Decrease in "showrooming" - An issue for FMCGs

Last week, @GinoVanOssel published an interesting post on the topic of showrooming. Brick-and-mortar retailers for high involvement goods face an interesting challenge from online retailers. Potential customers increasingly tend to visit showrooms to check out the products and then start searching online for the best bargain on their preferred product. So, the brick-and-mortar retailers invest in showrooms and staff, yet the online retailers get the the deal. This topic is often discussed, but less attention goes to a complementary issue in the low involvement category of FMCGs. With the steadily rising popularity of online grocery shopping and accompanying shopping apps, the producers of FMCGs are missing out on valuable marketing communications precisely because of the decrease of showrooming.

Green is for NO! Snickers' nutrition labels

Nutrition information on packaged foods indicating, for instance, caloric content is legally enforced in the United States and also in Europe there are only a few exceptions (I don't know about regulations in other parts of the world, so please leave a comment if you do so). What has been an issue, however, and one that has been debated for a long time, is the exact form these labels should have. What information should be present? In which format should it be presented? Where should the information be? There are still a number of degrees of freedom pertaining to these choices. In the USA, food manufacturers decided themselves to put the labels on the front of the packages. Being in the States at the moment, one of these front-of-pack labels caught my attention. It is the attention-grabbing green label on the Snickers bars. And I have ambivalent thoughts about it...

Example of a US Snickers calories label (originally featured on John B. Mahaffie's Blog)

Warm greetings by the Apple community -- Instagram

The instagram gates are open now for Android users. Fine. To be expected. After all, it is either them or someone else who would make a cool social photo app for android. Striking, however, is the Android Instagram lurker bashing going on on Twitter these days.

How "frictionless" is killing its darlings

One of the next hypes in social media will be frictionless sharing (see, e.g., Polle de Maagt). Whereas traditional sharing is fun and social, but cumbersome or time-consuming, frictionless sharing implies automatic sharing activities. In fact, lots of social network users are already sharing frictionless. For instance, with an automated link between LinkedIn or Facebook and Twitter, or with an automated Spotify sharing on one's Facebook account. Marketers now seem to massively dig into the frictionless idea, presumably because the less cumbersome sharing could increase eWOM (electronic Word-Of-Mouth). Or maybe they are just creating future job opportunities, because frictionless sharing might, in the longer term, kill a lot of the appeal of social networks to marketers.

What you hear about research

Academia is often criticized for being a too slow innovation force, with research being either too fundamental and abstract or specific but outdated by the time it gets published. This is certainly the case in more applied disciplines like marketing communication and advertising research. While I will not contest this observation, I will try to make clear in this blogpost that the slowness of academia should not be replaced by mediocre research from non-academic research agencies. Of course, everybody is free to conduct research but non-academic research is rapidly gaining impact in society and this could be troublesome if it is treated just as if it was a piece of research that went through the complete scientific publication process.