I am still not sure, if it is a viral by the Prague tourism board or not. Anyway. At least it is a wonderful (business) idea:
Toy Travel agency SendYourDarling.com in the Czech Republic is offering trips for stuffed toys. The agency will take pictures of plush toy animals at tourist spots and send the photos back to the owner with the toy. The cost ranges from 90 to 150 Euros.
Exciting viral video for Lieken Urkorn that creates a sense of higher quality simply by playing with flour and turning bread baking into art.
Detergent brand Wisk or its new product Wisk-It, promises to help people getting rid of objectionable photos.
With Wisk-It, Facebook users can find tagged and untagged photos in their friends’ albums and ask them to “wash them away”.
A simply simple and cool idea!
Revealed at the Gizmodo Gallery in New York City. It comes as a hinged touch tablet and booklet style PC with dual 7 inch screens. According to Gizmodo, the Microsoft Courier is in the ‘late prototype’ stages.
Watch the video here!
A friend of a friend sent me this: the brand-new Sydney International Food Festival will be launched in October 2009, a celebration of the Sydney food scene.
Therefore, agency WHYBIN/TBWA has produced a print and online advertising campaign featuring dishes representing the flags of twelve different countries by their native foods.
See all 12 flags of the campaign here
A few days ago, a new convenience store called frischwerk opened up in Düsseldorf.
One or two more stores will follow by the end of the year in Düsseldorf.
In this integrated endeavour, we from Leo Burnett Germany were responsible for brand strategy consulting, corporate design, shopper marketing consulting, POS materials, in-store communication tactics, store opening campaign and website design.
When the project started in spring this year – there was just an enthusiastic client with the idea to design a convenience store that would stand out of an emerging but still small market. And LB Germany, glad and excited to be part of this undertaking but also a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of such a huge project.
The journey entailed several workshops and presentations, lots of work and intensive discussions. We were even invited to test some products that were supposed to be listed. In the end, the result was pretty impressive.
The new store addresses two major human needs: On the one hand, people have very limited time to go shopping and so want their shopping needs to be satisfied quickly. On the other hand, people want quality goods and premium service like it used to be in the good old days. And currently, no concept exists in Germany that successfully meets both of these needs in one compelling offer.
And so, we built the store’s mission to marry what today is still scattered into different formats: a modern offering with traditional values, a retail atmosphere with culinary propositions, convenience with a smile, lifestyle with unpretentious coziness, organic products with taste, craftsmanship merged with digital services. In short: “Supplies for Body and Soul”.
This desired store experience is reflected in every single item and aspect – people are able to experience with all senses that it’s made with a lot of love and care – just take a look on the photos below.
Even if it sounds like we’re chumming up, this has been one of the most exciting projects – due to a passionate client team who stopped at nothing to bring their ambitious idea to life.
It’s summer and the third floor under the roof of our Frankfurt office guarantees: it will get HOT! The sun heats everything up, the architects of the building obviously thought air conditioning is just something for wimps.
A friend recently sent me a solution how to survive one of these hot days: the amazing high heeled bathtubs by SICIS.
A friend from Chicago sent me this article from McKinsey Quarterly.
On my first read, what came to my mind was that they actually did not come up with new facts. In fact, the authors themselves state that the obvious goal of marketing is to influence a potential buyer to decide on/buy your product, and use every means of persuasive communications at your disposal to influence that purchasing decision. It was something that leading marketers like P&G used to do well (think of their “soap operas”) and modern marketers like Amazon built their business on. But today it seems like we’ve lost that art of thinking through the most influential touch points and engaging with people there.
But at a second glance, you see that McKinsey at least affirmed what a lot of us have been saying to our clients for a while now, with extensive research in 5 industries and 3 continents, including big cities in emerging markets such as India and China. They redrew the traditional funnel into a loop-like model, which again, is not revolutionary because the purchase funnel has always been considered a loop, but it does paint a new picture. It impresses upon us two important things:
1) Consumers have changed the way they make decisions, but we haven’t changed the way we engage them. Or not enough.
2) Consumer decision process in nonlinear and dynamic.
So what McKinsey has done with this study is bring data about category, brand and consumer/touch points all in one place and brought the consumer decision path back to the center of integrated communications, where it belongs. And since the decision-making process has become more complex, dynamic and its phases interdependent, marketers need to know what kind of touch points are relevant to influence people in which phase of the process and how these efforts play together in an optimal way. It forces marketers to think through their communication plans with more rigor, and re-think (and maybe add or remove) touch points/tactics to better influence consumer decisions and move people towards the end purchase in a systematic way.
But ever the healthy skeptic about research, I would give anything to know more about the research design and questionnaires and how they recorded behavioral information in the various markets. Anyway, at least the focus on studying shopping behaviours across all channels and how they come into play differently for different categories is great!
Talking to our clients in these days, these questions always arise:
- How can I integrate Facebook into my campaign?
- What about an application or an ad?
- How does it work? And what about the costs?
Well, here is a quick introduction by ecommerce-guide.com that walks the reader through setting up a Facebook page for their brands.
But please note:
Being on Facebook doesn’t automatically mean that your brand wins. Even not instantly. It needs huge efforts to create a valuable network effect and to build a strong relationship with people. Thus, brands still need an engaging idea and have to give people a seat on the table.
