Thank you for sharing this. Lovemarks is a phenominal book and the economic development lessons we can take from it are numerous. The most important learning I took from your post is to identify the key points of differentiation that can be owned and continue to reiterate and leverage those as much as possible.

Bill Kiefaber
Fahlgren

1. Take advantage of developing a VOICE about the whole region and work in unison to regain the best of who you are.

2. Take BP out of the entire picture. In other words stop talking and communicating all reference to PB. Everyone know BP’s place in this. The focus now is who the region was, what it still is and how it will be.

3. There are tactics to come. The best tactic right now is NOT to complain but to cope and communicate all that is good!

4. A strategy? Let the public be creative and DO IT!

5. The people of the region have become the brand. It’s not a place brand anymore it the people brand and that is a HUGE positive to take advantage.

Tsunami damage in India, the shopping complex collapse in south Korea, were destrinations to view recovery and rebuilding.We had the Kibbutz – destination strategy in terms of help and rebuilding, we have various social and technical programmes for community relocation and restoration following floods, landsides or forestr fires.

Perhaps this would be one alternative for the affected communities who will need first to group as an affected area. Individual communities can then be part of an offer to visit, live and contribute skills and time – a constuctive, creative and interactive destination rather than a passive recreation destination. That might be many years away.

The BP oil spill is a contemporary tragedy – commercial carelessness and human ineptitude. The damage is understated, and long term implications unknown.

As a tragedy destination with overflight offers well, that would be simple but not a long term strategy in human terms.

Optimizing the costs on Promotions might have two aspects.

1) Communication Effectiveness :

Though it is still difficult to directly measure the effectiveness of few traditional activities (like signboards), however activities on web channels can be optimized through better targeting of content. This is being achieved through “Audience Measurement” and tens of the companies are already working, innovating new ways to achieve better ‘targetedness’. To name a few are Audience Science, Com Score, Quant Cast, Tumri, Kommli and many others.
However there is another big scope of cost optimization which is “Execution Effectiveness” and the “Creating The Right Content!” which becomes the second aspect.

2) Execution Effectiveness & Creating The Right Content:

Before the introduction of Wooqer, there were no (scientific and statistics driven) ways to rightly answer the questions like

Whether should I go for 50 % discount or Buy One get One Free?

Whether should I go for 30% discount or give a Gift Free which is having MRP equivalent to 30% of my product. What would be the tradeoffs between saving in reward costs (higher perceived value to consumers in case of gift than actual spend by brand) v/s higher execution costs , if I go for gift.

Whether the promotion which I am designing, goes well with the OBJECTIVE which I have in mind?

Whether this promotion be liked by end consumers for a particular geography?

List can keep on going.

And Wooqer has build it’s suite of products exactly to answer these questions and thus helping Brand Managers saving a lot by creating the “RIGHT CONTENT” which is asked by end consumers of a given geography and a given time.

At one place Wooqer collects millions of data pointers through its property (www.wooqer.com) and through various other online and offline partners , at the same some it mines the patterns from those data sets to calculate the effectiveness of various promotion types for a given input from Brand Manager.

So to summarize, you have Wooqer to add to your strategy to get more of your limited promotions budgets

Visit http://www.wooqer.com and refer ‘About us’ to more about this and offerings to Brand Managers. Respective channel for Brand Managers is http://aida.wooqer.com

Regards
Pavitra

1) Keeps employee morale up in tough times
2) Gets employees to take ownership of problems.
3) Gets the frontline that actually interacts with customers to put their direct learning to work.
4) Helps experimentation with little or no expenses and once the situation improves, the company can put more money behind winning formulas and get far superior returns on promotional budgets.

I like relearn because it speaks of the truth of the situation and the need for BP and other oil companies etc. to relearn how they are doing things.

It also addresses the truth of the local residents and business owners to relearn what they are about, how they make a living etc.

And it works potentially as an authentic theme for tourism because it could be used as a educational tourism destination.