After noticing that there was a sharp drop in their mature customers visits, and the majority of people visiting their stores were college students, Victoria Secret execs have decided to go back to basics.

CEO Sharen Jester Turney said recently in an analyst conference call, “We have so much gotten off our heritage. We will return to an ultra-feminine lingerie brand to meet needs and expectations.”

Gasp.

The cause of all the trouble? The Pink campaign that brought in a staggering $900 million in sales in 2007.

The Green Thing social community has nearly 61,000 members in 145 countries, and as a collective these people have saved 1458 tonnes of CO2 gas.

The community gives members tips on how to go green and prevent Earth’s self-destruction.

Part sample, part light show, part toy, this musical gadget rocks…

As a PPC (pay per click) campaign manager running Google, Yahoo or other paid search advertising campaigns, you may find that you are experiencing extremely high and sudden Cost Per Clicks. You may be a victim of click fraud, something you need to deal with as quickly as possible.

My good friend, Gordon Choi, a respected PPC campaign manager and PPC blog author, posted the following tell-tale signs that you are a victim of click fraud:

1. Identical IP address: too many clicks from the same IP address are a time-tested sign of click fraud
2. Change in number of clicks: if you suddenly find an unexpected increase in number of clicks on a particular day
3. Sudden spike in CTR (click through rates)
4. Change in bounce rate (page views per session) - any major unexpected change is an indication of click fraud
5. Short duration of visits: if suddenly you find visitors are hanging around for less than a minute, and your average visitor duration is 2 minutes, you could have a click fraud problem

Report click fraud immediately and ensure your campaigns remain profitable.

From Twitter to Facebook, ProBlogger gives beginner tips.

Your website is live and you have a few customers (or even a large number of customers) - but is it really performing? Measurement is one of the most important activities you need to perform once your website is live. How do you do this?

First, ask yourself a couple of questions:

1. Are you meeting the corporate strategic objectives you originally set for your Internet marketing strategy?
2. Have you achieved your marketing objectives as identified in your Internet marketing plan
3. Are you meeting your marketing communications objectives?

There are three main areas in any Internet marketing measurement system:

1. The process for the performance measurement system
2. The measurement framework within which Internet marketing metrics are defined
3. An assessment of the available metric measurement tools available

STEP 1: Creating a performance measurement system

How do you measure your online presence and performance?

SET GOALS: What do you want to achieve?

PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT: What is happening?

PERFORMANCE DIAGNOSIS: Why is it happening?

CORRECTIVE ACTIONS: What should we be doing about it?

STEP 2: Define your performance metrics framework

This is a fancy pants way of saying what are the key metrics we need to keep track of?

When deciding on this, you should ensure that your metrics are SMART:

Specific

Measurable

Actionable

Relevant

Timely

Here’s an example of five categories for metrics you may want to use (based on WebInsights presented in Chaffey (2000)):

1. Business contribution: online revenue contribution
2. Marketing outcomes: leads, sales, service contacts, conversion and retention success
3. Customer satisfaction: site usability, performance and site availability, contact strategies, opinions, attitudes and brand impact
4. Customer behaviour (web analytics): profiles, segmentation, usability, traffic paths and site actions
5. Site promotion: attraction efficiency, referrer efficiency, cost of acquisition and reach, search engine visibility, link building and email marketing

STEP 3: Introduce techniques to collect metrics and report on results

With a host of new analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Get Clicky becoming available, it’s really easy to keep track of your key site metrics, including:

• page impressions
• entry and exit pages
• visitor sessions
• path analysis
• unique visitors
• repeat visitors
• session duration
• country of origin
• browser
• operating system
• source of traffic: referrers, search engines, direct types
• domain

Site outcome data

This is data collected when a visitor performs a significant action on your website such as registration, subscribing, requesting more information, responding to an online competition or the purchase of a product or service on your site.

Visitors may be referred from offline sources, so it is important to use tools that integrates this with your site activity.

An important note about analytics: don’t get too bogged down in the numbers, or you’ll forget why you’re in business in the first place. Keep an eye on the metrics, but don’t be solely focused on them.

Strategy literally means “leading the army” if you consider the Greek word strategos which means “the general”. Sun Tzu’s ancient text “The Art of War” is perhaps the first manual on strategy. All men can see the tactics by which I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which great victory is evolved.

It was in the 20th century that business management became obsessed with strategy, thanks to the legacy no doubt of the two Great Wars. There are definite commonalities between business and military operations. A tactic is a plan for a specific action “I will send monthly newsletters to my customers” whereas strategy is the overall scheme for using the resources at hand to obtain a competitive advantage “I will ensure my business is the best in the market in terms of customer service”.

• Strategy is long term and is built on sustainable decisions
• Strategy offers competitive advantage
• Strategy is concerned with the relationship between the internal and external environments
• Major resources are required in order to implement strategies
• Processes are developed when strategies are implemented
• Operational decisions are affected by strategies
• The values and expectations of shareholders are affected by strategy
• Vision influences strategy - the road ahead

The five Ps of strategy

They are: plan, pattern, position, perspective and ploy.

Allow me to briefly elaborate on each:

Strategy as a plan gives a course of action

Strategy as a position relates to the determination of your product in a particular market

Strategy as perspective is concerned with the organization’s internal workings - how your company does things and its history, philosophies and values

Strategy as a ploy is the cunning tactics that will be deployed to out outmaneuver competitors.

Strategy as a pattern is the consistent action repeated over time e.g. Woolworths consistently provides quality food.

It is agreed that:

• Strategy is concerned with your organization and the environment in which it operates
• Value is created for stakeholders by effective strategies and this leads to above average revenue
• Strategy focuses efforts, gives direction and enables consistency

Strategy occurs at the corporate, business and functional level, to varying degrees.

So then, what is strategic management? It’s concerned with the overall effectiveness, focus and direction of your organization. Strategic decisions affect the entire organization. Strategic implications are long term, and are designed to give you competitive advantage. All the elements of the organization are synergistically focused to implement strategy.

Importantly:

GOOD STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT = GOOD STRATEGY + GOOD STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION

Influenced by STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT, Winning in the Southern African Workplace by Louw and Venter, Oxford Press.

Emotions are important to marketers because customers buy products based on emotion, although they use reason to evaluate what products to buy. Exactly what is emotion?

Anyone can give examples of emotions (fear, love, hate, excitement, sadness etc…). Emotions are feelings but not all feelings are emotions (Millward Brown’s Erik Du Plessis). And emotions are shorter in duration than moods, but longer in duration than a facial expression. Emotions are also caused by specific things including chemicals, exercise, eating, shopping etc…(people eat, go shopping or go for a run in order to feel good).

According to Oatley and Jenkins, emotions are defined as follows:

It has been difficult to define emotions and this difficulty continues. We will be rash and start this chapeter with a working definition of a kind that has been gaining acceptance. It goes something like this:

1. An emotion is usually caused by a person consciously or unconsciously evaluating an event as relevant to a conern (a goal) that is important; the emotion is felt as positive when a concern is advanced and negative when a concern is impeded.

2. The core of an emotion is readiness to act and the prompting of plans; an emotion gives priority for one or a few kinds of action to which it gives a sense of urgency - so it can interrupt, or compete with, alternative mental processes or actions. Different types of readiness create different outline relationships with others.

3. an emotion is usually experienced as a distinctive type of mental state, sometimes accompanied or followed by bodily changes, expressions and actions.

The major step forward for science is that a necessary condition for an emotion is the change in readiness for action.

Advertisers therefore take note:

Advertising does not first get attention, and then create an emotion.

Advertising creates an emotion which results in attention.

There have been a recent flurry of advertising from banks in particular that impact on emotion.

Du Plessis asks “Does the fact that there are so many emotions one can name mean that the brain generates so many emotions?” Why have many emotions? Can emotions be boiled down to two simple concepts: pull toward or push away from? The way the limbic system and the amydala work is to act quickly: either attractive or repulsive. What then is the point of multiple emotions?

People pay attention to advertising messages they like (and the same is true for any form of message, web copy, or other form of communication). If you like something you pay more attention to it. Or if you fear something you pay more attention to it. For marketers, there is no worse fate than to be ignored, to make no emotional impact whatsoever.

Professor Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes’ Error, suggests that when we make decisions we fundamentally only use one criterion (even after application of rational thought): How will I feel if I do that?

We can only rely on our past experiences to predict how we will feel after we make a decision and act on it Every decision we make has an emotional outcome, to some degree.

A French play has the following line: “How do I know what I think before I know what I feel?”

There are a larger number of dendrites leading from the limbic area of the brain towards the frontal lobes than there are leading the other way. This suggests that the traffic is largely headed from the area of emotion towards the area of rationality. Emotions can sometimes overpower rationality (as occurs when you act on road rage)

Domasio also hypothesizes that somatic markers highlight visceral sensations when decisions are made - acting on a “gut” feeling. These somatic markers forces you to focus on the negative outcome from your decision - a survival response. Beware! Danger! This allows you to narrow your choices to other less doom-filled options. Positive somatic markers are “beacons of incentive” - do this and you will feel good again. Emotion therefore ASSISTS in the decision making process, and is not in opposition to it.

With thanks to http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/millwardbrown/