Social Marketing is changing the rules: from technology to people

It is true that there are a series of words that have been introduced into our language during the last year; words such as prosumer, facebook, web 2.0, blogger, twitter or skype are current words that we usually use or work with. The problem is that we tend to link these words with technologies, blog platforms, nanoblogs, social networks; when we might relate them to people. We are facing a period in which we are changing attitudes, rules and behaviors where technologies can help, but only as a mean not as a goal.

These concepts are extremely important when we are talking about marketing especially when we try to the difference between e-Marketing and Social Marketing. The new marketing tool known as e-Marketing refers to the marketing strategies applied through Internet implying a relationship between a person and a specific technology. Traditional customer service processes, electronic commerce, on-line product catalogs, on-line advertisements, etc. they are all thought as managing an interaction between technology and user, but we no longer think about people sharing information. 

Social Marketing cares about the relationship between people. Technology is only a mean; currently most of brands are interested in conversations, they want to establish relationships between them and their customers to listen to them, to gather information, to detect trends, in other words, to find out what they want and how they want it. We are all surfing on Internet; giving our opinion in Forums, Chats or Blogs, recommending the products we tried or we plan to purchase and, creating at least an environment where we feel comfortable to give our expert opinion in the subjects we master. So technology, in the end, it doesn’t matter.

From now on, marketing departments might understand this change. They are not here to design and develop new environments or technology to serve the company; companies are here to encourage and drive relationships, to listen, talk and manage interactions between people.

Rules are changing and that causes a dramatic change in our life, because people are using the Internet to establish relationships. It can be drawn from the last elections in which politicians were trying to establish direct relationships with their voters to gain more votes or commitment. It is impossible to be connected with 1,000,000 at the same time. That enhances the value of people and team commitment.

Related to the same topic, we can talk about small and medium companies that are finding a new opportunity to gather information, listen to consumers and to ask them questions. It is important because consumers are on the Internet to compare opinions, to share knowledge and reduce their uncertainty and risk when purchasing products.

As Francis Pisani highlighted in his last book, “La Alquimia de las Multitudes (Spanish version)”. After the 2001 Boom of the Internet, users have continued using the Internet, and so people’s revolution came after the bourgeois revolution. Small and medium companies are not scared about consumer’s opinion because there’s no technology cost for the use of social media, so they can take advantage of this insignificant cost to compete against big companies.

Finally, there are some elements that can justify these structural changes that are allowing us to say that this sector is going to grow faster than other sectors. New business models are appearing to take advantage of these new tools and the ways to relate to people are evolving to networks and social media, so everything is pointing at the same direction: people and technology as a mean.

P.D: It has no connection to the topic I was treating but I want to show you these two ads, because I really liked them. They are about Blackberry and Apple. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVO8o_PKvVg

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ7iGjAC03I

 

Reptilian code & Lifestyle Brands

Clotaire Rapaille is a marketing expert and psychologist who tries to know how consumers make choices, but based on consumers’ unknown decision drivers; it means that he is able to decode behavioral information from unknown needs. As he says “My experience is that most of the time, people have no idea why they're doing what they're doing. They have no idea. So they're going to try to make up something that makes sense.”. They don’t know what they’re doing, so we need to investigate as much as possible what are these hidden drivers to market products as focused as possible.

For him is crucial to understand what he calls the Reptilian Hot Button. To do so, Rapaille has developed a 3-stage technique to find the consumers’ unconscious needs which drive consumption. These 3 stages are based on:

1. Past Reason: the reptilian inner core the most primitive, in other words, basic needs such as appetite, fear, lust, etc. People have different feelings for every single word, an unconscious code or mental highway. The first step is to ask the group about a single word, in this case it was the word “Luxury”. Rapaille thinks that people want to show how intelligent they really are in front of the group.
2. Through emotion (limbic brain): every word or every act has an emotion attached to it, so we need to know what these emotions are to market our products. Here starts the second step of the process. After having a break, the group is told to tell Rapaille a story, but the story has to be told to a 5 year old child from a different planet. At his point, consumers no longer try to be logical or seem intelligent; they only try to tell a story. The problem is that they get confused because they don’t what is intention of this step. Anyway, it evokes emotions that move them away from logical thinking. Rapaille sais that this step is very important because emotions drive you out from logical thinking. Then, the group has another long break, right before starting the last step.                                                                  

3. Primal core (the cortex: higher reason): at this phase to group enters the room where there aren’t chairs anymore, they only find pillows in the floor. Everyone is asked to sit down, relax and take notes about primal experiences (the first experience you had with this word). Rapaille thinks that people act based on primal needs and experiences, so he tries to put them in an estate of relaxation close to sleeping mode, to gather all this basic information.

Once we have done all the steps needed, Rapaille starts looking at all the steps to decode the consumption drivers to certain words. This code, enables a company to develop products or services totally focused on their target market, it also allows companies to save money because they are able to know what is marketable and how is marketable.

A very good example is the one that they explain during the video about the difference between selling cheese in France and USA. Usually in France and even in Europe we never put the cheese in the fridge because the cheese is alive. The problem of selling cheese in America is that Americans think that the cheese is dead, so the insight is totally different. Selling cheese in America is totally different to selling cheese in France. That’s why they decided to market the cheese wrapped with a hermetic plastic bag to put it in the fridge.   

Song Airlines is a new branch of Delta Airlines that was born as a low cost airline but trying to target a different market segment. Song decided to born as an out of the ordinary airline by offering organic products, low fares, entertainment, experiences, etc. It is a very good idea to penetrate such a saturated market this way, and the approach is very creative, but Song must know what really customers want and how much they want to pay for it. Song is trying to create a lifestyle brand but without enough money to maintain the initial strategy and without enough brightness to let the customer know that is an airline and not a travel agency or a fast food chain. I would like to stress that what they are doing is good but there are many companies performing better because they are more aggressive and focused on.

For example, I am from Spain, so I didn’t know most of the American airline companies when I first come here. In 2 months I’ve known a lot of companies, and one of them is JetBlue, but haven’t heard anything about Song, and I think I won’t hear anything about that company. Song is trying to target a market niche, but the problem is that this niche is now extremely limited to allow the company to live long.

I enjoyed Persuaders because it focuses on a different point of view of what consumers want and how to persuade them trying to gather information from their mind. I think this movie will be very useful for our career, because we will be able to find out more information when doing focus groups. 

T.C

Kenna's Dilemma

This post is about the chapter titled Kenna’s Dilemma from Malcom Gladwell’s book. After reading through the chapter, I found two main issues to take into account when marketing products and testing them.

The first lesson I found reasonably interesting is: “It’s exactly the same product, but a different set of sensations have been transferred from the bottle, which in this case is not necessarily a good thing.” (3. The blind leading the blind. Pg. 163). This fragment belongs to 7-Up case, when they added 15% yellow color to the bottle and people started thinking that it had a lot more lime or lemon.

When I think about this sentence, I realize that marketers can always play with consumer’s minds, trying to sell what they want to sell using hundreds of tactics. The implications for marketers in this case would be to understand what the consumer really values about the product and try to enhance it as much as possible to sell as much as possible.

There is a very famous case study in Catalunya directly related to transferring a different set of sensations thanks to marketing. Juve&Camps was a catalan champagne brand (champagne is called Cava in Catalunya) that was not performing very well in the mid 90’s because it was a low end product sold between 4$ to 6$. One day, the CEO woke up and decided to change totally his product. He wrote a letter calling to a meeting the 100 best sommeliers in Catalunya. Once they were all together Juve&Camps’ CEO proposed them to create the best Cava ever, all he needed was the sommeliers to work together in developing the best grape to come up with the best carbonated beverage.

Two years later they came up with the new product, new name (Juve&Camps) and a new story to tell when selling the product. At that moment, they needed to market the product. The strategy was so easy because the best 100 sommeliers in Catalunya would recommend their own product (we have to remember that they have developed the product). Then, people after tasting the product through a recommendation of a well-known sommelier, they will try to find the product in supermarkets or specialty stores. Juve&Camps decided not to market the product at the very first because supermarkets would be willing to give them more space because of the increasing demand. Finally, they started selling what is called a premium product focused on special celebrations and targeted to young to middle age people with a high-medium purchasing power. What is important to stress here is that the product itself was good, but what triggered sales was the story and the packaging of the product. Whenever you can tell a good story of a product, the product sells better because you are transferring a different set of sensations through colors, words and smells.

The second lesson I would like to stress is: “When you are in the product development world, you become immersed in your own stuff, and it’s hard to keep in mind the fact that consumers you go out and see spend very little time with your product. They know the experience of it then and there. But they don’t have any history with it, and it’s hard for them to imagine a future with it, especially if it’s something very different.” (pg 173).

Marketers should know before launching a breakthrough that consumers are not used to it, because thinking that they would understand without having any experience is a clear flop. Normally, when we develop a breakthrough, such as Aeron or the car that Ford developed before all other car manufacturers, we may know that consumers won’t be able to imagine a future with this product and here is where marketers have to play their role. It is said in marketing books that the first phase of the product life cycle has to focus on building links between the real product and similarities with consumers’ life. A very clear example of that is what AUDI did when they were starting to produce cars that used Quattro drive motion.

Last year in my Marketing Strategy class back in Spain we analized all AUDI advertisings. We realized that the first advertisements were totally focused on promoting this new feature called Quattro, but they were promoting it always using comparisons. I post an advertisement where you can appreciate how they did it (it is on spanish, but you can see it graphically). What I want to show with this lesson is that consumers need to link the product with something known, because if we don’t do it like this we’d face rejection at the first stages of the product selling process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT_actZK8bc

Finally, I would like to conclude my post with a summarizing reflection. When we are marketing products we must have developed a story behind the product so as to be able to gain customer’s insights. As we are developing unknown products we have to have links between the product and consumer’s life and as we are developing known products but using different approaches, we must  have developed stories and strategies to let them know that the product can satisfy their needs in a different way.