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Posted on by Louis Gudema

A month ago, on November 13, Coca Cola completely revamped on its social media presence for World Kindness Day. It removed all previous posts and posted many positive, inspirational items. This is the gallery of Instagram images, and the posts on Twitter and Facebook were similar.

Coca Cola's new Instagram feed

“This is a really great moment in time for us to reset, holistically, our social strategy on the Coke brand handles,” Sarah Traverso, group director, Social Center at Coca-Cola, said. “World Kindness Day feels like such an appropriate day and moment to kick off messages of positivity, but also when you look at Coke and what Coke stands for, Coke really is a brand about optimism, uplift and wants to bring people together in moments of connection.”

Engagement with the posts was the usual very low level that you see on social media – well under 1% of their followers.

This is a pure brand play, of course. Coke wants consumers to identify those qualities of optimism and kindness with the brand. Like many consumer products, people aren’t buying Coke based on its features and benefits. Aside from the taste, they have an emotional connection to the brand that Coke wants to shape and reinforce.

Coke TV ads have promoted such values as sharing (a Coke) and, a commercial I especially like, their game day tailgating ad. They’ve been doing this since at least their 1971 “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” TV commercial .

Coca Cola has the budget to repeat these messages enough that they become associated with those values and emotions. Smaller companies, though, may need different strategies.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Yesterday the New York Times had a very interesting feature on how marketing companies use very precise location data from smartphone apps to identify and target people.

The Times talked with various location data companies. Once people had given the app permission to use their location (for weather information, tracking running, etc.) they would find out where that person was within a few yards many times a day. The fact that, for many of the apps, the person’s location data would also be used for marketing purposes was buried in the app’s terms.

The anonymous data can be useful for understanding customer behavior when aggregated. Where do that business’s customers live? Where else do they shop?

But – when combined with publicly available data — just by looking at where the person spends several hours every night it’s easy in most cases to identify who they are. (One of the article’s authors, Natasha Singer, wrote four years ago that data scientists, using just four pieces of non-location data, in 90% of cases can figure out who a person is.)

The OMG moment in the article for me was when one marketing company said that they targeted anonymous people in emergency rooms with ads for personal injury lawyers.

Of course, if you use a smartphone GPS service, like Google Maps or Waze (which is also owned by Google), you know that you’re giving up this data. And of course Google uses that for targeting ads. Facebook uses its app data for the same purpose. This is the Grand Bargain that we’re making with technology: give us lots of useful free stuff in exchange for some/much of our personal information.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

While some companies rely solely on direct sales, many gain a significant amount of revenue through other channels – in some cases, such as producers of consumer goods, close to 100% of revenue may come through their retail channels.

For those consumer companies it’s common for them to do joint marketing with their retail partners. P&G, for example, may contribute co-op dollars to support a supermarket chain’s advertising of P&G’s products.

In the case of the supermarket, that’s a fairly straight forward arrangement. After all, the chain is marketing all the time and P&G can piggyback on it.

But what if your channel partners aren’t marketing?

That is the case for many B2B companies. They may be selling their equipment through distributors and dealers who are doing little marketing.

Many software companies have channel partners who resell, install (if the software is on premise), integrate, configure, and do training on their software. But while software companies are especially adept at today’s increasingly-digital marketing programs, many of their partners (who may be professional services firms at heart) often are not.

And when the channel partners aren’t marketing they’re both being hurt because the software vendor is losing out on sales, too.

In those cases, software vendors (and other B2B companies) need to go beyond just contributing dollars to their partners. They need to show them the way.

They need to educate their partners on what marketing even is (many people think it’s just advertising and promotions, or social media), why it’s important, and the impact that it can have on their rate of growth. They can explain the impact that their marketing programs are having on their revenue. And they also need to educate them on the most effective marketing programs, and how to successfully execute them.

But knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things. Marketing programs live or die with consistent, excellent execution. If the partner doesn’t have staff experienced in managing modern marketing programs, they may also need consultants, freelancers, and agencies to help them.

At revenue & associates, we’re helping companies empower their channel partners. Please let us know if that’s something that you need help with.