In a recent article at the USA Today, they looked at the recent American Idol finalists to see who would be better suited for marketing products.  Ahthough Kris Allen was the winner, Theresa Howard thinks Adam Lambert will be better to market products.  He has an edge for selling that is memorable.  He’s got the right look to sell sunglasses, spirits and fashions.

Nick Bishop, CEO of ad agency DDB West, states:

“If a marketer jumps on Adam for the right product and right audience, he will be more successful. Adam has a point of view.  He has the ability to deliver a message that’s more credible because he really strikes a chord.”

Marketing for Nissan’s Cube has begun with a decisively social media spin. The car incorporates Cube-themed iPhone apps, games, videos and ringtones. Marketers for the vehicle have utilized social media to spur excitement about the box like design which they hope will excite young adults by its very unconventional presence. But is the Cube just a square shaped car made to seem “hip”?

More often than not, if something is marketed as “hip” its not–much like people giving themselves nicknames.

Wired reports that Nissan is hoping that the mobile site will convince potential buyers that the slab-sided subcompact is just as essential to the mobile lifestyle as text messages, Twitter and Facebook. “We envision owners using their Cubes as one of their essential mobile devices, connecting with friends, sharing music and sharing fun,” Nissan marketing exec Christian Meunier said in a statement.

It seems that marketers are on shaky ground here, whereas by promoting this car as hip they may run into a backlash by the ones that they so desperately need to purchase the car.

What are your thoughts?

Entertainers have been quick to jump at the new micro blogging medium of Twitter; however, few have utilized the service as a worthwhile marketing tool for their work. Enter, Eminem–the controversial rapper whose five year absence from the music world has not gone unnoticed as the world of rap and hip-hop has changed with the influx of new talent. So to build even more excitement for his upcoming release, Eminem and the marketing teams have built an alter-ego Twitter personality to get fans and new fans excited about the Grammy and Oscar winning rappers return to centerstage.

AdAge reports that for Eminem’s new album, “The Relapse,” the marketing team at Aftermath/Interscope Records has mounted an audacious campaign that playfully smears the lines between the rapper’s troubled past and the nightmarish, fictionalized world of his latest work. By using Twitter to dispense short, often disturbing thoughts and links to multimedia components revolving around a mental institution, they’ve helped make the album the most highly anticipated hip-hop release of the year — and set it up for a sequel in the second half of 2009.

How Eminem’s Marketing Team is Using Twitter to Build Buzz

Medill Reports recently took an interesting look at the current efforts to market to the teens and twenty-somethings of today and how to best reach them when marketing. The article focuses on the current struggle weighing on companies of both the economic turndown and not knowing how to properly target this new tech savvy generation.

The article puts and emphasis on successful word of mouth marketing.  If companies give the generations the right content, the teens and twenty-somethings will then go out and market to eachother.  This form of Word-of-Mouth marketing will work best because the information takes on the appearence personal information instead of a marketing effort.

Read the full article here.

According to Will Akerlof, The hype about marketing on Twitter will sound as silly as buying islands in Second Life or crowing about your company’s MySpace friends. Most of us will deny that we ever took it seriously.

Akerlof states that the reasons why Twitter won’t change marketing are:

TWITTER’S HYPE EXCEEDS ITS GROWTH

TWITTER IS NOT PARTICULARLY YOUNG OR HIP

BUT WHAT ABOUT ZAPPOS?

PONZI SCHEME

ONANISTIC MARKETING

To read his article in its entirety, please click here.

Do you agree with him? Are you currently using Twitter in your marketing campaigns?

In the LA Times on Tuesday, Patrick Goldstein looked at the hype the media injects onto the movie industry and how movie studios are handling it.  One of the challenges is to keep the expectations of the media inline with what the studios are predicting when it comes to opening numbers at the box office.

They used last week’s release of Star Trek as an example.  Studio marketers have the job of downplaying the movie, so when the box office numbers return, there isn’t an outcry from the media that it was a failure.

Goldstein’s example follows:

As John explains: “… I was told by Paramount, that even if ‘Star Trek’ grossed $60 million — a perfectly good outcome for the studio, the way it saw it — the weekend grosses would be considered a disappointment, because I had set the bar too high.”

And Paramount’s efforts to tamp down expectations worked. Most box-office predictors had the movie opening to a $65-70 million number, so when it actually ended up grossing $75.2 million, the stories were all positive, with influential publications like the Wall Street Journal writing that the film “beat industry predictions.” Ah, another successful example of media management.

Do you have difficulties weighing outsiders expectations with your internal expectations?

Rick Braddock is the Chairman and CEO of FreshDirect. Here are a few excerpts from an essay appearing in the Wall Street Journal,  adapted from a lecture he gave at Pace University on May 8, 2009.

At FreshDirect, our core mission is to change our customers’ lives by giving them a superior on-line shopping experience. Our ’secret sauce’ is our customer database, and the company’s growing ability to use it to enhance our customers’ experience. For as long as people have shopped with FreshDirect (which has been operating more than five years in the New York metro areas and is achieving real growth even today), the company knows the details of each time a customer has shopped on the site, every unit bought during those visits, and all service interactions. The company also knows exactly who its customers are when they enter the online store for a new shopping visit — a loyal customer, a new customer, or a lapsed customer who has been away for awhile and needs to be welcomed back.

When you know your customer so well, you have the opportunity to change your whole managerial approach and really make the customer the king in your plans. This leads to what I call managing with intense customer focus.

At FreshDirect, the core of this intensity starts with daily focus. Each day our senior team starts with a formatted review of our immediate business — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Each manager uses customer-focused metrics to explain what is going right or wrong versus expectation and what we are doing about it. Shortfalls are addressed and successes are celebrated.

We bring additional customer focus by running about 140 customer surveys a year. We survey weekly, checking key metrics and items of topical importance like the economy or competition, and monthly on deeper topics such as product and service. We also analyze customers’ verbatim survey responses to allow us to truly understand where customers have problems we can solve. For most businesses, this type of information is on the periphery of their operations. For us, it is at the center. With technology advances and proven analytical methods, there is no good reason not to use these techniques to get closer to the customer.

What techniques does your company currently use when marketing online? Would you agree with Mr. Braddock’s theory that the closer you are to a customer, the more success your business will have?

Read his entire article here.

Kevin Ferguson writes in The New York Times, for eight years, Procter & Gamble has tried everything to market its PUR disinfectant powder — a quick way to make filthy water usable and a potential boon for poor nations where unsanitary water causes thousands of deaths each year.

But sales of the water purifier are up–but how?

Ferguson goes on to report, Proctor & Gamble now uses social marketing techniques — similar to those used to promote condom use — that combine education and subsidized product pricing to encourage behavior change and product use.

“We’ve learned to target our approach to people that need it the most — people with really dirty water, people with HIV/AIDS, moms with newborns at health clinics, and malnourished children,” said Dr. Greg Allgood, a toxicologist who directs P&G’s non-profit Children’s Safe Drinking Water program.

How else can social media help market tough to sell products?

For the entire article, please click here.

At Mashable, Adam Ostrow looked at a new report out that suggests companies are increasing their investments in social media. Of the companies polled, 24% of companies plan to increase funding to online marketing while 46% plan to keep it the same.

How are companies spending these marketing dollars? When they’re reducing their budgets, 56% of companies are cutting spending on SEO compared to only 24% cutting their spending on their social media budget.  Of the 20 retailers who thought they were performing well,  12 plan to increase their spending on social media.

What do you think of this study?  Are you increasing the budget for social media at your company?  What effects have you seen?