- BLOG BEAG –

We have to thank Gerard O’Neill, Chairman of the Amarach Group for pointing us to two items of particular interest. We’ll cover the first one here – the make up of the modern consumer and what are there demands. The second, the potential of the over 50s market, will be covered in a later post following the Turning Silver into Gold Conference tomorrow in Kilmainham.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value has produced a research  surveying more than 30,000 consumers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Brazil, India and China to determine how they choose where to shop, what shopping methods they prefer and what they will demand from retailers in the future. While Ireland is not covered specifically it would be foolish to imagine we are so different.

Consumers are getting smarter as they incorporate new technologies into their daily lives and information becomes more readily available. In IBM language, consumers are becoming more “instrumented”, “interconnected” and “intelligent”.

Today’s consumer knows:

• which retailers have the best prices and products
• how they (the consumer) want to interact with both retailers and other consumers
• what matters most to them as they decide where to shop
• which retailers need to improve
• where they want to spend their money.

To the question, what’s most important to you when deciding where to shop and what areas do you feel retailers need to improve upon the most, the answers were, in this order:

The good news is that smarter consumers are not only more demanding, they are also more willing to collaborate. They are ready to contribute to the development of new products and services and will reward those retailers that listen by giving them more of their spend.

If you have the time, the IBM Executive Summary is available for download here and the full version here.

A significant fiscal milestone in the history of the State is about to be met. Although not directly related to the advertising industry, and this is a business blog, it is surely related to the economic advancement of the nation likely for this generation, and the next. It affects investment, jobs and state services. According to The Irish Times (18/2/10) the first wave of “asset” (our quotes) transfers to the State agency NAMA will be taking place imminently. More than €16 billion in loans linked to the country’s top ten developers are being moved to NAMA. This is out of a total of €80 billion to be transferred finally.

Let’s just look at the smallest of those numbers – the ten. To quote the Times again, they are Liam Carroll; Bernard McNamara; Sean Mulryan of Ballymore; financier Derek Quinlan; Paddy McKillen, owner of the Jervis Street Shopping Centre; Treasury Holdings, which is owned by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett; Cork developer Michael O’Flynn; Joe O’Reilly, the developer behind the Dundrum Shopping Centre in Dublin; Dublin builder Gerry Gannon, co-owner of the K Club golf resort in Co Kildare; and Galway businessman Gerry Barrett, owner of Ashford Castle in Co Mayo and G Hotel in Galway.

The next number, the €16bn – just five characters to capture sixteen thousand million euro.

The question is simply posed. How were ten individuals  allowed to rack up 16,000,000,000 euro of loans without sufficient review, oversight or even context to the rest of the country’s economic activities?

To even begin to appreciate these figures with respect to our small nation’s total finances, some perspective has to be applied  (see the CSO for more).

• The total value of the 2009 primary and post-primary school building programme was only 614m.
• In 2008, the total value of Ireland’s agricultural output was 11.6bn
• In 2008, the total value of ALL food products manufactured AND sold in Ireland was 16.9bn.
• Finally, if you tot up all the wages and salaries for everyone who worked in the entire Irish service sector for one year 2007, it comes to 23bn.

Hard to get away from another word, this time with six characters, hubris.

Picking up on an article from The World Advertising Research Council (WARC) forecasting that Germany’s total advertising revenues would decrease by around 1% in 2009 led us to investigate a little further into the German “white knight” who might bail us out.

The German economy will contract by 3.7% in 2009 according to the Keel based Institute for the World Economy , which has revised down its previous prediction of a decline of 2.7%, made in December last year. Figures released by the German Economics Ministry also showed that industrial production fell by 7.5% in January. In addition, unemployment rose for the fourth successive month in February to 7.9%, and the country’s government now predicts that the total number of unemployed could reach 3.7 million this year.

Mind you, whether he arrives on a donkey or a horse, the white knight may still be very welcome.

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The Agency is pleased and grateful to have been given permission to circulate the detail of a special eMarketer report “Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn” (copyright holder: e-Marketer).

copyright: eMarketer

Although the language is somewhat US-centric, this is a quality report with very worthwhile suggestions of how to market your way through a downturn.

For marketers looking to not only survive, but possibly even thrive in these recessionary times, eMarketer has identified seven strategies made possible by the Internet.

‘Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn’ by Geoffrey Ramsey, CEO at eMarketer, is being circulated to coincide with the launch of the Dublin 2009 Praxis internet marketing seminar programme on at the Grand Hotel Malahide on 26th March 2009. An event well worth noting. For further details and a copy of the Report please also see our download page on the main site.

The headlines (note especially Strategies 4, 5 and 6) of the ‘Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn’ Report are:

1. Strategy 1- Get with the ‘accountability’ program
   Particularly in lean times, CEOs are going to be looking for accountability across all departments-including marketing programs.
2. Strategy 2 – Search: a necessity for marketers in a depressed economy
   “There’s a focus on efficiency during these leaner times. Advertisers are putting more
   concentration on maximizing direct response. The Internet is the most efficient
   direct response machine ever invented.”
3. Strategy 3. Beyond Search: Do not ignore the power of branding online
   Search accounts for over 40% of all online advertising dollars spent in the US. Beyond the debate over whether search is most effective as a direct response or branding tactic, one thing is clear, if marketers only do search, they are missing 70% to 80% of their
   market opportunity. Search works best when it is complemented by online branding
   efforts that create awareness, interest and desire among prospects. Often the idea to search for a particular item comes from brand advertising.
4. Strategy 4 – Stay close to customers
   Obviously, when times are tough, marketers should attempt to stay as close as they can to their core customers. Fortunately, the Web provides a number of opportunities that allow this to be done as efficiently as possible. With the vast majority of adults online, and much higher penetration among teens and millennials, according to eMarketer estimates, the Internet has reached the threshold of becoming a mass medium. In addition to scale, it also accounts for an increasingly large share of consumer media time.
5. Strategy 5 – Engender trust
   Trust is the currency of brands, and it has never been harder to create or hold on to.
6. Strategy 6 – Engage prospects and customers via video
   The online video revolution has begun. Marketers, content publishers and (especially) television networks are taking notice. The production costs and ease of distribution for online video make it attractive for brand marketers looking to save precious marketing dollars while allowing them to engage their customers with sight, sound, motion and emotion-all the elements that make for compelling brand messages. At the very least, marketers can achieve cost-efficiencies by taking the video assets they already own-including television commercials, video sales demonstrations, videotaped customer testimonials, promotional films and so forth-and putting
   them online.
7. Strategy 7 – test, test, test
   This last strategy is more of a marketing mindset. With marketing budgets slashed everywhere and most consumers in a similar slo-mo spending mode, now is really a
   terrific time to experiment. Not on wacky, unproven tactics that only get the attention of media headlines, but on practical, data supported success strategies that marketers are already deploying today, many of which are discussed in this whitepaper.

The Report is also located at: http://www.praxisnow.ie/base/Seven-Strategies.htm

The Seminars reference page is: http://praxisnow.ie/seminars.

END