While Facebook dominates in socially-driven shopping, Pinterest is driving the highest average spending per online shopping session.

RichRelevance, a specialist in dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, analyzed nearly 700 million shopping sessions to benchmark the performance of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest as drivers of traffic to retail sites.

“Every social network promises a new way of connecting consumers with retailers and brands,” stated Diane Kegley, CMO of RichRelevance, of the firm's latest Shopping Insights report. “However, the big take-away from our research is that not all channels in the social space are created equal.” 

Key findings include: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...

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...

Adam Sharp, Head of Government, News and Social Innovation at Twitter, is calling the 2012 presidential race “the Twitter election.” Given the plethora of digital ways of connecting and pulse-taking, it should more accurately be called the 2012 Socialection.

Let's start with Sharp's employer, which today announced its new sentiment analysis tracking of its users. The new Twitter Political Index is a social Gallup Poll, taking the daily pulse on users’ feelings towards the two candidates between now and November 2nd. Each candidate’s Index will be updated daily after 8 p.m. ET capturing the day’s trending conversations along with an historical chart, while partner Topsy will be posting its daily analysis, and USA Today has created the USA Today/Twitter election meter to run through the election. 

“More Tweets are sent every two days today than had ever been sent prior to Election Day 2008 — and Election Day 2008’s Tweet volume represents only about six minutes of Tweets today,” Sharp blogged. “For the first time, it’s possible to measure conversations that just an election cycle ago were limited to coffee shops, dinner tables and water coolers.”Continue reading...

Consumer perception of big companies can tend towards the negative when the ginormous salaries of their CEOs are subject to public scrutiny. Middle Americans are rightfully stunned to learn of the compensation packages afforded top executives, even as the economic recovery drags.

Big companies, after all, depend on consumers buying their brands, so maybe that's one reason they are eager to put a shine on their collective and individual images. Along comes a new initiative called "The Civic 100" to help them do just that.

Sponsored by the National Conference on Citizenship and Points of Light, with Bloomberg News as its media partner, The Civic 100 is a national initiative to survey, rank, and recognize corporations on how they engage the communities they serve and institutionalize these practices as part of their corporate culture. It aims to implement a scientific approach to measuring and evaluating corporate civic engagement, corporate citizenship and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) efforts.Continue reading...

American auto buyers appear to be falling right into the clutches of several auto brands as they switch to smaller new vehicles in response to higher gasoline prices and their need to replace that aging hulk in the garage. Along with better fuel economy, many buyers are gaining amenities, overall better quality and improved functional design than Americans used to get in downsizing their car purchases.

Chevrolet, Kia and Volkswagen are among the leading brand exemplars, as well as beneficiaries, of this trend, according to the conclusions of the annual J.D. Power & Associates APEAL study that was released Wednesday. Each of them has found ways to embody and cater to how Americans are increasingly downsizing with relish, according to the firm's Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout study.Continue reading...

Social-media marketing success is about more than just numbers of followers a brand has on Facebook, Twitter and the like — it's about engagement. What do fans do or not do, say or not say as a result of a brand's prompting via some social medium?

And measured that way, argues the social-marketing company Socialbakers, some brands rise surprisingly to the top. They include Audi, the German luxury-car marque that blew away nine other major brands selected by Socialbakers in a comparison of social-engagement rates. The also-rans included not only Audi rival Mercedes-Benz — which did finish second among the 10 — but also BMW, Taco Bell, Disney, McDonald's, Samsung Mobile USA, Walt Disney World, Skol and Starbucks Frappucino.

"We put a premium on engagement," Joe Quattrone, vice president of M80, Audi's social-marketing agency, confirmed to brandchannel. "We've developed the idea of what kind of content really resonates with fans. We understand what fans and followers want to talk about and we give that to them time and time again."Continue reading...

Here's some good news for brand marketers: In five years, you might be the ones holding your company's technology pursestrings.

According to recent findings from Gartner, by 2017 the chief marketing officer will be responsible for more technology spending than the chief information officer. A comparison of IT and Marketing department budgets for 2011 shows that Marketing is around a 10 percent share of revenue vs. a 3.6 percent share of revenue for IT, according to Gartner. Whereas Marketing departments expect their average budget to increase about 9 percent, the average increase for IT departments will be about 4.7 percent.

Marketing departments have become big spenders on technology, driven by the need to track interactions and buying activity by customers across many channels. Customers now have many ways of interacting with a company — by phone, mail, and online. Increasingly, they're using mobile devices and social media, not just for personal reasons, but to conduct business.Continue reading...