Women consumers rule - female customer trends

Most older consumers are women and most online sales are to women. Female consumers as pressure group and major economic force. Women and online banking. Why women own most of America and most of the UK -- living longer than men and wealth in pension funds and property. Feminisation of society, culture and business, workplace, work-life balance and emotional intelligence. Winning the war for female talent. Feminization of products and services. Niche marketing and advertising campaigns targeting women. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Online Communities Change the World - marketing and consumer

Impact of YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and other online communities. Why traditional advertising agencies cannot respond. Power of community opinion. New marketing models. Why online communities are trusted more than official websites or information sources. Web 2.0. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Future of marketing in a YouTube world

Interview of co-founder of YouTube Chad Hurley by Dr Patrick Dixon at Google Zeitgeist CEO Summit. Lessons on future of marketing for every brand owner, advertiser and corporate image builder.

Future of Marketing - Dr Patrick Dixon at Google Zeitgeist

In a YouTube, Wikipedia and e-Bay world - how media, marketing, and brand management is changing. Impact on every large business. Dr Patrick Dixon chairing panel for CEO event Google Zeitgeist.

Connecting with emotion of customers online - Patrick Dixon

Why consumers trust online comments on bulletin boards more than slick advertising campaigns.

Future of online marketing - overtakes newspapers

Still short of TV spending though by a long way in the UK.

Google accounted for more than 50% online advertising spend last year.

Web advertising spend is set to grow 39% while newspapers fall 9% in advertising revenue nationally.

 

Source:  Financial Times 30 May 2006

Strange death of modern advertising - feature by Maurice Saatchi in Financial Times

This week Maurice Saatchi made a fascinating confession:  “I feel as thought I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising”.   He describes the death of TV advertising as audiences diverted into an ever wider range of infotainment, and the fact that multi-tasking teenagers recall very little of the adverts they supposedly are exposed to on TV even if you can find them….  The result of multi-tasking with SMS, e-mail and everthing else at the same time as watching the football.

 

Saatchi reckons it all comes down to one word branding.  Owning a single idea like “search” = Google.   The trouble is that there are few words worth having and fierce competition for them.

 

And even if an agency has a great idea for a word, the industry itself is being re-shaped at tremendous speed by new media.

 

Most senior advertising executives have yet to get their heads around Google adsense for example, which is capable of creating customised ad content for a new page I create within 60 seconds of it being online.  Adsense goes further by pushing up or down different ads depending on how the users of that particular page on my website react.

 

Poor ads are removed – however much people pay for showing their content on the page – while lower paying but useful ads replace them.

 

The advertising space is thus being democratised, with huge implications for every brand-creator.

Future consumer trends in Europe - by Dr Patrick Dixon

Future consumer trends in Europe - by Dr Patrick Dixon: "How European consumers are changing, winners and losers in retail. The impact of technology, demographics and social trends on consumer behaviour, attitudes and lifestyle choices. How manufacturers, service providers and retail outlets will have to change to survive. "

Radio advertising needs a rethink

While great TV advertising can rank with short films for entertainment value, it is really hard to match that quality in sound alone on radio, using just a few seconds.  That is why radio audiences get bored so much more rapidly with often-repeated radio ads.

 

The answer of course is variety rather than quality. For example making a series of 20 compelling reasons to buy a product (randomly broadcast, and not numbered).  Radio advertising at best is more about information than entertainment. This is a words and sound effects channel, and sound effects can be really irritating after a while, as well as an odd voice or anything else originally designed to catch attention.

 

Do it once, do it twice, but don’t let people hear it a thousand times unless you have something they really need to hear again… just keep the content fresh.

Future of advertising agencies - paid for ideas or campaigns?

I spoke recently at an event for advertising agencies: Big issue for the future is how people will get paid?

In the past the ideas came free and corporations paid a commission on all spending on the actual campaign. But in a digital world many campaigns have little or no direct running costs - see for example viral marketing of a funny short video clip which carries a corporate message. That means paying for ideas, which is also tough because it is hard to value an idea and the best may emerge in meetings with clients so that it is impossible to prove who contributed what to the process.

Tough times ahead as the digital world forces a complete rethink about the whole relationship.

More than 200 million blogs - threat to brand management

More than 200 million people now keep a web diary of their own and their collective opinions are now a force to be reckoned with when it comes to brand protection and development of an advertising campaign.

Their collective voice is generating over 100 million pages every day of comment on a wide range of issues, many of which involve products and services people use.

For a long time now community sites like tripadvisor have been influencing consumer behaviour, yet many large corporations have hidden their heads in the sand, not really knowing how to respond.

While tripadvisor is not a blog, it is an example of what happens when hundreds of thousands of consumers start to share experiences online and the results can be devastating.

Just type in the name of a large hotel into Google and see who comes up highest - the official hotel site or the traveladvisor page with comments from people who have recently stayted there? And then the question is who do online readers trust the most? Answer: the majority of people trust community comment more than official advertising.

When community comments are loud and negative, corporations are probably wasting their time with expensive sites and online advertising campaigns.

The age of spin and hype is over. The third millennium is about revelation, reality and shared experience.

That's why so many companies are now quietly asking their own staff to go onto blogs and bulleting boards as well as other community sites to post nice positive comments, pretending to be customers.

It is just the start of a new era in advertising, branding and product promotion.

The lesson is this: get the product right every time and the online community will help sell it for you at zero cost. Get it wrong and you'll rapidly be out of the game. While that has to some extent always been true, in future brand elevation and destruction will happen faster than many marketing teams can even plan a campaign.

Marketing slides and videos

You will find a large number of marketing resources and other information including videos and presentations on my site http://www.globalchange.com/ppt/index.htm.

These are free for all to access. The site also contains the entire text of 6 of my books.