social media brand influencers and to craft the content that will turn these influencers into brand advocates.

Jack Loechner, writing for the Research Brief From the Center for Media Research, presents the finding of a report by SoftwareAdvice which shows how predictive analytics software can address these issues.

Key findings of this report include:

46% of marketers surveyed say they struggle to identify and communicate with social media influencers.

46% of marketers say they struggle to predict the preferences and behavior of social media influencers.

68% of marketers aren’t yet taking advantage of predictive analytics software.

Predictive analytics software can improve the brand’s advocacy-based social media marketing by enabling the company to identify key influencers and target audiences, and to generate user-centric content.

Dmitri Williams, founder of social analytics company Ninja Metrics, estimates that 5-10% of social media users are responsible for 60 to 80% of influence. Therefore, it is critical to turn these influencers into brand advocates.

 

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Media Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

 

Study Up on Omnichannel to Ace This Back-to-School Season

• Posted: August 17, 2015

According to a recent Direct Marketing News interview with Julie Krueger, Google’s industry director of retail, nearly one third of back-to-school shoppers have already started loading up on essentials. What does this mean for marketers and retailers? “If they’re not present as customers browse and consider products while outside of the store, then the odds of them winning shoppers over for their in-store purchases are not high,” Krueger said. Marketers and retailers need to be everywhere given that:

• 50% of back-to-school searches are happening on smartphones—up from 40% last year;
• 22% of 18 to 24 year olds visit YouTube to figure out what’s cool to purchase;
• 120% increase in watch time for back-to-school videos, and back-to-school YouTube searches are up 43%.

How can marketers and retailers do that? Jonathan Alferness, VP of product management for Google Shopping, focuses on three key moments in the shopper’s journey:

1. I-want-to-know moments: These are moments when the customer is deciding what to buy and is looking for facts (e.g., price, product details) to help him make a decision.
2. I-want-to-go moments: These are moments when the customer is looking for stores that carry the items that they need.
3. I-want-to-buy moments: These are moments when customers are ready to purchase fast and easily.

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Shopping & Retail Tab in Morning Coffee.

The Digital Shopper Genome

• Posted: August 17, 2015

In this McKinsey Insights article, Gadi Benmark and Maher Masri analyze how to build a meaningful picture of the online shopper. Cracking what these authors call the shopper genome requires converting the vast amount of data regarding consumer behavior and desires into meaningful insights.

Until recently, technology barriers were the major challenge to combining insights across different elements of the organization. As these barriers start to fall, more e-commerce companies and their technology providers have an opportunity to develop a coherent, comprehensive profile of their digital customers and effectively engage them across the seven primary digital touchpoints: Internet display advertising, email, mobile advertising, search, shopping engines, social media, and video.

The authors report that the rewards of building a comprehensive view of the online shopper are substantial. They have found that companies that are able to build this profile to inform the way they interact with customers can achieve revenue increases of 10 to 20 percent.

Cracking the shopper genome will enable the company to build a comprehensive customer engagement program and to deliver on the customer’s increasingly high expectations of the digital shopping experience.

 

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Marketing Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

 

Tips to Reduce Click Fraud

• Posted: August 17, 2015

 The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that bots made up 36% of Internet traffic in 2014, which indicates that invalid clicks are wasting the ad budgets of many firms. Rich Kahn, writing for MarketingProfs, provides tips for avoiding click fraud and the related spending losses.

-Closely track campaign data in real time and investigate any unusual activity in traffic or other metrics.

-Accurate targeting to consumers based on location, behavior, and interests makes the message more visible to more consumers and fewer bots.

-Consider engaging a click fraud specialty firm to help establish what type of traffic is visiting the sites on which you advertise.

-Although no laws have yet been passed, click fraud issues and botnet theft have a high profile with legislatures.

This article suggests that these tips can help rescue marketing budgets from click fraud.

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Marketing Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

 

 

Creating Personal Digital Experiences For Customers

• Posted: August 17, 2015

Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, CMO and co-founder of Hippo, analyzes the factors necessary to create a relevant digital experience for each customer in this iMedia Connection’s article.

Factors include:

-Providing responsive design.

-Developing contextual awareness.

-Building a profile of the individual website visitor’s interests, preferences, and intent based on engagement with the online content.

-Delivering relevant content.

Both B2C and B2B companies need to understand the needs of their customers and to provide relevant, contextually appropriate content for their online business. This relevant content  has two goals:

-To support the customers at any stage of their relationship with the brand.

-To expand the reach of the customers’ journey.

The goal of creating a personal digital experience and relevant online content is to develop a customer who is engaged, who will return to the site, and who will advocate for the business and the brand.

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Media Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

 

 

Both Brand and Client Research Contribute to Marketing Strategy

• Posted: August 17, 2015

In order to communicate your company’s unique selling proposition and to ensure that it appeals to your target audience, as well as your current clients, it is important to undertake research about both your brand and your clients. Joshua Conran analyzes these ideas in a MarketingProfs article.

By researching your own brand, you will be able to discern your unique features or services. The goal of this information is to create, maintain, and grow a robust brand.

Intensive client research will provide insights into what current, former, and potential clients feel are your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Analysis of this information will reveal the opportunities, as well as the threats, to your brand. This information will also also shape your messaging to target groups.

Conran reveals how your marketing will benefit from brand and client research:

-You will capture an unbiased 360-degree view of your brand and clients.

-You will discover a better product-market fit.

-You can maximize your company’s potential.

A stronger brand, a more focused company vision, and higher revenue will result from this brand and client research.

 

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Marketing Tab in Morning Coffee.

 

 

Disrupting beliefs: A new approach to business-model innovation

• Posted: August 10, 2015

Every industry is built around long-standing, often implicit, beliefs about how to make money. In retail, for example, it’s believed that purchasing power and format determine the bottom line. Success in pharmaceuticals is believed to depend on the time needed to obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. And so on.

These governing beliefs reflect widely shared notions about customer preferences, the role of technology, regulation, cost drivers, and the basis of competition and differentiation. They are often considered inviolable—until someone comes along to violate them. Almost always, it’s an attacker from outside the industry. But while new entrants capture the headlines, industry insiders, who often have a clear sense of what drives profitability, are well positioned to play this game, too.

How can incumbents do so? McKinsey introduces a framework to think differently about established business models.  The process begins with identifying an industry’s foremost belief about value creation and then articulating the notions that support this belief. By turning one of these underlying notions on its head—reframing it—incumbents can look for new forms and mechanisms to create value. When this approach works, it’s like toppling a stool by pulling one of the legs.

See all 5 Cups articles

For more on this topic, check out the Advertising Tab in Morning Coffee.