“A picture’s worth a thousand words.” But is that enough?
In preparation for a flight down to San Francisco the other day, I loaded my brand new iPad 3 with a few things to occupy my flight. Six videos, thousands of tunes, hundreds of photos, and tons of apps transferred from the old to the new and ready to go.
After the ‘ding ding’ sounded through the cabin – signaling it was okay to turn on electronic gadgets – I fired it up and immediately clicked on a video.
So why a video with all of the choices? Because a video tells a better story, especially compared to the alternative of a photo. Photos give an impression but leave lots to the imagination. They’re just a snapshot. They capture a moment in time.
Most of today’s marketing is still based on a snapshot frame of mind. Think about email campaigns – even from some of the biggest brands. If you do a quick analysis of your email or messaging inbox, you’ll see that all of the communications arrive at the same time in your inbox – first thing in the morning. Why? It’s certainly not because marketers have any sense of whether that’s the... Read more
Archive for Glenn Pingul 
Moving Beyond a Snapshot: Using Data to Create a Longitudinal View of Customer Behavior
How 1:1 Customer Engagement is Stealing the Spotlight from Traditional Segmentation
There’s been a lot of buzz in the media the past few weeks after the ‘all revealing’ NY Times article – How Companies Learn Your Secrets. According to the article, “one study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.”
So think about applying this to your mobile marketing strategy. Is how you engage with end users aligned to their daily routines – what they do day in and day out, how they actually behave – or solely based on ‘who’ they are? We’re all familiar with traditional segmentation. But what’s more helpful – knowing that I’m categorized as a “suburban sports enthusiast” or knowing that I make the same drive, around the same time each day and am 73% more likely to respond to a SMS offer in the morning rather than in the afternoon?
One might argue that marketing to ‘segments’ isn’t much better than mass marketing. So, what is the alternative? The alternative is having a ‘dynamic understanding of the user’. What... Read more
From Moneyball to Mobileball: The Answer is in the Data
In January, as most people are planning and executing their New Year’s resolutions (see my last post), my mind often wanders to playing catch up on things I didn’t do last year. It never fails that I always fall behind on keeping up with the latest and greatest movies – especially the ones that get nominated for the academy awards. And nothing makes the Oscars more irrelevant than not having seen at least one nominated movie.
With that in mind and a long fourteen hour flight to Sydney from Seattle ahead of me, I decided to watch the Oscar-nominated Moneyball.
Does art imitate life or is it the other way around? Given Moneyball is based on the nonfiction best seller by author Michael Lewis, the answer doesn’t much matter; that is unless you look outside of baseball.
Watching Moneyball, I was struck by how similar the plot is to what we see going on with mobile marketers around the world. Read some key dialogue from the movie:
“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. And this leads people who run Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. I apologize.” (Peter Brand)
Top 10 New Year's Resolutions for Mobile Marketers
As we ring in the New Year with overflowing glasses of champagne, the countdown to midnight, and crowds of family and friends, it’s time for the annual tradition…making resolutions.
So without further ado, I bring you a countdown of the top 10 resolutions for mobile marketers.
10. “Get out of debt”
We’ve all seen the predictions for increased mobile marketing spend (now projected to grow by more than 30% by 2016) but what’s the return? The newness factor is wearing off and companies are expecting it to ‘work.’ As marketers divert more funds to mobile, the pressure is on to prove its value and realize a strong return on investment relative to other channels.
9. “Help others”
The mobile phone has become a key part of our day to day lives and mobile marketers realize the value they can add when the right message is delivered at the right time and place. The key is knowing your customers – and their needs – and then delivering what offers real value at the time it really matters. And let’s remember, it’s not always about an up-sell or cross-sell. It may be as simple as an educational message, alert, informational message, tip or trick.
All I want for Christmas is….a sweater with a reindeer on it?
As a kid, sadly and in spite of my catholic school upbringing, my memories of Christmas were all about presents. I can remember many of them - Legos, Battleship, Hot Wheels, Sony Walkman, and the list goes on.
But what made Christmas exciting was not the gifts, but the anticipation of getting them.
The prelude to Christmas is one big tease filled with gamesmanship. As a kid, I played the game well dropping hints on what I wanted each year down to the color, the model, and even the number of AAA batteries required. Holiday shows with toy commercials provided the perfect foil for an impromptu, “Hey mom, that’s the really cool game Tony’s mom got him for his birthday!” All the data was there for my parents to grab.
This gamesmanship between child and parent is a lot like what goes on with marketers and their customers (just in reverse). Marketers collect data. Some do surveys. Some try segmenting them into meaningful clusters to find the right product or service to offer. They do all this work in order to anticipate what their customers want. Most get it wrong.
They’re wrong because they think about what the customer wants from their point of... Read more
