Apple's Middle Finger: Are Emojis The Fastest Growing Language In History?
The holy grail of emoticons has finally arrived, thanks to Apple’s latest update of IOS it is now possible to send a middle finger emoticon. This IOS update comes with a pack of 150 new emoticons available and for most of iPhones’s owners those new emojis are the number 1 reason to download the newest software. Meaning literally “picture” (e) and “character” (moji) in Japanese, emojis (or emoticons) were developed by NTT DoCoMo a Japanese company around 1998.
The case of the rude emoticon’s controversial buzz is extremely interesting because it underlines the fact that emoticons are increasingly becoming a new way to communicate online. SwiftKey Emoji, that conducted research about the usage of emoticons shows that 92% of the online population now use emojisand old informal abbreviation such as « lol » or « lmao » are slowing being replaced by emoticons.
So what does this all have to do with digital marketing?
Well, companies and marketers are beginning to take a closer look at emoticons, they recently understood that emoji is transforming digital communication and that it can be a very efficient tool to market their products. Big corporations such as Dell, Ford are creating emoji’s campaign via online messaging platform such as Facebook messenger, WeChat,Twitter and their stickers are available online for free download. When Ford launched his emojis campaign, it generated rapidly more than 25,000 download per day for about 10 days. Data analysts estimated than more than 1million people saw little Ford cars coupled with little phrases such as « Drive safely » and « Let’s go ». This practice is now widely use, a successful emoticon campaign can result in an increased online presence, a better corporate identity and more importantly, stronger bonds with customers.
Some companies are getting even more creative, the best example is Domino’s a fast-food pizza restaurant. When a Domino’s customer has created an online account, he has the possibility to send a pizza emoticon which is creating instantly a pizza order. Emoticon ordering campaign is resonating among customers so it’s likely to increase sales.
New feedback platforms are being created by e-commerce business, indeed feedback has always been important to understand how much credit costumers are giving for a particular product or service. Getting feedback has always been complicated and expensive as only a few costumers are giving some on their time to review. Emoticons could revolutionized feedback, indeed the first aspect of emojis is that it is fun to use, and the second one is that one « smiley face » can replace thousands words. We can therefore think that future customers will feedback product with a smiley face or a sad one.
As customer communication evolves, marketing evolvestoo. We are only in the early phase communicating, but as the online space is being now frequently limited by words counts, emojis has already shown great insight for communicating with costumers increasingly using social media and e-commerce retailers. Emoji is by definition emotion, they are easy to use, friendly, fun and an excellent tool for companies to connect to their audience using positive emotions.
Margaux Peuvergne & Alban Couturier
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewcave/2015/10/22/apples-middle-finger-are-emojis-the-fastest-growing-language-in-history//
Additional informations:
SwiftKey Emoji Report: http://www.aargauerzeitung.ch/asset_document/i/129067827/download
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