Joseph Jaffe’s Join the Conversation

If you’re a brand marketer
or have a brand, or a market to reach,
read this book.

A Marketing Dialog

The foundation of Join the Conversation, How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership is author Joseph Jaffe’s distinction between communication and conversation. He describes communication as one-way and carefully controlled in its implementation, while conversation is organic, non-linear, unpredictable, and not initiated by any one person or organization.

Key Moments

As collective online conversations begin to spill into conversations offline, the book addresses the opportunities presented to brand marketers engaged in conversation with groups Jaffe identifies as producers, prosumers and consumers.

He presents many examples of what we here at Brainstorm refer to as key social media moments—moments when companies have either seized an opportunity or been seized by it.

If you’re not present at a key moment,
you can’t exploit that moment,
but it may exploit you.

Helpful Advice

The book provides a number of guidelines to consider when adopting conversational engagement over mere communication: The need to embrace consumer-generated content, the importance of honesty, an emphasis on product quality and service excellence—coupled with a balanced sense of transparency, as well as the benefits of partnering with today’s consumer, paired with cautionary advice.

About the Author

Joseph Jaffe, author of Join the Conversation and Life After the 30-Second Spot, is president and chief interrupter at new marketing company, Crayon. He’s a noted consultant and blogger and hosts Coffee with Crayon Thursdays at 9am EST on Crayonville Island in Second Life. This review is part of his UNM2PNM project.

Join In

Although it may take purists a while to get used to the conversational writing style, regardless of whether or not you’re already engaged in conversation, Join the Conversation is a read worth talking about.

Meet the target audience of the GendeX™ Mutual Fund from Thrasher Funds

GendeX™ Not your father’s mutual fund.

A Changing Financial Market

The GendeX™ Mutual Fund (Ticker: GENDX) from Thrasher Funds targets the estimated 60 million people born between the mid 1960s and mid 1990s—a demographic largely ignored by the financial community according to Thrasher.

In the Pink: Access and Appeal

The Thrasher Funds brand identity breaks from traditional financial motifs by dipping their logo—a staid engraved “T”—in shocking pink (right), and reflecting their target customer in imagery (above). The Thrasher GendeX products bring real value to this unique investment brand. A $100 beginning balance and minimum monthly contribution of $50 makes an automatic investment plan feasible for young professionals. GendeX holdings also feature companies relevant to their target market such as Apple, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Lulu Lemon and Nike.

Thrasher Funds shocking pink logo

As markets and demographics change are you reflecting that change in both form and function across all brand touchpoints? Engage your customers in ongoing dialog to discern their short and long-term needs and desires.

Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 New Wireless Projects

(at right)

Brainstorm created a proprietary online tool to track B Series activity including offer page visits, video views, downloads, survey data and much more.

39% increase in average daily hits
on BrainstormBrand.com during the
B Series promotion.

Objectives, Then Numbers

The B Series was created as the initial step in an ongoing awareness campaign targeted to a group of C-level marketing executives and decision makers with little or no previous knowledge of Brainstorm. Our goal for the multiple-component B2B campaign was simply to build name recognition and knowledge of our firm’s capabilities.

All statistics and results were measured with that primary objective in mind, but we were also interested in how each piece performed. Because of the nature of the campaign and the protracted sales cycle in our industry, an accurate ROI measurement isn’t yet feasible; however we created a unique offer landing page for each recipient and an online tool to track their individual responses. With a total response rate of 14%, unique visits to the offer site looked like this:

B Series Response Rates

What Worked

Our mass HTML email had a 22% open rate and 3% unique click-throughs; however, the fourth piece in the series, the personal email, was the most effective with 7.5% of recipients visiting the offer page. This strong response confirms that multiple touchpoints built name recognition. After several contacts, recipients felt comfortable opening an email from someone they didn’t know and clicking through to learn more about our company.

18% of the respondents
visited the offer site multiple times.

Visitor Activity

Once visitors were at the offer site, 29% watched a video, 50% downloaded the Web 2.0 Summary Sheet and 50% downloaded the MediaSphere.

Telling Numbers

In addition to traffic to the offer page, during the three initial mailers and the mass HTML email, average hits per day on our corporate website increased 50% over the preceding 15 days. After the personal email, average hits per day were up 79% over pre-campaign traffic. Across the two and a half-month promotion, average daily hits increased 39% overall.

25% increase in
direct traffic to BrainstormBrand.com
during the promotion.

What We’d Do Differently

Two weeks toward the end of the campaign were reserved for three of Brainstorm’s principals to make personal follow-up phone calls—not to hard sell, but to merely introduce themselves. It proved difficult to connect with a live person. We left voicemail and spoke to several people, but the results weren’t worth the effort of calling the entire list. Next time, we’ll follow up via phone with only individuals who have expressed a tacit interest by taking specific action while visiting the offer site.

Qualitative Metrics

Relying on percentages and numbers alone is ill-advised when measuring objectives. A myriad of variables affect the success of any consumer or B2B marketing campaign: need, timing, industry, execution, audience, and messaging are just a few.

Our initial effort exceeded our expectations by creating awareness and developing relationships that have resulted in new work and ongoing discussions with an audience previously unaware of us. We will continue to reach out to these individuals throughout 2008 in an attempt to build trust and relationship equity through various means.

B Series Resources

To read previous installments in this series or download one of the marketing tools from the offer, click on a link below or “B Series” under topics:

The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview
The B Series Part 2: Strategic Design & Messaging
The B Series Part 3: The Componentry
The B Series Part 4: Personalization
The B Series Part 5: Offers and Incentives

Web 2.0 and Generation Me | 524 KB .pdf

The MediaSphere | 1.1 MB .pdf

B Series timeline: personal touchpoints, destination points

Vessel conceptual product rendering

Strong Concept + Strong Visualization

Creating a Personalized Beverage

According to their tagline, The Greener Grass.org is “Collaborating to design a better future.” With that and your health in mind, they created the Vessel concept, a system of components and options that would allow you to customize a drink to fit your personal tastes as well as your health and lifestyle needs.

With these three main bases and countless options, it’s about as far removed from today’s mainstream beverage model as you can get.

Bases: Nutrients to fit your lifestyle and demographic needs such as iron and calcium for women, or zinc and saw palmetto for men.

Flavors: Organic extracts to sate your specific tastebuds—everything from chocolate to wheatgrass, mango to mocha, or any imaginable combination in between.

Agents: Active ingredients like vitamins, minerals, and energy boosters for functional benefits—you name it, proteins or taurine, caffeine or ginseng—whatever you need.

The concept includes a reusable Vessel Lexan™ container strategically designed for optimum ingredient agitation.

Making the Concept Count

Programmatic design, packaging and convenience count in brand marketing. Whether or not the Vessel line ever comes to fruition, the concept is far more believable and supportable when visualized as a fully-branded product rendering.

Strong concepts become real through strong visualization.