Marketing

Imagine seeing a dozen pictures flash by in a fraction of a second. You might think it would be impossible to identify any images you see for such a short time. However, a team of neuroscientists from MIT has found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds — the first evidence of such rapid processing speed.

Collective Bias, a social shopper media company, launched a number of new service offerings and programs that together will make it easier for social influencers and brands to develop social shopper marketing campaigns that drive sales and product engagement.

In early February, Anheuser-Busch InBev, America’s largest brewer, signed a deal to buy the Blue Point Brewing Company, a well-respected Long Island craft beer company. With Anheuser-Busch InBev’s success, and its strong portfolio of beer brands that include Budweiser, Stella Artois, Beck’s, and Corona, why would the company feel impelled to buy a craft beer company?

Recently, Kathy Sheehan of GfK Consumer Trends and I presented highlights from our Decoding Y: Millennials Revealed research partnership in a live webinar.  As I continue on our roadshow with this exciting research, I find myself comparing and contrasting Hispanic and non-Hispanic generation-mates and identifying where Hispanics are leading total market trends.  By Roberto Ruiz / Univision Communications

I have many times said that Google is probably the most useful company in the world.  They are making information availability pervasive and usable. They have a service called Google Trends that traces, in relative terms, the prevalence of searches of specific terms and expressions in their search engine. They do not provide actual frequencies but percentages of a total represented by the tallest point in the distribution and that is equal to 100. 

I thought it would be interesting to check and see how different searches in the United States reflect the sentiment of those who search for multicultural and related marketing topics. The first search I did was for the term “Multicultural Marketing.”By Felipe Korzenny, Ph.D.

The majority of consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are failing to place analytics at the heart of their decision-making process, limiting their ability to improve the customer  experience and gain business advantage, a study by Accenture has found. Accenture’s analysis also suggests that in many cases the problem is compounded by fragmented investment in narrow programs that are not well coordinated and fully optimized.

Shiv Singh’s role at Visa is twofold: to manage global brand strategy and positioning, but also to evolve the way Visa does marketing. Singh spoke with eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson about Visa’s attitude toward real-time marketing and how the company plans to measure the performance of real-time initiatives.

Celebrities. They appear to be the focal point of every PR campaign these days, don’t they? Whether it’s to open a restaurant, get donations for a charity, sell a t-shirt or just to lend heat to a cool brand, we publicists tend to look to celebrities as a quick solution to every problem. (I’m distinguishing between an advertising campaign, in which a celebrity is paid big bucks to essentially “act” in a TV or print ad, and a PR campaign, in which a celebrity lends his or her personal credibility to support a cause or an event or a product.)

With the advent of the ACA, insurers have two drivers: share AND profitability.  Most sales and marketing focus is on gaining share by securing the highest enrollment numbers possible.  Effective Growth Leaders are measuring business success beyond market share: The utilization cost and ROI of the new pool is an equally important goal of effective marketing. Companies can measure their success by drawing in a pool that may have both a higher likelihood to health coverage and a lower propensity to acquire preventable conditions, both of which impact the bottom line.   By Santiago Solutions Group

Consumers have already voiced interest in receiving personalized emails, and recent polling suggested that personalization would be a key trend across all communications this year. In a November 2013 study by Conversant, around three-quarters of US senior-level marketers and agency decision-makers agreed that “individualized messages and offers will be more effective than mass messages/offers” this year, and about the same percentage said “personalized one-to-one marketing is the future.”

“Fast is fine, but accuracy is important.” That quote is attributed to Wyatt Earp, but I think it applies to marketing as well.  In a world of marketing that is quickly being pushed towards data-driven methodologies, I would think accuracy is one of the most important criteria, wouldn’t you?

Quick! When you hear the word “Millennial,” what words come to mind? How about “entitled”? “Unemployed”? Or maybe “living at home”?

The last year has been filled with talk about the virtues and the issues with the concept of total market advertising. In a recent article I posited that there are essentially three different models for multicultural marketing. Although the terms are being used interchangeably, the result is a great deal of confusion in the multicultural marketing world. This evolving lexicon has made its way into the agency side of the business. More and more Hispanic, African-American and Asian advertising agencies are adopting monikers like “cross-cultural agency” to describe themselves and have gone out of their way to label new ethnic assignments as “total market” AOR assignments.  by Jose Villa / Sensis

While you may have crafted the perfect communication platform and a brilliant portfolio of content marketing assets, telling your brand story can’t be done all at once. Effective brand storytelling means using various types of content to craft multi-stage engagement with your consumers. Here are some successful strategies for leveraging episodic content marketing to drive business results.

Millennials, the generation born beginning in 1980 (and defined for the purposes of this analysis as adults ages 18-34), are an extremely unique demographic segment with digital media consumption habits that vary greatly from older generations. While those age 35 and older still comprise the majority of media audiences in the U.S., Millennials account for a disproportionate share of total screen time and provide a useful glimpse at what the future of media consumption will look like. Because their media consumption habits serve as a leading indicator for the broader media landscape, understanding how to market to this valuable demographic is vital to brands, agencies and media companies seeking to stay ahead of the curve.

Every once in a while, new terms and jargon come in and out of favor within the business community.  Among the terms used by business executives targeting cultural segments include “multicultural,” “diversity,” and of course Hispanic, Latino, Black, African American, Asian, acculturation, etc.  Lately, the terms “Total Market” and “New Mainstream” seem to have gained some level of acceptance.  Terms such as these are intended to help communicate a concept that would require many more words to understand.  Although non-controversial, the term “New Mainstream” may lack clarity among industry insiders and is perhaps foreign to those not in the multicultural space.  On the other hand, “Total Market” seems to both lack clarity and revel in a fair amount of disagreement.  By César M Melgoza, Founder & CEO – Geoscape

There’s been quite a bit of talk about the new total market strategy approach. The approach is not new; as ethnic marketers we have always told our clients that there is ONE brand, not different brands for each consumer segment. We just deliver different benefits based on insights about that brand and our segment consumer. But the essence of the brand remains as one – a total market delivery, executed differently based on target needs.  By Enrique Turégano – alPunto Advertising

Online advertisers have struggled with the efficacy of standard banner ad units for years. Consumers tend to skim right past them, meaning the advertisers has little incentive to devote creative energy to the unit, which means the unit has no hope of delivering performance. Marketers have turned their attention elsewhere, and in in 2013 content marketing was one of the biggest stories in online media.

We all try to show mom we love her, but businesses have always paid careful attention to engage their mom clientele. Since moms differ from one another based on their lifestyles, we analyzed Working Moms—the 40 percent of women who have children under age 18 and hold full-time employment. How do you reach this affluent consumer group in their limited free time? By making their lives easier, anticipating their needs and interests.  

A recently released industry report reveals that the evolving field of experiential, personalized and hyper-local marketing is now rated “very” or “somewhat” important by three out of four consumer brand marketers, and that engagement marketing causes almost nine out of 10 shoppers to add a product to their shopping list.