Dear Reader,
Happy Twosday! (And I’m thinking of you too!)
In its European format, 22-02-2022, today’s date is a palindrome and an ambigram. this means it can be read forwards and backwards as well as upside down.
in China, the number two is considered lucky because all good things come in pairs!
Also yesterday was President’s Day in the US.
Following the Uniform Holiday Act of 1968 which moved federal holidays to Mondays to allow workers 3 day weekends and an executive order from President Nixon, Washington’s Birthday Day was moved to the third Monday in February.
After the date was moved, many believed it was meant to celebrate both Washington and Lincoln. By the 2000s, it became known as Presidents Day.
Many marketers use Presidents Day as a promotional hook to encourage customers to shop.
Recommended Reading:
► Marketing Lessons From President Lincoln
Like current times, Lincoln was president during highly partisan times.
Between 2020 and 2022, trust in government has dropped 13 percentage points and trust in media has dropped 6 percentage points.
More importantly, according to Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer:
Close to half of respondents consider the government and media to be divisive forces in society.
Actionable Marketing Challenge:
Lack of trust in media creates problems for advertisers seeking trustworthy platforms.
What did President Abraham Lincoln do?
He followed the suggestion of Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine, and made Thanksgiving into a national American holiday. With Presidential Proclamation 106 issued on October 3, 1863, Lincoln created the holiday with the goal of healing to a divided country.
Wisely choosing his words, Lincoln alluded to the ongoing war:
“… [We] commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.” (Source)
Recommended Reading:
Marketing Lesson of The Week
► Does Your Brand Create A Customer Experience?
Unaccompanied by any children, I visited the LEGO store across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. While I live blocks from the LEGO store opposite the Flatiron Building and have visited the store in Copenhagen (in 2014), the midtown Manhattan store was a lesson in how to do customer experience right.
Maybe they read Dan Gingiss’s The Experience Maker: How To Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can’t Wait To Share [Check our interview with Dan.]
In my opinion, LEGO has created the ultimate memorable customer experience. As you can see in the photo below, I’m sitting in a life size New York City taxi made from LEGO bricks. An employee complete with a LEGO apron volunteered to take my photo using my phone.
If you look closely, you can see the sign for their VIP Club in the background. It has a QR code to make it easy to register. Even better, like me, it’s in most people’s photos in the taxi.
Beyond being a museum of iconic New York City sights created from LEGO bricks, the store offers an array of toy options for small children, school age children and adults. Additionally, they offer different licensed sets such as Star Wars.
Across two floors there are stations that let visitors design their own LEGO creations. Visitors can create 3 figures to buy, pick their bricks by color, and use a mosaic maker to create a personalized LEGO image.
I love that they have a place where you can donate used LEGO bricks to help the environment and give them to children in need. Use this link to find out how to donate your used LEGO bricks. To date, customers have donated 597,177 pounds of LEGO bricks that are used by 103,224 children.
Located in a prime tourist destination, LEGO offers a number of New York City mementos priced under $10. Personally, I love the Statue of Liberty key chains.
Actionable Marketing Tips:
- Give passersby a reason to enter your store. The New York City sights displayed in the windows make you want to enter the LEGO store to get a better view.
- Get visitors involved with your products. The LEGO store not only showcases New York City sights, but also it offers visitors different ways to experience their products.
- Offer customers a reason to buy something at a reasonable price where it makes sense. Since the LEGO store is in a prime tourist area, it’s smart to offer New York City souvenirs for under $10 to get visitors to buy. Of course this doesn’t hold true for high-end products.
Recommended Reading
Voice Notes
► Voice Assistant Usage Continues To Grow In the US
As Conversational AI gets integrated into a variety of consumer activities, 123.5 million US adults will use a voice assistant each month in 2022. By 2025, this number should grow to 130.1 million or about half of the US adult population.
Privacy concerns combined with poor customer experience hinder further smart speaker adoption. As a result, only 2.6% growth in smart speaker adoption is expected in 2022. (Source)
Actionable Voice Marketing Tip
- Create audio content and make it easy for your audience to find your content. Since listening to audio content remains the dominant use case for smart speakers.
Recommended Reading
Social Scene
► Global Social Usage Data
From a global perspective, Meta has a lock on 3 of the top 5 social media platforms with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, according to data from We Are Social and Hootsuite. For marketing purposes, you need to understand the use of specific social media platforms based on geographic and demographic differences.
The WeChat platform placed fourth since 99% of its users come from Mainland China, where about one-fifth of the world’s total internet users live.
On average, people spend 2 hours and 27 minutes per day with social media, an increase of 2 minutes over 2021. As a percentage of total time online, social media has effectively remained flat.
By itself, these numbers may not seem like a lot but in aggregate this projects to 4+ trillion hours spent globally with social media in 2022.
New York City Marketing Minute
► What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach You
Last week, I visited a gem of a show about Sherlock Holmes at the Grolier Club in Manhattan. In honor of Holme’s London address, Glen S. Miranker selected 221 items of Holmesiana, items about Holmes, Watson and Conan Doyle, from his 7,000+ collection of books, illustrations and letters.
Together these 221 pieces are a lesson in book and content marketing at its best and its worst since the exhibit includes 2 cases of pirated editions of Sherlock Holmes books.
First appearing in A Study in Scarlet published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, Sherlock Holmes landed the Guinness World Record for the most frequently portrayed human literary character in film and television in 2012. (Source: The Guardian)
Recommended Reading
As a writer, I loved seeing Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s notebooks where he recorded ideas that he later included in his work. Even more surprising to me was how legible his handwriting was. When I write by hand, my penmanship can be difficult to read.
Originally, the Sherlock Holmes stories were published in magazines like other well known writers such as Dickens. Some stories were so popular that some issues needed to be reprinted to meet high demand.
Later, the stories were compiled into books. A number of versions of the Sherlock Holmes books were pirated. Their covers showed enticing women to encourage sales.
According to The New York Times:
“Conan Doyle hated pirate editions. He was as famous for denouncing pirate publishers as they were infamous for grinding out cheap editions — and not paying royalties to authors like him.”
In addition some versions of Sherlock Holmes were published by hotels and used as advertising where the message was placed around the main text.
Like a good content marketer, the stories of Sherlock Holmes were transformed into other types of content such as plays, movies and television shows.
Over the years, Sherlock Holmes fans have kept their interest in the famous detective alive as members of the Baker Street Irregulars.
The Sherlock Holmes marketing bottom line:
Make your brand characters universally appealing so people want more content and other products from them.
For example, a Life Magazine Special focused on Sherlock Holmes was for sale near the cashier at Michael’s.
Actionable Marketing Tips:
- Incorporate archetypes into your brand representatives to make them more universally appealing.
- Broaden the audience for your content marketing by transforming it into other formats.
Special tip of my hat to Scott Monty who wrote about the exhibit in his must-read newsletter, Off The Clock.
BTW – If you want to see the Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects show, it’s at the Grolier Club through April 16, 2022. (Tickets are free but you need a reservation.)
Recommended Reading:
Marketing Reads
Check out
SEMRush’s The State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report.
It contains must-read data based on results surveying 1,500 marketers as well as correlation data from 500,000 articles.
Also, it has input from content marketing smarties including yours truly.
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Recommended Reading:
Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar
► Future of Voice Experiences and Commercialization Case Studies – Wednesday, Feb. 23rd, 12:00pm ET. (Virtual)
Presented by Hannes Heikenheimo, CTO & Co-Founder – Speechly and Mandi Galluch, Head of Marketing – Speechly
► 2022 Trends in Content Marketing – Thursday, Feb. 24, 1:00pm ET (Virtual)
An expert Discussion (Virtual) with Andy Crestodina, Lenox Powell, Kathyn Strachan and Margarita Loktionova
► VoiceLunch US – Friday, Feb. 25th, 1pm ET. (Virtual)
#VoiceLunch is the community where voice enthusiasts from all over the world meet. Join Heidi and other Voice experts and guests. At VoiceLunch everyone has a voice. Note: You must Sign up for the VoiceLunch newsletter to receive the Zoom links and reminders.
► Project Voice – April 25 – 28. 18th, Chattanooga, TN.
The #1, in-person event for voice tech and conversational AI in America returns. Register Now!
► The 2022 Creator Economy Expo (aka: CEX) – May 2–4, Phoenix, AZ
By Creators for Creators: Join 500+ fellow creators to explore the latest strategies, tactics, and tools — plus make valuable connections — for achieving big success as a new breed of content entrepreneur.
Special AMG reader discount: Get $150 off — Use code: AMGCEX
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► Omnichannel X 2022 Conference – June 13 -16, (Virtual).
Save 25% when you use code: SPK2225
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Happy Marketing,
Heidi
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