Branding and Target Markets

A while back, a marketing company came to me with a very impressive design brief for a new product that they were launching. They needed a web agency to develop a website for them to use primarily as a sales tool to sell the concept to their clients. In their proposal they had I feel correctly identified their target market and designed a brand and corporate identity that played directly to the aspirations of that market, an example of very good targeted branding.

However, a committee came in and looked at the website we had developed for them and decided that the design was too target market specific and they wanted us to broaden the general appeal of the website. After spending thousands of pounds on a new website, the company seriously wanted us to look at their core design and make it "More commercial", This was a delicately designed very pretty website; full of lifestyle, aspirational imagery and perfect for its original target market. Making it more commercial in this case was like plastering sponsorship decals on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Where did it all go wrong?

The first step in branding is to identify your target market. Do your research in phase one. If you have a product idea, establish who is most likely to buy it and focus your branding and marketing effort on them.

This is where mistake one is usually made.

The temptation is to try and design your brand with as broad appeal as possible. This is common sense the more people who like your brand and are attracted by it, the more potential customers you have.

But this is flawed thinking.

The best way to grow a customer base is to have a strong identity that really speaks to your desired audience. People however are all different, even the most popular and powerful mass market brands like Coca Cola and Google have detractors. To reach the mass market, a design or marketing message has to be so severely watered down that it looses the ability to compel it's primary market.

This situation is all too common and it can really slow the progress of a new brand. A good way to illustrate this scenario is to imagine that you in an orchard full of (insert favourite fruit here). If you look at one tree you will notice that it is full of fruit and if you have an hour you can pick it bare of 100 lovely juicy (your favourite fruit).

So you commence picking, within five minutes you will have picked all the fruit within arms reach, lets say 20 fruit.

At this point you will start to struggle reaching the fruit on the top half of the tree. They are tantalisingly close so you exert more and more effort in the struggle to reach each fruit.

Sure, morally this feels great. Each freshly picked fruit is a small victory and no doubt will be all the sweeter for it. In the end you may reach the last fruit on the tree. Feeling very content you climb down from the ladder pleased and fulfilled with your hard days work and your just rewards. It may have taken 3 times as long as you originally thought but you are probably most pleased with the few surprise fruit that you hadn't even seen. 120 fruit for 3 hours work, well done.

Compare that to the targeted picker. He knows that he has 1 hour to pick as many fruit as he can. Realising that each tree has about 20 low hanging fruit it will take 5 minutes to pick those low hanging fruit he can hit 12 trees in his hour delivering 240 fruit and plenty of time to enjoy them.

Our targeted picker did not work as hard but got better results because he knew how to target his low hanging fruit.

A growing brand will benefit massively from the same approach. Identify your low hanging fruit, there should be enough of them out there to keep you busy.

The Internet in Your Car

Have you ever been sat on the M6 and had the compulsion to post a status to Facebook or Twitter? I am sure you have, some of the less law abiding people we know  may already twitter away while driving. A recent KPMG survey revealed that 37% of senior car industry executives believe that automobile connectivity will soon become the norm. I can see the value in this, it would be great to as part of a road trip engage with services such as Google places, TripAdvisor, Four Square etc. I can also see tremendous advantages in having access to iTunes and Spotify on the move and i am a little excited by the prospect. What does concern me is the auto industries poor record of software development. Recall Mercedes abortive attempts to integrate voice control into the early 00′s SL and the long lamented Volvo/Ford/Aston Martin/Jaguar propriety SatNav.

I hope that the auto industry does not attempt do go this route alone, that seems to be the way they prefer to do things but it would surely be cheaper to partner with an established player in the mobile market who already have suitable hardware and software sitting on the shelf. I like the idea of and android powered HTC or Samsung built “infotainment” centre that uses the widgets that we have all become very familiar with to convey useful driver data, some of which we have lost due to cost cutting and dumbing down of car instrumentation, I am specifically referring to voltage, oil temp and pressure gauges here. I also believe that it will be cheaper and have a faster moving development process due to us already being in possession of some pretty capable pocket-able devices that could easily be integrated into a car dashboard.

Another area of immediate concern is the UKs abysmal 3G coverage. While much of Europe is able to stream in the glorious glow of 4G download speeds, the UK is far behind still trying to support an inadequate 3G infrastructure, just dont plan to enjoy connectivity in the Vale of Clwyd! Other downsides to being more connected while we drive will be the increased likelihood of big brother finding out what we are doing an monitoring our behavior. We have already seen how our online misbehavior can be used as grounds for prosecution, what is to prevent the plod from using a quicker than normal point to point time as grounds for a speeding conviction? This is probably a little paranoid but it does fall in with current policing trends.

Overall, i am looking forward to seeing what comes of these developments, my personal tastes are for a car with fewer toys for spirited driving but for the week day grind, Spotify wouldn’t hurt!

Effective Email Marketing

http://www.recklessnewmedia.com/blog/rnm_blogs/effective-email-marketing/

Competitions: the secret to online success!

The concept of running a competition to drive footfall and sales is tried and tested in the retail and consumer markets. For a few years now, forward thinking internet marketers have been using competitions to drive website traffic and build marketing databases. The added benefit of competitions is that they tend to spread socially rather quickly, creating lots of word of mouth and social chatter about your brand.

There are a few risks, however, that must be considered when planning a campaign that includes prize giveaways but these are easily balanced by the excitement and fun factor competitions can bring to customers as they interact with your campaigns.

Here are five ideas you may wish to implement in your next prize giveaway campaign:

Set Clear Goals

It is important to have the marketing objectives of your campaign clear in your mind. Do you want to drive brand awareness? Collect a database of potential customers? Increase the take up of you business’ social media channels? There are many valid motivators for running an online giveaway but it is vital to know ahead of time what you are trying to accomplish. This will help you design, plan, monitor and manage your campaign.

Be Creative
You will not be the only company out there running a giveaway and it pays to be innovative. There are lots of so called competitions online which require the customer to complete page after page of tedious data capture and market research. The best online savvy customers will be weary of this type of activity so you would do well to ensure that your campaign cannot be confused with any of these.

Here are a few ideas of the types of competitions that have had good results for marketers.



· video competition inviting users to create a new commercial for one of your products


· user – brand experience completion that awards the best “experience stories” or photographs.


· guess the answer competition


· product invention competition with a cash prize


Leverage Social Channels


The best part about online giveaways is how easy it is to take them viral, encourage participation, and link them into your social media presence. Promote your giveaway via Facebook, Twitter, your company blog, and all other social channels, as well as via traditional marketing channels such as print, e-mail, and in-store signage.

A quick search for the term “competition” on Twitter shows hundreds of giveaway campaigns being delivered right now. The best competitions are intensely social by nature because people like to play games and contests together, and most people love to share the chance to win a cool prize with friends and family. It is vital then that your competition is easily sharable by embedding “share this” links on the site, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and everywhere else people will come across it.

Facilitate and encourage viral activity by encouraging easy “copy/paste” sharing using the Bit.ly URL shortener for the links to your location online. Most importantly, allow participants to vote to choose the winner, which keeps the audience interacting with one another and engaged with your brand after they have submitted their entry.

End with a Bang!

People will lose interest and your competition will fizz out if it drags on for too long. Online consumers have learned to expect instant gratification so make sure that your competition is just long enough to accomplish your objectives. A typical social competition runs for about four weeks –- longer, of course, if it includes user content creation. When the winner is identified, run a PR campaign to publicise the winner. This creates a great buzz about the competition, enshrines its validity and, of course, creates more brand awareness.

Measure the Results

As mentioned in the first point, launching a competition wasn’t just for fun; it was to achieve a specific marketing goal. Once the dust has settled, you need to measure the impact it had on brand engagement, clickthrough to your site, conversion, and bottom-line sales. You can use a social media tracking tool and Google Analytics to measure all of these parameters. Compare these to your original objectives to create success metrics and find out whether your campaign drove as much traffic to your site as you had hoped, and whether this traffic resulted in conversion.
So the cat is out of the bag; there is big money to be made by marketing your company online and competitions are one good way to do it. For more ideas on how to successfully market your business online, please get in touch with us at Reckless New Media. We will look at your marketing and sales objectives and work with you to develop online strategies to help you achieve them.

Now is the time to implement QR codes

A few months back I posted an article on a few forums about QR codes. I was somewhat surprised to see how much activity it caused. What astounded me most of all was the resistance I got from colleagues at other agencies. A number of them were decrying QR as being old-tech, passed it's best. As it turns out it was an interesting debate, with most people taking away the notion that QR are a powerful tool and ready to be exploited right now.


I regularly receive updates from a number of sources in order to keep up to date with the latest digital news. I was quite excited and rather vindicated when I saw this headline today: 4549% YoY rise in QR code scanning.


Surely a stat like that is going to get attention. It may well be that QR has had a long gestation and that even today, many thousands of smartphone users still do not know what they are however people are learning fast and they are willing to embrace this massively engaging technology.


Another driver involved in the success of QR is the fact that big brands have adopted it and are making it work hard for them as the street level presence on massive campaigns. The research also indicates a curiosity factor, code scanning is fun! Scanning a code and therefore interacting with a campaign is no longer seen as a chore or interruptive but part an parcel of the urban leisure experience.