Contenix Blog

Customers expect the latest product information, does your channel have it?

If you are a premium brand marketer and don’t provide your authorized retailers “brand-approved” content to promote your brand on their websites, you are missing a huge opportunity. Think about it for a moment: you spend thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of dollars to develop your brand identity. Then, you spend hundreds of thousands more to promote, advertise, and protect that brand online and offline. Meanwhile, one of your retailers can inadvertently dilute that investment by featuring your brand in an incomplete or substandard manner (note: if you aren’t helping them then you share some of this blame).

Many brands have a large numbers of retail partners. Most or all of these retailers have websites that they promote attracting a significant numbers of qualified customers. But, when they do, how is your brand represented? Here are some questions to … Read More

In every product category, there is the finest, the most extreme — the edge case that sets the bar higher than everyone else. In the Swiss watchmaking industry, that company is Maîtres du Temps (translation – The Masters of Time). The company’s timepieces are works of art that take the most skilled and talented watchmakers years to craft and assemble.

But as a premium brand, they have specific challenges that affect their sales channel. In their case, one such challenge is the incredible value and scarcity of their timepieces. Because each timepiece can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Maîtres’ in-house sales executives are unable to showcase every timepiece they make. This is also a problem for retailers who want to sell these timepieces because they are unable to stock and display more then a few pieces at a time. Add to this the complexity of servicing customers and retailers … Read More

Pick up the Wall Street Journal or New York Times on any given day and you’ll likely encounter articles about “the power of the cloud.” So, what does the cloud really mean for brand marketers, and why should you care?

In the most simplistic of terms, the cloud is a powerful network of computers that delivers software to you (or, to your business) as a service instead of as a product. Instead of buying software and hardware, and then paying a consultant to make it all work, why not just “rent” what you need? By using a cloud software solution, you have the option of scaling the amount of software and services you use up or down anytime, depending on the requirements of your business.

The old software model is expensive, inflexible and difficult to manage. With new cloud software solutions, your company can now realize significant savings on the … Read More

Every year, premium brands spend unbelievable amounts of money producing catalogs for their field representatives and authorized retailers — especially when you factor in photography, design, layout, printing, and shipping. So it’s no surprise that a brand might spend up to $100,000 annually just to get a printed catalog to each point of sale. Then, field reps often haul these massive catalogs around when they visit retailers and potential retail partners.

Moreover, if there is an addition or deletion to the printed catalog, a large-scale “update” mailing has to be scheduled to each and every retailer. This creates a massive headache for the entire channel. Each retailer with the printed catalog then has to add new printed pages or remove pages of discontinued products. For retailers this becomes a costly and an overwhelming hassle just keeping up with these catalog changes. Not something a storeowner wants to deal with when … Read More

A recent forecast from Informa Telecom & Media seems to suggest that Apple has a lock on the tablet market at least until 2015 when cheaper Android tablets will start to outsell the iPad.

Currently Apple owns around 75% of the tablet market but forecasts suggest that in 2015 it should slip below 40%.

Gartner released a study a few months ago which was a bit more bullish on Apple. In that study it mentioned – in 2015 Apple should still be be flirting with a 50% tablet market share.

Looks like the money is still on Apple – at least in the near future…

The full article is located here

Is Your Business on Facebook? Should it Be?

The arguments for advertisers buying pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google, Yahoo, and Bing are simple. When somebody searches for a specific brand or product, you buy PPC and then appear at the top of the search results offering to sell that exact product. The obvious context and association is clear between the “user” and the business promoting that product or service.

Similarly, the same case can be made for having a search engine optimization strategy (SEO). People are searching for your products, so construct your pages and content such that your pages are easily found and indexed by the different search engines with a high ranking (generally on the first page), so they will be easily found.

The same argument cannot be made for what we’d call “destinational” websites such as Facebook. The reason we call them “destinational” is because people do … Read More

For the last 30 years premium brands have relied on print media, TV and to a lesser extent radio as a way to reach potential customers……..and they still do.  With the advent of the internet and mobile technology, today’s consumers watch less TV and read fewer newspapers than ever before. They are choosing to receive their news, access information, pay bills, do research, connect with their friends and shop online…….all courtesy of their mobile phone, iPad or other internet enabled device. Premium brands now need to consider many new channels where they can interact with their potential customers. While the opportunity is exciting and vast, it does come with significant barriers to entry.

The good news is the internet provides premium brands with something the aforementioned channels never offered them – the ability to target and connect with potential customers in whole new ways.  When a browser searches Google … Read More