Perspectives - 2005, Issue 1

Street Smarts

Focusing on the latest trends in brand marketing and communications

TWINSUMER:

The movement of consumers to look for the best of the best, the first of the first, the most relevant of the relevant has a moniker, thanks to our friends at trendwatching.com. It’s Twinsumer and, increasingly, these consumers don't connect to "just any other consumer" anymore; they hook up with (and listen to) their taste "twins" — fellow consumers somewhere in the world who think, react, enjoy and consume the way they do. So a business person in Bogotá finds and books a small, independent boutique hotel in Brussels based on a Twinsumer recommendation, and an Etta James fan in Taipei stumbles upon rare and forgotten Candi Staton songs, thanks to Twinsumer software, and so on. Through the onslaught of new collaborative filtering software such as search engine optimization (SEO), millions of new personal profiles, exclusive communities and what have you, the Twinsumer phenomenon is turning millions of reviews, ratings and recommendations into truly valuable results fitting one person's very particular preferences or even lifestyle. Twinsumer isn’t about access to reviews or ratings or even trust in general, but about relevance. How important is this to you? Trendwatching.com urges you to put on your consumer hat and observe your own changing purchasing behavior. It may contain more traces of Twinsumerism than expected. Then apply these learnings to your own industry or business.

EMOTIONALISM:

All personal decisions, brain scans indicate, are decided by emotional input, no matter how simple those decisions might be. Researchers have found that the part of the brain typically involved in emotions is highly active even when subjects make what typically would be considered rational decisions. So, if you eliminate the emotional guiding factors, it’s impossible to make decisions in daily life, contends Dr. Dean Shibata of the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

And what does it mean for marketers? It may depend on how well marketers build persuasive selling environments that work on an emotional and rational level – environments with the right colors, images, design, tone and usability. Mark Alexander Posth, who specializes in creating content strategies, thinks the new findings are a challenge to marketing on the Web, where lean, stripped-down Web pages often are nearly bereft of design or emotion. Clearly, marketers must realize they must connect with customers emotionally on their Web sites to achieve the best results while also taking into account the ease-of-use issue.

OFFLINE MARKETING:

It’s becoming quite a challenge to get your message to your clients and prospects via e-mail. Aggressive spam filters mean fewer e-mails are being delivered, and many of those that do make it through the filter aren’t being read. In response, a growing number of businesses are resorting to offline marketing – creating small, targeted postcard campaigns to create online sales. Among other things, businesses are creating and mailing a postcard campaign to a targeted list of prospects all online through the U.S. Postal Service, which offers templates for doing so.

Blogger Denise Wakeman has tried and recommends it. (You can see the postcard here.) And she offers her template for your own postcard campaign. Right now, you can only send to U.S. postal addresses, but the USPS plans to expand to international mailing options soon.

TEEN SHADOWING:

The blogosphere, not surprising, sparks many new marketing trends by eagle-eyed marketers who spot the freshest happenings for their particular audience. Take teens, who spend $170 billion annually. Thirtysomething Anastasia Goodstein’s blog www.ypulse.com features teen news, commentary and marketing buzz as well as features about youth media. It has become a must-read over the past year for a growing number of marketers to teens.

Another new Web site, www.bamboozled.org, started by teens at the Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center in San Francisco, serves as a beacon to marketers who gather insights into the teen audience. It’s vital to identify those blogging sites that really have a pulse on your target audience.

What you have to remember with members of Generation Y – the first generation that never knew a world without the Internet – is that they are adept at identifying those marketers who aren’t really authentic.

SACHET MARKETING:

In developing mega-economies like China, India, the Philippines, Mexico and Brazil, micro-selling methods aimed at new consumers are emerging. Trendwatching.com calls this serving up of products, services and loans in affordable sizes sachet marketing, named after the single-use shampoo sachets that sell for a few cents in emerging economies. (More than 95% of all shampoo units sold in India now are single-serve!)

With small portions and sizes, lighter versions and single-use sachets, aspiring consumers can afford and get to know your brand. In India, the Simputer personal computer, priced at less than 10,000 rupees, looks like a Palm handheld device but it’s several times more powerful. It’s designed even for the illiterate, with its built-in text-to-speech conversion software.

Whirlpool’s Brazilian affiliate, Consul, has designed a fully automatic, three-cycle centrifuge washing machine that costs no more than an old-style tank washer, about $220 in U.S. dollars. Also in Brazil, that country’s biggest private bank, Bradesco, has set up very basic teller services, called Banco Postal, in underused post offices. And while most of Banco Postal’s depositors earn $65 a month or less, the service already has captured 1.6 million new accounts and will break even soon if it isn’t already profitable.

FUTURE BUZZWORDS:

Again, the eagle eyes at Trendwatching.com have penned buzz titles on several marketing-related trends:

Life-caching: Consumers are collecting, storing and displaying their entire lives, for personal use or for friends and family, and even the entire world to peruse. The necessary enablers are in place and include cell-phone makers such as Nokia, software producers like Microsoft, search-engine giants like Google, iPod and computer-maker Apple and camera-manufacturer Kodak.
Online Oxygen: "600 million consumers worldwide are beginning to see online access as an absolute necessity, and there are no signs that the pace of integrating online access into daily life is slowing down."
Generation C: The Generation C phenomenon captures the tsunami of consumer-generated content building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.