Marketing Mojo With Stephanie Fierman

Rising gas prices, baggage fees and the like are causing a lot of folks to plan summer vacations close to home… or at home.  UrbanDictionary defines staycation as “a vacation that is spent at one’s home enjoying all that home and one’s home environs have to offer.”  That sounds fun and relaxing - right up until you all decide you’d like to wring each other’s necks.  “Mom, there’s nothing to dooooooo!”

Over and above the normal picnic/game/pool promotions, this is a great opportunity for lots of local and national consumer-focused entities to promote themselves in this new context.

Some retailers are already getting into the act.  Wal-Mart has launched an “American Summer” campaign, cutting prices on everything from hot dogs to mosquito netting.  Their tag:  a summer getaway is “as close as your own backyard.”

Toy stores should get together recommendation lists based on budget, location (weather), age of children and so on.  Create promotions around toys and products best used at home.  And any smart local business trying to drive traffic should consider throwing a kid-friendly party:  growing up in a small town in New Jersey, I remember the parties thrown by the local Midas Muffler shop and one of the new bank branches in the community.  Hot dogs, face painting, balloons - families came out in droves.  Local, inexpensive happenings like these can create loyalty opportunities. 

Local newspapers (print and online) could feature daily and weekly ideas for great things to do around town - even borrow the concept of “3 Days In…” (see here and here for examples) and print entire itineraries for families to consider.  The web is great for this kind of editorial because it would enable a visitor to sort on the variables most important to him or her, such as distance from home, number of kids, indoor/outdoor activities, etc.  Sell incremental advertising around these features.

Local TV stations and affiliates should look at their programming schedules in the coming months and see what might be “repackaged” as stay-at-home, family fare.  Ad time could be sold to local supermarkets and other shops offering “specials” for fun nights at home.

There are also plenty of ideas being pitched for a very adult type of staycation, which usually revolve around a 2 or 3-night hotel or resort package of some sort.  Here’s one from Fodors.

Some creativity could really help businesses and families make the most of a challenging situation this summer.

NOTE:  And while you’re at home, you’ll have time to check out my second blog at http://www.stephaniefiermanmarketingdaily.com.

Many retailers and other merchants still use the old “Green Stamps” method to deliver their loyalty programs: they give you a card and punch it (only 8 more slushies to go ’til you get one free!). You are then supposed to keep track of it, and put it somewhere so it’s handy the next time you show up. All of this assumes you remember you have it in the first place.

As with gift card breakage, this is why these programs have such low redemptions rates and - for most consumers - become so unsatisfying: they’re just too hard to use. And if you’ve ever handed an over-worked counter clerk a paper card and asked for a stamp or a punch during the lunch rush, you know that that’s not a happy face he’s giving you. I’m not missing the fact that having a program that no one uses creates a certain amount of practically-free good will for the issuing company, but that’s a tremendous amount of work for an effort that does not ultimately generate the loyalty these merchants desire.

Now comes a loyalty technology company called Chockstone, which is introducing the newest generation of “single swipe,” a functionality that allows POS-based retail loyalty programs (QSR, department stores, gas stations, etc.) to be administered on the same major credit cards we all use today. For a single issuer, such as Subway, this makes the program easier to use and more likely to bring the customer back. It seems to me, though, that the overall potential of this technology could far more significant.

The average U.S. household is signed up for 12 loyalty programs. If multiple programs are administered on a single credit card, then “presence of” (information) and my usage of all of those programs will reside at a single source. Imagine the benefit to the credit card issuer, the administering retailers and other non-participating retailers and merchants:

* Mastercard, Visa and the issuing banks could all tinker with their loyalty efforts based on an assessment of the programs you have loaded on the program and your usage patterns. The issuers could also create an incremental revenue stream by selling various levels of data to participating and non-participating retailers via the creation of a loyalty database co-op.

The early movers could also create their own added loyalty by providing information and custom incentives delivered as a message printed on your monthly card statement.

* The owner of each loyalty program could adjust the levels, incentives and form of its program based not only on their own results, but potentially, your use of competitors’ (or complementary retailers’) programs as well. And customized reward programs could be administered at a cost close to zero. Subway, for example, may want to increase your rewards if it knows that you also have Quiznos’ loyalty program loaded on your credit card.

* Paneros (which, let’s say, may not have a program or might want to be smarter about the one it has) could purchase blind transaction data from the co-op showing your activity with Subway and Quiznos. It could then be quite surgical about testing and defining the value it would take to get you to shift to their program - not too much, not too little. It could creat one mass program, a “best customer” initiative or both.

Most functionality that would be required for all of the above to happen does not yet exist, but the potential for everyone involved is huge. At a macro level, every party in the value chain could achieve higher loyalty, with the right customers, at a reduced cost.  And I could throw away that paper Burritoville punch card I never have with me, anyway.

And, friends: I’ve started a new daily blog at www.stephaniefiermanmarketingdaily.com, offering shorter takes on news and trends of the day. I’d be delighted if you’d take a look.

loyalty marketingmarketingcredit cardsubway restaurantchockstonemarketingloyalty marketingloyalty program

My favorite selections for the week of 1-28-08 share a single theme:  interesting new ways that marketers are using personalized information to drive profitability and provide better customer service. 
 
Multi-Channel Marketer “Retargets” Attritors
Hobby-Lobby International, a multi-channel retailer of radio-controlled model airplanes, is retargeting visitors who abandon their shopping carts.  When the same visitor returns, the site shows the person ads based on her previous click activity.  Hobby-Lobby is seeing a 20% increase among returning visitors shown such ads vs. a control group.


Behavioral Targeting Beats Contextual Advertising
63% of the total online audience is more receptive to ads based on their own behavior vs. ads focused on a site’s purpose and content. In other words – as usual – it’s about them, not us.


My Shopping Cart Is Smarter Than Your Shopping Cart
The supermarket of my childhood, Shop-Rite, is on the cutting edge of behavioral-based advertising via in-store “smart carts.”  When a shopper uses his loyalty card, information on his purchases is stored and analyzed.  When this shopper returns to the store, his shopping cart will be equipped to serve up special offers on products he is most likely to be interested in based on those past purchases.  I didn’t have a “big brother” moment until I read that the carts can also target ads by location, detecting what aisle you’re in and showing you corresponding ads.  Just be aware of your location when these suckers start to talk…

Have you heard of a virtual world  called Whyville?

SecondLife, Club Penguin (bought by Disney for $700 million if the owners hit their entire earn-out), There.com, Gaia, Barbie Girls, Webkinz… all of these I know.  And as a marketer, many of us have certainly looked at SecondLife in particular and said… do I have to?
 
But I somehow missed Whyville, even though it’s been around since 1999.  And more notable than its age  is its humility in the face of success:  the site has somewhere around 2.4 million active users age 8-15 (70% of whom are registered), and 60,000 new kids register each month.   As virtual worlds go, users can do all the standard things – you can chat with your friends, earn currency to buy stuff, etc. – but Whyville offers an amazing twist, a la Jerry Seinfeld’s wife hiding squash in chocolate chip cookies to get her kids to eat vegetables…

 Whyville members can play games that are actually educational – a strategy that the site’s COO calls “active brain advertising.”  Kids whose avatars don’t eat nutritionally might find their little fake selves’ faces pockmarked with scurvy; others had to clean up after the advertiser Penguin Books caused a devastating storm as part of a campaign for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

So what is this place??  Whyville’s “About Us” section says that it was founded “to apply over 20 years of research in education and cooperative learning to develop new web-based tools for education,” and the company works with partners such as Getty, NASA and the School Nutrition Association to create and deliver fun content that is also educational.  Increasingly, Whyville is finding its way into the classroom, providing the ultimate endorsement.

 The site does work with advertisers and paying sponsors, like Penguin and Virgin Records, but I was impressed to learn that it also surveys members before and several times after a campaign as to the effectiveness of the advertising, possible purchase intent and other factor.  That’s good for the advertisers and the site as it works to refine its programming and adhere to its mission.  To the extent it can, I hope that Whyville continues to stay about reproach:  a Toyota campaign caught some flak – not a lot, but such an obvious play to get kids to influence their parents’ purchase of a car could have taken a chink out of the site’s educational armor.
 
And that’s not worth the risk because this is a pretty amazing site.  Luckily, just because I missed it doesn’t mean others have:  Whyville won the 2006 iParenting award for being the best kids Web site and best on the Web for its safety features.   And to me all this spells opportunity:  for kids, their parents and teachers, advertisers… and maybe a buyer in the future?virtual-worldwhyvillesecondlifesecond-lifeclub penguin

I’ve been tagged by Stephanie Cockerl to participate in a b5media’s meme about 7 (G-rated) things you may not know about me.   So here it goes.

1. I went to high school in Texas.
2. I am still in the same apartment I moved into after business school (two words:  rent control).
3. I am addicted to Japanese vinyl toys, a la KidRobot in Soho.
4. I was once ordered to make a halloween costume for someone at work - and I did.
5. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve never been to Governors Island (it’s been open to the public since, uh, 2004… hey, I’ve been busy!).
6. I am a huge fan of subway art.
7. The only other language I know so far is… Latin.  So if I ever have to take the SATs again, I’m ready.

I have tagged 7 other people to participate:

Mark Potts:  Recovering Journalist

Sam Taylor;  Reputation-Dynamics

Paul Dunay:  Buzz Marketing for Technology

Saul Colt:  Smartest Man in the World!

Jarvis Cromwell:  Reputation Garage

Steve Sieck:  SKS Advisors

Joe Jaffe:  Crayon + other endeavors

According to The New York Times, a meme “is an infectious idea or any other thing that spreads by imitation from person to person… the World Wide Web is the perfect Petri dish for memes.”  It seems like a 21st century chain letter to me but (a) neither I nor any of my family was threatened with death if I didn’t ‘pass it on,’ so that’s an improvement, and (b) it seems a harmless way to connect with people and to promote websites and blogs not only inside your existing network but to a broader audience, as well. 

Perhaps memes could be worked into fresh “Refer A Friend” online customer acquisition campaigns.

Richard Branson’s Virgin is one of the biggest brands in the world – nearly everywhere but the United States. There have been plenty of launches over the years:  Virgin Mobile by all rights could perhaps be considered the most successful.  There has also been Virgin Cola, Virgin Megastores, Virgin Comics and, most recently, Virgin Money.  Someone please let me know if I’ve missed any others. 

Cleverly, most of these come out of Virgin USA, which describes itself as a venture capital organization that looks for and invests in underserviced consumer markets that could be transformed by Virgin’s trademark characteristics of “value for money, good quality, innovation, exceptional customer service, fun and a sense of competitive challenge.”  Goodness knows it does seem to work everywhere else, with 50,000 employees generating $20 billion in top-line revenue each year from Virgin-branded companies. 

Now comes Virgin America, which launched its U.S. service on August 8 and so far, so good.  Like JetBlue, my opinion is that this new airline is trying to focus on what matters to flyers – that is, of the factors they can impact – including attitude, routes, prices, a robust frequent flyer program and decent seating/well-considered planes.  This is not to say that the consumer technology isn’t way cool, because it is.  A superior seatback in-flight entertainment system that offers PPV movies, games and live satellite TV, with high speed Internet access coming next year.  And for the truly lazy such as myself, I can swipe my credit card and order a sandwich without having to raise my arm aaaaall the way up to push that little button.  Plus, the airline hired one of my favorite shops, Anomaly, to do everything from advertising to merchandise to uniforms.  I knock none of it.  As a marketer, I know that this is what branding dreams are made of.   But this business in this country? Yikes.  I’m just skeptical that being “the most geek-friendly airline ever invented” is what will ultimately attract a loyal, long-term audience in the U.S.  We Americans tend to ask for style in our airlines but favor price and routes.  So we’ll see.   

One note on Americans and Virgin America:  we sure gave the company a tough go of it.  The DOT forced the airline to replace its founding CEO, shed most of Branson’s stake and appoint an independent (U.S.) trustee to represent his remaining 25% share and report to federal regulators any loans Branson might make to the U.S. carrier. As usual, Branson kept on going, prompting Transportation Secretary Mary Peters to note that it’d be “tough to think of a company that has done as much to meet our standards for becoming a commercial airline.”  And it took a Brit to do it!

I grew up in an airline family and can remember just about every new launch, crash, failure, strike, pension collapse, and major snow storm since 1979.  It’s a wild business.  But while the runways may be absurdly overcrowded, this sector, like many, could always use a little entrepreneurship to keep folks on their best game.

And for you bloggers out there… click here for some amusing back-and-forth between Fake Steve Jobs and Fake Richard Branson.

“Are we in heaven?” asks one of the videos’ guests. 

“No, Dorothy, we’re at Neiman Marcus.” Or so the high-end department store chain would have us respond on this, the store’s 100th anniversary.
Neiman Marcus has created a 4-part online video series called “The Mystique” and it’s getting its share of criticism online. For some reason, Neiman decided to run Part 1 on the home page of Youtube.com – and paid for it with some criticism. Comments range from “Neiman Marcus= needless markup” to “This is a seriously pointless video.” Other, more positive comments were logged, as well. Why did Neiman Marcus pay $250,000 to spend one day on the home page of Youtube in the first place? A little undercooked thinking is behind the plan, with the VP of corporate communications quoted as saying “Like with anything, you hear people in meetings say, ‘Did you see the thing on YouTube?’” Except Neiman Marcus isn’t “anything” – it’s not a video of someone killing an iPhone in a blender, or your crazy Aunt Agatha falling off the roof – it’s one of the greatest specialty retailers in the country.  Truly a story of American entrepreneurship, Neiman stands for luxury, fantasy and “retail theatre” in the grandest sort of way. It’s not for everyone – what luxury brand is? – but then again that’s why it doesn’t belong on YouTube.

And speaking of luxury, the videos are beautiful. All four are lovingly shot, produced and inspired in their thinking. I do have a beef with the editing, in that each of the four is a bit of a story hodge-podge, jumping between ideas such as design, store display, the history of the chain, the importance of designer relationships, etc.  Neiman would have been been better off reserving each of the four for one theme, and then naming each segment accordingly, so that each story had its own thread and viewers could tell what they were about to see (i.e., name the first installment “The Story” instead of Part 1, the second installment “What is Luxury” instead of Part 2, etc.). But they were fun to watch all the same. Lastly, I’m curious as to where NM is, in fact, running the series in order to reach its key constituencies, whom I see as shoppers and would-be well-to-do visitors, designers, vendors and partners (outside of employees, whom I hope can find them easily on the NM intranet). This intrepid blogger could not easily find them off the NM homepage, nor by Googling “Neiman Marcus, “Neiman Marcus video” or “Neiman Marcus 100 anniversary video.” I wandered luxury sites and blogs – no dice.

Let’s hope that Neiman is using its own customer list, at minimum, to make sure its most valuable friends and family see and enjoy this work. And how do you get a viewer to watch 4 separate vignettes? Give them something for doing what you ask. Neiman Marcus has long had one of the most successful frequent shopper rewards programs around, InCircle. If I were running the ship, I’d give each viewer at least 100 InCircle points (reward levels don’t even start until one has 5,000 points!) for giving me their email address and for watching each of the four videos. The viewer is inspired and rewarded, and I get them back into the store, feeling the magic.

Using new Internet capabilities – blogging, podcoasting, online videos –not to be part of the media pile-on (“yay, we’re on Youtube!”) but to draw your supporters even closer, make them even more loyal? Magic, indeed.