Title Image

Blog

Clubhouse app on Apple App Store
In Blog

Clubhouse 101: The Power of Audio and Live Connections

TL;DR – Clubhouse, the newest social media app, has exploded onto the scene with its unique live, audio-only experience. Driving conversation and dialogue between users, the invite-only app creates a new opportunity for digital marketers to connect (and listen) to their audience through authentic conversation. Don’t be the last to the Club – get on the waitlist or beg a friend on the app for an exclusive invite.Clubhouse has taken the digital marketing space by storm, exploding onto the scene with early adopters flocking to the invitation-only social networking platform. It has shaken up the social scene with its audio-first...

digital marketing
In Blog

Digital Marketing Beyond Online Metrics

Online digital marketing metrics are excellent for gauging levels of engagement on your brand’s website. But they're not providing you with the full story. For example, do they tell you if visitors truly connect with the messages on your website? Do they tell you precisely the reason why visitors stay on your website? What about if your messages are actually compelling? Unfortunately, the answer is no to all the above questions. Traditional Digital Marketing Metrics do not Provide Enough Information “Engagement” simply indicates how many views or interactions a page or post receives. And increased engagement rates lead digital marketers to assume that a...

bring messaging into the modern age
In Blog

How to Bring Messaging into the Modern Age

True story: most messaging documents are a joke. You know the drill. Before you launch communications around a brand, product, or service, you need to figure out why your target audience should care. The usual scenario involves penning messaging based on any existing, most likely outdated market research. Or, as PR colleagues frequently face, in the absence of research you try to pick the brains of product managers, marketers, or the C-suite. Once everyone has offered up their (adjective-rich) input on why the masses will stand in line for your offer, the hunt for actual proof points begins. You already know...

compelling content
In Blog

Compelling Content Creation: 5 Questions to Break Through the Clutter

Consumers are inundated with content, messaging and ads each day. Content creators upload 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute and 100 million photos and videos daily on Instagram, and The New York Times publishes 65 blogs every day. In addition, a 2017 IBM Marketing Cloud study discovered that 90 percent of the data on the internet had been created since 2016. In other words: the internet has no shortage of content and developing unique and compelling content that is appealing to your audience is more difficult than ever. So before hitting publish on your next blog, infographic...

consumer trust
In Blog

Who Do Consumers Trust, If Not Online Reviews?

It’s a Love Story The history of the relationship between gaining consumers' trust and online reviews is not unlike a love story. In knight’s armor, online reviews enter the scene on a white horse to save consumers from dishonest marketing and advertising by providing authentic reviews from real people. As the online reviews knight and his steed stand there in the majestic light of sunset (A.K.A. Amazon.com circa 1995), consumers stare in awe and fall madly in love at first sight. When this new information source and apparent transparency arrived, consumers proudly posted their status as “In a Relationship” with the online reviews knight,...

brand communications
In Blog

Brand Communications in the Age of COVID-19

Companies are navigating new ways of working and communicating during the COVID-19 crisis, as well as preparing for what lies ahead. It’s more important than ever to showcase support and thoughtfulness to customers while simultaneously demonstrating to employees their value to the organization. Here are a few tips we’re sharing to help clients with external and internal brand communications challenges related to this new and unfamiliar, fully virtual, economy: General Brand Communication Guidelines: Offer Something Different. Your audience has been inundated with messages from seemingly every brand it has interacted with in the past. To break through the noise, offer a different perspective...

Big data
In Blog

Big Data and the Futility of Ignoring the “Why”

Imagine that there are two gold miners: Swifty and Grace. Both are skilled mining managers and have dual degrees in engineering and mineralogy. Both are working mines that have been in operation for years. Over time, Swifty experiences a decline in his monthly yield of gold ore. Figuring that the actions he has taken for years have always worked, Swifty has his crews blast away ever more aggressively, with more equipment deployed over longer hours. Grace also experiences a similar decline in yield, but she takes a different tack. Instead of just doing more of the same, she assesses the situation. Grace...

cheap marketing research
In Blog

Why Cheap Marketing Research Leads to Expensive Mistakes

Are you considering stretching your budget by using cheap marketing research resources? Consider this before you do: Let’s say that you’re a brand manager presenting research results to a room full of senior executives.  Which of the following situations would you rather face? You are explaining data results that you derived from a free online survey platform. You feel great. (What’s not to love? Management now has pages of data at their fingertips.)  Then suddenly, they start to question your methodological approach. They inquire why you asked certain questions, and they start paging through the deck looking for insights and relevant recommendations....

brand tracker
In Blog

Is Your Brand Tracker Old-Fashioned?

Checking the Pulse of Brand Trackers As marketing researchers we often ask questions like: “What brands do you think of when you think of tennis shoes?”  After all, according to canonical theories of brand marketing, we need to identify what brands come to mind when thinking about a particular category… don’t we? Typically a brand tracker includes measures such as unaided brand recall, brand preference, and brand associations, and those measures certainly serve a purpose. But isn’t it appetizing to think that brand trackers could provide much more? Perhaps even results that brand and marketing managers could actually act on? We thought so. So naturally,...

In Blog

Brand Marketing: Is Everything You Ever Learned Wrong?

Here’s a distressing thought: New research might suggest that everything you ever learned about brand marketing was wrong. Okay, saying everything you learned is invalid might be an exaggeration, but there are several recent studies coming to light that suggest the old brand identity model popularized by David Aaker several years ago just doesn’t work in most product categories.  Yes, you read that right – new findings suggest that most of the advice first popularized in Aaker’s blockbuster book, Building Strong Brands, is fundamentally useless to marketing managers.  Moreover, these same findings suggest that the wisdom of “The Aaker Model” didn’t simply fade...