Top Brands

Every third import in the united European market is suspicious counterfeiting with infringed brand or design rights. The global loss is $30-50m just for one brand and billions per year for the top 5 cosmetic brands, mostly in less developed markets. Seems when your brand is 120 years old and you sell in 210 countries, you have an attractive critical mass to be attacked by counterfeiters, even if your licensee produces the goods in the same Chinese factory where the fake products come from.

What would you do? You develop a brand integrity strategy, you invent optical quality packaging, laser-focused quality control, nanocoatings, sophisticated visible/ invisible color shifting labels, individual 2D barcode tagging, transparent packaging, licensed factories and exclusive authorized distributors. You constantly secure, enhance, deter, partner and do brand ID trainings of law attorneys, National Customs Agency officers, The Border Police, NSCOC (National Service for Combating Organized Crime) agents.

Thanks to Turcu & Turcu law office, we had a chance to meet dozens of brand integrity managers and government, police and customs agents, monitoring and protecting global brands such as Sara Lee, Timberland, Samsung, Epson, Eli Lilly, Nokia, Estee Lauder, Coty Prestige, L’oreal, Lacoste, Chanel, General Motors, Levi Strauss, Puma, Daimler, Adidas, Bvlgari, Harley-Davidson and many others.

Sofia is a part of a worldwide network of administrative and brand integrity investigators and I was happy to see so many fake website knock-downs, seizes, raids and litigation programs. With more than 75 000 annual counterfeiting cases for Europe only, you can be sure that buying a fake Estee Lauder perfume, full of sulfur, ammonia, phosphorus, potassium, titanium and horse/dogs urine as a binder to keep the alcohol and oils, will not be the best bargain to make you girlfriend happy, especially if you don’t wanna see her face and skin burned tomorrow. It’s not only a brand protection or tax/unemployment protection issue; it’s your own health and consciousness.

When we headed to London, we didn’t expect much even though we were going to attend the well known SES conference. London is a favorite city, and despite the chilly drizzles we were happilly looking forward to spend few days there.  The well known Design Expo Center in Islington was holding several interesting events like SES and Surface Design Expo.

Polite smiling faces, a meeting hall with boots, small groups of people talking or typing – this was the first impression of the event. Most of the attendees were at the conference hall and later we would see them getting out like students and heading straight forward to the tables for the Yahoo sponsored lunch.

We attended some of the sessions, which were of the utmost interest to us. I will summarize the main topics and outline the most interesting finds.

One of the most famous speakers was Avinash Kaushik, the analytic evangelist from Google. Always surpising with detail-packed information and hands-on points of view, he didn’t miss to deliver the right stuff again. Joking about his wife dissaproving of him staying late at nights, he used this example to show how important data presenting can be. Some points from his speech:

• you can be much more effective, if your work is driven by data and analysis, feeding back into the strategy and tactics;
• look and present the data in visual ways;
• use tag clouds;
• create goals;
• measure the results;
• short head terms, long tail terms and impression virgins;
• most purchases occur after 15 visits.

Next follow some of the prominent names in web analytics industry. Lo and behold – Bryan Eisenberg reveals some of the best kept secrets of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation):

• Sometimes changing just a word helps get hundred times higher conversion rate - like when Dell changed “learn more” with “help me choose”;
• Make a strong 1st impression;
• Remember the 7 seconds to impress;
• Don’t do slice and dice optimization;
• Use Social Commerce for promotion and navigation;
• Ask for feedback and make engaging forms;
• Provide assurances and proofs;
• Prioritize and make data-driven decisions;

Lisa Myers gave some Social Media tips:

• Blogging is 50% writing and 50% managing;
• Use vodpod to incorporate video;
• Always put a picture – photo or avatar at the start of the post;
• Have the right idea/goal and be creative;
• Be personable;
• Don’t just broadcast – listen, communicate and share. if you only communicate about your own stuff, you’ll become boring, so share info from others too.
• Everything important is about real relationship and careful listening

Jim Sterne from Web Analytics Association gave an wonderful example of some clear web data:

If 10,000 people are talking about shampoo and a new customer has a life time value of $29 (profit), and, joining that conversation helps 5% to try, then:
10,000 x 5% = 500
500 x 5% = 25
25 x $29 = 725
725/10,000 = $0.0725 per participant = 7.25 cents. This is how much a social media participant is worth.

And last, but not least-  there are some things without which no analytics can yield any results:

• Traffic doesn’t matter, unless the visitors take action;
• Measurement doesn’t matter, unless there is a clearly defined purpose
• Data doesn’t matter, unless you have got the insight.