Welcome to ‘if only…’

Let’s be honest, every now again we all come across impressive campaigns, strategic insights or approaches where you just have to eat humble pie and wish you’d thought of it!  ‘If only we’d thought of that‘ is a distillation of some of the most inspiring work I come across within social media and interactive marketing, peppered with a sprinkling of my own strategic insights for good measure.  It’s intended to be a helpful and lighthearted resource for anyone in the industry, so do add this to your RSS feeds or follow me on Twitter.  ENJOY!

Creating buzz around mobile apps

So you want to build a top-ranking mobile app?  Nothing wrong with that but it’s worth noting that the barriers to success can be phenomenal. The competition is fierce now and unfortunately there’s no secret formula to success, even if your app is the next best thing since sliced bread. In fact, unless you’re extremely lucky you’ll need to market your app considerably through a variety of paid, owned and earned media.

I pulled the presentation together below for the EGB Mobile and Social Media Conference earlier this month and put forward two different strategic approaches to ensuring you generate sufficient buzz around your app. One approach adopts a more linear approach to promoting your app whilst the other  relies on a more 360 approach where the mobile app is integral to the overall campaign.

But I also argue that chasing app downloads for the sake of it is not necessarily the holy grail.  Considering the challenges of building apps which can generate buzz for the brand, there’s a lot of merit in developing apps which support lower funnel objectives too.

I’d welcome your thoughts.

Digital strategies to overcome the luxury conundrum between accessibilty and exclusivity

It wasn’t so long ago that luxury brands resisted the temptation of investing in digital marketing because of the risk of making the brand too accessible to the extent it devalues the brand’s exclusivity.   I happened to speak on this very subject at an IAB Luxury Forum a few years ago when I posted the slightly provocative question ‘is social media just for chavs‘.  Fortunately, nowadays, we find luxury brands not only embracing digital but also in a lot of cases setting the benchmark in digital marketing.

I thought this presentation by @marciikeler and @philaugustaj from Publicis provides a very clear synopsis of the different types of digital strategies which can be adopted by luxury brands, backed up with real life case studies.  It just goes to show how far the luxury market has come within the digital arena in a relative short space of time.