MKTG5605:Digital Brand & Product ManagementChoosing Your Activation Channels

April 11, 2018

“Doubt kills more dreams than

failure ever will.”-Suzy Kassem,

writer

Picking the Right Digital Distribution Channels

Audience, Budget and Message

• Who (and Where) is Your Audience?

• What Fits your Budget?

• How will it Connect to Other Content?

• What Fits your Message?

Consistency is Key !

Cross-Platform Distribution

Getting a single item in front of more people…

• Pick channels that make sense in conjunction

• Social Channels can be used to share many different types of content from other sources

Think about your distribution holisticallyrather than as a piece-meal activity.

Channel Activation

Activations, often inclusive and interactive, ignite the fire that will light the way for people to find your product and align with your purpose. It is the process of making a brand well known and loved by customers.

Pizza Hut: Pie Tops

CASE: Dove

1) How was brand meaning controlled before 2000 and how is it controlled at the time of the case?

2) Spend a little time searching blogs, using Google Blog Search, Technorati, BlogRunner, or any other blog search engines, to get a sense of what people are saying about Dove today. What does this discussion contribute to the meaning of the brand?

3) With reference to the age of YouTube advertising, “Is marketing now cheap, fast and out of control?” Dove has started a conversation “that they don’t have control of.”

In “When Tush comes to Dove,” Seth Stevenson writes about the “risky bet that Dove is making.” Do you see risks for the Dove brand today?

Case Study: Dove

Digital Influencers

DIGITAL INFLUENCERS

Why is understanding influencersimportant?

Think about platforms … do brand managers /

brand markers have full control

5 Types of Digital Influencers

The YouTuber – Strong ability to connect with vast audiences, due to digital success and reach

The Instagrammer - The #1 social media platform for brand engagement

The Snapchatter – Becoming one of the hottest platforms for marketing and advertising

The Vine Star – Huge hit with brands and across multiple social media channels

The Blogger – Advertising with bloggers remains one of the best and preferred ways

Digital Influencers

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is”

- Scott Cook, CEO, Intuit

Measuring Influence (Performance)

Share of Conversation (SOC) = proportion of posts during a specific period of time about a brand. (… is the number of posts)

Share of Influence (SOI) = Proportion of people who have a high influence score and have spoken about the brand during a specific period of time. (… is the unique individuals that have posted)

Awareness = an estimated number of people who may have read a post about a brand during a specific period of time.

Brand awareness vs. Share of Influence

Brand Awareness – the extent in which consumers are able to recall or recognize a brand

Social influencers can make consumers aware of a brand, but the share of influence (SOI) only occurs when an influencer shares their sentiment or opinion about a brand relative to competing brands, with a strong and active following in the industry of the brand.

CASE: HP Brandclout

HP’s use ofShare of Influence with BrandClout

Influencer

Who are the

influencers?

Where are they

conversing?

Are they referring to

our brand in

conversation?How do I engage with

them?

Soci

al M

edia

Imp

act

Social Influence

Has my engagement

increased my brand

influence?

Graph Content from BrandClout

Importance of Social Media Influencers in Business• Proliferation of social media has helped to

empower those with purchasing responsibilities to sidestep a supplier’s sales force during the early phases of the purchasing funnel; instead, resorting to social communities to research, evaluate and vet potential solutions

• As the sales pitch has been taken out of the supplier’s hands, purchasers have instead turned to industry influencers on social media channels to help with the product evaluation and vetting process

• Guidance provided by social media influencers that have established credibility within a business arena can help purchasers to make experience-based decisions, thereby mitigating potential risks associated with making uninformed decisions

Industry influencers have filled the research and evaluation gap that was once filled by a vendor’s sales force

Locating Influencers Through the Noise

• Identifying relevant influencers for a particular domain can be a challenge depending on the nature of the audience, market and product

• In the HP case, industry influencers could be identified and leveraged via the following:

1. Determine the channels where conversations are taking place by your target audience (e.g. Purchasing Managers) regarding “Big Data” topics

2. Identify individuals that are authoring steady streams of “Big Data” content within these channels, and are building large groups of followers

3. Leverage data gathering and extraction solutions (e.g. Hadoop and HP Vertica, respectively) to filter content that has been posted by influencers to then gauge social sentiment and activity regarding “Big Data”

Courtesy of: http://detechter.com/social-media-influencers-earn-more-money-online/

Brands should leverage the social connectedness of influencers to reach

purchasing decision makers

Social Influence Monitoring Tools – Competitive Landscape

PeerIndex• Social ranking site that

breaks down users’ scores according to authority and activity on a particular topic

• Only scrapes data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora

Reference: http://www.mycustomer.com/marketing/strategy/influencer-marketing-klout-vs-kred-vs-peerindex

Klout• Social influence measurement

tool that measures an individual or brand’s influence based on its ability to produce action from an activity

• Scrapes data from more social networks – including Foursquare, YouTube and Instagram – than any other tool

Kred• Ranks users according to

“influence” (when others retweet, reply or follow you) and “outreach level”

• Add offline “real world achievements” that add points to your score depending on factors such as size of company, timescales and certificates

Case Study: HP BrandClout

1. In the current business scenario, how important is the role of social media influencers as a marketing channel?

2. How can we identify the domain-specific influencers for the Big Data problem?

3. How does BrandClout compare with other solutions in the market?

4. How can HP justify investment ROI? (Information)5. What is the difference share of conversation versus

share of influence; awareness vs. share of influence

Best Practices

• Avoid splitting small budgets across all channels

– Focus on key area or two to deliver on brand objectives

• Match channel to target customer or target moment

– Think upper funnel vs. purchase intent– Match channels to target

• Target

– Right message, person, time

• Test, measure, and learn

– Be clear about success measures with agency partners

– Evaluate effectiveness

Go To Market Strategy

• Align and optimize your channels of distribution

• Deliver the right content at every stage of the buying cycle

• Drive conversions from your (target) audience

“Harvesting and analyzing the unstructured data available in social spaces like Twitter, Facebook, … to generate meaningful insights …is driving true value for business having presence in social media today”

- Dr. Pramod Singh, Dir, Digital Analytics, HP

Looking ahead. . .

• April 15 Meet Up … Unilever

Digital Influence & Innovation in the Marketplace

Guest Lecturer: Marie Wolf

Market Insights Director of Research Innovation

Research: www.unilever.com

T.hanks!

Herskovitz, Stephen and Crystal, Malcom, “The Essential Brand Persona: Storytelling and Branding,” Journal of Business Strategy, 2010

Zucker, Mat, “It’s Not Too Late: 5 Plays in Digital Activation for 2017,” Forbes.com, 10 May 2017

Deighton, John. “Dove: Evolution Of A Brand”. HBR. 03/25/08. Web, accessed 04/01/18.

T. (2006, October 06). Retrieved April 02, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U

www.dove.com, Dove corporate site, https://www.dove.com/us/en/stories/campaigns.html

“Media Tweets by Dove (@Dove).” Twitter, Twitter, 9 Oct. 2017, twitter.com/Dove/media?lang=en.

Rogers, David L., “The Digital Transformation Playbook,” 2016

Acknowledgements