Marketing is like cricket.

Business Standard's Strategist is carrying one of my articles today. I had written this note (over two months of the IPL fever) on the similarities on the evolution of the game of cricket and the evolution of the behavior of the consumer.

You can read the article here.

The note is why a smart marketer has to evolve to stay relevant to the changed consumer and that you either play by the rules of the audience or you perish.

Do let me know your views.

Little Red Riding Hood - RETOLD

What a wonderful project.

""The brief told us to do a classic ad to be printed in the magazine "Filter". The target group was swedes in ages 15–30 years. After some thinking and researching, we realized that a small ad in a small magazine wouldn´t do that much of a difference.""

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

The video takes you through the most memorable day in the life of Little Red Riding Hood and along the way, you learn all sorts of details. Like the air resistance experienced by a Volkswagen Type 2-61 Minibus at 43 MPH as measured by Volkswagen GmbH in 1955. Or the wildlife density of the Hundred Acre Wood, showing a surge in the rabbit population. Not to mention the nutrition facts of Grandma with a total caloric value of 10,000 kilocalories. :-)

Cost per contact is high. Really?

When compared to traditional advertising media, experiential is often overlooked and under-rated because of a perceived lack of reach, or high cost per contact. While there is the basic logic of "counting your reach" vs "reaching those who count" and the quality of the "engagement", even in terms of reach experiential engagement scores high.

Another bit from a research undertaken by EMF and IMI International in the US, shows that Experiential Marketing has effective reach well beyond consumers directly impacted. When considering sampling costs “per person impacted”, be sure to account for the amplification benefit.

Experiential Marketing - leads to trials.

If you are trying to get consumers to try a product / brand that they do not normally buy / use - do not rely on your ad campaign to transform behavior.

Recent results of a research undertaken by EMF and IMI International in the US, where they asked consumers what influences them to purchase brands they don’t normally purchase, and which of the tactic has the greatest impact in that switch gave the following results;

While 52% by way of Experiential Activated and hence more one on one marketing is exciting - what is even more impressive is that this has stayed consistent over the last 15 years - where-in there is so much of a change in the media consumption pattern.

Nice to note, promotion is another 20%.

Awareness driven communication, does drive sales, but only to the extent of 24%.

Twitter integration into Google search results

Integration of the real time twits into Google search results in my view does three things;

1. gives a new reason for brands to not just be on Twitter but ensure they are monitoring conversation on Twitter, not just of the brand but of the entire eco-system.

2. it brings together the twittering "elite / few" to a searching "majority" and hence cannot be ignored.

3. has an amazing effect on the search engine optimization of any brand / site. In fact majority of 1st page search results seem to be from the social media space, with Twitter leading them all. And it is a lot faster.

Also there is a wonderful way of integrating twitter results specific to your google search into your results for every possible subject. Read here about Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google