Horrifying Sales

It’s been said that nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul of candy and treats on Halloween night. Unless, of course, it’s $5 billion in Halloween sales.

Fueled by warmer weather and earlier availability of Halloween products in stores, 75% of consumers polled by Brand Keys reported that they’ll celebrate Halloween, with the average consumer planning to spend $75.00 (versus $60.00 spent in 2006).

For more on the consumer-side of this up-and-coming holiday, we invite you to read Halloween Becomes a Living Nightmare for Thrillseekers from Reuter’s Karen Bretell.

With retailers around the country reporting sales increases of +20% it sounds more like a dream than a nightmare!

Happy Halloween!

Jag Talar Bara Litet Svenska

That means “I only speak a little Swedish,” but you don’t have to speak a lot of the language to recognize a superb native landscape for engaging brand development.

We’re here for a couple of days presenting “Turning Targets into Customers” at the 2007 Mediaforum. Professor Richard Florida of George Mason University ranked Sweden #1 as having the best creativity in Europe for business, brands and marketing, so it’s not surprising to find them eager to learn and adapt the latest engagement techniques to the Swedish brand-scape.

In a country that created brands like Ericsson, Absolut, Volvo, Ikea, H&M, and ABBA, there’s a real sense of intellectual curiosity and an acknowledgment that brands must keep up with customer values (and ways to predict and measure those values) if they want to stay vibrant, engaging, and profitable.

There’s an old Swedish proverb that goes “what breaks in a moment may take years to mend.” Wise words for brands these days in any language!

Pack Up Your Rabbit Ears and 8-Tracks

According to a congressional mandate TV broadcasters must shift from analog to digital transmission by February 2009. That means consumers who watch TV using antennas or analog cable will have to upgrade to TVs that can receive digital signals.

How imminent is this switch for the over 60 million household's still using antennas? Well, Best Buy, the nation's biggest consumer electronics retailer, jump-started the conversion by pulling all analog TVs from its store shelves.

Manufacturers of HDTV's are poised to be the big winners in the conversion to digital, with incidence of HD usage estimated to be upwards of 80 percent of U.S. households by 2010. So we thought it was worth a look at the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index ratings for HDTV's. Rankings – by format – just to see which brand more up-to-date consumers are engaging with. Results were as follows:

HDTV (CRT)

1. Samsung
2. Sony
3. Sharp
4. Panasonic/Toshiba (tie)
5. JVC/Pioneer/RCA (tie)
6. Hitachi

HDTV (LCD)

1. Sony
2. Panasonic
3. Samsung/Toshiba (tie)
4. RCA
5. JVC/Sharp (tie)
6. Hitachi

HDTV (Plasma)

1. Panasonic
2. Toshiba
3. Pioneer/Sony (tie)
4. Dell/Samsung/Vizio (tie)
5. Hitachi/Philips (tie)
6. LG

But digital or analog, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language - and that's just deciding who gets to hold the remote control!

Bond Victoriously

Being part of a community isn’t like working a nine to five gig. It’s something that you may not think about 24/7, or even necessarily articulate it, but you know it’s there and it’s part of you. That’s why brands that are able to create a sense of community – an emotional bond – generally have more engaged and loyal customers.

We noted this a number of years ago about eBay. The brand eschewed becoming a virtual electronic cash register and opted to become a tangible community where people could bond with the brand and with others.

Does that work? Well eBay reported sales and profits that exceeded analysts’ estimates, with 3Q ’07 sales of 1.89 billion dollars!

So if the difference between just being out there and actually meaning something to the customer eludes you, maybe it will help to think of it as “bonding for dollars.”

Blog Action Day

Normally we post our blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we've made an exception with this one because today is Blog Action Day.

Brand Keys is joining nearly 15,000 bloggers around the web, uniting to put a single issue out in front of as many people as possible. In its inaugural year we're addressing the issue of the environment.

The environment is one of those topics that tends to be an "easy answer." Everybody thinks it's good. It's a good idea to have a safe environment. Everybody is in favor of a clean environment. But in a world of increased levels of consumer choice and control comes a higher level of responsibility -- for consumers and brands.

Today free enterprise forces brands who wish to prosper to meet the needs and expectations of the consumer. Sometimes those values deal with issues like "price" or "service," but one of the values that is making a greater and greater percent-contribution to consumer engagement and loyalty is the care brands exhibit toward the environment.

If you haven't already noticed, it's already become a differentiator for hotels, and electronics, light bulbs, and paper towels. Even gasoline brands have taken on the mantle of caretakers of the environment!

Brand Keys will continue to monitor and report how the issue of the environment makes itself felt in the customer loyalty arena. In the meantime if you are interested in discovering which products and services are providing some of the more difficult answers to really protecting and improving the environment, check out www.wecanlivegreen.com.

When Marshall McLuhan noted, "There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew," he was talking about brands too!

2007 LOYALTY LEADERS LIST

In case you missed Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys’ Founder and President, on FOX News this morning -- discussing some of the winners and losers on this year’s Loyalty Leaders List

-- here are two other means of checking on the brands you’re loyal to.

You can read Kenneth Hein’s “Loyalty Suffers When Consumers Pinch Pennies” in this week’s Adweek, or you can view the entire list of 361 brands (and where they ranked this year and last year) here.

No matter where your brands fell, it’s always worth remembering that an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

Be Prepared!

That's the motto of the Boy Scouts.

"Be prepared for what?" someone once asked Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. "Why, for any old thing." said Baden-Powell.

Except I’m guessing that nobody at the Boy Scouts of America was prepared to have to issue a recall of more than a million badges that the scouts wear on their uniforms because of a lead paint danger.

The plastic badges were made – where else? – in China and are blue and yellow and carry the words “Progress Toward Ranks.” About 1.5 million of the tainted badges are in circulation with no illnesses reported so far.

The call was the latest in a series involving children’s toys and other products made in China, but if the trend continues, maybe the Boy Scouts should consider adding a merit badge for Product Safety Regulation.

A Sponsorship Education

In a series of previous blogs having to do with visiting colleges with my son, I noted that colleges have been adopting more (and more) modern marketing and branding tactics. So here’s another for you:

In an effort to raise $20 million dollars for a building currently under construction, Barnard College is currently running an on-line ad that seeks a corporate sponsor to purchase the naming rights. Oh, and to cover the cost of the building.

Cameran Mason, the Vice President for Institutional Advancement noted, “it’s not typical to raise multi million dollar gifts by posting them on the Internet, but I think that it would be a brilliant thing to do if a company wanted to demonstrate its commitment to women and higher education. In an age when large corporations are committed to putting their names wherever they possibly can, this offer is apparently open to any corporation looking to make their brand synonymous with a prominent, 5-story erection on the college’s 4-acre campus.

How about “Victoria’s Secret Student Union”? Or “Maxim” or Playboy Playmates Hall”? Think I’m kidding? Universities have already named stadiums after brands like Papa John’s, Rubbermaid, and Taco Bell, so it’s not as if it hasn’t been done before.

One Barnard professor said that she didn’t “take to having corporate sponsors as the ideals that the students look up to,” but college and university fund-raisers say that all options should be on the table when it comes to getting the big bucks.

Sound familiar?

Unreliable Luxury

Socrates wisely noted, "If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it." So based on some signs of slowdown in the luxury retail sector, it seems as if some luxury brands aren't going to be commending consumers this holiday season.

Early reports indicate that orders for luxury brands "in whole or in part" are being put on hold by retailers who are buying more conservatively and are nervous about the economy and the upcoming holiday shopping season.

Luxury goods have always been thought to be immune to the vagaries of the economy and credit crunches. But given the fact that a number of luxury goods manufacturers have trimmed sales and profit forecasts, now is the time brands should be able to rely on customer loyalty to see them through a rockier economy.

It's easy to count on consumer confidence to see your luxury brand through when economic times are good. And while you can't always count on Wall Street or the Prime Rate, you can always count on the loyalty bond between your brand and the consumer.

Because by its very definition, luxury isn't a necessity. Loyalty, on the other hand, is.