Saw this great article this morning on whattheythink.com. written By Barb Pellow. Hope you enjoy:

Published: March 24, 2011

Print is the ultimate portable media… and it has been ever since someone thought to write on a tablet that could be lifted and hauled rather than using a cave wall. Today, mobile media devices such as mobile phones and iPads have become a primary source of portable media from which we can obtain information and communicate with one another. In fact, the average consumer always has three things with them: their car keys, a wallet/purse, and a cell phone.

According to The International Telecommunication Union, there were 5.3 billion global mobile subscriptions at the end of 2010. That is equivalent to 77% of the world’s population. It also represents a huge increase from the 4.6 billion mobile subscriptions at the end of 2009.

What we are seeing in today’s market is a massive drive to get these two forms of portable media to work together. Savvy agencies, marketers, and service providers are arming themselves with the right technologies to optimize print and mobile to reach consumers on the run.

According to a report from Mobio Identity Systems, QR code scanning increased 1,200% across North America during the last six months of 2010.

Probably one of the most astounding statistics comes from Mobio Identity Systems, Inc., a mobile payments and marketing company. According to a report from Mobio, QR code scanning increased 1,200% across North America during the last six months of 2010. Most people in the industry understand that QR codes are growing in popularity, but 1,200% growth in just six months really stood out for me.

Brands, agencies, and traditional media marketers are finding innovative ways to utilize mobile barcodes as an effective means of passing product information in-store, bringing static ads to life, and engaging customers through contests or loyalty reward systems. This integration of offline, online, and mobile allows marketers to provide a holistic experience to their customers. Let’s take a look at some of the things that successful marketers are doing to optimize the print/mobile customer experience.

Activating the Mobile Customer

Marketers are employing a number of print/mobile tactics to activate new customers and get them to opt-in to long-term relationships.

A number of today’s campaigns are focused on consumer activation. “Activation” involves obtaining the consumer’s permission to communicate with them and learning their digital channel preferences. Activation is the first step toward a unified customer profile that grows over time to include attributes and other information about the customer relationship. It enables more targeted, relevant, and higher-response campaigns. Marketers are employing a number of print/mobile tactics to activate new customers and get them to opt in to long-term relationships. The industry has seen a number of effective examples.

Point-of-Sale Calls to Action

In September 2010, Best Buy became the first national retailer in the United States to integrate QR codes with its product fact tags. Best Buy shoppers can view and compare key product features more visually, as well as access reviews and e-mail product information to friends.  Particularly when making complex purchasing decisions, having the relevant information just a scan away can accelerate the buying decision.

Figure 1: QR Codes on Best Buy’s Product Fact Tags

Out-of-Home Calls to Action

Marketers can use billboards, magazines, and radio/television advisements to create calls to action where consumers can opt in to a mobile marketing relationship. The Leo Burnett Company won a Gold Medal at last year’s Cannes Advertising Festival for its “Hidden Sounds” QR Code campaign promoting 14 indie bands (the hidden sounds) for Zoo Records, an alternative music store in Hong Kong. The QR codes, which were assembled into the shapes of animals that live hidden in the city, were posted all over the streets of Hong Kong. Scanning the codes enabled users to obtain more information about a band and hear its music. Consumers could also purchase the songs directly or share them on social media sites. The campaign was considered a success by the volume of sharing on blogs and social networks and the fact that more than half of the 14 bands’ albums sold out within the first week.

Figure 2: “Hidden Sounds” Animal QR Code Campaign by Leo Burnett

Expanding the Mobile Relationship

Many mobile marketing programs have fallen apart because companies don’t continually communicate with purchasers following activation. Once marketers have established a dialogue with consumers (via product information, movie times, trailers, or coupons), they can continue to correspond and communicate their messaging based on consumer opt-in. The program should include other offers and calls to action. In addition to maintaining a base of activated mobile customers, continuing the dialogue also builds on the knowledge you have about those customers. Some examples of how marketers are using that knowledge for segmentation and more targeted messaging are discussed below.

Promotional Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes can be used over time to drive floor traffic and increase purchase frequency, while helping to build the unified customer profile by requiring customers to answer new questions. Savvy marketers implement a localized sweepstakes campaign aimed at acquiring as many participants as possible. They blend printed signage, direct mail, and local advertising with a mobile platform to direct SMS text or QR Code responses. A “many small” prize approach is typically recommended because it provides immediate evidence if winning. SMS and QR code programs typically achieve response rates as high as 20% to 30%. The sweepstakes usually require participants to provide five pieces of information upon entry aside from their names, including e-mail address, ZIP code, age, gender, and marital status.

As an example, Subway created a printed free standing insert (FSI) for the Sunday newspaper. This campaign included a QR code that linked to a game where the recipient could win free prizes.

Figure 3: QR Code Campaign from Subway

Cross-Channel Engagement

Optimized print/mobile in magazines offers many benefits, even though circulation numbers are down and print may not be the in-vogue channel. The fact remains that print outlets reach a wider audience than any channel in the online word. Print focuses on grabbing the reader’s attention with good creative concepts. Combined with the proliferation of new technology such as barcodes, marketers can take something that has traditionally been one-dimensional and make it very dynamic. QR codes or SMS text campaigns are a way to enrich the relationship with the customer and leverage print for what it is—a good awareness mechanism.

Retail giant Target is the latest in a string of brands that are providing customers with a more interactive experience by embedding QR codes in advertisements within national publications. When readers come across the barcode-embedded ads in a magazine, they can take a picture of the QR code, which links them to a video of stylist expert Sabrina Soto. In the clips, Ms. Soto demonstrates how Target furnishings and products can liven up home décor. By including mobile barcodes in print advertising, marketers can use less advertising space while communicating more information and engaging the consumer. Interactions via text message, Web forms, and e-mail can all be driven through a single system based on a unified customer profile, which will facilitate the flow of interaction across digital channels and deliver a one-to-one marketing experience.

Figure 4: QR Codes from Target

Optimizing the Print Mobile Experience

Retailers like Best Buy, Subway, and Target are activating mobile customers with QR codes and cross-channel engagements.

Amid a sea of marketing messages that are bombarding consumers every day, thoughtful and integrated marketing campaigns can cut through the clutter and give marketers confidence that their marketing dollars are being spent wisely. Print/mobile-optimized marketing campaigns help marketers orchestrate campaigns that blend traditional and digital media. Printed communications (signage, advertisements, packaging, magazines, catalogs, direct mailers, etc.) are the primary mechanism for building awareness. Optimizing print and mobile with tools like QR codes is the right way to combine media and actively engage customers.

Service providers must take a strategic approach to provide seamless links from the traditional media to something of real value, like an offer or user reviews with the content appropriately formatted for a mobile device. With the popularity of mobile technology and a wide range of companies and solutions to support campaigns, it is time to ensure that mobile is effectively deployed in the media mix.

A digital printing and publishing pioneer, marketing expert and Group Director at InfoTrends, Barbara Pellow helps companies develop multi-media strategies that ride the information wave. Barb brings the knowledge and skills to help companies expand and grow business opportunity.

If you are interested in learning more about speaking engagements and our consulting project capabilities, please contact us for more information.

Please offer your feedback to Barb. She can be reached at barb@whattheythink.com.

The day kicked off with some big picture thoughts on sustainability from WM SVP Duane Woods and Xerox’s global vice president of Environment, Health and Safety, Patty Calkins . As a long-standing sustainability exec and thought leader, Calkins has a good perspective on what it takes to implement a successful environmental strategy. She laid out four “critical fundamentals to any sustainability program.”

Calkins’ four principles are:

• Take a quantitative approach. As she said, even though we’re sick of hearing it, the old saying “what gets measured gets done” has proved to be true every time.
• Keep a value-chain focus. Think beyond the four walls of the company to look at impacts up the supply chain and down through customer use and end of product life.
• Be economically driven. If initiatives don’t help the business, they won’t be sustainable by any definition.
• Seek quick payback and easy wins. Show success quickly.

I agree in principle on these, but wanted to elaborate on them and add my perspective. Starting with good quantitative data is critical, and marrying that with a value chain perspective creates a powerful starting point for sustainability thinking. These are definitely the two big fundamentals. Really knowing where your footprint lies – and it rarely is centered within your own operations – helps identify the true risks and opportunities for your business.

The third and fourth principles are solid, but are more nuanced in execution. Yes, sustainability has to be economically viable — to be obvious, if a company did things that weren’t profitable, it wouldn’t survive, so it wouldn’t be around to provide environmental or social benefits. But we need a broader sense of what’s included in the “economics” of strategic and tactical sustainability actions.

The typical cost/benefit analysis that most companies use is fundamentally broken in two ways: it doesn’t take into account either long-term benefits (strategic investments that pay off later) or intangible value (brand enhancement or customer and employee loyalty, for example). The “hurdle rates” we apply to capital investments are ignored for many common strategic decisions, such as investing in innovation and R&D, building a presence in a new geographic or product market, or engaging in brand-building activities and advertising. These all may have longer payback periods than the typical two-year hurdle rate. Like these investments, sustainability initiatives can also be both “economically-driven” and take larger strategic benefits into account.

For example, sustainability leaders are helping customers lower their environmental impacts, which may entail using less of their product (in my next article on this event, I’ll explore how both Xerox and Waste Management are doing exactly that). This kind of cutting-edge initiative is absolutely economically driven — maintaining or growing market share by satisfying customers is a good thing — but it could take time to make the transition.

<!–pagebreak–>On the fourth principle, “seek quick payback,” I agree that easy wins are important for a number of reasons. First, they’re everywhere – even the leanest companies continue to find new, innovative, sometimes head-slappingly obvious ways to save money by cutting energy and waste.  (See a recent announcement, for example, about GE helping GM’s factories reduce energy by timing all the power-using devices — lights, heat, pumps, and so on — to coordinate with the actual movement of the conveyor. As the Reuters reporter said, “it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before.”)

Second, these quick wins help win over internal skeptics — easy money is hard to argue with. And third, the freed-up capital can be invested in bigger changes. And here’s where I’d add something to the focus on easy wins. Incremental change can get you pretty far if you keep doing it, but sustainability leaders are also going to find disruptive, heretical solutions to their customers’ problems– big leapfrog changes in how a business or industry works. So a truly robust sustainability strategy needs to balance the two — incremental and heretical — to greatest effect.

I’d also add two more core items to Calkins’ four principles. First, top-level support for sustainability efforts is critical, but I suspect it went unsaid at this event because Xerox has clearly had CEO support for green initiatives for years. Second, employee engagement is an essential element in executing sustainability strategy. Luckily, most companies find that as soon as they mention wanting to do more on green, employees pour out of the woodwork wanting to help. Sustainability is one of the greatest engagement tools out there.

Moving past the core principles, I wanted to also share Calkins’ “Top 10 Reasons to Act Sustainably” because they capture the core logic of green business, and they fit very well into my framework of four buckets of value creation — cost reduction, lowered risk, higher revenues, enhanced brand — from the book I co-authored, Green to Gold. Here are her 10 reasons, with my buckets in parentheses:

1. Eliminate visits from your friendly regulator (risk)
2. Reduce lawyers on staff (risk/cost)
3. Capture bottom line cost reductions (cost)
4. Improve business process efficiency (cost)
5. Avoid shareholder resolutions (risk)
6. Enhance brand value (brand)
7. Retain/attract top/key talent (brand)
8. Grow revenue (revenue)
9. Drive innovation (all)
10. “We have not inherited the world from our forefathers…we have borrowed it from our children”

The last point is a proverb credited to indigenous peoples. Calkins makes the point that in the end, sustainability is the right thing to do for our children, and our future selves. The moral argument usually sits outside of the business world, but why? Businesses are part of society and the people working in them want to do the right thing, so it’s a good reminder.

In the end, what’s good for society — creating a sustainable economy and civilization — is good for business too. The same fundamental principles apply to both.

source: greenbiz.com