SKITTLES: NETWORK THE RAINBOW

Go to skittles.com. I promise it will throw you for a creative loop. Tagline is “Interweb the Rainbow. Taste the Rainbow.” This line makes sense when you see the site, because it’s not really a Website, but a social media smorgasbord. Initially, you’ll think you’ve landed on a Wikipedia page, because their Wikipedia page is the background of the Site!

To even get permission to view the Site, you have to give them your birth date. Marketing genius! First of all, 90% of people navigate away from a Website within a minute. So if someone takes the time and effort to enter their birth date, their level of interest in learning more about Skittles must be fairly high. Second, by requiring people to enter their birth date, Skittles can determine what age demographic their products reach.

As you surf the Skittles site, it uses various online social marketing tools to pull up information about Skittles. For example, when you click on the Media tab, it pulls up videos via the YouTube site, and photos via Flickr. When you click on the products tab, it takes you to the product description on their Wikipedia page. Again, marketing genius.

This bold move is risky, because by turning their Website into a social media hub for skittles, they lose a lot of control. For example, whenever someone twitters about skittles, its shows up in their twitter stream. That means if someone twitters something negative, that’s right-it shows up in its Twitter stream. But this site is causing buzz, and buzz, aka word-of-mouth, is marketing heaven. Looks like the Skittles rainbow is on its way to a pot of gold.

April's Attic has Arrived!

After hours of getting space design help, trips to Ikea in search of creative, bargain furnishings and lots of elbow grease painting and building furniture, April’s Attic is complete and ready for some focus group action!

The Attic is located on the third floor of a cozy, renovated Dallas home. With the visual guidance of a talented designer, April’s Attic captures the spirit of my business: to creatively discover and deliver quality results and have fun while I’m doing it! The Attic is designed to create a fun and relaxing environment where members of focus groups feel welcome and comfortable opening up.

In addition to focus groups and one-on-one interviews, I am excited about having a few Dallas-based clients use the Attic as a place for team meetings and brainstorming sessions. It offers a great escape from the daily monotony of the office to help cultivate good ideas or solutions.

You’ll notice I’ve chosen green as the signature color of April Bell Consulting. According to Wikipedia, green is closely related to the Old English verb growan, which means “to grow”. It’s also associated with regeneration, fertility and rebirth. Through my services, that is exactly what I want to produce for my clients-GROWTH.

All of this would not be possible without the help of McCall Keahey, who is an impeccable stylist/designer, as well as my friend and assistant, Suzanne Foote who made numerous trips to Ikea, spent countless hours building the furniture and setting up the printer, phone, etc.. And, of course, my friend from Frito, Steven Pulido, helped me transform the space into a true focus group setting by advising me on the latest and greatest A/V equipment for capturing focus group learnings.

Thanks to these guys, April’s Attic is officially up and running!

If you’re in Dallas and interested in using April’s Attic, let’s chat! Call me at 972.352.8075 or shoot me an email at april@aprilbellconsulting.com.

The G Trend

Over the past year, we have watched our economy going deeper and deeper into recession, with a lot of the blame being placed on one thing, GREED.

Through this a marketing trend has emerged-the G Trend. Consumers, or Generation G, are looking for the exact opposite of greed, which would be Generosity and Giving. Trendwatching.com defines this Generation G as this:

"Captures the growing importance of 'generosity' as a leading societal and business mindset. As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy—and while that same upheaval has them longing more than ever for institutions that care—the need for more generosity beautifully coincides with the ongoing (and pre-recession) emergence of an online-fueled culture of individuals who share, give, engage, create and collaborate in large numbers.

In fact, for many, sharing a passion and receiving recognition have replaced 'taking' as the new status symbol. Businesses should follow this societal/behavioral shift, however much it may oppose their decades-old devotion to me, myself and I.”

The G trend was what sealed the deal for President Obama getting elected back in November. He positioned himself as “one of us”, and regardless of your political beliefs, you have to admit he did a great job in his campaign of relating to the workingman. In the wake of the financial meltdown, people were not only ready for change, but also longing for someone who truly cares for others and has our best interest in mind.

The G trend is also why cause marketing has become such a buzz term. People have become more passionate about making a difference in issues they believe in, and they want the world to know about it. That’s why the Livestrong and the RED campaign have both been so successful. It’s fashionable to be generous.

To become more favorable to the consumer, companies need to get in touch with their sweet side. Playing nice is the name of the game. Being nice to not just the consumer, but nice to their employees, the earth, the community…you get the idea.

The Joy of Super Bowl Sunday--The Commercials

One of the main reasons I tune into the Super Bowl is to watch the highly anticipated Super Bowl commercials. And this year did not disappoint.

As usual, Budweiser did an outstanding job. Their best commercial, and the top rated commercial, was “Fetch”, where the Budweiser Clydesdale was imitating the dog, which was an extension to last year’s hit commercial where the dog was imitating the Clydesdale. Here it is if you didn't get to watch:

What makes the Super Bowl commercials so unique, is that it’s more about the entertainment factor than it is about the actual product. With that in mind, the strategy behind that is that whatever company can be the most entertaining, the most outlandish, the most controversial; basically whoever can produce the commercial that makes people talk is who wins. That’s who will be talked about on the morning radio shows the next day and will make their product memorable in the minds of the consumer.

GoDaddy.com has produced some major buzz from their commercials. They don’t advertise any other time, except the Super Bowl, but everyone knows who they are because of their infamously over-the-top racy Super Bowl commercials. As soon as their commercial aired, I knew it was a GoDaddy.com commercial. Most people don’t even know who GoDaddy is, but because of the racy content, they will be curious enough to look up GoDaddy.com on the Internet. Check out the 2 commercials in this year's Super Bowl:

It’s fascinating to analyze the lengths and creativity that goes into marketing in a Super Bowl commercial. To be entertained by all the Super Bowl commercials and to see the Top Ten ranked commercials, click here.

Which Websites will Win in 09?

With so much going on in "online social networking", I find it difficult to know just where to spend my time online. It's one more thing that has been added to my list as a B2B marketing tool.

So, I found this article in the NYTimes helpful. It gave a perspective on the sites that will most likely have staying power in the months to come. Although the audience was meant for IT professionals, I found it applicable as a market researcher, or anyone who wants to keep up with the latest business trends.

Carolyn Duffy Marson, Network World, IDG wrote the article on December 31, 2008, titled: "Nine Web sites IT pros should master in 2009."

She claims: "Master these Web sites, and you’ll prove you can innovate during the most trying economic times. And you’ll do it more efficiently than your 20-something employees, who waste too much time chasing the new, new thing on the Internet that may not survive the downturn."

Top of the list was LinkedIn while Facebook was discounted. If you're interested in seeing the full list, you can view it here at the NY Times site.

Interesting Learnings from the "Experience Generation"

Hello all, it's been several weeks since I've had a change to blog.  I wanted to post a follow up to an interesting workshop I had the pleasure to attend.  I met both Tamara Sachs, CEO and Robert Miner, President of SachsInsights at The Market Research Event in October. Their compelling qualitative research work is supplemented with high quality "video storytelling", and it's fascinating!

I was fortunate to sit in on their workshop and I am posting a small clip here of the workshop Robert Miner gave on "MilleniAdults--the experience generation."

Mr. Miner mentioned several key points that define this segment:

1) Belief in a Kaleidoscope of Options

2) Definition of Success Varies Across the Segment (financially secure, life experiences, making a difference)

3) Entry Level Debt

4) Online Social Networking

For more video footage of the ethnographic study conducted by SachsInsights, you can visit their website.

Good stuff!!

April

When Time is Short and Money is Tight

I attended another interesting workshop last week at The Market Research Event. Speakers, Tina Bronkhorst, Vice President Digitas and Jennifer Drolet, Vice President, iModerate gave a compelling story for the benefits of a hybrid research approach.

"Current consumer demands and expectations for 'real time' dialogue are changing the way we, as marketers, need to think about research", say Tina and Jen. Below is a bulleted summary of their reasoning:

• It’s harder to be heard : 20 years ago, just 3 exposures created awareness, now it takes 150
• Consumers have an amazing ability to multitask
• Consumers aren’t as overwhelmed by information as they used to be
• They trust their peers more than they trust marketers
• Real time dialogue is everywhere (myspace, facebook, blogger)
• They are coming together with common interests. One example of this is the Starbucks gossip site, which lets those who have a similar feeling toward the brand chat together.
• And there are a host of others: blog, microblog, online chat, RSS, widgets, social networks, social bookmarks, message boards, podcasts, video sharing sites, photo sharing sites, virtual worlds, wikis...and the list will be greater as we move forward.
• So, marketing doesn’t own the brand completely anymore
• And, consumers trust their ability to make smart choices and they aren’t afraid to trust their instincts (Yankelovich Monitor 2004/2005)
• Instead, they prefer to take a chance with a personal experience, instead of playing it safe
• Thus, we need to focus on listening more instead of shouting louder (active branding)
• Stop push marketing and start pull marketing

They gave practical examples of how to develop hybrid approaches, where qual and quant data are collected at the same time. These include conducting:

• Online survey with IM-like chat intercept (iModerate)
• Online focus group with closed ended, open ended, IM-like chat and redirects (invoke)
• Online communities (communispace, passenger)

April Bell

New Restaurant Concept

I was able to attend several incredible workshops last Wednesday at The Market Research Event and will be posting about those over the next few days.

One workshop, “Finding Billion Dollar New Opportunities” was presented by Roger Thompson, Senior Vice President of Darden Restaurants. He took us through his story of how they developed their restaurant concept, Seasons 52.

The majority of the presentation focused on Darden’s strategy of finding a new opportunity. With over 90,000 brands in the restaurant business, he mentioned it was one of their greatest challenges to find something that had not been done before. "What that means," he said, "is that you have to look around the corners. This gives you better peripheral vision, which helps you anticipate and lead to new opportunities.” Roger shared one approach they found to help them shift their perspective at Darden. By focusing on the “high potential arenas,” they began to determine where the possibilities lay. You can see by the slide below that mapping their brands against consumer needs created one area to pop, “Fresh and Healthy.”

Darden Restaurants (which used to be a part of the General Mills group until 1995) has a 8% share of the “Casual Dining” business. Some of these concepts include Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Long Horn Steakhouse and Bahama Breeze. And through their recent acquisition, The Capital Grille, they recently entered the “Fine Dining” business.

After developing 3 food positionings, then 9 healthful restaurant concepts, a new concept was developed, Seasons 52. I can’t wait until they open one in Dallas!

After the Fact

I made it back home to Texas late last night and have had a chance to ponder a bit about my first Market Research Event conference. In a nutshell, it was cool! I definitely enjoyed helping the IIR staff blog. It was similar to an ethnography project about market researchers, and as a moderator/qualitative consultant, that's my favorite thing to do!

I came to the conference wanting to learn more about the industry, including the wants, needs, desires, and frustrations of those in market research.

And I left the conference with a lot of learnings.

So, for the next several days I will be posting snippets of my what I learned (including photos and videos) onto this site as well as my own

blog.

And I hope you’ll join me in an online discussion— feel free to respond, ask questions, post comments. I think we NEED to start an online dialogue and continue to stay connected virtually. And this is the reason: One of my biggest takeaways is that the industry as a whole is wanting to understand more about “virtual connectedness.” In almost every workshop I attended, there was reference to it in some way: online communities, social networking, digital innovation, and the list goes on and on. How better to understand what many of our consumers want than to jump in and be a part of it!

Stay posted….

April Bell

Who's Drinking the Wine

As you can imagine, the workshop about wine filled up quickly! Although we didn’t get sample tastings, this presentation proved to be quite satisfying!

Chris Bacon, Director of Consumer Insights & Strategy at E&J Gallo Winery led us through their occasion-based segmentation workshop.

As he discussed the segments that most consumers fall into, I began to worry that I identified with them ALL! A few of the segments he referenced include: “The Night is Young”, “Gather ‘Round the Table”, “You’re Invited”, “Unwind”, “Dinner for Two” and a few more….sound familiar to anyone?

Great workshop!