How does marketing’s past affect its future: Ancient Egypt may hold the key to this mystery…

If you’re interested in how the past of marketing could end up affecting its future, you can check out this column by Brand Strategy’s editor Ruth Mortimer in this week’s Marketing Week. She discusses how trends from ancient Egypt still apply - who knew that marketing and brands had such distinguished traditions lurking in their history?

Dove: should ‘real women’ support the crusade against forest destruction?

Last month, we ran an in-depth case study on Dove, (subscribers can read it here) looking at how the moisturiser brand was using thematic marketing based around issues. The ‘real women’ marketing, which has now been running for around four years, seems to have got increasingly issue-based rather than product focused so we were asking: why, and will this work? Or, in a difficult economic climate, should you concentrate on selling the products rather than the brand?

Anyway, after publishing that article, we noticed that the interesting blog Ethics Girl (part of The Independent newspaper online) had picked up on a part of the Dove story we hadn’t covered. Apparently, Greenpeace has launched a campaign against Unilever - Dove’s parent company - to try and prevent forest areas being razed in favour of planting palm oil. Unilever is allegedly the largest user of palm oil on the planet and so the pressure group hopes that it will stop using the ingredient or admit to this less responsible action on its part. Independent toiletries brand Lush has apparently created a palm oil-free soap, so there clearly is potential out there.

What do you think? Does the issue of palm oil undermine Dove’s otherwise responsible messages? Let us know your thoughts.

A typical Dove ad, above….

Chinese creativity event at the Victoria & Albert museum

We wanted to draw readers’ attention to an interesting event taking place next week at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. It’s a two-day get-together for creative businesses keen to move into China, called: The Creative China: Visual Culture, Architecture and Design International Conference.

This event aims to let British creative businesses interested in moving into the expanding Asian market meet with experts in Chinese design. The conference is organised by King’s College London and co-sponsored by HSBC and Creative Connexions.

It runs from Friday 6th to Saturday 7th June and If you want more information you can email here. We’re not sponsoring it or involved with the event, by the way, we just thought it looked very interesting if you are keen to move into China.

Global fairtrade: what’s the latest?

It was World Fair Trade day earlier this month (see our original post on it here). The Fairtrade organisation has just released some figures explaining how fair trade sales are progressing on a global nature.

The details:

• Worldwide consumers spent over 2.3 billion euros on Fairtrade certified products in 2007. This represents a 47% increase on the previous year and means that over 1.5 million producers and workers in 58 developing countries now benefit from Fairtrade sales.
• Growth can be seen across all product categories. In particular, sales of juices have almost quadrupled, sugar have doubled and bananas have increased by 72%. Coffee, the first and one of the most established Fairtrade products, continued to grow steadily with an increase of 19%. Fairtrade cotton farmers have also seen demand for their produce more than double in just one year. During 2007, the sales of items made out of Fairtrade certified cotton, ranging from cotton wool to jeans and towels, surpassed 14 million individual items.

• The value of sales in Fairtrade’s biggest markets, the UK and US, grew by 72% and 46% respectively. Sweden and Norway were home to the fastest growing markets for Fairtrade with increases of 166% and 110% respectively. The highest per capita consumption in the world was in Switzerland where consumers spent an average of €20.8 on Fairtrade products in 2007

• The estimated retail value of Fairtrade products by country is listed below:

• 

The gap between executives and their frontline staff

There is a significant gap between what corporate executives perceive to be their brand’s customer service levels and what is actually experienced by consumers, suggests a new report from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories.

The company surveyed a group of C-level executives (CEOs, CIOs etc) and compared their responses to those on the front line of customer service (contact centre managers, directors of customer care etc). The firm did this across 42 countries with 927 participating companies.

The research found a significant gap between C-level perceptions and the reality experienced by most of their customers. Here are a few highlights:

• Both C-level executives and customer care professionals agree that customer service is a strategic branding issue. 92% of C-level executives and 85 per cent of customer-centric employees agree with this point of view.

• However, just 20% of CEO-level executives and 20% of customer care professionals say their contact centres are very strategic.

Vodka is the top global tipple, says report into top booze brands

Smirnoff is the most powerful alcohol brand in the world, according to the annual league table from brand valuation company Intangible Business. The study, which looked at nearly 10,000 spirit and wine brands, cites Diageo’s vodka as the most important global marque in the industry.

The league table assesses both the financial contribution of each brand alongside their strength in the eyes of the consumer and is compiled by combining scores from a panel of some of the world’s leading drinks industry experts with hard data.  This year’s top 10 are:

The Top 10

1.         Smirnoff
2.         Johnnie Walker
3.         Bacardi
4.         Martini
5.         Hennessy
6.         Absolut
7.         Jack Daniels
8.         Chivas Regal
9.         Baileys
10.       Ballantines

The Albert Sessions: events and educational marketing

The Brand Strategy team like to draw your attention to interesting initiatives going on around the world and we like this one: The Albert Sessions.

It’s an interesting piece of marketing and educational fare from London’s Royal Albert Hall venue. The Albert Sessions offer bands the hire of its 5,200 venue for just 50% of its normal price. Previous acts to play it include The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Jay-Z. Ticket prices are capped to allow younger people to watch the band in the famous venue.

In return, the bands are asked to get involved with an educational initiative. Working with kids from underprivileged schools in the local boroughs, the children will be invited to the Royal Albert Hall on the afternoon of the show to take part in various educational activities. The youngsters will have the chance to learn from the band about the music industry and watch them perform.

The first such partnership kicks off this Friday with Liverpool group The Wombats. Tickets are available here.

An interesting idea - it would be great to see some of the brands involved in music sponsorship getting involved with projects like this. What about having Nokia paying an electronic/technology-focused band’s venue hire and then sorting out educational sessions for kids? It would not only be something worthwhile - it shouldn’t feature overt, tasteless branding - but would reinforce Nokia’s brand focus on technology and usability.

What do you think?

Marketing to wealthy women: a report from The Luxury Institute

The Luxury Institute has released a new report into The Wealthy Woman, which you can download in full here.

But let’s pull out the highlights of this report, which surveyed women from households with $150,000 or more in annual income ($262,000 average income, $2.2 million average net worth):

First, The Luxury Institute defines the new ‘wealthy woman’:

• She’s educated, employed and controls the lion’s share of spending in wealthy households. Nine times out of ten, she is married, or living with a life partner. Her responsibilities often include a high-paid job or running her own business while also caring for a child or a parent.

Which are the brands she picks out as particularly noteworthy?

• Marriott, Hilton, Visa and Home Depot stand out for their skill in marketing to wealthy women. Each of these companies earned an unaided mention from seven per cent of respondents. American Express (five percent) and Remax (four per cent) each received frequent mention, as did Cadillac, Capital One, Lowe’s and Westin (each with three per cent).

So why is this important?

• Married wealthy women, on average, make almost two-thirds (64% ) of a family’s purchase decisions; 73% report making a majority of the household spending decisions.

World Fair Trade Day: Are UK consumers buying better?

It’s World Fair Trade Day today so we at Brand Strategy will be making sure we don’t consume anything but products that have been made and distributed in a fair way to all concerned. Although really we are still waiting for brands to make everything fairtrade so we don’t have to think about making a choice in the matter….

But while we’re waiting, let’s look at some research from the Fairtrade Foundation, which suggests that 70% of the UK population now recognises the FAIRTRADE mark, up from 57% in 2007.

Mind Your Avatars

Research agency Conquest has launched ‘Metaphorix’, a new online tool to measure unconscious emotional reactions to brands using online animations and avatars in its research process. Conquest believes this differentiation enables access to consumers’ gut reactions by bypassing the conscious mind.

David Penn Conquest co-founder comments: “Much current research is past its sell-by date. It assumes brand decisions are conscious, explicable and rational. In reality our behaviour and our response to brands is highly emotional. As consumers we say one thing and do another. Our behaviour is not logical, considered, conscious or easily accessed via standard questioning.”

While consumers are constantly bombarded with information, there simply isn’t time to think, says Penn, so emotions power much of our engagement with brands, and we use unconscious shortcuts to help us make decisions.

Metaphorix is designed to plug directly into how good, excited, desirous we really feel towards a brand, rather than rely on how we say we feel.  In this way, the tool facilitates measuring the warmth experienced towards a brand, the level of intimacy we feel with it, how empathetic we are towards it and how ‘cool and talked about’ we consider it is.