“Shouldn’t you know your Superfans?” asks The Build Network, a new sister publication of Inc. and Fast Company with the goal of delivering actionable advice to leaders and execs at midmarket companies.
Targeted to CMOs, the piece quotes Copernicus’ Eric Paquette and Kevin Clancy and presents their five-point plan for identifying and engaging superfans as co-marketers.
Here are the five-points as described in the article:
Track them down. Create a list of users who’ve recommended your company via social media, pinned your product to Pinterest, penned an Amazon review, or gifted your wares.
Invite them inside. Create a private Facebook group or other exclusive arena — less fan club than focus group — where your brand advocates can interact more intimately with the company.
Dig into their drivers. Take a brand history survey that asks how your advocates found the company, what initially made them try it, and what important problem it solves for them.
Estimate their value. According to Forrester Research, every Twitter or Facebook post reaches a minimum of 150 people. Know how many Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn connections your advocates have in order to accurately estimate their reach–and set conversion goals.
Collaborate with them. Ask your superfans what incentives, discounts, and special offers would be most meaningful to them–and begin testing, testing, testing.
On Thursday, March 21, at 2 PM EDT, Copernicus’ Jeff Maloy and the Path to Purchase Institute (P2Pi), a global association serving the needs of retailers, brands, and the entire ecosystem of solution providers along the path to purchase, will host “Mission Possible: Profiling Shopping Occasions to Maximize Sales,” as part of the P2Pi’s continuing I-Seminar series.
“Because retailers and manufacturers share similar goals to increase foot traffic and market baskets,” explains Jeff, “marketers at both organizations can benefit from customizing shopper marketing programs and solutions to specific shopping occasions.”
In his seminar, Jeff will outline a process for building a framework that distinguishes shopping occasions by trip mission, channel selection (online and off) and shopping behaviors.
Learn how to make these shopper insights more actionable and applicable to retailer- and channel-specific planning by:
Mapping the shopper journey–from pre-ttrip to post-trip–to identify what programs and touchpoints influence a shopper’s purchase decision by occasion.
Understanding the shopper “segments” that exist and how/when they experience each of the shopping occasions.
Assessing the value of each occasion by category and account to prioritize and allocate resources.
Connecting “why consumers shop” with “why consumers use” to inform and develop shopper solutions.
Get a peak at Jeff’s presentation at goo.gl/PNlF2!
When it comes to sharing our thoughts on the 55 or so 2013 Super Bowl ads, we thought Blackberry got at least one thing right in its ad when it said, “it’s easier to tell you what we can’t do.”
We can’t say people didn’t talk about the ads. According to social TV analytics firm Bluefin’s Tom Thai, “all of this year’s Super Bowl commercials tallied a combined 3.9 million social-media comments across Twitter and public Facebook. That’s a 225% increase from last year.”
We can’t say people didn’t like any of the ads either. According to the USATODAY AdMeter, the most popular commercials earned solid likability scores.
We can’t say people weren’t entertained or emotionally moved by spots that were otherwise unrelated to the brand. Jeep’s “Families Waiting” and RAM’s “Farmers” brought a lump to our throats and held our rapt attention, even if they provided little explanation of what brand the spot was promoting.
Very importantly, we can’t say which ads did or didn’t “work.” As we wrote in our blog post on Friday, answering the question “did it work” for any give Super Bowl ad isn’t an easy question to answer from either a marketing or business perspective without knowing what the company was trying to achieve or who the target was.
We can’t even say GoDaddy’s management made a completely bizarre creative call.
We can’t say that the “babe-on-nerd” open-mouthed smooch on GoDaddy.com’s “Perfect Match”–which personally made us feel like we were watching someone eat a lemon–won’t get people to remember the GoDaddy brand name. Sadly, it’s probably one of the few commercial-to-brand connections viewers will retain until Super Bowl XLVIII.
Still, it’s just no fun if we can’t point out some of the stranger Super Bowl marketing choices we witnessed on Sunday. GoDaddy was certainly not the only one to go the weird route by any means.
M&Ms usually has one of the few Super Bowl ads that we actually like each year—those M&M characters are usually pretty entertaining. Yet for the 2013 Super Bowl, the tail end of the M&M spot got pretty sadistic.
As AdAge’s Ken Wheaton recounted, this year’s ad featured a “montage of scenes showing him (the red M&M) in real-world M&M situations—being licked, shoved into an oven, etc.,” which “brings up a lot of questions about this campaign I’ve long repressed.”
“It hurts but I kind of like it,” says the red M&M as three women begin to eat him. Which is kind of horrifying.
Oreo’s “Whisper Fight” also struck us as a weird marketing choice. Maybe it’s because we’re more in tune with some of Oreo’s other ads—the one where a dad and his son dunk an Oreo over Skype when the dad’s off on his business trip, for example.
The ads are happy and parents and kids come together over a glass of milk and a cookie. Everyone is all smiles with warm hearts.
Oreo’s Super Bowl ad, however, took an entirely different, negative tact.
We felt jarred by the violent argument and destruction of a library that ensued after two guys started fighting over which part of the cookie was best.
Sure, it was supposed to be in jest. But when our kids asked us after the commercial finished, “aren’t Oreos supposed to make people feel happy?” we scratched our heads a bit at the new direction.
Oreo’s opportunistic tweet, “Power out? No problem,” and accompany picture with the tagline “you can still dunk in the dark” during the Super Bowl’s half-hour blackout was more in keeping with the happy cookie we know and love.
Moving on, we rejoiced to see a number of Super Bowl ads that actually offered up a positioning for the brand.
SodaStream, for example, provided a clear reason to buy its product—to save the environment from plastic bottles. The spot even offered a powerful statistic, “500 million bottles on game day alone,” to back up the claim.
We’ve no doubt that there is a group of consumers who would be motivated to buy an appliance to make their own soda to cut down on the number of plastic bottles getting tossed into landfills, but for the Super Bowl it seemed like an odd key message on which to focus. SodaStream’s other benefits—customizability, cost-savings, convenience, sleek design, etc.—might have had more appeal to a wider swath of the game’s viewing audience.
Another thing that struck us as peculiar was the number of Super Bowl ads that promoted a brand’s other marketing activities.
Axe’s “Lifeguard,” which informed viewers they could enter to win a ride to space, had only the briefest of mentions of the brand’s name or new product. Lincoln’s commercial touting—not its cars—but that it worked with Jimmy Fallon to collect stories and has put the results on a website, Steerthescript.com, was another example.
Yes, we expect to see hashtags; websites; and calls to vote, get free samples, or learn more on one of the brand’s social media properties or another. Seeing an entire $4 million+ Super Bowl ad dedicated to a gimmicky contest which is itself explained in the vaguest of ways, however, was curious.
Maybe it’s true that, to borrow a phrase from Bud Light’s somewhat nonsensical “Lucky Chair” and “Journey” spots, “it’s only weird if it doesn’t work.” Nevertheless, for so many of these spots, we just can’t help but feel there could have been a less perplexing way to communicate with the 108 million viewers.
In his seminar, Jeff will outline a process for building a framework that distinguishes shopping occasions by trip mission, channel selection (online and off) and shopping behaviors. 
We can’t say people weren’t entertained or emotionally moved by spots that were otherwise unrelated to the brand. Jeep’s “Families Waiting” and RAM’s “Farmers” brought a lump to our throats and held our rapt attention, even if they provided little explanation of what brand the spot was promoting. 
