Women are the biggest online shoppers

My students sometimes have the impression that men do most of the online shopping. This might have been the case in the early days of the internet. But nowadays Internet mirrors society and proof of stereotypes about men and woman and old and young can effortlessly be found on the internet.

The Nielsen market research company shows that women are the most frequent shoppers online in the USA. Only the category computer hardware remains a dominant male bastion.



All the old stereotypes still hold true: women shop the most, senior citizens watch the most TV, men play video games and women and the young like to text. I assume this is also true for European countries, but I have not found any data to confirm this.

The Nielsen USA report summary with data from Q3 2010 is interesting stuff to read and can be found here
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/in-u-s-men-are-shopping-more-than-ever-while-women-are-watching-more-tv/#

Battle of the imported beer brands: Heineken strikes back with brilliant campaign

Every beer drinker is convinced he can taste the difference between his favorite and other beers. The beer industry knows this is not true. Constant product / taste quality, good distribution, distinctive positioning supported by solid online and off line communication campaign does the trick.

In the USA there is a battle going in the imported beer category. Corona, the imported mexican beer, has "beer on the beach" positioning.


The Corona Beach from Big Spaceship on Vimeo.


It is under attack from Dos Equis with a brilliant "the most interesting man " campaign. Last year this campaign scored high on the viral video charts.






Advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy has developped a very appealing viral for Heineken.
They owe much to the campaoign of Dos Equis but gave it a modern and more refined twist in tune with Heineken´s positioning as a premium European import beer.  For people with a more cosmopolitan urban style.  Heineken shows correct way of entering a party.




Interesting to see what this new marketing campaign will do for sales and market share of the Heineken brand in the USA.


Source:
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=148178

Spoofs Viral Old Spice by Sesame Street and Will it blend ?

Sesame Street’s spoof of Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials has reached 2.6 million views in just five days.





Old Spice won an Emmy, doubled sales, and launched a film and TV career for its star with Wieden + Kennedy’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” marketing campaign. It was even imitated by Cisco, Conan and Elmo — but will it blend? This video has the answer



Original post http://mashable.com/2010/10/12/will-it-blend-old-spice-video/ 

The youtube original can be found here.Old spice original campaign

How android is transforming mobile computing

An article in newsweek paints an interesting picture about the rise of the Android platform mobile phone.

The business model behind it is interesting. If people use the android phone, google earns money from advertising. By making the android platform open source software, available to customize it by other manufacturers you will gain quick marketshare. The danger might be the fragmentation to many incompatible versions of the android operating system.

Huge market potential
By 2013 the mobile Internet ecosystem–money spent on access fees, online commerce, paid services, and advertising–will be worth more than half a trillion dollars per year, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker. As users keep downloading services and apps, every device sold generates an ongoing revenue stream


Desktop shift to mobile
The top companies in desktop computing–Apple, Google, and Microsoft–must shift their focus to mobile devices to remain competitive. But that pits them against traditional phone makers like Nokia and Research in Motion. Nokia, which has developed its own smart-phone software called Symbian, remains the industry gorilla. There are already 1.3 billion Nokia phones in use, and 200 million of them are smart phones. The huge customer base is a big advantage, according to Tero Ojanpera, an executive vice president at Nokia. By collecting location information from mobile phones, for example, Nokia can make traffic predictions.

Advantage android
But Google has a few advantages of its own. Instead of trying to modernize an older system originally created for voice-centric phones, Rubin and his engineers started with a clean slate, developing a modern mobile operating system for a new kind of device–a small computer that happens to make phone calls. Unlike older operating systems, Android was created to be good at rendering Web pages and to run many applications at the same time.

Business model Indirect revenue stream
Google also counts the very nature of Android as a strength. The company does not make money from Android directly. It gives the software away to hardware partners. Google reckons that Android gets more people onto the Internet, where Google can show them ads. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Android-based phones already generate enough new advertising revenue to cover the cost of the software’s development. Google could make money in other ways too, for example, by opening an online store to sell music and videos to Android users. Schmidt envisions a day when there are 1 billion Android phones in the world and notes that if Google could get just $10 from each user per year, it would be a $10 billion business. That’s real money even for Google, whose revenues this year will be $21 billion.

Offer full customisation options to gain rapid market share
In addition to making Android available for free, Google also lets phone makers change the code and customize it so that an Android phone made by, say, Samsung has a different user interface than an Android phone from Motorola. Rubin believes this open-source model gives Google an advantage over rivals selling closed systems, like Apple, which also operates its own online stores. Apple’s tight control enables it to deliver an exceptionally smooth user experience, where everything works seamlessly together.


Read the original article at:
how android is transforming mobile computing

Infectious personalities

Marketing uses the "connnectors" in a network to promote a new product.  Health authorities could use the connectors in a network to get an early warning signal of a disease outbreak. The spreading of a disease and the spreading of a new product through a network are remarkabely similar.





Social networks catch an early glimpse of disease outbreaks



Who will sneeze first?

CHANCES are your friends are more popular than you are. It is a basic feature of social networks that has been known about for some time. Consider both an avid cocktail party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and a grumpy misanthrope, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the “friendship paradox”: the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself.

Now researchers think this seemingly depressing fact can be made to work as an early warning system to detect outbreaks of contagious diseases. By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemiologists can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current surveillance methods.

In a report just posted on arXiv, an online repository of research papers, and which has been submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nicholas Christakis from Harvard University and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego put the friendship paradox to good use. In a trial carried out last autumn, they monitored the spread of both seasonal flu and H1N1, popularly known as swine flu, through students and their friends at Harvard University.

Dr Christakis and Dr Fowler selected a random group of 319 undergraduates and asked each to nominate up to three friends. Using these names, they collected another group of 425 friends. As the friend paradox predicts, the second group were both more popular (named more times by the random group) and more central to the connections among Harvard students. Flu infections were monitored from September 1st 2009 to the end of December by identifying those diagnosed by the university’s health services and by e-mail responses to a twice-weekly health survey. Overall, 8% of the students were formally diagnosed with the flu and 32% were self-diagnosed. But the infection rate peaked two weeks earlier among the group of more-connected friends. Their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner.


Early warning
As this result came with the benefit of hindsight, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. To do this they went back to the beginning and compared diagnoses between the two groups on a daily basis for each of the 122 days of the study. A significant difference between the two groups was first detectable a full 46 days before visits to health services peaked for the random group. For those with self-reported symptoms, there was a noticeable difference 83 days before the peak in self-reported symptoms.

These early results are impressive. Currently, the methods used to assess an infection by America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention lag an outbreak by a week or two. Google’s Flu Trends, which monitors millions of queries submitted to the giant search engine for the occurrence of flu-related keywords, is at best contemporaneous with an outbreak. Dr Christakis and Dr Fowler suggest that a hybrid method might be developed in which the search queries of a group of highly connected (ie, popular) individuals could be scanned for signs of the flu.

Although the technique has so far only been demonstrated for the flu and in the social milieu of a university, the researchers nevertheless think that it could help predict other infectious diseases and do so on a larger scale, such as in cities and across regions. Nor should it be difficult to implement. Public-health officials already conduct random sampling, so getting the participants to name a few friends too should not be onerous. When it comes to infectious diseases, your friends really do say a lot about you.



http://mobile.economist.com/science_16103882.php

R.I.P. Twitter as a marketing platform.

Twitter is ineffective a a marketing tool, argues the author. He shows some interesting statistics to prove it.
According to the author Dan Schawbel an email subscriber is worth five times as much as a blog subscriber and ten times as much as a Twitter follower. Taking all things into account, he would rather have 5,000 email contacts than 100,000 Twitter followers.


Personal branding not using twitter

Classic Old Spice Social Media Campaign

Well here it is. The Old Spice Social Campaign Case Study from WK. To save the judges some time this year, I’d suggest sending the pencils, lions, grand pix’ and the like straight to the WK head office in an overnight express bag, no need for a tracking code, everyone know’s who those awards will belong to! Check out the video above, the results are just as you’d expect.

The Old Spice Case Study talks us through the insight around targeting men & women at the same time to generate conversation around body wash. When it was launched online for the super bowl weekend (and TV shortly after) the campaign managed to capture 75% of all conversations in the category (although I’m sure that was off a small base) before every man and his dog was talking about the Old Spice ads.

To continue that success Old Spice & WK needed to take the campaign to the next level, Mustafa was now a household hero, and they wanted to engage the fans directly. And so the response campaign was born.

Over 3 days, a team of creatives, digital strategists, developers and producers filmed 180 odd videos around the clock, creating videos and responding directly to fans and celebrities in near real time to create what is now known as the best social campaign ever to have been created.

So here are a few of the stats… hold your breath…

• ◦On day 1 the campaign received almost 6 million views 
• (that’s more than Obama’s victory speech)
• ◦On day 2 old spice had 8 of the 11 most popular videos online
• ◦On day 3 the campaign had reached over 20 million views
• ◦After the first week old spice had over 40 million views
• ◦The old spice twitter following increased 2700% (probably off a lowish base)
• ◦Facebook fan interaction was up 800%
• ◦Oldspice.com website traffic was up 300%
• ◦The old spice YouTube channel became the all time most viewed channel (amazing)
• ◦Thecampain has generated 1.4 billion impressions since launching the ads 6 months ago
• ◦The campaign increased sales by 27% over 6 months since launching (year on year)
• ◦In the last 3 months sales were up 55%
• ◦And in the last month sales were up 107% from the social responses campaign work
• ◦Old spice is now the #1 body wash brand for men.

I don’t think I need to add much more to that. I just really want to see what old spice has in store for us next, in fact i’m itching for it. (no pressure WK!) (via Creativity Online)

From
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/old-spice-social-campaign-case-study-video/

Watch the case story on Youtube

Exploring the opportunities of social media in Marketing and Education

Slideshare presentation exploring the opportunities of social media in Marketing and Education

Cultural misunderstanding

Sometimes Cultural communication just goes wrong.

The Dirt on Laundry Trends Around the World

Unilever, P&G, Henkel Adjust Products to Suit Cultural Preferences -- and Washing Temperatures

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Every half hour 7 million people in the world wash their clothes with Unilever products, and 6 million of them do so by hand.

That rather jarring statistic, courtesy of Unilever Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Keith Weed, helps explain Unilever's exit from North American laundry a few years ago: The biggest growth markets are where people are dreaming of moving up from hand washing to their first hand-cranked or semi-automatic washing machine, or are looking for lower-suds products or rinse additives that will let them make fewer or shorter trips to the well or river.

......
 
'Nintendo kids'

Europe is embroiled in a new sort of cold war as the major laundry players launch a range of products promising better performance from cold-water washing, most recently Procter & Gamble Co.'s Ariel gel with Actilift. By contrast, in India, P&G and Unilever are in more of a hot war combining price cuts and competitive advertising claims, with both sides having had to pare back or scrap ads under court order in recent months.

Marketers do seek to capitalize on some global trends and attitudes, such as a preference for strong floral fragrances that spans southern Europe, Latin America and Asian markets. But even in broad trends, the world is often moving in opposite directions at once. For example, most people in the U.S. and northern Europe prefer lighter fragrances their southern peers would find too watered down -- or as having no scent at all.

In developing markets, the combination of warm temperatures, sweat and heavy physical labor create a need for powerful washing and stain removal, with much of the power supplied by elbow grease. Compare that to the U.S., where Eric Schwartz, VP-laundry marketing for Henkel U.S., identifies a segment he calls "Nintendo Kids." They're the growing number of youths who spend more time indoors playing video games than outdoors getting grass and ground-in dirt stains that generate challenging laundry problems.

For those challenges, Unilever markets four of its regional brands -- Persil, Skip, Via and Omo -- under a common "Dirt is Good" logo and positioning. For more premium brands, dirt is indeed good, but it's also good for kids, as Randy Quinn, exec VP global laundry for Unilever sees it.

"The proposition is based on the fundamental insight that giving children the ability to get dirty and experience life as part of the growing up process is healthy for their development and gives moms the freedom to say, 'I can let my children get dirty without worrying about whether I can get clothes clean,'" he said.
.... more


Posted by Jack Neff on 06.14.10

From: http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=144398