As ecommerce jumps years ahead thanks to the shove out of the airplane we call COVID-19, specialty retail looks for the emergency chute. To quote contributing author and retail expert Greg Petro, “retail is not dead, it is evolving.” Evolving indeed.

In this second installment of a two-part blog series on pet food nutrition, TBE explores the multi-channel nature of pet owners who are researching their pets’ food.

Ecommerce has changed the packaging paradigm. Traditional packaging is designed for shelf impression, logically. When stocked directly next to similar products competing for the same consumers, well-designed packages will emphasize the benefits that differentiate them from competition.

Have you ever watched a vintage 1950s television commercial from a well-known brand? Outside of the obvious technological limitations, the way the marketing message was conveyed probably feels simple or even patronizing. Part of the reason it feels this way is that our collective standards for evocative and powerful marketing messages have evolved significantly in the past sixty years. 

We believe that the creative brief, like most things in marketing, is a living, responsive document that changes with time. This means that in order to develop a creative brief, we must continually challenge our own thinking to deliver more relevant strategies to account for the increased complexity of the marketing mix.

Since our earlier blog post about the telecom industry, Trone Brand Energy has taken another look at our Spring 2017 national survey of 980 home internet subscribers to uncover additional insights and ways for smaller, regional internet providers to more efficiently differentiate their telecom marketing strategy efforts from those of larger, national telecom companies. 

Experiences with any brand touchpoint (including digital products) can either reinforce user perceptions of the brand or break them down. It's vital to a brand’s reputation that users have not only positive experiences with a company’s digital products, but experiences that reinforce the brand. Brand experience is user experience. 

Brand accountability. Company transparency. Ethical business practices. Social awareness. As companies continue to hone which messages resonate with millennial consumers, or more importantly, which ones backfire, these trends are no longer what makes companies stand out. They’re baseline requirements.

A user’s experience with a website or app is made up of a variety of elements and moments in time. Every detail--from load time to aesthetics--has an impact. Luckily, Semantic Studios has created a big picture model of the components that influence user experience, also known as the UX Honeycomb. These seven components are: usefulness, desirability, accessibility, credibility, findability, usability and value. Many smaller elements fit into these broad categories. For example, aesthetics, brand and pricing strategies can all be a part of the user’s perceived desirability of an offering. The value of this model is that it can help give us a broad view of the positive characteristics of user experience. 

Account planners at all levels should be familiar with the notion that brand planning is often an unexpected journey. For starters, you work within the scoped marketing budget to extract the best possible set of insights from primary research and existing data to get to a strategically-relevant brand story. Often, you are working within tight project deadlines preventing additional research. Getting to the heart of a brand story is rarely simple and is almost always an emotional process.