Kraft Celebrates Football Season with Social Media

When I wrote about the Kraft iFoodAssistant widget recently, I realized that Kraft had more going on in social media and resolved to look into it. When you look, you find all the usual blogs pointing out coupon availability, which is ongoing for most CPG brands. It certainly is a new way of distribution though; and therein lies one social media impact.

What you also quickly see is two seasonal promotions for Velveeta cheese. Tis the season for tailgating or football on TV, and snacks made with Velveeta cheese are a seasonal item. The Kitchenistas blogger promotion has been going on since September; here's the microsite. In fact, today is the last day of activity for the five compensated “Mommy bloggers” who have participated in the promotion.
How does this kind of promotion affect sales? Velveeta brand manager Sherina Smith admits they don’t really know:

“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals. We know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”

All this context seems to create warm fuzzies for the brand, and that may be all we can say at present. I’d love to know the ROI of a low-cost promotion like this, incorporating real people, compared with the ROI of, say a traditional television commercial. Yes, I’d like to know, but what is the dependent variable—brand awareness, favorable brand attitudes, what? We’re back to the difficulties of measuring attitudes and their impact on behavior. Marketers have operated on faith that positive brand associations do matter for a long time, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

Enter the Big 10 promotion, also for Velveeta and also tied in with football season. Here’s the Big 10 Conference home page for today. Note a banner ad at the top by Rotel with a dish of cheese dip beside it. You probably won’t be surprised when you click through and find that most of the featured recipes feature Velveeta cheese. Rotel is a ConAgra brand with a non-corporate-looking website that pushes recipes and attitude.
Note that on the Big 10 home page there’s a square box pushing a contest for bowl tickets, again featuring Rotel. At the bottom of the page there is another banner that makes the Rotel Velveeta partnership more explicit. It’s all quite integrated—and hard to miss!

Kraft’s website, the iFood Assistant, and one guesses its relationships with bloggers will go on. Promotions for various brands, many of them seasonal, can also be expected to continue. What do you suppose they have on tap for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Stay tuned!

Will This Summer Promo Go Viral?

Here’s one with a new wrinkle (pun intended!)!


7-11’s Slurpee frozen drinks are a staple of summer. It also appears that 7-11 has a long history of seasonal promos for the product. That puts them in a strong position to develop an engaging promo for the summer that’s coming—someday soon I hope, even though it certainly doesn’t feel like it in New England!

This is another one you need to experience for yourself. It won’t take long but you may want to consider their urging to have your volume up high, especially if others nearby are easily annoyed. What you need to do is to go to the Brain Freeze Laboratory and let the intro play. The final screen invites you to Try It!

When you do, you get the Brain Freeze screen. I chose Blue Raspberry as my flavor (first image) and used their avatar—no way I was going to upload my own pic for this!! You get a cutsey little message after each “experiment,” I didn’t manage to capture that. It’s quite interactive, although it doesn’t go anywhere. 7-11 hopes, of course, that you’ll have so much fun you’ll send it on to a friend. The campaign is too new to know whether it will become seriously viral, but it’s the kind of promo that has potential, which is more than you say for a lot of them!

When I think about the great summer season promotions, I often to back to Snapple. They had a more urban, more upscale market, and they could reach a fair number by pulling a Snapple truck up to the Boston Common and giving away free product. That’s compelling, but it 's low reach.

Slurpee machines are in all 7-11 outlets (at least all the ones I’ve ever seen), so this is a much broader, somewhat more downscale market. Is it also younger? Maybe. And for the last few years they have had a Free Slurpee Day, so that’s a possible tie-in for this year also. They’ve put the Brain Freeze Laboratory up in plenty of time to build up to a major event as part of the program.

If you’ll look at the home page of the microsite, you’ll see that they have other things going on. They have a Facebook page (of course!), a MySpace page (which may say something about their target audience), a game, a Slurpee Shoppee (how precious!) in 7-11s.

It’s a well-integrated promotion that looks like it has plenty of legs to carry it through the summer season. If they are lucky (and I still think luck and timing pay a huge part), it will go viral.

They’ve got the necessary tools in place for a successful, maybe viral campaign. Why don’t you give it a try and see what you think—or what you can learn!

Better than Viral?

A few days ago an article in iMediaConnection entitled “Tips for Media Seeding” caught my attention. It questioned our ability to make most marketing campaigns viral—not news to many of us. Yes, there are some exceptions; Burger King’s subservient chicken has been around since 2004 and you can still interact with it. It’s important to note that this is entertainment, with minimal promotion for Burger King.

This quote from the article captures the essence of the “big seed” approach:

"As an alternative to traditional viral marketing, agencies can employ a big-seed distribution strategy. In doing so, a planner assumes a low pass-along rate for any piece of content. To counteract the effects of the low pass-along rate, the planner makes efforts through paid placements, syndication or sponsorships to grow the number of initial seed users exposed to the piece of content. Thus, instead of relying on a small number of seed users, the planner relies on a large number of guaranteed exposures."influencers, s

To prove their point the authors give a case history in which Sega of America produced 4 videos. The first one was “seeded;” read that paid advertising and sponsorships were used to promote the video. The other three had no promotion. The first was viewed 797,000 times, more views than the other three combined.

That means the advertising reached “influentials” who passed it on, right? I started looking, and the consensus seems to be that it’s not that easy on the Internet. Consider the statement in a recent post that everyone can be an influential at the appropriate time. There’s a lot of research going on; much of it coming out of the Collective Dynamics Group at Columbia University. Their working paper version of the HBR article referred to in iMediaConnection makes an important statement:

“based on our results we would go as far as to suggest that in focusing on the properties of a few “special” individuals, the influentials hypothesis is in some important respects a misleading model for social change. Under most conditions, we would argue, cascades do not succeed because of a few highly influential individuals influencing everyone else, but rather on account of a critical mass of easily influenced individuals influencing other easy-to-influence people” ( p. 34)

In other words, the old opinion leadership/influencials model that we all learned in either a sociology or marketing course is questionable in the content ecosystem of the web. Cascasdes (of information) can start in many places.

Here’s another lengthy, statistical treatment from the same researchers. There’s a lot of discussion of these ideas in the blogosphere also, some referenced below. I’ll plan to do another post soon and talk about metrics, because the measurement issues are key.

An Edelman white paper gives some of the easiest-to-digest information. This is the model they propose; it covers both influencers and the influenced. It doesn’t give approaches to identifying either, but it does work on the hypothesis that people use information to make sense of and maintain control over their worlds. That’s all of us, and the Internet has given us a bigger scope for our information search. They also seem to accept the view that context is critical. In this view influencers attract attention, engage others, and influence them to take action. That’s what we all want influencers to do for us. The influenced identify interest in a subject, fulfill their need for information, review that information, and then take action. Both make sense, especially if you accept the argument that it’s not a small group of so-called influentials, but crowds of people who like to influence and be influenced, depending on the context/situation.

That’s interesting, but it doesn’t leave us with any directions for marketing action. Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent blog had a lengthy post with many links early this year. Her conclusions come from reviewing several sources and make sense to me. She recommends:

1. Focus less on who people influence and more on how people are influenced.
2. Think more about networks, and network structure, rather than treating everyone as behaving independently (group dynamics).
3. Move away from the idea that buzz can be engineered to achieve some pre-established outcome, and get better at measuring and reacting to buzz that arises naturally (observation from context).

There’s also an interesting, if a bit disjoined, live-blogging post from a September conference on the Mashraqi blog. He has some good recommendations also.

I keep coming back to the idea that this is a dialog going on in social networks or communities (are those the same thing? I think so). As marketers, we can’t just single out a few opinion leaders and expect them to do the job for us. The new Crest Weekly Whitening Paste seems to have taken that approach. I keep watching to see when it comes out of its “quiet phase” and begins to engage in active promotion. The only recent action in the blogosphere I can find via a Technorati search (lots of noise in those searches) is coupons for the other Crest Whitening products. Stay tuned.

It looks to me as if making a campaign viral, even assuming good content, is going to require several planned steps. Does that make sense?

Product Reviews = Online WOM

There’s not much doubt that word of mouth in general and product ratings in particular affect online buyers/researchers. I’ve noticed two developments in this space in recent days—a product called Bazaarvoice Stories™ from the services firm Bazaarvoice and a notice that another ratings services provider, PowerReviews is testing review services for small retailers. Both seemed worth investigating.

Customer reviews are a powerful engine of ecommerce, and I’ve written about their impact several times (1,2). I checked out Marketing Charts for what's new on the subject, and this is what I found:

• The importance of online reviews to offline purchases
• The impact of online WOM
• Both UK and US consumers find product reviews helpful in their purchasing process.

At a micro level it’s worth asking what some firms are doing to encourage reviews and product stories and what impact are they having. This headline from the WSJ’s MarketWatch site caught my attention—for obvious reasons!

Leading Retailer Encourages Customers to Tell Other People About the L.L.Bean Products They Own; More Than 13,000 Reviews Submitted to www.llbean.com Within One Week

Wow!

You’ll find interesting case studies at both Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews. A study at PowerReviews led me to an in-depth academic study with food for thought. IT professors Alanah Davis and Deepak Khazanchi from the University of Nebraska Omaha analyzed purchase data in a study published in Electronic Markets and available online. They started out with a fairly complex concept of how online WOM affects purchasing behavior. They performed a causal analysis using number of reasonable variables like the volume of reviews and the degree to which they are positive on actual purchases in a number of product categories. A number of independent variables were not significant in influencing purchases, leaving them with a simpler and provocative concept.

It’s not surprising that the number of product ratings and the number of product views influenced product awareness. It’s also not surprising that visual cues (including ones that are user-submitted) influenced product expectations while the product category itself affected both awareness and expectations. What’s most challenging to marketers you cannot see in this graphic (see page 135 in the pdf). Marketer promotion dropped out of the model as it had no statistically significant impact on purchases. Ouch!
The paper is worth reading for a good literature review as well as the authors’ reasoning process and statistical analysis, which are accessible to the lay reader. Actually, it’s worth reading alone for Sebastian’s review (he looks like a wonderful Basset Hound) of his big doggie bed! Your customers have creativity—and a sense of humor—that ought to be tapped!

It’s always a bit dangerous to take a short quote from a complex academic study, but this one is worth it:

One of the most important implications for practice is the idea that e-commerce companies need to have a strategy of combining efforts to increase product views and the volume of comments on specific product pages. This research also points out the value in allowing reviewers to upload product images, probably boosting the cognitive consequence of expectations about a product. (page 140)

That’s pretty straightforward. We need to be bringing more visitors to our product pages and, once they are there, encourage them to write reviews and upload their own product images. Think Sebastian.

And think how much cheaper this strategy is than all the marketer promotion that had no significant impact on purchases in this study. Note, however, that I said that carefully (I hope). Something has to be done to bring visitors to your pages. Once they get there, however, don’t just talk to them; engage them in the process. At this stage of the purchase process, user content is more powerful than marketer content.

Are Interactive Promotions the Next Big Thing?

A recent report from Borrell Associates, a firm that specializes in local interactive advertising, predicts an interesting shift in the expenditure of online marketing dollars. They assert that display advertising will lose ground to other types of expenditures, especially to promotions. “We believe it will peak this year at $12.6 billion, and then begin a precipitous decline to less than half that amount over the next four years.” The growth will come in online promotions, including public relations activity.

Click-through rates (CTR) for display ads have been getting a bad rap lately (and yes, there’s also been controversy over CTR for paid search ads, but that’s another story). The eMarketer chart (newsletter, February 28, 2008) from the “heavy clickers” study earlier this year got a lot of attention. According to comScore the study found “no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked." Ouch!

When Chris Autry asked in iMediaConnection, “Is Display Advertising Dead?” he pointed to low CTR and permission-based content including what he calls narrow networks for special applications and my favorite, widgets. He describes advertising as an application and recommends that, “Consumers will not be bombarded with relatively useless adverts but will instead interact and be able to use a range of applications to perform relevant tasks.”

It is also possible that the movement of traditional mass media advertising dollars onto the web has propped up online display advertising. Will these advertisers accept for long the miserable click-through rates that are the norm today?

What is the growth in online promotions going to represent? According to Borrell contests, coupons and promotional gift certificates are working well at the local level. We’ve seen a lot of evidence of the popularity of video contests in national media, from the SuperBowl to Heinz ketchup.

Are contests reaching the saturation point, though? Ok, I’ll admit I’m not an American Idol fan either, but it seems to me there is a lot of room for creative promotional strategies. If promotion is going to in large part replace display advertising, we need some creative ideas for interacting with our target audience, whether it’s local or national. Any good ideas?
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