We’ve all passed through the cosmetics/fragrance counters in a Macy store or other major retailer only to have a pleasant-looking person standing by to mist us with the latest fragrance from Elizabeth Arden or Tommy Bahama. It’s a nice sampling tool, but Sephora has taken it to a whole new level.

It offers an in-store or online quiz, Fragrance IQ, that will tell consumers whether they prefer fruity or floral scent notes in their perfume and other fragrance characteristics. The results can help the customer filter thousands of choices down to ones that match the customers’ preferences.

Sephora has also rolled out “InstaScent” stations so customers can test scents and learn more about scent categories. The marketing tools are an effort to help Sephora drive sales in its fragrance department, which lags far behind beauty and skincare. Read the article …

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In comes Amazon Go, joining those companies that quickly went through the phases of zero awareness to skepticism to broad adoption. They are all now taken for granted as a normal part of our commerce and are thriving. Amazon, a technology disrupter in the grocery retail space, is going to have the same success. In a few years, we’ll be complaining about having to stand in line at a register—something that would have seemed impossible to subtract from the retail environment just a few years before.

If Amazon Go is a game-changer in the same mold, then we can expect a lot of changes in the coming years from grocery retails and in-store retail overall. Let’s break down why this model, which skips store checkout lines via a smartphone app, will work.

Amazon can do what Kroger cannot. Amazon and other companies have been trying to disrupt the traditional grocery model for years. The first wave of attempts was around online shopping with delivery—an approach that is now finally seeing some success and struggling to grow rapidly enough to support demand. Plus, traditional grocery retailers are able to easily enter that space and compete with tech companies.

Amazon Go changes the game in the way traditional grocery cannot and promises to disrupt the entire distribution chain from cashiers to stockers to delivery trucks to mystery shoppers. Traditional retailers will avoid pursuing a similar path due to influences like union relationships with employees and outcry over lost jobs. Amazon is free to reinvent grocery retail because they are not beholden to any parts of the traditional structure.

Consumers are primed for innovation. The immediate resistance and skepticism to new category advances isn’t coming from the consumer, it’s coming from the industry “experts” who are too embedded in the existing structure to see what is coming. Consumers love innovation and convenience. Loyalty to your local Piggly Wiggly is out the door if a shopper has a better experience elsewhere.

Every time a category undergoes a revolution in the consumer experience, shoppers’ expectations increase for all retail and buying experiences. Whenever a shopper gets used to a convenience, leaving an Uber without having to exchange money, for example, they begin to find more traditional experiences burdensome.

Shoppers love choice. All shoppers are becoming promiscuous about their brand choices. Faced with massive changes in all categories, new innovations, all products within reach, and more information than they can process, shoppers are now primed to look for the new and better every time they enter a category. Traditional brand loyalty is dead.

Amazon Go is a perfect retail environment for promiscuous shoppers as it allows shoppers to feel freer to explore and consider products without time-consuming lines at checkout. Amazon can also use their algorithms to connect shoppers to brands they otherwise wouldn’t have experienced through push offers to the app or in-store placement. Promiscuous shoppers are also attracted to a feeling of independence and freedom of choice. Even though your grocery store clerk isn’t following you around the store, the concept of being completely unfettered puts the shopper in a new frame of mind than they’ve ever had before in traditional grocery shopping.

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Taco Bell has launched a video series to reach consumers far beyond its drive-thru windows and snappy in-restaurant seating.

“Taco Tales” are short branded videos that put Taco Bell in the background. Taco Tales all live on YouTube in a big push to get video and social content in front of customers and prospects alike. In the second episode, a Taco Bell drive-thru encounter forces a hangry race team to improvise in how they order at the drive-thru window to satisfy their late-night cravings.

Some of the ideas for #TacoTales come from social media fans where Taco Bell has a heavy presence on platforms like Twitter and Reddit and fans are active. Ryan Rimsnider, Taco Bell’s senior manager of social strategy, weighs in. Read the article … and watch Episode 2: “Race Thru”

Related articles:

Taco Bell’s CMO Marisa Thalberg on the New “Feast for $1 All Day” Promotion
McDonald’s CMO on Content, DDB and Other Stuff
Arby’s CMO Rob Lynch on the Fun and Meats that Move Sales

The post Taco Bell Looks to Social Fans for Video Content Inspiration appeared first on Chiefmarketer.

A recent survey (please provide a link to the survey) breaks down how digitally native Millennials are rethinking legacy marketing tactics and widening the divide between the two and the previous generation of marketers. Here are five ways for legacy marketers to gain ground and remain competitive among Millennnial marketers:

1. Don’t try to sharpen dull tools Millennials are 85% more likely to invest in social media than print advertising. Nine out of 10 Millennials at small-to-medium sized businesses lead their marketing strategy with social media. As evidence, social media is treated as the core from which all other aspects are conceived and disseminated.

2. Drive brand awareness by generating and engaging in conversations Millennial marketers establish brand loyalty and improve customer experience by being readily available to react to consumer inquiries and comments through social posts and messages. However, if you’re not available to answer promptly, prolonged response times can damage brand reputation.

3. Connect the dots Millennials build the customer experience as a clearly defined and unified journey. By understanding the importance of authentic messaging and formatted content, fit to specific channels, Millennial marketers are able to engage multiple consumer segments in their preferred digital realms. Through a mix of owned, earned, organic and paid media across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Google, Millennials create fluid conversations using a cocktail of mediums, generating a streamlined journey from brand awareness to purchase.

4. The need to know, now One of the great returns of a digital-first approach is the ability to easily measure success and see instant results. With traditional tactics such as print and television no such advantages are possible, leaving traditional marketers unfamiliar with essential tools and lacking immediate results, wasting budgets and time on ineffective media.

This capacity for instant feedback and ROI optimization has driven Millennials to adopt the “failing fast” approach. If something isn’t working they investigate, take notes, iterate or move on. To return to previous advice, I suggest you learn to do the same.

5. Get out of the box Television is on the endangered list, but video is booming. Close to 0% of Millennials invest in TV advertising; which isn’t surprising, seeing as Millennials are the “cord-cutting” generation and don’t necessarily find cable television a worthy investment for themselves, let alone their marketing budgets.

6. Video is currently one of, if not the most, effective marketing mediums Eighty-five percent of Millennials currently use video in their marketing strategy and almost half (45%) dedicate more than a quarter of their budget to it. Video combines the flexibility and efficiency of performance marketing with social culture and the engagement of storytelling.

Used as a form of social conversation, video showcases personalization and creative iteration for Millennial marketers across platforms and audiences. They use it among other tools as a means of targeted engagement, not as a broad net thrown into the vast digital sea with hopes that it catches attention.

Millennials are fleeing the barren terrain of legacy marketing practices and leading the forge into a profitable, digital landscape where social media and video reign. For legacy marketers, this unfamiliar territory requires new framing, skills and tools, as well as evolving marketing tactics and strategies necessary to survive. Though it may appear a difficult landscape to tread, legacy marketers need to learn to take advantage of available technologies—and keep a close eye on those Millennial marketers.
Reid Genauer is the chief marketing officer of Magisto. He can be reached at reid@magisto.com.

Related article:

Millennial Marketers Disrupt Balance of Marketing Power

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Lucky for us, we didn’t have to do all the work to find these gems: Brandwatch did it for us. It sifted through the massive amounts of marketing and advertising campaigns pushed out into the 2016 marketplace to show us its Top 10 picks.

These brilliant campaigns came from Virgin, Pret A Manger, Under Armour (the campaign featuring multi-Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps, of course!), Airbnb, OK Go & Morton Salt, Nike, H&M, Hotels.com, Spotify and Google. Read the article … and watch the H&M feel-good holiday video.

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“If we give our users more than one option, they will get overwhelmed. So let’s remove all of the choices to keep things as simple as possible.”

They’re referring, of course, to a popular landmark study on “choice overload,” where shoppers were presented with either six or 24 varieties of jams. While more shoppers approached the larger display, those that viewed the half-dozen jam jars ended up making 10 times the number of jam purchases. The findings, presented by psychologist Barry Schwartz in a TED talk and published in “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less,” suggested that too many options could make it harder for an individual to make a decision and consequently lead to inaction.

But is more choice always bad? As consumers, we can all relate to the feeling of being overwhelmed with too many options at times (the shampoo aisle in the drugstore comes to mind for me), but the notion of “choice overload” always felt too general and somewhat at odds with my first-hand experience designing experiences for patients and healthcare professionals.

For instance, in one recent test for a disease education website, we observed a higher success rate when 10 links were exposed on a homepage compared to a version with only five links. The additional options, which were organized into thematic groups, made finding answers to questions much easier. Links were no longer hidden behind menus; they became obvious.

If we look at the most recent research in psychology, the paradox of choice isn’t an absolute. Research has actually shown that the context of an assortment plays a larger role than the total number of options. In meta-analysis from 2015, a group of researchers identified factors that can contribute to choice overload:

• Options are formatted and presented in a random order
• Options have a high number of features/attributes and the features are not easily comparable
• Consumers are in a product-decision mindset vs. a browsing mindset, and may feel pressured by time constraints and/or the need to justify the purchase decision to others
• Consumers do not have a clear preference in mind prior to making a choice

At a baseline, these factors are a great reminder that we should avoid the temptation to oversimplify findings from individual research studies. Results from a single study, regardless whether it was focused on purchasing jam or sweat socks, should not be accepted or applied as universal truths.

When it comes to the presentation of options in an experience, we can use our skills as UX and visual designers to display well-formatted options that make it easier for customers to scan, compare and understand the choices before them.

There is no doubt that in some cases we will be presenting options to consumers that may include a high number of attributes, which may or may not be easily comparable. Choice overload is more likely to come into play when someone is making a choice from a set of options when they are not well versed in the facets or meaning behind the data set. (Comparing and selecting a health insurance plan is a fitting example.)

So how do we get there? It starts with a user-centered design process. We need to continue concentrating our energy on uncovering authentic insights about our customers and designing experiences with their contexts of use and specific needs in mind. What are they trying to achieve? How much do they understand about the subject matter? What influences and drives their decision making process?

The only way to truly answer these questions is to talk to our customers early and often, and then validate that we are offering the right set of understandable and valuable options. For health marketers in particular, engagement with the consumer and staying focused on the goal of delivering positive health outcomes is essential to overcoming a fear of choice overload and reliably guiding the consumer through a suitable array of options for themselves and their families.

Christopher Murray is vice president/group director, user experience at Digitas Health LifeBrands.

Related Articles:

The Art of B2B Creative: Special Report

20 Visionary Marketing Campaigns

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Technology—including monitoring and analytics tools—has made the job easier, but with social providing so many opportunities for marketers to engage with consumers for some many different reasons to spark an action it’s no wonder everyone’s heads are spinning. There’s customer retention, generating sales, pure engagement or entertainment, reviving dormant customers and on it goes. And with each different execution or engagement there is a different set of metrics to determine how it’s all going.

Here, we get five practical tips to help create and execute on measurable social media goals, including defining your scope, including a call to action and getting organizational alignment. Read the article …

The post 5 Ways to Set Goals and Measure Social Media Marketing appeared first on Chiefmarketer.

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter describing his groundbreaking experiments to the Royal Society in London. Franklin excused the length of his report as follows: “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”

Generations of experts have praised directness and brevity, and lamented the time and effort needed to achieve it. This concept still rings true in the digital era: creating a streamlined, engaging website that tells a compelling brand story requires the complex mastery of simplicity.

Rebuilding a website is not a straightforward process, especially when every customer wants to see your brand adapt to their viewpoint. Questions aren’t limited to marketing, either: they converge at the intersection of marketing, design and technology to become one. Rebuilding a website requires you to wear different hats. Even with a rock star team at your side, you have to be able to understand the language, the logic, and the thinking behind how websites work, why they work, and how they are used by your customers.

Rebuilding my organization’s website was an incredible journey that allowed me to roll up my sleeves and challenge design, write code, and implement new technology. As you embark on your own journey of rebuilding your website, the following five lessons will help you focus on key areas for crafting a unified brand experience.

1. Never lose sight of differentiation  

At some point, you will find yourself creating a list of websites that you like with the intention of sending them to your agency. Pause. You run the risk of having your agency catering only to your organization’s taste rather than focusing on the best way to showcase your brand experience. Instead, think about how each web element you liked could help an aspect of your brand and discuss these points with your team and agency. The more you focus on competitor sites, the more likely you are to end up with a website that only competes, rather than differentiates. Remember, your brand and story are what differentiates your website, not the website itself.

2. Let your brand flow

You nailed down your storyline and now you’re embarking on wireframes. You researched websites to get a basic idea on how things work and why the work. But then you become tempted to begin taking pieces of other sites and suggesting them to your agency to be included in your revised wireframes. Pause. Each web element is a component of a greater experience. Take one web element out and combine it with others, and you begin to bring more complexity in to your project. You lose flow. Ultimately, you will find yourself fitting your story into blank spaces, rather than allowing your story to create the spaces for your website. Your brand is a crucial part of your website’s identity in both visual and written communication. When your website speaks with a distinctive voice, it conveys authenticity, rather than simply appearing as another common brand in the eyes of your customers. Let your brand voice flow.

3. Simple is beautiful

There are just a handful of websites that can convey a lot of meaning with so little. For the rebuild of our site, simplicity drove its design and its messaging. To break down this concept, I think of three important areas that comprise simplicity: 

• How effective we are at allowing the user to find information
• How we leverage space to make the visitor feel welcomed
• How we place content across the site to narrate our story

Your visitor’s attention span is short. As you rebuild your site, the less information that’s needed to explain your brand’s story, the more powerful – and better – the brand experience will be.

4. Your brand lives through technology

Rebuilding a website involves more than just content and design. One of the biggest components is technology. Part of the brand experience is how personalization and automation work in unison to help deliver a message. Before you think about design, evaluate whether the technology supporting your website will help your organization achieve the desired brand experience. Interview key players in your organization to determine ways in which you can find gaps, change processes, and reduce operational costs. For example:

• Can we deploy landing pages not in minutes but in seconds?
• Can we quickly create microsites in a matter of hours?
• Can we maintain and edit our site without long delays?
• Can we find by name who is doing what in our site?

This is where your site rebuild can change the way you work and deeply impact the bottom line of your organization.

5. You will not get it right the first time

This is the most important lesson of all. Despite the countless meetings you’ll have, the wireframe and content revisions, and the perfect migration, you’ll always discover ways to improve. Most importantly, as you collect data in the first few months, you’ll know what needs to be iterated. Your website rebuild should take this into consideration from day one. Don’t be afraid to break convention and try something a competitor isn’t doing. This is how you differentiate yourself while remaining competitive. After your launch, switch gears into finding the sweet spot where your conversation rates grow exponentially. This is the most exciting part of all! Be prepared for weekly, if not daily, releases – push back if you’re given a schedule of quarterly releases as users expect that now.

Even if you spent thousands making your website look cutting-edge, a website without a story will be ignored by customers. You don’t need bells and whistles to create impact – you need simplicity and authenticity. This is what creates a special connection between your brand and the customer. Realizing this lesson is the most beautiful – and effective – thing you can do for your brand.

Bryan Hwang is a digital & content marketing manager for Wipro Digital.

Related Articles:

Website Performance Anxiety—Does Your Customer Experience Stack Up?

A New Website Won’t Fix Your Brand—3 Common Mistakes

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Take a moment and watch this video from Always, circa 2009. Now, watch another video from Always, circia 2014.

These videos illustrate a fascinating shift in brand marketing that’s been happening over the past few years: The shift away from messaging and toward storytelling.

Always 2009 Commercial

Message: Always is the best feminine hygiene product provider.

The messaging is focused on you—your features, your value props, your core values, and how you position them relative to your competitors. It makes a surface-level impact on the audience, which may be enough to prompt an immediate action, but doesn’t drive a memorable reaction or sustained connection.

Always 2014 Commercial

Story: Women’s rights is an ongoing issue in the US, and Always cares about it because its customers care about it.

Storytelling is focused on a narrative, and how that narrative engages your audience. It’s bigger than who your brand is or what your brand does. It goes deeper than messaging ever could. And it has a longer shelf-life, making a lasting impact that prompts action and loyalty over time.

Brands have been using product-focused messaging for a long time. Storytelling is a much harder craft to execute well. So why the shift away from messaging in favor of story?

1. It’s Memorable (Drives Brand Awareness). According to research Paul Zak, stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts. Messaging doesn’t usually stick with people, but stories do. 

2. It’s Relatable (Makes an Emotional Impact). Stories help you relate to another person’s perspective. When you listen to a story, you experience the exact same brain pattern as the person telling it. The emotional impact of a story is much deeper and more meaningful than a one-way exchange of information from your brand to consumers. 

3. It’s Shareable (Has Viral Potential). Unless your messaging is particularly ridiculous or surprising, most people won’t be motivated to share it with others. Stories, however, are infinitely shareable because they’re much more broadly applicable and appealing to different kinds of people. Going back to the Always example: Very few people shared the 2009 product-focused commercial (1 backlink according to Buzzsumo) but thousands of people shared the 2014 story-driven commercial (34,375 backlinks) because the story tapped into an important narrative that everyone could relate to. 

4. It Drives Action (Contributes to Engagement and Conversions). In his research, Paul Zak also found that stories trigger neurochemical processes that enable certain kinds of resource-sharing. This brain activity can lead to profound behavioral changes such as increased engagement and generosity (read: spend). Sounds like something brands might want to encourage their audiences to do.

Stories are omnipresent across every communication channel. Brands have been utilizing common channels—websites, blogs, social, and video—to tell stories for years. But some of the most interesting brand storytelling happening today is venturing into new technological territory.

In the U.S., consumers spent $23.5 billion in 2015 alone on video games. As desktop, console, and mobile platforms have grown more sophisticated, so too have the narrative capabilities of game makers.

Brands have only recently entered into the narrative game foray in a meaningful way. In 2015, Juniper, a networking solutions provider in the B2B space, made their first foray into games with their mobile app Deception Force.

The story caters to people interested in security, which relates back to their secure networking solutions. But it’s not designed to sell anything—it’s built to immerse the player in a world full of threats, which is a much more powerful way to communicate their message.

Content creators across industries and verticals are still in the process of learning how to use AR and VR as a storytelling canvas. Brands are already starting to experiment with augmented and virtual reality experiences to engage early adopters.

Consumer brand Patrón created an immersive VR story called The Art of Patrón about their tequila craft earlier in 2016.

The film explores the process they use to create their product, from agave farming to bottling. The viewer participates in the story from the perspective of a bee flying around Patrón’s villa in Mexico, adding a whimsical element to the experience.

Interactive web technology has been around for over two decades, but brands have only recently begun to leverage the power of interactivity to tell more immersive, personalized stories.

Universal Music Group has decades worth of fascinating stories about their artists and albums. Recently, the team created interactive experiences to promote specific albums and playlists. Their latest microsite, World on a String, tells the story of Frank Sinatra’s acts of charity as he toured throughout his career.

Each location features media, a short story, and photos from Sinatra’s visit, giving the viewer a chance to see and hear what fans experienced around the world.

The Bottom Line

If you want your brand to make a real, lasting connection with consumers, tell stories instead of pushing messaging. Whether you’re use established communication channels or test-driving the latest technology, story should be at the heart of your experiences. This approach to content creation will not only drive more engagement and impact from your efforts—it’ll transform the way you build and maintain relationships with your audience.

Ashley Taylor Anderson is director of product marketing at Ceros.

The post Messaging vs. Storytelling: The Evolution of Brand Communication appeared first on Chiefmarketer.

Already accessible to advertisers, ETAs will become Google’s only form of text ad by early 2017. That means standard text ads (STAs) will become obsolete in the New Year.

Early ETA adopters are currently experiencing better ad-performance, all while gathering crucial metrics on what the best ETA content is for their campaigns.

The Basics of ETAs

What are expanded text ads? Like the name suggests, ETAs are text ads with a larger character limit and more fields.

The key new features of ETAs are a second headline (H2) and an expanded description line. Unlike STAs, ETAs have two 30-character headlines and one 80-character description.

Having two headlines and a longer description allows for many new advertising venues, but keep in mind ETAs still need to meet the editorial requirements of all past Google ads.

Migrating to ETAs, however, isn’t a science. The best migration strategies will depend on context such as vertical, market and competition, etc. There are no rules; every advertiser needs to experiment to discover what works for them.

Testing ETAs

In order to know what migration strategy will work best, it’s important to run experiments where the performance of the best STA is compared with a migrated STA and a newly written ETA. The goal is to generate quantitative data on the relative performance of these ads.

Before we delve into ETA marketing strategies, it’s important to note that, even though ETAs were created with mobile-users in mind, ETAs do not have a mobile preference.

That fact may influence how you want to implement ETA testing, as it gives you a few options.

You can either choose to create new ETA campaigns for each specific device (mobile, desktop) and track how they perform alongside your current STAs or create an ETA campaign across all platforms.

Another option is leaving mobile ads untouched, since they tend to perform better in general, and test out new ETAs on desktop/tablet campaigns.

The choice is yours and will depend on your unique brand and business.

Regardless of what route you take, an essential step is to pause down your current ads, except for those you want to test. By having all your old STA and new ETA ads running at the same time, you won’t get enough data to track how the ETAs are performing.

If the migrated ad performs better than the STA, record the data and move onto another STA. If not, then it’s back to the migration plan drawing board. Some newly written ETAs might perform so well you’ll decide it’s worthwhile to rewrite more STAs as ETAs rather than migrating. It really depends upon the value that rewriting brings to your business.

Tips On Creating ETAs

• When it comes to formatting ETAs themselves, the possibilities are endless. More characters gives you more room to experiment, but certain techniques are already working for many advertisers.

• The simplest method of making an ETA is to take your old description line 2 (D2) and make it your new H2. Yes, it sounds strange, but you’d be surprised by the extra performance that brings.

• Another option is to place a call to action in your H2, or a consumer benefit.

• Don’t limit changes to your H2, either. Try flipping your existing H1 with an H2 and see how the ad performs.

• Make the most out of the longer character limit for your description, too. While a new description may not have the same impact as an H2, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the value it adds to a campaign. Try inserting a unique feature of a product or a business benefit in the description alongside a call to action, since you have the room.

• Of course, you could always just start from scratch and create a brand new ETA. Sometimes a fresh perspective works best.

What’s most important to remember is that you need to test your ETAs with all sorts of new configurations. Sample some of the strategies outlined above and track how each ETA-configuration performs. And consider this Migration Testing Flow Chart as a handy guide for testing.

Richard Beck is the AdPlatform product manager for Acquisio.

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How Leading CMOs are Planning Marketing Budgets for 2017

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