Alternative marketing thinking

Interesting premise from HBR. How customer loyalty programs, which many marketers think is a good thing straight off, could, if not analysed right could turn out to be costly for some companies. Authors Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy writing on Conversation Starter blog on HBR asks companies to look at the right kind of customers to build their programs around. Instead of asking whether there are enough loyal customers in the customer base, companies need to focus on three more complex questions: 1) which loyal customers are good for their business, 2) how do you hang onto them, and 3) how cam companies get more customers like them. The place to begin any loyalty strategy, according to the authors, is to determine which loyal customers are profitable and which are not. A closer examination of these two types of customers always reveals very different reasons for their loyalty. Unprofitable loyal customers tend to be loyal for one of two reasons: 1) they are driven by unprofitable pricing or exchange policies, or 2) they demand an excessive amount of service that they are not willing to pay fairly to receive. More here

As one of the early brands to use social media for all kinds of things, Dell is coming through as a completely open and transparent company in many areas. From the spat with JeffJarvis, to Dell IdeaStorm and Dell Swarm in Singapore and the famous Dell Twitter account. We now have news that Dell has sold some $3 million worth of merchandise using Twitter. Thanks Dell for sharing this info. Yes it’s really a drop in the $12.3 billion pond that Dell sits on. But the news surely is a pointer into the future where smart marketers look for free media to tell stories. Even make money out of it all. From the Viral Blog

Will it all end up like this is anyone’s guess, but former advertising planner and blogger guru, Russell Davis and graphic designer Ben Terret did this little experiment out of London where they created 1000 copies of a “newspaper” out of blog posts, tweets and other stuff they found online and sent it out to people who asked for it. For free! The requests, apparently came from places as far as New Zealand. Now the idea is getting bigger. Along with 4iP, they are in the Alpha version of Newspaper Club. The idea is that any group of people with a shared interests can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet. More on Tech Crunch Europe

New work on Honda from WK London that points to the fact that that we may be beginning to see the end of the low. Nice and honest, like only Honda can. Here

Baseball

Free is here. And here, And here sorry,

Continuing on one of our favourite memes at iContract, that anything and everything a company does these days tells the world a little story. Like what Faris Yakob talks about, Transmedia, his former employer Naked NewYork has a series of blogposts under Everything Communicates. The most recent one about the supermarket chain Tesco and their slogan, Every Little Helps, how the line has become the rallying cry for the company to build its business internally with vendors and customers, of course, for whom the line was originally conceived. More from the House of Naked

Interesting one from Adage where John Wallis, Hyatt’s global head of marketing and brand strategy at Hyatt, talks of how the current recession is making such fundamental changes in the way consumers behave that decades of customer information have been rendered useless. "Every single one of our behaviors has changed in one little way or another, so anyone who is looking at the way I used to behave is looking at data that makes no sense," said Mr Wallis recently. "I can’t think of anything worse than sending a message to people who lost their job, asking them to come and stay with us. We haven’t communicated with anyone who hasn’t stayed with us since September." More here

Yahoo has just launched a tool that will help small marketers make their own online ads. The first version of its self-serve ad product, My Display Ads, is a bid to win over local advertisers and convert search advertisers to display. Yahoo partnered with Seattle-based start-up AdReady, which provides creative tools for advertisers to develop their own ads. Advertisers can pick creatives off the shelf from more than 800 display ad templates — including dancing cellphones ads proclaiming "Amazing Values" or countdown clocks — or bring their own.
From AdAge

Interesting what Cupcakes Stop is doing in NYC. Their cupcake vans keeps moving around town and this mobility gives them the opportunity to try different things with their business. Like tweeting their location as they move around different parts of the city. With some 4000 people following their tweets they have built up a nice captive audience for their business.