Happy December. I always love this time of year. My family recently made the annual trek to the countryside near Indianapolis for our Christmas tree & wreaths at Dull’s Tree Farm. The holiday season brings so may familiar traditions from time with family & friends, time at church, holiday events and that crazy time of trying to find the perfect gifts. Speaking of gifts, I am always reminded of the power of brands around this time of year. Asking the simple question of “what do you want” from our children often elicits a list of cloths, toys and gadgets with even the youngest seeming to be impacted by the brands they see.
I recently had a chance to run through an ad hoc “brand” panel with a group of 60+ students at Purdue University a few weeks ago. I asked them two simple questions. The first was what is your favorite brand? The results ran the gamete from B2B brands that they liked the business, name or logo to a long list of consumer brands. I then asked them to think of the one brand on this list that they were most likely to recommend and that they felt did the best job engaging with them? The top three brands selected were Apple, Coca-Cola and Amazon. While this short list did not surprise me what did was that Amazon was the clear winner with a whopping 85% of the votes. In asking why they selected Amazon the students went on about how Amazon strives to interact with them via multiple channels to give them more of what they personally want. These personalized brand interactions caused a large number in the class to speak out passionately about the brand.
It was heartening to see the end results of Amazon’s personalized focus since for years Right On Interactive has been advocating for companies to focus on driving engagement with their prospects and customers across multiple channels in order to maximize their brand and the resulting revenue.
