A brilliant bit of inspiration from Trendwatching in their Feb report on the emerging point-know- (and ultimately) buy trend for ever info-hungry punters. There’s some exciting ways in which some brands have used mobile technology to help people find out stuff they encounter in the real world, as well as a handy round up of some of the technolgies fuelling point-know-buy.
Check it out, personally I’m LOVING the Heinz AR recipe book.
It’s hard not to miss your Facebook friends signing up to groups in an effort to ‘win a free iPad’, ‘a digital camera if you invite your friends’ or ‘Get £300 to spend @ Topshop’. What caught my eye about the latter was that I wasn’t actually sure whether it was genuine or not….some effort had been put into the group landing page, including an embedded video and the image looked ‘right’ (although the quality is a bit dodgy). But the ‘step 2 – tell your friends’ put me off….. Despite my friends still joining in an effort to get that £300 a backlash against scammers is starting – these are the statuses I found when I typed in ‘ipad scam’ whilst searching for ‘everyone’s’ Facebook updates.
(SCREENSHOT TAKEN FROM FACEBOOK)
Scam groups and brand jacking are becoming more common across social networking sites and this must surely impact on how consumers engage with genuine brand Twitter streams and Facebook fan pages and groups…. Brands need to be using these spaces with a real understanding of consumers needs and mindsets within these digital spaces and as scammers become more convincing and persuasive in their efforts will brands have to work harder to prove they are genuine – particularly where competitions and giveaways are concerned?
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Always controversial but often with a compelling point of view I was interested to see what Alan Mitchell had to say about my fave topic – consumer decision making.
At first he seems to question the value of market research at all but a closer look reveals that he simply offers up a number of challenges. If you agree with his fundamental point that persuasion marketing is over (and don’t we all we’re in an age of dialogue aren’t we?) then the conclusions for research are clear and yet they aren’t the most commonly pursued approaches.
His argument points to co-creation rather sitting behind a viewing facility mirror and to genuine ongoing brand insight rather than a constant diet of pre and post tracking. Hear Hear!! Here lays the path to genuine insight that is neither a waste of time or money.
Hi everyone,
Have a butcher’s at this article from The Guardian that pinpoints 1948 as the best ever year to be born.
It is worth bearing in mind the gilded lives of baby boomer punters when selling them as an audience or building communications strategies that target them.
Clearly they are not a bunch of old duffers – they were the original teenagers; have enjoyed universal public services and have driven the consumer choice society in which we live.
They were educated to question authority – bear this in mind when reaching out to them.
Cheers,
Sean
On 13-16th October we attended the Media Business Course in Brighton; a highly prestigious and intensive media planning immersion course which we stole based our very own Real Wold Pitching and Graduate planning training days on.
3 days of some of the most inspirational speakers in the industry (this isn’t a sales pitch, it’s what happened!) are surrounded by the task of working together in a team to answer a tough client brief and then present back a plan to extremely important and scary people in a bid to make it through to the final, and be crowned the winning team!
As the task of answering the brief was rather familiar to us as a business, we’ve picked our joint 4 favourite things about the week which surprised and delighted us –
Julia’s Favourite
I think that the key experience to take away from the whole 4-day event was learning how to work alongside team mates from other areas of expertise and experience. Most teams only had one planner/media agency delegate with the rest being media owners. Therefore, it often fell to the planner to lead the process in terms of format and logical steps. I think I had forgotten that our planning process isn’t obvious to everyone, and can take a bit of explaining to people who aren’t exposed to it every day. It was a good wake-up call therefore to work through the process with people who had never seen it before. Having to explain the process and having people question elements helped me to see our Planning process through fresh-eyes.
All of the members of our group had great creative minds (although sometimes too creative – focusing on what the TV ad would look like – grrr!), and once on board with the process all collaborated to produce the final presentation and media plan. As a planner it was hard once we had agreed on the ‘Strat Plat’ (check the lingo!) and idea not to start drawing the media plan in my head, but having the input from other disciplines helped to slow us down – fully investigating all opportunities and leading to a fully rounded plan.
Team work was also really important because you spent every waking moment in your rooms with your team when there weren’t any presentations. And every waking moment literally meant til about 2 am, so getting on was pretty crucial!
Tracy’s Favourite
I have a fairly laid-back, overly verbose, hugh-grant-“in-the-words-of-the-Partridge-family”-a-like style of presenting. So when , in our 1st run through, my bit lasted for the full 20 minutes allocated for the total presentation, I knew I had to make a change.
In learning to distill the key and salient points, and make sure I stick to a loose-ish script, I managed to get it down to 5 minutes. Combining this, with slowing down my breathing to make sure I didn’t sound too nervous (or be sick), I sounded more confident and assured that I ever have before. This will be massively beneficial to me in the future, and was a personal highlight of mine.
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Because we were awesome, both of our teams made the final (a shout out to James Wigley, a former Mediacom-er (now media owner side) who was in the 3rd team in the final – spot the trend?!), which was wonderful and incredibly scary at the same time.
So, to sum up, if you get the chance to go, definitely do it. You’ll be exhausted, feel like you’re on another planet, but be surrounded by enthusiastic and knowledgeable people, just as ready to share their knowledge with you as you are with them. It will be one of the most rewarding and inspiring things you’ll ever do for your day job.
P.s – Tracy would like to say thanks to Andrea Williams for helping out from afar. And Julia would like to thank Sam for his Media Multiplier and Chris K for the most mammoth Touchpoints ever!