Category — Miscellaneous

If you put any well known brand name of a consumer good into a free keyword tool such as WordTracker, you’ll generally find the word “coupon” among the top keyword search terms associated with that brand.

Especially during times of recessions, downturns, and economic stagnation, consumers tend to look for good value and deals. What’s different about this latest downturn in the economy, is that many are turning online to find them.

This behavior is leading to growth in online printable coupon sites such as RetailMeNot or Coupons.com. Viewed as a group, you can see the recent share growth in these type of sites in this graph from Heather Dougherty at Hitwise Intelligence:

During recessions, making sure that brands are providing a good value at shelf has always been a critical task for marketers when consumers are watching their dollars and cents.

What is new is that consumers are increasingly looking online as they look for good values in the brands they buy when budgets are tight.

Found this neat interactive visualization from Wired Magazine of what happens to a blog post after you hit Publish.

Just click and see where it takes you. Just be careful of the text scrapers!

When you boil it down to its essence, consumer behavior is dictated by needs and wants. Consumers very rarely buy something solely because of their demographics.

In other words, demographics help us form a picture of who a consumer is who buys a product, but almost never do they tell us why.

This post by Jolina at the Online Marketing Blog talks about moving from targeting Demographics to something called “Momentgraphics” in digital marketing. She also provides a good example of what this means:

“Momentgraphics focuses on the periods of time in which we need to target prospects. For example, someone searching for the phrase ‘cold medicine that works in less time’ is the prime target for a company producing cold medicine. The demographics of that person are irrelevant because we know they are in a ‘target moment’ making them the target market. “

While I think “momentgraphics” seems kind of kludgy as a term, the idea behind it is sound, since it brings traditional needs based consumer insights to the digital immediacy of search engine marketing.

It’s not often that Apple is seen taking a stumble, which is why the recent brushfire over the iPhone price drop was quite unique. Steve Jobs belated gesture of $100 back to earlier iPhone adopters quieted things down a bit until the whole 1.1.1 update “iBrick” thing set things off again. At the same time last summer, Jobs was in a tiff with NBC over iTunes pricing of their TV shows, which led to the dropping of NBC new shows from the service.

From his article last month in the New York Times, David Carr compares these two events, and puts a sharp point on inconsistencies how Apple prices and consequently places value on the products and services it markets. The point that both a song by Kanye West and a Barry Manilow/Lily Tomlin duet can’t be worth the same 99 cents is apt. The recent price drop for DRM free recordings is a move in the right direction, since DRM provides no value to consumers.

Dynamic pricing is something that Web 2.0 should be bringing to consumers. What is strange is that one of the most dynamic technology innovators of this latest tech boom is still clinging to a Web 1.0 pricing model.

A new blog focused on consumer insights, marketing research, and the digital media landscape.