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Reflection on HBR Article: Branding in the Age of Social Media

Because of the rising of new technologies and social media channels, customers are no longer attracted to traditional media like TV or magazines only. The companies are forced to compete with the entertainment contents that have large followers and audiences on social media. I find it interesting to see that corporate brands barely appear in YouTube or Instagram rankings. The companies need to think of the reasons why consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. Is it too commercialized, or is it lack of creativity? I personally do not search for brand contents on YouTube/Instagram as well, most of the times I am viewing celebrities, fashion advice or makeup tutorials. Customers tend to view more “sponsored” contents in YouTube instead of the videos from corporate official accounts. Therefore, for many brands, they choose to sponsor or partner with influencers/celebrities on social media to get to their potential customers or pay for the sponsor posts.

I think it can be one way for companies to increase impression on social media, but companies should think of more effective social media campaigns that can truly attract more crowds and emotionally build the relationship with them. I think Under Armour’s campaign is a great example of cultural branding and creating content with impact. They successfully used female celebrities to push against gender norms and resonated with women consumers and gone viral. Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” is also a successful one which has reached almost 80 million views on YouTube now. They celebrated the real women’s physiques and improved their old brand images by following the trends.

Lean Cuisine did a similar campaign as well on social media which I really like, they successfully shifted away from a diet brand and connected with the crowdculture by delivering women empowerment messages. Instead of weighing women’s bodies, the women in the video were weighing by their accomplishments, and the artist then painted women’s heartwarming responses on scales in Grand Central Station. This kind of social media campaign can really attract the crowdculture and increase participation in social channels. The companies with the successful social media campaign all successfully capture the customer’s needs, deliver their brand value creatively, improve their brand image and create inspiration through the brand content. I think these are the insights for companies to compete for crowdcultures on social media.

Reference: Branding in the Age of Social Media by Douglas Holt, March 2016

https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media

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Reflection on HBR Article: The Ultimate Marketing Machine

Purposeful positioning is an important winning characteristic of high performing organizations. According to the research in the article, companies with high organizational effectiveness are delivering three manifestations of their brand purposes: functional benefits, emotional benefits, and societal benefits. In terms of functional benefits, they stand in customer’s shoes and think of the thing customers will do with their products or services. For emotional benefits, the products should provide them satisfaction and meet their emotional needs. For societal benefits, sustainability is definitely an important topic if the company need to have a long-term operation and loyalty customers base. Corporation Social Responsibility is essential for companies to have the long-term sustainable business. Take Coca-Cola as an example, they were always in the controversy of being unethical and bad to the environment or health. They keep looking for ways to repair the situation and doing campaigns that make them profitable and ethical at the same time. They are emphasizing care for the communities and making creative campaigns to improve their brand reputation, for example, their “Hello Happiness Campaign” is an impressive one, which let the Dubai laborers call home with bottle caps. It definitely showed their care for society.

Through the internet and social media nowadays, people are more likely to engage and spread messages. It is true that the companies considering social sustainability provide more benefits, not only the profit, they can also gain trust from customers and communities. The marketers in the top performing companies are delivering powerful and clear brand purpose to create alignment throughout the organizations. The employees in the organizations need to have the clear understanding of their brand positioning, instead of listening to disconnected business goals or brand messages. It will not only have inconsistent messaging across touchpoints but also confuse the customers. Branding is important to influence customers’ perception, buying psychology and behaviors. I think the AkzoNobel’s Dulux is a great example of setting the consistent brand and business goals for different regions and channels. Companies should understand how customers perceive their brands and the three types of benefits mentioned above. The marketing campaigns can only be created after the company has a clear brand purpose, like the Coca-Cola’s example above. In the digital ages, campaigns with clear brand purpose can be successfully spread, increased the consumption and media impressions globally.

Reference: The Ultimate Marketing Machine. By Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, and Keith Weed. July–August 2014

https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-ultimate-marketing-machine

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Reflection on Accenture’s Research Report: Role of the Corporate Website

It is important to make the corporate website as a part of the company’s digital marketing strategy. First of all, a good corporate website can help attract more customers and get higher sales. For the retail business, more and more customers start to purchase online. According to the data in the article, the majority of countries have higher online retail sales than before and will be higher in the future. Before customers making purchase, they tend to look at the brand websites looking for information and making purchase decisions. Therefore, the corporate website is an important place to use digital marketing strategy in order to attract more customers and sales. For new customers, optimizing corporate website will help generate more clicks and customer interest. For returning customers, a good website can engage them and build long-term brand loyalty. Next, with the corporate websites, CMOs can tract their performance based on the customer data generated. It can help them improve through time. For example, they can use Google Analytics as the tool to see their performance metrics, such as users amount or bounce rates. Companies can, therefore, make testing on different features and designs to optimize the customer experience.

Companies should look at different performance factors about their websites. A clear navigation can help customers find the information they need. For customer service, the big consumer electronics companies like Microsoft or Apple all have the online contact support option where customers can communicate with assistants. For a new company building the website, it is important for them to create a clear branding message and build trust by showing enough information. Relationship building is also important, customers should have personalized and continuous experiences with the website. Take Amazon as an example, they have relevant and customized pages for different customers to view. It will build closer relationships with the customers and have better brand loyalty. In terms of customer’s journey when making purchases, companies need to make the purchasing steps as simple and clear as possible, or they will confuse the customers and lose them eventually. As the author addressed, registration is an important feature to build the relationship. Customers should be encouraged to register to the information instead of visiting and never coming back to the pages. Another reason is that it can help companies to track their customers and make efforts to offer them integrated/consistent experience between different channels.

Reference: The Role of the Corporate Website in the Critical Customer Conversion Journey. An Accenture Electronics and High Tech Digital Channel Study. 2013

http://www.accountingnet.ie/business_finance/The_Role_of_the_Corporate_Website_in_the_Critical_Customer_Conversion_Journey_printer.php

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Hidden Metric of Email Deliverability

Among the hidden metrics of email deliverability, I want to focus on the read rate of emails as an important metric for marketers. Read rate is defined as the number of emails that are marked as “read” out of all emails sent (returnpath.com). Different from the open rate, it accounts for all emails viewed including emails with enabled images as well. According to the study (returnpath.com), the average read rate in 2017 was 21.5 percent. The industries with the highest read rate were the Distribution & Manufacturing and insurance companies, while business & marketing and education/nonprofit/government had the lowest.

The reason I think it is an important metric for marketers is that it is straightforward and it tells us if the email is delivering a successful campaign or not. Marketers can do testing on different campaigns to see which ones work the best. The successful campaigns are the ones that attract subscribers so that subscribers are more willing to open and read. As a subscriber myself, I don’t read all the brand emails in my inbox because there are around 50 a day. But I am usually attracted to the emails with good subject lines and read them. For the other emails, I leave them unread without deleting them. Therefore, it is important for marketers to think of good subject lines. I have noticed that many emails have subject lines like “ends today”, “up to 40% off” and so on to create urgent feelings for subscribers. However, when all the emails are showing similar subject lines like that nowadays, subscribers will lose the interests over time. So, I think marketers should think of more creative subject lines and unique contents to be standout. It is also common that subscribers read the emails and leave the page without any further clicks or engagement. Hence, it is also essential for marketers to deliver consistent information in the email to retain the subscribers.

On the other hand, I think some features in email nowadays is affecting the deliverability and read rate. For example, the outlook allows users to separate emails to “focused” and “other”. The brand emails with promotion or campaign information are usually going into the “other” section, therefore the read rate for these emails will decrease when people are using more of these new features. Another feature is the “Mark as Read” button which allows users to mark one or many emails as read, which can also be a disadvantage for marketers to know the true deliverability.

Reference: The 2018 Hidden Metrics of Email Deliverability. Industry Benchmarks for 7 Key Metrics.

https://digital.returnpath.com/wp-content/uploads/main/2018/02/RP-2018-Marketing-Metrics.pdf

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Reflection to the article "Bringing Digital to Wimbledon"

The characteristics of Wimbledon is different from other tournaments. For example, Wimbledon is the only major tennis tournament that played on grass courts. It is creating a unique and special experience for customers and for players. The grass court is also reflecting the Wimbledon “brand” of epitomizing British traditions and being the most high-end sports event worldwide (Gourville & Arnold, 2017). The uniqueness and its superior characteristic are attracting global fans’ attention. Going “digital” is a great way of showing their brand values to more worldwide audiences. According to the article, it is remarkable that Wimbledon has a large audience size of advocate fans (Gourville & Arnold, 2017), which means they have the potential of increasing that audience size as they are considering more digital marketing.

Wimbledon’s goals are to increase awareness, understanding, and engagement in a long-term (Gourville & Arnold, 2017). Different from other tournaments, Wimbledon does not have the large pressure of increasing income or maximize audience in a short term. They do not use aggressive commercialization in the sports events, so they have to think of ways to increase their long-term value. Therefore, they value their audiences and want to create content to drive their engagement on channels. In terms of the audience’s viewing behaviors, viewers are switching to online media and mobile devices from traditional TV screens. The digital advertising is replacing the traditional TV advertising. It is then critical for Wimbledon to understand the importance of using digital methods to keep fans engaged. They can use social media platforms to create a unique experience for audiences and show the brand value to global viewers. There are different advantages for Wimbledon to focus on digital marketing strategies for different age groups. For younger ages, they can increase the awareness of the Wimbledon brand by showing their uniqueness in innovative forms. For the existing middle-aged Wimbledon fans, they can also increase their loyalty by upgrading the digital engagement. Digital marketing is creating the personalized experience for different customer segments, which is what traditional ways cannot achieve.

Through digital marketing, Wimbledon is also executing different campaigns of sharing Wimbledon histories and their brand value (Gourville & Arnold, 2017). They are even partnering with influencers on social media, increasing engagement by optimizing the customer experiences during “The Queue” (Gourville & Arnold, 2017). The new digital channels are definitely helping the Wimbledon brand to communicate and engage with global fans.

Reference: “Bringing Digital to Wimbledon” by John T. Gourville and David Arnold

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Why am I taking a Digital Marketing class at NYU?

Without any marketing background before, I am always interested in learning the integrated marketing knowledge and techniques, especially the most useful digital marketing strategies. Two years ago, I started up an online consulting company which helped students and unemployed to find jobs using psychological assessments. Under the trends of increasing e-commerce and internet customers, I transferred our offline assessment and consulting into online. I enjoyed the process of designing and building a company website with both computer and mobile versions. However, I was totally stacked in the marketing stages. Although I had the website and social media accounts as platforms for sharing contents/blogs weekly, I did not know how to use them and make marketing activities to promote my product and service. I had to upgrade the marketing analysis and strategies in a more professional and comprehensive way. With my immature practical experiences, a systematic study on marketing was what I needed to strengthen myself with the necessary marketing knowledge and abilities to achieve goals step by step.

I am hoping the Digital Marketing class at NYU will help me understand different formats of digital marketing, how to go through the journey with customers, how to enhance the relationship and so on. I have not heard of SEO and SEM before, but as a user online, I am surrounded by paid advertising, email marketing, content marketing, or organic search every day. I was not familiar with blog and content marketing before and did not know that it could actually help the company drive brand awareness and traffics. I am interested in learning more tactics. The class so far has taught me many digital marketing strategies, customer journey, and how to do a marketing campaign and so on. By working on the digital marketing plans, I will learn how to deal with more real cases and apply different digital marketing strategies learned through the process.