November 2015 – Melissa Di Terlizzi's blog

Coca Cola & Digital Marketing

Coca Cola has been investing much on its digital hub, shifting from a web centralized approach to a multichannel one that makes use also of social media and other mobile platforms.

The company’s marketing is reunited under the Integrated Marketing Communication which activities are managed globally, in Atlanta where the brand positioning and long term strategies are determined, at business unit (Southern Europea for instance) and locally, which involves the adaptation to the single country.
Compared to other traditional activities, the digital marketing can take up to the 50% of the budget, depending on the type of campaigns, the objectives and the markets to which its is addressed; it’s a holistic view.

Today, Coca Cola Facebook page counts with more than 19 millions fans, among the highest of global brands; in addition, each product has its own Facebook page and this is very useful because each platform is connected to the rest of social platforms (for instance Facebook linked to Youtube, Flickr, Twitter etc.) creating an amplifying effect.

Christmas is always a great occasion for Coca Cola to renovate and it always launches new campaigns to “share desires”. It’s fundamental for the company to engage the customers and increase the talk on socials as well.

Here is an example:
Coca Cola creates engagement and happiness and people making pictures and posting on socials will increase the engagement, the reach and overall the talk; it easily goes viral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExQM_oMfHxk

Finally, this is the new Christmas 2016 Campaign.
I wish you all a GREAT ONE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1BRdv2JjGk

iZettle: big things start small

iZettle is a Swedish start-up born in 2010 that it has been having a tremendous success since it took the scene in the market. Personally, I only got to know it a few days ago, scrolling down the online newspaper and it was surprising and very interesting to learn more about it since it consists on one of the frontiers of e-commerce.

The company can be considered as the direct rival of the American Square: it deals with mobile payments, allowing individuals and SMEs to accept card payments on their iOS or Android devices. However, iZettle detains the leadership in developing a new card reader that allows to pay small business across some European countries, Mexico and Brazil just by plugging it into

the headphone jack and it uses Apple Pay and other mobile wallets as Google Wallet.
This has allowed many small businesses not to upgrade their older POS hardware, by offering them a product that costs only 79 £ ($124) getting advantage of the huge popularity of smartphones; at the same time, customers can afford leaving at home their wallet and credit and debit cards, bringing just their smartphones.

This good move goes along with the current waves: currently, the contactless payments increase more and more especially in cashless countries like Sweden and most North European countries.

However, in countries like Italy, it may have some problems since 3/4 of the total transactions are still paid for in cash. For now the company is testing new markets and has entered Italy at the beginning of November.

Source Images: iZettle.com; Endgadget.com

Nestlè Social Marketing in India: “Start Healthy”!

What is social marketing? According to Kotler, it can be defined as making use of marketing strategies to influence a targeted group to accept, modify or abandon in a voluntary way in order to obtain an advantage for society as a whole.

Several companies engage in social marketing as part of their CSR.
I found an interesting and fun social marketing campaign adopted by Nestlè in 2014: it’s a rap video featuring super babies extolling the benefits of breastfeeding. Each of the individual characters takes life and represent one of the benefits: for instance Lil Wiz about brain and development, Germ Stoppa about the immunity gain from his mother’s milk.

In this video Nestle has had the ability to focus only con customers and their well being without mentioning indirectly the brand or promoting one of their products. In addition, these types of videos can easily go viral since they deliver an educational content but they are fun at the same time: super babies in their diapers dancing and singing rap. There are a number of different characters so that parents and children can identify themselves with.

The video gained an enormous success since it was launched coinciding with Nestlè “Start Healthy breastfeeding week” campaign that garnered community support and media exposure.
Surely, Nestle has been capable to reinvigorate his image and brand strength, indirectly, and get closer into a binding relationship to the local community thanks to his social marketing campaigns.

How to be viral on Facebook: a question of math

The dream of every marketer: creating a post that goes viral!
According to a new study of Chapman University this is made possible thanks to a mathematical model developed to maximize the spread of information on Facebook.
It is based on identifying culturally different clusters and creating an algorithm that determines how to maximize the number of users reached by an information.

In particular, scientists make use of the Graph Theory to quantitatively analyze the rate of diffusion of information among nodes within the network. composed of clusters that share same political orientation, ideologies and interests.
The experiment was carried out determining seven assumptions and testing them. Among those, for instance, they assumed that the potential spread of an information exponentially diminishes as the number of intermediaries users increase. Then, they tested these hypothesis on a video quantifying the engagement, the number of likes and shares. The experiment showed that within each cluster there are sub-clusters, each one with a leader (the one with more connections).

As a result, it is fundamental to identify these leaders through mathematical instruments in such a way that they can become an important channel of diffusion not just for businesses, but most important, they may help to spread important messages for society (as for humanitarian help or cancer prevention campaigns etc.).

Source Image: Entrepreneur.com

E-commerce in China: when a disadvantage becomes opportunity

E-commerce in China does not work the same way it does in the US and other developed countries, where Amazon prevails above all websites. In fact, e-commerce developed on a traditional network of retail stores in those countries.
In China, instead, the main platform used is Alibaba, and its origin lies on a structural lack. The potential market counts 667 million users and the demand is supposed to increase to $611bn compared to $471bn of US market (source Sole 24 ore).

Alibaba launched e-commerce in China through TaoBao website in 2003, starting by importing a foreign model, similar to eBay, to generate curiosity and observe reactions of Chinese customers, and creating a market place where buyers and sellers meet, in such a way to help small businesses to commerce despite the infrastructural deficiency. However, over time, Alibaba adapted the structure to Chinese clients and today TaoBAo and Tmall own the 70% of the Chinese e-commerce market. There are there main companies that manage the Chinese e-market: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, each of them strongly respectively in a different sector, commerce, social and services.

The main ability of the company has been to turn a disadvantage (infrastructural deficiency) into an opportunity, by creating a completely innovative and highly advanced online platform, smart logistics apps unknown to the Western world (it’s thought for smartphones).
This model is expanding also in other developing countries and has the potential to become Amazon antagonist.

*Image Sources: Più economia.com; Wallstreetpost.com