The Festival of Marketing

A brilliant two day conference in Shadwell’s Tobacco Dock, the highlight of which was nothing to do with marketing, but a once in a lifetime front row talk with astronaut Chris Hadfield. These are my notes from the marketing bits:

The role of social in digital transformation (Brandwatch)

The brands that adapted to telephones are the ones who survived
Adjust to the trend, transform the technology “Amazon knows what I like”
More departments are looking at social
Detecting patterns, the unexpected
Allows you to catch pr disasters or opportunities on the way up Spacasse (German Bank) listen to local conversations near branches to know when signs / cashpoints break, or branches aren’t opening at the right time
Customise your product depending on the local conversation
Kobo – Sony they designed it as they would a PlayStation and marketed it that way
Then found it was mums who were talking about it, they redesigned it for that market
Ice cream data – they thought it was middle of the day sunny that people bought it, actually it’s rainy Sunday nights, put their promoted money there
Ikea have information radiators everywhere, so any team is ready to jump if they see an opportunity
It’s about quality not quantity, decisions are made on the small things
Build multiple data sets and map between them
Test the value of the data first before investing on a large scale

Making ucg your brand’s bff:

Filtering and curating ugc
Capture data from that person for future brand advocacy
Then do data analysis and social listening on those people to build a persona of similar people, then you have a group to deliver targeted and personalised content to
Reactivate dormant users because you know them better Uber and Made – small brands who put ugc at the front of their marketing strategy and became massive

Influencer marketing:

92% consumers trust peer media over everything else
Think what you want to get out of it Decide who’s right for your brand
Measure their authority to make sure their influence hadn’t dipped, e.g. they’ve become too famous Build influencer strategy into your marketing
Look at their whole package, including who else they with with, what advertising appears on their sites etc
Does what you’re giving them to say fit with their personal brand
Gap are a good example of influencer use
It’s a kickstarter for user generated content too
It’s not always about reach, sometimes small but powerful can work too #spon actually doesn’t statistically put people off

Make things open, it makes them better (GDS):

They’ve set the standard, now being applied internationally with other governments Transforming the relationship between people and state
Digital inclusion They had multiple websites, lots of duplication, poor ux

Their aim:

Form a gds
Fix publishing
Fix transactions
Go wholesale (government as a platform) Their standards:
Start with needs

26th most visited site in the UK
Digital by default with inclusion and outreach
Huge scale mapping of transactions
Huge ambition
A service standard for quality control
Establishing consistent data
Settled on 4 KPIs to determine success:

Cost per transaction
User satisfaction
Completion
Digital take-up

Publicly report on everything, good and bad
Challenge – government digital evolved rather than was designed
User needs, not government needs
User need in context
We were the Ofsted of digital transformation, but we want to work with people, empowerment
Open data is a culture
Watch Ann’s video “If I can do it, anyone can, don’t be frightened, lasting power of attorney online gave me peace of mind and I’d like to say thank you to everyone who did the website”
Political leadership was important to secure buy-in across all departments Had digital advocates around the country Everything they do they do without a specific budget “begging and borrowing”
They have internal show and tell to upskill other teams

Putting your content in front of the right people:

In the context of high street shopping
Identified that people have around three that they consider ‘theirs’
Two thirds make purchases they hadn’t planned for
User eye tracker technology to find out what people are open to
Tested bus panels
Divided people into types of shopper
Found all the predictable things, but also that people open to advertising also remembered what they’d seen
Whoever you’re marketing too, the creative makes all the difference

Behavioral economics:

61% of people have innovation bias, they like it because it’s new
Anchoring, e.g. Numbers and price if people don’t really know what they’re getting
Priming – influenced by things we’ve already seen
Decisions often swayed by the most confident people in the room
Status quo bias – using or doing what’s already there
Projective questioning for internal buy-in
Loss aversion – 4 places left etc
Social proof, find out what people really think away from bias of others, put everyone on the same level
Challenge people’s biases, tackle them head on with disruptive marketing

Hyper connectivity is changing everything:

More people now spend more time online that watching tv
Consumers want more and more
Changing the way we swap – geo locating discounts as people enter the shop
Autoreplenshment apps linked to Amazon
Driving monitors linked to apps, measuring you not your demographic
Virtual reality headsets for kids from deprived areas – travel the world without going anywhere
Disney wristbands that revolutionised the user experience for parents too
Cost $1bn
Luggage delivered to your room from the airport Itinerary already picked
No queuing
Stress free swipe bands to order food, turns up at your table
The business that adapts to change survives (e.g. Netflix v Blockbuster)
Nothing is permanent “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man” (Heraclitus)
Think about this with people, think about their development
Uber are in a great position, they know everything about where you’re going and how often
They can market based on that to give you restaurant recommendations for where you are
Respect your supporter’s preferences
Relevance, always on
Understand the needs of the moment
Always make experiences better for people
Deliver messaging with value U.S. pharmacy chain send you an alert when your prescription is ready after you’ve handed the slip in – keeps people reassured, they don’t need to keep hovering round the desk keeping eye contact with the pharmacist, they can relax and browse, then they buy more Accessibility, remember not everyone wants to be connected

Most customers wouldn’t notice if two thirds of brands disappeared tomorrow (Cubit):

Digital changes the way we behave
Study by uber – most people would only wait three minutes for a cab
The longer they’re in a town, the higher people’s expectations
Driverless car testers, thrilling to normal to boring in 15 minutes
We’re no longer patient people
Big brands are seeing a new standard in customer expectation 66% have switched brand loyalty because of a poor experience
Your customer isn’t who you think it is
54-66 = biggest growing Twitter market
40% musical taste overlap between 70 year olds and 15 year olds
It’s not demographics, it’s what they do Behavioral segmentation “The BT homepage is trying to do too much”
Has one one of the biggest marketing spends in the country
They want to create a coffee shop experience for their customers, to get a ‘same as usual?’ kind of experience
They don’t want their customers to work too hard
Link people with the things they like, be careful not to silo people into internal segments
Build a rich profile of people, share that data
Don’t bombard people, keep things simple and streamlined
Together, organisations are greater than the sum of their parts
Build dates for an internal business case
Show successes and benchmark as you go
Share and celebrate quick wins
They do this whist still trying to cut costs every year
They’re now embarking on a massive digital transformation programme Incremental gains, what Disney call “all the small gestures”