Archive for July, 2009
Marketing Research Can Be Intense
The title says it all, marketing research can be intense. The following article reviews some of the things that Disney marketing analysts are doing in order to find out what programming, both television and online, is currently grabbing the attention of it’s viewers.
While their methods might not be what works for businesses on a smaller scale the driving question behind it stays relevant; what is it our customers respond and react to, in forms of advertising, in today’s market?
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Lab Watches Web Surfers to See Which Ads Work
Like other television companies, Disney Media Networks — which includes ABC, ESPN, ABC Family and Disney XD — has long conducted intense consumer research about its programming. But now, as the Web and DVRs uproot the way people consume television, and thus rip apart the industry’s business model, the unit is adding advertiser research as a fresh focus of intense inquiry.
Disney will unveil some of the lab’s early findings, including some surprises about new forms of online ads, on Tuesday in a presentation to about 200 advertisers in New York.
It is relatively easy for Internet companies and their advertisers to measure precisely how often Web site visitors click on advertisements, and which kinds of ads draw the most clicks. But what about those who do not click, the many millions of others whose eyes merely flit across the screen? Disney and other companies say they believe that not nearly enough is known about them — what kinds of ads in which configurations are likeliest to draw them, and hold them?
Read the entire article @ NYTimes.com
Changing to Meet the Market
The following article is proof of the fact that, no matter how big your business is and no matter how high your revenue, or how large your advertising campaign may be, no business is immune to having to continuously change and grow in order to meet market demands and keep your customers happy and coming back.
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With the closure of Circuit City earlier this year — and Comp USA before that — Best Buy is the only remaining national electronics chain. On its face, that would seem like a good thing for the company. But analysts argue that Best Buy has inherited a lump of coal.
Even in good times, electronics retailing can be a brutally tough business, littered with failures that were unable to survive thin profit margins, ever-falling prices, feast-and-famine product cycles and, more recently, major price pressure from Internet retailers.
Best Buy is “the last man standing, and it’s a good company,” said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. But “consumer electronics is one of the worst businesses in the world to be in.” Brian J. Dunn, Best Buy’s new chief executive, disputed that characterization.
At the same time, Mr. Dunn, who started as a store salesman at Best Buy in 1985, plans to keep renovating. He acknowledges that being the last remaining chain won’t ensure success.
Mr. Dunn said that Best Buy must account for changing tastes, like the shift away from CDs and DVDs, which have for years been a crucial generator of foot traffic in Best Buy stores. To cope, Mr. Dunn said, Best Buy was in the process of moving those products out of the center of its stores and focusing eyes and attention on fast-growing product areas, like mobile phones and low-cost laptops.
And Mr. Dunn said he wanted to create an atmosphere where consumers were attracted not just to products but also to services that help them master fast-changing technology and configure and connect devices.
“The center of the store will become an expression of the way people connect — connect with movies, music, pictures, to each other — all the things that matter,” he said.
Read the entire story @ NYTimes.com/business
Social Media: Twitter Success
Ahh the joys of a successful social media marketing platform…
Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media
SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.
For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an accountand has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.
“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.
Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcastuse Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.
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To Read the Entire Article visit NYTimes.com/business
“Crowdsourcing”: A Collective Intelligence of the Many
The wants, needs, preferences, thoughts and feelings of the CUSTOMER. That is what crowdsourcing is but on a very, very large scale. As business owners and entrepreneurs we are always striving to answer the question, what does my customer want, and more specifically, what will my customer buy?
There are many ways to get that answer whether it be with sales reports from like businesses, surveys and my personal favorite, good old fashioned research.
The following article follows a large company with wide customer base: Netflix. They need to accomplish a goal that will help them to sell more products and gain revenue by taking advantage of their own resources (sales reports, in this case customer viewing habits) and employing the help of experts to apply the needed change.
The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)
A look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. “There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”
“It starts out as crowdsourcing and it is culled to a set of action items,” said Jeffrey T. Kreulen, a researcher at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.
Open-innovation models are adopted to overcome the constraints of corporate hierarchies. But successful projects are typically hybrids of ideas flowing from a decentralized crowd and a hierarchy winnowing and making decisions.
OPENING the corporate doors to ideas and inspiration from the collective crowd holds great potential, but there are pitfalls, warns Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. To succeed, Mr. Chesbrough said, a company must have a culture open to outside ideas and a system for vetting and acting on them.
“In business, it’s not how many ideas you have,” he observed. “What matters is how many ideas you translate into products and services.”
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The last quote here is my favorite because it’s true! Owners, employees and collaborators can talk about new changes, procedures or products forever; but until they take action, all of the discussion and discovery is wasted.
Competition: Not just for Small Businesses
Barnes & Noble Plans Online Bookstore to Battle Amazon <–Click for full story>
In an announcement on Monday, Barnes & Noble said that it would offer more than 700,000 titles that could be read on a wide range of devices, including Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry and various laptop or desktop computers. When Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise in March, that online retailer had about 60,000 titles in its catalog.
More than 500,000 of the titles now going live on BN.com can be downloaded free, through an agreement with Google to provide electronic versions of public domain books that Google has scanned from university libraries.
Barnes & Noble is promoting its e-bookstore as the world’s largest, an implicit stab at Amazon.com, which currently offers about 330,000 titles for its Kindle device. Currently, Google’s public domain titles cannot be read on a Kindle.
Story originally published by www.nytimes.com
E-Mail Marketing: “Newsletters”
This is a video from MSNBC aptly named “Dollars and Sense: The Perfect E-mail Newletter”. In it, Eric Groves the Senior VP at Constant Contact, a company that provides e-mail marketing solutions, talks about important things to keep in mind when starting or improving an e-mail marketing campaign using e-mail:
Each of the topics he focuses on are all great points to remember when creating a sucessful e-mail campaign:
Get your e-mail opened: Use catchy subject line to interest readers, keep in mind this goes to customers and contacts; tailor to them and nuture that relationship.
Have Great Content: Try to stay away from always selling; send something informative that will engage and educate readers. Stand out as an expert and be the first in the readers mind when they think about your services. This also makes them more likely to forward your e-mail to others.
Look Professional: Keep your e-mails looking good by giving them an organized look using pictures and text together in a smart looking professional template
Proof Read: Always have your newsletters proof read by someone who wasn’t involved in the creation process so that they can take an objective look at the content and make the necessary corrections.
This is all great advice to ingest when starting to use e-mail marketing or even if you’re just trying to re-boot your current newsletters and give them a new look to reach more customers.
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