The Power of Facebook

Anybody who had any doubt of the power of marketing on Facebook has had an object lesson this week from a couple from Essex. Jon and Tracy Morter successfully campaigned using only a single medium, gathering nearly half a million fans on their Facebook page. Taking a song originally released 17 years ago and beating the 4-month long marketing campaign driven single from Joe McElderry shows the real power of reaching people. Taken in conjunction with the fact that this campaign was only one week long, and had no budget at all the results are truly remarkable.

This may now mark a true shift in UK businesses perceptions about online and social media. As we’ve already said in other blogs, more and more companies are using social media to reach and understand their customers. This is what research has always been designed to do, but the advantage of social media is that it enables the possibility of personalised two-way feedback between a brand and their customers. 2010 will be a year that using social media will become a mainstream business strategy, with more brands realising the huge potential that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter bring.

An end to deep discounts?

As Carluccio’s announces its abandonment of 2-for-1 offers, does this herald the end of discounting in the casual dining sector? Or does it indicate the end of the recession?

The casual dining sector is one that has been particularly active in offering deep discounts, with Pizza Express, to name but one chain, seeming to run offer after offer to the point where one feels it is almost impossible to pay full price for a meal!

So does this give us the first indications of a shift to other forms of promotion activity, and, if so, will others follow?

Christmas spend set to fall by 15%

Despite signs that the recession is beginning to pass, research we conducted in the past week paints a worrying picture for the high street.  The run up to Christmas is the busiest time of the year for most stores; indeed many rely on this period to make any profit in the year. Results from our survey show, however, that the average spend on non-food goods this Christmas is set to decline by 15%.   As many as a third of all shoppers also believe that they will be spending less this Christmas than last year, with a little more than half believing that their total non-food spend will be unchanged. Unsurprisingly, the main reason given to explain this is that they are ‘cutting back’ in the face of the recession.

In further worrying news for the high street, shoppers project that almost 30% of their non-food shopping will be done online this Xmas, with as many as a quarter of respondents doing more so this year than in 2008.  We also found that around one in 10 shoppers say that they are ‘definitely holding back’ their purchases this year in anticipation of pre-Christmas sales.  This shows a rise compared to our previous research. A further third believe that they will hold back ’somewhat’ this year – as a group these shoppers make up more than twice the proportion of previous years.  Clothing remains the most popular category to hold back on in anticipation of sales, but toys and games are estimated to be well up on previous Xmas research, as are electrical items.

Valentine’s Day

I heard on the radio over the weekend that, according to research by Asda, 39% of respondents were looking to ‘cut the cost of Valentine’s day’.  It’s an interesting statistic, but is this something that any normal person would actually think about doing; I mean totally unprompted. Sure we look to cut the cost of our groceries, manage the cost of Christmas, or try to budget our summer holiday. But Valentine’s day? Believe me, I’m all for market research, but I’m not sure what this really tells us other than that thankfully the media still lap up ‘research’ statistics and brand owners will continue to source them.