Équation Humaine

The global survey, “New Wave of Advocacy,” provides compelling evidence of the shift, and identifies Advocates among consumer groups that actively support and undermine brands, causes and issues.

“In a challenging and rapidly changing business environment, companies and organizations need to engage stakeholders in new and creative ways,” said Weber Shandwick Chairman Jack Leslie. “Advocates play a significant role in meeting this need as they affect the court of public opinion at Internet speed. They forge emotional bonds and higher levels of engagement that help attract new customers, earn support for issues and causes, spread word-of-mouth, and strengthen brand loyalty.”

Source : webershandwick.com, A global public relations firm .

Traditionally the Marketing Mix has been represented by four “Ps”: Product, Price, Promotion and Place. In simple words, the product must suit the customer’s needs, the pricing structure must be in line with the company objectives, the promotion techniques used must be efficient for the target market and the distribution channels must ensure that the product will be available on the right places. […] but in order to apply them to online entities like websites or blogs we must redefine the four concepts. (Suite)

Source : dailyblogtips.com

Robert Lanquard, auteur et directeur du marketing et des recherches à l’Organisation mondiale du tourisme des Nations unies, Carmen Ciotola, vice-présidente, communications-marketing, de Tourisme Montréal, et Chris Roop, chef du marketing d’Expedia.ca, font partie des conférenciers qui traiteront des bouleversements que vit le secteur touristique à l’heure du Web dans le cadre de la Journée-conférences Infopresse sur le marketing touristique.

Source : Infopresse.com, le portail du marketing, de la publicité et des communications.

Let’s face it : we’re not exactly becoming brighter by using Google. In fact, in the traditional education sense, we’re getting stupider, at least with certain types of tasks. However, we’ve learned to do something else. We’ve learned how to use Google to get information. It sounds like an evolutionary step, a natural progression. Instead of using your brain, you’re using something else - something that works faster and easier. It will be interesting to see how this - if it keeps up, and my bet is that it will - will affect our ability to think in the future.

Source : mashable.com, Social Networking News.

Who says you can’t buy love?

Trying to tap into the burgeoning power of blogs as promotional tools and fed up with the jaded attitudes of professional critics and TV feature writers, studios and networks are flooding bloggers with free stuff in hopes the flattered recipients will reward them with positive coverage. Flowing into the trough is everything from fancy gym bags and toasters to video iPods and free trips. Some networks — in the spotlight this week as they unveil their fall schedules to advertisers — have even borrowed a term from the technology industry to describe the strategy : blogola.

Source : online.wsj.com, The Wall Street Journal Online.

Hue Agence Média a été retenue comme un des trois finalistes dans la catégorie innovation du concours Stratégie de l’AMM-PCM.

Notre service de vigie de marque en ligne sera en compétition avec Eloda Protocole et leur service de vérification et de suivi en temps réel de la diffusion d‘achats publicitaires et de Sportdecision, premier média dédié au marketing et à la commandite sportive au Canada.

Source : Concoursstrategies.com, Concours Stratégies 2007 de l’AMM-PCM.

En manchette sur Infopresse.com, Le portail du marketing, de la publicité et des communications.

Stinky Durian
Durian is a fruit from Southeast Asia that can be charitably described as smelling like stale baby vomit. It is also revered by millions and served with pride in many Thai and Malaysian households. Most of all, it’s a great way to learn about marketing.

Songpol Somsri, a scientist fascinated by the durian, has spent decades cross-breeding more than 90 varieties of Durian and come up with a stinkless variety. No odor.

This is what most marketers do. They listen to complaints from non-customers (”why don’t you buy from us?”) address them and wait for the market to grow. After all, if the people who don’t eat Durian don’t eat it because of the smell, then removing the smell ought to dramatically increase the size of your market.

Except this almost never works.

Non-durian eaters don’t have a ‘durian problem’. They aren’t standing by, fruitless, impatiently waiting for Songpol Somsri to figure out how to make a stinkless one. Nope. They’ve got cantaloupes and kiwis and all manner of other fruits to keep them busy.

The feedback you get from non-consumers is rarely useful, because the objection they give is the reason they don’t buy from you, not the thing that will cause them to affirmatively choose you.

Will stinkless durian revolutionize the marketplace? Possibly. I’ve been wrong before. But if I were a durian farmer, I’d work hard to make durian stinkier.

Source : sethgodin.typepad.com, Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.

I speak with marketing professionals every day (both client and agency side) who are defining social media strategies but are not themselves active users of social media services, much less students of them.  They market on blogs, but aren’t themselves bloggers (or even regular blog readers.)  They define strategies for social networking but don’t themselves use social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.  Of course they are burning to “do something” in Second Life but often haven’t even gone through the registration process (if they have, many more don’t make it past Orientation Island.)  And never mind newer social services like Twitter and Tumblr — they’ve never even heard of them (but as soon as they do, they’ll want to find ways to tap those tools for marketing purposes too.)

Yet, when all is said and done, they don’t understand why their social media campaigns didn’t work…

The rules are different here than they are in traditional media — and you can’t learn those rules by lurking around on the outside.  I’m probably preaching to the converted (if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably of like mind) but it is pretty obvious that we’re in the minority.  Lots of people talk the talk; I don’t see nearly as many walking the walk.

Source : gregverdino.typepad.com, Greg Verdino is VP/Emerging Channels at DIGITAS LLC.

Dear Advertising Industry,

I am the new consumer, and you are wasting my time.

You’ve been wasting my time for many years now, and I’ve finally gotten tired of it; so tired that the time has come to introduce myself to you, because it is clear you have no idea who I am. Therefore, I’d like to take a few minutes to set you straight.

I don’t care about you. At all.

Occasionally, you may amuse me with your clever commercials. Once, I remember pausing at a particularly beautifully-shot magazine ad… though I can’t tell you which one it was, because every day I’m bombarded by beautifully-shot magazine ads, and they’ve all become a blur of nothingness. And that’s the reality of it for you, right there in a cozy little nutshell: advertising is just one big blur of nothingness.

Your response has been at once predictable and utterly mystifying. You believe that shoving more and more advertising at me is going to make me sit up and take notice. It’s such a flawed methodology that I can’t help believing you are all out-of-touch dunderheads waving your arms in a hysterical frenzy of ignorance. Just who are you targeting with your ad-heaped-upon-ad approach? Surely not me, because I gave up paying attention a long time ago. I have far too many other diversions to capture my attention.

I am the new consumer. Ten minutes of searching on the web taught me more about the product you’re flogging than entire campaigns you’ve created over a ten-year span. Did I spend those ten minutes combing through your minutely-designed interactive Flash website? Dream on. I went to the source: the people that have already used your product, and have something to say about it. And the really real kicker? It wasn’t your ads that introduced me to the product in the first place! Someone on a blog mentioned using it, and since she and I share a lot of likes and dislikes, I figured I’d check it out.

You people make no sense to me. Are you really that entrenched, that disconnected from reality? How do you manage to convince companies that they need you and your idiotic, pointless, instantly disposable ads? If you’re so elite, so godawfully cool, how is it you’ve managed to drift so far from the cutting edge of culture? Is it possible that you’re pretty much the animated corpse of years past? A ghost of 1950, come to haunt the people of the present?

I am the new consumer. I only buy the things that matter to me, the products that speak to me. Do you want my business? I believe you do not. If you did, you would come searching for me - and you would find me. In this hyper-connected world, there is absolutely no excuse for the inability to discover and ferret out people like me, the new consumers. What excuses do you offer for failing? If I can find you when I want to, why can’t you find me when you want to?

It is my opinion that you have become meaningless in today’s cultural climate. You, the advertising industry, are a dinosaur past your time on earth.

Not only are you meaningless, you’re far too cocky for your own good.

You waste my time, yes; but that isn’t so horrible by itself. Lots of things waste my time. I waste my own time… but I do it on my own terms, because I enjoy wasting my time, and I waste my time by doing the things I like to do. On the other hand, you waste my time… and in the process, you treat me like an idiot, which only goes to show just how out of touch you really are.

I guess I’ll be the one to announce it. I am far from the mindless sheep you expect me to be. I am savvy. Sophisticated. Networked. I know more about what I want than you do, and your attempts to force-feed me crap do not work. No ad you create is going to sway my opinion. I might chuckle; odds are, I won’t pay any attention. Do you want to know a secret? If I’m not TiVo-ing, I’m muting when the commercials come on. And I’m not watching much TV anyway, you’ll notice. There are far too many other interests for me to pursue, and television is just a mindless exercise in winding down before I go to bed. Emphasis on the mindless; I am divorced from television, and don’t really care about those ads.

You don’t provide me with anything. Your advertising may as well be a void to me. Do I come to you, asking about the products you’re hawking? Do you really think I remember the products you hawk in the first place? Please. Give me more credit than that; I am an active consumer, and haven’t a bit of passivity left in my pinkie to offer you. Feed me your lines, and I’ll just puke them back up, covered in vitriol.

You are out of touch, advertising industry. You show no interest in moving on, of adapting to my needs. That is why you are failing. I am the new consumer, and if you want me, you have to engage with me. You have to come to me, and you have to do it on my terms. I am far more intelligent and informed than you, and I am in control. Until you believe that - until you own that - you are worthless.

You want me to buy things. You tell your clients that you can convince me to buy. You lie to them, and they pay you for your lies.

Products have become extraneous. This is a me-too climate, where everything looks the same and does the same thing. Your response? To promote that mentality by producing even more me-too advertising. You talk of differentiation, but you don’t walk the walk. You aren’t willing to break out of the me-too mold, and that is why I do not care about you. I am an individual, but you can’t grasp the concept of the individual, much less the reality of the individual. When will you learn? “Lifestyle branding”? Puh-leaze. You can’t even be bothered to talk to me about my lifestyle, much less provide me with anything I want. You still think showing me pictures of pretty girls wearing pretty clothes is going to make me buy a watch, or a bottle of beer, or a new pair of pants. You have never been so wrong. I’ll look at the pretty girls, I promise. But when I’m done, I’m going to go and search for the pretty girl in your ad, not the product you’re selling.

Bombarding doesn’t work; pushing your products on everyone from trailer homes to multi-million dollar mansions is not effective. You want me? You have to come and get me, and that means a radical shift in the way you do things. Until you can admit that we are a fragmented marketplace, that we are individuals who are only interested in dealing with other individuals who share our interests and likes and dislikes, you are doomed to our hatred.

But have hope. I am the new consumer, and I am forgiving. If you can impress me, in my own arena and on my own terms, I can warm to you. But my time is precious, and my interest is fleeting. Offering me a cup of air will get you nowhere. I demand substance for my time, and I demand it now. Not tomorrow, when you’ve gotten around to researching me and pegging my profile. And to make it harder - to make it more interesting - I am not going to be forthcoming with my information.

This has nothing to do with CRM. It has nothing to do with swooshing logos, or spectacular websites.

It is your job to reflect my passions, my ideals, my interests. Gone are the days when you could expect my attention, or at least trap it. I am the new consumer, and I have become more sophisticated than you ever were. You may pretend to understand me. You may coddle me, tell me I’m beautiful and worthwhile. You may… because I will see through you in an instant, and it really won’t matter to me because I will dismiss you just as quickly. Unless your approach is genuine, and genuinely aligned with my approach, you will fail utterly and miserably.

You have to work for my attention, because you know what?

I am the new consumer, and I am in the driver’s seat.

Gabe Chouinard is a consumer. His website is http://urban-drift.com/

Source : adrants.com, Marketing and advertising news.

CROWD CLOUT: “Online grouping of citizens/consumers for a specific cause, be it political, civic or commercial, aimed at everything from bringing down politicians to forcing suppliers to fork over discounts.”

So, why is the business arena, a dozen years later, so much more appetizing for an Intention Economy and for CROWD CLOUT initiatives?

1. First of all, a billion people are now online. We cannot emphasize this mind boggling statistic enough. Whatever web-based business you’re planning to set up, you now have a potential audience. And this audience can be reached with virtually no marketing budget to speak of, as good ideas will spread instantly, thanks to the blogosphere.
2. Secondly, this huge online audience actually shops online. In the US, consumers spent more than USD 200 billion online last year (including travel), while Europeans shelled out EUR 100 billion on online goodies and services. Online sales in Asia are in the tens of billions USD, too. (Sources: Forrester, Shop.org and eMarketer.)
3. Thirdly, as the past few years have seen an all-determining shift from ‘visiting’ to ‘participating’ (if not grouping) in the online world, many consumers may now be up for more active and involved business models like CROWD CLOUT. As Jeff Jarvis put it: consumers are now both the audience and the participants.
4. Last but not least, an entire infrastructure of personal profiles and blogs is now in place (for example, MySpace boasts about 150 million profiles, Facebook counts 18 million registered users, while UK based Bebo has over 8 million users), potentially giving consumers a direct, private outlet to itemize and tag their intentions. And giving them readily accessible lists of friends to group with. Smart intermediaries or even the social networking sites themselves should jump on this opportunity and facilitate the aggregation process. Also keep an eye on the proliferation of social commerce sites (pick lists, voting mechanisms and TWINSUMERISM included): StyleHive, CrowdStorm, Yahoo Shoposphere, ThisNext and Kaboodle are just a few of the many sites exquisitely positioned to be future CROWD CLOUT leaders.

Trendwatching.com, Global consumer trends, ideas and insights.