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Millennials make up a crucial group of consumers.
Ad agency Moosylvania asked over 3,500 millennials — defined as 20 to 35-year-olds — to select their favorite brands over the past three years.
Great Questions, LLC helped rank the winning brands.
These brands are the ones that came out on top.
Some are surprising — others, not so much.
A common theme for successful brands? Engaging with millennial consumers via social media....
Value is in the eye of the beholder. But what influences the beholder in their perceptions? This infographic looks at the psychology behind our perceptions, noting trends, marketing practices and differing generational attitudes. Including: - How lobster went from prison food (at one time fetching $0.11/lb) to fine dining
- How ‘ancient grains’ got pricey
- How we experience more pleasure from a wine we’re told costs more
Since price positively influences perceptions of quality, and inversely influences perceptions of value, how do sellers of mundane products use history, story, exclusivity, and implied scarcity to change our appetites? Read on to find out a little more about the Perception of Value...
There are nine strategic and tactical mistakes that can effectively kill any chance of brand elevation.
To have one of them uncorrected is bad. Three or four will drag your brand down and give your competition plenty of room to steal market share. Five or more of these is disastrous and will effectively kill your brand faster than a roomful of politicians.
(The original draft of this list first appeared in one of my Fast Company blog posts, but I’ve updated it here to add that much more horsepower to the immediate usefulness of these nine points.)...
The brands that crush their competition are those who understanding that strategic branding goes much deeper than pretty visuals and responsive code. Branding is layered, sculpted, and tested.
To create a layered, brilliant, and competition-killing brand, three things must align. - Understanding of your brand (internal beliefs and communications)
- Understanding of your best potential audience(s)
- Understanding and differentiating from your competition
Combined, these elements create brand magic. To see these three things in action, keep on reading. Below I’ve curated some brilliant companies that are great at differentiating themselves from their competition....
...Q: In your new book, Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information (HarperBusiness), you and co-author Emanuel Rosen say marketing needs a total overhaul. Can you explain?
A: For the first time in history, people can assess the absolute value of things they buy. User reviews, price comparison apps and other digital tools mean we can buy things based on almost perfect information, instead of irrational perception. So marketers need to understand what influences this shift in decision making...
It’s not an earth-shattering insight that consumers are getting smarter and more skeptical of being sold to. But Wolff Olins and Flamingo’s report does offer some reasonable strategies for adjusting to today’s realities. If you’re still spending all your energy on thinking of ways to pitch and package, you’re in trouble. If you’re thinking of your brand as a static thing, set in stone, you’re behind the times.
The challenge for companies today is coming up with a fair exchange for consumers–one that could involve simple, honest utility, like Ikea, or a more altruistic mission, like Tom’s Shoes, or a broader engagement with the marketplace, like Faber and its academy. No matter what it looks like, if consumers think you’re being honest about the offer, they’ll come to you....
The Starbucks Coffee marketing research department is kept busy providing oodles and oodles of insights into the Starbucks brand through yearly brand audits. And take it from this former long-time Starbucks marketer: The company learns a lot from these studies.
However, when it comes to measuring and managing the Starbucks brand on a daily basis, the Starbucks marketing department generally relies on a much simpler method—a brand checkbook.
Just as your personal checkbook has credits and debits, a brand checkbook has credits and debits in the form of brand credits and brand debits. "Brand credits" are business activities that enhance the reputation and perception people have of a brand, and "brand debits" are those that detract from the reputation and perception of the brand....
... Nearly 40% of CMOs do not think they have the right people and resources to meet their goals, says an Accenture report entitled “Turbulence for the CMO”. Martin Sorrell, the boss of WPP, the world’s biggest marketing and advertising group, says that since the 2008 financial crisis marketers have been elbowed aside by finance and procurement chiefs. Dominique Turpin, the head of IMD, a Swiss business school, writes that “the CMO is dead”. Yet some have never felt perkier. With new digital tools marketers can reach the likeliest customers when they are most in the mood to buy. Last summer Wall’s ice cream and O2, a mobile-phone network, teamed up to send advertisements to Londoners’ smartphones when temperatures climbed. When the weather cooled Kleenex, a brand of tissues, used Google search terms and health-service data to target ad spending to areas likely to suffer the most sneezes. Andy Fennell, the marketing boss of Diageo, a drinks firm, thinks this is “a golden era for brand builders”....
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In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.
As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?
To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media....
Like it or not, your surroundings inform the special little bubble you live in. Just when you thought you couldn't be stereotyped, well, here are some handy maps that define each state by the brands they Google the most.
The results are pretty fascinating, too, from the obvious to the surprising. I had no idea Grand Marnier was so popular in Delaware, or that American Eagle was so in vogue among West Virginians. Less surprising results are Microsoft in Washington and Disney in Florida.
Where it gets super interesting is when competing brands bubble up in adjacent states, like Jose Cuervo and Patron in Arizona and New Mexico, or Dodge and Chevrolet in Montana and North Dakota....
Bob ‘The Ad Contrarian’ Hoffman opened the 2014 ITV Spotlight Lecture last March – a debate on the failed predictions of advertising experts over the past decade, with particular focus on the social media marketing of brands, to wit: ...there are people in our business who believe that consumers are ‘in love’ with brands. They believe consumers want to have ‘relationships’ with brands. they want to have ‘brand experiences’ and be ‘personally engaged with brands’.
These people actually believe this. You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.
You’ll like Bob....
...Brand is the story you tell and the position you occupy in people's minds. Do they file you under "high-end bespoke couture"—or "fast fashion?"
There are markets and target audiences for everything but it's your job as a business owner or marketing leader to be crystal clear about the image for which you're aiming and how that influences everything from pricing to distribution to customer experience to—yes—visual identity....
Branding positions your offering in your customer’s mind. A strong brand is simultaneously unique, relevant and consistently used. This is more than just empty marketing-speak. It’s an important success factor that delivers real value to your business’s bottom line.
The total value of the BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands grew 7% to $2.6 trillion in 2013,and 77% since 2006, according to Millward Brown. This includes overcoming setbacks experienced during the recent recession. The fastest growing brand markets were China, Russia, India and Africa. Over the past 8 years, this portfolio of public companies’ brands increased 58%, more than twice the improvement of the S&P 500’s market value of 23% during that same period....
The changing way in which customers review products can be great for business ... or terrible.
You ask a friend where she got her new Macbook Air and she gushes about the selection and service at her local electronics store so much that you decide to check it out next time you're in her neighborhood. Your boss can't decide where to go out to dinner, so you pull up Yelp on your phone and find a nearby restaurant with the highest ratings. Whether you're aware of it or not, both you and the businesses you patronize benefit from brand advocacy.
Brand advocacy is the latest reincarnation of a concept that most of us are quite familiar with: word–of–mouth advertising, individual recommendations, vouching and the like. It relies on advocates promoting brands via personal marketing, which can be as simple as telling a friend verbally or posting on Facebook.
This method is incredibly effective because of a simple – and very, very human – concept: trust. We trust our friends, the Yelp community, particular bloggers or Twitter personalities who share their preferences and influence our decisions accordingly. From the consumer’s perspective, personal testimony is vastly more relatable than pure numbers, and we value reviews over ratings. How often have you looked at a Yelp or Amazon entry without reading the reviews?...
Despite its current popularity, brand reputation management is not a new concept, but today it's about actively managing the references, conversations, and feedback that typically occur online....
So, what course of action should you take? Basically, having a good defense as well as attack strategy is required. Here are seven key areas you should address: - Search engine dominance - Brand monitoring - Social media PR - Reviews and recommendations - Customer service and culture - Negative-PR management- Brand advocacy...
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Note the great point that the brands favored by millennials are those that engage them most on social media. A valuable marketing take away.