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What's a little e coli among friends? That's the question US fast-casual dining chain Chipotle will soon be asking its best customers. After publicly eschewing the idea of launching a customer loyalty programme last year, Chipotle executives said on an earnings call last week that they aim to stem the flood of frequent diners abandoning the chain with - wait for it - a loyalty programme. Though the programme is likely to be temporary, Chipotle hopes it will reignite customer passion for bowls and burritos. The problem: Chipotle executives still seem to display a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of loyalty programmes.
The announcement was one of the only positives in an earnings call that can only be described as apocalyptic: same store sales fell nearly 30% in the first quarter of 2016 and the company posted a net loss of $26.4 million. The company has tried everything to pull out of the free fall: giving away millions of free burritos, BOGO offers, national advertising campaigns; nothing has worked. Money quote from reporter Virginia Chamlee over at eater.com:
"The aim is to target the most loyal Chipotle consumer — i.e. the one who visits 25 or more times per year. The company saw the largest declines among its top loyal (25+ visits a year) and its 'light' consumers (those that visit two to five times per year). Noting the decline in visits amongst its once most-loyal customers, [Chief Marketing and Development Officer Mark] Crumpacker said the company would love to get that 'habit' back up. "We do believe it's beneficial to us to get people back in the habit of visiting Chipotle [as often as they used to]."...
With an estimated 2 million people tuning in to his syndicated television show each weekday, there's no doubting the clout Dr. Oz carries in the arena of public opinion. Add to that 3.78 million Twitter followers and more than 5.5 million Facebook page "likes," and the good doctor reaches a sizeable audience with his opinions on everything from beating bad breath to cutting cancer risk.
But when consumers were asked whom they most trust on controversial food issues, the ratings for Dr. Oz fell flat, according to the latest U.S. consumer trust research from The Center for Food Integrity (CFI).
In the survey, "Cracking the Code on Food Issues: Insights from Moms, Millennials and Foodies," respondents were asked to rate their level of trust with a number of sources when it comes to the issue of genetically modified foods. University scientist was the top-trusted source, followed by a scientist who is a mom, and then a farmer.Dr. Oz came in second-to-last place on a list of 11 sources, edging out celebrity chefs....
Too often - and yet understandably - people outside of the PR profession ask what PR is all about. But explaining what it is does not mean that it answers the sometimes negative thinking behind the question in the first place. So here's a top 10 check list of What PR is Not.
How much is it worth to sponsor Tiger Woods or Lionel Messi or Rafael Nadal? What’s the payoff for being a sponsor of the Super Bowl, Olympic Games or the World Cup? Considering the huge amounts being spent on sponsorships, companies have surprising difficulty answering these questions.
Corporate spending on sponsorships in the United States is expected to grow to $20 billion in 2013—equal to one-third of total US television advertising and one-half of digital advertising. Yet industry research reveals that about one-third to one-half of US companies don’t have a system in place to measure sponsorship ROI comprehensively.In our experience, executives who implement a comprehensive approach to gauge the impact of their sponsorships can increase returns by as much as 30 percent. A good marketing ROI program uses five metrics to measure the performance of sponsorship spending....
In many ways stoke could be used interchangeably with the more marketing-friendly word “buzz.” You can think of stoke as buzz around a brand, product or athlete that simultaneously inspires and excites.
Stoke isn’t the place to get really granular about product details, features, or techy insights. It’s a lot more about building a story, putting forward your brand and letting potential customers aspire to the life your products can help create. Even specific products can take a backseat in many cases.
Ever seen one of those GoPro promotional videos of people doing crazy things in beautiful locations? You know that feeling you get in your gut that you want to go there, and do those things? That’s you getting stoked. Thanks GoPro!...
Being a big fan of alcohol, I wondered why this was. Is it down to peer pressure? Social malaise perhaps? A sign of Britain heading down the proverbial pan? Or is it down to canny marketing and PR stunts? I suspect it could be the latter. I still remember Carling Black Label adverts from my distant youth. The 'Carlsberg don't do (insert here) but if they did, they'd probably be the best (insert here) in the world' slogan is practically part of the national lexicon.
But it's not all paid-for television advertising. The big beer companies often chuck in a cheeky PR stunt or two into the marketing mix. Here's my selection of ten of the best. In no particular order...
Google now calls links in press releases "unnatural" and is mandating nofollowing them. Even though Google took away the anchor text links in press releases (and guest posts and articles), there are still press release optimization opportunities.
Google's most recent update to their defintions of link schemes sent shockwaves through the SEO and online PR world; a real downer to link building strategists.
It's true: the world's largest search engine called links in press releases "unnatural" and is mandating nofollowing them. What does this mean to organizations using press releases to gain digital visibility in search and social?For brands publishing a press release or an article on your site and distributing it through a paid wire service, such as PR Newswire, Business Wire, Marketwire or through an article site, you must first make sure to nofollow the links if those links are "optimized anchor text."
Is This a Big SEO Deal? Yes. No. Maybe.
Google has been slowly squeezing the SEO life out of press releases for a while now.
"In 2006 online press releases were amazing for SEO. In 2013? Not so much," said Joe Laratro, SEO expert and PubCon lead moderator. "Online press releases have had very little value in terms of links and content over the past few years – I would say it had been steadily declining. However, I still thought it was a good part of a large organic link building strategy until the new guideline changes."...
How clients interact with a brand has changed significantly. Now the customer experience extends far beyond customer service, and so it should....
If you didn’t know better you could be forgiven for thinking that the line was for an über cool nightclub. World class underground House music is pumping from the speakers and there is a doorman looking after the crowd outside. Unlike a nightclub doorman though, he is offering free gelato taste tests to help ease the decision making process once inside.
Even if you can’t make it to Surry Hills or Darlinghurst on a chilli winters night, the customer experience extends across the globe via their popular Facebook page. Messina’s Facebook audience enjoys (amongst other things) a personalized level of social media customer service that makes them feel like they are part of the brand. I guess you get the idea. Messina is nailing their customer experience.Forrester Research’s study ‘The State Of Customer Experience Management‘ suggests that over 90 percent of companies rate customer experience as a top priority moving ahead.
So what separates customer experience from customer service and what can your business do to improve your customer experience?...
Does advertising still have a place today? Take a look at what Jeff Rosenblum thinks in this Q&A.... ... Q. You also say that instead of just spending huge amounts of money on advertising companies should first look inward and spend money on making themselves better, on improving their products. A. That is the revolution in a nutshell. Take that lens and turn it inward and focus on behavior. Create an incredible platform. The advertising industry, in many ways, hasn't changed since the days of “mad men." And since the days of "mad men" the industry has been known for being full of shit. But being full of shit doesn’t work anymore. Q. It seems to me that your philosophy overlaps a lot with what we’re trying to do at HubSpot. Our co-founders talk about megaphones and magnets, the idea being that instead being a megaphone and using outbound tactics to “spray and pray,” you’re better off becoming a magnet, and using content to draw customers toward you....
Many companies large and small have attempted PR stunts and there are some great examples of successful events large and small that have worked out for the sponsoring company: think Red Bull’s Stratos Mission, with it’s daredevil leap from the edge of space, or Kentucky Fried Chicken’s giant logo in the Nevada desert, or even the granddaddy of them all, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. These efforts and others like them garnered tons of free press coverage for their sponsors, generated millions of impressions, and ultimately led to increased awareness and sales. But for every successful PR stunt that is launched by a wide-eyed marketing team, there are dozens of unsuccessful efforts littering the road. Even though the old saw, “there is no bad PR” is still widely subscribed to, real damage can be done when an attempt at a PR stunt fails, in truth the damage done to a sponsoring company’s reputation can be immense (not to mention the expense). Here are 5 legendary examples of PR efforts gone horribly, terrible, awfully wrong. #fail has never had better friends than these!....
Often companies “roll out the new re-branding” to employees. and the marketing team then quickly puts a check mark in the done box and they’re on to the next. Often brand managers focus only on the communications deliverables and not the holistic reality of creating passionate brand ambassadors from within the company. B2B, midsized companies, and especially tech companies are notorious for this painful disconnect. Not many companies are deeper tech than Xilinx. They design and supply programmable electronic systems. For simplicity just think semiconductors. Yet, they are a well branded company, which is unusual for their industry....
How should companies respond on social media when their followers are focused on a crisis? Should they shut up? Offer condolences? Here are some thoughts.
One of the hardest things that brand reps have to plan for in social media is what to do in the event of a national tragedy.
Perspective comes first, of course.
When news broke about the school shootings in Connecticut on Friday, the marketing firm where I work had to decide how to advise our clients. There is no single right answer, but there are plenty of wrong ones. Our goal was to actively avoid the wrong ones.
As we saw in the aftermath of the Newtown school shootings last Friday, marketers are still learning how—if at all—to respond when such devastating instances arise.
Here are a few things we can take away from these experiences...
Jason Sadler, a 30-year-old entrepreneur, is auctioning off rights to his last name for one year so that he can can raise money to invest in his IWearYourShirt startup. Sadler, who lives in Jacksonville, Fla., makes a living wearing T-shirts. For a fee, Sadler will wear a sponsored T-shirt featuring a company's logo for a full day or an entire week. He calls his company IWearYourShirt and, of course, uses social media to get the word out about his latest clients.
But like any small-business person, he needs capital.
Which leads to his latest idea: He is holding an online auction and will legally change his last name to the name of any company that makes the highest bid....
[$250K in revenue, ingenuity, lots of buzz. Top bid is $34.5K so far. Successful or stupid? Comments alone are worth reading. ~ Jeff]
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Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending my seventh Edelman Trust Barometer launch event in Toronto. This year’s results are some of the most interesting I’ve seen, highlighting a disparity in trust amongst what we call the “informed” public and the mass population, and the ongoing failure of businesses to live up to the expectations that people have of them when it comes to societal good (you can see the full results on SlideShare).
One of the interesting notes in this year’s Canadian Trust Barometer results was that trust in social media has fallen over the last year. In fact, social media was the only one of the five media types we examined to experience a decline in trust....
4Have you heard that including numbers in your media pitch will attract journalist attention? Apparently, so has everyone else. Over the holidays New York Post business reporter, John Crudele, published an article sarcastically “gifting” coverage to a select handful of PR people whose pitches had originally gone unanswered.
Why these pitches were unsuccessful is explored in-depth on the Bad Pitch Blog, but a common thread among them was using—and assuming—an unusual statistic or trend was enough to get Crudele’s attention. As evidenced by Crudele’s blunt reaction, numbers alone aren’t enough to get media coverage.
What journalists are really looking for is the story behind the number that is relevant to their beat and the interests of their readers....
Doug Scott’s recent departure from OgilvyEntertainment, the successful unit he founded eight years ago, has raised questions about whether its WPP parent might fold it into another corporate entertainment sibling like media agency Mindshare Entertainment or GroupM Entertainment at the operating level. While Ogilvy execs say that isn’t in the works, such speculation still begs the larger industry question: As media, creative and PR agencies—along with production companies—vie to lead the growing number of marketer content initiatives, where should responsibility for branded storytelling reside? With traditional advertising becoming less profitable, everyone, obviously, is scrambling for these new income sources.
On the creative agency front, proponents argue that without a great concept born from understanding a brand’s narrative, long-form storytelling doesn’t hold an audience’s attention and justify the media expense....
Month after month there’s increasing data showing us that marketing people don’t plan or measure enough. Our own Smart Insights survey broadcast to 40,000 marketers saw 69% admitting that there is no digital marketing strategy in their current role. It’s the same story here where only 46% have a content marketing strategy and this in-depth McKinsey study.
It appears that we’re quick to dive into solutions, new techniques, tactics and channels – but we lack the over-arching strategic thinking necessary to optimize for success. The good news is, this is a choice, and we can make different choices.
CEOs don't trust marketing Worse, a recent survey by Fournaise Group in London highlights that senior executives don’t believe the marketing function demonstrates objective commercial thinking, with 73% of CEOs stating “marketers lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient growth”. 80% of CEOs simply don’t trust marketers at all, while 91% do trust CIOs and CFOs. Ouch. Though is it a surprise if the marketing function is, in some volume, admitting it lacks the necessary plans and strategy?...
Our CEO recently broadcast a link to Secrets of the Science of Persuasion, a whiteboard presentation by Robert Cialdini and Steve Martin (no, not that Steve Martin). In it, Cialdini and Martin discuss six factors of persuasion and include scientific validation of the concepts.As I watched, I wondered how these factors might relate to PR and media pitching. Here’s what I came up with..
Today, after lots of messing around with data, we’re pleased to be publishing an Inkybee view of 60 of the best PR blogs in the world.
Why? Well, everyone loves a list. And, there are certainly a few of similar lists about at the moment. But, as far as we’re concerned, the primary reason for doing this it to experiment a bit with the powerful technology behind Inkybee.
Last month Cision published a list of their Top 50 PR blogs and earlier this year PRWeek published their “Powerbook” of the most influential practitioners in the UK PR industry.
We’re not competing with these publications and we’re definitely not proclaiming that this list is the definitive list of the best 60 public relations blogs on the planet. Quite the opposite. We recognise that this is a subjective process and ranking could be done in many different ways. We have been through a rigorous, objective methodology which we’ve detailed separately, but it can never be definitive. Plus, we have focussed sharply on “Public Relations” to the exclusion of blogs with wider coverage of marketing and social media....
10 Yetis Vents - Google update has not killed press releases or PR Agencies its just killed crap content and spammy writing.
Right now the interwebs are full of "Google has killed PR Agencies/press releases" stories. These all relate to big G's latest update that talks about its crack down on keyword optimised press releases and the need to use no-follow links in stories that PRs push out.
Whether it is emails from nervous clients wanting clarification on the situation, or people on Twitter sending me DMs asking if I have seen various stories (because we set our stall out around being very SEO savvy), it is really up in my grill right now.
Not many public relations professionals have put their head above the parapet and come out with their take on this, so I thought I would give it the first shot....
Read tips from event planning, media and marketing experts, and those who have held successful events.... Memorable events don’t just happen. Organizing and holding an event takes planning. Whether it’s a conference, seminar or a customer appreciation day, and whether you have three weeks to plan or an entire year, your event’s success is in the details. We’ve collected 42 small business event planning tips from the experts, including some of the organizers of the annual Small Business Influencer Awards....
PR is one very important ingredient in the recipe for success, but just like Rome wasn't built in a day, your brand won't be built in a day (or a month or even a year). It takes time and patience to build a long-lasting brand with loyal customers. It's time for some real talk, everyone. Take this scenario: you launched a new product, you hired a PR firm, you paid a hefty monthly retainer, and now you are disappointed. Where are your results? Where is your fame? Why isn't your product selling like a Kardashian perfume? I have worked with a lot of different PR firms, companies and brands. I have worked with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to mother/daughter teams making beauty products in the basement, from celebrities to regular folk. And more times than not, when a PR campaign isn't working, it's due to one of the scenarios below -- but your publicist is too scared to tell you the truth. Here now, the reasons why your PR campaign isn't working...
...From a PR’s perspective, there are three reasons to take in interest in podcasts: 1. Listen: learn about your industry. 2. Reach out: get your clients or your company featured on leading podcasts. 3. Speak out: make your own podcast and reach your target audience in a different way, at a different time. The reasons also map quite nicely onto a three-step process for PRs to get into podcasting. I’ve spoken to half a dozen podcasters to get an insight into why they do it and ways PR people can engage with them, with some surprising insights....
Most companies have been brought up on a diet of pushing ads in front of people to sell their stuff. On a social web it is about engaging through content first. ...Content’s role in this is about creating such great value whether that is entertainment or education that it engages your customers and prospects.... Here are 5 Infographics that share some valuable insights into how the content marketing game plays out on the world wide web....
...Here’s the thing. Anything can be branded, marketed, promoted. Anything can get a first look. But public relations won’t make or break your business without a little help from you.
Stop making your PR department/firm/executive the scapegoat for your crappy products.
It’s not our job to convince people that your products are good when they aren’t. We don’t “dumb people down.” PR isn’t to blame if you can’t sell. PR isn’t to blame if your product doesn’t do what you promised – or told us to promise. Even Apple can’t pull that off....
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Will a new loyalty program bring customers back to Chipotle after the E. coli crisis?