Marketing Trend for 2014: Smaller Messaging Has a Big Impact

Marketing

The new word in content marketing is small. Increasingly, brands are marketing themselves via short-form social media like Vine, Twitter, Instagram, Instagram video and the newer platform Snapchat--not by broadcasting their silly old messages but by treating their prospects and customers with respect, engaging with them directly through brief snippets of conversation, personality and humor. But it's not just for fun: Consumers who engage with brands via social media demonstrate a deeper emotional commitment to those brands and spend 20 to 40 percent more than other customers, according to a report from Bain & Company.

Taco Bell has been killing it on Twitter, creating a hip, fun presence to turn customers into evangelists. Based in part on its snappy, very human interactions, the fast-food giant generated enough early buzz to make Doritos Locos Tacos its most successful product launch to date. (Taco Bell reportedly sold 100 million in the product's first 10 weeks, and its parent company, Yum Brands, registered a 15 percent increase in profit during the launch quarter.)
So how does a corporate entity create a fun personality in just a few words? By starting conversations that have a human voice, an immediacy--a layer of excitement that transcends, say, a boring e-mail, or just about any other long-form medium. After Men's Humor tweeted, "This morning I gave birth to a food baby, and I think @tacobell is the father," the restaurant responded with a tweet of its own, demanding a DNA test. More recently, Taco Bell extended its small-but-smart content strategy to become one of the first brands to embrace Snapchat (a mobile platform in which messages disappear within 10 seconds), sending its followers there a picture previewing the reintroduction of its Beefy Crunch Burrito. Lowe's, Dunkin' Donuts and Target are other big brands that have embraced the trend successfully.
But the opportunity is equally rich for smaller companies. During New York's Fashion Week in September, designer Rebecca Minkoff previewed her new collection via Snapchat, giving fans a 10-second glimpse of each of her new looks. Virginia Beach, Va., coffeehouse Cafe Moka uses a short-form video to show how baristas create that leaf design atop a latte. FMW Fasteners in Houston manages to engage customers despite the fact that it sells decidedly unexciting, impersonal items such as nuts, bolts and rivets: "Nothing says 'I Love You Dad' like drill bits … just sayin,'" the company tweeted for Father's Day.
David Armano of global social agency Edelman Digital calls mini content, like the six-second video platform Vine, "the second coming of YouTube." He notes how a job applicant impressed him with a Vine video: "It told me a story about wanting to meet me in six seconds, which is tough to do." Such platforms are suited to this age of ADD, he adds, when the best way to reach someone is in those "in-between" moments when they're flipping through content on a mobile device.

Fashion Trend for 2014: Country Couture on the Rise

Fashion

Cowpoke couture is back in the saddle again. A new generation of consumers is embracing western-style snap shirts, cowboy hats, boots and accessories, a trend inspired by the crossover success of bestselling country and Americana performers such as Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton, Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers, as well as prime-time TV hits like Nashville and Justified.

"Over the last two years, we've had an increase in sales, and we're getting a lot more new customers who've never been in our store before," says Richard Alcala, president of Alcala's Western Wear, a 41-year-old family-owned retailer in Chicago's trendy West Town neighborhood. "It seems to revolve around country music and concerts--when there's a big show coming into town, we see a big spike in sales."

Twenty-eight percent of U.S. music listeners cite country as their favorite genre, more than any other format, according to The NPD Group. The research firm credits country's cross-demographic appeal to its diversity and accessibility. And it's happening in major metropolitan markets: This year New York City welcomed Nash FM, the Big Apple's first country radio station in 17 years.

Steve Weil--president of Denver-based Rockmount Ranch Wear, the venerable western apparel manufacturer founded in 1946 by his grandfather Jack--credits the 1980 film Urban Cowboy for initially driving country music and apparel into mainstream popular culture. In fact, he maintains that the urban cowboy trend never really faded away, but the media simply shifted its attention.

"I disagree with the contention that this is a recent resurgence. This is classic fashion that has been in vogue for decades," Weil says. "What makes Rockmount different from other brands is that we're not trendy. We don't follow seasonal cycles that come and go. We make successful products that have extremely long life cycles. That's our secret to survival."

Weil says interest in western apparel is a lifestyle choice, not a fashion craze. "We're trying to bring out products that appeal to a wide range of people who like the idea of the West," he says. "I design for my friends. They're not cowboys--they're people from a variety of professions, from banking to retail to resort real estate."

Rockmount's adherence to traditional western style doesn't mean the company is stuck in the past. "As a small business, we're extremely agile--we work on new designs every day and bring out new products monthly, if not weekly," Weil says. "Rockmount is also known for bringing disparate things together in a new way. For example, the fabrics we use are not necessarily used by others in this category. Everything we do, we do with a distinct twist."

Most Rockmount apparel is manufactured domestically and shipped to retail partners at home and abroad. The "Made in the USA" imprimatur is essential to western wear's enduring consumer appeal, says Alcala, whose store stocks thousands of boots and hats from American companies. "Europeans appreciate it even more than we do," Alcala says. "When they see stuff not made in the USA, they ask for something made here. They know if they buy something made in the USA that it's still high quality."

Overseas visitors make up just part of Alcala's clientele--neighborhood hipsters are a constant, lured by the store's Crayola array of Levi's jeans, and celebrity customers like Robert Plant, Bill Murray, John Malkovich and Steven Tyler have walked through its doors as well. All come in search of something colorful, comfortable and unmistakably classic.

"We're not competing with Sears, Macy's and Nordstrom. We're not selling the same products they do. We have something more unique," Alcala says. "It's not just country music that people like. It's the lifestyle. Europeans come to our store because they want to take something back with them that's American. Western wear started here. It's 100 percent American."

Tech Trend for 2014: The Risk in BYOD Offices

Tech,

It's enough to make a company lose its app-etite. From January to July of this year, 718,000 malicious and high-risk apps were distributed on the Android mobile platform alone, according to JD Sherry, vice president of technology and solutions at computing security firm Trend Micro in Irving, Texas. That's more than double the number of Android-based malware apps discovered in all of 2012.
This is the new open-door reality that gives nightmares to IT chiefs--and it's only getting worse. Already, more than half of the U.S. adult population connects to the internet through a smartphone or tablet, and 60 percent of businesses allow employees to access company networks via their personal devices under a strategy known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Why? The efficiencies offered by a mobile work force are too great to pass up, and moving the cost of access to the employees is too juicy a cost savings to ignore.
Android apps accounted for 79 percent of all smartphone malware last year, according to security firm F-Secure. But Apple's iOS isn't entirely in the clear. While Apple doesn't release malware figures, Sherry points to 2012 reports that a handful of products that had made it through the App Store approval process turned out to be carrying nefarious software.
The potential for damage this brings to a business with a BYOD policy is something Rizwan Hussain knows all too well. As vice president of sales at AllRounds, a Bay Area startup that provides private capital analytics and automation, Hussain managed a team of reps who were constantly on the go. In order for his employees to hit their sales targets, they needed constant access to the AllRounds IT infrastructure, which allowed them to do everything from e-mailing prospects to issuing contracts.
"The problem I have with BYOD is security," Hussain says. "Most personal devices have a range of user-installed apps. How am I supposed to know if any of them are malicious and can hurt my network? Then there's the whole storage issue. Where exactly is our company's data being stored when some-one uses their own device, and what about the security risks if someone loses their phone or it's stolen?"
Forward-looking IT pros are in the process of mapping out a new set of rules for BYOD. This can start with implementing a companywide policy that addresses acceptable and unacceptable device use and provides details of excluded apps, data ownership and scheduled IT access to the device for updates. Those same pros are also pushing for encryption of all files stored on or accessed by a personal device, either through the phone's encryption program or through a third-party app such as TextSecure or RedPhone. Another option is to mandate that employees use a tool like Divide, which creates a fully functioning workspace within the device that provides government-grade security and protection for the business.
Defensive maneuvers aside, Sherry warns that the big question with BYOD is not if your employees' phones will be infected but when.

Entertainment Trend for 2014: Low-Budget Movies=Big Business

Entertainment

There's a scene in Sharknado in which a great white shark, flung into the smoggy L.A. air by a freak tornado, is bisected by a chainsaw-wielding hero. This was, perhaps, the least shocking thing about the film. What's more amazing is that Sharknado was seen by more than 1 million people, and 300,000 tweeted enthusiastically about it the night of its premiere on the Syfy network.Sharknado is one example of a "mockbuster," a new genre of film defined by the internet generation's insatiable demand for quirky, cheap content. Call it the filmmaking version of the web's BuzzFeed. These movies resemble contemporary popcorn flicks but are produced in a fraction of the time (months instead of years) with a budget (usually less than $500,000) that would qualify as a rounding error on a big studio production. Despite shoddy quality, such films are finding an ever-growing audience and becoming a booming business.
The undisputed king of the mockbuster is The Asylum, a Burbank, Calif.-based production company founded in 1997. After producing mostly budget horror flicks, the studio released a low-rent version of War of the Worlds to coincide with Steven Spielberg's 2005 big studio adaptation. The Asylum's version became a DVD hit, with Blockbuster ordering more than 100,000 copies. More mockbusters followed. Transmorphers was released to accompany Transformers. Snakes on a Plane gave way to Snakes on a Train. This year The Asylum expects to rake in $19 million thanks to a robust production schedule and distribution deals with Syfy and Lifetime, as well as video-on-demand channels and services such as Netflix and Redbox.
Other production companies also have found a niche serving up ready-made schlock. Glendale, Calif.-based Renegade Animation leverages the PR blitz of well-heeled movie studios to hype its own creations. After the dancing-penguin flick Happy Feet scored at the Academy Awards, Renegade released its own version, Tappy Toes. Brazilian animation studio Vídeo Brinquedo has an entirely different strategy: crude mimicry. Several of its sloppily animated films (The Little Cars in the Great Race; Ratatoing) piggyback unabashedly on Disney/Pixar hits (Cars; Ratatouille).
But what makes the mockbuster palatable? Veteran producer and executive Kathryn Arnold believes it's all about low risk, high rewards: "Taking the blockbuster genre, storyline and creating low-budget versions mitigates risk--the storyline has already been tested and satisfies the audience's hunger for content. If the mockbuster hits a chord with the audience, the fan-generated buzz takes hold, and people flock to see it."