|
|
The summers before and after my first year of college, I worked as a cashier at Drug Emporium just eight miles outside northeast Philadelphia. It was a great job for a girl who went through a lot of hair products.
Drug Emporium was huge — a grocery-sized Walgreens meets Ulta Beauty. I loved having access to such a wide variety of products. It’s also the origin of my fascination with branding. Faced with so many choices I became a label reader. I discovered that most shampoos had the same top ingredients. What distinguished all these bottles of sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate was packaging, enticing blurbs, and scents. Branding made them appear different when in fact they all did the same thing using essentially the same main ingredients. This is when I realized just how powerful branding could be. It turned a few ingredients into hundreds of different products at vastly different price points. My journey into marketing had begun. What brands first caught your eye? If you have a product or service, does it convey the message you want to your intended audience? And are you conveying it consistently throughout your various channels? Conducting a marketing audit is a great tool to help document and track your branding. It’s actually one of my favorite things to do. Now that I think of it; it may remind me of exploring all those different brands in the Drug Emporium aisle. I’ve been brushing up on my SEO skills lately. There are so many resources available on the subject that it can be overwhelming, but I decided to go straight to the source – Google. Google is making changes to third-party cookies that may impact SEO. Kevin Indig in his article The Cookie Crumbles notes that “ … SEO is a strong and cost-efficient channel to get more 1st-party data. The death of 3rd-party cookies could be an opportunity to give SEO more value besides being a performance and brand channel.”
In an effort to balance the needs between advertisers and users’ privacy, Google began implementing Privacy Sandbox, a new tracking protection in Chrome starting January 2024. They plan to completely disable third-party cookies by the end of 2024. This is a big change to how online marketing has been done for the past twenty years. The shift will now be to first-party data collected through the websites and apps a business owns. Do you have a plan for this post-third-party cookies environment? Will this shift result in better marketing or just grow the power of large walled gardens by tech behemoths such as Meta and Apple? The scenes of Forest Gump talking to people on a bench were filmed in Savannah. You can’t find the actual bench in Chippewa Square because it was a movie prop. Interestingly, that doesn’t stop visitors from taking photos of the spot where the bench use to be. You can find the prop bench in the Savannah History Museum located in the Visitor’s Center at 303 MLK Jr. Blvd. if you are in town and interested.
Telling stories about your organization or product is the best way to engage with your customers. A box of chocolates may be handy. If you tell an interesting enough story, people may be willing to take a photo of an empty spot! |
AuthorWhen Heather isn't exploring the South in search of the best biscuits with her husband, Jeremy, and two energetic sons, she likes to volunteer, travel and drink comically large mugs of tea with her rescue Beagle/Lab by her side. ArchivesCategories
|
RSS Feed