Digital Loyalty Data for CPG

Lumping CPG companies together, across different categories, can blur a lot of what makes each category unique. The difference between Baby Care and Ready-to-Eat cereal is staggering-- when you're deep into it, but from the surface, these are all categories that are getting tossed in the same baskets at the same retailers by roughly the same customers.

So how do you leverage Data and Customer Experience to drive loyalty?

The Illogical nature of a gift card

You can't think of what to buy.  You know you want to spend $50.  You buy a gift card to a store you know they like.  Perfect right?  Nope.

If you have to spend that money, either buy an actual gift with a gift receipt (like a gift card, except bigger) or give cash.  Why?  Well, I've explained it a few times here, and here, but the gist of it is this:  You're admitting failure.  You're saying "I can't think of something meaningful, but I will have the balls to tell you where to spend my money".   That's not a thoughtful gift, that's formula.  They do, so I must do.

What about this:  Donate the $50 to a charity in their name?  Send/Give them a nice card with all the things that $50 is going to do or the number of people it's going to feed over Christmas. That's sweet and thoughtful.

Also-- if you are going to give someone cash, why do the bills have to be new and crisp and right from the bank?  The person you give them to is going to A) Spend them, at which point, it won't matter if they're creased or dirty or B) Deposit them back into the bank, which of course will take the dirtiest of money anyway...  

One last thing--- Never get those Visa Vanilla Gift Cards.  They have all the drawbacks of a regular gift card with the added benefit of an activation fee...  GIVE CASH!

Carbon Neutral Beef

It was an interesting idea.  Take the cost of off-setting carbon emissions of a major GHG contributor (namely beef for all purposes) and build it into the product's supply-chain, spread over multiple levels, to create a new category of product.

People seem to want to pay more for 'Organic' and other feel good labels.  Why not for Climate Change. 

Here's how I sold it:

Our goal is to not to simply burden production with the cost of offsetting, but like many other industries, efficiently pass that cost to the consumers who choose to buy and enjoy beef and related products through management and effective consumer and industry publications. By doing so as an aggregate entity, our industry can benefit from scale, and more efficiently convert the mindset of the average consumer to a new, responsible way of thinking.


In almost every scientific study on the topic of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock (specifically ruminent animals) are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

How ICANN and Registrars extort brands

If you haven't heard of the latest changes in the Top Level Domain world, it's time to start reading up.  Recently, the .xxx TLD went live, but as we've started to learn, it's the registrars and squatters making the money, in a system where companies are essentially being forced to defensively register domains to avoid trademark infringement later down the road.

Here's my problem: Trademarks are a known commodity.

ICANN, in all it's wisdom of allowing this new land-rush of domain names, could have easily created a system whereby existing trademarks were exempt from the process, and trademark owners could, if they wanted to, register a .xxx domain.  I equate this to the opt-in of most email programs.

Instead, legitimate trademark owners must either pro-actively register the .xxx domains as a defensive move (at $99 a year) or risk them being registered illegally and then trying to wrestle control back using the UDRP process + lawyers.

Why is this even possible?

Why is it that Microsoft can't sue GoDaddy for even allowing some nitwit to register microsoft.xxx.  GoDaddy knows that only the real Microsoft should ever be the one to register that trademarked name.  It's a trademark.  That's the point.  There's a big list over at the USPTO of all the trademarked terms, and ICANN and the registrars could just load in that list and wait for a company to dispute NOT being able to register a trademarked .xxx instead of the other way around.

On January 12th, 2012, generic term TLDs will become available...  This is the next chapter in this nightmare. Brands (this time for even bigger money) can start to register generic terms, as the last little bit at the end of a URL...  This means you could one day go to http://diet.coke and actually get somewhere.

Reminds me of something I read a while back:  The hardest challenge our grandchildren will face? Finding a username (or in this case a .com) that hasn't already been taken.

Identifying Twitter Spam

Twitter is a pretty neat invention. Like most great ideas though, as soon as there are lots of people in one place, some lazy marketer decides that spam will work and starts the inevitable struggle between good and evil. Like viruses and anti-virus software, or cops and robbers, everything in the spam world continues to improve. Just like the Nigerian 419, the object is still the same--- hit as many people as possible, try to fly under the radar, and try to look legit.

So how does one look legit on Twitter? Nowadays, if you have a tweet history of more than 15 tweets, you've changed your profile picture to something other than the default, and you have a girls name instead of a random character string--- you're doing better than most. ---But that's what some actual users look like, so how does the average person distinguish?

Content.

The following are screenshots of some wonderful people who have started following me in the last little while. I'm sure they're great people, except--- wait a minute?!-- they only talk about one topic and always have a link.

Most normal people (like my sister) when they started using twitter they asked open ended questions, they fumbled with over-sharing about breakfast--- they didn't immediately start recommending great articles (links) about tooth whitening, mortgages, insurance, credit cards, etc...

Content is the easiest way to identify a spammer from the average user. Have a look at these and you'll see what I mean:

The 4QR Project

A couple years ago I had the idea that QR codes could be slightly more useful if you could change the destination after the code was already printed all over everything.  I set out to come up with a way to do that.

The first thing I learned about QR codes was that since they are simply data, the shorter the string being encoded, the less data, the smaller the code needed to be.  Meaning, in the same amount of physical space, the squares in the code are bigger, thus easier/faster to read for a camera phone.  When I see giant codes, I know that they've encoded the full text of what they want the reader to see in the code itself.  This is poor on a number of fronts, as it's more data that can be corrupted by a smudge or tear (even with error correction) and it's also harder to read for a phone, since alignment and resolution matter. The other thing is the content itself-- why put text, when you can put a URL and put all the text you want on the page you send the user to?