COP3 Research: Agencies/Designers to Contact

When thinking about the designers that I need to contact to get the best views on my topic, one area that I wanted to look into is hand-rendered design. I plan to discuss how the digital age has changed the Graphic Design world, and designers that do not focus on working digitally are likely to have a strong opinion on this matter. On top of this, I would be very interested to visit the design studio of a person or agency that works in such a way.

1. Si Scott

Scott gave a talk in college last year that I was extremely excited about having followed his career for some time. It is some of his work that made me interested in pursuing graphic design, as before starting on this course all the design I did was hand-rendered.

COP3 Research: How Consumerist Habits Effect Design and Marketing

Consumer behaviour has a huge impact on both design and marketing as it can make obvious to marketers what it is that the public want to see. This is how design trends come about and then change so quickly. Having already looked at how digital marketing has altered design trends, it is the consumers reaction that determined the success of that trend, and how they will be continued.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/effect-consumer-behaviour-marketing-organization-17934.html

The Effect of Consumer Behaviour in Marketing of an Organization

by Rena Dietrich, Demand Media

Debit and credit cards provide information for marketing databases.

Consumer behaviors control the type of marketing strategy that organizations such as small businesses employ, so they conduct studies to determine which strategies are likely to prove most effective. Small businesses need to know the members of their target audience, what they want, where they are located and how they'll react to product promotions. They gather this information via surveys and studying data regarding the past behavior of consumers. Data is obtained from a variety of sources such as marketing databases, sales history and the Internet.

Sales Forecasts

Organizations study past consumer behaviors to determine future sales. Sales forecasts estimate the expected sales for a particular market during a specified time period. Sales forecasts cannot be higher than the market potential and usually fall short of expectations. Different methods exist for forecasting sales, most of which revolve around obtaining information directly from past buyers. Some examples of forecasting methods are quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative forecasts predict the sales of products based on past results and qualitative forecasts predict sales based on expert opinions in the field.

Research Surveys

Research surveys are conducted for the purpose of studying consumer behaviors. They help companies learn what consumers want, as well as how they respond to advertising. They also help pinpoint potential problems. Some examples of research surveys are new-product concept tests, product use tests and brand name recognition. Organizations conduct surveys in person, on the phone, through the mail and online. These surveys target specific population groups who share a similar set of characteristics.

Internet Research

Companies, including small businesses, use the Internet to conduct much of their research, monitoring the Web-based behavior of consumers. Based on their findings, organizations determine the right prices, attributes and sales promotions for their products. They also reveal the optimal places and market conditions in which to sell. The Internet is a cost-effective tool marketing research tool because it pinpoints target areas and is flexible enough to adapt to the changing demands of consumers.

Market Sensing

Market sensing processes can help small businesses develop a competitive advantage by giving them a deeper understanding of customers. Organizations use different resources to study consumer behavior, and the process of compiling that data into a marketing and management information database is called market sensing. The database provides the framework for integrating information and presenting it to management for decision-making purposes.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/effect-email-marketing-consumer-behaviour-1453.html

The Effect of Email Marketing on Consumer Behaviour

by Kristie Lorette, Demand Media

Emails can affect consumers behaviors.

Email is a common form of communication used for both personal and professional purposes. With businesses coming to understand how effective email marketing can be, email marketing is gaining in popularity. Email marketing tests and studies reveal that email marketing can affect consumer behavior, even convincing consumers to go to websites for more information or to make a purchase.

Cost

Email marketing is cheap; according to Responsys, a marketing company, email marketing costs businesses less than one cent per email sent to consumers. In comparison to cost, the rate of return a business sees from email marketing is high. The immediacy of email marketing can urge customers to buy within minutes of the consumer receiving and reviewing the email.

Interactivity

According to Forrester Research, email marketing makes up about 11 percent of interactive marketing. Since email marketing opens up the line of communication between a business and a consumer, it is a form of interactive or two-way communication. In essence, a business can garner a response from a consumer by sending an email introducing a new product or service, ask for customers' opinions in the form of a survey or send out a coupon for the consumer’s next purchase.

Positive Consumer Behavior

Email marketing is used by businesses to influence the buying decisions of consumers. Approximately 97 percent of businesses are using email marketing to try to convert email recipients into buyers. It must be working because, according to a Smith-Harmon survey, 76 percent of subscribers have made purchases from an email marketing message. Email marketing has not only led to an increase in sales online, but also influences purchases offline. Some offers can be printed and redeemed at the physical location of the store or restaurant. Responsys says that timing, relevance and personalization are email characteristics that can affect how the consumer reacts to the email marketing message.

Negative Consumer Behavior

It also seems that email marketing can bring out negative behavior in consumers. For companies that send unsolicited emails or too many emails, consumers can be impelled to hit the spam button. Some consumers define spam as email from a company that they don’t want to hear from even if they have previously done business with the company or are subscribed to receive information from that company. If the business sends too many emails, the consumer starts to get annoyed and, rather than unsubscribe, 55 percent of email users admit to hitting the spam button instead.

Conversion

Businesses have quickly learned that email marketing is a highly effective way to reach and convert target audiences into paying customers. Email marketing makes it easy for businesses to mark consumer behavior by tracking patterns that emerge when the emails are sent. For example, a business can track how the same email marketing message sent with two different subject lines performs by tracking how many consumers opened one email as compared to the other. Consumer behavior can also be tracked with click thru rates, or how many consumers visited the company website or social media page by clicking on a link in the email marketing message.

http://www.ehow.com/info_8310773_effects-consumer-behavior-marketing.html

Effects of Consumer Behavior on Marketing

Marketing is the business discipline that deals most directly with consumers. Marketers take cues from consumers before making any decision, whether on a product development issue, advertising strategy or pricing plan. Because marketing is inseparably tied to the marketplace, there are a range of different effects consumer behavior has on marketing. Understanding the link between consumer behavior and marketing strategies can boost your business effectiveness overall.

Sales

• Since salespeople can approach and communicate with consumers in a number of ways, individual companies craft sales strategies based on how target customers behave in reaction to different techniques. Some customers are completely turned off by hard-sell tactics, for example, while others are especially susceptible to them. Some customers prefer salespeople walk them through purchase decisions, while others prefer to be left alone until they're ready to buy.

Advertising

• Every detail of advertisements are put in place to appeal to the company's target customers in some way. Advertisers create messages based on proven reactions in their target audience to similar stimulae, to induce them to behave in a similar way. Certain consumer groups are shown to be influenced by celebrity endorsements, for example, while others are completely unaffected.

  Getting people to talk about advertisements is also a factor in advertising strategy. Advertisers carefully study their target audiences to determine exactly what kind of ads induce consumers to start spreading the word about certain products.

Promotions

• The area of price promotions is highly influenced by consumer psychology and behavior. Marketers plan promotional strategies based on statistical models that take a range of factors into account. Marketers consider the exact amount of price discounts, because consumers are proven to take advantage of larger discounts more frequently than smaller discounts. Marketers also consider the way in which discounts are to be redeemed, whether as store-wide price markdowns, mail-in rebates, coupons or other mechanisms, since consumers use different promotional methods in different ways and take advantage of certain methods more than others. Lastly, marketers consider the way in which they advertise promotions to consumers, who react differently to messages sent through various media.

  Mail-in rebates serve as an ideal example of consumer behavior's influence on promotions. The more valuable a mail-in rebate is, the more likely consumers are to mail it in. If a company offers a relatively small mail-in rebate, a significant portion of customers will not redeem it, even though the rebate persuaded them to buy. This brings in more total revenue than an in-store sale, during which all customers pay the reduced amount by default.

Product Development

• Product development no longer takes place in a vacuum. Marketers perform extensive research among their target markets to determine what kind of products and services are missing or underrepresented before beginning to develop product ideas. Marketers consider the way consumers use existing products as a way to spot unmet needs they can serve profitably.

COP3 Research: Combination of Social Media Marketing and Digital Marketing

The Powerful Combination of Social Media Marketing and Digital Marketing

Companies that are data driven and aim to cover a wider reach of audience are getting more inclined to apply digital marketing for business. Digital marketing is considered to be a sales force channel that is driving more profitable opportunities for business through the advanced technology of digital medium using emails, tablets, social networks and mobile technology. In the field of online marketing, social media and digital marketing are the powerful combination that can move your business towards profitability and brand popularity. By leveraging on these two powerful online marketing mediums you can enjoy the most convenient means of marketing your business in the internet with a promising result.

What is social media marketing and how does it drive your business?

The best advantage of using social media marketing is making even the smallest business at par with bigger companies in terms of its ability of reaching a wider audience. The use of social media networks can significantly boost the ability of businesses to communicate their business brand to the target consumers. Internet marketing transgresses geographical borders allowing businesses to have a better marketing coverage across the social media channels and through digital marketing platforms. Among the major marketing goals that you can develop in your marketing campaigns using the social media network include brand awareness, positive brand association and lead conversion, improved organic traffic, communicating business to target customers and interact with target audience within your market industry.

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The Powerful Combination of Social Media Marketing and Digital Marketing

Image credit: shiftdigitalmedia.com

Companies that are data driven and aim to cover a wider reach of audience are getting more inclined to apply digital marketing for business. Digital marketing is considered to be a sales force channel that is driving more profitable opportunities for business through the advanced technology of digital medium using emails, tablets, social networks and mobile technology. In the field of online marketing, social media and digital marketing are the powerful combination that can move your business towards profitability and brand popularity. By leveraging on these two powerful online marketing mediums you can enjoy the most convenient means of marketing your business in the internet with a promising result.

What is social media marketing and how does it drive your business?

The best advantage of using social media marketing is making even the smallest business at par with bigger companies in terms of its ability of reaching a wider audience. The use of social media networks can significantly boost the ability of businesses to communicate their business brand to the target consumers. Internet marketing transgresses geographical borders allowing businesses to have a better marketing coverage across the social media channels and through digital marketing platforms. Among the major marketing goals that you can develop in your marketing campaigns using the social media network include brand awareness, positive brand association and lead conversion, improved organic traffic, communicating business to target customers and interact with target audience within your market industry.

Various social media channels for business marketing

There are various social media channels that you can use in promoting brand awareness and popularity to boost your website conversion rate and organic traffic. How you are able to derive profitable and meaningful benefits from them will depend on how you optimize results in their use.

Google Plus

Image credit: blog.qnary.com

Google Plus is the best social media channel when you want to build your authorship. You can include your Google Plus profile in every blog post, comment and other published articles to associate your authorship expert to your business. Through your authorship popularity and trust rating you can create more circle of friends that can help in promoting your business brand and niche authority.

Facebook

Image credit: img.allvoices.com

Facebook is considered to be the giant social media network in the social media industry today. Business on Facebook is becoming a profitable marketing medium that helps businesses in reaching to the social media community owing to its millions of users. By building the popularity of your Facebook fan page you can continuously connect brand awareness to your target customers and grow the presence of your business on search as more people becomes your Facebook fan. The more Facebook likes your business page gets the more pleasing it is to the search engine algorithm.

Twitter

Image credit: blog.twitter.com

Twitter is a good social media platform in updating your customers about your business updates. By tweeting for updates about your new products and services, your business followers on Twitter can easily share your tweet updates which are great means of making your business updates known across different social media users.

YouTube

Image credit: www.thenewstribe.com

You can get better exposure of your business brand through videos by posting tutorials and informative materials that are related to your business Videos are hot items in the search engine today and you should grab the opportunity of using it as part of your social media marketing. Allow your business to reach your target market by engaging your viewers to your videos that can offer solutions and provide a broader knowledge regarding the benefits of your business to them.

Pinterest

Image credit: www.dailyvideobible.com

You can leverage in using images to promote brand awareness. By pinning great photos that are related to your business, you can get more followers from other Pinterest members who can re-pin and share your images to their own profile. By providing highly relevant and high quality images you can easily entice people to re-pin or share your videos to others which are to your business advantage.

Digital Marketing in growing businesses in the cyber sphere

One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is providing marketers the means of connecting to their target customers in a direct marketing approach. It is also possible to make your marketing campaign develop a more personal marketing scheme in reaching your target audience. Some marketers can also customize their business goals with the ability to measure their marketing campaign success while using electronic forms of advertising business such as email marketing.

With digital marketing you can obtain better insights regarding how your customers interact to your business. Digital marketers usually concentrate in addressing common problems such as poor engagement of a business to the customers using the following tools:

• Analytics to review customer engagement and responses to your business products and services.
• Customer reviews also provides a better insight on how they view a product and service and may often give better suggestions and recommendations on how businesses can better engage them and address the consumer changing needs.
• Customer behavior and its patterned responses to their environment should be observed in order to help marketers understand the new trend in customer preferences, shopping behavior, and responses to a particular brand marketing campaign.

The powerful combined forces of social media and digital marketing to business

The use of digital marketing alone can lag the results of your marketing campaigns. It needs a more effective channel or medium where you can promote your products and services more effectively to your target customers. The social media network offers the most convenient, practical and responsive means of marketing your business in the internet.

Image credit: www.digitalbusiness.gov.au

With social media marketing, humans can be effective endorsers for your business. Combining it with digital marketing you are optimizing the exposure of your business to the World Wide Web more proactively. In order to enhance your marketing campaign using social and digital marketing tactics, you can do these strategies to grow your marketing funnel:

1. Define your marketing goals in order to fully optimize the use of social signals to your digital marketing campaigns. There are many benefits that can be derived from both powerful marketing mediums and you can use to your best advantage if you know which aspect of your marketing campaign to focus on.
2. Leveraging on personal marketing and human endorsers. Digital and social marketing have personal value to your customers. With human endorsers sharing your business across the social media community, you can maximize your business search engine relevance and brand popularity online.

If you have a difficulty in reconciling the best benefits and advantages of using the social media and digital marketing in growing your business, WE CAN HELP! We have a team of experts who can provide you the best leverage on these two marketing mediums that can expand your business profitability and ROI results.

COP3 Research: The Impact of Social Trends on Design

The emergence of social media has greatly altered the speed at which trends circulate. This can be seen in how quickly an image or an idea (eg. charity promotions) can reach the entire world. Due to this, design is now in a constant struggle to keep up with the pace at which the world see it, now having to come up with new ideas before the old one has even been seen.

This may be partially responsible for the recycling of previous design trends - maybe designers are struggling to come up with anything new because they are blinded by all that's been done. The emergence of digital media has made it very easy for a 'designer' to recreate something that has already been done.

http://www.trendsactive.com/#!/our-trends/societal-trends/

https://www.notjustalabel.com/editorial/fashion-trends%E2%80%99-impact-society

Defining trends nowadays is not an easy task. Trends are in essence very complex mechanisms that mirror changes in the economic and political landscapes.

Fashion itself is a reflection of social, economic, political and cultural changes. It expresses modernity, symbolising the spirit of the times.

In the last thirty years the luxury industry has been completely focused on profitability, and quality has become a secondary objective for the luxury tycoons. The production of the finest merchandise is no longer their main objective. The focus has shifted from what the product is to what the product represents. To achieve this, big luxury corporations have intensively promoted the heritage of a brand, hiring a young designer to give it a modern edge and splashing the logo on everything, from handbags to bikinis. The product itself is not in the spotlight anymore: it is the brand that speaks.

Using a promising young designer’s talent and enthusiasm to “refresh” a legendary brand is a clever marketing tool. Far from supporting new ideas, it is part of a considered strategy for boosting sales and expanding the X, Y or Z luxury empire. A key example of this is Balenciaga, whose former creative director Nicolas Ghesquière left the brand this year, claiming he was “being sucked dry”. He has stated, “they wanted to steal my identity while trying to homogenise things. It just wasn’t fulfilling anymore. It all became so dehumanised. Everything became an asset for the brand, trying to make it ever more corporate – it was all about branding.”

Speaking to The Business of Fashion, Ghesquière said that he was often told his style is “so Balenciaga now, it’s no longer Nicolas Ghesquière, it’s Balenciaga’s style.” With this in mind, it is hard not to question whether today’s trends really are a natural evolution of fashion, or just the rules of big luxury brands, trying to increase their profit and presence. Many so-called trends are just old pieces, minimally reinterpreted in order to have more commercial appeal.

In this context it’s essential to mention that ‘the trend’ is not what it used to be. Many savvy consumers now follow their own fashion rules, inspired by what they see on the fashion-animated streets, the internet, and in the live-streamed fashion shows that are becoming a staple channel for fashion lovers.

Interestingly, Robert Burke, a consultant for luxury brands and previous fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, amplifies this point: “As little as a decade ago, we would gather at the Ritz in Paris to come up with trend stories, which would then be translated into shop windows and advertising. Forty or fifty of us held the keys to that secret information”. Now, anyone with a curiosity for fashion and access to the internet and television can draw his/her own conclusions. “The trend story is passé,” Mr. Burke told The New York Times.

Nonetheless, trends are still analysed and followed by many consumers and manufacturers, who use them as a way of establishing an order in the chaotic world of fashion. Trend forecasting companies use advanced technologies and professional experts to predict what will sell in the future, and fast fashion brands are using the huge number of trends in demand at any one moment to make and sell more clothes.

By utilising information and communication technologies, and through their efficient, flexible production and distribution systems, fast fashion brands are able to respond to changing trends quicker than ever before. This quick turnover of trends puts money in the brand’s pocket, but doesn’t benefit the consumer - who really needs a new wardrobe three times a week, paying a low price for low quality products, produced at a price ten times lower than the actual selling price?

These fast fashion brands, known for bringing democracy to the once elite world of fashion, have created a following of consumers who practice impulsive shopping, being blinded by the thrill of possessing something new as often as they can. They choose quantity over quality, without asking too many questions about the origin of the clothes they buy.

While fast fashion retailers masterfully imitate catwalk trends in their designs, providing cheaper versions of high-end trends in their stores at the speed of light, it seems that luxury retailers have learned from fast fashion companies too. Luxury retailers, feeling the threat of fast fashion giants, have started adopting similar strategies, trying to provide merchandise faster and in bigger quantities by providing secondary lines, immediately available to purchase.

In this chaotic landscape, there is an obvious need for identity and innovation, to shift the focus to where it should be - on quality and individuality. And where better to find uniqueness and innovation than in the fresh and free voices of young emerging designers?

Without being influenced and limited by rules set by big corporations, emerging fashion designers such as Arjan B, Damien Ravn, Matija Cop and 2014 Hyères finalistMarit Ilison to name only a few, are speaking about a different type of trend. This is a type of trend that customers are happy to embrace - not because everybody else does, but because it makes them look and feel distinctive. Through their innovative designs, emerging designers create the feeling that you buy a piece with meaning and personality, rather than a garment produced in a third world country which gained value only when a logo was splashed on it.

Many retailers and specialists acknowledge that the appetite for niche labels has started to grow, to the detriment of brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Giorgio Armani. Now more than ever, we as consumers need to inform ourselves better about how fast fashion retailers produce their merchandise, focusing on issues such as sustainability and ethics. For these reasons, young designers are becoming more valued by both consumers and investors, and the innovation they represent, is - hopefully - not just a passing trend.

http://www.digital-warriors.com/impact-social-media-marketing-trends-digital-marketing/

The Impact of Social Media Marketing Trends to Digital Marketing

The growth of social media marketing platforms has become a major part of building social signals that are very important in any SEO digital marketing campaign. Perhaps you are unaware that the emergence of different social media channels offer internet marketers like you a wider marketing opportunities in building brand visibility over the web. How your website rank on the search engine can make a big impact regarding your customer and lead acquisition and conversion rate for your site.

Social media marketing integrated with search engine optimization strategies is effective in building a website organic traffic. There are different social media marketing trends that will definitely affect the way digital marketers will undertake their search engine optimization campaign to boost their lead generation process and website conversion rates this year.

From the insights of digital marketing experts, here are some of the social media marketing trends that can impact the growth and success of your digital marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. Are you ready to embrace these trends to integrate them to your internet marketing structures?

Investing in social media marketing – A need than a want

Online marketers now view the value of social media marketing for their business on a different perspective. There is a significant explosion in the number of consumers who are using socials as a means of finding products and services that they need. According to prestigious social consumer statistics:

Image credit: www.newmediaandmarketing.com

• Social networking is used by about 76% of businesses in order to achieve their marketing objectives.
• Business retailers experience about 133% increase in revenues after marketing their business in the mobile market that promotes social media marketing value for their business.
• 40% of online shoppers from the US use the Smartphone for in-store shopping.
• About 71% of the consumers respond according to the feedback and recommendation of social users regarding a particular brand.
• Consumer reviews are regarded by shoppers as trustworthy than the marketing promotion coming directly from the brand site.
• The majority of successful brands have a social media page in order to widen their marketing coverage of making their brand more accessible among the social media users.

Among the benefits of using social media channels in promoting a brand include:

1.       Growing social signals

Social signals can significantly boost your search engine optimization efforts. The more people in the social media community share, like, recommend and talk about your business the more the search engine finds your website relevant thereby increasing the chance of your web pages to acquire a higher position to the search engine results page.

2.       Promote company branding and awareness

Image credit: i.marketingprofs.com

Social media users can always recommend to their social media circles significant quality about your brand. This can be a good marketing boost to your brand image and in growing the number of people becoming more interested about your brand reputation and to become a follower of your brand.

3.       Word of mouth advertising is powerful

Word of mouth advertising tends to have a higher trust rating from the consumers than the product descriptions that your company promotes from your site. Whenever your web page gains more likes and shares from the social media community, the wider your audience reach and influence becomes to your target customers.

Integrating social media to your digital marketing campaign is thus crucial in order to attain your marketing goals. From becoming a mere luxurious means of marketing business online, social media marketing becomes an important pillar in SEO with the need of integrating it to digital marketing in an effort of making small to medium businesses at par and competitive with their competitors.

The social advertising trend becoming indispensible in digital marketing

Digital marketers are being lured towards social media advertising due to the trend in the shopping behavior of the consumers. Social media surveys reveal that a big percentage of the consumers spend an average of 37 minutes a day on popular social media channels like Facebook and Twitter and 10% of the internet users are spent on social media sites. Imagine the potential market gain that social media can offer to online marketers.

In 2013, about 53% of digital marketers are already positioning their brand in the social media market and by 2014 social advertising investment will continue to grow. If your business is not taking this marketing step to grow your market coverage by now your competitors are probably taking advanced steps with a better and large market opportunity to play around.

In order to leverage on social advertising to your business advantage, it is essential to implement the following:

• Define measurable goals for your business
• Integrate social advertising to your search engine optimization strategy to optimize your marketing efforts and results.
• Identify your target customer behavior, needs and activities by using SEO analytics. This will help measure the potential effectiveness on the kind of social advertisement approach to use when engaging your target audience.
• Optimize the landing pages of your website by combining SEO and social media marketing strategies. Don’t underestimate the influence of social media buttons in making your landing pages more engaging to your website visitors.

Image Centric content for social media marketing

Social media users are becoming more engaged in sharing images and liking them. For an internet marketer this is a good opportunity to grow the social signals that will give their brand a better search rank. Image content can be very enticing among the social media users that offer a good online exposure of a brand. The image centric content has become one of the social media marketing trends embraced by Atlanta’s social media marketing companies that are likewise integrated to their search engine optimization campaigns under the principle that mages are known to boost a brand’s exposure to the search engine users.

Social integration to email marketing

Email marketing is viewed by digital marketers as one of the pillars for a successful lead conversion. The widespread use of email marketing remains to be prevalent despite the latest trend in digital marketing and marketers are taking the initiative of integrating social media marketing to further strengthen their business lead conversions. By using social media, your leads will find it easier to make a buying decision if they see your brand within their friends’ social feeds. Social media marketers usually employ the process of updating their email marketing content in their social media status updates which effective in promoting brand marketing updates.

DIGITAL WARRIORS can help businesses grow their digital marketing success by integrating an effective social media marketing approach that will give their business maximum exposure online using the power of the social media channels.