Diet Pepsi: aspartame is out and sucralose in – as myths persist?

The news that Diet Pepsi is removing aspartame (Equal) and bringing in sucralose (Splenda) is huge because aspartame is supposedly one of the most studied food ingredients and certified safe by the FDA and European Food Safety authorities. So why this major shift?

Pepsi has important business reasons for this move as sugary soda sales have been declining generally  in the US as people have become more diet conscious. Surprisingly diet coke has declined last year by 5.2% while Pepsi is down by 6.6% as people believe in certain myths about diet drinks that include:

  • Diet ingredients like aspartame cause cancer
  • It confuses your metabolism and your body does’nt know what to do with the artificial sugar
  • Might aggravate weight gain and diabetes
  • It may kill gut bacteria and cause IBS

In fact aspartame.org has a list of myths and arguments debunking those myths.

However, it is quite amazing that Coke/Pepsi that quite literally inform basic marketing teaching in classrooms worldwide, could not surmount the increasing perception that artificial sweeteners are unsafe. Muhtar Kent, the Coke CEO, repeatedly clarifies that he’s not defending aspartame and yet sounds defensive.

You have to wonder about why the leaders of consumer marketing are on the defensive on the aspartame issue?

It turns out that every one of the myths about aspartame and sweeteners generally  have been mentioned by some doctor to a patient in a private consultation. Ask around your friends and you’ll find at least one myth is reportedly mentioned by your friend’s doctor (or the friend’s friend’s doctor….) in a private  individual consultation session.

Since neither Coke nor Pepsi or the artificial sugar industry can hire sales reps to individually try and convince every doctor in the world , this is quite the marketing nightmare. Making things worse for the marketers are scientists who have been investigating some of these myths as they are interesting scientific questions.

For example, if you went to Google Scholar and typed “aspartame and cancer” you will find over ten pages of legitimate refereed scientific publications. At least the first few will start spooking you.

But since this blog is an ardent Cola supporter, we argue that probably anything in moderation can’t hurt you. A nice thought for the weekend and warmer weather with some chilled diet soda. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Is your innovation R&D intensive or customer intensive?

R&D Innovation vs Customer Innovation - StratoServeR&D Intensive innovation: It was a bio-technology strategy executive who explained when asked why it is hard to produce “made in the garage” innovations in biotechnology. The problem is that in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research you need labs, teams and a lot of money and time to come up with a blockbuster cure. You cannot do it alone.

It costs time and money, early in the process,  as depicted in the graph alongside. R&D and particularly R&D in basic sciences might take years to come to engineering and convert to something practical. This is the reason that a lot of these types of fundamental work starts at universities.  The stringent academic review process delays things, but you can reasonably sure that when ideas are published in major academic journals- you can actually start developing something applied based on those ideas. This holds true for the social sciences as well as one sees in the work of Malcolm Gladwell, who is able to take some core ideas from the social sciences and convert them into an applied, usable format via popular books. The entrepreneurial skill here is to be able to take an abstract- frequently academic idea  and convert it into a usable, practical insight that can be commercialized if there are customers willing to pay for that usable idea or product.  This is the case of a solution looking for a problem.

Customer intensive innovation: Contrast R&D intensive type of innovations with the “Shark-Tank” kind of pitches that are primarily based out of existing technology i.e. there is no new molecule being developed. In this category the entrepreneur observes a problem, thinks that he or she might have a solution and sets about developing that solution. The solution is developed with available technologies of the day because timing is of the essence as the market problem may disappear or change, competitors may emerge etc. Here the entrepreneurial skill is to understand the customers problem in as much detail as possible and make early changes in the solution without spending too much at the back end of the new product development process. Thus it is important to do concept testing carefully and also do product use testing or alpha testing in software so that most problems in the solution to the customers problem is ironed out early in the process of innovation. Most of the cost happens later at the launch and market stage where huge expenses on advertising and sales force are called for as depicted in the graph with this post. Here the problem is in search of a solution.

And both types of innovation have started using digital methods throughout the process from recruiting patients for clinical trials to introducing the new product through special deals online. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Why and How you should track your email marketing campaigns in Google Analytics

Why and how to track emails in Google Analytics-StratoServeCompared to direct mail, email marketing is much easier and far less expensive. However, observe the time it takes you to open a direct mail credit card piece from a major hotel (pictured above)… our guess is at least 10-15 seconds to find the letter opener and open the envelope, 5 seconds to flatten out the letter i.e about 15-20 seconds if you decide not to junk the envelope based on the outer messages on the envelope. Now think how many emails you would have dealt with in those 20 seconds… so many that we could find only one unopened email from Amazon Local for the picture above….

Email marketing campaigns  can be very effective particularly at the later parts of the sales funnel. The people on your list already know you or even better, have done business with your brand. Email marketing campaigns are not for the top of  the sales funnel where the prospect does not know you. In email marketing the prospect must opt in to receive email from you. Opt-in includes being friends on social media, having met and exchanged business cards at an event or conference, signed up for a newsletter online or during a store visit etc.In the US you  must remind your email recipient how they got on to your marketing list to avoid being seen as spam by the email marketing platform and the recipient.

This brings us to the question of why you need to go beyond the data your email campaign management software gives you. Unlike direct mail (you do not know who opens), email marketing platforms allow you to see who opened the email. Direct mail does not allow you to see if someone actually looked at the action piece (for example: order form) and you only get to only know who placed the order.

On the other hand email platforms allow you to see the who clicked on the order form in the email. It is after that click that customers arrive at your website and the email platform loses track of them.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. For every email containing different content or sent on you can tag the email at the action button like the “order now” button. If you have an “order now” button that takes them to the product you want them to order you can generate a URL using the Google Analytics URL Builder tool. Use words in the Campaign Content section  that reflect the main purpose of the email campaign that you are tracking like “EarlySpringOffer1”, this way you’ll know how your email campaign around “EarlySpringOffer1” was doing from Google Analytics information. Although Google Analytics collects  anonymous information it gives you key insights by email content after they arrive at your website including time spent,pages seen, orders placed etc. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

B2B Buying Center members getting younger

Buying Center Younger-StratoServe.If you have enabled demographic reports on your B2B marketing website in Google Analytics, you would have noticed it: there are lots of visitors from the 18-24 and 25-34 age group. 

We would not be surprised if you sell some non-glamorous industrial product (eg. valves or switches.. with no offence to readers from these industries) and yet you have over 50% folks  in the 18-34 age range as illustrated in the accompanying chart. This corroborates recent research by Google and Millward Brown on the changing face of B2B marketing.

Here we need to really understand the changing buying center. Imagine that a senior engineer is looking for a particular type of pneumatic valve for a plant extension. The senior engineer is also the manufacturing manager and has just hired several final year engineering students as interns (ages 18-24). As manufacturing manager, the executive has a lot of urgent issues to handle like failures in a particular machine, a quality complaint in a particular batch a brewing shop-floor labor dispute.All this apart from keeping organizational politics in control with folks above/parallel to  him like the General Manager, the Cost Accountant, the Production Planning/Sales folks etc. In other words, the otherwise very powerful B2B decision maker (i.e. Senior Engineer/Manufacturing Manager) still has all the organizational drama to manage- that has not changed a whole lot even with the Internet. 

So what does the Manufacturing Manager do? She/he calls in an engineering intern and assigns the research tasks of finding the best pneumatic valve for the new application in the plant extension. Now our intern is off to work and starts by Googling “pneumatic valve” because that engineering class seems so long ago… and so goes the research.

In a day or two the intern is ready with her/his research but the manufacturing manager is too busy to meet. Finally, a meeting occurs where the Supply Chain Manager is also present. There was a salesperson who had pitched to the Supply Department  some time ago but details have got a little fuzzy for the Supply Manager – and the intern’s research seems rather solid. Everyone decides to go with asking for quotes with the top three on the intern’s research list. The salesperson who had actually met the procurement folks six months ago does not have a place in the top three brands being considered.

Perhaps the salesperson organization finds out eventually that they were not even considered. All because of younger members of the buying center who would research online from a desktop/laptop and yes from their mobile phones and the salesperson organization did not show up either on searching or via Ads on the Internet. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Mona Lisa mystery eyes might be due to high cholesterol: tagging images for SEO

Mona Lisa cholesterol-xanthelasma- image tagging SEO-StratoServeThe Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci is open to so many interpretations that it is a  perfect example of the picture tagging challenge for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search Engines do not know if Mona Lisa is really smiling, or just letting you know that she “knows”…..

Research for this post on tagging pictures for SEO brought us to the Wikipedia page for Mona Lisa. It appears that many doctors believe that Mona Lisa might have had high cholesterol that probably caused fatty deposits under her eyes, that helped with that perennial enigmatic smile.

Popular press articles like the Telegraph UK,  ascribe the Mona Lisa-cholesterol theory to Vito Franco of the University of Palermo in 2010. When we did some search on Google Scholar we found that the earliest cited reference to Mona Lisa’s possible cholesterol condition is in a 2004 article
“Xanthelasma and lipoma in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,” by Dequeker, Muls and Leenders. It turns out that medical scholars refer to this stream of research as “Xanthelasma.”

We wanted to illustrate the tagging of a Mona Lisa picture in the context of the cholesterol-xanthelasma, so here goes with a public domain picture of Mona Lisa:

  • If we wanted to do only one thing with the image, it would be to name it in the file name as we would like folks to find it and its associated  content.Since the purpose of this blog post is to alert hi-tech/high knowledge businesses about image tagging for SEO, and we think that the cholesterol explanation is interesting, we are calling the image “Mona Lisa cholesterol-xanthelasma- image tagging SEO-StratoServe,” This is the name you see if you tried to download the image and save it.

When it comes uploading the image to this post, there are some options that WordPress or your  content system will give you. These could include ALT-TEXT, Keywords, Description and you should simply fill up the fields provided. Just keep in mind that you have a message to give your reader with the image and its associated text that answers the web searchers question.

It may well be that folks interested in Mona Lisa’s cholesterol condition have absolutely no interest in SEO, but they would not be disappointed if they searched “Mona Lisa Cholesterol” and came to this page. Similarly there may be folks searching for “Image SEO for high tech products” and only have a mild interest in Mona Lisa, and we hope that they will not be disappointed with this post, either !

Also see the LinkedIn post: Do you call your resume file “CV” ? The cardinal photo SEO sin.

About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Dentists beware: folks are ordering braces online

The news that many folks are actually ordering dental braces online is shocking for dentists and is an example of a service that you thought was “inseparable,” but is actually getting separated at the individual customer level.

For sure not everyone will be ordering dental braces online and bypassing the dentist, but almost everyone will be researching possibilities when the bill could be from $300 (for a dental mouth guard) to $10,000 (for teeth straightening). The NBC clip suggests that the online patient was expecting to pay only about $1000 for the entire teeth straightening process to the online provider.

It was that we believed that a plumber or electrician  in the US was safe from outsourcing, because you needed pretty advanced skills that needed to deploy at the the location of the task like fixing a leaking faucet. The growth of the D-I-Y (Do it yourself) stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s in the US was due to the high costs of calling in a plumber or electrician at least for simpler tasks like changing a plug. Within  a skill spectrum the local electrician and plumber were sure that they would be called in for a complex task (eg. remodel the bathroom) that would provide decent pay.

With YouTube and the very large number of helpful videos, this enterprising blogger (with negligible mechanical skills)  could successfully change the Clothes Drying Machine belt. The belt could be ordered online  and thus avoided calling a technician who had quoted half the cost of a new dryer for a) diagnosing the problem and b) fixing it -with parts charged extra.

There are two things going on here:

  • Consumers are moving up the D.I.Y. value chain: Because  information and knowledge is so readily available online, a consumer who is unsure about fixing a leaking faucet takes up daunting tasks like changing the dryer machine belt.
  • New business opportunity at higher ends of D.I.Y. value chain: You may not find a specific dryer belt at the local Home Depot or Lowe’s, but will find it online.The online store who caters to this emerging high end DIY market has opportunity. A range  of online dryer belts is similar to the online dental braces, who have been able to modularize/split  the dental mold making from getting the mold made at the dentist office, to having this made at the online patient’s home as D.I.Y. Remember, that the actual task of taking the mold in a dental office is done by a dental assistant under the supervision of the orthodontist who has historically been able to charge a high price.

So where does this leave our local dentist?

    • Dentists can be sure that existing patients have mostly checked the online options and prices and know that they are paying their dentist more, sometimes much more. At the least, patients are somewhat resentful. Over time the patients who are able to build confidence to go online will increase- and the dentist braces business will decline…. unless
      • Dentists actively recognize this change and perhaps discuss with patients upfront and work more with payment plans and also consider letting them go online after the initial treatment and set-up. This is similar to physical therapists who give you exercise sheets to do at home after a few paid physiotherapy sessions.

Either way, all skilled professionals need to re-evaluate their marketing approach and offering as customers go up the DIY value chain. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Assume that customers Googled your product

Information Symmetry-StratoServeAccording to research by Google, 97% people search online before deciding to buy from a local business. Ask yourself this one question and you’ll realize the extent of this problem (or opportunity)  depending on how you frame it:

Question:   When was the last time you watched a movie on TV without checking its reviews? Keep in mind that when a movie is shown on TV it is not that Friday release but something older. Also a TV movie means that you have no marginal cost as you are anyway going to pay the cable bill. Your only additional cost is the time you commit to watching a movie.

Answer: Most folks are unwilling to invest the average 120 minutes on a Hollywood movie on a TV run without Googling the movie and checking reviews on IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes etc.

Somewhat more unkind is the restaurant customer who walks out of a restaurant, just as the waiter appears, because by this time the Yelp reviews can be seen on the customers’ mobile phone.

In other words, almost no customer is likely to buy your product or service without Googling it first because people are doing research before spending only time infront of a TV and before deciding to have a $8 lunch sandwich.

All this is happening because of the fundamental disappearance of information asymmetry. There was a time that it really mattered to have the movie or food critic write a piece in the newspaper. The movie or restaurant would then take a blurb from the critic’s writing and feature it in the promo for the movie or at the door of the restaurant.

Restaurants still do this, but frequently the customer decides not to try the restaurant based on reviews online and does not get the opportunity to see that wonderful review by the food critic of the newspaper. In other words, the “no go” decision is being made from the cell phone browser.

So where does it leave the business ?

By assuming that people are Googling your product or service you can be empowered. Empowered to describe, explain and justify why your product or service is great on a continuous basis. You get out of the mindset that the customer knows less than you about your industry, your competitors or about how other customers feel about different offerings in the industry.

Assuming information symmetry can do wonders for a restaurant. Let us say that a New England snow beleaguered lunch place is getting bad/average reviews for its clam chowder soup but people like the piping hot turkey sandwich and the sweet potato fries. By trying to fix the clam chowder ( relaunched as “new” clam chowder) and talking more about its popular products on the website and social media can turn things around.

Simply ignoring the customer voice or pretending that new or even existing customers will not check it, is going back to the old times where information was power.

Now that anyone with an Internet connection can instantly research your product or services gives equal and more power to the average consumer. In B2B markets, when a buying engineer Googles something they see,read and understand things at quite a different and enhanced level than the sales engineer who is trying to make a sale from a canned sales script.

Assuming that your customer has Googled your product,company and you can go a long way in improving the value of whatever you offer the market. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Why is it hard to engage your organization in social media content creation?

Sparrow-Social Media -StratoServeHow to engage your organization in social media content creation? is a challenge for most organizations. Call it the legacy of the old industrial world, you joined a large organization and hoped to keep your job for life. The formula was ” keep your head down” , “keep your mouth shut” , “stay out of trouble” and “stay below the radar.” In fact, this blogger once encountered a head of HR (before Twitter) who had a glass sheet on his table that had The Story of the Sparrow facing the visitor to HR. For those readers unfamiliar with the story, do check out the story of the sparrow that is recounted by the late novelist-academic Raymond Federman. The moral of the story includes the verb “twitter”.Given that the Federman version of the story is before “Twitter” became famous is prophetic, for most employees worldwide would be unsure about tweeting today….

Couple the “sparrow effect”  with the PR department that has historically overseen press releases and conducted press briefings. If every employee started tweeting and posting stuff on the Facebook page of the organization, there would be serious chaos, is the typical PR department view.

So you have two forces of the Industrial era i.e. HR and PR  that reign in employee initiative when it comes to social media content . Both have great historical reasons for being hesitant, except that that the world has changed as follows:

  • HR concerns: Are primarily with the ability of the workers to unite and question the management via social media. You therefore hear about some company related Facebook post that got an employee into trouble. Today HR scholars and leading practitioners are trying to work on re-orienting the HR function so that employees feel safe and trained to undertake social media communications on behalf of the organizations. After all the employee is nearest to the work being done by her and is the most authentic voice – so important in social media success.
  •  PR worries: As the world changes with social media and easy access to information US Newsrooms have seen a major decline in staffers. Unless a story is path-breaking, there are no journalists that can attend a PR event. It’s far cheaper and easier today to send out a PR briefing online  rather than try and motivate tightly stretched journalists to attend an event. Fortunately many PR leaders and scholars are talking about how to become internal PR coaches in the organization so that multiple employees can share their achievements and successes online.

The above forces should make marketers life easier as they try and get all organizational members to share authentic stories online directly. More on how to mobilize your organization for social media, in a later post. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

Using SEO data in Google Analytics to develop useful web content

SEO web content Google Analytics-StratoServeGoogle works by indexing your web-pages and then retrieving them when someone queries Google. Coming up on the first page of Google is Search Engine Optimization (SEO),very important in digital marketing.Thus, if you are a flower seller with a website and a lot of description of each flower bouquet, Google would index your content around these offerings.In addition, if you had a blog that, for example, talks about different offerings for the upcoming Valentine Day (February 14)  and later Mothers’ Day  (May 10)- your content would be indexed against queries like ” new flower ideas for Valentine Day.”

In other words, depending on the content and words in your existing website content, Google produces the best results it can. Sometimes the results can be funny. Google Analytics data of a website revealed that the search query ” (name of executive) wife” was returning results that combined (name of executive)+ wife  merely because the word “wife” appeared in an unrelated page of the website. The content had nothing to do with the combination “name of executive+wife”. However,results are always getting better with Google.

So how do you check what SEO is working for your existing web content? Login to Google Analytics and on the left hand tabs go to:

Acquisition–> Search Engine Optimization–>Queries

Within “Queries” you will find columns named:

|Query|      |Impressions|     |Clicks|     |Average position|    |CTR|

All of these columns can be sorted in ascending/descending order and a great first step is to sort the “Average position” column with minimum on top. If you have “1”  as average position then for that particular query on Google , if you have “2” then for that particular query your pages come in at no. 2 and so on. You can have fractions like 2.6 in average position, given that this is an average reporting column.

Upon sorting the “average position” column, you need to look at the impressions column. The impressions column tells you the number of times your page was shown by Google for that particular query. Why was Google trying to show your page?… well because your related content in the past was helpful to prior web visitors.

The final step is to look for queries where average position is up  (i.e. 2, 1,…ie. the lower the number better), impressions are high but clicks are low. It means that based on your current content Google thinks that you might have good answers to the queries. If people are still not clicking, your content development has some great opportunity.

Upon reviewing these queries, you should get a few pointers as to where your content needs to be strengthened from an SEO viewpoint. The additional content you develop should be more useful to your web visitors. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.

B2B Marketing on Facebook

B2B Marketing on Facebook -StrtaoServe

If you wanted to advertise your B2B product or service on social media, should you try Facebook marketing is a question that we are often asked. 

Here are some thoughts as we get started with 2015 and wish our readers a Very Happy New Year !

  • B2B purchasing is for a business purpose: A business purpose could be direct materials and services or indirect materials and services. Direct materials are items that are used in your production and value chain. For example, if you own a bakery your direct materials are flour,sugar etc. In case, you are planning to expand your bakery business through franchises it may be critical to standardize the flour,sugar from suppliers. You simply cannot take a large risk with new suppliers. The bakery business will buy lots of things that are not direct materials, for example, stationery. These indirect materials tend to have many suppliers offering stuff at commodity prices.
  • If you supply a special niche B2B product: Assume that you supply a special organic flour for baking and you are looking for bakeries who are potentially interested in starting an organic line of products. Finding such bakeries on Facebook can be far easlier through advertising on Facebook.
  • People talk among friends on Facebook: People talk among friends on Facebook. OK some people talk a lot more than others, but if someone supports organic food you can be sure that they have liked some organic food pages and Facebook is correctly able to identify them. By targeting the bakery industry and organic food interests you should be able to reach a fairly narrow and focussed audience of potential B2B customers.
  • What if every business can buy my B2B product? If you believe that every business buys your product – you have a market segmenting problem. For example, while every business uses cleaning products – frequently it is the facilities cleaning contractor who buys the window cleaner. So you might need separate market segment offerings and campaigns on Facebook that offer compelling solutions to a) businesses that clean their own premises and b) who hire a contractor.
  • Narrow Focussed Market Segments Critical: If you want to see some good results with B2B Marketing on Facebook it is critical to define your market as narrowly as possible. 
  • Demographics-Work: Look carefully at the Demographics-Work section of the Facebook Ad Set Audiences and you can narrow down industries,level of people you want to target.
  • Interests – the best through Facebook ! Interest targeting has really great possibilities on Facebook. In an earlier post we had discussed about how effective it is to use Facebook for recruiting drug trial participants. Patients with a serious condition and their care givers are likely to discuss on Facebook and when they see a drug trial opportunity – you can expect a positive response and participation.

To summarize, B2B Marketing on Facebook can be effective when you are able to narrowly segment your target market by industry, interests and behavior. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.