The Power of Branding: How Consumer Behavior Shapes The Market – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

In a recent article on “The Economist” there is an overview of the current car market in Europe. The most interesting marketing insight I got from this article was that brands have a strong effect on what goes on in the market place. Volume (i.e. non-premium) carmakers are struggling as many consumers choose premium brands that have broadened their ranges of cheaper entry-level cars.

There are a number of reasons for some carmakers to have recently lost hundreds of millions of euros, but one of the main challenges they are facing is consumer behavior. It sounds like premium brands understand their consumers better. One possible reason for the difference is that the bosses of German firms tend to be people who have been in the car business for most of their careers and their passion and understanding of the car industry helps their companies and brands perform better among consumers.

Also, the brand equity that some firms have built along decades symbolize status, reliability and quality to consumers, even though Europe’s weaker volume carmakers have been producing high quality cars. The consumers are choosing based on their beliefs, preferences and taste, which in turn have been shaped by the image that the brands represent in their minds. Given the same offer level and equivalent perceived benefits for the price, consumers will decide on the basis of their brand perceptions and some firms have figured out the key drivers of value creation for their core customers.

In conclusion, market positioning is key for carmakers and the interactions of all the different global brands in Europe is a good reflection of the economics of this industry in which the power and the performance of a company are associated with many factors such as technology, key alliances, operations efficiencies, globalization, innovation capacity, overall business strategy, and politics, but especially with how companies can position their brands among customers, who ultimately will shape the demand for certain features like style, comfort, safety and, arguably, the most important: brand status and recognition.

Content Integration, Social Sharing and Potential Marketing Opportunities

In this post I will give you an overview of Springpad, a free web tool that provides you with a powerful and convenient way to explore the web, keep all your content organized, share it with your networks if you wish and use some cool mobile "personal assistant" features. I made this summary for you. Enjoy!




What Springpad is
It is a free cloud-based platform for you to easily save anything you want to remember and make sure it will be there for you, from an article to an email to a scanned bar code or a photo, etc. The tool offers you features that not only help you organize your "stuff", but also synchronizes it with online updated relevant content customized for your interests, such as alerts, deals and product availability, news, etc.


See what Gary Vaynerchuk has to say about it:

Features

• Notes, tasks and checklists;
• Web "look it up";
• Information saving without leaving the site you are browsing;
• Social networking and sharing;
• Bar code scanning;
• Photo saving;
• Search nearby;
• Notebooks (where you organize, categorize, customize and integrate your stuff);
• Tags;
• "The board" (visually organize and add labels, notes, maps, etc.);
• Enhanced information (links to prices, reviews, show times, addresses and more)
• Integration with Facebook, Twitter and email;
• Alerts and reminders;
• Public pages (share publicly and let people follow)

Potential Marketing Tool

On a blog post of Feb 19, 2012 by bfrench, I read about three uses for Springpad:

1. Personal project manager to keep track of meta tasks;
2. Curation platform (web research platform to capture knowledge artifacts and integrate streams of thought)
3. Potential marketing tool (an ideal platform for building interactive foundations of media, news, product content and other resources for subscribers to use)

Also the author mentions the possibility for a dynamic brochure - a publishing model that would allow prospective buyers to download a starting point for a product (or service) and then blend their own links, photos and social comments into the basic information.

Innovation Can Be The Art of Recycling Ideas!!! – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

Contrary to the common sense, the value of innovation may simply lie in the ability to improve on existing ideas. This post will discuss how innovation takes place in organizations and which mental paradigms still need to be broken.

The book The Innovator’s DNA explains that innovation skills have less to do with genetic gifts than to do with learnable discovery skills.
Interestingly, these skills (questioning, observing, networking, experimenting and associating) usually develop from the existing concepts in the minds of the individuals.
Innovators seem to improve or change concepts creating benefits that people value.

On the blog post titled Innovation Doesn’t Matter we read:

“The iPad wasn’t even the first tablet computer.”

 “Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Google wasn’t the first search engine. And Apple has invented nothing of breakthrough significance in its own right ever.”

“ […] a business that is very good at iterating on other’s genius will likely win you the title of innovator anyway.”

Generally, the innovative people or companies take ideas and use them as raw material for their innovation process through the discovery skills mentioned above, whether they are aware of such process or not.

From the blog post titled How process leads to the idea:

“Whether you are innovating with new products and services, tapping new technologies or shifting a brand and its image, corporate change and transformation of your business model is hard enough to manage if you have no model for managing the operations to support those innovations.”

Ideas are out there to be observed, used, tweaked, improved, associated, and this makes me wonder if the companies that secretly develop new product through research and development (R&D) are missing the external feedback. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between R&D and speed to market.

On the blog post For Successful Innovation, Sell Imperfect Products we read:

“Rather than making big upfront research and development investments in new ideas, these companies instead start with an MVP, or minimum viable product, […]  The concept behind the MVP is to find the fastest, most cost-effective way to build a salable product that delivers on your basic idea and induces a reaction from prospective buyers.”

 “Lowering product development costs is an important benefit of early market testing. Since more than 90 percent of new products fail the first time they’re launched, smart companies have discovered they can improve their success rate simply by testing an early version.”

Well, it sounds to me as if innovation and creativity are more similar to process improvement than to really having an idea and inventing the next big thing.

The reality is that companies should understand and focus on this iteration process, which is unique and generates great innovations!

Marketing from the customer perspective – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

This post helps marketers understand how to focus on the brand experience to turn customers into advocates for the company and the brand.

Any customer should have a positive experience with the brand and the company from the need recognition phase and awareness of the brand to the desired advocacy (or at least to a positive purchase experience).

Thinking of the brand experience as a multi-step process that takes place all the way through the “Awareness to Advocacy” (A to A) scale helps marketers identify at which level a brand wants to communicate to the customer and how to do it more successfully. These 2 key elements become clear once we identify the point where the target customer is on the A to A scale.

Although not all customers will make through to the advocacy level, marketers should bear in mind that each individual customer may be persuaded to advance one more level by a well-crafted message.

The complexity of the A to A scale will vary as a function of two basic variables: The time and energy necessary to reach a purchase decision and the risk from a poor decision.

The more complex the decision which a customer needs to make, the more touchpoints will be required to take the customer through the different steps, but broadly speaking the steps will be:

•      Pre-Awareness or need identification (marketing can begin influencing from here)

•      Awareness of the brand

•      Gathering of information

•      Evaluation of options and reasons to believe

•      Purchase experience

•      Results (post purchase evaluation)

•      Loyalty

•      Advocacy

Each of these steps has the potential to take anything from minutes to years and each step may have a large number of sub-steps. It all depends on the nature of the product, service or solution in question and whether the customer is a person, a business or some other institution.

The messages to the customers should always emphasize the main benefits that the customers will achieve as they become loyal to the brand and even the brand “personality”. Finally, the touchpoints should be weaved together so that they make sense to the customers and lead them through the experiences along the A to A scale which will potentially take them to the advocacy level.

Steps to Implement an Innovation Culture – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

In this post I am sharing my perspective on how to transform a company with a complacent attitude into a more innovative player in the market before it gets overtaken by the competition. This was inspired in a case analysis I made on a company during one of my MBA classes. I hope it’s useful and enjoyable reading for you!

Defining the areas for innovation:

I would identify which areas to tackle first in the corporate change process and in which order, if not in parallel, by looking at an in-depth SWOT analysis of my own company and of the main competitors. Those would be the most impactful areas for a company in the industry.

Identifying talent:

Next I would look deeper into those areas and conduct a survey to assess my company’s internal creativity potential. This assessment should be designed to highlight the potential talent for innovation that some individuals might have, which might be underutilized today. This would focus primarily on management of the previously defined areas.

Cultural change:

I would then lead personally a cultural change process by forming specific teams within each focus department making sure there were intrinsically creative people in each team. Such process wouldn’t radically change their work environment, since this could scare the managers instead of engaging them, but it would have a sense of urgency based in evidence that the company is at risk of being thrown out of the market if we don’t innovate.

I would involve managers in the solution by eliciting critical thinking and suggestions of how they see the company operating in the future to reach the success and growth necessary to keep us in business. They would have to come up with answers to questions like: How do competitors see us? What would take for a competitor to gain our entire market share? Which is our greatest weakness? If we don’t do something to change the situation, who will? Should we hire experts in creativity or should we teach our personnel to innovate?

Taking action:

Now, with the management buy in and their suggestions in my hands I could devise a plan to turn their departments into innovative environments. Maybe even have a contest to incentivize them to turn their work environment into a place that represents the new vision of innovation. Next I would give each manager the opportunity to try something new and give them more flexibility to define how to fulfill my new directions. They could begin by performing “question storming” sessions with their teams about their most urgent problems and other tasks related to observing and networking. In this phase I would mix people from different departments in each team, so that they would be exposed to different views on the business.

Conclusion:

These steps would create new environments, insights and philosophies that the managers would accept immediately because they saw the need for urgent change and were part of the creation of solutions. Also, their freedom to do things differently would motivate them intrinsically build on their loyalty to the company and their know-how and drive more competitive processes, products and brands.

One Way Communication Won’t Do The Trick – By Rodrigo B. Ferreira

Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone via internet in which for any reason you can’t hear the other party any longer when you know that they can still hear you? It would feel awkward to keep talking and then imagine what the other party is thinking while trying to keep the “pseudo conversation” going on, wouldn’t it? So why do some companies assume they don’t need to listen to their products users?


Can’t stop the “Word of Mouth”, baby!

Companies can no longer make customers listen to them, neither are they in control of the online messages about their products and services! The best that companies can do to manage their brand image in the digital spheres is to create web content that makes people want to engage while responding to customers as they decide to initiate conversations, for better or for worse.

Communication in online communities, blogs or social media should be viewed just an extension of familiar human behavior. Think about it. Normally you only engage in conversations with your family or close acquaintances when you feel comfortable and many times there are no barriers to stop you from expressing opinions, for better or for worse.

The good old word of mouth is back for good and companies are on one end of conversations with potentially thousands of people on the web so, by joining the conversations, they should be able to shape their brand image at least partially. The company’s online “voice” will help portrait their brand image as if the company had a personality. In the same way that a leader’s speech and actions can influence people, companies should realize that their messaging (on websites, social media, blogs, etc.) and their touchpoints will influence how the company is perceived. This will be a function of how well the company’s messages are communicated and how well the company knows their target audience. Creativity and focus on benefits (i.e. what is eventually made possible for the audience) are keys to succeed.

Why they call it “Relationship” Marketing

What about the "listening" part of the conversation? This is what many companies still struggle with. Some companies don’t know how to engage in a true conversation with their customers and this makes their messaging much less effective. Obviously, I have seen countless examples of excellent proactive listening. Some companies are doing an incredible job driving business from the interaction with customers, converting them into super advocates and spreading a reputation of good listeners who act upon the message that they get from customers. And probably the great majority of companies are at some stage of maturity in the process.

The best kinds of relationship are based on solid and clear communication. There are several resources to manage online conversations and they have basically all evolved from the concept of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and usually involve heavy Analytics. The actions taken by customers online like searching, rating, sharing, liking, commenting, tweeting, reviewing, recommending, asking, complaining, praising, engaging, etc. reveal the “voice” of the customer (sometimes referred to as “digital body language”). It’s up to the top managers, VPs, CMOs and CEOs out there to keep investing in building healthy and long lasting relationships with their customers!

ROMI That Makes Sense - By Rodrigo B. Ferreira

Last summer I developed a project as part of my MBA internship in a B2B Marketing environment. One of my project’s outcomes was an effective method to measure the impact of Marketing in large corporations through a more logical and constant measurement of ROMI (or Marketing ROI), which can be defined as the optimization of marketing spend in support of the brand strategy by building a market model using valid, objective Marketing metrics.


My research and the direction form my supervisor (an Integrated Marketing manager) led me to create an innovative approach to measuring ROMI which, to me, was a very successful achievement in the Analytical Marketing field. The idea behind this new approach is a quantitative method that enables a company to quantify monetarily the worth of their Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and to structure the calculation of the return on investment of a given Marketing budget in a given period of time. This, in turn, enables marketers in large organizations to demonstrate clearly and consistently the value of Marketing for the rest of the business.


The idea was born from the association of two concepts: The definition of ROI and the ideas of how to measure Marketing effectiveness from the book “Digital Body Language” by Steven Woods. Using MQLs as the main indicator of the Marketing contribution for a company’s profit I was able to build a spreadsheet that calculates the percent return for every invested dollar in Marketing. Being a mathematician I was happy to find my way through so many ratios, formulas, equations, averages, maximizations, etc.
Although detailed and somewhat complex, I believe that my model is a helpful way to measure the improvement of the Marketing effectiveness over time and it was really enjoyable to work on Analytics, Metrics, Lead Generation and B2B Marketing during this project!
The work could only be finished thanks to the collaboration from professionals in different areas from whom I needed to extract information. I talked to people working in Finance, Sales Operations, Sales, Channel Marketing and Agencies. I am grateful for their contribution and inputs.