It has been a long time since the first marketers began promoting products on printed media. Colorful ads and clever catch phrases were the most common ways of letting people know about their products. Then television came along and so the TV ads, which people watched in segments during their favorite shows. As innovative as their were at the time, they had an problem that haunted marketers when it came to improve and optimize their campaigns. Accurate measurement of data was impossible at the time, which made advertising a very uncertain thing. In 1982, Nielsen developed a way to measure ratings and collect data through telephone lines, giving birth to the first marketing analytics system. This allowed both clients and media to measure viewer engagement and add hard data to the equation, allowing media to charge more money for prime time, measure show success, and even turned influencers into a viable option for advertising.
Nowadays social media allows up to date customer information regarding its behavior, and how likely they will buy a specific product. Important demographic information such as sex, age and location are easily recorded by these platforms, and used to tailor marketing strategy for each specific market share. This gives companies the opportunity to optimize the return on their campaign investment or ROI, by directing their product towards a specific audience and only paying for the clicks they receive. On one hand, social media allows startups that cannot afford TV or Radio advertising to get exposure in a specific market segment, giving opportunity to small businesses to compete with big corporations for a share of the market. On the other, it gives companies such as Coca Cola the opportunity to reach their consumers in an omnipresent way, bombarding them from several angles at the same time.
Let's analyze Coca Cola’s social media strategy to gain a better perspective of what it means to run the third biggest brand in the world. According to Kevin Shively in his article “Lessons from Coca-Cola’s Social Media Strategy: Cohesive Campaigns and Creative Content” from the Simply Measured Blog, for them creating an audience is not an issue, since they already count with more than 80 million fans around the world. He sets the example of a regular month in the twitter account, in which they tweet an average of 2000 times to an audience of 2.4 million followers. This creates an exponential effect on the reach they have by taking into account the shares and the re tweets they generate, which increases their potential impressions enormously. We need to highlight the fact that social media accounts are not isolated from each other, on the contrary, they work in synergy to deliver an omnichannel approach that integrates every possible way of reaching customers. Let’s take a trip through their other social media accounts to have a better idea of the traffic they have. Coca Cola's main Instagram account has 1.5m followers, and 565 posts. The average post has between 20 to 30 thousand likes and around 100 comments. This means that they have appeared on the following page at least 1.5 million times (being visible to every follower of their new users), at least 14 million times they have appeared because of a like (user X has liked a picture from Coca Cola's account), and at least 56500 times because of a comment without taking into consideration algorithmic values such as followers of followers commenting and the number of mentioned users. Coca Cola Facebook account for the US is another giant with almost 100 million likes. They Share content from their other accounts, and are in constant interaction with their audience. We can say that they know exactly who they are promoting to, where are they located, what is the specific message they would like to share and at what time they will get a better response. They use analytics to measure their market penetration, and they can shift the direction of their strategy towards the most convenient path.
Our next company has taken analytics to the next level. First we were able to send the message, then to measure the response it generated, now they’re able to register, organize and analyze data to create the ultimate customer experience. Disney has developed a new tool they call magical wristbands. It's basically a rubber band that reminded me of the Lifestrong bracelets, the only difference is that it allows the company to record location, purchases and customer’s profile information. Inside the park, Disney employees can know beforehand who you are, eating and sitting preferences, number of people in your family, etc. even before you get to the restaurant. According to Bob Kroslin article, “Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband” from Wired, they work with an RFID chip and a 2.4 GHz radio. It has battery to last up to two years and it allows you to connect to a vast system of sensors inside the park. This means that Disney has a record of your preferences that they can use not only to give you a better service during your visit, but to tailor a marketing strategy for your specific taste, number of family members, etc. They can even know what type of roller coasters you rode the most so next time they open something similar you’ll get a notification with a link to get your park tickets or an annual pass. The simplicity of the band allows Disney to join the future of marketing with other big players such as Google and Amazon, in which companies automatically analyze patterns of conduct in order to predict future customer behavior, increasing retention and improving the ROI of their strategies.
Now that we have a better idea of the development marketing has gone through in the last 50 years, we can imagine how many more ways to improve these companies have. Should we see social media as a possible replacement of other channels such as radio and TV? With the development of new technologies such as interactive TVs and the internet of things is possible that radio and TV as we know them might disappear giving birth to digital hybrids with the best qualities of each one of them. Taking the example of Disney, Google and Amazon, should we see the recording of our conduct as an intrusion, or a way to have an improved customer experience? It depends on where you stand regarding privacy, but as long as they offer the option to reduce the amount of information they can record, we can have better service, and improved privacy at the same time.