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Brand strategies for an economic downturn

2009-02-24T06:25:00.003-07:00

In financial markets as in marketing, perception is often reality. Today, while all economists may not agree that we are officially in a recession, consumers are increasingly pessimistic about the state of the economy and are behaving as though we are in one. As the cost of oil and food continues to climb, and property values continue to plunge, consumers are looking for ways to save and also maximize value when they do spend. For marketers, dropping prices is always an option, but this often does nothing more than undermine margins and brand equity. So, how do we go about 'recession proofing' our brands for the realities of today?

If successful brands are those that generate consideration and loyalty, in good times and bad, all brands would be wise to invest in these qualities during recessions, when consumers are much more selective about what they purchase. The dotcom bust, 9/11, corporate scandals and the war in Iraq all contributed to the recession of 2001–2002 and shook consumer confidence in government, business and other institutions, including brands.

DECLINE IN CONSIDERATION AND LOYALTY

In the late 1990s, consumer confidence was on an upswing, fueled by the dotcom frenzy. Interestingly, we saw in BAV that emotional loyalty, defined as a preference for a certain brand over all others, moved upwards in line with consumer confidence indices. The spike in emotional loyalty during the late 1990s/early 2000s can be attributed to the aspirational quality of many higher-end branded products that were suddenly within reach of a wider range of consumers. But, in 2002, exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of the previous year, emotional loyalty crashed, along with the financial markets. From 2000 to 2002, emotional loyalty and preference as measured in BAV declined by 27% and 20% respectively, whereas the typical change year-on-year is approximately 5%.

SPECIFIC CHALLENGES FOR TODAY

Data from the last recessionary period highlight the importance of value as a basic requirement for consumer brand sustenance. However, as the Detroit car makers can testify, addressing this consumer need simply by dropping prices is no guarantee of long-term prosperity.

Therefore, a wider reframing of value must become at least one part of the equation. Low price alone has not proven to be enough to build a strong brand. We know that now more than ever, it is important for brands to demonstrate leadership, vision and high performance if they are to meet consumer expectations. To attain optimal loyalty and consideration, brands must guide and inspire consumers in their quest to offer more value. The following are five approaches that different brands have employed that have helped them achieve these goals.

1. Highlight the Value Proposition that Enables your Brand to Stand Out

Marketers can change the way consumers think about their brand by reframing their value proposition. During the last recession, luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes achieved growth, at a time when one might assume they would face declining sales. By highlighting their total cost of ownership and offering fixed maintenance costs, they managed to achieve volume growth, as buyers became attuned to value rather than sticker price.

2. Remove Cost while Adding Additional Benefit Appeals

Often, there are opportunities for a brand to remove or reconfigure aspects of its product, but to do it in a way that does not reduce value – or that even increases it. For example, Poland Spring water recently changed its packaging, saving on both cost and materials, while simultaneously creating a leadership proposition that is environmentally appealing.

Source: Admap Magazine

To be continued.

Online Reputation Management – Controlling the Conversation

2009-02-23T06:53:00.001-07:00

One of the most difficult aspects of managing an online reputation is managing and controlling how people talk about you or your business online. Those online discussions can often make or break your business communication results. The impact of negative discussions or embarrassing content circulating within social media circles can often be catastrophic to an organizations overall market reach and positive return on investment.

The focus of anyone trying to create consent within a marketplace should be to persuade and not manipulate. After all, the goal of business communication and of reputation establishing media is to create positive and long-term results. How you create these results and subsequently control the conversation will have far-reaching effects on your online reputation.

Western media has taken on a direct sales oriented mannerism and many marketers fall victim in mimicking this approach while trying to establish an online reputation. This approach works for some but for most, it ends up having a very negative impact on controlling conversations, creating consent and return on investment models. The reason for the negative results is that people attempt to manipulate others through presenting information or sales pitches guised as emotional appeals that either are perceived as unfair or are emotionally charged to force consent.

This approach destroys any chance of building goodwill within your target audience. It also affects their willingness to engage or discuss your content in a repetitive or meaningful way. Manipulation creates a violently competitive negotiation environment. The problem with this type of atmosphere is that the people you have induced to be incensed threaten your reputation on a daily basis. Controlling this type of conversation is virtually impossible and most time damaging.

The resolution to this problem is to create a participant group within your target audience of creatively conservative and loosely guided members. The only effective process to accomplish this goal is to employ a persuasion-based campaign. The difference between a manipulative campaign and a persuasive campaign is symbolically holistic. Manipulation employs tactics that force a participant to act through emotionally charged and fear based tactics. Persuasion based campaigns employ a mutual benefit based model that affects both sided positively and creates good will over time. Persuasion causes people to act because of relational connections at both logic and emotional levels. Persuasion leverages opportunity and complimentary benefits.

Using persuasion to control conversations and create consent over time is far more effective measured over long-term return on investment models and easily employed within indirect marketing campaigns. Indirect marketing leverages the benefits and opportunities presented to an audience without the need to commit or be responsible. Messages embedded into indirect marketing presentations allow you to effectively groom and control conversations without the propensity of manipulation and possible destruction of good will.

Join the Conversation

2009-02-21T06:08:00.000-07:00

Followers of Joseph Jaffe’s blog and podcast ‘Jaffe Juice’ - www.jaffejuice.com - will be familiar with his unorthodox approach to marketing, also encompassed in crayon, the marketing company of which he is president and founder.

Join the Conversation develops the arguments initiated in Jaffe’s best-selling book Life After the 30-Second Spot, and explores the changing ways consumers give and receive information, which is in turn creating new possibilities for marketers to engage with potential and existing customers.

Jaffe’s insights are targeted at marketers but would arguably have relevance to any business unit. The author clearly hopes to inspire brands to capitalize on what he believes to be the untapped opportunities which lie outside the traditional approaches to communications associated with advertising and PR.

Citing The Cluetrain Manifesto, the marketing tome which posits that all markets are human to human conversations, Jaffe claims current marketing techniques continue to communicate in a one-sided, one-to-many fashion in spite of the opportunities provided by the internet to create far more personal, two way dialogues.

As he puts it: “if engagement is an active state we strive for our consumers to exhibit, then we need to do likewise”.

Jaffe discusses the marketing implications of growing numbers of what he calls ‘prosumers’. These are the producers of content such as blogs who are also consumers, and likely to be part of ‘generation i’ - namely, those involved in the social side of media.

Such individuals, in Jaffe’s view, are rewriting the rules of persuasion - ‘production is the new consumption’. Bloggers who are also consumers are extracting power from and imposing influence upon their communities, and building on like-mindedness and trust.

Control has switched from the marketer to the consumer, who can increasingly avoid unsolicited promotional messages and as a consequence ‘missed opportunities are conversations not capitalized on’.

This backdrop is identified by the author firstly as an opportunity to build connections, such as the support, exposure and encouragement embodied in Weight Watchers.

Source: WARC

Herd: how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature

2009-02-20T06:01:00.001-07:00

Mark Earls has been acclaimed as “one of the advertising scene’s foremost contrarians”. He has held seniorpositions at Ogilvy and St Luke’s, and his first book, Welcome to the Creative Age, was widely-read and discussed.

His latest, Herd, challenges some popular theories about targeting and influencing mass behavior and is likely to be most relevant to planners, strategists and indeed anyone interested in motivating groups.

The key premise of the book is that “We are a we-species who do individually what we do largely because of each other”.

People think they act as individuals mainly because their memories are unreliable. In fact, they do not behave in a rational manner, especially when it comes to purchase decisions.

Earls however contends that “We are not a collection of discrete, idiosyncratic individuals but a herd animal acting under the influence of others. We are the super social ape”.

In the book’s theory of Herd Marketing, there are seven principles: Interaction, Influence, Us-talk, Just Believe, (Re-)lighting the fire, Cocreating and Letting go.

Some of the key tenets of this system are:

The views of individuals are unreliable so marketers should not focus on them alone. Instead, they should understand how consumers interact and remember that consumer to consumer communications is the key.
Theories of the “most valuable customers” are wrong. Rather, marketers must seek out the most influential customers.
Communication is behavior and needs to be recognized as such. Word of mouth can be a company’s most powerful sales tool.
Successful companies are built on sound, authentic founding beliefs about which they are passionate. These beliefs are expressed in all forms of communication and apparent at any consumer/staff touch point. Because consumers find these types of companies more interesting they are more prepared to engage with them.

Source: WARC

Predictably Irrational

2009-02-19T06:13:00.001-07:00

Dan Ariely is not your average economist. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ariely is a populariser of behavioral economics - a field attempting to explain people’s often irrational decision-making processes and wider social trends by reference to psychology experiments.

Several practitioners of this school of thinking - including Ariely - have rising profiles as social commentators in the US media.

With its particular focus on how individuals’ behavior can be influenced and manipulated by pricing policy and by the expectations created for a product or service, Predictably Irrational has a general relevance to marketers.

It is likely to of most interest to those involved in influence planning, pricing, comparative advertising campaigns and neuromarketing.

In this book Ariely details several case studies.

1. Comparative price advertising: An Economist promotion is analyzed to illustrate the common experience of consumers comparing price offers.

2. The power of free: Further to the free pricing experiments described above, Ariely makes a case for the implications of “free” offers in the real world.

3. The power of expectations: A student was invited to sample two beers and enjoy a free glass of the one they preferred. One was Budweiser and the other - labeled MIT Brew - was Budweiser laced with balsamic vinegar. He chose the second.

4. Overcoming consumer procrastination: To test theories of procrastination, Ariely gave students different deadlines for handing in their papers.

5. The collective influence on decision-making: Does the fact restaurant diners order out loud and in sequence affect the menu choices individuals make? If so, does this ritual enforce conformity or non-conformity? To investigate these questions, Ariely and colleagues conducted experiments in a bar.

Ariely uses these experiments to restate the book’s general point:

“According to the assumptions of standard economics, all human decisions are rational and informed, motivated by an accurate concept of the worth of all goods and services and the amount of happiness (utility) all decisions are likely to produce….

“Behavioural economists, on the other hand, believe that people are susceptible to irrelevant influences from their immediate environment, irrelevant emotions, shortsightedness, and other forms of irrationality…If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools and methods to help us make better decisions?”

Takeaway points:

Consumers often act in ways which are irrational, systematic and predictable
The values attached to products and services can be heavily distorted by the context in which things are valued, the presence of other individuals or the absence of directly comparable products
FREE is not just another price, but a different and irrational motivator of consumer behavior
Even small-scale empirical data can be used to overturn long-held assumptions
Expectations, including those created by brand marketing, can persuade people to hold irrational views, and make irrational choices, often against their own self-interest.

Source: WARC

Dynamics of the Downturn

2009-02-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

Price comparison, category switching and “social” online shopping could all increase in the downturn as consumers reappraise routine behavior and choices.

This theme connected the four presentations at the Future Foundation “Changing Lives” event in December 2008 which looked through a recession-tinged lens at prospects for the UK economy, consumer attitudes, technology take-up and eco-consumption.

Millions of Britons will probably sail untroubled through the downturn in terms of their personal wealth, according to this analysis. However a prevailing slump “mindset” - we were told a recession can be “psychologically national even if it is economically marginal” - will encourage most groups to re-evaluate their habits to some degree and will force brands to respond, especially on pricing.

In the UK specifically, recent recessions have tended to be shorter and less damaging than those from previous decades. And average UK household disposable income continued to rise during the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s.

Nevertheless, the key elements in determining the UK consumer’s state of mind in this context are the health of the property and labor markets. Serious, long-term declines in both could give this downturn a different shape to its predecessors.

Above all, recession will mean “an insistent and potentially rewarding invitation to consumers to reconsider everything they do/buy/desire”.

This will result in a fiercer scrutiny by consumers of all claims, and declining tolerance for unsatisfactory experiences. “Where decline is already under way."

Adspend prospects in Europe, the US and Japan

2009-02-17T06:47:00.000-07:00

Several key European markets are predicted to weather the advertising recession better than the US or Japan, according to the latest European Advertising & Media Forecast, published by WARC.

The internet and outdoor (except in Japan) are both well placed to ride out the storm.

Overall, ad spending levels appear most stable in the Eurozone-12, with a flat forecast for 2009, at current prices, following on from expected negligible growth in the region in 2008.

In real terms (accounting for inflation), the situation is already far worse than is at first apparent in some markets. Spending is set to drop by 7% in Spain, following a predicted slump of just under 12% in 2008, and by 2.4% in France.

UK advertising revenues are also due to drop by 6.5% year-on-year for 2009 in real terms.

Marketing spend will also post a 1% decline in the US at current prices, and will be down by 2.5% in real terms, following an estimated fall of 4.6% over the course of 2008.

In terms of media, online will continue its upward trajectory across all markets, albeit at slower levels than previously forecast.

Growth will be highest in the Eurozone-12, at 20% year-on-year at current prices, while the medium will expand around 15% in the US and Japan, compared with just 9% in the UK.

It is possible that the current downturn will accelerate changes in the media mix, most notably the rise in advertisers’ use of digital screen media of all kinds, which were already underway before many economies hit the buffers.

How Social Network Marketing Works

2009-01-30T05:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I read an article on How Social Network Marketing Works written by Crawley and I found it to be very informative. Here is a quote form the article and a link to the website.

"Most marketers would ask the wrong question here: “how can social networks make me more money?”

The problem with that approach is that you tend to focus on immediate means of monetizing the value of social networks such as MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn,Mixx, Stumbleupon, Reddit,Twiter and Flikr, while ignoring the real reason these networks were setup and how you can use those ideas to help your business.

MySpace, Orkut and Friendster grew as means to stay in touch with friends, meet new people online and to share ideas. LinkedIn has a similar slant - it is great for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to mine their contacts for hiring / outsourcing. And Flickr is just a blindingly simple tool for sharing photos.

The success of social networks marks a dynamic shift in how people are using the Internet. We’ve evolved from just searching for information to creating and participating in social spaces with other individuals through the Internet. This model is based upon the hive mentality where people identify themselves as part of a group with similar likes and interests that draw them together. This is easy to do online because the traditional communication barriers of physical locations no longer exist."

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.theecommercesolution.com/blog/2007/05/01/how-social-network-marketing-works/

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

2009-01-29T05:03:00.000-07:00

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

By
Richard Dawkins

http://www.richarddawkins.net

Today I would like to introduce you to one of the original thinkers included in The Third Culture: beyond the Scientific Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 1995) by John Brockman. Richard Dawkins who you can read about on http://www.edge.org or on his own website RichardDawkins.net (A Clear Thinking Oasis). Both websites are examples of the new community of intellectuals in action. Thinkers who are defining the key interesting and scientific questions of our times.

In The Blind Watchmaker the author Richard Dawkins who is definitely one of the great ones and one of the leading intellectuals of our time talks about the difference in the complexity of design.

“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.”
Of course as Mr. Dawkins points out we think physics is complicated because it is hard for us to understand. I agree with the author the best we can do is understand the general principles of science of biology and physics. After we understand the basic principles then we can understand “hierarchical reductionism”, which we can use to describe the view that complex systems can be described with a hierarchy of organizations.

Dawkins talks about another eighteen-century theologian William Paley who in his Natural Theology- or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802 argues for design and the existence of a God. Mr. Dawkins greatly admirers the Paley’s writing skills but disagrees with his conclusions. Dawkins argues for the Darwin view.

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature. It is the blind watchmaker.

I think the question should be why are these views or set of ideas; the Darwinian explanation vs the Conscious Designer theory not a part of our general education system? Why are these ideas not understood nor discussed? Hopefully I can inspire you to read more by Richard Dawkins and other Third Culture intellectuals. This is the best part of the Internet. It aids us and makes possible our questions with research and information that can lead us to knowledge, to understanding the intellectuals and ourselves. It leads us to ask the right questions, which is still one of the best ways to logical change and learning.

Futurist

2009-01-28T05:00:00.001-07:00

“Today the term most commonly describes authors, consultants, organizational leaders and others who engage in interdisciplinary and systems thinking to advise private and public organizations on such matters as diverse global trends, plausible scenarios, emerging market opportunities, and risk management.” Wikipededia

We at Relativity will also want to show the relationship between the professional consulting institutions like RAND and academic groups, visionaries and third culture intellectuals. What is the difference between anticipatory thinking, prediction, technology forecasting and futurist?

Why do we not think of Jules Verne or H.G.Wells as futurist but philosophers? Can what we collectively think and dream create the future. Are we co-creators or just witnesses to the evolution of life. Why do we consider literary intellectuals “the intellectuals” excluding scientists such as Edwin Hubble, John von Neumann, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, or Arthur Eddington?

We definitely want to talk about recognized futurists: Ray Kurzweil, John Naisbitt, Alvin Toffler, Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking and others. How can we understand the difference between these scientists and “men of letters”? Where do we draw the line between the methodologies they used and their personal beliefs.

Can we some day join together the best of our scientists, philosophers, and futurist? Is there time and space? As we reach the end of time, what questions should we be asking?

The End of Time

2009-01-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

The End of Time
By
Julian Barbour
http://www.platonia.com

The question is: what is the universe and how does it work? What is the relationship between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. “The aim is to try and find a description of the entire universe that is quantum mechanical and understand how it nevertheless it can look like the classical world that we actually see and experience.” i.e. a complete cosmology.

Quantum mechanics 1925, gave a new picture of physics. It tells us the world is not classical like we see it. It says time and space are relational as opposed to Newtonian absolute. It leads us to question is there some sort of unobservable framework of everything.

The world is relational and Barbours’ basic idea is that time as such does not exist. “But there are things that you could call instants of time or ‘Nows’. That’s my ontology of the universe- there are Nows, nothing more, nothing less.” Therefore what we consider as time or motion is really an illusion.

To help explain this Barbour uses the idea he calls Platonia. “Platonia is a special case of a very basic concept in physics called a configuration space or stratified manifold-the strata are what I call frontiers.”So if we take the structure out of the configuration space what is left is the stratified manifold, or Now. A picture of time or motion, a Now. QM tells us that until observations are made, for all these quantities, there are no definite values, but only probabilities.”

So JB is talking about a quantum cosmology that if we could understand would make it possible to make predictions about the universe which we cannot do at this time.

The Third Culture

2009-01-26T04:48:00.002-07:00

The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow , 1963 talked to classical academicians the traditional intellectuals and scientists . How they related to each other and communicated. Snow suggested that the two would emerge into a new third culture because the old traditional was a closed system. In reality today’s scientists are going directly to the general public.

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brochman ,1995. The author had had ongoing one-on-one discussions with the new third culture scientists in his book and at his website http://www.edge.org.

The third culture has become “science” and it is the “public culture”. It is the thing that is most interesting to the public and is changing our understanding of everything at an incredible rate.
Topics: artificial intelligence, artificial life, neural nets, superstrings, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, fuzzy logic, Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace to name only a few.

Relativity will be reporting on who these third culture intellectuals are and why what they are saying is relative to our world. We will be connecting the dots’ which is one definition of an intellectual and a good teacher.

The fundamental questions asked in the book: “Where did the universe come from? Where did life come from? Where did mind come from? “ How did this complex system evolve and how do we understand and make sense of it all.

Making Friends: LinkedIn vs. Facebook vs. Twitter [cartoon]

2009-01-23T07:19:00.001-07:00

I found this cartoon online the other day on the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog and thought it was pretty telling of the way people see making friends in the social networking sphere. Let us know what you think.

"Making Friends in Social Media" by HubSpot is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture

2009-01-22T06:46:00.002-07:00

The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture
By
Fritjof Capra

http://www.fritjofcapra.net

“After a time of decay comes the turning point.” I Ching

Capra is one of those original thinkers connecting the world of science and spirituality dots. In The Turning Point he drives home why our current Cartesian, Newtonian and reductionist paradigms which are the basis of the United States, military-industrial-academic complex has lead us to a state of profound, world-wide, and multi-dimensional crisis. This time we could be facing the very real threat of extinction.

These intellectual elite have created the ‘mainstream academic view’ which has lead to rampant inflation, massive unemployment, and a gross misdistribution of income and wealth, along with the never-ending escalation costs of war and empire.

The author explains why high inflation, unemployment, energy crisis, health care crisis, pollution, environmental disasters, a rising wave of violence and crime are all connected to a crisis of perception. This all leads us to try to understand our world with an outdated mechanistic view and apply it to a reality that we can not understand.

“What we need, then, is a new ‘paradigm’- a new vision of reality, a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from mechanistic to holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields.”

Capra’s goal is how to create the framework that would allow all the separate movements and similar intentions to interrelate their aims, or attention. He wants to focus their attention on their new paradigm of intentions. This could lead to a transformative change and be a turning point for the whole planet.

“This new vision includes the emerging systems view of life, mind, consciousness, and evolution: the corresponding holistic approach to health and healing, the integration of Western and Eastern approaches to psychology and psychotherapy; a new conceptual framework for economics and technology; and an ecological and feminist perspective which is spiritual in its ultimate nature and will lead to profound changes.”

I agree with Capra that what is at stake is the survival of our civilization. We need a cultural, as well as a scientific revolution.

Blogs in Plain English

2009-01-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

This is a video for people who wonder why blogs are such a big deal.A great job by CommonCfraft yet again on this topic.

Get more videos like this at: http://www.commoncraft.com/

RSS in Plain English

2009-01-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

The people at CommonCraft made this video for people that have not yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. They want to convert people and if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn't yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes.

Another great piece by CommonCraft

Get more videos like this at: http://www.commoncraft.com/

Podcasting in Plain English

2009-01-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

This is a 3 minute explanation of podcasting from the folks of CommonCraft. I just cannot say enough about these people and their ability to communicate effectively to their marketsace. Awesome job with the message and also with the proiudction and camera work CC!

Get more videos like this at: http://www.commoncraft.com/

Twitter in Plain English

2009-01-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

This video is a quick and plain English intro the micro-blogging service Twitter. Have you tweeted lately?

Get more videos like this at: http://www.commoncraft.com/

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

2009-01-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

Commoncraft made this video because they want people to see the power of social bookmarking and how it makes web pages easy to remember, organize and share.

It is a great overview of Social Bookmarking and a great example of camera work and production expertise.

Get more videos like this at: http://www.commoncraft.com/

Social Media in a Nutshell

2009-01-14T15:36:00.002-07:00

A simple story that illustrates the forces shaping social media.

This is a great overview of social media and great camera work as well.

Get more videos like this at: http://www.commoncraft.com/

Social Media Slide Show

2009-01-13T06:47:00.005-07:00

Marta Z. Kagan, developed this set of slides because she is hopelessly addicted to start up scenarios and needed to help people the people she serves get their hands around the topic of social media.

Provocatively titled What the F**k is Social Media?, I nearly blew it off because I thought it was going to be the usual tired "get on the bus or get left behind" sort of production but the slide show is not that way at at all. There is nothing "new" in this presentation on social media but it is one of the better explanations that I have seen out there to date.

What The F**K is Social Media?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing)

Online Reputation Management – Controlling the Conversation (Day 3)

2009-01-12T06:53:00.001-07:00

The resolution to this problem is to create a participant group within your target audience of creatively conservative and loosely guided members. The only effective process to accomplish this goal is to employ a persuasion-based campaign. The difference between a manipulative campaign and a persuasive campaign is symbolically holistic. Manipulation employs tactics that force a participant to act through emotionally charged and fear based tactics. Persuasion based campaigns employ a mutual benefit based model that affects both sided positively and creates good will over time. Persuasion causes people to act because of relational connections at both logic and emotional levels. Persuasion leverages opportunity and complimentary benefits.

Using persuasion to control conversations and create consent over time is far more effective measured over long-term return on investment models and easily employed within indirect marketing campaigns. Indirect marketing leverages the benefits and opportunities presented to an audience without the need to commit or be responsible. Messages embedded into indirect marketing presentations allow you to effectively groom and control conversations without the propensity of manipulation and possible destruction of good will.

Online Reputation Management – Controlling the Conversation (Day 2)

2009-01-09T07:06:00.004-07:00

Western media has taken on a direct sales oriented mannerism and many marketers fall victim in mimicking this approach while trying to establish an online reputation. This approach works for some but for most, it ends up having a very negative impact on controlling conversations, creating consent and return on investment models. The reason for the negative results is that people attempt to manipulate others through presenting information or sales pitches guised as emotional appeals that either are perceived as unfair or are emotionally charged to force consent.

This approach destroys any chance of building goodwill within your target audience. It also affects their willingness to engage or discuss your content in a repetitive or meaningful way. Manipulation creates a violently competitive negotiation environment. The problem with this type of atmosphere is that the people you have induced to be incensed threaten your reputation on a daily basis. Controlling this type of conversation is virtually impossible and most time damaging.

To be continued...

Online Reputation Management – Controlling the Conversation (Day 1)

2009-01-08T07:34:00.001-07:00

Online Reputation Management - Business Communication for a Business Result (Day 3)

2009-01-07T07:02:00.001-07:00

Business communication can often be illusive in an online and web 2.0 driven environment like the one we are dealing with in the current marketplace. It is often difficult to wrap your arms around the types of media and the number of outlets available to communicate with online. The best advice anyone can be given is to take time determining the best type of communication for your target audience and the results are sure to follow. For example, social networking and other interactive types of communication venues can serve as a way to engage in the grapevine. Relating your online business communication to offline communication scenarios will help you to determine the best courses of action for your online business communication campaigns.

The bottom line here is simple. Communicate to create a result for your organization not just to communicate.