First story this week in our marketing round up is the news that Virgin Trains has created itself a huge headache after sending a test email to its entire database (potentially 21,000,000 people) instead of the three internal staff that were meant to get it.
The email, offering a “Five star evening at The Grove” golf resort (as part of a campaign by Glue London being distributed by thetrainline.com) was an early stage trial mail that would have, after sign off, been sent to just 70 of Virgin Train’s most loyal customers.
Within hours of the gaffe Virgin confirmed that they were receiving telephone calls about the offer – worth in excess of £400. A follow up email tried to repair the damage and retract the offer (which Virgin state there is “no way” they will honour) but the company is now braced for the possibility of legal action. Virgin themselves are now talking to thetrainline.com about compensation. A cautionary tale.
A company not currently beset by such comic errors is Nike who have announced the launch of what they are billing as “the world’s biggest one day running event” – the Nike+Human Race.
The 10k race will be taking place across 25 different cities (including London, Los Angeles, Paris, New York, Melbourne and Shanghai) and Nike will urge runners to “Save A Spot” in their chosen city by visiting Nikeplus.com from the 2nd of June onwards. Runners unable to attend the official Nike branded events can participate in their hometown by using Nike+Ipod to measure runs on the day itself.
Nike say the event has been devised to inspire and connect more than a million runners around the globe. Each course will pass famous landmarks and all runners completing the race will be played across the finish line by a headline music act (all TBA). There will also be a host of pre-race activities featuring Nike sponsored athletes. The event will take place globally on August 31st.
Away from launches and into the field of marketing research and Conquest’s launch of Metaphorix, an online tool to “measure unconscious emotional reactions to brands by tapping into the metaphors people use to describe and express feelings.”
Using interactive online animations, Metaphorix measures how people really feel about a brand rather than relying on what they say they feel. This, Conquest say, allows the discovery of the warmth experienced toward a brand, the level of intimacy people feel with it and so on.
David Penn, co founder of Conquest, has previously worked on cognitive linguistics and claims to apply breakthroughs in neuroscience to consumer behaviour.
He claims that consumers are bombarded with so much information there isn’t time to think and that, therefore, emotions power much of their engagement with brands and unconscious shortcuts are used to help make decisions.
Finally, more proof that mobile marketing has the ability to have a major say in the future of marketing with the news that three in five mobile internet users are more inclined to purchase a brand in response to advertising on their mobiles – according to new research from Aerodeon and Millward Brown.
They claim that a study of 1,000 18-64 year old PC internet users in the UK is the first ever sector-specific research project into attitudes towards mobile phone advertising. Food for thought there…