Marketing Tactics for the Off-Season - Deals to Make You Salivate

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

SALE! SALE! SALE! How I love the sound of these words. Shopping seasons like Christmas, New Year, local festivals are a time of intense bliss. There is nothing better than finding that pair of shoes at just the right bargain price. It's only when the season is over that one realizes that the purse strings need to be tightened. No more bargain-price-induced shopping sprees for me, thank you very much.

And if the average shopper thinks anything like me then businesses have a big problem. Moreover, their marketing teams will be under pressure to come up with the next big idea to get the cash registers singing again.

For the B2B marketers these lean periods are the ideal time to plan and re-strategize (Do B2B Marketers Hibernate Come Christmas, New Year and Financial Year-end?). While B2Cs need to focus on identifying their near-future plans, they do not have the luxury to stop and think. Its all about getting the most of that time.

To tap the off-season Jet Airways recently came up with the Low-Fare Bonanza in the Indian market. By  offering 20 lakh low fare seats (as low as $50, inclusive of all taxes), for a one-way journey on over 450 daily flights across 57 destinations they attempted to garner volumes during the impending lean season(1). Needless to say most other airlines followed suit. Like they had a choice!

Another industry which is often hit hard by the lean season is hospitality. But, this time, if you had your eyes open, you could have picked some great packages from luxury hotels.  Luxury suites packed with add-ons like spas, airport transfers in Audi sedans, complimentary breakfasts at the Oberoi in Mumbai, India were coming at mere $360 - a 72% cut from the standard rates. Royal suites at the Leela Palace Udaipur are being offered at $1400 for two nights. As a standard you will only be able to access these suites at $1500/night(2).  So how can hoteliers afford cutting down the costs for these luxury suits? What we need to keep in mind is that it's all about redistributing the demand without drastically reducing the profitability. 

OTAs like Expedia, MakeMyTrip and Cleartrip have some neat packages of their own to tackle the off-season and pack in bookings for the year. By having access to immense data on the booking patterns, vacation schedules and popular destinations they are able to analyze and offer deals like $70-$100 off on return bookings and  10% off on hotels + air bookings.

Auto-makers are not far behind in offering salivating deals to counter the slump market is undergoing. Increasing fuel prices, slowing down of economy, higher road taxes all contribute to customers shying away from buying new cars. Discount deals offered by leading auto brands are perhaps going to turn the tide. One can buy a new Volkswagen by paying half the price at the time of buying and the other half after an year. Maruti is offering a 12.5% rebate on ex-showroom prices and a three-day paid trip to a location of choice by paying an additional $27. Tata is offering a buy-back scheme on its Manza sedan, where the company would offer to buy the car back after 3 years for 60% of the purchase price (3).

So it's back to battling my instinct to go into another shopping spree. I could do with a luxury vacation with travel and stay at half-prices. Or, a new car since I don't have to worry about paying for it for another one year.

1.http://m.businesstoday.in/story/jet-airways-escalates-price-war-offers-tickets-at-low-rates/1/192536.html

2.http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Five-star-hotels-offer-luxury-at-a-steal-in-lean-season/articleshow/18942729.cms?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweets 

3. http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130309/news-businesstech/article/nine-best-car-deals-season

Big Data and Marketing - It's Essentially Essential

Marketing is a science. Then again, it is also an art. One needs an understanding of human sentiments and emotions to grasp why a certain brand is preferred over another. At the same time, unless you are supported by hard facts, data and proper analysis it becomes difficult to reach any kind of conclusion - even an emotional one.

The world sees information being churned out at a humongous rate - IBM suggests it is 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every date -data from satellites, posts from social sites, mobile usage statistics, internet consumption rates, traffic patterns, content in form of words, audio and video, ….its an endless list.

Image courtesy of Vlado/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

For marketers the scope is teensy-weensy bit smaller. We only have to analyze the foot-falls, the buying patterns, the information exchange patterns, the economic trends, the competition. We have to be aware of what policy changes are happening in country A and how that will affect our sales in country B.  There has to be a constant study of which email campaign worked, why it worked, what's the click through rate, how many unsubscribes. Are there any cross-sell opportunities with our current customers, how do we profile new prospects…...Whew!!!! And, this does not even cover a miniscule portion of data we need to collect and analyze.

This is where Big Data comes in. Data would be considered Big if it covers 3 dimensions - Volume (the amount of data generated), Velocity (the speed with which data is generated) and variety (the kind and type of data being generated).

If the above list indicates anything its this - Marketers are being hit with Big Data from all sides. But the challenges are numerous. Most organizations do not have a streamlined process for collecting data. This means either the data is not collected frequently and consistently or, it is not in real-time. There is also a lack of data-sharing across the organization and marketing communications are still not personalized to reflect this data. The 2013 Big Data for Marketing survey* shows that 30% of those surveyed are still having a hard time understanding how, exactly, marketing analytics could be used in their companies.

What is needed are tools and techniques capable of handling such data. Such tools will help replace guesswork with insights, pinpoint trends and help analyze information so you are able to make faster and relevant decisions. On a broad scale these tools can be classified as analytics tools, predictive analytics tools and data driven automation tools.

Few companies are already becoming comfortable on this bandwagon. Amazon not only accesses and analyzes its daily visitor patters and provides them with suggestions on 'items of interest' but also has the agility to incorporate the now for business profit.  The day Michael Jackson passed away Amazon reconfigured their whole MP3 store within 2 hours**. This gave them access to a revenue stream that others were still unsure on how to tap. Linkedin, the world's largest professional networking site with over 200Mn+ members, can at any time pull in statistics which help decipher a company's attrition rate, regional expansion patterns and much more.

The market is seeing a number of players specializing in helping organizations in deciphering what their data means and then utilizing it optimally.  A good example is the India based company Vizury which helps e-commerce and online travel companies harness their digital data assets for micro-targeting highly-pertinent ads to website visitors.

Do you have more examples of how Big Data is being used by marketers? Do share.

*http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/moneyball-meets-marketing-leveraging-big-data-analytics-improve-results

 **http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/08/big-data-what-marketers-need-to-know/

Marketers Build and Fall - And, That's How It Should Be!

"You have to try. Because if you haven’t tried, you haven’t lived…” Those who have seen Meet Joe Black will recognize this quote. I believe that we, as marketers, must make this statement our mantra.

Innovation is a way of life now...new things are churned at super sonic speed and there is no scope for laggards. In fact, being a follower today may not cut it. You have to be amongst the first in the market to try a new product, implement a new tool, offer a new idea. Barely have talks of Samsung IV hit the market and people have  started clambering to be the first to lay their hands on it. Twitter just announced video uploading through Vine and we saw numerous marketing campaigns being released (Twitter Goes the Video Way - The Vine App for Your Visual Short Stories and Twitter Makes Video Marketing More Accessible With GIF-Like Mobile App, Vine)

Smart marketers live in the now. They leverage what is right there in front of them. 

Take the Oscars 2013, for example. Pantene came up with a very-now, very-relevant campaign where they shared how people could get the Red Carpet Celeb hairstyles quickly. They had numerous tweets like

 "An edgy look can be light as air. Get your pixie How-To here. #WantThatHair    http://bit.ly/O6e4q

  pic.twitter.com/rg28eTXCTa". 

One just had to click these to get the fashion tips….Great brand promotion.

Not to say that all is honky-dory. There have been casualties when brands have tried the new. For example, McDonald's started the #McDStories campaign on Twitter to encourage people sharing their positive experiences. However, this went horribly wrong when people started sharing the wrong kind of #McDStories. While the company pulled the stories, the damage was done.

But does this mean that the companies should stop coming up with new ways to put the brand out there? Absolutely not! In fact, in 2011 McDonald was one of the first few brands to use Promoted Accounts on Twitter to increase @McD_Canada's average new followers by using a 'suggested follow' that targeted Twitter users via specified keywords and hashtags. With a total budget of $15,000 USD, McDonald's Canada gained 9,503 new followers over the course of the campaign. The campaign also drew in 14,200 profile views. *

We have to be the forerunners of this daily race….be it in new media like the social network, or even the latest sales tool. There are no guarantees that our endeavors shall all be successful. But, of the 100 things that we try 5% will go right and that's where the reward truly lies.

*Source - http://mashable.com/2011/07/06/twitter-campaigns/>