The Tide is Rising

by Mark Mathis. Published Yesterday in One-Minute Marketer.

There are some pundits writing that brand is dead in the digital age. Others, like me, say it is even more important today because of digital.

I saw one great example of brand and brand extension that is cleaning up across the country. The best-selling laundry detergent wants to be the best-selling dry cleaners. When you say Tide Dry Cleaners, you automatically think that whites will be whiter and colors will be brighter.

Tide also has a huge advantage with nearly 1 million Facebook fans and a gazillion loyal customers who have trusted the name for laundry for 60 years.

P&G, which owns Tide, also has opened Mr. Clean Car Wash in many states. What I really like about what P&G is doing is that it’s staying true to the brand when it opens stores of any kind.

Tide is infusing the Tide Dry Cleaners with the known Tide fragrance (rather than the chemical-based blast you get in most dry cleaners) that’s been “cozily familiar to generations of households,” the New York Times reported.

Strong brand wins and, in this case, may raise all P&G boats.

The Price of Smartphones Seems Right to Me

by Mark Mathis. Published 4 days ago in One-Minute Marketer.

If you’re not a neuro-marketer, you think cellphone prices are out of hand and “losing touch with reality” of what people will pay. Polls and journalists who don’t like to pay a lot for a phone agree. USA Today says that the majority of people don’t want to pay more than $750 for a phone. Hmm, how did they come up with $750? That seems a lot compared with a few years ago, but that is the new target.

Market researchers will tell you another story about pricing. “Brainfluence” calls it anchoring. We store a price in our brain and then use that number anchor to judge all other prices. How that anchor is set is where marketing comes into play.

There are drifting anchors (like gas prices), infomercial anchors (everything is $19.99), expectation anchors (expensive wine always tastes better than cheaper wines when you know the price). Then there are irrational anchors. Sometimes anchors are set by a high number you might hear right before your purchase. For example, if you think of the last two digits of your Social Security number, they will impact the price you are willing to pay for an item. “Brainfluence” calls that a “foible of human brains.”

So to cellphones: You can see how setting a high anchor price for smartphones would be advantageous, because as you lower it or offer incentives, they seem much more like a bargain.

“Brainfluence” also warns that you must work the demand curve. You “demand a high price from the portion of the market willing to pay that much before dropping the price to reach a larger number of customers.”

So if you know most people will pay $750 for a phone, then you would price the phone over $1,000 to take advantage of early adopters. Then lower to the range where most people will buy. They now think they are getting a real bargain.

Early adopters are happy because for a little while they have the prestige of owning the new phone, and you make the price-conscious adopters happy because they got a deal. And you make the cell company happy because they made a boatload of money on both.

Anchors away, my friend. Anchor your prices today.

The Voice Will Soon Be in Control

by Mark Mathis. Published 2 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

The growth of smart speakers and voice commands is booming. The number of smart speakers in U.S. households grew from 67 million in December 2017 to 119 million in December 2018. With that growth rate, it will not be long until smart speaker penetration is at 50% of U.S. homes.

So what are people doing with their smart speakers, other than asking silly questions? Remember when we used our cell phones to actually call people? What we do with our smart speakers today is not necessarily what we will be doing tomorrow, but Adobe Analytics tried to determine usage in a recent study. What Adobe found was that more than half of consumers who have voice assistants use them a least once a day. Here is what they were doing:

61% playing music
60% weather
54% fun questions
53% general research
39% getting directions
39% setting reminders
22% shopping

The proliferation of smart speakers will change how we use them. There is a learning curve, but what we do know is this new technology will change how we write for websites, how we use audio such as podcasts and search marketing. What we say is so different than what we write. It is another disruption and another new media to wrap your ears around.

Marketing Technology is Marching Forward

by Mark Mathis. Published 2 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

Smart Technology Marketing (STM) is a phrase you need to know for the future. A media economist, PQ Media, released its first benchmark on this area and reported that STM was the fastest-growing marketing segment in 2018.

We can fall into the crowd that views the coming technology revolution in marketing as a threat, or, as Lawrence Crosby and Chris Langdon put it in an American Marketing Association piece: “What emerges are complex adaptive systems that pose an existential threat to marketing if the field cannot define its role.”

It seems to fit our nation today; marketing tech is either good or bad. Even though marketing technology offers an existential threat and is often challenging, to true marketers — people with a “results” orientation — technology fixes many of the problems with modern marketing. For example, AI-powered platforms will take the fake placement and fake views out of programmatic-based advertising. AI will allow more efficiency and, above all else, more accuracy in the digital media buy. The predictive analysis will also allow for better messaging placement to the right targets and at the right time.

Marketing tech is bleeding into all things, and it is coming fast — from Voice Assistants to Virtual Reality, from Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Reality. These areas are expect to grow at more than 100% for the next two years. Today, smart technology accounts for less than 1% of marketer expenditures, but PQ Media expects the investment to top $7 billion in 2023.

Smart technology marketing is marching forward. Are you going to stand on the parade route and salute, or join the band? To end this on an eerie note, and paraphrasing the Borg, resistance seems futile.

Is Your Pocket Money Disappearing?

by Mark Mathis. Published 3 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

You can buy money from ancient Rome (A.D. 200 to 300) for less than $20 for a grab bag of uncleaned and undocumented coins. It’s hard to believe that minted money has been available since 500 B.C. In a few short years, our 21^st century money may become a relic as well.

Bronze Roman Sestertius coin of Roman emperor Nero AD 54-68

More and more businesses are going exclusively digital. The cashless wave is saving some businesses a boatload of 0s and 1s as they eliminate counting cash, depositing cash and signing off on drawers, and take advantage of the overall speed and efficiency increases of cashless transactions. Last year, Visa offered a “Cashless Challenge” to get 50 operators to eliminate cash from their business. Many restaurant chains are starting to go cashless. Most notably on that list is Starbucks, because of the success of its pay app.

In additional to cash, you’re also starting to see another money image disappearing from restaurant menus — the dollar sign. A group from Cornell University — as reported in “Brainfluence,” by Roger Dooley — found that a restaurant should display its prices as a number only and not use a dollar sign or decimal. In the experiment, guests spent significantly more when ordering from menus with no decimals or dollar signs.

Dooley says there is a subliminal negative effect with currency symbols. He calls it the “money effect,” which can change a viewer’s self-interest feelings by seeing images of money or hearing about money.

So take off the dollar signs, you just might sell more 0s and 1s to your customers.

There’s a Lot of Time Pressure on a One-Minute Marketer®

by Mark Mathis. Published 3 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

When I started this blog nine years ago, I wanted to make sure that it was snackable — easy to consume, but with enough flavor to be satisfying.

What’s the optimum length for a digital video. It just happens to be 2 minutes. Smart.

And as the One-Minute Marketer® I also wanted to make sure it was always one minute long. No need to invest any more time twice a week on marketing’s hottest news and thoughts. I really appreciate other time-sensitive marketers. We value the reader’s or viewer’s time enough to thoroughly edit our thoughts down to a few minutes.

One of my favorite organizations for this is the Norman Nielsen Group. For years, this organization has been posting articles and videos with the time stamped under the title. Who doesn’t have two minutes to read about 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design?

We are all busy, and time is the new currency. Make sure you’re giving your viewers guidance about the time it takes to consume your content. If your viewers had time, they would thank you.

That Little Voice You Are Hearing Is Not a Threat

by Mark Mathis. Published 4 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

That little voice you are hearing is not in your head, it is Alexa saying she is not a threat, but an opportunity for future marketing.

Each questions was asked independently so the numbers add to 100 only when you add the pink numbers together.

In a recent study by Feedvisor, 43% of national brands in the US “strongly agree” that voice ordering is an opportunity of brands. However, nearly 30% said they “strongly agree” voice ordering is a threat for brands.

More than half of brands sell on Amazon. It is expected to climb to 75% in 5 years. More than 30% US adults own a smart speaker. What is troubling for those selling on Amazon is that when using voice ordering, “85% of consumers admitted that instead of purchasing the specific brand they requested, they purchased the first option selected by the voice assistant on more than one occasions” (Source: Gartner L2).

So are you getting ready for a voice activated world. If you haven’t started podcasting or work in the audio space, it’s time to activate your voice options. Alexa will love for it.

11 Hours A Day

by Mark Mathis. Published 4 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

We spend nearly 11 hours a day with electronic media. I didn’t read this in a newspaper or a book, I read it online on an internet-connected PC. Now consider we are only awake for about 17 hours a day, that’s a huge percentage of time staring at a screen.

Statista says that some of this is multitasking time otherwise, “we wouldn’t get a whole lot done these days.” But it does make me think about two important things:

How our communications needs to be specifically designed for the illuminated computer screen in a variety of sizes, and
How a well designed print piece on high quality paper really stands out in the sea of digital sameness

I do find that I miss the tactile experiences of reading on paper. Reading from a screen for long periods of time are a strain on my eyes and are not satisfying. There are hundreds of studies on comprehension, but little consistency in the results. We do know however, people are skimmers and not readers these days–that’s either caused by our busy lives or a result of reading from a screen

The largest screen we view is a digital billboard. Here you can really see the difference in a well-designed digital billboard and a design that would have worked better on a printed poster board. You also quickly notice that there should be different designs parameters for daylight digital displays than nighttime digital billboard designs. There probably should be different daylight designs as well depending on sun angles and time of day.

We spend a lot of time looking at screens. It’s time for our designs to acclimate to the new medium. It’s not a white piece of paper.

Cheers to Stella Artois Super Bowl Effort

by Mark Mathis. Published 5 weeks ago in One-Minute Marketer.

Final numbers from the Super Bowl 2019 are flowing in. Most want to talk about the low ratings for the “most boring Super Bowl of all time.” However, advertisers are seeing a different story to their results. Here are few highlights from Marketing Charts:

The most-viewed ad online was Stella Artois, “Change Up the Usual.” The commercial had more than 48 million views across top video platforms and websites.
The brand with the most online mentions on social media was Pepsi. It had 72,000 social mentions during the Super Bowl.
The most mentioned advertiser on social media during the entire day was the Bud Light ad mash up with HBO Game of Thrones.

Even though the game’s ratings were down from the previous year, 67% of homes with TVs were tuned to the game. CBS stream to the Super Bowl to an additional 7.5 million unique devises which was up 20% from last year.

What all this tells you is that you can’t focus just on the rating of a particular show. It’s an integrated media world that requires attention on all platforms to really win.

Keeping Donors Loyal

by AMPERAGE. Published 5 weeks ago in AMPERAGE Fundraising.

In fundraising, it is important to attract new and big donors, and it’s exciting when we do! However, relying solely on a small pool of new and big donors is unsustainable — it costs time, money and other resources. We need to remember the importance of donor loyalty, regardless of the donation size. A January […]

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