Many have been predicting that the internet’s two juggernauts were on a collision course for some time. Many thought the battleground would be over real time search. But it appears, following the launch of Facebook Places, it’s in the field of local advertising that these two unstoppable forces will finally meet. Few can say who’ll emerge the eventual victor. But one thing’s for sure – the way your business is promoted on the internet is set to change.

Google and Facebook will be collecting an array of information about your business to feed to both advertisers and users. Some of this information you can submit yourself. But a lot of it will be user generated and could influence whether people visit your website, let alone use your services.

Google starts writing report cards

For a while now, Google has been amalgamating information from around the web to add to their Google Places listings. Along with photos are user reviews and ratings – and it’s these that you need to pay attention to.

A common step in the process of finding a local service provider is to follow up your local search with a background check for reviews. In fact, a recent Social Shopping Survey found that 72% of online shoppers say that web reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than any other factor. With this in mind, Google has been pulling reviews from various sites (and treading on toes in the process) to give people the information they most want to know.

Google Maps already appears at the top of local search results and is starting to add reviews to its natural search results. So increasingly, people will be seeing ratings and reviews on your business before they visit your website. See it as Google handing people your report card before they enter your door.

What other people think

In a press release conveniently timed to come out on the same day as Facebook Places, Google announced that 100 million people were already using Google Maps on their mobile.

As Google Places and Facebook Places spread onto smartphones, there will soon be millions more people ‘checking in’ and checking for reviews whenever they visit a business’ premises.

So you need to monitor what’s being collected and added to Google and Facebook Places, because ‘what other people think’ could soon be the biggest influence on whether people visit your website or visit you in the real world.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. Award winners BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on Foursquare, a location based social network you used to ‘check in’ at certain places. With a mere 2.5 million uses, we recommended that it was worth being aware of its marketing potential, although major growth still looked like being a couple of years away. Well, two days ago that all changed.

Almost out of the blue, Facebook announced the launch of its new application – ‘Places’. This new service has been launched in partnership with the field’s existing players (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah) to bring location based social networking to its 500 million users. How Foursquare and Co will survive, now that Facebook has joined the party, remains to be seen.

Whilst it’s been out for less than 48 hours and is currently only available on iPhone in the US, many are already predicting that Places could change the way people use Facebook and evolve it into a platform for archiving daily life.

Bringing social networking into the real world

Rather than pitching it as an app for telling people where you are, Facebook is trying to steer Places towards being a tool for recording where you’ve been and what you did there. They envision that in 20 years time you’ll be visiting a beach and finding out on Places that it’s where your parents shared their first kiss (their example, not mine).

Once Facebook has found a way of integrating it with your photos, updates and conversations, Places could end up acting as an archive of your daily life. It will also help to bring social networking into the real world. You could, for example, use Places to find out who’s nearby when you’re at the shops and then arrange to meet up for a coffee, as you can on Foursquare now (if any of your friends use it!).

It’s still early days. But when you consider 150 million of Facebook’s 500 million users are already accessing the site on their mobile, adoption of people using Places will be rapid and, almost certainly, unrelenting.

Bringing location based advertising to your mobile

On launch day Facebook were careful to sidestep any questions on how Places would make money. But the data Places will capture on where people have been and what they did there is going to be a goldmine for advertisers. Remember the personalised advertising boards on Minority Report or Bladerunner? Well, you might be seeing something similar on your mobile with the data that’s going to be collected.

What does this mean for my business’ marketing?

Now that Facebook has pushed its mountain of chips onto the table, it’s a safe bet that location based social networking is going to be massive in the years to come. If you’re a restaurant or shop then we’d recommend claiming your place as soon as it is launched in the UK and using Places to attract customers with rewards and tips.

Even if you’re a B2B company selling paper, for example, Facebook Places still offers potential. Everybody uses Facebook these days and you never know who’ll be passing through your area and in need of your service. See it as a way of adding your business card to your local map for free.

Like I said, it’s still early days. But it’s going to be an exciting time for location based marketing in the coming months now that Facebook has brought it to the masses.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. Award winners BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Ever since Old Spice stunned the marketing world with the success of its witty series of videos responding to people’s blogs, comments and Tweets, the marketing world has been bracing itself for a glut of copycats. After all, when a campaign generates 40 million interactions and skyrockets sales 107% in one month, it’s no wonder brands will be falling over themselves to rediscover its magic formula.

But whilst the Old Spice campaign might appear simple to replicate, the fact is that there’s a range of factors that contributed to its success. Miss any of these out and you risk your imitation campaign becoming a source of embarrassment rather than pride.

Cisco presents…Ted from Accounts Payable

Two weeks ago Cisco launched a campaign aping Old Spice, but with Ted from Accounts Payable answering questions instead of a chiselled ex-American Football player. The campaign consisted of a modest 18 videos, compared to Old Spice’s 180+, and attracted a similarly modest number of views.

Cisco’s in-house marketing team probably saw it as a fun, spur of the moment way of latching onto Old Spice’s success to generate interest in its brand. But based on the comments and feedback, people who’ve seen the videos appear to think otherwise.

Being the first brand to ‘do an Old Spice’ was always going to be risky. People have been waiting to see which brand will be first to try and jump on the bandwagon, and are eager to knock it off if they think the campaign is a ‘#fail’.

These are a few reasons why I think Cisco’s campaign annoyed people:

Parody doesn’t go far enough – Cisco made it clear that they were aping Old Spice, but they didn’t do anything that would encourage anybody to take notice. They didn’t add anything or take the parody far enough, leaving people scratching their heads and wondering ‘what’s the point?’

Lack of build up or promotion – Old Spice had been building momentum since screening their advert at the Super Bowl in February, whilst Cisco merely promoted their videos through their corporate blog and disparate Twitter feeds. The campaign might have been a spur of the moment idea, but it would have benefited from more planning and promotion before its execution.

The campaign didn’t resonate – People wanted to engage with the Old Spice campaign. They thought the ‘Old Spice Guy’ was witty, likeable and even celebrities clamoured for a brief share of his attention. Who cares what Ted from Accounts Payable thinks?

Who was the campaign aimed at? – Old Spice wanted to reposition a fuddy duddy brand as fun and trendy to a younger demographic. A sales increase of 100%+ would suggest that they succeeded. Cisco sells routers and computer networking devices to businesses. I’m not sure how Ted from Accounts answering questions in a towel will influence an IT manager’s buying decisions?

The lesson for any brand wishing to imitate Old Spice is that you need to think carefully about how you use social media. You need to consider which platforms your customers are using; how you can introduce your campaign to them and in a way that makes people want to engage with it. Posting witty videos on YouTube might have worked for Old Spice, but there are plenty of ways you can use social media to your marketing advantage.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. Award winners BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Loved by many, irritating to some, Twitter hashtags are fast becoming an integral part of the internet’s vernacular. According to recent research, hashtags are now being used in blogs, forums and other social networking sites for highlighting key topics (and for witty asides). They’re evolving so fast, in fact, that you might soon be including them on your business cards.

The research, by Brandwatch, found that people were now using the hashtag ‘#fail’ throughout the web to highlight their dissatisfaction with brands (if you’re interested, Apple had the most #fails, with 1204 mentions on Twitter, followed by Facebook (153) and Nokia (107)).

Whilst these numbers might seem small and inconsequential, it’s inevitable that more people will start using the ‘#fail’ hashtag whenever complaining about products and services, and worth watching out for.

How to use hashtags in your marketing

Since its launch in 2006, there have been over 2 billion messages posted on Twitter. In this vast cacophony of noise, getting your Tweets heard can seem a daunting task.

You can, however, use hashtags to highlight your Tweets to those who might be interested. If you Tweet about car maintenance, for example, you could include the hashtag ‘#carmaintenance’ which will then be picked up by anyone actively looking for those Tweeting about that topic.

A couple of tips: with a 140 character limit it’s sensible to keep your hashtags short and make them obvious. It’s also a good idea to avoid using a hashtag that’s already being used.

tagal.us is a site you can use to check whether your tag is available. You can then add it to those being tracked on hashtag.org along with a description of what it’s about. Twitter Search, TweetGrid and TweetChat are other services you can use to search and monitor hashtag use.

Along with attracting followers, hashtags are great for pulling together Tweets of people attending a live event and to create a feed of people Tweeting about your company.

So after choosing your hashtag and checking it’s available, publicize it on your blog, website and even your business cards to attract followers and enhance your marketing activities on Twitter.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

There seems to be a growing feeling that us marketers have had our chance to ‘experiment’ with social media and now we need to start delivering real results. Customer service wants to know how those Tweets are making their jobs easier, whilst sales wants to know when they can start chasing all these Facebook fans you’ve been amassing.

Fuzzy claims about ‘engagement’ and stats on page impressions will no longer do. There’s too much cynicism around that social media isn’t the sales generating machine some of us marketers claim.

So it’s time that we started standing up to the naysayers with some stats proving that social media is worth persevering with and that it can deliver real results.

Metrics for gauging social media success

Before launching a social media campaign it’s sensible to note down all the various metrics you can use to gauge success. This includes qualitative engagements with customers (interactions, feedback and comments) and quantitative means of measurement, such as:

1. Mentions on Twitter and in Google
2. The number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, blob subscribers, etc
3. Website traffic
4. Backlinks pointing to your website
5. Latest sales figures

You can then combine both qualitative and quantitative measures to gain some insight on the impact of your social media campaign’s success.

How brand success from the World Cup has been gauged

Now the final whistle has blown, marketers have been pouring over the figures to gauge which brand benefited the most from their multi-million pound sponsorship deal.

Adidas got the most blog mentions, thanks to its controversial Jabulani ball, but it’s been Coca-Cola that’s been hailed as the clear winner after gaining 1.4 million social media fans during the tournament. This represents a 20% increase, with its YouTube competition to win match tickets being seen as a big part of its success. No mention of the impact of Bavaria beer’s orange dress attired ambush marketing stunt unfortunately.

Old Spice sets the benchmark

If you haven’t heard, the marketing world is swooning over P&G’s Old Spice campaign, hailed for transforming a fuddy duddy brand into the internet’s hottest topic. The campaign’s 200+ videos, responding to Tweets and blog posts (and thriving off user participation in the process), have so far clocked up:

• 16.3 million video views
• 1000% increase in YouTube subscribers
• 400% increase in Twitter followers
• 28,000 RT of terms ‘oldspice’ and ‘old spice’

Old Spice’s campaign has been hailed as the new textbook way of using social media, so expect a flood of clones in the coming months. However, one statistic that has yet to be reported is the increase in sales.

Blendtec is reported to have increased sales five fold thanks to its ‘Will it Blend’ series of videos. This may well be an exceptional example – for now – but we believe that more and more increases in sales will be able to be directly attributable to social media engagement campaigns.

Social media is brilliant for enabling businesses to listen to their customers, provide outstanding customer service, and engender positive word-of-mouth recommendations. But ultimately it will be its impact on the bottom line which will propel it into mainstream adoption as the central hub around which marketing campaigns revolve.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It’s not uncommon to feel embarrassed about asking customers for referrals. It’s normal to hope that they will occur naturally if you continue providing a high quality service. But referrals are worth encouraging because they can be marketing gold.

Having your customers tell their friends and colleagues about your business can generate leads that are already sold on your expertise. After all, who do you trust more? The helpful advice of someone you know or the sales pitch of a corporate enterprise?

Referral marketing tips

1. Ask – It sounds simple, but just asking customers to pass on your details is a straightforward way of creating leads. You don’t have to do this in person, but can add it into your after sales process. In your email or letter, thanking them for their purchase, you can politely suggest passing on your details to anyone who might be interested in your product. Hopefully, they’ll do this for free as a gesture of appreciation, but you can always offer them an incentive…

2. Coupons and affiliate schemes – In the ideal world, customers would refer you because they value your product and think it will interest their friends. But it can help to motivate them with a discount or free gift in exchange for leads that convert into sales. This type of marketing is rife on the internet in the form of affiliate schemes for eBooks and other digital products.

3. Form alliances – This is an underutilised tactic, but one that can be highly effective if your service crosses over with other non-competing service providers. For example, if you sell potted plants you could form an alliance with a local gardener in which you both agree to promote each other to customers. This can simply mean passing on their contact details or handing out each other’s leaflets. You could also sweeten the deal by offering each other a cut from the extra profits your alliance generates.

4. Harness social networking – People are constantly recommending products and services to their friends on Facebook and Twitter. With messages potentially being shared and forwarded amongst 1000s of people, encouraging customers to post positive Tweets and Facebook updates can generate significant exposure. Consider emailing customers and subtly ask them to Tweet about your product if they found it useful.

Hopefully these tips have got you thinking about how you can integrate referral marketing into your marketing strategy and harness the power of the best salespeople around – your customers.

Measuring customer loyalty

If you wanted to gauge customer satisfaction, and the likelihood of them recommending you, then you can try calculating your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a simple metric calculated by asking customers to gauge out of 10 the likelihood of recommending you. You then simply deduct the percentage of those scoring 6 or less from the percentage scoring 9 or 10.

(Disclaimer notice – One of our clients is Satmetrix which supplies software around the NPS concept)

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It’s tough for graduates out there: we’ve just come out of a torrid recession, 1000s of public sector jobs are to be axed and there are 70 of you competing for every role.

It’s certainly a challenging time to be looking for work. But you can boost your chances of getting an interview by using the internet to promote your personal brand to employers.

Blogs, Facebook and Twitter give you the tools you need to project the image of a proactive, passionate and enthusiastic up and coming professional that employers should be fighting over to get in their organisation.

How to build your personal brand

Facebook – It’s no secret that employers now use Facebook to screen candidates. But before you rush off to lock your profile from prying eyes, Facebook can be used to your advantage. Update your public details to give employers a positive impression, such as information on your work experience, hobbies, interests and qualifications. In the ‘About me’ section write a positive, inspiring branding statement that reflects why employers should give you an interview. Replacing your profile photo of you wearing a traffic cone with one in which you look smart, responsible and sober is also a good idea.

LinkedIn – Your old school and university friends are a good starting point for building your professional network. In particular, connect with those who graduated in previous years and are already active in the workplace. You never know who’ll be able to point you towards a job opening or can put in a good word for you. Join discussion groups related to the industries you’re interested to get some insight into the hot topics and to ask astute questions – you never know who might have an opening for a proactive graduate.

Blogging – Blogs are great for expressing your passion and interest in the profession you’d like to get into. You can also use it as an online resume, with pages on your employment history and interests. There are plenty of sites where you can start a blog for free (e.g. Wordpress.com) which enable you to be up and blogging in minutes.

Twitter – Sharing links to your blog, reTweeting experts in your industry and posting links to relevant news stories will help to build your exposure amongst professionals in your targeted industry. Following experts in your field to get you an insight into the key trends and if they follow you back, you never know, it might lead to a job opportunity.

Whether you’re a graduate, school leaver or have recently been made redundant, finding a job at the moment isn’t going to be easy. But social media can give you a platform to demonstrate the enthusiasm, passion and proactive attitude that will tick all the right boxes with employers and push you further to the front of the queue.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Foursquare can be a lot of fun, but try not to get lost

People have been predicting big things for location based social networking site Foursquare for some time. And it looks as though those predictions could be coming true after it received $20 million in funding and ramped up its marketing by sending out 1000s of ‘Clings’ (stickers to you and me) to businesses to slap on their windows.

With Facebook and Twitter already on the ‘to do’ list, is messing around with yet another social media site worth the hassle? Does Foursquare have any real marketing value to offer? Or is it just a creative use of GPRS for people who like playing games?

Big brands are experimenting

Foursquare might have a modest 2 million users compared to Facebook’s mahoosive 400 mill, but it’s already attracting the attention of big name brands.

It’s not unusual for brands to want a share of the spotlight when a trendy new ‘craze’ comes along. In this instance, Star Bucks, Bravo TV and the Financial Times have all been attaching their names to Foursquare’s rapid rise by offering rewards to users for ‘checking in’ at specific locations.

At the moment it might be a ‘niche’ service compared to FB and Twitter. But as more phones become GPRS enabled and awareness spreads, brands know it’s a safe bet that Foursquare’s 2 mill users will grow. The site also has great potential for evolving into a valuable source of local product and service information provided by real people, and being more than just a ‘game’.

How to promote your business on Foursquare

You can add your business to Foursquare by completing their ‘Add this Place’ form. Make sure you complete it fully to give users as much information as possible. You can also add ‘tips’ to your location, such as where people can park , whether you offer home delivery or product recommendations.

Perhaps the greatest marketing value comes from offering Foursquare users rewards for visiting your business. This could include a special discount or a prize to the most frequent visitor (known as ‘Mayors’ in Foursquare speak). In exchange Foursquare can provide you with stats on your visitors, their frequency and a histogram of check-in days.

Should your business join?

So is Foursquare worth bothering with? Should you get an official Foursquare ‘Cling’ for your business and show your part of the internet’s latest hip new trend? Well, it only takes a few minutes to ‘claim your place’ and then add it to the Foursquare community. And with a cool $20 million to play around with, who knows how many people will be using Foursquare in a year’s time?

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

And the winner is ....!

We’re all still buzzing from last night’s New Media Age Effectiveness Awards ceremony, where we won the category for Best Integrated B2B Marketing Campaign. We won for the Sage Taxation campaign which we worked on with the lovely Lisa Benner and Steve Porter at Sage.

The (still ongoing) campaign uses Personalised URLs (’PURLs’) and 1-2-1 direct marketing material to promote Sage’s suite of taxation software to current customers and prospects (over 7,000 of them). We were told on the night that we won the award because the judges were impressed not just by the high ROI achieved by the campaign, but also by both the precise level of measurability the use of PURLs provides, and the way we had injected real creativity and personality into a potentially dry topic!

The awards received over 500 entries and there were 23 winners on the night … we’re absolutely thrilled to have been one of them!

Andy’s still gutted that he didn’t take the opportunity to give Claudia Winkleman a peck on the cheek when she gave him the award, but we were more than a little gob smacked to have won, and hindsight’s a wonderful thing! Official photos, a video interview undertaken on the night, and a spread in the NMA Awards Supplement will follow …

Don't we scrub up well!

When was the last time you picked up the Yellow Pages to find a plumber, accountant or any other type of local service provider? If you’re like most people (76% make regular local searches), you’ll be using Google to find what you need and leaving the Yellow Pages as a door stop.

But whilst more and more people are conducting local searches (e.g. ‘barbers in Buckingham’), many business websites aren’t properly optimised to take advantage. Many continue to focus on targeting competitive keywords, lured by the chance to reach a global marketplace. But the fact is that most people would still prefer to do business with those they can meet face to face, or can more easily get hold of in the event of a problem.

Here are some tips for improving your website’s chances of showing up in the local search results:

1. Include your geographic location in your keywords – Instead of using ‘Chinese restaurant’ in your website’s copy make sure you include your geographic location i.e. ‘Chinese restaurant, Richmond’. This applies to your page titles and headings as well as your body copy.
2. Feature your address on every page of your website – As well as making it easier for visitors to find you, featuring your address in, say, the footer section makes it clearer to the search engines where you’re located.
3. Include a local phone number – Google can’t pinpoint your location from an 0800 number, so it’s wise to include a number with your local dialling code as well.
4. Add your website to Google Places –Google Places enables you to create a local search listing with your contact details, a description of your services as well as photos of you or your shop. You can also add coupons to your listing for customers to print off. Perhaps most crucially, adding your site to Google Places offers you the chance to appear on Google Maps and at the top of the page of search results. Bing and Yahoo offer something similar, but Google is the big daddy to focus on with the most traffic.
5. Ask for reviews – To improve your chances of appearing in the Google Maps section of local search results, you need to persuade your customers to write reviews of your service. Consider adding a request to your invoices, follow up emails and other marketing material. Customers can submit their reviews directly into Google Maps, and reviews are also collected from third party review site, such as TripAdvisor.
6. Add a page mentioning local towns and places – If your website has an faq section add plenty of local place names to describe the areas you cover and to give the search engines more local keywords to feed on.

There are other technical tricks you can try (such as adding your geo position to your websites code), but these 6 tips should give you a head start on your competitors at being found in the lucrative local search results.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

If you haven’t heard, Bavaria beer has been basking in headlines, this week, after grabbing attention when it planted 36 women clad in orange mini-dresses in the crowd at Monday’s game. Bavaria tried something similar at the last World Cup (but with 120,000 pairs of orange lederhosen) and this is just the latest example of ‘ambush marketing’ – a tactic steadily growing in popularity and ambition as mischievous brands try to gatecrash major events for free.

The risk of brands piggybacking on the London 2012 Olympics, without being an official sponsorship, has already got its organisers worried. Ever since the bid was won they’ve been locking down advertising boards and getting laws passed to restrict what combination of words brands can say.

So is ambush marketing merely plucky opportunism? Or does it threaten the ability of event organisers to attract sponsors?

As Bavaria beer’s tactic demonstrated, ambush marketing can be an effective way of getting attention when it’s done creatively and people see it as a bit of fun. But it can also backfire and damage your brand’s image if you tread on too many toes…

Examples of ambush marketing campaigns

Nike causes an advertising exclusion zone

Nike has a long history of using mischievous tactics to steal the limelight from its rivals. Despite not being official sponsors, at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Nike built a huge retail outlet just outside the official Olympic village and covered the city’s billboards with their advertising. They repeated the same tactic at both Euro 96 and the France 98 before both UEFA and the IOC banned anyone from advertising within a 1.3 mile radius of stadiums, forcing official sponsors to buy up all the billboard space instead.

FHM hijacks the race for London Mayor

Back in 1999 lads’ mag FHM used interest in the race for London Mayor to promote its annual ‘100 Sexiest Women’ issue. It released a series of posters featuring popular FHM pinups with cheeky slogans mirroring those used in the political race. The campaign’s final touch was to project a naked Gail Porter onto the House of Commons. Suffice to say, the stunt earned FHM mainstream coverage and the issue featuring Gail Porter sold out within two weeks.

Red Bull tries to clip Monster Energy’s wings

Whilst this isn’t strictly ‘ambush marketing’, it does demonstrate how covert marketing tactics can backfire. After being replaced by Monster Energy as a drinks supplier to JD Wetherspoon, Red Bull hatched a plot to win the contract back. The plan was for ‘wings girls’ to smuggle cans of Red Bull into JDW bars and then leave them behind to suggest to managers that customers were unhappy with the change of drink. When the plot was uncovered Red Bull blamed it on ‘overzealous junior employees’ whilst JDW accused it of ‘behaving like a rejected teenager.’ Not the best publicity.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

If you hadn’t noticed from the deluge of patriotic themed TV ads, the World Cup is upon us and is set to be the biggest cash bonanza ever.

In fact, its organisers hope to swell their pockets with a sweet $1 billion from TV rights, marketing and merchandise by the time the final whistle has blown. But it’s not been all plain sailing, with their choice of sponsors coming into question.

Campaigners say that having McDonalds, Budweiser and Coca Cola is counterproductive to the World Cup’s ability to inspire active, healthy lifestyles in our youth and combat childhood obesity. And I tend to agree with them.

Whilst the Cup’s organisers are well within their rights to secure the most lucrative deals, I think they should have considered the impact having sponsors with negative associations will have on the World Cup’s brand message.

The benefits of event sponsorship

Sponsoring an event can be marketing gold. It can:

• Raise brand awareness, credibility and prestige
• Link the positive associations people have of an event with your brand
• Reach your target audience in an unobtrusive way
• Gain social currency as being seen as helping an event to take place
• Capitalise on consumer interest in the event
• Influence people’s buying behaviour and increase sales

Whilst event sponsorship is great for brands, event organisers should consider whether their sponsors are relevant and support the image the want to promote.

Yes, the World Cup’s organisers will reap in millions, which can go towards improving the event taking place and fund future development projects. But will having unhealthy products associated dampen the World Cup’s image in people’s minds?

When people see the McDonalds logo emblazoned on posters of football’s greatest players will it inspire thoughts of athleticism, skill and determination? Or will it conjure images of couch potatoes sat at home gorging on fast food and beer whilst watching the football?

Developing a brand message is a complicated business. Careful consideration is needed of every facet and factor that contributes to how it’s perceived. I have to wonder whether the World Cup’s organisers considered this when choosing their sponsors, or just chose those waving the fattest cheque?

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Online video is fast evolving from clips of skateboarding pets on YouTube and into a mainstream activity. In January 2009 29.6 million people (8 out of 10 internet users) watched a combined 280 million hours of online video in the UK alone (comscore).

With Project Canvas, Google TV and a souped up YouTube on the way, the demand for online video content is set to explode. This offers a great opportunity for marketers to engage with customers in a highly measurable and engaging way.

The benefits of online video advertising

Online video advertising offers a number of unique benefits over TV:

Measurability – You can track every impression, click through, interaction and the amount of time people spend watching your ads. This makes it easier to gauge the success of your campaign, rather than having to rely on fuzzy metrics, such as brand uplift and message association.

Engagement – During the TV ad break you have to compete with people flicking channels, making the tea or fast forwarding your ads altogether. However, on the internet people are choosing to watch your video. This means they don’t feel like they’re being marketed to and are 100% engaged with your message.

Interactivity – Viewers can click on links whilst the video is playing for product information and they can even buy it before the ad has finished. Powerade’s The Never-ending Game world cup themed ad is a great example of how you can build interactivity into online video.

Viral marketing – Thanks to social media, people can spread videos virally and do a lot of the leg work for you. The global popularity of Cadbury’s Gorilla YouTube video, which was originally just aimed at the UK, is a textbook example.

Be innovative to get the most out of online video

Online video requires a slightly different approach to delivering 30 second commercials. If people think they’re being blatantly sold to, you’re ad is only a mouse click away from failure. So you need to provide online video’s that are interesting, funny or informative in exchange for your target viewer’s attention.

At bda we love Blentec’s Will it Blend? series of video ads. We think they’re a perfect example of how you can create cost effective ads that showcase your product and entertain viewers at the same time.

Their blending of an iPhone has so far received 8.5 million views, and their latest blender powered destruction of an iPad is catching up fast.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

When the Icelandic volcano first erupted it sent people scurrying for video conferencing rooms and looking for alternative ways of doing business. According to some reports, it caused a similar surge in attendance at virtual events, which some think could be a long term trend.

However, the shift towards conducting business over the internet has been evolving for years. Whilst conferences and trade shows can be a great for gaining contacts and meet people you’ve only known by their email address, traveling to them can be a drag. Then you’ve also got the cost: as well as flights and petrol, you’ve got hotel rooms to pay for, personal expenses and the environment is never far from the agenda.

So, along with faster broadband and online video, there are many reasons to consider running a virtual event for your product launch or training exercise.

The different types of virtual events

There are a few options to choose from for holding a virtual event:

Web conferencing (aka webinar) – The most popular form of virtual event for holding live meetings, training sessions or presentations. They’re great for talking to a large group of people at once but lack interactivity, with the host normally talking you through a series of slides or talking over a live video stream before holding a Q&A session at the end.

Virtual world you navigate with an avatar (e.g. Second Life) – Back in its heyday, many thought Second Life would be the future of how people interacted on the internet. Four years later and it still hasn’t won the mainstream acceptance its supporters hoped. The fact is that it’s just too complicated for the average user and flying around an imaginary world appeals more to some than others. Inviting clients to attend your Second Life event will more likely cause your calls to be ignored than make you seem cutting edge.

Virtual event website – Now this is what I think a virtual event should be all about and in the future I think most real world marketing events will feature a virtual element to accompany it. Virtual event websites can be used to engage with customers before, during and after an event has taken place.

Before they’ve arrived attendees can get background information, find out more about what’s going on and what will most interest them. During the event you can provide a live Twitter feed and stream video so people can follow it live from their office desk. Once an event has finished you can then upload videos of keynote presentations, download meeting notes and give people a reason to visit the virtual event website for months, or years, afterwards.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

The 2012 Olympics’ mascots have been unveiled and, predictably, they’ve been met with catcalls of derision by the British public. Whilst their creators see them as ‘futuristic, magical beings’, others think the lovechildren of a CCTV camera and a Teletubbie is closer to the mark.

The mascots’ case isn’t helped when people hear that they took 18 months, 40 focus groups and a rumoured £400,000 to design (although the estimated £15 million from licensing deals and sales of keyrings and T-shirts will help to soften the blow).

So what do I think of them? Whilst at first glance they might appear juvenile and more like something out of a Japanese cartoon than a true reflection of Britain, they do achieve their designers’ primary aim – and that’s appealing to children and building their interest in the Olympics.

The mascots do, actually, tick quite a few key boxes when it comes to mascot design…except for one.

The renaissance of branded mascots

Along with your slogan and logo, mascot’s can be a powerful way of building your brand identity. In fact, they’re experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment as a way of giving an otherwise cold, robotic website a personality.

Mascots can be great for offline brand building too. People’s visual memory is much better than it is for text. So people are more likely to remember you when they see your mascot rather than your company name.

Mascots are also an effective way of expressing your brand values and helping you to stand out from competitors. Comparethemarket.com’s dressing gown wearing meerkat is a perfect example.

How do I design a mascot?

Mascots are designed to make your brand seem fun, inviting and friendly. So they’re typically caricatures of animals, people or bizarre looking creatures. Bizarre can often be the best option because then you know your mascot is unique and more easily recognisable, which is where the Olympics’ mascots get top marks in my book.

When designing your mascot you need to think what type of animal or person will best reflect your brand values or personality. A beaver with a tool belt, for example, is ideal if you’re a carpenter, whilst a lion is a popular choice for portray yourselves as kings in your field. Adding clothes and accessories also helps to convey what your company is all about.

As in the real world, people will gauge what your mascot’s personality is based on its expression. So it should be smiling if you want to come across as friendly and with a faraway look if you want to come across as determined. And I think this is where the 2012 Olympics’ mascots slip up – because I’m not sure how many easily you can express your personality with just one eye.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Despite all the fuss over Facebook and Twitter, email remains a marketer’s favourite tool: it’s cost effective, measurable and great for one-to-one relationship building. But social media still has plenty to offer, particularly when it comes to spreading your messages virally. So it makes sense to try and combine the two.

You’d have thought retailers, with their regular offers and product announcements, would be leading the way in persuading people to share emails on Facebook and Twitter. Not so, it seems.

According to dotMailer’s annual ‘Hitting the Mark’ study UK retailers are still behind the times in understanding how people are using the web and where their customers are spending most of their online time.

From assessing emails of 36 UK retailers, dotMailer found that:

• Only 17% included a ‘share on social network’ link
• Half failed to include a ‘forward to a friend’ link
• Only 4 out of 36 had a link to their blog
• Only 3 used a personalised salutation (which is proven to improve open and click through rates)
• Only 4 used other data they’d collected to personalise their email content (personalisation makes emails more relevant and improves response rates and reduces the numbers unsubscribing)

Social media can expand email into an ongoing conversation

If your customers are using Facebook and Twitter (who isn’t these days?) then adding links to them in your emails should be a no-brainer. At the click of a button your email recipients can share your offer with 100s of their friends in seconds, and at no extra cost to you.

With marketing supposed to be a ‘conversation’ these days (rather than a steady bombardment of one way messages), social media offers a great way of expanding your static email into an ongoing dialogue.

Sending people an avalanche of emails every time you have something to say is bad practice: it annoys people and has them looking for the unsubscribe button. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are great for providing a steady stream of updates, links and special offers.

So, for example, if you’re lunching a new product or running a special event you could use email as the introduction and social media for providing up to the minute news and customers’ reactions.

Combining email with social media offers enormous possibilities for marketers. So don’t wait for the big name retailers to get their act together, start experimenting today!

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

We’re thrilled that our ongoing work with Sage to promote their range of taxation software to accountants in practice has been shortlisted for the New Media Age Awards in the best B2B campaign category.

The Sage Taxation campaign combines personalised websites (’PURLs’) for over 14,000 contacts (a mix of customers and prospects) with personalised direct mail pieces and emailers.

The aim of the campaign has been to support up-sell opportunities and new business generation whilst providing an exceptional customer experience. The revenue generation results continue to be outstanding, so we have our fingers and toes well and truly crossed.

The winner will be announced on 24 June, so watch this space!

Marketing is often at its most creative and edgy when it plugs into a hot topic or trend on what people are thinking. In the case of Pringles’ ‘The Oversharers’ campaign it’s annoyance at dull updates on Facebook, irrelevant Tweets and people sharing things that are ‘totally ridiculous’ online.

In terms of reflecting a popular trend, the campaign certainly appears to hit the proverbial nail. But in asking people to expose their friends’ boring updates publicly, does it go too far?

People can engage with the campaign in a variety of ways, such as posting their friends’ Tweets (e.g. ‘long sleeves make my arms itch’ and ‘LOL!! A pigeon!’) and downloading a Facebook app for flagging offending updates. It even has an online store where people can buy personalised T-shirts and mugs which they can send to ‘oversharing’ friends as ‘a friendly reminder of the tripe they write’.

Whilst the campaign is aimed at promoting Pringles’ crisps as something that’s ‘really worth sharing’, you have to wonder whether this campaign will backfire.

Pringles likes to portray itself as a fun, friendly brand that helps bring people together. But I’m not sure this will be people’s impression when they receive a message from Pringles telling them that their updates are boring? I fear this campaign could leave a trail of broken Facebook friendships in its wake.

Viral marketing with Twitter

On the plus side, Pringles’ campaign does show how Twitter can be used as part of a viral marketing strategy. With user engagement now a key component of online campaigns, persuading people to Tweet about your brand is an excellent way of encouraging people to engage and get involved.

Persuading people to Tweet about your campaign achieves two main objectives:

• It enables you to collect together Tweets about your campaign which you can post to a wall on your campaign website. This helps build a sense of community and user involvement in your campaign
• It helps to spread your campaign virally – when people see the topic appearing in their Twitter feed they’ll (hopefully) be intrigued to find out what the fuss is about and visit your campaign website before Tweeting about it themselves

Often the excitement of seeing your Tweet appear on the campaign’s website can be incentive enough (as shown on our Cobol.com anniversary website) for people to get involved. Running competitions and offering prizes for inventive Tweets can be a greater incentive.

One thing to remember is that Twitter is a social medium, with people’s messages exposed to friends and followers. So it’s sensible to run Twitter campaigns that encourage positive messages and engagement that brings people together, rather than pushes them apart.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Search marketing firm Epiphany Solutions has found that many of the UK’s top brands rate poorly when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). It seems that whilst they’ll happily spend millions on TV slots and magazine ads, the leading brands struggle when it comes to making their websites easy to find.

I do have some sympathy for them though, because SEO can be a confusing and complicated business. But there are some tried and tested methods you can use to maximise the chances of your website reaching page 1:

Keywords – People are more likely to be searching for product keywords than your particular brand. So it’s sensible to be optimising your website for keywords that are relevant to your industry. Google’s Keyword Tool can tell you how frequently keywords are searched for and offer suggestions on alternatives. It’s a good idea to choose 4 or 5 primary and secondary keywords, which you can then mix and match in your content.

Content – It’s widely believed that keyword density has little bearing these days. Instead you should aim to feature your keywords in your headings and subheadings (using H1-H3 tags in html speak) and ideally in your domain name.

Blogging – Google’s success relies on its ability to return the most relevant and up-to-date information. So it tends to push websites which are regularly updated to the top. This is one of the reasons why a blog can be the engine room of an SEO campaign – they keep Google fed with new content and, if given time and attention, can attract links from other relevant websites.

For blogging software look no further than Wordpress – it’s free, easy to use and has a great collection of plugins for maximising its SEO power.

Backlinks – Another key factor in SEO is backlinks, which are links from other websites pointing back to your own. The key is to build up links from relevant websites with a high Page Rank. Page Rank is Google’s ranking system for defining a website’s authority – you can check a website’s Page Rank by installing the Google Toolbar into your browser.

To attract links you can try commenting on popular blogs in the hope of being noticed so they read your posts and, hopefully, publish a link. Other tactics include writing articles and publishing them in article directories and writing online press releases with links back to your website.

Analysing – Once your SEO campaign is up and running you’ll want to watch the results. Google Analytics is far and away the most popular website analytics software. It’s free and gives you a wealth of information on what visitors are clicking on and what’s making them leave. With it you can find out how to gradually improve the amount of time people spend on your site and its success in generating enquiries.

The proof is in the pudding

We applied these principals to a website we launched three weeks ago for our client Misys. We worked hard to generate backlinks by posting links to relevant LinkedIn Group discussion forums and on Twitter – and the results have been spectacular. To date we’ve attracted 1,250 unique visitors (260 of whom have visited the site more than once) 63 visits via Google and according to Mike’s Marketing Tools the site already ranks 14^th on Google for the search term ‘the future of banking’ – making reaching the magic ‘top 10′ tantalisingly close.

Hopefully these tips should get your SEO campaign rolling. But if you’d like to find out more, Econsultancy has a long list of popular SEO articles you might like to have a read through.

Useful resources

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://wordpress.org/

http://www.dwpub.com/

http://www.articlesbase.com/

http://www.seobugz.com/

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

How do you persuade people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free? This is the problem faced by many service providers in the internet world, with both Twitter and Times Online trying to solve it in different ways.

Twitter’s ‘promoted tweets’ ad system has been met with a mixture of relief and caution. Many are pleased to hear that it will finally be monetizing itself, whilst others are already complaining about floods of unwanted ads clogging up their feed.

So will the new ad system work? Well, according to some estimates, Twitter’s owners could pocket a sweet $100 million from sponsors. But these figures still rely on a small proportion clicking on the sponsored tweets. And therein lies the problem…

How do you charge for news?

For years now, newspapers have been watching their circulation and profits dry up as people bin their papers for good and get their news fix online for free. Whilst the leading broadsheet websites attract over 10 million readers every month, not enough visitors are clicking on the ads to keep them in the green.

Rupert Murdoch has been on the warpath blaming Google for allegedly stealing his content whilst defending his decision to throw up a paywall around Times Online.

Murdoch argues that “when they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying.” But the problem for Murdoch is that there are plenty of places people can get mainstream news for free.

But David, what’s this got to do with marketing?

Cynicism over Twitter’s ad system and the Times Online’s paywall both highlight the problem brands face when it comes to advertising online. The fact is that people aren’t clicking on ads because they’re not interested in or have become oblivious to them (admittedly, people do click on ads in the search results but that’s when they’re actively looking for a product or service).

What Twitter and the news portals also highlight, however, is that people are using the internet to find content they find interesting or useful. So, you’re your online marketing budget could be better spent on providing engaging content rather than pouring it into ad clicks.

After all, the internet is a platform for finding information, not advertising. Which is bad news for Twitter and Murdoch, but good news if you’re a business wanting to engage with content hungry customers.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

A good marketer finds a gap in the market and then creates a product to exploit that gap. A braver (or more foolish) marketer creates a product for a gap that doesn’t even exist and then tries to create demand through their marketing. It could be said that this is what Apple is trying to achieve with the iPad.

Yes, its touchscreen and browsing experience is a joy to behold. But once you look past the fancy display, does the iPad do anything practical that other devices don’t do already?

Apple hopes its ‘magical and revolutionary’ iPad will be a ‘game changer’ and a mass market phenomenon. But without a clear market need, is Apple banking too much on its fabled air of exclusivity to drive sales; will the iPad be just a niche product for Apple fans and tech geeks?

Making the iPad exclusive

For decades Apple has been carefully weaving an air of edgy exclusivity around its brand.

Its cultish followers will queue through the night to get their hands on its latest products, whilst Mac fanboys get into pitched battles with PC owners in forums throughout the web.

The iPad’s launch has seen Apple run a carefully staged PR campaign to build anticipation and a sense of occasion around its new gift to the gadget world:

• Review copies were only sent to a select group of tech journalists, leaving most to wish longingly they could be welcomed into Apple’s circle of trust
• The iPad featured as the central story element in a prime time sitcom, with a few well chosen product shots and the actors cooing over it by the end
• A lack of supply meant if you were late placing your preorder then you’d have to wait for a few more days to get yours. Some have suggested this was cynical manipulation of the supply and demand curve to drive interest in the new ‘must have’ gadget

Apple understands that exclusivity can be a powerful trigger to buy. Releasing a product in limited quantities, making it a talking point and giving it a sense of pride of ownership can be a powerful lure for those who like to define themselves by the brands and products they own. But exclusivity isn’t enough for everyone…

So, was its launch a success?

Whilst first day sales of 300,000 have been seen as disappointing by some, others are bullish on the iPad’s prospects. Stories on its WiFi connectivity problems, lack of a camera and other teething problems means that many potential buyers are now waiting for the upgrade. And its ‘revolutionary’ new uses still need to be figured out by third party app developers.

Perhaps most tellingly, many reviewers have commented that whilst the iPad is a slick device it simply doesn’t fulfil any need that’s not already met by the iPhone or MacBook. And this could be Apple’s biggest problem: exclusivity alone isn’t enough when you’re targeting the mass market.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It might be little more than six words long, but a strapline is as important to your brand’s identity as your logo. It should reflect your values, your expertise and what you have to offer customers. With so much to fit in so few words, thinking up straplines isn’t easy. Get it wrong and it could dampen your image for years, which is why brands will happily spend a king’s ransom to get it right.

M&S’s latest slogan, ‘Just Because’, is currently under the marketing spotlight after the supermarket chain revamped its food advertising. Whilst everyone agrees an update was needed, with its old ‘food porn’ ads now so frequently parodied they can no longer be taken seriously, opinions are divided on the ‘Just because’ slogan. Does it make M&S sound special? Or does it fail to differentiate it enough from its competitors?

Personally, I think it sounds more like something you’d say to an overly inquisitive child than an assertion of quality. But then, I’m sure M&S have done their research.

Strapline writing tips

Your strapline should be memorable, catchy and creative. Oh, and did I mention it shouldn’t be more than six words? So as you can imagine, creating an inspiring strapline that builds confidence in your brand is no mean feat.

So how do you go about it? Well, a good place to start is to jot down a list of words that describe your business and another list on what benefits you offer to customers. Then try mixing and matching words and ideas to mould a concise, punchy sentence that reflects your brand’s identity. Easier said than done, I know.

But before you go plastering your favourite creation all over your stationary, test it out on customers and suppliers first. They’ll be able to tell you whether they think it reflects what your brand is all about, or whether you need some more brainstorming.

A few of bda’s favourites:

• Nike ‘Just Do It’ – As concise a projection of brand values as you’re ever likely to hear
• Stella Artois ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ – A great example of using a high price as a USP
• Ronseal ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’ – A no nonsense appeal to its practically minded target customer
• De Beers ‘A diamond is forever’ – A persuasive sales argument that emphasizes the timelessness of its product
• Heinz ‘Beanz Meinz Heinz’ –Written over two pints of beer in 1967. It went on to become one of the best known straplines in advertising, and was even wheeled out and used in a campaign only last year.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Click to download a pdf of this chart, recently published on CMO.com

Social media is often clumped together and shoved into the same pigeon hole. But the two main sites, Facebook and Twitter, are actually very different. All they have in common is that they enable people to connect, interact and share content, and there the similarities end.

So which is best for marketing? Well, it depends on your target audience and the type of marketing you want to deliver…

Marketing on Twitter

Twitter is a lot more news driven than Facebook. People are constantly posting links, Retweeting and commenting on the latest topics in a constant stream of discussion. It’s why it’s often compared to a cocktail party. This makes it ideal for pushing out links to press releases, blog posts and industry news. Just remember that nobody likes a bore who only talks about themselves, so interact and don’t focus too much on trying to impress people.

Another difference with Facebook is their audiences. Facebook is seen as being populated by a fun loving under 30s crowd, whereas Twitter has an older, more professional audience. Twitter users are more interested in connecting with other people in their industry than playing Farmville, which makes it a more suitable place for posting business related news.

Perhaps Twitter’s biggest appeal for marketers is its ability to spread news virally. Thanks to keyword search tools and #hashtags, your Tweets can get picked up by relevant Twitter users and spread amongst 100s or 1000s of users in a matter of hours. Third party monitoring tools (such as Hootsuite, TwitJump and TweetBeep) also make it easy to track the success of your marketing efforts and gauge how to improve them.

Marketing on Facebook

With 400 million active users compared to Twitter’s 75 million, Facebook’s massive user base gives it the edge when you’re looking to attract as many people as possible to your brand. Facebook ‘Fan page’ feature makes it quick and easy to build your own minisites, in which you can add photos, videos and post updates.

The static nature of Facebook also makes it much better for interactivity. People can post comments and engage with your brand on an ongoing basis, with messages remaining visible to other users for days or weeks afterwards.

Facebook’s instant messaging feature also gives it the edge over Twitter’s direct messaging function for enabling one-to-one communication with your company.

So which is best?

If you had to choose, my advice would be Twitter for targeting a professional, news hungry B2B audience whereas Facebook is more suitable for B2C. Twitter is great for giving your business a voice and getting your industry related content to interested followers. Facebook’s Fan pages and interactivity makes it better for engagement on an ongoing basis.

However, both are free, quick and easy to use, so why not give both a try? Just don’t expect results overnight and be prepared to experiment to find out what works best for you.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

If you work in direct marketing you might be keeping a low profile at the moment. Following the Royal Mail’s decision to abolish the limit on unaddressed mail, people are angry about the prospect of torrents of junk mail flooding through their letterbox.

Judging by the outcry, it appears that unaddressed mail is about as popular as traffic wardens and the Ebola virus. People see it as an unwanted and intrusive abuse of their attention, and that cutting down trees to print pizza flyers and insurance leaflets is an environmental crime. In many people’s eyes, all direct marketing falls in the same pigeon hole as printed spam.

But there’s a big distinction between unaddressed mail and the targeted campaigns sent by modern direct marketers. Unaddressed mail’s aim is simply to spread its advertising message as widely as possible. Direct mail, on the other hand, is far more advanced and precisely targeted.

Targeted direct mail is more relevant

Direct marketing has evolved a lot since the days of delivering the same message to as many people as possible. Now the game is about personalisation, segmentation and relevance.

If you own a sportswear company, for example, it’s now possible to send customers brochures that are customised to match their buying history and interests. Personalising direct marketing, in this way, means it’s more relevant and offers a higher conversion rate than simply sending the exact same brochure to every customer.

The fact that you’re only sending people messages they’re interested in also means you’re vastly reducing waste, in both expense and paper.

Targeted direct marketing offers the introduction to digital

There’s a simple reason why businesses of all types continue to use direct mail: it works. Despite all the fuss over Facebook and Twitter, surveys show that people prefer to receive marketing messages in print. This means direct mail can act as the ignition for integrated campaigns by introducing your offer and directing people to your website.

Integrated print campaigns are particularly effective when you take advantage of personalised URL (PURL) technology. This enables you to include a website address in your direct mail featuring the customer’s name e.g. http://www.thinkbda.com/davidknowles.

People love to see their own name in print, and will be curious to see what’s on their personally addressed website. Once they’ve landed, you can then capture valuable nuggets of data on page views, record entries and mouse clicks, which are all fed into your database. This data can then be used to make future campaigns even more targeted and relevant to your customers

So, if you work in direct marketing and become embroiled in the junk mail debate – stand your ground. Targeted direct marketing is more relevant, personalised and effective than its unaddressed cousin, and doesn’t deserve to be placed in the same coop, let along the same pigeon hole, as ’junk mail’.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

With over 90% of the world’s emails classified as spam, it’s inevitable that scammers will try to infiltrate the latest technology to fill their pockets. Social media services are under increasing attack, with phishers desperate to snare people’s login details.

Last month, Twitter was subjected to a series of outbreaks of phishing emails and direct messages sent to its members. High profile victims included Ed Miliband MP and First Direct, whose hacked accounts were used to advertise dodgy knock-off pills and post links to scammy websites.

This video explains the outbreak in more depth:

Since the outbreak, Twitter’s technicians have been busy in their lab devising a solution. This week they emerged to announce that Twitter would now be screening all links in direct messages and emails to make sure they didn’t send people to fake phishing websites or anywhere else a little iffy.

Twitter has yet to confirm whether it will also start screening links in Tweets as well. But maybe it should – according to a recent study 10% of Twitter traffic is already junk, and it’s only going to rise…

Four Twitter Spam tactics

If you’re a Twitter user you might recognise a few of these by now:

1. Profile picture of a pretty girl and endless, moronic Tweets pitching products. The aim of these accounts is to follow as many people as possible so that when users check to see who’s following them they see the spammy messages
2. The hijacking of hashtags and popular topics by adding keywords to promotional messages. Habitat faced a PR disaster after it used interest in the Iranian election as an opportunity to flog its latest in-store discounts
3. Auto posting Tweets with scraped content to direct people to spammy websites filled with Adsense ads and affiliate links
4. Although this isn’t strictly spam, it’s still annoying – accounts with autoresponder messages which ask you to download their eBook or signup for their webinar the moment you start following them

MySpace has already been ruined, for many people, by its abundance of fake accounts and ‘friend’ requests from spammers.

Let’s hope Twitter doesn’t go the same way and steps up its efforts to combat spam. Otherwise it risks the user experience becoming ruined and having to watch its chances of making money fly out of the window.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It could be said that there are two key factors to delivering a marketing message:

1. Knowing what message to deliver
2. Knowing which platform to deliver it on

Based on some stats recently released by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), it would appear that mobile web is fast becoming a platform to focus on.

The survey’s highlights include:

• 10 million people in the UK now browse the internet on their mobile every week
• Those accessing the mobile web do so for on average 6.3 hours/week
• That’s more time than they spend reading newspapers (5.3hrs) or magazines (3.7hrs)
• 46% use the internet whilst watching TV

These stats simply reinforce what us marketers already know: marketing on mobile is going to be huge. Very soon, having a mobile element to your marketing campaign will be a must, rather than an option.

But before you rush off to start designing your mobile apps and widgets, you need to consider whether your customers are active mobile web users. After all, the mobile web is still a predominantly young user base.

Whilst the EIAA survey found that 43% of 16-24 year olds and 26% of 25-34 year olds are accessing the mobile web regularly, I expect the numbers plummet past 35.

The fact is that despite all the fanfares on the millions now accessing Facebook and using branded apps on their mobiles – millions aren’t.

Why Labour’s focus on direct mail is a smart move

Some have been quick to judge the Labour party’s decision to allocate most of its budget to direct mail as a sign that it ‘doesn’t get’ the internet and is past the times. But focusing on direct mail might, actually, be a smart move.

With modern digital printing technology, they can create campaigns which are personalised to feature local issues, as well as those of national concern. Making their marketing more relevant to each individual means it could be more effective than a high profile poster campaign delivering the same message to every passer by.

If they had the budget for it, I’m sure Labour would have happily blitzed every platform. But focusing on direct mail is probably their best chance of engaging with their traditional Labour support base. Spending millions on mobile isn’t, yet, the most suitable strategy.

If Labour were really smart, they’d be integrating their direct mail with personalised URLs leading voters to websites customised with policies to match each voter’s interests. Maybe by the next election their marketing will have caught up.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

David Mitchell wrote in The Guardian this week about a company that gives teenagers vouchers in exchange for mentioning ‘key campaign messages to friends, both on and offline.’ Essentially, they’re being paid to spread advertising propaganda and, as a parent, I can understand why David is concerned.

But this type of word of mouth marketing is nothing new.

In the last decade Procter & Gamble (through its Tremor and Vocalpoint campaigns) has recruited millions of teenagers and mothers to hand out coupons and drop brand names into everyday conversations.

Should we be worried about this cynical approach to word of mouth? Or is there a more authentic way of integrating brands into daily conversations?

Viral marketing is difficult to fake

Many marketers hoped that social networking would make it easy to spread their campaign messages. But creating content in the marketing lab that people want to share is easier said than done.

Often, it happens by chance. People are now suspicious of videos featuring brands, and faked ‘viral’ videos can soon get exposed. You then face a potential backlash and damaged trust because people hate it when they’ve been tricked by a cynical marketer.

Instead, consider giving people an incentive to create authentic viral content for you…

Ford’s Fiesta Movement Campaign

Last year, in the US Ford gave 100 people Fiesta cars to borrow for 6 months.

The catch? They had to complete a series of monthly missions, such as delivering gifts to the National Guard or finding celebrity lookalikes. They then had to upload their adventures onto social networking sites.

The result? 6.5 million YouTube views, 50,000 requests for car information and increased brand awareness at relatively small cost.

The Fiesta Movement campaign succeeded because it offered authentic videos of real life experiences. It wasn’t contrived simply to force the brand into people’s conversations.

So when creating social marketing campaigns give your customers an incentive to create content for you, even if it means your brand taking a backseat. Bribing people to talk about you will soon be exposed, leading to people losing trust in your brand and each other.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Is it time to start worrying about what details we’re storing on social networking sites? If the relaxed attitude to privacy taken by Facebook and Google is anything to go by, we certainly should be.

Back in December it was Facebook feeling the brunt of a backlash after it ‘updated’ its settings and released information users thought was supposed to be private. This came after it had already faced lawsuits, a media frenzy and public outcry over its controversial Beacon contextual ad system. Trust in Facebook is already beginning to wane.

So have any lessons been learnt about looking after people’s information? It would appear not…

People prefer to pick their own friends

If you haven’t heard – last week Google bolted on ‘Buzz’, a social networking feature, to Gmail. In a rather clumsy approach to data mining, Google pulled information on who its users had been emailing and chatting with to automatically generate lists of Buzz ‘friends’.

Predictably the wheels fell off because Google had failed to see the harm in making these lists public. This meant, for example, if you’d been emailing an ex-girlfriend or chatting to someone you shouldn’t this was immediately made public for all to see.

There’s already one story doing the rounds of a woman’s abusive ex-husband being able to follow her after Google added him to her newly created friends list.

Google’s ‘confusion’ over people’s privacy

The lack of thought and testing that went into Google Buzz suggests a rather relaxed attitude to people’s personal information.

People are already getting fed up of playing cat and mouse with Facebook over their privacy settings. So as more incidents like this occur you could see people starting to abandon social networking altogether if they don’t think their personal content is safe.

One example of the dangers of social networking is PleaseRobMe.com – a website which claims to reveal when people aren’t at home by publishing the Twitter feeds of people playing Foursquare (an online game based on people’s location). It highlights how people are only too happy to publicly share details about themselves they’d have kept private only a few years ago.

It’s not just brands that should be worried about ‘transparency’

You hear a lot about how the internet is bringing in a new era of transparency and authenticity in marketing, where businesses are forced to reveal themselves, warts and all, because social networking is making it impossible to gloss over their misdemeanours.

Well, it would appear that it’s not just the marketing departments of big brands that should be worried. Social networking is making more of our private lives more public, whether we want it or not.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

One is Steve Jobs’ latest gift to the world of technology. The other is a treatment for sickness using highly diluted substances. So what can they possibly have in common, I hear you ask?

Well, in the last two weeks both have been the subject of online backlashes against what their critics say is marketing hype. More than ever, using hype to promote your product is a dangerous game. Making exaggerated claims might be a fast track route to building interest and exposure. But when your product fails to live up to the hype you’ll find your credibility derailed.

These days, people are only too happy to blog, Tweet and share their rage when they think they’ve been hoodwinked by a cynical marketer.

‘iPad Sucks’ – 667,000 Google hits and counting

When Steve Jobs chose to unveil the iPad with the adjectives ‘revolutionary’ and ‘magical’ he was met by a wave of criticism from people with adjectives of their own.

Within hours the internet’s influential tech bloggers had unleashed a barrage of negative posts, comments and articles on what they saw as the iPad’s failure to live up to the hype.

From the way the iPad was promoted people were expecting it to have a new slick interface or built in projector. When it was shown to appear little more than an enlarged iPhone (without the camera) people felt misled, and a backlash ensued.

‘Homepathic overdose’ – 622,000 undiluted hits

Two weeks ago hundreds of ‘sceptics’ gathered outside branches of Boots to ‘overdose’ on homeopathy remedies in protest at the selling of remedies they said were ‘scientifically absurd’.

Now, this blog isn’t the place to debate whether taking highly diluted substances will cure your cough. But it’s interesting to note that, according to a Guardian article, one homeopathy pill maker spends €108 million on marketing and only €6.5 million on research.

Awareness of the homeopathic overdose campaign was spread, largely, by the online community of sceptic bloggers and podcasters. The fact that it generated so much exposure in the traditional press reflects how people now have the tools to challenge what they see as marketing hype and can more easily take their protests into the real world.

Be careful about your marketing’s claims

So will brands respond to the changes in consumer power and cut back on the exaggerated claims made in their marketing? I’m not holding my breath. I read today that luxury soap maker Dove plans on promoting a new range based on scientific knowledge that took 15 years to develop.

Let’s hope those claims prove to be true. Who knows, there might be a community of dry skin bloggers already with their hands hovering over the keyboard.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

If people are spending most of their online time on social networking sites, is this where most of your digital budget should be going? Well, Coca Cola certainly seem to thing so. It recently announced it would be abandoning campaign websites, for future product launches, and focusing on social networking sites instead.

And they’re not the only big brand to do so. Kellogg’s and P & G have also announced similar moves in going to where their customers are, rather than trying to entice them to their branded sites.

So is this where online marketing is heading? Are social networks the future of online marketing? Or are Coke, Kellogg’s and P & G abandoning campaign websites too early?

Well, to work out the answers to these questions, let’s assess the benefits of both:

Benefits of Facebook

• It’s where your customers are spending the majority of their online time
• You’re only a mouse click away and don’t need to build a time consuming and expensive SEO and site awareness campaign to attract visitors
• Creating a Fan Page is free, quick and easy
• Did I mention that it’s free?
• People actively engage on Facebook commenting, uploading photos and sharing interesting links, helping them to feel like part of the campaign
• Awareness spreads virally when people joining Fan Pages appears in the news feed

Benefits of Campaign websites

• You have more freedom in the type of brand experience you can create. You’re not reliant on people clicking through the tabs or having to squeeze everything into their template
• You can capture email addresses and contact details for follow up marketing activity
• You have access to metrics on number of visitors, time on site and where people are clicking to gauge the success of your campaign

Based on the above, I think it’s a safe bet that Facebook will be offering marketing packages to brands, which give them access to metrics and user data, in the near future. Facebook is, after all, still struggling to make a profit and will want to take full advantage of its gargantuan (and active) user base.

Advice on campaign websites

When it comes to building a successful campaign site, our advice is to consider how you’re going to engage visitors’ interest and encourage repeat visits.

Are you hoping they’ll sit through your Flash presentation and then immediately want to buy your product?

Or do you want to build a place where likeminded people can congregate and interact over their shared passions and interests, and build an affinity for your product over time?

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been offering suggestions on engaging with customers using social media. Now, giving advice is easy. Following through on it is the tricky part. So to prove we’re not just hot air at bda, here’s a rundown on our social media marketing strategy:

1. How we engage

As you might have guessed, our primary tool for engaging with social media, and the online marketing community, is through our blog. We publish a variety of posts to share our views, offer advice and give readers some insight into the thinking behind the work we do. The types of articles we write include:

• Discussing what’s happening in the fast paced marketing world
• Sharing the results of marketing surveys and commenting on their significance
• Advice on implementing modern marketing strategies, notably email, PURLs and integrated campaigns
• And the occasional post about who’s pulling the levers at our agency

As well as sending weekly posts to subscribers, we repackage our blog posts into an email newsletter which we send to existing clients. We also occasionally pull articles together to create a ‘Greatest Hits’ eBook, which people can download and share without a pesky email signup box getting in the way.

2. Contributing to our networks

With our blog the engine running our social media marketing campaign, we like to ensure our posts get spread around and shared with as many people as possible. So you’ll often find links to our latest articles featured on a variety of marketing websites, including:

Internet Marketing News Watch

Marketing Service Talk

Business Week’s Business Exchange

Junta42 Content Marketing

UTalk Marketing

You’ll also find the bda team active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook as well as taking part in discussion in a variety of online marketing forums and websites.

3. Earning positive attention

When writing blog posts, we always aim to provide readers with practical advice they can actually use and apply to their own marketing. We also like to offer fresh opinions and to challenge hype (which, let’s face it, can be fairly common in the Web 2.0 marketing world). It’s through being useful and offering practical advice that we earn the positive attention that we do.

With Twitter being the yardstick for measuring interest these days, a couple of recent blog highlights include:

When Social Media Backfires - Tweeted 53 times

Conversational Marketing – Should You Believe the Hype? – 36 Tweets

What someone should tell Tiger Woods about marketing in a crisis – 27 Tweets

4. Gauging success

It’s no secret that blogs are great for improving website rankings and attracting links from other sites. In the month prior to starting to blog regularly our website received 360 visitors. Less than two years later and our visitor numbers have nearly quadrupled to over 1200 a month. We’ve also amassed 212 comments and links from other blogs sharing our posts with their readers.

How these figures translate into sales is a conundrum that’s still baffling social media experts. However, we like to approach its value in the same was as any type of marketing: does it boost our reputation for thought leadership, build credibility in our expertise and make our website a more useful resource to potential clients?

When choosing a marketing agency clients also want to know whether you’re switched on to what’s happening in the marketing world and plugged into the new ways of engaging with customers. We like to think that’s what our social media marketing strategy achieves for us, and helps spread the bda brand name at the same time.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Knowing what to do with social media has a lot of businesses scratching their heads: Should you be creating a Facebook fan page? Tweeting? Pasting links in forums? Or not bother with social media at all (because it’s all just hype)?

Well, as my recent experience of buying a tent shows, the fact is that people are sharing opinions on all sorts of products, services and brands online. Someone somewhere might be writing about your business right now, this very second. So you need to be able to engage with the online conversation if you want your voice to be heard.

Here are four steps for engaging with social media:

1. Join the conversation

Rather than go to the library or pick up the phone, the internet is now the first port of call for many people when hunting for information. They want answers to problems, not sales pitches; your marketing can feed this hunger for info. This is one of the reasons why you always hear marketers preaching all the time on why you should be blogging.

Instead of writing about what happened in the office, your blog should focus on providing customers with useful information. This can include product guides, industry insight, case studies and as a forum for answering the questions that regularly crop up when customers place an order.

Similarly, Twitter is another tool you can use for sharing relevant links, product tips and other useful titbits of information.

2. Find your networks

With a bigger population than Russia or Japan, you’d think Facebook was the only social site worth bothering with. But the fact is people are visiting all sorts of forums, review sites and social networks to discuss their shared interests and passions.

The internet is, after all, a vast place. If you imagine the internet is like the sky at night then constellations represent the different groups of websites where your customers might congregate. To track them down, setup Google alerts to notify you whenever your brand, product or service is mentioned. You can then plot a course and zoom into where the most relevant conversations are taking place.

3. Earn trust and positive attention

Once you’ve found your industry’s online community, you’ll need to make friends with the natives. So make sure you’re engaging in a helpful, useful way, rather than assaulting them with sales messages the moment you arrive.

Answering people’s questions, objectively responding to criticism and offering useful advice in an authentic, transparent manner is the only way you’ll become a valued member of the community. The key is to focus on being helpful and contributing to the conversation, rather than tiresome self promotion.

4. Finding success

Some marketers might fear what impact the spread of reviews and opinions will have on marketing when people can sidestep your sales pitch to find out a product’s true value. But there are benefits to engaging with social media.

Feedback, and even criticism, can be harnessed to improve product design and find out which areas your services are lacking. The other side of the coin is that superior products, which receive better reviews, will be easier to sell, with customers acting as (dare I say it) ‘evangelists’.

Offering useful content, whether it’s in your blog or commenting in forums, will build closer relationships with your brand. People are inherently inclined to repay generosity, and the brands and businesses offering value in the way they engage are more likely to be regarded as valued members within social media communities and rewarded with increased sales.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In this year’s marketing predictions (ours included) there’s no shortage of people preaching on how influence is being plucked away from the fingers of brands. No longer are people settling for what they’re fed in the sales pitch, but are now checking for reviews and real life experiences online. Well, I experienced this firsthand when shopping for a tent to take my kids away on holiday to the Lake District.

In previous years, buying a tent would have involved jumping in my car, heading to the nearest outdoor activities shop and then picking up whatever appeared most suitable. Whatever I chose would have been decided purely by the sales information I found in store.

Not so now. These days you can use the web to track down the opinions of other consumers in minutes, and find out all the nitty gritty details missing from the brochure.

Word of mouth is more trusted

Initially, I’d thought one of the cheaper tents would be adequate. Being relatively warm and, of course, waterproof seemed the only factors I needed to worry about. However, after reading a few negative reviews I discovered that whilst the cheaper tent was waterproof it was prone to leaking at the entrance. Not wanting to wake up with wet feet, I decided based on positive reviews to opt for the more expensive model.

What this brief example shows is just how important word of mouth is becoming in marketing. People are more cynical of marketing than ever; thanks to the web they can sidestep the sales pitch altogether to get the ‘real deal’ on a product’s true value.

This new age of transparency has some marketers worried. But it also presents an opportunity.

Harnessing word of mouth in your marketing

The ease with which people can share opinions means poor products and services can no longer be disguised behind clever copywriting and Photoshop. Complaints and criticism can spread in hours, undermining million pound marketing budgets in the process.

As my example shows, superior products (even if more expensive) will become easier to sell because of people’s trust in real life reviews. Customer feedback can also be incorporated into product design – no amount of testing is going to be as effective as the real life experiences of thousands.

So, as the transparent age approaches, marketers can choose to bury their heads in the sand, and ignore what’s being said about their products, or they can hail the rise of the consumer and incorporate the online conversation into delivering better products and more authentic marketing.

Next week: How to develop a social media marketing strategy

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Is your marketing aimed at building closer bonds or telling people how wonderful you are? If it’s the latter you might want to head back to the whiteboard. The fact is that consumer mindsets are changing; the ability to share opinions globally, in mere hours, is irrevocably changing the nature of marketing.

No longer can we simply spoon feed people advertising whilst they’re slumped in front of the TV, or carpet bomb messages they’re now adept at sidestepping. People just aren’t listening anymore when there’s so much noise to contend with.

Added to this is the recession tightening purse strings and hardening people’s resolve not to be bullied into buying ‘stuff’.

So what we’ve now arrived at, in 2010, is the rise of the cynical, sceptical and often critical consumer, who’s not shy of sharing their opinions with friends, followers and the search engines. With consumers now less trusting, building more personal relationships will be the key to marketing in 2010.

Here’s a rundown of some of the trends to watch out for this year:

1. Driven by the proliferation of laptops, smartphones and internet enabled TVs, people will be going online more often and from more locations – positioning digital closer to the centre of marketing campaigns, rather than an offshoot

2. Despite what some digital fanboys might say, direct mail still has a role to play. Surveys show that people prefer to receive offers in print. But to help print survive it needs to be supported by email, personalised URLs and mobile to enhance its relevance and impact

3. Digital advertising will become more targeted as advertisers start using data on where visitors have been and what they’re doing. Expect a backlash when complaints on privacy lead to rushed government legislation. You can pre-empt this (and build trust) by making it clear what data you’re collecting and what visitors gain in return

4. Expect more cases of multi million pound marketing budgets being ruined by critical or mischievous consumer generated content

5. Brands will create their own media channels (and sidestep the traditional media) offering consumers valuable content, useful apps and branded live events

6. Search gets social –Tweets and status updates will start appearing in the search results, making customer service more integral to marketing

7. Crisis marketing – the ability to spread negative opinions globally in hours means you must have a plan in place for monitoring what’s being said, and have the tools to respond and be a part of the conversation

8. Social networking will fragment as teenagers abandon Facebook to escape snooping parents and as people form private networks amongst those whose opinions they actually care about. This will make the job of identifying where customers are congregating that little bit trickier – you won’t be able to just slap up a Facebook fan page and tick social media off the list

9. Mobile will come of age as people start buying more than just ring tones. Short code and coupon marketing will become more widespread, and smartphone apps will evolve from mere gimmicks into useful tools

10. 2010 is going to be an interesting year for marketers, and one in which you’ll need to significantly update your job description as marketing becomes integral to everything a company does

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Tomorrow there will be people wondering whether their Christmas wishes will be granted this year. And marketers are no exception, many of whom will be hoping for some festive cheer after what has been a difficult year.

Here are five wishes we think many marketers will be hoping come true this Christmas:

1. Proliferation of smartphones

Smartphones are an exciting prospect, with their flashy touch screens, the explosion in the popularity of apps and because they’re such a personal device. There have certainly been some impressive marketing hits and misses this year. As we learn from those who got it right and avoid the mistakes of those who got it wrong, smartphones will become an integrated part of the marketing mix.

Even if millions of people don’t get smartphones in their stockings this year there’s no need to feel glum. There’s still plenty of fun to be had with short codes and coupons in the meantime.

2. More businesses realising the importance of the web

I could sprout off some stats about the millions who went shopping online this Xmas and the millions more searching for product information throughout the year. But I think a timely example is the recent race in the music charts. The X Factor marketing juggernaut had the power of TV, radio and in store advertising powering its campaign. Rage Against the Machine had Facebook.

Rage’s victory (on download sales alone) was a great demonstration of social media flexing its muscles to influence opinions and spread ideas. More businesses need to realise that online is where their customers are spending more and more of their time, and invest in their web presence accordingly.

3. More investment in PURL campaigns

We bang on about PURL campaigns a lot on this blog, and for a good reason –they’re just so darn effective.

Marketing needs to be targeted and personalised if it’s going to appeal to people weary of being carpet bombed messages of little relevance or value to them. PURL campaigns, whether integrated with print or email, enable you to deliver customised messages based on an individual’s preferences and capture data for future campaigns at the same time.

In 2010 you’ll need to be marketing smarter if you want people to listen, which is why many marketers will be hoping they get the funds they need to deliver targeted PURL campaigns next year.

4. Less spent on celebrity endorsements

The implosion of brand Tiger has had many brand strategists shaking their heads and saying we’ve already seen the first and the last one billion dollar brand.

Whether or not Tiger Woods seeks deliverance on Oprah, brands are now nervous of risking millions having their identity stapled to a fallible human being. Many marketers will be hoping the millions saved on celebrity endorsements can go on campaigns they can more easily predict and control.

5. Job security and rebuilt teams

2009 has certainly been a difficult year. Despite everyone agreeing that marketing more in a recession is the smart thing to do, most companies have guillotined budgets, leaving depleted teams scrambling around to deliver the same results on a shrunken budget, slowing momentum and dampening morale.

With signs of brighter times ahead, many marketers will be hoping the grip on the money hose is loosened, and they can start rehiring and jumpstarting campaigns that have been put on hold.

Here’s hoping that Santa makes some of these wishes come true and spreads some festive joy for all the overworked marketers out there this Christmas.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

“As Tiger takes a break from the public eye, we will support his desire for privacy by limiting his role in our marketing programs.” – A Gillette statement as expertly spun as a Tiger Woods chip

Only two months ago Tiger Woods was being hailed as the world’s first billion dollar sportsman. Well, since then he certainly hasn’t been behaving like a billion dollar brand. As the criticism grew the more silent he became in what is a worsening PR disaster for the troubled golfer.

Going silent in a crisis might have worked in a time when you could control the messages being spun in the media. Not so now. The power of social media means people can spread rumours and opinions at a startling rate. Which is why speaking out in a crisis is vital, otherwise inaccurate claims go unchallenged and silence is equated to guilt.

Social media has sped up the need for crisis marketing

Whether it’s sharing opinions on Russell Brand, Jan Moir or BA’s cabin crews, it seems as though every week there’s another story being driven by what people are saying online. Nowadays people rush to comment, Tweet, join Facebook groups and angrily hammer out blog posts to fan the flames of that week’s raging debate.

Much of what’s written isn’t fact checked or balanced, with many false claims accepted as truth. So you must speak up and be part of the debate if you want to challenge inaccuracies and diffuse negativity.

But first you must have a marketing plan in place for when a crisis occurs.

How to market in a crisis

Listen – Before you can respond to criticism you have to be able to hear it. So you’ll need to set up listening posts in the form of RSS feeds for Google, Twitter, YouTube and anywhere else you think your brand name might be mentioned. You’ll then be able to listen to what’s being said so you can prepare your response.

Respond – Paralysing in a crisis isn’t going to win you friends. So you should aim to respond to an outbreak within 24 hours. In this era of transparency and sharing of information, denial will only backfire. Instead you should acknowledge the situation, explain why it has occurred and say what you’re doing to put it right.

When responding you could follow Dominos’ example and post a YouTube video (the most appropriate response in its case), start Tweeting or send out a press release. Publishing a statement on your website is a must.

Make sure you have a process for approving anything you publish and stick to a consistent message. Impulsive, off the cuff comments can live for a long time online, no matter how quickly you try to delete them after.

Prepare for a successful relaunch

In 1982 US painkiller brand Tylenol faced the disaster of a tampering scare. But through the way its parent company, Johnson & Johnson, handled the situation it emerged more trusted and with a larger market share. This reversal of fortune became known as a Tylenol 180, and is a legendary example of successfully turning a disaster into an opportunity.

When crisis occurs, holding your hands up and saying how you’re going to make things right can actually deepen your customer relationships. You can then start planning for a successful relaunch, because the story of redemption is a powerful one.

With sponsors abandoning him daily, Tiger Woods will need to make his tear filled appearance on Oprah soon, or find another way of relaying what the Tiger brand is now about. The longer he stays silent the more time (potentially) false claims will have to weaken his deteriorating marketing muscle.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

This year the Fairtrade Foundation celebrated its 15^th birthday. Over the years it has helped improve the livelihoods of more than 7 million people throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. It’s a well respected organisation, fighting a noble cause. But as more shoppers opt for ethical brands, are companies going Fairtrade just for the marketing value?

This week Nestlé announced its Kit Kats (the four fingered variety anyway) are to be made from Fairtrade cocoa. It’s estimated the extra cash will benefit 8000 Ivory Coast farmers, with more funds being poured into education, healthcare and training.

But with Nestlé arguably the UK’s most boycotted company (thanks to their controversial marketing of baby milk), the news has hardly been greeted with universal praise. Nestlé’s critics have come out in force to question whether its gesture is genuine or just a cynical marketing ploy.

Nestlé aren’t the only company to be put under the ethical spotlight this year, with Starbucks, Cadbury and Tate & Lyle now all basking in a Fairtrade certified glow.

Going green is big business

These days you won’t just find ethical shoppers in Bodyshop and buying wicker baskets in specialist boutiques. The ethical market is now big business, with UK shoppers spending 40 billion green pounds last year. Many High St retailers now sell eco fashion ranges, whilst you can fill your home with sustainably made furniture and choose from 45oo Fairtade certified products.

In a recent survey 82% of consumers said they prefer to buy from companies that are socially and environmentally responsible; 23% will do so even if they’re products are more expensive. So it’s no wonder brands are eager to give their marketing an ethical stamp.

‘Green washed’ marketing risks a backlash

In 2007 the Advertising Standards Authority warned that the ‘green’ claims being made in many marketing campaigns might not be authentic. This followed action against a number of car manufacturers for their shaky claims on the ‘clean technology’ used in their cars.

The ASA’s warning seems timely, with so many brands now eager to paint themselves with a green tinted brush. But in the rush to go green many are forgetting the other values that are intrinsic to being seen as ethical: authenticity, honesty and trustworthiness.

As with all claims made in marketing, if brands are seen to be wearing green badges they don’t deserve they risk a backlash when their misdemeanours are exposed. This is why I don’t expect to see a rush of people lifting their embargo on Nestlé products anytime soon.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Christmas is fast approaching, and with it the rush to get to the shops. But with all the traffic and crowds, you’d be forgiven for staying away and buying your gifts online. Well, this year you can visit some of London’s top retailers from the comfort of home thanks to a new virtual world called NearLondon.

NearLondon offers laser scanned 3D recreations of Oxford St, Regent St and Bond St, with more streets to follow. Many top retailers have signed up to advertise their wares, although they’re currently limited to selling from a shop window. But as NearLondon evolves they’ll be able to house fashion shows, interactive games and virtual concerts in their branded stores.

Does this all sound familiar? Well, NearLondon’s creators have been at pains to point out it isn’t another Second Life, and for good reason too…

Second Life – Not dead, just evolving

It was only two years ago that Second Life was basking in the media spotlight as brands, businesses and even nations rushed to grab their piece of online real estate. In fact, the number of people joining jumped from 450,000 to 4 million in just one year.

But unfortunately Second Life just wasn’t accessible enough for most people, and failed to attract the numbers needed to make it a successful marketing platform. The branded shops and buildings became ghost towns when the crowds failed to materialise and the buzz fizzled out. In many brand managers’ eyes, Second Life is now dead.

However, the site still attracts a million regular users and is now being touted as a platform for online collaboration, virtual meetings and a teaching tool. But it remains to be seen whether Second Life will ever attract the numbers needed to tempt brands back to what was, for many, an expensive experiment.

Will NearLondon be different?

The fact that NearLondon’s creators are already talking about a NearNewYork and NearTokyo shows they’ve got big plans. But will they be able to attract enough shoppers to keep the brands happy?

Criticisms of Second Life have been its awkward controls and the cartoony graphics. In NearLondon, however, you just click around the screen to explore London’s streets which are rendered in detailed 3D graphics similar to the latest video games.

NearLondon is currently on limited release, with software disks to be handed out in London next Monday. Whether it can compete with the buzz and physicality of the real world shopping experience remains to be seen. But it’s certainly another step towards delivering more innovative branded experiences in the digital world.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In these cash strapped times, frugality has never been more fashionable. So it should come as no surprise that (according to a Juniper Research survey) 3 million people are now using mobile coupons in the UK. And with a redemption rate 6 times higher than paper, giving out mobile coupons is a marketing trend set to continue, even when we’re back to maxing out our credit cards.

Hunting around for discounts is already popular on the web. In fact, Hitwise estimated that searches for discount vouchers went up 47.5% in the past year. Coupons are great for email marketing too, with reports that open rates for emails with coupons average 25% compared to 16-18% for emails without.

So, as the figures show, coupons can be a great way of attracting people to your website and getting your emails opened. But when it comes to mobile, coupon marketing offers so much more…

Mobile – the ultimate personal marketing channel

Let’s just consider some of the benefits mobiles offer to marketers:

• Most people have one (many have two)
• They offer a direct route of contact
• They’re normally switched on and close to hand
• People can use them to respond impulsively to marketing
• The success of campaigns can be measured to the exact text message
• They have a built in payment mechanism

And all these benefits without the need of a touch screen!

When you consider the immediacy of mobile it’s no wonder coupon campaigns can be so effective. Here are two great examples:

Coca-Cola’s 200k giveaway

Coca-Cola recently ran a promotion (comprising of point-of-sale advertising, door posters and shelf blazers) letting people know they were only a text message away from a free drink. Participants simply had to text ‘YES’ and their date of birth to receive a promotion code for a free bottle of Fanta, Sprite or Dr Pepper.

The promotion helped distribute 200,000 free bottles to 100,000 people, without the need to fill in a form or cut out a coupon. The campaign had a very high redemption rate of 87%, and provided Coca-Cola with valuable data on coupon hotspots.

Planet Funk’s 377% campaign ROI

Uber trendy US clothing retailer Planet Funk is currently the poster child for mobile coupon marketing. In the run up to Christmas last year it sent 2000 coupons to text subscribers and people who’d texted in response to posters and ads on its website.

Planet Funk’s campaign received a 91% redemption rate – contributing 28% to their December sales and a 377% return on the cost of the campaign. As an added bonus, 15% of coupon redeemers (not wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth) opted into future Planet Funk mobile campaigns.

As these two examples show, coupon marketing, whether by email or mobile, can be a very effective way of attracting a burst of sales and filling your database for future campaigns.

So, instead of Christmas cards, consider sending coupons to your favourite customers this year. It’s a gift many will be happy to receive.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Email services provider Campaigner recently surveyed 259 small businesses of which 46% said they used email marketing and 36% plan to start in the next year. So am I impressed by these findings? Does nearly half already using email sound a lot? Well, to be honest, it should be a lot more.

If only 36% plan on starting email marketing campaigns that leaves 18% who’ll continue to miss out on one of the best marketing tools around. Whether you’re a landscape gardener or an international retailer, email is a great tool for relationship building, attracting people to your website and notching up sales.

So for those 18% of small businesses who don’t see the need to use email (and anybody else’s who’d like some advice) here are a few tried and tested types of email marketing:

Informational

Arguably the most effective use of email (well, we certainly think so) is as a relationship building tool.

Sending out a newsletter packed with useful advice, product tips and industry insight is a great way of building rapport and trust in your brand, and, dare I say it, ‘thought leadership’. These typically receive high open rates and click throughs (but only if you’re providing great content, of course).

Newsletters can be quite time consuming to put together. But the beauty is that you can reuse the content in other marketing materials, such as your website’s blog (here at bda we do it the other way round).

Inspirational or entertaining

Consider sharing customer success stories and case studies of how your product/service has helped solve a problem. If you can write it in an interesting way (rather than like a backslapping press release) you can show off your expertise and reflect your business’ personality at the same time.

Promotion

Another popular way of using email is as a quick fire sales tool.

Whether it’s announcing a new product or offering a discount on an old one, email can be used to quickly spread awareness on your special offers. Email is also great for sending out coupons, which you can track to gauge the success of your campaign.

However, with many people weary of the amount of salesy emails they receive these days, response rates for promotional emails are typically low. You can, however, dramatically increase response if you can personalise your messages.

Personalisation power

Thanks to modern one-to-one marketing techniques, the days of carpet bombing the same message are over. Now it’s possible to personalise every email for each recipient.

And I don’t just mean changing the name. An email’s content can be customised based on all sorts of criteria, such as the recipient’s company’s size, their industry, purchase history and any other nugget of info stored in your database.

You can then create a flexible template in which you can drop customised content with a single mouse click. Personalising emails means you can cross-sell offers based on a customer’s purchase history, deliver case studies relevant to their industry and increase the value offering of each message.

With email fast becoming a mainstream marketing tool, it’s vital to ensure your messages are more relevant and valuable than your competitors. Personalisation (and great content) is what can make your emails ‘must reads’, rather than banished to the junk folder.

Offer a mixture of the above

So which type of email do you think is best? Well, they all certainly have their merits. But the best strategy is to mix all three.

Email marketing can take time to bear fruit. But one of its benefits is you can track every open, click through and sale. Watching how people respond to your messages helps you to identify what they’re interested in and which types of emails work best. You can then adjust your campaign accordingly.

Golden Rule = Get permission. Don’t spam

But before you run off to start penning your first email, whatever you do don’t buy a list of email addresses. Sending unsolicited email is akin to door-to-door selling in many people’s eyes. As well as being blocked or deleted, your message risks being flagged as spam, which will leave your credibility and campaign in tatters.

So do the honourable thing and start your own list by asking for email addresses at every opportunity. It might take longer to build your database. But you’ll have a list of permission based leads keen to hear what you have to say.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region

With Christmas fast approaching, there will be plenty of people hoping for smartphones in stockings this year. Amongst them will be Google, who’ve just shelled out £449 million on Admob, a mobile advertising company. Dumping such a huge pot of cash on mobile has been seen as preparing for mass market adoption of smartphones. It’s expected that soon there will be millions more smartphone owners eagerly consuming content, and the ads to go with it. But in all this anticipation for smartphones, are some companies missing out on a mass market mobile marketing opportunity that already exists?

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m as excited as the next marketer about the opportunities offered by touchscreens, mobile apps and miniature web browsers. I just think that, in all the excitement, many companies are ignoring a way of engaging people on mobiles that’s popular, is already proven and offers one of the most immediate response mechanisms around.

What am I talking about? Why, the humble text message of course.

Marketing with short codes

Whilst some wait eagerly for the age of the smartphone, many smart marketers are already taking advantage of everyday, run of the mill text messaging technology.

You might by now be used to seeing five digit text numbers on TV shows, like X Factor, and on print ads (e.g. the Times’ 7am delivery ad on the London tube). These numbers are known as short codes, and they’re earmarked for massive growth (irrespective of what’s happening on smartphones).

These are just some of the benefits:

• More easily remembered than a telephone number or website address, particularly when the numbers spell out a word e.g. 62262 = OBAMA
• Virtually all mobiles can text
• People can take part in polls, receive coupons, register for news alerts and respond immediately to marketing messages
• All responses demonstrate interest
• Mobile numbers can be fed into a database for follow up activity
• Low deployment costs and fast delivery make short codes particularly suitable for time sensitive campaigns

But do people really want to receive floods of texted coupons, special offers and marketing messages I hear you ask? Well, according to research released by the Direct Marketing Association – yes, they do.

The DMA’s survey, of 270 people, found that 70% would be happy to receive messages from brands and 55% would welcome texts of sales and special offers. However, these findings shouldn’t be seen as an excuse to open the floodgates and start flooding people with text messages. Being useful and timely, rather than an annoyance, will be the key.

So whilst some companies sit watching the horizon for the dawn of the age of the smartphone, you can be engaging people with a simple technology that virtually everyone can already use.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Cynical, fickle and easily bored, these are just some of the reasons why teenagers are difficult to market to. In the past, marketers have struggled to reach this younger segment, but, thanks to the amount of time they’re spending online, the opportunities for engaging with teenagers are growing.

Persuading them to listen to you is tricky though because teenagers have grown up with marketing; they’re savvy enough to ignore anything that’s inauthentic, has nothing to offer them or tries too hard to be cool.

 So how can you deliver market that appeals to teenagers, rather than comes across as an embarrassing dad? These tips should help:

1. Teenagers get bored very quickly, so messages need to be short and simple

2. Be authentic because marketing savvy teens can quickly turn cynical ploys and shallow attempts at engagement into an online backlash

3. Despite how they’re often depicted in the media, teenagers are interested in serious social issues. So aligning your marketing with a campaign they care about can pull them in. Just make sure it’s a campaign you also believe in as well, otherwise you risk falling foul of tip 2

4. Teenagers change their clothes, hair styles and how they present themselves all the time. So you’re message needs to keep evolving along with them to avoid seeming dated and stale

5. Whatever you do, don’t try to be cool. Teenagers hate being patronised and will ridicule any clumsy attempts at teen speak. Trying to come across as cool is one of the main reasons why teen campaigns devised by 30+ year olds fail

6. So how should your campaign speak to teenagers? Well, one way is to consider who your audience’s role models are and then mirror their language and tone

7. Word of mouth is very important. Teenagers like to be seen as early adopters, but part of the crowd as well. So you need to get them talking about your product if it’s going to become a national craze

8. Consider marketing messages as pieces of entertainment and how you can create messages teenagers will want to share. Making them laugh, whilst tricky, can be a very effective way of making your product a topic of conversation during the school lunch break

9. When it comes to direct mail, your messages need to:

a) Be personalised to treat teenagers as individuals

b) Offer them something they can share or show off to their friends e.g. a badge or voucher

10. Social networking sites aren’t places for simply raining down your messages on teenage users. Instead you need to find a way of becoming a valued part of their online experience. This is why fan pages for products and brands are popping up all the time; the High School Musical and Hannah Montana Facebook pages are two great examples

11. Teens are content creators, whether it’s writing a blog, creating an avatar for a virtual world or uploading their mashups onto YouTube . You can harness this creativity, and build participation in your campaign, by asking them to contribute content

12. Teens have grown up with technology and can happily text, instant message and update Bebo all at the same time. They’re used to accessing content on demand, and will expect this from your campaign

13. As with all marketing, the best teen campaigns integrate TV, print and online. Aligning your campaign with a live event can also be a great way of building interest

14. If you’re not already using it, you should aim to include mobile in your teen marketing campaigns in the next year. Whilst teenagers are inseparable from their mobiles, the tone and style of content has to be pitched so it’s welcomed on such a personal device

15. Instant messenger is a popular tool amongst teenagers. But when communicating with the adult world they usually use email. So if you’re thinking of using IM in your campaign make sure you ask their permission first

16. Cyberbullying is rife, so brands have an ethical responsibility to protect members of their chat rooms and social networking groups. Monitor what’s being said and step in when necessary. Don’t leave teenagers to moderate themselves, unless you want your brand associated with an online version of Lord of the Flies

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 BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

With marketing so fragmented these days, even the biggest brands risk slipping up trying something new. And it’s been Pepsi left blushing after its iPhone app, ‘Amp Up Before You Score’, attracted the wrong sort of headlines for pigeonholing women (around half its customers). It’s certainly one experiment they won’t be in a rush to repeat.

Whilst most don’t backfire so spectacularly, there’s no shortage of poorly conceived iPhone apps created by brands. But there are also some great ones too, which reflect what the brand is about and extend the marketing experience onto the popular mobile device.

Here are 10 great branded iPhone apps Pepsi might want to take note of before releasing their next one:

1. myStarbucks – Users can create their own drinks, locate their nearest Starbucks and view nutritional info on different types of coffee bean. This is a good example of the type of apps retailers can create for directing people to their nearest store. Gap ‘Stylemixer’ is another notable example.

2. Jamie’s 20 Minute Meals – Currently the top grossing app in the UK iTunes store, with 50 recipes and step-by–step prep photos, perfect for when you’re at the supermarket and want to try something new for dinner.

3. Official Arsenal Football Club app – Another new and popular app in the UK iPhone store (well, with Gunners fans anyway) featuring info on fixtures, team news, video highlights and match photos. You can expect to see a flood of apps from sports teams enabling fans to stay connected to one of their life’s passions whenever and wherever they are.

4. Mercedes-Benz –C63 AMG – This is an excellent example of the mini site apps being created by luxury brands (e.g. Breitling, Christian Dior and Lacoste), which extend the marketing experience onto the iPhone. Mercedes’ app features videos of the new C63 AMG drag racing, engine sounds and, of course, directions to the nearest dealer.

5. Volkswagen Polo challenge – In an adrenaline fuelled alternative to Mercedes’ approach, this 3D racing game is designed to promote the launch of the new Polo. Race around seven courses before finding directions to the nearest showroom to test drive the real thing.

6. P!nk’s Funhouse – One of the first artist themed apps released, this promotional vehicle for the singer’s latest tour features pictures, video interviews and 30 second song clips to entice you into buying the full track. Expect to see similarly themed apps appearing for more artists and tours very soon.

7. Absolut Drinkspiration – If you ever want to impress your friends as a drinks connoisseur then this app can help. It offers drink suggestions based on criteria such as mood, the type of bar and shape of the glass. Maybe you’ll only use this app occasionally, but it fits in perfectly with what the brand is all about and promotes it’s logo at exactly the right time.

8. Virtual Zippo lighter – Currently the most popular branded app around with 5 million downloads of the imitation flame, which you’ve probably seen sparking up at concerts. Carling’s iPint is another popular example of virtual product marketing.

9. Oakley Surf Report – Access surf community news and weather reports for planning your next jaunt to the waves. Just be careful not to get your iPhone covered in sand when you go.

10. Last Minute’s Talking Phrasebook – More of a sponsored app this one, but perfectly relevant to the brand nevertheless. Rather than leave you struggling to pronounce phrases this app actually says them for you. This app is practical, useful and will certainly encourage you to visit Lastminute.com when planning your next trip abroad.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

There was a time when the biggest surprise you’d find in a packet of Cornflakes was a plastic toy. But soon you could be finding logos floating in your bowl of cereal after Kelloggs announced plans to laser ‘brand’ individual flakes. Kelloggs hopes this rather extravagant measure will differentiate its cereal from cheaper imitations, highlighting the plight many luxury brands face in persuading customers to pay for the real thing.

Whilst counterfeiting is nothing new, the scale at which imitation products are being made and sold has grown to a whole new level in recent years. Many brands blame the recession and the internet for their piracy woes. But is the success of their marketing to blame as well?

Counterfeiters meet rising demand for luxury brands

In the chase for higher profits, many luxury brands have extended their product range and marketing from niche boutiques to high street retailers and the average shopper. What this means is that more and more people have been seduced with the allure and aspiration of owning a luxury brand. The problem is that many of these people can’t afford or don’t want to pay the price tag that goes along with it.

Luckily for those people, the internet has made it possible for counterfeit manufacturers in China to connect with Western shoppers in only a few mouse clicks. The quality of imitation products is often so good that even savvy shoppers can’t tell the difference. In fact, it’s rumoured that some counterfeit goods are churned out on the same machines that make the originals, with the only difference being that they were made without the brand’s approval or knowledge.

It could be argued that many luxury brands blundered when they moved the production of their handbags, clothes and perfumes into countries which are less regulated and harder to control. So what can they do to fight back?

The carrot and the stick

The war against cheap imitations is already being fought on two fronts: educating shoppers and chasing counterfeiters in the law courts.

A proportion of many brands’ marketing budgets are now being spent on persuading people why they should buy the real thing. Campaigns such as by the Federation of Swiss Watches and Fakes Are Never in Fashion are aimed at spreading awareness on all the evils associated with counterfeiting e.g. child labour, poverty level wages and even funding terrorism.

In terms of the legal war, eBay, until recently a treasure trove of fake handbags and perfume, has already felt the full brunt of the luxury brands’ rage. In June 2008 a Paris Court ordered eBay to pay £15 million to Louis Vuitton and £13 million to Christian Dior for selling fake imitations and causing ‘moral harm’. Louis Vuitton’s lawyers have been particularly busy, launching 24,000 lawsuits in 2007 and shutting down 750 counterfeiter websites.

The luxury brands will be hoping these efforts persuade people to pay a premium for the real thing. As otherwise they’ve created a hunger for their products which seemingly only the counterfeiters can satisfy.

Incidentally, sales of Kelloggs Cornflakes have actually gone up during the recession, as people opt for a reliable and reassuring brand on their breakfast table. Perhaps Kelloggs should worry less about lasers and promote this fact in their marketing instead.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Nearly two years after its release, it seems as though iPhones are becoming overloaded with gimmicky apps that get deleted after only two days. And this is particularly true when the app has been created as part of a marketing campaign.

Last year I commented on why iPhone apps were at the top of many brands’ Christmas wish list. Ever since Stanley Works released their virtual spirit level, brands have been pumping out mobile apps on an industrial scale.

To be fair, it’s easy to understand why. A recent Wireless Expertise study estimated the number of smartphones sold per year worldwide will rise from 165 million to 423 million by 2013. So finding a way of integrating mobile into the marketing mix is becoming essential, rather than an optional extra.

The market is saturated

The problem for marketers is that the smartphone market is already swamped with apps. In fact, there are already over 85,000 different apps just for the iPhone, following a gold rush of developers hoping to make their fortune.

With this level of competition, one of an app’s key aims should now be to stay on people’s mobiles and be something people will use regularly. So are brands going the right way about it? Or are they at risk of annoying people fed up with gimmicky mini games?

Well, according to research by Flurry, a mobile analytics company, the apps people use most frequently and for the longest period are those offering them useful information, rather than novelty mini games.

Mobile apps should give people what they want – useful info

In a study of user retention of 19 different types of apps over 90 days Flurry found that gimmicky apps (labelled as entertainment) and games ranked poorly for retention, as shown in this handy chart:

This study suggests that if brands want their apps to be used regularly and stay on people’s mobiles they need to be apps providing useful content.

There’s a growing consensus that brands need to become publishers if they want their marketing to appeal to consumers hungry for information and dismissive of advertising.

So as well as harnessing the ability to pump out news, industry insight and product advice on their website, brands need to start doing it through mobile apps too.

Gimmicky apps might get five minutes of fame. But according to Flurry’s study, it’s apps people find useful and use regularly that will stay on their mobiles and keep them engaged with a brand’s marketing.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Fernando Alonso's Gloves - they could be yours!

Last month a woman who works for the BCQ Group (which bda is part of) was in a major motorcycle accident and suffered serious injuries. On hearing the news, a team at BCQ whipped into action to organise a Quiz Night and Charity Auction to raise money to aid her rehabilitation.

The event’s on 13 October at the Buckingham Town Hall, and already over 30 teams have entered. But what’s been even more inspiring is the number of people not directly connected to BCQ who’ve come forward to donate to the cause.

We’re lucky enough to be located in the midst of Formula 1 team territory, with a number of team headquarters nearby, along with the Silverstone racetrack. Rachael Furn’s father, who works in the industry, told a number of F1 drivers about the auction at last week’s Japan Grand Prix, and the result was some astounding generosity.

Scuderia Toro Rosso held a spontaneous whip-around, resulting in a gift of 150 euro. We also have some great F1 memorabilia for the auction:

- Two Ferarri caps – one signed by Kimi Raïkkönen and the other signed by Felipé Massa; and
- Driving gloves – as worn on the day by Fernando Alonso, and also signed by him

Bid for this Ferrari Hat, signed by Felipé Massa

Or this Ferrari Hat, signed by Kimi Raïkkönen

If you or anyone you know is a Formula 1 fan, and you’d like to place a pre-auction bid for any of these items, please let us know, and we’ll make sure your bid is put forward on the night! And, needless to say, any further help or support for the cause will be greatly appreciated.

For more information, or to place a bid, please email anita.wise@bcqgroup.com. (Note that email bids must be received by Anita by 3pm on Tuesday 13 October to be eligible.)

Advertising agencies are notoriously male dominated, which is a problem when the majority of your customers are female. The fact is that rising female spending power is causing a shift in how products are designed and sold. And it will be those able to deliver marketing that’s appealing to women who’ll prosper. Those who continue to think we only live in a man’s world will fade away.

A few facts:

• 85% of US household purchase decisions are made by women (National Federation of Woman Business Owners)
• Women spend 10% more on the internet than men (Verdict Research)
• 91% of women say ‘advertisers don’t understand us’ (Martha Barletta, in ‘Marketing to Women’)

The web turns female

At ad:tech London, this week, a consultant from trend forecasters The Future Laboratory announced that the web turned female last year, meaning that there are now more female users than men.

So with female spending power, influence on buying decisions and prevalence on the web on the rise, marketers must consider whether their campaigns need to be adjusted.

How can marketing be made more appealing to women?

Does marketing need to be made more feminine?

Well, according to Martha Barletta, in ‘Marketing to Women’:

“Men and women don’t communicate the same way, and they don’t buy for the same reasons…He simply wants the transaction to take place.  She’s interested in creating a relationship.”

Other experts on feminine marketing have suggested that women take longer to reach buying decisions than men. They tend to research more and are less influenced by advertising. This means marketing needs to find subtler approaches.

Word of mouth marketing

When discussing feminine marketing, Tarek Mady (chair of the Marketing Department at the American University in Dubai) said:

“Women are the most powerful brand builders and the most dangerous brand killers due to their tendencies towards information sharing…In Dubai they are six times more likely to use word of mouth than men because by nature, people talk about products they are satisfied with.”

Perhaps the rise of the female shopper means it’s time to focus even more closely on subtle approaches, such as word of mouth and viral campaigns, rather than traditional advertising.

When it comes to feminine marketing the trap is falling into dated stereotypes, delivering marketing that’s patronising and treating all women as a single segment. So creating campaigns that are more appealing to women certainly poses a challenge, but it’s one marketers can’t afford to ignore.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

According to a recent study many of the top brands struggle when it comes to being loved. In fact, none of them scored above 30% at the ‘love score’ amongst customers, based on criteria such as whether the brand ‘makes time to reward me’, ‘relates to me best’ or ‘cares about me more than just money’.

So what’s gone wrong with the top brands’ love lives? Why aren’t they creating the emotional connections that are supposed to come from millions spent on marketing?

Well, the low levels of affection for brands have been blamed on a lack of personalised engagement. After all, you need to make people feel special if you want them to love you back.

Internet dating is about relationship building

Internet dating is like marketing in many ways. There are two main approaches:

• You can send the same message to as many potential partners as possible
• Or pluck nuggets of info from their profile about their passions, hobbies and interests to drop into personalised messages

So which approach do you think works best? Yep, you guessed it – taking the time to show an interest in people as individuals is the best way to get a conversation going in the internet dating world.

Once you’ve started a dialogue you can then keep asking questions to make your messages more relevant before reaching a conversion in the form of a date. Where you go from there is the subject of a different blog entirely.

So what does internet dating teach brands?

If brands want to be loved they should try mirroring the tactics that work so well in internet dating, and deliver campaigns that are personalised to match the interests of individual prospects.

Thankfully, we now have the technology to build these campaigns.

With Purls (personalised URLs) we can create websites customised for each individual prospect, and then use variable data printing to send them personalised promotions based on every click and page view.

Boots, for example, could reward its customer better by sending them personalised print and online promotions based on their purchase history. Not only will this cut down on the printing costs of sending an entire catalogue, but will also deliver marketing that’s more relevant and better received.

Brands need to remember that people are individuals, with their own interests and preferences. So, as in the internet dating world, they need to treat customers as unique individuals if they want to be more loved in return.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Andy looking surprisingly good in lurid green

Big congratulations to Andy who completed his second Great North Run yesterday, raising £480 for Leukemia Research UK. Shaving five minutes off his 2008 time, Andy completed the half marathon in a highly respectable 1 hour 57 minutes.  He finished in 9,819th position, leaving 44,181 other runners behind him in the dust.

We’re impressed, despite the fact that he was overtaken by someone wearing a Scooby Doo costume on the home stretch!

Thanks to everyone who sponsored Andy  and don’t be surprised if he tries to hit you up for some sponsorship for next year’s London Marathon ….

How can you make money from a user base that hates advertising and doesn’t want to pay for content?

Well, that’s a puzzle all media companies seem to be struggling with at the moment. Whether it’s newspapers, commercial TV or Facebook, no one has yet worked out how to monetise content with advertising people are happy to receive.

But that doesn’t stop them trying…

ITV gets the law changed

Commercial TV has, at least, been thrown a lifeline (albeit a thin one).

Almost exactly a year ago we discussed on the bda blog ITV’s ill fated experiments with ad overlay technology, which could have had viewers spitting out their tea when ghostly slogans started appearing on walls and on people’s foreheads. Thankfully these experiments are unlikely to reach our screens now that product placement on TV has been given a tentative green light.

It’s predicted that product placement could earn UK commercial TV companies £125 million a year. Whilst mere pocket change compared to total TV ad revenue of nearly £3 bn, the decision to allow product placement reflects how advertising has to become more inventive if it’s going to survive in our anti-ads culture.

UK commercial broadcasters will have to tread carefully though. They don’t want to shoehorn too many mentions of Aston Martins and lingering shots of iPhones into the script. Any product placements will need to be done subtly, otherwise viewers will vote with their remotes.

Twitter changes its user agreement

Finding the right balance in how many times you mention brand names is something ITV and Twitter have in common following Twitter’s announcement of changes to its user agreement, which “leave the door open for advertising” to its 45 million users.

Grumbles of discontent at the news are already spreading on blogs, in forums and on Twitter itself. So Twitter, just like ITV, will have to be careful in how it introduces its new advertising model. It will need to find a way of delivering ads people are at least accepting of, in exchange for a service they value.

As with all marketing, the answer lies in delivering advertising in a way that’s useful, relevant and welcomed. But unfortunately this is a puzzle few, if any, have been able to solve.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.