Banking On the Future

Students might not exactly be the most desirable clients for a bank. With few assets, higher levels of debt and little need for other financial products – they probably don’t match the same profile of their A-list clients (see Fig. A)

Fig. A

But the funny thing about students is that they grow up, start working, earning money, buying houses and cars and need a bank.

TD Canada Trust has crossed the digital divide and launched an application “Split It” on Facebook directly geared for students living with roommates.

You can add roommates and divide bills, and it sends reminders to those people through their Facebook mini-feed.

Practical, simple and unique. A quick scan of Facebook applications can’t find any of the other major 5 Canadian banks with on the site.

So do you think this is a good way to build brand loyalty among students?

My one question is how this application is marketed. I couldn’t find anything on the student page of the TD CanadaTrust website. But, like most things in the social network universe, I found out about this from another friend on Facebook – so maybe that how they want it to spread.

Dis-Obay (Part 2)

Part 2 of this campaign is now at your local bus shelter and billboard.

It reads ” Luckily, Obay isn’t real. Sure, you want what’s best for your kids, but when it comes to post-secondary education, pushing them to do what you want isn’t right.

Explore all the options at ontariocolleges.ca”

OMG! MMOG !

MMOG – Massively Multiplayer online games are not just games – they are full economies and destinations. They really behave no differently than countries or cities in the real world – so why should marketing behave any differently in these worlds?

Second Life already has embassies of real countries, real business that have set up virtual location and a land developer that has “second-life-ed (?)” enough to make herself $1,000,000 in real dollars. Expanding into these platforms is more similar to expanding into a new country rather than another component of your marketing plan.

How is this for a job description? Virtual World Marketing Consultant. The Electric Sheep is a firm dedicated solely to improving the virtual world experience for business. Along with creating platforms for your avatar to have a brand experience, they help build strategies for companies to want to increase their presence in various virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com.

How much of your company’s marketing plan include a budget for “virtual” media buys ?

Thinking out-loud, there are a lot of upsides to being a consumer in the virtual world that marketers are starting to be aware of. People are spending a lot of time in these worlds and we all like buying stuff – so does it not make sense that we are going to be looking to these worlds as another location of consumption? Do you know how much more efficient I would be at getting through my shopping list if I could teleport and not have to waste time parking? What kind of impact could this have on supply-chain management if you could create the benefit of a retail experience (virtual) while still maintaining the cost-savings of a direct-supplier model (real)? You would never run out of inventory. If I were in sales forecasting – i might start getting a little nervous.

Of course there are downsides. Involvement right now is somewhat limited. There is no way you are confusing a virtual consumer experience for a real one when you still have to use a mouse and keyboard. In some services, going there IS the product (The Grand Canyon is not quite the same on a 13 inch laptop monitor) and that cannot be substituted for online, no matter how large the bandwidth.

Dis-Obay (Part 1)

This “fake/real” ad is showing up everywhere in Toronto, but probably more importantly, in a lot of places on the net.

What happened to the good old days (i.e. maybe as much as 3 years ago) when viral marketing campaigns at least gave us a “real” URL that could take us to a “fake” website that would redirect us to the “Real” product behind them and let us in on the joke without much effort.

Apparently Colleges Ontario (according to Torontoist) is behind this spot and in a few weeks they are going to reveal the connection between . I hope so, because I don’t get it with only the first half – and I worry that I won’t really care in three weeks when the second half comes out.

Personal opinions aside – is this effective? Is this creating word of mouth and is it creating it with the right target market (assuming the bloggers got the source right)?

…to be continued (when the second installment comes out)

Diamond in the Rough

Has anyone been following this campaign from Post Cereal’s (Kraft) “New” Diamond Shreddies? They are actively promoting the fact that Shreddies now have a new diamond shape, which is actually just their old shape – rotated by 45 degrees. Good, Good whole wheat irony.

I actually think this is a cleaver campaign and is successful through its high level of commitment. They have gone to great lengths to go support the joke behind the spot, inlcuding changing the packaging and name from just “Shreddies” to “Diamond Shreddies”. Somewhat funny, and certainly self-deprecating from a marketing perspective – it stands out.

Is there actually some seriousness to this campaign? Is Kraft chosing a creative way to get people talking about a re-branding strategy?

What I wonder is what will will happen when the campaign ends? Is Kraft going to stick with the “new” name and shape. I wonder what you think they should do 6 months or 12 months into this campaign?

(This is a spot is coming out of Toronto’s Ogilvy Office, and their blog says that while the moderator is an improv actor, the people in the focus groups are real)

Searching for Meaning

A topic that seems to be popping up a lot these days in the off-line marketing community is creating “Meaningful Consumer Experiences.”

Isn’t it great when an emerging trend has the right combination of words that sound different enough that it could be considered breaking the “status quo” while vague enough that it allows snarky online critics the ability question if it means anything at all? Sometimes I feel like whoever creates these phrases does it on purpose. (Maybe it is the same guy/girl that came up with “synergies”)

Before we dive into what exactly “Meaningful”…well…means – let’s first isolate and dissect a consumer experiences. Do consumer experiences happen only at the point-of-sale or do they go beyond that simple interaction and branch into the pre and post-purchase behaviour? If you buy something and are dissatisfied, it is hard to argue that the return process isn’t part of the consumer experience. If you are still enchanted by a product or brand 15 years after you bought it (retro-chic anyone?) isn’t that still part of the experience?

My first challenge to the community is to question if consumer experiences can really be managed by marketing? They can encompass so much and are different for each individual that can extend well past the life of a product that it makes you wonder if this is something that is ever in the control of the marketer.

Now – we move onto our quest for meaning. How could a company create meaning for an individual whom they have never met? Even if market research was sophisticated enough to start asking about what is meaningful to consumers, the context in which an experience takes place may hold different levels of meaning for even the same individual. We are starting to get into some very tricky territory for a brand to enter – but the alternative is that it can be a very powerful connection that goes beyond functional and emotional brand equity.

One potential example that I found was Method Cleaning Products (taken from PeachPit Book Review) :

Co-founders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry started by taking an ordinary experience—cleaning the house—and making it more meaningful. As Ryan says, “Our goal was to make chores less of a chore. We thought we could do this by creating experiences that expressed our consumers’ love for their home and tying that to our products. If people don’t have to look at cleaning as killing germs, but as doing something positive for their home, the power of the experience goes deeper than the activity. It’s touching something primal.”

So is Method onto something new with pursuing a strategy for a meaningful consumer relationship? Is this just a rehash of positioning? Are there examples of other companies that are trying to use this strategy? Are the succeeding?

Please Share examples and comments about what value Meaningful Consumer Experiences can add to marketing – or if you think it is just another group of buzz-words that are having their moment in the sun.

Link to book on the subject: Make Meaning by Steven Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea

What we have here is a Failure to Communicate

Most companies, brands and marketing departments are not used to having a conversation with their consumers. Although humans have been conversing since before Socrates, it has been more of a “we talk about our product, you listen, (and hopefully) you buy” structure for the greater part of modern marketing’s 100+ year history.

But in more recent years, technology has taken what was an asymmetrical control of the communication and marketing mix, and spread it evenly between consumers and marketers. If you like a product or service, consumers can become “brand evangelists” and spread their message to message to the world, sometimes showing higher on a Google search than the actual brand.

Of course, the same can happen with a negative experience. Frankly, frustration, disappointment or the feeling of being ripped-off tends to motivate people start talking much more than a positive experience. (Please see Dell Hell)

Brands and companies have reacted in several different ways to this shift in power. Some operate in a state of denial, choosing neither to acknowledge or participate in a dialogue that might run the risk of saying something negative about their product.

Others have taken a different approach, taking an active roll in the conversation with their clients. And if it is genuine interaction (which is not always a guarantee), it can be very powerful for both parties.

I would argue that every company that has something to sell to someone (i.e. every company) has to participate in a conversation with its clients if it truly wants to evolve for the following 3 reasons:

1) People are already talking about your brand or product, so sitting in the boardroom denying that this is happening around you and refusing to participate may lead to some regrettable decisions that could have been avoided if someone was listing.

2) Involvement does not equal just another location to handle complaints. There are lots of ways that ongoing, honest and genuine communication can increase brand affinity. If these consumers are already willing to engage in dialogs, why not give them insight into information beyond the typical campaign.

I am not suggesting throwing intellectual property out the window. But people have a strong desire to be a source of authority on any given topic, so if you as a company are satisfying that need, then we start to enter into a much more meaningful relationship with our customers.

3) To cite Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe: Good Conversation is Productive. Conversation gets stuff done. “By interfacing with the blogosphere, [The Company] fundamentally changes how it looked at treating all their primary customers.” Why fight to resist something that is happening and instead work with it to grow together? Conversation seems to lead to collaboration and isn’t that what we all want to have with our customers?

This blog is simply another product, tell us what you think…

Hello all SMA members…and Beyond!

Welcome to the inaugural post of the new SMA marketing blog! While our current website has a lot of great resources for our members, the SMA exec realized that a vital way that we can add value is by letting our members create content and provide insight for the marketing community as a whole.

So here is your opportunity to show us what you got! Change is the one thing that has remained constant with any marketer in any industry – so why not use this medium to talk about the most current topics of discussion?

We’ll try to bring in topics of discussion on a regular weekly basis. If there is ever something that you want to write about, feel free to start a discussion string of your own. See the following page of best practices.

In time, we hope that this site itself turns into a substantial marketing resource. Please take the time to check out what this blog is about and the code of conduct that we want to uphold.