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Looking Back, Looking Ahead – CMOs Weigh In

This is such a great time of the year isn’t it? I mean with all the parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the snow. This time of the year is also time for fearless forecasts, the ones where everyone dares to boldly go where no man, or woman has gone before.

Or something like that.

What I am referring to of course is it’s the time of year when people make predictions for the coming year about this and that. And while I wanted to pen such a piece myself, I wanted to put a little different spin on it – I am a big fan of spinning, as it were.

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When It Comes To Mobile Marketing, Integration Is Key

As a long-standing proponent of marketing integration I can speak to the fact that many marketers still have difficulty in putting it into practical use, including many chief marketing officers which was the basis of my piece aptly titled The Eleven Letter Word That Continues To Elude All CMOs And Marketers.

Based on recent research it would appear many in the mobile marketing space would be wise to integrate their marketing messages, especially this holiday season and in particular across two specific mediums.

The research comes from Responsys, AKA the company I work for, and reveals some very interesting and intriguing findings and shows a clear correlation and opportunity for mobile marketing folks.

According to the research almost 40% of consumers who previously opted in to receiving promotional emails from a retail marketer are also interested in getting promotional messages from these same retailers via SMS or text messaging. The findings alone would be significant but when you factor in that this past Cyber Monday saw an increase of 96% in mobile sales year-over-year from 2011 according to IBM, plus mix in the the fact that the percentage of emails being read on a mobile device are growing steadily literally as we speak – 

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Twitter for Sharing and Syndication

Many misunderstand the current power and relevant scale of Twitter. It is not about how Twitter has scaled to the general public. The most important thing about News, Content, and anything else published via Twitter, is that a great deal of the influencer community “is” utilizing Twitter for news, communication, and discovery. This information then finds its way to other publishing mediums be it Blogs, Traditional News Media, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, the water cooler, or whatever other mediums exist. Twitter is a tool that leads into other forms of social sharing.

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What Mobile Marketers Can Learn From The Papa John’s Lawsuit

“With nearly 86 million Americans now shopping on their smartphones, this pronounced shift in consumer behavior is simply too large for retailers to ignore, with the future of their business depending on how well they adapt to the new environment.”

The above quote is from an article I penned back in September titled appropriately enough Mobile Marketing Too Large For Brands To Ignore.mobile marketing

It was said by Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of mobile and I found it so telling I repeated in a column I wrote about a month later Mobile Marketing – The Elephant In The Room For Marketers.

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What Are You Doing to Connect Women with Your Brand/Product/Service?

What is happening now, as more women spend more time on more social networking sites for more reasons, is that women’s purchasing power now goes well beyond the purse … into women’s relationships.

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Do Brands Have A Responsibility When It Comes To Packaging?

Last year I wrote a story about The Most Misleading Packaging Design I Have Ever Seen. The inspiration for my article came from a text message my wife had sent me while at our kids’ school.

The text message include a picture and, as I wrote originally “What I thought was one thing turned out to be something completely different entirely and made me want to openly question the motives behind brand packaging design.”

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Freedom in a digital world

For a long time, there was alignment between what we wanted when it came to privacy and what was possible for the government to do. We relished our privacy and got used to the freedom to act anonymously at the same time that the government and marketers really couldn’t keep track even if they wanted to.

In the pre-internet world, there was just no way to imagine a useful database of every citizen’s fingerprints. The thought that a store would know every item you’ve ever purchased (and not just at their store) was crazy. Freedom from intrusion existed largely because the alternative was impossible.

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Relationship Building on Social Platforms

So can you maintain meaningful relationships with thousands of people at a time? No, but every touch is important, no matter how small. Think of it this way… individual touches are like relationship seeds. You have a much better likelihood of reaping a good harvest when you sow widely, but only if you prepare the ground with value and nurture with authenticity.

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Even More Brands Jumping On The Instagram Bandwagon

In case you don’t know this about me I am a huge sports fan. Huge. The reason I bring this up is because the word “bandwagon” is often bandied about in the sports world as in “more and more fans are jumping on the [[insert name of team here]] bandwagon.” This jumping is associated with said team’s fortunes rising thus the sudden popularity therein.

Make sense?

Now normally these same fans who were once so eager to grab a seat on the bandwagon, will just as quickly jump ship if and when the given team’s fortunes begin to head in the opposite direction. These of course are not true fans for any real fan stays the course and supports their teams through good times and bad.

But I digress.

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