It’s no secret that we love coffee at Decimal. It’s the petrol in the tanks of our creative team and the wind in the sails of our account managers and digital team. One may call our obsession unhealthy, but drinking coffee at work is, in fact, good for you. Multiple studies have shown that coffee may assist in protecting against Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and liver diseases. So what are you waiting for? Put on the kettle and settle into these five reasons to drink coffee at work.

General Alertness

We all know that caffeine is a stimulant. Anybody who’s pulled an all-nighter before work will be aware of the fact that coffee keeps you going when your energy levels are plummeting. Ever wondered how caffeine works? As your body goes about its day, a neurochemical called adenosine builds up in your body. As more adenosine passes through your neuroreceptors, your brain starts signaling that it needs sleep. Caffeine is a sneaky imposter that your brain mistakes for adenosine, which in turn allows more uptake of dopamine. So, when you have your coffee you’re basically fooling your brain into not being tired.

Increased Productivity

Drinking coffee can make you more productive, but it’s not only because caffeine is a stimulant. The coffee break is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. But you may be asking how a break makes you more productive. The act of taking a coffee break with a colleague or two allows an opportunity to socialise and talk about personal and work-related topics, which in turn promotes camaraderie and therefore more effective workers.

Alleviates Sleep Deprivation Related Stress

Merely smelling coffee can reduce your stress levels if you haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep. A study conducted at the Seoul National University found that rats who were exposed to the aroma of coffee showed changes in brain proteins tied to stress from getting too little sleep. Just get up and smell the coffee for a less stressful day.

Protection for Your Liver

Drinking alcohol is very bad for your body, especially your liver. But many of us decide to ignore that fact and have a glass anyway. A 2006 study showed that those who drink at least one cup of coffee a day are 20% less likely to develop liver cirrhosis – a nasty disease caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

Not a drinker? You may still want that cuppa. Coffee can also help prevent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but you have to drink 4 or more cups a day to enjoy the benefit.

Coffee Keeps You Slim

Multiple studies have proven that caffeine increases metabolic activity, and many weight loss supplements use it as a main ingredient. While the power of coffee alone probably isn’t enough to get you to your goal weight, it is useful for helping your body burn fat at a higher rate while you’re sitting at your desk.

With the recent H&M blunder, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that sometimes marketing goes horribly wrong despite having the best intentions at heart. Now, we’re not here to defend H&M’s choices, but we are here to tell you that mistakes happen. Sometimes these mistakes go under the radar, but every now and then Twitter finds a new problematic campaign to rip apart online. Here are three of the biggest marketing clangers from 2017.

1 – McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce – October 2017

This one will be familiar to Rick and Morty fans. Thanks to a joke made about a limited edition dipping sauce offered by McDonald’s in the late 1990s as a tie in to the movie Mulan, fans of Rick and Morty made it their mission to get their hands on the 20 year old treat. Never ones to miss a marketing opportunity, McDonald’s jumped on the hype-wagon. They sent the creators of Rick and Morty their own supply of the sauce, and when fans questioned why they couldn’t have it too, McDonald’s decided to make the sauce available to the public (in the USA) for a limited time. When it came time to start the Szechuan Sauce promotion, demand seriously outstripped supply and thousands of Rick and Morty fans were left disappointed (and had a lot to say about it online).
Moral of the story: if you’re going to stoke the flames of hype, make sure you have the goods to back it up.

2 – Dove’s Unintentional Racism – October 2017

Beauty product giant Dove found themselves in hot water over an ad that depicted women from a number of races. The problem was that the ad focused on how Dove products make women more beautiful, and that they showed this with women transitioning from black to white. Outrage broke on Twitter with calls to boycott the company that had unknowingly associated beauty with whiteness.
Moral of the story: race is a touchy subject and marketers should be very careful not to associate a specific trait with a specific race. Dove’s apology, admitting that they’d “missed the mark in representing women of colour thoughtfully” was well received, but they have a long way to go in regaining the trust of women of colour.

3 – OUTsurance Father’s Day – June 2017

Brands celebrating days of importance of social media has become the norm. Father’s Day brought us OUTsurance’s biggest social media mishap to date. The company posted a video featuring multiple fathers interacting with their children. The problem: not a single one of the fathers was black. Of course, social media was ablaze with people bringing attention to the fact that OUTsurance was basically saying that black men aren’t good fathers. The company blamed the mishap on a junior employee, but the fact at the end of the day is that the post would likely have been approved by a supervisor.

Moral of the story: once again, race is a touchy subject. If you’re going to be showing a range of people in your ad, make sure that all races are represented. And don’t blame it on a junior employee when everything goes wrong.

H&M isn’t the first company to make a huge marketing mistake. They’re not even the first to miss something potentially racist. Having diverse creative and brand management teams could go a long way to prevent work that could be considered offensive from reaching the public.

If you believed the hype from all the “top marketing trends for 2018” articles that have peppered industry related blogs over the past few months, you’re probably looking for ways to incorporate influencer marketing into your 2018 strategies. But it’s not as simple as grabbing a rising social media star and hitching your cart to them.

1 – Know Your Audience

This is an essential component of any marketing strategy, so it goes without saying. Or does it? The blessing of digital marketing is that you can reach a huge audience, the curse of digital marketing is that you can reach a huge audience. The key is to identify the specific niche community that you want to target and then find the influencer who matches that audience.

2 – Know the Goal

Why are you implementing influencer marketing? Are you just doing it because it’s the current trend? Again, having a goal in mind should go without saying.

Are you looking for new followers? Are you hoping to reach a wider audience? Do you want more views and engagement on your posts? Or are you looking for sales?

Pick one goal and center your campaign on it.

3 – Find an Influencer Who Fits

Now that you have the building blocks for your campaign – audience and goal – it’s finally time to get to the exciting bit: choosing your influencer.

Finding an influencer who fits can be a tricky task. You’re looking for somebody who not only has a large following, but somebody who’s following fits your target audience. You need to ensure that the person you choose does hold sway over their audience and that their followers will value their insights. Lastly, and most importantly, you need to make sure that your influencer fits your brand. It wouldn’t make much sense for a tween fashion influencer to suddenly start talking about men’s grooming products, would it?

4 – Let Your Influencer Do What They Do

You wouldn’t go to a restaurant and tell the chef how to cook your dish; so you wouldn’t hire and influencer and then not let them post their own content. You picked an influencer because you liked what they do.

Now, it is necessary to weaponize your influencer with essential items needed to communicate about your brand, and you may want to include some pre-written posts, but you should really be leaving it up to your influencer to create posts (within brand guidelines, of course) for the most part. Remember, an influencer will have their own personal style and manner of communication that resonates with their audience.

5 – What’s in a Name Anyways?

Especially in South Africa, there’s the temptation to go with the biggest name available. However, this can be less effective for the simple reason that they are celebrities, not influencers. Though stars in SA may have large followings, their reach of influence may be very low. Getting the right influencer is more about finding trendsetters and thought leaders rather than finding celebrities with thousands of followers.

Once your campaign is running don’t forget to track your results and measure your effectiveness.