The most profitable day for online shopping is no longer called Black Friday, but Singles Day. Originated in China in the 1990s by four college students who wanted to celebrate the idea of being single with parties and events, Singles Day is now considered the world's most important shopping event.
The date was not chosen at random. In fact, 11/11 corresponds to four "ones," representing the four individuals who celebrated it at Nanjing University for the first time. But the commercial breakthrough came in 2009 from the Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba, which launched never-before-seen discounts for 24 hours on its platform on November 11.
Singles Day, an opportunity to give a special gift to a friend or just to yourself, is becoming one of the most popular shopping days in Europe as well, especially in the UK and Germany. On Google the word single reaches 13,790,000,000 results, although a new current of thought prefers to use the term "self partnered."
In any case, the positioning built behind this new celebration is that "being single allows you to better focus on your desires and those of your friends." And apparently it allows brands to focus on a sudden boom in purchases.
"Computers have been able to digitize sight and hearing, but not smell, our deepest and oldest sense," declares Alexander Wiltschko of Osmo, an American artificial intelligence company and Google Research spin-off.
The startup carried out a study on the digitization of smell published in the prestigious periodical Science, creating the first "master map of smells." A map that, by matching the chemical structure to the perception of odors, is able to predict their perfect semantic description. At present, 5,000 different odor molecules have been isolated, described by combinations of 55 semantic descriptions.
The AI "artificial nose" was compared with 15 "human noses" in describing 323 novel odors and passed the test brilliantly. In addition to opening up new possibilities for scientific research on olfaction, the digitization of odors represents a great opportunity for the entire industry of fragrances, food and even repellents.
While we are certain that AI will never be able to "smell" an odor for lack of the sense of smell, we now know that it will learn to acquire it, process it, and translate it into a language that will be increasingly perfect.
Organic eggs, free-range eggs, cage-free eggs: there are regulated wordings on egg packages that seem to give us very precise indications.
Yet to the layman, that is the vast majority of consumers, these definitions tend to be misleading and actually unclear. In response to this critical issue, the Australian company Honest Eggs has decided to take it a few steps further, or rather have the chickens on its Victoria farm do so. To show Australians, consumers of 6.6 billion eggs a year, how beneficial regenerative farming is, it has invented the first chicken pedometer.
It is called FitChix and is a lightweight technological device that counts the steps and movements of hens as they roam the farm, allowing the farmer to better understand their health and nutritional needs. Finally, the step count is printed right on the egg shell.
The initiative was designed and implemented together with VMLY6&R, leading the Australian brand to stand out from the competition and record a 493% increase in online conversions in just a few months. Consumers need transparency, but sometimes mandatory legal wording written on packs is not enough to provide clarity. Sometimes an extra creative and strategic step is needed.
WPP launched its own index a few days ago, called the WPP Creative Capital Index, aimed at showing companies that creativity can bring real value to business results.
"Creativity is an investment, not an expense. The Creative Capital Index allows us to quantify the return on investment of creativity." says Katie Rigg-Smith, Chief Strategy Officer of WPP Australia and New Zealand.
This measurement shows that brands with higher creative capital generate a purchase desire in the minds of consumers that is 1.4 times higher than all other brands. After studying a range of brands over seven years, WPP found a doubling of revenue for brands with high creativity, regardless of their size or level of influence.
How successful a brand is at being visionary, breaking the mold, overturning a point of view, creating different attitudes and building new proactive behaviors. These are the ingredients that make a brand creative. Ingredients that are becoming less and less secret and more and more measurable. An important step toward a new scientific view of creativity.
