Cullmann Design Blog

Mar 6, 2011 0

Scent As Branding

In competitive spaces like the hotel industry, differentiation is crucial. Defined by many difficult to articulate properties, service, ambiance and implied personal taste being examples. Modern brands have found new ways to leave an impression in customer’s minds: Olfactory marketing.

What does “scent” mean to a brand? What can be communicated? Several examples come to mind, the coconut scent of suntan lotion, synonymous with beach vacations and the heat of summer sun. Other examples include the branding of hotel chains via a specific aroma that is uniform regardless of location or geography and the most famous–the formulation of fryer oil for McDonalds to induce a pavlovian purchase from the hungry masses.

The approach to branding via aroma can be approached several ways, As a welcoming message to returning patrons with a scent that is unique the first time, but can trigger a memory upon re-encountering the scent. This is a way for marketers to approach still new territory with consumers. The brain is capable of storing and retrieving memories associated with odor more clearly than the other senses. This, combined with the reliance on visual stimulus for online marketing, can make “real-world” encounters powerful opportunities for a service to establish itself in memory.

Scent can also leverage a feeling based on pre-existing proclivity. An example, would be the smell of cleanliness. Lemon and citrus smells lend themselves well to household instances. Heavier reliance on cleanliness (hospitals and healthcare facilities) require something stronger to reach sterile requirements and also set expectation for a stronger smell to establish the sense of cleanness in visitors mind.

for many brands, the task may seem daunting: where to begin? How much is too much? How will I measure success? For large brands, a finding a specialist in the field is a great chance to be a leader and do so with a group that has experience. Brands can also work on a smaller scale with market research and smaller, pilot programs. Such testing can yield not only information on how to “sniff” out success, but also a way to learn about your audience’s disposition for your brand. Scent is a way to articulate ideas without the typical predispositions most market research has.

In many ways, technology is tearing us away from analog encounters and refining our perception on what is a narrow channel of measure. So much of digital branding is now held to the visual and audio communication that travels well digitally. This encounters that we have as consumers outside of that narrow band can be very powerful. As brands enter into s maturing online market and social branding becomes a minimum point of entry, making strong mark’s on people’s memories is crucial. Accessing those memories and provoking a feeling or mood will help build an affinity and a toggle for strong feelings at a later date or even without direct exposure to the trigger.

Using a series of colors and tones, we may soon be seeing some marketing tools that cause sme-mories.

Sep 20, 2010 1

Google Instant Search

Search engine giant Google recently announced a redesign of their homepage that enables a new way to see your search result. This new method, titled Google Instant, shows a real-time adjustment in your search results as well as “suggestions”. The new search mechanism allows users to see the results as they add characters to their search query. The page dynamically changes the search engine results page (SERPs) as well as the Google advertising that appears above and to the right of nature search results. The change is significant as it allows users the opportunity to adjust their search query immediately to fine-tune their results.

The change to the search behavior is currently only available on the Google.com homepage and the google results page. A more comprehensive inclusion of this technology into browser search bars as well as Google’s own browser Chrome is planned for later this year and early 2011. This does mean that not all searches in Google will have an equal experience (at least not in the short term). Mobile integration is also not currently available, even via the search engine’s homepage.

What does this mean for website owners and content creators? It could mean quite a lot if you are relying on search engines for your traffic. Previously, a user may have been searching for a particular subject matter, “web site design” for instance. This search string as a whole offers quite a few options (mainly websites hosting lists of web designers) all relevant to finding a talented individual to design a website. From the new Google homepage, you would begin to enter in the search “web” and you are shown links for webmd. Adding site and design to the search refines itself to the user’s query, but offers hosting, software and DIY solutions. Many which may distract or divert a user who previously may have completed the search and been presented with a web designer eager to have their business.

If you take this example and apply it to a large scale advertising campaign, you have several problems. The largest of which would be controlling search terms in as few descriptive characters as possible for any given category. Additionally, those competitors who may have a brand name similar to your own may have priority results where previously they had been ranked lower.

The obvious question is will Google Instant change search engine optimization? Yes, but not in a revolutionary way. Despite what some experts may be claiming, content optimization will likely make a tremendous leap forward. As users become more familiar with and learn how to refine their searches with addition of words, phrases and boolean statements, content creators will see less visitors, but a more engaged and “sticky” audience. Advertisers and brands should see a higher level of engagement and improved conversion rate. The SEO industry may see a temporary dip, but should come back as a re-invented and more targeted industry as a whole.

Google is the 400lb gorilla in the room, but not the ONLY gorilla. It’s easy to look at this monolithic presence and feel the earth tremble, but this new change is not as wide-sweeping as it may seem. First, Google does not host all search queries from their homepage. Many searches are begun on third party website, via toolbars, desktop utilities or from internet browsers themselves (10% of Google’s traffic alone is referred from browsers)1. Many industries have niche browsers. Bing, for instance, has one of the most popular platforms for health-oriented and travel searches. Yahoo is dominant in many foreign markets and with some age groups. You should look at where your traffic is coming from and how you interface with your audience before taking any reactive steps at all as a result of this new change. You may be in the fortunate position of receiving more traffic as a result of this new paradigm in search.

The market will adjust: Obviously, with any new technology, both users and marketers will find ways to use Google’s new solution as a platform and to generate traffic for the long (and short) tail of the market.

Aug 29, 2010 0

Automated Creative

The convergence is here and the evil robot overlords will be taking over shortly. Am I exaggerating? Probably, for effect, but a recent demonstration by BETC, a subsidiary or Euro RSCG shows that a computer program, a script, can generate the same mediocre concepts produced by a creative team.

The project, under the direction of Stéphane Xiberras, the President and Executive Creative Director of BETC, is titled CAI. The title, an acronym for Creative Artificial Intelligence is an experiment designed to test the principles of formulaic ad generation.

The program can create upwards of 200 concepts based on several parameters including product category, target demographic and expected benefit. From these criteria, concept designs are created and can be applied to traditional online and offline media.

Although I think that there is a place for CAI in an agency, it’s true place is in eliminating the bad creative that is making its way into the market due to time constraints, low budgets and lazy creative teams. Having a tool like this to compete with will challenge agencies and also create a baseline standard for those producing ideas and campaigns.

As a creative person, I find the idea of a creative-producing program offensive, but one can make the argument that the standard filters and default brushes found in popular software packages find themselves into projects is no different. CAI is the same principle brought to an extreme. If you look at ad concepts and designs that are popular at the moment, you can certainly see patterns of design, “safe” concepting and repeated messaging between brands, categories and aesthetics.

What a solution like Comp-U-Creative, CAI, will bring for both the agency and their clients is a challenge to meet the expectation that is set in most agency’s charters: Provide the best solutions for your clients. This can mean many things–Being a taste-maker, being the most engaging, knowing the audience, predicting market trends and changes–but it does not mean producing predictable, scriptable solutions and wasting time, money and effort in their delivery.

Of course not all agencies fit into the category of “replaceable” entities that can be replaced by a well fueled server. Computers are not very adept at predicting those things that will capture human imagination or trends that appear. In fact, it is the advertising industry that has been the spark-point of many cultural trends. Those ideas, those bright-spots in the creative process are examples of what makes us human. Although I think that saying that great ideas are the sole of humanity is dramatic, it is certainly evidence that the sole exists.

Aug 15, 2010 0

Facebook Share For Pharma (What Is The Issue?)

Last week, Tasigna, a Novartis product, received a letter from DDMAC for including a “share” button on their website. The letter stated that the utility “fails to communicate any risk information”. For those who may not know, a “share” button is a small widget that allows you to link to the site that it has been hosted on, with one or two clicks, to your favorite social networking service (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).

The issue with this tool (in order to make use of it) for the pharmaceutical industry, or any other highly regulated industry, is two-fold: 1.) There is a character limit placed on the title and description that is shown to other users using the framework provide by Facebook and 2.) That to be assured that this information is included in a social network post, it must be included in the metadata of the branded page (thus mitigating the natural search engine opportunity afforded by the use of metadata).

Controlling social media

The Facebook share widget, and almost all other widgets that are similar, use images found on the webpage they are linking to, any metadata (content coded into the page to help search engines) and the page title (again, content coded into the webpage for search engines) to create the presentation on the host service. Facebook is one service that provides these features. Just like search engine results that are shown to users when they make a web search, the amount of data that can be shown is limited. This is precisely the issue that the FDA has with the “Share” feature.

To add an additional complication, users can also make changes to the metadata before publishing it a part of their social network posting. Although there are many ways to do this using third-party solutions, the easy with which this can be done exacerbates the situation for brand managers and regulatory officials.

The “sharing” features of social media websites are a valuable tool for marketers and extend the reach of brand messaging. It makes use of peer-to-peer recommendations and allows easy communication of ideas and findings between professionals and patients alike. The relevance of social media for the Healthcare Professional can be debated, but regardless of your opinion, the ease of use and subtle differences between social media tools like this and search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are indistinguishable.

Then what does this mean for SEO/SEM?

Recently, the requirements for presenting “important safety information” and warnings has become very important. Suggested parameters range from the vague “presentation above the fold”, to a persistent sidebar presentation,like Tasigna demonstrates, to a complete “opt-in” splash screen before beginning to display content. Regardless of your position, many of these parameters are moot when taking into account the growth of alternative consumption devices like mobile phones, iPads, and dedicated readers. The user experience is not nearly as controllable as regulatory groups would ideally be comfortable with.

I suspect that if regulatory boards and staff where more aware of how search engines worked and behaved that metadata too, would become equally as scrutinized. The limited amount of space allotted by search engines for description and the need to describe to doctors and consumers the offerings on a webpage may quickly come to odds. A danger exists in the sunsetting of branded pharmaceutical websites and the growth of less-accurate non-branded websites and third-party control of the search space for indication categories.

Is this preventable?

The facts around social media tools are that there is little anyone, brand managers, agencies or legal boards, can do to stop someone from linking to a pharmaceutical web property and manipulate the properties of a given post. What companies can do is pay attention to the attributes that these applications and services use. Do you know what the metadata on your brand’s websites says? Have you seen what it may look like if you link to it from Facebook or LinkedIn? That is the best place to start. You should include this in the discussion you have with your agency, peers and legal boards.

Educating yourself and those responsible for approving your web properties is more important than ever. The presentation of the DDMAC letter shows how the FDA is educating itself and taking a position. Marketers will need to be equally, if not more educated, in order to avoid the conditions which Tasigna must address.

What can be done?

If you are responsible or contribute to a brand that may require a black box warning or similar safety notification requirements, there are currently some limited actions that can be taken to make use of social media sharing tools:

Check your metadata. Can you provide a description of your content and your required legal disclosure in 420 characters or less (you likely don’t work in pharmaceutical marketing!)? At the time of posting, that is the current maximum character count for Facebook’s status area. Anything additional will be truncated.
Does your brand have a dedicated Healthcare Professional section? Although consumer facing communication is harshly regulated, the jury is still out on making a use-case for “sharing” tools to be a peer-to-peer vehicle with slightly more liberal policies for social marketing requirements.
Do you have an unbranded channel? This would be an ideal opportunity for using Facebook, Twitter or any other social media channel as a driver and awareness vehicle.
Talk to your medical legal review board. Nothing can aid your cause more than knowing your company’s policies and what your board’s opinions and policies are for the use of social media and how that may apply to a particular indication or brand.

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this and all of my posts are my own and are not those of my employer or its parent company.

Aug 1, 2010 0

Is E-Mail Marketing Still Relevant?

In the past 2 years, there has been a tremendous push to move messaging and advertising to social media. Whether FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, every market has it’s niche and ad agencies have gotten proficient at targeting groups within these networks. While social media marketing was maturing, there was (and still is) a trend in dismissing e-mail marketing. With relatively low click-through rates, competition with SPAM, difficulty in delivering branding elements in many e-mail clients, it had become easy to cast off for the more attractive and exciting new arrival: social media.

Verification

Despite a dip in popularity, e-Mail is still a force to be reckoned with for communicating with customers. Regardless of audience, e-Mail is still one of the few ways outside of a closed-wall eco-system like Apple or FaceBook, that a marketer has to “verify” identity or ownership of credentials. One field of any online transaction of information is ALWAYS e-mail. A savvy marketer will verify the e-mail address with a call-to-action confirmation as quickly as possible to confirm that the email can reliably be associated with a particular identity. Next to credit card information, this is a very easy and convenient way to apply a small amount of accountability to an online user. The process of having users “opt-in” and define the terms that they would like to be communicated with is important and based on metrics, e-Mail is still the most popular method for online CRM and brand-building communications.

Call To Action & Response

E-Mail offers users an expected behavior that is comfortable for them. A well-designed e-mail program will have a clear “From” identifier, visible before even opening the e-Mail, a subject line declaring the main intent of the message and the message (usually with several call-to-actions). User are familiar and typically follow a pattern of behavior if you structure your e-Mails with consistent design and language. This is where e-Mail excels: While social media channels are still working towards how to handle unique customer response and moving users from the gated sanctuary of a particular social network, e-Mail delivers a personalized medium with the ability for a unique call-to-action. All of this can be done addressing the users as an individual, tailoring content and offering an end-to-end dialogue. E-Mail’s ubiquitous nature allows this to be done across any platform or device (including mobile).

Reach & Audience

One of first and still the most common method of communication on the internet, e-Mail offers the widest audience. A majority of web users claim more than one active e-Mail address1, many having several. There is also a wave of adoption for new audiences. AARP has recently released data showing that seniors are the fasting growing group of adopters2 of e-Mail. Those in emerging markets overseas also represent a growing population of e-Mail users. There is a simplicity and approachability that makes it attractive to new web users and bullet-proof to web veterans. There are several complications when dealing with e-Mail as well. e-Mail is a communication channel protected in the US by federal law. The manner in which you engage your customers (or recipients) must adhere to the US CAN-SPAM Act. Although it’s a simple criteria to adhere to, not observing the standards set by this policy will likely land you in your reader’s junk-mail file.

Privacy (sort of)

Although E-Mail is far from a secure medium, it does offer several advantages over social media, SMS and several other hot advertising mediums. A marketer and e-Mail recipient can both expect that the contents of an e-Mail message will not be seen by dozens of their friends, other customers or competitors. Additionally, this same channel can be acted upon with an expectation that the action will be equally as private. This may seem like a small nuance, but if you are someone buying a present for a loved one, accessing banking information or even making a mundane request from the post-office, you can expect that the exchange is limited to the addressed parties.

Equally important, a user can respond via e-mail without a character limitation, or concern that there will be additional charges on their bill for the communication. These are both issues facing SMS marketing and communication. Although immediate, it is a concern to those not familiar with texting and it’s protocols.

Cheering The Underdog

I am a believer in e-Mail marketing. I don’t think it is a silver bullet or the only solution for marketers, but rather, a tortoise in the proverbial race with the hair. Currently, the role of the hair is played by social media and SMS marketing. I think both of these have a place. I also believe there are many cases where social media marketing is a run-away winner. The power of e-Mail marketing is in it’s familiarity and direct nature. It offers strong ROI and is easy to measure both success and failure. For the average person, e-Mail is approaching 15 years old. Even if you’re not measuring your time in “internet years”, it has come into it’s maturity.

Before you pass-off your next opportunity to pitch an e-Mail marketing plan to a client, ask your self about the message and audience. The solution may be easier and more traditional than you may have thought.

You want more?
Check out MailChimp and CampaignMonitor for great tools to launch your campaign. If you want to learn more about who is opening and how frequently messages are read, check out MailerMailer’s metrics report from 2009.

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