Coca-Cola Archives - Diane Hamilton

Developing Curious Cultures: Getting Brands To Resonate To A Global Audience With James Sommerville

Projecting a message to the universe takes true grit anchored with the right skills and team. Dr. Diane Hamilton and James Sommerville share their ideas on curiosity, branding, immersion, and how all these three blends to create a winning campaign. James is the Co-Founder of the UK design firm Attik, where he was responsible for the massive redesign of Coca-Cola’s brand and visual identities. Honing his skills as a teenager, he shares how he got involved with Prince’s Trust, and offers some advice to companies on developing more curious cultures.
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Brand Awareness: The Importance of Facebook

Youtube, Coca-Cola and Starbucks are just some of the most popular brands according to “fans” on Facebook. Companies that have yet to embrace Facebook as an important marketing tool, are missing the boat. Gourmet Marketing explained, “Businesses carve out an identity and following of customers through Social Media…none is more central than Facebook.”

Seattle Local Marketing’s article Tips on How to Find Fans for Facebook Fan Page stated, “Why is Facebook so useful? If you want to pull a lot of people to look and find out about your business then, the best way is Google since majority of these people use this search engines. However, Facebook comes almost as second in being one of the most accessed sites in the world.”

Social Media Today recently ran an article titled 15 Ways to Use Facebook for Business. By creating a Facebook page, businesses can create a forum for discussion, facilitate word of mouth, research and test-market products, list press releases, and even hold contests.

Simply Zesty’s article Beer Company Generations $50.7 Million from 400,000 Facebook Fans demonstrates the impact on Facebook fan pages. New Belgium Brewing, “recently surveyed their Facebook fans and found that on average, their fans are spending $260 annually on the company’s products. This equates to $50.7 million in annual revenue, with 400,000 Facebook fans spread out across their products. Not a bad return on investment, given that the company had invested just $235,000 in 2011 in social media campaigns.”

Related Articles:

Neuromarketing: The Future of Advertising

via threeminds.organic.com

In Morgan Spurlock’s movie, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, there is a scene where they discuss neuromarketing. Spurlock is put into an MRI machine and shown product images. The information obtained showed dopamine was released when he looked at images of Coca Cola. His desire for the product was actually visible on the brain scan.

What is neuromarketing? Tech.FAQ defines neuromarketing as, “a field of marketing that involves studying the way people react to marketing techniques and adjusting those techniques to maximize sales and inform the public about a specific product, idea, or campaign. Neuromarketing includes the use of biometric sensors, social studies, and subliminal messaging. While neuromarketing is a relatively new technique, it has been widely implemented in recent years and nearly every marketing agency and medium-large company in the world now uses it.”

Just less than a year ago the question was asked: Is neuromarketing the future? AdvertisingAge stated, “Neuromarketing offers a chance to get accurate, factual data about the buying habits of target markets.” However, they also pointed out that, “At the end of the day, neuromarketing is still in its infancy. A technology that is unproven outside of laboratory conditions, prohibitively expensive, and potentially a legal minefield is a technology that requires a lot of capital and a solid brand to experiment with.”

The future may be here sooner than anticipated. Combining neuroscience and marketing may just be the next big thing available through the use of apps. ThreeMinds reported, “large companies like Google, Disney, Microsoft and Chevron have already begun to dip their toes in the neuromarketing waters. And research vendors have responded, recently announcing the availability of portable EEG devices that can wirelessly transmit brain scans to iPads, as well as “full-brain home panels” for original research studies.”

Marketing professionals may be able to use this technology prior to products coming onto market. Currently researchers from Duke and Emery are studying how products appeal to the human brain.

iTunes offers a free series of videos from the University of Warwick about neuromarketing. In these videos, find out how “Cognitive neuroscience has revolutionized our understanding of the consumer’s brain – a fact with huge implications for business and marketing…you will hear from practitioners, clients and academics at the forefront of neuromarketing. Hear how neuroscience is being applied commercially to research and develop new products and services, improve the effectiveness of communications and boost revenue.”

What to Know before Investing in IPOs like LinkedIn or Pandora

Is investing in an initial public offering (IPO) a good idea? With the recent LinkedIn and Pandora IPOs and talk of future IPOs with Twitter and Facebook, this is a question that many investors may be considering. Imagine getting in on the ground floor of a giant like Coca-Cola? It might have been a wild ride, but those that hung in there, had a nice payoff. Joshua Kennon of About.com reported, “A single share of Coca-Cola purchased for $40 at the IPO in 1919, for example, crashed to $19 the following year. Yet, today, that one share, with dividends reinvested, is worth over $5 million.”

Kennon suggests that if you have the stomach for risking your investment, you might want to consider whether the company can grow at a rate high enough to justify its price, whether there are any patents or trademarks to protect the business, whether you’d want to hold onto this stock for 30 years and if it fell by 50% would you have the stomach to handle it?

DailyFinance reported some additional questions to ask before investing in an IPO: (1) Is there an attractive market for the product? (2) Does the company have a significant share of the market? (3) Is the company’s management team experienced? (4) Is the company growing and profitable?

The following list shows some more recent IPO original offering prices compared to their current price (as of July, 2011):

Google Initial Offering Price, 2004: $85/share

Google Price July, 2011: $530/share

Pandora Initial Offering Price, June, 2011: $16/share

Pandora Price July, 2011: $19/share

LinkedIn Initial Offering Price, May, 2011: $45/share

LinkedIn Price July, 2011: $98/share

Many employees of companies like Google became wealthy overnight when their companies went IPO. The New York Times article Google’s IPO 5 Years Later stated, “When the offering finally happened, it turned an estimated 1,000 Google employees into millionaires, at least on paper. Since then, many more millionaires have been minted inside the Googleplex, the Web search company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.”

Not all startups have been this successful. Businesspundit lists the 25 Internet Startups that Bombed Miserably. MSMoney also warned, “Many investors fret they’ll miss the next big thing because they have no access to the IPO market, but study after study has proven that IPOs historically underperform the broader markets.” FIGuide echoed that same sentiment in their article Should You Invest in IPOs, stating that there might be better options. “A seminal paper published in The Journal of Finance looked at IPOs from 1970 to 1990. During the five years after issuance, investors in these IPOs got average annual returns of only 5%.(1) By contrast, the overall stock market’s average annual return from 1970 to 1990 was more than double that figure, at 10.8%. To put this in perspective, $1,000 invested at 5% for 20 years would have generated $2,653, while $1,000 invested at 10.8% would have generated $7,777, almost three times as much.”

15 Products Made by Mistake

Have you ever wondered why a certain product was invented? Some of them that have been a big success actually were a mistake.

Think of these products:

1. Coca-Cola – A pharmacist, trying to make a tonic for people with sore teeth, found that when he taste-tested it, it wasn’t too bad. He added a little carbonated water and low and behold . . . a great product.

2. Sticky Notes – Post it notes by 3M was discovered when trying to find a better adhesive tape. The scientist found an adhesive material that just wasn’t sticky enough though. While this same scientist was at church looking for a way to stick notes to his hymnal, he decided to use that not so sticky stuff he created to help hold his work in place. A new idea was born.

3. Scotchgard – Another 3M product was created out of trying to create rubber for airplane fuel lines. After spilling some on their shoes, the scientists realized that this stuff was protective and wouldn’t come off. Through time, the shoes looked dirty everywhere except for where they spilled the substance.

4. Rubber – Its first use was when they discovered it could erase things from a piece of paper. The original substance was unstable because it would become too liquid or shattered based on temperature. When rubber and sulfur were accidentally dropped onto a hot stove, the combination turned out to be something no one had anticipated.

5. Penicillin – Spores that contaminated a bacteria sample were the unintended beginning for this drug. When the scientist took a closer look at these spores, he noticed they were actually doing harm to the bacteria.

6. White Out – A secretary who took pride in her work discovered this while trying to cover up some of her errors. Soon other secretaries were asking to borrow her concoction. This started the Mistake Out Company, later named Liquid Paper.

Do you want to read about some more mistakes? Check out these other famous blunders by clicking on the links below:

7. Corn Flakes

8. Microwave Ovens

9. Silly Putty

10. Saccharin

11. Slinky

12. Potato Chips

13. Fireworks

14. Play-Doh

15. Chocolate Chip Cookies