Guía para establecer precio o fee de servicios a un cliente

En varias oportunidades se charló y debatió en Australinos acerca de los criterios a tener en cuenta a la hora de cobrarle por servicios prestados a un cliente. ¿Cuánto cobrar? ¿Qué tener en cuenta a la hora de establecer un fee o de ponerse un precio? ¿Cómo estimar cuánto valen nuestros servicios?

A continuación una interesante nota (lamento que sea sólo en inglés) con criterios para tener en cuenta. Básicamente una guía que plantea los beneficios de comenzar con productos/servicios for free, apelando al «experience good»: un producto que necesita de un período de uso antes de que el cliente pueda determinar su valor. Otra de las opciones planteadas es comenzar con un precio de entrada bajo, confiando en que el producto/servicio de uno creará valor en la empresa cliente.

El artículo habla también de la ley del costo marginal y del precio de largo plazo en el mercado. Hace más hincapié en internet e incluso en el modelo free que plantea, pero sirve como guía para levantar buenos criterios a la hora de ponernos un precio. A continuación:

The Complete guide to fremium business models

Fuente: techcrunch.com

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple, which creates online software for small businesses. The post is based on a study done with Professor Eric Budish, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. It also includes ideas and comments from Peter Levine, a Venture Partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and a professor at Stanford GSB

The idea of offering your product or a version of it for free has been a source of much debate.

Pricing is always tricky. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs don’t give it enough thought. They will often copy the pricing strategy of similar products, base their decisions on pompous statements made by “experts” or rely on broken rationale (we worked hard so we should charge $X).

Free is even trickier and with so many opinions about it, we thought it would be refreshing to take a critical approach and dive deep into why some companies are very successful at employing the model while other companies fail. We’ve looked into economics academic papers, behavioral psychology books and strategies that worked for companies to come up with the key concepts below.

The Law of Marginal Cost

Pricing plays a huge part in competing for customers. Here’s an economic law that holds almost as much truth as the law of gravity: in a perfectly competitive market, the long-term product price (aka “market clearing price”) will be the marginal cost of production.

Guess what? Because of declining hosting and bandwidth costs, for most Internet products the marginal cost today is practically … zero.

In other words, if the cost to serve a customer (support aside) is zero, the long-term price of the product in the market will be zero (because of competitive pressure).

An Experience Good

At the core of the “Free” models are the products or services being offered to the customer. Most Internet products or services fall into the definition of an Experience Good: a product that needs a period of use before the customer can determine the value they can derive from it.

A good example is Dropbox. Consider Drew Houston’s words: “The fact was that Dropbox was offering a product that people didn’t know they needed until they tried.”

There are plenty of academics who looked into the pricing of Experience Goods. In 1983, the Economist Carl Shapiro wrote a fascinating paper about this subject. His conclusion was that since customers tend to underestimate the value of a product, the optimal pricing for an experience good is a low introductory price which is then increased when the customer realizes the value of the product.

In some cases, a customer might overestimate the value of the product. In that case, the optimal pricing strategy is to charge as much in the beginning or to lock in customers with long-term contracts.

This is why customers are reluctant to buy when someone asks them to prepay for a service or product or sign a long-term contract.

Hence, the introductory price is a signaling mechanism. The conclusion?  A low entrance price signals that you are confident that your product will create value for the customer.

The Psychology of Free

Much has been written about the Psychology of Free. Two books that looked specifically into the subject are “Free” by Chris Anderson and “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. Putting it simply, Free is an emotional hot button that immediately reduces the mental barriers for the customer. Free makes people think that they have “nothing to lose” since many ignore time as an investment.

From this perspective, free is a huge accelerator of adoption. The flip side of this is that after using the product for free, it is very hard to get the customer to start paying for it. This phenomenon was broad enough to get its own name: “The penny gap”—the hardest part is to get your customer to pay you the first penny. This is why it is so critical to choose your premium features wisely.

Decision Factors

If all that is true, it seems like Free (or Freemium) is the answer. Well…. not so fast. The decision is definitely not easy. Here’s a basic framework to help you make a more informed decision. A word of caution though: for every complex problem there’s a simple solution … and it’s wrong. The framework is helpful as a thinking tool but there’s no magic formula.

Here’s a set of questions that you’ll need to ask yourself:

1. How big do I want my company to be? If you are looking to build a lifestyle business that’ll make you $8,000 a month and you have a good product, you can probably do without Freemium. If you want to build a dominant company that has a substantial market share, Freemium can help you accelerate adoption.
2. What is the value of the free users? Across all successful Freemium companies, there is a way of making money or saving money from the free users. Either by saving on marketing costs (Dropbox) or by making money from ads or data (Pandora, Evernote, Mint) or both. If you cannot turn your free users into savings in marketing costs or revenues from third parties—figure out how!
3. What is the cost to serve free users?  This is a critical aspect of the model. If you spend a lot of money and/or time servicing free users, you are going to lose a lot of money. The cost of servicing free users must be lower than the dollar value they provide.
4. How big is my market? “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using,” says Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote. Free adds another conversion step on your way to revenues. You need a big market to have enough people who will be paying you at the end of the day.
5. Is there value to one customer from other customers using the product? This will determine how many new users the free users will refer. There are three levels of value:

1. Inherent value – You can use Skype only if the person you talk with also uses Skype. You can share a Dropbox folder only with other Dropbox users. In this case, Freemium can be a powerful strategy.
2. Added value – You wouldn’t want to be the only user of LinkedIn. You derive value from other people using it. In this case, Freemium can help you gain traction if you use an effective invitation mechanism.
3. No value – You don’t care if someone is using Evernote or not. The only reason for one person to tell another about the product or service is if they think it is awesome.

The Types of “Free”

One of the key factors in making Freemium work is the structure of the offering. What is it that you offer for free vs. charge? There are different types of free strategies. Let’s take a look at the popular ones:

1. True Freemium – Give a version of the product for free and charge a fee for the other versions. There are two ways to go about this:

1. Value based – The most successful type of Freemium strategy. The more a customer uses the product, the more value she derives, the higher the switching costs are, and at some point she’ll hit a usage limit and convert to a paying customer. Evernote and Dropbox are beautiful examples of this.
2. Characteristic based – For example offering the product for free for one user (so it is based on company size for instance). Let’s think about a B2B application. If I’m a freelancer, I will use the application forever and I will never have to upgrade. If I’m a 3-person company, I can’t add more users and try the application for real and hence might not get to the point where I see the value in using it.
3. Free Product for a Cross Subsidy  – Give one product for free and charge for complementary products.
4. Time Based Free Trial – Give a free trial for X days and start charging once the trial ends. The issue here is figuring out what X is. On one hand you want to create a sense of urgency, on the other hand you need the customer to see the value in the system.

Open Source as a Free model

Lately I’ve seen many entrepreneurs confuse Open Source with Free so I thought it would be helpful to make the distinction. An open source model can definitely accelerate the distribution of your product and is a viable free model. It has two main advantages. You might get developers to contribute to your product (see WordPress). By doing that you can accelerate the development of your product. The other advantage is that you give customers peace of mind as they have control over the source code. You can then make money from selling pro features or value added services. There’s a critical distinction here and that is that your code is out there and anyone can start a company to commercialize this code. Bear in mind that it is very hard (often impossible) to reverse a decision to open-source.
The Last Bit And The Secret To Success

There are many factors to consider when you are evaluating whether to use the Freemium model or not. However, there’s one last secret that I didn’t share with you. During the study, while looking at the successful Freemium companies, a pattern emerged. They all had phenomenal products. All of these decision factors are useless if the product or service you are offering is nothing short of amazing. If your product is not creating great value for its users, no tactic in the world will make Freemium work for you.

Improving Market Research in a Recession

Harvard Business Shool | Working Knowledge

Published: May 26, 2009 Author: John Quelch

Recession-challenged consumers are buying less, looking for deals, or switching to different brands, product categories, or stores. Some are even changing long-held attitudes toward consumption. To many folks, filling the home with more stuff or keeping up with the Joneses is no longer appealing.

As a result, the degree of uncertainty in business and consumer markets has soared. Yet, to conserve cash, most firms are reducing spending on the market research that would help manage that uncertainty. In the United States, spending on market research has dipped for four consecutive quarters, and chief marketing officers don’t expect the situation to turn around soon. Most big consumer marketers are seeking to shave 10 to 20 percent off of research budgets.

In flush times, a rising tide of consumption can compensate for less than optimal branding, positioning, pricing, or segmentation. That is certainly not the case now. At the same time that marketers must pare down research expenditures, they face added pressure to secure high-quality data and insights.

I recommend that CMOs take the following seven steps to minimize the impact of reduced spending.

Stay focused. Savvy marketers focus their research on the products, brands, and markets that are key to their marketing strategy. In a recession, it’s essential to get a clear read on existing core customers, including those who are most loyal to the brand and those who are most profitable, rather than fritter away research resources on potential or peripheral consumers. When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers. Now, nice-to-knows that are not essential will have to wait.

Enlist trusted partners. Marketers and research suppliers who trust each other and have established long-term relationships can jointly plan how to extract more insights and make better decisions based on fewer expenditures. For example, combining data sets may reveal new leading indicators of changes in consumer behavior. Tracking studies may have an edge over one-off projects. CMOs who trim costs by consolidating their budgets with an integrated research supplier should insist that the supplier aggressively explore synergies across its various component agencies as well as eliminate research redundancies.

Value experience and judgment. CMOs should tap the knowledge and intuitions of managers and researchers who’ve lived through previous recessions. In setting prices, for example, such insight can help calibrate the optimal level of price promotion offers. Experience also reveals proxies: in tough times, some marketers use research results from Sweden as a proxy for Scandinavia, rather than conducting the same research in all Scandinavian countries.

Seize opportunities overseas. Some large multinational marketers, such as Unilever, are shifting research expenditures away from Western Europe and toward emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. Relative to the developed economies, the costs of research in emerging economies are less and the payoff from incremental insight can often be greater. Brand preferences and consumption levels in emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil tend to be more fluid. Consumer research is therefore critical to aid marketers trying to cement brand preferences early on as these economies develop.

Go online with a dash of skepticism. Online research is cheap, fast, and the wave of the future. Tools like SurveyMonkey allow non-expert users to create custom surveys in minutes. As an alternative to offline focus groups, custom online panels of consumers can be formed for qualitative research on new product ideas or new ads. Taking the do-it-yourself approach rather than outsourcing to a market research firm is attractive in a cost-cutting era, but you risk getting no more than what you pay for. The opinions of convenience sample of an enthusiastic online brand community may not represent all users.

Don’t cut across the board. Just as important as knowing where to cut research is knowing where not to cut. When marketers are creating fewer new ads and introducing fewer new products, it is doubly important to use rigorous pretesting to select the strongest alternatives. In categories where the bases for consumers’ value judgments are changing, modest expenditures on copy research can prevent blowing much more money on ineffective messaging. Adding a few questions to standard tracking studies is a low-cost way to shed light on changes in customer attitudes and purchase behavior. For key products, running conjoint studies to check on shifts in price elasticities of demand and price-attribute tradeoffs can usefully improve the profitability of pricing decisions at a time when cash is king.

Keep an eye on the new consumer. No one has a perfect record of predicting the future, and the recession is making it harder for consumers to envision or articulate their needs. Even so, and despite budget pressures, smart marketers devote a portion of their market research to getting a handle on future changes in consumer behavior. Are consumers of your brand going to revert to previous consumption patterns when the recession ends? Or are they developing coping mechanisms that will endure, especially if the recession is lengthy? What new products and services will consumers be open to embracing? If, as in the financial services category, consumer confidence and trust in brands have been seriously eroded, how long and what steps will it take to regain them? Eventually, the recession will end, and future success depends on being well-positioned, based on sound research, when it does.

Plan para una campaña de Social Media

No es el plan de comunicacion…. pero bien puede un Social Media Plan cotizar en la bolsa australina tambien! Les copio nota y video (sugiero verlo) que levanté de Interactividad.org.

Para esta semana, el album Sound of Silver, de LCD Soundsystem. Bienvenido junio!

miércoles 20 de mayo de 2009

¿Cómo desarrollar un Social Media Plan? (Iniciador Barcelona)

Ayer tuve la suerte de ser el ponente invitado en Iniciador Barcelona (honor doble ya que ayer se celebraba el primer aniversario de este evento). El tema, «Social Media para emprendedores«. Mi objetivo era tratar de transmitir mi experiencia personal en la red, así como la de Cava&Twitts durante los últimos meses, tratando de explicar lo que me ha funcionado y lo que no con el uso de los Social Media. No era doctrina, no era una tesis doctoral… era mi experiencia.

Y nada mejor que empezar preguntando… ¿Cuantos de vosotros tenéis blog? ¿Cuantos de vosotros tenéis Twitter? ¿cuantos de vosotros estáis en una red social?…. la inmensa mayoría contestaron que SI. La siguiente pregunta es ¿Cuantos tenéis un plan?… la gran mayoría no lo tenía.

El objetivo era constatar la importancia de seguir unos pasos, sencillos, pero necesarios para tratar de garantizar un resultado. Construir un Social Media Plan no garantiza el éxito, pero si evita cometer muchos errores. ¿que pasos seguir?

1. Definir objetivos : que quiero conseguir
2. Posicionamiento: ¿que dicen de mi? ¿como funciona mi sector en Internet?
3. Escuhar y hablar: definir que herramientas utilizar
4. Medir, medir, medir, medir (lo que no se puede medir no existe)

 

Os dejo la presentación de ayer (supongo que en breve colgarán el vídeo con toda la charla):

 
http://www.slideshare.net/marccortes/social-media-plan-iniciador?type=presentation 

 

De todo lo que hablamos si me gustaría repescar algunas cosas que se comentaron:

 

• «Para encontrar diamantes hay que picar mucho carbón«. Sólo con tener un blog, un twitter y estar en facebook no te garantiza nada, hay que entender tu entorno, tener claros los objetivos… Sobre este tema se cuestionó cuanto tiempo dedicar a cada cosa: la respuesta se irá modulando, al principio seguirás a muchos blogs o participarás mucho en las redes sociales y poco a poco se irá encontrando el punto de equilibrio. Cada uno tiene su propio equilibrio.
• Internet y los Social Media son muy potentes, pero no hay que olvidar que una parte importante de la población no está todavía en la red o, si lo están, no participan de forma activa.
• En los Social Media hay el mismo SPAM que por correo electrónico. Discutimos si es o no legitimo usar los social media para generar notoriedad y atraer tráfico (como cuando un «amigo» de facebook te invita 10 veces a que te hagas fan de un determinado grupo)… opiniones encontradas como siempre. Para el que envía un millón de correos vendiendo Viagra para que 2 lo compren, seguro que les es rentable pero ¿que imagen dejas a los otros 999.998?
• Para todos hay un ecosistema en Internet, lo importante es encontrarlo. El que venda ropa para perros… tiene su espacio para encontrar a su público objetivo, la comunidad Unitteddogs tiene más de 44.000 perros dados de alta.

Seré un romántico, pero sigo pensando que hacer las cosas paso a paso garantiza un éxito a medio y largo plazo, aunque a corto no sepas ver los resultados.

Cómo convertir una blind date en un cliente

(enero de 2009)

Blind Date to White Wedding: Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
(6/29/2007) CRM Project Volume 7
By Marketo, Inc., Marketo

No one enjoys blind dates. Whether you’re introduced by friends, the Internet, or your neighborhood matchmaker, it’s nerve-wracking to meet for the first time.

Conversely, everyone loves weddings. The flowers, the tradition, the drunken dancing at the reception, you can find something you like.
Everything that comes in between is the interesting part. When you’re dating, you’re learning about each other: what you like to do, the things he doesn’t eat, the stuff she does on Saturdays. And you’re discovering the things that you do well together.
It’s no different when it comes to B2B marketing. You need to deepen your relationship with prospects over time, interacting in a variety of settings, learning more about each other’s needs and capabilities while progressing seamlessly from one interaction to the next. And you need to know when to commit more resources to the relationship as well as when to pull back and give the prospect some space.
In the B2B marketing world, this dating process is called lead nurturing, defined as the process of building a relationship with qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time.
Just as in dating, lead nurturing can be described with defined stages, including:

1. The Introduction
2. The First Date
3. Dating
4. The Proposal
5. The Wedding

 
The Introduction
The introduction is the first time your future betrothed hears of you. It is up to your friend, online profile, or matchmaker to make you seem interesting and attractive. You don’t have direct control over the introduction, but the more you can do to influence it, the better.
 
Discover your ideal prospect
The first step in the introduction should be to determine your ideal prospect. Just as you know you like tall, dark and handsome, you should also know that the best prospects for your products and solutions are companies in the United States with 100 or more employees, in the pharmaceutical and healthcare verticals. It’s not usually this simple, but having an idea of what your ideal prospect looks like will help you focus your marketing to certain locales and mediums. If you know that tall, dark and handsome is often at your alma mater’s tailgate parties, you’ll probably want to be there, early and often.
 
Build your brand
If you’re wondering whether branding matters in B2B marketing, RainToday has issued a report that says the answer is yes, concluding, «If you are well known, whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.» In fact, 65% of companies that claim they are well known report being good or excellent at lead generation, while only 44% of the not well known companies report being good or excellent.
Brand matters because B2B buyers are still people and emotions impact economic decision-making. B2B buyers are overwhelmed with choices and information more than any buyer could evaluate rationally. This means that no matter how disciplined a buying process is, emotional brand impressions do influence vendor selection.
Web 2.0 is also changing the way marketers build their brand. With the growing popularity of blogs, podcasts, social media and the like, buyers would rather talk to each other, instead of listening to a marketing message. So take advantage of this by creating thought leadership, using Web 2.0 techniques.
 
Create thought leadership
One way B2B companies can build their brand is by helping buyers research early in the sales cycle, demonstrating that they are trusted advisers who understand the prospect’s problems. By using thought leadership to engage prospects early, you build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.
Creating thought leadership helps your prospects learn more about you, your background and how you think. It helps build the foundations of a relationship: familiarity and trust. At this stage, don’t hide your thought leadership content behind registration forms. Set this content free to allow it to spread virally.
 
Write white papers
White papers are used at almost any stage of the pipeline, from lead generation to customer retention. They typically range from four to eight pages, and shouldn’t be more than 12 pages long. According to Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers, white paper is a persuasive document that usually describes approach of an article and weaves in persuasive corporate messages typically found in brochures.
And studies have shown that white papers are highly viral; that is, they are passed around by 60% of technology professionals. According to a study by MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm, this is because white papers are considered to be credible resources for thought leadership and subject matter expertise.
 
Create eBooks
As an alternative to white papers, consider eBooks, defined by David Meerman Scott as the «hip and stylish younger sibling to the nerdy whitepaper.» An eBook delivers the content in a form that’s designed for quick scanning and reading online. The content tends to come in more bite-sized chunks (as in a presentation). With newer versions of Microsoft PowerPoint, audio can be added to each page/slide.
 
Use social media
Social media continues to grow in popularity, and has become another conduit to your prospects. Sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace allow people to build online relationships by joining groups, chatting and commenting about products and services. On LinkedIn, for instance, you frequently see questions from your network asking for recommendations for products and consultants.
Blogging is a great way to build thought leadership and, therefore, your brand. Your blog should fill the information needs of your prospects and invites comments from readers. Podcasts essentially audio clips of you speaking instead of writing, or of an interview with another thought leader are a great attachment to your blog. RSS feeds and content formatted for mobile devices such as Blackberry, Treo and iPhone extend your blog reach. The YouTube phenomenon cannot be forgotten. A funny or clever short video that goes viral can quickly build your brand.
In B2B marketing, social media has a big role to play in driving traffic, building thought leadership, and facilitating word of mouth referrals. It’s one more tactic in a portfolio of techniques that best practice companies use to generate awareness, drive leads, and nurture relationships.
Social networking for B2B relationships is similar to your personal relationships. You meet someone through friends, whether at a party or on Facebook, share your thoughts and dreams, and if all goes well, you decide to have your first date.
 
The First Date
The first date is all about making a good first impression. Don’t come on too strong or you’ll scare your prospect away. And don’t talk only about yourself. Use the first date as an opportunity to learn more about your prospect’s wants and needs, as well as to share some relevant information about yourself.
In B2B marketing, this means you should deliver some form of premium content that is worth registering for. While thought leadership content should influence and guide people before they’re in a buying cycle, the content here should be targeted to those who are just beginning to look for solutions, such as self-running video demos and customer case studies. Either way, they should be short and to the point. You’re trying to make a good first impression.
 
Create short videos or demos
A few tips from the Foneshow blog: Make it short. Snack-sized content needs to have a single idea, should be easy to share, and should require little or no commitment. If it can be viewed on a mobile device during an elevator ride, you are on the right track. Create short, two- to three-minute videos that showcase your value proposition, or use Adobe Captivate or TechSmith’s Camtasia to demo your product at work.
 
Develop case studies
Also known as success stories, case studies are short, one or two page documents that evangelize a customer’s success and ROI from use of your solution. Sections typically include an intro, challenge and solution. And don’t forget to include a customer quote or two and a short section at the end that tells about your product and company.
 
Dating
This is where the lead nurturing comes in. Your prospect has shown at least some interest in you. You don’t want to ruin a good first impression by calling too often or asking for too much commitment too soon. Instead, develop the relationship by sharing additional information at the right time. If tall, dark and handsome responds to your overtures, you want to talk to him and try to gather more information: Is he single? Is he interesting? In B2B relationships, it’s much the same: make offers of more information at respectable intervals and determine the level of interest at each stage. The goal, of course, is to date exclusively.
 
Schedule webinars
While some webinars are designed to generate leads, others can have content that moves prospects farther along in your pipeline. These latter kinds of webinars should assume a certain level of familiarity with your product, since you are making this offer only after positive responses to other nurturing activities.
Webinars that feature an industry analyst or expert not associated with your company are particularly proficient at moving prospects along in the nurturing process. One thing to keep in mind is that, according to MarketingSherpa, decision-makers are more likely to attend webinars than contributors, so webinar attendance might weigh heavier later in your nurturing process.
 
Share relevant third party information
You don’t need to create all the lead nurturing content yourself. You can demonstrate how well you understand each prospect’s wants and needs by sharing relevant third party content with then. This can be as simple as emailing a news article and saying «Based on our conversation last week, I thought you’d find this interesting.»
 
Make it personal
Remember, the goal of «dating» is to build a relationship with a real person. B2B buyers are people, so the human touch matters. Lead nurturing is a conversation, not a series of disjointed campaigns. Personalize email responders and landing pages. Make sure each step connects with the prior one. And except for webinar invitations, don’t make the same offer twice in one email flow.
 
The Proposal
When creating your ideal customer, marketing and sales must work together to determine the best indicators of success, in terms of what the customer looks like (demographics, etc.). During this discussion, you should also determine the activities that result in a sales-ready lead. For instance, if a prospect fit your demographic target, clicked on one of your pay per click ads and watched a short demo, then downloaded an eBook from your email follow-up, you might consider him to be moderately qualified (a 7 out of 10, for instance). But if he then attended a webinar from an invitation you sent and went to the «pricing» section of your website, you might consider him a 9 out of 10, which tells you that he’s ready for a contact by your sales team. Your sales team would then go to work (with your help, of course).
 
Make outbound calls
Your sales team takes the action to follow-up on your qualified leads with a phone call. Their job is to further qualify the lead and deepen the relationship. Marketing can help by providing call scripts (including qualifying questions) that make it easy for the inside sales team follow-up from the campaign. They also indicate which product the customer is most likely to be interested in based on the campaign.
 
Send personal follow-up emails
Since marketing typically stops nurturing when the prospect is sent to sales, the inside sales team should also have a set of emails to send depending upon the level of interest shown by the prospect (and whether calls are completed). Marketing can assist by providing detailed email templates that continue the lead nurturing process.
 
Use customer references
Customer references are always excellent ways of closing new customers. Marketing should cultivate and nurture existing customers and gain permission to use them as references. Care should be taken with references to ensure any single reference isn’t over-used. Remember that they’re doing you a favor.
 
Conduct ROI analyses
An essential sales tool for many companies is an ROI analysis tool. Plugging in numbers of employees, current costs, and the like, then comparing to your solution is an outstanding method of showing costs and comparing benefits. Don’t forget to train the sales team and to provide written explanations for each section of the ROI tool. A results document that sales can send as a follow-up further cements the activity.
 
The Wedding
The Deal. The Close. The Win. Ultimately, making the sales is up to your sales team, but by implementing a sound nurturing and scoring process, you have helped them by establishing a relationship and positioning your company as a leader with the prospect.
 
The Tools
Just as a nice haircut and a manicure prepare you for that first date, every marketer should prepare for that introduction. You’ll need easy to use tools to help you nurture leads, including email, landing pages, forms, and lead scoring: essentially, a lead management solution.
 
Send triggered emails
Send a series of emails as part of a drip marketing campaign, or triggered based on specific prospect activities. Each email offers a document (or webinar, or trial software, etc.) that helps move your target along in their decision-making process.
 
Use custom landing pages
Don’t forget that custom landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 48% during your lead nurturing as well as your lead generation activities. You only have eight seconds to get their attention, so use bullets, short forms, and no external navigation. And have only one call to action!
 
Use smart forms
You will get better response rates by using a form as the call to action on your landing pages, but why use the same form with the same fields over and over? Just like you wouldn’t ask your date for his or her name every time you see them, you shouldn’t ask for contact information again and again. Smart forms recognize known visitors and can fill in the fields you already know. Since you don’t have to ask for this, ask for other info, such as company size, time until decision, etc. Building the profile over time will help you in scoring the lead.
 
Use web analysis and lead scoring
Knowing which pages your prospects visit on your site can be very beneficial to determining their interest as well as their level of engagement. Being able to connect anonymous visits to actual prospects? Priceless.
 
Automate and measure
Salesforce.com and other customer relationship management (CRM) products are great, but they typically fall flat in their marketing capabilities. As marketers we need to automate the everyday tasks of building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. We also need to more objectively score leads according to their company demographics as well as their activities on our websites, landing pages, emails and other campaigns. And a single lead source doesn’t cut it when lead nurturing. It’s great to know where we first encountered the prospect, but knowing what happens between that first meeting and closing the sale is imperative in these days of marketing accountability.
 
Evaluate
As you move through the nurturing process, you’ll probably discover that some of the assumptions you made are incorrect; for instance, that downloading a particular white paper means that they are close to buying or that sending a particular email would elicit a good response. Don’t forget that lead nurturing and marketing in general is constantly changing. You’ll want to stay flexible and be ready to change your lead nurturing process as you experiment with new tactics and learn what works.

Vuelta de tuerca – apelar a qué teme el cliente

(enero de 2009)

Acabo de leer un artículo cortito e interesante. No dice nada nuevo pero tiene relación con lo que sería una posible estrategia a seguir en estos tiempos de incertidumbre: dejar atrás las preferencias y los gustos de las personas para centrarse en sus miedos e inquietudes, y entonces comunicar/marketear/posicionar acorde a eso. Qué quiere el cliente vs qué teme como para dejar de comprar o contratar un servicio.
Muy buen 2009 a todos; como dice Cortázar, las crisis y los años nuevos siempre generan oportunidades.

Changing Your Tune for a Changing Economy
Hyundai, Wendy’s Evolve Brand Messages to Stay Relevant in Tough Times

Posted by Marc Brownstein on 01.12.09 @ 12:56 PM | Advertising Age

Much of the advertising we see and hear today is different than what we saw and heard a year ago. The messages have changed to reflect the economic times we live in. And for good reason. Can you imagine not revisiting your client’s brand message and, rather, putting more media dollars behind ideas that are out of touch with how people are thinking and feeling today? It would be marketing suicide.
Of all the work I’ve seen, two recent campaigns have stood out for their boldness: Hyundai’s Assurance Program and Wendy’s 3Conomics. In the case of Hyundai, I was working on my laptop one night at home, with the TV on in the background. When I heard the voice-over announce that Hyundai will let you return the car if you lose your job, I stopped what I was doing and paid close attention. That statement was the boldest one I’ve heard yet in this pool of recession-based marketing. It struck me as daring, but also as very smart: Most auto showrooms are struggling to attract customers, so these times require another level of connection with customers. With 500,000 Americans a month losing their jobs, this message (unfortunately) resonates to more people than we care to admit. After all, look at me — I’m writing about Hyundai, not some other auto brand. They have taken increased risk with the Assurance Program, but it has cut through, at least in my home.
Then there’s Wendy’s lesson in 3Conomics, «3 waaaaay better sandwiches for just 99 cents each.» At a time when most fast feeders are pushing value eating, Wendy’s has done a nice job in positioning its menu of inexpensive sandwiches under the «3Conomics» banner. And — even more refreshing — it has not resorted to a desperate, hard-hitting tone in the work. Instead, it’s continued with the effective use of humor, while clearly expressing the 3Conomics value idea. Who says you can’t sell with a smile in hard financial times? People still need to laugh, and that still enables consumers to remember your message, and motivates them to consider you.
There are more examples of marketers that have changed their brand’s message to adapt to tough financial times, and I’d like to hear which ones have stood out for you. In the meantime, kudos to Hyundai and Wendy’s for giving careful thought about how to better connect with their audiences, and effectively executing. I look forward to discussing examples of how marketers have changed their messages for the economic rebound that we are enjoying — hopefully in the not too distant future!

Los pensadores no están liderando – Thought Leadership

(agosto de 2008)

Alguien puso en palabras formales lo que yo digo siempre caseramente, qué bueno. El artículo es un poco aburrido y además podría ser mejor. Pero ojalá los motive a la acción.

Thought Leadership – The New CRM?

By: Roger White, Roger White · Professional Marketing · April 01, 2003

The thinkers aren’t leading…

A few weeks ago the Marketing Director of a major professional services firm said to us that, «thought leadership is the new CRM for professional services firms, everyone is talking about it and hardly anyone is doing it…»

Thought Leadership is currently one of the most overworked phrases in professional services marketing, and in reality might be translated as «we need some press coverage on this topic». We have reviewed many marketing plans in which a stated objective is to achieve a thought leadership position in a particular market niche. This overview article looks at four key issues:

                     What does this actually mean in practice?

                     What are the benefits of thought leadership?

                     What are the key success factors in achieving thought leadership?

                     How can one go about becoming a thought leader?

There is clearly a paradox here since in many professional firms there is a latent potential to achieve the position of a thought leader Professionals of all varieties often have great insight, way beyond their narrow technical specialisation, and are good at thinking. So why is more not happening? In a board meeting we only came up with a handful of examples from the professions where we could recall more than one action in building a position in a market niche.

 

What happens in practice… and why?

Everyone wants to be a thought leader but few really are. In reality thought leadership in professional services firms is usually nothing more than a book to be published, a survey to be publicised, maybe an event to speak at and probably a press release to be issued. This is not thought leadership, its pure day-to-day PR, something to hang a story on for a brief flurry of media attention and to boost a partner’s ego. And in our view this still has its place.

So why do professional services firms feel the need to be thought leaders and what should they be doing to achieve that status? Well let’s start by defining the problem.

The fundamental problem is not that professional services firms call one-off marketing initiatives «thought leadership’, but because well targeted issues are often treated as a PR exercise they have no plan in place to properly exploit the thinking that has taken place. Some internal marketing people or traditional PR Companies who are neither expert in the issue or in developing successful sustainable thought leadership campaigns often find it difficult to create campaigns that achieve thought leadership status. In our view most traditional PR companies are not particularly well placed to develop campaigns, though their traditional press contacts may be valuable.

Thirdly, thought leadership requires serious effort, including thinking…that in turn is going to require partner or senior associate time. We have observed, no names or pack drill, that partners who, often single-handedly, achieve serious profile for their firm often do so at the peril of their billing targets, partnership or their domestic life or all three. It is unlikely that you will achieve thought leader status in your spare time or with a 1600 hour target… So if «thought leadership» is a term in your marketing plan, quantify it and get the management on side.

Lastly, there is often good work going on by firms under the umbrella of a trade association or professional bodies. However, marketing thinking may not be bought to bear on this type of activity, as partners may not see it as a marketing issue, rather something that reflects a personal interest or a straight «pro bono» for the profession or the industry. In fact, many trade associations, short of funds, are willing to jointly badge important work in recognition of the effort expended.

Too often the thinking is often shallow and amounts to little more than yet another survey or series of articles. That’s OK, but lets just be honest about it and stop pretending it is more than it is. You might surprise yourself and get better value from it and avoid disappointment internally!

 

Key sources and elements of thought leadership…

But if we want to be real thought leaders and gather the benefits in brand building this can produce, what should you be doing?

For the purposes of this article we have defined genuine Thought Leaders as those who influence board or management decisions. They tend to be the leading management thinkers, like Tom Peters, Michael Porter, Harvey Jones, or leading figures in an industry, like Bill Gates. Most firms are more likely to target a specific issue or an industry that aligns with their business development programmes. Firms of the scale and calibre of McKinsey may try and cover a broad spectrum of activities through its eponymous «Quarterly» but for most firms the scope will be more focused.

For specific industries trade associations also carry weight particularly where government policy and regulations are in play. Business schools may add research capability and credibility to research-based projects. The growing array of think tanks tend not be taken seriously by business, as they are not always seen as practical, though there are exceptions.

The things that tend to make real thought leaders successful are also the things that count against professional services firms. What are those things?

Real industry or issue specific knowledge counts for everything. Good ideas, supported with research need to be matched to an understanding of the issues at board level. The topics and issues chosen should be ones of importance to clients and potential clients, or to be issues that are of significance. (Who would have thought corporate governance would have been such a hot boardroom topic during the long bull-market?)

Thought Leaders are expected to bring an independent view on an issue, and not be leading into a sales pitch for their own benefit. That means giving balanced commentary. Professional services firms are frequently blatant in how they present their `thought leadership’ and their sceptical audiences can be turned off. Even worse they usually fail to have the sales plan in place to exploit the potential that still does exist…

Certainly thought leaders should be creative, innovative and provocative but they must do it from a foundation of reasoned argument and preferably empirical research. Audiences expect thought leaders to bring clarity and succinctness to their position, not waffle or legalistic technical jargon, the very things professional services firms’ spokesmen by their nature and training are happiest with. Also they should be capable of covering the angles of all the stakeholders affected by the topic.

And thought leaders are expected to be around for a while, maintaining long-term relationships with their audiences. They are not one hit wonders. Would-be professional services firms thought leaders usually publish, perform and then disappear.

So if those are the factors that thought leaders are expected to deliver how can a professional services firms become one and reap the real and tangible benefits that ensue?

 

Planning to become a thought leader?

Thought Leaders do three things well. They raise the profile and deepen the understanding of an issue. They provide good coverage and opinion of industry events to their industry peers. They introduce new topics to the board on their chosen fields and they do those things over a prolonged timeframe. Because of that, they deliver sustained awareness, publicity, differentiation and added credibility to their organisation. That brings added power in the market place and enhances the environment for new business generation. The acid test used by advertising agencies for advertising campaigns is relevant. Does the idea have legs? Is it «buildable»? (If not it still may be a good one-off initiative.)

General rules of thumb are that organisations are more influential than individuals; commentators who tackle current issues are most valued; and those who maintain regular contact with their audiences are most highly regarded. That means that you have to exploit the full potential of the original and creative thinking that has taken place:

                     Think and plan beyond the initial PR burst;

                     Think about the long-term targeting of the message to key audiences;

                     Plan to take the message to your audiences singly (particularly journalists who are key opinion formers) in groups and to the mass market;

                     Plan to do it over a sustained period;

                     Plan to build it into your overall marketing and communications plans and activities;

                     Keep your thinking up to date.

The truly successful thought leadership organisations are the ones who can sustain a programme over a long period. If you build a position you need to reinforce and defend it, not just open the door for the competitors. To quote an old adage: Tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; then tell them what you have told them. Then do it all over again, and again. As marketing people you may be bored but most of your audience still won’t have heard your views even after a year!

 

Roger White and Robert Pay are with Jaffe Associates, a business development consultancy focused on the professions. Roger was latterly Corporate Affairs Director of PwC.

Optimizar el espacio en los avisos publicitarios

Dejaaame que te cuente un cuentito! Era la versión personalizada del “cuento de la buena pipa” que tenía mi papá… y fueron tal vez esos años de cuentos truncos, jamás contados, que me dejaron con esta obsesión que tengo por las historias.

No puedo evitarlo, soy la freak de los cuentos. Me encanta sacar frases a colasión, o imágenes de películas/libros ante situaciones de la vida, y muchas veces me cuento la vida con bandas de sonido. Cualquier circunstancia puede ser exitosa (con Here come success de fondo y Ethan Hawke saliendo triunfante del auto, Great Expectations), o trágica (cual Mel Gibson fumándose mil cigarrillos ante la supuesta muerte de su chica, Eternamente Joven). Y soy la peor cuentista… no hay quien me gane, soy la más aburrida contando anécdotas. Podemos decir que soy el cuento mismo en su peor expresión, o el costado patético del cuento.

No voy a ahondar en el cuento del tío ni en si somos lo que nos contamos que somos, sólo les voy a contar un cuento… que no es mío, así que con suerte no los aburro.

Estábamos reunidos con el ejecutivo y el director de cuentas de la agencia de publicidad, viendo cómo vender mediante un aviso de 2×4 tooodas las promociones que teníamos para un modelo de auto… “y además, service bla bla bla” insistía mi jefe; y no había manera de convencerlo de que una cosa o la otra. Entonces el director de cuentas, un señor de 60 años, nos contó un cuento, el de Isaac.

Isaac era un muerto cuyos familiares recurrieron al diario para informar de su velorio: “… y a las 21.00, en Honduras al 4000, luminoso, excelente esquina, vista al pqe, 2 baños…”.

Abajo, dos páginas de un librito de Ogilvy, creo, levantadas en una de las ediciones de Communication Arts (revista). Hablan, irónicamente, de la manera de optimizar un aviso publicitario. Divertido.

Las empresas en You Tube

 (abril de 2008) 

Va nota gentileza de la australina Cecilia Acuña.

Las empresas buscan espacio en YouTube

Según un artículo de Universia Knowledge Wharton, en un mundo digital de información instantánea y de una honestidad sin piedad, o la empresa consigue un resultado envidiable o hace tanto el ridículo como un adulto que intenta parecer joven.

En el video del nuevo Corolla, tres universitarios deciden ir en coche hasta Daytona Beach, en Florida, para pasar el receso de primavera. Son 960 kilómetros de carretera. El estudiante en el asiento de atrás menciona casualmente que había traído un juglar. Los amigos lo miran y ven que está sentado con dos músicos vestidos de época isabelina: uno tiene una pandereta, el otro, un flauta dulce. «¿Un juglar?», preguntan. «Sí», dice él. «Él canta acerca de nuestras hazañas y aventuras. Mi familia lo compró cuando fuimos a esquiar a Vail. Es sensacional».
El video de dos minutos, creado por un trío de comediantes profesionales, es uno de los 10 semifinalistas de un concurso de sketches cómicos emitidos en YouTube con el patrocinio de Toyota Corolla 2009, cuyo lema es «viva su sueño por menos dinero». Si a usted no le hace gracia el juglar sentado en el asiento trasero del coche, no se lo tome como algo personal, probablemente, no forme parte de la clientela a la que Toyota quiere llegar con su ambiciosa campaña de YouTube.
Como los espectadores están pasándose cada vez más al ciberespacio, y sabiendo que YouTube representa cerca de un tercio de todos los videos vistos en Internet, la web, propiedad de Google, se ha convertido en un nuevo lugar muy codiciado por los anunciantes. Pero, encontrar espacio en ese medio no es fácil, de acuerdo con los profesores de Wharton. En un mundo digital de información instantánea y de una honestidad sin piedad, o la empresa consigue un resultado envidiable para sus productos o hace tanto el ridículo como un adulto que intenta formar parte de un grupo de jóvenes a la última moda.
«Las campañas publicitarias tradicionales saben perfectamente lo que hay que hacer para crear en el consumidor conciencia de marca, pero no saben cómo hacerlo con el público joven. Para llegar a ellos, es preciso adrenalina», observa Jonah Berger, profesor de Marketing de Wharton, resaltando que, como se trata del segundo coche más barato del fabricante, el Corolla está dirigido a un público más joven y de menor poder adquisitivo. Sin embargo, transmitir una imagen vibrante y llena de energía es más difícil de lo que pueda parecer. «¿Cómo dar al Corolla un aire irreverente? Es el tipo de cosa que no se puede simular tiene que ser real», dice Berger.
Nadie sabe si, de hecho, los usuarios de YouTube identificarán en el Corolla ese componente de energía pero, dado que uno de los diez videos finalistas del concurso promovido por la empresa tiene como título «Pedos calientes», todo indica que Toyota está dispuesta a llegar donde sea necesario. La empresa está «intentando crear un vínculo con la próxima generación de compradores del Corolla», dijo Cindy Knight, portavoz de Toyota, a Courtney Messenbausgh, blogera de MotherProof, una división de Cars.com enfocada al público femenino y, en especial, a las madres. Knight definió el cliente objetivo del Corolla como un individuo instruido, incondicional de los medios digitales móviles y visitante asiduo de los medios online como YouTube.
Aunque Knight y otros representantes de Toyota no revelen de qué manera la campaña de YouTube encaja en toda la campaña del Corolla, el Wall Street Journal informa que la campaña de YouTube costó a Toyota 4 millones de dólares y contó con la máxima colaboración de YouTube, Google, Toyota y Saatchi & Saatchi, agencia de publicidad de Nueva York contratada por la empresa.
 
La culpa es del mayordomo
La campaña del Corolla 2009, lanzada a principios de marzo, cuenta con dos canales separados en el YouTube. El primero de ellos, Sketchies II, donde aparece el video del juglar, ofrece dinero y premios por valor de 40.000 dólares para el mejor sketch cómico creado por los usuarios. El vencedor se conocerá en abril o mayo. El Corolla aparece destacado en la página principal del canal, con enlaces a la web de la empresa y a varios otros spots de video que anuncian las características del Corolla 2009 a través de representaciones en las que la figura del mayordomo inglés es una constante.
En el caso, sin embargo, de los videos creados por los usuarios, el Corolla 2009 no aparece en ningún momento. En el video del juglar, por ejemplo, los universitarios están subidos en un Honda. En otro video finalista, «Shotgun Song», tres sujetos se disputan el asiento delantero del BMW de un amigo. Ese toque sutil de branding, naturalmente, debe formar parte de la estrategia de Toyota. Kim McCullough, actual gerente corporativo de comunicaciones de marketing de la empresa, dijo al Wall Street Journal que «si usted bombardea esas webs con anuncios tradicionales, espantará a los clientes, y no es eso lo que deseamos».
Berger, sin embargo, dice que es posible atenuar exageradamente el impacto de una marca. «Si la conversación online gira en torno a los videos, y si Toyota no forma parte de ellos, la empresa se quedará fuera de las conversaciones de las personas», dice. Gracias a la interfaz de usuario del YouTube, los internautas pueden ver todos los finalistas del Sketchies II sin jamás visitar la página principal del canal, que retrata de modo específico el contenido promocional del coche.
El segundo aspecto de la campaña del Corolla 2009 en YouTube consiste en un canal con una serie de características especiales denominado «Best in Jest» (Las mejores bromas), donde se pueden ver los vídeos más graciosos de la semana. Esos videos, por norma, son producidos por compañías profesionales de medios, como el periódico y web de humor The Onion, o empresas como VeriSign, de Mountain View, en California, que emite actualmente una campaña en video sobre un hombre ficticio que tiene como misión espiritual rescatar carritos de compras abandonados. Berger compara el canal «Best in Jest», de Toyota, al patrocinio corporativo de un festival de cine o de un festival de grupos de música. «Se trata de una opción más tradicional y segura. Crea asociaciones positivas con la marca, pero como los riesgos son menores, los retornos son menos sustanciales».
 
El cliente como protagonista, y no mero espectador
Las campañas publicitarias en YouTube y otras webs en la que se comparten videos constituyen un desafío especial, señala Kartik Hosanagar, profesor de Gestión de operaciones e información de Wharton, que investiga actualmente la publicidad en Internet. «Nadie va a una agencia de publicidad y dice: Quiero que vosotros hagáis un vídeo de mi producto con las características tales y tales, y quiero que sea visto tantas y tantas veces y que presente un nivel x de audiencia». Ese tipo de experiencia no se hace por encargo y no está lista.
Está claro que la publicidad siempre buscó crear en cierto frenesí en torno al producto, pero la novedad aquí es la implicación del cliente, dice Hosanagar. «Antes, el cliente era el público, y el anunciante intentaba descubrir qué mostrarle. En el ambiente online, el cliente es el protagonista de la campaña».
Un portavoz de YouTube afirmó en un correo electrónico que «la plataforma de marketing de YouTube está cien por cien asociada a la participación del público. Nuestros usuarios celebran los anuncios que consideran de buena calidad y se sienten motivados a expresar su opinión sobre los anuncios que no les gustan. Ellos comparten anuncios y hacen comentarios sobre ellos, reaccionan a la publicidad proponiendo un contenido producido por ellos mismos, participando en concursos y diálogos creativos con otros que comparten con ellos los mismos intereses. Es esa participación activa la que muchos anunciantes desean, para que puedan comunicarse con nuevos clientes y llegar a ellos».
Esa implicación puede redundar en retornos significativos, observa Xavier Drèze, profesor de Marketing de Wharton. «Es una forma de ir al grano. Como los clientes son bombardeados por un número enorme de mensajes, ellos desconectan. Para conseguir involucrarlos en la construcción de su propio mensaje es preciso tomar el camino de la puerta de atrás». Marcas como Doritos, de Frito-Lay, por ejemplo, obtuvieron un gran éxito gracias a los videos que sus clientes crearon a petición de la empresa. Las campañas de la marca Doritos de 2006 y 2007, Crash the Bowl, emitidas durante la Superbowl, fueron un fenómeno de difusión viral en la Web y consagraron a sus creadores.
Otra ventaja de la participación del cliente está en la investigación de mercado, según afirma Drèze. «Las empresas pierden mucho tiempo imaginando de qué forma las personas se relacionan con sus productos», comenta. Hacer que los clientes participen en la creación de contenidos originales es algo muy parecido a lo que sucede en los grupos de discusión. «En vez de usar sólo la campaña para transmitir su mensaje, usted acaba recibiendo información y aprendiendo alguna cosa».
 
Recelo de lo desconocido
La idea de transformar las campañas de marketing en un debate público puede despertar algún que otro recelo. «El mayor problema es que las empresas quieren controlar su mensaje, pero no se puede controlar la participación online», observa Drèze. «Las empresas necesitan cambiar de mentalidad y aprender a relajarse», dice, añadiendo que en el caso de empresas fabricantes de productos polémicos, como las compañías de tabaco, una interacción totalmente libre puede ser demasiado arriesgada. Emitir anuncios en medios interactivos, como YouTube, no es para cualquiera. «Usted necesita preguntarse: ¿ayuda a alcanzar mi público objetivo? El riesgo tiene que valer la pena».
Para Hosanagar, saber evaluar los riesgos y los retornos de campañas publicitarias online no es una habilidad común a muchos profesionales de marketing. «Mientras las mismas personas encargadas de crear anuncios impresos y para la televisión estén también involucradas en crear anuncios online, no debemos esperar gran cosa. Necesitamos jóvenes universitarios, gente que haga las cosas de una forma totalmente nueva. Las oportunidades de éxito de los tradicionalistas, en este caso, son pequeñas».
Matt Dickman, director de marketing digital de Fleishman-Hillard, agencia de relaciones públicas de St. Louis, cree que las empresas apenas usan sus campañas en YouTube. «Suelen recurrir a los segmentos de medios sociales en los cuáles se sienten a gusto, por eso hacen videoclips de 15 o de 30 segundos. No es que esos videoclips sean poco productivos, pero están lejos de causar un impacto real«, observa, añadiendo que las grandes campañas online, en general, no llegan a los blogueros en su área de actuación, privando, por lo tanto, a las campañas de su principal motor de divulgación.
Century 21 Real Estate, empresa inmobiliaria de Parsippany, Nueva Jersey, lanzó un canal de concurso de videos en YouTube a mediados de marzo. La idea es que los dueños de inmuebles y sus agentes participen de un video tour de la propiedad a la venta «con humor y creatividad». El vencedor, que se anunciará en mayo, se llevará a casa 21.000 dólares y un aparato de HDTV. Aunque la empresa generó muchas expectativas cuando anunció el concurso, refiriéndose a él como «el primer canal de YouTube en llevar la marca de la industria inmobiliaria», su primer video no parece haber inspirado una reacción muy significativa: el canal emite actualmente sólo cuatro videosclips. El comentario de un espectador sobre uno de los videos exhibidos por Century 21 dice que el vídeo presentado es la mejor forma de no vender la casa en cuestión.
De momento, la experiencia heterogénea de Century 21 pone de manifiesto el lado negativo de la evaluación del público que frecuenta las webs de redes sociales. Todo video de YouTube es medido por una serie de parámetros como, por ejemplo, cuántas veces se ha visto el video, si se ha marcado como ?favorito?, si se han suscrito  a él y cuantas estrellas recibió. Cualquier persona que abra una cuenta gratuita en la web puede dejar un comentario debajo de la ventana de exhibición. En las webs que comparten videos, dice Hosanagar, «el riesgo del boca a boca negativo es real. Otra persona puede ver si su video ha recibido visitas, o puede colgar un mensaje del tipo ese vídeo es muy malo y el producto anunciado también». Hosanagar resalta que muchas empresas prefieren anunciar en YouTube a través de medios que no permiten la interacción con el usuario, tales como banners, anuncios cortos insertados antes de la transmisión del video, o anuncios emitidos a lo largo del video al pie de la pantalla de exhibición.
El miedo a lo desconocido ayuda a explicar por qué «el gasto en anuncios en Internet actualmente no está en sintonía con el tiempo gastado por el consumidor online», observa Hosanagar. «Existe un inmenso abismo aquí. Las empresas todavía no han comprendido totalmente lo que se necesita para hacer una campaña online de éxito, y el miedo a lo desconocido dirige las decisiones de publicidad conservadoras. Se trata de una estrategia de vida corta, porque las personas migran cada vez más hacia el video online».
Un estudio hecho en febrero de 2008 por eMarketer, una empresa de investigación de mercado de Nueva York, constató que un 53% de todos los americanos, o 154 millones de personas, verán vídeos online en 2008. Aunque General Motors, la tercera mayor empresa anunciante del país, haya monopolizado las titulares en marzo al anunciar que pretendía canalizar la mitad de su presupuesto de gastos por publicidad, por valor de tres mil millones de dólares, en anuncios online, es evidente que los anunciantes no están migrando al ciberespacio tan deprisa como los consumidores.
John Bell, jefe del equipo 360° Digital Influence de Olgivy Public Relations Worldwide, en Nueva York, cree que el negocio de la publicidad está evolucionando, a medida que los profesionales de relaciones públicas y de publicidad empiezan a entender que para ganar los medios generados por el consumidor, es preciso dar a las personas alguna cosa de valor, y que lo mejor sería comenzar oyendo lo que los consumidores quieren. Aunque muchas agencias de publicidad «pequen por no crear material alguno de entretenimiento que lleve su marca como, por ejemplo, un video viral o un juego cualquiera», dice Bell, «puede ser necesario algo más que una diversión inteligente para conseguir involucrar a las personas hasta el punto de que opten por la marca del anunciante».
 
Ejemplo real
Cuando la empresa de Bell lanzó una nueva loción para combatir el envejecimiento de la marca Aveeno, de Johnson & Johnson?s, tomó como referencia el trabajo en 3D del artista británico que dibuja con tiza en el suelo Julian Beever. Un video producido con la técnica de animación time lapse (lapso de tiempo) muestra a Beever creando un dibujo en que utiliza la técnica ilusionista de pintura, marca registrada de todo lo que hace. La escena tiene lugar en Union Square, en Nueva York, y en ella se ve el logo de Aveeno. El clip fue visto más de 1,2 millones de veces en diversos canales de vídeo, dice Bell. «Supimos que los fans de Beever estaban intercambiando ideas sobre su obra oímos lo que decían y les dimos algo de valor. Fue eso lo que los llevó a divulgar y a compartir el video».
Pero, así como los anunciantes comenzaron a adaptarse al ambiente de YouTube, la ecuación puede cambiar. «YouTube están en este momento al alza, pero no se sabe por cuánto tiempo. Los anunciantes siempre intentan alcanzar a las personas de diferentes formas. Si surge un nuevo medio, ellos van a probarlo», concluye.
 
Fuente: Universia Knowledge Wharton br /

Adbusters | revista de publicidad

Qué es Adbusters?

http://adbusters.org/home/

 

Fuente: Cristian Pinto [me limité a copiar y pegar la explicacion de otro, es viernes, no se me puede pedir mas]

 

Mientras algunos soñábamos con destruir las vallas publicitarias, otros tomaban las mismas herramientas de la publicidad para combatirla y sobretodo denunciar las malas practicas de algunas grandes corporaciones, ¿las herramientas? Las mismas que usaban las grandes marcas para llegar a su público objetivo; el diseño, la publicidad, los comerciales y reportajes en profundidad sobre los temas que como sociedad estaban empezando a ahogarnos. 

Fue así como un grupo de artistas, publicistas, diseñadores y personas de las más amplias profesiones se reunieron alrededor de Adbusters Magazine, esta revista editada en Vancouver Canadá, se publico por primera vez en 1994 por iniciativa de Kalle Lasn y como toda revista que se respete, planificaron un original lanzamiento, para lo cual organizaron el Credit Card Cut Upsday, donde invitaban a los consumidores a romper sus tarjetas de créditos, rompiendo así metafóricamente las cadenas de la esclavitud del consumismo.

 

Tan bien les resulto este lanzamiento (con una amplia cobertura de prensa) que la iniciativa se amplió y se articuló al año siguiente con el día sin compras Buy Nothing Day en más de 15 países. Diez días antes del lanzamiento de esta campaña, Adbusters lanzó un anuncio televisivo que fue rehusado por todas las cadenas de televisión, salvo CNN.

 

Pero no fue hasta el año 1995 en que organizaron la campaña que los ha hecho famosos a nivel mundial, ya que instauraron la semana sin televisión, es decir la T.V Turn off Week – entre el 23 y el 29 de abril este año – en que invitan a las personas de todo el mundo a apagar sus televisores, bajo el slogan de T.V Turn Off – Turn on Life (apaga tu televisor – enciende tu vida).

 

Temas como el consumismo, la obesidad, la anorexia, el sedentarismo, las cirugías estéticas, las guerras o el cambio climático; son solo algunos de los tópicos abordados tanto en su revista como el sitio web que mantienen activo y en donde lo dejan muy en claro es en esta denuncia al mundo del consumo: 

«Bienvenidos a nuestra tienda. ¿Que ofrecemos? Cosas que no son esenciales pero sin las cuales es difícil vivir. Cierren los ojos al mundo y disfruten. Adquieran todo aquello que los haga sentir felices; y si aun no se sienten bien: consuman más. No importa que los productos que compren provengan de la explotación de personas que al fin y al cabo ni conocen, o si el medio ambiente esta en ruinas. Es por nuestro bien personal. Reaccionar a la verdad económica es algo de hippies de los sesenta, escritores idealistas y jóvenes desadaptados. Así que únanse y no se quejen, porque la base de su tranquilidad es la indiferencia y el individualismo.»

 

El principal objetivo de Adbusters Magazine, es la búsqueda de un equilibrio entre la economía y la ecología, promoviendo la concientización y el activismo social como mecanismos para demandar la atención de las grandes corporaciones.

Pero más allá de la critica y el análisis, Adbusters invita a la acción por dos medios: Uno es el Spoofing publicitario (satirizando las marcas de las mega corporaciones) y el otro son las constantes campañas de acción que llevan a cabo (como el Buy nothing day o el TV Turn-off Week); acciones que impulsan también a partir de su pagina web http://www.adbusters.org.

 

No es una labor fácil la que realiza Adbusters, pues las actividades y campañas que realizan son una y otra vez censuradas por los medios de difusión masiva; a pesar de lo cual la revista canadiense tiene actualmente una circulación de 120.000 ejemplares mensuales, y suscriptores que provienen de mas de 60 países.

Con todo lo anterior, las personas ligadas a esta revista han dado respuesta a la pregunta sobre si es posible otro tipo de comunicación masiva que no tenga como único fin el afán de lucro, ya que Abusters Magazine se financia exclusivamente con la venta de su revista y la ayuda de sus suscriptores, sin publicidad de ningún tipo, llevando de esta forma adelante la misión que se han propuesto como colectivo, enunciada con claridad en el sitio que la Fundación mantiene en la web y que es:

 

“Examinar, denunciar, poner de manifiesto, investigar y en última instancia explicar los desequilibrios de las relaciones humanas, las injusticias de la economía, las problemáticas del medio ambiente y todo lo que tiene que ver con la cultura “oficial” y sus herramientas de control”

 

Adbusters Magazine, no es una revista política y dentro de ella se pueden encontrar interesantes notas sobre arte alternativo, comerciales y videos de denuncia desarrollados por ellos mismos, como también las publicidades “falsas” hechas por algunos de los creativos más reconocidos del mundo, asimismo en la red están detalladas todas las campañas realizadas y hay una sección denominada Uncommercials, donde aparecen los anuncios creados por ellos que han sido rechazados por los mayores periódicos y cadenas de televisión a nivel mundial, todo esto ha transformado a Adbusters Magazine en todo un fenómeno, pero sin duda alguna su gran plus como revista es su estrategia creativa e irónica, ajena al enfrentamiento frontal, lo que ha impedido que los mejores bufetes de abogados de Estados Unidos les acallaran y por lo mismo en su site en internet, se pueden apreciar sus versiones de campañas anti publicitarias para Calvin Klein, Camel, Smirnoff, Nike y Coca Cola.

Sao Paulo no logo

SAO PAULO: A City Without Ads 

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/73/So_Paulo_A_City_Without_Ads.html

 

 

São Paulo: A City Without Ads

From Adbusters #73, Aug-Sep 2007

 

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

As the driving force behind the measure, mayor Kassab quelled the rebellion from the advertising industry with the help of key allies amongst the city’s elite. On many occasions, Kassab made the point that he has nothing against advertising in and of itself, but rather with its excess. He explained,

“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

Since then, billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses have been eliminated at breakneck speed. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal, and strict new regulations have drastically reduced the allowable size of storefront signage. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape.

One sore loser in the battle was Clear Channel Communications. Having recently entered the Brazilian market, the corporation was purchasing a Brazilian subsidiary as well as the rights to a large share of the city’s billboard market. Weeks before the ban took effect, Clear Channel launched a counter-campaign in support of outdoor ads, with desperate slogans that failed to resonate with the masses: “There’s a new movie on all the billboards – what billboards? Outdoor media is culture.”

Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful of billboards standing, the city, now stripped of its 15,000 billboards, resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront facades. While it’s unclear whether this cleanup can be replicated in other cities around the world, it has so far been a success in São Paulo: surveys indicate that the measure is extremely popular with the city’s residents, with more than 70 percent approval.

Though materialism and consumerism, along with gang violence will continue to pollute the city of São Paulo, these human dramas may at least begin to unfold against a more pleasant visual backdrop.

 

 

---

 

 

On The Media’s Bob Garfield interviewed Vinicius Galvao, a reporter for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, about São Paulo’s ban on visual pollution.

BOB GARFIELD: On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America’s largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.

The ban on what the mayor calls «visual pollution» was the culmination of a long battle between the city’s politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil’s economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past.

Vinicius Galvao is reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, and he joins us now. Vinicius, welcome to the show.

Bob Garfield: I’ve seen photos of the city, and it’s amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did São Paulo look like up until the ban took place?

Vinicius Galvao: São Paulo’s a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.

And now it’s amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.

BG: No writer could have [laughing] come up with a more vivid metaphor. What else has been discovered as the scales have fallen off of the city’s eyes?

VG: São Paulo’s just like New York. It’s a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.

And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers’ shops.And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it’s a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.

BG: I want to ask you about the cultural life of the city, because, like them or not, billboards and logos and bright lights create some of the vibrancy that a city has to offer. Isn’t it weird walking through the streets with all of those images just absent?

VG: No. It’s weird, because you get lost, so you don’t have any references any more. That’s what I realized as a citizen. My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered through this Panasonic. So you start getting new references in the city. The city’s got now new language, a new identity.

BG: Well, cleaning up the city’s all well and good, but how do businesses announce to the public that they’re open for business?

VG: That was the first response the shop owners found for this law, because the law bans billboards and also even the windows should be clean. Big banks, like Citibank, and big stores, like Dolce & Gabbana, they started painting themselves with very strong colors, like yellow, red, deep blue, and creating like visual patterns to associate the brand to that pattern or to that color.

For example, Citibank’s color is blue. They’re painting the building in very strong blue so people can see that from far away and they can make an association with that deep blue and Citibank.

 

VG: Not to revert to previous clutter, but I think like very specific zones, I think they’re going to isolate the electronic billboards in those areas, in the financial center. I don’t think they should put those in residential areas as we had before.

BG: Now, the advertising industry is obviously not happy about this. They’re complaining that they’re deprived of free speech and that it’s costing them jobs and revenue. But is there anyone else in São Paulo who’s unhappy about this? Tell me about the public at large. What’s their view?

VG: It’s amazing, because people on the streets are strongly supporting that. The owner of the buildings, even if they have to renovate a building, they’re strongly supporting that. It’s a massive campaign to improve the city. The advertisers, they complain, but they’re agreeing with the ban. What they say is that we should have created criteria for that to organize the chaos.

BG: Vinicius, thank you very much for joining us.

VG: Thank you so much.

BG: Vinicius Galvao is a reporter for Folha de São Paulo.

Excerpted from “NPR’s On the Media” from WNYC Radio.

 

 

 

2-b- SAO PAULO: the city tha said no to advertising

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/id20070618_505580.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_innovation+%2Bamp%3B+designa

 

 

São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising

The «Clean City» law passed last year by the populist mayor, Gilberto Kassab, stripped the Brazilian city of all advertising. So how’s it looking now?

by Patrick Burgoyne

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist’s dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

In September last year, the city’s populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the «visual pollution» caused by the city’s 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city’s streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. «It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn’t legal,» reasoned Kassab, «so we have decided to go all the way.»

The law was hailed by writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo as «a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash& For once, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.»

Border, the Brazilian Association of Advertisers, was up in arms over the move. In a statement released on 2 October, the date on which law PL 379/06 was formally approved by the city council, Border called the new laws «unreal, ineffective and fascist». It pointed to the tens of thousands of small businesses that would have to bear the burden of altering their shopfronts under regulations «unknown in their virulence in any other city in the world». A prediction of US$133 million in lost advertising revenue for the city surfaced in the press, while the São Paulo outdoor media owners’ association, Sepex, warned that 20,000 people would lose their jobs.

Others predicted that the city would look even worse with the ads removed, a bland concrete jungle replacing the chaos of the present. North Korea and communist Eastern Europe were cited as indicative of what was to come. «I think this city will become a sadder, duller place,» Dalton Silvano, the only city councillor to vote against the laws and (not entirely coincidentally) an ad executive, was quoted as saying in the International Herald Tribune. «Advertising is both an art form and, when you’re in your car, or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom,» he claimed.

There was also much questioning of whether there weren’t, in fact, far greater eyesores in the city—such as the thousands of homeless people, the poor condition of the roads and the notorious favelas: wouldn’t Kassab’s time be better spent removing these problems than persecuting taxi drivers and shop owners? Legal challenges followed while, in an almost comical scenario, advertising executives followed marches by the city’s students and its bin men by driving their cars up and down in front of city hall in protest.

Nevertheless, the council pressed ahead. «What we are aiming for is a complete change of culture,» its president Roberto Tripoli said. «Yes, some people are going to have to pay a price but things were out of hand and the population has made it clear that it wants this.»

Originally, the law was to be introduced last autumn with immediate effect but it was first delayed until December and then finally introduced in January 2007 with a 90-day compliance period, supposedly giving everyone time to take down any posters or signs that did not meet the new regulations or face a fine of up to US$4,500 per day. Throughout that period, the city’s workmen were busy dismantling around 100 sites per day, occasionally supervised personally by Kassab, a man with an obvious eye for a photo opportunity.

In theory, 1 April was the first day of São Paulo’s re-birth as a Clean City. So what does it feel like?

«I can’t tell you what it’s like to live in a city without ads yet,» says Gustavo Piqueira, who runs the studio Rex Design in São Paulo, «because in a lot of places they still haven’t been removed. In Brazil, every time that some new law comes in, everybody waits a little to see if it will really be applied and seriously controlled, or if it’s just something to fill the newspapers for a week or two.»

In a lot of places, Piqueira says, this has led to the removal of posters but not the structures on which they were displayed. «It’s a kind of ‘billboard cemetery’. I guess they’re waiting to see if the law will really last. If the mayor keeps the law for a year or so, people will start to remove them and the city will, finally, start to look better.»

Photographer and typographer Tony de Marco has been out documenting this strange hiatus in a sequence of images published on Flickr and used to illustrate this piece. The city, he says, is starting to feel more «serene».

Already the law has led to some strange discoveries. Because the site-ing of billboards was unregulated, many poor people readily accepted cash to have a poster site in their gardens or even in front of their homes. With their removal, a new city is emerging: «Last week, on my way to work, I ‘discovered’ a house,» says Piqueira. «It had been covered by a big billboard for years so I never even knew what it looked like.» The removal of the posters has «revealed an architecture that we must learn to be proud of, instead of hiding,» says de Marco.

But there are downsides—Piqueira worries that much of the «vernacular» lettering and signage from small businesses—»an important part of the city’s history and culture»—will be lost. The organisers of the São Paulo carnival have also expressed concerns about the long-term future of their event now that sponsors will not be allowed to advertise along the route. The city authorities for their part have made it clear that certain public information and cultural works will be exempted from the rules.

After a period of zero tolerance, Piqueira believes that advertising, albeit in a far more regulated form, will start to creep back into the city, either as a result of legal challenges, a change in administration, or compromises between media owners and the city. Already, the council has stated that it would like to see the introduction of approved street furniture such as bus stops, which may well carry ads. As these will no doubt be for the major brands that can afford such lucrative positions, a more sterile, bland visual environment may replace the vibrant, if chaotic streets of the past. Flyposters, hand-lettered signs and club flyers will remain banned while international ad campaigns for global brands on city-approved poster sites will return.

For de Marco, though, «the low quality of the letters and the images on those immense pieces of propaganda» were always a concern, as was «the misuse and occupation of public space. In the weeks before my birthday,» he says, «my visual enemies begin to disappear like the happy end of a motion picture. To see my city clean was my best birthday present and my photos were the record of the feast.»

Meanwhile, according to Augusto Moya, creative director of ad agency DDB Brasil, the ban is forcing agencies to be more inventive. «As a creative, I think that there is one good thing the ban has brought: we must now use more traditional outdoor media (like bus stops and all kinds of urban fittings) in a more creative way,» he says. «People at all the agencies are thinking about how to develop outdoor media that do not interfere so much in the physical structure of the city.»

Moya takes an enlightened view of the law. «As a citizen, I think that future generations will thank the current city administration for this ban,» he says. «There’s still a lot to be done in terms of pollution—air pollution, river pollution, street pollution and so on. São Paulo is still one of the most polluted cities in the world. But I believe this law is the first step for a better future.»

And even if some Paulistanos remain unconvinced, there is at least one group who are certainly not complaining—the city’s scrap dealers, who are set to make a killing from recovering all the old signs and structures.

 

 

 

2-c- SAO PAULO NO LOGO – FOTOS BY TONY DE MARCO

Photographer and typographer, Tony de Marco, has been documenting the new, ad-free world of São Paulo, publishing a sequence of images on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/72157600075508212/

 

BG: Now, the city has said, having undertaken this effort, it will eventually create zones where some outdoor advertising will be permitted. Do you expect São Paulo eventually to just revert to its previous clutter?