We hope you are enjoying our series of posts on the value of your "Wallys", the 20% of your customers who are responsible for 80% of your sales.

Here in the agency, we are passionate about this strategic focus, because it truly helps both B2C Marketing creatives, as well as B2B strategists. Instead of making the (grave) mistake of creating campaigns based on the now obsolete "Old Paradigm", knowing Wally helps them to focus limited resources, budgets and headcount on precisely those Customer+Fans who truly drive their businesses.

A Marketing focus on Wally, his needs and interests can also make it easier to embrace the "New Paradigm" of Business for the 21st century, the "Network" model.

That's Home for the billions of "synapses" taking place 24/7, conversations and connections that make up the true markets of the Digital Economy.

Think "Cluetrain". 

If you've ever heard Paul Fleming speak about the importance of Wally, you will know that he likes to joke about "Wally and the WOMs".
What, you might ask, is that?
A new boy band?

You might think of pop hits if the ever-increasing sales that result from focusing on Wally and his friends, the WOMs (Word-of-Mouth customers) is "music to your ears".

WOMs, simply put, are "Super Wallys": fans so fanatically in love with your Brand that they recommend you non-stop to whomever will listen to them. WOMs consider your New Brand their "Lovemark", a product, service or project so important to them that it occupies their HEARTS, and not their MINDS, the much touted mental (and rational) "Short List" of Brand Awareness studies.

Why is Wally so important? And why should you especially want to get to know his friends, the WOMs?

It's actually quite simple: if you take good care of Wally, and hang out with the WOMs, sooner or later he'll present you to his cousin, ROI. That's right: ROI!

ROI (Return on Investment) is now, more than ever, the Holy Grail of Sales and Marketing in our crisis-ridden reality. What we propose to you is that you relax a bit more about your sales figures, and that you forget about stuffing your quarterly Excel-sheets with false fans, short-term customers that will not impact your long-term strategies.

It's far more intelligent to keep in mind the Lifetime Value of your best customers, a concept IE Business School professor Enrique Dans develops quite well in this brief PDF (in Spanish: for English resources on "Customer Lifetime Value", please also check out the excellent work of Peppers & Rodgers). Managing this crucial relationship is the very heart of CRM, Customer Relationship Management and its tools.

At Barcelona Virtual, our daily mantra is this: ¡La Rentabilidad nace de la Relación! ("Profitability is born from the Relationship!") Find your Wally, take care of your WOMs and soon you will meet Cousin ROI.

We hope it is a relationship that will last for a lifetime.

Photo sources:

Wonderbra: http://pinterest.com/pin/91901648616239175/

Heart Balloon: http://pinterest.com/pin/91901648616131455/

Relax: http://pinterest.com/pin/91901648616172786/ 

The other day, we introduced the idea of focusing on your most profitable 20% of customers in order to achieve a better ROI, or Return On Investment in your Digital Marketing. These are your "True Fans", the 20% who cause 80% of your business' turnover, according to the Pareto Principle.

To make things easier, in the preceding article we christened clients of this type with the name Wally, the name we use here in Spain for the popular children's character "Waldo" in the books created by Martin Handford. Calling your "Most-Profitable-Twenty-Percent" simply "Wally" is not only shorter: it helps us visualise a Real Person, instead of a series of data points in an Excel sheet or Access database.

Here at Barcelona Virtual, we'll keep developing key strategic points around Wally in successive posts of this series on Día 1. In today's article, we'd like to underscore not only the importance of identifying and taking care of your "Wallys". You also need to be on the lookout for the "False Wallys", who are nothing less than "False Fans". They can be very toxic.

Community Managers know them well: they usually refer to them with exasperation as "Trolls", "Terrorists" or worse. We prefer to give them the name "Andrés", thanks to a popular Spanish refrain:

"¡Es por el interés que te quiero, Andrés!"

The quip "I love you for what I get out of you, Andrew" points clearly to a situation that is mutually beneficial, because both parties are interested in using each other for their own ends. However, an Andrés is far from being a Fan, and will quickly abandon any Old Brand* foolish enough to invest resources in cultivating a relationship that will never be.

To make matters worse, since very many Old Brands are themselves USERS, only interested in consumers as long as they consume and serve a purpose, this mutual "use and abuse" is quite endemic, especially in Social Media "strategies". Paul always complains that such campaigns are not only short-sighted and ineffective: they also indirectly insult you as a current or potential customer.

They're not really interested in YOU; they only want to use you as long as you continue to be a €€€ or $$$ "Dispenser".

To conclude for today, Forrest Research has grouped users of Social Networks in a series of categories you can see in the chart below. In our opinion, your Wallys, all of them "True Fans", will tend by nature to be more active and to contribute to healthy Engagement indicators in your Social Media channels. They might even engage in constructive criticism, once in awhile.

But it will be for your good. They want you to succeed:

they truly love and admire your New Brand ;-)

* Old Brands = our designation for companies who have not yet "seen the light" and awakened to the fact that the New Consumer has the power and decides their future. New Brands not only are products and services of the 21st Century, both digital and relational by nature. They are also Brands created by companies that recognise their future innovation and success will come only from the "Relevant Relationships" they cultivate with their Wallys, their most profitable customers.

Photo sources:
Keyboard: http://creativosinc.com/blog/2013/03/customer-engagement-lease-con-cuidado/

Feliz Falsedad: http://aliciafitipaldi.wordpress.com

Forrester Research: http://www.webgeekly.com/lessons/social-media/the-6-different-types-of-social-media-users-which-one-are-you/

These days it's not easy to develop successful Marketing strategies.

We often have the feeling that we have completely lost sight of our customers. Where are they hiding?

With the hyper-fragmentation of Mass Media, Social Media, the popularity of Gaming's virtual worlds, and relentless changes in consumer habits driven by technology, finding our "targets" is much like the famous childrens' book by Martin Handford, "Where's Waldo?".

The change from the Sender-to-Receiver paradigm in Communication, now obsolete and replaced by the New Paradigm, "Network", makes many advertisers feel dizzy and lost. When we explain to our clients the premise of the "Cluetrain Manifesto", that Markets are Conversations occuring 24/7 in a non-stop "matrix" of interconnected consumers, their eyes tend to glaze over at once.

The "Chaos Theory" comes to Marketing. They feel overwhelmed.

It's for this reason that we have been using the figure of "Wally" (his name in Spain) as a shorthand way to focus our clients' attention on the importance of their most profitable customers. Wally is our way to simplify (and remember) the famous Pareto Principle: that 20% of your customers will cause 80% of your sales.

Of course, that is a generalization: most advertisers have a series of important clusters or target groups.

Still, Wally is an important resource that aids many of them, as well as students who attend Paul's classes and conferences, to focus scarce budgets, resources, time and headcount on precisely those customers who drive the future of a Brand and its company.

Stay tuned: we will be talking much more about our friend Wally in coming posts!


Photo credits: "Waldo", Copyright by his author Martin Handford

We are pleased to finally present a fresh, new look online

that gives a much more accurate idea of who we are.

As always, "Botox-free": transparent and real, intimate and personal.

The eternal struggle had been to find time for an already hopelessly outdated former web. 

With customer needs constantly changing, the "Always-On", almost 24/7 attention required naturally means that our Top Priority is to ensure that our clients' Digital Marketing strategies succeed - and even surpass - their objectives. 

Until now, our own web needed to wait in line.

Today we've launched a preliminary, provisional one-page web to cover the basic questions potential clients, press and friends might have about our vision and the "BV Team".

The next step will be to furnish a detailed Online Portfolio to showcase the exciting projects we are working on in Branding, Interactive Marketing, Webs and Promotional Microsites, Smartphone apps, 3D and Social Media.

We hope you like it ;-)

Thank you as always for your support and friendship!

When it comes to Christmas, expressing the joy... and even whimsy, of the Holiday Season is something that is often best done using the magic of 3D.

The proof is in the (Christmas?) pudding with this short spot we developed for our client Cinesa, in collaboration with our very own "3D Lord", Cyro Oduber, who has recently founded Cyrostudios.

The creative benefits of 3D are clear, but perhaps you are also looking for cost savings in terms of location, talent and other production charges. Thanks to the pre- and post-production done in virtual spaces, new avenues open up to promote your products, in a more economical way.

Whether that be through commercial spots, short animations, corporate presentations or even "cyber-series" for brand loyalty strategies on the Web and in Social Media... how might we help you to make a big impact, at a significant cost savings?

Please contact us (here)! And, oh... watch out for that sleigh!!!

Source: Social networks, author unknown. No copyright infringement intended.

3 from B-Reel & B-Reel Films on Vimeo.


The New Brand now has a real-time human face, personified by your most cheerful, people-loving Customer Service Reps. Coming to a webcam soon near you! ;-)

A special thanks to Juan at Pasión por el Marketing for this tip!

El Marketing Digital sin pelos en la lengua, ni cortinas de humo / Digital Marketing: straight talking with no hot air

View more presentations from Paul Fleming

Paul was in Galicia (in Northwestern Spain) yesterday, speaking to the Confederation of Business People there.

We have taken the liberty of adding English to the presentation
so that you can enjoy it here on the blog.

You might also enjoy the interview published today in the newspaper LA REGIÓN, if you are comfortable reading Spanish.


Also worth a look: "Redes Sociales, vitales para el 20% de las PYMES" (Social Networks: Vital for 20% of SMBs)

As always, we welcome your comments!

Immersed in a complex economic context in constant technological evolution, accompanied by changes in consumer purchase habits in Fashion, the Redcats Group, through its brands La Redoute and Vertbaudet in Spain, has radically changed the way it sells its clothes.

In this interesting interview with Isabelle Le Cam, Director of Client Marketing, we see how New Brands now use the various media mixes, adapting their Direct Marketing from paper to smartphones to webs, all the while tracking the ROI of each initiative.

What are the Keys to creating effective Direct Marketing
these days?

• Keeping your Database clean and enriched with information about
  user behaviour, online and offline
  
• Creating multi-channel Communication campaigns, taking into account their efficacy using Internet
  
• Communicating such campaigns with techniques adapted to each medium: moving from the paper mailing, to Mobile Marketing and online access according to profiles, then further on to adapting the messages by type of Social Media on the Net (Twitter, Facebooks, blogs and forums)
  
• Measuring the efficacy of your Direct Marketing, including the results of all online campaigns
  

What new possibilities do Social Networks offer
to Direct Marketing?

Direct Marketing, since the very beginning, has always been a Marketing of Dialogue. Social Networks give us the opportunity of using most of traditional Direct Marketing's techniques: from database management vía Facebook to new promotional channels on Twitter, or by means of exclusive sales to a group of VIP customers using a blog, for example.

What trends and challenges do you forsee in the future?

I am definitely closely watching Mobile Marketing and Geocoding
as well as Interactive Social Shopping.

We encourage you to visit these two dynamic New Brands ;-)

La Redoute · Vertbaudet

We'd like to share with you a true gem of a campaign: the new Line of Communication for a surprisingly fresh and vibrant New Brand: the nation of Spain.

In the video above, you will find 4 different spots (in Spanish, for English please see below*). Each one is directed to a different target group. What is noteworthy is the Voice of these "mini-movies", all of them intimate slice-of-life portraits.

It is the voice of the people to whom the message is directed, full of knowledge about their lives and their needs. Infused with empathy and emotion. A serene, compelling and utterly seductive invitation to consider for oneself:

Perhaps I Need Spain, as well?

* Please see these English versions if you do not speak Spanish:

Families | Young Couple | Seniors | Young Man