While Krum is making this point to demonstrate why mobile marketing isn’t for everyone, I think this is a powerful statement. The temptation to get in on the mobile marketing game is strong for many universities. Those working in the higher education web field will have experienced or have heard of some variation of the following conversation (I must note, that I heard this conversation second-hand).

Boss: I read an article about apps! They are the next big thing! I want one!

Web Comm Pro: What will it do? Who is the audience?

Boss: I don’t care! I just want an app!

Web Comm Pro: Shouldn’t we try to figure out …

Boss: (interrupting, waving hands in the air) I just want an app! I want it to be cool! (walks away)

In my experience, whether in print, web or mobile marketing, getting people to think about the call to action is the hardest part of the process; however, I think it is the most important. Without a clearly defined outcome, the campaign may be “cool,” but it will likely be ineffective. No matter how difficult it may be to convince others that having a strategy is important, it’s worth the effort to create a tool that people will actually use.

Start out by talking to students. Ask them what they want. What you find won’t be surprising, but it will provide the foundation for a strong, well-used application. The functionality that students ask for shouldn’t be overshadowed by the brand building tools included in the application. Ideally, these two things can live in harmony.

All too often the management of social media is handed over to interns under the misguided assumption that because they are part of the Facebook Generation, they’re the best choice to manage the company’s social networking presence. Unfortunately, they are often given the keys way before they’ve mastered driving.

Giving interns the full run of your university’s social media presence is no different from letting them draft and send out news releases you’ve never seen and may not know exist. If the intern isn’t provided with the goals, a clear guide to best practices, parameters for interactions and careful supervision, irreparable harm could befall your organization.

That said, interns can provide valuable insight into reaching a younger demographic and, if given good guidance, can provide a more authentic voice for your fans and followers. But treat their social media interactions as you would any other project. Direction, support, guidance and supervision will not only make your results much stronger, they will give your intern a much more valuable learning experience.

With all of the options out there, how does a marketer decide which to utilize when creating a marketing campaign? And how can marketers measure their return on investment?

The first step toward determining which new media tools to utilize is establishing where your audience is — and whether you’ll be able to target your message to reach those audiences. For example, while Facebook is still dominated by younger audiences, it is possible to target advertisements to specific niches: for example, women over 50 who list photography as a hobby. Meanwhile, Twitter provides marketers the opportunity to engage in two-way dialogs with their customers, and to address any consumer concerns mentioned on Twitter.

The second step is to set goals for your new media utilization. Do you hope to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase sales? Is consumer engagement your chief concern? Do you want to improve the reputation of your customer service? Here it is important to measure your baseline, otherwise you won’t know if you are effective. How are you perceived today? How often do you engage with your customers? What is your reputation in the market?

The third step is to take a step. Because the media is so new, there are relatively few best practices (although Mashable.com offers some great tips). The important part is to stay true to your brand and to create a strategy with your goal in mind. If you blindly venture in, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t. But if you are continually working toward your goal, you’ll know based on the metrics whether you’ve been successful or not. It’s important to track what you do, so you know for the future what measures worked and what did not.

Finally, evaluate the performance of your efforts. Did you accomplish your goals? Was your strategy successful? Did your foray into one medium give you insight into how you might better utilize another medium? Did you discover that while you hoped to drive sales, you instead increased consumer engagement? The answers to these questions will give you valuable insight as you move forward with your new media marketing plans.

These theories are all well and good, but trying to define the steps to creativity is like trying to explain to a blind person what the color blue looks like. There are infinite ways of being creative. Personally, if I am trying to write copy for a piece but can’t come up with a good tagline, I might be struck by inspiration in the midst of a conversation about something completely unrelated. Meanwhile, as a designer of accessories and plush toys, I sometimes simply stare at the fabric for as long as an hour before it “tells” me what it wants to be.

Perhaps I am moving through those stages of creativity while I work. However, there isn’t a single formula for creativity. No book or process in the world can make you creative. It requires letting go and trusting yourself to create.

Miller’s theories draw on studies he has conducted on mate choice, intelligence, creativity, personality, mental illness, humor, and emotions. As an evolutionary psychologist, he studies how humans have evolved socially by competing for mates, friends, support, and status. While general psychologists believe that evolution has simply provided humans with instincts, such as the desire to survive and reproduce, evolutionary psychologists hold that nearly all human decisions — including consumer behavior — are driven by evolutionary theories.

We live in an age of marketing. Marketing serves to produce goods and services that people desire. It is one of the most dominant forces in human culture. It analyzes what people want — through market research tools, such as focus groups and surveys — and develops products that meet needs people didn’t realize that they had. As marketing has become more refined over the last century, products have been designed increasingly based on human desire. However, while marketing is a dominant force in culture, the consumer mind-set is the dominant force in marketing.

Consumers make purchases for a number of reasons. Among them are the desire to demonstrate status or to send fitness cues — fake or otherwise — to others who are judging them as potential mates, members of their social circles, or potential leaders of their “packs”. These fitness cues convey useful information, such as where a person falls in a social hierarchy, what their sexual status is, and what their survival chances are.

According to Miller: “We buy things for status or for hedonism, to show off to others or to please ourselves, to send fake fitness indicators to others or to fake fitness cues to ourselves. Remember that fitness indicators are signals of one individual’s traits and qualities (good genes, good health, good social intelligence, and so on) that are perceivable by others — signals like the peacock’s tail, the bowerbird’s bower, or the consumer’s iPod.”

The desire to display status is a major driver in consumer behavior and is part of evolutionary psychology’s “signal theory”. By flaunting the ability to make conspicuous purchases, the purchaser demonstrates that he or she has the wealth to make such purchases. By consuming products that reflect different personality traits, the consumer demonstrates that he or she has those traits. In some cases, these signals can be faked, which is why counterfeiting is a major industry. If a consumer good — for example, a designer purse — is desired because of its higher quality rather than its ability to demonstrate wealth, a consumer without that wealth would not purchase a lower-quality fake. However, by “faking” the wealth cue with counterfeit good, the consumer is faking that wealth signal.

Other signals demonstrate a person’s mental health status, general health status, personality traits, sexual and reproductive health, and ability to provide support and nurture to kin. Miller explains that this signaling has become extraordinarily important in our culture. Signals of quality can lead to greater support from kin, strengthen social alliances, and attract and retain higher-quality sexual partners.

While it is easy to understand how one might demonstrate sexual fitness or wealth, how consumer behavior reflects personality traits is a bit more complex. According to Miller, there are six traits essential to understanding consumer behavior: general intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extroversion. According to Miller, humans identify each other as possessing these traits and make decisions about whether to continue their interactions or move on.

Miller states: “Much of human social intelligence seems dedicated to discerning which kinds of people, with which Big Five personality traits, would be most useful at any given moment, given the particular challenges we face…. Equally, we have incentives to bias how we present ourselves to others, depending on their needs and circumstances.”

Consumers unconsciously make purchases based on their desire to match their personality with the “brand personality” of the product being purchased. From vehicles to music to bumper stickers, consumers demonstrate their intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extroversion. Unfortunately, marketers do not understand how these traits can predict behavior, says Miller. Instead, marketers focus on demographic variables, such as age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, rather than on personality traits. Consumer researchers do understand that consumers seek to communicate their identities through their purchases, but do not fully understand those traits as being those listed above. Therefore, they rely mainly on demographic profiles rather than personality profiles when targeting consumers.

Spent offers a great amount of insight for consumer researchers. By framing consumer behavior with a new lens, Miller’s theories give food for thought to marketers and consumer behaviorists who seek to further understand what drives consumers to make a purchase. While Miller holds a PhD and has authored dozens of scholarly works, Spent is easily accessible to a reader with an average understanding of human behavior. Although the book conveys a significant amount of information, it does so in an easy-to-navigate manner with clear examples that demonstrate the validity of Miller’s theories.

The strengths of Spent lie in Miller’s ability to make a powerful case for his theories. The book is filled with examples, charts, and exercises that help the reader to understand evolutionary psychology as it relates to consumer behavior. A section at the end of the book offers exercises for the reader, and scores of books, articles, and other resources the reader can turn to for additional information. The book also backs up many of Miller’s theories with descriptions of his many research projects that demonstrate how evolution drives behavior.

While Miller does use examples from studies he has conducted, the book does not use a significant amount of data to support his theories. Although he references other readings and provides a list of articles and books that support his theories, this lack of data does serve as a weakness in the book. Because evolutionary psychology is a relatively new field of study and because its implications for consumer research are still being discovered, Miller would do well to include significantly more data and research in his future works. However, given that this book serves partially as a manual for consumers to understand what drives their behavior and make choices differently rather than written as a manual for consumer researchers, his lack of data is understandable.

Other weaknesses in the book include Miller’s stated bias toward a specific point of view. In his introduction, Miller defines his biases, which continue to appear throughout the work. The prevalence of phrases and terms that reflect his biases becomes distracting and damages the credibility of the work. Some who do not share many of Miller’s traits may find themselves offended, in fact. By reviewing this text with a critical eye and removing such commentary, Miller’s work would certainly be less amusing, but would likely appeal to a broader audience.

Finally, the last third of Spent focuses on how the user can become “immune” to marketing. While initially this may seem to make it less useful for marketers, it does provide interesting insight into how anti-consumerist individuals may approach purchasing.

Regardless of its faults, Spent provides significant insight into consumer behavior. Exercises for applying his theories to marketing could include defining a target market not by its demographic — or even psychographic — profile, but by the personality traits the desired consumer would seek to reflect by making the purchase. For example, a marketer could define his or her audience as “women who seek to demonstrate their high agreeableness, high stability and low openness” rather than “conservative, church-going women in their 50s”. Whether this would be of benefit would require further research.
It would be my hope that Miller and other evolutionary psychologist would continue their research into how evolutionary theories affect consumer behavior. Research demonstrating how understanding personality traits and how they affect a consumer’s understanding of a brand personality would be of most use to marketers — and for those marketers who embrace such theories early, provide a competitive edge.

I would strongly recommend Spent for any individual interested in why humans do the things they do. It is a compelling book with extremely interesting theories that are helpful not just to marketers, but to consumers. It offers a new perspective on marketing and food for thought for individuals seeking to understand purchasing behavior. Finally, it helps consumers understand why they feel desires to purchase specific types of products over others — and helps them identify signals that others are sending about their quality and fitness.

Users of Blippy would assign one or more of their credit cards to the service. Then, every time they used one of those cards, the transaction details would be broadcast over Blippy. According to an article in Cnet News:

It will tell you not just where you’re spending money, but what products you’re spending it on and–if you set up the privacy settings appropriately–who else is buying the same stuff as you. It will combine all your spending data into one big stream and let you compare your purchase data to that of other people, again at a granular level. Eventually you’ll be able to see if you’re paying more than other people for Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, I gather, and find deals on items you like or purchase regularly. Mint, by contrast, shows you comparative data by category and vendor, but not by item.

OK, sounds lovely for consumers, if you aren’t afraid to have all your friends know you spent $83.45 at the liquor store or that you bought your mother-in-law’s birthday present for $6.95 on clearance at Walmart.com. But what about marketers? I would imagine that within 2.43 minutes of the service going live, marketers will have found a way to harness the data to analyze purchases, target consumers and make decisions about products and pricing. Great for marketers, but is this a good thing for consumers?

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

But marketers have a thing or two to learn from the Snuggie.

The New York Times wrote a feature that described the history of the Snuggie. Shockingly, the Snuggie was not the first blanket with sleeves. The equally goofy-named Slanket entered the marketplace a full two years before the Snuggie. But the Snuggie shot to stardom after a series of comical infomercials introduced the product to an eager nation. That the nation was apparently eager to purchase gag gifts is beside the point; more than 4 million units were sold in just three months!

So what’s the difference between the Slanket and the Snuggie campaigns? It’s simple:

1.) The Snuggie is cheaper. While both products DO have some practical purpose (keeping you warm while give you arm mobility), the price difference makes the Snuggie and easier sell to people who might be thinking, “Fifty dollars for a blanket?!”

2.) The Snuggie captured the American passion for infomercials. Goofy, over-the-top and full of cliches, the Snuggie infomercials are almost parodies.

3.) Spin off products. Your mom liked the Snuggie? Maybe Fido or Fifi will, too!

4.) Direct response works. According to the Star-Ledger, falling media rates have allowed infomercials to move from late-night, insomniac-populated slots to prime time. Meanwhile, as people stay home more, they watch more television. The combination of the two results in infomercials during shows that more people are watching. The next thing you know… there’s a Snuggie phenomenon or a ShamWow run.

So what do you think, dear readers? Would you make fun of me for wearing a Snuggie?

UPDATE: I got a Snuggie for Christmas. Mock away!

Two Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Its Social-Media Agency – Advertising Age

7-Eleven launches mobile marketing test – BrandWeek

‘The 12 tweets of Christmas’ – When holiday marketing goes viral - Canada.com

Earlier this year, the brand created a banner ad that invited users to click and click … and click and click and click. Each click rewarded the user with hilarious commentary or an amusing observation. Low tech and low key, the ad generated so much buzz that it was rewarded with a Cannes Lions Advertising Award.

Discovery Channel also got into the market with its advertisement for Shark Week. Other noteworthy viral advertisements include Virgin Mobile Australia’s Vanilla Ice apology video and Burger King’s Whooper Freakout.

What makes these videos succeed?

1.) They are amusing. People don’t forward boring videos to their family and friends. They want to forward content that will make their friends laugh and be thankful that they opened the e-mail.

2.) They have an element of the unexpected. Whether its a shark lunging at you or rap artist Vanilla Ice poking fun at himself, viewers are typically surprised by what they are watching.

3.) There is an element of parody. The Pringles ad pokes fun at banner ads; the Burger King commercial positions itself as an undercover video.

Certainly there are other important elements, but these seem to crop up again and again among the most-watched viral videos.

This new tool takes online shopping to a new level. According to InformationWeek, online shopping for 2009 topped $4.6 billion for the week ending Dec. 6 — more than any single week in 2008. What’s driving this online spending spree? Some theorize social media. According to InformationWeek:

In its latest poll, comScore found that consumer-generated product reviews were the most cited social media purchase influence in the period with 13% of the poll respondents citing that category. Another 11% said they were influenced by an expert product review; followed by a Facebook fan page, 7%; a Facebook friend’s recommendation, 6%; company recommendations on Twitter, 5%; and “tweets” from a friend, 3%.

So how can marketers tap into the power of social media to generate sales this holiday season? It won’t happen overnight. If they aren’t already using social media tools, it will hard to develop a following during this holiday season. If they do have a fan base, however, they are in a position to tap into that power. Mashable.com outlines what businesses can do. The bottom line, is: give consumers what they want. If certain types of sales are successful, run them again. If “secret sales” go viral, have another. Try things and see where it goes.