Want 6 Easy Tips To Get Your Website And Catalog Producing Higher Dollars?

While there are some “home grown” product merchandising experts in the age of laptops and scanners, most successful catalog and web designers accept these "rules" as basic to increasing dollars per page. You might want to apply these to your latest creation as a final litmus test:

*Copy is more than critical; Key words need to be relevant and emotional tag lines supportive of moving the buyer to action.

*Consistent ordering SKU/identifying numbers, and pricing at the bottom of the product's descriptive copy.  This makes it easy for the patron to identify and buy in 3 seconds:

Chocolate Covered Cherries.

Creamy milk chocolate with

liquid centers and a cherry. 

D347  |  6 OZ  |  Boxed  |  $6.49

Flexible Plastic Storage Bowls.

Set of three  (10 | 8 | 6 | inches).

D483  |  Shrink Wrapped  |  $9.99

*Covers count!  Front/Back pages (outside and inside) plus the center spread are the critical “sweet spots”.  Their job is to grab attention, put the best foot forward i.e. products, price points and get the reader to pick up the catalog and go inside!  Sometimes this gets lost in translation when designers get distracted looking to create a pretty picture instead of a great performing catalog.  These pages are paramount to “selling product” and demand a lot of attention.

*"Touch points” and “eye movements” (for readers) start with the attention going to the top right of the page and moving in a “C” across both catalog pages.  Web site viewing always starts at the top and moves downward i.e.  gravity pulling the reader to the bottom. Strategically place your best selling products for maximum effect.

*Relevant offers (call to action promotions) should be on both your website and catalog. Catalog front and home pages of the website are very important "silent salespeople".

*Be a consistent steward of your brand, on both your catalog and website.  Fonts, color ways, best sellers, low price points, should all be similar in the initial customer experience. 

As always, do with this what you will, I keep these “basics” close and have found them to hold true even in the face of an ever changing 21^st century marketing world.

Its 10:00 Do You Know Where Your Mom Is? (Mom Marketing 2010)

A sizable bit of my business in CPG takes me to studying the buying habits of Moms all across the nation. Today I came across the most current study from The National Retail Federation (RAMA study) below, thought I would share and ask your observations:



My curiosity is; with the importance of MOMs and Marketing, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the Social Media impact on Moms who are one of the most active consumer groups that buy my consumer goods? Some interesting findings from the study are:

*Regular and Occasional Weekly Media Usage: Moms vs. Adults 18 PLUS:
Listen to the radio 80.3% | 70.2%
Listen to Satellite radio 14.2% | 18.0%
Listen to Web radio 15.0% |14.2%
Watch TV 91.2% | 88.9%
Surf the Internet 86.2% | 82.0%
Read/Send E-mail 90.3% | 86.5%
Read magazines 60.7% | 57.6%
Read the newspaper 54.0% | 58.1%
Read the mail 81.5% | 77.9%
Instant Message 30.7% | 26.1%
Blog 11.4% | 9.6%
Video Gaming 27.5% | 28.8%

*Mom Is More Tech-Savvy Than You Think:
The world of online shopping has grown leaps and bounds in the last decade. As the internet becomes more sophisticated, Americans are finding it easier to locate exactly what they want when they want it.

*Moms and Social Media:
Read Blogs: 51.6%
Post to Blogs: 27.7%
Have a “Blog of my own”: 15.3%
Twitter: 15.3%
My Space: 42.4%
FaceBook: 60.3%


What are your observations? Yes, Social media is growing, but what are you doing to find Mom where she is hanging out? Any surprises here?
*Source: BIG research SIMM 14, June 2009 and NRF

Branding; Are You Headed To Extinction Or Distinction?

Have you looked at where your brand is headed lately?

You may be surprised at some of this year’s top 100 movement up or down. If you believe a brand ranking is the canary in the mine as I do, the year 2009 has some telling signs of where the economy is affecting buyer’s habits. Check out the below selected activity from the top 100 global brands list*.

New brands on the top list in the last two years:

·Polo Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Puma, Adobe, Burger King, Lancôme.

Dropped backward:

·Toyota, Intel, Disney, Mercedes Benz, BMW, American Express, Oracle, UPS, Sony, HSBC, Dell, CITI, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Harley Davidson, GAP, Starbucks, Lexus.

Rising brands this year over last on the top 100 list:

·McDonalds, Google, HP, Gillette, Cisco, Marlboro, Honda, Samsung, Apple, H&M, Pepsi, Nescafe, Nike, SAP, IKEA.

Where is your brand headed in the next five years? What have you done for your buyers lately?


*Interbrand 2009 rankings

GC3HGZPSADMY

Yes, Kemo Sabe, This Company Is Succeeding In Today’s Economy!

Want real positive simple answers to why this giftware supplier company is making it?

1. Products people want to buy are offered for sale at fair, affordable retail prices. Simple as it sounds many companies today have beaten to death tired old product lines because they get a big mark up or they don’t have the monies to develop new designs. Most old giftware today is in the "dollar store" graveyards and competes directly with the "Brand" offerings at rock bottom prices. The perceived value is still there on this new companies products, they sell thru and the "Brand" retailer gets great turns because it is priced right. Many giftware companies are still slapping new or licensed art on old tired junk, this is not 2010 product development, those days are gone....

This "new" company understands that impulse products must do more than one thing in the market today. Being a “dustible” (A giftware or Collectible that now or in the future collects dust on a shelf) doesn’t sell in today’s economic environment. Products today have 3 seconds to stoke the emotion of a buyer, cruel as it sounds. This company positively pushes specific targeted responses and connects with the individual buyer’s “emotion button.”

2. Internal systems are state of the art, outsourced, and yield variable overhead at low cost. VOIP Phones, Cloud email, I.T., accounting, HR, customer service infrastructure, and web services, etc, are all outsourced and the savings are given back to the end customer in lower prices, again giving the products high perceived value and high turns for the retailers.

3. Interactive consumer mindset. One of their top selling “Giftibles” is designed for today’s and tomorrow’s buyer enlisting the capability to have the product interact with a personalized live website as an ongoing ROI service.

4. Aggressive marketing that finds the customer and supports the brand for its retailers. Infomercials, Permission email marketing, Direct Marketing, and a number of innovative techniques that are proprietary all support their retailers and drive end customers to their dealers in an ongoing effort. They are playing offense, not defense with their marketing and sales in conventional and unconventional ways!

Who is this company that “get’s it” in today’s challenging marketplace? The company is called Little Gifts (http://www.littlegifts.com/) and is one of the top giftware companies listed on this year’s best seller list by Giftbeat magazines 2009 charts (Pet gifts) (http://www.giftbeat.com/ ). One of its hot items? IDtag.com (http://www.idtag.com/ ) is a non evasive, privacy protected pet system that invokes a gift and interactive web solution for finding lost pets. Great sellers are breed specific targeted affordable impulse items for owners of specific dogs, cats, etc.

The owner’s did not drop out of the sky with their innovations, rather learned the gift marketplace after being highly regarded consultants (for some of the “big Dog” brands back in the day). Growing up in the new interactive world Little Gifts owners took the entrepreneurial path and combined their business know how and consulting experience with their own money to create this vision of what works. This product line and company is gift, collectible, and decorative accessories circa 2010. They have reinvented the successful gift company model for the next decade.

So Kemo Sabe, better to light a candle than curse the darkness of this consumer economy, lessons learned from today’s buyer are showing the way. This is one case study with a happy ending, these folks are adapting and being rewarded for creating a new business model; they should be congratulated!

You might want to take a page from their book and forget about all those Indians that are swarming around your present situation.......

Ecommerce And Interactive Avatar Advertising Inside The Box; Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

First The Basics Of The Interactive Virtual Landscape Inside The “Box”:

•At least one or more Nintendo Wii (younger and family friendly games), XBOX 360, and PS3 (Older, albeit more “mature” rated) game systems are in many homes today.
•Most non gamers (and Parents) are unaware of the virtual worlds that come into your homes when these boxes are hooked up to the internet live.
•Avatars are the alter ego virtual travelers created by the player inside the interactive worlds.
•Interactive product placements, Ecommerce and youth advertising inside these boxes are now a billion dollar industry! Surprise!

Recently, I worked with an advertiser in Manhattan who is heavily involved in a beta project where local advertisers and promotions are triggered and rotated by the location of the Ip address visiting the live games inside Nintendo, Xbox, and PS3. The idea is national ads and product placements show up as the visitor travels through the game or a chat mall. The real trick for him was targeted local ads are triggered (i.e. Joe’s local pizza place) by the IP address or the visitor can punch in a zip code if they are traveling into a temporary city (future business trips into say San Francisco to see where 2 for 1 restaurant coupons are available to print off).

Perhaps this national interactive advertising is not new to any Ecommerce and Interactive experts, but what was new to me was my “Local” AVATAR could go into a name brand store or local (i.e. virtual 3D Radio Shack or locally owned Betty’s clothing store) and make a purchase in 3d with my credit card. This was an incredible customer experience for me as I don’t actually go to malls anymore to buy “stuff”. The experience was a virtual web shopping site in 3d while I was strolling along talking to other Avatars. That week my purchases came to my home on time and in good condition, just like making a website purchase. Also of note, above the buildings in virtual beta town, one could clearly see the graphic ads were targeted to me in the demo, with a few national Nike billboards thrown in for good measure.

Just as a heads up, today’s kids are not out playing street football, or dressing Barbie as much as they used to, but they are very active! We as Ecommerce and Interactive Marketers can curse the generational darkness or we can go into these AVATAR boxes and find our future buyers in their native habitat. This new Interactive advertising world can be a force for good or bad, but it will be a force to be reckoned with in the future. Good luck, the Ecommerce and Interactive Marketing game just changed…………..