Hasta La Creative!

One of Alibaba’s shopping platforms just hosted a surprising Valentine’s Day contest: Ten same-sex Chinese couples won a trip to California to get married there.

The contest appeared on Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace, which is similar to eBay. Users voted on the finalists based on short videos of the couples telling their stories when and how they met, why they want to get married. A Chinese bedding company called Bliss, which sells its products via Alibaba, is funding the trips.

The promotion is noteworthy on a few levels. Gay marriage is not legal in China. Since homosexuality is still relatively taboo, many in the community aren’t out to their families and friends. (Discussion of weddings in China’s LGBT community often focuses on marriages of convenience between gay men and lesbian women, a way to shield their identities from their families. Gay marriage is still a distant dream.)

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It’s harder than ever to earn your customers’ loyalty. They are “always on,” have instant access to myriad choices, and can easily find the cheapest prices from any supplier. Many companies think they’ve solved this with a loyalty program, but the competition is stiff there, too. On average, consumers belong to eight loyalty programs — the majority of which are ruled by points, discounts and financial rewards. And let’s face it: These transactional benefits are more about increasing frequency and spend than influencing emotional loyalty and devotion to a company.

The bad news? Traditional approaches to loyalty don’t cut it anymore.

The good news? I’m not going to tell you to scrap your loyalty program. But I am going to tell you to reframe how you think about your program. It should be treated as one of several tools — alongside customer experience, brand and customer service — that helps foster customer loyalty wherever customers interact. Marketers have a huge opportunity to help their firms gain insight about who their customers are, what motivates them and how they currently interact with their products and services — an opportunity that just 26% of marketers currently cite as a top business objective from their loyalty programs.

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Thirty days ago I stepped into the role of Digital Governance Center of Excellence lead at SAP. It’s quite an immersion as I embark on leveraging great work done in the past to kick-start the next gen of social media channel governance. But social media remains a “wild kingdom” that’s tough to harness, so here are my tips for anyone entering a new leadership role in the social media space. I focus here on governance, but I think the lessons are widely applicable.

My top three takeaways after 30 days:

1. Find mechanisms to harness the best practices from “leaders of the pack.” Information too often stays within the domain of the early practitioners, while others struggle up the same learning curve and waste time. The best thing we can do is leverage the learnings of the teams who’ve mastered an approach to raise the level of performance across the board. Examples:

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The Chicago Board Options Exchange, an options trading company, was faced with a challenge last year: educating its target audience of investors about CBOE products they weren’t familiar with and weren’t trading.

“As the market changes, so do the needs, wants and sensibilities of the target audience,” said Ted Kohnen, CMO at SteinIAS, which has been CBOE’s agency of record for more than three years. As part of its ongoing engagement, SteinIAS is charged with doing research among CBOE’s target audience of institutional and retail investors to find out what their investing needs are.

CBOE was established in 1973 and provides trading platforms for equity, index and exchange-traded fund (EFT) options. It also provides a Volatility Index (VIX), which is a barometer of investor sentiment and market volatility, and a VIX Options trading product. Last year, CBOE had operating revenue of $617 million, up 8.0% over the previous year.

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Mobile operator Three has co-opted Vinnie Jones into giving Spanish lessons in its latest spot promoting free roaming abroad.

Gareth Griffiths, head of sports sponsorship at O2 talks to Nicola Kemp about why 2015 is the most significant year in the brand’s 20-year association with England Rugby.

Category: Up Your Game
Summary: These days the popular brands spend a lot of time trying to sound more human. Conversely, industry people strengthen their “self-brand” by trying to sound more like corporations. Between these two we find the robots.

Starbucks is the latest brand to jump on-board the Valentine’s Day bandwagon, with the coffee chain serving up free trials of Match.com alongside its lattes and espressos.