With the number of US smartphone owners officially passing more than 50 percent of the population, marketers realize that these devices are shaping consumer behavior and purchase decisions at astonishing rates. Shoppers’ ability to access the internet on the fly affects all stages of the purchase cycle. Consumers constantly reach for their phones for product reviews, price comparisons, coupons, and
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Social Media and Digital Marketing for Education: What We Learned at NAASS 2013
Last month, we were invited to join a panel about digital marketing and social media for education at the New England division of the North American Association of Summer Sessions annual conference. Twenty directors and deans of regional summer sessions participated in the event, hosted by Yale in New Haven. The Q&A session shed light on some of the difficulties
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Climbing On Board with Vine
Twitter recently acquired Vine, a new app which allows users to share looping video clips of up to six seconds. Because it uses stop-start recording, the app itself is easy to jump into: lifting a finger from the screen stops recording, and you can pick up again wherever you would like, allowing for a stop motion effect. The six second limit
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Where to Coupon for Maximum Response
Given the multiple ways consumers can get coupons – through events, in-store sampling, store affinity card programs, etc…we are always curious about what’s most effective for redemption. We discussed it with Associate Professor Leonard Lee of the Columbia Business School, who, as it happens, did his dissertation on “Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions.” The findings are fascinating.
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When Shopper Marketing Backfires…Or Does it?
Brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-store promotions, often with results that are hard to measure. The provocative title of a new study out of Columbia University suggests that those efforts may not only be ineffective, but actually have a dampening effect on sales. In the study, titled When Shopper Marketing Backfires, the team coined their findings the
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The Three Gaps that are killing your Digital Strategy
Internal Gaps, Vendor Gaps, Strategic Gaps. Many clients have one or more of these critical gaps in their capabilities, and its keeping them from achieving their marketing potential online. Is this you? You have Internal Gaps How’s your technology and in-house capabilities? Website platforms have evolved tremendously in the last few years providing greater flexibility and actionable insights. You need
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You Like Me, But Are We Friends?
How and Why Brands Should Get Personal in Social Media I’ve been managing the social media community for one of our brands for a year now – Facebook and Pinterest primarily. My M.O. has always been to represent the voice of the brand–not my own voice. My passion for food drives the content, but I’ve always stayed in the
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Corporate Social Responsibility as a New Way of Marketing
A few blogs ago, we mentioned the HBR study that showed that consumers align with brands that share their values. Does that translate to revenue? It’s starting to. A March 2012 Nielson study determined that “46 percent of global consumers are willing to pay extra for products and services from companies that have implemented programs to give back to society.”
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Powering Ecommerce with Pinterest
Like you, we’ve watched Pinterest.com explode in popularity over the last eight months. Has it occurred to you how fascinating it is that, at its inception, the direction of Pinterest’s development was open to interpretation? The concept was simple: pin up pictures of things you like. Maybe the crowd would turn it into YouTube with photos, or maybe a visual Tumblr. Who knew where
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Self Storage Lead Generation
One of the maxims we live by is: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” In self-storage, where marketing and promotion dollars can go quickly, and turn and occupation are the twin drivers of revenue, it’s crucial to be able to track your leads and know what actions are converting to a sale. So what works and what doesn’t? Here are a
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