Digital CPG Blog

Jimmy Dean wanted to solve those traditionally tough coupon problems of distribution and targeting and turned to a shareable coupon campaign. Here’s how it worked:

Basically the coupon campaign, which ran for a month, allowed online users to print off a coupon worth $1 off a 4-count pack of D-lights. However, if they chose to share the offer with three of their friends via email, Facebook Twitter or MySpace, they could score a coupon worth $2.50 off the same merchandise.

Sounds like the Huggies campaign right? So, did it work? Oh yes -

According to metrics provided by SocialTwist, in the 30 days the Jimmy Dean D-lights coupon campaign ran, more than 64% of users who came to the microsite opted to refer the coupon to their friends and get the higher rebate. Of those referrers, more than 70% of the sharing was done via email, while 27% of users shared over Facebook, and 1% each over Twitter and MySpace.

However, when it came to which channels produced the most clickthroughs from those referred friends, Facebook won out at almost 41% of shares, compared to only about 30% for email. And although it had fewer users, Twitter proved almost as effective as email in terms of driving traffic from referred friends: 29.35 of those who saw the referring tweet from someone they followed went on the click through to the microsite.

Word of mouth works best when it comes from those you know and allowing your customers to spread what’s valuable to them to each other is always important. This type of deal is still early enough that it can still be incredibly effective, so don’t wait to get on the bandwagon!

For some companies, an online coupon is social enough. Huggies recently took it one step further, however, with an innovative offer: “Instead of just the traditional online coupon to drive more diapers off the shelf, Huggies is offering parents a 2-for-1 choice.  More precisely – that is a choice between a $3.00 or $1.50 incentive.  The “catch” is simple and pleasant – just tell 3 friends about the Huggies deal.  They also offer customers the choice of how to spread the news to other fellow parents:  via social networking sites like Facebook, via instant messaging or via a good old-fashioned email,” reports Colloquy.

Their research shows that child care is the most important category for advice and referrals from friends and family, which makes the Huggies promotion all the more critical and smart.

The offer is clear, engaging and compelling – word of mouth at it’s best.

“As a marketing tool for online community and influence engagement, every brand and agency should be considering the use of Tumblr when developing long-term marketing programs; it’s going to become as commonly used as Twitter or Facebook.”

That quote via Jessica Now seems to predict what the next big thing just might be. While we’ve heard through the grapevine that Tumblr is focusing more exclusively on the fashion industry, it’s strength is it’s simplicity in uploading and sharing images, video and other media content – all of which are uber important to the CPG industry.

Could Tumblr prove to be just as important for CPG manus as Facebook has been? Or by the time the CPG industry catches up will Tumblr be old news?

Do you use Tumblr for your brand or personally? I’ve only used it for personal experiments, and have to say, I don’t exactly get all the hoopla…

If you don’t have friends to ask about a certain product or company, it takes a lot of time and research to evaluate whether you want to buy in or make a purchase.It’s understandable that when a friend or knowledgeable acquaintance is available, you’ll want to skip this process.

“There is, however, a deeper reason why your customers turn to each other,” argues Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent, “and that is that they get an immediate focused reply instead of having to wade through clumsy content on your site [hat tip: Bernd Nurnberger]. It also means they have the feeling that peers are in it to help, while the business purely for profit [contribution: Brian Driggs].”

If you’re actively listening to your customers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to replicate this interaction, however. Maltoni asks, “How can you change the customer experience so that your business is part of the positive conversation and solution?” I love how Patagonia uses a great Q&A experience on their site to do exactly this:

How else can you be useful to the customer?

This week, you will probably see those with whom you have strong emotional bonds for Thanksgiving. And the most influential word-of-mouth effects arise when people tied together by those bonds share and spread a message.

“You will naturally listen more to recommendations and opinions from your family and close friends than from people you do not know. This insight was strengthened by a Harvard Business Review study showing that out of the famous ‘Six degrees of separation,’ only the first three degrees of social connectedness actually have impact on people’s behaviour and opinions,” reports the Word of Mouth newsletter.

But there is also a gray area, and this loophole helps to explain the influence of bloggers:

“The grey area I am referring to holds the people you know well but don’t have truly close emotional ties with. That guy you went to school with and you now meet from time to time through common friends but that you never really hang out with, would qualify as such a ‘grey area connection.’ Beyond the grey area, you have people you do not know as well, and they may actually be more influential than your grey area connections. I recently found a post over at PsyBlog that made me think that this may be the case. PsyBlog lists a number of studies showing that the better you get to know people, the less you seem to like them.”

Bloggers and other social media influencers build relationships with followers without letting them get too close, argue the authors.

What do you think? Do you buy this line of thought? I think it’s more probable that followers perceive that they do actually have a relationship with the influencer. The influencer wouldn’t define it as such, but the follower feels very connected, thus willing to follow in the influencer’s footsteps.

Photo Credit: Alx.

“The simple truth of the matter is that a Facebook status update or tweet is not as social, or direct, as many of us would like to believe. And thanks to all of the chaff that’s floating around in the social mediasphere, posting a Facebook status update or tweet is often like sending an email to /dev/null. In short, status updates and tweets hardly represent the one-to-one interactions that serve as the foundation of effective word-of-mouth.”

This quote comes from a new study from the Keller Fay Group (h/t Jessica Smith) that argues word of mouth is still largely an offline phenomenon.

Even among teens, who are blazing the way in social media and mobile technology use, have a whopping 85% of their word-of-mouth activity take place off of the internet. That percentage is even higher for the general public at 93%, dispelling the myth that the internet is the primary platform for word of mouth.

Seems face-to-face communication still reigns.

Does this affect your marketing plans? How can you adapt your strategy  to take advantage of this research?

Well, this is a no-brainer – women are motivated by good experiences! But almost equally, women are sharing bad experiences as well to their friends and family.

92% of women turn to those same friends and family for product information, making word-of-mouth their top source. They consider it important to seek and share information on a variety of product categories, with appliances, restaurants, automobiles and entertainment leading the list.

Stay tuned… next week, we have some interesting research to share on word of mouth!

In case you haven’t heard, Tide is getting into the dry cleaning business, while Mr. Clean is now vying for your car-washing business. Caitlin McCabe argues that such forays into the service industry from large brands are a result of of social media:

Social media has showed us the importance of having a story.  With television, you had 30 seconds to a minute to tell a story so we were conjuring up quick and simple stories for viewers.  After that, people went on their merry way.  With social media (and I’m not talking just online here, social media is really the way connecting is going on nowadays) there became a major emphasis on stories.  Even long stories like the Johnny Cash Project where people uploaded their Johnny Cash portrait to become part of an ever changing collective view of the man in black.  You can follow stories about how car companies come up with new designs or how clothing is chosen to become part of fashion shows.  The story is huge.

So what’s the story on a simple product from a major company that makes a billion products?

…from a marketing standpoint this makes sense as well because the brand will own the story from start to finish.  Mr. Clean doesn’t have to send video crews to some other car wash in order to do “behind the scenes car wash” videos, they can just film their own.  People can check in on Facebook and Foursquare to an actual location.  The addition of a location will undoubtedly boost their online buzz a million fold.

Will brick-and-mortar locations increase word of mouth and social media cred? How much will these initiatives strengthen the existing CPG brand? Could they dilute the brand as well?

That’s what Matt Owens argues in a recent E-Consultancy post. He aruges that the supremacy surrounding social media is creating a number of problems and calls out these key assumptions:

- Assuming social media is more influential than traditional media

We agree with Matt on this one – social media should be used in tandem with other marketing and advertising initiatives for full effect. Particularly the broadcast arena, which Owens argues is still alive and well.

- Social media is the best place to create brand awareness

I do think social media is a great place to create initial brand awareness through expediting word of mouth, but like Owens, I agree you must have a long-term plan to maintain your brand’s exposure. You can only be featured on the same blog so many times after all…

- The audience can be trusted to curate their own content

Owens argues that with more content than ever, it’s important to have editors and curators to build trust with your customers. We agree, but also took a different stance – don’t be afraid to let those customers create their own content either. Sometimes that’s even more powerful than organizing what’s already out there.

What do you think? Are we relying on social media too much to the detriment of other areas of marketing and advertising?

While this crosses into the food category, I absolutely love this idea of branding, innovation and customer engagement from Chiquita Bananas. They asked, ““How do we leverage the iconic real estate that we already have on all our bananas, throughout the world?” A tiny bit of real estate at that! But a piece of real estate we would all immediately notice if changed. The New York Times reports how they did it:

The campaign involved using this inconspicuous and familiar little bit of branding turf for a visual experiment: instead of the familiar logo, the stickers carried bold and whimsical iconish face imagery — a monkey, a happy Cyclops, a vaguely anime-style girl, a luchador and so on. Using the same colors as the familiar Chiquita logo, the designs were genuine eye-catchers.

And they may have caught even more eyes online than they did in the store: Chiquita set up a Web tool for people to whip up their own sticker drag-and-drop mixes, and an obliging public created more than 25,000 of them in less than five months, according to the company. This enthusiasm has led to a competition — 1,355 entries were submitted over several months, and online voting starts tomorrow at eatachiquita.com to pick 18 designs that will be stuck onto actual bananas.

By actually contributing to the defamiliarizing of something familiar, the contestants layer new “intrigue” onto one company’s supply of what is, after all, a pure commodity.

It’s an amazing campaign of community and letting go of the control of your brand to bring emotion to it. Or as Chiquita reps put it, the campaign is “designed to re-engage that emotional connection with consumers.” So many brands try to this, but with little success. The attempts are usually fairly meaningless, because adding your words to a coffee cup isn’t nearly as interesting as genuinely engaging, re-working and re-imagining an iconic brand to include your ideas, not your ideas of what you think the brand will like. Way to go, Chiquita.