Duke MBA Marketing Conference: Buzz Marketing
February 23rd, 2006Yesterday I attended the first annual Duke MBA Marketing Conference at the Fuqua School of Business and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the event. All the sessions were entirely relevant to what I’m working on now with Messenger, TripleBlaze, and Safarium. Here are my notes (I planned on typing them up anyway, why not post them on the blog as well?).
Lenovo
- Using blogs to gauge brand impressions on certain brand attributes (positive/negative/neutral)
- Media spend is divided among these steps to loyalty:
- Ad awareness
- Consideration
- Preference
- Lead generation
- Conversion
- Loyalty
- Leveraging partnerships with global brands; partnership with Google helps Lenovo to be seen as innovative, cool, etc.
- Go after your fan base and they can talk for your brand (influencers)
— Bloggers are influencers
Ford Fusion
Mockumentary on Hurra Torpedo
Lots of interesting web and TV advertising.
Long Term Brand Equity
- Price elasticity on sales is approximately 15X advertising elasticity
— This means discounts have a much larger effect on sales than ads
- Advertising is a form of promotion
- Brand managers are increasingly short term focused at the expense of the brand
— Data is increasingly thinly sliced (up-to-the-minute sales numbers, etc.) leading to a short term focus
- People have become more price sensitive over time (decades)
- Average long term effects offset short term effects by about 40%
- Advertising and discounting have largest effect on long term (baseline) sales
- Price premium: distribution and product have greatest role
- Wide availability helps price premium: form of advertising, signals value
— “With such wide distribution, it must be good”
- Discounting can be good for new products to induce trial
ING Direct
- Memory = saliency (relevance) X frequency
- ING has no physical locations (beyond cafes)
- Bringing groups together makes online biz more personal
— Free outdoor film screenings
— Free commute, events, etc. [reinforces “save your money” message]
— Show up to a movie, it’s paid for by ING! People tell friends, surprise
- Credit card companies push credit irresponsibly, ING promotes savings
- Good service is good for repeat business but is not usually enough for exponential word of mouth growth
- Don’t advertise the surprise
Tremor (P&G subsidiary)
- Focus on “connector” consumers rather than innovators
— Connectors have social networks 5 to 6 X larger than normal folks
— Connectors actively seek new news, love to talk, highly influential
— Inqusitiveness, connectedness, persuasiveness
— Prime prosepect is female HS sophomore or junior
— Trend spreaders, not trend setters
— Motivated by sharing
— Typical teen has 25 people on his/her buddy list; connector has 150!
- Slightly less than 1% of connectors can affect change on national scale
- There is a message the consumer wants to HEAR
- There is a message the consumer wants to SHARE
- These two messages are ALWAYS different
- Advocacy plus amplification
- Buzz (viral) marketing - not the same as word of mouth (WOM) advocacy (amplification without advocacy; ex: subsurviant chicken)
- Connector brand enthusiasts are best salespeople
- Advocacy does not occur online but in 1 to 1 conversations; exceptions: consumer electronics, travel
- Connectors are 70% female
- Marketers must remember they are not the average consumer
- Dawn connector marketing: making chores around the house easier by having kids help
— Make it easy for the consumer to talk about the brand
- Identify who your target customer listens to
- Create a database of your enthusiasts
- What is uniquely talkable about your brand?
- What is the consumer insight that is driving your brand?
- What triggers are you providing to allow talk about your brand to occur naturally?
- Product design can lead to talkable moments: iPod “wheel”
- Qualitative feedback yields insight
- WOM window is 1-2 weeks before launch then periodically
