Branding Strategy Insider

Digital Marketing and the New Push / Pull Dynamic

Consumers are bombarded with more messages than ever before. Refining and clarifying your target segment is becoming evermore important as mass-messages are falling upon deaf ears. Specific, tailored and relevant messages, combined with consumer engagement and empowerment are elemental in the new marketing era. Less and less are market leaders dictating consumer needs through “push” advertising. By way of digital networking and publishing tools, consumers are creating consumer needs. To identify the key forces driving this marketing shift, we synthesized insights from over 40 industry professionals.

From Company Push to Consumer Pull
What is push and pull marketing? Push is the 30-second TV / radio spot. Push is the billboard and web banner. Push is the full-page magazine / newspaper spread. Push is becoming evermore difficult to push. The converse of push, is pull. Pull marketing is engaging; interactive; a two-way line of communication. To illustrate the push / pull marketing dynamic 15 years ago, if you were in the market to buy a TV, what resources would you have at your disposal? TV, radio, billboard, direct mail advertisements might have influenced your decision. Those messages are finely crafted to be persuasive. In essence: they’re bias. For a more objective view, you might turn to your friend that knows something about TVs. Or, you can go to Best Buy and they might be able to educate and inform your decision. In short, advertisements and a handful of “experts” were your resources. That was the push / pull dynamic then.

In the digital era, we can better manage and prioritize the influence of each resource. With the ubiquity of the internet, resources are seemingly endless; therefore you can choose which are more important as you refine our decision. Where in the past your decision was constrained to a limited number of resources, in the digital age, there are countless information hubs to help you choose one product over another. With the extensive consumer conversation on social media sites and product pages, what weight does the mass message—pushed from TV, billboard, radio, etc—carry when you’re making your decision? Though consumers will still soak up push marketing—and factor those impressions into their spending decisions—the internet and its vast networking reach typically bypasses traditional push media. In the past, the number of resources was limited—therefore each opinion meant more and consumers were just consumers. In today’s age, consumers are researchers, advocates, creators, promoters and marketers.

Building Brands Online in the Post-Sales Market

Customers will talk about your company, its products and services, whether you want them to or not. And online there are a multitude of places to do so. The question is, do you as a brand facilitate or participate? I will argue that you should do both, and tell you why.

It is not unheard of for customers to eulogize - one only has to browse Trip Advisor to see that. It is most definitely not unheard of for customers to complain, or to seek answers to questions or solutions to problems. Consider Apple and BMW. They collaborated on the first proper integration of the iPod and the automobile, and are the only two brands I would consider getting tattooed, were that my thing.

Apple provided a forum for their customers back in 2000. Duane, who has posted 113,365 posts so far, is a 'Level 5' and the number one poster. A blogger said of Duane, "I'm guessing that if you play "Apple Related Trivial Pursuit" with Duane, Duane first kicks your ass and then takes your name." Apple describes the service as a user-to-user support forum where experts and other Apple product users get together to discuss Apple products. You'll find a wealth of information about your favorite Apple hardware and software products that will help you get the most out of your purchase. You can participate in discussions about various products and topics, find solutions to help you resolve issues, ask questions, get tips and advice, and more.

BMW, on the other hand, does not provide a forum for its customers. As a result, a plethora of home-grown forums have arisen from bimmerfest.com to model specific e46fanatics.com, meaning a time-consuming and sometimes fruitless Google search for information. It is still not too late for BMW to enter the fray, and provide value to its customers. Disenfranchising the people who have filled the void is not something I would do - rather BMW could provide:

The Art of the Brand Story

Stories have been around for millennia; probably as long as humans have existed on earth. Some may claim that stories help make the world go around.

Well, stories are no less powerful today than in the past. And with the help of new technologies, stories are hitting the world of brand building in a big way. Viral videos enable rapid transmission of stories that captivate an audience. Ever heard of the ‘Back Dorm Boys’, ‘JuHua Jie Jie’, or ‘Tian Xian Mei Mei’ for example? Each of the four teenagers represented by these names has been viewed by more than one billion consumers. And this exposure was achieved without spending one single dollar. In fact, these self-made web stars, whose escapades they filmed themselves on webcam and published on the net, were not even aware of their fame until Pepsi, Motorola and Sony Ericsson approached each of them with offers of enough money to retire.

These kids communicated their own stories in a way that was irresistible to viewers. Wanting to share the entertainment, the viral links were spread by viewers responding to the characteristic that is shared by the best of those viral videos - an intriguing story.

Now brands have begun to take a page from the story telling tradition themselves, tying their approach into a phenomenon I discuss in my book, BRAND sense: ‘HSP’, the Holistic Selling Proposition, describes a technique which conveys information within a whole context, a technique that enables the world of religion to captivate audiences.

Customer Relations: How Does Your Brand Rate?

If you’re not sure what you should wish for your brand in 2009, I have a suggestion for you to consider.

The Internet and its viral power has turned everyone into a broadcaster. But how is this increasingly affecting brands?

The answer is simple: brands cannot afford to upset the consumer any longer. Chances are that you’re most likely upsetting your customers more than ever. If you don’t believe me, read on.

Ten years ago I wrote the world’s first book on how to build brands online. In the back of Brand Building on the Internet, I listed ten essential rules for brands to follow online. Rule number one was to reply to customers. Very simple, yes, and essential for anyone with a serious online presence. I decided to test the rule by sending out a simple consumer inquiry to the one-hundred largest brands in the world. Using the ‘contact us’ feature on the corporate website of each brand concerned, I asked each company a simple question about their brand. Questions you’d be able to answer in seconds. What do you think the response rate was?

First the good news. Thirty percent of the brands replied back within the first 24 hours. Great, thought I, merrily assuming a similar response rate on day two. The reality was, however, that I had to wait a very long time to get replies back from all the companies I’d written to. In fact, I’m still waiting. More than fifty percent of the companies never replied back at all. Now, I’m not talking about mom-and-pop brands, but brands which are valued in the billions; companies that also talk about customer satisfaction and in most cases even include their professed commitment to consumers in their vision statements.

Brands Feel Web's Growing Influence

In the 90s we all got a bit carried away with the Internet. Marketers wondered when Internet marketing expenditure would exceed traditional forms of communication. One bestselling article in the Harvard Business Review concluded that the Internet would render brands obsolete.

Well beyond a decade later and some marketers have relatively mundane expectations of the Internet. Perhaps because everyone has created a high-information, brand-centric website and many companies now sell their products online. But there is a growing role for the Internet that has far more serious implications for brands. Implications that cannot be ignored even by the most web-phobic of marketers. Consider two highly successful, but hugely divergent, brands.

Moben Kitchens is one of the UK's biggest suppliers and fitters of kitchens.

It has an impressive website which showcases some of the company's attractive kitchen designs and lists more than 200 of its outlets.

Skinny Cow is a low-fat ice-cream bar. Originally launched in the US, the brand was introduced to the UK in January of 2004 by Richmond Foods. Skinny Cow's website,(UK version) shows off its three flavours and makes much of the fact that at less than 2% fat and 90 calories a bar, it is a genuine treat for those trying to lose weight.

Frankly, neither website is stunning. But what is interesting is what happens when you leave the controlled environment of the intended brand page and run a Google search on the two brands.

New Marketing Defined

Get a dictionary and look up the word media. It will contain several different definitions, but this is the meaning that, as a marketer, you will probably be most comfortable with - media, n. : The main means of mass communication, esp. newspapers, radio, and television, regarded collectively.

This is what marketers mean, and have always meant, by the concept of media. It is the classic agglomeration of channels that they consider, plan, buy and evaluate in order to communicate their messages.

In recent years, many marketers have spoken of the media mix or medianeutrality, implying that they no longer prioritise any one channel over the others in their campaigns. Most marketers have added interactive, too, because that is the modern thing to do. But, generally speaking, their definition of media fits nicely with the one the dictionaries have offered us for the past 100 years.

Fast and Fearless – the Future is Blogs

You can’t avoid them – the blogs. They’re so plentiful that the opinions they offer are influencing our daily news reports. Given the evident potency of blogs, therefore, the question is should blogs remain within their current sphere of influence, helping individuals to share their personal opinions on the world, or should they be adopted by brands as communication tools?

The fact is that the marriage between blogs and brands is no longer a vision. Personality brands, like Seth Godin or Tom Peters, have been blogging for some time. And brands like Weight watchers, LEGO, Apple or Harley Davidson already appear on a frequent basis, not on behalf of their brand-builders, but promoted by their fans.

This raises a potential danger: gradually the control over brand messages is being drawn away from brand builders and being redirected by consumers. So should brands begin investing in posting their own frequent blogs on the net, representing their points of view and personalities? Could you imagine Disney blogging its fans about its characters, Nokia about its latest products or Microsoft about its virus issues?

Yes, I’ll bet you can. The action would probably help brands get closer to their consumers by reaching right into those core communities of fans. But exploiting this avenue takes commitment.