94% of consumers profess to watching explainer videos to learn more about a product (link) with 84% saying it influenced their purchasing decision positively. More than 50% of consumers actually expressed a desire for more content from brands they like, with video being the most popular form of content. To put it plainly, video production is the most engaging, entertaining, informative, and reusable form of content your business can create. Perhaps you’ve already thought about investing in a great homepage video, social ad, product demo, etc. Most business owners don’t need convincing to see the benefit in video content, but most are rightfully weary of finding the right team for the job. It’s difficult to know just how much manpower and budget are appropriate for SME video projects. Fortunately for you, Duco Media has become a mainstay for Ottawa Business’ with video production needs. Here’s why:

Pause and imagine Steve Jobs. A man in a black turtleneck unveils a new gadget, perhaps the new iPhone. He speaks to you intimately, as if he knows you personally. He tells you a story about the phone, but the true meaning of his words is: “we share the same values and lifestyle: we are a community.” The people who bought Apple when Jobs was alive saw themselves as part of a community, to the extent that the phones were less important than the lifestyle they represented. How could Jobs appeal to their emotions so powerfully?

Not to sound like a broken record, but having a high-performing, well-designed ecommerce website isa necessity in 2021. If the past year has revealed anything about consumer behaviour, it’s that people will always find a way to purchase the products they want. A 2021 survey by Canada Post showed that 93% percent of Canadians plan to either increase or maintain their level of online shopping (link). Naturally, this influx of online shopping has saturated the playing field, and it's led to bad ecommerce practices becoming commonplace. For that reason, we wanted to give you a few simple guidelines to follow when planning your first ecommerce website.

The Truth About Working with Marketing Agencies

If there’s one thing we here at Duco Media have learned over the years, it’s this: Agencies that don’t have digital marketing analytics are destined to fall. Succeeding digitally requires an enormous amount of effort, resources, and the ability to sift through constant streams of data. Without the use of software, marketers and agencies lack the foresight to maximize their campaigns and create productive feedback loops between their analytics and marketing efforts.

Why Stories Matter

Let’s say you want to market your brand to millennials and Gen Z, but you don’t have the key ingredient for this audience: a powerful digital presence. How do you grow your brand in a time when competition for digital mind space is fiercer than ever?

This was the task we faced last year when we transformed Breakmood, a new apparel brand, into an up-and-coming player in the digital market. First, we gave them a facelift and identity positioning that would resonate with values and habits that appeal intimately to millenials and Gen Z audiences. We then built a new e-commerce site based on this new identity and prepared it for business. But organic traffic was slow at first because the brand was too new, and the content on the site was limited. While we have had great success with paid advertising campaigns, these are difficult to fund for a small brand. Our solution was to build on these first steps by developing a holistic social media strategy: we created a photo and video shoot, we collaborated with influencers, we engaged the community, one customer and follower at a time. In other words, we did not just rebrand Breakmood from the ground up—we also made Breakmood the center of a new community organized around its mission and product.

What do the changes to the Ontario Blue Bin Program mean for your business? 

Did you know that Ontario was the first place in the world to start a local curb-side recycling program? And that the program has now been replicated in hundreds of jurisdictions around the world?

Picture running your business like driving a car: you’re cruising along the highway on a summer day when suddenly the check engine light comes on. You figure it’s nothing so you ignore it and keep driving. Next, your oil change light comes on, then your brake pad wear indicator. By now you’re starting to realize you’re in trouble, but you’ve made it this far so you might as well keep going. One by one, cars start to pass you by until you slow to a stand still miles away from the nearest repair shop.

Let’s cut to the chase. We have a new product to announce.

If I told you in January, 2020 that bread machine sales would increase by 652% in the coming months while bridal wear drops 63%, would you believe me? (Source)

On the last day of 2019, as many of us were counting down the New Year, health authorities in Wuhan, China were treating dozens of patients suffering from a newly identified respiratory virus. Days later, China reported its first death. A week later Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States reported similar cases.

Finding out how to certify a product in Canada can be a complicated process. The wormhole of legislative bodies and vast array of regulations often confuse people more than they inform. My research into this topic began when Duco consulting had a client ask for a detailed report on product certification. We wanted to share our findings here because, in hindsight, we would’ve given an arm and a leg for a condensed report such as this. In other words, we did the work so you don’t have to! So lean back and let me outline the process of product certification in Canada.

Made in Canada?
Let’s say a big client of yours is planning for expansion into Canada. Their preliminary research shows that Canadians have more affinity for Canadian brands, so they’d like to move part of their production to Canada and tag their products with a made in Canada stamp. Can they do this? What are the regulations? Are there even any?

What is the secret ingredient to building a global empire? For Jeff Bezos, it comes down to one thing—a compulsion for customer experience; for Duco it’s our passion to deliver quality results for our clients and it’s a passion that drives each and every corner of our business.

Over the past decade, the advent of Google, Yelp and Facebook have made online reviews and customer satisfaction the hallmark of client acquisition. For nearly 9 out of 10 people, a Google Rating is as important as personal recommendations and is often the starting point for the customer journey (see Bright Local’s Research). This makes online reputation management a paramount investment in today’s marketplace, as trust is the first asset a customer acquires on their journey to finding the right business to support their needs. Reliability, expertise and professionalism are the most important reputation traits for a business, since 68% of customers say that positive reviews make them trust a company more than not and 40% of consumers form an opinion after reading 1 – 3 reviews (Bright Local).

If you read our previous blog you know that we are obsessively seeking new ways to collect experience data – specifically in an attempt to replace (or significantly compliment) the dreaded survey. Our mission is to help businesses capture the customer & employee experience without additional burden to the customer or business. The answer: Artificial Emotion Recognition.

Imagine this: As you get out of your car and walk towards the store, the Fitbit on your wrist calculates how you are feeling about your upcoming shopping experience by noting physical changes. In this case, your heart rate picks up and your pace quickens; you are excited. As you open the door and walk in, the store’s emotion recognition algorithms analyze your facial expression to measure baseline satisfaction. You have been excited about this purchase for a couple of weeks, and so your mind is flooded with positive anticipation. You get to where you believe your product should be and realize it is not there. Your wearables detect a sudden skip in your heart rate, a slight clamming of your wrist, and a stop in motion. You start scanning the shelves around you, heart rate matching your mounting frustration. What you don’t know, is that from the moment you approached the store your customer data have been shared with and analyzed by the store’s Customer Experience AI. The physical response data from your customer experience has triggered the intervention threshold, and has instructed the store clerk to immediately find you in aisle 9. Your issue is immediately resolved and no customer experience survey required.

We are obsessed with Customer Experience Management – after all, it is our core business and the reason why we love what we do. A recent survey from PwC found that 73% of consumers indicate that customer experience is one of the most important factors in their purchasing decisions, just behind price and product quality (you can read the full report here). Sadly, their data also suggest that only 49% of U.S. consumers say companies provide a good customer experience. The statistics are eye-opening, but also reveal tremendous opportunity for companies who invest in Customer Experience Management. But what is Customer Experience Management? There are quite a few misconceptions about what Customer Experience Management is and how to properly execute a customer experience program, which are listed below.

Duco Consulting Launches its first line of business: Customer Experience Solutions