Kmart Christmas Ad Airs In September
I watched my first Christmas commercial of the year last week (3 months earlier). The commercial, which features a giant gingerbread man and promotes the company’s layaway program, warns shoppers to not “let the holidays sneak up” on them.
My $0.02
This is a great marketing strategy by Kmart, this means customers can plan ahead of time and spend wisely. Planning well in advance leads to more savings, more creativity, more choices, more flexibility in your schedule that can lead to more generosity. I suppose it also reduces impulse buys, last-minute panics, price gouging and out of stock must haves.
The National Retail Federation says more than 40 percent of holiday shoppers start buying before Halloween. I realize that several retailers have already announced their layaway schemes. I think Costco is one of them, I haven’t been there in a while to confirm this assertion.
What do you think of the timing of Kmart’s Christmas ad?
Too soon or just right? or is it great marketing strategy to make customers become more budget conscious?
Carlton Draught – Big Ad Commercial
Carlton Draught, the Australian beer. The Big Ad is a larger than life commercial.
This ad was a genius idea by George Patterson and Partners (Young & Rubicam) of Melbourne, Australia. Big Ad parodies the visual style of battle sequences used in notables movies like Lord of the Rings, the story is about two battle teams. In the end one group looked like a man and the other as a pot of Carlton Draught beer. The ad was catchy, interesting, musical, very dramatic with a touch of humor in it.
This was considered an expensive ad, but it entertained people, and the ad took 7 months to launch. The agency used viral marketing techniques to promote the ad before it was broadcast on television. A half a million people watched the ad on the web. Within 24 hours after release, the “Big Ad” had been downloaded 162,000 times; two weeks later, it had been seen by over one million viewers in 132 countries making it the biggest viral Australian beer launch in history.
The “Big Ad” has since received over 30 awards globally. But it was reported that given its popularity, it didn’t increase the shareholder value to match the hype and popularity.
Enjoy “The Big Ad”
Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from social media websites, blogs such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc., and analyzing that data to make business decisions, ideas or solutions. Social media analytics are mostly used to support marketing or customer service activities, but this depends upon your type of business and your goal.
The first goal is to determine what are you trying to analyze and what is your end goal. For instance, some companies use analytics to find better ways to engage with customers, to reduce customer service costs, to determine the return on investment, feedback, or amending the public opinion of a particular product or service.
Once you identify your end goal, key performance indicators (KPIs) for objectively assessing the data should be placed. For example, on Twitter customer engagement might be measured by the number of followers, retweets, mentions or clicks on a link.
There are so many social media analytics tools that measure performance. Below are different social media analytics tools.
Works with all major social media channels
Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Klout, and Google Analytics; Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn is coming soon. With Simply Measured, analysis doesn’t stop with one profile. Measure the cohesive relationship between each network, your competitors’ social profiles, and how your audience interacts throughout the entire social space.
Hootsuite is one of those multi-function social media tools.
The leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks. You can manage multiple social networks, schedule messages and tweets. Track brand mentions. Analyze social media traffic. 7 million+ satisfied users. You can post updates on a wide range of social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube. Tumblr, WordPress.
Social marketing is all about relationships. With the new Adobe® Social, marketers finally have a comprehensive solution to build stronger connections through the content that’s guided by tangible data. Create the most relevant posts, monitor and respond to conversations, measure results, and connect social activities to business results.
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real time.
PageViral tracks real-time user behavior, sentiment, engagement and interaction patterns in 41 different languages. PageViral is one of the very few multilingual social media analytics platform in the industry. Multi-Lingual support is a subset of our natural language processing technology, which analyzes audience interactions in their own native language. You get to identify key influencers and understand your audience better, including how they feel towards your brand, how they engage, their active time intervals, etc.
Conclusion
In social media, it is important to determine if you’re reaching the right audience and connecting with them. Regular reports and metrics enables you to figure out the best solution and gain insights for your company or brand.
YAHOO! New Logo
Yahoo! Has unveiled its first major logo change in 18 years. Yahoo logo has been mostly the same since 1995, but the last logo update was 2009 (18 years ago). Yahoo spent the month of August releasing teaser designs one a day, which was a setup for a more exciting swerve on day 30. This new change is trying to breathe new life into the brand.
The new logo retains many of its predecessor’s qualities, but unless you have studied design it’s hard to differentiate the new logo with the old one. The logo retains the traditional elements, the color remains purple, though a bit darker, the letters capitalized and rounding off with the signature exclamation mark. In some versions the exclamation dances around. Overall the look is sleek, cleaner with a new sans-serif typeface. See the previous logo below.
The unveiling generated a lot of an unfavorable buzz on social media platforms. Most of them were in favor of the old logo and widely viewed the new logo as a let down. More than three-quarters of Internet users prefer Yahoo’s old logo to the new logo, according to a survey of more than 400 online respondents Thursday from Survata, a market research group. See below.
My $0.02
Most people hate change, I would have guessed even before the release that consumers would vote for the old logo. This new logo is close to the old one, and I may not be a designer but that is a good outcome for Yahoo and its customers because they haven’t made a major change. Consumers can still identify with the color purple as well as the exclamation mark, and these two are the most important symbols for Yahoo.
In most recent years, companies like Gap, J.C. Penney, MasterCard, Microsoft and Tropicana have experienced disastrous logo changes. Yahoo will not experience a similar fate because it has clearly communicated through the change with the 30-day rollout. Most importantly Yahoo is not a physical product that consumers need to locate in stores. I doubt somebody will quit using Yahoo because the logo is so “a decade ago”.
The new logo shows a more serious look, signaling to consumers, investors, others in the tech world and employees that change is occurring. The 30-day rollout was successful in creating a buzz about Yahoo and sharing these variations prepared consumers for the change.
Even though this new logo generated a lot internet hate but if you think about it, a bad Yahoo logo made everyone talk about it. It was a successful campaign to get the media and consumers stay afloat for 30 days. On the whole, people are paying attention to Yahoo again. I believe in no time consumers will get used to the new logo. By the way, I like the new Yahoo fantasy football (soccer) layout. I Play for fun with people around the globe.
New Yahoo logo live stream.
The logo concept..
Placebo Effect in Advertising
This A new study suggests that the placebo effect can be invoked by advertisements.
As with all kinds of placebo effects, the placebo effect plays an important role in advertising especially during drug trials. The strongest factor behind the placebo’s in advertising is that it can influence the actual effectiveness of a product.
The expectations play an important role in the placebo effect; companies use the placebo effect in advertising to influence customer buying behavior. For instance, a placebo effect on price, you’ve probably had discovered that many companies sell items at $99.99 instead of $100.00 or at “25 percent off the retail price.
From a scientific standpoint, it’s a positive response which does not derive from the actual ingredients but from the patient’s perception and expectations. These expectations can lead to inappropriate and excessive prescribing. Just as placebo (Latin word) means, “I shall please”
http://io9.com/bizarre-study-shows-that-advertising-improves-effective-992610371
The Marketing Explorer 