Is this L'Oréal's Uber moment?

It's a big month for us, as L'Oréal - the world's largest cosmetics company - launches a new customer acquisition programme using the Buyapowa platform. We'll be helping some of their best-loved brands to bring peer-to-peer selling - a cosmetics industry tactic ever since Victorian times - beautifully up to date.

It couldn't come at a better time, with the challenge of acquiring new customers growing more and more difficult for the skincare and beauty industry every day. Shoppers are blinded by the flood of pharma-jargon spewing out of billboards and tv adverts ("five times more prettiness particles than other brands!"). Meanwhile, new players and hipster indies come to market every day, creating such an avalanche of choice that it's easier to find a botox needle in a haystack than it is to settle on a new moisturiser.

And the people we used to turn to for help - the celebrities, YouTubers and bloggers collectively known as 'influencers' - are so utterly in the thrall of paid promotions and playing the PR game that, every time you take their advice and purchase today's 'holy grail' product, you can't help but feel that it's your gullability which is paying for the

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The Miracle Cure for Your Black Friday Hangover

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After The Party...The Hangover!

Well as parties go, this year’s Black Friday weekend was ‘one huge sales party’!

We are not going to bore you by repeating all the stats about how many billion dollars of sales were made, how many million parcels need to be delivered or what was the average response time for the Argos or Target website. Let’s suffice it to say that US$4.4bn spent online in the US and £1.1bn spent online in the UK is a big party in anyone’s vocabulary.

But like all good parties the morning after normally starts with a hangover as you try and piece together what happened the night before.  And the bigger the party...... the bigger the hangover.

If you are a retailer you will still be busy for a few days trying to get all those parcels out and working out how to deal with the inevitable returns. But there is a moment on the horizon you are dreading, in effect this moment is going to be the ‘mother of all your hangovers’.

That moment is going to be like someone throwing a jug of ice cold water over your poor

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Bauer, Future & Immediate Media Innovate To Drive Subscriber Growth

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Leading UK Magazine Publishers Drive Subscriber Growth from Referrals

After a difficult decade for the global magazine industry, beset by competition from abundant free content online and peer to peer sharing of copyrighted information, 2015  was predicted to be the year that digital revenue gains finally outweighed falling print revenue. So it is encouraging to see the UK, with its long and illustrious history of printed magazines and pamphlets, leading the way in adopting innovative solutions to drive subscriptions growth across print and digital, as seen in the recent PPA ABC Consumer Magazines Report in August 2015. 

An example of how the UK's leading magazine publishers are embracing the opportunities offered by digital to drive subscriber growth was our announcement on the occasion of the Professional Publishers’ Association’s ‘Customer Direct Conference’ at the Jumeriah Carlton Tower Hotel in London, on 18th November 2015 that each of Bauer Media, Future Plc and Immediate Media will integrate the Buyapowa software into their magazines’ websites.

Thanks to Buyapowa's easy to use sharing tools, each of these publishers will enable and empower existing loyal magazine subscribers to recommend, straight from the magazines’ websites or from newsletters, that friends, family and colleagues try out

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What a Waste: Has Product Sampling Led To Global Warming?

How Innovation Has Made Sampling Better.......And Saved the Earth Tons of Trash!

If there was an area of marketing ripe for innovation it had to be sampling!

If you have any doubts, then the next time a smiley young person presses a face cream pack or International SIM card into your hand, just check the mountain of discarded packets round the corner.

Then just think of all that waste from all the sampling campaigns across all the cities and towns where teams are handing out sachets and packets heading to landfill sites and then you get an idea of the environmental problem. 

Whether from live sampling teams in co-ordinated sweatshirts or sachets glued into magazines pages, apart from the environmental waste of all that bubble wrap, traditional sampling’s problems are:

  • scatter-gun targeting meaning products go to people who will never become customers;
  • no feedback as to who liked and disliked the product and why; and
  • little conclusive link between the sample distribution and future purchases.

Yet sampling remains a valuable tool for marketers looking to introduce a new product or grow market share because it removes the ‘price barrier’ to adoption and lets potential customers try the product

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Winning New Customers Without Losing Your Shirt!

 

If you have been following the business pages lately you cannot help being struck by the huge changes underfoot in the online gaming industry with mega-mergers between Betfair and PaddyPower and GVC beating 888 Holdings to acquire Betwin.

These gaming behemoths have sought scale as a response to spiralling customer acquisition costs, as well as increased tax and regulatory burdens. A profitable customer can often cost hundreds of dollars to acquire.  It is refreshing to see a leading online gaming business like Welton Holdings’ Fun88 take an innovative approach to reducing customer acquisition costs.

Quite simply, Welton Holdings' Fun88 has gone back to a basic fundamental of marketing: ‘Word of Mouth’. But the innovation is in that by adding the latest generation of innovative Invite-a-Friend marketing software it has ensured that, finally, referral marketing channel can now drive a significant percentage of new customer acquisition.

But first let’s take a quick look at the challenges facing online gaming:

PRESSURE FROM ONLINE MARKETING COSTS, REGULATION AND TAXES

Online gaming is a fiercely competitive industry where, as Tim Stocks reported in April 2015, marketing costs are typically one-third of the operator’s total cost base:

Image: Page 6 of 'Red Roses

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