Major brand owners including Estée Lauder, PepsiCo and Yum Brands are making increased use of television advertising as they seek to drive up awareness and revenues.

Over the last two years, Estée Lauder has made “more frequent use of TV” to promote the skincare and cosmetics products across its eponymous and Clinique brands, Fabrizio Freda, the firm’s CEO said.

“The biggest way to attract mass is still television,” Freda argued, as reported by Reuters. “People that today buy a lot of cosmetics in mass around the world don’t always read Vogue.”

Pepsi, the soft drinks brand, also recently announced what Albert Carey, head of its US beverage arm, called “substantial increases” to its adspend levels. TV, where the firm has made noticeable cutbacks in the recent past, is due to be a big beneficiary of this.

As an example, Pepsi cola resumed advertising in the Super Bowl with an ad starring the winner of the X Factor, the talent show, and Elton John, the singer. Coca-Cola also ran three ads during the annual event.

“It looks like it’s back to Coke versus Pepsi right now,” Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix, the effectiveness measurement company, said. “I really think the cola wars are going to be focused on the base brands.”

Google has also used TV ads to promote its Chrome web browser, while eBay ran its first campaign for several years in late 2011. Barnes & Noble is similarly using this channel to champion its Nook e-reader.

“TV is the king of media categories when it comes to branding,” said Vincent Letang, global head of forecasts for Magnaglobal, a division of IPG Mediabrands. “It is indispensable.”

O’Reilly’s Automotive, the car parts provider, will also leverage television for the first time this year. “We feel the addition of television … along with moving to a national level program, will be a great benefit in continuing to grow the O’Reilly brand across all markets,” said Ted Wise, its CFO.

Yum Brands, the fast food group, has also made heavy use of TV to drive up revenues in France, which has the highest average unit volume returns worldwide.

“We continue to build our scale and increase television advertising. France is also the first market where we experimented with the business rental market to drive new unit development and returns,” David Novak, its CEO, said.

“And we’ve taken this approach to Germany where we’re expecting to have the necessary scale to utilise television advertising in 2013.”

Lining up financing and writing a marketing plan are among the crucial standard steps that entrepreneurs take to launch or fortify a business. But a firm is doomed to mediocrity or failure if it doesn’t know how it’s going to thrill its customers, contends Mark Stevens in Your Company Sucks: It’s Time to Declare War on Yourself.

Stevens, who runs a management and marketing firm and blogs about unconventional thinking, suggests several ways to surprise and delight your clients:

1. Tell customers “It’s always business hours for you”: How many times have you approached the door of a business, only to have the proprietor flash the “Closed” sign in your face? You can read his expression like a book: “Too bad. You missed your chance. We’re going home for the day.” Contrast this with a business that, when a customer asks for sales or service after hours, opens the doors and warmly invites her in. That creates the sort of thrill that even a great sale event can’t equal.

2. Discover your clients’ passions and cater to them: Stevens’ father mentioned at a furniture store that he was a fly-fishing addict, and the merchant took note. A week later, the merchant sent him a box of handmade flies as a thank-you gift. After that, Stevens’ father wouldn’t even think of buying from anyone else.

3. Offer customers an enticing product in a category they didn’t expect you to carry: Stevens’ favourite haircutter broke from convention by selling bold and unusual cufflinks on its display counter rather than the usual hair products. The author often buys a pair, and the display has turned getting a haircut into a multifaceted experience.

4. Appoint a chief customer officer (CCO) dedicated to making your firm a joy to do business with: This should be someone with an aptitude for seeing things from the customers’ point of view and a passion for thrilling them. If every company had a CCO, retail establishments would have clean washrooms, websites would make it easy to find the information you need and complete a transaction, and a member of a hotel loyalty program who’s checking into a near-empty hotel and asks for an upgrade wouldn’t be told “It’s against policy.” Consumers used to shabby service from most firms would be thrilled if yours treated them with the thoughtfulness and consideration they deserve.

Many business owners become overwhelmed when attempting to figure out how to use social media to grow their business. But they don’t have to, according to Jason Falls, author and CEO of Louisville, Ky.-based Social Media Explorer, a social media marketing, digital marketing and public relations consulting service.

“In order to understand what you want to accomplish with social media, you first have to understand what’s possible,” Jason encourages entrepreneurs to first identify one or more of these seven business goals for social media before even getting started:
1: Enhancing Brand Awareness
2: Protecting Your Reputation
3: Enhancing Your Public Relations
4: Extending Your Customer Service
5: Building a Community of Advocates
6: Facilitating Research and Development
7: Driving Sales and Leads

In this video, Falls shares examples of strategies business owners can use to achieve their social media goals.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/222825

This week we share some great insights from author Jon Gordon. Being an ex- hockey player, a lot of Jon’s insights hit home with us. The difference between winning and losing is often fractional, but the lessons we learn from losing can be truly life or game changing.

Only one team wins the Super Bowl.

For each player on the NY Giants going to Disney World after the game there is a player on the New England Patriots going home disappointed without the joy of victory.

It’s a lot like life.

Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.

Sometimes we win the account, the game, the job promotion, the award and sometimes we lose the very thing we want most.

Winning matters. Losing matters. But in life what matters most is what we do with our wins and losses.

When we win do we become complacent or stay humble and hungry?

People often say that success breeds success but often it breeds complacency. After a win people think they can just show up and achieve the same result, forgetting the effort, determination and mindset it took to achieve the win.

To continue winning it’s essential to turn the euphoria of winning into a fire of burning desire that fuels your continuous improvement, passion, and quest for excellence.

Even more important than what we do after our wins is how we respond to our losses.

Do we give up or come back stronger?

Do we allow the loss to act like a cancer that eats away at us for the rest of our life or do we turn it into a learning opportunity that leads to our healthy growth?

I certainly know what it feels like to lose. I’ve lost many arguments with my wife. : )  My book The Energy Bus was rejected by the first 30 publishers. As a sales person years ago I lost as many accounts as I won. I lost too many games as a Lacrosse player at Cornell and now I watch my children lose tennis matches and lacrosse games.

Everyone loses but the key is to make the loss stand for something and in my family LOSS now stands for:

LOSS (Learning Opportunity, Stay Strong)

When we lose we ask what we can learn from this loss and how we can improve because of it. Then we stay strong and work harder to come back and try to win.

This leads to more wins in the future…and also eventually more loses…and more learning opportunities and opportunities to stay strong and develop our character.

Through this process of winning and losing we learn the greatest lesson of all:

No matter how hard we work and how much we improve there will be times when we experience the worst of defeats instead of the greatest of victories. But ultimately life is about more than winning or losing. It’s about the lessons we learn, the character and strength we build and the people we become along the way.

Whether we win the Super Bowl or not, when we realize this we will surely be a winner in the game of life!

Have a great week unless you choose otherwise.

Drago

Here is some excellent post sales advice from Jeffrey Gittomer.

The average sale takes a matter of hours. And that’s where 95% of sales training is focused. Not good.

After a customer purchases, that’s when USE of product or service begins, and that’s where 95% of their time is spent.

• What are you doing to create loyalty?
• What are you doing to create word-of-mouth advertising?
• What are you doing to create value in the mind of the customer?
• What are you doing to create memorable moments?
• What is your social media presence that focuses on customer communication and interaction?
• What are you doing to create and ensure reorders?
• What are you doing to earn referrals?
• What are you doing to build a value-based relationship after the sale?
• What are you doing to ensure it’s easy to do business with you?
• What are you doing to ensure that everyone who answers your phone is happy, friendly, and helpful?
• What type of customer service and customer loyalty training are you doing that ensures consistent, positive, helpful responses?

ANSWER: Nothing or not enough.

MAJOR CLUE: These questions are the HEART of your future. And for the most part, the answers are way below an acceptable level to ensure your future success.

REALITY: It’s likely that your present actions will ensure that you’ll have significant customer attrition, or churn, or some other BS corporate buzzword that will cost major dollars in lost customers, and further ensure that your sales team will have to sell more than last year just to maintain present sales levels.

Many companies employ the “Hunter-Farmer” strategy in making sales. One person makes the sale, and immediately turns it over to some service person (often with little or no personal handoff), and heads for the next sale.

MAJOR CLUE: THERE IS NO DUMBER SALES STRATEGY THAN HUNTER-FARMER – other than cold calling.

The hunter-farmer strategy creates a vacuum between what was promised and what will be delivered. And the “hunter” has to continually prospect and cold call to make new sales rather than cultivate an existing relationship and earn referrals.

For the past three years, I have asked my corporate and public seminar audiences this question: What ten things are you doing AFTER the sale to ensure loyalty, reorders, referrals, and reputation.

99.9% give me a blank stare.

Okay, so what can you do and what should you be doing to make certain that you are keeping the customers you have in a manner that THEY value? Or better stated: What happens after the sale?

Here are a few suggestions for what to do… (CAUTION: They require work.)

• Send a weekly value message. My email magazine, Sales Caffeine, is the most effective communication tool to send a weekly value message to every one of my customers. It’s now almost 500 issues strong. IDEA: Read a business book and send your customers your review with salient points of value.
• Enhance your social media effort. By setting a full-blown, VALUE-BASED business social media campaign in motion, your customers will have the chance to learn about you and get your messages, and you will have a chance to learn about them and get their messages. Examples of value-based message: If you sell health insurance, tell me how to avoid common colds or keep my kids healthy.
• Help their social media effort. Your customers could gain insight from your social media effort, and visit you to learn and emulate. You have to set the example, then set the standard, and then invite your customers to study your strategies to help their success.
• Share ideas that can benefit your customers. Not offers to buy your product.
• Share observations and tips. When you visit other businesses, become aware of things other successful businesses do, note them, and post about them.
• Bring several customers together for a monthly mastermind meeting. Be the pivot person that brings together value-based meetings.
• Refer customers. The best way to get referrals is GIVE referrals.
• Do business with them. Go out of your way to patronize those that feed you.

Every business wants re-orders, every business wants loyal customers, and every business wants to have a great reputation. The question to ask yourself is, “What (of value) am I doing about it?”

What you do after the sale determines the next sale, and a whole lot more.

Here are some great insights about Steve Jobs from Eric Jackson.

I had a feeling – like I suspect many others – that he only had a few more days with us on this Earth.

He’s irreplaceable.  We’ll never see anyone else like him.  Edison, Einstein, Henry Ford… he has left an indelible mark on our society in the last 35 years and for many more to come.

Yet, despite his greatness, he also taught us that he’s just a man.  He got up every day, like you and me.  He kissed his family goodbye and he threw his heart and soul into his work – his passion — just like we can.
We all can be great.  If we try, we’ll honor him.

Here are the Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs taught us:

1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science – Steve has always pointed out that the biggest difference between Apple and all the other computer (and post-PC) companies through history is that Apple always tried to marry art and science.  Jobs pointed out the original team working on the Mac had backgrounds in anthropology, art, history, and poetry.  That’s always been important in making Apple’s products stand out.  It’s the difference between the iPad and every other tablet computer that came before it or since.  It is the look and feel of a product.  It is its soul.  But it is such a difficult thing for computer scientists or engineers to see that importance, so any company must have a leader that sees that importance.

2. To create the future, you can’t do it through focus groups – There is a school of thought in management theory that — if you’re in the consumer-facing space building products and services — you’ve got to listen to your customer.  Steve Jobs was one of the first businessmen to say that was a waste of time.  The customers today don’t always know what they want, especially if it’s something they’ve never seen, heard, or touched before.  When it became clear that Apple would come out with a tablet, many were skeptical.  When people heard the name (iPad), it was a joke in the Twitter-sphere for a day.  But when people held one, and used it, it became a ‘must have.’  They didn’t know how they’d previously lived without one.  It became the fastest growing Apple product in its history.  Jobs (and the Apple team) trusted himself more than others.  Picasso and great artists have done that for centuries.  Jobs was the first in business.

3. Never fear failure – Jobs was fired by the successor he picked.  It was one of the most public embarrassments of the last 30 years in business.  Yet, he didn’t become a venture capitalist never to be heard from again.  He didn’t start a production company and do a lot of lunches.  He picked himself up and got back to work following his passion.  Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he only had a few weeks to live.  As Samuel Johnson said, there’s nothing like your impending death to focus the mind.  From Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

4. You can’t connect the dots forward – only backward – This is another gem from the 2005 Stanford speech.  The idea behind the concept is that, as much as we try to plan our lives ahead in advance, there’s always something that’s completely unpredictable about life.  What seems like bitter anguish and defeat in the moment — getting dumped by a girlfriend, not getting that job at McKinsey, “wasting” 4 years of your life on a start-up that didn’t pan out as you wanted — can turn out to sow the seeds of your unimaginable success years from now.  You can’t be too attached to how you think your life is supposed to work out and instead trust that all the dots will be connected in the future.  This is all part of the plan.

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

5. Listen to that voice in the back of your head that tells you if you’re on the right track or not – Most of us don’t hear a voice inside our heads.  We’ve simply decided that we’re going to work in finance or be a doctor because that’s what our parents told us we should do or because we wanted to make a lot of money.  When we consciously or unconsciously make that decision, we snuff out that little voice in our head.  From then on, most of us put it on automatic pilot.  We mail it in.  You have met these people.  They’re nice people.  But they’re not changing the world.  Jobs has always been a restless soul.  A man in a hurry.  A man with a plan.  His plan isn’t for everyone.  It was his plan. He wanted to build computers.  Some people have a voice that tells them to fight for democracy.  Some have one that tells them to become an expert in miniature spoons.  When Jobs first saw an example of a Graphical User Interface — a GUI — he knew this was the future of computing and that he had to create it.  That became the Macintosh.  Whatever your voice is telling you, you would be smart to listen to it.  Even if it tells you to quit your job, or move to China, or leave your partner.

6. Expect a lot from yourself and others – We have heard stories of Steve Jobs yelling or dressing down staff.  He’s a control freak, we’ve heard – a perfectionist.  The bottom line is that he is in touch with his passion and that little voice in the back of his head.  He gives a damn.  He wants the best from himself and everyone who works for him.  If they don’t give a damn, he doesn’t want them around.  And yet — he keeps attracting amazing talent around him.  Why?  Because talent gives a damn too.  There’s a saying: if you’re a “B” player, you’ll hire “C” players below you because you don’t want them to look smarter than you.  If you’re an “A” player, you’ll hire “A+” players below you, because you want the best result.

7. Don’t care about being right.  Care about succeeding – Jobs used this line in an interview after he was fired by Apple.  If you have to steal others’ great ideas to make yours better, do it.  You can’t be married to your vision of how a product is going to work out, such that you forget about current reality.  When the Apple III came out, it was hot and warped its motherboard even though Jobs had insisted it would be quiet and sleek.  If Jobs had stuck with Lisa, Apple would have never developed the Mac.

8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with – There is a misconception that Apple is Steve Jobs.  Everyone else in the company is a faceless minion working to please the all-seeing and all-knowing Jobs.  In reality, Jobs has surrounded himself with talent: Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Tim Cook, the former head of stores Ron Johnson.  These are all super-talented people who don’t get the credit they deserve.  The fact that Apple’s stock price has been so strong since Jobs left as CEO is a credit to the strength of the team.  Jobs has hired bad managerial talent before.  John Sculley ended up firing Jobs and — according to Jobs — almost killing the company.  Give credit to Jobs for learning from this mistake and realizing that he can’t do anything without great talent around him.

9. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Again from the end of Jobs’ memorable Stanford speech:

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision – Although he’s the greatest CEO ever and the father of the modern computer, at the end of the day, Steve Jobs is just a guy.  He’s a husband, a father, a friend — like you and me.  We can be just as special as he is — if we learn his lessons and start applying them in our lives.  When Jobs returned to Apple in the 1990s, it was was weeks away from bankruptcy.  It’s now the biggest company in the world.  Anything’s possible in life if you continue to follow the simple lessons laid out above.

May you change the world.

Malcolm Gladwell sold millions of copies of his book The Tipping Point, and he made millions of dollars on the concept he wrote about. But, he didn’t discover it.

An unknown political science professor, Morton Grodzins, first conceived of “the tipping point” more than 40 years before Gladwell released his book. Yet, Grodzins didn’t make millions of dollars.

Gladwell went on to sell millions of copies of his book Outliers, and he made millions of dollars, again. One of the key principles he described was a concept called “deliberate practice.” And, you guessed it. The original theory was developed by someone else—Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericcson, who toils in academic anonymity while Gladwell hits the big-dollar talk-show and speaking circuits.

Gladwell ‘Messaged It Great’

What did Gladwell do that those other guys didn’t? Why was he able to make millions while Grodzins and Ericcson never hit the mainstream?
He messaged it great. Gladwell was able to take very geeky, academic concepts and connect with the buying public, getting them to part with their money. The other guys didn’t.

Have you ever been frustrated that a less-dominant competitor beat you and your company? Are your customers continually trying to commoditize you? Or, maybe you’re the one who needs to outsell a more innovative competitor.

Regardless, as a marketer, you are charged with creating your company’s story and getting it told in a way that drives growth. It’s your job to message it great.

Five Lessons for ‘Messaging it Great’

Here’s what you need to learn from Malcolm Gladwell. You need to find something within your company that is inherently awesome and make it obvious to your customers. Because buried in your company and your offerings are bright ideas, capabilities, or concepts that just need to be messaged great.

And you need to apply the following five lessons.

1. Your customers live in their story; don’t force them to live in yours

The biggest thing that separates a successful company from an unsuccessful one is the story it tells prospects during the buying cycle. Do you force prospects to understand and love your company story, or are you engaging them in a compelling dialogue about their story?

The real challenge in the customer’s story is what we call the “status quo barrier,” which keeps prospects from wanting to change. You need a message that not only differentiates you from competitors but also convinces the decision-maker that she needs to do something different.

Your message needs to be about how the customer’s current story is changing, and how your strengths line up in response to those changes.

To break through the status quo barrier, you often need to tell the customer something she doesn’t know about a problem she didn’t even know she had. Your story needs to be a little challenging, dangerous, and fearless rather than safe and self-satisfying.

Too many of today’s value propositions are too impotent to provoke a response, let alone a business opportunity.

2. Translate your brand positioning into customer messaging

Brand positioning is typically about what we feel our brand should be, how we want to be known, why we come to work each day, what we promise to do for the customer, and what customers like about us. Companies tend to we, we, we all over themselves when they create brand messaging.

Brand positioning becomes a 30,000-foot hyperbole that rarely separates you from your competitors; it’s difficult to translate for the three-foot level—where the customer conversation takes place—and it almost never compels a customer to do anything different.

Companies test whether customers like their brand position, but they don’t test whether it will change behavior. I like the way Sergio Zyman, former Coca Cola chief marketing officer and author of The End of Marketing as We Know It, says, “We can’t live on virtual consumption.” (He said that after his brand advertising won many awards but failed to change Coca Cola’s market share.)

The bottom line is that branding, especially based on voice-of-the-customer, rarely offers a compelling story that’ll create commercial impact. Customers can’t tell you what they want or need that will get them excited enough to do something different and make them willing to go through the pain of change.

To create selling opportunities and activity, you must translate your brand into something truly compelling and remarkable that breaks the status quo barrier.

3. Offer a distinct point of view, not just more content

I got major heartburn at a recent conference on content marketing. The biggest topic of conversation seemed to be how to create the quantity of content needed, in a timely enough fashion, to fill all the holes in the demand-generation and sales-enablement content map. The conference included presentations about and products for sourcing third-party content from analysts and outside writers and managing that process.

Not once did I hear a speaker address how to make your content more distinctive and how to make it drive action. Seriously, if you are going to be an aggregator of industry-analyst information in your marketing programs and customer portals, what value will you add? What should a customer do differently because she found someone else’s content on your site or in your emails? Is being a content clearinghouse for other people’s generic content going to move the needle for you?

Gladwell didn’t just report on Grodzins’s discovery. He made it meaningful to you and me, and useful for our lives and jobs. He took an esoteric concept and made it pragmatic and applicable. Likewise, you must add value to the messaging content you create. You need to offer a distinct point of view.

Your story must show customers the relevant impact that the latest trends, issues, challenges, problems, and changes will have on the outcomes those customers desire. And then your story must show them how your organization can help them avoid risks and maximize opportunities.

4. Focus your messaging energy on the right enemy

When you build messaging content, think of the status quo barrier as your biggest competitor. Before you ever get to an opportunity, you need to break through and create a buying vision.

Your message must confront these four challenges that cause the status quo barrier:

1.Attention Economy. Time is the new currency. It’s nearly impossible to get people’s attention. You can’t be timid, and they don’t have time to play the 20-question game. In fact, you will need to tell customers something they don’t know about a problem they didn’t even know they had. Be provocative and fresh to get your listeners to the edge of their seats.

2.Change Burden. No surprise here, customers loathe change. So much so, they are often willing to live with their current pains because they perceive the pain of changing to a new solution as being worse. Breaking through the status quo barrier means you have to clearly show customers how the pain of not changing is worse than the pain of change management.

3.Risk Aversion. Pay attention here. People respond better and faster to the threat of risk or loss than to the potential for more gain. That’s why your feature/benefit stories and your ROI calculations aren’t enough to break through. You must show customers where their status quo is leaking and squeaking. They must see it as “unsafe” before they will move away from it.

4.Entrenched Competition. Incumbency has its advantages. If a traditional competitor or an in-house solution is in place, it’s safe and comfortable. No competitor is standing still, so they won’t give up their customers willingly. Your messaging needs to clearly show the contrast between your approach and the status quo. Prospects must see enough contrast to consider changing.
Like a spaceship trying to make it out of the earth’s gravitational pull, breaking through the customer’s status quo barrier is going to take booster rockets in those four areas.

5. Be great, where it counts

When Gladwell messaged it great, the measuring stick was how many books he sold. That metric isn’t about critical acclaim or awards from peers; it’s about connecting with buyers and getting them to respond and choose you. It’s about selling millions vs. toiling in obscurity.

Messaging it great matters in demand generation and sales enablement—those moments of truth when your company is participating in and looking to take the lead in the customer decision-making process. Those are easily tracked and measured messaging activities. We’ve been able to demonstrate improvements in response rates, pipeline size, deal size, and quota attainment when companies message it great.

Marketing has a bull’s-eye on its back. Now that senior management knows that those things can be measured, you can’t get away with subjective or pre-funnel objectives. Success is not about followers, or clicks, or impressions, or opinions. It’s not about the volume of sales materials and training you put out. Success is about revenue performance and the metrics that matter to the bottom line.

Are You Malcolm, or are you Morton?

To say that messaging it great is critical to corporate execution is not an overstatement. All the best ideas, innovations, investments, and introductions your company makes will mean nothing unless your customer says “yes” to them.

And, the one thing that determines your relevance or irrelevance is having the ability to develop and deliver a compelling enough story to get customers to say yes.

In this post by Thierry Costa, we’ll learn…

How the mobile and tablet retail experience will change in 2012

Seven trends marketers and retailers should prepare for
The 2012 consumer is not much different from the 2011 consumer, and the changes that began over the past 12-24 months will solidify in 2012. With faster networks, more Web-centric smartphone devices, and the ease of making mobile payments, more shoppers purchased on mobile devices in 2011 than in years prior, demonstrating a trend toward mobile buying rather than simply mobile researching.

In December 2011, sales from smartphones and tablets accounted for 11% of total online sales, up from 5.5% in December 2010, according to IBM Benchmark. The same study found that iPad tablet users are more likely to complete a purchase: The conversion rate for iPad users was 6.3% in December 2011, compared with 3.1% for mobile devices overall.

In addition, the 2012 consumer will continue to turn to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks—including some new ones that are gaining steam—to get suggestions and feedback from social connections when making buying decisions.

To help prepare you for a new year and the changing mobile and social retail environment, I’ve provided a list of the top trends to watch and suggestions for how to respond to your customers’ continually evolving shopping habits.

1. Online storefronts come to tablets

As if you didn’t have enough work to do extending your brand to smartphones, the popularity of tablets means you’ll need to make sure your online shopping experience also works in the tablet environment. However, the challenges posed by smartphones aren’t necessarily the same ones posed by tablets.

For example, the iPad doesn’t support Adobe Flash, so if your retail storefront relies on that programming tool, you’ll need alternate solutions for the tablet storefront. Also, tablet users don’t use a mouse to click on and zoom in on images. If your site has images that require a mouse for zooming, you’ll need an alternate—tablet-friendly—method.
2. Ensure a consistent experience

While you’re retooling your storefront to address tablet users, you’ll also need to be conscious of maintaining consistency of look and feel across all channels: PCs, mobile devices, tablets, and (of course) print catalogs and brick-and-mortar stores. If you offer a benefit in one channel, such as free shipping or giftwrapping, for example, make sure that offer appears in all other channels. Most important, ensure your brand’s customer service standards are maintained across platforms as well.
3. Rethink search and navigation

The growth of shopping via tablet will increase search and navigation challenges for retailers, because they have to develop new ideas for helping shoppers move around a site. Tablets offer certain benefits over smartphones: Their screens are bigger, so content and images are easier to read and see.

On the downside, navigating a website via a tablet screen isn’t easy if the website is crafted for the PC experience. Tablet users tap and swipe with their fingers to choose content, but small text menus and lists of refinements can be difficult to select with taps and swipes. That is also true for onscreen buttons or page numbers: The elements are just small enough to pose problems for finger-driven navigation.

Retailers should test the tablet experience to make sure shoppers don’t inadvertently click on other selections when choosing search refinements or navigation options.
4. Satisfy the real-time shopping urge

A key shopping difference exists between tablets and smartphones. When shopping via smartphones, people generally do research before buying. When browsing via a tablet, people are usually prepared to make a purchase. Accordingly, retailers should make the buying process on the tablet storefront as fast and straightforward as possible. For instance, they should make sure that search and navigation tools help speed the path from browsing to buying, and they should add relevant merchandising.
5. Bring shopping and searching to social networks

When mobile users spend 91% of their Internet time on social networks, that’s a sign that you need to bring the retail experience into those social settings. The 2012 online consumer would rather do her retail browsing from within the social networks that she spends so much time using, instead of being forced to jump to another site. You can respond to that social environment by adding search boxes to your Facebook pages and letting shoppers use their Facebook login info to sign in to your storefront.
6. Bring social into search

Besides wanting to search while being social, shoppers want to do the reverse. When viewing search results, whether on your retail site or on search engines, shoppers want to know what their social connections have to stay about the search target. Shoppers trust what their friends and family say about brand preferences and shopping selections, and they’ll look for ways to tap into those information sources when they search and shop. Consider ways to weave social information into search results. One way is to reorder search results based on how many Facebook or Google+ “Likes” the product has racked up.
7. Get new social networks on the radar

Pinterest, the online pin board, is gaining attention and is occupying online user mindshare that might otherwise go to Facebook. The site increased its audience from 418,000 visitors in May 2011 to 4.9 million in December, according to ComScore. Pinterest has been slowly rolling out tools for brands. You can now add “Pin It” buttons to products so that shoppers can add their favorite items to their Pinterest page. Stay tuned to the Pinterest blog for more news about branding tools for marketers.

Monday Morning Motivator

The Adam Ad Group

Quote Of The Week – There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded. (Mark Twain)

Word Of The Week – Peroration (per-uh-rey-shuhn) : A long speech characterized by lofty and often pompous language.
eg : Politicians are well quoted for their peroration during elections.

Proverb Of The Week – It is better to heed the rebuke of a wise person than to listen to the song of fools. (Ecclesiastes 7 verse 5 The Bible)

We hope you’ve been enjoying your Monday Morning Motivator. If you’ve received this issue for the first time – welcome aboard! It only takes a couple of minutes to start your week off right with the MMM! Be encouraged by the success or great ideas of others in your business community. The MMM has a community of 84,381 subscribers.

Click Here to check out our recently updated YouTube Channel or copy and paste the following link (http://www.youtube.com/user/10ogard)

Encouragement Changes Everything

This week we share a powerful and timely message from leadership author and expert John Maxwell. As you read John’s message think about how his principles if applied would affect your family, friends, workplace, team, school etc..

Today, I would like to talk to you about what an important tool encouragement is and how we can use it to truly influence the lives of those around us.

Several times in my life, I have wanted to stop, but words or deeds of encouragement have kept me going. George Adams said, “There are high spots in all of our lives, and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else.”

Years ago, an experiment was conducted to measure people’s capacity to endure pain. The test was to see how long a barefooted person could stand in a bucket of ice water. It was discovered that when there was someone else present offering encouragement and support, the person standing in the ice water could tolerate pain twice as long as when no one was present. Again, encouragement keeps us going, no matter the adversity that faces us.

Encouragement Makes People Better

To further illustrate the power of encouragement, I would like to share with you an experiment performed some time ago in the San Francisco school system. A principal in the district called in three teachers and told them that, because of their expertise, they were considered the finest teachers in the system. He also told them they would be given 90 high-IQ students who would be allowed to learn at their own pace to see how far they could advance.

At the end of the year, these students achieved 20 to 30 percent more than other students in the entire San Francisco Bay area. The principal called the three teachers in and told them he had a confession to make. He told them they didn’t have 90 of the most intellectually gifted students. In fact, academically, they were run-of-the-mill, average students picked at random. The teachers naturally concluded their exceptional teaching skills must have been responsible for the students’ great progress. But the principal had another confession to divulge: These teachers were the first three names drawn out of a hat.

Why, then, did these students and teachers perform at such an exceptional level for the entire year? They were encouraged to believe that they could. Psychologists say that, deep down, all people have certain desires in common. If you want to encourage people, help them fulfill these most basic, heartfelt desires. People want to:

• do the right thing. Stand with them.
• find better ways of doing things. Empower them.
• achieve things they can be proud of. Motivate them.
• belong to a group that achieves the extraordinary. Invite them.
• earn recognition for who they are and what they achieve. Honor them.

Encouragement Turns Lives Around
Encouragement is deciding to make your problem my problem.

I would like to share with you a wonderful story I read in A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul. The author of the story, Dan Clark, recalls when, as a teenager, he and his father stood in line to buy tickets for the circus. As they waited, they noticed a family immediately in front of them. The parents were holding hands and had eight children in tow, all under the age of 12. Based on their clean, but simple clothing, Clark suspected they didn’t have a lot of money. The kids chattered about the exciting things they were expecting to see, and he could tell the circus was going to be a new adventure for them.

As the couple approached the counter, the attendant quoted the price for the entire family. The woman let go of her husband’s hand, and her head dropped. The man leaned a little closer and asked, “How much did you say?” The attendant again quoted the price; the man obviously didn’t have enough money. He looked crushed. Clark says that his father, who was watching all of this play out, put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a $20 bill and dropped it on the ground. His father then reached down, picked up the bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.” The man knew exactly what was going on, and he looked straight into Clark’s father’s eyes, took his hand, shook it and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, replied, “Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”

Clark and his father went back to the car and drove home. They didn’t have enough money to go to the circus that night. But it didn’t matter. It encouraged the whole family. And it was something neither family would ever forget.

Encouragement Gives Hope

My wife, Margaret, and I love to visit presidential libraries and museums. While most people are in and out, we take our time. I usually take a notebook and will come out with anywhere from six to a dozen lessons on leadership.

At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., they had some of the personal articles Abraham Lincoln had with him the night he was assassinated at the Ford Theatre on display. Among those listed, there was a Confederate $5 bill and a worn-out newspaper article that extolled Lincoln’s accomplishments as president. The article starts out, “Abe Lincoln is one of the greatest statesmen of all time.”

Isn’t it interesting that the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the free world, would be walking around with a worn-out newspaper clipping in his pocket from somebody who was giving him praise? If you are a student of Lincoln, it makes sense. He was never really appreciated until after his death. But here he is, hanging on to one man’s opinion saying he was doing a good job.

Everybody Needs Somebody

None of us achieve anything without the help of somebody else. In fact, some of the greatest discoveries and achievements in history happened because these people were encouraged by others. Authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien maintained a close friendship throughout their careers, sharing their love of mythical stories and a desire to create those stories for the public. It was Tolkien who led Lewis to Christianity, and it was Lewis who encouraged Tolkien to keep writing fiction. It is said the literary world would have neither The Chronicles of Narnia nor The Lord of the Rings if not for the friendship between these two men.

One of the great things about encouragement is that you don’t have to be brilliant to encourage people; you just have to have a heart for other people. Find ways to encourage others. Put your arm around them, and tell them how much you appreciate them. You never know if that one good act of kindness is exactly what they need. As you encourage others, you encourage yourself.

When giving encouragement, be sure it’s earned. And remember to keep it sincere, honest, appropriate, meaningful, balanced and specific. Think of someone who has been an encouragement to you. Follow their example and pay it forward to someone you know. Don’t hesitate; do it today and make a difference in someone’s life.

Have a great week unless you choose otherwise.

Drago

Do you know how a client, prospect, potential hire, or member of the media really experiences your company? You need to find out now.

Have you ever walked in your customer’s shoes? Have you really experienced your organization in every way a potential audience member might? Or, do you rely on quantitative market research, competitive intelligence, and your gut instinct to tell you what course to chart and what brand promises to make?

If you’re like three-quarters of the 75 Inc. 500 chief marketing officers I recently surveyed, you’ve never experienced your brand from the outside in. You’ve never gone online to check how easy (or difficult) it is to find relevant information and make a decision. You’ve never ventured into a retailer that offers your wares and asked a sales representative to show you washer-dryer combinations for less than $800. And, I guarantee you’ve never gone to the chat rooms occupied by college students thinking about a career in your industry and listened to what they had to say about your firm in particular.

You’ve also probably never asked a close friend or confidant to play-act the role of prospective customer or employee and either show up in the reception area unannounced and ask to meet with an account manager, or to leave a voice mail saying that they were in the final stages of selecting a new vendor and needed a return call within 24 hours.

I have to come clean. Until I’d read Emily Yellin’s book about customer service entitled, Your Call Is (not that) Important To Us, I hadn’t done any of those external checks either. But the book hit me like a ton of bricks.

Aside from the annual client report cards we distribute, how do I know what our experience is really like? I decided I needed to find out. And, I needed to find out ASAP. So, I teamed up with one or two of my peers and we identified no fewer than 24 different online and offline ways in which a client, prospect, employee, potential hire, member of the media, or someone in the public at large might experience Peppercom. We tested each and every one, and found five of the 24 touch-points sadly lacking in quality, responsiveness, or just plain information.

Having experienced my experience, I became born again. I began evangelizing on the subject. I made a point of meeting Emily Yellin and striking a partnership with her. We now have a service offering called Audience Experience. And, it has not only generated revenue, it has changed the entire mindset of my entire organization. We no longer take client market research for granted. Instead, we ask permission to experience their brand on our own. Often, we find subtle, but very real, differences between what a brand promises in its marketing messages and what the end user actually experiences.

You don’t have to hire my firm, but I do urge you to abandon the executive tower and experience your organization from the outside in. I absolutely guarantee you’ll change at least one fundamental way in which you currently communicate with your various audiences. And, I’ll bet your brand promise will be much more closely aligned with the actual end user experience as well.