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Anna Bradshaw, Account Director at our Sydney based office, takes a look at one of Australia’s top integrated campaigns of the moment, and applauds the unsung heroes behind the campaign’s execution.

Going into any branch of Coles, Woolies or your local convenience store in recent weeks, you couldn’t help but notice the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, featuring different first names printed on bottles of Coca-Cola.

In the first phase of the campaign which launched in the Autumn, Australians could pick up a personalised bottle, or buy a can and get it personalised at one of 18 Westfield shopping centres.  Widely supported by out of home and social media, the campaign quickly captured the imagination of local consumers.  A second phase had over 30,000 fans voting on the next 50 names to release, results were announced in mid-December, and those winning names have already been on shelves throughout this month.

At first, like many others, I was struck by the genius of such a simple idea. It taps wonderfully into the brands iconic nature and people’s love of personalisation. In doing so, it invigorates the brand keeping it top of mind whilst also being a strong sales driver which doesn’t erode value.

But then I went on to thinking that though this is a simple idea – as is all too often the case with integrated brand experiences – making them happen isn’t all that simple.

The unsung heroes of this campaign are the print, production, logistics and supply chain departments. A great idea poorly executed, goes back to being a weak idea – the devil is in the detail. This campaign would fall flat if the labels were a significantly different quality to that of the real thing, or the time lag between the names being decided upon and them appearing in-store was too great, or if the different names weren’t evenly distributed across the country.

This is a truly integrated campaign which works not only across different consumer touch-points, but also across different client and agency disciplines.

It’s a lesson for all brand teams.  If ever you find yourself thinking “great idea, but I’m not sure we’d get our Operations team on board to make it happen”, be willing to challenge that mindset.

Good agencies can certainly deliver great integrated ideas.  But excellence in integrated delivery can’t come solely from them.  The key is getting all areas of your company working in tandem if you want your marketing to fizz and not fall flat.

Big brand experiences and ad campaigns can be fantastic for building brand awareness and driving desire.  But with up to 70% of brand selections made at the point of purchase and 68% of buying decisions unplanned, is it better to focus marketing from the shelf backwards?

In recent years, the concept of shopper marketing has surged in popularity.  Of course, in-store marketing has always been important, but shopper marketing is much more than just packaging, display and promotions.

It’s about everything brands can do to influence shopper behaviour, from initial interest to final purchase.  In short, it’s about the whole journey, not just the final destination.

What’s driving interest in shopper marketing?

• Media fragmentation – it gets harder for brands to stand out via traditional media, so many are now investing at the final “moment of truth”.

• Economic climate – shoppers are looking for ways to save money, driving down brand and retailer loyalty.  Never has it been more critical for brands to provide strong reasons to buy.

• Own brand focus – retailers are investing heavily in their own brands, so manufacturers need to find ways to work with them for mutual benefit.

• Wealth of data – loyalty cards and EPOS data are opening up more opportunities for brands and retailers to analyse and predict shopper behaviour.

 

Principles of effective shopper marketing

There are many tactical elements that make up effective shopper marketing strategies – some of which we’ll be looking at in future posts.  Ultimately, though, it’s important to follow a few guiding principles for success in this field:

1. Adopt a different mindset

Shoppers are very different to consumers.  The mindset and motivation of someone out shopping is poles apart from someone watching, listening or reading ads at home.  Shopper marketing is about focusing on the in-store experience first, and using clever integrated marketing ideas to create touchpoints which seamlessly build to that final experience.

2. Focus on positive interruption

Shopping can range from social excursions to task-driven outings.  Understanding different mentalities, group dynamics, dwell times and environmental factors for each is vital if brands are to connect in positive ways.  Disrupting peoples’ “auto-pilot modes” only works if brands leave shoppers feeling glad they were interrupted.

3. Understand and work with retailers

A crucial element of shopper marketing is working with key retailers to create mutually-beneficial shopping experiences.  That requires a real understanding of each retailer’s openness to new ideas, their value and relevance to individual brands, and their wider objectives or strategies.  Success is all about aligning your brand’s interests with the retailer’s category visions.

4. Deliver on the brand promise at every touchpoint

Shopper marketing is all about aligning the online, off-line and in-store brand experience.  Brands need to ensure their communications are integrated and consistent – before, during and after the store visit.  The art of shopper marketing is building understanding, desire and expectation right along the shopper journey.  But if the “moment of truth” purchase experience doesn’t fulfil those “promise” touchpoints, then it’s worthless.

 

Here at BEcause, we have years of experience working with brands and retailers on campaign-based in-store experiences and shopper marketing initiatives around the world.  Notably our retailer activations for Pamper’s, one of the world’s leading brands, which is still the UK’s most awarded shopper programmes  To find out how we could help you, contact Sharon Richey in London, Meredith Cranmer in Sydney, or Igor Gusev in Moscow.

 

Tracking trends and reacting in real-time to consumer behaviour is one of the aspects to social media campaigns that can make them so effective.  The growth in use of smart-phones and ‘check-in’ apps offers potential to extend this strategy offline by tracking how consumers are interacting with a real-world location.

But the level of insight that can be gleaned from Foursquare and Facebook Places has, until now, been fairly limited.  With check-in deals also a relatively new concept, launching and managing promotions is still quite a disjointed process, especially if it involves more than one platform.  Multiple locations mean multiple deals and venue pages, so a national campaign can become quite resource intensive and complex to manage.

This month Hootsuite may have provided an answer with the addition of Geotoko to its ever-expanding suite of social media campaign tools.

Geotoko offers brands and agencies a platform to manage campaigns across key location-based social networks including Facebook Places, Foursquare, Twitter and Gowalla.

Geotoko also addresses the need for insight and offers a more joined-up approach to campaign management with the following tools:

A promotions builder that allows check-in deals and offers to be launched simultaneously across multiple networks & multiple locations.  QR codes can also be automatically generated, opening up the promotion to an even wider audience.

An analytics dashboard that presents check-in data in a variety of ways, including check-in time / day trends, key influencers, sentiment, demographic trends and consumer feedback by location.

So how will these tools aid experiential marketers?  Here are some examples of how we think they could be used:

1. Inform strategy

Use historical data from venue check-ins to inform sampling strategy.  For example, what day of the week do people tend to be checking-in? What time of day are they more likely to leave feedback?  Which locations are check-in hotspots?

2. Real-time feedback

Track the effectiveness of a campaign in real-time by monitoring check-ins and consumer feedback across the locations where field staff have been placed.  Trends in sentiment and product/brand/event feedback can be monitored and acted upon as the experience or sampling happens.

3. Tailor content & promotions

Location-specific online content and promotions can be created (or revised) and posted on the fly, based on consumer feedback during an event.  With the addition of the QR code generator, this content / promotion can also be attached to real-world objects and events by field staff at the location.

4. A clearer picture of success

Support results from consumer surveys and other measurement mechanics with check-in data from each location.

 

Until now, consideration of geo-location platforms has tended to be an ‘either/or’ choice, with Facebook understandably winning the toss in most cases due to its huge user-base.

Geotoko has just made it a lot easier for brands to launch integrated, multi-platform campaigns that can be evaluated effectively.

Last month we explored how digital and social media can amplify an experience by extending reach, enabling conversation and encouraging content sharing.  But despite the technological benefits to digital integration, there are still certain aspects of a brand experience that work better in the real-world.

In part two of our blog, we outline why face-to-face conversation and interaction are still key to a successful experiential campaign.

 

1. Body language

Despite video chat becoming more prevalent, when it comes to reading people’s responses there is still no substitute for a good old face-to-face chinwag.  A consumer’s body language will paint a thousand words when they are presented with a product sample, a visual or a new experience.   Brand ambassadors can also use open and welcoming body language when speaking to participants, which helps them to relax, enjoy the experience and form a positive impression of the brand.

2. Eye contact

We all feel much more at home speaking to an actual person in the flesh, rather than a generic company profile or call centre rep.  This is why many brands have applied the personal touch to their social media presence.  But use of eye contact, a key part of developing trust, will always work better in a real-world environment.

3. Tangibility

As each generation learns digital skills from an increasingly early age, we are all getting comfortable with the ‘virtual’ world of the web.  But despite this we are still very much hard-wired to think about our immediate surroundings as much more ‘true’ and ‘believable’ (hence the term ‘real-world’!).  Something that is more tangible is likely to be more memorable and will inevitably generate a longer-lasting impact (albeit one that is then shared virtually!).

4. Multi-sensory

Although the web can deliver a sensory experience to some extent by combining visual and audio content, a digital experience will rarely engage with a person’s full range of senses.  The combination of smell, touch & taste is often critical to shaping a consumer’s positive impressions of a product, especially for food and beverage brands.

5. Trial

It is true that the web can potentially extend reach of sampling activity, but if a physical product is involved it will still need to be delivered by post.  The brand will have no control over the context of the product trial and will be reliant on the good nature of the consumer to respond with their opinion without prompting.  Face-to-face sampling is still a much more robust way of delivering a product in a controlled environment and enabling the field staff to instantly record responses from consumers.

 

A real-world event will deliver a tangible, multi-sensory experience that consumers are likely to remember for longer.  But to fully capitalise on the value of that positive impact, it is important to ensure there is plenty of opportunity for consumers to talk about and share online what they have just experienced.   This is why we believe that a truly memorable experience will involve a combination of digital, social media and experiential approaches that work in unison, resulting in a campaign that that is more than the sum of its parts.

Click here if you missed our previous blog on 5 elements of brand experience that work better online.

A great brand experience will work across multiple platforms integrating experiential, digital and social media to create something special that people will want to talk about and share.  The key to an effective multi-channel campaign is in understanding the possibilities and limitations of each platform.

There are certain rules of conversation marketing that apply universally, but there are also aspects to online conversations that cannot be recreated in the real-world and vice versa.  In Part I of our two part blog we explore how digital and social media can amplify a real-world experience in ways that offline activation alone won’t deliver.

1. Enhanced targeting

Social media has enabled people to build expansive communities based around their passions and lifestyles.  Search and monitoring tools make it easy to pinpoint topics of conversation (including brand-specific ones) and connect with people based on their interests.  Similarly the granular level of user data on offer through the Facebook ad platform allows for highly targeted advertising and recruitment to brand pages of only the most relevant consumers.

2. Buzz-building and recruitment

Seeding ‘teaser’ content and conversation across online channels will help build anticipation for an event, developing a buzz that can be tracked and channelled in way that offline conversation can’t. Digital tools such as e-tickets and mobile short codes will help drive recruitment and data capture, with social apps like Facebook events enabling consumers to instantly extend the invitation to their friend networks.  In addition to traditional digital channels like email, social media now offers even more scope for brands to stay in regular touch with consumers in the lead up to an event, maintaining interest and improving footfall on the day.

3. Extended reach

A brand experience can now reach hundreds or thousands more online without being restricted by geographical or regional boundaries.  The cleverest campaigns will invite consumers to take part in an experience without necessarily requiring physical attendance.  Social media also enables those who physically attend to interact with online participants, creating a shared experience that extends far beyond the location, but is still driven by real-world content.

4. Content sharing

Exciting and immersive real-world experiences provide the perfect fuel for content-hungry social networks.  Thanks to the popularity of smart-phones and social apps, word-of-mouth can now spread across these networks at lightening pace.

5. Campaign longevity

What goes online will most likely stay online and, if popular, consumer content will continue to spark conversation around the brand long after the initial event has passed.  Recruiting participants to the brand’s social profiles will then enable sustained and long-term interaction with fan communities, meaning less reliance on awareness campaigns to reach target audiences in the future.

Digital and social media platforms allow a brand experience to reach and engage with far more consumers, overcoming the geographical limitations of a real-world event.  But although online conversation has the potential to be far-reaching, there are still benefits to face-to-face interaction with consumers that online activation won’t replace.   Check back in September for Part II – ‘5 elements of a brand experience that work better in the real world’.

 

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