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Brand Matters: Manufacturers Assert Brand Authority Online (CRM Daily)
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Posted: 05/27/2010
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Heavy hitting consumer brands like Levi Strauss, Procter & Gamble, Mattel and Columbia Sportswear have set their sites on the internet to increase direct sales and connect with consumers. Direct online retail sales by consumer-brand manufacturers skyrocketed nearly 13 percent to $487.6 million in 2009. The online offensive can be attributed to one part private-label, one part recession. The availability of lower-priced, private-label goods made up 22 percent of consumer-packaged goods retailed in 2009, while the global recession has rallied more budget-hunting comparison shoppers online. Online sales are expected to double from 6 to 12 percent ($211.7 billion) of the total retail market by 2012. Nearly 66 percent of U.S. shoppers surveyed said they would purchase the same amount or more on goods over the coming year as they had over the past year at the manufacturer’s Web sites they had visited.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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Stay Out Front With Smart Mobile Marketing Tactics (Marketing Vox)
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Posted: 05/13/2010
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You know the mobile marketing drill: Offer local coupons. Allow customers to pay for purchases directly from their phones. Inject with a little vavavavoom and you’ve got a competitive mobile marketing package. In light of the ever-changing mobile technology landscape –which means competitors are always on the hunt for bigger, better, more creative tactics – it makes good sense to consider adding these four tips to your mobile marketing toolbox: 1. Matt Silk, SVP of Waterfall Mobile recommends including a store locator in your mobile plan; 2. When used like direct mail or email, mobile subscriptions lists can help you to target your subscribers on-the-go; 3. Build applications and then market them strategically. Paul Reddick, CEO of Handmark at MoCoNews, recommends brands to "distribute them from their own Web sites or other traditional media outlets;” and 4. Forget about the apps altogether and concentrate your efforts on building a mobile Web site, which may be the smartest tactic of all, according to Practical E-Commerce.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
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Developers Build Native Mobile Web Applications With Titanium 1.0 (Info World)
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Posted: 04/29/2010
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Appcelerator recently released Titanium 1.0, a cross-platform development system for mobile and desktop applications. The open source system is compatible with JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby, which eliminates the need for mobile application builders to learn the Objective-C language for iPhone or Google's Java language for Android systems. A translator enables building mobile and desktop applications that will run natively on different systems. The system supports development for PCs, Macintosh, and Linux while mobile platforms include Apple iPhone and Google Android. Plans include Research In Motion Blackberry support within the year. Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing for Appcelerator attributes Titanium’s competitive advantage over other cross-platform development frameworks to its ability to “offer native performance as well as native UI (user interface) and access to device capabilities.” Eliminating the barrier of learning Objective-C makes Titanium highly attractive to developers. Appcelerator will also develop a version of Titanium for Apple's new iPad.
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Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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Zappos Implements “Video Experience” (CIO Magazine)
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Posted: 04/15/2010
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Zappos recently launched interactive videos detailing Nike products, one of the shoe and clothing company’s largest brands. Initiated from customer queries that were best addressed visually, Zappos used software from Overlay.tv to link videos about various Nike items to its supply-chain system. Among the perks: shoppers can click on featured items to view any current promotions and find out if the product is available in stock. Customers can post video links on Facebook, upload their own videos to Zappos.com and post comments. Zappos objective is not necessarily the bottom line, but it will track stats on customer click-thrus and purchases. "The goal is to create a more pleasurable experience on our site," Kalma says. "The general philosophy is that will lead to purchases."
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Mastering The Whole Customer Experience (.net)
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Posted: 04/15/2010
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In a recent interview, Oliver Lindberg caught up with Paul Dawson, EMC Conchango’s experience director, to discuss the company’s methodology. EMC Conchango concentrates on what it calls “total experience design,” taking a comprehensive look at the customer journey from beginning to end, and all the points in between. EMC Conchango operates as the European arm of EMC Consulting, allowing it to leverage its global reach and cast a wider net to capture more global business. Based on fact, the experience planning process incorporates Agile methodology, regularly released software and eye tracking to analyze how people interact with the content of a page. The agency is also experimenting with electroencephalograms that are literally wired to reveal what consumer’s brains are thinking and feeling. The agency also partners with Microsoft to adopt new user-facing technology to better understand customer behavior and devise ways to prolong consumer interactions with brands and products.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global,
Europe
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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Rice University Study: Facebook Fan Pages Excel at Niche Marketing (ClickZ)
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Posted: 04/01/2010
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The results are in for Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business study to determine how creating a presence on Facebook impacts businesses. The study incited an article in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review, with the study authors calling the Facebook page a qualified success for niche marketing. Rice professors collaborated with social media virgin Dessert Gallery, a local bakery and café chain in Houston. The study revealed fan pages have impact; however, mostly when targeting niche groups. First, after taking a preliminary survey, 75 out of 700 loyal customers accepted the invitation to fan Dessert Gallery’s Facebook page. Three months later, respondents completed another survey that revealed Facebook had a significant impact on their interaction with the brand. The bakery’s fans stopped by the cafe 20% more than non-fans, spending 33% more. The fan page also seemed to cultivate brand affection and loyalty.
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Industry:
Retail & Products
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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From Buzz to Buy: Social Commerce and Word-of-Mouth Marketing (ClickZ)
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Posted: 04/01/2010
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There’s a new buzz in town: social commerce skilfully links customers to customers online and then bridges them into commercial connections... driving customers to transition from "buzz" to "buy." The ultimate goal for delivering a meaningful and measurable social commerce program is to integrate all marketing activities into one streamlined campaign, blending social programs like Facebook, Twitter and company blogs with more traditional programs like in-store, direct marketing and mobile advertising. Building a social commerce program entails the following: (1) give your customers a venue for creating user-generated content; (2) expand your customer-voice from the outside-in and (3) leverage customer feedback in all your marketing initiatives. The challenge then is to deliver meaningful products and services that meet your customers’ needs.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Sears Innovates with Multichannel Strategy (Chief Marketer)
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Posted: 03/18/2010
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Chief Marketer recently spoke with Sears' senior vice president online Imran Jooma to unravel the success behind the brand Sears Holdings Corp’s (Sears and Kmart) aggressive approach to bring merchandise and marketing to online communities (MySears.com) and mobile commerce (Sears2Go). The new campaign, “ShopYourWay”, is a multichannel strategy with new initiatives including Marketplace at Sears.com, which gives online shoppers the opportunity to locate and purchase products from outside retailers. Jooma credits Sears with having a robust fan community at MySears.com, which allows the company to pinpoint and deliver additional categories of interest. To maintain ease-of-use and minimize cumbersome navigation, Sears launched Quick View and ClickSee, which gives customers a quick visual of related and compatible products. The company is in-touch with customer feedback to improve both in-store and online shopping experiences, and recently added an iPhone app to its Sears2Go mobile shopping initiative.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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On-the-Go with Target’s Mobile Gift Cards (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 03/18/2010
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Now, with its mobile gift card option, Target, the second-largest U.S. discount chain, makes paying with plastic old school. The retailer is letting customers use mobile phones to redeem gift cards as more consumers use phones with Internet access. Shoppers simply save the account numbers for their Target GiftCards to a PIN-protected area at either online or at the retailer's mobile-optimized site. Customers access the mobile site on their phones, enter the login and PIN for the card and complete the purchase when the cashier scans the unique 2D barcode on the display screen into Target’s P-O-S system, which has been outfitted across all 1740 Target stores nation wide. Customers can also access the mobile site to view merchandise, check product availability, manage gift registries and find locations, among other things. Other retailers like Starbucks and 7-Eleven are testing similar barcode technology to incorporate into their mobile business strategies.
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Industry:
Retail & Products
Topic:
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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Programming With Screen Shots, Not Just Code (Dr. Dobbs)
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Posted: 03/04/2010
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new system that allows one to program with screenshots. For more than three decades, the graphical user interface (GUI) has dominated computer programing, but its underlying reliance on code manipulation means it’s still relatively labor intensive for computer programmers to customize or build programs. The new system, Sikuli, enables programmers to develop programs using GUI screen shots. While it requires some knowledge of Python, the system enables even casual users to create new programs without mastering complex programming language. The user simply draws a box around the desired content, captures the screen shot and then places it appropriately into the Python code. The research team plans to present a paper entitled GUI Testing Using Computer Vision at CHI, the premier conference on human-computer interactions, where they will describe new applications of Sikuli aimed at large software development projects, both for programmers and non-programmers.
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Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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We cut through the clutter of the web to highlight innovation and forward-thinking. The best stories from leading publications – hand selected and organized to provide you a single point of access.
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