Like & surlike :
Author Archives: 730mapledays
Patagonia
FAST COMPANY.COM
How Patagonia Makes More Money By Trying To Make Less
WRITTEN BY: Jeff Rosenblum
The company’s proposition–that you not buy its clothes–is resulting in some of its best sales ever.
It’s holiday season and retailers are gearing up with every technique possible to maximize revenue for the next few weeks. Some retailers will earn more during the holiday shopping season than in the previous months combined, and already this year’sBlack Friday online sales set a record by topping $1 billion for the first time, according to comScore. Sales for Cyber Monday were expected to exceed $1.5 billion, another record.
But in the midst of this shopping mania, one prominent retailer took a different approach.
Instead of blasting sales prices and urging consumers to load up their virtual shopping carts, Patagonia encourages consumers to buy less by promoting its Common Threads Initiative on its home page, advocating sustainability. The company says: “We design and sell things made to last and be useful. But we ask our customers not to buy from us what you don’t need or can’t really use. Everything we make–everything anyone makes–costs the planet more than it gives back.”
This holiday campaign follows last year’s groundbreaking advertising strategy featuring an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday saying “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” That’s right–an ad discouraging sales on the biggest shopping day of the year.
But like any great campaign, their message the past two years is tied to the brand’s promise. Environmentalism is at the core of Patagonia, but to specifically discourage sales is an unusual maneuver since Patagonia is not a non-profit organization. It’s an exceptionally profitable manufacturer and retailer generating $400 million in revenue each year. Patagonia makes some of the best, and most expensive outdoor gear in the world, but the company’s mission is bigger than simply maximizing profit. The mission is: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
That would be an easy pursuit if Patagonia didn’t care about running a great business. But therein lies the lesson. Patagonia has found a way to marry good business with its brand promise. According to Patagonia’s Director of Environmental Strategy, Jill Dumain, “If I wanted to make the most money possible, I would invest in environmentally responsible supply chains … these are the best years in our company’s history.”
The company is making money by living its brand promise. They actively invest in reducing their carbon footprint and exposing associated challenges online through The Footprint Chronicles. This feature allows customers to track the environmental impact of any Patagonia item. They even explained why you shouldn’t buy the jacket: “To make it required 135 liters of water, enough to meet the daily needs (three glasses a day) of 45 people. Its journey from its origin as 60% recycled polyester to our Reno warehouse generated nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, 24 times the weight of the finished product. This jacket left behind, on its way to Reno, two-thirds its weight in waste.”
Thus, Patagonia’s audience trusts the brand, admires its values, and aspires to live by the same principles. Very few brands can compete on quality and price alone. Your brand doesn’t necessarily need to invest in the environment or take such risky maneuvers. However, it can’t be built exclusively through great products and great advertisements. That model is antiquated. Consumers have too much information and too few dollars. They want to invest in brands that have similar values to their own. Perhaps that simply means your product has more advanced engineering, is more user-friendly, or has better customer service. Those are all viable brand elements that create a powerfully rational connection with consumers. Ideally, your brand would also embody behaviors that elicit an emotional connection, such as investing in social, educational, or environmental responsibility.
Building a brand platform like Patagonia’s is difficult, expensive, and somewhat risky. But, when brands reduce the amount they spend on paid media, they can invest in building a brand which will help their paid media work significantly better, and more importantly, create brand evangelists.
Find your greatness!
Water is a serious problem –
Procter & Gamble forever!
Quand j’ai vu ce spot la première fois, j’ai été très touchée, je me suis dit “ils sont quand même forts” …. et une pointe d’agacement sur une perception légèrement too much et peut être trop facile.
Fin 2012, je revois ce spot et je suis convaincue, qu’encore une fois, P&G a su faire passer un cap à notre relation avec nos consommateurs.
1) la ménagère de moins de 50 ans est enterrée, vive la maman active et dédiée à ses enfants (hardest but best job :-))))
2) P&G dépasse encore une fois ses supers produits, ses supers marques ….welcome la super company qui accompagne / qui nous accompagne dans la vie de tous les jours pour nous rendre la vie plus facile (cela me rappelle le tournant des années 2000 pour Pampers ou la marque a transcendé son super pouvoir de dryness pour aider les jeunes mamans dans leur découverte de cette nouvelle responsabilité (Happy mum and baby relationship!)…. bref, une bonne vision efficace et inspirante :-))))
3) l’opportunité est JO est unique pour donner un echo héroïque et massif à ce spot,
4) l’éxécution est finalement assez réussie et parvient à nous faire verser quelques larmes.
Juste sublime – L’Odyssée de Cartier
J’ai aimé la première fois …. et je le revois avec toujours autant de plaisir….
Une jolie histoire sur une marque qui a su chercher en elle pour nous faire rêver à nouveau ….
Unique, ownable, et memorable !
Healthy and sound rituals
Fast company – extracts
6 Simple Rituals To Reach Your Potential Every Day
BY AMBER RAE
DECEMBER 4, 2012
Becoming and staying productive isn’t about hard-to-follow programs or logging your every move in an app. It’s about self-care. Here are daily to-dos to get you started.
Here are the six simple rituals he uses to perform at his highest, which you too can begin implementing right away:
1. Drink a glass of water when you wake up. Your body loses water while you sleep, so you’re naturally dehydrated in the morning. A glass of water when you wake helps start your day fresh. When do you drink your first glass of water each day?
2. Define your top 3. Every morning Mike asks himself, “What are the top three most important tasks that I will complete today?” He prioritizes his day accordingly and doesn’t sleep until the Top 3 are complete. What’s your “Top 3” today?
3. The 50/10 Rule. Solo-task and do more faster by working in 50/10 increments. Use a timer to work for 50 minutes on only one important task with 10 minute breaks in between. Mike spends his 10 minutes getting away from his desk, going outside, calling friends, meditating, or grabbing a glass of water. What’s your most important task for the next 50 minutes?
4. Move and sweat daily. Regular movement keeps us healthy and alert. It boosts energy and mood, and relieves stress. Most mornings you’ll find Mike in a CrossFit or a yoga class. How will you sweat today?
5. Express gratitude. Gratitude fosters happiness, which is why Mike keeps a gratitude journal. Every morning, he writes out at least five things he’s thankful for. In times of stress, he’ll pause and reflect on 10 things he’s grateful for. What are you grateful for today?
6. Reflect daily. Bring closure to your day through 10 minutes of reflection. Mike asks himself, “What went well?” and “What needs improvement?” So… what went well today? How can you do more of it?
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant”
Fast company
RESEARCH—YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. HOW UNCOVERING THE UNCONSCIOUS IS KEY TO CREATIVITY
BY: DOUGLAS VAN PRAET
If you think consumers are telling you what they want in traditional research, you’re wrong. Deutsch’s Douglas Van Praet argues that marketers must look to unconscious behavior for real creative breakthroughs.
Businesses invest billions of dollars annually in market research studies developing and testing new ideas by asking consumers questions they simply can’t answer. Asking consumers what they want, or why they do what they do, is like asking the political affiliation of a tuna fish sandwich. That’s because neuroscience is now telling us that consumers, i.e., humans, make the vast majority of their decisions unconsciously.
Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research. When a reporter once asked him how much research he conducted to develop the iPad, he quipped, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.” And according to some measures, the iPad became the most successful consumer product launch ever and Apple went on to become the most valuable company of all-time.
Marketers are living a delusion that the conscious mind, the self-chatter in their heads and the so-called “verbatims” in surveys and focus groups, are the guiding forces of action. They are talking to themselves, not to the deeper desires of people, rationalizing the need for the wrong tools aimed at the wrong target, and the wrong mind. They have hamstrung an industry based upon backwards thinking by encouraging concepts that beat the research testing system, rather than move people in the real world. Not surprisingly, there is a sea of sameness and mediocrity and merely 2 out of 10 products launched in the U.S. succeed. The truth is the unconscious mind, the seat of our motivations, communicates in feelings, not words.
Einstein once said: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Creativity, the indispensable fuel of economic growth, is being killed by a corporate culture of wrongheadedness. It’s time to stop the violence! It’s time to honor the gift of the unconscious mind!
I know this firsthand because I have been “that guy.” I am a brand strategist, a market researcher, a sometimes bearer of bad news and unfortunately, a killer of creativity based upon flimsy reasoning and flawed research. “Don’t kill the messenger,” I’d jest. “Let’s kill your idea instead,” I’d mutter beneath my breath. My frustration with the tools of my trade led me to search for a more enlightening message.
I found it not in the research of marketers but in the research of cognitive authorities in evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, and behavioral economics. I became a behavioral change therapist specializing in unconscious behaviorism, helping people change their lives for the better, the same things they seek in brands. I reverse-engineered what I learned, starting with the things that were proven to yield real results in real people. I created a seven-step process to behavior change, one that I have been applying to ad strategies with remarkable success ever since.
These are the seven steps: 1) Interrupt the Pattern, 2) Create Comfort, 3) Lead the Imagination, 4) Shift the Feeling, 5) Satisfy the Critical Mind, 6) Change the Associations, and 7) Take Action.
These steps also explain the success of highly effective iconic campaigns created by those that have perhaps intuited these laws of influence. Take for instance the famous Old Spice campaign created by Wieden+Kennedy that leveraged the first of my seven steps: Interrupt the Pattern.
Freud once conceded: “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.” Great ad people are like these poets. Fortunately neuroscience is now empowering access to the streams of our collective unconscious, a new view that will help create and sell better ideas. Let’s deconstruct a brilliant case of effective use of “pattern interrupts.”
Brands are learned behaviors or expectations of outcomes based upon past experience that eventually become second nature. The pathway to our unconscious and the best way to learn something is through conscious attention. And nothing focuses our attention better than surprise and novelty. That’s because our brain is a pattern recognizer or prediction machine. It learns through the satisfying release of dopamine, the “feel good” chemical messenger of “wanting” behavior. And novelty activates this system. The purpose of this surge in dopamine is to draw attention to potentially important information and a possible new pattern by sending a signal to the brain to take notice and learn, which happens to be the key roles of advertising.
Old Spice transformed its stodgy image with an infectious campaign that was brimming with these pattern interrupts, creating a cooler contemporary image. It introduced the world to the charismatic hunk of Isaiah Mustafa or “the man your man could smell like.” The magic behind this effort is not just the smooth pitchman of body wash, but the equally smooth and unsuspecting “interrupts.”
One of these spots has the great-smelling Isaiah go, in the span of a mere 30 seconds, from standing at an outdoor shower to log rolling in the wilderness, to carrying a gourmet cake, to remodeling a kitchen with a power saw, to swan diving off a waterfall into a hot tub, and finally . . . as the walls of the hot tub collapse, we are left with him straddling a classically cool motorcycle. Our brains are surprised and amused . . . again and again and again . . . with the reward of dopamine and the payout of attention. With an amazing 1.4 billion impressions, it captured more than attention–it changed behavior, spiking sales over a year ago by 27% in the six months since the launch. One of the original commercials for this campaign alone has generated a massive 43 million views on YouTube to date.
These are not creative self-indulgences but hardworking devices that universally galvanize our focus and spark a rush of good vibes that we all instinctively share. And that dopamine high is essentially that elusive viral “buzz” marketers demand from their agencies but also make so difficult to create.
Douglas Van Praet is the author of Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing. He is also Executive Vice President at agency Deutsch L.A., where his responsibilities include Group Planning Director for the Volkswagen account. Van Praet’s approach to advertising and marketing draws from unconscious behaviorism and applies neurobiology, evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics to business problems.
[Image: Flickr users Sarah Faulwetter, RawheaD Rex, and Sol Goldberg]
What kind of future?
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680977/alternative-futures-for-todays-popular-brands
Alternative Futures For Today’s Popular Brands
The world is going to be a very different place in 2030, and what makes a brand powerful will be entirely different. A design agency gave these three brands unasked-for makeovers so that they’ll be as powerful in the future as they are now.
In a resource-constrained world, big brands have to make major adjustments. Some are already doing this; the Institute for the Future and Forum for the Future are often tapped by companies to offer insight into the future global landscape. Others still operate unaware of (or unwilling to pay attention to) the shifting environment around us.
Fiona Bennie, head of sustainability for design and innovation agency Dragon Rouge(and former sustainability advisor for the Forum for the Future), worked with a design team to come up with a series of concepts for how today’s well-known brands could adapt to an “aspirational future” in 2030–that is, a future where humanity hasn’t devolved into an apocalyptic cesspool.
The six brands chosen–Primark, Bupa, Argos, EasyJet, Rio Tinto, and Morrisons–are all popular in the U.K. (where Bennie is based) and span a variety of sectors, from transportation to mining. “We wanted to go with strong-loved brands. We went to brands that aren’t necessarily really outspoken on sustainability,” says Bennie.
None of the brands were consulted for the project, which examines the brands as they exist today and then offers alternative versions of what they might become. Popular airline EasyJet is reimagined as a high-speed rail company. British health care organization Bupa is refashioned as a global preventative health care specialist. And clothing retailer Primark is transformed into a style subscription service. “We deliberately kept ourselves away. We let Rio Tinto know [about the project] because they’re a Dragon Rouge client, but they didn’t have any input,” says Ruth Wyatt of Dragon Rouge.
Here, we look at some of our favorite versions of Dragon Rouge’s brand futures.
EASYJET
If you’ve traveled in Europe, you’ve probably encountered EasyJet. It’s the biggest airline in the U.K., and it’s the second biggest low-cost airline in Europe (RyanAir is first). But despite the company’s earnest overtures towards sustainability, it’s impossible to ignore the realities of air travel: It guzzles lots of fuel, and it’s responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. While some airlines are moving towards biofuel, the industry will rely on fossil fuels for a long time to come.
So Dragon Rouge’s future rebrands EasyJet as a high-speed rail operation that retains the company’s values (more value for less, honesty, fun, etc.). In this future, EasyJet connects the smart grid and offers fares based on excess capacity. All trains give energy back to the grid via an “advanced kinetic energy recovery system.”
RIO TINTO
Today, Rio Tinto calls itself the “world leader in finding, mining, and processing the earth’s mineral resources.” Tomorrow, Dragon Rouge imagines that it will instead be “the global leader in sourcing, grading, re-purposing, and processing the world’s used metals, plastics, and minerals.” With metals and minerals creeping up in cost, pressures to mine sustainably, and concerns about issues like peak metal, it makes sense for Rio Tinto to turn towards re-use. After all, we throw away unconscionable amounts of perfectly good materials with our old electronics.
The alternative future version of Rio Tinto takes in used materials for recycling and ensures that its leased metals, plastics, and minerals all come back to it at the end of use. The company also has mastered landfill mining techniques.
MORRISONS
This popular U.K. supermarket chain is facing many of the same issues as other supermarket chains: a rise in the collaborative consumption culture, increased online purchasing, on-demand manufacturing, and a desire for a local, more personalized shopping experience.
In its Dragon Rouge-inspired future, Morrisons is all about “keeping local, local.” It provides fresh goods via partnerships with local bakers, butchers and greengrocers. Other household and grocery items can be found in neighborhood Morrisons stores. It’s less of a transition than the proposed futures for Rio Tinto and EasyJet; Morrisons already lays out its stores like a “market street,” with special awnings for bakers, fishmongers, and other goods. It’s almost like being out on the street, but inside a store.
Some brands will undoubtedly react positively to their Dragon Rouge makeovers. “I think that Rio Tinto is a really forward-looking company. I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked at the [proposed future] and nodded sagely,” says Wyatt. But others might not take too kindly to the idea that their business models need to be flipped upside down. But Bennie believes that a lack of inspiration and storytelling in the sustainability movement has caused it to be left behind in the CSR department of companies, when really it should be integral to business. “We want to talk about trends in an open and approachable way,” she says.
Content marketing
FORBES
5 Big Brands Confirm That Content Marketing Is The Key To Your Consumer
Brandon Gutman, Contributor
Image sourced from Daily Blogma
2012 has been the year of growth for content marketing. Brands have begun to embrace the discipline as a vital part of their overall strategy. What was once a conversation on “why content marketing” has turned into a conversation on “how to.” Here’s how five leading brands are developing content their consumers want.
Virgin Mobile
Virgin Mobile recently launched Virgin Mobile Live, a social newsroom that publishes content several times daily. Featuring new music, apps, and web memes, Virgin Mobile Live shares content across a host of social communities including Facebook, Buzzfeed, Twitter and Instagram. To date the site is averaging over 1 million unique views per month, spread virally by over 50,000 “super-sharers” on Facebook and Twitter.
According to Ron Faris, Head of Brand Marketing at Virgin Mobile, “scaling our content efforts isn’t just about expanding the size of our social reach across new platforms. It’s also about deepening the level of engagement we have with our fans in the social communities they hang out in. We’ve been successful so far in rewarding our fans with Virgin experiences on Facebookand Twitter. The next step is to evolve our social platform to allow fans to reward one another with special moments.”
Screenshot from Virgin Mobile Live
American Express has participated in many content programs. One of their most successful, and long-standing, is American Express Unstaged – a program that live streams concerts by some of the biggest names in music through the lens of a well-known director to fans across the globe. Fans are viewing not only the event during its live performance, but also exclusive videos before and after the event. When American Express Unstaged presented Coldplay in 2011 it became, and continues to be the largest single-artist event on YouTube.
“Content is an important piece in all of our marketing efforts…extending our messaging through content is a great way for us to continue to convert our customers from simply seeing a message to considering our brand,” explained Walter Frye, Director of Entertainment Marketing & Sponsorships at American Express. Frye went on to share that American Express will continue to invest in content through their partnerships with music but also sports and other entertainment properties. “These partnerships allow us to create memorable experiences for our Cardmembers; through our content use, we are able to scale out that experience to prospective and current customers and ultimately exposing more people to our brand and driving consideration.”
Marriott
Renaissance Hotels is Marriott’s experiential “lifestyle” brand, designed for business travelers who see travel as a way to explore the world. Hence, the brand designed two platforms to help guests “Live Life to DiscoverSM.” The Navigators platformhelps guests to discover the local city outside their hotel and the RLife LIVE program helps guests to discover new music, films, arts, food and drinks inside the hotels. Both programs provide rich content for engaging guests online. In May Marriott relaunched RenHotels.com as not just a hotel website but as a discovery site. All the curated local discoveries (over 6,000 and growing) from their 155 hotels around the world now live online. And the brand promotes them to start conversations in their social channels. The brand’s site is seeing record traffic and exponential growth in engagement while its Facebook community has grown to 270,000 likes.
We asked Dan Vinh, VP Global Marketing, Renaissance Hotels at Marriott International, about how the brand is measuring the worth of its content. “As a global brand with limited awareness and limited marketing budget, we have to find ways to be relevant and drive consideration. Content is critical for us because it’s the currency that drives our relevance and therefore consumer consideration for our brand. And content for us lives first and foremost in the offline world through our hotel guest experience. This is how we ensure that what we do and say is authentic. Then we extend it to online to continue the dialogue with existing guests and their network (our prospects).”
L’Oréal
Over the past two years L’Oréal’s Garnier Fructis brand has partnered with Rolling Stone to create content marketing around discovery of new, emerging musicians and their styles. In 2011 they made history by searching new artists in the country and asking consumers to vote and decide who would become the first unsigned artist ever to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone. They developed a series of content around this program – which culminated with the winner artist signing a contract with a record label – looking to engage and connect with consumers throughout the process with the ultimate goal of building stronger affinity and emotional connection.
Garnier Fructis partnered with Rolling Stone
In 2012 Garnier Fructis evolved the program to leverage Rolling Stone’s Women Who Rock annual issue, inviting consumers to get involved again, voting and deciding which female emerging musician would be in the flip cover of this celebratory issue that featured Adele in the cover. “We are very satisfied with the program having much stronger results this year achieving or surpassing our targets and benchmarks from number of page and video views, earned impressions to brand health tracking metrics,” shared Debora Koyama, AVP Marketing, L’Oréal USA.
Koyama is excited about what the brand is planning for 2013. “My vision has been to take this strategic platform for the brand to the next level by comprehensively integrating all initiatives and touch points and by expanding our footprint on content creation appealing to Millennials in a much stronger and relevant way.”
Vanguard
Last year Vanguard launched a campaign called “Vanguard at the Movies”which spoofed classic movie genres of horror, drama and suspense to convey what using Vanguard doesn’t feel like. The initiative was launched during the summer blockbuster movie season with in-theater trailers and a heavy digital presence on sites like Hulu and Rotten Tomatoes. Vanguard used the movies not only to extend the brand, but also use it to cross-merchandise its existing video content on YouTube. The movies became a focal design point in re-launching the brand’s YouTube page via a movie theme.
Michael Ma, Head of Retail Advertising and Prospect Marketing at The Vanguard Group, explained that in days after its release, the movies became the most watched video on the brand’s YouTube channel and more than doubled its traffic. “Within weeks the Vanguard’s YouTube channel went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of views — half of them being our spots, but roughly the other half staying to learn more about our brand through other video content.”
While the brands profiled here are well on their way to becoming publishers, many advertisers are just getting started. We asked Lisa LaCour, VP Marketing from content recommendation platform, Outbrain, to share 5 Tips on developing a successful and sustainable content marketing strategy:
- A content strategy should focus on existing customers as well as prospects. Content marketing is a great tool to create brand affinity but can also be powerful in building a new audience of potential customers.
- When it comes to content marketing, brands should think beyond direct response tactics and focus more on the top of the funnel customer engagement and awareness. Content marketing is a great tool for thought leadership, education and customer relations. Define the appropriate analytics so that the ROI can be measured effectively.
- An amplification strategy should be a key tactic in a content strategy. Once the content is created, search and social networks can be used to distribute, but you should also make sure to distribute it out to others who may not know it exists. Intent is not created in a search box.
- Invest in the appropriate resources to meet your objectives.
- Stay honest and true to the brand
The brands profiled in this article and many more will share their success stories at Brand Innovators Content Marketing on December 6, 2012 at the Sony Club in New York City.
Libellule Vibe 