A Look At What's To Come

It wouldn’t be the start of the new year without a handful of predictions. To get started, the following is a look at six macro trends anticipated to affect the global landscape in 2009. Additionally, we’ve got a video from Trend Hunters with twenty smaller trends to look out for and to top it off we’ve got ten great ideas for a variety of industries care of Springwise. Enjoy!

Trend watching here.

Trend hunting here.

Springwise here.

The Death Of Traditional Retail

The traditional retail environment is being forced to innovate or die. The expansion of ecommerce and the easy at which consumers can find goods online (cheaper goods) is making retail real estate inefficient, relatively more expensive and potentially obsolete. If retail is no longer an environment for brands to showcase tangible goods what future does it have?

All this talk about price cuts driving retail sales is driving me nuts.

Nobody goes to a store to get a cheaper deal than they could online or, if they get it, there's an overwhelming likelihood that the store will be out of business sooner versus later. The idea all but explodes any pretense of a store brand meaning anything (other than Wal-Mart, which means cheaper deal).

It worked to prompt a lemming stampede on Black Friday, but Silent Saturday followed thereafter. Price is about as durable a brand attribute as wind direction. It's just a rotten reason to shop at a store, at any time during the year.

So why all the price cuts now?

For all of its innovation, CRM, and value-add experience branding, most geophysical retailers have yet to figure out how to compete with their online brethren. The primary differentiator continues to be immediate gratification, as real inventory can be distributed upon checkout (online has to ship, unless it's selling a digital asset). I go to a store because I don't want to wait.

So retailers' strategy centers on inventory management: how much can be displayed; when can orders be delayed or cut; what items will sell best, and need to get merchandised up front. Space has innate value, as buyers and reps alike know that there's a direct correlation between inches of exposure and dollars of sales.

No wonder price is the biggest (and/or only) quality that most of them feel empowered to adjust and offer. The rest -- employee experts, extended service agreements, member cards, whatever -- is still incidental to the primary vision of brick-and-mortar retailing. All they really care about is monetizing the real estate with the physical stuff they put in it.

No wonder consumers don't really care. I'm a dim bulb, but I think that the retailers who survive this holiday season (and the rest of 2009, which won't look much better), will have come to a central realization: the competition is real, not virtual. And there's lots better and smarter stuff they can put into geophysical space than merchandise.

I have never understood why booksellers have allowed themselves to get whacked by online retailers. Books (like lots of products) are tangible things...tactile objects with smells, etc....and decision-making involves lots of qualities, like referral, review, comparison, contemplation, and sampling, that aren’t necessarily digitally duplicable.

So a bookstore isn't competing with an online retailer, per se, as much as it's fighting for a portion of my limited travel and visitation time, right? Yet most bookstores are aisles after aisles filled with books. Amazon does that a lot better, and cheaper, too.

I can count on one hand the interesting things that have occurred in stores while I've been visiting during the past few months. Most of them were bad happenstance, like a kid puking, or someone trying to run away with stuff. This is after how many gazillions of dollars, and reams of expert blather, have been devoted to the idea of "experience" and its importance to the retail equation?

Of course, there are exceptions, but the vast majority of brick-and-mortar retailers don't know what to do with customers. And, when they rely on price to drive traffic, the resulting experience involves sharp elbows, long lines, and reminders of the many other reasons why shopping online can be far more civilized.

Where are the in-store promotions? The roving entertainers? Themed-days, or hours, or whatever? I don't have the right answer here, but the questions should be able creating not just brand-relevant experiences, but memorable experiences that are consumer-relevant.

Finally, don't customers stop being customers the moment they buy something? I can say that I shop at Target, but 99.9% of the time I'm not shopping there at all. What does the company do to keep my attention during the rest of my life outside of the store?

Run image advertising, mostly.

Seems to me that brick-and-mortar stores could find ways to utilize online technology to engage with me in meaningful, ongoing ways that might, in fact, drive me into stores more often. Virtual retailers don't have the resources to offer added benefits or experiences in reality. Shouldn't Target measure its brand strength base on how many times I go back to the store (and by what I buy, and how much), instead of how fondly I might think about its ads?

The holidays are going to stink. But I'm hopeful that the crisis will be cathartic for retailers, and that the smart ones will embark in 2009 on the true journeys of reinvention that, up to now, they've barely even recognized, let alone begun.

Source - Baskin Dim Bulb

Real Time Marketing - Jack Bauer Styles

The online environment has allowed consumers to converse about your brand and offerings in ways that were never possible a few years ago. Your ability to market and manage your brand in real time is more important than ever. Just ask the people at Motrin. You want to be part of that conversation and that’s where real time marketing comes in.

How do you think real time marketing affects what traditional marketers do? How do big marketers cope with the idea that you spend months on end planning, creating, producing and then launching major campaigns that could get hijacked by consumers using blogs, Facebook, or the weapon of choice: Twitter.

Case in point: last week J&J's Motrin's new national advertising campaign was brought down by a mob of moms on Twitter. How do you prepare for this? What strategy do you use?

"Praying doesn't sound like a wise strategy to me," says my friend PJ Pereira who broke away from the management of AKQA earlier this year to start his own agency.

Real time marketing is fast becoming the challenge for brand managers. What is real time marketing? Think managing a marketing campaign as if you were Jack Bauer, the lead of Emmy winning show 24 starring Kiefer Sutherland who heads field operations that take you into a number of different directions all at once. Real time marketing is the "flash flood" phenomenon on the Web, in which consumers band together through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other sites. Real time marketing has become fairly commonplace by now: A TV show gets canceled, a company's product turns out to be less than advertised, and boom - an instant protest group forms, using blogs and other "social media" as a megaphone to make its collective voice heard.

Real time marketing is a new challenge brand managers need to get their heads around. What is the appropriate approach?

It's about being able to respond real time, thinking much like dynamic PR people managing all aspects of an advertising campaign. A mindset that can react to changes in the currents, on daily or hourly events as they unfold. It's thinking and acting much more like a PR agency and much less like a traditional advertising agency.

"It's tough," says PJ.

But it does work, and increasingly it's the mentality needed for modern brands as they manage their marketing campaigns. The more you work this way, the more deft you become at managing this way.

Steve Etzler is leading the biggest conference on the subject: Real Time Communications and Marketing the 14th of January 2009 in New York. Steve said: "There's a strong correlation between real time and Cultural Movements - ie: StrawberryFrog's Scion campaign. Turning over the campaign to the community has a lot of real time facets to it. The buzz/word of mouth groundswell is all about real time engagement with the community which causes the Cultural Movement."

Real time marketing does require brands to have a clearer and harder working brand idea, one that can stretch into many different media without breaking a sweat. Without strategic clarity, events could easily overtake a brand real time causing anxiety among clients. The more real time marketing takes hold, the more consumers are engaging with and taking control of brands, the greater the demand for strategic clarity by brand managers. Without the high-end strategy enabling you to focus, you won't be the rehearsed machine ready to make fast decisions with agility.

Perhaps the biggest impact of real time marketing will be the emphasis on strategic idea and less on execution.

Source - Scott Goodson's Writings

Generation C

We’re all aware of Generation X, Y and Z and we’re beginning to hear about other “Generations” that are not characterized by age. Generation C is one of those “other” generations that has emerged from online behaviour. Generation C characteristics and traits are kind of like looking into the future.

Slideshow here.

Source - FutureLab

Fourth Degree Black Belt In Problem Solving

Complex problems are inherent to work however the means by which we solve problems are not. When it comes to solving complex problems, the methodology you choose can have a big impact on success. The following will bring you one step closer to being a problem solving ninja. Be sure to explore the site.

Click here then hover over the resulting page.

Click here to learn more about the who, why and how.

Sort of John Caswell and the Consulting Periodic Table's bastard son.

Source - Interactive Marketing Trends

Exam Revenue

Times are tough in the States and schools are doing everything they can to make up for short budgets – including selling media space on schoolwork. Interested? Take your pick: $10 for a quiz, $20 for a chapter test, $30 for a semester final.

Tom Farber gives a lot of tests. He’s a calculus teacher, after all.

So when administrators at Rancho Bernardo, his suburban San Diego high school, announced the district was cutting spending on supplies by nearly a third, Farber had a problem. At 3 cents a page, his tests would cost more than $500 a year. His copying budget: $316. But he wanted to give students enough practice for the big tests they’ll face in the spring, such as the Advanced Placement exam.

“Tough times call for tough actions,” he says. So he started selling ads on his test papers: $10 for a quiz, $20 for a chapter test, $30 for a semester final.

San Diego magazine and The San Diego Union-Tribune featured his plan just before Thanksgiving, and Farber came home from a few days out of town to 75 e-mail requests for ads. So far, he has collected $350. His semester final is sold out.

That worries Robert Weissman, managing director of Commercial Alert, a Washington-based non-profit that fights commercialization in school and elsewhere. If test-papers-as-billboards catches on, he says, schools in the grip of tough economic times could start relying on them to help the bottom line.

“The advertisers are paying for something, and it’s access to kids,” he says.

About two-thirds of Farber’s ads are inspirational messages underwritten by parents. Others are ads for local businesses, such as two from a structural engineering firm and one from a dentist who urges students, “Brace Yourself for a Great Semester!”

Principal Paul Robinson says reaction has been “mixed,” but he notes, “It’s not like, ‘This test is brought to you by McDonald’s or Nike.’ “

To Farber, 47, it’s a logical solution: “We’re expected to do more with less.”

The National Education Association says teachers spend about $430 out of their pockets each year for school supplies. This semester, Christine Van Ruiten, a teacher at E.C. Reems, a charter school in East Oakland, has spent $2,000. She scours Craigslist for free supplies and posts requests to DonorsChoose.org, which matches teachers with donors.

Founded in 2000 by Charles Best, then a Bronx teacher, DonorsChoose has funded about 65,000 projects totaling $26 million. Best calls it “a more dignified, substantive alternative for teachers than selling candy door-to-door — and certainly than selling ad space on final exams. That’s crazy.”

Source - Commercial Alert

Learn From The Mistakes Of Others

Expect social media to be a strong presence in 2009 despite a movement from users to pull back on full disclosure of their lives. Marketers will also continue to explore their sweet spot within this heavily peer regulated environment. To help you on your journey, the following is a smorgasbord of examples, lists and links of what NOT to do in social media.

Besides collecting lists of Social Media Case Studies for my Superlist of Social Media Case Studies, I’ve also been collecting links about Social Media mistakes, failures, blunders and no-no’s. Since my Superlist of Social Media Case Studies has proven so popular (and since Jacob Morgan suggested a Superlist of social media failures would be helpful), I thought I’d take a crack at starting to pull together this type of list (Anti-casestudies?) with the articles I have so far.

Have any more case studies lists or good articles/posts on social media mistakes, no-no’s, failures or bad ideas? Feel free to add them here in the comments!

Superlist of What Not to Do in Social Media http://tinyurl.com/6rahtu

• A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media by Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang

From brand backlash to brandjacking, a list of companies who were blindsided by social media by year including the now infamous case of the Motrin Moms.

• Ad Age Video: Social Media Mistakes of Five Big Marketers

8 minutes video of speech given by Joseph Jaffe, head of the marketing consulting firm Crayon, at the Association of National Advertisers’ Integrated Marketing conference. From faking to manipulating to controlling, Jaffe criticizes the social media programs of 5 major marketers including Target and Starbucks.

• Mashable’s Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus

A list of errors in judgment from the people who should know better- top notch social media all stars. A couple of notable blunders - assuming social media doesn’t exist until you arrive and posting a comment on your own Facebook wall.

• How to Commit Social Media Suicide by Socialmediatrader.com

A list of some of ways you can ensure that your content fails on social media sites from ignoring criticism about your website to selfishly promoting only your own content.

• Six Stupid Marketing Mistakes by Adam Broitman

Great article that talks about mistakes made in social media and interactive marketing campaigns with some good examples. Includes solid constructive critiques of several social media initiatives including British Airways’ Twitter presence and Slurpee’s social network, Slurpee Nation.

• Ignite Social Media’s 6 Part Video Series: Social Media Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

Part 1 Not Listening. Not Responding. Not Good
Part 2: Schmoozing Instead of Connecting
Part 3: No Transparency, No Authenticity
Part 4: Social Media As A Channel, Not A Conversation
Part 5: Applying traditional marketing tactics to social media marketing
Part 6: Thinking anyone cares about your brand

• Corporate Missteps from Frymaster Speck

Examples of 5 companies who thought they could control information on the Web but found out that they couldn’t including Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s blogging well-publicized blogging fiasco.

• 6 Stupid Mistakes Companies Make with Their Online Communities from CIO.com

Nice discussion of 6 ways companies often show that ” ‘doing community’ doesn’t mean ‘doing community well’ ” — from trying to control the conversation too closely (e.g. removing all criticism) to forgetting that volunteer participants are part of your company’s community.

• Video: “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media” Panel at Blog World & New Media Expo 2008

5 Part video series can be found on YouTube as part of Managing Communities’ YouTube Channel. Here’s the first part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eP4s5NtKKw&eurl=http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/superlist_of_what_not_to_do_in_social_media/


• Deadly Sins of Social Media from Room 214

From Pride to Sloth to Greed to Gluttony, this post (also available in PDF form) is an entertaining take on what not to do in Social Media.

• 10 Social Media Blunders that Can Destroy Your Brand from Sparkplugging.com

From submitting every single post you’ve ever read (or written) to social bookmarking sites to being a copycat - a collection of short and to-the-point advice for entrepreneurs and small businesses on how not to use social media.

• Tamar Weinberg’s The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook

A great rundown of no-no’s in social media etiquette you want to avoid on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites.

• The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History from InsideCRM.com

• 8 Sure-Fire Ways To Tick Off the Twitterverse
  by Jenny Cromie on a guest post on Twitips.com. Here Jenny explores 8 sure ways to tick off other Twitter users from being a TwitterNarcissist to being a TwitterDumbLinker.

Source - iia

Coupon Revolution

On the Internet, nothing travels faster than a tip on how to score a bargain. Especially in an economic downturn.

With online retail sales falling this month for the first time, Internet merchants are offering steep discounts to anyone willing to punch in a secret coupon code or visit a rebate site for a “referral” before loading up their virtual cart.

Shoppers obsessed with finding these bargains share the latest intelligence on dozens of sites with quirky names like RetailMeNot.com, FatWallet.com and the Budget Fashionista. And more consumers than ever are scanning the listings before making a purchase at their favorite Web site.

Some online shoppers are so good at this game that they almost never buy anything at full price, making them the digital era’s version of bargain hunters who used to spend hours clipping coupons to shrink their grocery bills.

Tavon Ferguson, a 25-year-old graduate student in Atlanta, became obsessed with finding online deals last spring, while planning her July wedding. She scoured the Web for coupons and got free save-the-date cards, $8 bracelets for her bridesmaids and free shipping on flash-frozen steaks for the rehearsal dinner.

“I was able to do my wedding at a price that nobody would even guess” — $6,000, all included — “because everything down from invitations to the photo album, I got for ridiculously low prices with online coupon codes,” Mrs. Ferguson said.

Her favorite sites include RetailMeNot.com, which has one of the most comprehensive lists; CouponMom.com, which includes coupons for physical stores; and CouponCode.com, which is organized by category.

Mrs. Ferguson may be more fanatical than most people, but surfing for online coupons is growing in popularity. In October, 27 million people visited a coupon site, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 33 percent from a year earlier.

“Coupons had never been a big factor online the way they are offline. This is something new,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “It’s taken pricing power away from the retailers and given it to the consumers, because the consumer is totally up to speed on what the prices are.” Retailers have mixed feelings about this shift.

Generally, companies prefer limited discounts, e-mailed to a select group of customers or sent inside packages with a purchase. When the coupons get wider exposure, retailers lose control, potentially costing them more money than they expected.

Two years ago, Sierra Trading Post, a site that sells overstock outdoor gear, sent a coupon code with 1,000 of its 50 million catalogs, expecting to generate $2,000 in sales. Instead, it led to $300,000 in sales after a customer posted it online.

“We certainly appreciated the sales, but sales with that code were at a very low margin,” said David Giacomini, director of catalog operations for the company. Sierra Trading now sends some coupons directly to Web sites and limits catalog codes to three uses.

Some retailers try to battle the coupon sites. Harry & David, a seller of fruit baskets, threatened legal action against RetailMeNot.com this spring for publishing its discounts, prompting the coupon site to steer visitors to other gift-basket companies. William Ihle, a spokesman for Harry & David, said that all of its deals were available on its own site and the coupon sites “disingenuously mislead the consumer” by posting expired or unverified discounts.

Other retailers use the coupon sites as marketing tools. For example, when Scott Kluth founded CouponCabin in 2003, he had discounts for only 180 stores, and many of them did not like it. Today, 1,300 merchants, including Dell, Target, Home Depot and Victoria’s Secret, send him discount codes — totaling about a thousand a week.

“They have seen the power of a coupon, in this economy especially, and they’re absolutely embracing us,” Mr. Kluth said.

Most of the sites list coupon codes submitted by readers and retailers. Shoppers can comment on whether the coupon worked and share tips in user forums. Some sites e-mail coupon lists to subscribers. RetailMeNot.com goes further with an add-on to the Firefox browser that alerts users when an e-commerce site they are visiting has a discount.

Many of the coupon sites are run by Web entrepreneurs who see a business opportunity in collecting online discount codes at one site. They earn a commission from the retailer when a customer makes a purchase. Sites like FatWallet.com and Ebates offer shoppers cash back on purchases if they sign in and then click through to the retailer.

But other discount aggregator sites were started by passionate shoppers eager to share their bargain-hunting wisdom. Kathryn Finney began Budget Fashionista in 2003, when she finished graduate school and found herself broke and newly interested in bargains. Now, “it’s in my blood,” she said. “I cannot physically pay full price.”

Ms. Finney’s site was originally aimed at friends and family, but it quickly developed a following that has spiked 60 percent since August to 550,000 visitors a month. “We’re gaining a whole new level of fans, who maybe weren’t budget shoppers last year,” Ms. Finney said. Her site now makes money through advertising and referral fees.

Among her coupon-scouting tips: search the name of an online store and the word “coupon” and compare the promotions, because bigger sites are often able to negotiate better offers; if you find a coupon for an offline store, call the Web site and ask it to match the price; and insist upon free shipping, even if it means calling the manager and asking for a coupon code.

Deborah Dockendorf, a power Web shopper in Chicago, has another piece of advice: if you cannot immediately find a coupon code for a specific store, just wait. “It might be two weeks, but you will have a code for it,” she said.

Even though Ms. Dockendorf lives near the department stores of Michigan Avenue and the boutiques of Oak Street, she says she does 98 percent of her shopping online — always with a discount. She recently bought six pairs of $45 Wolford opaque stockings from Saks Fifth Avenue with a 40 percent discount and free shipping. She also snagged a $400 feather bed at half off from Pacific Coast Feather Company.

“I used to feel a little embarrassed about using them, like I was one of those coupon queens at the grocery store,” she said. “But now there is not a day that goes by when a friend doesn’t e-mail me for codes, and if I don’t have one, I can find one for them soon.”