Brand Experience: Sharing Is Caring

Brand Ambassadors, Brand Loyalty, Mobile Marketing, Shopper Marketing, Social Media | by

    Every store of every brand is different. The Apple Store on 5th Avenue isn’t quite the same as the one on Newbury Street in Boston. It goes the same for any food or beverage chains; the Starbucks in Seattle isn’t identical to the ones at the airport. Different stores give customers a different experience.

    A photo taken with the male model in front of Hollister’s 5th Avenue location.

    If you’ve ever walked down 5th Avenue in Manhattan, it’s a street full of every brand you can possibly think of. There are thousands of people walking up and down that one avenue, in one day and even so, people remember to stop in front of their favorite store and take a snapshot of that moment.

    Pongr isn’t just a social media platform, it’s somewhere you can have fun with the pictures you take, visually share what you love about your favorite brands and share your experience at different stores of various brands.

    Stores like Uniqlo have limited locations in the U.S., mostly focused in New York City. Johnny Cupcakes is another clothing store that is limited to the East Coast and only one location in Los Angeles, California. Each store has its unique atmosphere and some brands even launch limited promotions in different areas.

    A band playing live jazz at one of the Uniqlo stores.

    Through Pongr, not only do users enjoy uploading pictures and earning points, but also can share a personal experience of a brand or store that is exclusive to their memory. By sharing various photos of products or stores, users can gain information about sales, themes and limited edition products. On the Pongr website, there is a location function that identifies where the photo was taken, helping users locate which store has what specific product.

    Pongr a photo of your favorite store, shop or product. It could be a photo of a Starbucks mug that’s exclusive to your city, photos of a flagship store or even a limited edition product that you want to share. Head over to www.pongr.com to share your experience.

    Enduring Athlete Brands: Isn’t Reggie Jackson a member of the Jackson 5?

    Advertising, Brand Ambassadors, Brand Loyalty | by

      RETRO BRAND — More than three decades after the debut of the Reggie candy bar, New York Yankees legend Reggie Jackson is still extending his brand to snack foods.

      As an unrepentant supermarket junkie, I love prowling the aisles to see what new products, brands and promotions are on the shelves. I suppose the addiction stems from my childhood love for cereal and Cracker Jack prizes.

      Anyhow, while the New York Yankees are fighting for their lives against the Detroit Tigers tonight, I wanted to share this gem of a find: Reggie Jackson Ballpark-Style Sunflower Seeds. I suppose they are Ballpark-Style because you can spit the seeds on the ground.

      To be candid, I avoid shelled seeds because the shards usually become pretty painful. This bag just may remain unopened and displayed with my baseball memorabilia as a museum piece.

      In the 1970s and 1980s, Reggie Jackson was Mr. October, the epitome of swagger for any team he played for — seeing tons of postseason play for the Oakland A’s, New York Yankees and California Angels.  He hit .357 with 10 homers in five World Series. His coolness and slugging prowess earned him his own candy bar, the “Reggie,” a milk chocolate, peanut and caramel patty that was, well, simply delicious.

      Reggie with “The Reggie.”

      So in my excitement for finding Reggie sunflower seeds — ironically selling in Jackson’s “enemy territory” of Boston — I asked a Pongr co-worker in her early 20s how familiar she was with the Baseball Hall of Famer.

      “Wasn’t he a member of the Jackson 5?” she asked.

      Popularity is fleeting. That’s true for celebrities and it’s very true for brands that assume that consumers think about them 24/7. Advertising exists because new generations of customers must constantly be wooed to first try the product and then become brand loyalists.

      Apparently, Reggie Jackson is still famous enough (to us die-hard baseball fans) that his image is being slapped on bags of sunflower seeds decades after his peak. He’s not dependent on those seeds for his livelihood and he’s quite comfortable letting autograph seekers come to him.

      Global brands don’t have such a luxury. They must constantly reach out to their fans, because if they don’t, you can be sure that the competition will.

      At Pongr, we use photo sharing, a natural habit already enjoyed by hundreds of millions of mobile phone users, to help brands forge closer connections to their most devoted customers. Interested in how brands such as Mountain Dew, Arby’s (more than 660,000 fan pics!) and Pepsi/Frito-Lay have leveraged the power of Pongr?

      Download our free eBook, The Ultimate Field Guide to the Photo Sharing Universe, to learn more.

      And while you’re watching the Yankees-Tigers tonight, don’t forget to download some Reggie Jackson songs on iTunes!

      Everything in one, all in your pocket

      Advertising, Brand Ambassadors, Mobile Marketing, Social Media | by
        The iPhone 5

        The new Apple iPhone 5 in black and slate.

        There’s a new kid in town: the iPhone 5. The newly added features have people talking and more excited than ever. Among the many features, we’re most excited about the enhanced mobile camera. Now with the iPhone 5, you can take higher-resolution photos, photos in darker areas, and panoramic photos without a separate application. Apple even integrated a function that allows photos to be shared on Facebook directly without launching the app. The screen is 176 pixels taller, so you can see even more. With a metal back instead of glass, the durability of the iPhone 5 enables mobile phone photographers to take pictures with less fear of the heartbreaking drop-and-shatter.

        Smartphones, like the iPhone 5, have freed the public of carrying around different digital devices and combined it to one, making everything mobile. Now it’s even lighter to carry around. For any smartphone, each upgrade presents a camera with higher definition. Why are companies so focused on enhancing the camera function on a mobile phone?

        With all the fast-paced changes in the world, people don’t have the time or patience to carry around a phone and a camera in their pocket. Now with all the mobile applications and social media platforms, photos have become such a big part of everyone’s life. Photos can show a perfect day or years and years of memories. In order to capture that moment, people need a good camera in hand. Nowadays, the quality of camera phone photos are good enough to even frame on walls. The public needed something that could make photo-taking convenient and smartphones have achieved just that.

        For those of you who have smartphones or camera phones, we want to invite all of our users to face the mirror with your phone, tag the brand and share them on www.pongr.com. We want to see the ones responsible for all those wonderful photos on Pongr!

        Photo Taking: The Universal Behavior

        Brand Ambassadors, Mobile Marketing, Social Media | by

          Even though this K-Pop music video has gone viral within days, not many people can produce high quality videos.

          Who here hasn’t seen Gangnam Style? It’s everywhere: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MTV Awards and even on Ellen. The hilarious K-Pop video went viral within days and now the song is replaying all over the radio. YouTube stars are making their own parodies and sharing them on the web.

          While there are a handful of people who make high quality videos, quality videos are yet to be created by everyone. It’s hard to do.

          Creating high quality videos is still harder even in the high-tech world we live in. Brands, professionals and celebrities have enough resources to create a cool video to post online. Many YouTubers express themselves through these high quality videos that go viral within days. That is where a trend starts.

          A photo taken with Instagram on an iPhone 4.

          However, trends are maintained differently. Camera phones are easily accessible and now consumers express their own style through photos and hundreds of iPhone and Android photography apps that instantly enhance photo quality. People are searching for ways to take better photos and get more likes on Facebook or more followers on Instagram. Taking photos is now a universal behavior. And, it’s much much easier to create high quality photo content than video content.

          Products and brands aren’t meant to be one-sided; it should be reciprocal. Through photos, product marketing and expressing individual style has never been easier. Pongr is here to make it faster, simpler and more fun for everyone on the web.

          Have a favorite brand or product? Pongr your photos and add a little Gangnam Style to it – or maybe even your own – and share it with the brands you love and the friends you like.

          Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Brands

          Brand Ambassadors, Brand Loyalty, Mobile Marketing, Shopper Marketing | by

            Ever wondered where your favorite make-up guru got her mascara? Stumbled upon a Facebook photo of a beautiful nail polish shade and wanted to know what it was?  Went out for Fashion Night Out and wanted to ask everyone where they got what they were wearing?

            What if we told you that you could get information on items from the photos you saw online?

            They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but now, it’s worth a thousand brands. No more asking around where that random user got that shiny bracelet in the photo they took. Pongr will tell you what kind of brands are out there, where the items were bought and what they are is called.

            Word of mouth? Correction, word-of-mouth marketing.

            It’s simple as snapping a photo, tagging the brand and clicking submit to earn points for rewards and answering all those questions of where you got it and what it is called.

            For those of you who participated in Fashion Night Out last night and went through the pain of wondering what people were wearing or simply wanted to share the glamorous styles of the global event, Pongr your photos and hashtag #FashionNightOut2012 and check out what shined the fashion streets of SoHo and fashion cities all over the world.

            The New Face of Marketing

            Brand Ambassadors, Mobile Marketing, Shopper Marketing, Social Media | by

              In a recent article for the Harvard Business Review, Bill Lee makes the claim that traditional marketing is dead. It’s quite a proclamation, and he backs it up with several studies that confirm things like the relative lack of influence traditional marketing has on buyers’ decisions, as well as the apparent disillusionment of many CEOs with traditional marketing spending versus sales results. We still think traditional marketing has its place, but tight integration with newer, more social marketing tactics is definitely the future.

              Lee posits that what may be creeping in to replace traditional marketing is a return to what he calls “community marketing”—companies empowering brand advocates to promote the product using social channels. For consumers, this “approximate[s] the experience of buying in their local, physical communities,” by applying the trust inherent in social networks to buying decisions. Community marketing is good for brands, because it makes the search for influencers easier. What better place to look for people to promote and advocate for your product than among people who already use and like the product?

              Lee also argues that in exchange for helping promote the brand, consumers should be rewarded not with cash prizes or other similar incentives, but with social capital. By allowing brand enthusiasts to build trust and authority within their social network through promoting the brand, companies appeal to our desire to belong to a community and be recognized in that community.

              Although he doesn’t know it, Lee is describing all the best things about photo response marketing. User-generated content is the most authentic and compelling form of content. Photos, too, are especially attractive and appeal to our universal human desire for authenticity and self-expression. Pongr’s platform lets brands empower their customers to create compelling original content to express their relationship with the brand. Our one-click sharing capabilities give users the opportunity to spread their content throughout their social networks, helping their influence to reach places traditional marketing never could.

              Even if, like us, you believe traditional marketing still has a place, there’s no denying that integrating traditional with social marketing has become an essential part of running a business. Investing in new media marketing strategies is no longer a choice—it’s a requirement. According to a recent survey by Empathica, 62% of consumers feel brands are not participating sufficiently in online conversations. It’s time for brands to give consumers what they want and take advantage of the power of community marketing by enabling brand enthusiasts to promote the brand through social photos.

              The Olympics of Advertising: Is it possible to survive using only “official” brands?

              Advertising, Brand Ambassadors, Brand Loyalty | by

                Ronald McDonald welcomes Five Ring Diet founder Terin Izil to London!

                She cleverly called it “The Five Ring Diet,” and from the moment the torch was lit to kick off the 2012 Summer Olympics to the last few notes of the closing ceremonies, copywriter Terin Izil only ate, wore, lived and cleaned herself with brands that were official sponsors of the Games. She shared her daily quest on her Tumblr blog.

                The challenging publicity stunt was staged as a fundraiser for Camp Promise-West, a camp the 28-year-old Chicago woman helped start for children and adults with muscular dystrophy and neuromuscular disorders. One of the camp’s amazing programs involves giving wheelchair-accessible hot air balloon rides.

                For breakfast, Terin usually ate Chobani Greek Yogurt or Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (three-time Beach Volleyball Gold Medalist Kerri Walsh graces the box).  Procter & Gamble gave her a wide berth of choices of soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, skin care products and laundry detergent.  And Budweiser was there with commemorative bottles when she wanted to kick back and relax.

                Photos Make Social Media Social Again

                Brand Ambassadors, Social Media | by

                  Brands—how much do you know about your Facebook fans? I mean, really know? You know how many you have, you can see how and when they interact with your content, but what else can you say about your fans? How many use your product on a daily basis, or how many wish they could? Which ones clicked “like” on your page two years ago and then forgot about you entirely, and which ones remain devoted brand enthusiasts who proudly advocate for your brand and spread word of mouth via their own personal profiles?

                  Chances are, most brands can’t answer these questions. A new like or follow doesn’t tell brands much about the users themselves, and this makes it very challenging to engage with fans on the personal, one-to-one level that social media promises. As a result, lots of brands have resorted to simply blasting their message on Facebook and Twitter, and they’re a bit lost when it comes to personalized, individual engagement with fans.

                  Victoria Ransom points out this challenge in her latest blog post for AdAge today. She proposes that brands need to implement systems to aggregate and analyze social data in order to be able to create highly personalized interactions with consumers. Of course, this is exactly what makes Pongr’s photo response management tools so great.

                  Behind The Scenes: How Miles High Clothing Set Up Their Sticker Photo Contest

                  Brand Ambassadors, Photo Marketing Widgets, Pongr Contests | by

                    STANDING OUT: Miles High Clothing gave its outreach campaign a stylized look by hand stamping every envelope.

                    Why use the U.S. Postal Service and rubber stamps to promote a mobile photo contest?

                    It’s not surprising that start-up company Miles High is embracing snail mail and a nostalgic printing method to promote their sticker contest. Heck, these are the same guys who chose an antique airplane as their logo!

                    The premise of their “Earn Your Wings” contest is to have fans photograph their logo in the highest places in the world. It’s a fitting theme since the wool from their Alpaca sweaters comes from mountainous Ecuador.

                    Pongr Tools You Can Use: The Contest Leader Board Widget

                    Brand Ambassadors, Photo Marketing Widgets | by

                      Is Winning Within Her Reach?

                      As demonstrated by Miles High Clothing, Pongr’s new free Photo Marketing Widgets help small businesses, nonprofit groups, community organizations and bloggers run automated direct-response photo contests. You’d have to hire your own team of developers to run your photo sharing campaigns so smoothly!

                      Competition breeds creativity.

                      Miles High is asking its fans to “Earn Your Wings” by photographing its logo sticker “in the highest place they can be.”  The challenge is both literal and metaphorical as brand enthusiasts are bringing the stickers in airplanes, the tops of mountains, on the sides of cliffs, but also to places that personally symbolize achievement.

                      We love this pic of a dad and his little girl reaching for success.

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