Chinese Web Marketing – A case study from Money Cat

Money Cat Consulting is and Australian multi-lingual marketing company.
It provides innovative marketing solutions for corporations wishing to reach Chinese communities in Australia and abroad.

They launched a Chinese-language financial & investment website (http://www.moneycat.com.au), to reach Chinese investors.

To reach out and acquire members, they used various marketing & PR tools – with different levels of success.

When reaching for the Chinese market, these are the lessons that we can learn from Money Cat.

• Using newspapers is very expensive with a very low response rate. Especially advertisements have little effect, but some advertorials can generate a good level of interest depending on the specific product.
  
• Web banners can work sometimes, but they usually have a limited exposure period. It can be a good tool for branding, but Chinese web users do not click a lot on web banners anymore.
  
• Google Adword-campaign is not effective for reaching the Chinese market – the favorite search engine is Baidu. Google Adword and Yahoo keywords do work in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where English is is predominant Web language.
  
• Taiwanese websites are effective as a marketing channel, since many Chinese web users also look at Taiwanese websites for information. Especially articles on consumer goods and finance are popular.
  
• Blogs are highly effective, it generates consistent traffic. Chinese web users love to read and write blogs. Money Cat sent an article to 200+ blogs across Asia (and Australia), and saw their traffic grown tenfold in a month. However, it is important to target the right blogs for the right topics.
  
• Videos and Audios can be effective, but bandwidth is still a problem. Broadband infrastructure is not yet fully established across China, and quality is often distorted. Money Cat opted to upload video clips on Taiwanese and Hong Kong websites that can also be accessed by Chinese viewers.

Mayo de Cinco Marketing Mania

Cinco de Mayo is the celebration of the victory of the Mexican people over the French army in the La Batalla de Puebla on May 5th, at Puebla, Mexico.
(Puebla is 100 miles east of Mexico City). It should not be confused with Mexico’s Independence Day.

The reason why Cinco de Mayo became such a national celebration in the US is a nice lesson in marketing.

It started in 1966, when Coors Brewing Co. was facing a crisis. Chicano activists began protesting against the employment discrimination against Latinos working at Coors breweries and called for a boycott of Coors beer. Not exactly the corporate image you want for your company.

Coors did some brilliant crisis marketing – they started sponsoring Cinco de Mayo. It served multiple purposes: it kept them on the good side of their ethnic workforce; they kept their Latino customer base, and they bumped up their May beer sales to college students.

That’s the reason why Cinco de Mayo celebrations mainly take place across the U.S. and only locally in Mexico. The US-based Hispanic advertising community uses it as great promotional opportunity for their clients – promoting a wide range of products, including alcohol. Since Cinco de Mayo has been warmly embraced by the US population as a whole, there are now marketing campaigns galore.

A small selection:
1) The Food Network tells its consumers how to get ready for Cinco de Mayo – with a Rachel Ray fajita pan and a corn zipper
2) The Fine Living Network sends their customers 10 margarita recipes
3) Maxim magazine invites its readers to pick their favorite Mexican hottie

This year, Cinco de Mayo marketing activities got a setback. Many Cinco de Mayo festivals got canceled across the U.S. because of swine flu. Unfortunately, anti-Mexican sentiment also reared its ugly head in some places.

Similar to St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo has become a marketing tool for many companies – especially alcohol companies.

Rest me to wish you all a fun Cinco de Mayo, but please be responsible - don’t drink and drive!
(illustration by courtesy of TMN).

KFC's Super Bowl XLII marketing campaign - flying without a feather?

The upcoming Super Bowl XLII is a marketeer's dream arena.

Sponsors fork out big bucks to get themselves noticed - Fox is charging a record $2.7 million for each 30-second slot.

But one company launched a clever marketing campaign linking its name to the event without spending much money.

KFC Corp., is known for its creative (some would say: wacky) promotions over the years.
For the Super Bowl, it cooked up a clever one to promote its hot wings.
If a player or celebrity performer does an impromptu chicken dance in the end zone or on stage during the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, KFC will donate $260,000 to a charity in the name of that person. The person must perform at least three seconds of the "wing flapping" portion of the chicken dance, and only one donation will be made, according to a news release.
The donation will be made to the KFC Colonel's Scholars Program, a charity that provides scholarships to high school seniors planning to attend a public in-state college or university.
Also, people across the country can visit www.showusyourhotwings.com to upload their own chicken dance videos in the hope of winning a Super Bowl party.

"Talk about an offer worth showing off your Hot Wings for: this could be a great dance performance benefiting charity," said James O'Reilly, chief marketing officer for KFC.

"This will continue KFC's tradition of 'marketing first' promotions. We really hope someone shows the world his 'hot wings.'"

KFC is not an official sponsor of, or affiliated or associated with, the National Football League, the big game, or any other football-related entity.

KFC is not the only saves big time on sponsoring, but also on its PR.
Inviting the public to submit their videos is part of the recent consumer-generated media trend.

It's the ultimate low-cost/high-result strategy.

Just look at the following examples.
Lay's Doritos asked consumers to upload 30-second videos praising its chips, they received more than 1,000 entries. They picked two winners that aired as Doritos ads.
This year, Doritos invites musicians to submit original songs at myspace.com/DoritosCrashTheSuperBowl.
The song that wins online voting will air as a 60-second music video in the Super Bowl.

Considering the popularity of these campaings, they are here to stay - at least for now.

It is a win-win situation - the company saves big time on their PR budget and participants get a shot as their 15-minutes of fame.

Shopdropping – a cool marketing strategy or the nicer twin of shoplifting?

Shopdropping is a marketing and self promotion tactic by clandestinely placing altered or recreated objects into retail stores.
It is not new – in 1989, the Barbie Liberation Organization swapped the voice boxes of 300 Barbie dolls to those of G.I. Joes before putting the dolls back on store shelves. The organization tried to make a point about sexism in children's toys.

There are two main groups that are currently using shopdropping.
The first group is promoting a cause. Anti-consumerism advocates slip by replica products packaged with political messages onto store shelves and religious zealots insert their pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian magazines in bookstores.
The second group uses it for personal marketing and promotion.
Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” sections of bookstores, personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, music producers place their free CDs between commercial music CDs, and aspiring professional photographers place their homemade cards, URL included, in the greeting cards section of book and stationery stores.
No store is safe: Wal-Mart, Target (T-shirts with political message), Starbucks (free CDs of budding artists were shopdropped), Bloomingdale’s (music CDs) are just a few examples.

In itself, shopdropping is not illegal (yet), in contrast to its evil twin shoplifting.
However, trade name and brand name infringements and product liability (especially when it comes to consumer products such as cosmetics and toys) do have legal repercussions.
A telling example of how shopdropping is evolving and becomes illegal is the case of a lead singer for an independent pop-rock band in the East Village, NYC.
The band started shopdropping by slipping their promotional CDs between the pages of The Village Voice newspaper and into the racks at large music stores.
They now changed their strategy and put stickers with logos of fashion designers such as Diesel, John Varvatos and 7 for All Mankind on their promo CDs. They then placed them in the pockets of those designer clothes.

Shopdropping seems to be limited to the US; outside of the US, there was only one major shopdropping recorded. In 2005, the French Fondation Babyrul shopdropped hundreds of home-made CDs into record stores and mash-up DVDs into Blockbuster branches to “challenge the commercial space-time of a store”.
This brings the catching New York Times headline “anarchists in the aisles?” to mind.
What will be the future of shopdropping? Will it be a passing fad or develop in a serious guerilla marketing strategy?
Time will tell – we will all be a lot wiser after the holiday season.

Is Aquafina heading for a watery grave?

Bottled water consumption is increasing both in the US and in Europe.
Whenever there is a growing market, there is aggressive marketing.
Clever marketing campaigns have created consumer perceptions that bottled waters are purer or healthier than tap water.
What is inside the water bottle often remains a mystery to the consumer - not in the least due to lack of a defined standard for bottle labeling.
It gives water producers creative freedom in their product positioning.

Take Aquafina, the top selling water in the US. Due to clever branding, it is perceived as generating from a distant spring in a glen or mountain. However, this PepsiCo Inc. product is pws: from a public water source. In plain language - tap water.
A US watchdog group called “corporate accountability international” took action and forced Pepsi to reveal the source on the bottles.

Pepsi tried some crisis management.

North American spokeswoman Michelle Naughton declared:

“If this helps clarify the fact that the water originates from public sources, then it's a reasonable thing to do.”

In contrast, Pepsi’s competitor Coca-Cola (producer of Dasani) was a lot smarter marketing wise. It clearly states on the Dasani website that it comes from local water supplies, is then filtered using a process called reverse osmosis, followed by enhancing it with minerals.
Coca-Cola spokeswoman Diana Garza Ciarlante went on record and stated:

“we don’t believe that consumers are confused about the source of Dasani water. The label clearly states that it is purified water.”
Coca-Cola further leveraged the Aquafina story by informing Reuters that it will post online information about its quality control testing later this year.
Coca-Cola is ahead on its competition in the social conscience arena as well – it supports nearly 70 public water projects in 40 countries, in partnership with such groups as CARE and the World Wildlife Fund.

Is Aquafina heading for a watery grave? Not likely.
For starters, the demand for bottled water rose by nearly 10 percent in 2006.
The average annual consumption per person is around 26 gallons.
Industry observer Beverage Digest estimates annual sales in 2006 at $15 billion.

Dave Kolpak, a portfolio manager at Victory Capital Management, said the environmental objections will have little impact on the bottom line for either Pepsi or Coke, though he admitted it could slow the market's growth rate.
According to Dave Kolpak, portfolio manager of Victory Capital Management, people may talk about the issue, but will likely continue buying bottled water.
If Pepsi launches a clever marketing campaign, addressing the source issue and combining it with support for selected social causes; they will not even feel it in their financial results.

Make Way for the Widget Marketing Wave

One of the latest trends in marketing is widget marketing.
Widgets are small applications that provide online functionality and content, and are distributed through a potentially vast number of websites.

A website or webpage owner integrates the widget from a third party website or webpage by placing a small snippet of code.

The code brings active content from the third party website (links, advertisements, images) without the need for the website or webpage owner to update the content.
Due to their nature, they are now becoming a new marketing & advertising venue.

Widgets are uploaded onto all kinds of sites, including profile pages, forums and blogs.
Widgets are sometimes called blidgets (TypePad) or snippets (PageFlakes).
Yahoo offers more than 4,300 widgets. It entered the widget arena with the purchase of Pixoria, a producer of widgets.

Other companies, such as Netvibes, Snipperoo and YourMinis also offer widget galleries.

Apple and Microsoft have desktop tools in the form of constantly updating stock tickers, news feeds and airline schedules.

According to Google, “gadgets” are one its fastest-growing products.

But they don’t stop there. Apple’s latest version of its Mac OS X operating system let its users build widgets from scratch and share them with others, even if they’ve never written a line of code.

Microsoft’s Vista comes with 11 standard “gadgets, as well as the option to create more and upload them to Windows Live.

Current users of widget marketing include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and ESPN.

Flickr (a photo-sharing site) lets its members create a “badge” that they can post on their blogs and personal home pages to let friends know when they’ve uploaded new snapshots.

Fox Interactive Media (comprising all of Fox’s sites as well as MySpace, RottenTomatoes.com and AskMen.com) launched its own platform, called SpringWidgets.

What are the benefits of widgets?
1) They are low cost to develop.
2) They don’t require advance coding skills to create.
3) They are extremely easy to use.
4) They are pulled by the consumer, not pushed by the marketer.
5) They are a completely new marketing tool and a great addition to the current marketing mix.
6) They are low cost to distribute.
7) They have a much longer lifespan than traditional online ads.

A great example of widget marketing is Purina’s weather widget.
It lets pet owners know what the weather is outside when you wan to take the dog for a walk.

In the first two months, it was downloaded more than 15,000 times.
It means, that the Purina brand is now constantly in front of 15,000 pet owners, which gives maximum exposure for minimum costs.
The key success element of Purina’s widget is the fact that it is an extension of its brand while giving useful, up-to-date information.

Widget marketing is still in its infant stage. It is hard to tell if widget technology providers such as well-funded Clearspring and Freewebs will be able to become profitable.

Widgets do have some disadvantages. The state-of-the art interactive ones use a lot of computer resources, resulting in slow downloading.
People might download so many widgets, that their webpage becomes cluttered and therefore the marketing message of an individual widget is lost.
As a business model, it isn’t clear yet how profitable it will be as a promotion and branding tool. Advertisers are not yet comfortable with widgets, since tracking and analyzing its traffic is hard and their influence on consumer behavior not yet known.

Personally, I like this new addition to the marketing mix.
It’s exciting to see how it will develop.

For those of you who want to learn more about widget marketing, it’s worth while to attend WidgetCon 2007 taking place on 7/11 in NYC.

Let's widget away!

Cause Marketing – the Diesel way

Cause Marketing has become popular.
It’s aimed at consumers that want to “do something good” with their purchase.
Needless to say, it should not infringe on their lifestyle.
Cause marketing campaigns peddle products while contributing to a worthy cause.

An example is the Red Motorazr cellphone of Sprint.
Motorola and Sprint contribute part of the revenues of each phone purchased to Bono’s Project (RED) to fight AIDS and other diseases in Africa.
Apple quickly followed with its red iPod Nano, retailing at $199 in the US. From each sale, Apple donates $10 to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa.
Fashion brands are especially good at cause marketing.

Way back in 1990s, Italian fashion label Benetton launched its "Benetton Clothing Redistribution Project".
It was a clothes drive, regardless of maker, that benefited charitable organizations like the Red Cross and Gifts in Kind America.

For the last decade, cause marketing has gone mainstream.
Consumers are used to shop and save the world at the same time.
Companies are selling products and a clean conscience. Wherever you turn, it’s there.
But is comes to a point that it’s not effective anymore.
The pink ribbons of the breast cancer cause are all over the place, triggering a backlash (or "pinklash"). In such cases, both product and cause suffer.

So what are the key success factors of effective cause marketing?

• Define your marketing goals
  What do you want to establish as a company: reaching potential customers, increasing sales, brand recognition, PR?
  To reach their target audience for their next-generation Xbox and Samsung HDTV, Microsoft and Samsung Electronics launched a nationwide (USA) cause-marketing program entitled "Samsung's Hope For Education."
  The program will deliver more than $2 million in much needed technology and software products, to elementary, middle and high schools across America through an on-line essay contest.
  
• Make it part of your overall marketing strategy
  A good example is Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.
  They launched a three year, global partnership with Special Olympics, in which Starwood Hotels will be the exclusive hotel sponsor of Special Olympics and the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai, China. In addition, Starwood will donate $50 dollars to Special Olympics for every Westin Heavenly Bed, Sheraton Sweet Sleeper Bed and Four Points by Sheraton Four Comfort bed sold through Starwood retail channels, until June 30, 2007.
  
• Define who your target audience is, and which causes appeal to them
  The company Clorox markets its products to the global adult population.
  They cleverly chose a cause appealing to this broad target audience. They will donate a small percentage of the retail purchase price of its bleach products to the Red Cross.
  Barclay's Taking Care of Christmas 2000 campaign benefited four charities chosen by Barclays' customers as the most popular causes.


• Choose a cause that fits your business
  A perfect example is Radio Taxis, a carbon-neutral, London-based taxi company, boasting more than 2,500 cars.
  It measures the carbon pollutants its 2,500 cars emit, and then invests proportionally in air-cleansing projects, from forestry to renewable energy.
  
• Define the timeline- how long do you want the cause campaign to run?
  Target Corp. operated a temporary, “pop-up” Target store, located on New York’s Times Square for 30 days. All profits made during this period were marked for breast cancer research.


• Make the relationship between company and cause clear to the public
  Vodafone communicated the following about its relationship with the National Autistic Society.
  “As communication lies at the heart of everything that Vodafone does, it made sense to partner with a cause that is closely related to communication. As the leading provider of mobile communications, Vodafone has a unique opportunity to employ its strengths, size and marketing power to: help the NAS improve the lives of people with autism; bring the issues to a wider audience; increase the capacity and accessibility of NAS services.”


• Be aggressive in your corporate communications and public relations
  Companies like Ben & Jerry's and Avon are good examples.
  
• Be creative – stand out in the cause marketing crowd
  The best example of creative cause marketing is the Italian fashion label Diesel.
  To promote their apparel, Diesel gives a positive spin on global warming.
  Its ads show Manhattan buildings and Mount Rushmore’s presidential faces half-submerged in water from melted glaciers; Venice and Paris are tropical and the Great Wall is covered in desert sands. Against these surreal backgrounds, Diesel's fashionable and immaculately dressed models live glamorous lives, having camel rides, relaxing on a yacht or applying suntan lotion to their partner’s toned back.
  To fight global warming, (potential) customers are invited to visit the Diesel.com website to buy are encouraged to by Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” on DVD.
  The creativity of Diesel is two-fold.
  First of all, its campaign is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek funny and gets the global warming issue across with humor.
  Secondly, Diesel doesn’t pretend to be a crusader – as its creative director Wilbert Das puts it: "We are a fashion brand. We want to sell product. We don't do anything more or less."
  Diesel’s cause marketing will definitely support its main cause – making profit!