From the NEW primetime to the Cold Storage blunder
By Clara Lock and Kelly Morse
At Singapore Polytechnic’s Media and Communication Conference 2012: Click to Connect, marketing professionals shared their insights into the industry.
Here’s a snapshot of what we found to be the most interesting.
The morning after is the new primetime
Gone are the days when the highlight of our social lives was congregating over a social event, be it the 7pm Chinese serial or the Friday night party at the bar, said Mr Lee Yew Leong, the executive director of the Starcom Mediavest Group. Now, we validate our experiences by their social media presence – pictures on Facebook, or it didn’t happen. Along with the pictures, the deluge of comments, tags, likes and tweets serve to build our perception and memory of what really happened. So always follow up with your audience, because the party doesn’t stop till Facebook says so.
Marketing isn’t always about your product
When Blackberry wanted to reward and connect with its loyal users in Indonesia, it reached out to fans through a large scale concert – Live & Rockin – starring K-pop idols 2PM and R&B singer Taio Cruz among other big names. While this may sound completely irrelevant to Blackberry, Mr Gerald Ang, head of digital marketing in the Asia Pacific Region shared how this concert garnered an immense amount of social media action, which is always invaluable to a brand. Users are engaged, concert-goers are excited, the brand connects with its audience, and everyone wins.
Even Cold Storage makes mistakes trying to guess at marketing
Tesco HomePlus launched a virtual supermarket using the subway walls in South Korea, which eventually secured their position as the top grocery store in the country. Commuters in the station simply take pictures of items they want from the wall images that replicate grocery store aisles, then it’s delivered to their home. Geoff Tan, the senior vice president, head of strategic marketing for SPH Limited, shared the failed attempt by Cold Storage to mimic Tesco here in Singapore. Utilizing SMRT, they tried and failed at the same gimmick. At the culprit, marketers realized that grocery stores here are much more conveniently located than they are in South Korea, eliminating the high demand for virtual shopping. From this, we can learn that in-depth market research is vital when launching campaigns and perhaps realizing these market differences could have saved Cold Storage a lot of headaches.
Social branding needs to be sincere (Okay, you might have heard this one)
“If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face” read the opening slide of Nokia’s Head of Earned Media Marketing Shalabh Pandey, a quote taken from Hugh MacLeod. People have a well-honed bullshit-filter these days, honed by the vast amount of information on the web. This means to cut through the clutter, you need to create a message people can relate to – not by hard selling, but by being authentic. Marketers need to be producing genuine, useful content that fans connect with and want to pass on so that they appear funny, insightful and intelligent.
