# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Brief

The Question

Brands spend billions of dollars each year on lavish social media campaigns. But do those campaigns increase revenue?

The Problem

Marketers often confuse cause and consequence. It's possible that getting people to follow a brand on social media makes them buy more-but it's also possible that those who already have positive feelings toward a brand are more likely to follow it in the first place, and that's why they buy more.

The Opportunity

To get the most out of social media efforts, companies must combine "push" and "pull" marketing, supporting likes with branded content.

Brands spend billions of dollars a year on elaborate efforts to establish and maintain a social media presence. Think of the live-streamed video of a man setting a world record by skydiving from 128,000 feet (Red Bull) and the strange tweets sent from a supposedly hacked Twitter account that in fact originated with the company itself (Chipotle).

Facebook is the preferred platform: 80% of Fortune 500 companies have active Facebook pages. Each day enormous amounts of brand-generated content-articles, photos, videos, and so on-appear on those pages and on other social media platforms, all designed to entice people to follow, engage with, and buy from brands. Even the U.S. State Department seems enamored of acquiring followers, having spent $630,000 from 2011 to 2013 to garner Facebook likes.

Marketers often justify these investments by arguing that attracting social media followers and increasing their exposure to a brand will ultimately increase sales. According to this logic, recruits who socially endorse a brand by, for example, liking it on Facebook will spend more money than they otherwise would, and their endorsements will cause their friends (and friends of friends) to shop-creating a cascade of new business. At first glance the evidence seems to support this rationale: Many brands have discovered that customers who interact with them on social media do spend more money than other customers. A recent influential study by comScore and Facebook found that compared with the general population, people who liked Starbucks's Facebook page or who had a Facebook friend who liked the page spent 8% more and transacted 11% more frequently over the course of a month.

But that study and others like it contain a fatal logical flaw: They confuse cause and consequence. It's possible that getting people to follow a brand on social media makes them buy more. But it's also possible that those who already have positive feelings toward a brand are more likely to follow it in the first place, and that's why they spend more than nonfollowers. In 23 experiments conducted over the past four years and involving more than 18,000 people, we used an A/B testing method to explore a crucial counterfactual: what followers would have done had they not followed a brand. Given the millions of dollars in marketing budgets that flow to social media at many companies, the distinction is not trivial. It has enormous implications for marketers' resource allocations and for how they manage their brands' social media presence.

In our experiments, we gradually added complexity to test four increasingly interactive ways in which Facebook might affect customers' behavior. First, we tested whether liking a brand-that is, passively following it-makes people more likely to purchase it. Second, we examined whether people's likes affect their friends' purchasing. Third, we examined whether liking affects things other than purchasing-for example, whether it can persuade people to engage in healthful behaviors. Finally, we tested whether boosting likes by paying Facebook to display branded content in followers' news feeds increases the chances of meaningful behavior change. We chose to use Facebook in our experiments because it is the dominant social network, but we believe that our findings apply to other popular platforms as well.

The results were clear: Social media doesn't work the way many marketers think it does. The mere act of endorsing a brand does not affect a customer's behavior or lead to increased purchasing, nor does it spur purchasing by friends. Supporting endorsements with branded content, however, can have significant results. And given that social media pages are gathering places for loyal customers, they can offer brands a unique source of customer intelligence and feedback from a crucial cohort. Armed with this knowledge, marketers can build new, more successful social media strategies.

Testing the Effects of Likes

Basic psychological principles give reason to suspect that liking a Facebook page could indeed change behavior and increase sales. Research has shown that people experience "cognitive dissonance" when their actions don't reflect their beliefs, so it would stand to reason that a social media user who endorses a brand on Facebook would be more likely to buy it. Yet that's not what we found.

In one of our first studies, conducted by two of us (Leslie John and Oliver Emrich) and our Harvard Business School colleagues Michael Norton and Sunil Gupta, half the participants were invited to like a new cosmetics brand on Facebook; most accepted. The other half did not receive this invitation. All participants were then given coupons for a free sample-redemption would serve as a proxy for purchasing. Members of the two groups were equally likely to redeem the coupon; it didn't matter whether they had been invited to like the Facebook page or not. This finding held in subsequent studies, in which we increased the length of time between proffering the invitation to like and extending the coupon offer; it also held when we ran the experiment with a variety of new and existing brands. Across 16 studies, we found no evidence that following a brand on social media changes people's purchasing behavior.

Marketers often find it hard to prove the ROI of social media investments. Here's an easy way to quantify the value of recruiting people to like your Facebook page.

You'll Need:

A Metric.

What is your goal in acquiring likes? Is it to increase sales, change offline behavior, or accomplish something else? Your metric should reflect behavior that is measurable. For some metrics, such as sales, measurement is pretty straightforward; for others, such as brand attitudes, you may need to do extra work, such as administer a survey.

An Invitation Method.

You need to invite people to like your page. One simple way is to obtain e-mail addresses of people in your target market.

Then Follow These Steps:

Acquire Likes.

Invite half your sample to like your page; this is your "treatment group." The other customers form your control group. Record the group to which each customer is assigned.

Confirm Your Assumptions.

Check to see whether the liking induction worked-you need to make sure that a good chunk of people took you up on the invitation. You can approximate the number by looking at the increase in your Facebook followers at the time you issued the invitation.

Advertise.

Run some advertising on Facebook to expose your new recruits to your marketing messages. You can do this by paying to promote posts.

Check Your Response.

Measure the behavior you defined up front. Say it's sales: If the average spend of those in the treatment group is higher than the spend of those in the control group, the difference is the value of a like. Of course, your results will contain some "noise"; for example, you might miss the purchases of people who check out using an e-mail address that's different from the one you have on file. To increase accuracy, aim for a large sample size and make sure that your e-mail list is as current as possible.

In our second set of experiments, we sought to determine whether liking a page influences the behavior of online friends. When people like a brand on Facebook, their endorsement is typically broadcast to a subset of their network. Any subsequent engagement with the brand-likes, posts, comments, and shares-also appears in some of their friends' news feeds. In classic marketing, word-of-mouth endorsements by peers have been shown to increase sales. But the value of endorsements may be lower on social media, for a couple of reasons. First, on many platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, following does not guarantee brand exposure for either endorsers or their friends. Facebook's algorithms determine what content appears in a user's news feed, and a user's liking of a brand is broadcast to only a very few friends (without this intervention, users would be exposed to an average of 1,500 posts daily). Second, some Facebook users appear to like brands indiscriminately or for various one-off reasons-to get a discount, say.

To test the effects of social media endorsements, we asked 728 people who had recently liked a brand for the e-mail addresses of three friends. We sent each friend a coupon for one of the brand's products, varying the information provided about the referral. In each group, one person was told that his or her friend liked the brand in the conventional, offline sense and had sent the coupon. The second person was told that his or her friend liked the brand on Facebook and had sent the coupon. The third person was told only that his or her friend had sent the coupon; people in this category made up the control group.

We then compared coupon redemption rates among the three categories. We found that 6% of those told about an offline endorsement redeemed the coupon, whereas just 4% of those told about a Facebook like did so. And the redemption rate among the control group was 5%; that is, liking a brand on Facebook had no enhancing effect on the purchasing habits of friends.

The Divide Between Digital and Real-World Behavior

In our final set of experiments, two of us (Daniel Mochon and Janet Schwartz) and Duke University's Dan Ariely partnered with Karen Johnson, an executive at Discovery Vitality. An insurance company based in South Africa, Vitality offers its customers a comprehensive wellness program. People earn points for engaging in healthful behaviors, such as exercising, buying nutritious groceries, going for routine physicals, and getting vaccines; the points can be redeemed for rewards. The company wanted to know whether getting customers to like its Facebook page would affect those behaviors. To find out, we invited all new Vitality customers to participate in an online survey about Vitality and Facebook, during the course of which a randomly selected group was invited to like Vitality on Facebook, with the others forming a control group. We monitored the points accumulated by customers in both groups over the next four months.

By virtue of having liked Vitality, the customers in the first group could engage with the company on its Facebook page-a space in which it invests heavily. The page has innovative branded content, including an app that lets people share their health success stories, ask questions of health experts, and participate in polls about upcoming fitness activities. But unless customers intentionally visit the page, this content is unlikely to appear in their news feeds, even if they have liked the company; Facebook's algorithms will probably filter it out. Therefore, we suspected that Vitality's investment in branded content on its page might be for naught. Indeed, when we compared the two groups of participants, we found no difference in behavior; those who had been invited to like the Facebook page accumulated no more points than the others. Once again, merely liking a page did not change behavior. Put another way, liking a company that offers flu shots does not translate into getting a flu shot.

Unlocking the Power of Likes

The good news is that there is a way to convert likes into meaningful behavior, and it's straight out of the 20th-century marketing playbook: advertising. Each year Facebook collects more than $22 billion in ad revenue. Most of that comes from brands seeking to circumvent the platform's algorithms by paying to guarantee that their content will be prominently displayed to large numbers of users.

A follow-up experiment with Vitality, using the liking and control groups from the first experiment, proved that this approach can be effective. Over a two-month period, Vitality paid Facebook to display two posts a week to members of the liking group. This made a difference: Participants in this group now earned 8% more points, on average, than people in the control group. Considering how challenging it can be to get people to go to the gym, buy healthful food, and undertake other wellness measures, that's a profound result.

What does all this mean for marketers? As social media swelled in popularity over the past 10 years, many predicted a revolution in marketing strategy. It wasn't uncommon to hear about the end of "push marketing" (in which brands promote and advertise their goods and services) and the rise of "pull marketing" (efforts to draw customers in through social media and other channels). "More judo, less karate" became a popular aphorism. But our research suggests that marketing on social media will be ineffective if it uses only pull tactics. The modern social media marketing playbook should combine new and traditional approaches.

Make likes work for you.

Facebook does not currently give companies the option of paying it to highlight the posts of engaged customers, something our research suggests could provide significant value by influencing behavior. Savvy firms could overcome this obstacle by monitoring their social media channels for eloquent endorsements and integrating those endorsements into their marketing messages. The athletic apparel brand Lululemon collects favorable customer-generated content by tracking hashtags (such as #thesweatlife) and retweets it. The fashion retailer Free People adds customers' Instagram photos to its product pages. And in a holiday promotion, Lamar Advertising's billboards displayed photos that people had tagged with #ThankfulThisHoliday. More brands could also adopt the increasingly common practice of "seeding" social endorsements by paying influencers to try the brand and send endorsements to their followers. This tactic has spawned several new platforms, such as ReadyPulse, that automatically match brands with appropriate influencers.

Make endorsements meaningful.

Another reason why liking a brand does not influence online friends is that liking is a very weak endorsement; our research shows that it doesn't carry the same weight as a real-world recommendation. Yet research by MIT's Sinan Aral and colleagues has shown that endorsements, and referrals more generally, can spur action. One experiment demonstrated that people were more likely to download and use an app if a friend recommended it than if they were merely told that their friend had downloaded it. Other experiments indicate that "deeper" social media endorsements could close the effectiveness gap between real-world and digital recommendations. For example, a study found that Facebook posts indicating that a Facebook friend is using a product-not just that he or she likes it-increase the chances that a member will use the product too. The effect is pronounced when product users send their friends personal messages of recommendation. However, encouraging this level of engagement with a brand can be difficult and expensive.

Our research suggests that when it comes to highlighting customers' engagement, brands will find it fruitful to choose online postings and other user-generated content that are more creative and meaningful than simple likes. For example, TripAdvisor informs users browsing a hotel which of their Facebook friends have booked there. In the political realm, a campaign to increase voter turnout found that telling people a friend has voted makes them more likely to vote. A word of caution, though: This tactic can raise privacy issues. Facebook discontinued its social ads-ones showing the profile pictures of friends who like the product at hand-in part because of privacy concerns.

Use "pull" marketing to find your best customers, and listen to them.

One reason Facebook advertising can be effective is that a brand's social media page reaches a highly desirable audience; likes illuminate a path for targeting ads. Yet even if a brand decides not to spend money advertising, it can use its social media channels to gain intelligence from its most loyal customers. This need not entail recruiting new followers through flashy content and other lures; in fact, such tactics might backfire by attracting people who are not strongly attached to the brand. Companies pursuing this option should favor organic growth, letting customers seek out the brand. Almost by definition, the people who go to the trouble of finding a brand on social media will be its most devoted, and thus most valuable, customers. As a group, these customers are a great asset: They will enthusiastically provide feedback to improve product development, management, and delivery; defend the brand against unjustified complaints; and be early adopters of and evangelists for new offerings.

For example, Lego uses its social media channels to gather customers' ideas for new products and to tout new product lines. MyMuesli, a German maker of customizable granola, asked customers to publish images of their own granola mixes on Instagram and subsequently sold some of the customer-created products through its website. The Dutch airline KLM clearly uses its Twitter account as a customer feedback tool; in addition to responding to customers' tweets, the airline shows that it is listening by prominently posting its estimated response time in its Twitter header (and updating it every five minutes). Knowing that their voices will be heard can make customers more willing to offer information and might even cause them to be more civil when they (inevitably) have complaints.

CONCLUSION

As social media has grown as a marketing channel, so too has enthusiasm for its potential to drive sales. Yet a recent survey of 427 marketers at U.S. companies showed that 80% are unable to quantify the value of their social media efforts. And in a study of Fortune 500 companies, 87% of CMOs acknowledged that they can't document that social media creates new customers. Our research helps explain why marketers are frustrated by social media-they are using it the wrong way. Amplifying efforts with advertising can provide higher returns on investment while creating an opportunity to connect with the most-loyal customers.

A version of this article appeared in the March-April 2017 issue (pp.108-115) of Harvard Business Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Brief The Question Brands spend billions of dollars each year on lavish social media campaigns. But do those campaigns increase revenue? The Problem Marketers often confuse cause and consequence.

# data[].attributes.headline
What Trump Understands About Using Social Media to Drive Attention

# data[].attributes.subject
What Trump Understands About Using Social Media to Drive Attention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Throughout the recent U.S. presidential campaign, commentators of all political stripes urged Donald Trump to give his Twitter account a rest. He ignored them, bypassing mainstream media in favor of a technology that continued to deliver his provocative messages directly, frequently, at all hours, and without filters. While no hard proof exists that his tweets put him over the top in the election, they undeniably riveted the attention of a broad public, media included - and continue to do so. Here's what business leaders can learn from the tweeter-in-chief about trying to win over large segments of consumers through social media.

"Big-seed" marketing beats viral. Duncan Watts, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has been studying the sociology of networks for decades. His notion of big-seed marketing suggests that a message can spread faster and more systematically if it is "seeded" among many people. That differs sharply from the viral approach, which attempts to create an "epidemic" of interest through a few targeted influencers, who spread a message among the people to whom they are connected. If those connections fail to pass on the message, it soon peters out. Big-seed marketing is more reliable than designing content that mimics the qualities of cat videos in the hope of going viral. Companies like BuzzFeed have used the big-seed model to create successful news websites and advertising businesses.

Trump exploited Watts's theory at scale. He began with an enormous seedbed: Just before Election Day he had more than 19 million Twitter followers, 18 million Facebook fans, and nearly 5 million followers on Instagram. The broadcast and cable networks - almost unwittingly - amplified Trump's network capabilities. Every time they reported on a tweet or posting, they effectively seeded the message among millions of viewers, many of whom, in turn, shared these messages. This offline/online complementarity helped Trump double his Twitter following during the campaign. Social and broadcast media work hand in hand, and Trump understood this better than his rivals, gaining by some estimates almost $2 billion in free air time through March 2016.

The takeaway for business leaders is obvious: Study the principles of big-seed marketing and apply them by seeding your messages among as many contact points as possible.

You can't gain the benefits of scale unless you have attention-grabbing content. Traditional media would not have been so complicit if Trump's tweets hadn't been so provocative as to be irresistible. His tweets call out specific individuals and demand a response. What is remarkable is that he engages in these personal confrontations in front of a mass audience - for example, with actress Meryl Streep, with the CEO of Ford, and with a local union leader at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis. Those on the receiving end quickly learn that the bigger their brand, the more it comes into the crosshairs, and, sometimes, the harder it falls (though being on the receiving end can also be of great benefit, as the New York Times and Nordstrom can attest).

Trump's tweets are provocative because they strike raw nerves, speaking boldly to themes that people struggle to work through: race, nationalism versus globalism, financial insecurity, status inequity, sexism, and more. Fans cheer him on by retweeting and favoring his messages, while his enemies hope to get under his skin through their posts and replies. Trump uses tweets to seek cultural resonance, today's branding nirvana, and he finds it. He understands that while he is an author of brand meaning, branding is a joint activity - a coproduction on a cultural stage.

Twitter's 140-character limit provokes by encouraging messages that are ripe for misquoting. Within these constraints, Trump doesn't have to explain details or elaborate on context, and this allows multiple interpretations of the message. The format invites controversy, encouraging media pickup and growing the audience in kind.

Leaders should consider how they could make their messages provocative in order to draw attention and encourage discussion far beyond the social media platforms on which the message was originally posted. Deciding how far to go, though, means carefully weighing the risks against the rewards (discussed below).

The raw presentation of self creates a personal relationship. Unlike former president Barack Obama, who primarily used social media to mobilize supporters en masse, Trump uses Twitter to address his audience directly as individuals. Trump's tweets are unfiltered, spontaneous, and reveal his personal feelings and emotions about everything from the media to L.L. Bean, creating the impression that a relationship is in play. Like or hate the approach, people believe they know the real Trump. This seemingly person-to-person disclosure of the man, warts and all, grants coveted authenticity and a stronger base of influence (and backlash) than mass communication ever could.

The lesson for business leaders? Authenticity matters. It is the secret ingredient that converts one-to-many messages to one-to-one relationships, with outsize benefits for the brand.

Weigh the risks against the returns. Going directly to the public with an authentic voice is cost-effective. Trump's use of Twitter gained him enormous traction at a fraction of what his rivals spent to spread their messages. During the Republican nominating contests Trump vanquished 16 opponents while spending virtually no money on ads. On television advertising, for example, he spent about $2 per vote he won in the primaries, a fraction of Chris Christie's $257 per vote (the highest among Republicans), Lindsey Graham's $247 per vote, and Jeb Bush's $241. In the general election Hillary Clinton outspent Trump almost three to one on television advertising - $211.4 million and $74 million, respectively, through October 2016. And although Trump did increase his ad spending in the closing weeks of the campaign, much of it went to social media.

But this accounting exercise fails to acknowledge that the strategy bears major risks. Messages that gain traction work through the power of provocation. They polarize, alienate, and enflame. They push the limits and make people uncomfortable. They come from communicators who are simply not afraid to be wrong. The question for business leaders who might consider borrowing some of that strategy is: How provocative are you willing to be?

No one has leveraged big-seed marketing and the virtuous circle of online and offline media to become president before. But there have been other notable success stories: Richard Branson has 9.2 million Twitter followers. Mark Cuban, who sold an unprofitable web site to Yahoo, in 1999 for $5.7 billion, bought the Dallas Mavericks, stars on Shark Tank, and now claims 6.1 million Twitter followers. The mother of all celebrity executives is probably Kim Kardashian. She has translated her 49.5 million followers, fed by an enormously popular television show, into a $300 million business empire.

All of these now household names have been provocative in their own way, but no one has dialed it up as far as Trump. Perhaps the closest analogue to Trump in the business world is John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, who from his position as underdog has regularly inflamed the competition (and has even gone head to head with Trump himself) in order to build his brand.

Most CEOs seem to wisely prefer the relatively safe approach of developing intimacy through personal disclosure rather than provocation to build audience. CEOs who can speak in an authentic voice, one that feels honest and personal, are most likely to connect with the audience. Consider Box's CEO, Aaron Levie, providing revelatory commentary on Trump's tweets, Richard Branson posting poems he wrote for his first girlfriend, Tim Cook recommending the new One Republic album, or Oprah Winfrey confessing her love for the Chicago Cubs during the World Series. That is why CEOs' individual Twitter accounts get significantly more engagement on social media than corporate or brand accounts do.

Extreme provocation may be advisable only when the CEO has nothing to lose, which was was true for both Trump as a long-shot candidate during the election and Legere as third fiddle in the cellular world. As Trump's presidency gets under way the implications of his strategy are at best unclear and remain largely untested in the business context. But as 2016 has proven, we're truly in a new branding world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Trump Understands About Using Social Media to Drive Attention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Throughout the recent U.S. presidential campaign, commentators of all political stripes urged Donald Trump to give his Twitter account a rest. He ignored them, bypassing mainstream media in favor of a technology that continued to deliver his provocative messages directly, frequently, at all hours, and without filters.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Targeted Marketing Can Improve Your Brand's Efficiency

# data[].attributes.subject
How Targeted Marketing Can Improve Your Brand's Efficiency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
3 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

When trying to connect customers to your brand, you simply can't make everyone happy. It's bad marketing to even try.

By its very nature, marketing is all about targeting the right customer for your product, and then creating a brand that they can specifically buy and buy into. The notion of a "right customer" inherently means that there's also a customer who's "not right."

In its most simple form, it's called targeting.

Target the right customers with the right message at the right time, and you just might have a shot at engaging them. But, if you do it correctly, you won't engage those who don't care or agree with the message. And that's ok.

It's called targeting.

Which is why, in our current socio-political environment, I think it's perfectly fine for a brand to comment on an issue and take sides . . . assuming of course that it makes some sort of sense from a brand perspective. By taking a stand, the brand is effectively speaking to its core customers with a message that resonates with them because they share the same views on the issue. Those who don't they may very well choose another brand.

It's called targeting.

It would be very difficult for a brand to take both sides of an argument, so brands must either choose one side, make a neutral statement or remain silent. No brand can be everything for everybody.

So, how do you stick to the right brand message to the right target audience, particularly in these roller-coaster news cycles?

First, figure out what your brand is all about. Make sure you have a clear definition of what your brand offers and what it stands for. Outline your key benefits, both functionally and emotionally, and flesh out the values you want to project to your customers. Know thyself first, and then you can go to market.

Next, determine who is best suited for your brand. Who can you please the most? If you know what your brand delivers, then determine who best benefits from your offering. Determine the best fit, from a customer perspective, so that you can specifically target those who you think will adopt your brand the most easily.

Then, develop a marketing plan and a message track that will connect your brand with your target.With brand and customer fully defined, you can outline your message and contact points where you will engage with your customers on their terms with your product and brand benefits. Plan for the year, recognizing that you may change your messaging and touchpoints as the year goes by.

Above all else, the entire process should begin and end with having a deep understanding of your target audience. It's important to know how they live their lives and what's important to them. Without a deep knowledge of your customers, you can't possibly figure out how your brand will improve their lives. That learning process is never complete because your customers' lives change all the time.

Let your brand develop and change in a similarly way, and realize you can't be everything for everyone on the planet.

It's called targeting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Targeted Marketing Can Improve Your Brand's Efficiency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
3 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. When trying to connect customers to your brand, you simply can't make everyone happy. It's bad marketing to even try. By its very nature, marketing is all about targeting the right customer for your product, and then creating a brand that they can specifically buy and buy into.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Targeted Marketing Can Improve Your Brand's Efficiency

# data[].attributes.subject
How Targeted Marketing Can Improve Your Brand's Efficiency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
IN THE the heart of old Shanghai is a magnificent villa that serves as the workplace of Guo Jingming, a provocative young film-maker. "Tiny Times", his recent blockbuster, follows the travails of some fashionable college girls (pictured, in the walk-in closet of one of them). Its depictions of the high life, rarely shown in Chinese films, have set social networks ablaze; they have also been attacked by the People's Daily for "unconditional hedonism". Mr Guo says: "So what? Materialism is neutral, neither positive nor negative." After all, he goes on, China's cosmopolitans know at any given moment what movies are playing in New York and what fashions are on the Paris runways.

China's once-drab and Mao-suited interior is not so far behind. In Mianyang, a middling city in the province of Sichuan, an enormous billboard featuring Miranda Kerr, an Australian supermodel, draped in Swarovski crystals welcomes shoppers to the Parkson shopping mall. It is one of half a dozen high-end malls in town. Luxury sales are exploding there. Local Audi and BMW dealers sell more than 100 cars each a month; Land Rover, Jaguar and Cadillac have just muscled in on the market.
Get our daily newsletter
Thirty kilometres (20 miles) away in Luxi, a town of 57,000 people, online shopping is hot. The first express-delivery office opened only three years ago, and handled perhaps ten packages a day; today, there are five, each handling 100 packages a day. Even 60km away, in rural Santai county where farm-workers are the customers, one modern shopping mall has sprung up and another is being built. "Customers are evolving very quickly from the low-end market to the middle and high-end," says Yang Shuiying, proud general manager of the Zizhou shopping centre.

In the 1950s and 1960s the world economy was transformed by the emergence of the American consumer. Now China seems poised to become the next consumption superpower. In all likelihood, it has just overtaken Japan to become the world's second-biggest consumer economy. Its roughly $3.3 trillion in private consumption is about 8% of the world total, and it has only just begun.

"The future of the world will be profoundly shaped by China's rush toward consumerism," says Karl Gerth, an expert on Chinese consumption at the University of California, San Diego. Although investment made the biggest contribution to China's growth last year, and although private consumption's share of output, now at 36%, fell between 2000 and 2010, that trend is unlikely to last, for several reasons.

First, boosting the people's desire to consume is a stated goal of China's leaders. Higher government spending on health care and pensions may encourage households to save less for such things. Higher interest rates may, paradoxically, discourage thrift if people reach their savings goals faster. Rising wages and an ageing population will also shift the balance towards consumption rather than saving. And although household debt is growing fast, China still has relatively little.

Besides, consumption has not fallen in absolute terms. It has, in fact, grown briskly-just not quite as quickly as the economy overall. In dollar terms, China contributed more than any other country to the growth in global consumption in 2011-13, according to Andy Rothman of CLSA, a broker. Moreover, China's official statistics understate some consumption-spending on housing, for example.

A massive push to urbanise is also under way, which should produce tens of millions of richer citizens seeking retail therapy. McKinsey, a consultancy, forecasts that consumption by urban Chinese households will increase from 10 trillion yuan in 2012 to nearly 27 trillion yuan in 2022 (see chart 1).

Fickle sophisticates

How much China spends is striking. Even more so is the way it spends. This is now one of the world's most sophisticated consumer markets, heavily skewed towards expensive goods. Local property barons are now building half the world's new shopping malls in China, many of them in smaller cities, because even punters without big incomes are becoming big shoppers. Research by IDEO, a consultancy, has found that many young migrant workers earning less than 5,000 yuan ($830) a month will spend a month's wages on an Apple iPhone.

That points to another difference from previous consumption booms elsewhere: with the world's largest e-commerce market at their fingertips, Chinese shoppers are online from the start. As a result, what was once a foreign marketers' fantasyland is now the world's fiercest battleground for brands.

Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm, calls the Chinese "increasingly aspirational and conspicuous consumers" who routinely trade up to fancier labels even on staples. Newly middle-class types in cities in the interior are keen to try out new products, especially the ones they have seen on foreign television shows. Jeff Walters of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) points out that even country bumpkins are consuming global media, thanks to the wild popularity of local online-video services. Chinese consumers, he says, were watching the latest season of "Downton Abbey" on Youku, a video-sharing website, well before it was released in America.

This passion for fashion is, in theory, good news for multinational marketers. Unlike, say, Japan, where consumers heavily favour local brands, Chinese consumers hold foreign brands in high esteem. Torsten Stocker of AT Kearney, a consultancy, observes that foreign brands are doing well in sectors they introduced to China (chewing gum, chocolate); those that have "heritage" appeal (premium cars, luxury goods) and those where local brands are not trusted, such as powdered baby milk. The world's fast-food and consumer-goods giants-Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, General Mills and so on-are also big in China, but they are increasingly dogged by local rivals. A recent study by Bain, another consultancy, found that although foreign brands still lead in some areas (biscuits, fabric-softener, bottled water), local brands are surging in others (toothpaste, cosmetics, juice).

Brand-hopping, though, is rife. Having grown up with radical economic change, Chinese shoppers are "very fickle, and hard to pin down to a strong brand loyalty", says Mintel, a market-research firm. Yuval Atsmon of McKinsey reckons that brand-switching-between Pepsi and Coke, Colgate and Crest, KFC and McDonald's-is common, "much more so than in most markets". Swarovski, the crystal-maker, has discovered that over three-quarters of Chinese customers are eager to try new brands, a far higher figure than elsewhere. A recent study by Bain found that the top five brands in ten categories lost 30-60% of their customers between 2011 and 2012.

This creates several problems. With two or three times as many brands on shelves as found in other countries, competition is ferocious. This makes advertising and marketing vital-but the cost of publicity is soaring. Also, firms that thought they enjoyed a "first-mover advantage" have discovered that their brands are now seen as stodgy or old-fashioned. Olay, a cosmetics brand, defined skin care in China for a generation-but Carol Potter of BBDO, an advertising agency, reckons that "the new generation thinks it's a brand from yesterday." She adds that whereas Louis Vuitton once symbolised good and expensive taste in China, a new generation is seeking different, subtler luxuries.

The empty suitcase

Another complication for marketers is that many Chinese shoppers have a global outlook. When previous middle classes rose to prominence in America and Japan, the internet did not exist. People could not Google the latest European fashions or check discounts on Amazon. The arrival of cheap air travel has also made the Chinese more discerning shoppers. Mr Stocker argues that these factors have "compressed the discovery process", which in Japan took 30 years, to less than ten.

The Chinese are already the world's biggest shoppers abroad, but a report released on January 20th by CLSA forecasts that the number of outbound Chinese tourists will double to 200m a year by 2020 and that their spending will triple over that time. James Button of SmithStreet, a consultancy, reports a well established piece of etiquette: "You must let friends know when you are going overseas," and take along an empty suitcase.

Many Chinese also use online shopping agents, who aggregate requests and bring back foreign goods. Sales by overseas purchase agents came to nearly 50 billion yuan in 2012, a leap of more than 80% on the year earlier; they jumped by half again last year to 74.4. billion yuan. Foreign websites, including Amazon, now offer direct delivery to China for certain products, and local e-commerce giants such as Alibaba run cross-border services.

Buying overseas saves money, since mark-ups and hefty taxes are the rule in China. Many ordinary folk travel not just to Hong Kong, the most convenient spot, but to Jeju Island in South Korea (where they can visit without a visa and shop duty-free) to stock up on cosmetics that cost much more at home. Price, though, is not the only motivation. Another is to avoid the counterfeit goods so common on the mainland. Even more important, consumers say, are the variety and freshness of the products available overseas.

Nowhere is this wide-ranging urge to spend more obvious than in the market for luxury goods. Globally the Chinese are the biggest buyers of expensive items, accounting for some 29% of purchases last year (see chart 2). Some two-thirds of Chinese spending on luxury goods takes place outside the mainland; a fifth of it in Europe. (Harrods of London has seen sales to Chinese shoppers, its largest foreign contingent, increase by 50% a year since 2011.) Consistently favoured brands include Lancôme, Gucci, Audi, Rolex and Tiffany.

The Chinese are also the world's largest consumers of Bordeaux wine and cognac, though sales (like those of Moutai, a local grain alcohol) have fallen in the wake of official campaigns against gift-giving (see article). At Berry Bros & Rudd's bonded wine warehouse in Basingstoke, in southern England, where 4.5m expensive bottles are stored, more than 1m of those are owned by oenophiles from greater China. No longer, says the firm's chairman, should the Chinese be pictured ruining fine wine by pouring Coca-Cola into it.

Although a government crackdown on corruption has crimped mainland sales, and some luxury firms slowed down the rollout of new boutiques there last year, Coach, Prada and Bottega Veneta continued to expand. Apple expanded too; it now has more stores in Shanghai than in San Francisco, and launches new iPhones in Beijing when it does in California. Mr Button of SmithStreet thinks brands offering affordable luxury-Michael Kors and Kate Spade, say-can capture both the upwardly mobile and the "post-luxury" elites in the cities, who want less flashy brands.

In the past, the Chinese showed little interest in Western art. That is starting to change, and may change quicker with the opening of a new museum of Western art in Shanghai. The richest man in China has just paid $28m for a Picasso, though he was condemned as "unpatriotic" on Sina Weibo. Ms Potter also observes that two-thirds of affluent consumers are keen to know the history and cultural background of foreign brands. So they love to buy Piaget watches in Geneva and Zegna suits in Milan, but reject unconventional offerings such as German watches or Japanese leather bags.

It is not only in luxury goods that Chinese shoppers are leading the way. China has become the world's biggest e-commerce market, with spending forecast to reach $540 billion next year. On Singles Day, an annual online-marketing extravaganza held on November 11th, 400m Chinese spent $5.7 billion just on Tmall, an e-commerce platform run by Alibaba; Americans, on their Cyber Monday a few weeks later, spent only about $2 billion. China is the world's biggest maker and consumer of smartphones, and will soon be the largest "mobile-commerce" market, too.

Perhaps because they distrust official information, the Chinese rely heavily on peer reviews. Research by BCG has shown that they write, and act on, online reviews of products and services far more than Westerners do. A recent study of purchases of moisturiser found that two-thirds of Chinese buyers relied on online recommendations by friends or family; the comparable figure in America was less than 40%. Millions of online shoppers follow the thoughts of Miumiu and Viviandan, leggy twins from industrial Chongqing, who started posting pictures of themselves in the latest fashions, with wry observations on trends and prices, a decade ago. Even now they post recommendations nearly every day on social-media sites such as Instagram, or on Weibo. Their likes and dislikes make or break products.

Online shoppers in the remotest parts of China often know a great deal about a global brand's attributes and pricing worldwide-which can put marketers on the back foot. Chinese consumers are no longer willing to pay a hefty premium for any old foreign brand. As they grow more discerning, multinationals are having to work harder to prove their worth-and are having to defend their brands on China's wild social media. But creative approaches can pay off.

When VF Corporation, a large American clothing firm, wanted to promote The North Face, a brand of outdoor clothing, in China, it struggled. Whereas climbers and hikers in the West relish the thought of conquering mountains alone, the Chinese generally think of outings in Nature as a spiritual escape, to be enjoyed with friends. So the firm created an online community linking amateurs to clubs devoted to outdoor pursuits. The website offers points for activity and loyalty that can be redeemed for products. Sales are soaring, and VF now has a detailed database of over half a million keen customers.

The online awareness of Chinese customers has big global implications. According to Andrew Keith, the president of Lane Crawford, cosmopolitan Chinese consumers are now setting the agenda: "We are not teaching them, they are teaching us." (He should know; his Hong Kong department store has half a dozen shops in greater China, 650,000 high-spending customers and, in the new Shanghai store, private suites for "Platinum VIPs" who spend 60,000 yuan or more a year.) Alexis Perakis-Valat, head of L'Oréal's China business, agrees. He believes that the Chinese market, unlike those in Western countries, is driven by young urban consumers who are demanding something new and have no taboos. He points to peculiar and distinctive products developed for this niche in China, such as a black-foam face-scrub for men, which are now being launched around the world.

He's come a long way

We're all Chinese now

Another sign of such innovation is the reinvention of Johnnie Walker, a mass-market whisky brand belonging to Diageo, the world's biggest spirits firm, as a luxury brand in China. Keen to win over sceptical consumers more accustomed to baijiu (a local firewater), the firm opened Johnnie Walker House in Shanghai almost three years ago. For around 800,000 yuan, or $132,000, the company's master blender (with the delicious surname of Beveridge) will fly in and brew a special batch of Johnnie Walker precisely matched to a customer's tastes. Certain rare blends, including some bearing the marks of the Chinese zodiac, are sold only at this venue.

This effort has helped Diageo introduce its whiskies to thousands of affluent customers, who in turn have pushed the firm towards new inventions-such as blends with a much higher alcohol content-which helped its whisky revenues grow twice as fast as the industry average. The concept has been such a success that the company has opened new Houses in Beijing and Seoul, and plans others. When Diageo unveiled Odyssey, a special-edition blend, in 2012, it kicked off the global launch not in London or New York but in Shanghai.

Life was simpler for foreign brands when they first came to China, reflects David Roth of The Store, an advertising agency: "It was a land grab...you just had to create awareness as quickly as possible." Now the Western invaders must not only cater to the world's most demanding shoppers, but also cope with increasing home-grown competition. Chinese firms are starting to catch up with their fancier foreign rivals. Some even aspire to become global brands.

Huawei, a telecoms-equipment giant, is making a big push into branded consumer electronics. "We have it easier than Samsung did," says Colin Giles, chief marketing officer for its consumer business, because Korean firms paved the way for global acceptance of Chinese brands. Xiaomi, a startup smartphone manufacturer in Beijing, has developed a hugely popular phone-and-app system inspired as much by Amazon as by Apple. It could become China's first global innovation powerhouse.

Leading the local pack is Lenovo, an electronics firm that previously bought IBM's personal-computer business (and on January 23rd agreed to buy its low-end server business, too). When it launched its latest Yoga tablet last year it chose Ashton Kutcher, a Hollywood star who had played Steve Jobs in a film, as its spokesman. David Roman, Lenovo's chief marketing officer, says that even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to do a global product launch in China with a single tagline, unified advertising content and a Western spokesman. But now he thinks there is "a global consuming class", with more in common across borders than within.

That sums up the rise of China nicely. Future consumer markets everywhere are going to look more Chinese. They will increasingly be cosmopolitan, luxury-minded and online. Firms that can flourish in China are not only winning today's toughest market, but are also positioning themselves for tomorrow's.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
IN THE the heart of old Shanghai is a magnificent villa that serves as the workplace of Guo Jingming, a provocative young film-maker. "Tiny Times", his recent blockbuster, follows the travails of some fashionable college girls (pictured, in the walk-in closet of one of them).

# data[].attributes.headline
Five things great brands will do differently on social media in 2016

# data[].attributes.subject
Five things great brands will do differently on social media in 2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Social channels have become walled gardens, offering meaningful mobile reach and relative safety from fraud and adblockers. Ironically there's never been a better time to invest in them, not because of some new promise of engagement and conversation, but because they're starting to deliver on traditional media and marketing objectives. There are however still plenty of ways to completely waste your time and money on social media marketing, and no reason at all why every brand should "have" to use it.

Last year was great for social but it's always good to have some perspective. Facebook's recent $4.5bn (£3.1bn) earnings are hugely impressive but also suggest that overall social investment is still only around 1% of total media spends ($611bn globally). If there's any doubt of the continual appeal of traditional media then look no further than the US Super Bowl - any advertiser could have shifted their budget from a single 30 second commercial and instead driven around 80m views on YouTube, enough to make them the most viewed video of the year. Clearly many advertisers were happy to keep their budgets on TV.

In short, there's a long way to go before social channels truly dominate media plans as much as they monopolise marketing headlines. Here, however, are five things great brands will do differently in 2016 (on top of the ones they started doing in 2015).

1. Put their money where their mouth is

However great your content is, if it doesn't reach people it can't possibly impact them. Brands must either accept that these channels are a serious part of your media mix (building incremental reach over other media) and put mainstream investment behind them, or quit wasting their time. An alarmingly high number are trapped in this halfway house of investing in producing content but not being committed enough to truly put scale behind it. Plan investment based on how many potential consumers you'd realistically need to reach to drive business results, not how many fans you have. And don't produce any content you won't have the media budget to support.

2. More video, less often

It costs a lot to reach large numbers of people more than a couple of times a month, and like in traditional media you can also show the same piece of creative more than once before it "wears out". Producing just one or two great posts a month removes the need to churn out thoughts of the day and reactive nonsense, and allows you to focus resources on producing something genuinely memorable. Video offers a huge opportunity to tell richer stories or even just to better stand out with gentle animation. With more time to shape it (and new sources such as super-users, crowdsourcing and media partnerships) there's no reason why brands cannot make all their content video in 2016.

3. Think about real people

Although these channels offer mass broadcast opportunities, they're also hugely personal spaces where a generic message can feel out of place. Thinking about real people and not just pixels or numbers doesn't mean you cannot have huge scale, but it means you can explore personalisation and targeting within that - subtly different executions served to different people based on interests, posts or even sentiments. Managing how people see your content across related platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, or perhaps one day Google and Twitter through their integrations, starts to give you real control of your marketing - allowing you to stop wasting money by reaching someone in too many places (frequency capping) or even to tell a continual story across channels. The social platforms themselves have even started using real people to curate content instead of just algorithms such as Twitter's Moments and Snapchat's Live Stories.

4. Send a message

Four of the world's six largest social platforms are messaging apps, and their growth is only accelerating, but few marketers are yet to make use of them. In western markets it's hard to blame them, as few scalable opportunities exist, but platforms such as WeChat and Line, in China and Japan respectively, give a glimpse of what's to come when these platforms open up. Branded stickers and promoted conversations only scratch the surface of a world where commercial transactions (from airplane tickets to clothes shopping to taxi booking) can take place directly through the app. By the end of 2016 the capabilities of messaging apps, and in turn the transformational opportunities they present to marketers, will be unrecognisable. Global brands don't have to sit back and wait either, the clever ones are already experimenting on Asian platforms.

5. Innovate through brilliant basics

There are plenty of shiny temptations in social media marketing, from immersive ad units, through 360-degree videos, to the latest and greatest betas. Some of these will one day turn into powerful platforms but their early adoption can often be innovation for innovation's sake - have you ever tried telling a story in 360, where people can accidentally look the wrong way the entire time?

The most impactful innovations of the past couple of years come from looking again at the basic tools these platforms offer. Cinemagraphs are a basic video technique that has existed for many years, but when you realise that Facebook's autoplaying video feed can show a few seconds of one to a person for the same price as a static image they're a no brainer. Brands and their agencies are always keen to be part of the next big thing, but chances are that might be right in front of you. The biggest innovations social media still needs are improvement in the quality of content, and sophistication of media planning. Brilliant basics.
To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, All Guardian Media & Tech Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled 'Advertisement feature'. Find out more .sign up free for Media & Tech Network membership Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Five things great brands will do differently on social media in 2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Social channels have become walled gardens, offering meaningful mobile reach and relative safety from fraud and adblockers. Ironically there's never been a better time to invest in them, not because of some new promise of engagement and conversation, but because they're starting to deliver on traditional media and marketing objectives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
All brands have a clear idea of their audience: identifying, understanding and segmenting customers underpins every marketing strategy. But how much effort is spent uncovering a brand's ideal target context - the times, places and moments when a message will resonate best? Far less.

Is this a mistake? Psychological research into the fundamental attribution error suggests so. The fundamental attribution error refers to the widespread, but mistaken, belief that people's character is more important in explaining their behaviour than the context of their decision.

What's the evidence?

One of the original experiments (pdf) into the fundamental attribution error was conducted by Princeton psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson, who devised a rather mischievous test to determine the impact of character versus context.

First, they assessed the personalities of 40 theology students by asking about their motivation to study - personal salvation, or to help others? They then asked each student to deliver a sermon in a nearby church. This was when the researchers introduced a situational variable.

Brands should focus as much on target contexts as they do target audiences

Just as the students headed off to preach, half were told they were running late; the other half that they had plenty of time to reach the venue. Here's the next twist. Darley and Batson had positioned, en route to the church, a plant - a man in need of help, claiming to have fallen. The final step was to record which students stopped to help the suffering man.

The results are not what you may have predicted. Despite there being two distinct personality types - either selfish or altruistic - this type was found to have no noticeable effect on whether participants stopped to help the man. The biggest determinant was simply how much of a rush they were in. This seemingly small variation had a tremendous impact: only 10% of those who were late stopped, compared with 63% of those who had plenty of time.

However, when the psychologists told another group about the experiment and asked them to judge what the biggest influence on behaviour would be, most respondents picked personality.

Why do we underestimate context as a driver of behaviour? Perhaps because it boosts our self-image: it appeals to our ego to believe that we are paragons of rationality. Who wants to admit to being at the whim of external forces?

Intriguingly, this opens up an opportunity for businesses. If most people place too little weight on context then it leaves an underexploited opportunity for a contrarian brand.

How can marketers apply these findings?

So what can marketers do? The most important learning is that situational or contextual factors are often more important than personality in determining behaviour. This undermines one of advertising's most deeply held beliefs: that brands must identify and then focus their communications on a core target audience. The experiment suggests that brands should focus as much on target contexts as they do target audiences.

Brands are increasingly identifying the right target context for their message. The creator of Snickers chocolate bars, for example, recently began targeting its ads by mood, believing that people who are happy, bored or stressed are more likely to snack. It identified these moods by mining information captured by Google's ad server, DoubleClick. However, mood targeting has application beyond just identifying snacking moments.

Identifying relevant contexts

The final consideration is: which context should a specific brand should focus on? This is not straightforward, as a twist in the experiment demonstrates.

Darley and Batson told half the participants to give a sermon on their job prospects. The other half talked about the parable of the good Samaritan. It's hard to think of a topic better designed to encourage people to help a stranger than this - but the sermon topic made no difference to the likelihood of a student helping.

So while it is critical for brands to reach their customers in the right target context, identifying that context is not a matter of intuition. Brands need to test, rather than assume, which context their message will be best received in: whether that's when customers are in a good mood or a foul one; distracted or attentive; in public or in private.

Brands that prioritise context will have a significant advantage over those that fall for the fundamental attribution error.
Richard Shotton is the head of insight at Zenith To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, All Guardian Media & Tech Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled "Paid for by" - find out more .sign up free for Media & Tech Network membership
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All brands have a clear idea of their audience: identifying, understanding and segmenting customers underpins every marketing strategy. But how much effort is spent uncovering a brand's ideal target context - the times, places and moments when a message will resonate best? Far less. Is this a mistake?

# data[].attributes.headline
What creativity in marketing looks like today

# data[].attributes.subject
What creativity in marketing looks like today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What makes marketing creative? Is it more imagination or innovation? Is a creative marketer more artist or entrepreneur? Historically, the term "marketing creative" has been associated with the words and pictures that go into ad campaigns. But marketing, like other corporate functions, has become more complex and rigorous. Marketers need to master data analytics, customer experience, and product design. Do these changing roles require a new way of thinking about creativity in marketing?

To explore this question, we interviewed senior marketing executives across dozens of top brands. We asked them for examples of creativity in marketing that go beyond ad campaigns and deliver tangible value to the business. Their stories - and the five wider trends they reflect - help illustrate what it means to be a creative marketer today.

1. Create with the customer, not just for the customer

Everyone likes to talk about being "customer-centric." But too often this means taking better aim with targeted campaigns. Customers today are not just consumers; they are also creators, developing content and ideas - and encountering challenges - right along with you. Creativity in marketing requires working with customers right from the start to weave their experiences with your efforts to expand your company's reach.

For example, Intuit's marketing team spends time with self-employed people in their homes and offices to immerse themselves in the customer's world. Through this research, they identified a pain point of tracking vehicle gas mileage. Based on these marketing insights, Intuit createda new feature within its app that combines location data, Google maps, and the user's calendar to automatically track mileage and simplify year-end tax planning.

Brocade, a data and network solutions provider, created a "customer first" program by identifying their top 200 customers, who account for 80% of their sales. They worked with these customers to understand their sources of satisfaction and identify areas of strengths and weakness. Brocade then worked with sales teams to create and deliver customized packages outlining what Brocade heard is working or not working, and what they would do about those findings. Later, Brocade followed up with these customers to report on progress against these objectives. The results? Brocade's Net Promoter Score went from 50 (already a best in class score) to 62 (one of the highest B2B scores on record) within 18 months.

2. Invest in the end-to-end experience

Every marketer believes the customer experience is important. But most marketers only focus on the parts of that experience under their direct control. Creative marketers take a broader view and pay attention to the entire customer experience from end to end. This includes the product, the buying process, the ability to provide support, and customer relationships over time. That takes time and resources - and it also requires bringing creative thinking to unfamiliar problems.

Kaiser Permanente believes that as health care becomes more consumer-oriented, the digital experience becomes a key differentiator. The marketing team instituted a welcome program to help improve the experience for new plan members. Members are guided on how to register for an online member portal, which provides access to email your doctor, refill prescriptions, make appointments, and more. The welcome program required coordination with many areas of the business. As a result of this program, about 60% of new members register within the first six months. These members are 2.6 times more likely to stay with Kaiser Permanente two years later.

Like many retailers, Macy's has traditionally spent 85% of its marketing budget on driving sales. Each outbound communication is measured individually for immediate ROI. However, recently they began to take a more holistic approach, focusing on lifetime value and their most profitable segment, the "fashionable spender." This group looks across the business to gather behind-the-scenes information on the runway, newest clothing lines, and aspirational fashion content. The metrics also changed. Macy's started evaluating engagement per customer across time and platform instead of per marketing message per day. The results? In the last year, customers in the top decile segment increased digital engagement by 15%, cross shopping by 11% and sales by 8%.

3. Turn everyone into an advocate

In a fragmented media and social landscape, marketers can no longer reach their goals for awareness and reputation just through paid media and PR. People are the new channel. The way to amplify impact is by inspiring creativity in others. Treat everyone as an extension of your marketing team: employees, partners, and even customers.

Plum Organics gives each employee business cards with coupons attached. While shopping, all employees are encouraged to observe consumers shopping the baby category. When appropriate, they ask a few questions about shoppers' baby food preferences and share business cards with coupons for free products as a gesture of appreciation.

For Equinix, surveys revealed that a third of employees were not confident explaining its company story. The company introduced an internal ambassador program for its more than 6,000 employees. This program gives employees across all disciplines and levels tools to educate them on the company, its culture, products and services, and how they solve its customer's needs. More than 20% of employees took the training online or in workshops in the first few months of the program, and employee submissions to its sales lead and job candidate referral programs were up 43% and 19% respectively.

Old Navy has traditionally dedicated their media budget to TV, particularly around back to school. However, over the past few years, they've focused on digital content to engage kids around positive life experiences and giving back. Through this approach, the 2016 #MySquadContest led to 32,000 kids sharing their "squads" of friends for a chance to win an epic day with their favorite influencer, creating 3 million video views, a 60% increase in social conversation about @OldNavy, and a 600% increased likelihood of recommending Old Navy to a friend (versus those that viewed TV ads only). In addition, the program led to record breaking donations for their partner, The Boys & Girls Club.

4. Bring creativity to measurement

The measurability of digital engagement means we can now know exactly what's working and not working. This gives marketing an opportunity to measure and manage itself in new ways. In the past, marketing measured success by sticking to budgets and winning creative awards. Today, the ability to measure data and adjust strategies in real-time enables marketing to prove its value to the business in entirely new ways.

Cisco has created a real-time, online dashboard where the entire marketing organization can look at performance. The leadership team conducts a weekly evaluation to assess, "Is what we're doing working?" This analysis can be done across different digital initiatives, geographies, channels, or even individual pieces of content. The result is an ability to quickly adjust and re-allocate resources.

Zscaler, a cloud-based security platform for businesses, created a Value Management Office. The Office helps each client define, quantify, and track their unique business goals associated with Zscaler implementation. Zscaler and their clients hold each other accountable to specific, measurable, time-based results.

OpenTable recently launched a companion app just for restaurants to make better use of the data they've been collecting through their reservation system. Restauranteurs can now get a handle on their business right from their smartphone, allowing them to easily answer questions like "How did your last shift perform?" The app can tell them if they are running light on bookings, and soon they'll be able to activate marketing campaigns to increase same day reservations. More than 50% of restaurant customers on OpenTable's cloud-based service are already using the app, visiting an average of 9 times a day, 7 days a week.

5. Think like a startup

In the past, marketers needed to be effective managers, setting goals well in advance and then working within budget to achieve those goals. Today, creative marketers need to operate more like entrepreneurs, continuously adjusting to sustain " product/market fit."

The start-up Checkr represents a trend we are seeing more of in the Bay Area in particular. Marketers are adopting the business practices of entrepreneurs such as lean startup and agile development. For its background check solution, Checkr wasn't getting the results it wanted from traditional sales and marketing tactics as it expanded into new market segments. They realized they had to think beyond marketing as promoting an existing product. Adopting an agile method of customer testing and rapid iteration, they worked with engineering to rethink the product and bring a "minimum viable product" to market for these new buyers. As a result of this integrated, agile approach, the company easily hit some early 2017 revenue targets with conversion rates that are four times what is traditionally seen in the industry.

The changes happening in consumer behavior, technology, and media are redefining the nature of creativity in marketing. The measure of marketing success isn't the input, whether that's the quality of a piece of content or a campaign, but rather the value of the output, whether that's revenue, loyalty, or advocacy. Marketers of the past thought like artists, managers, and promoters. Today's marketers need to push themselves to think more like innovators and entrepreneurs - creating enterprise value by engaging the whole organization, looking out for the entire customer experience, using data to make decisions, and measuring effectiveness based on business results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Creativity in Marketing Looks Like Today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What makes marketing creative? Is it more imagination or innovation? Is a creative marketer more artist or entrepreneur? Historically, the term "marketing creative" has been associated with the words and pictures that go into ad campaigns. But marketing, like other corporate functions, has become more complex and rigorous.