Marketing

Whether you’re selling an innovative new razor, a new season of a television series or a provocative message for an established sporting goods brand, it’s all about the launch. Making a big splash—the right kind of splash—plays an increasingly critical role for long-term success in consumer markets.

Hispanics are currently the fastest-growing demographic in the nation, and already make up 18 percent of the total U.S. population. And yet, despite these numbers, marketers have been slow to connect with U.S Hispanics as consumers. For a long time, advertisers lacked definitive data that could justify investment in reaching Hispanic consumers, particularly through Spanish-language TV. Until now.  By Carrie Stimmel - EVP, Lifestyle & Hispanic Advertising Sales, NBCUniversal

DTC businesses are flourishing these days, promising to disrupt categories that have been at a standstill for years. Recently I spent some time with Dr. Emmanuel Probst, author of the book “Brand Hacks”, who suggests that DTC companies might be missing a crucial ingredient that will ensure their long-term success.  by Nigel Hollis

Today’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers are under immense pressure to bring products to market faster in order to capitalize on emerging trends and defend against smaller players, among many other reasons. As a result, many marketers are looking to borrow agile innovation techniques developed in the tech world and apply them to CPG. But Nielsen research has found that lifting an approach that works quite well for many technology companies may have less successful outcomes in CPG.

By Gonzalo López Martí - Creative director, etc./LMMiami.com

• A few years back, a senior marketing executive employed by a very large soft drinks company asked me what I would do with their flagship brand of sugary carbonated liquid, which was starting to confront strong public opinion headwinds as one of the main culprits of the growing epidemic of obesity, tooth decay, diabetes and so on and so forth.
• An unfair accusation if you ask me but a problem for the company nevertheless.
• To be sure, it could be argued that the volume-based nature of the soft drinks industry is partly to blame.
• Still, nobody forces people to chug down the thing.
• Anyhoo.

When it comes to transformational technologies, the irony that unites them all is how they're routinely hyped before proven, applied, or even understood among CMOs and marketers. By the time they change the world, people barely notice and are well onto shinier objects. Technological innovations morph and rebrand as they spread throughout society and the business sector. The information superhighway, grid computing, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are just a few examples.

Brands are realizing they can't thrive by personalizing only a few customer experiences. Because the brand relationship with the customer changes every day, every hour, with every experience, the investments in occasional outreach are better spent on a process that continuously learns about customers. With that kind of process at hand, chief experience officers and digital leaders are coming to see their ability to drive hyper-personalization is finally within their grasp.