Craft An Irresistible Price By Focusing On Your Users
Price influences behavior. In order to craft an excellent user experience, the price — and how your users interact with that price — must be central to the development of the product, especially applications. No user will welcome an application if the cost is prohibitive. This makes price every bit as important as design, information architecture and wireframing, and it goes deeper than just getting people to click “Buy.” By focusing on users in setting and maintaining a price, you will increase revenue, lower overhead and, most importantly, significantly improve the user’s (read customer’s) experience. Read More
Google Wave is Dead
Google Wave, the revolutionary product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration will no longer be actively developed and may be shuttered after the end of the year, Google announced this afternoon. Read More
Vanity Purchases Are All About Image Even in a Recession
Vanity purchases occur when a customer buys a product with the intention of using it to enhance or support their perceived personality or, as we call it in the Consumer Buying Behavior tutorial, their self concept. Read More
Train your customers
Yes, you can train them. By rewarding some behaviors over others, by keeping some promises not others, by having some expectations instead of others, you get the audience you deserve. Some things you can train customers to do… Continue Reading
Turn More Visitors into Buyers with Adwords Ad Sitelinks
Ad Sitelinks is a new Adwords targeting feature for sponsored search ads that allows you to extend the value of your existing AdWords ads by providing targeted and specific links for searchers whose keyword triggered your ad. Read More
UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience design misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take our word for it, we’ll show you lots of researches and articles from design and usability gurus.
Kevin Rose (Digg founder) posted a tweet regarding a rumoured launch of a Facebook competitor service called ‘Google Me’.
Often correct with his posted rumours, this one will be interesting to watch unfold.
Even with Facebooks monsterous growth and profitability, Google is still an online powerhouse with a massive user and press following. Should their social network offering be more usable and not dabble in the areas of privacy infringement, which has been a common downfall for Facebook, they could do very well.
The latest popular online trend in businesses online appears to be social and group buying of daily specials in your local area.
Websites like Groupon and LivingSocial have become very successful by applying this business model to special deals. Group is valued at about $1 billion only after a year of operation with many new locations added to their website.
The websites make use of social media sharing, such as Facebook Connect to spread the specials through visitors’ circles of friends. This not only broadens the exposure of each special, but gives it a personal recommendation from each person that posts it.
It will be interesting to watch what other social equipped businesses launch in the future.
Whenever you see that little pink note stuck to someones car window, you can’t help but have a little laugh and say it serves them right. Although as soon as it’s found on your own car, you heart sinks and anger sets in while you try think of excuses to try get out of a decent sized parking fine.
This emotional response by people towards traffic fines presented the perfect marketing opportunity for FmyFine to engage with potential customers.
I was walking to my car, which was perfectly parked in a bay designed for a car and saw the little pink slip stuck to my window. I really had a hard time understanding why I had been fined and almost gave the nearby car guard a hard time about it too. Upon closer inspection of the fine, it turned out to be a witty marketing stunt by FmyFine.
Having your brand associated with laughter and a feeling of relief is more than some brands could wish for.
FmyFine.co.za is a website designed at providing customers with high quality excuses for lowering or getting out of their traffic fines.
These ads are brilliant examples of how creativity in advertising can not only capture the attention of consumers, but also make them decide between illusion and reality.
The following example was sourced from The Cool Hunter website.
The game of marketing has changed fundamentally. Taking out uninspiring, run-of-the-mill print and TV ads doesn’t fly any more. Marketing a brand effectively requires exceptional ideas and concepts that are entertaining and unusual enough to capture the imaginations of today’s cynical, ad-wary consumers. Our advice is to go beyond the traditional media to capture your audience in other platforms as well – offline brand experiences that DEMAND consumer attention.
If only these walls could talk, the saying goes. In the case of the N building near Tachikawa station in Japan they do. In fact the whole building facade has been transformed into a real time dialogue between smart phones and what’s going on inside the store.
All you do is hold your phone up to the walls and the constantly changing QR codes tell you what’s going on inside. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons.
The simple thing is that people listen to what their peers, colleagues and clients have to say about brands and companies. It’s either going to be good, bad or an ongoing form of gossip about ever move your company makes, all depending on where you are in the market and if your company fits into a social segment.
How to create a viral element
There’s no formula to create word of mouth marketing, but there are methods that can create the platform: read more
Crowdsourcing is the new age technique of outsourcing the idea generation process to large groups of people through an open invitation.
Crowdsourcing
Who uses Crowdsourcing?
Companies use crowdsourcing to generate content and products like Wikipedia and Threadless or to come up with marketing concepts for companies in return for a reward or payment, which is done well by Idea Bounty.
Why is it so Popular?
When you crowdsource your campaign results you bypass a single team of experts and open your company to the many talented individuals all over the world. The ideas submitted are often much more fresh and innovative than ones you would receive internally. The individual reward or payment is often quite valuable for the person with the idea and much more cost effective for the company, as they are paying one person… rather than a whole team.
How do you run a Campaign?
If you have a large subscriber base, such as through a facebook fan page, newsletter list or blog base, then you can submit the idea to them and offer a prize for the idea that is chosen. Alternatively there are many agencies who offer crowdsourcing services and have databases of thousands of registered creatives and professionals who are eager to scratch their heads.
Apple reports that on the first day they sold more than $150,000,000 worth of iPads. I can’t think of a product or movie or any other launch that has ever come close to generating that much direct revenue.
Are their tactics reserved for giant consumer fads? I don’t think so. In fact, they work even better for smaller gigs and more focused markets. Continue reading
