Subject: The Rise of "Culture Marketing"

From: Chief Marketer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 08:50:09 -0600

March 8, 2005 | A PRIMEDIA Property |

Table of Contents
Branding: The Rise of "Culture Marketing"
Online Marketing: Registering Dissatisfaction
PR: This Time, Not a Peep Out of Bill O'Reilly
Quantitative Marketing: The Known, the Unknown, and the Danger of Deadlines
Demographic Targeting: Wait'll Next (Lunar) Year

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This Week's Stories
Branding: The Rise of "Culture Marketing"
By Betsy Spethmann
PROMO XTRA
Brands should ride the "participation revolution" among consumers in order to gear their marketing for the upcoming "culture economy." That's the message that futurist Andrew Zolli and International Events Group (IEG) president Lesa Ukman gave to attendees yesterday at the IEG Event Marketing Conference in Chicago.

"The relationship between brands and society will be a major opportunity and chafing point for the next century," said Zolli, founder of New York-based think tank Z + Partners. "People deeply resist the idea that they're merely consumers. They are participants -- and what's more, they are in control."

Branded content is the first glimpse of the current crossroads between culture and marketing. As with TV programming, branded content can be worked into sponsorships to enhance consumer experiences, Ukman said: "Rather than interrupting consumers' experiences, companies have an opportunity to enhance them. The big opportunity is to make people feel better about themselves because of a sponsorship."

To read more, visit PROMO.

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Online Marketing: Registering Dissatisfaction
If there's one thing American consumers don't like, it's being forced to do something. And if they're forced to register on a Website before they can complete a purchase from that site, they may well leave before they make the purchase.

According to the Keynote Customer Experience Rankings from e-commerce management services provider Keynote Systems, 25% of the 2,081 consumers surveyed cited forced online registration as a major frustration of shopping online, making it their top complaint. Twenty percent labeled difficulty in comparing items a frustration, while 17% complained that consumer ratings and reviews were inadequate or unavailable.

As for the key drivers of "brand impact" for online retailers, price satisfaction was the number-one factor, followed by visual appeal and customer support.

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PR: This Time, Not a Peep Out of Bill O'Reilly
By Andrew Grossman
It's rarely a good day when Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly blasts your organization in front of an audience of more than 2 million people.

That's what happened to the American Red Cross in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy when O'Reilly hammered the venerable relief agency for failing to act fast enough to channel millions of dollars in donations to victims' families.

Cut to another tragedy three years later as the Red Cross mobilized to raise more than $400 million in the wake of the Asian tsunami disaster. Asked to recommend a charity to trust, O'Reilly told viewers, "I'd go with the American Red Cross or Catholic Charities. Both seem to be well organized and accountable."

If you can win Bill O'Reilly over to your side, you're doing something right. And while Red Cross vice president Darren Irby is not likely to dwell on 9/11, he will point out to marketers next week why the lessons of crisis management are as relevant to a cookie company faced with a nationwide backlash over trans fats as they are to a relief agency. The venue is the MIT Sloan CMO Summit in Boston on March 16-18, and the topic is protecting a brand in a "hostile" marketplace.

"Sometimes organizations get so caught up in a particular path where they get so entrenched in trying to fox the problem internally, they can't see what trends are taking place externally," Irby told CHIEF MARKETER in an interview.

But when handled correctly, "a crisis can help a particular organization. Tylenol is the most famous one," Irby said, referring to Johnson & Johnson's up-front reaction after seven Chicago residents died from swallowing poisoned tablets in 1982. J&J won praise from critics and, more important, regained the trust of consumers by being proactive and honest about the incidents.

"When there's a sense of chaos, which can be internal--the CEO leaves, for instance--it's a matter of taking the basic procedures I'll be talking about, our standard operating procedures in times of disaster," Irby said.

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Quantitative Marketing: The Known, the Unknown, and the Danger of Deadlines
"In the universe, there are things that are known, and there are things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors," wrote William Blake. Those doors, according to a new white paper from database services provider Merkle, are key to "quantitative marketing."

In its paper, "Mastering Quantitative Marketing," Merkle suggests that marketers can improve their effectiveness by linking "known," observed facts and unobserved but "knowable" data: "For example, knowing the 'best' market segment-level pricing strategies for a new product launch may be currently unknown, but is imminently knowable with appropriate prelaunch customer research."

So far, quantitative marketing sounds like common sense. But while most chief marketing officers will probably agree that their organizations should be practicing it, according to Merkle three major issues prevent most organizations from doing so:

An inability to use the applicable data they have or to obtain the applicable data they need.

An inability to organize and implement the ideas that result from effective application of data. Lack of understanding, lack of infrastructure, high costs, lack of clear metrics, and organizational silos are among the reasons behind this pitfall.

The "functional complexity of marketing....As complexity increases there is a greater likelihood that decisions and initiatives start to focus on the process and timelines in order to meet production schedules. This is often in conflict with working on the 'right' things that will actually have a direct impact on results."

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Demographic Targeting: Wait'll Next (Lunar) Year
By Kathleen M. Joyce
PROMO
The lunar New Year celebrated by many Asian groups is a time of free spending. Asian-owned businesses hand out annual bonuses, often an extra month's pay or more. "The consumer market really booms," says Philip Chan, a sales manager for Mercedes Benz. "Everybody buys new clothes, gets a haircut before the New Year, and they buy new furniture, a new car, so it's really like the day after Thanksgiving."

Given that the current lunar year--the Year of the Rooster--began last month, you won't be able to take advantage of this knowledge for quite some time. But it's well worth planning for: By 2008, nearly 5% of the country's population will claim Asian ancestry, according to the Simon S. Selig Jr. Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, and Asian-American buying power will reach $526 billion. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 12.5 million Asian Americans in 2002, with median annual incomes almost $10,000 higher than those of the general population.

A number of brands show appreciation for their Asian American clientele, at least in (primarily urban) markets where there are large concentrations of Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian ethnicities. Southwest Airlines sponsors the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco; the Hilton at LAX has had all of its rooms redecorated in the feng shui style to accommodate its Asian guests.

To read more, visit PROMO.

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