“Made in America” Does it Matter?

Flip over that coffee cup on your desk. I’ll bet it has a sticker or imprint with the words “Made in China.” How about that golf hat your wearing? Or that handbag? Yep, “Made in China.” Are you predisposed to buy American, or don’t you really care? A recent Harris poll says you carry an opinion.

Mine was formed from the recession of the 70′s and the Asian encroachment into the automobile industry. Since then I’ve automatically flipped coffee mugs, backs of telephones, bottoms of staplers, inside slippers to find the country of origin. I’d say the majority of the time the label states “Made in China” or import. My wife loves her US National Parks hat she wears on our Fall hikes in the Kettle Moraine forest. We checked the label. Yep, Made in China.  At one point, I even went on a one-month binge of buying nothing but American made products. The result, it was quite difficult as the availability of American made hard good products was outnumbered by imports. So I accurately fit in the Harris peg of “more likely to buy” (when given the opportunity to do so).

How about you? Do you care? The Harris poll says you do. Lets see where you fit in. Continue reading

Tags: center for media research, marketing research

CBD at CASE: The Importance of an Integrated Media Strategy

Long gone are the days when one medium can comprise your media strategy to acquire new students. Today’s prospective student is likely to be more active and exposed to various media opportunities than students of a decade ago. It takes a multi-touchpoint strategy to reach this highly mobile audience. Less time is spent on TV. More time is spent on the internet, whether via laptop or mobile device. More time is spent traveling to outside activities (sports, clubs, special interests) thereby exposing them to more out-of-home media. Email is an important communication tool. And social media – networks like Facebook, entertainment like YouTube – has created a whole new dimension for engaging one’s interest. Reaching your target audience is a complex issue when your prospective student is bombarded with consumer messaging all day. So how do you create an affordable “break through the clutter” media campaign that effectively reaches your target audience and yields high response rates?

Dick Strassburger, CBD’s Vice President and Director of Integrated Media Strategies, will be focused on this topic at the upcoming C.A.S.E conference this December in Chicago. He will be providing insights into media consumption habits of today’s undergraduate and graduate students that identify opportunities for high engagement. He will also reveal successful strategies that have worked for CBD’s client campaigns. Joining him with a case study that employed these integrated media strategies is Kate Colbert, Director of Marketing for Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. Over a three-year period, LFGSM has progressively increased their media mix from a direct mail/radio approach to include innovative use of online, out-of-home and mobile marketing to increase enrollment for their MBA program.

If you are attending CASE, please let us know so we can meet you there.

Tags: CASE, facebook, integrated media strategy, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, YouTube

LFGSM Goes Mobile

The Lake Forest Graduate School of Management (LFGSM) student profile is a 38-year old, mid-level manager, living and working in the busy Chicago area earning $100,000 plus and likely has a young family. This prospect carries a company-issued Blackberry or other task-oriented smartphone. They are mobile and depend on that Blackberry for email, calendars, contacts, online maps, online search and online sources of information and news. You almost never see that device out of their hands. The prospective student is similar in nature and behavior.

In an effort to reach this mobile target audience, CBD created a mobile marketing campaign that leveraged and greatly enhanced an existing “stealth” local marketing campaign for the Chicago campus. Surrounded by competing MBA schools, we previously deployed an out-of-home poster advertising campaign on Chicago’s “L” platforms that carry busy business commuters from home to work and back. While waiting for their trains, our station saturation of multiple poster ad units conveyed the “just steps away from your MBA” message of close proximity to the Chicago campus. This medium was ripe for inclusion of a text messaging (SMS) component to fully engage the prospect while they were standing around waiting for their train. By sending MBA to the text messaging short code (75309), prospects could obtain more information about the school or register for an open house (MBA Preview).

The benefits of a text messaging campaign such as this gave LFGSM the opportunity to establish and continue a dialogue with that prospect via text or email or however the prospect indicated their preference.

While actual response rates cannot be revealed for competitive reasons, we can state that LFGSM expanded the program to include other “stealth” media and enjoyed even greater results.

Tags: Higher education marketing, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, LFGSM, MBA, text messaging short codes

Mobile Marketing for Marketers in Higher Education

If you’re marketing to an undergraduate prospect, you should consider mobile marketing. If you’re marketing to a Masters candidate, you should consider mobile marketing. If you’re marketing to an MBA candidate you must consider mobile marketing.

The proliferation of smartphones – nearly 50% of all mobile phones in the USA will be smartphones by mid-2011 – and nearly fanatical usage – Apple reports millions of apps have been downloaded – makes mobile marketing a must in the media mix for any higher educational institution. And the trends for 2010 fully support the need for serious marketers to acknowledge and adopt some form of mobile marketing. I spoke with Mickey Alam Khan, editor-in-chief of MobileMarketer.com, and discussed five key trends for 2010.

Continue reading

Tags: Higher education marketing, MBA, Mickey Alam Khan, Mobile Marketing, MobileMarketer.com, smartphones

QR – the new marketing barcode

The consumer world is beginning to see a funny new Rorschach-type of symbol in their advertising. QR Codes (Quick Response) have been all the rage in Japan (Wikipedia reports Toyota invented it back in 1994 for high-speed decoding) and has now traveled overseas and onto US brands’ advertising materials. CBD’s own client, Constellation Energy, prominently displayed a QR Code in their transit station domination advertising in Philadelphia recently, linking customers with QR Code reading capability on their mobile device to the newenergy.com microsite.

The reason QR Codes are now catching on is traceable to the proliferation of smartphone growth in the US. Our research indicates that by 2011 nearly 50% of mobile devices will have smartphone technology with myriad capabilities. Google has included QR Code readers in their Android mobile operating system and Apple offers several readers via iTunes, making this a pop culture trend for the short term and a defacto method of linking consumers to websites, apps and other downloadables in the future. Simplicity is key when communicating via mobile devices.

How does it work in the consumer world? You need a smartphone with built-in camera and an app for scanning and decoding the two-dimensional QR Code. After scanning the QR Code, you will be linked to whatever the marketer wishes to convey, product info, coupons, a link to a website or video, for example.

The application of this to Higher Education marketing is quite intriguing. First, using QR Codes puts you in the “cool” and “they get it” category. It evokes forward thinking, unafraid to try new things, leading edge; all the same traits you look for in a new student. I could easily see using a QR Code in a poster campaign to drive registration to a campus event, for example. We have a few more ideas on how this could enable engagement, registration or fulfillment of materials such as course catalogs. Having difficulty getting students or prospects to download your app? A poster campaign featuring nothing but a QR Code would be so intriguing it not only would get noticed it would also cause word-of-mouth buzz because it’s so different. And once scanned, you’ve got their attention to whatever you are promoting.

Yes, we have a few other ideas like that. Call or email us. Or better yet, just scan this QR Code.

Tags: Apple, Constellation Energy, Higher Education, QR codes, smartphone, Toyota

Sex or health … which is the better sell?

With more teeth than displayed in recent history, both the FTC and FDA are on the hunt for companies who are, let’s say, “stretching” health and sustainability claims in marketing their products.  One of the more interesting cases is that against the owners of POM Wonderful, Lynda and Steward Resnick and their company, Roll International. On September 27, the FTC filed a claim against the POM Wonderful marketers for “false, misleading and unsubstantiated” representations of their product’s health benefits.  

Earlier this year, the FDA issued a warning letter stating that the extravagant health claims made for their POM juice qualified the product as a drug, and its marketing campaign therefore was unlawful. (POM responded that it was within its rights to convey “truthful, non-misleading and substantiated” scientific results.)

The LA Times published an fascinating story about the allegations and POM’s weird responses, most of which revolve around Ms. Resnick’s basic ignorance of science, and the truth that she knows in her heart about pom juice’s beneficial effects on prostate cancer, cardiovascular health and even erectile dysfunction.  The story also describes the $30 million in company-funded research.

Whether they played a little “loose and free” with the research methodology or interpretations of findings remains to be determined.  Equally interesting will be the results of the old marketing language (“Cheat Death,” Drink to Prostate Health! “) vs. that of the brand new series of three sexy-beast commercials that launched this week.

We see Aphrodite introducing the pomegranate to Cypress as an aphrodisiac,  Eve in the garden with the pomegranate instead of an apple as the fruit of temptation and a Persian warrior eating pomegranate before going into battle to be “hard as bronze”. 

The commercials are beautifully shot and art directed, in b/w with the only color being the ruby red POM Wonderful bottle. A bit of trivia … playing Eve is Sonja Kinski, whose mom, Nastassja posed in a similar fashion in the infamous nude-with-snake Richard Avedon photo of a couple decades ago.

The company claims that the new approach wasn’t the result of the FTC/FDA actions, but because they want to “go after the Cokes, Pepsis, Tropicanas and Minute Maids of the world” that have jumped on the pomegranate bandwagon.

With an estimated $100 million plus in sales last year, POM Wonderful has done well with its aggressive health claims.  I can’t wait to see the results that Eve, Aphrodite and the handsome Persian warrior deliver!

Tags: brand, CBD, Lori Colman, POM Wonderful, POM Wonderful advertising, POM Wonderful FDA, POM Wonderful FTC, pomegranate