Singapore Airlines social media blunder

Even top Airlines such as Singapore Airlines can come under fire these days for social media blunders. You would think that Singapore Airlines, one of the top global airlines, would have a social media expert to handle their public relations.

Singapore Airlines released a statement that was deemed offensive by many people around the time of MH17.

“Customers may wish to note that Singapore Airlines flights are not using Ukraine airspace.”

When they released this statement, there was outcry amongst various social media channels.

To which they followed up with:

To be honest, (call me a psychopath) I don’t see what the big deal is.

It seems like an honest mistake. In such a competitive industry such as the airline industry, these small incidents can hurt the industry and cause a rapid decline in ticket sales.

Any manager in the industry thus would probably have thought that such a statement released to the public would have been reasonable and acceptable.

However, it DOES seem like they would have had better PR if they had simply started with their thoughts and prayers being with the victims of MH17 passengers.

However, the damage was done and the negative backlash spread like wildfire. Imagine the tarnished brand associations to a brand that is supposed to be associated with higher class and status. Many people thought it was a smear strategy against their rival malaysia airlines. What if it was simply to inform anxious singapore airline customers who were going to travel to destinations nearby that hot zone shortly?

Which leads me to the next point, does this mean that customers these days simply have too much power with the advent of social media? I mean are we not all humans that make mistakes? In management, we learn that people have a tendency to overestimate their judgements of other people and underestimate people’s own judgements of their behaviour. Thus the statement could have been completely misinterpreted and given in to people who have a need to point out flaws for the sake of likes on facebook.

They didn’t however, respond with a sincere and honest apology attempting to explain themselves. This is very crucial to do during a PR disaster as illustrated by the case with Black Milk Clothing.

What are your thoughts on this?

Do you think they were wrong or totally misinterpreted?

-Arjun

Citibank Marketing campaigns: how a boring category such as banks can still reach consumers’ hearts

While working at Citibank Sydney from December 13 – Feb 14, I was responsible for tabulating NPS scores and organizing data on excel for the sponsorships team.

Due to Citibank’s marketing team, their awareness and brand recognition has jumped exponentially from the early 2000’s to now.

My bosses ran instagram competitions around the world for Citibank Australia. To encourage the global aspect of the brand, they had a promotion worldwide on instagram. It was an instagram competition. Users were supposed to express the ‘soul’ or ‘heart’ of their city in an instagrammed picture. The picture with the most likes was then selected to be considered for a grand prize which included tickets to Sydney to attend New Year’s Eve (which was also sponsored by Citibank) and a cruise around the harbor while the fireworks went on.

Through doing this, many instagram users around the world tapped deep into emotions about their city encompassing their childhood and lifetime ambitions and attempted to capture it for the competition.

For example, a customer from Malaysia took a great picture of himself having beef noodle soup in a small shop on a hidden street in Kuala Lumpur. This was one of his favourite childhood activities. Eating at these small ‘cafe’s or going for ‘mamak’ as malaysians say is very central to the Malaysian culture and this photo was in the finals for the competition.

By connecting this to the Citibank brand, these emotions are then subconsciously attached to the brand and meaning transfer occurs. Thus a “boring bank” brand can gain a deep meaning to several thousand people through using this instagram strategy

The theory behind it is connected to the node and link model of human cognition.

Where nodes contain clusters of closely related information that are linked to other centers of information. Thus through this promotion, whenever the person perceives the Citibank brand, they may also automatically think about those feelings attached to their instagram picture, and these feelings become closely associated with the bank.

There were so many thousands of entries for the instagram promotion. Imagine the reach Citibank had.

What are your thoughts on this type of strategy?

-Arjun

Social Media for small businesses

With the rise of social media, small businesses are able to broaden their reach to their target audiences exponentially. In the past, small businesses had to rely on using traditional mediums such as print, radio, and tv to advertise. These mediums are generally much more costly compared to using a digital marketing strategy. Small businesses nowadays now can simply pay for a website domain and other online marketing research tools that enable them to profile potential and current customers.

For example, small businesses can track what people are saying about their brand on social media through hashtags.

http://www.hashatit.com/

The website above allows you to type in any hashtag and the website will provide many posts across facebook, twitter, pinterest, and instagram showcasing the word that you have chosen to be hashtagged.

For example, fukuryuramen could use this website to monitor their instagram promotions and see what customers are saying about their brand on other social media.

Businesses can take this further and actually reach their customers on twitter, see what conversations they are having with the brand, and respond with an offer to them if the time is right. This serves as a nice little surprise for customers and can result in positive brand associations. One website that provides this service is socialcentiv.com

http://socialcentiv.com/#social_centiv_form

Socialcentiv helps businesses find those conversations when and where they’re happening, lets you reply to those conversations in real time, let your offer and response show up in their twitter feed naturally, and enable you to give offers and reach to customers at the precise time when they want those offers. By having this natural rather than forced conversation, dialogue can occur between the brand and the customer which in turn can lead to feelings of loyalty and attachment to the brand.

Thus small businesses can reach thousands of people around the world, target specific groups and form clusters of target markets and customer relationships fast, cost effectively, and with ease.

However, it is important to consider certain risk factors which include:

Wasted time and money for little to no return (consider the case of fukuryuramen giving free green tea soft serves to customers who later delete pictures of their food), having negative reviews available publicy for others to spread negatively (black milk clothing and their poor social media management).

What are your thoughts on small businesses using social media to reach out to customers?

-Arjun

How to create organic buzz using Instagram for your restaurant brand

With thousands of restaurants in Melbourne, diners are spoilt for choice. Its hard to differentiate yourself as a restaurant owner and to be a cost leader in this market is quite risky as well. Even if your food is great, there are many other restaurants serving great food. Customers are so fickle that they will drop at the slip of a hat. Most customers however, are likely to believe the recommendations of their peers when it comes to picking a place to dine. Anecdotally, I would rather go to a place with an 80% urbanspoon recommendation if a good friend of mine recommended it or posted about it online compared to going to a place based on having a 90% rating from random people on urbanspoon.

Even if you used marketing to spread awareness and create brand associations, customers may think that your restaurant needs to use marketing to convince people to come there rather than the food itself being persuading enough.

One way to bypass this cynicism on the part of customers is to let them “create”the buzz for you. People are much more likely to frequent a restaurant if it is viewed favourably and recommended by their peers.

Restaurants are using this word of mouth strategy to encourage customer loyalty and entice new customers to dine with them. They are taking to social media to increase their reach exponentially more than they could before.

One example is Fukuryu Ramen in the CBD. Customers who take a photo of their dishes and post it onto instagram get a free green tea soft serve. This gives customers incentive to do a part of their marketing for them.

Thus friends of the customers are exposed to fukuryu’s marketing efforts and are persuaded to dine there with other friends. This in turn leads to a large part of marketing done for them. Imagine one friend who shares an instagram picture of their food at this place with their other 997 friends on facebook or with their 3000 followers on instagram (some people treat instagram as their job). Thus a simple free green tea soft serve can be transformed into a marketing message sent potentially to thousands of people to pique their curiosity enough for them to feel enticed to try the food for themselves.

However, while talking to some of my friends who dined there, I realized that they were simply taking the instagram photos, showing it to the waiters, and deleting it afterwards. Imagine all the resources wasted by giving free green tea soft serves to customers who ultimately won’t end up sharing their pictures of your food. After further probing, I realized that they felt like it was too troublesome to engage with instagram as they weren’t big users of it and were a little frustrated that they couldn’t simply share these photos on other common social media such as facebook, twitter, or wechat.

Thus restaurants using this strategy must take into account their customers’ social media preferences as well. They should be flexible and allow monitoring on multiple social media platforms to avoid customers feeling pressured to use a social media that they are not accustomed to. Maybe the customers are too lazy for simply posting a picture for some free ice cream but of course, the customer comes first.

What are your thoughts on this social media strategy?

-Arjun

Piggybacking: a way to get online exposure at a lower cost

There is a marketing strategy called piggy backing which means in a nutshell that companies can look at events, products, brands and news stories and come up with an idea that allows them to ‘piggyback’ off it without having the huge cost that is often associated with big stories and launches.

In this day and age, many of us are exposed to these types of piggybacking marketing strategies and we do not even realize it. Imagine being the brand manager of Apple for example and having Samsung ride off the fame and buzz from the release of your new product to gain exposure for themselves by indirectly making a video about your product flaws.

In the video, Samsung subtly or not so subtly makes fun of Apple ‘genius’ employees and points out flaws in their products. By releasing it at the same time as the release, it can ride off the buzz generated by the product launch to get its own product exposure, at a fraction of the cost of launching an advertising campaign. This can lead to consumers spreading news of the video like wildfire on social media.

Another example of a brand using online piggybacking techniques is Nandos.

Nandos often uses trends around itself to capitalise on their buzz and generate brand exposure. For example, they did this using the release of the trailer for the new hunger games movie on their facebook page. 

The association between hunger games and nandos is then likely to be activated when people are exposed to media from the makers of the movie. This effectively means that another entity is doing a part of nandos marketing for them.

Ikea has also rode on the fame of popular brands such as Apple, to achieve online exposure.

In the style of the Apple advertisements for their macbook pros, Ikea lightheartedly stole this concept to introduce their new catalogue. The video has 11million plus views on youtube, a testament to its success. It is unlikely that they would have received that much exposure for a normal boring ad for their catalogue compared to their approach above.

What are your thoughts on this type of marketing strategy online?

-Arjun

An uncommon platform for digital marketing – Reddit

Reddit has so much potential as a marketing platform yet brands shy away from it. Brands are wary about marketing on reddit as it could go wrong very easily and thus they have to tread lightly. In much the same way brands were first getting into marketing on youtube, Reddit is like a foggy lake that has treasure yet is rich with crocodiles and sirens. 118 Million unique users visited the site last month.

The problem is that Reddit is full of people who hate marketing and rejoice gleefully when brands fail spectacularly at advertising on reddit. They are quite quick to point out flaws in marketing strategies and will beat your reputation to a pulp if you are dishonest or beating around the bush. One such example of marketing gone wrongly on Reddit was the case of Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich doing an “ask me anything” on the reddit website. People were quick to point out flaws in their computer security and their decision to name Will.I.Am (one of the most laughable “musicians” in the modern music industry) as director of creative innovation. Furthermore, Brian did not follow up on these questions and simply left them unanswered. Thus brands need to be prepared to deal with potentially negative questions and to be honest when dealing with redditors online.

A good example was Nissan’s advertising campaign celebrating being able to be bought on amazon. Nissan asked redditors, if they could buy anything on amazon, what would it be? Some said ordinary things like boots whilst others said extremely odd things like 4500 ladybugs. Nissan then actually bought these things on Amazon and delivered them to the redditors. Yes including the 4500 ladybugs that some troll ordered. This helped create positive dialogue between the brand and countless amounts of redditors.

Furthermore, brands can give reddit users “reddit gold” for rewarding them if they speak positively about the brand. Reddit gold enables users to use a more premium version of Reddit which comes with different benefits and features.

An important feature is that the reddit community is surprisingly well informed and experts in many fields are available to criticise marketing strategies from a variety of industries. For example, in the Intel AMA, expert coders and IT specialists were asking very technical questions related to flaws in the product security. There is a very honest dialogue that happens between brands and redditors.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ycs5l/hi_reddit_im_brian_krzanich_ceo_of_intel_ask_me/

http://www.reddit.com/comments/1vva6g/thank_you_reddit_for_making_our_huge_amazon_box_a/

In sum, to be successful on reddit, you must not use memes, you must be prepared to deal with difficult questions, and you must be honest and sincere when trying to create dialogue between the brand and redditors.

-Arjun

Nostalgia in Digital Marketing

One kind of emotional appeal that is uncommon yet can have a potent effect on sales is nostalgia.

The word nostalgia itself has roots in greek language. In greek, it literally translates to the pain of an old wound. The meaning is still applicable in today’s day and age.

Nostalgia appeals themselves are so mysteriously alluring as they cause the strings of our memorable past events to vibrate gently. The detachment of not existing at the same time and place as when those positive events in our pasts causes us to asymptotically seek those feelings in a vain attempt to exist in the past again.

Nostalgia often can be triggered by feelings of sadness, loneliness. However, it ultimately helps people feel better according to psychologists researching nostalgia. According to research, nostalgia actually helps in improving self esteem and feelings of connectedness.

Nostalgia appeals can be potent in driving sales as nostalgia has a powerful positive impact on emotions, which can lead to better attitudes towards brands and products.

An example of this strategy online is the official pokemon facebook fan page. They are always attempting to connect with fans through nostalgia appeals. This helps curry favor towards the brand as it stokes positive emotions of playing videogames from childhood. One of the examples is illustrated above, with the fan page having the hashtag #throwbackthursday what was your first fighting type pokemon.

A second example is coke. Coke tapped into emotions of nostalgia to drive sales through its campaign that encouraged buyers to share a coke and a song from a year in the past. It is powerful because hearing songs from the past themselves bring us to a place back in time. These positive feelings are then conditioned to Coke. Coninuously engaging with consumers and currying favor towards the brand is one of the reasons that Coke enjoys a high amount of market share.

Another example is the use of nostalgia in the advertising of the playstation 4.

What are some of your favourite appeals in advertising?

-Arjun

What do employers want now?

People may be currently looking up interesting movies to download or catching up on the latest celebrity gossip. How many people have googled what employers want in a marketing graduate? I was a bit disheartened to learn that I need to develop a fresh bunch of skills that uni didn’t prepare me for. I am talking about actual digital marketing skills. I don’t mean to undermine all of the things I have learned from my tutors and lecturers at Monash University. Data and digital marketing skills are so critical to success in today’s competitive job landscape. I did some research online and current employers are mentioning that the thing that stands out the most is the basic lack of digital marketing skills amongst undergraduates. Upon further probing, I discovered that many want skills in all of Adobe Suite softwares which include photoshop, flash, and adobe in design. Furthermore, knowledge of google analytics and SEO ( search engine optimization) were key things that were desired. I heard the same things while meeting people from the marketing department at Citibank. 

Here’s a link to the post on reddit. I thought it would be useful for any one of us.

I’m a tertiary student, and currently applying for Marketing/Advertising internships/jobs. What are some things I can do to make me attractive to employers?
byu/thenestisinoursoul inmarketing

If university is meant to prepare us for our future careers in marketing, shouldn’t we be getting a hold on these skills while at university? What about as an elective? I understand that margins are important (marketing planning and implementation) and sound knowledge of case study MAY be useful in finding a job. My time interning at Citibank did nothing to confirm these two theories. I can’t help but feel that what we learn at Uni is always going to be behind the times of what is currently going on. That being said, it should be our responsibility to make sure we are not entering the workplace half baked. 

~Arjun

The future of digital market research: helix personas

Imagine that just by looking up your area on google maps, marketers are able to tell what kind of economic status your neighbours are of, what interests you have, and what your aspirations are likely to be. A bit creepy isn’t it? Roy Morgan Research has come up with helix personas, a research tool that delivers unique insights into potential customers and profiles customers across various attributes. Here is a link to the site http://www.helixpersonas.com.au/browse/leading-lifestyles/personas/109-progressive-thinkers/overview

If you have a membership, you could go into google maps to see what kinds of places different segments live in. Furthermore, based on your location, they are able to profile what values you are likely to have. 

Imagine a person wants to open up a restaurant in south yarra. By using helix personas, the business owner to could look into what kinds of people live around the area, what kinds of attitudes they have, what kind of income they have, and even what their likes and dislikes are. 

Marketers will soon be able to take customization to whole new levels

First Digital Marketing Post

Hi everyone,

I just thought I would like to share how small time game developers have marketed games through memes on reddit and 9gag to achieve short term instant popularity.

Goat simulator is to be honest a pretty useless game and nobody in their right mind rationally would buy a game to pretend to be a goat. The way it was marketed however, somehow tapped into the inner child in many people, which led them to buy the game. I believe this was done through the use of memes.

In addition, their youtube trailer was effective for creating awareness and communicating the personality of the game.

Much like the Doge meme, I believe the the success of the goat simulator game stems from wanting to make something popular and be a part of it just for the sake of being able to make something popular.

-Jun