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.

Web 2.0 and Generation Me download, one of three B Series offers

Knowledge leads to action. Give them the gift of useful and relevant knowledge, and in return they will give you brand loyalty and word-of-mouth.

—Eran Livneh, Marketingprofs.com

Show, and Tell

The B Series awareness campaign was designed to introduce Brainstorm’s strategic branding, design, and interactive media capabilities to a select group of marketing executives who were not familiar with our company. As part of that introduction, we wanted to provide something of value to the recipients—incentives they might find useful—that would also demonstrate our expertise.

Three Offers

In our bid to connect with our audience we offered three items, an informational download about a specific demographic, a digital marketing reference chart, and a t-shirt.

B Relevant

Our first B Series offer was a summary sheet of our popular Web 2.0 and Generation Me presentation. The paper condenses the 2 hour presentation into a downloadable 12-page pdf (below).

Initially developed to assist our higher education clients understand how current high school and college-aged students think and communicate, we discovered many of our corporate clients wanted to better understand that demographic as well. Therefore, we felt the offer would be relevant and useful to members of the B Series audience.

Web 2.0 and Generation Me | 524 KB .pdf

B Informed

Our second offer, The MediaSphere (below), is a tool we created to help marketers plan and develop an integrated communication strategy. The MediaSphere is a single source menu and glossary of both traditional and emerging channel options available to today’s marketers.

Our clients are using it as tool to develop initial marketing mix ideas, as a learning resource, for war room brainstorming, and even as a way to mitigate interdepartmental communication barriers.

The MediaSphere | 1.1 MB .pdf

The MediaSphere chart

B Clothed

If useful knowledge-based tools are the new black of incentives and offers, t-shirts are retro noir. Tactile, fun and useful, we offered a B brilliant t-shirt for completing a 3-minute post-campaign online survey. In this case the rationale behind the offer is clear and straightforward, less trust-building, more “Thank you!”

The shirt is purposely devoid of urls or any direct promotion of our firm. This group doesn’t represent existing customers or friends. They know where they got the shirt and we just want them to enjoy wearing it.

See the shirt design in The B Series Part 3: The Componentry article.

No Hidden Agendas

In B2B communications to C-level executives it’s important to respect the recipient’s time and focus on their needs. Dangling incentive carrots to obtain email opt-ins or artificially inflate response statistics is counterintuitive and may land you on SPAM blacklists.

Our Web 2.0 and MediaSphere pieces were offered without obligation simply to demonstrate our capabilities.

The Priority

The primary objective of the B Series was to create awareness. By offering our audience useful tools, we positioned ourselves as brand strategists here to serve and support, and established a foundation for trust. If recipients agree, they’ll opt-in—genuinely. It’s all about creating value, dialog and trust—not building stats for stats sake.

Useful tools and educational materials are a great way to connect and communicate information about your company. Consider putting your audience first and they may just reciprocate.

Up Next

The B Series Part 6: The Metrics

To read previous installments in this series click on one of the links 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

Miss Irresistible (Nice Teeth)

Meet Miss Irresistible, the new spokesperson/avatar for P&G’s Crest product line. A self-proclaimed “irresistible babe,” she’s helping brand giant P&G enter the realms of Social Media.

P&G’s Social Media Exploration

Miss Irresistible invites visitors to send a naughty—or nice—personalized e-card from her MySpace site—very “You.”

However, 80% of the real estate on the MySpace page seems designed for a Parent’s magazine print ad—predictable and less “social” than you’d expect.

Although the effort still needs some work, P&G is making the right move. Adopting a Social Media plan, sidestepping potential legal department concerns and institutional resistance to change is a critical move forward for the corporate behemoth.

As quoted on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s website, P&G global marketing officer James Stengel said:

“Consumers are right now very dynamic in their media habits. If you stay in touch with that and you want to be relevant in their lives, obviously, a lot of things change … It’s the same reason we got into television 60 years ago.”

New Media, New Lessons

Some large, less nimble corporations stumble a bit as they grapple with how to enter the Social Media market space.

In a move that drew fire from new media experts, Sears Canada recently launched a so-called Consumer Generated Media (CGM) site—a glossy Flash for Flash’s-sake basic voting booth where visitors could choose one of four catalog covers.

The fear of reprisal isn’t limited to corporate legal and marketing departments. The Internet is rife with examples of traditional corporate Public Relations (PR) handling and mishandling of Social Media events.

Something to Smile About

None of these companies has been ruined by its Social Media experiences. In fact, if embraced and acted upon, each Social Media corporate headline event presents an opportunity to learn and change.

Traditional approaches to marketing, public relations and legal issues can be disconnected in the Social Media marketing space.

Taking time to affirm that the people and firms with whom you’ve aligned have a demonstrated understanding and breadth of experience in the Social Media arena is a proactive step toward making your brand irresistible in a sea of free-flowing Social Media dialog.

A Protest

Tom Wayne, owner of Prospero’s Books in Kansas City, Missouri, loves books. Recently looking to reduce his used book inventory, he found he couldn’t even give them away. So he got a permit and burned them in protest (see the Yahoo article).

Read a Book? LOL!!!

Apparently the 18-34, web 2.0, GenMe, millennials just don’t read books much anymore.

According to a recently released study on The Arts and Civic Engagement by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 18-34-year-olds have the lowest literary reading rate among all adults at 45.2%. In 1982, the rate for the same age group was 61.1%, the highest among all adults at the time.

Burning Issues

The Internet is one likely cause in this behavioral swing. With the web’s seemingly infinite supply of information and the finite number of hours in a day, books are becoming arcane, expensive, and volumetric. Committing to more than a 2-minute video, a podcast sound bite, or a short blog entry is increasingly impractical if GenMe individuals hope to keep up.

Relevancy, Transparency and Brevity

Trying to reach GenMe and other market segments flooding into online social environments is a long-term, long tail play. Consider words like transparency and participation over terms like selling—and above all, keep it brief.

In fact, if you’re still reading this, you may be over 35.

*Download the complete NEA report here:
Civic Engagement pdf | 136 kb

Image source: n8ive

Minding the Crowd

The backbone of any social network is participation, and comments and conversations are the vertebrae. But efficiently tracking the data trails of ever-shifting collective opinion has been an elusive exercise.

coComment.com now provides a single resource for accessing and tracking all the latest online conversations–yours as well as others you’re following. You can track top commenters, articles and posts as well as who’s commenting on the same conversations you are–coComment subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Anticipating Critical Mass

Imagine a repository of social media conversations reflecting current collective attitudes and views, accessed by topic. On-demand data parsed to reflect the pulse of socially networked opinion is invaluable market intelligence for any business looking to establish, advance or protect their brand.

According to coComment.com CEO Matt Colebourne in an interview with MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider:

“If I am Coke and I want to know I am being talked about, that is an easy measure in a database. But how do I find out if I am being talked about positively? That is exactly where we can offer something that at the moment we don’t believe anyone else can. You need to have all of those stored conversations.”?

Beware the Backlash

Social networks are leery of being measured, tracked or marketed to. Their sting can be swift, severe and unexpected, their lauding and accolades, equally surprising. The behavioral analysis and insight provided by coComment.com can help businesses anticipate shifts in market preferences, buying habits, trends and public opinion, thus mitigating the downsides and maximizing the upsides of fickle-willed social media realms.

The Future is Now

Few brand marketers are taking the time to thoroughly understand the Web 2.0 nuances of Social Media Marketing (SMM). Any institution could benefit from the type of information coComment.com purports to offer.

That is if “You”? and “GenMe”? allow it.