Alternative marketing thinking

Yes, banks are jumping on to the design wagon. Barclays, for instance has just rolled out a new branch in Manchester post its makeover. This branch gives you the feeling that you’ve just waked into a high street store. Be it an illuminated globe with rolling film footage suspended above its entrance or a designated play area for children, Barclays claims to have “listened” to its customers and arrived at this design. The lady behind this makeover, Deanna Oppenheimer has experience in revamping retail banking previously too. While at Washington Mutual, after studying ways to draw customers to branches, she and her team came up with the Occasio concept. These branches did away with traditional tellers and their windows. They were replaced with khaki-clad “concierges” who direct people to where they need to go according to what the customers need. They may be directed to one of the “teller towers,” circular help desks where they can conduct their own business or talk to an employee, or may end up at one of the touch screen service areas where they can research products and services or at a computer that will help them conduct online banking. Or they could plunk themselves on one of the private chairs and tables set up so employees can meet with customers to discuss issues that require privacy. So why so much attention to branches when everyone’s doing all that they can with mobiles and the Internet? Because the most expensive of banking products, like investments and insurance are sold over the counter, we’re told. More here.

Janet Bodnar, a known face in financial expertise has always come out strongly about letting kids use credit cards. In a three year old article on Kiplinger, where Bodnar serves as a deputy editor, she spoke about how teaching kids smart money management does not necessarily mean that they need to use a credit card. So how big is the market for young (or maybe much too young) credit card users? Pretty big, we’d think. We stumbled upon a website called Credit Card for Kids, claiming to give advice to kids and their parents about what credit card is best for them. All this, under the umbrella of “encouraging responsible spending”. But when should kids be taught about responsible spending? Agreed that parents might want to take this step when their young ones are about to go away to college and start living on their own, but would kids younger than that also use credit cards as responsibly? Or even debit cards for that matter? Lloyds TSB was recently criticized for issuing Visa Debit Cards to kids aged between 11 and 15 years after a father caught his 15-year old boy buying Viagra, cigarettes and a fake id over the internet with the debit card. Maybe it’s time to go back to the old school of hard cash to teach our kids a thing or two about money.

Information is getting democratic, personal and ubiquitous more than ever and business operators are digging into this trend. Visa is paying Facebook $2 million to advertise their new service, Visa Business Network, designed specially for Facebook users. Visa will give away $100 advertising credits to the first 20,000 US start-ups that download its service via Facebook. This online service is designed to help small firms run their businesses more efficiently. The company aims to tap into Facebook’s global audience of 80 million people. About 80,000 small businesses already have profiles on Facebook and thousands of Internet programmes have been developed specifically for the social networking site. But the majority of these applications are based on social activities, such as gaming, listening to music and picture-sharing, rather than traditional commercial activities. It will be interesting to see how this plan unfolds, even as small business operators find more ways of getting closer to their audiences. Many other companies like Visa may also follow suit to tap the power of social networking and that might come as a relief to sites such as Facebook, who would only welcome the extra income. More on this from Finextra.

On May 26, the Frankfurter Allgemeine published an interview in which Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that social networks may not be a suitable venue for online advertising. While many of us have already come to this conclusion, Schmidt’s acknowledgement is newsworthy because it’s the first time that anyone with such status in the industry has conceded that some popular sites where people spend a lot of time may not necessarily be good places to advertise. So what does this mean for sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo? More.

Check out MoneyAisle the next generation online market auction where banks actively bid against each other for every individual customer request about bank CDs and High Yield Savings Account. The customer, of course, emerges as the real winner, as he is the one who’s offered the best rate available in just a few minutes. The auction is on demand, available to customers 24/7 and is absolutely free of cost. MoneyAisle reverses the traditional auction method by making the sellers bid, and not the buyers. Watch the video on the home page about what people are saying about this very fresh concept, and read the blog here.

Beautiful campaign from Akron Children’s Hospital’s childhood cancer centre that tells stories of real patients undergoing treatment in the hospital. The site features videos, web 2.0 tools and more to show how young children with cancer do better if they are in a children’s hospital. Powerful stuff.

According to experts in social networking, people who really love a certain product or service could soon be advertising these brands. Travis Katz, MD, International MySpace/Fox Interactive Media in an interview to Campaign Magazine said that “real brand enthusiasts will become the advertisers for the brand in the MySpace community”. Read the interview.

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

A bit late reporting this one, interesting nonetheless, IKEA has opened its doors to shoppers who want to spend a night in one of their Oslo warehouses. From Guardian.

Check out these five services that allow you to lend money online. Some of these have been talked about in detail in our previous posts, like Kiva and Prosper. Whether it is helping out family or an unknown person in need in another corner of the world, web technology today allows people to reach out and make a difference.