In a nation that loves to eat out, restaurants ought to be CRM learning laboratories. Unfortunately they’re not. But Jim Daleen, CEO of Appsuite, hopes to change all that. Restaurateurs commonly skimp on marketing. They don’t think about connecting their brand to their customers. Many assume that the food and the ambiance will do it for them automatically, saving an investment in technology or marketing people.
Four Marketing Predictions For 2014
16 Dec 2013
It’s the end of the year and every pundit, yours truly included, has an open opportunity to predict the future. So here’s my best guess at four critical factors that will be driving innovations, insights and interactions for brands, advertisers and marketers in 2014.
We are at the dawn of a mobile, personal health revolution. Beginning soon, technology will play a much bigger role in all aspects of healthcare and will have a heightened role and urgency for marketers selling drugs, health brands, devices, therapies and services. Apps will become a critical marketing and promotion tool. Apps hold out the possibility of fulfilling marketers persistent fantasy — that consumers will record daily, personal activity and that this data will fuel on-going relationship marketing programs. This belief is especially strong among pharmaceutical marketers who dream of patient diaries and yearn for patient data as a door opener for the patient-doctor conversation, widely acknowledged to be the single biggest hurdle in the DTC arena. Apps also offer technology for overcoming the two biggest consumer adherence and conversion stumbling blocks – what’s in it for me (WiiFM) and do it for me (DiFM). Depending on how you count, there are as many as 97,000 existing mHealth apps ranging from broad-based health and wellness tools to single brand, single action apps. Three out of four are paid apps. Forty-three percent are aimed at healthcare professionals. The majority of those are either dosing calculators or reference materials. In real life, less Read more…
Mobility will turn us into direct, relationship and database marketers.That’s the cornerstone message from two new studies — Forrester’s “2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers”and Urbanairship’s “Connect with the Connected.” The keys to successfully making this transformation will be surrendering control to consumers while continuously creating relevant and resonant content.
Mobility has transformed e-mail. Unfortunately too many brands haven’t kept pace. As a result, they squander the power and impact of the most ubiquitous and most effective digital communications channel because messages don’t render properly or links drive users to pages that can’t be read or properly interacted with.