Off the Shelf: The Retail & CPG Blog

Considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, John Wanamaker is credited with saying "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". 

Wanamaker's question is one of the biggest in marketing and one which persists to this day.  Living in the late 1800s - early 1900s, his was a world of mass market print media where it was very difficult to correlate marketing and advertising spend to actual sales in his retail stores. 

Fast forward to the late 1990s - early 2000s, and digital marketing and online sales channels are offering retailers and CPGs the opportunity to calculate ROI on marketing spend.  Tracking with tools like Google Analytics and Omniture allowed marketers to isolate specific activities along the process and divert funds / attention to those providing the most return.  A simple example is the ability to track impressions to clicks to conversions to online sales (and incremental profits). 

These are simplistic high ROI examples that don't take into account factors like brand awareness or sales driven to Bricks & Mortars, but you get the idea. 

So what about companies not selling online?  How can they track media effectiveness to a Brick & Mortar point of sale?

One way is to use an offer with a coupon or code that provides a 'line of sight' from the media channel to the point of sale.  If a customer redeems the offer then the revenue can be attributed to the campaign.  Though mobile couponing has seen successes in this, a challenge is that printing coupons and remembering codes can be an impediment to redemption and conversions. 

Another method is something we take to large CPGs.  This involves running analysis on historic campaign data from costs to target segments to response numbers.  Insights can be derived on the contribution of the different media types, and then the insights are used to model and simulate future campaigns.  Marketers can then select the optimal media mix which maximizes their response and activation rates, and in turn incremental sales and net profit!

If only John Wanamaker could see what has become of his classic question...

Posted by Kaysa Kumar at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently met up with an old friend who works for one of the largest global advertising and marketing groups.  His focus area is Consumer Goods companies, and over drinks he was telling me that his clients are increasingly viewing digital marketing development services as a commodity. 

While he was speaking from an agency perspective, his reference to commoditization got me thinking about what those CPG clients are driving towards.  In this case it brought to mind 3 things; cheaper, quicker, and consistent; and how digital marketing platforms that we've built and run for global CPGs enable these goals. 

Cheaper - When we hear commoditization we immediately think costs.  My friend's concern is the cost of his agency services and a race to the bottom in rate cards, but there are many other cost components for CPGs.  Some companies are already realising cost benefits by consolidating hosting & support activities and optimising processes, but this is only one gain to be had. 

From an Infosys perspective the next logical savings opportunity comes in leveraging offshore delivery.  Using the Global Delivery Model to shift work can immediately realise development and deployment savings of over 30%.

A further enabler of cost savings is in reusable assets.  Agency rate cards can be expensive, and duplicating development effort across numerous sites can quickly add up.  By reusing assets like webservices across sites, agencies can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs (and of course pass that savings on to the customer)!

Quicker - Reusability is a nice segue into time-to-launch.  In today's dynamic marketing environment the time to take a site live is key.  CPGs can't be limited to pre-planned marketing activities; they need agility to immediately react to everything from shifting consumer tastes to competitor movements.  

As in our cost example above, calling on a library of reusable webservices and assets can shave weeks-to-months off development schedules, bringing sites live in a fraction of the time taken previously. 

When combined with efficiencies from (previously mentioned) optimised processes, we've even seen sites taken from concept to live in less than 24 hours.

Consistent - In its early days Digital Marketing was a bit like the Wild West with brand and agencies within the same company left to their own devices; creating sites and campaigns with little alignment and few standards.  This obviously led to inconsistency in user experiences and messaging across the brand portfolio and geographies.  As digital strategies developed, consistency has gained importance with companies ensuring brand teams and agencies align to defined standards and practices.  Building processes and audits in to a Digital Marketing Platform allows CPGs to ensure compliance whether it's messaging, aesthetics, or user journey. 

Further, those same reusable webservices we talked about earlier mean that users are automatically getting a consistent experience when logging in, registering, or interacting with the site in any number of ways.

So if my friend is right and digital marketing development is being commoditized, a digital marketing platform may be the smart way for tomorrow's CPG to reap benefits in cost, time, and consistency...

Posted by Kaysa Kumar at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According to Forrester Research, eCommerce will reach nearly $300 Billion by 2015. The race in the eCommerce space is heating up with eBay buying GSI Commerce (Amazon rival) earlier today. We are already seeing a surge in the number of global eCommerce implementations and instance strategy is a question that every large RCL firm operating globally is grappling with. While there is no single answer to this question, it depends on a few factors like below:

1.       Business organization model (Centralized globally -vs- De-centralized regionally)

2.       Speed to market

3.       Maintainability

4.       Upgrade cycles

5.       Integration with other enterprise systems

Based on the weightage that the global firms place on these factors and rank them against single global or regional instances, you can arrive at the strategy that best fits their business model and strategic goals.

Let's look at the pros & cons in a single instance strategy:

Pros:

1. Single global instance of the application configured for different markets

2. Easier rollout of global feature set (eg: branding changes can be rolled out quickly)

3. Optimal utilization of infrastructure across the globe (leverage 24 hr cycle to meet the peak load requirements from Latin America to Asia-Pac)

Cons:

1. Longer time to market as each requirement has to be analyzed for applicability to all markets and developed

2. Each time a new feature is rolled out, all markets have to upgrade to that version at the same time. If all the markets do not upgrade at the same time, divergent code bases have to be maintained leading to dilution of the benefits with a global implementation

3. Shared application and infrastructure failure will impact multiple markets at the same time

Another way to answer the question is to determine the degree of separation. If you have global business features required only 20% of the time while 80% of the needs are for regional features with a faster turnaround, it may not be worthwhile to go with a single instance strategy. The regional requirements could be diverse and it is important for the business to react to the regional requirements either to tap the market or counter competition.

Drawing a parallel to the cloud computing world, Salesforce has a different strategy as opposed to others in the space. Salesforce.com upgrades everyone simultaneously. There are different models adopted by businesses given the nature of their organization structures. In an M&A scenario where integration and unifying the affiliates was key, the model was to have a single global instance and upgrade all markets at the same time whenever there was a change. A large Logistics provider went with a 6 month window for the end users to upgrade after which the previous version was not supported. A global CPG firm organized regionally implemented a regional instance model so they could react faster to regional requirements.

It is important to figure out a robust instance strategy given your business model and priorities and stick to it from the beginning of the implementation. Governance models need to be established to carry out the decision taken and enforce it throughout the global rollout phase. Any change in stance on the instance strategy during implementation leads to a lot of unnecessary costs and complexity.

So, what's your instance strategy?

Posted by Vishnu Veerubhotla at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently owners of a small time fast-food joint filed for bankruptcy. The fast food joint did not have a dedicated FB page. The petition was declined by the magistrate who commented, "One who never existed can never die!" As the word goes, either you exist on FB or you don't exist at all.

With the ever rising popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and My Space, the virtual taste of food is certainly on an upscale. I was reading an article on the invasion of social media in the fast food industry and was amazed to find that almost all known / little known restaurants and fast food chains in US today have a dedicated facebook page which is full of apps and trigger points for drawing customer attention.  An interesting example was of a restaurant called Lenny's sub shop which launched a campaign offering free half pound sub to every new and existing facebook fan for a week and tripled their fan base in 3 days. Meanwhile, it has to be seen if this fan base is converted in footfalls.

Social media sure facilitates a more advanced and far reaching awareness of the brand and is a cheaper and easier tool these days to gain publicity. Let's list down the various advantages of having presence in social media sites:

·         Increased brand awareness

·         Reviews and feedback on regular basis

·         Innovative ideas at times suggested by consumers themselves

·         Easy place holder for promotions and campaigns

As they say, "All that flutters are not eagle wings" we don't know if the presence on social networking sites is quite the winning stroke.

Imagine a scenario where a small fast food chain named "Beans n Dough" develops a dedicated page on FB. The average footfall on weekdays is 500 and on weekends is 1500. It designs a campaign to attract new customers, increase popularity and improve sales. The FB page has a food puzzle game, solving which the user is entitled to a complimentary coffee on a minimum bill of $10.  The puzzle game is a major hit and has everyone on FB going gaga about it. Suddenly it has a fan base of 15000 over a period of a week and has thousands of 'likes' and innumerable 'shares'. One of the user releases the crack of the puzzle and as a result everyone who visits cracks it. The following week there is a sudden surge of customers. The promo team has done its job. Now the store faces the tricky part. The weekday footfall has surged to 1500 and the weekend rush has reached a dizzying 5000. The store doesn't have the capacity to handle such numbers and the customer service starts to get affected. The workflow is not followed to satiate the numbers and the product quality deteriorates. To fulfill the rise in demand, the store has to order raw material at ad-hoc quantities and at non-economical prices. The whiplash effect of the sudden rise in demand sends shockwaves backwards and the buying department orders large stocks of raw material for the following weeks. At the store, customers aren't happy. The existing loyal customers switch on to other fast-food joints to stay away from queues and the new customers don't bother to visit twice owing to the sub-standard product and the service. What started as a superb marketing campaign proved to be a perfect recipe for disaster for the fast food joint.   

What could be the repercussion of such a situation on the fast food chain?  Negative publicity, customer's criticism, blasphemy. What initially sounded a cool marketing strategy, ended up creating a negative impact on sales and brand image.

Since the nature of food industry is such that there is a need of constant marketing / publicity of products to entice the customers with something new, social networking sites serves as the perfect platform for it. Put some cool aaps on your page, let the customer explore what you have to offer through games and contests, gain word of mouth by expanding your fan base and you sure can do a lot of marketing and that too at a price which you would be too foolish to ignore.

But is this publicity translating directly into increased sales or new customers? What the seller should not forget is that campaigning through social media can fetch one time sale or may be a few more times but an elevation in the number of loyal customers can only be achieved of the rest of the P's of marketing are not ignored.

Unless the promotions are supported by solid pillars of product, price and place - and this holds very true in case of fast food industry - the hype of social media will not last long.

Lets take the example of the big players like McDonalds, Sub way etc.

When they promote the product on a face book page, the user is also made sure of the fact that the product will be fresh and of good quality, it will be easily available and the price will be affordable. The item is absolutely fresh, the supply chain and logistics are completely supporting the warehouse - store business and pricing is sensitive to the average customer's pocket.

Any fast food player, when plans to venture into a new media platform, should make sure to get answers to the following questions:

·         Does increasing fan base translate to increase sales?

·         Do the fast food chains make permanent customers via this media?

·         How long lasting is the effect of every campaign launched?

·         Does liking the FB page actually yield in liking the food?

·         Is it just the freebies which attract customers?

Marketing through social media surely has a lot of advantages these days, given the kind of penetration it has amongst the consumers. But a player has to carefully play his cards to ensure that the visibility it attains through campaigning fetches more and permanent customers instead of shoving them away.

Going back to the stated illustration on "Beans n Dough", can we have ways to control how a viral promotion is limited like a nuclear reaction to harness its unlimited energy to good use? Your suggestions are welcome to be a part of the next blog in this series.

Co authors: Sneha Tarang (sneh_tarang@infosys.com) &

                     Harshad Deshpande  (harshadhanumant_d@infosys.com)

Posted by Sneha Tarang Randev at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Sports Marketing has always been one of the biggest verticals in any of the world's leading sporting goods industry. It's by far the biggest unit within Brand Marketing for any leading sporting goods industry.

• Have you ever wondered why sporting goods companies use professional athletes as their brand ambassadors?
• What a professional athlete (or asset) would mean to the brand that has contracted him / her?
• What does the brand mean to the contracted athlete (or asset)?

There is a complete value chain behind contracting the asset to realizing its value (ROI). In today's world this value chain is further augmented and supported by various Digital Marketing platforms and its realization complemented as a Digital Asset Value chain.

Let's start at the basics - why would someone want to contract a David Beckham and show case him as a brand ambassador?

The answer is simple - he is a huge icon, with a great fan following and people like to follow his trends and products he supports. Companies like to target this audience with major digital marketing campaigns and ad campaigns to enhance the volume of sales of their products. This could tie in with a major sporting tournament or a product launch.

So, how does one get contracted by a company? And how is his contracted period lived? This is the "life cycle of a contracted asset"; which is augmented by a digital value chain.

Posted by Gagandeep Singh Nanra at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Few weeks back, while browsing one of my favorite cricket websites, I came across a fantasy game hosted on their website. Somehow I got impulse to join the game and play with my fellow mates spread across social network and other unknown sources. 4 weeks down the line, I am realizing that I am visiting the website about 10 times more than what I used to do earlier fulfilling or even exceeding the expectations of website owners.

This triggered the thought to find out how brands are using Gaming as medium to generate more brand awareness, drive more traffic to their online presence, build more consumers loyalty and finally converting them into sales.  This is especially more relevant for Retail and CPG companies who other than demonstrating their product/services qualities and probably manufacturing process were struggling to offer anything fresh and jazzy to their consumers to build consumer loyalty over a longer period of time.

Why Gaming?

Let's get real and put on Brand CEO's hat and see how (if) Gaming will help my brand. Here is my take:

1)      If my game is interesting, easy to understand but still very competitive in nature, I would be able to bring more traffic to my site and sustain consumer traffic on my site for much longer period.

2)      If I combine this with one of my bigger product or campaign launches, I will give my product every opportunity to catch more eyeballs.

3)      If I connect the game on Social media sources, I will be able to generate fan loyalty and multiply my consumer base exponentially not just thro' sources like FB and/or Twitter but also via Word of mouth (or Blog in Digital Marketing world).

4)      Games are much easier to propagate device independently meaning I am able to target people with iPhone, iPad, smartphones with pretty much the same investment as done for building web based games.

Let's just look at some stats over the last few months and

Ø  A recent report by Jupiter Media Metrix states that 35.1 million people play online games and the number is projected to increase to 104.9 million in next 6 months.

Ø  Toyota's was ranked 6 among major car companies when they launched their online game Adrenaline racing game on MSN Gaming Zone in 2000. In 3 months, they rocketed to number 2.

Ø  A total of 60,000 children logged onto Lego's online treasure hunt campaign to search for its new Mini Figures range. I don't have the corresponding sales numbers but for sure the final sales would have got a big boost.

Online gaming is real and at the same time a casual way of introducing your brand to consumers in unique way.  Tell us what your customers and clients are doing in ever growing and improving Online Gaming space.

Posted by Akshay Gupta at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Traditionally there are various approaches which could be followed to develop IT solutions to support the ever changing business dynamics. There have been many evaluation in the process and latest being the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Software as a Service (SaaS). These approaches have been paradigm shift in the application development to bring in agility and faster implementation of the solutions. Still they lack orchestration transparency of the business processes and even though loosely coupled services are being developed still they become embedded into the systems. It becomes difficult for business team to understand the IT intricacies which brings in the divide between IT and business team.

Process oriented implementation approach is natural progression of SOA paradigm of development where in different services threaded together to complete the process on common platform. Process oriented approach is implemented on any common Business Process Management (BPM) platform. This platform provides platform for process orchestration capability which is used for modeling the executable processes very near to the actual business process strategy. There is multi-dimensional advantage with this approach of development like:

v  Reduced cost of implementation

o   The process driven implementation approach ensures that existing investment done on other legacy & new dimensional product is leveraged with little or no extra cost by promoting SOA paradigm approach.

o   Almost every BPM platform provides out of the box support for generating user friendly user interfaces without investing additional effort which provides ideal platform for faster system implementation yet reducing overall cost.

v Business Process Cost Reduction

o   BPM implementation will ensure removal of redundant removal of the manual effort in overall business process thus significant cost reduction

v Align execution with business

o   Fundamentals of BPM ensure that process implementation and execution is in line with the overall business strategy.

o   Providing common understanding of the business process across organization. This leads to harmonization of the process across business verticals as processes as well documented and represented using common platform

v Enhanced Productivity

o   BPM implementation will ensure that laborious work of data conciliation, manual tracking of documents, follow-ups with stakeholders are reduced which leads to better utilization of existing resources.

v Real time process visibility

o   Business activity monitoring ensures tracking each and every process instance and provides real time visibility into the process for any bottlenecks.

o   Ensures timely intervention from concerned team for addressing this issue thus better control of the process.

o   Also ensure regulatory compliance with the different regulations like SOX etc.

No structured business can run without defining business processes. It can be manual process or semi-automated processes but processes are lifeline of the business. This is where BPM will start bringing in benefits listed above as well as provides platform for continuous optimizations.

Posted by Kamalakannan Anantharaman at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone has heard about the wide variety of tools available to support and encourage enterprise collaboration. But collaboration doesn't start with a tool, it starts with people. Collaboration is a hot topic right now, and has been for a good few years. The word 'enterprise' in front and the term becomes even more newsworthy. "Enterprise collaboration -- yes that's what we should be doing" is a sentence that can be heard in various guises across boardrooms all over the world. When you really think about it, collaboration is at the very heart of every business on the planet.  It's very rare that you find someone that is isolated from the rest of the company.  Most people are a part of a team that needs to work together to achieve the best possible results; that team is a part of many teams that all need to work together to help grow an enterprise.  We collaborate in pretty much everything we do at work, it's not always efficient and it's not always effective, but what if it were?

Frost & Sullivan along with Verizon Business and Microsoft conducted research around the impact of collaboration within the enterprise.  The results of the study showed that collaboration is a key driver of company performance (the study was conducted in 2006).  A global collaboration index model was developed which looked at variable factors that affect collaboration as well as several variables that affect company performance.

The highlight of the research project was that 36% of a company's performance was due to its collaboration index, 16& was due to strategic orientation and 7% was due to market and technological turbulence influence.  Here is how collaboration affected the various aspects of business performance:

Posted by SathishKumar Ramadoss at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

iPhone, iPad, Mobility, Digital Marketing - these are the buzz words in the industry today, right? With the end users having embraced this advancement in technology with both hands, how far the corporations have leveraged this? Has every industry realized the avenues to monetize this new trend? While the answer is Yes, the degree of awareness and adoption varies from industry to industry.

While retailers are ahead on this road, and with CPG companies starting to think seriously, core distributors have not caught up with this trend at all. In this blog, I want to focus on how the food distribution industry is reacting and my take on how they should react.

Before we go any further, we need to understand the profiles of the customers of food distributors. By the sheer nature of their business, food distributors do not directly interact with the end consumers. Their customers are business entities like restaurants, hospitals, etc. So, what we will generally call as B2B will be B2C for them. While some of these customers are large multi-location restaurants, most of them are street customers like the street corner restaurants.

Traditionally, food distributors have relied on touch & feel relationship whereby the sales associates interact with the customers for all their needs. While the main objective of the sales force should be business development, the reality is that they have become the only point of contact for all the customer needs. Be it a simple query like the status of an order or some questions on the invoice, the customer will call the sales person to get his/her question answered. As per one survey, almost 60% of the sales force's bandwidth is being spent on non-sales related activities and that is scary. This is not a scalable model by any stretch of imagination.

Of late, some of the food distributors have realized the opportunity of taking the administrative work away from sales force and either make that into a self-service model or to a back-office call center. The moment the customers are forced to place an order thru the self-service online systems, the question of portability across devices will rise. You can look at mobilizing the customer facing apps from two aspects; first to improve adoption by providing access thru multiple devices so that it becomes easier for chefs to place an order from even the kitchen; second to explore the opportunity to drive business growth or new market share by making it more accessible for the customers and prospective customers.

The second aspect is far more important given the fact that the food distribution industry's market size is somewhat static and the only way to grow for a food distributor is to increase its market share. Ease of access to information and data will provide with that opportunity.

Posted by Prasanna Ramaswamy at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Test Marketing - The easy win ?

Tropicana & GAP - We are all aware of the sequence of events unfolding as they recently tried to revamp the brand image with brand new logos and packaging. However soon after launch, the blogosphere came alive with the negative feedback on the new look of the brands and both the companies were forced to roll back the changes. Millions of dollars spent on launching the new brands look went down the drain. Millions more spent on reversing the launch and meanwhile the brands were tarnished and conceivably lost loyalty - the highest level of consumer satisfaction that the Marketeers vie for. More importantly, the 'straddlers' - consumers on the fence would have moved to competitor brands.

Enough has been said about the mass effect of social media and the feedback cycle and I don't want to discuss that here. The question that crops up is how can the companies that have been doing test marketing for so long go so wrong? Months of focus groups, feedbacks, test marketing could not measure the final feedback from the market which was diagonally opposite of what they expected.

There is a lot of thinking going around on how Marketing can leverage the social media & blogosphere, however isn't test marketing an easy win to start this? Place your new brand look on social websites, get feedback on them and let the consumers select what they like. Easy, convenient and cost effective. The added advantages of doing social test marketing are:

v  Consumers feel involved in the decision - brand affinity & loyalty increases.

v  Wider base of feedback is possible rather than restricting to as specific focus group or segment.

v  Negative social comments post launch get neutralized by consumers who 'own' the selection and decision process. The best medicine for bad social publicity is positive social reinforcement.

The biggest issue is that the competitors know about it also and can plan a counter strategy especially in the case of new product launches. Other industries (especially media) have adopted the test feedback from the consumers to shape the final product. CPG companies have tested the waters with specific feedback on products already launched but not on test marketing. The other challenge will be the Agencies - are they ready to embrace the open model ? How can they help the CPG companies to leverage this model.

What do you think? Will this model work in making and launching more successful products and increasing brand affinity? What are the challenges?

Posted by Kapil Khanduja at 2:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

 The events in Japan shook the earth.. literally. No words can describe the suffering that people in Japan are going through. Dual natural calamities and then a nuclear emergency coming all at once is truly unimaginable. And hence something that no one plans for. Yet this is the time when it is most imperative that the millions affected be helped at the earliest possible time - within hours or days. Similar large scale disruptions have happened in the past - Indonesia Tsunami, Chile, Haiti, and in war scenarios.

Amongst other things, lots of basic consumer goods are needed for recovery. For instance, bottled water, packaged high nutrition imperishable Ready to Eat foods, sanitation, cleansing and household products, and clothing.  This is needed. Urgently. At a low cost or even at no cost to the end consumer. At places which are most inaccessible.

CPG companies bear an important responsibility in making this recovery happen.

The challenge is that exactly at this time, the regional/ local supply chain suffers the most too. These disasters led to severe supply chain disruptions- from unavailability of raw material, to factories closing, to infrastructure, port, roads and warehousing disruptions. The people who would run the local links of the supply chains are often themselves the affected ones.

The question is how can companies create truly agile supply chains that can operate fast in these difficult times?

- How can the CPG organizations' regional leaders and their teams quickly and proactively organize themselves, prepare fair-priced or subsidized offers, contact buyers (donors, relief agencies, and host governments) to quickly determine the impact, and get the contractual arrangements sorted out? Can this be done in hours, not days and weeks?

- In parallel, how can the demand planners quickly get visibility into the event-driven demand,  the available inventory, and determine the gap for categories that are known to have an increased demand after these catastrophic events?

- What is the best way to determine the right SKUs and the right packaging?

- How can the Supply planners provide this "Demand Signal" to the factories in near real time, and ensure adequate production?

- How can supply chain planners re-prioritize some of the existing production, and existing inventory towards these humanitarian needs?

- How can alternate transportation and warehousing contracts be put in place, and goods moved fast from multiple factories and warehouses?

- How can the last mile problem be solved? Partnering with the emergency response team is a must, and that's something many in the local distribution network might not have experience with.

These are some of the many questions that CPG companies need to solve for, while creating their "disaster recovery" plans. If you are aware of any best of breed examples /  benchmarks, we would love to hear from you.

Posted by Aditya Mittal at 3:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Internationalization as well as Connecting with the customer are top priorities for most CPG companies. Most companies are leveraging electronic, social and mobile channels for this.

In this regard, it was very interesting in recent days to see how online social collaboration and mobile channel were used in the middle east by protestors seeking democracy. It was a very quick and effective way for the people to collaborate, communicate, organize and align. In some ways, it appears that the impact of social collaboration / mobile has been more intense in the emerging markets than the West. The adoption seems to have been more pervasive and fundamental. At the same time, it is also important to note that each country is at a different stage of maturity .

The question of interest is how do companies, especially CPGs with an emerging market growth agenda, leverage this trend effectively?  One way is to have a global social/ mobile strategy with local flavors, with predefined governance around what can and should be localized. This is similar to how a brand strategy might be tweaked for a particular region.

Posted by Aditya Mittal at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is marked shift amongst CPG companies to shift their marketing spends to digital from traditional media - close to 12% - 15% spend is planned for digital.

Why are CPG companies moving to digital media? What are the questions they are grappling with?

·        How do we react to the shift of control from marketer to consumer?

·        Consumers are now in control of the messaging they receive - therefore, how do we focus on the 'pull' instead of the 'push'?

·        Consumer data has always existed but brands are now realizing the true potential of data and the need to treat it as one of the most important assets. How do we create and mine the asset to realize the maximum ROI from our loyal customers? How do we reach those who matter?

·        How do we create digital campaigns that can be launched in hours, not months?

·        How do we increase digital activities and still keep costs in control? How do we foster digital creativity and yet, ensure that we reuse what we have already built?

Traditionally, CPG companies have decentralized digital marketing - let the brand managers do what they want, how they want, when they want.  Though this has driven creativity and speed, the lack of a central approach has led to a fractured model of digital marketing.

The front-runners in digital are now focusing on 'Digital Marketing Platforms'.

What would a digital marketing platform do - is it about hosting all websites at a single location? Does it force our digital agencies to work on a specified technology and therefore, inhibiting creativity? Neither of the above.

 What does a Digital Marketing platform provide - is it a solution for Digital next? It provides:

·        Platform that allows marketers and creative agencies to build on multiple technologies with tools and reusable components thereby, reducing time and effort - such a platform, if used effectively, can reduce campaign launch times within 24hours

·        Centralised consumer data that the analytics brain of the digital platform can then leverage to provide meaningful insights - imagine the power of being able to send targeted messages across channels based on your asset's (read, consumer) browsing pattern or registration profile

·        Adapters and solution components that seamlessly integrate with multiple channels including mobile and social channels such as Facebook - if we need to engage with our assets, we need to go beyond websites and microsites and engage more intimately and frequently

·        Processes and solutions that ensure that the digital campaigns have been built robustly and are scalable and secure - how often have we seen digital campaigns break as they go viral?

·        Solution components for the future - marketers focus on brands, platforms focus on the latest cutting edge technologies and processes to support the brands

Posted by Amby at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Facebook and Twitter's of the world have provided corporate world a new organic way of socializing with their consumers. A new innovative way to build brand awareness & brand loyalty. A new way to connect with consumers as per there profile, preferences, likes and dislikes at a time of the day convenient to them.

The experimentation started with more of broadcast campaigns/deals/promotions to now with two way communication. The idea is to start an interactive dialogue/conversation and keep the consumer engaged. Today the marketing teams of medium and large organizations are lined up to do marketing on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels. The teams are putting strategizes for the next financial year to drive branding and how to provide better consumer experience. Organizations are trying to give complete website experience on the social channel by investing on Facebook apps and custom pages. For organizations that do have their presence on social channel today, are trying to innovate to keep the interest of consumer intact and be relevant in the ever changing social channel. One of the important property of the social channel is its ability to go Viral.

Why the rush!! Over last one year, social channel has shown its influence to not just the corporate world but also to governments around the world. They say it all started with tweets and texting in Egypt. It played an important role for people to communicate, collaborate & most importantly EXPRESS. It's a mob on the net. However we have also seen a dangerous face of it, when anonymous groups used the social channel to coordinate DoS on non-supporters of Wikileaks.

Baking period:  Yes, organizations are still experimenting to join the dots and define a roadmap for marketing with social channel. They still have the challenge to converts the 'Likes' to actually drive up sales. Note that it's not just a learning curve for the organizations but for the consumers also.  Do people really know that a 'Like' click on any product/brand is equivalent to opting in to receive communication on that product/brand?

As the consumers mature on social channel overtime, I believe the challenges to engage with get tougher because people do not like push communication. Smart organizations have been trying to engage fans on social channel for a cause. However if you ask the people to 'Like' you before you donate for the latest earthquake in Japan? I would say, common on - give me a break!!! What kind of humanitarian values is that?

Also is it a good idea for organizations to sell directly on the social channel? OR just share relevant information on events/promotions to people who 'Like' you and use this channel to get effective feedback on your brands by polling them.

The other important question that organizations are trying to get answered is "How much should we customize the solution for a particular social marketing channel?" particularly when digital assets reusability has been a challenge for many organizations. On the other hand IT industry has moved swiftly to provide point solutions around these channels to reduce turnaround time; like the 'SHOPTAB' feature (used by Coca cola) to link their Facebook merchandise shopping cart with existing online store, usage of Social Relationship Management Platform - 'Vitrue' (used by Diageo brands like Smirnoff) to enable a CMS like feature for Facebook apps development using 'Vitrue Tabs' and 'Vitrue Organizer' OR usage of 'Wildfire' to build and launch Social Media Marketing campaigns.

Posted by Amby at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, ignore the above headline - I definitely don't want to instigate a new round of rumor on this topic. This was a sensational rumor in the first part of 2010 where some unscrupulous elements started this. But I do want to ponder on this interesting question. If you know, when Mark Zuckerberg invented thefacebook.com, he and his Brazilian partner, Eduardo were struggling to attract advertisements and were finding it difficult to sustain their business venture.

Couple of days back, when I was having a chat with two of my colleagues, one a business consultant and another, a technical architect, I posed this question to them. While Twitter and Facebook have become integral part of our lives, how would the users react if these social networking sites start charging the users? Are we so addicted that we don't mind shelling couple of dollars a month to keep my network up and running? I have to say that we had a divided house in that coffee bar.

This is not the first time these kinds of questions have been asked. During the dot com burst, Hotmail and Yahoo were considering a proposal to charge a nominal fee for their email users - this was considered a necessity to keep them afloat. But better sense prevailed and they dropped that proposal.

So, let us try to solve this riddle. While Facebook is merrily adding 1 million users every day, would they lose their user base, if they charge say $1.99 per month? My take is that yes, there will be an impact to the user base, provided there is an alternate to Facebook for the users. If all social networking sites form a cartel and decide to take this proposal forward, would the users just discontinue their habit of logging into these sites? My emphatic answer is No. These networking sites have become our twin brother and I personally find it very difficult to imagine that I will be ready to lose the contacts that I have established with some of my school friend who were long forgotten till I found them on Facebook. And if I have to pay couple of dollars a month, I don't care.

Not many will agree with my stance, but as a person who has become an addict of Facebook, Twitter and linkedin,couple of dollars a month is not going to deter me. Having said that I don't think this will happen. With the user base growing phenomenally for these websites, I don't anticipate a need for such a drastic measure. But we never know how the economy is going to behave and God forbid, there may be a time when Facebook and Twitter will struggle to find sponsors. In such a scenario, there might be an in-between solution which can help them retain the user base, but also open other avenues for revenue.

There are lots of websites which enable the users to share large files and data with others. If you are familiar with YouSendIt.com, you know what I am talking. And their business model is an interesting one, where they allow the users to share files for free with some restrictions, like the size of the file or restrict the enhanced features or the types of files and so on and so forth. Their ideology is that once they get the users into their website, they can lure them into subscribing for added functionalities for a nominal cost.

I think social networking sites can take a cue from the above and create enhanced functionalities and charge the users. Today Facebook allows people to share videos and also have a chat room. They can look at a video chat or video conference between friends and charge them per usage. This way you are not taking away any basic functionality that the users have got used to for free, but offer them a premium facility for a nominal charge. I believe this is an attractive proposition.

While I don't claim that my idea is revolutionary, but having reached a critical level of success and with a user base as addicted as they have currently, the social networking sites should explore these ideas.

 I need to set up sometime with Mark Zuckerberg to sell this proposal and see how he reacts. I hope he is not going to get a restraining order on me J

Posted by Prasanna Ramaswamy at 7:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Susie Lonie of Vodafone UK had never thought that the little pilot project done in Nairobi will soon become a household name in Kenya. The founder of M-Pesa in Africa has paved way for mobile payments across African countries where the customers can transfer money, withdraw cash and buy airtime from their mobile phones. Popular in the 57% of Kenyan adult population, the number of domestic transactions done by M-Pesa has outstripped the money transfers Western Union does globally.

Well, this is just a small instance which unveils the power of mCommerce. Going by the numbers, there are 490 million mobile Internet users globally, with that number set to increase to 1 billion by 2011. According to the Facebook official statistics released in January 2011, there are more than 200 million active users [40 percent] currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and people who use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active as non-mobile users!

Though mobile commerce is one amongst many commerce channels in multi channel commerce, it has the potential to rule the roost as mobile phones have become more important than a wallet, carried everywhere from the dining table to bag's pocket to the folds of sleeping pillow. A recent research published by ATG (Art Technology Group) shows 33% of consumers across the world are using their mobile devices to browse or research products and services at least periodically, 13 % are using them to make purchases. Usually, mobile is used during all four phases of multi channel commerce, namely Engage, Transact, Fulfill and Services.

As using a Smartphone has become second nature to consumers, it should come as no surprise that retailers are making use of all modern and contemporary P's of marketing to engage their customers at this new and valuable touch point. If one has to ponder upon, what are the most frequently mCommerce transactions -  making a purchase using a mobile device; use of a mobile wallet or a digital coupon; price comparison using bar code scanning.  But there is no end to innovation and retailers are doing their best to make hay while the sun of mCommerce shines. Targeted GPS based promotions, mobile virtual malls, digital signage integration with mobile location and Coupon/gift card redemption at Store PoS are some of the new techniques being used to tap the power of the technology.  According to NRF, a reported 74% of online retailers either have in place or are developing mobile commerce strategies, while 20% have already implemented their complete plans. These have essentially become the need of the hour especially when customers can actually buy a Corvette on eBay mobile for $75,000. This is an eye opener which demonstrates that people are whole heartedly embracing the new technology and keeping the businesses on their toes.

And to help businesses bridge the gap, IT and business solution providers have come to the fore. Apart from providing mobile services for websites and e-commerce sites, the other areas of focus are Barcode/RFID solutions; Telematics; GPS based solutions; real time analytics and actionable alerts to store exception scenarios and robotics.  iPhone apps such as Shopkick and Android have created huge buzz in the market by launching easily downloadable apps to help customers buy when they are on move. A leading pharmacy retailer in US allows the users to refill the prescriptions from account history, take the order prints and locate store just by a single touch on the app.

Another growth opportunity in mobile industry is that of mobile payments which is gradually gaining traction. Since most of the companies only limit themselves to the usage of credit/debit cards for mobile payment, Paypal and Isis see a huge opportunity in the fledgling industry. Isis, which is a joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon wireless, intends to create a mobile wallet that will eliminate the need to carry cash, credit and debit cards, reward cards, coupons, tickets and transit passes.  The time is not surely far off when the customers won't carry anything in their wallets, not even debit/credit cards, just a wave of mobile phone will do!

So, the ball has been set off rolling and market forces will drive it. Let's see how much momentum it gathers!

Posted by Nitasha Dhir at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)