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Electric cars have been around for a hundred years or so, but until now, they’ve been at the fringes of the automotive world. This fall, the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt will go on sale, and Ford and Mitsubishi are planning to launch their electric cars sometime next year. Oh, and let’s not forget there are at least two companies (Zero and Brammo) selling street legal electric motorcycles right now.
I saw a few interesting trend tidbits in my online travels lately:
Email is fading.
While annual email volume is in the trillions, 80% of it is commercial or unsolicited. Meanwhile, personal email has declined by 40% since 2003, and millions of teens do not even have email — but instead rely on cells, texting and social networks.
We work with credit unions all across the country, and I’m always amazed by the incredible diversity in business models and in the people. It’s one of the things that makes working with credit unions a lot more fun than other industries.
The conversation never stops online, and we expect to be able to access it when and where we want. We are used to connecting to friends, family and coworkers in short bursts, interacting and building on comments and ideas, then moving on to the next topic of interest. There is no delay, no hierarchy, and no limits on who connects to whom.
How often have you watched a TV commercial, laughed at it, but at the end you really couldn’t remember what it was advertising?
I would venture to guess that this happens far too often. Agencies or advertisers get caught up in the creative and lose sight of the message. Yes, the ads are entertaining and may even become part of our pop culture, but they aren’t very effective at selling.
I was an English major in college. I also grew up in a household where I was constantly
corrected if I used incorrect grammar. I was taught at an early age to say “This is she” when the phone rang and someone asked for me. “This is her” would have resulted in a scolding and a rant from my father. Needless to say, I learned to speak correctly. I also learned how to write correctly.
Scott Adams, creator of the serial documentary “Dilbert“, invented the term “confusopoly” back in 1998. Basically, it refers to the tactic of entangling consumers through sheer confusion rather than being directly competitive.
In a recent poll we asked “Who is generally responsible for developing new products at your CU?” Over half of the participants said that “it changes with the moon” and another 23% of you said that “Our CEO has his ‘projects’”. Sadly, only 13% claimed that “Marketing has all the ideas.”
Would you agree to do anything someone on Twitter told you to do as long as it was legal? One poor schmuck has.
That’s right. David Perez, a 29-year-old ad agency recruiter, has agreed to wear a pair of glasses complete with a webcam, and follow the Twitter commands of followers for a full 6 days. Think of him as an internet puppet and the audience is pulling the strings. If anyone tells him to jump into a fountain, he will and you’ll be able to watch in real time.
In a time when every credit union seems to be on the prowl for loans, it may be easy to downplay the importance of Gen Y since they are not yet using credit union products as heavily as other demographics.
At the 2010 MAC Conference, Bob Hoel, PhD of the Filene Research Institute shared these megatrends that are reshaping the financial services world:
1. Demographic trends
Moms are hot.
If you want a sure-fire marketing strategy, you need to focus on one underserved market niche that has the strongest sense of affiliation, the most homogeny, and the most influence over others. According to Shari Storm, CMO of Verity Credit Union, author of Motherhood is the New MBA and speaker at the recent MAC Conference, you need to target Moms. Here’s why:
Sugar cubes started it all. The product was the same, but the packaging changed to something easier to handle. And it was something that you did not have to be rich to be able to afford. Sugar cubes were the first example of average consumers buying a product based on a desire to show off, to have an early social status symbol, to have something only the elite had previously. That made it an act of social rebellion.
Campbell’s knows how to sell soup to my six year old. Place SpongeBob on the front, metamorphose the noodles into orbs that vaguely resemble Squidbert, and park the can on a shelf within her eyesight. Voila – she’s sold! And even though I can acquire essentially the same soup for 22 cents cheaper, I buy SpongeBob to see her eyes light up when it’s placed in the cart.
Shopping may not only be our biggest achievement, it may be a reason for us to feel optimistic about the future. Now perhaps that just sounds like some weak rationale to hit the mall, but I’ll leave it to a trained zoologist and former editor at The Economist to combine lessons from all of human history, including our beginnings, to explain why.