Brand Managers: Sponsored NBA shirts are a Challenge and a Reward

New branded shirts for the NBA are the first or many new way to reach a target market...but you have to know how best to use them. As an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) student and sports fan, there are two issues in discussion: how will the fans react to this new trend, and how will brands benefit from the new 2.5x2.5 inch ad space?

According to Tony Manfred in his article titled "The NBA's Massive New TV Deal Clears The Way For Putting Ads On Jerseys" for Business Insider, the sponsored shirts are tied to the new $24 billion deal with ESPN. Both the Network and the league expect to see profits by displaying a highly viewable space on the players. With some issues that still remain un-resolved, such as if the sponsors would be national or local brands, the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, referred to the ads on NBA jerseys as “inevitable”. Sponsored shirts is something that will happen in the near future, a groundbreaking innovation to the league that will have a major impact on teams, sponsors and fans.

Image source: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-07-20/nba-jersey-ads-likely-in-2013

Kim Skildum-Reid offers a critique on her blog powersponsorship.com, arguing that “(teams) You’re hurting yourselves, limiting your value, and limiting the appeal of your sponsorship to companies who don’t get it – a rapidly diminishing pool.”  Furthermore, she elaborates on how shallow is it for a brand to only take a space on a shirt, hoping to see returns from it, as opposed to actually engage with highly passionate communities such as sports fans.

After reviewing these two articles and drawing on my sports marketing expertise developed in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have three action items you need to consider when developing your marketing strategies as a brand manager of the actors here involved:

• Set a goal that transcends the jersey - As a brand manager from the sponsor side, you must think about what you want to achieve by buying a space in a jersey. That Engagement Strategy might not be well rewarded if not followed by a thorough IMC plan.

• Match brands and team positionings - As a team brand manager, think what´s the price to have a sponsor on your shirt. You might want to be picky and choose one which stands for the same values as your team and deliver consistency to your devoted fans.

• Take care of your league - The marketing division of the NBA must take care of their league, establish homogenous criteria for sponsors and teams to not affect the league´s image as a whole.

In sum, the league is opening a door for sponsors to have a bigger presence in the NBA. For the first time in its history, the league will have branded shirts, and this new scenario compels all actors involved to think clearly and strategically of how to deal with it to have benefits for all.

Manuel Altomonte| @manualtoIMC
About the author: 

Candidate, Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill (Northwestern University, Chicago IL). I have work experience in corporate communications and marketing, development and management of communication platforms and digital marketing. I enjoy team-work to find creative solutions to challenges.

Brand Managers, Stay Ahead of the Game by Watching the Shifts

Fueled by the ever-growing and expanding technologies and the web, consumers are now ever more involved as companies struggled to build their brand. Does your company understand consumers and their digital behaviors? Are you building brands around major touch points to really drive engagement? As a graduated student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program and a former account who had worked on both branding and digital campaigns at OgilvyOne, I suggest marketers to read the following two articles. 

The first Article is iConsumer: Digital Consumers Altering the Value Chain by Ewan Duncan, Eric Hazan, and Kevin Roche from Mckinsey & Company's Insights and Publications. It’s no news that consumers are migrating towards digital, but what are the trends exactly? In their report on the digital consumer behavior released on April, 2013, entitled iConsumer: Digital Consumers Altering the Value Chain, Mckinsey identified six overarching trends in consumer digital behavior. 

The first is a shift in device from PCs to mobile/touch devices. The second observation is that there's been a shift in communication, as consumers are going from voice to data and video(Ex: Vine, Snapchat). The third shift is bundled content is now becoming more and more fragmented. Another shift, albeit not as apparent to consumers, is social shift from growth to monetization. Also, there is been a video shift from programmed to user-driven content. Last, there's been a shift in retail from channel to experience.

Source: iConsumer:Digital Consumers Altering the Value Chain

The second article that brands will find useful is Interbrand's "Branding in the Post-digital world" written by Interbrand’s Global CEO, Jez Frampton. As companies try to build brands in a highly digitized world, it is now evident to marketers that consumers and businesses co-create brands. In addition, consumers leave trails of brand opinions along the way as they go through their purchase decision journey, which will in turn affect the next consumer. The good news is, marketers now have the chance to be present at every touch point along the way. Digital should now be central to all brand building activities, as it is key to reaching and engaging consumers by making it possible to respond quickly. Both online and offline is now one ongoing experience that determines the company’s vitality.

Based on my analysis of the two articles and my observation of working closely with brands, there are three things that need to be implemented for brands:

1. Stay close to consumers - Changes may happen very quickly, be sure to stay close to consumers and invest in discovering insights such as the shifts mentioned in the first article.

2. Invest right - Ensure investments in channels and engagements are aligned with consumer behavioral shifts.

3. Make structural changes - Make changes within the company to align digital efforts.

Changes in the industry will happen very quickly and demand companies to strengthen their capabilities in order to continue to prosper in an all-digital world. Companies should also be investing in understanding shifts in consumer behaviors to build their brands and actions around their consumer understandings. Structural changes within the company should also be made accordingly so that digital efforts can be communicated and aligned across all sectors. When that’s all done, then your brand is ready to go.

Professional Summary

Janice Shieh

M.S. Candidate of Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill, Northwestern University. Double concentration in Brand Strategy and Marketing Analytics. A bit greedy so also on the Digital and Interactive Marketing concentration track. Previously worked at OgilvyOne Taiwan in the Account department. Specializes in Digital Marketing. 
Follow Janice on twitter: @janicew_shieh

Three Things Luxury Managers Need to Know about Digital Strategy

As a graduate major in the Medill IMC program, we learn about luxury brands and the trends which impact the marketing of them. Just a few years back, most luxury brands were skeptical about digital media. The question, “Is digital killing luxury brands,” was frequently asked, and for many prestige executives, their brands’ exclusivity ran tangent to those wholly democratic platforms. Their fear was reasonable – if they failed to nail it, the democratizing effect of digital media could have diluted the brands.

Now that premium brands have found themselves befriending the fear. And they have good reasons to talk themselves into going online. According to Adweek, eighty percent of people with an income of over $250,000 are active on social media sites. In addition, a 2011 Digitas study shows that millennials, also known as digital natives, will become major high-end shoppers over the next few years and should therefore be targeted now.

So brands from Aston Martin to Cartier are embracing digital wholeheartedly. They are setting up Facebook pages, posting videos on YouTube, redesigning their ecommerce sites, and developing mobile apps. Choosing the right platforms is essential to good luxury brand digital strategy – on that we can agree. However, great luxury brand digital strategy puts emphasis on a more holistic approach. They ask how – how to leverage the world’s most democratic media. With that in mind, here are three things today’s luxury executives must know when creating their own digital strategy:

Picture Source: ogilvydo.com

1. Maintain that sense of exclusivity. Luxury managers have been worried about losing their cachet in this digital landscape. However, their concern misses the point because if premium brands want to remain prestigious, they need to engage not only the affluent set but also the aspirational set. This is where the power of digital media comes into play. Digital media offers luxury brands an opportunity to build tremendous clout among customers who want but cannot afford the products. This, in turn, helps the brands preserve that sense of exclusivity and makes the products more desirable for high-end shoppers.  

2. Create an engaging experience. Oftentimes, engagement relies on stories that sell, whether it be a Facebook post or a branded video. Cartier, for instance, has done a great job selling its story recently. The French jeweler is running a digital campaign for the new Tank Anglaise timepiece. The campaign focuses on communicating the history of Cartier’s iconic Tank timepieces. Cartier creates a video that showcases the Tank model alongside the evolution of the arts, and the Tank story is also incorporated into Cartier’s social media content. 

3. Be consistent in the brand image. Maintaining brand consistency across digital platforms has become somewhat of a challenge to today’s luxury marketers. This is because digital media has changed the way these brands reach their target audience – it seems difficult to control the brand image while encouraging “interactivity.” For luxury marketers, however, killing the conversation between the brand and the consumers is not the answer. Instead, understanding that they need to ultimately gain control of their branding through generating content, responding, and monitoring on a regular basis is the key. 

By adhering to these principles, luxury brands are taking that first step to better ingratiate themselves with consumers in the digital landscape.

Phoebe Chen is a graduate student in Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University. She specializes in brand management and marketing analytics and has experience working with multinational companies operating in various industries. Follow her @yhschen or connect with her on LinkedIn: Phoebe Chen. 

Learn To Target...Like CPG Does

As a graduate student in the Nortwestern Medill IMC program, I have been studying best target applications by social marketers. In the past decade, the lack of face-to-face interaction in the store had been a challenge for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) folks. But things started to change with the expansion of technology and tools. In the face of intensifying competition, digital channels will be critical in keeping your brands relevant to the consumer. To be specific, the CPG industry has been hit hard by the economy in recent years, and as a result, private labels are gaining more popularity. There is no better time than this for brands to start embracing social media as a form of trusted, earned media.

It is important to understand your competitors’ strategies (obviously leaning towards social and interactive now) in order to stay ahead of the pack. A research conducted by dunnhumby reveals that shoppers who already had a history of brand purchase are more effective in social media marketing. CPG firms would need to do more to take advantage of retail data by looking for shoppers with high frequency of purchase in their brands and locate them on social media platforms. Building authentic voices will help influence other consumers and eventually drive sales, creating a strong foundation for a profitable growth of the company.

The social marketing program will be heavily reliant on shopper marketing data. In addition to the frequency of purchase (most likely an indication of loyalty), CPG firms will need to target demographics profile while also  considering their customers’ social influence scores (e.g. Klout) in order to find the right advocates for the brand. My recommendations include:

1) Observe what people think about your product – finding what customers have been sharing online e.g. uploading product picture on Facebook wall, or writing reviews on the latest items they purchased on Amazon. This way, CPG marketers can monitor real-time user experiences and obtain feedbacks promptly. There is also a possibility of improving product design by finding what they might have missed out during product testing via observing discussions around the brand.

2) Improve in-store experience – letting some of the more socially-engaged customers do their job, for example, customers sharing experiences via their smartphones while also being able to research similar offerings online, or scanning the QR codes to deepen their purchase experience right in the aisle. 

3) Share what your customers care – posting the latest trends on social media. We can do extra research and analysis to find out what the consumers really want to stay ahead of the competition by, for example, observing the meals people prepared and shared on Pinterest to learn what they are looking for in the grocery stores in terms of convenience and creativity.

4) Activate the dialogue – creating a space where customers who have a history of purchases can tell their personal stories and share their expertise. We already know that word-of-mouth and personal recommendations are one of the biggest drivers to purchase in the CPG category.

Yet, the biggest mistake is to let the advocates run the program themselves. We need to provide guidelines and activities to keep these consumers engaged and motivated, hence the need to strike the right balance between over-monitoring and letting the social marketing program run itself.

Arisa Kulpiyavaja is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program. She is a marketer with a long passion in the consumer packaged goods industry, specializing in branding and marketing analytics. You can reach Arisa on http://www.linkedin.com/in/arisakulpiyavaja or follow her @arisaimc.

Healthy is the New Skinny

The “Healthy is the New Skinny” Campaign Fights Back

Teen Vogue’s support of the push to promote a positive body image among young girls and what it means for beauty brand marketers

By Andrea Bussey

@A_BusseyIMC

Society as the Supervillain

For years, parents and doctors have faced the daunting task of fighting the forces weighing heavily on the minds of teenage girls. Models, actresses, and celebrities displayed on television and in advertisements have been the subject of attention as young girls search for validation of their beauty.  In many cases, parents and psychologists believe that these mainstream advertisements are responsible for negative body images held by this delicate, impressionable demographic.  Girls have succumbed to drastic weight loss measures, eating disorders, and in less severe cases, distasteful misuse of beauty products all in an effort to make themselves “beautiful.” For this reason, TeenVogue, one of the most popular publications among teenage girls, is featuring the "Healthy is the New Skinny" (HNS) campaign in its June/July issue.

According to the official website, HNS is a multi-platform movement to spread the message to young girls across the country that a healthy life is a happy life.  The movement is structured in three major components: The Perfectly UnPerfected Program, HNS Ambassadors, and the online apparel store.  PUP is the non-profit arm of the movement that offers outreach to high school and college audiences by making on-site presentations on self-esteem, body image, and healthy living.  The program ambassadors may be former or current models, beauty industry experts, or students who believe in the movement’s mission and are dedicated to reversing the effects of having a negative body image.  All participants and supporters are encouraged to wear branded apparel to support the movement and spread the word as quickly as possible.  HNS is on a mission to show teenage girls that society is redirecting its attack on the female body by proving that they don’t need to change who they are to be beautiful!

What This Means for Marketers

As advocates for products used to augment physical appearance, beauty brand managers must consider the potential impact of societal trends.  While cosmetics and fragrances are intended to enhance the consumer, this movement proves that latent motivators may drive consumers to use the products for other reasons.  In the case of many teenager girls, beauty products are used in an attempt to conceal insecurities and adverse body images.  As marketers, we must be sensitive to this epidemic and genuinely position the products as mere enhancements for people who are already beautiful.  As beauty products are primarily used for facial enhancement, brand marketers must devise targeted campaigns that deliver the message: “Beauty” is you. The brand’s reach may not occupy the space in a teenager’s mind that cultivates body image, but an empowering message can certainly assist in directing her down the right path.

Leverage the Power of Brand DNA to Succeed Amidst a Changing Demographic

                  The history of the beauty industry dates back to the eighteenth century, so I do not predict obsolescence in the near future.  However, throughout time, industry professionals have set trends and adjusted to trends, depending on consumer demand.  The time has come again for adjustments to be made so that we may support the millions of teenage girls who are struggling with their self-esteem and body image.  Consider taking the following steps to place your brand among the ranks of HNS campaign supporters:

v  Evaluate your brand DNA to determine how it should be positioned to uplift the teenage demographic through a targeted campaign.

v  In the spirit of beautiful diversity, incorporate non-traditional models and actors into product campaigns targeted to the younger demographic.  This includes television, print, and in-store displays.  Be the brand to lead by example.

v  Encourage colleagues to get involved with the HNS movement when/where possible.  Ambassadors appear at schools to speak to students, and the expertise and insight offered by a beauty industry professional is hugely impactful.

v  DONATE to HNS!  Statewide school tours reach over 10,000 students, and donations go toward supporting all related expenses. Your support is needed!

Beauty does not come in one size, shape, color, or creed.  It lives in all of us.  Not only as brand marketers, but also as adults, we are accountable for the state of our youth.  Teenage girls are putting themselves in danger by trying to change their bodies to become what we have told them is beautiful.  The "Healthy is the New Skinny" campaign seeks to unite us all as we take strides to encourage healthy, vibrant living above all else.  Beauty brand marketers operate on a platform that has the potential to impact thousands of lives.  After all, beauty is what we say it is.

Andrea is a student in Northwestern University’s Master’s Integrated Marketing Communications program.  Her studies are concentrated in Brand Management and Digital Marketing, and she has a particular interest in the beauty industry. 

Love of beauty is taste.  The creation of beauty is art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Celebrating the Beauty of your Customer by Finding the Beauty in Your Brand

Pretty Face?

As a professional in the industry, you have a good grasp on the concept of beauty, but have you recently taken a moment to consider the face of your brand? What does it look like?  Arched eyebrows or high cheekbones?  What distinctive features allow it to stand out in a crowd?  How beautiful is your beauty brand?  Many beauty brands boast glamor and allure, but what makes a brand genuinely attractive?  As a brand manager, it is not enough to just know the product and its variations well, you must also understand how customers interact with the product in their daily lives.  As it may seem to the untrained eye, you are in the business of building communities of brand fans, but in actuality, your success is driven by your ability to engender confidence, style, and poise in consumers.  Concealers, liners, and pigments are tools used to help display inner beauty to the outer world.  In order to build toolboxes full of your branded products, you must: (1) profile your loyal customers and those who could become loyal customers in the future; (2) understand how they engage with the brand; and (3)  Capitalize and expand upon the “beauty” of the brand as defined by consumers. 

The Double Helix  

In the same way that double-stranded molecules determine our appearance and composition, your brand’s DNA determines its identity, aptitude, and scope.  A brand’s DNA is dependent upon the product(s) it represents, its origin, reputation, and possibly the people who build and endorse it.  By assessing these elements, you and your team will ensure that your communication strategies, product developments, and brand trajectory are aligned according to the most essential aspects of your product(s).  By understanding the core of your brand (i.e. what consumers associate with it, what they expect from it, and what characteristics could or should separate it from the competition), you will connect with consumers by intersecting at points of engagement, communicating authenticity, and creating financial and competitive results. 

Make Over 
 

       They are often highlighted during morning shows and teenage birthday parties, but makeovers have secured a place in almost every aspect of daily life.  In many cases, experts are solicited to lend consultant services, but since you are an expert on your brand, there is no need to seek the help of outside resources.  You can take a few simple steps to answer the question – How beautiful is your beauty brand?

§  Discuss the brand’s DNA and customer base with your team.  It is imperative for all those involved with the day-to-day business of the brand are functioning on one accord and working toward a common vision.  

§  Evaluate the current state of the brand in the competitive market and articulate weaknesses.  When everyone has gained a renewed sense of the brand's identity, the team must determine the ways in which marketing and advertising strategies are (or are not) aligned with the essence of the brand's DNA. 

§  Develop 3 ways to make your brand more beautiful.  Brainstorming never hurts!  Following a deep analysis of the brand and its position in the market, create a list of short- and long-term action items that will promote beautification.

Take the time to put on the best face of your brand.  After all, your customers do.

Andrea is a student in Northwestern University’s Master’s Integrated Marketing Communications program.  Her studies are concentrated in Brand Management and Digital Marketing, and she has a particular interest in the beauty industry.


Follow Andrea @A_BusseyIMC 

"Love of beauty is taste.  The creation of beauty is art." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson