Online retailers have a uniquely difficult challenge in building relationships and creating customer loyalty. Without a store-front to rely upon, most online retailers lead with product selection and price to attract first time buyers.

This leaves many to rely on ad words and keyword search as their only acquisition funnel. Generating repeat business, building trusted relationships, and retaining valuable customers? Those three goals can become esoteric concepts to the marketing department as they  continually focus resources on acquisition for fear of muffling the principal sales driver that works.

The first wave of internet business placed the hurdle for marketing very low. Building traffic and gathering eyeballs was all that mattered and it seemed that selling this portfolio of traffic was more the goal than creating a business model on fundamental business principles.

Web 2.0 is different. The online stores that are working operate like a traditional retailer in the sense that they have to provide product choice, quality, and good service as a minimum to succeed. The business models adopted are generally sound and the achilles heel for those single channel, pure online, retailers remains price. Price as in LOW price.

Hammer Nutrition is one pure online retailer that caught my eye. The company caters to a well defined passionate customer group, endurance athletes. But they are not allowed the privilege to compete in a vacuum as many of their supplement and fueling products (electrolyte drinks, energy bars, joint formulas) are sold by larger, heavily branded, and more widely marketed companies from GNC to Power Bar (owned by Nestle) and Clif Bar (distributed through major grocery chains, Costco, and specialty shops).

How does Hammer Nutrition compete? It stays true to the values of its founder, Brian Frank. Brian grew up in California in a progressively-minded household and caught the action sport bug early on, riding bikes, skateboards, swimming, and racing BMX and motocross bikes to the point where he won Montana State Motocross Championships in the late 90’s. Frustrated by the sparsity of quality, naturally formulated products to meet the needs of endurance athletes, he founded Hammer Nutrition during the 80’s.

His mantra from those days has survived the passage of time:  Deliver naturally formulated quality products and cement customers for life with product knowledge and trust.

A little guerrilla marketing was at the core of the Hammer strategy: provide “Race Bags” at events around the country as a cost effective way to meet the core audience for Hammer products at their moment of highest interest. If you’ve participated in any organized athletic event from a local 5K walk to an Ironman, one of the “bennies” received for your entry fee is the race day bag. The bag itself carries branding on the outside and is kind of like the athlete’s version of an Easter basket – lots of product samples and surprises inside. When I spoke with Brian a few months ago, he told me that the program now distributes over 750,000 bags across 2,200 events in North America. That’s some powerful grass roots marketing – Word of Mouth advertising at its best before the term was coined.

The impressive part of the marketing strategy at Hammer Nutrition is its constant flow of educational and product information materials, part of an overall communication stream designed to build engagement and increase customer retention. A first order will usually trigger sending of the “Little Red Book” (product descriptions and usage instructions) and a “Welcome to the Family” letter signed by Brian Frank or one of his guru partners Steve Born or Dr. William Misner.

Triggered by an array of qualifying metrics, new customers receive monthly product-focused brochures, quarterly Endurance News magazines with articles highlighting athletes of all types who have competed successfully using Hammer products, and reminder post cards with previous orders outlined to facilitate easy reorder. Invitation to join the Autoship program is packed with benefits and discounts and the Referral program has a dual benefit feature where both existing and new customer earn a discount.

An open call to any athlete to use Hammer products is made via the HammerBuck$ program which challenges customers to “Turn race day into Payday”. Over $36,000 in cash and credit was awarded to 36 winners during 2009. The program is simple, race in Hammer gear, place highly in your race, and win some cash or credits for future purchase. Talk about crowdsourcing, just think about motivating gobs of your best customers who fit your ideal profile to wear your logo on race day and give it their all to stand on the podium at the end of the day!

Granted that I may have lost some of you who hate to run, or for whom the idea of an open water swim, adventure race or ultra-marathon is greeted with a wry smile while muttering “they’re nuts!”

Look past the issue of endurance sports and you will see a sophisticated, if not home grown, communication stream that delivers on the company’s brand promise while driving business goals. There are lots of good lessons for any pure online retailer to take away from a visit to the Hammer Nutrition web site.

In case you’ve been going to sleep early these days and you’ve been missing all the buzz on both Facebook and Twitter about what’s going on in the late night TV world,  NBC “Promoted” Conan O’Brien to the big chair of late night, The Tonight Show.  But for some reason, they wanted to keep Jay Leno in the NBC fold and put him in a prime time 10 PM slot before the local news.  The reasoning for this is very simple.  Producing one show with one star is 100 times cheaper than producing five quality prime-time shows with multiple casts, crews, directors and teamsters for five 10 PM prime time slots.

After a very short run, a simple domino effect is in play.  Leno “failed” in the 10PM time slot which led to lower ratings for the local news and lower ratings for The Tonight Show. NBC Failed to provide good shows before the local news. And now, it seems that rather than accept responsibility, the NBC execs have thrown the blame on Conan.

Was this Conan’s fault?  Maybe a little.  He didn’t ask about the prime-time line up and his lawyers didn’t go through his contract with a fine tooth comb.  Conan has a pretty iron clad contract BUT they missed the detail of what time the new Tonight Show was supposed to start.

“I believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.”  - Conan O’Brien

“I left NBC prime-time the same way I found it: a complete disaster.” – Jay Leno

Considering what happened when Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show and the fallout between Letterman and Leno and now with the flip flop between Leno and Conan and back to Leno again, NBC is losing trust within the industry and Loyalty with its viewers.  And if NBC screws over Conan after what they did to Letterman the last go around, who’s going to want replace Leno AGAIN?  If Leno failed in a prime time slot why is NBC giving him a 30 min show at 11:35 going to help the Tonight Show or NBC?  What’s the point?  Carson didn’t do anything to compete directly with the Tonight Show when he left.  Why let Leno compete at all?

I'm with Coco

This can either go down as the biggest disaster in TV history; bigger than when NBC passed Letterman over for the Tonight Show gig, bigger than when NBC Let Star Trek the original series die in 60s, or it’s a fiendishly brilliant viral marketing plan to boost NBC’s lagging ratings (wishful thinking on my part, but we can hope right?).

Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty?  Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?  There’s no apparent popular effort to bring Leno back to the Tonight Show – but there is a whole lot of buzz on the Social Media web sites in support of Conan.  Simply put, NBC would be stupid to let Conan go. He would most likely end up on either Fox, ABC or, even worse CBS, where he could team up with Letterman and later on replace him on his show.  Everyone in Late Night is getting a leg up except for Leno and NBC.  Needless to say, I’m with Coco.

Dean Bairaktaris – The Greatest Living American Dude: Evil Power Digger, SEO Consultant, Social Media Maverick, Web Developer and Elite Space Monkey in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Think Green.

In case you’ve been going to sleep early these days and you’ve been missing all the buzz on both Facebook and Twitter about what’s going on in the late night TV world,  NBC “Promoted” Conan O’Brien to the big chair of late night, The Tonight Show.  But for some reason, they wanted to keep Jay Leno in the NBC fold and put him in a prime time 10 PM slot before the local news.  The reasoning for this is very simple.  Producing one show with one star is 100 times cheaper than producing five quality prime-time shows with multiple casts, crews, directors and teamsters for five 10 PM prime time slots.

After a very short run, a simple domino effect is in play.  Leno “failed” in the 10PM time slot which led to lower ratings for the local news and lower ratings for The Tonight Show. NBC Failed to provide good shows before the local news. And now, it seems that rather than accept responsibility, the NBC execs have thrown the blame on Conan.

Was this Conan’s fault?  Maybe a little.  He didn’t ask about the prime-time line up and his lawyers didn’t go through his contract with a fine tooth comb.  Conan has a pretty iron clad contract BUT they missed the detail of what time the new Tonight Show was supposed to start.

“I believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.”  - Conan O’Brien

“I left NBC prime-time the same way I found it: a complete disaster.” – Jay Leno

Considering what happened when Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show and the fallout between Letterman and Leno and now with the flip flop between Leno and Conan and back to Leno again, NBC is losing trust within the industry and Loyalty with its viewers.  And if NBC screws over Conan after what they did to Letterman the last go around, who’s going to want replace Leno AGAIN?  If Leno failed in a prime time slot why is NBC giving him a 30 min show at 11:35 going to help the Tonight Show or NBC?  What’s the point?  Carson didn’t do anything to compete directly with the Tonight Show when he left.  Why let Leno compete at all?

I'm with Coco

This can either go down as the biggest disaster in TV history; bigger than when NBC passed Letterman over for the Tonight Show gig, bigger than when NBC Let Star Trek the original series die in 60s, or it’s a fiendishly brilliant viral marketing plan to boost NBC’s lagging ratings (wishful thinking on my part, but we can hope right?).

Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty?  Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?  There’s no apparent popular effort to bring Leno back to the Tonight Show – but there is a whole lot of buzz on the Social Media web sites in support of Conan.  Simply put, NBC would be stupid to let Conan go. He would most likely end up on either Fox, ABC or, even worse CBS, where he could team up with Letterman and later on replace him on his show.  Everyone in Late Night is getting a leg up except for Leno and NBC.  Needless to say, I’m with Coco.

Dean Bairaktaris – The Greatest Living American Dude: Evil Power Digger, SEO Consultant, Social Media Maverick, Web Developer and Elite Space Monkey in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Think Green.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association held its “WOMM-U” event earlier this month in South Beach.  The conference report which follows was originally published at www.TheWiseMarketer.com on May 28, 2009 as filed by Bill Hanifin, North American Contributing Editor.

If you are interested in the latest news on Loyalty and Relationship marketing, I strongly encourage you to Register here for a free subscription to the Wise Marketer

Among weekly updates and special reports, the WiseMarketer also offers the Loyalty Guide III,  the most comprehensive resource covering the industry today.

Loyalty Moving from Marketing to Engagement

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s conference in Florida earlier this month provided some surprising insights, according to contributing editor Bill Hanifin of Hanifin Loyalty, who notes that the loyalty business is desperately re-engineering itself as programme sponsors look for innovations to freshen up their programmes.

Among the hottest topics concerning loyalty marketers are those of ‘engagement‘ and ‘word of mouth‘, with both having been quickly identified as effective paths to building more frequent and meaningful dialogues between sponsors and consumers.

Among the brands represented at the conference were big names such as Amway, Dell, Disney, Heinz, Kraft, Lenovo, McDonalds, NBC, PepsiCo, Proctor & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Unilever, and Walmart. The Web 2.0 names were also present, including Facebook, Google, MySpace, and Yelp.

Yelp’s Geoff Donaker kicked off the event with an overview of what he called a “platform for lifestyle blogging”. Over 21 million people had used the service to search for local businesses during the previous month, and the bulk of the consumer reviews posted broke down into 31% for restaurants and 23% for shopping. Donaker provided several examples of the power of the Yelp service, such as a carpet cleaning business in San Francisco which had invested in improving its customer service and generated such good reviews that the company was able to save US$100,000 per year in Yellow Pages adverts.

NBC also discussed its social media strategy, noting that community conversations, blog posts, and so-called “tweets” can not only build brand awareness and loyalty but also positively impact search engine results. Charles Edwards, CEO for Federated Media, also confirmed the importance of a strong search engine presence (particularly citing Google rankings): “It used to be that the homepage of your web site was your first digital impression, but now it’s the Google search result. Every marketer is a publisher now, and we don’t just compete with competitors but with any consumer that is also talking about us.”

Lenovo shared the story of how it tackled the challenge of making the most of its US$120 million Olympic sponsorship in 2008. The PC manufacturer chose to recruit 100 Olympic athletes, offering each a free technology solution and asking them to blog live from Beijing. Lenovo chose “long tail” athletes (i.e. those who weren’t in major sports, and who weren’t expected to draw general media attention). The campaign was a tremendous success and the athlete blogs quickly became the “insider’s view of the Olympics” during that highly competitive time.

Jeben Berg of YouTube also highlighted the power of video in marketing, noting that 15 minutes of video is uploaded every 60 seconds, all day every day. YouTube claims to be the largest site in the US (and the sixth-largest in the world), and boasts 81.6 million unique US-based visitors each month. Interestingly, the largest demographic in this massive set of visitors comes from the 35-49 age group.

WOMMA was able to get representatives of both MySpace and Facebook onto the same stage at the same time, and Heidi Browning (MySpace) and Chris Pan (Facebook) compared and contrasted the two social networks in detail. Browning exploded some myths about MySpace (particularly stressing that the site is not “just for teens”), and claiming that more than 70 million of its users are in the 18-34 age group in the US alone. Pan explained that successful Facebook marketing campaigns usually involve “building movements, not campaigns”, with a good recent example being the election campaign of Barack Obama.

Duncan Wardle of Disney discussed lessons learned using social media, and described a campaign that invited people to apply for their ‘dream Disney character job’. This word of mouth campaign quickly became viral and the responses were overwhelming. But Wardle was also practical, noting that “impressions don’t equal engagement” and suggesting that brands who don’t change from marketing to engaging risk soon becoming mere “nostalgia brands”.

The conclusion was that advertising and traditional ‘interruption marketing’ techniques are slowly but surely being replaced with collaboration, co-creation and dialogue with willing consumers.

This article is copyright 2009 TheWiseMarketer.com and is published here with permission.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association held its “WOMM-U” event last week in South Beach, and was attended by an impressive array of consumer brands including Dell, Disney, Heinz, Kraft, Lenovo, NBC, McDonalds, Pepsico, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, and Walmart. Add to these familiar names, several titans of Web 2.0 Facebook, Google, MySpace, Yelp and YouTube and you can imagine attendees got their money’s worth during the two day event.

I’ll have a full conference report submitted to The WiseMarketer very soon, but couldn’t wait to share a few highlights. WOMMA puts on a good show and to keep the conversation lively, they shared a live Twitter feed in the main conference salon.  Two days of Tweets are archived on their web page and, taken as a whole, they provide color commentary for the event.

I wanted to share my favorites which were selected for being insightful, forward-looking, or just humorous. Hope you enjoy them and please follow the folks who generated the original content to continue the conversation.

• It used to be that the homepage of your website was your first digital impression. Now it’s the Google search results. | @spikejones
• Federated Media: Amex has found Twitter best online vehicle for advertising their small biz website | @leslieforde
• Lenovo gave 100 Olympic athletes a free technology solution to blog live from Beijing…a social media plan with real teeth | @hyperdrivei
• “Trying to change an organization is like swimming in peanut butter.” – Chris Aarons |@CatchUpLady
• Facebook: focus on building movements, not campaigns | @tsiles
• 50% of US families have broadband – look for video explosion – this is likely how people will consume info – Duncan Wardle | @CentsibleSawyer
• Disney’s Ducan Wardle: Brands who don’t change from marketing to engaging will soon become nostalgia brands | @davekerpen
• 90% of moms watch online video in last 7 days vs only 1/3 of all moms are in the blogosphere. Integrated marketing w/ moms a must | @MomTalkRadio
• Duncan Wardle from Disney: It is NO LONGER about clicks and impressions. It’s about engagement , conversation and conversion. | @warrenss
• “Internet is not a library of information anymore it is a social area for people.” – Kathryn Collins.|@tanyachadha
• FTC Change “The communicator of the message must be transparent and honest.” Well that about says it all. | @jamietedford
• Wonders what a talk at WOMMA looks like. Based on my feed, it’s quiet with hundreds of people looking down, typing madly on mobile devices. | @justicar