How does the weather affect response?

When it rains, businesses offering goods and services for sale online should be rubbing their hands in glee because what do we all do?  We stay inside out of the rain and spend more time and money online. And what happens when the sun comes out?  We go out to make the most of the sunny high street before it starts raining again.  Also, apparently when the sun is shining it puts us in a good mood and we spend more on in-store purchases.

So don’t knock the changeable British weather because depending who you are, it can be used to your advantage to increase your responses.

Sainsbury’s lead the way here by appointing their own ‘Weather Manager’.  They are very aware of how weather can affect response and by monitoring the weather across the UK they can ensure that in regions where people are enjoying long hot sunny days, there is a plentiful supply of lettuce, ice creams and barbecue foods in-store.  And where it is cloudy and cold, warming soups and hot meals are prominently on display.

Last winter really demonstrated the power of the weather for us at WPN. Our 2010 Christmas mailing for The Salvation Army was delivered when the weather was notoriously bad, with heavy snowfalls and temperatures outside reaching as low as -20 degrees.  Through experience we know that direct mail always works better when the weather is bad, but there may have been an added factor here in that the cold weather may have increased the donor’s empathy with the homeless people sheltering in doorways or lonely older people worried about the cost of heating. It resulted in a record response to the appeal, raising over £10 million for the charity.
We can all speculate as much as we like about how the weather either boosted or ruined the response to our advertising, but is there any way we can prove that it really was the weather that affected response?  Yes. It’s called Macroeconomic modelling and is a service offered by our data department.

As well as seasonality and weather, they can take into account a number of economic factors which may affect your results including The Stock Market, Bank Holidays, Pay Days and Sporting Events. By monitoring all these factors over a year, they can help you build up a picture of the effects of external events on response to your advertising message.

Has Olympic fever gone too far already?

It’s now just a year until the UK host the Olympic games for the first time in 64 years. A lot of people are excited about this (even those people who felt robbed by the ticket ‘raffle’ system). And no doubt there were some crafty marketeers who thought that there would be a prime opportunity to piggy back Olympic fever in the coming months to garner interest in thier own products.

Not surprisingly, the Olympic Games has pre-empted this and defended themselves with some robust copywrite laws. And fair enough. But I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking they have gone too far.

The ruling works like this:

There are two categories of words.

Category 1 – ‘Games’, ‘2012’, ‘Twenty twelve’, ‘Two Thousand and Twelve’

Category 2 – ‘gold’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’, ‘London’, ‘Medals’, ‘Sponsor’, ‘Summer’

And if anyone unauthorized

(a) uses two words from category 1 (e.g. ‘Games 2012’)

or

(b) uses one word from category 1 and one from category 2 (e.g. ‘Gold Twenty Twelve’)

then they could be found to be breaking the law. And these rules aren’t even exhaustive! The legislation makes room for plenty of other grey areas.

We are all currently acutely aware of the dangers of monopolies in communications industry. And this one worries me because common sense tells me that in many cases  it’s ridiculous. We don’t want companies ‘ripping off’ each other’s intellectual property but it seems a misguided and disproportionate allocation of power to allow ANY organisation veto phrases such as – ‘Summer 2012’ or ‘2012 Sponsor’.

In our work with charities I can think of a number of times when we might want to use these phrases like these over the coming months – in ways that would make absolutely no threat to the sanctity of the Olympic Games brand. It seems at best churlish to restrict fundraisers in this way – especially as money gets tighter and times harder.

To be honest, I doubt that the Games would want the bad press of holding a fundraising organisation to task over such a misdourmeaner. Given the heavy-handedness of the legislation we’ll be steering well clear of any obvious transgressions. But we’d suggest that there are other ways of riding on the coat tails of Olympic joy – we just need to be careful and a little clever with our words. Copy that acknowledges ‘a summer of sport’, ‘a special sporting year for Britain’ can help us make the most of the auspicious year without treading on anyones toes .

Move over QR codes

My colleague, Lucinda recently wrote a very insightful piece on the merits and pitfalls of QR codes. But I must admit I’ve never quite seen the appeal of them. For me, they just represent a bit of a hassle with little reward.

I believe their adoption is more a result of advertisers’ paranoia about driving online response from an offline medium, rather than a genuine customer desire for a short-cut means of typing a URL. There are obviously truly inspired applications of QR codes like this, but more often than not, they just feel like an afterthought – ‘why don’t we shove a QR code on the poster, that will make us look progressive’!.

This is all pretty redundant – I believe that QR codes will soon be cast off to the marketers’ scrapheap. No, the real opportunity is in Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is short-range wireless frequency that allows transactions and data exchanges with a simple touch.

In London we’ve all been using the technology for years. The NWC chip in Oyster Cards has allowed Londoners to buy tickets and travel on public transport, while completely avoiding the typical rudeness of TfL staff – brilliant!

Google accelerated their inexorable takeover of the digital world last month with the launch of Google Wallet – an NFC application that will allow mobile payments. With this they join the global arms race to own, what will be, the next form of commerce.

However, the potential of mobile payment and social applications (imagine a group huddle on FourSquare) masks some of the more fundamental applications of NFC. You’ll be able to do anything you could do with QR codes quicker and easier!