Marketing Pilgrim

“This is OnStar, what is your emergency?”

“I just saw Britney Spears buying bananas at Ralphs and I have to tell everyone I’ve ever met.”

No. I’m not kidding. Sam Mancuso, general director of marketing for OnStar told Advertising Age this week that the company is beta-testing a feature that will allow drivers to update their Facebooks by voice while on the road. It’s part of a push to make the brand seem hipper and cooler and it includes a new slogan “Safely connecting you in ways you never thought possible.”

Mancuso stands behind the idea saying that people are going to update their Facebooks by texting while driving and that’s dangerous and illegal. With OnStar, they can do it safely while keeping both hands on the wheel. He also claims that if they find this new feature to be distracting and unsafe, they will discontinue it and they’ll be upfront about the mistake.

Tell the truth. Have you abandoned a shopping cart this week? I’m not talking about the people who leave actual carts in the middle of the parking lot when there’s a corral two feet away. (Though they annoy me, too.) I’m talking about the 70% of shoppers who load items into a virtual cart on a website only to walk away without buying anything.

We all do it. Ironically, I was going to do it today simply to see if the online store I was buying from would offer me an incentive to come back and finish. I decided not to count on it and it’s a good thing. According to an article on eMarketer, only 35% of marketers send out a remarketing email to people who showed an interest but didn’t follow through. Odds are the small site I was buying from wasn’t part of that 35% but they might be in the future.

It’s probably no surprise that Coca-Cola is the number one brand in the world, but did you know that they are one of only three non-techie brands to make the top ten? For the 11th year in a row, Interbrand has published their list of the 100 Best Global Brands and it’s good news for Google and Shell and bad news for Toyota and BP.

Interbrand uses a variety of criteria when dolling out the ranks including the many ways a brand touches and benefits an organization, whether it attracts top talent and how well it delivers on customer expectation. Three key aspects that contribute to a brand’s value are the financial performance of the branded products or services, the role of brand in the purchase decision process and the strength of the brand to continue to secure earnings for the company.

Yelp rolled out its service aimed directly at the Groupon crowd in San Diego in the past few weeks with the promise that other markets would follow soon. Well, if you want to make an impact with the market you decide to go to next then what better place than New York City.

The Next Web reports that Yelp Deals will hit the streets of New York starting today. Here is the e-mail that is being sent to New York Yelpers

Location based services, group discount offers and location patent lawsuits. The new world order of the possibilities of the Internet is heating up.

What are the most exciting opportunities for your business?

Google continues to make improvements to their Place Page offering. This time it’s with the ability to see the images in the page (which most companies don’t take advantage of anyway) in a slideshow.

Google continues to try to improve the Place Page experience and it’s not because they don’t have anything better to do. It all points to the mobile web and the ability for more and more people to eventually get this kind of information on the go. Let’s face it, mobile is here and Google is gearing up big time.

For now this feature appears to be restricted to the desktop / laptop version of Place Pages but my guess is that seeing it on your iPhone or Android device will likely be available sooner than later. The Google Latlong blog says

You’ve heard the old saying that “less is more.” Apparently, this isn’t true when it comes to email marketing. According to a recent JangoMail survey, 67% of those who enjoy consistent email marketing success include three or more calls to action in their email campaigns.

This reminds me of my college days when I worked as a telemarketer. We were instructed to get three “no’s” from a prospect before we were allowed to end the call. With email marketing, the rejection isn’t so overt, thank heavens, it’s more about the prospect’s ability to ignore a call to action than to vocally object. (Your email came in the middle of my favorite TV show! Dangnabbit!)