Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Marketing Lessons from the Netflix’s Micro-Genre Generator” plus 1 more |  |
| Marketing Lessons from the Netflix’s Micro-Genre Generator Posted: 03 Jan 2014 01:48 PM PST
This week, I have “Goofy TV Comedies from the 1990′s.” This showed up because I’ve been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I suppose is goofy, it was on TV in the 90′s and it’s funny, so I guess it works. Alexis C. Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic was so fascinated by these strange encounters, he set out on a quest to understand and catalog all of the Netflix mico-genres. Final count? 76,897. To create this massive database, Netflix hired people assign tags to every TV show and movie on the service noting actors, directors, setting, mood, and more. (A full-time job watching TV! Where do I sign up?) Madrigal reverse engineered the process and found a few interesting facts along the way. For example, they were able to pick out the most popular subjects.
Marriage and parenthood. Fame and royalty. Cats, dogs and horses. It is indeed a picture of the average American. Other attributes that popped up a lot included the words Romantic, Classic and Dark. Movies and Shows “Set in Europe” and works from “the 1980′s” and “the 1970′s.” What does all of this have to do with marketing? Two things. First, the concept of micro-genres can be applied to any retail business to help customers make a buying decision. For example, I’ve recently taken up paper-crafting. I visited one large craft store online and was so overwhelmed with the choices I left without buying anything. Then I found an online store that features packages of items every week. They don’t actually sell the package but they create a page with links to everything I need to create a specific product. They’ve narrowed my choices and I’m grateful. Click, click, click. I buy the products, download the project sheet and feel confident in my choices. When it arrives I’ll be able to create something beautiful. There’s that verses the stacks of miscellaneous stamps and stickers I bought over the years that don’t go together and never will. Pick five items that go together, make-up a theme then post the collection to your blog and / or Facebook page. Get specific. The more niche, the better. Second, let’s think about reverse engineering. Look at the sales data and work backwards. See the most popular items – what can you add to your line that will complement those items? Look at the poor sellers – are they bad products? Not right for your audience or were they just hidden on your site. What happens if you take the worst seller on your list and feature it alongside one of your best sellers. The takeaway here is that data is your friend. Dive in and see what’s really going on with the business then craft a campaign to either capitalize on your big sellers or push out that old merchandise that’s not moving. People will buy anything (Visually-striking Foreign Nostalgic Dramas) if you package it right. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community |
| Almost 50% of Online Christmas Day Traffic Came from Mobile Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:49 PM PST
Mobile also accounted for nearly 29% of all online sales for the day, beating 2012 by a whopping 40%. Smartphones and tablets both played a huge part in the numbers for different reasons. Smartphones drove 28.5% of all online traffic compared to tablets at 18.1%. But when you look at sales, the numbers flip. Tablets accounted for more than double the online sales on Christmas – 19.4% tablets to 9.3% smartphones. Tablet users also spent more, an average of $95.61 per order, versus smartphone users with an average of $85.11 per order. Quite a bit of holiday traffic was likely generated by new mobile owners who happily took their new device out for a test drive. For those numbers, we turn to Chitika.
To create this chart, Chitika sampled “tens of millions of smartphone and tablet online ad impressions from the Chitika network” from December 20 to December 29. The result is two sets of numbers. The gray bar shows the brand that is sending in the most impressions. The percentage represents the loss or gain post-holiday. From this, we can somewhat extrapolate which devices came into a household and which ones went out. On the smartphone side, Apple and Samsung dominate for impressions but only Apple showed a post-holiday gain. Looks like lots of people got brand new iPhones for Christmas. Google held steady while every other brand lost ground, including Samsung. On the tablet side:
Apple is still dominating like a cranky tyrant over a small village but it looks like the villagers are slowly crossing the border into Amazon town. Amazon ran a strong and compelling campaign for their new Kindle Fire line with ads that demoed the inventive Mayday Button. Just last night, I saw a Kindle Fire ad that started out like an ad for iPad Air. In the end, I learned that KindleFire is just as good in many ways for a lot less. I’m an Apple lover but Kindle is playing a siren song, slowly drawing me closer and closer to the edge. Microsoft, Samsung and even Google all saw upticks in holiday traffic, but with that lead, I doubt Apple is worried. Finally, let’s go back to IBM for one last interesting holiday fact:
Mobile. Social. Mobile. Social. Get used to it because it’s not going away.
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