Marketing in Real Life

I was just reading an article over on Searchengine land (courtesy of Marketing Profs' email) about tailoring your ad copy to people at different stages of the purchase process. These five stages (Stage 1: Awareness. Stage 2: Information Search. Stage 3: Alternative Evaluation. 4: Purchase Decision. Stage 5: Post-Purchase Behavior.) are fairly common in marketing publications and in research studies designed to measure the impact of of communications and other initiatives. Unfortunately, they don't apply universally in today's world. As consumers have taken more control of the buying cycle the traditional buying process has been thrown out the window in many cases. What used to be linear now could take on any sort of shape. For that reason its important to map out the decision process of today for your products and services before any campaign or research project is launched and confirm it with your findings. People may be buying differently than you expect and your strateg

We've been doing a lot of digging around on social media recently. 3 quick tips from the NExpo on tuesday coutesy of an excellent panel of speakers. Social media should be measured in years not days. Need the human piece. Need to be a publisher and utilize people as the voice who engage with consumers. Not measured in numbers... Measured in engagement. It is about 2 way conversations and you need more than authenticity, you need ruthless honesty. Make sure your content is relevant. Relevance and benefits are better than strictly promotion. Very funny viral video from VistaPrint today as well. I learned about it from their twitter site. As always, integration is the key to success! Enjoy!

We've been doing a lot of digging around on social media recently. 3 quick tips from the NExpo on tuesday coutesy of an excellent panel of speakers. Social media should be measured in years not days. Need the human piece. Need to be a publisher and utilize people as the voice who engage with consumers. Not measured in numbers... Measured in engagement. It is about 2 way conversations and you need more than authenticity, you need ruthless honesty. Make sure your content is relevant. Relevance and benefits are better than strictly promotion. Very funny viral video from VistaPrint today as well. I learned about it from their twitter site. As always, integration is the key to success! Enjoy!

Shameless promotion today of this Friday's webinar on loyalty programs... You're invited to the next session of CMB's free webinar series on May 22 at Noon ET. Hilton's Vice President of Customer LoyaltyBusiness Optimization and Guest Intelligence, Joe Rhodes, will join Judy Melanson to discuss "The power of loyalty programs" and what companies are doing with their programs in light of the current economic situation. The state of loyalty programs: Cut-backs and increased investments in today's business landscape Does loyalty still matter? Program changes: Best practices and issues to consider We hope you can make it! Time and Date: May 22, 2009, Noon ET Registration: Register via webex here.

I am very excited that AirTran announced they will have wifi available on every flight starting in July. For the short period that they have the competetive advantage, they need to be promoting the heck out of it. I recently flew a Delta flight with WiFi and was shocked that it was an option. And because the airline industry is so full of parity, AirTran can win just by being first. Good work AirTran! Read the article here. (Everyone else, get on the ball!)

I am very excited that AirTran announced they will have wifi available on every flight starting in July. For the short period that they have the competetive advantage, they need to be promoting the heck out of it. I recently flew a Delta flight with WiFi and was shocked that it was an option. And because the airline industry is so full of parity, AirTran can win just by being first. Good work AirTran! Read the article here. (Everyone else, get on the ball!)

Mirroring the comments of Chadwick Martin Bailey's Chris Neal pointed from a recent webcast on Cloud Computing ( watch for yourself here ), The Metro has an interesting article on Google's free business apps and their impact on emerging businesses, specifically startups. “Today you can start your own company from your living room at almost no expense,” says Louis Rosas-Guyon, author of the new book “Nearly Free IT.” “That’s why the recession has led to an explosion in entrepreneurship.” Google apps and other free or inexpensive business applications are a boon to all of us trying to do more with less. And it is not just for documents and email. We recently discovered this when figuring out how to make sense of Twitter posts and found numerous free downloads that could help identify trends instead of spending money on paid solutions before we needed them. Now as researchers we are able to take advantage of these free solutions that present data simply and make them useful for ou