21st century marketing general

Just a few months ago the BBC embarked on a groundbreaking experiment. (show video 2.41) Virtual Revolution is not only a thought provoking documentary, telling the story of how the Web has changed the world dramatically in the last 20 years, it is also a radical change for the BBC… an open source TV show. You see, the program was available on the Web before it got broadcasted, but not in its final format... no just the plans, the ideas, the rushes… for people to debate program themes, suggest and send questions, comment on rough clips. Even the name of the program was up for debate. Suggestions could be sent in via the site, via email, or Twitter – that amazing webservice that managed to convince about 200mio people to send each other over 2bio short messages a month by taking a service launched by mobile operators further, converting mobile phone text messaging into a free and public service on the Internet and such turning it from a one-to-one communication tool into a one-to-many publication platform, and even an aggregator and search engine of opinions. Still 80% of Twitter’s usage happens over a mobile phone. So Twitter… a virtual revolution, just as is this BBC program. A true collaboration between a broadcaster and its audience… or in other words a media brand and its consumers. 10 years ago, it would have been simply unthinkable to see the world’s media giants forsake the dominance of the TV screen – the cash cow convenience of one-way mass broadcasting. And instead become on-demand, multi-platform content distributors and even co-creators that actually listen. They had no choice – they have to adapt to the dramatic makeover of the media and content industry, a makeover instigated by the tremendous media and hence audience fragmentation that has been happening in the world. Because while the media explosion started decades back, digital in the last 10 years has truly accelerated it - giving consumers so many more media options in their increasingly abundant media-centric lives. Do you realize we spend more time with media than ever before, 7 to 8 hours per day in continental Europe… up to 9 hours a day in the UK and the US, that’s more hours a day spent with media than sleeping, working or eating. And this freedom of choice and audience fragmentation is making it harder for media companies to attract the large prime time audiences advertisers have been always so willing to pay for. While in 1990 evening news shows across key TV channels in the US attracted 41mio viewers, 2 decades later and despite the fact that the US population has grown by 25%... there are only 24mio today. In 1994, 182 BBC programs counted more than 10 million viewers, today none of shows are left and a program‘s a hit with only 4 million viewers. The average movie on the number 1 French TV channel only gets half the audience today it had 5 years ago. Audience fragmentation is happening in nearly all corners of the world. And here's more evidence. Today already 20% of the globe's 3,5bio unique mobile phone users access news. The New York Times is exemplary in its approach, making news accessible for all types of mobile users. Mobile text alerts, a mobile website and funky apps that make reading news even more enjoyable on the phone are available for the iphone, the palm and blackberry. Today the New York Times sends 100mio text messages and services 90 million views on its mobile site per month. Yes, the re-purposing of content from traditional to digital channels is moving extremely fast, and not just for news but also for TV content, accelerated by the incredible success of YouTube. Launched only 5 years ago, today YouTube counts 2 billion videos viewed every day and 24 hours of video uploaded every minute. 2.5 billion YouTube videos are watched every month by 25 million UK viewers, that’s about half of the UK population watching each 3 videos a day. In many more markets the same share of the population now watch even more videos online. No wonder the media owners took the hint and have started to move TV programs online. The BBC iPlayer is a website that allows you to watch a TV show you missed online for 7 days for free. Two years after its launch it now services 84 million streams a month. And figures reveal that Brits love to watch the iPlayer on their mobiles with big peaks in traffic post 9.00pm, and again on Saturday and Sunday morning, suggesting that the nation is snuggling up with their favourite BBC programs from the warmth of their own bed. Catch-up TV websites are increasingly available from leading broadcasters, democratizing the living room to every computer and even mobile screen in the world. And more players are in the pipeline. If you’re in the US, UK, France or Germany you can rent or buy hundreds of tv shows and movies from the iTunes store. And 2,5 years ago, US broadcaster NBC launched Hulu.com. This site goes beyond catch-up TV. It gives viewers free, advertising-supported access to a catalogue of thousands of TV episodes and movies. (show movie 60sec) Just imagine, your favorite TV shows and movies available to you anytime for free. When you want. Not when a scheduler tells you. No drives to the video store needed. No late fines to pay. Freedom of choice for free. This is what made in little more than a year Hulu the 2nd most popular video site in the US. Today, it has over 40 million unique monthly viewers watching over 1 bio videos a month, that’s about 15% of USA active population watching each 25 programs on Hulu a month. The more than 15bio hours of time spent on Hulu made YouTube very jealous… So the company who with ‘broadcast yourself’ was all about user-generated content since a few months now also offers TV shows and movies – free and on-demand. Anyone here who already has an iPad? This is not just an iPhone on steroids… itunes tv shows and movies, hundreds of magazines in different languages incl. the most recent and back issues at your fingertips thanks to the Zinio app. The iPad has a huge impact on your content consumption. So yes, it’s a dramatic transformation. Media channels used to have a single purpose - papers were for reading, TV was for watching and the radio was for listening to. Today everything is available in one place. The Internet… which we can access from any screen, when and how we want it. Which brings me back to the BBC’s experiment. The Virtual Revolution documentary is evidence of more change. Driven by the fact that the Internet is more than a new channel. After all, the real engine of the Internet is interactivity. Broadcasting or one-way communication seems simply too restrictive in a world where people increasingly are expect to be able to comment, feedback or interact. Welcome to the virtual society. 2. How opinions and decisions are made in a new virtual society Interactivity Our constant social evolution from hunters, to tribes, villages, cities and nations has entered a new stage thanks to the Internet – that of the virtual society. In which physical boundaries between people are disintegrated - allowing everyone to connect and interact. Because just think about it… from street conversations to telephones to mobiles and soon video calls, and from letters to email to instant messenger and social networks, the trend is about increasingly more connectivity, richer interactivity, instantaneously. According to Nielsen, 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks – those websites that connect people 24/7 by allowing them to not only share their profiles, but their every moment thoughts through short status updates, links, pictures and videos. As a result social network usage has exploded. Today they exist for any community – teens, mothers, artists, doctors, pet owners. They have become the number 1 web activity, outperforming email and even porn. In fact, last year 1 out of 8 couples that married in the US met via social media. They are popular all across the world, even more in developing markets with relatively low internet penetration such as Brazil where time spent on social networks doubles the WW average. Here’s an interesting fact: if Facebook, the largest social network counting 500 million active users, were a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world. And social networking is growing in popularity on mobile phones in all corners of the world. In South Africa, half of the active population is registered for and send each other 250 million messages per day on the mobile social network Mxit. Collaboration But the virtual society isn’t only about interactivity, but also about real collaboration. For example, the open source practice that gives IT developers’ access to source code to develop software together is defining our digital environment. The 200,000 applications that make the iPhone a success - and by success I mean 10 to 20mio app downloads a day - were developed by more than 50,000 developers. But you don’t need to be a geek to collaborate on the Internet. Facebook users translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks, at no cost to Facebook. Here’s how Lacta, a chocolate bar in Greece activated consumer collaboration for its brand. Show video 3min Yes, people collaborate on the internet all the time. Have you realized that customer service has moved out of the call centre onto the web, out of the hands of your representatives into the hands of your customers? After all, where do you turn to when you’re trying to make your phone do something and it won’t. Online. You search, go to forums, ask question, browse and contribute answers and tips. That’s why Dell over the last 3 years has moved away from only driving its customers to its own off/online care centers. It has also opened channels in social media and built capability to respond and connect to conversations about their products wherever they happen on the web. This connected community of 3,5mio people facilitated by about 42 full time Dell employees has offered about 10000 new fixes that have been viewed about 2,5mio times, saving millions in phone support. A recent US study showed that 74% of technology buyers choose brands based on customer-care experiences shared online. This trend is obviously not unique to technology products; it’s as big for consumer electronics… but equally for categories such as beauty, health, parenting, cooking, travel or any other category that raises questions – big or small – that can be solved by tapping into the collective opinions of peers aggregated on the internet. Expression Talking about opinions… it has never been easier for people today to express themselves. Anyone can set up a blog, free of charge, in seconds. Creating a twitter account is even easier. In fact, there are dozens of tools that we can use to express ourselves. And some people gain a wide following, not only their friends and family but even a following as influential as that of mainstream publications... not by being a trained writer or journalist, but by simply expressing their views online. Yes, the voices of a few people count more, but equally important is the cumulative effect of billions of comments, posted by people like you and me. Tripadvisor alone has more than 25 million reviews on over 490,000 hotels and attractions. Restaurant, phone, game, supermarket, baby toy, recipes reviews… you name it, the web has got it. Why do they matter? Because globally a massive 81% of people online use reviews in their purchase decisions… a phenomenon I like to refer to as not e- but we-commerce! Consumers' decision-making processes – whether to buy from you or from someone else - have shifted to a new, powerful peer-to-peer arena. You see, never before was there so much to choose from. This fuels the need for trusted advice and recommendations. Over the last 100 years of commercial communication consumers have become more skeptical of advertisers. They are more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend than a brand. I suppose that has always been the case, digital just facilitates sharing of these recommendations. The latest Nielsen Survey, including data from more than 25,000 online consumers from 50 countries, proves this. 90% of internet consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, and 70% trust consumer opinions posted online. In other words, reviewing is the new advertising. Brand who truly embrace this will gain from the public transparency and trust it fuels. When recently arriving in the newly opened Radisson Royal in Moscow I used Foursquare, the location-based social network which people use to let their friends on Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook know where they are by checking in at a hotel, bar, restaurant, shop or any other location, to tell my friends … The hotel replied the next day via Twitter… Encouraged that they were listening I took the opportunity to give the hotel some more feedback and hence replied via Twitter… and as you can see they replied again. A great example that shows that brands can really embrace consumer reviews to their benefit, to get feedback, to ask for reviews and build their reputation in the public forum of the web. It’s also a great illustration of the fact that mobile will be truly accelerating this whole review phenomenon. Shopsavvy is a smartphone app that by taking a picture of a barcode will not only give shoppers access to consumer reviews for 22mio products from 20.000 retailers worldwide, but also will tell you how much they cost at online and nearby stores. For all of these reviews – to both contribute to and access them - we will be increasingly using our mobile phones. Simply because mobile allows to do it now. Immediacy Yes, patience is a thing of the past. In the virtual society technology has created the expectation for immediate answers and solutions. After all, finding information is now instantaneous, with the average Google search taking less than 1 second. The time between transaction and ownership is disappearing too, with the average on-line card transaction taking less than 2 seconds. That’s why Ebay, the leading online auction and shopping site, decided to go mobile – so its customers could stay constantly connected to the deals while they were happening. Today Ebay attracts 750,000 global daily unique users to its mobile services. Last year it has seen more than $500MM worth of transactions via its mobile website and iPhone app, which has been installed by more than 6MM shoppers. No credit cards needed. Thanks to pay pal, a web service that allows you to set up a payment account linked to your bank account or credit card, transactions on ebay mobile are pain-free and immediate. As such, an item is now purchased via Ebay mobile every 2 seconds. Users from 165 countries have used Ebay mobile with American cities accounting for only 4 of the top 10 locations. In less than 18 months time Ebay has built its mobile revenue up to a 6% share of its total revenue. 1.5MM purchases took place over the last holiday period - including that of a 1966 Chevrolet Corvette, bought on ebay mobile for $75,000. The point I’m trying to make is not about e- or mobile commerce, but about playing into virtual society citizens’ growing desire for immediacy. So while the consumer of today is potentially more self-reliant in terms of finding answers to his needs, he is demanding that the distance between need, exploration of possible options and the ultimate decision will only be a few clicks away. High expectations of ‘free’ value Last but not least, today’s consumers don’t only demand more speed, they simply are expecting more. 60% of European web users consult price comparison sites before they go shopping. A virtual society in which full price transparency seems near - with consumers spending hours online hunting down the lowest fare for a flight, the best price for that widescreen TV, the cheapest place to shop - leaves no choice but for a company to either compete in the price war or provide consumers with higher value, surrounding products and services with experiences that are harder to price, if not priceless. As a matter of fact, ‘free’ value. In this web-world of ours we have been spoiled with ‘free’ – free news, free knowledge, free entertainment, free recipes. Already 10 years ago J&J bought babycenter.com, a rich parenting magazine online, to get to its customers heart with added value information. Over the years they extended it with all kinds of interactive, social, community and mobile features. (show video 20sec)Today BabyCenter is the Web's #1 global parenting site, reaching 78% of new and expecting moms online in the United States, and reaching 16 million parents monthly across 19 markets worldwide… And it’s owned by a brand. 3. Rethinking the marketing funnel Summing up the observations so far: We’re facing a dramatically changed media landscape, far different from the old world of one-way broadcasting or publishing. We live in a virtual society in which technology has enabled free access to almost every information resource; tools and platforms encourage interactivity and collaboration; consumer opinions shape our purchase decisions; and, the demands of consumers have never been higher. Immediate fulfillment and higher value – often for free - is expected. This isn’t a passing trend or a fad. This is nothing less than a new world of media and communication in which brands need to adapt to the new opportunities offered by media switching from analogue to digital, to the reality that consumers have raised their personal advertising shield to protect themselves against the 1.5 million marketing messages they are bombarded with a year, and to new interaction possibilities between consumers and between consumers and brands. That’s at least what the CMO of Best Buy believes (show video 3.40) Live digitally. As a Forrester report says: “The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity digital and social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers’ trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach.” Yes, the holy grail of 20th Century Marketing might need some rethinking. While the funnel still represents the stages a consumer goes through in his relationship with brand and as such can still stand for brand goals, digital is more than just a channel leveraged in all of the different phases. It has a transformative effect on the funnel. It takes away the line - above-the-line, below-the line… today there is no line – and that means there’s no need to solve the marketing funnel in such a media or channel linear fashion. The 5 New Marketing Behaviors for 21st Century Marketers In the 21st century we should aim to solve the marketing funnel in a much more integrated way. Brands need to learn 5 new marketing behaviors… moving away from just mastering how to broadcast messages to woo consumers into considering your brand and flogging promotions to make them buy. 5 new marketing behaviors of which engaging instead of just interrupting people is the first important one. Over the last 5 years Nike has dramatically transformed its advertising budget. Formerly leading media spend in many countries around the world, media spend now only represents one third of its total advertising budget, with digital and content being responsible for the other 2 thirds. Behind the shift is a fundamental change in Nike’s view of the role of advertising, as its executives report in this NY Times article: “No longer are ads primarily meant to grab a person’s attention while they’re trying to do something else – like reading an article. Increasingly the company advertising spending will take the form of services for consumers, like workout advice, online communities and sports competitions.” The Nike+ website is, to date, the company’s best illustration of this vision. It allows runners to set their objectives, track progress with every run and… to make it more fun and social … compare it to that of their friends, even if they live thousands of miles away. Any member of the Nike+ community can invite any other membmber to participate in running challenges, a great feature to provide runners with goals that motivate them, but also turning what used to be a very individual and local sport into a truly collective activity of the virtual society. Adage just awarded Nike+ the best digital campaign of the decade. But it’s not just a campaign, not just a website, it’s a 21st century program that has taken the form of a useful service. Allowing consumers to spend time with the brand regularly but also bring in their running friends to do exactly the same. The result: in its first 2 years runners have logged over 100milion miles on the site. And global running shoe sales increased by 21%. It’s a great example that shows that instead of shouting nicely wrapped commercial messages in consumers’ faces, useful content/useful services have the power to invite and make consumers spend more time with our brand voluntarily… allowing brands not to push, but pull – not to interrupt, but engage… just as the Michelin Guides did when launched more than 100 years ago. Hence branded content or value is the very important key to unlock that engagement. Cisco recently began moving into the consumer space – selling not just business but home networking solutions. To make consumers aware we created digitalcribs.com, the home for a series of short documentaries on high-profile people, living uniquely connected lifestyles in uniquely wired homes. (show video 2.08) Site visitors can of course virtually visit the digital homes with hot-spots highlighting the enabling Cisco technology. With very little traditional media support digital cribs, today in its second season, is one of the most visited sites for Cisco. In its first few months it received over 5M page views and in excess of 650K unique visitors. How did we create that traffic without media? By choosing personalities that had big audiences on the web. But also through a user-generated-movie competition for students of famous film schools. Being digital natives, posting their cribs movies on Facebook and YouTube, they massively contributed to the buzz. You see, as brands we have always known that content is the way to the consumer’s heart – hence we have been surrounding it with advertising since decades. In the digital age we can create content ourselves. And that content can take so many forms. Useful services, entertaining experiences, etc. It’s how you can differentiate yourselves from your competitors, beyond product and price. It makes consumers spend time with your brands, building consideration and preference and can even prompt purchase by seamlessly integrating purchase trigger such as promotions and test drive invitations or undeniably relevant product information as Tele2 in Sweden did to promote Mobile Internet to the business audience. (show video 2.00) And this branded value doesn’t always need to sit on a site. As innovation is a much overused word, IBM decided instead of talking about it, it would practice it. We invented a useful service for its Wimbledon sponsorship… a mobile application combining Google Android technology, Augmented Reality, GPS, Twitter and live data feeds. It didn’t only provide Wimbledon visitors with a mobile handbook listing locations and facilities in an easy to navigate interface, but also allowed them by pointing their mobile camera to for example the toilets, strawberry or taxi stand, discover how many people were queuing up via an overlay on their mobile screen. Pointing it to a tennis court would give them the latest match stats as well as see Twitter comments about the match. The goal of this app wasn’t consumer uptake, but build IBM’s reputation in innovation. And that’s what it did. Free media buzz through blogposts, consumer comments, editorial coverage was valued at £2mio. Sales followed. ROI: 156x the cost of the campaign. Branded value can take many different shapes and forms. But it needs to be an expression of your Brand Platform, of the role your brand plays in consumers’ lives. As such, instead of just telling people through ads that it’s new brand promise is Life’s for sharing, T-Mobile figured it would make sure its consumer would experience what that new brand promise was all about. A 21st Century Marketing Campaign that had conversation creation at heart. (show video) Lots of media coverage, blog articles and consumer comments created unseen conversation around the brand. (Alternative version) At Ogilvy our brand promise is we sell or else. To get our client’s attention for the differentiation our agency can bring to their brands we didn’t produce a brochure or print ad, but launched a competition for the World’s greatest salesman through a series of videos on Youtube. (video.2.15) We also posted sales guides and tips on slideshare, linkedin and many other social media. Ogilvy’s chairman Brian Fetherstonhaugh received the following email from the CEO of a large organization. The meeting is happening next week. Off- and online media incl. the New York Times and American TV news shows and many more blogs and consumer posts talked about our competition, creating unseen conversation around our brand. 2.Influence to assure mass conversation Why is creating conversation today so important? Because soon there’ll be only one mass media left: the consumer. And it’s the most powerful mass media: in the virtual society consumers don’t only have unlimited access, but also trust each others’ opinions the most. This forces brands to master more than just broadcasting, and beyond engagement also learn how to become skilled at influence, encouraging positive conversation. Or in other words, how not to pay for but earn media. The combination of paid and earned media will assure brands the reach and awareness as well as the credibility they are looking for today. Branded value plays an important role. As the word-of-mouth marketing association says, word-of-mouth is first about giving people a reason to talk about your brand and next about making it easier for that conversation to take place. A useful service, entertaining movies tends to have more talk value than a nicely wrapped commercial message. Here’s how we put that in practice for a cereal brand. Since it was advertised last in 1999 Schreddies had dropped to the N12 brand in Canada. Last year we brought it back and increased sales by 8%. (show video 2.50) The formula of this campaign is clear. A conversational contagious idea, paid media and an earned media approach creating content and distributing and seeding it across all those social places where your consumers are spending time and talking. The ultimate reward = conversation. Your consumers become your brand advocates and forwarders. Paid media definitely still have a role to play, but I have to stick to my guns and say I don’t believe in a future of indiscriminate interruptive ads. I am though passionate about relevant advertising, leveraging the benefits of digital media in interactivity and data. After all, all ads – from the highly emotional to the highly promotional – will be welcomed by consumers if they are targeted to their needs, take into account who they are, arrive at the right moment. Yes, advertising will become increasingly data driven so how you connect your customer data with your site & digital engagement data and digital media data will start making the difference in effectiveness and efficiency of your communications. 3. Build Relationships to create more sales opportunities Data, the 21st century marketer’s secret weapon. Barry Judge, Best Buy’s CMO, talked about the phone as a response device and the opportunity of the Internet in the hand of every consumer! Data hence won’t only assure that we can be more relevant to our audiences. In a digital media world every touchpoint that has managed to get the time and attention of our consumers provide brands not only with the opportunity to build emotional engagement with the brand earlier on through branded value, but also to turn that engagement into an individual relationship and possibly ongoing conversation. In a virtual society where everything is at consumers’ fingertips aiming to become friends seems the obvious thing for a brand to do. Because don’t friends always get picked over strangers, and don’t friends bring other friends along. Just think Babycenter or Nike+. It’s a 21st Century Relationship Marketing Program that doesn’t even need email or direct mail, nor does our newly launched Hey Community for Ikea in Germany. So I believe in the 21st Century, relationship marketing has a much bigger role to play. So far CRM was most often applied post-purchase, when we were better able to collect and act on knowledge of our customers and activate that to build loyalty and sales with existing customers. It wasn’t as efficient to use pre-purchase in converting more leads with the complexity of mass data and the cost of one-to-one communications being too prohibitive. But if you think of Google and search marketing, you realize mass one-to-one communication is here to stay. Actually I believe all marketing needs to become more customer centric... moving away from series of one-way once-off campaigns for more a combination of ongoing consumer programs, that accompany consumers along their purchase path through connected brand initiatives. 4. Win on the digital shelf And one of most important brand initiatives is about building the capability to be able to pick up and respond to consumer behavior that indicates your consumers are getting ready to buy. Which brings me to the 4th skill 21st Century Marketers need to master. Before we only knew a consumer was considering buying our category or brand when he was browsing our store or the retail shelf, resulting in the very powerful discipline of retail marketing getting a large share of marketing budgets. But today we can know a consumer has entered in the consideration phase because he searching for us on the web. I believe it’s P&G who coined the phrase ‘Winning on the Digital Shelf’ in an attempt to emphasize the importance of this opportunity to its sales organization. Winning on the digital shelf should be any brands first priority. It’s first and foremost about a comprehensive search strategy that combines paid search with search engine optimisation of your sites to make sure that your brand appears high up on the search results page when people are looking for your brand or category. After all, 90% of Internet sessions still start with search. But equally important is figuring out how to convert that interest expressed in a search query into more actions for the brand. But even that won’t be enough, as people are increasingly turning to social media such as YouTube, Facebook, blogs and review sites to make up their purchase opinions. Sites that have started dominating the search results pages, sites that have become search engines themselves and sites that as brands we haven’t got any control over. The only thing we can try to do there is influence positive conversation around our products. Here’s where I have to make the important difference between marketing conversation initiated by the brand as we’ve seen in the T-Mobile or Schreddies examples, and product conversation driven by your customers. As you know billions of comments, questions & answers get posted by people in any category on the web. So how to assure constant, massive and positive chatter about your products? It needs 2 things. First, it’s about realizing the voices of a few count more. A series of key online influencers are driving most of the conversation in any category or around any brand. Conversation monitoring tools allows identifying them. Segmentation helps to understand what triggers positive reporting from them. And influencer engagement programs might turn them into your advocates. Next, it’s about following in the footsteps of Dell and opening up channels on the Web and in social media as well as building the capability to respond and connect to conversations your customers are having about your products wherever they are happening on the Internet. Encouraging them to tell you, not just each other what they think and need, by sharing things around your products they can react to and of course responding. And that’s what Best Buy’s Twelpforce is all about. (show video 1.15) That’s exactly the job of the 6-man social media team at Starbucks. In October 2008 they opened up the official Starbuck fan page on Facebook. Today, the community counts 10mio fans. Why? Because they organized a few campaigns that had as a sole purpose to make people sign up to their community of fans. And three/four times a week Starbuck will share something interesting about its products or stores on its community – a bit of news, a promotion, an event – encouraging its members to comment and interact. As on average a person has 150 friends on Facebook and any of his interaction on the social network will be seen by them, Starbuck has been able to calculate that for every four people that interacted with its community, another three people signed up. Starbucks was also one of the first brands to set up a customer service channel on Twitter. Issues, complaints, questions and suggestions, just tweet @Starbuck and get an instant reply as any of the other 1mio followers do. And Starbucks is also the first brand to use Foursquare and the newly launched Facebook places to reward people to check in at its stores. The more check-ins, the more contributions to the product conversation online… key to win on the Digital Shelf. 5. Listening for marketing insight But the smartest thing Starbuck did and how its venture in social media started was when 2 years ago they opened Mystarbucksidea. It’s a site where they welcome product, service or shop suggestions from their customers and immediately respond which ones they are putting into action. In one year the site welcomed 77.000 consumer contributions, about a million more votes and comments. Today more than 70 product and service innovations have been put in action. Listening for marketing insight. McKinsey research shows that few marketing executives can name three key insights, derived from online analyses, that they acted upon in the last few months to generate value for their organization A car company we know tracks the volume of people using its online car configuration tool to forecast sales and tweak production. A food client of ours now constantly listens to search keywords its consumers are using and the conversations they are having on the web to inform its marketing plan. Listening all-ways for marketing insight is the lifeblood of 21st Century Marketers . Conclusion To conclude, the Virtual Society isn't a passing trend. It’s a new world order for marketers. I truly believe that. 5 new marketing behaviors to adopt: engage with branded value, create conversations through paid & earned media, build relationships earlier to bond and convert more, win on the digital shelf, and listen... to solve the funnel in a much more integrated way. 3,5bio mobile subscribers, 2bio internet users, 1bio social networkers. The time to commit is now. Welcome to the virtual society! Thank you.

21st century marketing general

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