Kookmeyer Institute

What comes after a Happiness Machine? If you’re Coca-Cola the answer is a Happiness Truck – driving around Rio. While there is part of me that feels the company is simply buying friends with freebies, I do love the feel good vibe that gets people smiling like they do.

At the risk of further confusing Kiwi retailers already behind the eight ball, I hereby present this infographic from savings.com. It’s based on consumer behaviour in the US but no doubt these trends will filter through to our markets in a year or two. Key points include:

• More Facebook promotions, more mobile coupons, more offers sent direct to smartphones
• Rise of ‘pay on the spot’ technology such as iPads to manage checkout
• Increased use of mobile price comparison apps
• Small booms followed by mini busts as consumers alternate between spending one day and saving the next.

(Double click on the full image to enlarge.)

Let’s see…social media guru sees ‘Egypt’ trending through the roof before spending rest of morning deciding how best to leverage it and ‘generate’ discussion around the brand. Goal: achieved. But probably not the type of attention he wanted. Don’t worry mate, consumers have short memories. If in doubt, see Kyle Lacey’s post on the end result for Nestle, following the palm oil controversy.

Now here’s a lesson in keeping ideas simple. The guys behind Lacta’s Facebook strategy noticed that Greeks were comparing loved ones to Lacta’s sweet taste. So they built an application that allowed fans to personalise and send virtual chocolate bars complete with their lovers’ names on packs. We’re talking little more than wall posts, wall-to-wall posts and tagging in galleries. Yet in two months, Lacta almost trebled its number of Facebook fans, from 87,000 to 250,000. Many fans also changed their profile photo to show off their own unique bar. What a victory for insight, simplicity and shareability! As with many case study videos, there’s no reference to the actual impact on sales. But I’m picking the application was fairly cheap to build. In any case, the benefits in terms of brand attitudes and brand loyalty would have far outweighed the costs.

University of Farmers is a good example of how well video content can be integrated into a site. The only issue I had was the juxtaposition of this with the parent site, which looks bog ugly. Rabobank is guilty of much the same – a very sexy ad campaign supported by a very dour corporate website. For me, these kind of disconnects tend to send mix messages that simply confuse punters. Is it a warm friendly insurance company with a sense of humour, or, dull and conservative?

Yo. My man. You don’t have to be a Jay-Z fan to admire this rich media site filled with previously shot video, stylish black and white stills of the ‘hood and everything you could ever want to know about the performer’s career. I’m only surprised he hasn’t taken this opportunity to push his merch(andise) harder. I guess he knows what’s cool. Beyonce’s not-so-better half has nicely harnessed the power of his tweeps (tweeters) with a page overlay that lets fans add their voice (figuratively speaking) on a favourite lyric, show or moment.

My eyelids tend to get very heavy when people start talking technology but a recent post on Digital Ministry did catch my attention. The guts of Jon Mooney’s argument is that mobile websites are simpler, cheaper and just as good given the advances in the likes of HTML5. Not knowing the man, I couldn’t tell you whether he has commercial imperatives for talking in this way. One commenter has given an alternate view, which is: “Interesting, BUT I would say that another arguement may state that the mobile site is increasingly not needed these days? If I want facebook, linkedIn, Wikipedia, Google etc I go to that icon. If on the other hand I need specific information on a company I normally look at that website through my ipad or laptop. The internet icon is now just another icon on my iPhone desktop, it’s like a parallel universe. If I like you are on my iphone desktop, if I don’t you are invisible. Will a great mobile site change this?”

Waiting at airports can get pretty boring, so KLM wondered if it could use social media to make passengers feel special and turn their boredom into happiness. The social experiment started with a small team of people tracking down passengers who had checked in to one of KLM’s foursquare locations or left a message on Twitter. They then browsed through their social profiles in search of ideas for small, personalized gifts that were later presented by a lovely hostess. KLM was rewarded for these random acts of kindness with more than a million impressions on Twitter as passengers tweeted about their surprise, plus, more than 63,000 views on YouTube. I love it when brands engage in this type of micro level marketing, which reminds me of  a low budget campaign Vodafone ran on Facebook back in 2009.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the ‘Fair Go For Retailers’ campaign in Australia. And I have to say, I’m not liking the whining. In case you haven’t heard, the likes of Myers, David Jones and Harvey Norman are calling on the government to charge consumers GST on goods bought from online stores in other countries. Because it’s hurting their business. Gerry Harvey even declared it ‘un-Australian’ for Aussies to buy in this way. Fair dinkum. Maybe these same retailers should focus more on improving their in-store experience so that they can justify their inflated prices. They’d be better off hammering home the advantages of buying offline (things like try before you buy and the ease of returning items), rather than running full page ads looking for public sympathy.