The prevailing opinion is that social media is a free marketing channel that is good for sharing information but has little consequence on reputation and business results. It is important to distinguish between social media and social networking. Social media is content created by people using publishing technologies. Social networking is focused on building online communities with shared interests and activities. It is also important to understand how users engage in social communities. The 90-9-1 Principle of “participation inequality” applies here- 1 percent of people create content, 9 percent edit or modify that content, and 90 percent view the content without contributing.

There is some good news. Those CMOs who have adopted Social Media successfully have used carefully crafted strategies that are aligned with their corporate business plans to cover three broad areas: increasing employee engagement, engaging customers and prospects and strengthening the company’s reputation. CMOs must consider some important facts about Social Media:

Engage employees

Here are some surprising insights from the 2011 Arcus Employee Engagement Research Report. Only 20 percent of employees are engaged with their organizations, the remaining are actively disengaged. Moreover, managers rank internal communication problems as the top barrier to productivity. 55 percent of employees feel they work in silos and only 28 percent of employees say their companies are effective in communicating with them. Social media can help. Here are three steps you can take to address these gaps:

• Create a “You Ask, We Answer” Forum. A key tool used by CEOs to leverage social media is to open a highly transparent two-way communication channel with employees. A “You Ask, We Answer” forum hosted on the company’s Intranet will enable employees to post questions with an anonymous post option. The response time is important. A 24 hour turn around will increase employee confidence and also demonstrate that the channel is important to the management team. Mandating an answer to every question also reinforces the transparency of the channel. The benefits of the Intranet Q&A strategy includes a deeper understanding among employees of the corporate strategy, the challenges faced by the company and how employees can help with a shared decision making process.

• Recognize Performance. A second strategy is to use the Internal channel to recognize outstanding employee performance. A monthly recognition program with an outline of the case that led to the award can inspire employees to find new and innovative ways to solve problems.

• Empower employees to blog. The third strategy for the Intranet would be to encourage Employee blogs. This allows employees to share ideas, knowledge and solutions within the organization. A scan of these ideas may allow the company to tap into new strategies to increase client satisfaction and solve problems that may otherwise not be apparent. Employee blogs also allows quick insights into departments and issues such as gaps in employee development, leadership issues or product sales related challenges.

Engage customers and prospects

• Define your social networking strategy. A good strategy is focused on sharing useful content that is of interest to your network of customers, employees and partners. A good strategy will also allow you to identify success points in your social media plan and leverage information that can position your company as a leader and innovator. A key driver of the process is a continuous and ongoing stream of relevant information that we call a “drip strategy”.

• Engage your contacts. Most of us have a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Few of us really understand how to leverage the platform. Leading social media users will tell you that it isn't about the number of connections, it is more about the quality of connections. A good gauge is to ask if your connections would recommend your company or your work. A higher percentage of recommenders means your social strategy is working harder for you.

• Foster a community. Your sites should promote active participation and foster a community as part of an enhanced shopping experience. This is facilitated by a high level of social interaction and consumer-driven content that support the shopping experience and deliver superior value to the customer. A community can be a valuable asset to help your customer support team solve problems quickly and efficiently. Fans of your company can connect directly with other customers and offer solutions that could strengthen customer satisfaction.

Strengthen your social commerce strategy

• Focus on destination branding. Making your brand a destination is likely to drive your social commerce strategy. Create a channel to listen to what your customers are saying and respond and act quickly to criticism. Our research shows that customers can be a valuable source of feedback on satisfaction drivers and their input can dramatically increase sales. The approach allows more informed decisions about social commerce strategies and improvement of the customer experience. A key measure of success is how many of your customers become your advocates.

• Monitor online conversations. It is critical to monitor in-market conversations about your brand and products. A better understanding of the tone of conversations can provide valuable indicators of the value your brand delivers to customers. A good social media strategy will include metrics that provide insights on activity, sentiment, share-of-market, and themes of online conversations. Thought leaders who are also prolific bloggers are closely monitored. With a sound impact measurement strategy, companies will be able to assess the return on social media investments and also offer benchmarks for ongoing social media activities. Companies can use analytics tools such as our Reputation Analysis and Management Tool for a real time, on-demand and in-depth understanding of the reputation of their brand on the Web. An advanced analytics tool searches, tags, and indexes topics on the Web. It can filter thousands of online content sites and identifies relevant brand and reputation information by applying discovery tools that interpret content trends and provide deeper visibility into impacts on strategies and sales.

• Leverage key social networking tools. Explore emerging trends in social media tools such as Widgets (portable carts (e.g., zazzle.com) and brand engagement (e.g., lemonade.com), social bridging (enable shoppers to log into e-commerce sites without a registration ID) and Mobile Social Networking Applications (allow users to access social networks from their smartphones). These cutting edge tools create seamless interfaces with customers and your brand. They encourage more frequent interaction and robust two way communication.

Benchmarking your social media strategy can provide surprising insights about where and how you need to recalibrate your approach. Email me for best practices from 1500 companies and viewpoints of CEOs on social media.

Merril Mascarenhas

He said that in reference to some of his new product ideas. Product ideas that had not yet been conceived or at least not readily on the market. His view was that consumers did not know what they needed until he showed them what they wanted. A great view for a truly innovative company that is bringing out products that no one yet uses.

For most companies however, they are not the innovation leader that creates truly new markets. What they are doing is selling similar products to other companies in a competitive market. This is why most companies need market research.

Six ways to do market research:

1 - Do the traditional and hire a market research firm. They will do focus groups and surveys. Their anonymity can help them do unbiased research (it is tough to tell GM that you would rather drive a Toyota but easy to tell a market research firm).

2 - If the budget is limited, companies can do their own focus groups. The disadvantage is bias. The advantage is they can create a double advantage of keeping clients "sold" because they spend time with you and feel heard.

3 - It is easy to do surveys now. You can even use free tools like surveymonkey to do this. And a well worded survey can be a sales tool. If you ask a customer do they like you more because of X or Y, it draws attention that you are both X and Y.

4 - There is a new breed of company that monitors social media. Companies like General Sentiment read all the Tweets, blogs, news etc and even interpret if what is being said is good or bad. These are a good addition to traditional market research.

5 - I have often blogged about "fail often, fail fast, fail cheap" as a way to do market research. Experimenting is a great way to do research. I advocate selling products at a price. Giving away products is not a good test of the market. If people have to invest their hard earned money, it says something.

6 - I am a big advocate of split run testing. Try one thing in one market or sample and measure the return compared to a different approach in a different market or sample. Send 500 people an email saying "lowest cost" and 500 people saying "most reliable" and see which one draws best. Doing split runs can prove which approach works best.

Market research is here to stay and adds value despite the fact that Steve Jobs and Alexander Graham Bell did not do it.

Jim Estill

Short-Term Memory

In this we are dealing particularly with short term memory.  Here is part of an article from McGill in Montreal that explains how short term memory functions.

In the course of a day, there are many times when you need to keep some piece of information in your head for just a few seconds. Maybe it is a number that you are “carrying over” to do a subtraction, or a persuasive argument that you are going to make as soon as the other person finishes talking. Either way, you are using your short-term memory.

In fact, those are two very good examples of why you usually hold information in your short-term memory: to accomplish something that you have planned to do. Perhaps the most extreme example of short-term memory is a chess master who can explore several possible solutions mentally before choosing the one that will lead to checkmate.

This ability to hold on to a piece of information temporarily in order to complete a task is specifically human. It causes certain regions of the brain to become very active, in particular the pre-frontal lobe.

The pre-frontal lobe is highly developed in humans. It is the reason that we have such high, upright foreheads, compared with the receding foreheads of our cousins the apes. It is no surprise that the part of the brain that seems most active during short term memory is located precisely in this prefrontal region that is well developed only in human beings.

Improving Your Memory

There are of course a number of ways in which you can improve your memory.  HelpGuide offers suggestions on  how to Improve Your Memory with Tips And Exercises To Sharpen Your Mind And Boost Brainpower

Their list includes the following:

• Don’t skimp on exercise or sleep
• Make time for friends and fun
• Keep stress in check
• Bulk up on brain-boosting foods
• Give your brain a workout - Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier

There are some excellent suggestions in this detailed article.

Another source of Memory Improvement Techniques is MindTools.  They promise that using them will allow you to avoid frustrating memory loss.  You will be able to retain and recall more information.

Some Memories Work Better Than Others

The latest news is that some of us will never have memories that are as good as those of other people.  Recent research at Cambridge is now suggesting that our memory capability is set at our birth.

A structural variation in a part of the brain may explain why some people are better than others at distinguishing real events from those they might have imagined or been told about, researchers have found.

The University of Cambridge scientists found that normal variation in a fold at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus (or PCS) might explain why some people are better than others at accurately remembering details of previous events -such as whether they or another person said something, or whether the event was imagined or actually occurred.  The research was published tin October 2011 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

This brain variation, which is present in roughly half of the normal population, is one of the last structural folds to develop before birth and for this reason varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population.  The researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain.  Interestingly, all participants believed that they had a good memory despite one group’s memories being clearly less reliable.

Dr Jon Simons from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Experimental Psychology and Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, who led the research, said:

All those who took part were healthy adult volunteers with typical educational backgrounds and no reported history of cognitive difficulties.  The memory differences we observed were quite striking.  It is exciting to think that these individual differences in ability might have a basis in a simple brain folding variation.

This is indeed remarkable news and could be the reason why some memories are just not as good as others.

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

How Good Is Your Memory

Technorati Tags: memory, pre-frontal lobe, retention

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As your organization plans for the upcoming year, now is the perfect time to assess whether it has the process discipline required to succeed in five cross-functional areas, and if not, what to do about it.

In this post, we share five key trends that we believe will impact marketing and sales functions in 2012, and discuss specifics around each.

1. Content Remains King
Creating compelling content that engages target audiences has been a primary focus of b-to-b marketers for more than a decade, yet most continue to struggle to keep up with evolving content requirements. B-to-b organizations realizing efficiencies and success in creating and managing highly effective content have done so through a disciplined approach, starting with assigning accountability for creating a content strategy that maps content to the information needs of specific buyer roles in defined buying cycle stages. SiriusDecisions research shows that the trend of b-to-b buyers engaging with sales reps later in the decision making process continues. Organizations are responding to this trend with inbound marketing strategies and the creation of better and deeper content to attract, engage and educate, which has resulted in buyers with deep knowledge, and well-formed opinions and perceptions. When they’re ready to engage, they expect salespeople to add even more to their knowledge, meaning that marketing needs to up its game in terms of the enablement content provided to reps and partners.

2. Leads: Volume Down, Quality Up
Marketing automation has made it easier than ever to design and execute multi-touch marketing programs that generate high volumes of responses. While this is great news, it hasn’t created the efficiencies many expected. Marketers are also busier than ever and spread so thin that it becomes difficult to do anything well. By focusing on efforts with lasting positive effects such as search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), automated recycle nurture programs and Website conversion optimization (WCO), and integrating those efforts with serialized marketing programs, marketers can create a steady stream of leads via sustained tactics that simply need monitoring and tweaking over time. Leading organizations are using inbound marketing, WCO and other strategies to create more leads while executing fewer programs. In addition to fewer programs, marketers should review the volume of leads delivered to sales and consider turning down the volume and increasing the quality. Our research has found that fewer, better-qualified leads result in a far more efficient sales force and contribute to improved pipeline dynamics. If salespeople spend less time reaching out to prospects who are not ready to engage or buy, they can spend more time focused on deals that are moving forward.

3. Enablement’s Next Step
While product and solution marketers and product managers have always focused on supporting field reps and channel partners, what often have been ad hoc activities are evolving into a more formalized, continuous process known as sales enablement. The core goal of enablement is simply put: Increase rep and partner productivity. Product teams, business units and product/solution marketing will continue to set business goals, define strategy and act as subject matter experts (SMEs) for their domain (e.g. industry, solution, product, customer segment). But making a person or group of people (formal or virtual) responsible for standardizing enablement initiatives (e.g. program frameworks, content templates) from disparate business units or product teams is critical to ensuring that sales resources can absorb what is being delivered to them. This function also should be responsible for sharing enablement best practices across the organization, and performing the data collection and reporting necessary to demonstrate how enablement is improving sales productivity.

4. Integrated Social Properties
For too many organizations, social media strategy still consists of maintaining a Twitter account or two, updating a blog a couple of times a week and accepting LinkedIn group members. In larger organizations, different business units or regions often establish their own social accounts with little thought or insight into what their colleagues are doing. This results in social accounts whose focus overlaps, along with content and links that are endlessly repurposed and a general dilution of uniqueness and brand – not to mention the confusion that customers, prospects and other constituents experience when they can’t find the most appropriate social property to engage with. Organizations should conduct a social properties audit to determine the state of all of their social accounts and properties, including blogs. In some cases where there’s topic-area overlap or low levels of engagement, consolidate accounts to drive the highest levels of interaction. One of the best ways an organization can advertise its social presence is to create a landing page that lists all of its social properties by topic area to make it easier for individuals to find the most appropriate account.

5. Data: Better Buyer and Customer Insight
Data quality gets a lot of attention because it is the foundation of successful sales and marketing interactions. Unfortunately, having correct and complete contact and account records doesn’t mean much if they aren’t used to learn about buyers and customers, rather than just catalog and count them. Once data quality processes are in place and trustworthy data becomes available, use it for more than results reporting. Insights are needed to deliver the right assets and interaction options to buyers and customers at the right time. It’s not necessary to wait until a data project is finished. In fact, data improvement will never be finished; it’s an ongoing process. As data-related investments are made, look for incremental uses of data around analysis and action. Focus on “need-to-have” data elements first, then expand based on the potential value a new data element could bring to insight-driven marketing. Don’t forget to build a data dashboard to show progress.

Much uncertainty remains in the global economy, making it unlikely that marketing budgets will grow significantly in 2012. To succeed, those responsible for marketing and sales must focus their resources where they will make the most positive impact. Another key to success will be finding leverage points and preparing for the future. By employing strategies with longlasting effects (e.g. inbound marketing, WCO), marketing can deliver better-quality leads with fewer programs.

Finally, when planning for the year ahead, be sure to determine on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis the steps that must occur to accomplish your goal. While the goals may be exciting, the key to success is the execution.

Ally Motz

This had never occurred to me until I had a conversation with a friend who is one of the top sales reps at his company. We were discussing his company’s brand and I asked what they did to track the satisfaction of their customers. Although the company was religious in sending out csat surveys, I was shocked to discover that my friend had never seen the results.

While marketers are often responsible for developing the brand strategy, this is an unfortunate example of ignoring the rest of the business system in the development and execution of that strategy.

A few ways that this customer data could be used outside of marketing:
• Sales reps could learn about the biggest pain points so they could proactively address them on sales calls
• Operations could learn about – and fix! - an aspect of product delivery that customers don’t like
• Design could adjust the product delivery to make it more intuitive for their customers

But if market research data isn’t shared by marketing then your business will be prevented from reaching their full potential. With first access to market research data comes great responsibility. In addition to promoting the brand externally, marketing must promote customers internally so that the rest of the people in the business system can help build the company’s brand as well.

Here are some simple ways to improve sharing:
• Hold cross-functional meetings to review research results when they are available, and better yet, include these groups in the survey development process
• Create a wiki for different groups to share and collaborate based on research
• Post research result presentations on the corporate intranet

Sharing shouldn’t be that difficult. A shame that it doesn’t happen more often.

Ben Wise

It's because they relinquished their ownership of the consumer.

At one time ad agencies had vast consumer research departments. Leo Burnett Chicago housed a 40 person research group and another 10 person insights group in the mid-1990's. They also had a fully-integrated media department. Since those days most agencies have spun off media departments to create distinct media companies. This was driven by holding company profit goals and not what was necessarily right for clients.

Media departments and now these media companies have access to vast amounts of consumer data the "creative agencies" do not. And virtually no multi-national agency in Canada has a fully staffed research group. They abdicated research to the client, to the media companies, to research companies and now digital agencies. Agency researchers have been replaced by planners. Planners are necessary. But they should be in addition to, not a replacement for research. Information is power. By relinquishing research agencies have relinquished a degree of power now being assumed by their media companies, digital agencies and PR agencies

Tony Altilia

Q. CMA: Is social media good for business?

Joseph Carrabis (JC): One could consider that question flawed. However, the flaw is unrecognized and is the source of a problem in the current “social media” environment.

The question as stated implies a "one size fits all" response, something like "Yes, social media is good for business" and that's not correct (me thinks).

Q. CMA: Mea culpa. I was expecting you might say “It depends”. What are better questions, helpful questions?

JC: The better questions are:
1) "What types of social (whatever) are good for what types of businesses?"
2) "What types of social (whatever) are good for what types of business goals?"
And other questions in a similar, more specific vein.

This re-questioning allows for a logical development and implementation process with a self-creating evidentiary trail.

Should things go sour, one knows where, when, how, why and for accountability* purposes, who. Hence things are more easily fixable.

Right now we're seeing a one-size-fits-all methodology even though consultants and companies are "tailoring" the solutions. This methodology shows up in "best practice" manifestos that are either completely general (hence useless) or so siloed that nothing works outside that vertical. If "social media was good for business" then a solution in the automotive vertical would work perfectly well in the sportswear vertical, in the gourmet food vertical, ... and this isn’t true.

To use social media correctly as a marketing tool, you need to be able to use the tools to create truly specific solutions. Right now the "state of the art" is the equivalent of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" and that's sad.

People aren't spending much time understanding their audience (at least in the terms I consider "understanding their audience") and the results are starting to show up as mass exoduses from various social platforms.

Understand your audience and you’ll know how to trigger loyalty responses rather than simple recency (with no offense intended to recency advocates. It's a reasonable metric that doesn't quite go far enough, in my opinion).

Q. CMA: If gaining audience understanding is so critical, but difficult, do you have any suggestions improvement?

Susan Carrabis (SC): Social Media, if used incorrectly, without understanding the audience and other Joseph words, is a dangerous tool. And please get away from one-size-fits-all.

We do a training based on the experiences of working with companies for seven years, a training based on how we actually work with clients. The whole focus of the training is to create marketing material that exactly targets your audience. You don't need NextStage tools or technology to do this but we learned how to do this by using our tools and technology. By the end of the day students are inside their consumers’ heads in ways they can’t get from just reading a book (except Joseph’s, of course). They look at material the way their audience looks at material, respond as their audience responds, see what their audience sees… It can be either fun or scary and we go for fun.

Q. CMA: So rather than seminars, is practical roll-your-sleeves-up, put your brain-to-work training part of understanding what’s needed?

JC: Seminars are (by my understanding) overview or summary in nature. We are true believers in "Understand the theory and you can apply it anywhere" and the best way to teach this is “Teach Application to Theory to Application”. This means take the student from the familiar to the new so that the new becomes familiar, start with something they’re doing in the real world, explain/demonstrate what’s going on, extract the key elements/principles, then have them apply those elements/principles to their current and similar problems. We taught the class mentioned above to about thirty marketing managers and they were blown away. They all knew the stuff, they simply hadn't 1) thought of it in the way we presented it or 2) performed their practice the way we were suggesting.

Part of that training is to develop a real-world campaign during the class. They were all doing social media campaigns -- the techniques will work for any kind of marketing (radio, tv, video, gaming, web, kiosk, print, down, up or sideload, ...) -- and it was exciting how many things were becoming obvious to them as opposed to their standard methods for campaign development. Not only understanding aspects of consumer psychology and how to reach consumers that they'd never considered, but which channels and media to use when.

This was a very rewarding experience. For us, and when we asked, for them, as well.
So for us it all comes back to knowing the correct question to ask.

Everybody knows I collect quotes and one I use is "It is perfectly useless to know the answer to the wrong question." Right now the majority of businesses are (in my opinion) asking the wrong question. I'll be sharing what I consider the correct question -- and answering it, or at least demonstrating ways to answer it -- in my CMA presentation.

CMA: Joseph, you’ve said that ‘sentiment’ is an exhausted term and the word has been so bastardized and mis-used such that it no longer has any real meaning. How do you define sentiment?

JC: There are lots of good psych and related definitions, all close and few metricable (ie. meaning they are reliably and repeatably measurable).

Following in the steps of Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites and Meet Online Engagement's Little Friend, Satisfaction and after a day’s research, "Sentiment" is the measure of emotional versus cognitive activity demonstrated by an individual when their attention is focused. This translates loosely to:

"Sentiment is demonstrated by behaviors that are caused more by emotion than they are caused by logic."

This is a definition that is a) accurate, b) metricable, c) teachable to any self-learning, social interaction system (Evolution Technology, for example) and d) repeatably metricable via that system within a reasonable +/- distribution.

This Sentiment definition can determine a visitor's sentiment in real-time while they're navigating your site. It won't matter if they write anything, post anything, comment or whatever. It won't even matter if they bounce. I now know what to have ET look for and we can make a tool that determines a) if sentiment exists, b) if it's positive or negative and c) the degree of that sentiment (companies interested in using such a tool should contact Susan).

Q. CMA: Has sentiment analysis evolved to the point that it can be relied upon? Do we have precision or accuracy, both or neither?

JC: I cannot comment on other company's tools or definitions of sentiment analysis because I only know about them from hearsay.

However, one of my favorite quotes is from a C level person at a major Canadian social media monitoring/analysis firm, "All we need to do is to score a handful of words and then assign polarity. It doesn't matter that different audiences use words differently."

This same individual and company arbitrarily (my opinion) decided that they could standardize their dictionary, meaning that words don't change meaning over time and within groups. I'm sure this company doesn't have any linguists or psycholinguists working for them because such a concept would drive them nuts.

But when that's what vendors are saying behind closed doors, how can what they offer be relied upon?

Take the "sentiment" metric I defined above.

NextStage has (at this point) twenty years of data we can look back on when we create a tool or test a definition.

We know, for example, whether or not people acted favorably or unfavorably -- had positive or negative sentiment -- to something going back twenty years, so when we come up with a possible definition we can test it against lots of historical information to determine its accuracy. When vendors knock on our door with referrals and references we ask for historical demonstrations of accuracy or ability. That’s when they go away.

I don’t know how a business can rely on tools without knowing how they came about, how they're tested, their accuracy and so on.

I also know that our clients -- all of whom want to test our suggestions via A/B and like testing in the beginning -- eventually stop testing and just start doing. There's also the aspect that many of our tools (our Sentiment Analysis tool being one) provide suggestions for better audience targeting. There's nothing quite like holding up a bullseye and saying "Here. Test this" to demonstrate confidence.

As for precision and accuracy, no comment about other tools because all I know of others is based on hearsay. If anything, I’ll go back to the bullseye concept. If anybody’s tool is either making or saving you money, it’s a useful tool. If it’s not doing either, why are you using it? There may be lots of other reasons, and that’s fine, just stop telling yourself you’re using a tool because it’s providing a business ROI.

Joseph Carrabis is speaking on "Measuring Emotional Response - Attaching Dollars to Sentiment Analysis" on June 23 at CMA’s Social Media Conference. During the afternoon “social media monitoring roundtable” session, attendees can ask Joseph directly about social media tools.

AC Nielsen has published some very intriguing data on how mining the differences between the generation gaps can provide specific insight that can be applied to everything from ad planning to promotional assortment: This could be the next generation (no pun intended) of shopper marketing.

How a 60 year old and a 20 year old prepare for -and execute- their retail shopping trip is quite different, however they still may buy the exact same soda, soup, and sandwich bread once they get to the store. Their interactions with the brands to get there may be different, but the end goal of the individual marketing activity remains the same: to help people make better purchase decisions along the way.

The brands that people love, the shoppers that buy them, and the retailers that provide the environment (either physical or virtual) to sell them are all beginning to embrace the opportunities that generational analytics can provide.

Brands
With the growing focus many brands have on activating the path to purchase, there has been an enormous amount of consideration put on the common traits shared by their target shoppers. We are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation in things like packaging in this respect. Some products targeting the 55+ set are changing theirs to specifically address vision impairment, so their products show up more easily on shelf. Other products are putting QR codes or augmented reality markers on their products in order to allow a completely different level of interaction and engagement with the brand at retail. Some brand media plans are being reconstructed to better align with shopping habits, with focus moving from TV to retailer web, from outdoor to on-shelf communication, going where the generational target can have their purchase consideration most affected.

Shoppers
The faster marketers can adapt to the shopping habits of their targets, the better they will be able to optimize the messaging that will generate awareness and purchase intent. It is curious to note that even though shoppers of the “greatest generation” are the ones who most rate shopping as a ‘chore’, they are also the most likely to spend time walking the entire store – leaving them open to incremental signage and opportunities for impulse purchase. On the flip side, Millennials – who shop the least of any segment- actually love shopping, but research first so as not to spend as much time on the actual store floor. They key with them is pre-shop activities via SEO, social, WOM, and electronic couponing. The fundamental truth to engaging shoppers is the understanding that the act of shopping is not just a behavior, but also a generational mindset.

Retailers
You can read articles over and over regarding the impending arrival of US mega retailer Target and what they will do to the general merchandise landscape in Canada. The Nielsen article rightfully describes how Target has created a niche by catering to the Gen X and Millennial segments through trippy advertising, with fully designed shopper marketing executions and promotion of “now” celeb tie-ins like Todd Oldham and Giada De Laurentiis. Those of you who have made the trip past our southern border to pay them a visit may find the advertising and shopper executions around Loblaws new Everyday Essentials lineup rings a little familiar. Loblaw however, has done some fantastic work merging their segmentation research and shopper marketing executions on the grocery side, parlaying it into four massively supported Insiders Report executions around their core generational constituencies (Back to School, Summer BBQ, Holiday Entertaining, and Health and Wellness). Both the retailer and manufacturer communities are taking notice. It’s also notable that retailers like Shoppers Drug Mart are adopting a generational shopper approach for their promotional planning, where diverse tactics like social media, solution-set orientation, loyalty programming, and seniors days are being employed (and integrated) to cater to the interests of their shopper continuum from 18-68 years and beyond.

The Nielson article reference is for US data… Feel free to share any great examples of generational marketing delivering innovative shopper experiences in Canada!

Jason Dubroy

However, interest-based marketing still has two important limits of which you need to be aware.

Why are you interested?

The expression of a customer’s interest is usually done in 1-3 words. That is pretty concise. I don’t know about you, but I would have a lot of trouble explaining my interests in so few words. Therein lies the problem – people may share the keywords but still view their interests in a very different way.

Imagine people with an interest in blogging. They could:
? Read celebrity gossip blogs or financial analysis blogs
? Read blogs only or write their own blog
? Read multiple blogs every day or read one every few weeks
? Write a personal blog as a hobby or write a professional blog to earn a living

As you can see, the nature of someone’s interest in ‘blogging’ can vary immensely and you can’t tell the difference based on one or two words on their Facebook profile.
Interest-based marketing is doing better than traditional channels, but still needs some work to get to the level of detail and accuracy that would be most effective.

Are you sure those are your interests?

Any market researcher will tell you that what people say and what people do can be quite different. The ability to accurately articulate what you are interested in is a skill that surprisingly few people actually have.

These inaccuracies can lead you to market to the wrong people and/or miss the right people.

What is a brand to do?

Don’t get me wrong, interest-based marketing is a significant improvement but we are far from the Holy Grail. As a marketer, you need to continually test different target segments to make sure you are reaching the right people, don’t simply take their word for it!

Ben Wise

However, interest-based marketing still has two important limits of which you need to be aware.

Why are you interested?

The expression of a customer’s interest is usually done in 1-3 words. That is pretty concise. I don’t know about you, but I would have a lot of trouble explaining my interests in so few words. Therein lies the problem – people may share the keywords but still view their interests in a very different way.

Imagine people with an interest in blogging. They could:

• Read celebrity gossip blogs or financial analysis blogs
• Read blogs only or write their own blog
• Read multiple blogs every day or read one every few weeks
• Write a personal blog as a hobby or write a professional blog to earn a living

As you can see, the nature of someone’s interest in ‘blogging’ can vary immensely and you can’t tell the difference based on one or two words on their Facebook profile.
Interest-based marketing is doing better than traditional channels, but still needs some work to get to the level of detail and accuracy that would be most effective.

Are you sure those are your interests?

Any market researcher will tell you that what people say and what people do can be quite different. The ability to accurately articulate what you are interested in is a skill that surprisingly few people actually have.

These inaccuracies can lead you to market to the wrong people and/or miss the right people.

What is a brand to do?

Don’t get me wrong, interest-based marketing is a significant improvement but we are far from the Holy Grail. As a marketer, you need to continually test different target segments to make sure you are reaching the right people, don’t simply take their word for it!

Ben Wise