Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Delta Air Lines is bringing its in-flight experience to the streets of New York City with a pop-up lounge called Delta SKY360.

Visitors can drop by the 3,500 square-foot space at 101 West 57th St. called Delta SKY360 to test some of the airline’s newest features, including refurbished seats, new menu items and route information.

The space will be open for six weeks through Nov. 10.

Claritas has concluded that 66 types of people live in the U.S. suburbs, cities, and riral areas. You can view a presentation on their research here. If you’re really interested you can look up your neighborhood based on zip code to find out what segments are living next door to you.

No time to visit the site? How about a few examples!

For some time marketers have recognized Influencers as experts who offer credible reach into niche audiences. Their challenge has been figuring out how to leverage those Influencers to meet marketing objectives.

A recent CNET Networks study “Understanding Influence, and Making it Work for You” sheds new light on the Influencer psyche. Far from supporting the ‘expert’ position, the research suggests that “influencers are individuals who gain self-worth by giving good advice.”

Influencers build large social networks and interact with 100 or more people each month. Moderately-connected individuals report connections with between 11 and 99 people each month, while less-connected individuals have 10 or fewer connections with close or casual friends, neighbors, family members, co-workers, and church or civic organization members. The study finds a correlation between network size and self-reported influence activity. Fewer than half the less-connected group is asked for opinions or advice, versus 75 percent of the highly-connected cohort.

The research shows a direct correlation between the size of the Influencer’s network and thew role of technology in their ability to stay connected. According to the report, “Technology enables the maintenance and frequency of connections…”

A recent marketing campaign turned Boston bomb scare exposes the fragmentation and generational divides that modern day marketers are confronting. There intent is to cut through the noise in an effort to present relevant messages to people who care. To do this successfully they must increasingly find ways to reach smaller and smaller niche audiences with more and more relevant content.

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is a pipeline into the hearts, minds, and wallets of the 18-24 and 18-34 adult population coveted by the advertising industry. Aqua Teen Hunger Force, one of CN’s shows has been so popular it supported a recent spin-off movie.

And that leads us back to a clever idea for a Gorilla Marketing campaign gone bad. As part of a larger campaign to promote the new ATHF movie, light-up signs of the show’s characters were placed around the city of Boston.

At first it appeared that the campaign was set up for success but a fragmented audience responded in ways the marketers hadn’t anticipated.

The Boston Globe exposed the fragmentation in its piece “Marketing Gambit Exposes a Wide Generation Gap.” The author pointed out that people like Todd Vanderlin, a 22-year-old design student, were photographing the signs and blogging about the campaign just as anticipated.

“I knew it was art, and I knew it was part of the Adult Swim ads, because I saw a billboard for the same thing,” said Vanderlin, referring to a series of cartoons on cable television. “I see it in New York all the time.”

Unfortunately on the other end of the market spectrum a subway worker less hip to the ways of gorilla marketing and Adult Swim called the police after spotting one of the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” cartoon characters on an overpass in Charlestown Massachusetts. What followed was a terrorism scare and a massive police response that practically shut down the city of Boston.

Once it was discovered the electronic boards were part of a viral marketing campaign the dichotomy was again exposed. One one side serious condemnation flowed from officials in Boston and Washington while it was clear the 20-somethings had a different take. one 29-year-old from Malden Massachusets blogged it this way:

“Repeat after me, authorities. L-E-D. Not I-E-D. Get it?”

Nothing could have illustrated the schism more than the press conference held by Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky, the two men responsible for posting the signs, following their release on bail. Referred to as artists by their attorney they agreed to make a formal statement to the press. As they described it, they preferred it to be more of a conversation than a statement. The topic? In there own words:

hair cuts in the 70s–we really want to discuss the style of them”.

HBR recently published results of a year long study, conducted in collaboration with eBay Germany, that involved 140,120 eBay customers. The study was aimed at determining whether or not there is business value in Customer Community Marketing Programs. The results are quite fascinating.

Over the course of a year, we compared the behavior of community enthusiasts and lurkers with that of the control group. The differences were astonishing. Lurkers and community enthusiasts bid twice as often as members of the control group, won up to 25% more auctions, paid final prices that were as much as 24% higher, and spent up to 54% more money (in total). Enthusiasts listed up to four times as many items on eBay and earned up to six times as much in monthly sales revenues as the control users. The findings on first-time sellers were even more impressive: Compared with the controls, almost ten times as many lurkers (56.1%) and enthusiasts (54.1%) started selling on eBay after they joined and participated in customer communities.

What the study doesn’t tell us is why the program worked for eBay and how it can be replicated. Many have learned the hard way that building community online is not as easy as it would seem. A deep understanding of your customers is a must. Followed by careful planning and implementation of community tools that meet their wants and needs.

MacDonalds is taking advantage of the ubiquity of clell phones in Japan to introduce QR codes on its sandwich wrappers. The codes, commonly used to code business cards for scanning by cell phones, will contain nutritional information for each of 19 sandwiches. They’ve also created cell phone friendly URLs for those with out cameras in their phones.

I think MacDonalds’ is smart to get out ahead of the curve on the nutritional issue. At a time when obesity is creeping around the globe and local government in the US are banning transfats, it makes sense to be prepared to embrace new trends. Placement of nutritional information on wrappers and websites makes it easy to change ingredients in response to local trends without incurring huge printing expenses. Not to mention the opportunities to build their brand through online and wireless channels. I’m lovin it!

BoldMouth just released an interesting new study on WOM Marketing (PDF). It’s worth checking out. The report is good. Judging from their website they just skipped right past online marketing!

Social networks and community sites have changed the rules of marketing. The thing is, most of your competitors just don’t know it yet.

Businesses of every size from large enterprises like Microsoft and Panasonic to small companies like MyKumari.com and Verity Blue are, or soon will be, adopting word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing at an incredibly fast pace. The implementation of WOM marketing may be enthusiastic, but it often results in ineffective or misguided campaigns.

The rules for marketing are changing at such a fast pace—and that fact was reinforced—when 65% of organizations that participated in the study told us they did not have a formalized word-of-mouth marketing plan.

We believe that industry stakeholders need formalized processes to assess how referral conversations are initiated, modified and terminated, and to better understand the relationship dynamics that develop as a result of individuals making independent referrals.

The study includes a comprehensive overview of where the word-of-mouth industry is now, and shows you how to create a word-of-mouth marketing strategy for your own organization that will help you avoid missteps than can detail your success to build buzz and revenue.