For all the very complex consumer segmentation models used by a lot of brands we have to increasingly ask if we are paying adequate attention to the most important and clearly most under-represented segment inside the consumer electronics market. I do not mean youth targets, but instead the largest segment of all, females. They represent at least 30% of the decision influence inside families (US and even PRC) and if we assume they are also about 50% of the singles market this means that they are at least 45% of all the influencer targets. The carriers and other organizations such as healthcare providers understand this. We often see from traditional technology brands no more than a tacit and visual recognition of them as influencers.
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We are a few days past the annual chocolate and flowers fest of Valentine’s Day and it has occurred to me that, just as Forrest Gump may have told you, you never know what you’re going to get. This warning holds true particularly when you are handed one of the smaller boxes that do not contain a nice description inside them. My wife's (Lara) approach to this is smart but maybe not very enticing to others: she takes a small bite from each chocolate, tasting them. Please see the photograph below. Some chocolates she enjoys, some she becomes tentative of, and some surprise her. However, in other situations she feels that the insides could be great and she is just as often disappointed as overjoyed. Unfortunately for many of us, marketing and integrated marketing too often resemble this experience.
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A funny thing happened to mobile advertising as we entered this year. The cries of now-is-the-dawn-of-a-new-age took a step or two back. After years of ‘this is the year for mobile advertising’ we thought we would try something novel and actually ask customers who had just bought a smartphone (or were about to buy one) if they were open the concept. We even said it would cost no more and they would have to sign up in order to avoid junk messages - or at least some of it.
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Letting go is so difficult for marketers, especially in the technology space where features, benefits and constant product launching reduces the propensity to just interacting with targets. One of the three key “legs” for social media is the branding opportunity area. This is where we can interact in environments these targets care about, and we believe from research we have seen a significant increase in brand value for the company.
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Read no further if you are the following brands as the news is not good: Lenovo, Cisco, Nokia, Acer, NEC, Toshiba, Samsung and Symantec. We measured against two separate audiences which brands were seen as green. Look at the simple chart below to see if your brand is either good in consumer’s minds or BtB technology influencer’s minds in the US.
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We all remember the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. It never really existed but both parties, the populace – frightened to say it was not there - combined with the emperor’s ego, meant all bar one little child were conned into awe and admiration. It is a version of group hysteria thinly held together by a lack of basic questioning about it really being there.
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Hello, McFly! We all know that scene from the first “Back to the Future” movie. It is an appropriate, if not slightly, rough take on consumer electronics brands aspirations to charge premiums for their green efforts. The chart below clearly shows that the 5% or more premium (expect and willing to pay) is a darn tough sell everywhere in the globe. There are no countries in the top right box: lots of expectation and willingness. Most countries are in the left hand part here, so this is not just a mature or immature market issue, but a genuine global expression of buyer’s lack of eagerness to justify coughing up extra money for this stuff.
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Okay, so no great news here on consumer confidence, but we still have to market and sell consumer electronics and technology products. Consumers are still considering which technologies, what brands and where to buy them, so while consumer technology marketing is no longer a catwalk we have to be darn efficient at what we do and how we use marketing. The old logic is to pare back on brand and squeeze hard on offers. In itself this is not a bad model; however we can no longer just rely on quick pricing actions to win the day.
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November 4, 2008 | Tags:
consumer
A recent piece of work from a WPP company quoted in AdAge reinforced a view we had back in mid-year when we talked about “pre-recession proofing marketing.” The heading read “Exclusive Survey Shows Americans Texting Less, Brown Bagging More.” We know nothing of what is in those brown bags but the heading of the article “Consumers Curtail Consumption” is always enough to panic a marketer looking to live and breath on market optimism.
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October 3, 2008 | Tags:
consumer
With apologies to anybody with political sensitivities to the above partial quote, but the fundamentals of consumer technology demand are not looking so good going into the traditionally key consumer buying season. It may not be a perfect storm, but the weather conditions at best are cloudy and at worst could be awful.
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