January 2014 Newsletter

The American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF) on Jan. 7th announced that Ed Keller and Brad Fay's The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace and Daniel Pink's To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others as the co-winners of the 2013 Berry-AMA Book Prize for the best book in marketing.  ....

According to [The AMA], “The committee had the good fortune this year of a very strong set of finalists for the Berry-AMA Book Prize. There were two books that rose to a level of excellence that had an amazing similarity in terms of communicating a simple but powerful message.  Ed Keller and Brad Fay in their book The Face-to-Face Book provide us with strong evidence that in today's high tech digital world, face-to-face real relationships matter most. Daniel Pink in his book To Sell Is Human offers compelling empirical evidence that everyone has the ability to persuade and alter another's position, or to in short "sell".  These books with their simple and compelling messages do not so much as take us back to the basics but into the future of marketing with the basics.”

Read Full AMA Announcement

As part of his talk last month to the UBS Annual Global Media and Communications Conference CBS’s Chief Research Officer Dave Poltrack discussed social TV among other topics.

“Nothing was hotter this year than social media with Twitter front and center with its IPO,” according to Poltrack.  “Television programs and televised events have always been a major source of conversation. With the emergence of the online social media we are seeing how much these subjects dominate people’s non-personal interaction.”

Then, in what might have been a surprise to the investors in the audience, Poltrack made this strong statement:  “However, the real action is not online, it is still face-to-face.”  And the correlation statistics he shared bear this out.

But this part was new and never before released.  When close to 50 TV shows that have aired this fall are analyzed, the correlation between Keller Fay’s WOM metrics and the Nielsen Live+7 ratings was a strong 0.784.

“The next question,” said Poltrack is “how does the volume of online social site mentions compare to these broader Keller Fay results?”  The answer is…”not very well.”   READ MORE

Our Keller Fay research shows that women talk about brands somewhat more than men, with females making 67 brand mentions per week and men only 64. But for marketers, the gender issue runs deeper than sheer volume of conversation. In this edition of The Word on WOM, we’ll shed light on the gender gap in key product categories and for key brands as well as see how it’s been shifting over time.

Men outtalk women in just three of fifteen categories tracked by Keller Fay’s TalkTrack®: Technology, Sports and Automotive. For ten other product categories, women generate more WOM than men, including a decided advantage in Retail / Apparel and Personal Care / Beauty. Financial Services, a category that traditionally carries a male stereotype, is split evenly between the sexes, as is Telecommunications.

The question then becomes, has there been a shift in conversation in recent years, or have women always been ahead of men in WOM about product categories? To get to the bottom of this, for each category we compared the gender gap over a 12 month period in 2009-10 with the current period three years later. Sample Full Article from "THE WORD ON WOM", the Keller Fay Client Newsletter