Brand Daily

Imagine pop-up advertisements on the Internet migrating from the virtual world to the physical world. That's not unlike the growing practice of placing printed advertisements on the floor in stores. According to one account, 73% of purchase decisions are made in-store and marketers should endeavour to have the last word as consumers reach for the shelf. On MSNBC, Roland Jones explains how a company called Floorgraphics has defined the category of floor advertising in the United States. Sure, you've seen logos on store floors in a handful of countries, but best-practice is increasingly a poster-sized message printed in color and using a patented process to withstand being trampled under foot. Animated versions with sound and, believe it or not, with scents are being tested. Mindful of the increasing clutter of messages within the retail environment, many hypermarket chains severely limit the use of point-of-sale advertising and some even ban it. But the real lesson of floor advertising is nothing new: it's not the medium, it's how you use it. Look for progressive marketers to dispense with the usual floor advertisement in favor of executions which tease consumers or which prompt purchases outside the aisle where the brand is located. And if floor advertisements are not allowed? Try a shelf liner or other POS material. And, of course, almost nothing in-store works as effectively as product sampling. The old adage "telling is not selling" has some truth to it.

A classic cartoon in The New Yorker magazine showed a man touring an advertising agency. His host gestures to a graphic artist busy at work and says "And this is where we paint the naked ladies on the ice cubes." This satire of subliminal commercial messages is both humorous and an indirect reminder that multiple variables (if not the improbable hidden nude) may influence how individuals choose to buy or not. These days, the advanced management of in-store consumer experiences is being discussed under the label of Intuitive Retail. In BrandWeek magazine, Brian Priest explains how Intuitive Retail goes beyond buying habits to incorporate lifestyle dimensions and the complexities of human behavior away from the store, in family and peer groups. Solutions based on Intuitive Retail recognize that the store should create a world in which products or partner brands appear in human, not necessarily commercial, contexts. Driven by a brand "story", this retail world makes orchestrated use of color, lighting, display formats, entertainment, and opportunities to learn. Target and Apple Computer in the United States and Sainsbury's in the UK seem to do this well. Although the principles of Intuitive Retail arguably work best when applied to an entire store, smart marketers will look for ways to dramatize even a single shelf. Also, look for retailers to offer more than the usual product demo or sampling. Options for in-store information and entertainment are multiplying and retailers may enrich the consumer experience while earning co-marketing fees from sponsors. The irony is that while many marketers say that retail is growing more restrictive, the opportunities for truely creative retail concepts have only just begun.

Canada may be the Great White North, but when it comes to kids marketing, you could call it a global village. Kids there are as informed about brands and demanding of parents as anywhere in the developed world. According to a recent study of Canadian families and their buying habits, mom and dad say No to only one in four purchase requests by their children. In a country with less than half the population of France, all those Yes moments tally up to USD15-million in household spending. Sure, you've heard much of this before, but in Marketing magazine Chris Powell illuminates emerging trends. More intelligent forms of entertainment content have become a bridge platform joining the world of children with the world of parents. The result is that families are watching more programming together, as they might have 50 years ago, and adult advertisers are expected to follow parents into this family-friendly environment. Also, the Internet allows kids to gather information about brands far more rapidly than a generation ago. They are more aware of products and their performance and, for some categories such as household electronics, clothing and automobiles, they are not merely influencing adult purchases, but specifying them. For better or for worse, contemporary households are said to be more "democratic" and some marketers are creating subordinate campaigns which specifically target kids with messages about products purchased by parents. Obviously, not all cultures are alike and many countries regulate advertising to children. But the sociological roots of parent-child interaction are timeless and in operation quite apart from marketing. One caveat I would add: families don't buy products, individuals do. If you're considering a parent or kid campaign, be sure you're working from the motivating insights of a specific target individual.

In the post-war years, advertising agencies pioneered consumer research, copy testing and direct marketing techniques. However, since the proliferation of the MBA on the client side and the increasing sophistication of audience and retail data, advertising agencies have often ceded the role of innovation to advertisers, themselves. Cable television, low-cost production, web marketing, and strategic below-the-line initiatives have all been driven, or greatly shaped, by clients keen on increasing their return on brand investments. Ten years ago, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, Edwin Artzt, challenged agencies to seize the initiative in developing measurement tools for Internet and other forms of marketing. It was a watershed speech that put the advertising world on notice. Unfortunately, it would appear that little has been done. In Advertising Age, Jack Neff summarizes how P&G's global marketing officer, Jim Stengel, gives low marks to the agency sector and rails against the failure to create better and universal forms of audience measurement as well as tools for projecting consumer purchase intent. If you're a client, show this article to your agency and ask what's going on. If you're an agency, do the same. And take the initiative to suggest reasonable ways in which your client can measure the effectiveness of his spend. One area of potential disagreement: P&G's Stengel says that agency attention to finances is part of the problem. Many in the agency world would say that declining margins and limited opportunity to invest in human capital is indeed linked to the paucity of innovation from today's agencies.

Australia leads the world in per-capita consumption of flavored milk, and now drinks giant Coca-Cola wants a piece of the action. If you've ever been to the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, Georgia, you may have survived the "tastes of the world" exhibit where visitors sample carbonated soft drinks in multicultural flavors like lemon-ginger or sour cherry that are popular in different countries. Such cultivation of the local palate doesn't fit the rhetoric of anti-globalists, but it's kept the the Atlanta juggernaut in business. More recently in its history, The Coca-Cola Company has taken the search for growth to global acquisitions and new product introductions in juices, milk drinks, and bottled waters. In The Age (Melbourne), Julian Lee tells how Australia's affection for flavored milk makes that market of 18-million people a priority. Despite the heat, the average Australian consumes about 10 liters of flavored milk annually, with well-known domestic brands dominating retail shelves as well as the nostalgic minds of adult consumers. The impending battle Down Under could prove an incubator for tips and techniques that marketers elsewhere might borrow to enter adjacent or even vertical markets with strong established players. This shall be especially interesting if intelligent solutions and not just big media budgets will decide the outcome. Let's see.

It's a perennial question in marketing circles: what's going on with private label brands? This global survey of private label retailing from Fabig & Pead Marketing (South Africa) presents current trends as well as a useful overview by region. Europe leads in the penetration of private label, but Asia Pacific, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe enjoy the fastest percentage growth. In these emerging markets, the food and FMCG sectors are evolving rapidly with the expanding middle classes, and retailers seek more heterogenous offers, and more revenue, apart from low-priced local brands and higher-priced internationals. In developed markets, the term private label is no longer commercial code for the cheapest price and cheapest quality. In the United States in particular, retailers have established private label brands as offering value-for-money in the premium segment. It is a truly post-modern world in which the predictable paradigms of the past have been turned upside down. Today's brands, retailers, and consumers can be highly fluid in their interactions; value-for-money is available at every price point. Most often, this has been a headache for traditional branded goods manufacturers. But smart marketers will want to look for opportunities to innovate or to re-position. Start by asking "Why not?".

Media markets vary from country to country, but in truth, differences reside along the same trajectory: audience fragmentation and reduced marketing efficiency. Debunking the myths and preaching progressive techniques, a German media executive talks with an Indian journalist at The Economic Times. We hear again how media planning has ascended from lowly number crunching to a strategic role equal to or more critical than campaign creative development. Marketers no longer buy functional disciplines from their agencies. Today, brands require total selling solutions which are driven by a marriage of customer insights with patterns of media consumption, including non-traditional media (shop floors, for example). You may find yourself dithering with some of the claims in this article (I did), but there's no question that the new generation of media person is less a channel guru and more a scientist of lifestyles and their attendant message flora and fauna. Since the ascendence of the MBA on the client side, and particularly in the United States, agencies have ceded innovation to clients and sometimes failed to make the case for balancing the quantitative with a judicious dose of qualititative. The encouraging thing about the holistic media future is that agencies may find new ground to create truely big ideas. Watch this topic for news on the proliferation of branded entertainment.

An English executive I know has a serious professional job, yet he insists on calling himself a salesman (even on his business card). In Europe, referring to yourself as a sales person is not the most socially acceptable way to highlight your status. But to this Englishman, status is for poseurs and selling is the key to success for his brands and him. How often do marketers lose themselves in ponderous documents instead of getting, and staying, close to customers and trade partners? In Business Week, entrepreneur John Bello tells how his partner and he created a drinks company from nothing and sold it to PepsiCo for $370 million. In five years. The key: solution selling. The sales force of South Beach Beverage Company didn't just push cool new soft drinks and juices. They delivered more sales information, more selling ideas, and more point-of-sale support to their distributors and retailers than even the big beverage brands. Many people think of consultative selling as belonging to the service sector, but here is an example of how the same principles of adding value can benefit fast-moving consumer goods. It's also a useful reminder to get out of the office and get talking with customers and the trade. Warning to cynics: this article is optimistic in tone.

The Americans may not be cheered for their beer, but many marketers copy how they sell it. Now, US brewer Anheuser-Busch has introduced a variant of its Michelob brand called Michelob Ultra. The news? It's brewed specifically to be low in carbohydrates. In today's world of millions of obsessive Atkins dieters, a low carb beer is just what the slim-hopeful are looking for. In The New York Times, Rob Walker explains that while a "regular" beer has about 11 grams of carbohydrates, Michelob Ultra has 75 percent fewer. What started as a test by Anheuser-Busch has become a phenomenon, particularly among active middle-aged women. In the US, 37 percent of those drinking Michelob Ultra are women, while only 21 percent of total beer drinkers are women. Purists will scoff at mass-brewed beers, but the implications for marketers are timeless: products, even food products, can enjoy immense appeal if they are pitched to the discriminating needs of a particular user segment. Also, marketers don't always need to spend millions in new product development. Some brands have existing advantages which have gone overlooked. Time to revisit your product or service and see if subordinate attributes might become dominant attributes when talking to a more narrow user segment. Above link requires (free) registration.

Mobile phone users are being promised the world these days. Funny how one of the coolest new products, and sources of incremental revenue for mobile network operators, is just another way to talk. It's called Push To Talk (PTT). In Forbes magazine, Aude Lagorce tells how the US cellular network, NexTel, has turned PTT into a super-sticky app that keeps customer churn low and revenue streaming. It works like a two-way radio or what in some countries is colloquially called a Walkie-Talkie: just push a single button and you can speak instantly to a pre-designated recipient; or to a whole group of recipients. In the US, NexTel's PTT is a big hit with families, small firms, construction contractors, and others who need to keep in touch at frequent intervals. Now this technology is morphing from NexTel to other mobile phone operators in the US and even to the ubiquitous and much-loved GSM mobile networks in Europe. Smart marketers should look for ways to partner with network operators to introduce PTT-driven promotions and tie-ins with non-telephone products.