Understanding South Australia’s Recent Kangaroo Campaign with Brand Asset Valuator

The South Australian Tourism Commission’s (SATC) recent television commercial for Kangaroo Island was certainly an evocative piece of film and it certainly builds upon a long running strategy to differentiate the state from other tourist destinations. Using the BrandAsset Valuator, we can uncover what this strategy is and whether it is working. 

For some background, the BrandAsset Valuator (BAV) is a set of brand image diagnostics based on an annual collection of Australian consumer perceptions of over 1,400 brands, from Net-a-porter to Old Spice, across 28 different sectors, from auto to non-profit organisations. The data collection has been ongoing since 1993 and is also concurrently run in many other countries. To date, $150 million has been invested in the study to have a truly complete picture of the global brandscape.

To start the examination of the SATC strategy, we need to look at the BAV headline measures. The chart below shows how the different states have changed between 2006 and 2011 in terms of their Brand Strength (an index of the differentiation and relevance of a brand) and Brand Stature (an index of how well-known and regarded a brand is). South Australia has had a relatively large increase in Brand Strength since 2006 (this is likely the result of SATC’s historical marketing activity).

Changeinbrandstrengthandstature

This change in Brand Strength has been driven by an improvement in one of the pillars that underpins Brand Strength, what we call Energized Differentiation – an improvement in people’s perceptions that SA offers something distinctive.

Pillars20062011

In exploring which brand image attributes make South Australia a distinct proposition, we can see that consumers strongly associate SA with attributes such as ‘Down to Earth’, ‘Traditional’, ‘Simple’, ‘Reliable and ‘Straightforward’, relative to Victoria. There’s a current of ‘Authenticity’ about consumer perceptions of SA and the imagery in the recent Kangaroo Island campaign certainly seeks to build on these existing perceptions. 

Consumerassociationwbrand
 

With BAV, we can also see what SA is not, and that’s a place that is dynamic, hip and happening. Again, SATC has made the right move by not attempting to convince people to a view that has little existing currency.

Consumerassociationwbrand_2
To further examine the success of SATC’s attempt to distinguish South Australia, we’ve compared the brand image attribute scores between South Australian residents and non-residents. The chart below shows that with the exception of ‘Reliable’, both South Australians and Non-South Australians are aligned in perceiving South Australia as offering this ‘Authentic’ experience.

Savnonsaresidents

So interstate Australians are on board, but it remains to be seen whether the SATC’s strategy of selling the ‘Authentic’ Australian experience will enjoy similar appeal with international visitors. Are the evocative and wind-swept landscapes of Kangaroo Island and similar outdoor adventures compelling to an international market?


 

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Asynchronous programming: a few lessons

At Datalicious, we maintain quite a few systems that need to handle serious network activity loads while working with some fairly large data sets. Often we're simply gluing existing components - such as Splunk - together, but we still need some pretty serious performance.

Traditionally if you want some major performance out of your software without some serious hardware up-scaling, you'd basically write your programs in a "low-level" programming language like C (or C++ if you're a masochist).

This has a couple of problems, though:

  • we want our code to be 'portable' - to work across platforms without writing 'glue code'
  • we need to code to tight deadlines
  • I'm not a computer scientist!

An alternative approach is to use programming frameworks that behave asynchronously. This has allowed us to build systems that handle huge amounts of data and staggering loads of traffic on our clients' websites.

I've always been interested in the 'asynchronous' programming model. Like Ryan Dahl, creator of node.js and until recently an employer of the cloud computing provider Joyent, I'm partly driven by an anxiety about the inefficiency of the most popular model of web development: spawning a process to handle each request, which dies as soon as the response is sent to the client. This works well for simple atomic web applications, but we have some complex requirements that don't suit this well: we need to be able to handle hundreds of requests per second on small, relatively weak machines, and log information from those requests without slowing down the response time at all. The only effective way to do this is to decouple the process of writing data to disk or into a database from the process of sending data to a user's web browser.

Developing web services this way is challenging, and it requires a different mode of thinking, it has significant rewards. It's possible to write a program where a single process can handle all of these responsibilities with barely any impact on the CPU, where an equivalent solution written (for example) in PHP had to be sharded across multiple heavier machines and still required attention when there was a spike in website traffic.

Event-driven and asynchronous programming have a simple concept at there core: instead of making your programs wait around for some data to come off the network, the disk or from user input, the program asserts that it needs to wait for something and registers some instructions that will occur when the data arrives, without blocking in between.

As I mentioned, this does carry a cost - generally in the complexity of a program. The benefits can be immense, though:

  • handling many disk operations or network connections in a single process allows the state of a system to be shared more effectively, providing greater interoperability between systems
  • having a single process handle many incoming network connections avoids the expense of spawning threads or new processes o handle connections, which is the traditional network programming approach
  • programming with an asynchronous model gives the developer access to network protocols at a low level that represents the reality: they they are streams of data, not necessarily just atomic request and response objects
  • asynchronous systems generally run in long-lived processes and can integrate far more effectively with other services and processes, as they have the ability to store state over time and to communicate with other processes or systems, whether on the same machine or over the internet

There's a long-running argument in computer science over different models for asynchronous programming. The current node.js craze has revitalised this debate

The prevalent dichotomy is between threads and event loops (also referred to as reactors. It's an ancient argument and I don't have much to add to it, except that as someone who is constantly trying to find a balance between 'correctness' and 'efficiency' in my software, I find programming with threads to be difficult and sometimes tedious.

Many developers find it counter-intuitive to deal with event-driven models in programming, but I think this is mainly an education problem: most people are raised on the 'imperative' approach in languages like C++ and Java, with some coverage of object-oriented concepts. This is already changing: the current generation of self-taught programmers is overwhelmingly focused on JavaScript, which strongly emphasises functional programming and often deals with an asynchronous approach when communicating between a web browser and a server. I don't believe that asynchronous programming is necessarily more difficult than traditional programming.

Our own lessons lately have involved the stability of node.js. I do think it's a great project. It's raised awareness of a programming approach that was neglected, and it's made systems development a little more accessible to front-end programmers. It's also looking to be a popular alternative to Ruby on Rails for the development of truly hypermedia-based RESTful APIs.

That said, the project's immaturity has to be recognised. We've found that it's challenging to deploy node.js as a HTTP server without encountering stability issues. Node is constantly improving in this regard, but there are no established standards for maintaining and monitoring a process, nor for integrating with existing tools popular with system administrators. At the moment it's very difficult to run node.js as a daemon, which is deal-breaker for some system administrators.

For this reason, we've started to explore alternatives, such as Python's Twisted framework. It turns out there are a range of solutions similar to node.js which are much easier to "productionise", which have stable releases and a lot more experience in the community.

- Daniel Bryan

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Bootstrap and LESS Framework: making CSS and HTML fun again

More and more websites are being built on frameworks, including one of the world's biggest websites - Twitter - which has its own framework called Bootstrap and it's awesome.

Bootstrap is a simple and flexible CSS, HTML and JavaScript framework built by three employees of Twitter. The biggest plus about Bootstrap for me? It makes developing websites fun again and you don’t have to write the same old code you have been doing since 1999. For example, to reset every single form element for all modern browsers, just load the framework and you're ready to go, nothing else to include.

No more fiddling around with your own build resets or complicated CSS-based buttons that only work in “most browsers”. Instead, this powerful tool makes all browsers act the same and makes the life of web developers a lot more comfortable.

LESS is a extension of Bootstrap - a CSS preprocessor which takes advantage of ‘variables’ and ‘mixins’ inside Bootstrap.

The best way to show you how Bootstrap and LESS work together is to show you some examples from our own website. One of the features which are really easy and effective to use are Variables. A variable is set by using the @ in front of a name - for example @colorGrey10 : #1A1A1A. We made a bunch of different variables for shades of grey so we could easily use them across the site.

Capture

Every web developer will know how irritating and time consuming it is to write your own CSS/HTML that perfectly aligns buttons and elements to have the same look overall. Bootstrap and LESS takes all these things away and makes the page appearance more unified.  You don’t have to reset EVERY <h> to a specific font-size, it’s all done by the magnificent Bootstrap.

One of the other things Bootstrap is very useful for is making your website responsive (ie. so that it displays well across every browser, tablet and screen resolution without making a mobile version). You do this by setting different media queries inside the CSS, which is driven by Bootstrap. Bootstrap already has a standard format inside itself for media queries, so you can start writing your code for tablets in both portrait and landscape view in no time.

Por-view

Want to see how it works? Visit www.datalicious.com or supertag.datalicious.com on a tablet or mobile phone - or try it right now by simply resizing your browser window.

The learning curve of Bootstrap and LESS can be a little bit steep, but the moment you get the hang of it you will have more time to think up and develop cool stuff and you won’t have to worry about making that damn DIV move two pixels up in IE7 and stay the same in every other browser.

 

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AIMIA event: Big data is cool but most marketers don't have it and should aggregate their data first

As promised this morning, please find the slides from today's AIMIA event on Big Data below. For all of you who couldn't make it, the presentation gives a quick overview of what big data means and what the challenges are but also highlights some of the simple best practices that should be implemented before we even start worrying about big data.

In fact, most marketers won't ever have enough data to have to worry about big data problems, but all of us would get a great deal of value from just aggregating all our different customer data sets into a single customer view - which doesn't have to be expensive either! Check out the slides for a few simple examples of how to use Splunk to start building a single customer view across channels such as your website, call center and CRM. 

Click here to download:
201203 AIMIA Big Data Challenges V1.pdf (2.04 MB)
(download)
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Identify and visualise suburbs with most profitable customers using RDA geoTribes and Tableau

Marketers often have a specific idea about the type of people they want to sell to, and now there is a way to find them. RDA Research has grouped Australian people over 18 into 15 distinct ‘geoTribes’ by using social status and more uniquely, by their age. Unlike other geosegmentation models, geoTribes are at person level rather than by whole households which makes it ultimately more accurate and powerful.

By using an interactive data visualisation tool such as Tableau, you can now find your target geoTribe segment! Here’s what to do:

1. Identify your dream customers among the 15 geoTribes segments

Choose your type of customer based on their social status and lifecycle stage or match your existing customer database with RDA's geoTribes segments to find your most profitable segments.

Geotribes
2. Plot their incidence on a map using a tool such as Tableau

3. Identify relevant geoTribe hotspots

We can see in which suburbs of Australia the geoTribe of interest are more densely populated. The green shade indicates a greater percentage of the geoTribe in that suburb. These are the places to target (to attract more of the same profitable customers)!

For example - many businesses, especially in financial services, are keen to reach those with a high level of income and wealth. In geoTribes, this segment is the Rockafellas. The image below shows the incidence of Rockafellas by postcode in metropolitan Sydney. Rockafellas can be seen to cluster in suburbs such as Cherrybrook, Castle Hill and West Pennant Hills.

There is also heaps of profiling info for each geoTribe. Again in the image below we can see that:
  • 28% of Rockafellas have at least Bachelor degree
  • A majority of 42% Rockafellas are Professionals and Managers
Get in touch with us to see how you could best use geoTribes to boost the effectiveness of your segmentation and media planning! 

Geotribe_dashboard
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