Kohl's has just shy of a million Facebook fans.
Here, we see how Kohl's facilitates interaction with pop television star Lauren Conrad and the Kohls Facebook crowd. The Facebook fan gets to learn all about her exclusive collection at Kohl's. A fan can flip through a design sketchbook, watch a behind-the-scenes video, see television commercials, get tips on how to wear the collection, shop her merchandise line, read her tweets, take a quiz, or view a YouTube video.
I've talked before about how the lines between e-commerce and media will blur. There's no reason that your garden variety e-commerce site couldn't have an online "television or media channel", complete with unique programming and content that surround the e-commerce/retail brand.
So take a peek at what Kohl's is doing, and see if there is something that resonates with your customers!
This stuff makes tracking ROI much harder. You have to figure out incremental sales (no way to do a holdout panel) and justify the costs of content creation.
ReplyDeleteClearly allocation isn't getting any easier. At some point we'll have to agree that perfect allocation isn't possible (like the offline world) and generalized allocation is "good enough." I bet Kohls allocates all the costs to FB and tries to drive an ROI from the entire presence on FB. Right now we're still trying to track individual FB tabs.
I think the future is all about difficult ROI measurement. The web analytics folks will tell you that you can measure anything, and technically, you can. But measurement of a "dynamic system" is very hard, and it is not a linear process. Direct Marketers are in for an adustment!
ReplyDeleteKevin,
ReplyDeleteI think the comments by you and Jay Allen deserve a new post all to themselves. A kohls, a walmart, a macys, etc, all have significant budget for marketing in several different channels, and while I am sure they do their best to track which email, google search word, tweet, text, fb wall comment, or tv ad campaign worked best, the reality is they probably had several channels working in tandem. See the ad on tv, search their website via Iphone, get pointed to the facebook, go back to website, do a google search on product to make sure reviews are good and no one has it significantly cheaper, go back and order it either to your door or pickup at the store if in stock at the one on your way home from work.
There are several examples of the intersecting channels, and the big guys have room to play.
The question is primarily for the limited budgets--where do you put your resources? Mr. Glieber loves free marketing--but there is no such thing--even ann carter had to pay incentives for employees to twitter(and probably more for damage control when an employee tweets inappropriately or worse, disgruntled employee airs the company linen.
As always, your posts, Kevin, like Socrates, always lead to more questions.
K