Digital CPG Blog

Yesterday, we talked about how you should probably be on Pinterest (and we’re featuring it again below!). Today, here are many more places your customers would love to see you:

1. On YouTube As the second largest search engine, YouTube provides moms an easy way to not only search for products, but to also learn how to use them. Create short videos — less than three minutes — that tell moms how to create solutions with your product. Use mom vloggers or mom employees to produce videos in order to create a relevant connection with the female audience.

7. On iTunes More and more moms are listening to podcasts. It’s easy and inexpensive to create a podcast for your brand. Consider what solutions you can offer mom and pull up a microphone. For example, if you are a car company, create product podcasts on travel ideas or destinations for families. If you are a food brand, consider a cooking podcast. If you can’t find a radio guru in your hallways, think about contracting with a mom podcaster to host your show for you.

I have long argued that social networks aren’t really social and we shouldn’t let a few platforms define what social means online. Now, others are coming around. Econsultancy argues:

Social technologies have seen great advances and widespread adoption. But the way we behave socially online is still unnatural and stilted. The technology doesn’t yet fully reflect the way we socially interact in real-life.

Amen! The article goes on to reveal the results of an interesting psycholgy study carried out amongst UCLA students:

Interestingly, In contrast to similar studies conducted previously, it found that:

…the overwhelming quantity of [social network site] use among college students is more consistent with the global use paradigm, which sees internet use as universal, as opposed to a realm inhabited by people who are somehow different than non-users.

The Internet isn’t just for the lonesome any longer, which will hopefully mean some increased innovations into mirroring technology to our human interactions.

Is your brand doing anything interesting to mirror offline behavior online?

What do those young’uns want?

Well, as a Gen Yer myself, I can say this recent study is right on:

In general, you can remember that Gen Yers like to shop as an experience, not just a chore and all the things they tend to like fall under that idea. For instance, we love deli counters and prefer brands with a well-developed social and mobile media presence. Is your CPG brand set up to serve and reach the millenial generation?

Companies are losing out on billions of dollars and pounds in revenue due to a poor online experience, according to research published today by Econsultancy and Tealeaf. A global survey of more than 500 businesses for the Reducing Customer Struggle report found that companies able to quantify site abandonment estimate they are losing the equivalent of 24% of their annual online revenue due to a bad website experience.

Ouch.

“This focus on understanding customer acquisition and giving less emphasis to the rest of the sales and marketing cycle mirrors the marketing bias towards acquiring customers which has been a feature of the business landscape over the last few years,” the report argues.

I believe that user interfaces and experiences, not data will redefine online commerce in the next wave. I would love to see an interface that allows me to see what strangers and my friends are browsing in real-time. I’d really love to invite my best friend in Madison to go on a shopping date while I’m in DC and browse a site simultaneously while I glance at her and what she’s browsing.

If you try to imagine these experiences in the web’s current architecture, it seems clunky, unrealistic even, but I assure you, the interfaces that use the data of web 2.0 will evolve and become increasingly important in web 3.0. And that’s what will define social on the Internet.

Common predictions are that “the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce will be about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs will drive buying decisions,” but here’s my prediction: after the data, it’s going to be the experience. Data is useless without a meaningful experience to plug into. How the interface and experience of social is formed will drive the next evolution of online commerce.

We talked yesterday how consumers want Facebook and coupons in their online interactions with a brand. But I wouldn’t recommend putting up a Facebook page and littering it with coupons. Because while consumers say that’s what they value most, the real thing that consumers want is an entire brand experience.

In the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, consumers defined brand value ‘not through the narrow lens of price but in terms of the total experience that consumers have when they interact with a given brand,’ said Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president.

So make sure the Facebook and coupons are not the end in and of themselves, but pieces of  your larger strategy to show how your product can create a meaningful experience in the consumer’s lives, not just how it can help their pocketbooks.

“This year consumers’ skyrocketing desire for experience and authentic innovation are exerting the strongest impact on customer decision-making and profitable engagement with the brand. Brands able to meet or exceed these expectations become category leaders. ‘This only matters, of course, if you’re keeping score by counting sales and profits,’ Passikoff argues, ‘and not merely tracking awareness levels.’”

“Products that respond with a truly consumer-centric view of their category – delighting the customer – based on predictive loyalty metrics, stand to gain the most and establish themselves as this decade’s brand leaders.”