Why should you study the Digital Marketing module at LAIBS?

This post is aimed purely at current studying students @ARU_BusinessSch who may be selecting their modules for subsequent semesters. And I make no bones about it... this is a sales pitch! So why should you select this incredibly exciting, cutting edge, creative, thought-provoking, essential on your CV module?! Well, if those aren't good enough reasons, here is a flavour of what we will be covering throughout the semester:

• Online consumer behaviour 
• Creating digital personas
• Social activism
• Creating viral photos / videos
• Blogging and vlogging
• Online PR and reputation management
• Sentiment analysis and marketing metrics
• Content marketing
• Customer experience design
• Principles of html coding
• Live simulations of SEO, email and ad planning
• Experience of using social media platforms for content, research and building a personal brand.

It goes without saying that digital marketing skills are essential for new graduates entering the job market or wanting to start up their own business but strategy always comes before tactics, so a firm grounding in relevant academic theory is also included. 

If you have any questions about MOD004487, tweet me @ChezZzaG or mail me via the university.

Cheryl Greyson
Module Leader

A new kind of loyalty card - SPARKS of genius from M&S?

My handbag is so heavy, I cleared it out this morning and realised it was my purse weighing me down. Now, teaching is not that lucrative so it wasn't my riches giving me backache but the number of loyalty cards in my wallet. Want to take a guess how many I had? 20, and this is how it broke down:

• Clothing: Matalan, Bonmarche, M&Co
• Supermarkets: The Co-Op, Tesco, Nectar
• House & DIY: Homebase, IKEA Family, Wyevale Garden Centres, Wickes
• Other Retail: The Works, Holland & Barrett, GAME, Boots, Go Outdoors
• Food: Nandos, Caffe Nero, independent cafes x 3.

I realise I'm probably the last person in the world to pick up a Nando's card, but that is a lot of loyalty I'm spreading around freely... in fact, am I loyal at all? The only cards I truly use on a weekly basis are Tesco's Clubcard and Caffe Nero. The cards that I have received a benefit from in the past are: The Co-Op which pays me an annual small dividend, Tesco which sends me Clubcard vouchers which I boost for day's out, Boots Advantage points which gives me money off goods occasionally when I redeem them, Caffe Nero which gets me a free coffee every 9 tokens and Go Outdoors provides access to discounts - however this is a slightly different scheme and costs £5 annually as a membership fee. The significant factor for me as a consumer though, is that almost all of these schemes collects my data - personal and behavioural to improve their marketing promotions and shopping experience. This is good for me when I get something back, but it doesn't feel quite so good when I don't.

So it was with interest that I opened my post today from M&S addressing me as a 'valued customer'. I've found myself buying less from the store in recent years sticking to basics and school uniform for the kids. Their mailshot presents their new style loyalty card 'Sparks' which is described as a members' club, giving you 'priority access to M&S new season previews, sales and exciting money-can't-buy experiences'. 

New M&S SPARKS Card

Once you've registered the card, you can collect Sparks points through shopping, 'shwopping' old items of clothing which are donated to Oxfam and writing product reviews. They will also donate 1p to a M&S charity of your choice every time you use  your card. 

It's good for corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and building loyalty whilst giving the store the opportunity to understand more about its loyal customers' buying behaviour. The difference with this card is the focus on personalised promotions and access to VIP style events and experiences, rather than money-off coupons. 

It's this unique differentiation which makes it feel more modern and relevant. Experiential marketing is a brilliant way to get consumers to live your brand and create positive word of mouth. It reinforces brand values and creates positive associations of indulgent treats, glamour, exclusiveness, etc. 

In terms of positioning, it makes M&S feel high end and high heels, rather than drab mid-calf hem lines.

Priority Access kicks in at 3000 sparks which you could achieve after spending just under £300 depending on how many times you shopped but you start to receive personalised offers after 100 sparks. 

The scheme launches on October 22nd, 2015 but cards can be registered now. M&S has struggled with its general merchandise business in recent years, despite a stronger performance in food, so it will be interesting to see if this new loyalty scheme can bring a spark back to the business too, and if the card can battle its way to the front of the purse for female consumers in the UK.

***

For more information on M&S' performance, read the annual report here.

For more on their new loyalty scheme, click here.

Have we lost a sense of decency in content creation?

As an ex-hack, I know the pressure of having to fill a weekly printed newspaper so the never-ending demands of supplying content for rolling-news channels and online editions must be enormous, not to mention the pressure of achieving the right metrics. Yet, in the last week, following the terrorist attack in Tunisia and even the disappearance of ex-Blue Peter presenter John Noakes in Majorca who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, I have been shocked by the extent that journalists will go to get a headline, increase clicks or fill a slot.

Is it necessary to show...

• John Noakes, who was missing for hours in hot sunshine and was clearly in a poorly state, being strapped to a stretcher;
• A woman in pain and distress following the Tunisian attacks in her hospital bed;
• Mobile phone footage of the attacks actually taking place;
• The injured being removed from the beach in swimwear who may be identifiable to family and friends who were not even aware their loved one had been injured;
• Painful interviews with survivors who are clearly in shock and who probably require medical help or counselling to recover;
• And finally, journalists (many at the BBC) who have been trained at the Ministry of Silly Questions...

I am a firm believer in a free press and the rise of the mobile phone has given everyone the potential to be a reporter on the ground, but there has to be a balance between good journalism and gratuitous headline grabbing. Victims should be allowed to keep their dignity. If they cannot give their consent to filming, is it ethical to show them on a live news broadcast? Is it right to upset their family and friends in that way? Journalism is under pressure. It's hard to make a return on investment when so much news is now free, immediate and reported by multiple agencies instantaneously regardless of time zones.

Content is king, however just because more content is required, doesn't mean standards and ethics should slip. 

We all make mistakes, but how do you put it right?

Week 5 of kitchen chaos and I still don't have lights or a cutlery drawer but we're finally getting there. Read my Twitter feed if you want the full story (I'm boring myself now) but my kitchen woes were down to an approved kitchen installer not communicating with management, stretching himself too thinly and buggering off onto another job, not answering the phone, then going on holiday whilst leaving everyone else wondering what was going on... Thankfully, my tweets for help finally got the desired response and good management support but not before we'd gone round the houses trying to get the various customer services teams to sort the mess out with no success. It's clear that as soon as you bring other intermediaries into your supply chain, the risk of things going wrong increases. And the first rule of theory in managing your distribution correctly is communication and adhering to quality standards / processes. 

My second customer service grips this week is with Ryanair. I appreciate there has been a baggage handlers strike in Spain and external environmental forces are issues that are hard to predict too far in advance and are out of your control but it's how you deal with them that matters. On Sunday, my flight back from Madrid was delayed 10 minutes before the gate opened by 6 hours! There was no clear information and not a sniff of a Ryanair member of staff - believe me, we all looked for someone. It was only through speaking to the general airline information desk that we found out that our plane was doing a quick return trip to the UK and would be back later - something they would have known about at 6am when the issue first arose. Some passengers got food vouchers, but  most of us didn't. Delays happen, but a little bit of information and a standardised process of supporting customers would have gone a long way to assist the matter... I got a text that arrived after the flight would have boarded! I also didn't appreciate taking a transfer bus in the dark to a lonely car park at 11pm either, something I had no plans to do with my original booking getting me home by 5pm. And of course, amidst the varying excuses of why the plane was late, it turned how to be conveniently 'out of their control' so we are not entitled to compensation. I don't think anyone on that flight would choose Ryanair as their first choice airline next time.

How do you fix customer service gripes?

So the lesson of my customer service gripes are that most customers are pretty reasonable. They will accept that things happen, unplanned events that do cause disruption, but it's how you respond that is important. A human face. Clear information. A plan to fix things. And some form of recompense. Wriggling out of your responsibilities just leads to post-purchase dissonance and a lot of angry tweeting...

If you want to establish what level of service you should be providing and how well you are meeting those expectations, the SERVqual methodology is a great place to start. It adapts very well to use in an online survey and our customers have found it very helpful in identifying elements that need to be improved. Contact us for more help with applying this framework to your customer research.

Who would be an opinion pollster? Why did it all go wrong on election day?

Since the general election, I've been scouring the press for explanations of why the opinion polls were off-piste with the final outcome which saw the Conservatives win with a clear majority, rather than even votes for the two major parties as predicted by numerous polls before voting day. There are no definitive answers but they reveal the real difficulty in trying to predict people's behaviour, particularly when dealing with something so important as a general election.

Here are some of the theories that may be at play here:

• Online panels are wearing out... respondents are not paying as much attention to answering the questions as we would like them to and are clicking as quickly as possible to gain their incentive.
• Telephone surveys are not reaching representative samples due to fewer households using landline, only answering calls from known numbers,not wanting to spend time on the phone answering a long survey, having our mobiles on silent, etc.
• Modelling based on previous election results or estimated turnouts are not appropriate - the turnout in 2015 was up 1% to 66.1% for the UK but leaped from 63.8% to 71.1% in Scotland following Nicola Sturgeon's strong and successful campaigning (UK Political Info, 2015)
• Voters are not inclined to discuss their voting habits, may not have decided at the point of interview, or may be ashamed of their voting intentions if it is not seen as socially acceptable or deviates from their family's views / class heritage.
• Voters change their mind or vote tactically as they are swayed by campaigning, celebrity endorsements, the results of opinion polls, or as they become aware of election manifestos, or election values quizzes shared on social media.
• Last minute PR gimmicks are damaging to voter intentions such as the #EdStone manifesto where even the supposedly neutral BBC showed edited images of Ed Miliband compared to Moses. 

Of course, it may well be that there were major flaws in the complex methodologies employed by the polling companies that are yet to be revealed but I'm not convinced. It's a complex process and there will always be room for improvement (for any survey) in the way we phrase and order questions. Should they measure people's values instead and match those values to the parties? Should they ask people's voting intentions if they voted today? Should they be asked who they voted for last time and if they changed their mind at any point? 

I think that, within the margin of error (generally +/- 3%) that the polls were probably right... voters felt at the time of the interview that they would probably vote for [x] and then... they spoke to their friends and family, or watched an interview, or saw something on social media, or took offence at a gimmick or statement, or thought perhaps things wouldn't turn out quite how they hoped and... they changed their mind. So the opinion polls and the exit polls could both have been right all along, it's just that what we say we'll do and what we actually end up doing are entirely different based on numerous theories of consumer behaviour*.

Read our post on the Scottish Referendum here.

Read more about the differences between online and postal polling in The Guardian here.

*Some of which you can read about on our blog but lots more to come.

3 ways HE lecturers can use social media as a learning tool

Using social media as a learning tool has being a running theme for me this semester. As a marketer and market researcher, I find Twitter to be a valuable depository of links to white papers, conference papers, research findings and best practice guidance. LinkedIn helps me to build contacts and relationships as I grow my network as well as highlighting useful collateral I may have missed on Twitter. And of course, there are many other social media platforms that have value to the marketer too. I was guilty of assuming that the digital natives I teach are tuned into social media in the same way, but I was wrong; certainly, social media for social purposes but that professional angle wasn't as clear to them.

There is a clear rationale for using social media with business students - employability is of course key to that but I've found that they are often so focused on using text books and journal articles as references in their assignments that they forget that professional practice is just as important to business people as the founding principles.

Here are 3 ways I've used social media as a learning tool this term:

1. Students were asked to create a student-led creative campaign to promote the business school to potential undergraduates or postgraduates using social media with the message that 'learning has never been so much fun'. Key learning outcomes were for them to understand the importance of a creative idea, how promotional tools and media need to be integrated to work effectively, and the importance of marketing metrics. This was a quick and dirty one week activity but students developed a range of great ideas including a Facebook page with mini-blogs from international students; a fun set of images adopting the 'keep calm and carry on' theme; and a video for sharing featuring student life in the style of a cartoon strip. This learning by doing exercise gave students the chance to understand the limitations of their approach and the challenge of developing good content that is shareable and genuinely 'fun'.
2. Getting students to set up a Twitter profile and find 25 people or companies to follow in their field of interest. Concentrating their efforts to select useful contacts was a challenge but this helped them to understand how they could build an effective network and start to see relevant content.
3. Free blogging tools such as WordPress, Google Blogger or Weebly were used to set up an e-portfolio. Students were asked to select a marketing topic of their choice and challenged to discover 'what is best professional practice in this area?' by using social media. This taught them how to critically evaluate the quality of professional sources, how to search for the right kinds of material and how to direct their information search by setting clear objectives. This was an activity that took place over the semester partly in-class and also through self-directed learning. It required motivation, dedication, and a curiosity in the marketing topic to succeed. The jury is still out on the results but formative feedback told me that this was an activity and an alternative assessment method that they really enjoyed.

Student-centred learning and applying the theory to practice work really well for me when helping students to understand the value of social media to the marketer and to every business. What has worked for you?

 #learning #digitallearning #edtech

Walkers Crisps and Gary Lineker go together as well as salt and vinegar...

Walkers Crisps' latest promotional campaign (published 08 May 2015) is so good you'll want to share it, but they're relying on the fact that you still won't share your crisps! The strength of their brand proposition relies on their consistent ability to deliver good quality, moreish snacks, in a range of traditional flavours as well as delivering new innovations in taste and texture that customers want to keep to themselves. And they've been doing this since 1995 with the ex-England and Spurs football player and now sports broadcaster, Gary Lineker OBE as their brand ambassador. 

The link between crisps and football may seem tenuous but Lineker kicked off his career with Leicester City, which is where Henry Walker, a butcher, founded the company in 1948. He had to diversify to keep his workers busy when meat was scarce in post-war Britain; thankfully potatoes were not rationed and our favourite crisps brand was born. But this is not the only reason for using the ex-footballer to sell their wares... he was football's Mr Nice Guy and was never cautioned for foul play, nor did he receive a yellow or red card. It is this belief in his character that has connected him to the Walkers brand so successfully for so long. It is only the lure of a packet of Walkers that can make him a tiny bit nasty, leading to a multitude of creative ideas that are still paying dividends.

The latest creative idea sees Lineker eating his lunch on a bench and refusing to share his packet of crisps with his colleague. Revenge comes when the co-worker scrunches up his baguette and throws crumbs over Gary who is immediately caught in a pigeon scrum. The campaign is focused on a sales promotion 'Win a free lunch' where 1 in 6 packs will win customers a free lunch up to the value of £4 from selected outlets. The advert is supported by digital and in-store marketing materials. Walkers also encourages customers to join the conversation using the hashtag #CantHelpButSmile.

Walkers haven't changed their creative idea for 20 years but by using a consistently popular brand ambassador who fits well with their brand values and continually evolving the idea into new formats and story lines, they have kept their place as UK market leader and developed a strong and endearing brand personality embodied by Gary Lineker. You can watch the ad below.

 

You can read more about Walkers in this Superbrands Case Study here.