Canadian Marketing Blog

Scent Marketing

Does scent play an impeccable role in the success of a brand?
How would anybody relate to their favorite bakery if they couldn’t smell fresh cinnamon buns drifting through the air? Human’s posses five senses (six if you’re born in a town full of radioactive pollution), these senses include: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Are marketers aware of the power their brand can have by utilizing one of these senses to stimulate a response from their product?

I’m a 3rd year student studying Integrated Marketing Communications in Kingston, Ontario. Located in the main hallway of my school is a very popular Pizza store. Many students flock to this location on a daily basis to devour their daily intake of grease (a great substance known among students to fight the dreaded hangover). Just a couple of months ago the Pizza store began baking garlic bread sticks; within days there was not enough supply to reach the demand. Why did these breadsticks become such a hit so quickly—and without any advertising? In a hundred foot radius the air was embraced with such a thick smell of garlic the temptation was impossible to resist.

There is a famous slogan in the advertising world by Toucan Sam, “Just follow your nose”. It is amazing how many times people are drawn to products because of the smell. Some may not be aware of this; their drive toward a product could be completely buried in the subconscious.

A person might choose one car over another because of the way it smells on the inside—perhaps, as a child; they remember what their parent’s brand new car smelled like. So how can a business use scent in order to reach company objectives? First, it depends on what product you are selling. Second, it is important to decide on what medium to use, and no, television and radio cannot permit smell. Lets take a look at the folks who sell hot dogs on the streets. Usually, they will cook onions on a side burner to draw consumers to their stand by the smell of onions. Every fast food chain has a different smell inside their stores. I bet if you were blind folded you could instantly smell the difference between a Subway and A&W. We must all remember that the power of scent can make, or break an establishment.

If you walked into a restaurant and the place smelled like a farm; my guess is that you'd probably leave, never return, and tell all your peers about the experience.

I can guarantee that readers of this blog have been attracted to somebody by their scent. In the world of marketing, we must be conscience about what our brand, location and products smell like.

By Eli Nicholson, a student at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, ON.

Our Own Worst Enemies

My wife recently had an interesting customer experience that, although she categorized as positive, I am sure the service provider would categorize as negative. My wife was trying to redeem points from a loyalty program toward an airfare. Her first stop was online where her options would have required eight times the number of points she had anticipated. Dissuaded by what she saw, she called the loyalty contact centre. By talking to an agent she was able to obtain an upgraded ticket at one-fifth the number of points as was required by the sel-serve option presented on the internet.

My wife was delighted with the service and results that she received from the contact centre, but as a contact centre guy myself, I was haunted by the unnecessary call that was driven into the contact centre. At the core of the issue for me was the inability for two customer-touching channels to harmonize their servicing strategy. The internet, a channel used to improve customer experiences and reduce costly calls to the contact centre, had in fact driven an additional call into the contact centre.

This experience is not unique to loyalty programs or an online contact centre strategy. We see this type of unintended end result frequently caused by organizations with multiple customer touch points. When you consider all the potential ways in which you touch a customer (inbound calls, outbound calls, marketing solicitations, statements and invoices, applications, letters and so on), its easy to understand how difficult it becomes to maintain consistency within a customer touch point communication strategy.

I have seen organizations where customers question that company’s price competitiveness not because of the outside competitive market, but rather because different channels are offering different rates for the same product suite. I have seen organizations where statement inserts have not been communicated to the contact centre and thus resulted in frustrating customer experiences and lower than anticipated take-up rates. All of theses types of issues, and many more similar ones, drive both customer dissatisfaction and increased cost.

The overriding issue seems to be that the larger an organization grows, the more touch points and channels it has to communicate with customers. As the number of customer touch points grow, the control over the consistency and sharing of information internally seems to weaken.

What is missing is a customer contact guru: an individual or a team who does not own a specific customer contact channel, but rather is empowered to ensure that all information sent or accessible to a customer is appropriately disseminated within the corporate organization. A group that is tasked for identifying and eliminating conflicting information between channels. Effectively, a group that makes sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Until such time that we recognize that all of our touch points with our customers need to be zealously guarded, we will continue to be our own worst enemies.

Richard Litvack, Vice President, Operations, Citi Cards Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Contact Centre Council

The Humanity and Biology of Brands

First a confession: When I was at University, I struggled with the concept of branding. An odd thing for someone in the business of building brands to admit, but it’s true; as a concept branding never made much sense. Every book had a different theory, every agency offered a different approach and every expert had some unique model or metric. Depending on who you talked to, or what you read, a brand could be a pyramid or a personality, an experience or an equation.

It seemed that branding was either the most compelling and complicated topic in marketing, or it was a load of crap.

Now an insight: Brands are like human beings. They exist as a mirror of our motivations, reflecting our ideals and dreams, fears and frailties. Nothing can exist in branding that doesn’t already exist in our everyday lives. In fact, if we want to better understand brands, we don’t need more complicated metrics, we need to better understand ourselves.

So how can we gain a better understanding? We need to go back to basics and re-consider the psychological and biological parallels between human beings and human brands.

Just like people, brands are born. Where a brand is born and to whom, are important factors in determining its development. A brand may have great nature (visual appeal or personality) but without the right nurture (parental support and security) it may never survive. As marketers, what type of parent are you and how will that affect the development of your brand?

Just like people, brands go through adolescence. Very few brands can become an overnight success; indeed it takes time to establish an identity and become independent. Attempting to circumvent this process can be as detrimental for a brand as it is for a person; the childhood stars of today are the forgotten failures of tomorrow (think Macaulay Culkin or Extreme Football League). What was your brand’s adolescence like; did it experiment and gain experience?

Just like people, brands need the right environment. As Prof. Richard Florida found in his study of cities, “the place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose.” The same can be said for a brand. A brand must pick a place that will help it build relationships and earn the income it needs to survive. Is your brand in the right environment, an environment that matches its motivations?

Just like people, brands can get sick. We like to believe that we, and the things we create, are invincible - but nothing could be further from the truth. Human beings and brands are fragile and prone to illness. Even the strongest leaders can get sick (Bill Clinton or Toyota) and without proper treatment they may die (Michael Jackson or Pontiac). When was your last brand check-up, do you have insurance, or are you working your golden goose to death?

Just like people, brands must reproduce. Reproduction isn’t just fun, it’s fundamental to our survival. By reproducing we allow our species to adapt to the environment and evolve. A brand must also reproduce; it must adapt and evolve itself in order to maintain relevance and to respond to changes in the environment. Is your brand ready to reproduce?

As a brand strategist, having worked across three continents with many multinational clients, I believe there is something missing in our understanding of branding. As a morphological researcher, I believe what’s missing is an understanding of their humanity. Because brands are more than a metric or a model, they are a mirror of our psychological and biological motivations; and to properly understand them, we must better understand ourselves.

By Nick Black, Vice-President of Strategic Insight, Concerto Marketing Group

Boomers Go Online to Stay In Touch

As I’ve posted on this blog about two years ago, social networking sites are not just for young people. According to a new report on this subject by eMarketer, baby boomers check out social media sites as they’ve always been good communicators, as proven by their presence at sit-ins, protests and demonstrations in the 1960s.

About 47 percent of online boomers maintain a profile on at least one social network, according to several sources. Their contacts include family, friends and co-workers of all ages. Burst Media reported that 47.5 percent of online boomer respondents had a social network profile in June 2009. Last September, Deloitte found 46 percent of boomer respondents said they maintained a social network profile. Both comScore and Anderson Analytics data show that Facebook is the favourite social network for boomers.

And the numbers keep growing. While millennials’ use of social profile remained fairly steady, boomers’ social network presence has actually grown since a 2007 survey, when only 30 percent said they maintained a profile on a social network. Boomers are expanding their networking efforts to include both online and offline connections. They will be interested in online marketing messages that help them build on their connections and make new friends.

Customer Insights and the Qualitative and Quantitative Mix

Word of mouth is likely the oldest form of advertising and traditionally one that has been nearly impossible to target and measure. But that is changing, and changing quickly. In addition to web analytics and third party audience measurement data, there is an increasing wealth of information available for organizations to measure and mine. Consumer feedback sites, social networks, blogs as well as on-site tools all provide a wealth of information that companies can use for product and service improvement. With these opportunities come new challenges, as success is a measure of more than just numbers and percentages.

The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (April 6 – 9) is a good place to go to really understand how far eMetrics has come. One of the panel presentations, that includes Lisa Lloyd of Microsoft (who will also be wearing her CMA hat) will address this very issue.

On a related panel, named Predictive Analytics and Digital Marketing - Paul Tyndall of RBC (also wearing his CMA hat), will be discussing how RBC and other marketers are utilizing predictive modeling in the online space.

Full disclosure – CMA is one of the association sponsors of the Summit.

.... if you are a member of CMA, you can save an additional 15% off the regular attendee rate by using discount code CMAPARTNER15 when registering for the conference.

Elizabeth Harvey, Manager of Councils and Self Regulatory Programs, CMA

The Tribe has Spoken - Are You Listening?

I met Marty Neumeier (renown speaker and author of Zag, Brand Gap) when he was conducting a workshop at the Design Exchange. In conversation, Marty shared that he began his career implementing brand strategies only to realize there were a lot of flawed strategies that execution couldn’t fix. This prompted Marty to focus his effort on brand differentiation – the #1 strategy of a successful brand in Marty’s eyes. If you’re looking for verification of the power of differentiation think IPOD. 4th to market in the MP3 player category, Apple has 72% market share, a price point that is 2 to 5 times higher than the competitors....well I think you get the idea. High performance brands are way out in front in terms of loyalty, profitability and they’re tough to beat – unless of course you find your own unique way of differentiating.

One of the first rules is you can’t be all things to all people. In the session Marty talked about knowing your “tribe”. I caught up with Marty to get further clarity on why the tribe matters. “You have said the emphasis today needs to be on the Unique Buying Tribe rather than the Unique Selling Proposition. Can you explain that?”

Marty Neumeier: The Unique Selling Proposition was the brainchild of Rosser Reeves, an advertising genius from the "Mad Men" days. He worked for the Ted Bates agency and wrote a bestseller called, "Reality in Advertising." His thesis was simple: Advertisers need to focus all their energy on one strong claim or one strong concept. In a time when the industry believed "the more you tell, the more you sell," this was a refreshing idea that caught on almost immediately. It was so powerful, in fact, that to this day advertisers search high and low for "the big idea" to hang their campaigns on.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this inclination, as far as it goes. Without a unique value proposition, your campaign---and your business---will lose focus and have no compelling point of differentiation. The problem is that the principle now seems dated. Customers today don't like to be sold. What they like to do is buy, and they buy in tribes. Every brand has a tribe that supports it. If you talk WITH your tribe, they may well continue to support it. If you talk AT your tribe-using manipulative one-way conversations-they'll tune out in a New York second.

So rather than focusing on a Unique Selling Proposition, focus on a Unique Buying Tribe. If you find the right tribe and give it the right stuff, you'll get enough love to sustain your brand. People crave tribal identity. What they want to know is, "If I buy this product, what will this make me?"

Thanks Marty for sharing your insights. Marty is currently Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency.

Marketing's Outlook for 2010

This is year four of the CMO Council’s annual Marketing Outlook study that probes media and marketing intentions for the year ahead - and year two that CMA is a fielding partner. The study is fielded globally; to the CMO Council's members and through its partners, therefore, a comprehensive and valuable benchmark tool for any organization.

The study’s executive summary will be freely available as a download, and the full report available only to respondents.

You can link to take the survey here - takes about 15 minutes to complete.

Survey closes end of day on March 4th.

Early Adopters and the Mass Market

A well-established principle of marketing says that a small group of early adopters can spur mass-market acceptance of a new product. But how do early adopters react when its brand is accepted by the mass market? And do mass markets react the same way that early adopters do to the same brand? Marketers assume that dominating the first market (early adopters) will also help them dominate the second market (mass market).

Wharton marketing professors David Reibstein and John Zhang have explored the topic and say that a company could experience a backlash as early adopters move on to other new products. An example is Porsche, a successful brand for sports car enthusiasts. The brand saw a decline in sports car sales after it entered the SUV mass market. The backlash was significant.

In fact, as The New York Times points out, teenagers would rather text their friends a message rather than post it on Twitter. Instead, Twitter has been embraced by an older demographic. Twitter’s success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations. The brand has proved that an offering can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular. Twitter is defying the traditional model.

So why do marketers assume that success with early adopters will lead to quick adoption by the mass market? The "early adopter" concept is flawed because they aren’t always a good indicator of the growth potential of a brand nor do they have an extended Customer Lifetime Value. Most early adopters move on to the next big thing and may not be loyal to brands.

What is more important is to identify your most profitable potential customers. These profitable customers will eventually be the core of your growth strategy and profitability. The important indicator is the rate of adoption - the relative speed with which the most profitable consumers adopt an innovation. Success depends on an organization's ability to build and maintain loyal and valued customer relationships. Therefore, it is essential to build refined strategies for customers based on their value to the organization. The best marketing strategies pursue long-term relationships with profitable customers.

Two questions for you: (1) Who is your most profitable customer? (2) What is their lifetime value to your organization?

Please email me for our "View from the Top" series on best practices in customer satisfaction strategies.

Search Engine Marketing for Beginners

In my current role at a home and auto insurance company, we sell our products exclusively through independent brokers. That said, we are keenly interested in providing value add services to our broker partners to ensure they are both growing and retaining the right customers.

Like many businesses today, brokerages know they need to have an online presence but often lack the technical know-how. As a result, our marketing department has put together a series of marketing best practices for our brokerages to help them get started. To compliment Jim Estill’s blog post here late last month, SEO - Search Engine Optimization Basics , I thought I would share one such piece that attempts to demystify Search Engine Marketing. In our Introduction to Search Engine Marketing we tried to simplify SEM and provide some tangible tips for businesses trying to get started in the SEM space.

What SEM strategies and tactics have worked for your business, and which have not?

Martha Turner, AVP Marketing Services and Campaign Management, Aviva Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Direct Marketing Council

Social Media in B-to-B Survey

Our most recent b-to-b social media survey examined a wide range of issues, including strategy, budget, tactics and measurement. While social media appears to have moved past the “shiny new toy” phase, clear goals are still evolving. Companies must understand opportunities and limitations as they move beyond trials to integrate social media with more established marketing functions

During the past 24 months, SiriusDecisions has collected data and insight about the evolution of social media in b-to-b as related to awareness, adoption, measurement and much more. In this post, we review a few findings from our 2009 Social Media in Business survey.

A cross-section of b-to-b organizations that sell complex, enterprise b-to-b products and services participated in the quantitative portion of the survey, which was co-sponsored by social media vendor Visible Technologies. Appropriate data and insight from SiriusDecisions benchmarking activities, consulting engagements and client inquiries were added to the sample as appropriate. As observed in prior surveys, all phases of marketing – including reputation initiatives – are now being more closely evaluated to determine return on investment. While there is a general understanding that social media is not necessarily the most efficient direct demand creation engine (especially in the short term), leading-edge organizations are increasingly testing new ways of integrating social media initiatives with other key marketing activities. Once organizations have gained working knowledge of how various social media activities can impact their prospects and customers at which particular points in the buying cycle, they can better align social media content to demand creation and sales enablement.

Our survey tracked the behaviors of b-to-b organizations around a number of social media activities. Specific observations in two areas include:

One: Usage and Objectives. We asked organizations to rank order how they are using social media, with the most important objectives listed first. While there was no dominant consensus, generating awareness ranked highest (26% of respondents) followed by engaging with customers to promote loyalty and retention (18%), and interfacing with analysts and other influencers (16%). Marketing specific products finished fourth in the rankings (15%). Each of the top four responses points to active, information-to-the-market type activities; monitoring and responding to customer support issues finished immediately behind the group. Perhaps this information feedback use is assumed to be part of all social media initiatives; however, the value of social media to constantly take the pulse of the market and its perception of your organization’s reputation should not be underestimated. Without a formal process or dedicated resources to monitor market perception, a company can be easily overwhelmed by misunderstandings or misinformation, hindering its ability to make any headway in the social media space at all.

Two: Demand Generation Support and Alignment. Studies by SiriusDecisions of broader reputation activities during the past 24 months have revealed a growing trend toward integrating reputation and demand creation. In our last survey, 33% of organizations reported that more than half the time, they linked their reputation with demand creation activities. In our social media survey, only 15% of respondents reported that more than half the time, they use social media to support their demand creation efforts. More than two-thirds of respondents reported that 25% of the time or less, they align social media with their demand creation activities. Clearly, organizations are still in need of a strategy to best leverage social media within the demand creation process. Organizations must begin to consider the ways that social media tactics can be applied beyond the top of the demand waterfall, such as for pipeline acceleration efforts and more comprehensive, just-in-time sales readiness.

Slowly but surely, social media technologies and systems are emerging from their initial perception as just a shiny new toy to be played with, then discarded. As organizations identify and recognize the risks and rewards of social media, they have begun to clarify best usages and objectives for specific initiatives, as well as to learn both the nuances and positioning of various social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook. Knowing which watering holes are frequented by which audiences – and what types of content can best influence them – can help marketing and sales organizations better customize messages. All of this guidance and information helps organizations understand the optimal role of social media for supporting broader demand creation and sales initiatives.