Middle Earth, Airline Companie, and Viral Marketing... Where is the intersection?

It is obvious that generally, the people trust more when a friend say “this product is amazing” than in a company that says “look, my product is sooooo good! Buy it now!”

Chaffey use in your book, Internet Marketing, the concept of Cs2Cs (Consumers to Consumers). In other words when a consumer talks about their experience with a product and helps the company sell this product.

Build a viral marketing campaign and have a lot of people spread your message is an ambitious goal for every company. So let`s have a look at an example to understand better how to create a viral marketing campaign.

Air New Zealand and the Middle Earth

Before we begin: for those who do not understand the nerd world the Middle Earth is the fictional local where happens the Lord of the Rings history. To film the movie and represent the Middle Earth they choose New Zealand, what increased a lot the tourism to this country.

Knowing that the Air New Zealand knew that a lot of people choose to travel to New Zealand to have the Middle Earth experience so why do not start this adventure before arriving in the country, using the "official" airline company of the Middle Earth?

With this in mind, Air NZ ran a campaign in 2012, when Peter Jackson filmed the Hobbit trilogy, to commemorate this new movie.

The video was a success and have more than 12 million views on youtube. So in 2013 when was launched the second movie of the Hobbit trilogy the Air NZ came with a new video and moreover, they offered a chance to win tickets to the world-wide premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

And finally in 2014, with the last movie of the trilogy, they launched a third video:

The 3 videos together have more than 30 million views! But what bring this success to the campaign?

According to Kaplan, we have three conditions to create a viral content:

Messengers: Basically it means to use the right people to tell about your product. They used the personages of Middle Earth, that were responsible to increase the tourism to NZ, and consequently, the passengers of Air New Zealand.

Message: They use a typical message of safety rules that we see in every flight, but present that in a really creative and fun way, doing this memorable.

Environment: According to Kaplan "messengers will only pass on the message when they think it’s not already something everyone knows about". Here we are talking about timing, the Air New Zealand could do that after the Lord of the Rings movie, but they did not, because everyone saw that, but when Peter Jackson launch the Hobbit trilogy was the perfect timing that renewed the interest of people.

You know other viral campaign that was a success?

4 Changes That Will Come With New Technologies

The World Economic Forum published an article in January about The Fourth Industrial Revolution. This revolution is characterised by the technological increase in several areas, blurring the boundaries between digital, physical and biological. For examples, According to JP Rangaswami the devices will become embedded more and more in our bodies. It will generate a lot of data.

How digital marketing relate to this?

First: For Laurel Papworth “Every part of our life will be quantifiable”. These devices in our bodies or in our houses will generate data that can be used to generate specific ads. It is a segmentation not for small groups, but will almost turn the marketing in one-to-one with really personalize ads. New strategies will emerge from that.

Second: With a lot of devices, customers will make decisions faster and better. The customer need have easy access to your brand and find good recommendations of other people. If the client does not find your brand in some seconds and can not have the necessary information you can lose the sale.

Third: Marketing will become more and more interconnected with other parts of business. For example, with a lot of data, the companies will have access to more accurate forecasts and marketing will need share more information with operation and logistics departments. Furthermore, to extract this information marketing will need be in constant talk with IT department. The fourth industrial revolution and big data will impact more than marketing, according to Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson big data is a management revolution.

Fourth: The experts and leaders of marketing department (and others business areas) will need to create the habit to look constantly at the data and try to find what the data say. Further, leaders need to allow themselves to be overruled by the data. Instincts emerge after we entry many times in contact with some kind of data, why not go directly to the original source?

Chronicle of Mobile World

stevecutts.com

Just a little history today for we think about.

Chronicle of Mobile World

Every ten characters sighted underground in the capital, eleven are mobile. They say here that the profession of the future is the specialist of unaugmented reality. Some scholars even argue the hypothesis that real life has been more interesting. So démodé.

Marketing: Creative or Logical?

Probably the image of a marketing man as a crazy guy in an innovative and colorful office will be replaced by an image of a geek-guy looking 3 computer monitors with a lot of numbers and graphs.

With the almost universal access to the internet, people spending more and more time on social media, purchases being made online, and cloud computing providing cheap and practically infinite computer power, Marketing will become more and more an exact science.

In the past, we were really dependent on the great idea of creative guys. A company spent a lot of money in an advertising to television and just would measure the outcome after weeks.

Today is possible to test hundreds of ads, with just some little differences and know in some hours which is the best ad. Moreover, we can do different ads for different people, based on their behavior on the internet. It is possible using A/B tests and big data, tools of these geek-logical-guys.

The marketing is changing, and to survive in the new scenario the professionals will need to understand better about analytics and new types of online research and how to use big data. The creative work will not end, but will change, and the creative people will need at least know the new language to can communicate effectively with new logical-workers in this field.

To improve our skills in this area we can use some free resources available on the internet, two examples are:

•    Analytics Academy, from Google: https://goo.gl/TgImJv

•    Marketing Analytics class from Berkeley University, available free on edX: https://www.edx.org/xseries/marketing-analytics

The world is increasingly interdisciplinary, and learn to talk with other areas will be essential. Great things will emerge from the interaction between creative and analytical people, and the consumer will have better and custom ads.

New Business Models in Internet Era

The world is changing.  Fast.

When we look back we can see that before the first industrial revolution the business were just the craftsmen, that made and sold their products. When the 1º revolution arrives in the mid-eighteenth century, with the first industrial machines, the first modern companies began to emerge with the mass production.

More than a hundred years later we had the second industrial revolution with the automotive industry and electricity. Then, the businessman starts think about scientific management and new business models start to emerge, but the focus continuous in mass production. The logic is still build-sell, build-sell, build-sell.

Took less than a hundred years and we come to the internet revolution. A lot of business are changing, like educational sector with distance education and MOOCs. Other markets are breaking, like record industry with music downloads. And finally other markets are born, as the app-companies, that can build millionaires companies “overnight”.

The fact is: The technologies are changing, and with new technologies, we have new business models, and finally with new business models we are changing the interaction between people and with the world. For example, with the internet the marginal cost per new client is almost zero, this allowed companies like Dropbox and Spotify offer products and services for free, it is the famous “freemium” business model, that allow people have access to excellent products free.

Michael Rappa, analyze different business models on the web and show us nine categories for business models:
•    Brokerage
•    Advertising
•    Infomediary
•    Merchant
•    Manufacturer (Direct)
•    Affiliate
•    Community
•    Subscription
•    Utility

In their article, he explains these models, and we can see examples of billionaires’ companies that usage these models. However, the world continuous changing, the internet is changing, being faster and cheaper. The way that people relate to the internet is changing (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), with user-generated content and social networking sites.

The issue now is imagining how we can improve these business models or create a completely new business models, that will allow the new billionaire's companies emerge.

Books to deepen:
To understand business model and learn how to build one:
Business Model Generation (Canvas): https://goo.gl/ezdbhf

To understand how new technologies will change the world:
Abundance: https://goo.gl/bCj5tz

Businesses Need to Professionalize Social Media

image taken from: threadsys.com

In the Sensis Social Media Report (2015) we have some interesting statistics, like:
• 49% of Australians use social network sites everyday (and growing each year)
• 45% of Australians access social networks site as thirst thing in the morning

Despite half of Australians are in social medias and access this daily, just some businesses are in these spaces:
• 30% of small business
• 32% of medium business
• 56% of large business

Besides that, less than half of companies update social media daily. Despite be active is an essential part to construct a good relationship.

Just 19% of small business, 39% of the medium business and 63% of large business have a strategic plan for social media. Forgetting that social media need planning and lot of study to bring good results.

And almost all businesses measure the success of social media investment with a number of likes and increasing in sales. Despite, that the internet and the social medias permit us to have access to a lot of data to construct good ways to measure results, business continuing just using “likes”.

This scenario shows us how entrepreneurs and large enterprises continue amateur in this area. Besides social media be a constant in the lives of their customers, less than half of business take this opportunity. And, when to participate in this do not treat this like a science.

Some businesses no entry in social medias because see it as a dangerous place where they cannot control what users will say. However, in the era of web 2.0, can be more dangerous for a brand is not in social media than be. In a market that change faster and faster, choose not be in social media can mean not be able to construct a relationship with customers, and consequently not sell to them.

Business need understands the importance of social media and invests more time to understand how to use this, doing congruent plans and thinking about how to measure the impact of their strategies.