“Mommy, I want it.” Marketers and the Powerful Influence of Children

Today, kids are targeted by many marketers, spending billions, compared to $100 million in the 1990’s. With dual incomes, smaller families, and postponing later to have children, parents have more disposable income, it’s no wonder parents are spending so much more on their children.

How do marketers get away with this? Several things play a role in targeting children:

Pestering & Nagging
Kids have the ability to nag at their parents about purchasing items that the parent wouldn’t otherwise buy. In fact, Barbara Martino, and advertising executive says “We’re relying on the kid to pester the mom to buy the product, rather than going straight to the mom.” In fact, there are two types of nagging, according to the book Kidfluence, it states that there is “persistence nagging” and “importance nagging”. Persistance nagging is repeating nagging which is not as effective as importance nagging, which plays on the guilt that parents might have for not spending enough time with their kids.

Psychology
Marketers are also tuned in to what makes kids tick. Utiliing reports, researches and psychologist, marketers are able to craft together cleaver marketing strategies.

Brand Name Loyalty
Marketers goal is to create brand name loyalty with children from the very beginning in hopes that they will create a lifelong relationships. According to the Center for a New American Dream, infants at the age of 6 months are able to create mental images of corporate logos and mascots. In fact, brand loyalty can develop by age two, which by 5, a child can recognize hundreds of brand logos

Buzz Marketing
This savy marketing is used by marketers to target young kids, especially teenagers. The idea around this is to create a buzz around the product, allowing the “word of mouth” to do the work. The idea is to have cool kids where the product or to allow a “cool” status with the product. Using the internet, social networks, blogs, chartrooms and other similar internet communications to help spread the word.

Mary Kay Postcards (Brand new designs)

Just recently a friend of mine, Danielle Shirkey contacted me about needing some postcard designs for her Mary Kay business. After doing some research, I found that there were many poorly designed postcards so I designed a few myself.  Most of my designs are to capture and recruit other Mary Kay representatives through images that show support, encouragement, and strength.  

If you would like to check out my designs, please see my new website at: www.pinkwarehouse.com

Mobile Marketing: Does Your Website Pass the Informative Test?

Informativeness is measured by four things: Web site informativeness, vividness, irritation, and product choice. With such a large range, marketers have to balance look, information cleanliness and product details within the parameters of a mobile phone and its small screen. In order to keep information clean and neat, marketers need no include photos unless needed to keep consumers happy with content.

In fact, an article on developing mobile pages suggests the following, “Make the most of your real estate by avoiding large pictures or logos. Page real estate is so valuable on a mobile site due to constraints in screen resolution and the need for large, clear buttons and boxes: images will add little value to most pages. If you wish to use images, do so pragmatically; a pared-down version of your logo atop each page should double as a link back to your mobile homepage.” ( Meaning to keep importance on information, not photos. This will help with irritation and infromationness. However for product choice, when details are needed, photos and/or video may be beneficial and help with vividness.

To get an idea of how a mobile website page should look, visit any of this top 10 mobile website pages shown below:

Are Paid Inclusion and Paid Placement On the Rise?

According to emarketer.com, the US Paid Search Advertising Spending growth is expected to increase 11.8% in 2010. This shows that these types of advertisements, paid placement and paid inclusions are on the rise.

So, why is this number growing?

• Site optimization for good ranking in natural listings takes time, unless easy paid placement and paid inclusions.

• In order to get high search engine rankings, continuous site changes of adding fresh content and building links are needed

• Impossible to naturally optimize a website for all of the needed keywords

If you are interested in generating more traffic to your site, you can visit either one of these sites:

Google Advertising– www.google.com/ads/

Yahoo Advertising – http://advertising.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/ysm

Are Advertorials Effective?

Advertorials, a cross between an editorial and advertisements have become increasing popular. Ranging from 1 to 2 pages, and sometimes up to 16 pages long, advertorials provide great educational and scientific information for the consumer. In fact, have deemed themselves to be very effective, according to well known copywriter, Joe Vitale, advertorials are up to 500 times more likely to be read than a regular advertisement.

Two things that help to add creditability to the product…first, an advertorial adds information for the consumer in the subject that they are interested in, and second, it appears that the advertisement is from the editor.

For tips on how to make your advertorial more interesting and effective, please visit Susan Alloco’s article called “9 Key Points for Increasing Sales with Advertorials”

Profiling:Marketers Can Have Their Pick

With the internet and the help of computers, profiling has been made easy for marketers. After much research, I found that there are several lists that consumers are associated with.

The main profiling grand daddy of them all is the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). They lobby extensively against privacy rights that would prevent them from being able to collect and exploit consumer’s data.

While the DMA can provide many lists for marketers, there are several very interesting lists in which about any kind of information can be found:

Post Office: Companies can purchase 1000 address changes for as little as $5.

Affluent America: This is a data base of millionaires…the cream of the crop.

Sub-Prime Auto Loan Applicants: Lists of consumers that have bad credit because of high percentage on current credit cards, auto, home or other loans.

Opinion Molders Database: “Effective Mailing Lists to Reach influential’s in Media, Government, Business, Religion, Education, Medicine, Environment and more!”

So, who uses profiling? Casinos! According to an article with CNN casinos have huge consumer databases, “Native American-owned Foxwoods Resort Casino can parse its 200GB customer database, match it against third-party demographic data and tell whether a patron has kids or how much he makes per year.”

Web Design – The Good and the Bad

Web design is so different, than say print design, many people don’t quite understand it. Most people who have the control over website design, don’t really have any clue on what web design really is, nor do most people who work in the web design industry. The reason behind this is that most people get stuck having to manage or design a website when in reality, their profession is an editor or a person prefers to write over designing. It’s much like a real estate seller who overlooks the architecture.

While website design does go through phases, it’s important that companies keep in the loop to what the emerging media is in website design and what is new on the web. Below is a basic timeline of new website design trends:

Website design does involve a digital environment and requires activity from people for it to be effective. Website design also has to reflect or adapt to individuals tastes, preferences, content, and voices because without popularity to a website, it doesn’t serve its purpose. Change requires that the website stay on top of new emerging media and website design without losing their brand identity or image.

Is Advergaming Still on the Rise?

First and foremost, what is advergaming? In basic terms, advergaming is a video game in which companies use to advertise their product. Typically, the game is offered for free in exchange for advertisement of the product throughout the game.

Since advergaming has been around since 1978, it has since grown into multi-million dollar industry. A couple of quick facts in order to understand the scale at which advergaming has grown to.

• The first American politics to utilize advertising within a video game, was the Obama campaign.

• 30B was the number of hours that men from the ages of 18-34 years spend on playing video games.

• 50% of consumers that receive a free advergame will spend about 25 minutes playing the game.

As for the future of advergaming, it is expected that advergaming will reach 1B in advertising spending by 2010. Research has shown that the rise in Smartphones and young mobile phone users have increased the drive for mobile marketing. It is also cited that consumers have complains on pricing, choice and/ or lack of choice as the main reason for not downloading more games. With the economic state, free gaming has taken a likely and therefore on the rise.

To find more quick facts or information, please click on the photo below for a detailed advergaming report.

Does “Free” Work, When it Comes to Mobile Marketing?

Attitude plays a very important part in interactive marketing communications today, involving feelings and opinions. Examining attitude can help with mobile messaging or strategy in terms of likability, persuasiveness and intent to click. While a consumers interacts with a mobile advertisements, he/she how interesting, effective and favorable the advertisement may be. According to eMarketer.com, consumers attitudes were highest when they received something free mobile content for watching an advertisement, they also enjoyed when ads were informative.

Take a look at the table below. It clearly shows that the top two highest and most effective strategies were when the marketer included something “free”.

Why Should Marketers use Twitter?

Twitter has close to 45 million unique visitors worldwide every month. With so many visitors, they can choose to either tweet or follow. To tweet, Twitter allows for 140 characters for a short message and allows for continuous messages to be broadcasted on the Twitter user’s page. Twitter is similar to Facebook and MySpace as it allows for social networking, but different in the sense that Twitter users can declare who they are following.

According to a blog on Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing website, Twitter can have many benefits for companies who want to boost their marketing and public relations:

• Engaging CEO’s into Twitter is a great way “to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers.
• Convenient for keeping in touch with bloggers and the media
• A great way for a company to monitor their brand
• An easy way to announce deals, specials and promotions
• Quick and live updates for events, conferences and other company activities
• Promote company blogs, news, webinars, etc.