Corporate Eye

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Archives for July 2013

Ethics: Massmart Share

massmart-ethics-sMassmart, a firm that owns more than 300 stores in Sub-Saharan Africa, has made it possible to download ethics training documents, along with their official Code of Ethics straight from their website. The page also features links to Massmart’s Whistle Blowing Policy and Anti-Corruption Policy.

Massmart acknowledges that unethical practices would have a negative impact on their brand’s reputation. By attaching the documents to the webpage, they prove that ethical behaviour is being promoted within the organization.

The incorporation of these documents aids Massmart’s marketability in two ways:

  1. It allows potential customers to feel included, and to become familiar with Massmart’s exact ethical policies. This helps customers to see that Massmart encourages ethical practices, and helps to create a mutually beneficial relationship between customer and company.
  2. It demonstrates that Massmart is true to its mission statement, which includes the sharing of knowledge and information, as well as principle-driven, ethical leadership

The Evolution of Single Fathers and What Brand Marketers Need to Know

father_and_daughterA recent study from Pew Research found that the number of single fathers in the United States has risen by nine times since 1960. The evolution of the single father consumer demographic has significant effects for brand marketers.

It has long been known through numerous research results that women make or influence the vast majority of purchase decisions, and brands have changed their marketing strategies and tactics to better appeal to the influential mother demographic over the years. However, the growing number of single fathers and stay-at-home fathers is getting bigger every day. This is a market segment that brand marketers need to target with unique messages and campaigns.

According to the Pew Research study, in 1960, just 1% of households (300,000) with minor children in the United States were headed by a single father. In 2011, that number had grown to 8% to 2.6 million. Looking at the data from a different angle, just 14% of single parent households in the United States were headed by men. In 2011, that percentage was up to 24%.

In other words, nearly one in four single parent households in the United States are led by men. Clearly, this is a target audience that cannot be ignored. Ads, promotions, and messaging that cater to antiquated stereotypes of “traditional” families are not just missing an important audience but they’re also losing favor with two-parent households.

Pew Research also found that the role of fathers overall has changed. Today, Americans believe that fathers aren’t necessarily the family breadwinners alone. Gretchen Livingston of Pew Research writes, “Fathers are narrowing the still sizable gap with mothers in the amount of time they spend with their children. The public believes that a father’s greatest role is to provide values to his children, followed by emotional support, discipline, and income support. Public opinion ascribes roughly the same hierarchy of roles to mothers.”

Brands that market directly to the growing niche audience of single father heads of household and fathers who are primary caregivers are in a unique position to seize opportunities to build critical relationships with an audience that shows no signs of slowing down.

How is your brand connecting with this target market? Leave a comment and share your insights below.

Image: Glenda Otero

New Digital Ad Best Practices Will Benefit Brands

gavelEight of the biggest digital ad networks in the United States are voluntarily implementing a set of best practices that should reduce online copyright infringements, piracy, and counterfeiting. AdWeek reports that Google, Yahoo!, 24/7 Media, AOL, Microsoft, Conde Nast, Adtegrity, and SpotXchange will all implement new guidelines that support the White House’s efforts to better protect intellectual property.

This is great news for online publishers, including brands, brand journalists and sites that publish branded content because it is a key step in ensuring content owners’ copyrights and brand’s trademarks aren’t violated. The best practices will enable ad networks to stop paying sites that publish content which violates intellectual property protection laws. By cutting off an important revenue stream to these nefarious site owners, advertisers, high quality online publishers, and consumers win.

The new Best Practices Guidelines for Ad Networks to Address Piracy and Counterfeiting includes three primary sections:

1. General Commitment

Ad networks will maintain policies that prohibit websites from earning revenue through the network, which are found to be primarily dedicated to selling counterfeit goods or infringe copyrights by publishing content owned by another individual or entity. These policies will be published on each ad network’s website.

2. Identification and Verification Process

Ad networks must be certified against the Interactive Advertising Bureau Networks and Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines or maintain an independent quality assurance process.

3. Complain Process

Ad networks sill accept and address notices from rights holders related to content published on sites in the ad network, and contact information for the person or entity responsible for receiving complaints must be clearly published on the ad network’s website. Ad networks must conduct appropriate investigations for all valid complaints received.

You can follow the link above to read the complete best practices document.

Not only will the new ad networks best practices cut the revenue stream of sites that are clearly breaking copyright laws, but it will also hurt sites that are selling counterfeit branded merchandise. Of course, these best practices won’t completely stop these types of sites. They’re likely to be replaced faster than consumers can complain about them and ad networks can remove them from their networks. However, it’s a step in the right direction.

At the very least, this is a topic that brand marketers need to be aware of and follow, because the outcome will help them protect their copyrights and trademarks as well as reduce ad spending on these sites. It’s an all-around win for brands.

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Jason Morrison

Do You See What I See? Reducing Online Tunnel Vision

tunnel-vision
Websites are like grocery store shelves – users pay selective attention to only certain items. 

Do you know what your readers are actually seeing on your website?

Of all the variables affecting the success of a box of cereal, grocery shelf positioning is at the top of the list. [1] In fact, the optimum shelf height for selling a box of cereal is 60 inches (152 cm) high [2].

The strategy behind grocery shelf placement revolves around the science of visual attention. Countless visual stimuli battle for our attention at all times. The human visual system filters this incoming data, reserving only a few relevant pieces of information for higher-level cognitive processing. [3]

Online Tunnel Vision

Research indicates that the online viewer is not excluded from this selective visual processing.  Renowned Human Computer Interaction expert Jakob Nielsen refers to this online selective processing as ‘tunnel vision’. [4]

Nielsen states: “Users don’t look around much. They often stay highly focused on the screen section that they’re engaging with or that they assume contains the answer to their problem.”

Nielsen conducted a study to investigate this form of online tunnel vision. They asked users to view a corporate website, and determine when that corporation entered the U.K. market.

Interestingly, although the answer to the question (which was year 2000) was prominently presented in large font size at the upper left side of the screen, next to a picture located above the text, the user did not see it. In fact, they managed to read through the entire page, finally locating the year ‘2000’ in the very last sentence of the substantial body of text.  – They completely missed the bold ‘2000’ displayed in large font that one would think impossible to miss.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Grocery shelf selective attention and online tunnel vision are similar in that they are dependent upon a myriad of factors. However, classic Gestalt Principles offer a simplified solution for online tunnel vision – group similar objects together on the page.

Gestalt Principles are rules of the organization of the visual field. The Similarity Gestalt Principle states that we group visual elements that are similar to each other in order to simplify our higher-level cognitive processing of visual elements. According to this principle, when objects with similar lightness, color, size, orientation, or shape are grouped together, they are easier for the brain to process, and are thus more noticeable.

So, with this information in mind, the corporate website featured in Nielsen’s study should have grouped the large, bold ‘2000’ with the rest of the text, as opposed to separating it from the rest of the text with a picture.

Therefore, it is wise to group images with images, and text with text. This will make your website more readable and effective. The user’s brain will also thank you for reducing its workload.

Resources

[1] Cox (1970) The Effect of Shelf Space upon Sales of Branded Products.

[2] Chung, Schmit, Dong, & Kaiser, (2007) Economic evaluation of shelf space management in grocery stores

[3] Walther et al.  (2005) Computer Vision and Image Understanding

[4] Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. August 27, 2012: Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention

 
 

 

8 Proven Tricks to Create Perfect Pinterest Pins

pins pinterestWhat makes the perfect Pinterest post? That’s the question Curalate wanted to answer, so they researched 500,000 images in a recent study and identified eight specific factors that affect how many views and re-pins your Pinterest pins get. This is important information for brands that want to more effectively leverage the visual marketing opportunities that Pinterest offers.

The infographic below shows all of the details from the study. The highlights include:

Faces or No Faces?

Images that show a person’s face are repinned less frequently than images that don’t include a face. The study reveals that images without faces in them receive 23% more repins than images that include faces.

How Many Colors?

As you might expect, images with multiple colors that are dominant in the image receive 3.25 times more repins than black and white images or images with any single color.

What Color is Best?

Just as colors like yellow and red catch people’s attention offline and on web pages, images that are reddish-orange get approximately twice as many repins as images that are blueish.

Does Lightness Matter?

The answer to this question is a resounding, “Yes.” Curalate found that images with medium lightness received 20 times more repins than images that are very dark.

Is a Specific Saturation Level Important?

The sweet spot appears to be 50% saturation. The study found that images that are 50% saturated get 10 times more repins than desaturated images.

What Should the Background Look Like?

You might think that a single product image with a blank background will get more repins than images with cluttered backgrounds, but the opposite is true based on the data from Curalate. Images with less than 10% background are repinned 2-4 times more than images with more than 40% background (meaning more than 40% of the image is empty background).

How Does Aspect Ratio Affect Repins?

Vertical images should have a 2.3 aspect ratio. Curalate found that vertical images with an aspect ratio between 2.3 and 4.5 get 60% more repins than images that are very tall and skinny.

What Texture Is Best?

Images with a smooth texture are repinned 17 times more than images with a rough texture.

8 Tricks for Repinnapble Pins

Here are the 8 tricks brand marketers can leverage from the study data:

  1. Avoid images with people’s faces in them.
  2. Use images with multiple colors.
  3. Pin more images that are reddish-orange than blue.
  4. Adjust your images to medium lightness.
  5. Use images with 50% saturation.
  6. Avoid blank backgrounds. Instead, keep the background of your images to less than 10%.
  7. Pin images with visual interest that are high-texture.
  8. Avoid vertical images that are very skinny.

You can see the complete infographic below and visit the Curalate website using the link above for all of the details.

The-Eyes-Have-It-Curalate-Infographic-copy

Images: Talk2Frank, Curalate

 

Forging New Networks: Facilitating Intern Interaction

intern-networkThe relationship between interns and full-time staff is well known and well documented and there’s a distinct learning relationship that both firms and interns really value during their time in any company.

For the intern, however, this certainly isn’t the whole story and feedback from interns often shows that the most valuable relationships are those which are formed between the interns themselves. It’s hardly surprising that interns in the same firm get together to share stories, thoughts and the occasional drink, but it is surprising that many firms aren’t always too facilitating to inter-intern interactions.

Developing Firm-wide Connections
Though some inter-intern relations are purely social, there’s a very good business case for encouraging quality interactions between young graduates. Normally there isn’t much demand for more than one intern in any department and, thus, when interns mix, they’re able to discuss practice, talk about working culture and share advice from different areas of your business.

This information is not only invaluable to each individual department in comparing and matching up its progress against others, it’s also great for strengthening inter-departmental relationships. It’s all too easy for new recruits to get comfortable in their own departments, but by interacting from the off with other parts of the business, interns can begin business life as well connected and well aware of the potential of the whole business.

Connecting Outside of Your Firm
Equally, not all interns will stay with your firm when graduation time comes and though this isn’t great for your retention figures, it can be a tangible advantage when it comes to actually doing business. If one of your interns graduates and then starts off with ties to other interns who moved into, say, accounts, banking and project management, it’s a connection that’s there to be exploited later.

It’s also worth remembering that most interns can talk a lot and will be more than happy to share their experiences. Providing their time at your company was positive, a good network of connections all over the country can be a great recruitment tool for your department in the future.

Harnessing Good Relationships
Interactions between interns are great, but if your business isn’t working to harness them, they might as well not be there. There’s a fine line between stifling any genuine interaction by being too rigid and organising too many compulsory after-hours events and missing the boat all together.

One very simple way to keep interactions strong is to use social media to great effect. Encourage the use of LinkedIn and highlight the importance of networking and also don’t be afraid to set up (and monitor) a Facebook group for arranging meetings and sharing ideas. It’s simple, it keeps interaction honest and businesslike and, best of all, it’s free!

If you’re taking on more than one intern this summer, make sure they’re not isolated. Ties that are formed with other interns can last for many years: be sure to use them to your advantage!