Marketing and ethics have always had a complicated relationship, to say the least. It’s easy for anyone to take one look at the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, along with Facebook’s continuous denial and downplaying of their involvement, and be concerned. Even more so if they discover the prevalence of bots and fake accounts, still very much alive on the website, and the sway they hold.

So really, how much does data matter? Why do we care? Well, with 54% of Australians expressing strong discomfort at the idea of businesses sharing personal information with other organisations, and 61% of Australians uncomfortable with the idea of personal information being sent overseas, we clearly do have some viable discomfort with the idea. The reasoning is solid, when one takes a microscope to the concept.

Sure, if Google tracks your purchasing habits and takes note of the fact that you have a pet and markets dog treats to you, you may be okay with that. A little creeped out, sure, but generally alright with it. However, if Facebook was using your addictive spending habits to promote gambling games riddled with wallet-draining micro-transactions to you, would you be so amenable?

Because this is something Facebook, Google – and companies like it – can, and will do. In accordance to sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci; “Facebook can infer a user’s race, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, addictive behaviour, age and gender by merely analysing your likes.” Facebook knows you better than your mother, and with that comes a certain responsibility.

This isn’t just advertising products and services, either. It’s ideologies. As Cambridge Analytica spelled out for us all in painful bold print, elections of smaller countries were certainly influenced by the direct paid contracting of the Cambridge associates, and furthermore, it’s highly suspected the US 2016 Election was rife with the scandal. If you’re more inclined to having evidence a little closer to home, then you only need to see the suspected 300,000 Australians who had their data mined via the organisation.

You may be saying at this point, yes Paige, this is awful, and very political, but where does marketing play into this? And I would respond to you, dear reader, by posing this: where doesn’t marketing play into this? Be a political ideology or a new dog treat, there is always something to promote, and data always will provide the most efficient and accessible way to promote it. This is often a great thing for the industry, but as seen here, sometimes, a bad thing for the consumer. Without regulation and enforcement on who it’s enforced by and how it’s collected, a post-truth world may only be the beginning of the corporate dystopia.

So, what can we do? Well, as consumers, there’s a few things. You can campaign for the brands associated with these scandals to work towards a more transparent, honest, less predatory marketing approach, and using your wallet to drive the point home. You can report bot accounts, which have infested facebook and twitter and are driving the new wave of fake news. You can also campaign to your local government, reminding them that as a consumer and a citizen, at least, of Victoria Australia, you are very much entitled a right to privacy, as it is included in the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006, and more recently, The Privacy and Protection Act 2014. And finally, if you don’t trust your social media network, don’t be afraid to deactivate.

Anyway, what do you guys think? Do the statistics match up with you? How do you feel about data privacy?

Until next time,
-Paige

If you’re from Australia, or more specifically, Melbourne, you’ll know the little cartoon figures that are always smiling up at you from Flinders Street Station. Be Safe Around Trains! They cheerily proclaim, showing a bean-shaped, balloon holding figure about to step onto the tracks.

Now, if this was your first exposure to the campaign, you may be a little confused as to their choice of messaging. ‘Why is he holding balloons?‘, you might ask. However, if you, as have most people, had seen the viral video campaign running its rounds in 2012, it might make a little more sense.

Dumb Ways to Die was an innovative, cheery re-branding of what had previously always been a rather grim, reprimanding, ‘don’t be an idiot’ marketing strategy – with the obvious intent to reach kids, parents and teens alike with its catchy tune and important message hidden slyly under the cheery aesthetic.

The idea is simple. Have a happy jingle narrating the characters all finding their eventual demise in gruesome ways that are all hallmarked by their idiocy – hence the title Dumb Ways to Die. The clever implication, and outright statement at the end of the campaign, is that while sticking your fork in a toaster, or jumping into a pit of piranhas is stupid, it’s not as stupid as messing around on the train tracks.

The marketers at McCann, the advertising agency hired to create the campaign, evidently made it far catchier than they ever intended, as the video on youtube now holds over 147 Million views, and the game has three versions, all with millions of players. Adding to that, Metro claims their campaign reduced the number of “near miss” accidents by up to 30%.

So why did it work? Well, I believe a fair bit of the credit can go to the unique messaging, and the consistent way it resonates throughout all the forms of marketing, from the signs, to the video, to the game.

If we look at the 7 Ways to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign and apply it to the campaign, we can gain a better idea of where exactly the campaign resonates with consumers.

Step 1: Have a clear understanding of who your target audience is
If you look at the narration, animation style and design choices, it becomes pretty clear that while Dumb Ways to Die hit home for a lot of people, the primary demographic it was aimed at was children. Because of that, the jingle was designed to be catchy and re-playable, because thats what kids are known to become obsessed with.

Step 2: Pick your channels
Metro knew that while they needed this on posters and billboards around their train lines, it wasn’t quite enough. Hence the video that blew up, and later, the ingenious game that further propelled the brands fame. While they hardly shoved it down people’s throats on social media, with the TV Campaign, the signs at stations, and the Youtube video/game blowing up online, it became hard for Melbournians to avoid the campaign for a while.

Step 3: Have a consistent look
While the same branding was present on the posters, videos and games, the messaging was always subtly different to help the message adapt to the platform through which it was being presented. A good example of this was the make your pledge display at Flinders Street Station. Knowing most people had seen their video at this point, Metro decided to make their messaging actionable with a call to action for its viewers: make your pledge to not mess around on the trains. Similarly, the game opens with a message players have to agree to before playing the game – promising not to mess around on train lines.

Step 4: Create clear, consistent content that can easily be adapted or repurposed to suit different media or channels
In a similar manner as mentioned above, the campaign was uniqely designed with recognizable characters, so even if just one is displayed alongside a cautionary message on a sign, people will know what’s being said.

Step 5: Ensure that your messaging is integrated
The message needs to be there in every format, which is why it’s so important the game opens with what it does. Otherwise, it may come off as a hollow attempt to cash in on the entertainment value of their viral success while losing the core messaging and goal. The point is more subtle in the game, however, likely because Metro was aware they now had a global audience, and their overt messaging would likely ring in hollow ears in many places.

Step 6: Make sure your marketing teams/agencies are working in sync
As above, it’s important that Metro kept their core point in mind, and ensured that while each option was marketable and resonated with people, that it didn’t lose it’s point, that jarring hit home that the video achieves when you realize what the campaign is truly about. Without that, the meaning and impact of the campaign is lost.

Step 7: Don’t forget to track your campaigns
Metro’s ongoing statistics proved it’s campaigns success, despite many people who doubted them, and while they haven’t tried to beat a dead horse, so to speak, you can still see little reminders of the campaign from years ago scattered across Metro’s facilities in Melbourne.

Hence, it’s abundantly clear why the campaign worked the way it did. It had a core messaging and theme that it stuck rigidly to, while being adaptable and intuitive in the ways in which it delivered said message, to customize it for maximal sharability. As one of the most successful PSA’s in history, we all certainly have something to learn from Metro’s accidental viral hit.

What do you guys think? Do you remember Dumb Ways to Die? How did it resonate with you? Do you think it truly worked, or was more talk than action? I look forward to your responses!

Until next time,

-Paige

If you know any brand, you know Coca-Cola. The ubiquitous soft drink and it’s definitive branding is globally recognized and it’s not hard to see why, with Interbrand rating it as one of the most valuable brands in 2017, with a brand value of up to 69.73 Billion US Dollars. Alongside their 36.7% North American market share, it’s understandable that any brand worth it’s money would want to invest in working out why Coca-Cola has maintained the public’s eye for over 100 years.

While there are many factors playing into the brands success, including luck, advertising, research and development and endorsement – a key factor for the brand was their product strategy. More-so, their ability to adapt their product for any available market, to make their product so pervasive that every consumer can find a Coca-Cola product just for them.

A model to help analyze Coca-Cola’s product strategy is The Ansoff Matrix. The model allows us to quickly summarize growth strategies and compare them to the associated risk. With each new quadrant you move into, risk increases. So, let’s see how they apply to Coca-Cola:

• Market Penetration – Market penetration focuses on selling the brands existing products to existing markets. Typical strategies for this sector include reducing price, increasing promotion, and increasing distribution. Coke’s original product line is most relevant here, and as for promotion, an easy example would be Coke associating their brand with Christmas. The campaign didn’t advertise new products, but succeeded in elevating the brand identity of their original product.
• Product Development – Product development is centered on introducing new products to existing markets. This can include modifications to an existing product, a product line extension, or a new edition of a product. Coke’s done this a few times, with their Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke and Orange Coke varieties.
• Market Development – Market development is founded on the idea of an industry selling a company’s existing products to a new market. This can be geographical, demographically, or via new distribution channels. The best example here is Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Fundamentally the same product, but aimed at entirely different demographics; women and men respectively. When Coke discovered through its market research that men shied away from Diet Coke as a “girls drink”, they designed Coke Zero: a masculine, gritty, coke product with zero sugar. And as such, they’ve successfully created a more “masculine” product for the sugar conscious market.
• Diversification – Diversification is the concept of a brand producing new products, in new markets. Coke is an expert at this by now, with their variety of drink brands produced under a variety of different names, all with the same ownership. Currently, coke is investing in more health-conscious drink varieties, including water, flavoured water and kombucha. These products are an entirely new market to Coke’s current demographic, and an entirely new type of product. But Coke knows, with the growing sugar conscious trend, it’s where the money will be. Coke’s diversification is generally in the related sector; that is, drinks products.

With this model, it’s easy to decipher how much Coca-Cola has established its dominance over the drinks market, and provides an insight into how exactly they do so. With this model applied to product strategy and new markets, a brand can successfully risk manage their ideas and implement successful strategies.

What about you guys? What do you think about Coke’s success? What kind of products do you anticipate to see from them in the future?

Until next time,

–Paige

If you have a phone, which I’m guessing you do, then you’ve heard of Spotify. The juggernaut of a music platform has a staggering 222 Million users, of which 110 are paid subscribers. Their closest competitor is Apple Music, which only touches 50 Million paid users. Considering the standard plan is 12 Dollars a month, the numbers certainly add up in Spotify’s favor.

So how do they do it? Their primary interface for daily users (of which 44% of users are) is the mobile app, and the app is designed to draw you in. With a friendly interface in a non-invasive colour scheme, you’re immediately shown the vast variety of music available to you, and once you use the app, the tailored nature of Spotify’s algorithm makes it hard to resist using it regularly. While the web interface is fairly flexible for free users, the mobile app makes it far more difficult to escape the allure of paying for premium.

When using the mobile app with a free account, you can listen to any songs in any order with unlimited track skips as long as it appears on one of the 15 personalized playlists chosen for you by Spotify’s machine learning algorithms. Things like discover weekly, daily mix and curated playlists fall into this category. This generally adds up to 750 tracks to choose from, which alternate daily.

On top of the limited song selection, there are ads featured between the songs played on the app, which for many users can be quite jarring when using music to focus, exercise, or anything else where the music is providing ambience.

When you look at Spotify’s value offerings, and just how much premium gives to the users, it becomes clear why so much of the user-base opts for the paid alternative. When one looks at Kaplan’s 4 I’s of Social Media Marketing, some comparisons can be drawn. While Spotify isn’t in the strictest sense a social media platform, it has many features that can make it comparable to one, with shared content, friends lists, collaboration and interactions.

• Individualize – Spotify allows users to customize their personal experiences in the most intimate of ways. It tracks their song choices and music preferences to offer them weekly customized tracks that are more than likely to meet their exact needs, along with the option to make personal playlists to express each user’s unique tastes.
• Involve – Through the ability to customize playlists, choose genres, and scroll through friends music collaborations, Spotify provides content that is hard to break away from.
• Integrate – With features like downloaded playlists, background play, and low data usage options, Spotify offers a service that is applicable to most people, from a businessman on the way to work to a student in the library trying to focus.
• Initiate – With fully customisable playlists, the ability to share links to these playlists, and the opportunity to turn on collaborative mode to allow your friends to customize said playlists, Spotify offers a unique user experience.

With such an integrated, collaborative experience, it should be no surprise that Spotify dominates the music market. And with more and more research being invested into their Context Targeting features, it’s easy to imagine Spotify can only grow in the future.

How about you guys? Do you listen to Spotify? If so, do you pay for premium? I know I do! Where do you think Spotify will go in the future, with the ever evolving mobile marketing space? Let me know!

Until next time,
– Paige

There’s certainly been more than a few viral trends over the years, and most millennials have at least one that comes to mind where internet memes are concerned. Whether that’s Nyan Cat, Charlie Bit My Finger, Leave Britney Alone, or Charlie the Unicorn, with the internet sprouted the idea that any piece of media can become an internet phenomenon, regardless of perceptions of quality.

However, with time, viral memes have changed. While funny, random videos were primarily the basis of original, 2000s era viral content, they slowly developed into customisable images, allowing for individual users to add their own commentary and take on the images and increasing the sharability. With the ability for a commentary to become a norm on internet viral posts, a space for a global discourse was born.

Alongside commentary and social trends being shaped by internet viral trends, so did behaviours. And with that, internet challenges were born. The first notable example that many people would recall is the Cinnamon Challenge, which invoked users, primarily young adults/children, to attempt to swallow a tablespoon of ground cinnamon in 60 seconds without drinking fluids. The challenge – where the focus remained on the difficulty of the task and sharability of the obvious discomfort of the ones who attempt the challenge – quickly blew up as a viral sensation. With that attention though, came public concern towards health and wellbeing, which has followed most viral challenges since.

Whether it’s the ice bucket challenge, that while well meaning, caused public panic as to whether or not a girl died performing it, or it’s the bird box challenge, causing danger to kids running around hazardous areas blindfolded, with the denotation of a challenge always comes a certain risk. The internet, by nature, only seems to amplify such.

Nothing encapsulates the tumultuous reputation of these internet trends better than the Tide Pod Challenge. The trend, which came into public focus in early 2018, essentially challenged teenagers to attempt to eat detergent pods of a particular brand. Needless to say, the danger of this was quickly realised by mass media outlets. With that came mass hysteria, a public condemnation of the internet trend, and it left a lot of people wondering where this leaves us, and what’s next.

What I’m left to analyse is how, exactly, these trends come to fruition, and how they spiral into the crazes that we see taking the internet by storm. Only through understanding them, and how they work, can we seek to control them. A model to frame this is the Principles of Contagiousness.

With this concept, comes six principles. While you don’t need all of them for a successful campaign, it provides a good guideline for what is needed for a catchy trend, and can be used to analyse the tide pod challenge, and why exactly it caught on.

Social Currency: People, as a whole, want to relate to other people. It’s why they are so predisposed to share about themselves on social media, to seek validation, and why word of mouth marketing works so effectively. People will share things that make them look good to others, and we can see this in viral posts. While, to outsiders, it may seem like a dumb and risky way to endanger yourself, to those involved with and sharing the trend, it makes an individual look brave, cool, and involved with the group. With that increased risk comes an steady increase in views/shares too.

Triggers: By pairing a product with environmental stimuli, a connection is formed that helps to remind consumers of a product even when they aren’t independently thinking of it. While this doesn’t strongly relate to the viral challenge concept, there are connections to the fact that tide pods, and washing tablets, are an everyday item, and each time a consumer is exposed to something in the product category, they are likely to recall the specific viral trend.

Emotions: It’s easy to see that with emotional investment in a concept comes more attachment, sharability and interest. There’s inherent emotional investment in the tide pod challenge because of the risk and excitement of the concept. For both the ones creating the content and those viewing it, there is a level of excitement, nervousness and investment that comes from taking part in something that everyone around you doesn’t understand and condemns, and as such, the riskiness of the concept and the stakes in it go up.

Public: Once the trend has taken off, even to a relatively minor scale, the fact that a number of people in a community are doing something draws attention to it just for that fact, even if the people consuming the content don’t yet know what it’s about. This creates a snowball effect of sorts, with the more people viewing and talking about a viral concept, the more and more people interested enough to talk about it themselves.

Practical Value: Now, this one is lacking in this trend. As the point of attention is the shock at the useless danger of the trend, there is little to no practical value, aside from noting the lack thereof.

Stories: Now, this is the biggest player by far in the sharability of risky viral trends. The talkability of it, and the conversation it generates, whether that is about the stupidity of it, the kids doing it, the parents of the kids doing it, or the people sharing it, is what generates so much of the attention surrounding these trends, and leaves them in our memories long after they’re gone. Maybe that, in and of itself, is what drives so many young people to participate in these challenges. The knowledge – that once it’s taken off, these trends will fade into a cult like legend.

With this model, marketers and those interested can analyse viral trends like these, specifically the ones that don’t initially make sense, and break down what exactly is driving consumers to participate, how to harness this energy, and what to avoid, lest your product becomes the next headliner of a public scandal, like what happened to Tide Pods.

Thank you for reading! What do you guys think about viral trends, specifically the ones that seem a little surreal? Do you think they’ll continue in the years to come, or fade into the past like the viral videos we grew up with? Let me know!

– Paige

If I asked you who the largest social media platforms were, who would you say?

As, I’m sure, comes to no surprise to anyone, Facebook is largely the platform that comes to the front of everyone’s mind. With 2.32 Billion monthly users, the juggernaut truly looms over the social media landscape. Yet, their business integration efforts fall flat, user engagement has dropped amid privacy concerns, and only 51% of teens use the site. So, perhaps, Facebook isn’t the best place to look to get a solid take on what social media holds for the future.

Alright, not Facebook then. How about Instagram? Instagram, on the other hand, has surely mastered it’s marketing integration, with the amount of money it’s influencers tout about making, right? Well, partially. While sponsorship and brand deals are prevalent on the platform, most of the brands flourishing are small startups, and the tenacious relationships users can have with social media influencers can often mean that efforts to maintain a strong, reliable brand persona fall flat. And with the shift Instagram is making towards removing likes from the platform, it’s hard to see what exactly Instagram will be in six months, let alone two years.

So, that leaves Twitter. Twitter, one of the oldest, most established, most unchanged platforms still going strong, that at a first glance, seems surprisingly lacking in terms of paid advertising, marketing integration, or brand messaging. And yet, you’ll see every brand, from your local coffee shop to giants like McDonald’s and Coke on the platform. And it works. Why, then? What makes Twitter so different?

Engagement. With an environment so reliant on strangers communicating, with a core ideal of twitter being the celebrities who interact with their vast fan base, it’s no surprise at all that on Twitter, brands see an opportunity to connect with fans in a way truly unseen before. Brands can create a personality beyond an ambassador on your TV screen, one that has quirks, talks just like you, and can even reply to you.

While on Facebook, brands often reply in comments responding to faulty products or dissatisfaction, Twitter takes it to a whole new level. They can generate discourse about their brand, create meaningful dialogues that further their core ideals, and all in one swoop, get straight through that barrier that so many consumers put up against traditional marketing methodology. While you may skip past the video ad in front of your video, you’re actively reading articles about Wendy’s and McDonald’s latest twitter feud.

Aside from engagement, Twitter has become a hub for the beginning of a social change storm, with examples including hashtags like blacklivesmatter, the ice bucket challenge, and the womens march. With these movements, opportunity is generated for companies to ally themselves with consumer mindsets, and demonstrate excellent corporate social responsibility without the level of artifice such efforts usually are accompanied by.

For brands and users alike, Twitter presents a new, exciting future for internet engagement. Brands can be held accountable for their mistakes and flaws, and can communicate with their consumers more readily, easily and effectively. And with an expected total revenue of $875 Million for its third quarter, it doesnt look like they’re stopping anytime soon.