News and Analysis
Brand Building or Performance Marketing? Why Multi-Location Brands Must Invest in Both
Brands have long grappled with the decision of how to allocate marketing dollars across brand building and performance marketing. Building sustainable brand awareness and a strong reputation requires a long-term investment with tough-to-measure results. Performance marketing delivers more immediate local leads and sales. It’s easy to see why many brands overinvest in performance marketing at […]
Content Creators are Upping Their Game
When we hear “content creators” and “influencers” we may think primarily about people unboxing new products, waxing poetic about their cosmetics, sharing branded recipes, or merely dancing on TikTok. Many of these people are “citizen marketers” who promote products for a paycheck. However, another group of content creators focuses on developing more in-depth content that […]
Holidays 2024 Installment 1: Megan Harbold Predicts the Spending Future
We recently announced that because the holidays are a huge and complex spending season for MULO (multi-location) brands we are reaching out to industry leaders for their predictions about holidays 2024. Our first perspective is from a company with a broad and deep understanding of spending data and today’s marketing strategies and tactics. Skai VP […]
Latest Posts
Why Are Multi-Location Brands Ghosting Their Customers?
You may have heard of ghosting in the dating or job application world. It’s when someone communicates with you and then vanishes suddenly and without a trace. Your messages go unanswered. Here today…ghost tomorrow! Multi-location brands (MULO) are ghosting their customers and prospects. A recent study by SOCI, “The High Cost of Invisibility for Multi-Location […]
On GDPR’s 5th Anniversary, Fragmentation Remains Biggest Privacy Challenge
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Although the privacy landscape is quite different in 2023 than it was five years ago, when the European Union’s GDPR went into effect in May of 2018, the adtech industry in the U.S. remains in a state of flux, struggling to deal with fragmentation caused […]
5 Franchise Tips to Ease Friction
Franchise businesses account for a whopping 10.5% of all companies with paid employees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, they account for $1.3 trillion in sales across various industries. Franchising enables brands to grow and quickly open multiple locations. People who buy into franchises have the ability to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams without shouldering the […]
Acoustic Gets to the ‘Why’ of the Customer Journey
Acoustic is a global SaaS subscription company that provides customer-engagement tools for B2C brands. It has worked with brands including Pura, PayPal, Scientific American, and Ticketmaster. In 2022, Acoustic helped clients manage over 120 billion personalized interactions by focusing on the customer journey. John Riewerts, SVP of Engineering at Acoustic, explains the company’s newest offering […]
Emodo COO: AI Is Where We’re Continuing to Focus
As the mobile adtech division of the telecom giant Ericsson, Emodo is placing a major emphasis on AI-driven performance and personalization in programmatic advertising this year. The company is also doubling down on innovations around optimization, especially as it relates to targeting, innovative formats, and unique inventory. At the head of all these initiatives is […]
How LiveRamp Helps Brands Manage First-Party Data
Is the juice worth the squeeze? That’s what SaaS company LiveRamp wants clients to ask themselves when they opt for the relative ease of scaling ad campaigns in walled gardens like Facebook. Consumer perceptions and privacy regulations are continuing to evolve, and personally identifiable information (PII) via first-party data is a brand’s most valuable asset. […]
The Top 7 Challenges Multi-Location (MULO) Brands Face Today
Whether a multi-location brand has 10 storefronts or >1,000, the challenges faced today are similar. Over the past five years, cosmic shifts in how people work, live, travel, and shop have surfaced a new range of consumer trends. “Near me” is a common part of search behavior today. And the distance someone is willing to […]
Survey Reveals Why Customers Delete Branded Apps
The number one reason consumers delete branded apps is to free up phone storage space. According to a survey from Airship and Sapio Research, 32% percent of respondents cited space as the top reason. In-app ads, if multitudinous, were cited as the second highest reason people deleted branded apps (30% of respondents). Sapio Research and […]
GroundTruth CMO: ‘Most Brand Marketers Struggle with Marketing Vanity Metrics’
The role of a marketer changed drastically in 2023. Rather than being centered on brand, advertising, and digital marketing, brand marketers today are focusing more heavily on strategic areas, like marketing analytics, revenue growth, innovation, and market entry strategy. Surveys show that while firms are slowing their investments in customer relationship management systems, brand building, […]
Hair Care Today…$41B Tomorrow: The Growth of a Category
Hair care is a rapidly-growing category for multi-location brands. As part of our future-forward series, we’ll cover categories that are on the upswing in the MULO (multi-location) ecosystem, along with trends that will impact individual brands’ survival and growth. Intellectual capital has value, but what’s ON our heads can be as lucrative as what’s in […]
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