Marketing

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are on a rapid ascent, disrupting traditional retail. These digitally native brands are experts at cutting out costs and efficiently acquiring customers. They are also succeeding as “brands” in a very traditional sense—by identifying the unmet needs of modern consumers.

Chapter Two:  Hispanic Americans – There have been Hispanics living in the present-day United States since the Spanish started roaming around Florida looking for the Fountain of Youth. But it was the 1980 Census that led some white Americans to wonder whether the country was “browning.” The Census made headlines when it proclaimed that there were 14.6 million Hispanics living in the U.S., an increase of over 50 percent from 1970. By 1990, the number, largely driven by immigration, had increased to 22.4 million. Headlines were made again, big time, when the 2000 Census showed that there were 35.3 million, meaning that Hispanics had surpassed African Americans as the largest minority in the country. In 2018, that number was more than 60 million, over 18 percent of the U.S. population. The number of Hispanics in the U.S. is expected to grow to 106 million by 2050, at which time Hispanics will make up nearly 30 percent of the population.  By David Morse / New America Dimensions

Advertisers across industries share a common challenge: how to know which marketing activities are actually driving profit and which are wasting spend.  One way to answer these questions is a measurement approach called marketing mix modeling. Marketing mix modeling calculates the total effect that every marketing channel and its key dimensions, such as product and geography, have on sales and other performance metrics, while controlling for exogenous factors such as weather and seasonality that impact business performance.

No longer a futurist’s daydream, artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting significant investment and growing quickly. According to a December 2018 estimate from tech research firm Tractica, the direct and indirect application of AI software generated $5.4 billion in worldwide revenues in 2017, and is forecast to produce a whopping $105.8 billion by 2025.

In this video, Keith Reinhard, Chairman Emeritus, DDB, states, “We over-appreciate data and under-appreciate data”, and he is right. We tend to over-appreciate the data which tells us what people do, and under-appreciate the data that tells us why they do it.  by Nigel Hollis

In 1979, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter launched his Five Forces framework with a powerful statement: “The essence of strategy formulation is coping with competition, yet it is easy to view competition too narrowly and too pessimistically.”

Consumers today have infinite options when it comes to premium content, which presents a unique challenge for brands and advertisers: attention is finite, and it’s far too easy for consumers to tune out a brand’s message if it isn’t relevant to them or their interests.

To really understand the attitudinal power of brands we need to look beyond the absolute scores and instead examine relative strengths and weaknesses. If more people say good things about a brand than claim to use it then that difference represents an opportunity to grow, provided that association has a positive relationship with business outcomes.  by Nigel Hollis

If marketers understand the need for a balanced approach to understanding performance, why do they still focus on short-term sales as the primary indicator of campaign success?

In its definitive CMO tenure report, Winmo finds that female CMOs, which make up about 42 percent of tenures across industries, rotate up and out of roles five months sooner than their male counterparts (37.5 months vs. 43 months).

Brand choice is driven by primarily by emotion and feeling. People don’t make brand choices based on logical, persuasive marketing arguments (as many in our industry still like to believe), rather the more you feel for a brand, the more likely you are to buy it. But is this equally true for all product categories?  by Nigel Hollis

Choice has always been coveted among consumers. When it comes to the media universe, the abundance in devices, services and content has never been more prevalent, which in turn is opening up a complex web of consumption behaviors. With all of this technology at consumers’ literal fingertips, which of these platforms are they focused on?

ThinkNow released its ThinkNow Snapshot: 2018 Total Market Markers + Milestones, identifying the top trends that shaped multicultural research. Milestones range from shaky consumer sentiment to the proliferation of mobile shopping and from the rise of stream-ing services to the new multicultural mainstream consumer.

As far as news coverage of emerging trends in marketing go, this one was exceptional: “New Report Cites Skyrocketing Growth of Internal Agencies,” the Ad Age headline shouted, while Adweek weighed in with, “ANA Report: In-Housing Agency Work Is Accelerating.” MediaPost followed suit with “ANA: Over Three-Quarters of Our Members Have In-House Agencies” and Campaign US ran with, “Number of In-House Agencies Rise Dramatically, ANA Study Finds.”

To grow sales, more companies are teaming up to attract each other’s customers—and persuade their existing customers to buy more—by creating a positive association with another brand. Well-known alliances include McDonald’s Happy Meals with Disney toys and Dell PCs with Intel processors.

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will

What if there was a proven, brand-safe video ad format that’s equally effective for targeting unique consumers and regions, or blanketing the whole country with a campaign? A medium that offers loyal, engaged audiences at competitive CPMs and the power of sight, sound, motion, and narrative?  What if marketers found out that their agencies won’t even consider it for campaigns because they can’t buy it at their preferred profit margin?

A brand no longer needs, nor can embrace, all trends. It must create sub-brands specifically designed for each niche, and reach each one using algorithms. The organic food brand Mãe Terra recently bought by Unilever has been a smart move in this way.  by Anahi Lucas & Felipe Ramirez

Brands that are perceived as innovative and that also provide a great experience – meeting consumers’ needs where and when they are wanted – grew the most in value in the latest BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable US Brands ranking, announced by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown.

Today’s shopping expectations have created new selling opportunities for businesses in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry. “Consumers and businesses now expect every interaction to be shoppable–whether on the web, mobile, social, in-product or in-store,” said Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager of Adobe Digital Marketing.