Industry Insights
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Eight Reasons Why Brand Purpose Fails
Pulse April 12, 2022Organizations hoping to pursue a brand purpose that focuses on more than mere lucre frequently have the best of intentions; however, those good intentions don’t prevent many efforts at brand purpose from failing. Guests on the ANA Center for Brand Purpose’s Beyond Profit podcast often reflect on the sources of such failure, and below are eight of the causes that they identify. Those championing brand purpose in their organizations will find the following quotes helpful in their own efforts as cautions against common pitfalls.
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8 Attributes of Purposeful Brands
Leading Edge April 11, 2022It has become rather trendy to question — or even speak out against — the value of brand purpose. That mountain of studies from trusted sources about consumers preferring to support, buy from, and work for purpose-led brands? Overblown and misleading, the skeptics say. The idea that a deeply embedded purpose can drive business strategy and operations, improve organizational culture, and lead to solutions that address societal issues? Perhaps, but at what cost to the business in time and effort? The notion that purpose can spur sales, business growth, and competitive advantage? Oh, please.
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As TV’s Ecosystem Complexity Increases, It’s OK to Demand Simplicity
Leading Edge April 8, 2022Without a doubt, the media marketplace has fragmented, platform choice has skyrocketed, viewing hours have soared, and the capabilities that underpin today’s TV advertising ecosystem have never been more robust. And yet, advertisers’ goals and needs remain fundamentally the same. They want to build awareness among the right audiences for their brands, and they want that awareness to translate into sales.
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5 Marketing Leaders on Ethical Marketing
Pulse April 7, 2022ANA events bring together some of the smartest and most-talented marketers in the industry to share insights and best practices that help ANA members get the most out of their own marketing efforts.
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A Rose By Any Other Name: The Evolution of Brand Reputation and Accountability in the Era of Cancel Culture
Pulse April 6, 2022No matter which side of the cancel culture debate you may fall on, the impact it has for brands hasn’t essentially changed from any other previous form of accountability companies have faced. Consumers expect brands to act, at the least consistently with the values they espouse, and studies continue to show that a brand’s reputation and trust among consumers increase when they’re doing good for society, whether that’s through sustainability initiatives or in the ways they’re helping communities.
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Heroes at Zero: How Marketers Can Help Companies Reach Their Net Zero Sustainability Targets
Pulse April 6, 2022Net0 defines net zero emissions as “the balance between the greenhouse gases that have been emitted and the offsets that have brought those emissions to zero. Zero carbon is when no GHGs were emitted to begin with. Successful carbon reduction strategies include lower emissions targets every year until zero emissions are achieved.
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Keep Colors Bright All Year Long: How to Avoid Rainbow Washing Your Pride Marketing
Pulse April 6, 2022Marketing to any demographic includes looking at sets of trends and profile basics to craft a message that will reach them most effectively (the explosion of articles discussing "marketing to millennials" is an easy way to see this in action). The issue with reducing groups of a similar generation, race, or preferences to a target on a marketing calendar, however, is that it forgets the individual, and betrays strong consumer preferences for personalization.
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Light at the End of the Tunnel: How Dark Stores and Micro-Fulfillment Centers are Revolutionizing the Retail Supply Chain
Pulse April 6, 2022As the well-worn proverb says, “necessity is the mother of invention,” the pandemic hit retail spaces particularly hard, pushing consumers to use e-commerce more as social and safety protocols increased. While there may be more stores open now, shoppers have found that the convenience and speed when ordering items online is invaluable even long after the protocols have gone.
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QR Codes: Are They Back for Real This Time?
Pulse April 6, 2022QR Codes are an extension of the barcode, and were first introduced as a way for manufacturers to scan larger amounts of data quickly. By 2011, retailers and trade shows were able to take advantage of smartphone technology to utilize QR codes in their inventories, badging, and check-ins — and slowly there emerged consumer usage in the form of online offers.
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SEO for the Future: To Keyword Clusters, and Beyond
Pulse April 6, 2022SEO was a lot simpler in a less-crowded marketplace; you could optimize by keyword for your product, industry, or customer demographics and watch your traffic grow. In 2021, however, not only is the online space left with little metaphorical keyword elbow room, but search engines have gotten smarter to keep up with consumer demand.
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4 E-commerce Advertising Trends to Watch
Leading Edge April 4, 2022As the endemic consumer is rapidly changing, modern brands seek to leverage all of the tactics at their disposal to engage customers. One of the trends we’ve seen over the past two years is a drastic rise in e-commerce and social commerce utilization across retail and direct to consumer brands. As e-commerce continues to take over the marketplace, brand marketing teams will need to better understand the buyer journey in the modern consumer experience-centric era.
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7 Marketing Strategies to Boost Conversions & Average Order Value
Leading Edge April 4, 2022As more customers flock to social media to discover the next big trend, research future purchases, and engage with influencer content, brands have become savvy at meshing their content into our daily digital lives. And with so many options to choose from, customers have grown increasingly fond of the brands that give them new and convenient ways to buy their products, which is why more and more companies are offering a Buy Now, Pay Later across their digital platforms.
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Engaging Gen Z with Empathy
Leading Edge April 4, 2022The past two years have had a dramatic impact on consumer behavior. New cultural phenomena like pandemic exhaustion, digital inspiration, and ethical online shopping have forced brands to quickly adapt to the changing dynamics — and leading the charge is a growing market of young, empathy-driven buyers.
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Top Mobile Marketing Strategies for Success in 2022
Leading Edge April 4, 2022The World Advertising Research Center (WARC) predicts that by 2025, 73 percent of people around the globe will rely solely on their smartphones to access the internet. With this forecast in mind, it’s clear that brands and businesses should be incorporating as many mobile touchpoints as possible into their digital marketing strategies.
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What the Metaverse Means for the Future of Marketing
Leading Edge April 4, 2022The metaverse is all about bringing customer experience to the forefront of marketing in a whole new way. The pandemic gave way to a boom in virtual shopping methodologies, and the response of the consumer market speaks well to the future possibilities of marketing in the metaverse.
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Why Radio Is the Ideal Place to Share Brand Stories
Leading Edge March 29, 2022Consumers have strong expectations that the brands they choose both support and align with the values that are important to them. Recognizing what drives consumers, brands are laser-focused on living their mission, principles, and ethics. As such, brands market their products and services grounded in that mission and the shared values and beliefs between the brand and its target customers.
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Is It Live, or Is It an Infomercial?
Pulse March 25, 2022The COVID-19 pandemic and the quarantines that followed quickly changed the way brands could sell and show off their products, fostering a need for marketers to get inventive with their tactics. The online space also evolved during this time, becoming increasingly dominant and the perfect place to welcome creativity beyond banner ads, video, and social posts. Enter livestreaming, a tactic already well established by gamers and other communities as a way to connect with one another in real-time. What better way for marketers to connect with consumers with so many traditional methods inaccessible for the foreseeable future? Similar to a television informercial or home shopping network, livestreaming offers all of the benefits of those models but cuts out production costs and call-center intermediaries. While brand livestreaming is mainly centered in Asia at the moment, there is a huge opportunity and an eager audience ready for marketers to connect with everywhere else. Read on for more information about the livestreaming trend, how to do it, and what other brands have done in this space.
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What the C-Suite Needs to Know About ABM
Leading Edge March 25, 2022The buzz in sales and marketing circles around account-based marketing (ABM) refuses to die. And with good reason, because ABM works. A full 87 percent of B2B marketers surveyed by ITSMA reported that the ROI from their ABM initiatives outperformed their other marketing investments, and companies are seeing three times higher win rates with larger average deal sizes (91 percent of companies reported increases in average deal sizes with 25 percent seeing average increases of over 50 percent) when using ABM.
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A $340 Billion Industry Is Ripe For Disruption with the Metaverse
Leading Edge March 24, 2022Technology has empowered us to achieve so much more — to do things that could not be imagined before. And still, one thing that has not changed is the dread we experience when we enter the world of customer service.
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Half-Human, Half-Machine, All Marketing: Managing Algorithmic Limitations
Pulse March 24, 2022When AI-based algorithms were introduced to the marketing world they were an immense game changer: they upped the ante on how brands could target their existing audiences, and they sped up the process of understanding how to build new ones. As machine learning grew exponentially, however, it also lost much of its human touch. Without a balance of human input and safety checks, algorithms can adopt human biases (including hate speech), and cannot adapt fast enough to real-time crises like COVID-19. The resources here discuss how marketers can best work with algorithms to ensure they reach desired targets with efficient, optimized results, and avoid communicating the wrong messages.
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