Crystal Cruises is launching an iPhone app to help travelers share customer postcard images of their journeys via social media, email and even traditional U.S. Postal Service mail. In what the company is calling a “luxury cruise industry first,” the app incorporates the personalized memoir look and feel of the line's recently launched "Begin a New Story" brand campaign. "The Storyteller" photo-customization app is available for free download from iTunes. The app invites travelers to snap a memorable moment, stunning view or new friend with their iPhone, and then use the app to add professional-style effects and share the image on either their personal Facebook page, Crystal Cruises' Facebook page, via email or U.S. mail. The “snail mail” option results in an actual paper postcard that can be personally signed and mailed to friends and family with the tap of a touchscreen. Users can customize their photos with color filters in black and white, sepia, high-contrast, or de-saturated; frames, with different black-and-white clean, classic, or more artistic border options; and captions, with choice of handwriting-style typeface, font color (white or black), and word positioning on the photo. The app provides the perfect venue for “contemporary storytelling,” combining photography, technology and creativity, says Crystal's Vice President of Marketing Nitsa Lewis. "It's also a lovely nod to classically vintage travel correspondence and photos past, while celebrating the modern era of vacation storytelling.” Crystal's Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/crystalcruises will have a "Never Ending Journal" section where all photo submissions will be compiled into an online group journal and categorized by cruise. To promote the app, upcoming guests will receive brochures with their cruise tickets. Crystal Cruises launched the "Begin a New Story" brand campaign in mid-April. It was the first work from Y&R California since winning the account in September 2011. The fully integrated campaign, which runs through 2012 and into 2013, positions the brand as a luxurious blend of discovery and adventure. At the campaign's core is the notion of the travel journal, a personal set of reflections, memories and mementos that travelers collect to remind themselves of their treasured vacation. The campaign consists of print advertisements, online banners, brochures and literature, as well as a 60-second animated film that brings to life three individuals' personal experiences in destinations across the globe. It also includes a 170-page Worldwide Cruise Atlas that shares personal travel stories, images, and mementos in journal-like form. Profiling 84 itineraries in more than 75 countries and 250-plus ports, the booklet shares story elements of sailing aboard.
While consumers are spending less time in grocery stores, and more time researching purchases before putting their lists together, impulse buying is alive and well: A new study from the Point of Purchase Advertising International reveals that 76% of all grocery purchasing decisions are being made in stores. That represents an all-time high, the trade group says. What’s more, the study, which added EEG and eye-tracking technology to attitudinal findings and consumer interviews, found that when shoppers engaged with an in-store display and touched a product, 66% of those grabs resulted in a purchase. And overall, shoppers are still lousy at projecting how much they will spend, with the average person misjudging the amount by 35%, either high or low. The study reports that 24% of purchases are specifically planned before the consumer starts wheeling the grocery cart. The rest of the shopping decisions fall into generally planned purchases, substitutes, or unplanned buys. Even when accounting for those impulse buys, the trade group says, 57% of shoppers still spend more than they planned. And while unplanned purchases, naturally, drive spending up, the surprise was by how much: Those who overspend on impulse items typically do so by 200%. Plastic leads to even greater sloppiness. Those shopping with either a debit or credit card are even less accurate in their calculations, buying larger quantities of goods and making more unplanned purchases than those paying cash. Overall, one in six of the observed purchases were made when a display with that brand is present in store, with toaster pastries, pickles/relish, dishwashing soap, and pet supplies getting the biggest boost. POPAI says the data, based on 2,400 shoppers in four broad geographic regions, suggests that in-store displays work best when aimed at a “core group of loyal, female stock-up shoppers” -- even those who are more likely to plan purchases before shopping, using lists and circulars.
A new Odwalla campaign aims to build loyalty by integrating the brand’s “goodness” benefits with real-life good-works messaging and engagement activities across platforms. The effort, taglined “Goodness Grows Here,” includes a Web site redesign, Facebook page features highlighting good works as well as brand goodness/benefits, an email campaign, marketing partnerships and paid online and traditional media. Spearheaded by the brand’s lead digital agency, 360i, it targets consumers 18 to 34. The redesigned site uses “papercraft” graphics that lend a scrapbook feel and pull-tab animations. The goal, according to 360i, is to help visitors “feel” the brand’s “whimsical” nature while more effectively presenting Odwalla’s beverages and food-bars product portfolio. Several “Earth Month” activations on the site led up to the May 7 launch of the digital aspects of the campaign. Other elements of the campaign:*Odwalla’s Facebook page is serving as a hub for offering tips and suggestions for daily good deeds, and for highlighting some of the most inspiring acts of “goodness” submitted by brand fans. *A “Mission Goodness” email campaign will seek to rally brand fans to do good, as well as provide updates on how Odwalla is helping to foster good out in the world. Emails will be sent to opt-ins every 30 to 45 days. *Odwalla is a launch partner with National Geographic for its “Good Traveler’s” section, and sponsor of the NG brand’s new “Travel Favorites” social hub. *Odwalla will encourage fans to incorporate nature and outdoor/”green” activities in their lives through its own “LivingSocial Adventure” events (such as kayaking, paddle boarding and biking). *Paid digital elements include a Facebook media rollout, individual media placements that include social extensions, and online banner ads that promote “goodness” with headlines such as “Goodness Grows Here” and “Shake Well. Live Well. Get Good.” Odwalla will also be the official launch sponsor for SAY Media’s Gardenista channel, to be part of its Remodelista.com channel. *Paid offline media include ads in Women’s Health, People Weekly, Fitness Magazine and Men’s Fitness, plus out-of-home in the Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco markets. In addition to 360i, agencies contributing to the campaign include Starcom MediaVest Group, Hatch Design, LeadDog Marketing Group and Fast Horse.
Cadillac is radically changing how the automobile instrument panel looks and functions, making it less like an instrument cluster and more like the touch-sensitive screen of an iPad. A new information/entertainment platform called CUE (Cadillac User Experience) that will be standard in forthcoming XTS and ATS cars includes a redesign of both the screen on the control pillar to the right of the driver and the usual gauges behind the steering wheel. Among other things, the CUE system allows drivers to change the layout of those gauges because they will be entirely virtual, and even are designed to tumble out of a virtual abyss onto the console surface when the ignition key is depressed. The entertainment and GPS screen on the center console is also customizable, and was designed to function like, say, an iPhone or Droid. The automaker says the CUE center screen and control panel represent the first automotive use of capacitive touch that brings in familiar multi-touch gestures. The system pairs with up to 10 mobile devices. Cadillac is giving buyers of the forthcoming XTS sedan a new iPad -- a physical one -- to help them learn the system, and will launch an app to tout CUE. These are two elements of an array of technology and services the General Motors luxury division is offering to support the rollout of CUE. The iPad that comes with the XTS will also have the MyCadillac App and OnStar RemoteLink. There is also a microsite with videos showing how the system works. The automaker sent out 25 or so "Connected Customer Experts" to dealerships around the country to train sales staff on how to talk about CUE to prospects. Caddie is doing likewise at its customer assistance services center in Austin, Texas. Jim Vurpillat, Cadillac global marketing director, explains to Marketing Daily that rather like an iPad, the platform is meant to be plug and play. "We have this term we like to use," he says. "It's as simple and easy to use as you need it to be and as technically sophisticated as you want it to be." Vurpillat says that like a smartphone, the center entertainment and info screen uses capacitive touch, active feedback (which creates a Droid-like tactile pulse when the user selects a virtual button or icon), and proximity sensing (which allows the screen to reflect one function at a time when in use because it brings buttons and choices back into view automatically when the user's finger draws near.) He says the effect of the enhancements -- including the way that the 12.3-inch reconfigurable instrument cluster behind the steering wheel launches from a black screen -- "is very dramatic; there's a little bit of theatre to it." Some of the advertising for the XTS will focus on that light show aspect of the instrument cluster as well as on its tablet-like functionality. "It's definitely one of the the highlight features. We will run TV spots that talk about the ease of use -- the simplicity of it," he says. One spot will start by making a comparison between the button-laden console of a competitive vehicle, and then transition to a "Now count the number of buttons on your tablet," message. Says Vurpillat, "It focuses right on CUE and comes back to the correlation that CUE is like a tablet for your car." He adds that another forthcoming spot will talk about how a user can change screens, controls and perspectives with finger gestures and swipes.
Ask General Motors about global agency relationships. The automaker recently created a global working group comprising two holding companies to herd the cats of redundancy, fees, and general agency proliferation around the world. It ain't easy. Dealing with global agencies, and local subsidiaries, not to mention the marketer's own regional offices, poses challenges at every bend. There are also some stark differences inside versus outside the U.S. when it comes to agency compensation. These latter similarities and differences are delineated in the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) first-ever Global Agency Compensation Survey, which offers something of a sub-orbital view of how marketers structure and manage compensation practices with their advertising agency partners worldwide and locally. Although the study polled marketers in nearly 40 countries on every continent, the results were similar to how things work in the U.S. The study, which polled 71 marketers from global marketing organizations including Brown-Forman, Dell, Ford, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, in February and March this year, found that for 57% of respondents, fees are the dominant method of agency compensation. A big divergence from the U.S., per the study, is that while none of the respondents said they use only traditional commissions to compensate their global agencies, 37% of those outside the U.S. said they combine fees with commissions. In the U.S., only 6% of global marketers use a combination of fees and commissions. According to David Beals, president and CEO of R3:JLB, who worked with the ANA on the study, two factors favor fees plus commissions outside the U.S. First, in markets like Japan and Brazil, commissions are still the dominant compensation practice. Second, in smaller markets, where campaign commitments are less predictable, fees don't make sense because spend is not steady. The study also says global marketers are considerably more likely to base incentives on such metrics as media delivery, brand perception, digital delivery and copy testing, and far less likely than in the U.S. to employ sales metrics as a success criterion. And only 4% of marketers use new approaches like value-based remuneration, while half now employ performance-based incentives -- just slightly more than in the U.S. The respondents also articulated the problems they have managing global agency compensation. They include getting everyone aligned to goals, strategies and approaches, both within the client’s organization and between the client and agency global operations; serving the marketing needs both of the global organization and its local operations; and untangling country-by-country differences in compensation rates, languages, cultures, laws and practices, not to mention a territorial mindset within local client organizations.
“TMI” or not, certain brands will be delighted to learn that one in five moms (born between 1977 and 1994) admit to consuming media in the bathroom. Even more startling, 12% of American moms report using their smartphones during sex, according to new research from Meredith’s Parents Network. Whether they’re checking Facebook, streaming TV or reading magazines, it’s clear that moms are developing entirely new relationships with media -- and increasingly relying on their smartphones to do it. “Today’s moms are media omnivores,” according to Carey Witmer, EVP and president of Meredith’s Parents Network, which encompasses Parents, American Baby, FamilyFun and Ser Padres. “Controlling their voracious diet is so important to them that they are constantly creating new rules about how and when media intermingles with their busy lives via their various devices, screens and networks.” Meanwhile, while more than 8 in 10 women are on Facebook, Meredith found that many are conflicted about the social network. In fact, 57% of millennial moms feel that Facebook is a waste of their time, although 89% describe the time they spend on the site as “me time.” What’s more, 38% of moms admitted that the overly personal information others share in their status updates is annoying, while 22% are turned off by Facebook “friends” who use the platform as a political soapbox. Overall, 81% of moms said shopping took up more of their smartphone time. While much has changed, however, moms still spend an average of 16 hours a week watching television. What are they watching? Well, 41% report viewing live TV events -- which is actually down from 55% in 2010. Streaming, however, is on the rise, as 23% of moms report streaming television -- up from 16% in 2010. Back to their mobile habits: moms report keeping an average of 13 apps on their phones, while two-thirds say that less than half of their apps are for their kids.
Good business ideas occasionally die an unnatural and premature death. While benchmarks, stage gates, and filters can help prevent bad -- and costly -- decisions, sometimes ideas are just ahead of their time. Revisited periodically, a company’s inventory of dead and discarded ideas may become the source of new opportunities. While few ideas can deliver the kind of transformative growth that business leaders salivate over, looking at clusters of ideas -- linked by similar benefits and dependencies --can result in rich, diversified, and durable growth platforms. Breakthrough innovations take the dedication of resources to find and link ideas together. But the process does not require a huge investment of time and resources. It takes “innovation audits” involving a handful of people with visibility or relationships across major externally and internally facing parts of the organization. Some businesses may have a formal innovation pipeline infrastructure to leverage. But in most cases, the innovation audit team will have to leverage its collective network to uncover inventories of ideas and concepts that have been discarded, for whatever reason. Innovation audits involve a process that can be scaled small, focusing on a specific region, function, or P&L -- or can be broadened to uncover big, enterprise-wide initiatives that can create positive disruption in your industry. Here’s a brief framework: Find and explore your idea “archives” How companies generate and archive ideas can vary. Those with a more mature innovation system may have a robust pipeline of concepts bucketed by P&L, brand, or region. Others find ideas buried in sales, marketing, R&D and sometimes HR. The first step is to find inventories of ideas in whatever form. P&L and marketing leaders are usually a good place to start, as they are typically the budget owners and de facto historians of a product or brand’s evolution. Study ideas, look for patterns Once you have collected your inventory of ideas, apply several different filters to identify the most powerful clusters. For starters, look for similarities across the following: · Target – groups of ideas that will surprise and delight a common audience segment. · Occasions – day parts, touchpoints, or other points in time that can be owned or shaped by a common set of ideas. · Asset – technologies, intellectual property, infrastructure, and capabilities shared across the idea inventory. · Trends – new developments in the industry, marketplace, or culture to build ideas on. · Frame of reference – opportunities to play in a completely new space. Experiment with your clusters, layering filters to help identify the richest veins. Make gut-level assessments of feasibility and business impact to rank their relative strength. Regroup, reconsider Continue to break down your clusters into sets of individual ideas that complement, support, or follow each other. Idea sets that can be deployed over time will provide more flexibility and resiliency. Ideally, you should have a mix of quick-win ideas and long-term plays that could deliver big returns over the long term. Take a sports nutrition company with a new technology, “X Fuel,” that helps the body break down and use carbohydrates in food. A portfolio of product concepts would look like this: · Existing Category – Existing Product with X Fuel - for Current Consumer · Existing Category – Existing Product with X Fuel - for New Consumer · Existing Category – New Product with X Fuel – for Current Consumer · Existing Category – New Product with X Fuel – for New Consumer · New Category – New Product with X Fuel – for Current Consumer · New Category – New Product with X Fuel – for New ConsumerPlanning and mapping From here, you can begin to build out your business plan, prioritize development sequence, and inform the level of investment required to realize growth goals. Using the X Fuel example, developing and deploying line extension-type ideas first will create opportunities to assess the appeal of the new benefit to a broad set of consumers with low risk. Confidence in the ability to create demand with a larger audience will lead to high investment/high impact product concepts in existing and new categories. The door opens for the company to build first mover advantage. This process takes rigor, hard work, and creative thinking. But it ultimately will be more fruitful than starting from scratch -- and will lead to richer and more durable growth platforms over time.