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A Big Smile May Not be Effective in Online Marketing Ads

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Be careful with the size of your smile.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study that includes a University of Kansas researcher has found that the level of smile intensity in marketing photos influences how consumers perceive the marketer’s competence and warmth, which can lead to different results depending on the context.

“We found that broad smiles lead people to be perceived as warmer but less competent,” said Jessica Li, a KU assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business. “We ask how that can influence consumer behaviour and in what situations might marketers want to smile more broadly.”

The study by Li and her co-authors was published online recently and will be in the January issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, one of the leading journals on marketing academic research.

Participants in the study viewed images of marketing photos that depicted the marketer either smiling broadly or only slightly. The researchers found that in advertisements for services that carry higher risk, consumers were more likely to assign competence to marketers that smiled only slightly rather than more broadly, which was associated with warmth but not necessarily competence.
Credit :Journal of Consumer Research

 

The researchers conducted experiments in which respondents viewed marketing images that included marketers with either broad or slight smiles. Also, they conducted a content analysis of postings on a crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.com, where people commonly seek donations for causes or business ventures.

Past marketing and psychological research has focused on smiles leading consumers to perceive people as being friendly and viewed in a more positive light. However, Li said the research team’s new study shows that is true but that there can be a trade-off in how a smile might elicit action from a consumer.

Li said one consideration is the context of the service the marketer is providing and whether or not there is potential risk associated with it.

The intensity of someone’s smile in a marketing image elicits two fundamental dimensions of social judgements – warmth and competence, the researchers found.

Li said broader smiles that tend to elicit more warmth seem to be more effective in promotional ads for a service that would carry less risk. But photos with a slight smile did better in marketing scenarios where services were higher risk, such as a medical procedure, legal representation or investment in a startup company.

“If I see an ad with a heart surgeon who smiles really broadly at me, I might think she is really warm, but not choose her to be my doctor because she seems less competent than a surgeon with a slight smile,” Li said. “If the risk is really low, such as going to the store to get a new shirt, then the competence of the salesperson isn’t as important and I respond more positively to the broad smile.”

In their analysis of Kickstarter.com, when the page creator’s profile photo exhibited a broad smile that tended to elicit perceptions of warmth, the total amount of money pledged decreased by more than 50 percent, and the average contribution per backer was 30 percent less than when the creator’s photo included only a slight smile.

“Project creators with a slight smile are perceived as more competent,” Li said. “More people wanted to donate to their project because they believe this competent person is able to deliver the product.”

However, a more intense smile does appear to elicit more buzz on social media or other low-cost behaviours. Profile photos with a broader smile received twice as many Facebook shares than someone with a slight smile.

“It’s intuitive that if you seem to be friendly but not competent, people will want to help you in low-cost ways but not necessarily be willing to give you a lot of money,” she said.

The study could be valuable for marketers as they strategise on how to best elicit a response for their products. “Warmth and competence are such important judgements,” Li said. “We want to make sure we are giving people the right signal.”

 

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Marketing to millennials: Should brands spend money?

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By Shawn Lim

As social media increasingly becomes the tool of choice for millennials, is it sensible for brands and marketers to base their marketing strategy around user-generated content on these platforms and not invest any money into their strategy?

According to Rohit Sharma, founder and chief executive of Pokkt, a mobile video advertising and app monetisation platform for game developers, he tells The Drum that even though the millennial generation is extremely plugged into social, many companies are plunging headfirst into social without understanding that social simply cannot function as a standalone strategy as it must be incorporated as part of an integrated strategy.

“It is akin to functioning with tunnel vision, or with blinkers on – you end up overlooking other channels that could deliver greater reach, engagement, and which ultimately drive the bottom line,” he adds.

Sharma believes that social is prized for how easily it lends itself to native and while there are channels that might do this just as well, or even better. For example, he says by engaging the user in a mini-game within a game, in-game advertising is the perfect example of native, with a far higher guarantee that the user will actually see and interact with content, instead of simply scrolling past as they might do on a social feed. “Furthermore, the nature of the games in question often allow for short, predictable breaks – easy spaces for advertisers to communicate their message without being annoying or interruptive,” he adds.

However, there are some brands who buck the trend by putting their trust into social media. Take GlampingCity for example, a company that combines glamour and camping for people who want a hotel-style accommodation, but with the feel of outdoor camping.

Its entry into Singapore was initially met with scepticism, but the trend slowly caught on when the company started posting picturesque photos on its Instagram page, taken by its staff and local social media influencers that it collaborates with.

Aside from its Instagram page and a website, GlampingCity does not have any budget allocated for ad spend and marketing strategy, according to founder Ryan Lam, adding that glamping caught on fast in Singapore through word of mouth and social media because people were posting about their experiences with it.

Lam, who was speaking to The Drum on the sidelines of the 2017 ACI Asia Business Summit in Singapore, also reveals that 50% of the photos on the company’s Instagram page is from his own team. “This business is very new, so we have not approached anyone (influencer) yet, all of our collaborations and partnerships, it all came naturally. I spent zero dollars on marketing. I only spent on logistics. The publicity came naturally.”

“I don’t plan to pay influencers, the genuine ones, maybe, not those that are looking to do it for their own benefit,” he adds.

Bart Mroz, co-founder and CEO of Sumo Heavy, a ecommerce consulting company, tells The Drum that he agrees with GlampingCity’s social media heavy strategy as he feels that social should be a main priority for the production, distribution and syndication of content when it comes to marketing to millennials as they are changing the ways brands market.

Brands like Sephora and Nike, have also been successful in marketing to millennials by using Instagram to post visually stunning photos that clearly reflects brand identity and draws users in, according to Mroz, noting that Nike has become the 19th most followed account and the fifth most used hashtag, while Sephora has increased its engagement rate and now boasts nearly 13 million followers.

Mroz however, adds that in order to effectively use social media, brands still need to put money into these platforms. “You won’t see the needle move much if you don’t invest. Marketers need to shift their spending from traditional channels like TV, print, and PPC to social media. For example, Facebook and Instagram are both strong channels because of their high engagement rates, robust targeting options, and popularity with this demographic.”

Noting that 41% of millennials use Facebook every day, which makes it still the number one marketing channel, and that Instagram and Snapchat are catching up because the platforms are very different in style and have features that attracting more millennials, Mroz says: “Therefore, brands should still focus on Facebook, but pay much more attention to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to better engage with this target audience in the long-run.”

Feature Image: Ryan Lam, founder of GlampingCity. Photo by: Institute on Consumer Insights

By Shawn Lim

Shawn Lim is a reporter at The Drum, covering industry news around the Asia Pacific region with a focus on Singapore and Southeast Asia. Based in Singapore, he has worked across photography, video and online, covering a range of subjects including current affairs and sports.

Before Game of Thrones, he was a huge Breaking Bad fan. He does CrossFit and yoga to stay healthy.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Millennial Chinese Become The Biggest Group of Online Shoppers for Luxury Brands

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By Nicole Buckler

Singles Day, held in China, is a day where Chinese shoppers go mental, buying themselves all sorts of nice stuff. This is all in aid of cheering themselves up while living the single life. The day is now the biggest day for e-commerce sales in the world.

The celebration for Singles Day held on 11/11 used to celebrate people who were proud to be single. So about those 1s in the date – obviously, single means “1.” But also, the four 1s evoke “bare branches,” the Chinese expression for the unattached. So the day became an anti-Valentine’s day of sorts. It was a self-love day. It was nice. Ahh.

But since the day started out, a lot has happened. There are now lots of single dudes in China. And, they are slowly getting richer. They have Yuan to burn and no one to spend it on but themselves. But let’s not forget the Chinese women too. They are now richer, taking their time to marry, and certainly love a good spend-up. And, if these women can afford it, it is the day where luxury brands get a solid burst of credit card love.

Even up until the Noughties, Singles Day used to be a small celebration. Then Billionaire Jack Ma of Alibaba came along (Alibaba is the Amazon.com of China.) Ma decided that he would do huge promotions around the day and plug it as an online shopping fiesta. And it worked. It is now the biggest online sales event in the world.

People who have gone on to marry have kept buying themselves stuff on Singles Day, jealous of singles and their self-spoiling. Singles Day is now a 24-hour-period where just about every demographic goes utterly mental with their credit cards. And if we don’t adopt it in Europe I was be very distressed. It sounds awesome.

While Alibaba was the first to link Singles’ Day to a shopping craze, plenty of rivals have joined in. Xiu.com is a Chinese luxury e-commerce platform. It just released its sales report for this year’s Singles Day.

So much to buy, so little time…

Here are the sales stats generated via Xiu.com:

Online shoppers born after 1990 have become the leading consumer group in China

Online shoppers aged between 25 and 30 (born between 1987 and 1992) took up the biggest share of Xiu.com’s total sales on this year’s November 11. Purchasing behaviours vary significantly across age groups. Citing a few examples: the favourite fashion brand among women shoppers born in the 2000s was The Kooples, an emerging French street fashion brand featuring a Brit-pop style that, to date, had not yet proven popular in China.

Shoppers born in the 1990s preferred Dolce & Gabbana. Burberry was the top-selling fashion brand among women born in the 1970s and 1980s.

Giuseppe Zanotti was the best-selling shoe brand among male shoppers born in the 1990s and 2000s, while men born in the 1980s preferred Gucci. Men born in the 1960s and 1970s opted overwhelmingly for Prada. Surprisingly, Chanel was the favoured brand among male shoppers born in the 1950s.

Burberry remains the country’s favourite brand

The top selling brands overall were Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel.

However, obvious differences existed between different cities. In Beijing, Moncler was the bestselling brand, while in Shanghai, Hermes, which was barely mentioned in other cities, proved to be the best seller. Philipp Plein was favored by Shenzhen buyers, while Emporio Armani sold best in Chongqing.

Male buyers spend more in fashion field

This year saw a huge increase in the average sale among men for fashion items, outspending the women. Male shoppers preferred the casual style of Armani Jeans and the avant-garde fashion style of Philipp Plein, while women remained with traditional luxury brands represented by Valentino, Dior and Chanel.

Beijing is where most of the shoppers are

Beijing ranked first on Xiu.com’s list of the top 20 Chinese cities in terms of sales during the one-day event, followed by Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu.

The overall results showed that while there were more luxury-item shoppers in the bigger cities, people from smaller towns spent more per person, although there were fewer of them. So this seems to show that there is more money in bigger cities, which seems to be true of every country in the world.

If we can learn anything from this, it is that European luxury brands are killing it in China. And, that we must institute Singles Day here at once, people. Let’s get on it!

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How to Avoid the Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes

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Mistakes are part of digital marketing. What’s important, however, is making sure you’re avoiding preventable mistakes that could kill your campaign.

When it comes to digital marketing, mistakes are all but guaranteed to happen. After all, marketing your company is very much a process of trial and error.

The key, however, is minimising the impact of these mistakes and avoiding those you shouldn’t be making in the first place. Of course, this is much easier said than done, especially for businesses, many of whom still practice and believe in many traditional marketing techniques.

Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping things classic, but there’s no denying that traditional marketing – even “traditional guerrilla marketing”– is sometimes completely different from internet marketing.

And this is where mistakes often happen. Writing for Inc., Neil Patel notes, “These mistakes cost money, traffic opportunity, and growth. Unfortunately, marketers make these mistakes because they fail to truly understand how to leverage their skills and improve their approach.”

Digital marketing requires a significant investment in terms of time and resources. The last thing you want to do is to waste your efforts doing things that are taking your online presence farther away from your goals.

Here are some of the most common digital marketing mistakes your company might be guilty of making.

Marketing Without any Goals

If you’re writing on your blog or posting on social media without any real goals, you might as well as be wandering around aimlessly on the internet. One of the most common mistakes many digital marketers make is not setting any goals before launching their campaign.

Goals are critical for evaluating the success of your digital marketing efforts, whether it’s in the context of sales, sign ups (for newsletters), messages, or phone calls.

“Goal setting is the backbone of marketing. Goals help us prove how effective we are, keep us focused and push us to succeed,” says Amber Klein of Hive Digital Strategy. “And while we know how important goals are to measure our success, more than 80% of small business owners do not keep track of their business goals.”

With no goals, you have no direction. With no direction, you have no way of knowing your campaign is successful. And if you don’t have benchmarks for success/failure, what’s the point of marketing your business?

You Don’t Know Who Your Audience Is

Marketing your small business on the internet is one thing, but all you are doing is wasting time and resources if you do not know whom you’re reaching out to.

It’s not enough to just say “potential clients,” because that could mean anyone.

Even if you’re creating insightful killer content, you’re only setting yourself up to fail if you’re not promoting your content to the right audience at the right time. Chances are your niche is already saturated with content, making it difficult to stand out.

The trick is figuring out just whom you want to market to.

“Identifying your target audience is the first step in any type of marketing endeavour,” says Neil Patel in a Forbes write-up. “Tragically, it’s also easy to overlook. Don’t make this mistake. Study your audience, and much of your marketing will take care of itself.”

The most basic way to understand your audience is by creating buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer/client, complete with personal descriptions as well as behaviours.

You’re Not Putting Your Customers First

Many marketing teams make the mistake of boxing themselves inside echo chambers, where all they do is strategise and plan about things they like, but not so much the things their customers actually do.

This rookie mistake is something you can easily avoid if you focus your entire campaign on putting your customers first.

At its core, digital marketing is about doing the following:

  • Attracting
  • Engaging
  • Educating
  • Nurturing
  • Converting
  • Retaining

And naturally, all these things involve your customers. The experience you provide must be tailored to their needs and preferences, which fortunately you can know through data analytics and engagement evaluation. To put it simply, the customer must always come first.

You’re Not Being Social on Social Media

While there are certainly many businesses building a presence on social media, many of them use platforms like Facebook and Twitter not so much to engage their audience, but as a way to simply promote their firms with ad-like content.

This is not what social media is about. Yes, you can broadcast information about yourself, but this should not be your priority. Social media is a way to be social—to interact and engage your audience with genuine dialogue.

In other words, you need to respond to your audience and not just post something and leave them alone in the comments section. Your community will come to respect you more if you genuinely want to build a relationship with them, which can only be a good thing for your firm in the long run.

Conclusion

In summary, the 4 most common mistakes digital marketers make are ignoring the importance of setting goals, failing to understand your audience, not putting your customers first, and misusing social media.

Although it would seem these are ‘no brainer’ mistakes, you would be surprised just how many marketers, even those with quite a bit of experience under their belt, are guilty of making them.

 

Author: Qamar Zaman a Dallas based website conversion expert.

 

 

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Want Your Band to be Famous? Then Get Your Music on Video Games

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There’s a whole genre of music that has grown inside the world of gaming. Many now-famous bands got their mainstream breakthrough thanks to this process. So if you have a band, you need to read this.

By Nicole Buckler

The symbiotic relationship between music and video games is now so established that a games studio called Bugbear Entertainment is searching for bands to submit music to them. The winning tunes will be played inside their latest racing game: Wreckfest.

Bugbear Entertainment specialises in action driving. They have been making car games for sixteen years, starting with Rally Trophy. They are best known for the critically acclaimed demolition racing series FlatOut (2004-2007, PC, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360) and street racing title Ridge Racer Unbounded (2013, PC, PS3, Xbox 360).

As of yesterday, Bugbear are calling for bands everywhere to send in their tunes to accompany gamers while they race and smash the crap out of each other in their latest game. The winning prize is $3,500 and there are nine runner-up prizes of $1,000 per track. But it is not the money that’s the real prize: it is exposure to their gamers that is the real coup. There are hundreds and thousands of them.

The winning music will be featured on games released on Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC. Bands featured in previous Bugbear releases have included upcoming indie bands and household names like Megadeth, Rob Zombie, Fall Out Boy, Audioslave and Skrillex.

So if you have a band, get on it. You can apply here.

Want to check out the competition? You can listen to the other entries here.

This innovative approach to sourcing music is evidence of a growing realisation amongst game designers, that there are thousands of unheard of bands out there. According to Bugbear, “They just need the right chance to have their music heard internationally, and by the right demographic to get to that critical mass of fans to push them to the next level of popularity.”

For more established bands like Megadeth, putting their music inside high-selling video games offers a symbiotic relationship. Gaming studios can promote Megadeth music to their gamers, and Megadeth’s fans might be more open to buying games that have their favourite tunes in it. It’s a match made in cross-promotion heaven.

Bugbear is very interested in getting the sound right for their games, which is why they are letting their gamers cast their votes on the tracks they want to hear while playing the game. Happy customers, more sales. Well, in theory, anyway.

Music has always been a vital part of the gaming experience. The aim of Wreckfest is to create an immersive experience for the player, one where the in-game radio feeds the road rage in all of us. While you can blast your tunes out on your REAL car radio, you can’t smash the crap out of other drivers while doing so. But, in Wreckfest, you can. What’s not to like? Smashing other people up and decent tunes? It’s win-win.

The Wreckfest title will be published soon by THQ Nordic. While it is not yet for sale, you can have a little preview play of it here.

Drivers…start your engines.

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Could the generation lost to the art of branding building be saved by the oldest medium in the world?

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By Guy Phillipson

For a medium that commands over 50% of total UK ad spend, online advertising is but a babe in the firmament of media.

At the age of just 22 – despite its many well-documented growing pains – digital media has become by far the biggest line item on marketers’ media plans, largely due to its targeting and accountability credentials.

Let’s compare and contrast with outdoor advertising – we’re talking the oldest medium in the world here. The ancient Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages on wall posters; and political campaigns have even been found in the ruins of Pompeii. Wind forward to the 1790s and the invention of lithography was the launchpad for mass produced billboards, and by the 1860s the first outdoor advertising trading companies were formed.

Unlike the rest of the print sector today, outdoor advertising revenue has been unaffected by the unrelenting rise of online advertising. In fact, it’s going through a digital renaissance which I believe will spur healthy growth in the sector, and put a shot in the arm of classic brand advertising, which has undoubtedly suffered at the hands of online performance media.

There are two key reasons for the current decline in brand advertising

The first dates back to the recession. In 2009 – when a whopping £2bn was wiped off the nation’s collective media plans – search advertising was the only format to grow (by 9% if my memory serves me correctly). Every scrap of spend came under the FD’s microscope, and while traditional display media suffered double-digit cuts, the easily trackable ROI from search powered its stellar growth to command the £5bn is does today.

The second major reason is generational. Media planners are nearly all millennials (at iCrossing the average age is 31), and they live and breathe mobile and social media. So with increased sales and measurable results at the centre of every client brief, the candy of online performance marketing increasingly trumps the classic branding approach.

The question is, have these two dynamics combined to create a whole generation lost to the art of brand building?

Back in 1986, at the age of 26, I became the assistant advertising manager at (now long gone) Visionhire. In those days, dear readers, half the living room tellies and nearly all the VCRs were rented. I’d read ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’, which extolled the virtues of brand and response techniques, then largely confined to coupons in the press, nascent direct marketing and promotion at point of sale – all known as ‘below the line’ techniques. All the big money went ‘above the line’, which offered two commercial TV channels, a huge audience for the press, plus some radio and outdoor. Media fragmentation wasn’t a thing in those days. Hence the long, boozy agency lunches.

But we learnt to totally respect the branding cycle – how long it took to plan, produce and execute a campaign. And how long it would take to build awareness, consideration and purchase intent; usually several months, which was also the typical timescale for the squeaky-bum presentation from Millward Brown who delivered our Awareness Index (AI) scores on the doors, against direct competitors.

Digital Out Of Home will inspire today’s young planners

Being ever the optimist, I don’t truly believe the wonderful art and science of brand building will be lost on today’s millennial marketers and media planners. I happen to believe that the oldest medium – now reborn as Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) will be a catalyst for growth in brand advertising, offering many of the accountable attributes of online display media and hardly any of the current brand safety and ad verification challenges.

Here I’d like to congratulate JCDecaux, who filled the Hansom Hall at St Pancras for their impressive Digital UpFronts presentation this month. First off – credit to JCD for repositioning their brand alongside the big pureplays and setting out their DOOH stall for the buyers, now that it accounts for nearly half of all outdoor revenue. And it’s growing at +30%.

The story is compelling.

98% of the population sees an out of home ad each week, and for millennials it’s easily number one for reach and time spent, according to IPA Touchpoints. As a subset, DOOH offers 49% UK reach with 1.3bn weekly viewed impressions.

That little word ‘viewed’ is music to the marketer’s ears. Digital outdoor is brand safe, there’s no ad fraud, and there’s no such thing as a non-viewable impression. And, they say, 99.5% of those impressions are generated by just four different aspect ratios, all offering video and animation in nice, large formats.

But the kids want programmatic! Step forward the JCDecaux SmartBRICS self-serve planning and buying platform which currently caters for half of the UK’s DOOH estate. Planners can set parameters down to street and frame level, complete with day-parts, numbers of impressions and ratings. They can even ad rules connected to the weather, or deliver moderated tweets as part of the creative. And post campaign, your viewed impressions report is independently verified by PwC.

Now if the delights of DOOH don’t reignite the branding buds of today’s marketers and planners, I’ll eat my best socks. It’s certainly inspired iCrossing’s media strategist, Lauretta Wood who seeks programmatic perfection by joining outdoor with mobile. Growth over the next few years is easy to predict, and the prospect of high visibility, high reach, location-based video ads is surely a no brainer for the contemporary advertiser.

Just imagine the enhanced effect when you sprinkle a bit of mobile and data over the creative for the perfect match between the oldest and the newest media? We’ll see more high profile award winners like the BA #Lookup campaign at Piccadilly Circus.

Then the generation lost to planet brand will surely come back in in to land.

By Guy Phillipson

Guy Phillipson is the chairman of iCrossing UK and the former CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau UK.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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We are at “Peak Micro-Influencer” When a Hotel Company Hires a Bad Grandma to Attract New Customers

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An Insta-grandma called “Baddie Winkle” says she has been stealing your man since 1928.

By Nicole Buckler

Hotels.com have got together with a bad-ass granny who calls herself “Baddie Winkle” to encourage people to go travelling (staying in their hotels, of course). Using the hashtag #BadAssBucketList you can follow her adventures and even contribute yourself to the hashtag should you be a granny looking to feel up some prime young beef. I’m only in my 40s and I’m ready to join the squad.

Don’t touch, Weinstein

Baddie is promoting Hotels.com Rewards program, which gives players a one-night freebee in a hotel for every 10 stayed. She says, “I have always wanted to party in London, go to the Moulin Rouge in Paris and watch cheeky volleyball players do their thing on a beach in Brazil!” Now as a micro-influencer, she can unlock the “Perve Level: Brazilian” and other treasures on hotel.com’s dime. Which is nice work if you can get it. All the Insta-grandma has to do is to flit around a number of hotels, staying there and showing fans what she gets up to inside them. Baddie wrote on her Instagram page last week; “I’m international baby!”

International indeed. The 89-year-old microinfluencer even has her own celebrity fans, including Miley Cyrus, Khloe Kardashian and Nicole Richie. Perhaps they will be watching with glee as she mixes rooftop cocktails in NYC, rubs shoulders with NFL players, and helicopters over The Grand Canyon. It’s a tough life, but someone’s Nana has to do it.

Hmmm… slutty but hot.

It’s not just the rather wealthy grandparent market hotel.com are going for. According to the astonishing results of a recent survey, one in five people under 30 have confessed that their travel plans are inspired by their favourite oldies. Who knew that oldies could be travel inspirators? The marketing people at Hotels.com knew. Oh hell yes, they knew.

Damn she’s bad.

Baddie is bringing her granddaughter along on the trip, and this seems to fit in with accusations that millennials are a bunch of home-loving family-stalking squares. The previously-mentioned survey shows that 40 percent of millennials would prefer to complete their bucket lists with their parents or grandparents – that’s more than celebs (11 percent), siblings (28 percent) or on their own (25 percent).

What the….?

One in eight confessed that their gran (or nana) was cooler than them and travelled more than them. I am ashamed of millennials. Stop protesting over stupid crap and go and see the world you wasters!

Squad goals: Polyamory

And for those of us in marketing? Let’s remember that the best micro-influencers might be someone you haven’t considered before. Like grannies in leather dresses. Who are on their way to steal your man. Now would be a good time to panic.

 

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Marketing Executives Are Now Pumping Out Content Daily or Hourly

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Is the world becoming swamped with content?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A recent survey by 10Fold has revealed that marketing executives now focus a substantial portion of their budget on creating and constantly delivering new content at an ever-increasing frequency. According to the research findings, nearly one-third of respondents are now producing content daily or hourly.

The report looks at current and planned content marketing budgets, frequency, type, development and measurement of content programs. It found that three-quarters of technology marketers plan to generate three times more content in the next 12 months than they did in the previous year; and 42 percent will spend €250,000 or more in the next 12 months on content.

Measuring the effectiveness of content is still a challenge for marketing executives. But it seems that soliciting customer feedback never goes out of style.

Key Research Findings:

  • Social media, video and webinars are cited as the best content “types” among all respondents
  • Top executives prefer video as a content medium
  • 44 percent of respondents say that lack of domain expertise is the top barrier for creating quality content
  • 99 percent of respondents use third parties to create at least 25 percent of their content
  • 83 percent of respondents report that third party generated content is at least above average
  • 80 percent leverage basic tools (Google Analytics) to track and measure content impact; followed by 60 percent using marketing automation systems

“The marketplace is constantly changing,” said David Gehringer, principal of Dimensional Research. “Based on the results of our research for 10Fold, there is no doubt that there is an insatiable demand among technology companies for content that has technical relevancy and that is delivered in a form, such as video and blogs, that is appealing to their buyers.”

It seems that the saying “content is king” still rings true, for now.

 

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What Consumers Buy to Feel More Powerful

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

It’s all about the face.

Research has found that people prefer wider faces on products if they are seeking to show dominance or would like to project importance. People are typically averse to wider human faces because they elicit fears of being dominated. However, consumers might like wider faces on some products they buy, such as watches or cars, when they want to be seen in a position of power in certain situations, according to a new study led by a marketing researcher.

“When consumers are motivated to dominate others, or when they use the product in public, their liking will be heightened toward high-ratio product faces,” said Ahreum Maeng, assistant professor in marketing at the KU School of Business.

In five experiments, respondents examined photos of human faces that varied from low width-to-height ratio (narrow) to ones with a higher ratio (wider) to establish the perception of dominance when seeing higher-ratio faces. The researchers also had respondents view photos of products that might have a design resembling a human face, such as watch and clock faces and automobiles, from low to high width-to-height ratios.

“These kinds of things are automatically going on in people’s brains,” Maeng said. “When we see those shapes resembling a human face in the product design, we can’t help but perceive it that way.”

Researchers have established that people are evolutionarily adapted to read facial cues, especially those signalling dominance, and the width-to-height ratio of face is a cue to attribute dominance to the face. In the notion of anthropomorphism, scholars have found people often attribute human traits to non-human entities, such as products.

In addition, the researchers had participants view the images while they thought about different scenarios, such as preparing to encounter either an old high school bully or a former sweetheart at a 10-year-old high school reunion or a business trip that might require a difficult negotiation.

Their main finding was that when people felt they were in a situation where they might want to be perceived as dominant – such as that business negotiation or when seeing an old bully at a high-school reunion – people were inclined to select the wider product design for a watch or car they might be renting for the trip.

Maeng said this differs from how people tend to see dominance in the human face. They typically become averse to a higher width-to-height ratio because they feel threatened or intimated.

“But when it comes to a dominant-looking product face, they really like it,” she said. “It’s probably because people view the product as part of themselves and they would think, it’s my possession. I have control over it when I need it, and I can demonstrate my dominance through the product.”

In scenarios where participants did not feel the need to project any dominance, such as a more laid-back time with their children or family, the width-to-height ratio of the products became less important, the researchers found.

Maeng said the findings have important implications for marketers of products that might resemble a human face, such as watches with a circular face and cars. They found consumers’ preferences for dominant-looking product faces is not the same as people’s preference simply for luxury or expensive items.

Also, typically, product-design efforts have focused on visual aesthetics and ergonomics, an assumption that beauty and functionality covers the entire canvas of product design. However, more recent contrary findings by marketing researchers suggest that product design can signal a specific personality trait about the product.

Maeng said this type of preference means that manufacturers and marketers would be able to charge higher prices for products that have wider faces. They have already found a positive relationship in examining 2013 prices of automobiles based on the width-to-height ratio, and their study likely supports those types of decisions.

“Brand managers and product designers may be particularly interested in these findings,” the researchers said, “because a simple design feature, namely product face ratio, can have marketplace impact – by significantly improving the company’s bottom line.”

 

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Your brand is talking about itself too much

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By John Long.

You’re at a cocktail party, and you find yourself standing next to a guy you’ve never met. He seems pleasant enough at first, offering his name — let’s call him Eric — and a friendly handshake.

But then, unprompted, Eric tells you what he does for a living, where he’s from, where he went to college and what he majored in. And then Eric rattles off all the places he’s worked, what he did at those places — and babbles on about a new project he’s working on — in painstaking, mind-numbing detail — as he produces his business card. Just minutes after meeting him, you’re frantically scanning the room for any to get away.

We’ve all run into that guy. We hate that guy. So don’t let your brand be that guy.

These days, everyone’s trying to figure out “content” (a terrible term, but that’s for another piece) — while, every year, advertising spend on social media spending keeps going up. Given those two trends, it’s surprising how many brands still prattle on incessantly about themselves like that blowhard Eric.

I’m not saying brands no longer need artfully crafted communications about their products and services that are compelling and grounded in a human truth—they still do, and always will. But an important question marketers should be asking today is:

What should my brand talk about other than itself?

This isn’t a new concept. I’m an Ogilvy guy, and one of my favorite ads from the archives is this one for Guinness that ran in Esquire in the early 1950s.

1950s Guinness ad

Now that’s what the kids today call “native content.” And it’s great. A lot of people love oysters, but almost no one knows anything about them. So in addition to its eye-catching art direction that immediately draws you in, the copy holds your interest, in part, because it’s not about Guinness — it’s about a delicious mollusk. And it wasn’t a one-off. There were ads about cheeses, game birds, and steaks. In short, it was a beautiful and highly effective campaign for Guinness that wasn’t about Guinness.

Let’s pause for a minute.

Think about the kind of people you find interesting and enjoy being around. They don’t ramble on endlessly about themselves. They’ve got a knack for finding what interests you—and they always seem to have some interesting tidbit about that subject that captures your attention. They meet you on your level. They listen. They fascinate. And so should brands.

A lot of brands understand this.

Nike doesn’t just talk shoes, they talk about hard work and human achievement. REI doesn’t just talk about ski equipment, they talk about the transformational power of being outdoors. And Apple doesn’t just talk about smartphones, they talk about design and creativity.

But other brands have some catching up to do. Take the major pizza delivery chains. Why do they seem to talk about pizza and prices and little else? People already love pizza, and a dollar here or there isn’t going to buy their loyalty for the long haul. Or consider retailers that dominate a category — like say, toys or music. These brands have a wonderful opportunity to talk about something other than themselves and they’re mostly not taking advantage of it.

So let’s say you’ve accepted my premise. How do you know what your brand should talk about? Two things you need right off the bat are a razor-sharp definition of your brand — yes, brand still really matters — and a deep understanding of your customer. But tread carefully. To enter certain conversations, brands need credibility.

Guinness could credibly talk about oysters and cheese because beer goes pretty well with both. And almost anyone can talk about say, the Olympics. But even if they had done so in a less ham-fisted way, Pepsi didn’t have the credibility to talk about the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter.

The bottom line: in an increasingly distracting world, brands can’t expect people to be interested in them just because they show up on their television or tablet. They must start with the premise that people just don’t care about their heritage, their ingredients, their propriety processes or their “solutions.”

To attract interest and build loyalty, they need to talk about something besides themselves that’s relevant to their customers in an entertaining or provocative way. In other words, brands should be more like REI and hell of a lot less like Eric.

By John Long.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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