Alternative marketing thinking

Banking solutions in rural India are about to get a new lease of life with a wireless technology solution deployed by NXP semiconductors. Already tested as a pilot in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, this path-breaking technology involves a banking representative carrying a mobile phone, a smart card reader and a finger-print reader and going to villages where people can use these to make transactions. The incorporation of the finger print recognition was necessary since a lot of the population in rural India is illiterate and does not use signatures. So will this open up a whole new world of possibilities for rural India? Slowly, but surely. With Indians being very comfortable with mobile phone technology, avenues such as these will only see them take a step towards their own convenience. SBI, one of the banks who have tried this technology already has a wide reach in the country with the maximum number of ATMs. This kind of technology will only see it reach reaching further. A recent interest from State Governments in this technology can also see a possible extension to employee and pension schemes. So not just banking, rural India could get a lot going for them on the mobile phone.

Two views on the future of mobile ads. LA Times reports how teenagers are signing up into services that send them relevant sales pitches, tips, text messages, photos, videos and more. Even while this is a reality many people believe that ideas that will tap the real potential of mobile advertising is years away from reality. Here’s the second view from Reuters.

In an age of recession when Americans are doing all that they can to save up, Bank of America has declared that their Keep the Change programme has its takers accumulating over $10 billion. What started as propagation for the bank’s own Check Card, the eight million people who signed up for this service are happy to have saved up without even actually meaning to. Customer round-ups have alone contributed to $1 billion, implying that people are actually finding ways to get more out of their money. Finextra reports here.

A few weeks ago we carried David Notolli’s piece on what brands can do in a recession. Here’s a more, in-depth view from research agency Millward Brown.

The Conclusion. During recessions, consumers and marketers alike must make the best of a bad situation. Not every brand will cut spending, but many of those that do will find themselves at a dis-advantage when the recession ends. Marketers need to make the most of every dollar spent in support of their brands if they hope to maintain strong consumer relationships. Those that succeed should then be well positioned to take advantage of weaker competition when the good times return.

The key to success during a downturn is maintaining focus. Keep your wits about you and focus on four things: your competition, your brand, your customers, and your communication. If you have a strong, successful brand, focus on what has worked for you so far. If your brand is in a relatively weak position, focus on systematically exploiting what strengths you have while addressing your weaknesses.

Concentrate on your core brands and products. Just like what David wrote, brand needs to support their core proposition and emphasize its value. Strong brands can support a price premium. Consu-mers have clear and strong associations with these brands and know what makes them desirable. Focus your marketing effort on reinforcing what made your brand successful in the first place.

Don’t cut quality. As the pressure to find cost savings increases, companies may be tempted to cut back on the quality of their products or services.

Think internal branding and morale. The motivation level of employees is critical to a company’s success, particularly in service industries. Therefore, workers need to be convinced of the merits of their brand and reassured that their jobs are safe. Use internal communication to remind your staff that they make a difference.

Focus on Your Customers. Keep in touch. Whether the category is B2C or B2B, a brand’s biggest asset during a recession is its existing customer base.

Focus on Your Communication. Review your budget allocations. Your customers are looking to maximize their value for money. You should do the same. Think about the relative cost and effectiveness of the available media channels. You may conclude that you can’t afford to completely pass on TV, but you can extend your TV investment in less expensive media like print, radio and outdoor advertising.

Make your creative work harder. In any communication channel, the best way to leverage your spend is to put it behind high-quality creative. A meta-analysis of econometric sales modeling published in Admap (February 2006) found creative to be the biggest potential multiplier of profit (other than market size). Across a wide variety of categories, brands, and channels, Paul Dyson and Karl Weaver found that creative had five times as much impact on profit as did budget allocation.

Download the story. Here.

Human beings are social creatures. Groups evolved from common ancestors, bound by common language, common traditions and mutually rewarding goals. But the industrial revolution created new cities and towns and the emergence of cheap travel ensured that communities that once lived together for centuries broke up and grew disparate.

Soon economists and anthropologists were busy finding ways to group people with different interests, views and beliefs. Age, income, job profile, education, family size became some of the yardsticks used to put together different people into similar groups.

Direct marketing went a step further. Instead of talking to large groups, these marketers went out to create ways to speak to individuals. 1 to 1 became their mantra. Engaging with one person, creating customized products and services that could fulfill his unique needs became the order of the day. Tools like CRM were able to take one to one marketing to levels of sharpness that could never have been possible.

The world is changing once again. New communities are forming online that are in many ways similar to the old ones that broke up a century or two ago. In fact these communities are bound by a different set of values that go far beyond the ones that bound traditional ones. What’s more, these groups can come together and break up at will. The recent protests against Flickr allowing video uploads were from people around the globe who came together in a matter of few days and broke away the day after the protest was over.

Even more interesting is that a person can be a part of multiple groups, leading multiple lives quickly and easily.

So are we about to see the emergence of GRM (Group Relationship Marketing programs) and the emergence of specialists who deal with social groups? While this may look like a simple evolutionary step, there could be interesting challenges that need to be thought through before direct marketers take a plunge into engaging with social groups.

Unlike talking to one person and convincing her about the values of buying into something, groups are a little more complicated. There is a lot of chatter that goes about within these groups. Also, if a person within the group has had a positive or negative experience with a product or service, then that pretty much seals the chances of acceptance or rejection within that community.

Another interesting angle to these new group formations is that people have started to understand how much power these groups can actually wield. Unlike in the past, a stray complaint could have been handled one to one and resolved without too many people becoming aware of the problem. In the new group-forming culture, small hiccups could turn into big problems for companies and
marketers.

Interesting reads. The new book by Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody . Al Gore’s new environmental effort, We Can Solve It. Steve Yastrow’s new book, We. The Ideal Customer Relationship

One of the problems that marketers are having with new media is that there are not enough reliable measurement tools to calculate ROIs and other metrics that they are so comfortable with. According to Ian Scaffer of Ad Age, this cat and mouse game is set to continue, with ad models continuing to lag behind changing media habits of consumers. More from AdAge.

Generation Y is making bankers take notice and is now seen as a very distinctive segment altogether. It is the most demographic group on the horizon with great spending power. The annual spending is projected to be around $24.5 trillion by the year 2015. From now on any strategy or plan that does not have the needs of the Gen Y in mind is a complete non-starter when it comes to long term impact. To read more click here.

For the first time in three years, credit and debit cards fraud has risen by 25% in the United Kingdom, amounting to a loss of GBP 535m. However, this is still lower than the scary numbers before the banks brought in the ‘chip and PIN’ technology. Chip and PIN is the name of a government-backed initiative in the United Kingdom to implement the EMV standard for secure payments. There is also a similar initiative in the Republic of Ireland called Chip and PIN Ireland. Banks throughout Europe have also agreed to bring in this technology by 2010. The fact that more countries are upgrading to this initiative will reduce the opportunities of using stolen cards outside the UK. More on this story here.

Two interesting stories that have started a lot of buzz this week. Esther Dyson’s op-ed piece in Wall Street Journal on new thinking about online ads and how this could change the pecking order of many online companies.

He writes: “While the big news in the online world focuses on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, a more profound revolution is taking place on the online social networks: The discussion about privacy is changing as users take control over their own online data.

The current online-advertising model will become less effective, even as it gets increasingly sophisticated. New players are emer-ging to devalue the spaces that the ad giants are currently fighting over. Companies like NebuAd, Project Rialto (Funded by Alcatel & Lucent), Phorm, Frontporch and Adzilla are pitching tools directly to Internet service providers, that will enable them to track users and show them relevant ads”.

One of the key predictions in Esther Dyson piece is the involvement of uses in the whole thing. A good example of which he feels is travel site Dopplr, where users get together “and list their trips, and see how they intersect with their friends’ itineraries. “Oh, we’ll both be in London April 4? Let’s get together!” Or, “Juan and Alice will be in town next Tuesday. Let’s hold a dinner!” You can imagine or visit equivalent approaches for books (a hypothetical Amazon 2.0, new and more persona-lized), clothes (Glam.com and Stardoll.com), and even money management”

“So what’s the business model? I’ll “friend” British Airways, which will say, “We see you’re going to Moscow next month. Why not fly through London and we’ll give you 10,000 extra miles?” I’m no longer in a bucket of frequent travelers, my privacy protected. I’m an individual with specific travel plans, which I intentionally make visible to preferred vendors. British Airways, of course, will pay Dopplr a handsome sponsorship fee to be eligible to be my “friend”

If friending is what Dyson is talking about Umair Haque is writing in HBR blogs about the need for brands to do less to become relevant.

One of the examples he quotes is of Nike, who are beginning to rethink communications as a set of services that listen to and benefit consumers, instead of impose costs on them.

Like this story in NY Times “…Behind the shift is a fundamental change in Nike’s view of the role of advertising. No longer are ads primarily meant to grab a person’s attention while they’re trying to do something else - like reading an article. Nike executives say that much of the company’s future advertising spending will take the form of services for consumers, like workout advice, online communities and local sports competitions.”

Haique sums up by saying that “Like Google, the Nike guys have come to the conclusion that new sources of advantage must be built on finding ways to invest in consumers – on communications that benefit consumers, not impose costs on them. In turn, these new modes of communication will let Nike talk less – and listen more”

Ethnographers love it. The overload of information and data that technology is spawning. If you are a researcher in the human condition, you will understand the value of all the seemingly meaningless data that’s exploding around us.

Like the other day we were playing around with FlickrLeech a site that displays the most interesting pictures of the day, as shown on the photo sharing site, Flickr. And the number of beautiful images of the moon told us that the 20th of Feb was a full moon and that the moon looked particularly good around the world that evening. Much more impressive it was in the previous month.

We are leaving some imports bits of dust that anthropologists and others can scan and find new meanings, in our searches on Google and Wikipedia, (The link is not up-to-date) stuff that can tgive the future generations a glimpse of how we lived, what we did and what the state of the world was. Like on Facebook, a casual phrase under what are we doing now could contain rich pickings.

There are some beautiful experiments that are happening at the moment on gathering all this information and making new things out of it. And none better than the ones imagined by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. We Feel Fine, The Universe, and their recent interactive show at MOMA, all using technology to tell human stories in completely new ways.

There was another little research experiment that was conducted during the recent superbowl where a few Forrester researchers got together and signed up people to participate in a Twitter enabled advertising rating exploration. Some 70 people signed up for the research and during the four hour show, sending in short “reviews” of ads, as they were being broadcast. In fact the results of this new age survey was not very different from the ones that USA Today has been running for some two decades now.

Many analysts are writing off Focus Groups as being a part of a different era. Now is the time to research to get into our heads with FMRI Scanners and neuro imaging. Ideo talks of unfocus groups. Someother in search of new jargon set up emmersion groups and build personas to understand how people behave.

Just like with everything around us, research too is evolving. While it maybe easy to write off the old ways and jump in and embrace the new, the thing what we may need is people who understand how things work. Old and new ways to use them intelligently because the human minds hasn’t changed significantly ever since the old models were invented. What we have are new places to leave our stories, and new ways to discover them.

Update: Similar thoughts in AdAge