Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Ten years ago, a lot of breweries found they could get away with soliciting a friend to design their beer packaging. Not anymore.

With so many beers competing for attention on the shelves, standout beer labels have become a critical part of any brewery's marketing strategy.

So which breweries have come up with those really standout designs?

There's a good chance you already have video editing software installed on your computer. For Windows, that's Windows Movie Maker, and for Macs, it's iMovie. But depending on your particular skill set and what it is you're trying to accomplish with your videos, you may find that these options aren't packed with enough features.

 

The good news: There are several free video editing solutions you can download that run the gamut from super simple to Hollywood-level powerful. Use these to start making videos today....

In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the mid-point of the year and get a fresh restart.

While the previous post kicked off the idea today’s post 1 of 5 Summer Restart is meant to get us down to business.

Ready to cover the five steps to restart your marketing plan for the year?

QOh, side note – I love summer – I embrace the heat and here in the Midwest the humidity – so since we are talking about restarting your plan as Summer kicks in I thought I would give this entire series a Summer motif. Thus the watermelon in the image above....

Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one.

Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute.

It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done.

Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion....

“When you tell people you work at National Geographic, you get incredible reactions. It’s revered, trusted, and stands for quality. And, they’ve been at the content game for close to 130 years,” she says.

On the other hand, Cress says her role feels more like being at the helm of a one-year old company.

“National Geographic Partners is a joint venture between 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society. We’re like a well funded startup, working on reinventing and reinvigorating the brand,” she says.

But with so much history to rely upon, however, the brand is hardly resting on its laurels. Instead, it’s continuing to push the boundaries of innovation and technology, just like it did back when Alexander Graham Bell was the president of the National Geographic Society. He was the one to make the then-controversial decision to start including photography in the magazine, something that was considered to be a lowbrow, tabloid way to sell magazines....

Think back to the best shopping experience you ever had. Chances are it involved a well-informed and upbeat salesperson who engaged with you, asked about your needs and guided you through the purchase. You left knowing you made the right decision.

This kind of conversation-driven sale—high on empathy and knowledge, low on price and haggling—has long been a staple of successful retail loyalty. It focuses on understanding the needs of consumers and delivering an exceptional experience. But in today’s continually upended shopping environment, that conversation between seller and buyer is as likely to take place with an AI-driven bot as it is with a friendly associate.

Welcome to the age of conversational commerce.

Coined by Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, the term “conversational commerce” refers to the ability of a digital tool to interact with a consumer using natural language. Combining rich interfaces and AI, retail brands are using tools like virtual assistants and chatbots to scale relevant, personal and helpful interactions with their customers. And the timing couldn’t be better for an industry that needs to tip the scale back to providing a great shopping experience....

Colors can affect our feelings and behavior in ways so profound that studies have been conducted on how we can better use them in life, and in society, to “hack” culture. This covers subjects from what colors to wear to a job interview … to the ideal shade for prisons.

Because of this odd relationship we have with color, the colors we choose, and what we name them, become meaningful shorthands for much bigger stories. Every year, Pantone selects a “Color of the Year” that thematically puts us on the right track for the next 12 months. We project as much onto Pantone’s choices as the brand seeks to project onto us. (This year’s color was “Greenery.”)

With all this in mind, research scientist and neural network geek Janelle Shane decided to see how well artificial intelligence fares at both selecting colors and naming them. A writer at Ars Technica calls her results “the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.”

On Tumblr, Shane describes both the terms of the experiment and its output. “I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values (RGB = red, green, and blue color values),” she writes. “Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?”...

For many brands, the substance that’s all the rage with tweens is a recipe for revenue, with the likes of Michaels, Elmer’s and McCormick & Co. all benefiting from the trend.It started quietly last summer, when social media watchers began buzzing about it. Tweens had struck on a recipe for a mucilaginous, stomach-turning substance and were posting videos of themselves playing with it.

The slime trend had hit.In fact, slime’s now bigger than ever. Devotees of the glutinous gunk—easy to make by combining glue, water and borax—have posted some 2.8 million images and videos of the stuff on Instagram. Search “slime” on YouTube, and you’ll get 11.9 million results.

Which is (mostly) good fun for kids who, to many parents’ delight, have actually found something analog to do. But slime’s biggest impact isn’t on kids at all: It’s on the bottom lines of brands that sell or make the ingredients for it....

The "hub and spoke" model is not a new concept in marketing, either: I'm not the genius who came up with it. I'm just the dude trying to illustrate it and advocate for it using this comparison with the Disney theme parks. 

The idea has been around for so long because it works: it is a fantastic way to envision our overall marketing strategies and how each component works together to reinforce the central ideas of our businesses. It can help us to ensure we aren't leaving out or neglecting one or more of those components so that we always know that our marketing machine is working at its most efficient....

We need both art and science in marketing — the “MadMen” and “MathMen.” I think the most compelling campaigns of the future will bring together the greatest creativity and the greatest insight informed by data.

 

But creatives and data scientists can make uneasy bedfellows. It’s one thing to optimize media; it’s another to optimize the creative itself. As marketing increasingly becomes data-driven, how will this impact creativity?...

It's all in caps and punctuated with a small maple leaf at the end. And it only took three years to develop. "This is our one-word brand," said Brad Ferguson, president and CEO of the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation, as he presented a picture of the so-called wordmark to city councillors Tuesday. The wordmark is one piece of the redevelopment of Edmonton's overall image, brand and reputation that EEDC has been working on for years. It will be used to promote the city to an international audience. ...

After a decade of Millennial obsession, the marketing world is increasingly buzzing about the next generation around the corner — Generation Z.

Studies highlight their buying power of $44 billion, that they’ll be 40% of the population of US, Europe, and BRIC by 2020, and that they are naturally immune to advertising. Agencies are lining up to offer tools and tricks for brands to “engage” with Generation Z.

And yet, as with Millennials, I’m not sure how useful these broad-brush generational stereotypes really are. Generations are not monoliths. Can a generation-level insight really help a brand engage with such a large and diverse group of people in a meaningful way?...

2017 marked the fifth year of NewsCred’s annual #ThinkContent Summit.

Over the past five years, the event’s theme has reflected the evolution of the digital marketing space. In 2015, the theme was “Creativity, Technology + The Future of Storytelling.” In 2016, it was “Convergence: The New Marketing Imperative.”

When I looked at this year’s theme, its proclamation was even bigger and bolder than years past: “The Marketing Revolution.”Not only was this theme different in the scale of its claim, but it begged the question of what, exactly, made this year a revolution?

After listening to the speakers at the event and diving more deeply into the current state of marketing, it was clear that we are in the midst of a marketing revolution....

When I discovered these two facts, I was shocked.

44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up.

80% of sales require five follow-ups.

In other words, 44% of salespeople aren't putting in 1/5 of the effort needed to close the deal. Too often we give up after one follow-up email, despite data proving that multiple follow-ups are required.  Yet persistence is only one lesson that can be learned from the following 107 sales statistics. There are countless others to be revealed.

Check out this SlideShare to sell smarter, stop wasting time on useless tasks, and start closing more deals in less time:...