"Buy the Way…" Insights on Integrated Marketing Communication

I would like to close out this semester’s blog with a note about someone I worked with who gave her life working in communication.

Anne Smedinghoff worked with me at US Embassy Kabul. She was killed in early April while managing press at a school book donation ceremony. The affects have been very tough for everyone in the embassy.

With this note, though, I don’t want to pour sadness all over her memory, but wanted to say that she believed in her work and fought to make a difference in Afghanistan and the world around her … and I think she did.

Often, we communication and public affairs types get stuck in the daily grind. Sometimes it seems like were just spinning our wheels and not making a difference as we slug throug talking points and messaging. I beg to differ though – you and I do make a difference.

Building communication between people is like building a bridge of understanding.

Ann’s death did not wipe away her memory. The State Department and her friends continue to memorialize and celebrate her life and the positive affects she had on the public affairs community. Matter of fact, tonight is “Space / Pirate Night” at the Duck and Cover bar here. It combines some of the things she loves; friends, pirates and space theme parties ; )

Also, in the community where she died, the families and children also honor her. They stand up and face threats and violence every day. They send their children to school, vote, and demand control of their lives.

Ann died too young, but her death hardened the local Afghan resolve to not allow brutality to control them.

And in that way, Ann built a bridge and it led to understanding.

-Jack

I’m so saddened by today’s events. As a runner, I know what type of disorientation the body (and mind) experiences after such a long distance. Then to have your personal victory met with the harrowing echoes of screams and shards of glass flying at you – the experience is unimaginable. The outpour of support, prayers and outreach has been encouraging and I think social media has played a big role in facilitating that support.

Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube brought us the news as it happened. And just as quickly, these same networks created a sub-network of people who were willing to help in some way.  Today, Mashable reported that the Boston community has built out a massive Google Doc indexing homes and space availability for anyone who has been displaced by today’s events.   On Facebook, over 16,000 people are talking about the Boston Marathon and #prayforboston has been trending internationally on Twitter all afternoon. The topic has quickly risen as a ‘popular’ topic, proving that social media brings people together at lightning speeds.

I think it’s easy to forget how powerful social media is.  Throughout our coursework we talk about ways that social media can be used to market a product or communicate a selling point. Today’s events though underlined how well social media can not only inform the masses but also organize a coalition of people who are willing to help others in need.

As coverage over the next few days unfolds, I think it will be interesting to see how our own social media networks flood with thoughts about what happened, questions asking why  and reflections about how grateful individuals are in their own lives. It’s events like these that remind me that social media networks have changed the way consumers access, talk about and react to news.  While social networking can sometimes be met with criticism or misunderstanding, I hope people don’t forget how these networks facilitate fast response to such a tragic event.

Facebook is losing ground among teen users.  FB noted In its 2012 10-K report:

We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook. For example, we believe that some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram.

This could be part of the product’s normal lifecycle (even Beatles fans sometimes migrate to other bands).  Or it could indicate the beginning of a seismic shift as people make decisions about how they choose to interact.

With due respects to Melinda’s post, I’m not addicted to FB.  I get on maybe once every couple of months to update photos for friends far away.  But I don’t stick around.  Maybe it’s a generational thing.  Many of my GenX coevals are migrating away from FB … or never got on in the first place.

And so I was surprised to learn that younger users were beginning to drift away.  Facebook may be headed for a Facelift, a revamp that will bring back the apostates looking for the Next Big Thing.  In the case of FB, it may not have so much to do with cool.  People will use FB if they need it, and stop when they don’t.

Are you a FB apostate?  Here’s one guy’s Top 10 for hating FB (from facebookhaters.com):

1. Lack of privacy. If they say they protect it, then why do they always ask for more and more of your information?
2. It’s a (fake) popularity contest.
3. They don’t include a ‘Dislike’ button.
4. My high school bully sent me a friend request 10 years later
5. Someone posted and tagged that photo of me with my fly down.
6. People from work trying to befriend me.
7. Facebook’s creepy friend suggestions. Am I actually similar to these bozos?
8. Notification overload. I don’t log in for a week and return with 10,000 notifications.
9. The people that post the most often are the people that post the most mundane crap.
10. You can’t go one day without having to hear someone talk about Facebook.

—————

Sources:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/05/Facebook-In-Decline

http://facebookhaters.com/

Facebook is on the Move

Online communications have come a long way from impersonal and un-customizable chat rooms, to the fully integrated Facebook. (i.e. fan pages, businesses pages, advertisements) Facebook started off as a platform to communicate with friends and now has transitioned into a vehicle for communication for businesses as well. Businesses such a Neiman Marcus and General Motors have bought into social media and included Facebook as part of their integrated marketing communications. Most recently, Facebook helped Pepsi reach 18-20 million people every month versus 3 million a year ago. (Rusli,2013) Hyundai saw a 28% increase in sales from its ad campaign on Facebook.

There are many ways that business can advertise via Facebook, they can advertise through their customizable business pages, as well as banner ads on the side bar and embed advertisements within the feeds. Using Facebook as an avenue to maximize consumer reach is advantageous; however, Bryan Nagy for Social Media Today states “the Facebook problem” is this: “brands have forgotten about integrated marketing communications.” Businesses have put much focus on Facebook, making it the core of their communications for potential mass reach that they have forgotten that Facebook is a single market channel and one part of the social media umbrella. (DM Confidential, 2013)

Bryan Nagy, further states that in addition to businesses making Facebook the core of their integrated marketing communications, “ there are other problems with how brands are using Facebook, – namely, the increasing noise, and additions to numbers and the lack of focus on crafting good marketing messages and creative.” (Social Media Today, 2013) Although this may be true, Facebook continues to be a powerhouse and a very effective tool for businesses.

BY: LeiLani Lemle-Macias

References:
DM Confidential (April, 2013). ‘The Facebook Problem”: Brands Have Forgotten About Integrated Marketing Communications. Retrieved by: http://www.dmconfidential.com/ the-facebook-problem-brands-have-forgotten-about-integrated-marketing-communications/

Nagy, B. (April, 2013). The Facebook Problem: Why We Need to Rethink Facebook Marketing. Socialmedia Today. Retrieved by: http://socialmediatoday.com/bryannagy/1340136/facebook-problem-rethink-facebook-marketing

Rusli, E. (April. 2013). Buy Signal: Facebook Widens Data targeting. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved by: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324504704578412960951909032.html?KEYWORDS=pepsi

Faced with dramatically plunging sales and a bleak future, this week the retailer J.C. Penney (”JCP”) fired CEO Ron Johnson just 17 months after he started with the company.  Notably, Johnson was the Apple executive who masterminded the retail experience for Apple Inc.  Shortly after Johnson was fired, JCP indicated that it was replacing him with the company’s former CEO, Myron “Mike” Ullman.

Johnson had a dramatic, yet flawed, vision for JCP.  For a chuckle, you might want to check out Business Insider’s excellent portrait of Johnson’s failed plan: http://www.businessinsider.com/ron-johnsons-failed-plan-to-turn-around-jcpenney-2013-4

As can be seen from the Business Insider article linked above, Johnson’s plan for JCP was like taking the Apple retail experience and just super-imposing it onto JCP with the apparent thinking being that what works for Apple will work for JCP.

As part of his plan, Johnson eliminated JCP’s high/low pricing policy of marking up prices and then offering sales and discounts.  Instead, he wanted to offer “fair and square” reasonable prices all the time.  Also, Johnson rejected the traditional retailing strategy of conducting pricing tests in a limited number of stores before widely rolling out the pricing changes, which was a big mistake.

Johnson’s pricing policy changes did not go over well with JCP’s bargain-minded customer base that was used to the company’s previous promotional pricing policies.

Sales plummeted and JCP eventually was forced to return to its former promotion-centered pricing policies.  But, by the time the company returned to its former pricing policies, it was too late; the customer based had been thoroughly alienated.

There are some valuable marketing lessons to be learned from Johnson’s failed marketing changes at JCP.

You must understand your customer.  You must be in touch with what your customer wants or needs.  The JCP debacle underscores the importance of customer research prior to changing pricing strategy.  I just simply don’t understand why pricing tests would not have been performed prior to making the significant changes envisioned under Johnson’s plan.  Was it a case of CEO hubris?

Summing up the key lesson is hedge fund manager and JCP principal shareholder and board member Bill Ackman: “One of the big mistakes was perhaps too much change too quickly without adequate testing on what the impact would be.”

Ironically, JCP board member Ackman was instrumental in Johnson’s hiring.  He even once showed a slide at a conference that stated: “Ron Johnson’s record of retailing success makes him the ideal leader to fix JCP.”

JCP’s failure under Johnson is a financially painful lesson for Mr. Ackman, since he is now sitting on a substantial underwater stock position in JCP.  Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management LP, currently owns 18% of JCP (39,075,771 shares).  He paid around $25 a share, while the share price is now $14.62—a 42% decrease in the per share price.  Ouch.

If you were the incoming JCP CEO what would you do to help turn-around the company?  I’m curious what you think.  Please leave your comments below.

Fashion icon Lilly Pulitzer

“It all started 50ish years ago with a simple shift dress in Palm Beach, Florida” (Herald Online, 2013). Well, not quite…

It actually started 80ish years ago when Lillian McKim was born in Farmington, Connecticut. And what a beginning it was! Lilly attended school with future first lady, Jacqueline Bouvier (a friendship that would last for years), and married Peter Pulitzer, grandson of newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer (Newcomb, 2013).

On the advice of doctors trying to cure Lilly of severe depression after moving with her family to Palm Beach, Florida (put more bluntly, they basically told her that she needed to find something to do), she began juicing oranges from the family’s groves and selling the juice at a roadside stand. Finding she was always covered in juice at the end of the day, Pulitzer designed herself a shift dress to match the juice stains. After receiving many compliments on her creation, she began selling a few dresses at her juice stand, and a fashion empire was born. The year was 1959.

Jackie Kennedy, photographed for Life magazine wearing The Lilly, on a family vacation.

So with no business sense or fashion design experience whatsoever, Lilly Pulitzer entered the fashion business full time. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she had come from and married money. Or that Jackie Kennedy was photographed wearing one of her dresses…made from kitchen curtain material! After that, The Lilly took off and a fashion icon was born (Fashion I.Q., 2013).

Vintage 1960s Lilly Pulitzer wearing her own design in one of her early shops

Part of Pulitzer’s success can be attributed to being in the right place at the right time. The time was the rules-busting, turbulent ‘60s, a decade perfectly suited to Lilly’s rebellious bohemian nature. In fact, Lilly and her husband were pioneering an alternative lifestyle that was more casual and organic than the rest of high society. Lilly, herself, describes her success thus: “It was the time, the place and the name” (cited in Fashion I.Q., 2013).

Lilly Pulitzer shop today.

The Lilly Pulitzer line is still alive and well today, although its founder shut down the company in 1984. A decade later, the line was revived when its founder sold the license to Oxford Industries, a publicly traded company, in 1993, remaining on as a consultant. The company continues to feature the bright colors and prints that Lilly loved, introducing “the wonderful world of Lilly to new markets” (Lilly Pulitzer president James Bradbeer, Jr., cited in Herald Online, 2013).

Lilly Pulitzer passed away peacefully on April 7, 2013, at her home in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 81 years old. But thanks to the continued Lilly Pulitzer revival, the free-spirited socialite’s belief that “it’s always summer somewhere” lives on (Newcomb, 2013).

References:

Business Wire (2013, April 3). Lilly Pulitzer opens 20th store in The Shops at Riverside. Herald Online. Retrieved from http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/04/03/4744482/lilly-pulitzer-opens-20th-store.html

Fashion I.Q. (2013, April 4). Town & Country’s Kathryn Livingston on Lilly Pulitzer. Sarasota Magazine. Retrieved from http://sarasotamagazine.com/fashion-iq/2013/04/04/kathryn-livingston-on-lilly/

Newcomb, A (2013, April 7). Lilly Pulitzer: Fashion designer, socialite dies at 81. ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/US/lilly-pulitzer-fashion-designer-socialite-dies-81/story?id=18901439#.UWJkZknn-M8

It’s all about leveraging the power of consumer engagement, right?

From the opening pages of Brand Media Strategy to the Effie Award-winning Old Spice campaign to our evaluations of the integration of respective brands, 541 has focused significantly on engaging with consumers and allowing their feedback and conversations and activity guide the trajectory of current campaigns and inform future product enhancements and launches.

But what do you do when that feedback is decidedly negative and, furthermore, organized?

Some companies have had to answer that question with the advent of the #notbuyingit Twitter movement. Organized by missrepresentation.org, a non-profit social campaign aimed with the goal of shifting cultural mindsets and ending gender discrimination, the #notbuyingit movement “calls out sexism in the media” and “challenges the misrepresentation of women and girls.”

While the #notbuyingit hashtag has been in use for several years, the movement picked up considerable steam during the 2013 Super Bowl, when some 10,000 people tweeted to decry the sexism they saw in ads by Go Daddy, Audi and Budweiser, just to name a few:

#notbuyingit attracted even more participants in the days after the game as media outlets including CNN and The Boston Globe reported about the campaign:

And now missrepresentation.org is upping its own game with the #notbuyingit app, which organizers say makes it even easier to call out companies they feel are degrading women.

missrepresentation.org expects the number of #notbuyingit tweets to soar with the ease of the app, development of which has been financed in part by $13,000 from interested consumers donated through the indiegogo website.

So what should companies do in the face of such intense consumer blowback? Corporate reactions have been mixed, ranging from this humble post from the founder of Solid Gold Bomb clothing to accusations of extortion:

Negative consumer feedback appearing online certainly isn’t anything new, as anyone who has ever read walmartsucks.org or ihatedell.net can attest. But what makes #notbuyingit a little different is how quickly a campaign can pop up and spread. Just by watching #notbuyingit trend on Twitter, consumers can form opinions about multiple companies and products — no need to visit individual gripe sites. And as we all know from the astonishing billions of Tweets sent each week, retweeting is as easy as click and send.

missrepresentation.org and the consumers who Tweet #notbuyingit say they’re working toward a less sexist culture, something to which companies certainly don’t want be seen as opposed. So how do they respond?

About the Author

Lynn Tefft Hoff is the Assistant Director of Communications for the Radiological Society of North America, a society of 53,000 radiologists based in Oak Brook, Illinois. Lynn is in the Fall 2012 cohort of the Masters of Communication Management program at the University of Southern California. She lives in Aurora, Illinois, with her husband, 10-year-old stepson and 3-year-old son, who doesn’t believe that “writer and editor” is an actual profession and is waiting for her to decide to be a doctor or fireman “when she grows up.” Lynn chronicles life as a mom, middle manager and master’s student at mommyhitsthebooks.com.

Salad dressing just got steamy, sexy and sensual. Last week, Kraft introduced their new “Let’s Get Zesty” ad campaign for it’s Italian dressing. It features a hot guy cooking over an outdoor grill and it’s full of sexual innuendos, take a look:

This commercial, with several targeted spots on Bravo, has a similar look and feel to past Effie award winner – “Old Spice” which used sex to entice women to buy it’s body wash for the men in their life, but “Mr. Old Spice” didn’t have quite have as many sexual undertones in his commercial as “Mr. Zesty.” And, sex sells.

Kraft takes the integrated marketing campaign a step further with its “GetMeZesty.com” landing page where you can personalize a “Zestygram” and share it with friends and family.

And if that wasn’t enough to engage consumers, you should check out Mr. Zesty’s Facebook page and Tweets to his fans– complete with brief (Vine) video messages to his followers.

Vine was released by Twitter in January to engage consumers in conversation, create brand awareness, introduce new products, etc., and of course, it comes with analytics. It allows you to measure what “Vines” are being shared or re-tweeted compared to other media such as YouTube and Instagram. So, Kraft can measure Mr. Zesty’s appeal and if his sexiness is selling the product.

By judging tweets from over a thousand fans so far, Kraft should be pleased with the positive responses from their steamy new ad campaign. For instance, T. Monet tweeted “My mom and I both purchased Zesty Italian dressing after watching TheZestyGuy’s commercial and Kristen K. said “Definitely need to buy some Kraft dressing after seeing @TheZestyGuy’s abs… ummm, ads…”

It will be interesting to see how this campaign unfolds. If Kraft’s brand image and awareness will increase by successfully mimicking the “Old Spice” concept, or just see a temporary spike in sales. Either way, Mr. Zesty (aka Anderson Davis) is definitely entertaining eye candy and might just become the next “Fabio.” Afterall, he’s already getting marriage proposals from women online which even caught Good Morning America’s attention. So, what you think? In the world of advertising — Fad or Fab?

References: