New Brand Assets: Where are we going?

"We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests."

Kosinski et al. 2013 (The Psychometrics Centre, University of Cambridge)

Like. Comment. Engage. Sponsored post again? Uhm.. Is your behavioral targeting ok? No?It's fine. Don't worry. Numbers are fine.
How have brands embraced digital ecosystems like Facebook as a key marketing channel to drive engagement and brand awareness? Let's use FB like waveforms as a metric of brand engagement and let's illustrate some examples of FB like pages:

Multinational retail corporation with 35M likes

Ivy League management magazine:

A worldwide branded commodity

A multinational sports company

Leading Telecommunications company in Greece-edited

Leading retail operator in Greece

It seems that these waveforms are similar to a manipulated oscillograph signal where the peak comes in "Sponsored Campaigns" periods and then to zero, till the next paid campaign. 

There are tons of examples like these. Off course, some of these effects could be explained by deeper analysis of econometric advertising models, mentioned here, but is this the best we can do with these new media? Where is organic traffic? Does paid traffic have a decent ROI in terms of brand engagement?

It depends.

I believe that the virtual digital economies which are developing as we speak will reshape the landscape of marketing as we know it. But do marketers do their best in order to engage with the customer, as brand ambassadors? The images above indicate that apart from the times that we press the button "Boost Post", things do not go very well in terms of brand engagement. Further KPI's, like numbers of comments and shares, retweets and favorites, per brand page, analyzed with statistical tools, should easily verify this hypothesis. I understand that perhaps, the higher the numbers, the higher is the brand perception and other key brand assets, but are the results discrete and measurable? 

In the long term, does the world have enough strategists to make optimum use of the new technologies and channels of communication?

For the time being we have:

• Google, Facebook, Twitter charging and gaining billions for "awareness" and "engagement".
• Overvalued IPOs, overnight millionaires, questionable business models, startups offering frivolous services, fake engagement tools and similar services.
• Marketers trying to deliver actions with ROI but frequently unable to achieve optimum brand engagement, let alone incremental sales or other corporate goals.
• 3B customers who are now online but have the same purchasing power that they would have if digital marketing wouldn't exist in a parallel universe.
• Academics trying to follow up and model consumer behavior versus both real-life and digital marketing stimuli as technology advances.

A nice bubble? I think, yes.

How would Aristotle structure his philosophical pillars if he was writing his "Athenian Constitution" in his free time while working as a Chief Marketing Officer for Facebook or Google?

21st century. Who will pay for the news?

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Win with Adwords Strategic Decisions

I make myself tiring when i say to my friends and colleagues again and again that what is missing nowadays is not skill, but critical thinking. Strategic insight and then tactical implementation.

Marketers are not an exception.

Now, if we think Adwords from a marketer’s holistic point of view, caution is necessary; otherwise our campaign is doomed to fail. What else could we put emphasis on, apart from grouping the keywords correctly, using optimized settings and then sitting back to drink scotch (or soda if you prefer), thus leaving our account to run without intervention?

Ignoring our Unique Selling Proposition

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. The USP states that such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer that convinced them to prefer or even switch brands. In Google Adwords, no part of the marketing campaign needs a USP more than our ads. If we write the headline, benefits and URLs without strategic insight on how to sell the offer to a specific customer, our ads will fail. The stimuli provided by the ad will not cause attention and perceptual selection, causing CTR and ad position in the search results to go down.

Instead, before writing any Adwords ads, we should try to understand and be ready to circulate the benefits of our advertised products or services. Understand our target customer, the needs and solutions they would value. Reflect all of these points in our ads and landing pages. Bid on the brand, not the money. Google may reward us with high quality score (QS) and customers will reward us with a good Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and, why not, feasible lead generation. This is the quintessence of marketing, after all. Satisfying customer needs.

“Highest bid for the highest position” strategy

“Turnover is vanity and profit is sanity”. I will bypass the theory behind the auction computational problem that is called Google Adwords, even though I strongly recommend deeper digging in publications of researchers like Aranyak Mehta or Nikhil Devanur as food for thought for the computational mechanism behind Adwords. The truth is that we must be stupid if we think that we must bid the most to get higher search result positions. This is a common Google Adwords budgeting mistake that will waste money and leave us with nothing more to spend very soon. It may get us to the top temporarily, but it’s definitely not a sustainable strategy for our resources. Especially if our PPC campaign is the part of our strategic marketing plan and we have limited budget.

Instead, we may opt for the long-term, budget-safe solution. Improve the relevancy and consistency of our ads, ad groups, keywords and landing pages, then Google will increase our Quality Score (QS). A good QS may increase the frequency of our ads at better positions and our CPC may go down. By improving overall quality in PPC campaigns, we end up to spend less budget for a higher position in the long-term.

Forgetting conversion profit margins & costs p.u.

Not setting up conversions for sales or enquiries so that ROI of this marketing action can be measured? No conversion tracking? Not understanding the profit margins and marketing costs per unit for our products or services so that we can set a price per click? FAIL.

When we spend €10,000 on Google Adwords, this is a cost. Marketing costs need to have a ROI. Wise planning of cost per conversion/impression/click/unit/day etcetera is highly recommended. Off course, there is always the opportunity cost, the cost of the missed opportunity. Ok, it’s time for some critical thinking, I guess. But come on, had we managed the account better and spent our budget in a smarter way, we may have had more satisfying financial results. Which is why we are paid for, at the end of the day.

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Intro to Data Mining for Marketers - Part 1

Data mining can be defined as the process of "discovering patterns, meaning and insights in large datasets by using statistical and computational methods". Data mining works to analyze data stored in data warehouses that are used to store that data that is being analyzed. That particular data may come from all parts of business, from the production to the management. Managers also use data mining to decide upon marketing strategies for their product. They can use data to compare and contrast among competitors. Data mining interprets its data into real time analysis that can be used to increase sales, promote new product, or delete product that is not value-added to the company.

History

Data mining was born in the fields of Statistics and Computer Science (some might say Artificial Intelligence) and may also be referred as “Statistical Learning”. From a statistical perspective, most early and recent advances coming from Statistics have come from the Stanford Statistics department school of thoughts like  Bradley Efron, Jerome H. Friedman, Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani. By the way, don’t forget that Stanford University is only 7 miles away from Google.

Stanford University ©

Data Mining Framework

Using data mining techniques, we, marketers, need to master an approach that will provide the decision makers with  a-priory knowledge about customers’ preferences and needs. Since there are many different kinds of customers with different kinds of needs and preferences, a simple, solid approach is meant to be a tool for performing market segmentation: divide the total market, choose the best segments, and design strategies for profitability serving the chosen segments better than the company’s competitors do. The example developed below is described for product development in auto industry, but it can be successfully implemented for any other applications where it is necessary to  find the correlations between the customer feelings or perceptions and the physical characteristics of a product. Yes, correlations, even through our statistics lenses. 

Yes,arithmophobia is over, my friend!

Understanding

Any data mining application should start by understanding the business goals of the application since the blind application of data mining techniques without  the requisite domain knowledge often leads to the discovery of irrelevant or meaningless patterns. In order to understand the target customers of an automotive company, it would be helpful to examine the relationships between the vehicle image/attributes and the customer emotional benefits that are tied to psychological needs, personality traits, and personal values. Thus, data mining can enable us to understand more completely how product specific characteristics relate to customer needs and the benefits a customer hopes to obtain from them. For instance, for many people, cars, homes, restaurants and vacations provide emotional benefits as well as rational benefits. However, for a wealthy person who has everything, the emotional benefits provided by status, prestige and superiority of an expensive automobile could outweigh rational benefits such as gas economy, lower maintenance and insurance costs, and resale value.  

A target audience perhaps? "Free to do anything, in control, confident, sporty but with family."

Therefore, it will be beneficial to have a tool that will help us to respond to questions such as: What and how many of the personality attributes used to describe the customer might be shaped by the vehicle’s image?  What kind of vehicle this customer or group of customers will buy?

Data selection

This step calls for targeting a database or selecting a subset of fields to be used for the data mining. The following issues should be considered in developing a plan for collecting data efficiently:

• Evaluation of existing data sources 
• Specification of research approaches 
• Data gathering (contact methods, sampling plans and instruments)

The survey research is a simple, efficient method to collect data. One of the advantages of the survey research is flexibility because it can be used to obtain many different kinds of information in many different situations. Furthermore, depending on the survey design, it may also provide information quicker at a lower cost compared to manual processing. The survey may be in the form of a questionnaire that is very flexible as there are many ways to ask questions. In preparing the questionnaire, only the questions contributing to the research objectives will be asked. The questions may be closed-ended, as they include all possible answers. In designing the survey, we also make sure that the questions are simple, direct and arranged in a logical order.  The first question should create interest if possible, and difficult or personal questions should be asked last so that respondents do not become defensive.

Instead of a traditional mail questionnaire, a more modern approach is the computer interviewing process, in which respondents sit down at a computer, read questions from a screen, and type their own answers into the computer at their own leisure. The beauty of this approach consists of its multiple benefits. As a first benefit, the respondents’ answers are automatically stored in a database. Furthermore, the survey is posted on the web and it can be accessible by an unlimited number of people. Filling out the survey becomes a non-time consuming task even for a busy person: the survey is on the web and it is accessible for anybody at any time; the submission of the completed survey requires only a ‘click on’ action executed by respondent, action possible  through an interactive survey implementation. 

Third, the computers might be located at different locations such as auto shows, dealerships, or retail locations. The biggest benefit is the collection of more relevant data since people present at those locations are most likely willing to answer correctly to the questions because they are interested in automobiles. The approach can be implemented such that the data is gathered from numerous computers  at different locations and stored in a unique and global database. As a fourth benefit, same survey format will be accessible to different categories of people: expert people (such as car designers) or people less familiar with auto domain characteristics. The large number of respondents and their diversity give more reliability on the results than small samples.


                                                      ...To be continued...

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Viral Marketing-A myth?

That ideas can go viral is now a given in corporate marketing and the culture – it’s even part of the plot of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad.” But new research suggests the term “viral” marketing does not describe accurately what happens in the market.

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Ο αλγόριθμος της Google - Part 2

(Συνέχεια από Αλγόριθμος της Google - Part 1)

 Aυτή είναι η βασική ιδέα πίσω από τη Google και αρχικό αλγόριθμο PageRank που κατασκεύασαν οι Page και Brin.Έκτοτε ο αλγόριθμος, ως στατική κατανομή της αλυσίδας Markov που αντιστοιχεί στο στοχαστικό πίνακα της Google,  έχει βελτιστοποιηθεί από τους PhDs της Google αρκετές φορές. Ενδεικτικά,πλέον η Google τον επαναπροσαρμόζει 500 φορές το χρόνο.

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Ο αλγόριθμος της Google - Part 1

 Πολύς λόγος γίνεται τα τελευταία χρόνια, για το SEO (Search Engine Optimization),για το οποίο κάναμε μία νύξη εδώ. Το SEO στην ουσία είναι η βελτιστοποίηση των αποτελεσμάτων όσον αφορά την ιστοσελίδα μας στις μηχανές αναζήτησης ,με πρώτη τη Google.

Πώς λειτουργεί η μηχανή αναζήτησης της Google;

 Η Google μέσω προγραμμάτων ανίχνευσης  χαρτογραφεί όλες τις ιστοσελίδες.   Οι  σελίδες κατηγοριοποιούνται και στην καθεμία ανατίθεται μία αριθμητική τιμή PageRank.Όταν κάνουμε μία αναζήτηση, οι σελίδες που εντοπίζονται ως απάντηση εμφανίζονται σε εμάς ανάλογα με την τιμή  PageRank που τους έχει ανατεθεί. Η κλίμακα διαβάθμισης του PageRank είναι από το 1 έως το 10 (PR1 - PR10). Όσο μεγαλύτερο Pagerank προσλαμβάνει μια ιστοσελίδα, τόσο υψηλότερη θέση έχει στην κατάταξη στα αποτελέσματα αναζήτησης.Το PageRank αντανακλά την πιθανότητα που έχει ένας χρήστης κάνοντας τυχαίες αναζητήσεις σε συνδέσμους να καταλήξει σε μία ιστοσελίδα ή εναλλακτικά το χρόνο που μακροπρόθεσμα θα αφιερώσει στη σελίδα αυτή.

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Tips για SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

 Όταν καθημερινά πραγματοποιούμε αναζητήσεις στις μηχανές αναζήτησης όπως το Google,το Yahoo ή το Bing,για κάτι που ενδεχομένως ψάχνουμε, προϊόν ή υπηρεσία, η μηχανή αναζήτησης απαντά με αποτελέσματα σύμφωνα με τον   επιτυχημένο αλγόριθμό της. Πρέπει δε να έχουμε υπόψη μας ότι η κυριότερη μηχανή αναζήτησης (με ποσοστό τουλάχιστον 2/3 της συνολικής αγοράς) είναι η Google.

 Σε μία υποθετική λοιπόν αναζήτηση στο Google.gr τα τρία πρώτα αποτελέσματα που βρίσκονται σε κίτρινο φόντο είναι διαφημίσεις. Τα υπόλοιπα είναι τα οργανικά αποτελέσματα αναζήτησης και αποτελούν ταξινομημένες ιστοσελίδες.

Τι είναι όμως το SEO?

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