Suppose you’re a local craft brewery, without the marketing resources of a Coors, Miller or Sam Adams. You don’t have money in the budget for national TV commercials—or any TV spots for that matter. So how do you get the word out about your award-winning brews?

If you’re Delaware-based Dogfish Head, you make the most of your marketing dollars—by leveraging the Web and social media to help spread the word and turn casual customers into loyal fans.

Now if you’ve ever had a bottle of any type of Dogfish Head, you’ll know that this is one company that knows what they’re doing when it comes to making beer. Dogfish Head brews are consistently tasty, distinctive and often complex in flavor, with notes that are more akin to a fine wine than a beer.

So it probably comes as no surprise that these passionate brew masters have brought the same level of passion and flair to their brand marketing efforts. A few highlights that set the brand apart:

• A robust Web experience—at the Dogfish site, you can read about the latest Dogfish Head releases as well as happenings at the brewery and company restaurant. What’s important here is the sheer depth of the content. Each brew—and there are lots of them—has it own page, with the story behind the beer, tasting notes and even food pairing recommendations.
• An active presence on Facebook and Twitter—the key to success on both of these social sites is to keep the material fresh and interact with those who reach out to you. Dogfish Head does both and has over 55,000 Facebook followers and 18,000-plus on Twitter, impressive for a microbrew.
• Its own video-rich YouTube channel—most of the videos feature founder Sam Calagione with a behind the scenes look at the brewing ingredients and process. Sam is personable, has a good camera presence and his commitment to his craft comes through loud and clear.
• A community of fans—what better way to develop brand advocates than to develop a place where they can congregate and interact. At the site’s community forum, members can pontificate on issues ranging from music to home brewing to, of course, Dogfish Head’s latest releases.

On a personal note: my favorite Dogfish Head beers are the delicious 60-minute IPA, or when I’m in the mood for a more intense “sipping” beer, the raisin-infused Raison D’ Etre.

Cheers!

Tom Rapsas is a seasoned Creative Director and has helped many brands deliver their message effectively to consumers. Loyalty Truth appreciates this tasty post on the eve of the July 4th weekend. You can follow Tom’s creative insights on Twitter via @TomRapsas

Black Cats, Black Magic, and Black Friday … sounds like a threesome to avoid.

But untold millions will be lining up the day after Thanksgiving in the wee hours of the morning with steely-eyed focus and adrenaline pumping – all with the almighty bargain in mind.

Maybe it’s a gender thing, but while you might find me up at 5am to go fishing, you’ll never find me caffeined-up and ready to shop at that time of day. Maybe Black Friday is defined less by gender and more by the American way. We’re competitive and like to win. And, after a year of economic suffering like we’ve had in this country, you can’t blame consumers for wanting to taste even a small victory.

But as any coach worth his salt will tell you, winning comes at a price. Unfortunately, the price of playing the Black Friday game reached an all time high in 2008 when a Walmart worker was trampled to death by a mob of shoppers at a store in Long Island. The repercussions have been strong and retailers are taking steps to calm the crowds and bring order to stores as the holiday season kicks off this coming Friday.

Walmart settled the lawsuits that followed with a nearly $2 Million payout to victims of the incident. Concern is so high that even the National Retail Federation (NRF) has released crowd management guidelines for its members hoping to prevent future disasters.

Consumers seeking ways to get ahead of the game have options. They can check out Top 10 Black Friday websites to find bargains in advance, or they can just sit at home after turkey dinner on Thursday and watch “what not to do” videos on YouTube ranging from Stampedes at Walmart to Scuffles at Target.

Outside of the fun that some people associate with the crazed energy of Black Friday, I have to wonder if retailers knew what they doing when they originally promoted the concept. Competing on price only leads to a “death spiral” of diminishing profit margins. And since there is usually only one acknowledged price leader in a discounting category (ahem, Walmart) the rest of the retailing pack might be much better off taking a higher road to open consumer wallets in their favor.

There have been some really good articles written about the violence of last year’s Black Friday, and academics such as  University of Delaware professor Sharron Lennon are now studying the human behaviors that lead to such incidents. There is also a groundswell of voices encouraging consumers to “Spend time together, not money”.

All of this makes me smile when people ask if Loyalty Marketing programs work. Yep, there are some lame versions of the concept out there, and even the good ones could make use of their data to be more relevant to their customers. But as a business owner, it should be attractive to preserve margins, improve the shopping experience, and justify repeat business at your store without having to fake a “going out of business sale” once a month.  Data-driven Customer Strategies do just that.

I’ll bet there are some forward thinking people at the NRF and among larger retailers that could change the paradigm. Maybe the time has come to return a bit of elegance and class into daily shopping experiences, not to mention air travel. And, retailers had better consider the impact of promoting mass shopping frenzy on Millennial (Generation Y) consumers shopping online at home from their PC’s.

Could it be time for Black Friday to “Go Dark”?

Black Cats, Black Magic, and Black Friday … sounds like a threesome to avoid.

But untold millions will be lining up the day after Thanksgiving in the wee hours of the morning with steely-eyed focus and adrenaline pumping – all with the almighty bargain in mind.

Maybe it’s a gender thing, but while you might find me up at 5am to go fishing, you’ll never find me caffeined-up and ready to shop at that time of day. Maybe Black Friday is defined less by gender and more by the American way. We’re competitive and like to win. And, after a year of economic suffering like we’ve had in this country, you can’t blame consumers for wanting to taste even a small victory.

But as any coach worth his salt will tell you, winning comes at a price. Unfortunately, the price of playing the Black Friday game reached an all time high in 2008 when a Walmart worker was trampled to death by a mob of shoppers at a store in Long Island. The repercussions have been strong and retailers are taking steps to calm the crowds and bring order to stores as the holiday season kicks off this coming Friday.

Walmart settled the lawsuits that followed with a nearly $2 Million payout to victims of the incident. Concern is so high that even the National Retail Federation (NRF) has released crowd management guidelines for its members hoping to prevent future disasters.

Consumers seeking ways to get ahead of the game have options. They can check out Top 10 Black Friday websites to find bargains in advance, or they can just sit at home after turkey dinner on Thursday and watch “what not to do” videos on YouTube ranging from Stampedes at Walmart to Scuffles at Target.

Outside of the fun that some people associate with the crazed energy of Black Friday, I have to wonder if retailers knew what they doing when they originally promoted the concept. Competing on price only leads to a “death spiral” of diminishing profit margins. And since there is usually only one acknowledged price leader in a discounting category (ahem, Walmart) the rest of the retailing pack might be much better off taking a higher road to open consumer wallets in their favor.

There have been some really good articles written about the violence of last year’s Black Friday, and academics such as  University of Delaware professor Sharron Lennon are now studying the human behaviors that lead to such incidents. There is also a groundswell of voices encouraging consumers to “Spend time together, not money”.

All of this makes me smile when people ask if Loyalty Marketing programs work. Yep, there are some lame versions of the concept out there, and even the good ones could make use of their data to be more relevant to their customers. But as a business owner, it should be attractive to preserve margins, improve the shopping experience, and justify repeat business at your store without having to fake a “going out of business sale” once a month.  Data-driven Customer Strategies do just that.

I’ll bet there are some forward thinking people at the NRF and among larger retailers that could change the paradigm. Maybe the time has come to return a bit of elegance and class into daily shopping experiences, not to mention air travel. And, retailers had better consider the impact of promoting mass shopping frenzy on Millennial (Generation Y) consumers shopping online at home from their PC’s.

Could it be time for Black Friday to “Go Dark”?

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.

Being a player in our new digital age is akin to being the catcher in a knife throwing act at the county fair. It’s exciting, and cool that you can keep up the pace, but will the end game work out in your favor?

Both games are fast paced and just a little dangerous. The pace of introduction of new web based applications, communities, and services never seems to let up and the merit badge of those “in the know” is expressed by their ability to dissect the latest phenom, master it, and then declare it nearly passé as they go on all night vigil waiting to coin the next great thing. The danger in playing is not physical, so you can relax on that count. The risk is that while we are chasing the rabbit in this blistering race, we can easily lose sight of why we are running so hard.

The rapid progression of Web 2.0 offerings MySpace, Facebook, You Tube, and Twitter are example enough. According to Business Week, the most well known social network in 2005 was Friendster. With multiple generations of social networking in play, it’s safe to say things have changed.

Marc Andreessen, of Mosaic and Netscape fame, is behind Ning, a platform that allows people to make up their own mini-MySpace. Speculation abounds that instead of one of the established social networking platforms dominating an industry consolidation, there may be a big bang in our digital future with the resulting fragmentation translating into everyone having their own micro-mini network.

While I do hear people asking questions about how this will play out, I don’t hear them asking the important question – what tangible benefits do I get from social networking and how much time do I have for it? In short, we should be looking for the drivers of desirable behaviors, rather than “twittering” about which glob of mud thrown against the wall will still be worth our time in two years.

For the majority of the connected population that still finds sleep useful, decisions will be made of how best to allocate our digital mind space. Life online still has competition with TV, music, movies, meals, work, and families. While it’s fun to have a profile on LinkedIn and pages on MySpace and Facebook, we will eventually make choices as to where we get the most benefit from time invested and pare down the number of engagements we maintain online.

Don’t misinterpret my take here. Social networking is an awesome concept and has benefits for its participants. I just find it interesting that the web started off with bulletin boards and forums and now envision that we could return full circle to an environment where people match up with others on increasingly granular subject matter. Where the commercial benefit resides is not yet clear, but so far it looks like the participants stand to receive greater benefit as they can short-cut rolodex networks and bring efficiency to their business and personal lives.

It may be that the next great thing will be found in the madness itself.

Just like Executive Book Summaries, which offers summaries of business books to save time and money for their subscribers, maybe a clearinghouse application that aggregates and filters multiple networked memberships will constitute the most hip home page that you can add to your browser.

Or, maybe it’s already out there and I just haven’t had the time to find it! >>> Bill Hanifin