Nicer bras for masectomy survivors. Healthier ingredients in soft drinks. Halting gender stereotypes in toys.

All are among the causes and quests that have gained momentum — and in many cases, acquired success — through Change.org, which has quickly become a major force to be reckoned with among brands. While activist organizations such as Greenpeace lobby companies and others around a particular set of issues, Change.org is an open platform to agitate for action.

PepsiCo, for instance, recently announced the removal of brominated vegetable oil, which is used as a flame retardant, from its Gatorade drink after 16-year old Sarah Kavanagh’s Change.org petition garnered more than 200,000 digital signatures. (The company is continuing to use it in Mountain Dew.)

"When I went to Change.org to start my petition, I thought it might get a lot of support because no one wants to gulp down flame retardant, especially from a drink they associate with being healthy," Kavanagh said on The Dr. Oz Show. "With Gatorade being as big as they are, sometimes it was hard to know if we'd ever win.”Continue reading...

It’s fitting that the ancient mythical figure Icarus is the poster boy for marketing maven Seth Godin’s latest manifesto, The Icarus Deception.

A prodigious author of more than a dozen bestselling books translated into more than 30 languages, this aims to be more than just a book. It's Godin’s most provocative thesis to date, using the entire publishing process itself as a marketing experiment to illustrate how the connection economy works by creating and activating a community to participate by making and sharing their own "art" (he takes a broad view on art, as you'll see).

Godin’s aim is to reinvent the process of writing, making, funding, marketing and launching a "book" by sparking a public art-sharing project. On Monday he launched the first ever "Icarus Session," get-togethers organized via Meet-up and his website Squidoo, in a bid to create a worldwide event in 1,262 cities with 11,168 "Linchpins" and "Artists." 

The sessions invite strangers to share (in 2 minutes and 20 seconds) something they've made or something that inspires them. That passion could be a company or brand, a piece of art or literature, or another creative expression. Godin will pick the best to publish on YouTube.

As much about the process as the end result, Godin sold his publisher, booksellers and readers/participants on the concept by launching it as a crowdfunded project on the Kickstarter website. The creative trailblazer launched the project on June 18, 2012 and ended it July 17, 2012, having raised $287,342 (well above his goal of $40,000, which he passed within three hours of launch) from 4,242 backers.

A video that Godin co-produced with Squarespace and highlighted in a blog post, features Sasha Dichter (Acumen Fund), Sarma Melngailis (One Lucky Duck), Josh Rubin (Coolhunting), and Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swiss Miss/Tattly).Continue reading...

All PR is good PR, right? Getting your brand name in front of as many eyeballs as possible can’t hurt, especially if the eyeballs are attached to bodies that are participating in a fun, engaging activity and so moved to purchase? Well, no.

The eyeballs of Britain have been staring down hard at Starbucks after it surfaced that that the coffee giant has paid only £8.5m ($13.8 million) in tax in the UK since entering the country 14 years ago despite having £3bn ($4.8 billion) in sales in that same time. In the last three years, the company paid exactly nothing in corporate tax in the UK. Some financial wizards at the company (or that the company consulted) figured out a way to make this a legal possibility. It involves the UK division of the company buying its coffee from the Swiss division in order to circumvent the tax charges.

Starbucks has agreed to voluntarily cough up £20m ($32.4 million) over the next two years to help make amends, but the dust-up hasn't settled yet. It's sponsoring an ice skating rink at London’s Natural History Museum, where Jessica Alba took her daughter for a spin. A big screen is pulling in Twitter messages with the hashtag of #spreadthecheer — and some wags took the opportunity to #spreadthesneer.Continue reading...

One in five consumers in 2012 switched companies they buy from including wireless phone, internet service and retailers according to new research released today from Accenture. 

The Accenture Global Consumer Survey polled more than 12,000 consumers in 32 countries and found that 85% of consumers would have stayed if their provider had acted differently. “Companies need to embrace the changing dynamics of what we call the nonstop customer experience,” Robert Wollan, global managing director of the Accenture Sales & Customer Services told brandchannel.

“The traditional customer-engagement funnel—beginning with cultivating awareness and ending with securing a customer’s purchase and loyalty—has lost its relevance. After all, many of today’s buyers neither enter nor exit a channel at one single point. As long as they’re using a smartphone, tablet or Internet-enabled PC, they are continuously in the channel.”Continue reading...

Epsilon’s new New Mover Report 2012 finds brand loyalty challenged when consumers move. The online survey of 999 U.S. respondents covered a range of categories of loyalty, including household services, electronic products, appliances and professional services.

Top line findings include: 

• moving is an incentive to change service providers (60% of respondents) or upgrade (42% of respondents).
• movers change brands, but are also two to three times more likely to purchase/acquire or upgrade their products and services as well.
• across all categories 20% or more of new movers change their current products and services and 20% or more upgrade their current products and services.

“We have known for a long time that new movers represent a highly lucrative category for marketers as the average household moves every five years and during each move a household spends approximately $9,000 on a broad array of goods and services,” said Don Hinman, SVP of Data Strategy at Epsilon. “When marketing to new movers, brands aren’t just up against their competitors for share of spend, they’re also competing against goods and services providers in other categories.”Continue reading...

Does your child's face light up when you mention the possibility of visiting a fast-food establishment for dinner? Well, apparently, their brain does, too. 

According to new research of MRI scans of children’s appetite and pleasure centers in their brains, the logos of such fast-food giants as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Burger King causes those areas to “light up,” according to research by University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center as cited by London's The Independent.

Logos that aren’t food-related did not elicit the same response from the 10- to 14-year-olds involved in the study. Researchers fear that the marketers have “tapped into the 'reward' areas of the brain which develop before youngsters learn self-control,” the paper notes.

The research project will be published in the Oxford journal Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN), which notes in its abstract: "Branding and advertising have a powerful effect on both familiarity and preference for products, yet no neuroimaging studies have examined neural response to logos in children."

“Research has shown children are more likely to choose those foods with familiar logos,” commented study leader, psychologist Dr. Amanda Bruce, whose B.R.A.I.N. Lab (short for Behavioral Rewards And Incentives Network) conducted the Pediatric fMRI Logo Study. “That is concerning because the majority of foods marketed to children are unhealthy.”Continue reading...

Tesco CEO Philip Clarke told the World Retail Congress in London today that the "tectonic plates are shifting" in retail and residual from financial woes in the euro zone is requiring companies to adopt new technologies or lose their competitive edge.

"We are in the first downturn of the digital age," Clarke stated, adding "consumption is weakening" in China, Thailand and South Korea, regions previously earmarked for growth but reeling from economic turmoil in Europe. "[These economies] are vulnerable to the crisis in the euro zone, as well as inflation caused by high commodity prices.

"Digital technology gives us the opportunity for a warmer, more meaningful conversation with our customers, local communities, our colleagues and the suppliers we work with.” That's why Clarke, who started as Tesco CEO in March 2011, has just launched a corporate blog, Talking Shop, in an effort to build trust and, as he puts it, "explain what we are thinking and how we see the world."

He's not much of a tweeter, though he likes writing bylined op-ed pieces (such as this week's FT column). So why blog?Continue reading...

Older customers are more likely to use digital coupons for in-store purchases, with an average 10% increase in median age yielding a 2.49% increase in activation rates for retail coupons in urban U.S. counties.

That's one of the findings from a new study by RevTrax, an omnichannel promotions platform for brands and retailers to drive and measure in-store sales. The new survey of of digital coupon activations shows the relationship between demographics and digital coupon conversion.

“The data we’re releasing illustrates digital’s ability to provide brands and retailers with more precise and detailed insight into the relationship between coupons and consumer behavior than traditional direct marketing has provided over the last several decades,” said Jonathan Trieber, co-founder and CEO, RevTrax.

The study cross-referenced aggregated, non-identifiable digital coupon activation data from millions of coupons between January and April of 2012, parsed by location, income, age, household, education, political affiliation and employment.

“Marketers have begun to realize that digital advertising should not be aligned just with ecommerce marketing budgets," Trieber commente, "but also with brick & mortar budgets, especially given that 90% of retail sales still take place offline.”Continue reading...