MARKETING COMMUNICATION DIGEST

Everyone was talking about it. United seems not to have thought enough about it Two young girls, traveling on so-called "Pass Rider" friends-and-family tickets - and reportedly wearing leggings - were stopped from boarding a United flight from Denver to Minneapolis, while a third happened to have a dress with her to cover up her leggings. All this while, their dad apparently wore shorts, which were deemed just fine. One of the girls was said to be only 10 years old. Twitter roared with disbelief, especially when United's Twitter account reacted with cold quotes from a rule book. How could United behave this way, and why? Here are the five ways United showed a considerable lack of emotional savvy: 1.  When you're enforcing rules, think about  how  you enforce them United claims that the leggings rule is in place because anyone flying on these special tickets has to follow the company's dress code, as they are deemed to be representing the air...

On a flight from Denver, Colorado, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, early Sunday morning, Shannon Watts observed a United Airlines gate agent refuse to allow two young girls on the plane because they were wearing leggings. Watts took to Twitter immediately to document the incident, decrying the apparent policing of girls’ clothing and regarding the dress code enforcement as “sexist and hypocritical.” Watts objected to the policy, saying that it sexualizes young girls who were simply wearing comfortable clothing. She questioned if boys were subjected to the same sort of policy. As the incident unfolded in real time on Twitter, United ’s own social media account began to chime in. But the airline’s responses seemed to only stir the pot and trigger more anger. This kind of gaff is increasingly making the case for the engagement of social media account managers with a Public Relations background or appreciation. Amid the reactions, chatter, question...

Artificial Intelligence is already well-established in the world of targeted advertising and recommendations. But Artificial Intelligence is also rapidly evolving on social media as a way to help brands quickly and efficiently discover, engage, and learn from their followers. Although there is no one definition for it, we can summarize Social Artificial Intelligence, SAI (not Sai Baba!) as a form of collecting and sifting through customer history, user-generated content, and data from social media channels to generate more relevant content and as a result, a more meaningful experience for followers. Social AI has the ability to provide a better social experience overall. For an example of what SAI can do, we just have to look at Facebook. The social network has already incorporated artificial intelligence as part of the platform in many innovative ways. From automatic face tagging to the stories that appear in News Feeds, Facebook has been at the forefront of what AI can do fo...

​ Throughout my professional career, I've always been working for either a Startup or an incubation business within a public company. When I hire someone, or sometimes when I am being interviewed as a candidate, this is one of most frequently asked questions: "How would you describe yourself in three words?" It sounds like a simple question but it can reveal a lot about who you really are, and whether you would be a good fit for the job. Here are my answers: 1.  Optimistic Startups and new business will inevitably face challenges and should always expect the unexpected.  When I interview someone for a job or mentor someone in my team, I look for the signs to make sure that this person is optimistic about what we are doing in the long run, not just being enthusiastic about the next project or the next salary. Being optimistic is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have: Products could fail, markets could change, customers could come and go, and fundi...

The IBB approach to marketing success for entrepreneurs- Well, it happened again. I was approached recently by an entrepreneur who had tried to segment the market top-down to prepare a Marketing Plan and found it delivered groups of customers who were defined too generally and were too numerous. The numbers were way beyond his resources to reach, and supply and the requirements were so general so as to make the product-service fit to the customer impossible to implement. The drilling down process was killing him and he was suffering a classic case of paralysis by analysis. I suggested to him that a better approach was the entrepreneurial approach because this is what many entrepreneurs do naturally; identify, build, and broaden (IBB). It is a bottom-up process unlike segmentation which is top-down. The approach involves identifying the perfect customer, easy to change, accessible, and fundable with an economic number of similar cohorts. (For many entrepreneurs, this is...

Every advertising person has stories about how their agencies have blown new business pitches, often because someone said or did something stupid.  There is a classic story about an agency which pitched a car account but not one person showed up at the client’s office driving the client’s brand. There is another story of an agency pitching a watch account, but the Agency President showed up wearing a Rolex. I had to start drinking Stout though, first as Octagon Marathon Account Director for the Legend Extra Stout brand in 2001, and further as Chief Executive of a Guinness Nigeria-Retained Agency, R&B, in 2005. I would love to collect your stories if you can top the one that follows. I know quite a lot of them can be very funny, even in the telling.  When new business prospects come to visit a prospective agency, they can always sense and feel whether there is good chemistry among the agency participants. In many cases, even agency principals who do not ...

In his famous book The 4 Minute Work Week , author Tim Ferris introduces readers to Pareto’s law, also known as the 80/20 rule. The idea is that you can vastly improve your quality of life by focusing your energy on the 20% of activities that produce 80% of your desired outcomes. Conversely, says Ferris, you need to identify and eliminate the 20% of activities that take up 80% of your time. The goal is always to find and eliminate inefficiencies in order to give yourself more time to spend on high value activities. Let’s apply this to the office for a second. How often do you leave at the end of the day with an underwhelming sense of achievement because it took too long to find what you were looking for? The frustration of having wasted time trying to find information is one I’m sure you can relate to. If not, just ask someone in the Sales or Marketing team. I’m guessing you’ll find that people in Marketing spend a fair amount of time and energy creating brochures, data sh...