Why build a mobile website? What's the best way of targetting the mobile Internet audience? This is an area we've debated extensively at Jupiter over the last year.
The w3 alludes to this, but the main web standards body doesn't face the "why the web on mobile" issue head on.
Here's my take on why marketers need to ensure their organisations build mobile websites, in addition to whatever applications they develop:
The "One Web" position is contained in the W3's just published guidelines for building mobile web sites, Mobile Web Best Practices. It's a good read and is full of common sense tips all collected into one neat place. While it's aimed at actual website builders as it's lucidly written most of the mandates are easy for marketers and strategists to understand, and should be appled to normal websites too to maximise usability. A few examples:
The industry, of course, has done its best to fuel this faith. Through the years we've seen a handful of studies claiming that search really can help drive this brand impact -- from ancient research published by the US IAB to frustratingly incomplete pronouncements from the company that has the most to gain from search marketers bidding on brand terms. Even we at Jupiter have been saying since at least 2004 that you can brand with search; the problem is that we as an industry didn't know then -- and we still don't know now -- how to assign a value to the brand impact provided by search listings. And without a concrete value, marketers have no idea how to adjust their bids to account for branding.
This autumn I'm going to have a deeper look into this issue, and see if we can't start down the road of assigning concrete values to the brand impact of search. But in the meantime, I found a couple of analyses recently that touch on the bread-and-butter of search branding: bidding on brand keywords. Harvest Digital searched on 100 UK brands [PDF] and found that, two months after Google started allowing UK marketers to bid on competitors' brand names, less than 20 percent of brands are being targeted by competitors. (In fact, they found that most of the brands they searched for don't even bid on their own keywords!) Meanwhile, StraightUpSearch argues (with no evidence but great conviction) that there's no point in bidding on competitors' keywords, since the direct response ROI doesn't work out. If that's true, then bidding on competitors' keywords is purely a branding exercise.
As I said, I'll be looking at this in much more detail in the coming months. If you have any insight or case studies you'd like to share, please drop me an e-mail: n e l l i o t t (at) jupiterresearch (dot) com.
]]>Which is pretty odd. Because the search engines and portals have been getting their butts kicked in social media. Sure, Google owns YouTube and Blogger, and Yahoo owns Flickr and del.icio.us. But those were all acquisitions. The truth is, portals and search engines have had no success at all in building their own social media offerings. (And Blogger, Flickr, and del.icio.us aren't exactly hotbeds for marketing. Nor, really, is YouTube.)
So these findings tell me that social marketers are pretty confused -- they still don't know exactly how to make social marketing work, or even where they should be trying. Maybe that's why most European marketers spent less than €10,000 on social marketing last year, and why less than 10% of European social marketers say they're happy with their social marketing ROI.
It's a complicated topic -- one that's hard to deal with properly in a blog post -- but for those interested in learning more, we've just published a new report with lots more discussion and detail: Mining for Fool's Gold: European Social Marketing Budgets Grow Slowly as Marketers Focus on Free Opportunities.
(And for anyone who's curious, Facebook was #2 on the list of most important sites for social marketing. MySpace finished a very distant #4.)
]]>What if your product is physically indistinct (like a lot of consumer packaged goods), physically repulsive (like your first puff of a cigarette), or if you need a more economical alternative to giving consumers first-hand experience of your product? You can create an "experience" and convey it with media. Share the experience of a loving mom caring for her family by tending to their laundry; or experience the manly thrill of galloping across the mesa surrounded by snow-covered mountains and enjoying a smoke at the end of a challenging day.
What if media is losing its ability to influence consumers? This is the question that came to mind listening to Clark Kokich, CEO of Avenue A | Razorfish, at the company's client summit this week in New York. He called on marketers to move beyond talking to consumers, beyond focusing on creating perceptions, and toward creating real experiences. [Update: I got his slides. He said, "Less 'saying things' & more 'building things'"; "messaging replaced by brand immersion"; "digital experience becomes part of the product"] What this means in the digital world is moving beyond banners and paid media and toward creating immersive, interactive, participatory digital experiences to reach and engage online consumers where they spend an increasing amount of their time.
Now, digital brands (online retailers, search engines, portals) are experienced online and the expression of the brand and the experience of the brand can be one in the same. Off-line brands have to break new ground and create digital "experiences" and not just perceptions for online consumers.
Why is this becoming necessary? There are many reasons, but surely one is that consumers become habituated to everything, and it takes novelty and a new levels of intensity to reach them. If you are from a quiet place and come to New York city, you are hugely impressed by the energy of this place. But even transplants from Lincoln, Nebraska get used to it here. If you are old enough to remember your first color TV, you probably remember being wowed by the experience. Or your first game of Pong. The bar is higher today. And marketers need to aim higher than ever before to connect with consumers.
[For an analysis of online engagement, a look at best practices, and recommendations for marketers, see Emily Riley's recent research report on the topic.]
]]>If anyone will be there and wants to meet up, either stop by my presentation -- Thursday at 3:30pm -- or drop me an email: nelliott *at* jupiter research -dot- com.
]]>The ad-funded MVNO has announced it will launch in the Netherlands (sometime in S2 2008) and is willing to expand in other European countries.
It is an interesting concept. The company will have to adress 3 main issues moving forward:
- widening the installed base so that advertisers and marketers benefit from a larger reach
- making sure ads are perceived as information/entertainement so that the growing number of youth attracted by the offer will continue to engage with brand messages
- find a profitable business models in countries where market conditions are not ideal for MVNOs. In this regard, bear in mind Blyk is not a totally free offer. Customers get 43 minutes and 217 texts every month for free and have to pay a fee when they reach this ceiling or when they use other services. This is also part of complex modelling of their profitability approach.
]]>The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Census Bureau is scaling back plans to use hand-held computers to count millions of people during the 2010 census. The Commerce Secretary cited what sounds like scope creep in the requirements for the customized hand-held devices as the reason for limiting their use. This change is supposed to increase the cost of conducting the census by $3 billion to $14 billion.
If the population in 2010 reaches around 312 million, as we expect (link to our forecast in Quantify), that puts the cost of the census at about $45 per person. That might be a decent price when compared to the cost of customer acquisition in, say, the telecom industry. But it seems like overpaying when you consider that AOL bought Bebo for about $20 per member, and, according to a promotion my colleage David Daniels sent me, eToys Direct is offering a list of its recent customers (with average order value of $71) at $105 per thousand.
If the Census Bureau took on a commercial sponsor such as Comcast or AT&T Wireless, we might save a few bucks.
]]>Or, at least, this will overly restrict the options when creating a logo for a mobile-related site or service.
We'd all have to stop using the letter T, the number 3, we'd need to find something else to breathe, only talk about stale food, avoid using the colours orange (plus red, blue, green, and of course magenta).
Crazy.
Common sense needs to prevail here.
]]>It reported that researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo that found that "...exposing people to a brand’s logo for 30 milliseconds will make them behave in ways associated with that brand."
Skeptical? Fine. But the methology of the experiment isn't too shabby. Researchers
... exposed subjects to imperceptible images of brand logos for Apple and IBM (as well as logos for other non-tech companies). Surveys found that people felt similarly about the two companies in every way except creativity, where Apple came out ahead, and competence, which was IBM’s perceived strength. After exposing them to the brands, the researchers asked subjects to describe as many uses for a brick as they could."
Gavan Fitzsimons, one of the Duke professors who conducted the study, was quoted in the article.
Most people mentioned a door stop or a paperweight. “But the subjects who had seen Apple’s logo also came up with uses like tying it around my roommate’s foot and throwing him in a deep pond,” Fitzsimons tells us. The Apple-primed subjects averaged 30% more answers and independent reviewers also deemed their answers as more creative. It’s harder to measure competence, but Fitzsimons says that IBM-primed subjects had strikingly uniform answers.
They used to say people resembled their pets, but it was an open question whether a person and his pet grew to resemble each other, or people tend to select pets that look like them. Now you can ask the question about consumer brands. Perhaps people come to resemble the brands they spend time with.
]]>