NZ Marketing September/October 2016

Recently, the psychological study claiming you could smile your way to happiness failed under a replication test. For years, this study, which had people put a pen in their mouths to imitate a smile or a frown, was accepted as compelling evidence that even the most subtle cues—whether purposeful or inadvertent— can influence the way a person feels or behaves. The failure of this test wasn’t unusual. A paper published in Science magazine in 2008 found that results in only 39 of 100 selected psychology experiments could be replicated. It was a pretty damning finding for those hoping to apply the scientific method to psychology and behavioural studies. Further muddying the water in this space is the way we analyse results. Even the most successful studies don’t always age well,…

WHO WON? Vote for your favourite on StopPress.co.nz Nay Joseph Silk / director at Chemistry Interaction Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a good bit of craft. Some finely kerned kerning, beautifully leaded leading, an exquisitely shot shot and a beautifully retouched … well everything really. But seeing the numbers that mean we’ve achieved good results for the client – those cold, hard, unemotional numbers – is what really gets me going. And the way to achieve those numbers is through using the other numbers available to us: yes, I’m talking about good old-fashioned targeting. Every day, we are assaulted by more than 3,000 commercial messages, not to mention our Facebook feeds, Snapchat snaps, Twitter tweets, Instagram pics and every other bloody thing. For even one of these to…

MIMI GILMOUR, BURGER BURGER AND FISH FISH The hospitality industry is a crowded space and standing out takes a fresh approach. Burger Burger and Fish Fish owner Mimi Gilmour is providing just that and taking on the industry by giving the classics a new lease of life. 1 Burgers and fish and chips are pretty engrained in New Zealand’s culture. How did you make them seem new and exciting again? I guess in a way I look at them and think what will make them exciting to me ... Almost like the inner child version of me that saw these as special treats and exciting opportunities to have an experience that wasn’t a home cooked meal. I then get a bunch of cool and clever people together and we created…

The challenges of marketing in a small country like New Zealand are easy to see; with smaller segments and even smaller prospect pools, marketing spend needs to work harder to achieve returns, while marketers themselves need to wear multiple hats to get the job done. That makes marketing automation all the more attractive—and the choice of an automation partner all the more important. Ubiquity’s Nathalie Morris gives us the low down. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BIG MISTAKES MARKETERS MAKE WHEN IT COMES TO AUTOMATION? Underutilisation. What we often see is that after investing heavily in technology platforms, marketers realise they’re only using about 15-20 percent of the available functionality. The reason for that is because they simply don’t have the right resources to drive the additional functionality and often…

ON CONVINCING CONSUMERS TO TRY SOMETHING NEW It’s been the hardest thing I think. Someone told me that the loyalty in tea brands is the strongest of all the categories in the supermarket and from my experience that would be the case. We started off doing tea tastings in the supermarket. And I think I was under the misconception that if you have the best quality tea, people will try it out and drink the brand from then on, because we know ours is probably the best tasting tea. And initially we started off doing a leaf tea only, being the purist in the tea sense, but then the realisation is, a lot of people think they buy on taste but they buy on brand. ON MARKETING STRATEGY The biggest…

Whybin\TBWA chief executive Andrew Scott says there are two types of executives in adland. “You can either be a builder or someone who stands sentry duty,” he quips as we sit down for what turns into a long chat. He says that of the two, standing sentry duty—or inheriting a big, strong-performing agency—scares him far more. “There’s only one way you can go and that’s down,” he says. “When you go into a shop that has every piece of business across every category, you have to wonder what comes next. You could maybe grow different divisions, but often you’ll start losing accounts. You see this in agencies all the time. They build up and they go down.” Scott jokes that standing sentry duty over a big agency that has everything…