Subject: Those Good Ol' Reptilian Impulses

From: Chief Marketer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 07:50:02 -0600

January 25, 2005 | A PRIMEDIA Property |

Table of Contents
Branding: Appeal to the Reptilian Impulses
Web Marketing: Why Blogs Matter to You
Event Marketing: Guerilla Marketing Grows Up
Promotions: What Wins Over Buyers Doesn't Always Keep Them
Demographics: The Overlooked Asian Market
Retail: Merchants, Consumers Have Different Priorities
Win Kudos, Boost Morale, Create Buzz...

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This Week's Stories
Branding: Appeal to the Reptilian Impulses
By Margery Weinstein
CATALOG AGE
Your customer's conception of your brand is formed from his first experience or "imprint" with your company, or more generally, with the products you sell. But without emotion, according to psychiatrist and author Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, there is not enough neural transmission to garner a strong memory. During a session at last week's National Retail Federation Convention in New York, Dr. Rapaille cited several examples of how marketers can benefit from this knowledge.

Folgers Coffee, for instance, was able to make use of the first impression consumers had with coffee, which, said Dr. Rapaille, is its scent. People smell the product when they are children, long before they're old enough to drink it. The scent becomes linked in a person's mind with his mother making coffee in the kitchen as she prepares to feed him. Dr. Rapaille found through the use of surveys that 97% of coffee drinkers love the smell of it, while only 43% drink it because they like the taste. So Folgers created an ad campaign centered on the smell rather than taste of its product. This is the reason that commercials for Folgers focus on the customer opening the package and savoring the scent, rather than on the actual experience of drinking it.

The main reason a scent linked with family and the consumer's mother is so powerful, said Rapaille, is that the home is part of a category of subconscious motivations that he has termed "reptilian," meaning they are prehistoric instincts geared towards survival and reproduction into the next generation. These, he said, are the most compelling motivations. "The reptilian always wins when people are trying to figure out what to do," he said. The second class of motivation is "limbic," or governed by the limbic system in the brain that controls emotion. This is the category of motivations where the differences in how men and women react to products and advertising campaigns can be seen. While men, he said, are akin to a simple box with an on/off switch, women are more like a box that has multiple options to choose from. "These are the people who buy your products," he noted, "but most companies are run by men with a box and on/off button."

To read more about Dr. Rapaille's findings and how they can improve your marketing strategies, visit CATALOG AGE.

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Web Marketing: Why Blogs Matter to You
SEARCHLINE
Obviously blogs have an impact on the folks who create them -- about 8 million people in the U.S., according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project -- and those who read them (32 million, per the same study.) But the Pew research also found that 62% of American Internet users still don't know what a "blog" is. What difference can this blogging trend make in their lives?

If they search the Web, it does. Search engines like Google and Yahoo spider blogs extensively because they have two attributes the engines value: a continuous stream of fresh content and lots of links, both inbound and outbound, suggesting popularity. The blogging influence on search, and thus on search engine marketing, is real.

Unfortunately, some of that influence has been less than benign. Recognizing that the engines rely heavily on blogs, some Website owners have manipulated that system by posting links to their URLs in the public comment boxes provided at the end of many blog stories. This can increase their Web traffic, but more important, it can produce higher organic rankings for their sites on the search engines, since search crawlers find those links and assume they're from legitimate posters. The insertions can be done automatically by bot software, so abusers don't even need to invest sweat equity in inflating their page ranks.

Beyond this sort of "comment spam," Gene McKenna, chief technology officer for online marketing firm Digital Impact, says there are numerous synergies among blogs, search, and the Web that will permit coordinated cross-channel marketing. Of course, the most basic of these is to create your own blog, but that's tricky. Blogs need care and feeding. Their high refresh rates are part of their attraction for search engines, so a blog that lies fallow won't help a company's Web ranking.

To read more about the marketing challenges and opportunities created by blogs, visit DIRECT.

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Event Marketing: Guerilla Marketing Grows Up
PROMO
Guerilla marketing is growing as mass media fades and more marketers adopt non-traditional methods. The trick will be for marketers to keep their edge as guerilla marketing becomes more commonplace and less surprising.

"Back in 1999, dressing someone up in a costume on the street was considered out-of-the-box marketing. Traditional marketers didn't consider guerilla marketing to be 'grown up' marketing," says Linda Bennett, senior director of buzz marketing at Yahoo. Today it's more layered and complex, blending off- and online ads and promos. "The fine line is, How do we push the subculture feel of guerilla marketing without becoming traditional and being seen as sellouts? That's the art," Bennett says.

Street teams are the cornerstone of guerilla success. Some brands are using event-marketing dollars to fund semipermanent and permanent street teams in local markets. "You have highly trained staff throughout the year, vs. personnel that are just rented for a weekend event," says Bradford Bryen, president of New York-based U.S. Concepts.

Such teams often work with national mobile-marketing tours. This winter, Nintendo shows off its new Nintendo DS gaming system with a tour of snowboarding events that piggybacks snowboard maker Burton's 10-market Burton Demo Tour, running Dec. 31-March 13. Nintendo is also a sponsor of the Philips U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships in Vermont, where tricked-out tractor-trailers or SUVs staffed by Nintendo street teams demo the new handheld gaming system and the latest GameCube software. A schedule is posted at Nintendo.com with details on street team appearances. U.S. Concepts handles street teams for Nintendo.

For more on guerilla marketing, visit PROMO.

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Promotions: What Wins Over Buyers Doesn't Always Keep Them
All marketers know that sales, coupons, and other promotions can yield short-term gains. But a holiday 2004 study by ForeSee Results, a Web development strategic firm, confirms that such offers don't necessarily build long-term loyalty.

Fifty-eight percent of multichannel consumers surveyed said that promotions caused them to buy from a particular company that they would not otherwise have purchased from. Free shipping was particularly effective: 75% of those offered free shipping with their online purchase said that the offer influenced their decision to buy from the particular Website.

But the satisfaction level of and the likelihood of a repeat purchase by customers who were offered free shipping was only marginally higher than that of consumers who didn't receive free shipping offers.

What's more, ForeSee found that one-quarter of consumers chose the Web over another channel due to online-only promotions. In a white paper, ForeSee president/CEO Larry Freed wrote, "Retailers may simply be causing customers to switch channels by offering incentives to use the 'wrong' channel instead of the customers' true preferred channel for dealing with the company...which may ultimately lead to lower satisfaction and decreased loyalty."

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Demographics: The Overlooked Asian Market
Hispanics are the current "hot" demographic among marketers, but the nation's 12.5 million Asians and Pacific Islanders are a significant group worth targeting.

According to a recently released report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the median annual income of Asian families is almost $10,000 higher than that of U.S. families as a whole. They are also more likely than the total population as a whole to be in management or professional occupations.

Among the myriad ethnic groups that make up the Asian American marketplace, five have more than 1 million members in the U.S.: Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indians, Vietnamese, and Koreans. Given that 95% of Asian Americans live in urban areas. targeting specific groups within the demographic is manageable.

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Retail: Merchants, Consumers Have Different Priorities
By Jeff Morris
OPERATIONS & FULFILLMENT
While merchants and their customers believe that superior customer service is extremely important, the two differ on the most important customer service elements, according to a new national survey conducted by the NRF Foundation, an arm of the National Retail Federation, and the American Express Co. According to the survey, all merchants believe that customer service is extremely important, and 55% believe they have become more committed to customer service. However, stores also acknowledge that their customers do not feel that merchant commitment has changed.

When asked what customers thought was important, many merchants overestimated the value of certain service elements. For example, while 61% of merchants thought customers would say it was extremely important for store employees to be well educated about the merchandise, only 52% of customers cited that factor as being very important. Additionally, 44% of merchants thought their customers would find it extremely important that employees get to know customers, while only 25% of customers saw it as extremely valuable. More than a third of merchants (35%) thought their customers would place a high importance on the quality of merchandise offered, though only one in five consumers felt quality was extremely important.

The result of these discrepancies in perception is that retailers put extra emphasis on customer service elements that are not as important to shoppers while underemphasizing others that are very important to their customers. Nearly three out of four customers (71%) are extremely concerned with accurate item prices, though only 58% of retailers thought accurate pricing was critically important to customers. While three out of four shoppers (73%) felt that it was extremely important that retailers not share information with other companies, only 59% of retailers saw this as important to shoppers. And while only 31% of retailers felt it was extremely important to customers that their stores were staffed with an adequate number of employees, 47% of customers thought that aspect was extremely important.

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Win Kudos, Boost Morale, Create Buzz...
Would you like to see your e-commerce site or print catalog -- or that of your clients -- get the recognition it deserves? Then enter CATALOG AGE's Annual Catalog Awards and I.Merchant Awards, the industry's most prestigious award programs. By popular demand, the deadline has been extended to Jan. 31.

To download an Annual Catalog Award entry, visit catalogagemag.com/specialreports/ACA%20Entry%20Form.pdf

To download an I.Merchant Award entry, visit catalogagemag.com/specialreports/IMA%20Entry%20Form.pdf

For more information, visit catalogagemag.com/specialreports/ACARules.pdf or contact Heather Retzlaff at 203-358-4233 or [email-masked].

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