Marketing Thoughts by Domus Inc.

The Conference Board reported today that the Consumer Confidence Index fell to 53.1 percent in September, down from 54.5 in August. For marketers hoping to see a turnaround starting this holiday season, this is not good news. Consumer purses might not be as open as hoped. As such, marketing strategies should be adjusted accordingly. That doesn’t necessarily mean cutting back, but rather positioning one’s brand for the longer term.

Domus is a full-service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia.

Starbucks is launching a major marketing campaign for its new instant coffee, Via. A major part of the roll out is a huge taste test throughout their 7,500 cafes in the US and Canada.

One possible problem with this introduction, though, is how it impacts the Starbucks brand position. Starbucks became successful by selling an experience and an image. Otherwise, why pay so much money for a product that can be gotten elsewhere for much less? Now, though, Starbucks is starting a huge campaign to convince people that they can’t taste the difference between a fresh-brewed coffee in one of their cafes and some powder added to hot water. The more successful the campaign, the more Starbucks will convince people that there is no need to return to their cafes.

Domus, Inc. is a marketing consulting firm based in Philadelphia. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.

GM recently launched its new advertising campaign for Buick with the slogan, “The New Class of World Class”. Moreover, Buick ads now prominently feature comparisons against Lexus. (And, in fact, people who are test-driving the 2010 Buick LaCrosse do say that it bests the Lexus ES.)

But how do these ads affect GM’s overall brand mix? Cadillac was always the brand the was positioned at the high end. (Cadillac’s advertising tagline use to be “The standard of the world.”) Over the years, though, Cadillac’s luster faded and Toyota seized the high end market position with the Lexus. So, by constantly comparing Buick to Lexus, is GM blurring the brand positions between Buck and Cadillac? If GM is successful in its Buick ads, how does Cadillac position itself?

Cadillac recently did come up with a great ad – for their SRX crossover. The tag line for this ad was “SRX – the Cadillac of crossovers.” So Cadillac is finally standing tall and proclaiming its former place at as the world standard. But will they limit this tag line to the SRX or will they make a full frontal assault to regain their status across all models? And will they be fighting a war on two fronts – against Lexus and against their sister brand, Buick?

Domus, Inc. is a full service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

Over the years, various studies have shown that the standard QWERTY keyboard layout that we all use is not the most efficient for typing. (In fact, it was originally designed in part to slow down typists.) However, various attempts over the years to introduce more efficient layouts all failed. The QWERTY layout was too ingrained into our typing habits to be supplanted.

Similarly, over these last few years we’ve seen a number of new search engines, all touted as Google-killers. There were Wolfram-Alpha, Hakia, Cuil, and others. All promised innovations in visual displays, in the structure of the input queries, and the organization of the output. But none have really made an impact. In fact, the only engines other than Google that still have some significant market share are those that use the same basic keyword requests returning relatively simple results pages – Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, etc. Obviously, one reason is that these other companies have enough marketing capital and existing user bases to be successful.

However, another reason might be that people are comfortable with how search engines work today and are not interested in any change other than the relevancy of the results. This is just a thought, but it’s also one to be considered by any marketer introducing a better mouse trap of any kind.

Domus, Inc. is a Philadelphia-based marketing consulting agency. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

Mobile internet usage today is exploding. The year-over-year numbers from January, 2008 to January 2009 showed over a doubling of usage. Since then, the introduction of new generations of “smartphones” such as the iPhone have stressed the mobile networks almost more than AT&T’s and Verizon’s combined $35 billion per year in mobile infrastructure investments can handle. And the trend looks to only point up, with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter being increasingly accessed by mobile devices.

So, as a marketer, what are you doing? At a minimum, this is the time to revisit all of your web properies and ensure that they are mobile-friendly. Other avenues of mobile marketing, including mobile ads, text messages, etc. will all be drastically less effective if you don’t have a mobile-friendly web site. Would you ever invest in wired web banner ads without a web site or at least a landing page for users to click through to? The same is true for the mobile web.

So, if you wish to position yourself to take advantage of the mobile web as it explodes throughout 2010 and beyond, your first step should start now – make your web site mobile-friendly.

Domus, Inc. is a full service marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. One of our priorities for the remainder of this year is to position ourselves and our clients to take advantage of existing and growing mobile marketing opportunities. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.

Although advertising, sales, and customer service have always been strongly related, today more than ever the lines between them is blurred. Advertising is generally the process of increasing and reinforcing brand awareness in anticipation of a future desire to purchase. Sales is the process of converting interest to action later in the sales cycle. And customer service is generally the process of keeping existing customers happy with their purchasing decision post-sales.

Today, however, the display ad that increases brand awareness can have a hyperlink click-through to a landing page that starts the cycle for an online sale. Or the click-through can directly or indirectly (e.g., through a search) go to an online community forum where existing customers discuss their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the brand (which in turn becomes an input into the sales decision process).

So, given that the three have become so interrelated, why do so many companies still keep different organizational reporting lines for the three functions? Especially today when the economy is fragile and profits are razor-thin, companies should consider how they can maximize the effectiveness of all three functions by more fully integrating them.

Domus, Inc. is a Philadelphia-based marketing communications consulting company. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.

There’s a saying that even bad publicity is good publicity, but unless you’re Paris Hilton that is far from the case. Some companies may not see the value in public relations, but if they become victim to a devastating media disaster then the value of public relations becomes priceless. However, PR isn’t just meant to quality control major disasters, it’s one of the main branches of an integrated marketing campaign. PR will raise brand awareness through legitimate industry sources vs. paid advertisements and help shape how customers view a product, company or even…you.

For instance, the State Lotteries are no stranger to negative publicity. The amount of press covering stories of lottery winners whose lives have been negatively affected by the money trumps the number of positive winner awareness stories. With a solid PR program, that could be reversed. By broadcasting on tier one outlets and creating feature stories, positive life changing stories would be heard, attracting consumer attention which will help raise sales.

Bad publicity might get you on the map, but a negative impression is hard to shake. By implementing a fully integrated marketing program with a strong public relations presence and internet presence tracking, any product, brand or company can raise awareness levels and inevitably raise sales.

Domus is an integrated marketing communications firm based in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

According to Nielsen, Microsoft’s Bing dramatically increased its share of the search market in August, increasing over 22% compared to July. Moreover, it appears that Microsoft’s gain was principally at Yahoo’s expense.

This brings several thoughts to mind.

• It appears that at least one reason for Microsoft’s success was their broadbased, aggressive advertising campaign, involving both new and old media. All marketers should take notice – aggressive advertising can still be a potent tool.
• Yahoo should seriously consider a plan “B” in case their search deal with Microsoft does not go through. Even if Federal regulators do eventually approve the deal, if that process takes too long and Yahoo keeps losing share to Bing, then Microsoft might not be as interesting in completing it – at least not at the original price.
• Although Google has not yet been affected by Bing’s success, they should not get too complacent. Microsoftstill has a number of salvos in their attack. They just released their “Visual Search” feature for Bing and their are rumors of an upcoming Bing 2.0.

Domus, Inc. is a full service marketing communications firm based in Philadelphia. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.

Social media marketing is supposed to focus on online conversations with consumers, not disruptive advertising displays. But display advertising is still where the money is being spent and earned. Social networking sites, led by MySpace and Facebook, now account for over 20% of US online display advertising. And with sites like Twitter now opening up to display ads, the numbers will continue to grow.

Display advertising will always be an important component of marketing – whether offline or online. Display advertising is where companies put and keep their brands in the forefront – and the back – of people’s minds. If companies are only active at the points when people are ready to buy (search engine marketing) or converse (social media participation), then those companies will have lost consumers who could have been customers but never knew to search or discuss their brands.

In fact, recent comScore research showed quantitatively how the combination of display advertising and search advertising was more potent than the sum of either individually. The same, I’m sure, will be shown for social media marketing – in combination with both search and display.

Domus, Inc. is a Philadelphia-based full-service advertising, PR, and social media marketing communications firm. We focus on applying classic marketing principles in unique and innovative ways to modern marketing needs and channels. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

As more and more companies are creating Facebook brand fan pages, Facebook’s shortcomings in the area of metrics are becoming more significant. Although Facebook Insights offers information as to how many fans are receiving and possibly engaging in feeds from pages, Facebook offers virtually no metrics to companies trying to acquire more fans.

In the non-Facebook world, companies can measure how many people see an ad, how many click through to a web site, how many come to a web site from sources other than the ad, what people do on the site, and how many return. Companies can split-test ads, landing pages, and more to determine the best mix of content, presentation, and exposure to not only attract people to a site but to retain them.

On Facebook, however, there are no metrics that provide information on the number of or demographics of people visiting fan pages. Only once people become fans do the metrics kick in. (In fact, it’s explicitly against the Facebook rule of service to try to track page visitors.)

So, what should Facebook marketers do? Basically, the same thing we did with old media – use inference. Keep statistics of activities that we hope are driving people to our fan page and keep statistics of how many people become fans. Then analyze presumed cause-and-effect relationships without knowing the intermediate numbers (of page visitors). It’s an imperfect world, but given that Facebook is becoming an important media on which companies should have a presence, we have to work within the boundaries set for us.

Domus is a dynamic marketing communications firm based in Philadelphia. We provide integrated marketing consulting and execution services to domestic and international clients. Please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com for more.