It turns out that one key to the success of marketing so-called “green” products is actually to deemphasize the environmental messaging — at least when targeting consumers in the United States.
According to a number of surveys conducted by branding and marketing communications firm Landor, American consumers value possessing “green” attributes the least valuable of a series of brand attributes studied.
This despite years of social engineers and marketers of environmentally friendly brands attempting to “educate” consumers on environmental consciousness and the importance of sustainability.
At this point, it’s probably better for products to promote themselves based on other attributes besides “green” attributes … or at least to stop leading with that argument.
Instead, what are the values that resonate the most with American consumers? According to Ted Page, a principal at content marketing firm Captains of Industry, there are three in particular — none of them having much to do with environmental issues — at least on the face of it:
Freedom
Independence
Saving money
But for green products, it’s possible to tie everything up in a nice bow by being able to lay claim all three of these attributes as brand attributes while not compromising the environment, either.
An example of this message strategy in action is the Nest Learning Thermostat, which promises saving energy in the context of achieving increased home efficiency, automated temperature management and lower energy bills. The “green positioning” is nice — but it’s the other product attributes that really hit pay-dirt.
Another example is Tesla electric automobiles. Tesla is promoting the performance of its high-torque electric engine as superior to other sports cars manufactured by BMW, Lexus and Audi.
The fact that Tesla’s high-performance engine happens to be emissions-free is just icing on the cake.
Thanks in part to this messaging platform, sales of the Tesla Model S auto now outstrip those of the Mercedes S-Class, Lexus LS, BMW 7-Series, Porsche Panorama and the Audi AB.
One has to wonder if this would had happened had Tesla chose to lead with “green” messaging instead.
The bulk of time Americans are spending on digital media … is now happening on mobile applications.
According to data released this past week by Internet and digital analytics firm comScore, the combined time that people expend using digital media breaks down as follows:
Mobile apps: ~52% of all time spent online
Mobile web surfing: ~8%
Desktop: ~40%
Apps are clearly in the driver’s seat – particularly in the mobile realm. In fact, comScore estimates that apps account for 7 out of every 8 minutes spent on mobile devices.
On smartphones, the app usage is ~88% of all time spent, whereas on tablets, it’s ~82%.
This doesn’t mean that app usage is spread evenly throughout the population of people who are online. Far from it. Only about one-third of people download one app per month or more. (The average smartphone user is downloading about three apps per month.)
The inevitable conclusion: App usage is highly concentrated among a subset of the population.
Indeed, the 7% most active smartphone owners account for almost half of all the download activity during any given month.
But even if most users aren’t downloading all that many apps … they are certainly engaged with the ones they do have on their devices: comScore reports that nearly 60% are using apps every day.
Here again, the data show that usage levels are much higher among smartphone users than they are with tablet users (where only about one quarter of the people use apps daily).
Where they’re spending their time is also interesting. Well over 40% of all app time spent on smartphones is with a user’s single most used app. (Facebook takes top honors — of course.)
And if you combine social networking, games and Internet radio, you’ve pretty much covered the waterfront when it comes to app usage.
When you think about it, none of this should come as much surprise. We’re a mobile society – hourly, daily, monthly and yearly. It only makes sense that most online time is going to be happening when people are away from their home or their desk, now that it’s so easy to be connected so easily from even the tiniest mobile devices.
And speaking of “easy” … is it really any wonder why people would flock to apps? It’s less hassle to open up an app for news or information rather than searching individual sites via mobile. People simply don’t have the patience for that anymore.
I’ve blogged before about the propensity for Americans to forego using all of their allotted vacation time in a given year.
But that was back in 2012, in the waning months of the “Great Recession,” so perhaps one reason for those dynamics was leaner workforces and the need for “all hands on deck.”
A few years have gone by since then, and … very little has changed in these dynamics.
What the survey found was that 40% of workers fail to take all of their allotted paid time-off.
When asked why this was the case, look at the reasons that were cited:
Taking time off will cause my work to pile up: ~40% cited
Nobody else can do my job while I’m on vacation: ~35%
I can’t afford to take time off: ~33%
I don’t want to be seen as “replaceable”: ~22%
The study characterizes the atmospherics surrounding the phemonemon as a “work martyr complex.”
As U.S. Travel’s chief executive puts it, “busyness” is something Americans wear as a “badge of honor.”
But there may be a bit more to it than that.
The survey also found that two-thirds of the respondents feel that their employer sends mixed messages about taking vacation … says nothing at all about it … or actually discourages people from taking paid time off.
What appears to motivate workers to take their full allotted vacation time is the implementation of “use it or lose it” policies. When such policies are in place, ~84% of workers take all of their allotted time.
By contrast, for companies that offer the ability for workers to roll over vacation time, bank it, or be paid for time not taken, only about half of their employees (~48%) use all of their time.
The big question is whether most companies truly buy into the notion that taking vacation time is important for overall employee health, well-being and relationships – because the survey found that only a distinct minority of companies (one in four) maintain a “use it or lose it” PTO policy.
Of course, the members of the U.S. Travel Association would certainly benefit if more Americans took paid time off and used it to travel to vacation destinations. Still, Roger Dow’s contention that “it’s time to start a conversation and reclaim the benefits we work so hard to earn” makes sense to me. The full report can be viewed here.
At our company, we’ve a “use it or lose it” PTO policy in place for years. What’s your own situation?
Here’s a statistic about social media platform Pinterest that will probably surprise few people: As of June 2014 statistics reported by digital analytics firm comScore, its user base is more than 70% female.
… Which means that Pinterest remains the most “gender imbalanced” of all the major social media platforms.
For the record, other social platforms have far more gender balance among their user bases – with at least 45% being male:
SnapChat: 52% male
Tumblr: 52%
Twitter: 48%
Facebook: 47%
Instagram: 45%
Pinterest: 28%
But here’s the thing: Pinterest has been trying mightily hard to attract more male participants, but the proportional figures have yet to budge.
This points to a fundamental challenge. It’s very difficult to change the image and atmospherics of a social platform once they’ve become so firmly entrenched.
And it’s not just a question of image. The platform’s content says it all.
Jill Sherman, vice president of social and content strategy at marketing communications firm DigitasLBi, puts it this way:
“If you pull up Pinterest and go into any content section, you will see purses, dresses and women’s shoes — because women are the user base. When 70% of the users are female, then 70% of the content is going to be female-oriented.”
Hope springs eternal, however. Pinterest is continuing its effort to attract more men.
Or at least … to make the site more “guy friendly” when a new member goes there signs up. This means making sure to show items more stereotypically catering to men’s interests rather than things like women’s fashion items.
He’s David Rubin, erstwhile senior vice president of marketing at Unilever, where he worked on marketing the Axe brand of men’s body care products.
Mr. Rubin might wish to start his tenure by asking himself what would bring him to engage with Pinterest more … because according to news reports, Rubin had posted only 22 items on Pinterest prior to joining the company.
DigitasLBi’s Jill Sherman sees a challenge for Pinterest that is fundamentally basic. “They haven’t cracked the motivation code: How to attract men and keep them using the platform beyond saving things that pique their interest.”
I agree – and I’d go a step further. Convincing people to visit Pinterest to find or view something of interest “feels” like a function a search engine such as Google Images is doing quite well already. Who needs “yet another place” to tap into that functionality? Especially if one is a male of the species?
In order for Pinterest to evolve beyond where it is today, perhaps it needs to look at what Facebook and others have been doing to create communities and interaction beyond just pretty pictures and videos.
As media properties have moved away from finite schedules of daily, weekly or monthly publication to something more akin to 24/7 content dissemination, it’s becoming quite a challenge to deliver new content.
The reality is, building a digital media property in today’s “always on” world that can successfully deliver new, original content on an ongoing basis is quite costly.
In fact, it’s economically unfeasible for many if not most publishing enterprises.
This explains why readers have started to see a parade of news items that have been reused, recycled or repurposed in an effort to present the items as “fresh” news multiple times over.
This is happening with greater regularly, and it’s seemingly getting more prevalent with every passing day.
Here’s a representative case: Business Insider. This finance and news site has doubled its traffic over the past several years. Business Insider now attracts more than 12 million unique visitors each month – each of them presumably interested in consuming “fresh news.”
But for content that is fairly “evergreen” in nature, Business Insider is perfectly content to serve up the same (or nearly similar) stories two … three … four times or more.
The various iterations of that article varied very little each time. Sometimes there were a different number of facts presented (usually 15 or 16). Business Insider even published the identical list twice in the same year, using the exact same headline while revising only the introductory paragraph.
Beyond the fact that publishing essentially the same article six times within three years took some of the burden off the news-gathering and writing team, it turns out that topics such as this one really do engage readers — time and again.
Business Insider’s first iteration of the McDonald’s article attracted more than 2.5 million views. And overall, the story has been clicked on more than 8 million times.
(Of course, the final time the article ran, the story generated only around 400,000 views, so at some point the law of diminishing returns had to come into play.)
I like another example, too: Cosmopolitan Magazine. In April of this year, it published an article titled “25 Life-Changing Ways to Use Q-tips.” That story generated only 44 shares — hardly earth-shattering results for a media property with over 3 million subscribers.
But then Cosmopolitan promoted the article on Pinterest in May … and also on Twitter in May and again in June … and on Facebook in early May and again there in early June.
Whereas Cosmopolitan’s original posting of the article on its own website didn’t result in much engagement to speak of, just the two Facebook posts resulted in nearly 1,500 shares.
With these kinds of results being generated, it’s no wonder publishers have decided to “publish … re-publish … and then publish again.”
So the next time you have a sensation of déjà vu about reading an article, chances are, you’re not dreaming.
All the emphasis on having consumer-facing brands “surprise and delight” their customers isn’t what many people are looking for at all.
In the interactive age, what we hear often is that companies and brands need to go beyond simply offering a high-quality product.
Many companies and brands have the notion that they should strive to engender a kind of “personal” relationship with customers – so that consumers will develop the same kinds of feelings for brands as they have with their close friends.
How true is this?
One marketing company decided to find out. Toronto-based virtual agent technology firm IntelliResponse surveyed ~1,000 online consumers in the United States earlier this year.
When asked what sort of relationship they would prefer to have with the companies whose products and services they purchase, here’s how the percentages broke for these respondents:
Prefer a “friendship” where they get personalized service: ~24%
Prefer a “transactional” relationship where they receive efficient service and that’s all: ~59%
Prefer both equally: ~17%
Evidently, “boringly consistently good” beats “surprisingly delightful” far more often – assuming the company is minding its Ps and Qs when it comes to product quality.
Here’s what else consumers are seeking: They want to be able to get the same information and answers from a company’s desktop or mobile website … online portal … or social media sites as they do from speaking with company representatives over the phone.
The IntelliResponse survey found that two-thirds of the respondents will go to a company’s website first when seeking out information regarding a product or service – so the answers better be there or the brand risks consumer disappointment.
The takeaway is this: No matter how much breathless reporting there is about this “surprising” social media campaign or that “delightful” interactive contest … the majority of consumers continue to view companies and brands the way they have for 100 years: Companies are merely the vehicle by which they can acquire the goods they need.
Rather than spending undue energy trying to make the interactive world “fun” or “sticky” for customers, companies should focus on the basic work of delivering products, information and answers that are easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to act on.
And related to that — make sure support systems (and support people) are in place so that customers can get any problems or issues solved with a minimum of time or hassle.
Do those things well, and companies will naturally please the vast majority of their current and future customers.
The amount of translated content is also showing big-time growth.
According to an analysis by venture capitalist and Internet industry specialist Mary Meeker, in 2013 nine of the ten top global Internet properties were U.S.-based.
For the record, they were as follows (in order of ranking):
Google
Microsoft
Facebook
Yahoo
Wikipedia
Amazon
Ask
Glam Media
Apple
Only China-based Tencent cracked the Top Ten from outside the United States — and it just barely made it in as #10 in the rankings.
And yet … the same Top 10 Internet properties had nearly 80% of their users located outside America.
With such a disparity between broad-based Internet usage and concentrated Internet ownership, the picture was bound to change.
And boy, has it changed quickly: Barely a year later — as of March 2014 — the Top 10 listing now contains just six American-based companies.
Ask, Glam Media and Apple have all fallen off the list, replaced by three more China-based properties: Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu.
Paralleling this trend is another one: a sharp increase in the degree to which businesses are providing content in multiple languages.
For websites that offer some form of translated content, half of them are offering it in at least six languages. That’s double the number of languages that were being offered a year earlier.
And for a quarter of these firms, translated content is available in 15 or more languages.
What are the most popular languages besides English? Spanish, French, Italian and German are popular — not a great surprise there. But other languages that are becoming more prevalent include Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
In fact, the average volume of translated content has ballooned nearly 90% within just the past year.
The growing accuracy of computer-based translation modules — including surprisingly good performance in “idiomatic” language — is certainly helping the process along.
Moreover, when a major site like Facebook reports that its user base in France grew from 1.4 million to 2.4 million within just three months of offering its French-language site, it’s just more proof that the world may be getting smaller … but native language still remains a key to maximizing business success.
It’s one more reminder that for any company which hopes to compete in a transnational world, offering content in other languages isn’t just an option, but a necessity in order to build and maintain a strategic advantage.
I’ve blogged before about the fallout from the Edward Snowden affair and its effects on the U.S. cloud computing industry.
In fact, back in the summer of 2013 I read an interesting thought piece published by my brother, Nelson Nones, Chairman of Geoprise Technologies. His experiences as an IT specialist who has lived and worked outside the United States for two decades has made him particularly sensitive to what the international implications of the Snowden revelations may be.
In his 2013 analysis, he claimed that the NSA spying revelations would likely have serious consequences for the cloud computing industry. As he wrote at the time:
“… these threats will be perceived to be so serious that many businesses could decide to abandon the use of cloud computing services going forward — or refuse to consider cloud computing at all — because they bear full responsibility for compliance yet now realize that they have little or no ability to control the attendant non-compliance risks when utilizing major cloud services providers.
Out front: Geoprise Technologies’ Nelson Nones was among the first to warn about the negative consequences of NSA surveillance programs on the U.S. cloud computing industry.
In view of recent revelations, the tantalizing cost savings and efficiencies from cloud computing may be overwhelmed by the financial, business continuity and reputational risks.”
And his prediction as to what would likely happen as a result if these concerns played out in the market was even more chilling:
“Revenues and profits of U.S.-based service providers will suffer to the extent that businesses of every nationality abandon the public cloud computing services they are now using, or refuse to consider public cloud computing services offered by U.S.-based providers, in response to the heightened customer risks that have now been revealed.”
Shortly thereafter, I began to notice similar writings back here in the United States – in particular those by members of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a DC-based think tank focusing on technology policies. It projected that the U.S. cloud computing industry would forfeit somewhere between $22 billion and $35 billion in lost business as a result of the NSA-related revelations.
For anyone keeping score, that’s between 10% and 20% of the worldwide cloud computing market.
And now, one year later, the full scope of the impact is being realized. New America Foundation, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization focusing on public policy issues, released a report this past week which outlines the impact of Snowden’s NSA revelations.
Here are just two examples of the findings it published:
Within days of the first NSA revelations, cloud computing services such as Dropbox and Amazon Web Services reported measurable sales declines.
Qualcomm, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco and others have reported sales declines in China – as much as a 10% drop in overall revenue.
Not only that, foreign governments are giving U.S. tech firms wide berth when it comes to contracting for a range of products and services that go well-beyond cloud computing.
Among the casualties: The German government ended its contract with Verizon as of June … while the Brazilian government selected Swedish-based Saab over Boeing in a contract to replace fighter jets.
In the current environment of security jitters, it’s much easier for foreign competitors to portray themselves as “NSA-proof” — and the “safer choice” for protecting sensitive information.
Hans-Peter Friedrich
And unambiguous comments like this one made by Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich just add fuel to the fire:
“Whoever fears their communication is being monitored in any way should use services that don’t go through American servers.”
Even more ominous, a number of countries are debating – and indeed close to enacting – new legislation that would require companies doing business within their local to use local data centers.
Sure, some of the countries – Vietnam, Brunei, Greece – aren’t overly significant players in the grand scheme of things. But others certainly are; Brazil and India aren’t inconsequential markets by any measure.
In all, the New America Foundation report forecasts that the fallout from the NSA’s PRISM program will cost cloud-computing companies multiple billions in lost revenues – from $20 billion on the low end to nearly $200 billion on the high end.
This, plus the collateral damage of lost contracts involving ancillary and even unrelated tech services and manufactured products, may result in a contraction of the U.S. tech industry’s growth by as much as 4% — not to mention seriously undermining the United States’ credibility around the world.
Isn’t that just what America needs to have right now: international credibility problems not only in the political sphere, but also in the economic one.
Unfortunately, what I wrote in my blog post a year ago still stands true today: “OK, U.S. government and administration officials: Have fun unscrambling this egg!”
I’ve blogged before about the number of print magazine launches versus closures in the age of the Internet.
Now the latest report from media database clearinghouse Oxbridge Communications shows that when it comes to this most traditional form of media … hope springs eternal.
In fact, Oxbridge is reporting that in the first half of this year, new magazine start-ups outstripped those that ceased publication – and by a substantial margin.
The Oxbridge database, which includes U.S. and Canadian publications, shows that 93 magazines were launched in the first half of 2014, versus just 30 that were shuttered.
True, this represents a lower number of start-ups than is the historical average … but it’s also a lower number of closures.
What specialty audiences are being targeted by these new pubs?
In the continuation of an existing trend, there’s growth in new “regional interest” magazines such as 12th & Broad (aimed at the creative community in the Nashville metro area) and San Francisco Cottages & Gardens.
Food and drink is another category of growing interest, with publications like Barbecue America and Craft Beer & Brewing hitting the streets for the first time.
And why not? Despite ever-changing consumer tastes and interests, all of us continue to share at least one fundamental trait: We eat!
But on a cautionary note, the smaller list of magazine closures do include two vaunted “historic” titles: Jet (Johnson Publishing) and Ladies’ Home Journal (Meredith).
These closures underscore the point that the magazine industry shakeup continues – and who knows what other famous titles might cease publication during the second half of the year.
As for the biggest reason behind the magazine closures … isn’t it obvious? It’s decreased advertising revenue.
Continuing a trend that’s been happening for the better part of a decade now, Publishers Information Bureau reports that total magazine ad pages declined another 4% in the First Quarter of 2014 as compared to the same quarter of last year.
For the record, that’s 28,567 ad pages for all U.S. and Canadian publications.
While that figure may seem like a healthy total, it’s not enough to sustain the total number of publications out there.
The harsh reality is that print journalism remains dramatically more expensive than digital production. Unless a magazine can obtain enough subscribers to justify its ad rates, the only other way it can survive is to cover its costs via a “no-advertising” business model.
The vast majority of subscribers will never pay the full cost to produce a print publication. And with more free information resources than ever available to them online, many people aren’t particularly inclined to commit to even a subsidized subscription rate.
Indeed, the wealth of free information means it’s more difficult these days even to get qualified business readers to subscribe to free B-to-B pubs that target their own industry or markets.
What changing dynamics would portend a shift in the downward trajectory? It would be nice to anticipate a bottoming-out followed by a turnaround.
Unfortunately, if the past five years have demonstrated anything, it’s that there may be no “natural bottom” when it comes to diminishing advertising revenues in the print magazine business.
When reading articles or promotional copy about certain brands, the extensive use of footnotes plus “®” designations dangling off of words like ornaments on a tree look clunky and can be a real distraction.
But there are important reasons for companies to police and protect their brand equity … because if you spend some time snooping around the English language, you’ll find any number of words that began life as trademarked terms but became “genericized” over time.
Trademark lawyers refer to this progression as “genericide.” And there are a surprising number of high-profile examples they can cite.
Recently, business writer and editor Mary Beth Quirk compiled a list of once-trademarked brand terms that have become victims of genericide, and she published her findings in the Consumerist, an e-zine put out by Consumer Reports.
Among the trade names she highlights that have “gone generic” are these:
Aspirin — Originally registered by German firm Bayer, aspirin’s trademark was confiscated by the U.S. government in the wake of World War I. Considering the massive headache Germany would unleash on the world barely 20 years later, perhaps this aggressive move wasn’t the best course of action!
Dry Ice — Believe it or not, this was actually a trademarked term, dating from 1925. To nearly everyone, it sounds so much better than “solid CO2.” The clearly preferred “dry ice” descriptor everyone uses is probably why the company lost its trademark by 1932.
Escalator — Registered in 1900 by Otis Elevator, the company lost its trademark when the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office determined that Otis had used it as a descriptive term — even in its own patent applications.
Heroin — This was yet another Bayer trademark. It seems strange that heroin started out life as an actual branded product … but there we are. Presumably, these days Bayer is happy that its company is no longer associated with such a problematic substance.
Laundromat — This term started out as a General Electric trademark back in 1940, issued for the first wall-mounted washing machine. GE failed to renew its registration after the 1950s.
Linoleum — Here’s an example of a brand name that had already entered the generic lexicon before the manufacturing firm even attempted to register it. Coined in the mid-1860s, the company’s efforts to register the flooring name were to fail just a decade later.
Thermos — This trademark was established in the early 1900s as a more pleasing way to describe a “vacuum flask.” After too much loosey-goosey use of the term, the USPTO pronounced it genericized in 1963.
Trampoline — It appears that this term, coined by inventors George Nissen and Larry Griswold in 1936, was never officially registered. The real generic descriptor is “rebound tumbler,” but “trampoline” sounds so much more effective to me. Everyone else seemed to think so, too, leading to its ineligibility for trademark status.
ZIP Code — An acronym for “Zone Improvement System,” the ZIP code began life in the mid-1970s as a service mark of the U.S. Postal Service, but the registration was never renewed. I guess the USPTO chose not to notify its sister agency of the renewal — not their business to do so even among friends and colleagues, evidently.
The next bit of interesting information in Quirk’s article is her listing of brand names that remain trademarked to this day — even though some of them seem to epitomize the essence of generic terminology.
Quirk concurs in the view that these terms may be on life support as proprietary names, noting that they are “trademarks who need to watch their backs” because of how pervasive they are in everyday language usage. Among the terms she cites are these:
Adrenalin® (owned by Park-Davis)
AstroTurf® (Monsanto)
Band-Aid® (Johnson & Johnson)
Bubble Wrap® (Sealed Air)
Crock-Pot® (Sunbeam)
Dumpster® (Dempster Brothers)
Fiberglas® (Owens Corning)
Frisbee® (Wham-O)
Hula Hoop® (Wham-O)
Jet Ski® (Kawasaki)
Kleenex® (Kimberly-Clark)
Lava Lamp® (Mathmos)
Mace® (Mace Security International)
Memory Stick® (Sony
Ping Pong® (Parker Brothers)
Plexiglas® (Rohm & Haas)
Popsicle® (Good Humor-Breyers)
Q-Tips® (Unilever)
Realtor® (National Association of Realtors)
Stetson® (John B. Stetson Company)
Styrofoam® (Dow Chemical)
Taser® (Taser Systems)
Teflon® (DuPont)
Thinking along these lines, do other trade names come to mind that could be in danger of losing their trademark status? If you can think of any, please share your nominations with other readers here.
It turns out that one key to the success of marketing so-called “green” products is actually to deemphasize the environmental messaging — at least when targeting consumers in the United States.
An example of this message strategy in action is the Nest Learning Thermostat, which promises saving energy in the context of achieving increased home efficiency, automated temperature management and lower energy bills. The “green positioning” is nice — but it’s the other product attributes that really hit pay-dirt.
Another example is Tesla electric automobiles. Tesla is promoting the performance of its high-torque electric engine as superior to other sports cars manufactured by BMW, Lexus and Audi.
Nones Notes 