What you need for imaginative play

"Timeless Toys. Endless Possibilities" is the title of the first-ever marketing campaign for Melissa & Doug. Of course, the brand believes that its toys are the key: “When playing with a Melissa & Doug toy, imagination runs wild — a toy broom isn't just a broom, it's a rocket ship heading to the moon.”

It’s a nice idea, and there is something, indeed, timeless about low-tech toys. However, in truth, even a real broom or even a stick that fell off a tree or an empty box left from another purchase could also serve as a rocket ship for the kid with imagination.

In fact, if imaginative play is your goal, less is more. It’s when you can’t buy everything you want to play with that you are forced to improvise and get more creative.

Read more in Toys Powered by Imagination

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2020/10/now-you-can-revisit-your-childhood-on.html

The Value of Zero: Accuracy and Trust

Data-driven marketing has always focused on getting as much information on your customers as possible through various channels. As privacy grows increasingly important and tracking becomes increasingly limited, zero-party data (ZPD) is on the rise.

Conventional marketing wisdom has always been that the more you know about your customer, the more effectively you can target them. For that reason, marketers have always been trying to get their hand on as much data as possible, relying not just on their own first-party data but even paying for second-party and third-party data. 

To clarify terms, here’s a rundown on the differences in data sources.
First-party data

First-party data is what a business receives directly from a customer typically as a result of purchases, subscriptions, or points of contact. It can be the result of what a customer actively fills in on a form or passively shares as a result of cookies that the customer accepts by using the brand’s site or the tracking that comes through use of an app.

While a complete record of information given by a customer is valuable, for businesses that haven’t had much time to gain a complete history, it may not suffice to inform truly tailored experiences. That’s why businesses will pay for access to additional information through second and even third parties.
Second-party data

Second-party data is first-party data acquired by another company that is then sold to a business that wants more information about its customer base. Drawing on the more thorough information can fill in more of the customer picture, but it’s still limited to what a single business has been able to gather on the customers, which is why some will pay a broker for data.


Third-party data

Third-party data is different from first and second party in that it draws on multiple sources of data that a separate company puts together into a single dataset to be sold to those in the market for that kind of customer information. Typically, the company in the business of delivering data will purchase first party data from a number of companies to create these data packages for others to buy through the data exchange marketplace.
Data drawbacks

While going from one to three increases your data resources, it’s not without its drawbacks. As anyone can buy third party data, what a business buys is not unique to it. As a result, it is very likely that all businesses competing for the same customers are working off the same data set.

Also since the establishment of GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, marketers have had to respect consumer-set boundaries for the collection, use, and sale of their data.

The rise of such legislation has shed more light on privacy issues that has created pressure for platforms to stop enabling data collection without users’ knowledge. That is the story behind Google’s resolution to phase out third-party cookies and Apple’s new iOS setup for informed consent on apps.

The new frameworks don’t only curtail marketers from using data obtained from outside sources. They can even limit some first-party data that businesses have obtained without informed consent by tracking consumer behavior with cookies, pixels, or cross-device identification (XDID).

That is why a couple of years ago, we started hearing about zero-party data or ZPD. The term has been credited to Forrester, which presented it in Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing Report.

This approach has gained momentum over the past couple of years. AW360 predicts that a quarter of CMOs will be looking to implement ZPD in 2021.
The zero-party solution

As both zero-party data and first-party data take in information directly from the customer, there is some overlap between the two. The crucial difference between them is that zero-party data only includes what a customer knowingly and willingly shares.

That means that customers are in full control of the information they share with the business. They are willing to give their data if they feel they can trust the brand and are getting something of value in return.

Read more in  Zero to Hero: Providing Personalization & Privacy

The Pause that Refreshes Marketing Relationships

The old-time tagline for Coca Cola makes a lot of sense when applied to marketing, particularly for a holiday that they don’t want to be thinking about right now.

 

I just got an email from ShopRunner that really got my attention far more than anything I’ve ever seen in a marketing email. The subject line was “Skip our Mother’s Day emails this year.”

With so much clamor to sign up for emails, some of which have already pushed Mother’s Day marketing in mid-April, this subject line really stood out. So even though  I delete most of my ShopRunner emails automatically, just as I do most marketing emails, I clicked this one.  It showed me thsi: 

 

Pressing pause took me to a landing page that showed this:

It’s not like ShopRunner is giving up its raison d'être to promote brands that participate in its program.

As it says, the pause on Mother’s Day communication doesn’t mean that it is pausing all marketing messages. In fact, right under the banner acknowledging my pause were two banner ads for products it is promoting now.

It’s only offering to pause one specific marketing theme. It's actually a smart move not to push their Mother’s Day marketing in the face of people for whom it is just so much spam.

People can have any number of reasons not to have to deal with a bombardment of Mother’s Day messaging. They may find the messages to be irrelevant or, even worse, a sad reminder that they’ve  lost their mothers or their position as mother to children who are gone.

The move is smart because it offers to lessen email fatigue and reduce the irritation of spam. We all get more marketing message than we can even think of responding to. Certainly, customers who recognizes which occasion they'd rather not hear about would appreciate the consideration of a brand sparing them from that onslaught.

Really, this is such a great idea that it should be applied to all occasions typically taken up for marketing, like Father’s Day, graduations, back to school, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, etc.

Related: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2021/04/why-less-is-more.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2021/01/7-ways-to-grab-customer-attention-in.html

The Ad that Delivers What Women Want

 "What does woman want?" That question  perplexed that father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. It continues to puzzle marketers today, as we saw in What Women Want to See in Ads.

 The truth is that the answer was set out well over 500 years ago in one of the legendary knight stories, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell: Spoiler alert: when the knight was given the choice of having his otherwise hideous-looking wife beautiful at night or during the day, he lets her make that decision and  was rewarded with beauty 24/7. 

But that insight of 1450 has been lost over the generations as marketers seek to push on women what they want instead of empowering them to make the decision for themselves. But one swimsuit company got smart about it and so has seen a very positive response to its ad on Facebook:

We proudly want to introduce ModLi.

A different kind of swimwear.

Sometimes - the usual bikini/one-piece is just perfect. Whether you are sun bathing, in a hot-tub with friends, going to the beach with your partner, etc...

And for "other" situations in life, ModLi is perfect.  Playing with your kids on the beach, going to the pool with family, swimming, water sports, or just walking on the coastline.

Benefits:

- Sun Protection (UPF +50 Reducing harmful rays by 98%)

- No wardrobe "Malfunctions"

- Comfortable "It's like the difference between wearing work clothes and sweatpants"

- Lab Tested Fabrics

- Designed by professional designers with customer requests in mind

The ad served on Facebook garnered 6.7K reactions, 683 shares, and 1.2K comments, a sample of which you can see below:

The large number of likes on many of these comments indicate that they do accurately reflect the feelings of many women. They like having  the option to choose if they wish to cover up or not without being judged for those choices. 

Read more in  The Answer to What Women Want in a Swimsuit Ad

Today's targeted marketing is powered by data and automation

 Marketing is always more effective when it is more targeted. As a result of integrating data and algorithms, marketers are able to now deliver a personalized customer experience at scale. 

There are various ways to target specific customers, and approaches range from lumping customers into very broadly defined categories to getting a lot more fine-tuned about the segments and responsive to individual customer behavior .In collaboration with Google, Deloitte put out a Digital transformation through data: a guide for retailers to drive value with data that took a closer look at these gradations. 

It ranked them as follows:

• Limited segmentation: All users are analyzed in broad segments. 

• Basic segmentation: Uses standard characteristics (e.g., gender, geography) for segmentation.

• Detailed segmentation: Segments are based on personal and behavior

• Dynamic segmentation: The UX / UI can respond to a customer’s in-session behavior as he or she exhibits different segment characteristics.

Achieving the detailed level depends on much more data than the static kind that is used for basic segmentation, and advancing to the dynamic level requires a level of automation that will enable recommendations and responses to go out in real-time. 

 The coming AI revolution in retail and consumer products invoked the women’s clothing store,  Avenue Stores LLC as an example of dynamic segmentation. It explained that  it brings together “data across multiple touchpoints, including in-store activities and market trend analysis, to learn and reason about what customers want and when they want it.” On that basis it can reach out to customers with communication tailored to their situation in real-time, which makes it possible to capture their attention while in “‘shopping mode.” 

Marketing for loyalty

Being in touch with your customers to let them know you’re there for them without pressuring them to buy can pay off in winning their loyalty and business later. In this case, your automated messaging doesn’t have to respond to segment your audience, as you would be working off a general form of communication.

When you don’t have history

But what if you do need to sell your products now? Marketing recommendations can work even on the more basic level, not just for new customers for whom you have no history to flesh out a profile but for the type of marketing communication that depends on general trends. For example, a very broad segment of all people in the United States can work for promotions tied to events shared by all due to the calendar, whether it’s Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, etc. 

You don’t need to know much about your customer other than that they’ll know what these days are because they are on their calendars due to living in the United States for the trending algorithm to work well. That makes using this approach ideal for customers for whom you don’t have first-party data.

It doesn’t matter so much what they are normally interested in or what they’ve bought before when you’re sending out a marketing message about buying their mother something before May 10. However, if you do have information about the customer, say you know they’ve ordered flowers for their mother last year, then you can combine the trending recommendation with what you know about their behavior.

Read more in

Advanced Segmentation and Automation Are Changing the Marketing Game

You've come a long way, baby, but you haven't yet arrived

The current state of marketing to women has a vibe that harkens back to the print ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes that ran through the 1970s and 80s with the tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The backgrounds were a representation of the bad old days of restrictions on women that contrasted with the confidently posed model holding her slim cigarette.

The bad old days for marketing featured blatantly sexist ads in which women aspired to nothing more than pleasing their husbands or on catching a husband by being pretty and ladylike. We have moved on, but not altogether.

Marketers have become aware of the need to move with the time and have adapted ad images accordingly. The way women are represented in ads is no longer limited to airbrushed models who exhibit the “right” figure, skin tone, hair, and age.

While ad imagery has come a long way, surveys of women indicate that marketing still has a long way to go.


Only 29% of American women believe advertising portrays them accurately is the title of Callie Schweitzer’s LinkedIn article posted on March 9, 2021. The statistic comes from Morning Consult. Even men weren’t fully convinced, as less than half (44%) said they considered women’s representation accurate.

That's not exactly passing marks.

A flame-broiled fiasco on International Women’s Day 2021

You don’t have to look hard for the brand that seriously misread the room in issuing a Tweet in honor of International Women’s Day, and the Internet made sure you knew about it even after the Tweet was deleted.



The extremely provocative-sounding declaration was meant to reference support for women who become professional chefs and its project called HER (helping equalize restaurants). But without that immediate context provided only within the print ad that you can see below, there was the apparently sexist declaration alone, and that boomeranged against the brand.



The backlash was so strong, that the account had to offer the combination of an apology and reason for deleting the tweet.



Burger King fell right into that marketing hole that Schweitzer complained about with an assertion that “perpetuates centuries-old cultural stereotypes of what society ‘expects’ women to be.” It should be obvious that marketers should steer clear of marketing to women in such forms. But it is still trickier for them to identify what women do want to see and hear in marketing.

Read more in What Women Want to See in Ads

Podcasts may be the missing ingredient in your marketing mix

• Brands that want to strengthen their relationship with their customers are discovering the medium of podcasts. 

• Podcasts have proven effective for targeting audiences, engaging their attention, and converting customers. 

• Purchase intent rises significantly for podcast listeners as it captures their attention even when TV, radio, or digital ads fail to. 

Podcasts take off  

The term “podcast” was not something you would have associated with marketing a decade ago. But that has changed drastically as podcasts have been steadily rising in popularity. 

The number of podcast listeners in the United State rose from a mere 32 million in 2013 to a projected 120 million for this year, Statista reported. It derived a compound annual growth rate of 17% that anticipates an audience of 164 million for podcasts in 2023.’ 

 Podcast ad revenue has also risen tremendously, more than tripling over the space of just four years. According to Music Oomph!, Podcast ad revenue in 2017 was $317 million, but it is expected to hit $1.13 billion this year and to rise to $1.33 billion next year. 

Become the best CRMer you can: 

Read more in Why It May Be Time to Add Podcasts to Your Marketing Arsenal