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Socially Responsible Brands Jump on Fair Trade Certified Bandwagon

Socially Responsible Brands Jump on Fair Trade Certified Bandwagon

There is a new wave of socially responsible brand labeling available for companies to slap on their products called Fair Trade Certified. In 2008, 284 Fair Trade Certified products were launched in the United States, up from 130 in 2007.  According to an article in Brandweek, Mintel reports that most of the products attaching the new label to their brands are coffee, tea, herbs, cocoa, chocolate, fruit, sugar, rice, spices, cut flowers and (coming soon) wine.

What is Fair Trade Certified you ask?  It’s a product designation handed out in the United States by TransFair USA out of Oakland, California to signify products from farmers in locations such as Ghana or Costa Rica who, “work in safe labor conditions, use environmentally friendly practices and are paid at least a minimum floor price for their crop. These family farmers may also belong to a co-op that democratically decides how to invest their profits in building schools, health clinics or developing better business and sustainability practices.” [Read more…] about Socially Responsible Brands Jump on Fair Trade Certified Bandwagon

The Rise of Social Logins in the US and UK

social login lockSocial logins have become the norm and consumers not only look for a social login option on brand sites and mobile apps, they also expect a social login option.

Gigya’s 2014 State of Consumer Privacy and Personalization study recently surveyed 2,000 people between the ages of 18 and 55 in the United States and the United Kingdom. The results showed that 77% of U.S. consumers and 60% of U.K. consumers have logged into a brand website or mobile account using a social network account.

This is a huge jump (45% increase) from 2012 when just 53% of U.S. consumers used social logins.

The rise of social logins is happening for three very specific reasons according to the Gigya report:

  1. Convenience: Fewer passwords to remember
  2. Ease: Particularly on mobile devices where filling out registration forms is difficult
  3. Relevance: By using a social login, consumers believe they get more personalized, relevant content and offers

In addition to convenience, ease, and relevance, consumers also believe that social logins offer greater transparency. The Gigya report explains:

Social login gives consumers the power to permit brands access to the data points housed within their social profiles needed to provide them with more relevant and timely user experiences, effectively striking a balance between two traditionally competing goals: privacy and personalization.

In other words, consumers feel like they have more control over their privacy and data sharing when they use a social login to access a brand site or application. With that said, it’s important to note that far more respondents to this survey used social logins because they’re convenient and easier than respondents who used social logins for greater transparency, relevance, and personalization.

Here’s the breakdown of why U.S. and U.K. consumers use social logins:

  • I don’t want to spend time filling in registration forms = 53% U.S. and 60% U.K.
  • I don’t want to create and remember another username and password = 47% U.S. and 46% U.K.
  • I feel that my personal data is better protected when I use social login = 21% U.S. and 15% U.K.
  • I want to share articles, products, or other content with my social network friends = 26% U.S. and 12% U.K.
  • Other = 3% U.S. and 4% U.K.

What Should Brands Do?

First, it makes sense to provide an option for consumers to use social login on your website and in your mobile apps. Make sure that you clearly communicated how and why their information is used.

Furthermore, don’t ask for information beyond what you need to give the user what they’re looking for. The Gigya survey found that 84% of U.S. consumers and 81% of U.K. consumers have abandoned an online registration form because they weren’t happy with the amount or type of information that was requested. It’s nice to get extra information that you can use for targeting in the future, but you need to weigh the worth of that data with the possibility of not getting any data at all when users abandon your form. This is a time when split-testing will be extremely helpful in creating the highest performing forms possible.

Does your brand use social logins on its sites yet? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Camilla Ahrensball

3 Keys to Designing Effective Online Ads

facebook mobile appNew research from Facebook’s Marketing Science team identifies three keys to designing effective online ads as well as a variety of recommendations and warnings about things to avoid.

The researchers studied 350 brands in 18 industries between October 2013 and March 2014 by recruiting 700 people from around the world to rate more than 1,500 ads that ran in their Facebook News Feeds.

Using the data collected, the team identified the following recommendations for online advertisers to increase conversions:

  • Focus on the product.
  • Provide product information in the ads.
  • Provide a clear directive in the ads.
  • Focus on the brand.
  • Provide a strong link between the brand and the ad.
  • Provide a good fit between the brand’s personality and the ad.
  • Online conversion-focused ads should provide a clear connection to the brand’s personality
  • Single product-focused images should be used in ads to make potential customers perceive the brand as “approachable and accessible.”
  • To increase brick-and-mortar sales, use an iconic product image in the ad that grabs consumers’ attention and enables them to easily identify the brand.

The report repeatedly states that a strong brand link and product placement within online ads are important, but that doesn’t mean that ads that didn’t rank high in each of these elements among consumer participants were failures. Ads with diverse creative or ads that were highly tailored to the brand goals and audience preferences might not score well for all elements but could score very highly for the most important elements.

That brings us to the researchers conclusions. They identified three keys to designing effective online ads:

1. Know your objective because different elements are important for achieving different goals.

The researchers found that brand-focused advertisers consistently scored higher on elements like the link between the ad and brand, the emotional reward delivered by the ad, and the noticeability of the ad. However, direct response-focused advertisers scored higher ratings on call-to-action. These results make complete sense, but some advertisers still use the wrong types of ads for the wrong reasons and audiences, and in the wrong places.

2. For online conversions, focus on product or brand within the ad.

The researchers found that ads that focused on the product with a strong call-to-action and informational reward scored well in online conversions. On the other hand, ads that focused on the brand performed well in online conversions when the ads offered a strong link to the brand and a strong brand personality.

3. For in-store sales, focus on prominent product placement or well-rounded ad creative in the ad.

The researchers found that ads with strong product placement scored well for having a strong brand link, brand personality, and noticeability which successfully drove in-store sales. Similarly, well-rounded ads  that scored high on all elements (or most elements) were successful at driving in-store sales.

While none of these findings are groundbreaking, they do give you some insights into not only how Facebook users rate ads but also how well those ads performed. The researchers compared results of the rating study with previous research that tracked conversions and sales to provide a more comprehensive picture of what’s working (and what isn’t) in online advertising. Therefore, there is value in considering these research results and consumer preferences when you’re planning future online ad creative designs.

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

Image: Maria Elena licensed CC BY 2.0

How to tell your innovation story (in 5 inventive steps)

innovation
Most companies understand the value of innovation, or at least they say they do in the research and development part on their website…

We often come across businesses with a great research and development story that don’t share this online, or don’t do it particularly well. By talking about innovation, a company can reach out to key stakeholders, and also promote core messages about their business. For these reasons, an increasing number of companies include at least some R&D content on their websites (although some do it better than others).

So what’s the best way to communicate this online? Well there’s nothing wrong with having some innovation pages with well-written text, accompanied by nice images and maybe even some video. But let’s be honest about this, although this approach is far better than having nothing at all, it isn’t a very innovative way of talking about innovation.

What’s the alternative then?

Well we’ve looked at some current best practice and come up with 5 innovative ways of sharing your innovation content online:

1. Read all about it

There’s something rather sad about R&D webpages with lots of old content. A good R&D section must show that innovation is an active and current part of a business, and not just something the company has done in the past. One way to ensure that visitors get a fresh hit of innovation content is to follow the example of Airbus Group, and include a regularly updated Innovation News page.

2. Keep a date with RWE

RWE are also obviously aware of the need to include fresh content in their excellent Innovation section. Their innovation calendar is a great way of illustrating their ongoing commitment to R&D while at the same advertising clear opportunities for stakeholders to engage with RWE in person.

3. Get in touch

There is so much to like about RWE’s Innovation content – I just wish I could tell them how much I like it! The good news is that I can, thanks to RWE providing contact information for their innovation team, including the head of R&D. Joking aside, by providing R&D contact this way, not only does it offer stakeholders a great way to engage directly, it also reinforces just how important RWE views innovation and opportunities to collaborate.

4. Graphics are good. But interactive graphics are even better!

It’s another goodie from RWE. We’ve talked about how effective infographics can be on a corporate site in the past, and interactive infographics can be even better. If your innovation strategy includes a diverse range of projects in different parts of Europe, how would you illustrate this? RWE have come up with a great way of describing their diverse innovation portfolio with an interactive map.

5. An innovative approach to describing innovation

The new ideas and technology of R&D can be hard to convey online, without resorting to uploading lots of text. Roche have used graphics again to breathe life into their innovation content, but we’re not talking graphs and pie charts here. Instead, Roche have used cartoons and concise text to explain the science behind their latest R&D, and it works very well indeed!

The Social Media Newsroom: X-Factor Style

sony ericsson social media newsroom
Sony Ericsson

Communicate Magazine’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference yesterday ran a session examining social media newsrooms in the style of The X-Factor. Yes, really!

If we’d been assessing each of the sessions of the day to see whether they should go through to the next stage, this one would have got my vote.

Naturally, nobody was publicly humiliated and bleeped off stage, but the format of the session was entertaining, and enabled us to see 3 corporate social media newsrooms in some detail, with highlights presented by their ‘owner’, with commentary on each from the panel of 3 experts, and then questions from the floor.

First Direct social media newsroom
First Direct

This meant that we could hear from the inside about the issues involved in getting the newsrooms established, which included:

  • meeting the requirements of the Legal and Compliance teams
  • dealing with the difficulties of using legacy IT systems
  • and the organisational difficulties in dealing with large companies with a lot of historical momentum going in the traditional direction.

These issues, which were mentioned several times, received a lot of nods and smiles from the audience, who clearly recognised the situations the speakers had found themselves in.

GM Europe (Opel) social media newsroom
GM Europe

We heard about the intentions of the companies in moving towards a social media newsroom, and some of the benefits they found:

  • projecting good news, and news to interest consumers, not just professional journalists
  • supporting a brand refresh, with new brand values including ‘openness’ requiring that this be demonstrated on the corporate site
  • significant increase in the number of visits per week – from 5 per week to over 2,000
  • decrease in time-to-publish, so they were able to respond faster, which was of particular benefit in managing crises
  • the ability to provide embeddable, sharable content for visitors to reuse, reaching their target influencers and spreading the brand message.

I was particularly impressed by the astonishing increase in the number of visits to the newsroom achieved by going social. This, together with the statistics presented by Simon Henderson from Centrica in a later session – that visitors to their CSR blogs visited 11 more pages than the average visitor, spent 8 minutes longer on site and were 10% more likely to return – makes a good argument for moving in this direction.

The experts appeared to be enthusiastic about all the sites, picking up on different good features of each. There did seem to be a slight divergence among the three on whether or not it was a good thing to merge news intended for consumers, news intended for the professional journalist, and content intended for reuse or sharing, with a suggestion that it could be of benefit to have a dedicated area for the professional in case of crisis. Two of the responses that I noted to these questions were:

  • the ‘contestant’ (in this case Merran Wriggley from Sony Ericsson) responded that they didn’t mind who was visiting (that is, whether it was a traditional journalist or a blogger) but were much more interested in where their material was used
  • one of the judges (Stuart Bruce from Wolfstar Consultancy) later pointed out that one option could be a popup mini-site triggered in case of need, and available from the social media newsroom, to provide a dedicated area for crisis communications.

For me, this was the standout session of the conference, and it’s well worth looking at all three of the newsrooms examined. I’ve included images (just click the image to see a bigger version), but they don’t really do them justice. Why not have a look at the newsrooms (links under each image above), and then let us know which you’d vote for – and why?

A Font Causes an Uproar for IKEA

Over the past few weeks, IKEA has been challenged from multiple directions over its new logo — specifically, the font change in its new logo design.  Remember the old IKEA logo that used the serif Futura font (check it out below)?


ikea logo old-400px


Now take a look at the new IKEA logo with the sans-serif Verdana font (check it out below).


ikea_logo_new


Apparently, this font change has caused an uproar with 3,000 consumers signing a position against the new logo and USA Today and the New York Times writing about it.  Is this font change really so bad?

Here are my thoughts: [Read more…] about A Font Causes an Uproar for IKEA