Marketing

Retailers still trying to unlock the question of millennial spending patterns, take note: Millennials are sagging under a heavier debt load than Gen Xers faced at this point in their economic lives.

The report tracks the value of the world’s most valuable brands and provides insights on the potential of strong brands. The total brand value of the 2018 BrandZ Top 100 is $4.4 trillion following a record 21% growth – equating to a rise of nearly $750 billion.

Five the key themes firmly set on the CMO agenda: revenue generation, customer experience, data, content and processes.

While agencies have adapted to consulting firms’ disruption of the media landscape and their role as auditors in the client-agency partnership, we feel strongly that Accenture Interactive’s new Programmatic Services unit is a clear conflict of interest, positioning Accenture to engage in media trading and then also be responsible for auditing the trading results and processes of its competitors.

A new study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Deloitte, surveying close to 200 chief marketers worldwide, revealed many CMOs are still focused on the traditional storytelling aspect of their position and are less comfortable with aspects associated with driving growth, including acting as revenue science practitioners and customer experience architects.

Can marketing be too efficient? It seems like a silly question, I know, but hold your judgement for a couple of minutes and read on. A review of a new book titled “The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do” written by Edward Tenner raised a couple of important issues that apply to marketing as well as other disciplines.  by Nigel Hollis

The failure rate of new products has always been high. However, in recent years, a number of nimble upstarts have emerged as fierce competitors to well-established category leaders. Their success has driven many large manufacturers to question whether their resources, scale and processes are weaknesses that should be discarded in favor of a new “agile” playbook emulating these emerging competitors. However, it’s easy to forget that the most prominent new players represent a very small sample, and there are many others who failed to gain traction along the way. This results in “survivor bias” when assessing the performance of small players; because only the surviving brands are tracked, the average performance of small brands is artificially inflated.

Customer engagement is a priority for many, but no single action plan exists for how to measure it. Some brands simply identify and tally customer engagements, while others truly understand the value of each action.

In this post, Dale Beaton, Global Head of Brand Guidance Insights Division at Kantar, considers why marketers need to know what they are trying to achieve and measure their progress toward that goal if they are to maximize the return on their marketing investment.

The Culture Marketing Council: The Voice of Hispanic Market (CMC) announced today that Sprint is the winner of the 2018 CMC Marketer of the Year Award. Sprint joins a prestigious short list of elite brands that have received the award, including Ford, McDonald’s, State Farm, Toyota, and Walmart. Alberto Lorente, multicultural marketing director for Sprint, will accept the award and discuss the wireless carrier’s commitment to the Hispanic and multicultural market at CMC’s 2018 Annual Conference. The session will take place on Wednesday, June 6 at 9:00 a.m. at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles.

Driving frequency of visits and encouraging more small basket purchases is likely to be a key driver of growth for retailers in the first half of 2018; and with 77% of shoppers actively look for a promotion, this could be one way for convenience retailers to help encourage one extra item in the basket behaviours.

The ARF’s Scott McDonald tackled the topic by providing tips on the best use of A/B tests vs. Market-Mix Models (MMM) vs. Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) to measure marketing ROI in an article published in ForbesMagazines. His overall recommendation: “all three of these techniques can provide value, but none should be treated as ‘the answer.’”

The 2018 ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference was chock full of important learnings on marketing finance and procurement.

After Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, and Procter & Gamble ads were found next to violent and inappropriate online content, brand safety became a major concern for marketers. Months later, the dust has settled and brands are deep in discussions about what brand safety means for them—and what needs to happen to create change and avoid future crises.

The ubiquity of the smartphone and its integrated camera has brought about a new era of consumer behavior. One specific form of camera marketing, the use of augmented reality (AR), is quickly gaining traction according to a new report released by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report is titled Augmented Reality: Is the Camera the Next Big Thing in Advertising?

Despite a mandate to drive growth, chief marketers are still stuck in a decade-long rut that has yet to see them fully optimize the lifetime value of existing customers. In 2008, when asked if brands were fully realizing the revenue potential of customers, 76 percent said no. Ten years later, 77 percent of respondents to the same question in a new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council audit still say no, and 10 percent say they are not even sure.

A while back I wrote about the need to break out of the comfort zone in order to create brand growth. The scary thing is that data can be one of the things that helps create the comfort zone. Our data becomes the lens through which we see the world and the real opportunities lie outside our view.  by Nigel Hollis

The apparel market hasn’t reached crisis mode, but shopping behavior has changed in ways that are affecting clothing retailers. Yoga pants are now just pants, fewer consumers have separate work and leisure wardrobes, and younger shoppers are supposedly less materialistic (or maybe just poor), embracing experiences instead of goods.

Digital has a growing share of total media investment for global brands, and rightfully so. Mobile usage in the U.S., for example, has skyrocketed to more than three hours per day, according to last year’s Mary Meeker report. Additionally, some industry onlookers claim that brands are now spending more than half of their media spend in the digital space.

The proliferation of both video platforms and video content has consumers frustrated and unnecessarily struggling to find what they want. And with user experience at the forefront, content providers, media distributors, and tech companies are being forced to improve the discovery, personalization, and “stickiness” of their content.