Brand Experience

The Burger Files

Generally speaking, people hate ads—unless, you’re in pain, of course. And whether that ad demonstrates the solution to your pain well enough to hit its mark.

Knowing this, clever marketers are devising unique ways to engage their audience (or any audience, for that matter).

Enter The Burger Files from none other than the always snarky Wendy’s, a spoof crime series featuring a most common crime: bad fast food.

In the world of quarterly reports and lead gen marketing machines, it’s always wise to consider the long-term brand awareness play, which doesn’t fit into typical playbooks.

What creative ways can you devise to grab much-needed attention for your brand? Sure, it’s a long-term play, but who’s playing for the long term anymore? That an advantage.

Marketing Experience

20 Awesome Examples of Social Media Campaigns

Hey, we all need examples to inspire us. Here are 20 examples of great social campaigns.

There are a couple of gems in here, but the one that surprised me was Studying with Stormy Reid—who knew people were such voyeurs? Well, the end is a bit of a surprise if you want to skip ahead. But of course, the payoff is lost when you skip to the end of the movie, right?

Here are 19 more to inspire you:

Tap Into Your AI Genius

If you’re not using AI in your business, well, then you’re not. But… do you know what you’re missing? From the article, here are some ways that smart brands are using AI:

• Restaurants utilizing AI to auto-generate daily specials based on ingredient availability, popularity, pricing trends and social media buzz.

• A craft brewery utilizing AI to analyze social media buzz, ingredient availability, and flavor trend data to inspire and generate recipes for experimental limited-edition beers.

• In eCommerce, rapid product development that matches demand by analyzing customer data, reviews, and feedback with AI to predict trends, optimize inventory etc.

Didn’t know of some of those use cases, but it’s nice to see people getting creative.

A good read:

Google Adwords Cheatsheet

If you’re running Google AdWords on your own, then maybe this might help you. From Channable:

User Experience

Lessons from 1000 eCommerce pricing tests

We’re all guilty of not testing enough. As you grow, you can’t afford NOT to test because, in most cases, you’re losing sales. Just as there’s an overpricing bias, underpricing can also hurt you.

Because it’s about perception of value, right? Not price.

Well, here are some lessons from 1,000 eCommerce Pricing Tests, courtesy of Intelligems and HBR. Some highlights:

1. Many small and medium-sized e-commerce retailers set prices ad hoc, often leaving money on the table. Price testing can help identify opportunities to improve pricing decisions and better understand consumers' willingness to pay.

2. Intelligems has run over 1,000 price tests across more than 300 eCommerce retailers. They found that in 54% of cases, there was a "better" price than the retailer's current price. That’s over half. Among these non-control winners, 59% of the winning prices were lower than the control price, suggesting that retailers often overprice their products.

3. In contrast, 60% of the winning rates were higher than the control when testing shipping rates, indicating that retailers tend to underprice shipping fees.

4. Almost all retailers (96%) who ran at least three price tests found a better price point, with a median improvement of 3.2% in purchase price variance (PPV). Similarly, 78% of retailers who ran at least two shipping tests found a non-control winner, with a median improvement of 4.5% in PPV.

Enjoy.

Icons generate generate a lift of 23.5% in conversions on mobile

Blue Stout always has some great CRO wins. From this article:

For a CPG brand, we moved 2 out of 4 benefit icons from lower on the page to higher up below the buy box.

This generated a lift of 23.5% in conversions on mobile.

Get the details here.

How AI is becoming the next SEO

I suppose an unintended consequence of AI assistants, particularly shopping assistants, is their “objectivity”. Whereas your average human uses typical bias levers to choose a product from dozens, AI doesn’t have our biases (though they still have some).

That means AIs can shop or recommend products based on merit versus how the packaging looks—unless you tell it specifically to look at certain brands.

How will this shake out? Will higher-quality products get funneled by AI to you because you weren’t the one choosing? Will your affinity to certain brands fade as long as you get the best quality product in the end?

Hard to say. But it’s something to keep an eye on, which means:

• Pay attention to how AI evaluates your products — then adjust accordingly (AI becoming the next SEO — AIO, perhaps?)

• Make better products (kinda goes without saying, but not really—makers need to be reminded)

• Watch how reviews get curated by the AI

Ultimately, how will AI balance your preferences with what’s out there? And how will you, as a merchant, adapt and adjust?

Customer Experience

Luxury Hotels and Lessons on CX

From the article:

Today, the most powerful differentiator in the service sector is a culture of excellence—powered by staff that can anticipate customers’ needs, exceed expectations, create cherished memories, and make it all feel seamless.

Some quick takeaways:

• Regularly reinvent the customer experience to avoid stagnancy

• Go to extra lengths to create unique memories

• Empower staff to gain knowledge of customer preferences

• Enable a distinctive customer experience

• The best leaders model the behavior they want to see from employees.

A lot in this one. Enjoy.

Employee Experience

5 ways to simplify your employee experience

Data Experience

How Likely Are Consumers to Share Good and Bad Customer Experiences?

Interestingly, in the US, if consumers have a good experience, they’re less likely than other countries to share via 3rd party sites or on social media. In fact:

Within the US, consumers are as likely as the global average to tell friends or family about a very good experience, but are much less likely to post on a 3rd party site (21% vs. 34%) or to post on social media about it (17% vs. 24%).

After a very bad experience, US consumers are slightly more likely than average to send feedback directly to a company (31% vs. 26%), much less likely to post on a 3rd party site (16% vs. 34%), and also less likely to post on social media (15% vs. 21%).

In other words, the US is great for raw word of mouth, but they’re less likely to post their experience on social.

Who knew? More here: