Coke are to close their points scheme ‘Coke Zone’, according to Marketing Week. You can read the article in the link above, but it raises the intriguing question:
Are consumers falling out of love with Loyalty schemes? As we know, certainly in the UK, the best scheme appears to be Boots Advantage, swiftly followed in terms of usage by Tesco ClubCard. If we looked at the data from both, they appear to provide an asynchronous value exchange, aggregated value to Boots and to Tesco is immense, but to the individual, the benefits might be slightly less obvious.
It’s always been said that in the time of recession, Coupon cutting becomes mainstream, and I can recall at the time of the last recession Unilever having in the US version of their management report a page of vouchers for people to cut out.
So, what of loyalty schemes, and the proxy for them - FourSquare. Both seem to be on the wane if the recent estimated re-valuation and re-financing of FourSquare (Bloomberg this week), and Coke’s retrenching of Coke Zone.
Where next?
Looks as though the promised second screen application market is still in-the-pipeline. Even TV execs appear to be somewhat frustrated in the penetration of applications such as Zeebox, and perhaps are looking to ‘go it alone’ with their own applications.
This is regretted, since one of the main issues is going to be inter-operability of the second screen. Viewers will want one application, not one per channel or one per viewing genre.
Let’s wait and see, and hope common sense prevails. But in the land of the magic box, nothing is ever that simple…
Yes, we have been around this one before. It’s a little old hat, and once you understand it, you probably don’t need a consultant to help you (if you are sentient), but like Multi Channel Marketing, it’s gaining traction as the ‘thing to watch’ in 2013.
The goodnight lamp (goodnightlamp.com) enables you to connect, through Wi-Fi, lamps around the world. The designer, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsimo observes that within 2 years, around 40% of UK citizens will be living on their own. Her solution to engage and connect families is one of a growing number of m2m (machine to machine) connections, part of the Internet of Things.
The new P&G Old Spice campaign. So much better than one for WolfThorn, recently aired, which is still tongue in cheek, but more ‘traditional’ (but contains an Opel GT so not all bad…)
https://vimeo.com/58785318
Oh daer, Apple. Something else you missed on the iPhone 5 launch, so now you’ve missed the boat. But if you hadn’t missed the boat, your customers couldn’t have paid for the boat using their phone. Unless they are an SME and they have a small Square dongle… Oh, no, that’s the other way around isn’t it.
Another misstep from the once and future king.
Definition of digital seems to be something very few groups or individuals agree on. Publicis talk about reaching a 50% split to digital:traditional sometime last year. But what does this mean? I think it’s time for a more definitive definition…
With the rise of AR and Shazam -style marketing within stores, it’s great to see some hard data coming out of research.
Now children… You’ve been told to behave nicely.
Facebook have now decided to do the equivalent of parking the bus outside the entrance to the retail premises of a competitor, and shouting from a loud hailer ‘move along, nothing to see here’.
Clearly, maturity and open competition are in short supply at the parent company of Instagram. Maybe the headmaster needs to get both families in, and have a ‘tea with no biscuit’ discussion.
The UK lags behind Spain and Italy in the use of video streaming. In fact, the US lags behind Europe, according to the Rovi report too.
In the Red corner and in the Blue corner…
Samsung account for 40% of all Google powered (android) mobile devices sold. So, whilst everyone is in Barcelona at the Mobile Congress, google execs are fretting over Samsung being the elephant in the room. Maybe they can google ‘what to do when your client competes with you’…
As an indication that mature, brand-savvy marketers in (some) FMCG businesses are finally getting ‘digital’, Unilever have changed their marketing development process to put social and mobile at the heart of their communications planning.
