Social commerce is one of the hottest digital sectors. From the explosive growth of Groupon and Pinterest to the widespread implementation of social sign-on across brand and e-commerce sites, it's plain to see that many companies are scrambling to leverage social networks and influence in service of their business goals.
Booz and Company estimated that $30 billion in goods and services will be sold within social networks by 2015.
On-network sales are just a segment of the total range of services and vendors that comprise the "social commerce" segment.
The basic concept of social commerce -- that social influence and communication networks can be leveraged for business -- is nothing new. What is different today is that the explosive growth of social networks, coupled with the availability of connected tools within and outside of such networks, has given people even greater reach and influence over one another.
With so many social options available, it is critical that marketers take an objectives-based approach to evaluating and selecting social commerce tactics and partners for their businesses. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Understanding social influence
For millennia, people have been influenced by the ideas and actions of others. With the advent of social media, the number of people that we influence and that influence us has grown markedly. For example, without social media, a highly satisfied customer might evangelize your product to perhaps 10 people. With social media, that number can now easily exceed 100, or 1000, or 10,000. Further, the ability to measure and track social influence is dramatically increased by digital social platforms.
Ultimately, this means using social networks and media to help people become aware of options, consider their choices, make purchase decisions, and eliminate friction in the buying process. We all want to make better choices, and the process of gathering information to make those decisions can be made easier through our relationships with others.
The six types of social commerce solutions
There are a variety of categorization models available to "bucket" social commerce solutions and companies. The European agency SyZyGy developed an excellent categorization model for social commerce solutions and providers. Those who are looking for more than a top-line view of the category would do well to visit the site Social Commerce Today. I'm going to do my best to do it justice by providing a capsule summary of the market segmentation model, which classifies categories and companies into six groups:
Social ShoppingThe common denominator in this set of services is empowering people to simultaneously shop online with others. The category encompasses group buying (e.g., Groupon and Living Social), socially empowered shopping experiences (i.e., an online store using Facebook Connect to enable a richer and more interactive shopping experience onsite), stores within social networks (e.g., Facebook stores), group gifting (e.g., eBay's GroupGifts service), and social shopping portals such as Kaboodle.
Ratings and Reviews One of the most ubiquitous forms of social commerce, these services allow consumers to rate and leave comments about goods and services. The largest such platform is probably Amazon.com, which includes ratings and comments on virtually every item offered. While we often think about these as simple text based recommendations, services such as ExpoTV and Zuberance have expanded this category to include video and encourage recommendations.
Recommendations and RatingsThis category focuses more on recommendations for specific audiences, rather than universal availability -- social referral programs (e.g., Extole) fall squarely into this category. The key difference between these offerings and those in the previous category is that the recommendations group generally uses the personal networks of participants to spread the message, whereas the services in the previous category are available to any viewer.
Forums and CommunitiesForums and communities have been around almost as long as the internet itself. In the context of social commerce, these terms refer to brand-sponsored venues for the sharing of information. Examples might include a Mercedes Owners Club, or the American Express Open Small Business community. Here people organically share information and advice related to categories and products.
Social Media OptimizationThis category refers to the use of social media to drive more qualified traffic to an online sales environment. It encompasses using social for SEO, link building, offer and deal feeds, company news feeds, and other means by which links can be disseminated.
Social Ads and ApplicationsHere the focus is on socially empowered ad messages. The range includes socialized ads, social shopping apps, and remote catalogue or shopping units.
Evaluating social commerce options for your brand
In order to identify the best strategies and tactics, it can be helpful to start with a simple assessment focused on six key questions:
What are the business goals of this effort, and how will performance be measured? Selecting a platform should begin with a review of your goals and measures. Different platforms will be able to "move the needle" in different ways and to different degrees.
What channels are you trying to address, and what is their relative importance? Many products and services sell through a variety of channels. "Own" stores, online retailers, supermarkets, and department stores are just a few of the options. The set of channels you use should play an important role in determining the social commerce approaches you deploy.
Companies that sell goods primarily or exclusively online were among the first movers in social commerce, both because many of the tools were designed for online stores and because tracking the impact of social commerce on sales is easier when digital actions can be tied directly to specific purchases. Offline retailers and brands sold primarily in brick and mortar stores have generally been slower movers in social commerce, but that is changing. A great example is Procter and Gamble, which was among the first CPGs to incorporate social influence into its websites and other marketing experiences. Additionally, the company has experimented with intriguing new retail formats like Facebook stores in order to determine their potential impact.
What are the bottlenecks in your customer flow?The concept of a buying funnel -- the progression of consumers from awareness to purchase has driven marketing decisions for decades. Chances are the other elements of your marketing mix are already aligned to the greatest communications needs. If so, then the challenge of selecting the best social commerce tools is a relatively simple one. The needs of businesses change over time and the range of appropriate social commerce tools may change or expand over that time. For example, if your biggest problem was awareness and your first social tactics focus on that area, increases in awareness may shift your greatest marketing need to increasing conversion rates. A second social commerce tool -- like a review and ratings platform -- might then make a great deal of sense.
What aspects of the product or service are most important to prospects?Understanding the attributes that matter most to consumers is a critical step in making the right social commerce decisions. Ensure that the social commerce platform you choose has the "legs" to communicate the most important product information and attributes. Some tools like ratings offer the advantages of ease and universality, while others -- like video reviews and social shopping -- provide much richer platforms, but with perhaps less reach.
This is truly a fascinating new arena -- one that is thriving because of the "perfect storm" of new buying options, ubiquitous connectivity, and the explosion of social tools available.
As next steps, I suggest you talk to a few of the companies making news in the space. These companies can provide a great deal of color and granularity for the sectors in which they operate. I truly believe that there is a tool (or set of tools) out there for most brands, and that the first movers will reap tremendous benefits in the months and years ahead. Why not be one of them?
Thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard the words "shopper marketing" in the past year. I was first introduced to the term while doing a database project for iMedia. Over four months I began to see more and more titles with "shopper marketing" in them -- this in an industry in which titles and hierarchy don't change that often.
Many definitions have been promulgated, but at its core shopper marketing relates to marketing programs that reach consumers inside brick and mortar store walls. That could mean anything from a tear-off pad sweepstakes to integration into an in-store shopping phone app to an end-of-the-aisle display or a program on Walmart TV.
What the shopper marketing "revolution" is really about is taking a more integrated and strategic approach to in-store experiences as a driver of both sales and brand equity; that every program should strongly deliver on sales objectives while driving differentiation and brand appeal.
It's getting harder and harder for brands to make a sale. Given that, brand teams are scrutinizing every dollar spent and working to ensure that all significant expenditures are strategically based.
Additionally, the amount of money spent in store has climbed markedly over the past years. Decades ago, the ratio of ad to in-store spending was heavily weighted to the ad side. Companies spent the bulk of their dollars driving awareness and brand liking among consumers. As retailers consolidated and became more sophisticated, and as the number of brands and products within categories grew, the balance of power shifted. Today, retailers demand a larger portion of the pie, and they can get it because:
More than half of brand choices in many categories, including consumer packaged goods (CPG), are made in store. (Source: Booz and Company)
High quality store brands have put further pressure on brand differentiation, pricing, and the need for deals.
Retailers view "slotting allowances" and promotional vehicles like features and displays as a major revenue profit source and demand brand participation "or else."
The 2009 economic downturn made consumers more deal conscious and more willing than ever to substitute brands.
If a category spends 30, 50, or 80 percent of marketing dollars on in-store activity, those dollars need to be enhancing brand imagery as well as selling product.
Finally, our hyper-fragmented media market has contributed more indirectly, but perhaps no less significantly. Brands cannot reach consumers as efficiently as they used to. In some categories, a large portion of a target audience might never see any marketing element for a brand beyond store walls.
How is "shopper insight" different from "consumer insight?"
One of the key tenets of shopper marketing is that we need to pay more attention to how people make decisions and buy. The rationale here is pretty compelling -- most brands have spent bazillions understanding who their customers are, but relatively little on how they approach an aisle and what drives them to choose one offering over another.
Here's an example: Companies that make laundry detergent know who buys the most product, what forms they prefer, what stains they find the toughest, etc. But, as to how they make an in-store brand choice, the research probably gets a little sketchier. Do they shop by form? Stain? Color of clothes? Package size? Washer type? Which matters more, price or brand? If price is primary, do they compare price per ounce or price per load? Do consumers think there is one best brand or that they get better results by alternating brands? Do some people get confused and walk away from the aisle without buying anything?
Of course, many brands have examined these sorts of questions in the past. But most brands spent less time on this than on advertising research and the like. And if more than half of purchase decisions are made in store, does it really make sense to spend 80 percent of your time testing TV ads?
That isn't to say that the "who" of marketing isn't important. Rather, we need to improve the balance between demographic, psychographic, and behavioral research.
What product categories are most active in shopper marketing?
Most people think of shopper marketing as primarily a CPG phenomenon. Certainly, the leading CPG companies -- Procter and Gamble, Kraft, General Mills, Unilever, Clorox, Nestle, Coke, Pepsi, SC Johnson, Kimberly Clark, etc. -- are among the most active in the discipline. This stems from the following:
Relative size and sophistication of these companies
High levels of marketing spend in CPG
Proportion of total marketing spend that goes to in-store in these categories
Within CPG, the activity is most pronounced in high spend categories like soft drinks, refrigerated, laundry, household cleaners, cereals, and convenience foods with high margins.
But this is by no means a CPG-only phenomenon. Shopper marketing is permeating many consumer categories from electronics to consumer durables like washers and dryers. I'm told even some auto makers are getting on the bandwagon because of the primacy of in-store experience in auto purchase decisions. Since there are relatively few categories where in-store spending isn't significant, expect to see more and more shopper marketers in virtually every consumer category over time.
Where does shopper marketing "live" in a brand organization?
If ever there were evidence of the benefits of breaking down departmental silos, it's in shopper marketing. This is totally a cross-disciplinary field. If you had to lay odds on what role a shopper marketer played before assuming that title, the safest bet would probably be trade marketing or promotions. But shopper marketing is more revolutionary than evolutionary. It is not simply a new name for promotions, but rather a new function that integrates consumer marketing, trade marketing, and consumer promotions expertise in service of multiple brand objectives.
Shopper marketing appears to attract "high fliers" -- people on the fast tracks in their companies. Perhaps this is because success is so rooted in cross training and leading multiple disciplines. My suspicion is that in the same way that "pure" consumer marketers were the "powers that be" in years past, I am convinced that shopper marketers will be playing those pivotal roles in the future.
I used LinkedIn to draw some observations about the paths that shopper marketers have taken to reach their current positions. A fairly large number of the profiles I examined showed experience in both sales and brand marketing. Often shopper marketers began their careers in sales and shifted to trade marketing or brand marketing before they assumed their new, integrated roles.
When you think of in-store marketing, the first things that come to mind might be displays or cardboard shelf talkers. But digital, and most specifically mobile, are changing the face of shopper marketing every day.
Mobile phone applications have already had dramatic effects on retail shopping, and their impacts are really only beginning. The stats on mobile and retail are staggering:
66 percent of smartphone users use their phones as shopping aids. (Leo J Shapiro and Assoc, 2012)
59 percent use their smartphones to compare prices. (Deloitte, 2011)
47 percent leverage local search to find retailers. (e-tailing group, 2012)
47 percent use their phones to get product information. (Leo J Shapiro and Assoc, 2012)
18 percent have redeemed a mobile coupon in the past 90 days. (JiWire, 2012)
A lot of retailers and brands were caught off guard by mobile. Amazon was a very big winner early on when they encouraged people to comparison shop from retail aisles. They continue to do well with this strategy, much to the chagrin of retailers like Best Buy. But Best Buy has since responded in a host of ways, not least by providing early funding for Tecca -- a review and price comparison site. Other retailers have their own initiatives in place.
For brands, the number of mobile shopper marketing options is growing rapidly.
What's most remarkable about these new apps is the incredible range of functionalities. There are so many variations that virtually any brand sales objective can now be accommodated.
Conclusions
Shopper marketing is definitely something you will be seeing more of in the months and years ahead. If you work on brands that sell at brick and mortar, it makes great sense to keep learning about the field. More broadly, digital marketers would do well to keep abreast of developments because they are sure to be among the key catalysts for the near- and medium-term growth of mobile.
Certainly, the development of shopper marketing as a discipline is great if you believe that strategy should guide all marketing efforts -- shopper marketing extends strategic alignment into retail environments in unprecedented ways. And that's vital to the future of brands because so much of our marketing budgets are being deployed inside retail walls.
Thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first!
can be rather tempting for brands and causes to shake things up by making shocking marketing messages that cause visceral reactions. Some brands have gotten great business mileage out of this approach. Others have found themselves in deep doo-doo as consumer blowback undermined their messages and integrity.
In the following pages, you will find nine examples of shocking brand messages. Five seem to work in that they garner strong reactions, but largely of a positive nature. Four had some really bad brand consequences. We'll sum up with some conclusions on what works and what doesn't.
WIN: MethLife ain't pretty
Lots of agencies volunteer to do pro bono work for worthy charities. A big part of the appeal, beyond the opportunity to do good, is that PSAs offer the opportunity to do award-winning work free of the taste constraints of large companies. Nonprofits in particular gravitate toward the technique because their limited budgets and reliance on donated remnant inventory mean every exposureneeds to get noticed.
These ads against methamphetamine use are a great example of how dramatization and raw empathy can get a message noticed.
The campaign has received strong media attention and significant free views on YouTube and other venues. Perhaps more importantly, it dramatizes very real possible consequences of taking the drug.
WIN: Febreze shows us going "negative" can be very positive
For decades CPGs have tried to emphasize the positive "solution" rather than the negative "problem" in their messaging. A recent example of a brand winning by flouting the formula is the powerful new campaign for Febreze that dramatizes the odor removal with some very shocking torture tests.
What works so well here is the relatability of these situations -- that ultimately in order to buy into a solution I need to remember that I have the problem in spades right here at home. The shoe above gives all of us the skeeves.
WIN: Benetton gets long-term mileage from shock
For decades the Benetton brand has stood out from the crowd by presenting "shock images" that are lightning rods for free media publicity. The brand has long maintained that its images are intended to get people to rethink prejudices, bad behaviors, and the like. It was, for example, among the first brands to depict interracial relationships.
In the last couple decades they have, for instance, shown dying AIDS patients in hospital beds, and photoshopped images of global leaders kissing -- Reagan and Gorbachev for example -- to define a brand essence that translates into apparel appeal.
The brand uses these stunning messages to differentiate itself despite the very mainstream appeal of the product. In fact, part of the intent appears to be making the brand's values part of the mainstream culture. The image above is not at all shocking now, but pictures like these were very much out of the norm when Benetton began this powerful ad approach.
One wonders whether images like the one below will feel not at all surprising in a decade.
WIN: L'Oreal Dermablend is at the center of a cover up
This stunning viral video garnered millions of views while offering an incredible demonstration of the efficacy of L'Oreal makeup. How often is a cosmetic advertisement absolutely engrossing?
The brilliance of this message is its use of a classic advertising approach (before/after), but in such a compelling and remarkable way. We see dramatic proof rather than heavily retouched model photos.
WIN: Sisley really seems to know its target
I preface this by saying I loathe Sisley advertising. And yet you would be hard pressed to find a brand of its size that has more ad fans. Do a Google search on Sisley ads, and you will be impressed by the number of sites and comments that laud these very graphic brand messages.
When you read the brand fan commentary, you find fashionistas who connect with the purist nature of the message and love its photographic style. It's clear that Sisley gets its audience and crafts messages that are at once shocking and appealing to its customers.
I may hate it, but I am about as far from Sisley's bull's-eye target as ad people come. It clearly has something that's working for the brand.
FAIL: Accident Prevention shocks but confuses
We began the win section with a PSA. Let's do the same with the fail section. This PSA for workplace accident prevention takes graphic depiction of consequences too far.
Where I think it goes wrong is in tonality and format, especially in the use of an aside to introduce the horrifying event that transpires. It puts an arm's length distance between the message and the viewer. Further, the tagline muddles the communication, failing to make crystal clear what exactly the ad is advocating. Don't make mistakes? Keep a clean kitchen? What are we supposed to do but grimace, shiver, and then try very hard to forget what we saw?
FAIL: Groupon proves that Tibet suffering is not hilarious
Online-only businesses tend to take more risks in messages and tonality, perhaps because buzz and publicity can play such a key role in their fortunes. But sometimes the buzz is anything but beneficial. This ad, part of a campaign from Groupon, uses the classic "redirect" to surprise people with a brand message when they were expecting something entirely different.
People were surprised alright, but not in a good way. The campaign received blistering criticism across social media that jumped to broadcast and cable news just hours after its first airing. A short time later, the campaign was scrapped.
The issue here seems to be in mocking the values and compassion of the viewer. Who cares if that monk gets bludgeoned as long as I get a cheap dinner? Do I really want to be that guy?
FAIL: Dolce & Gabbana seems to confuse violence with sexuality
D&G advertising is definitely so distinctive it could run without a logo. The images have a unique style and almost always challenge lockstep conventions; vehicles like interracial, gay, and polyamorous relationships feature prominently, for example. But this ad took all that challenging way over the line.
The company pulled it after a strong online outcry that accused the company of depicting (advocating) rape. It certainly stops viewers in their tracks. But not in a good way.
What usually works in D&G advertising is its empathy with the values of an urban and fashion forward set. The brand challenges conventions in the same way that the lives and aspirations of its customers do. But this message did just the opposite.
FAIL: Shock makes Pete Hoekstra's campaign very weak
Few expect this year's elections to be anything but savage and ugly. A profoundly polarized political environment coupled with Super PAC money has already yielded bitter fruit. And primary season isn't even over.
The Senate campaign of Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra bought regional time in this year's Super Bowl to air this video, which went viral, but in ways that truly damaged the campaign.
Many objected to the racist speech patterns, and what was considered a deliberate attempt to drive racially motivated white anger. Hoekstra, who was doing well in the polls until the airing, saw an immediate and lingering drop off in his favorables as the ad drew a firestorm of criticism and dozens of critical analyses on cable news.
At first the campaign defended the message, but later agreed to pull it. Perhaps part of the reason for was that the on-camera talent went public with regret for appearing in the message. The fail here appears to be overtly sowing prejudice -- a value much of society finds repugnant.
Conclusions
There's risk in shock ads -- the very name suggests the sort of visceral responses that these messages are trying to drive. They seem to have a greater likelihood of working when:
They viscerally connect with and celebrate the lifestyle and values of the user.Sisley does that well, and stands out because its message is anathema to people (like me) who "don't get it." Similarly, Benetton speaks to an emerging set of values most common among young tastemakers.
They depict more relatable situations and drama.These are things that people can envision. The meth ads, for example, do this really well. We all know that the dire straits they depict actually happen.
They direct our emotional reactions to a clear set of action steps that tell us what we should do now that we are all fired up.Febreze wins here.
They go easy on complex analogies.Very few people study ads, so their meaning needs to be immediately accessible. The Dermablend message shows an incredible demonstration with a strong impact. There's visual proof -- stark and unadorned.
There's no formula to effective shock -- its very essence is in surprise. But given the two-way nature of modern media, brands need to tread carefully so that the strong emotional reactions they foment have the desired business effects.
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