Another day, another dollar
Posted: February 26, 2009 Filed under: brand, social meaning, social media 2 Comments »
Robin sparks some interesting rants over on Advertising 2.0, in response to a frankly bizarre set of comments published in Campaign about how twitter can be used by brands.
The debate appears to be over whether brands should tweet and how – should they pretend to be real people or inanimate objects, funny characters or abstractions?
Not suprisingly many respond by dismissing twitter out of hand as nonsense (echos of ‘this internet thing will never catch on’), others talk about how no brand belongs on the microblogging site.
It seems that - to me at least – first off, we are fundementally misunderstanding the important but indirect social role of brands, and secondly that the twitter ‘debate’ is no more and no less than than the debate we used to have about brands and websites all those years ago in the ninetees (on which Amelia has been passing some suspiciously tweet-length thoughts).
Look at this. It’s a Bovril website. With a breath-taking circularity of irony (or perhaps secret plea for help from a web designer), the site’s strapline (and perhaps the brand’s slogan) is ‘give me strength’. And, indeed, what on God’s earth is the point of all this? And who thought it was a good idea (apart from the agency that created it)?
Don’t get me wrong, once you’re there, it’s quite nicely done, graphically interesting etc. But why would anyone ever go there? Even if it wasn’t difficult to use, I still wouldn’t treat it as my number 1 source of information about Bovril itself (that would be Wikipedia), Bovril recipes (is that a thing?) (I’d start in Google and since the site isn’t search engine-friendly, it doesn’t show up), outdoorsiness (ditto, you’d never get there and if you did you wouldn’t stay long because of the thiny veiled comtempt for this audience), or even gurning cows. It’s just bizarre.
Anyway, brands on twitter are all just like that: pointless, unless they manage to be interesting, useful or entertaining. And not all brands can be those things every day, using content.
I’m sorry, I don’t want to ruin the party. But don’t believe your agency when they give you this nonsense. Coca-cola office furniture making jokes is just not as funny or interesting as even your least funny mates, no matter how clever it sounded in an agency brainstorm.
We do not need a detailed study or deep meditation to tell us this. Clients: when you’re first reaction is to tell the agency ‘don’t be so bloody stupid’, trust your feelings.
The other question is, conversely, do brands have no role in social networks? After all this pointlessness, it would be easy to conclude that they have none. But I believe this is an entirely different question. Brands are massively important in social networks. But they are a method of communication not an issuer of communication. They are talking points, they are social tokens, they are items of self expression. And, of course, this is not just true in a digital setting.
To entirely steal from Seth Goddin, to turn this effect to their advantage, brand managers must make their brand interesting to a vocal audience. Providing genuine uility can amplify this effect.
This is why Barack Obama and Stephen Fry can be interesting brands on Twitter but Starbucks and Vauxhall can not. Is it really that complex a distinction?
Spot the obvious mistake
Posted: February 14, 2008 Filed under: advertising, brand, engagement, facebook Comments OffWhat’s wrong with this picture?
Well apart from the fact that their advertising is clearly so laser-guided that they’re shoving the ‘your ad here’ ad up to their entire market, there’s only one item on the page you can’t ‘prioritize’ (dig or bury) yet it’s likely to be the only item on the page that people will want to remove. Why not collect this data at least – perhaps it could even be passed off as a piece of that much over-discussed and underdone ‘customer engagement’. ‘We tried to get brand X to engage with your customers and they interacted with it… by telling it bugger off!’.
And not like this either:
On with the show
Posted: June 17, 2007 Filed under: brand, engagement, experience, marketing 1 Comment »
Aside from the usual rubber chicken and three-inch-wide movies, most of my long flight yesterday, and a rather intimidating trip on the A-train into Manhattan, was taken up with reading Lewis P Carbone’s Clued In.
This amazing book provides a method for understanding customers, products and brands that not only fits the classic American hospitality industries of the 70s (which is where Carbone’s own interest was kindled by his work with clients including Disney at Epcot) but the new moves away from mass-communication and towards brands and reputations. His system doesn’t need re-invention for the noughties. It comes millennium proofed, with massive relevance to the new consumer and even the way digital interfaces must work.
And it is incredibly accessible. It’s amazing to see ideas that have been washing around my brain half-baked given a clear articulate voice.
Carbone starts with the premise that the accountants and management consultants have caused us to lose focus on a key fact – that the “value” our companies produce must be measured in terms of what the customer wants not just the bottom line of pounds and pence. Sound obvious? Well look what’s happening to the airline industry. In the name of low prices, we now have to put up with non-predicatable pricing models, literally no service on the (low cost) flights, being bumped and moved around, fighting over chairs (on EasyJet) and being routed through multiple stops. Carbone points to JetBlue and Southwest who have both consistently posted profit in a market which is otherwise falling apart. Southwest publicly explains their philosophy for business
More than 30 years ago, Rollin King and Herb Kelleher got together and decided to start a different kind of airline. They began with one simple notion: If you get passangers to their destinations when they want to get there, on time, at the lowest possible fares, and make darn sure they have a good time doing it, people will fly your airline. And you know what they’re right.
As Carbone goes on to say, it’s not precisely about having a good time (flying on any low-cost carrier is not going to be a week at the Four Seasons), it’s about feeling good about the time you’re having.
And here we get to what I think is the central insight. The question brand marketers often ask is “how does you customer feel about the brand”. Ask a customer that question and you will get an abstract post-rationalised answer back. Instead, Carbone suggests, we should focus on how the customer feels when they’re interacting your brand. The negative feelings that we have when companies who provide poor customer service are actually negative feelings about ourselves that have been created by the experience.
For the experience to work, it must be authentic and it must connect on an emotional level as well as a functional one. He points to a survey which shows that defecting customers are likely to say they are “satisfied” on customer service score cards (i.e. not “dissatisfied”, “neutral” or “very satisfied”). To bread the sort of customer advocates we need nowadays, we need to be aiming for customers who thoroughly enjoy the whole experience and come to expect a fantastic experience on future vists; customers who enjoyed your experience so much that they are willing to put their own reputations at stake and recommend it.
As a brief aside, Carbone is looking at established retail chains so does not dwell on purely funtional issues, assuming that all outlets achieve “hygiene” levels of service. Obviously, this is far from being the case online, where far too many mistakes have been made in the name of emotional design).
Where’s this working in practice? Taking roughly equal sellers of a commodity product – Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donughts, Carbone shows that the product itself is a small part of the value proposition, with a focus on customer experience driving the lion’s share of the value. Krispy Kreme sells more (of essentially the same thing), at a higher price, with less advertising to a more enthusiastic audience.
He maintains this is possible in any market or scenario, showing how it’s been applied even in emergency rooms int the US and in the development of campus sports facilities.
My old boss had a great epxression about all this. Traditional wisdom has it that “If you take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves”. Kim Conchie’s version was
If you take care of the pennies, you’ll end up with a big pile of pennies
Businesses that drive ’shareholder value’ by cost-cutting and commoditising their product will end up with a bigger and bigger share of a smaller and smaller market, as new entrants, redefine their products around customer expereince.
We’ll let you know
Posted: June 10, 2007 Filed under: brand, logo, london, marketing 1 Comment »
The people at Wolff Ollins must be kicking themselves. The 2012 logo seems likely to not just make them look like heartless corporate robber-barrons (where’s our £400k guys?), but may be part of the deathnell for the entire “branding” industry.
Russell Davies joins the cry for the end to the overuse of the term and its misapplication to just about anything so that consultants get to do their thing and charge their fees. John Dodd’s wants to see an end to branding experts.
The brand marketing debate seems to me to resemble in format the viral marketing debate. Just because you can perceive a phenomonen (the ‘viral effect’ of interesting information or consumers building long term value into brands), doesn’t mean that you can achieve that effect for yourself.
Is it true that brands exist? Yes of course. Does that mean that your product and service is a brand? We’ll let you know. Brands exist in the minds of consumers. They are what you get when you put together all building blocks of all of the experiences that consumer has of your product or service. You can influence them, but you can’t control them. Especially not nowadays.
And perhaps that’s the especially frustrating thing about 2012. The games was building a really strong brand image, in my perception at least. It was about worthy inclusiveness. It was about the success of the underdog through passion (the story of the bid itself). It was about regeneration and about the rejunivation of an old and tired area of an historic city. And now – all of a sudden – it’s become about a bunch of branding consultants, a large sum of money, and the inventiveness of the British at ripping apart an icon.
Brand on the run
Posted: June 4, 2007 Filed under: brand, logo, marketing Comments Off
Like Dan at RMM London, I had to look at this logo about 10 times before I spotted that it was supposed to spell out 2012. I think I may have, however, uncovered it’s true meaning. Close one eye and quint a bit and it looks like Paula Radcliffe in the famous marathon “toilet break” incident. Bigger head obviously.
Anyway, my money is on the petition against overtaking map my name by lunchtime tomorrow. Viral marketing!
Incidentally, it didn’t have to be this way. Below are some previous olympic logos. Perhaps Wolf Ollins wouldn’t mind giving our money back or having another go which doesn’t look like Grange Hill opening graphics.
Truth and classification
Posted: May 28, 2007 Filed under: brand, Futurama, Futurism, knowledge, marketing 3 Comments »
Like Antony, I’m waiting for Royal Mail (or rather Amazon) to deliver my copy of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. From reading around the book, it seems it will be a fascinating look at the role for taxonomy in the new world order of infinite capacity.
The traditional taxonomies of mass storage systems (that’s a euphemism for the fusty libraries of my youth) were necessary to make it possible to find stuff. Because physical items (books) must have a physical location, we need some way to map and understand that, hence we need some sort of filing systems, and we end up with taxonomies that put everything in its precise place: Non fiction > Travel > Humour > B > Bill Bryson > Neither here nor there. But we all know the limitations of that approach. What do we do when Bryson writes a book on copy editing, or the English language, or an autobiography about growing up in small town America (all of these things have happened). Now it looks more like a useful taxonomy is Authors > American > Slightly overweight > and funny > Bill Bryson.
And, of course, we get into the bizzare circumstance where the tail starts wagging the dog and it becomes a skill to navigate the taxonomies. It becomes something you learn in school, even though it is not a natural way of thinking. The brain is much more able to build rich adaptive non-hierachical maps of how things fit together (the packed cupboards of the Advertised mind).
In this interview, Weinberger points to the underlying belief (which he describes as Aristotlean) that there is a perfect classification of things. Of course Aristotle was never faced with some of the quandaries we have today like the Jaffa Cake problem (is it a biscuit or cake). And indeed many brand marketers are now employed specifically in order to challenge and break taxonomies.
But the bigger problem is an even older debate, and it is the most fundamental taxonomy decision: true or false. I might be able to say something is green and yellow. I might be able to describe something as old-fashioned and trendy at the same time. I can describe something as a tool, an advert, and an event at the same time. But can I describe something as true and false simultaneously?
The question becomes more obtuse when we look at socially owned knowledge like Wikipedia. Can a post in Jimmy Wales’ encyclopedia ever be truly correct?
Again, we can thank the ancients here. And this time it’s Plato, and in particular some interpretations of Plato which place knowledge as an unchangeable mirror of underlying forms and essences. This has led many to expect certainty in knowledge which in our day-to-day experience is simply not there. If all our knowledge had to stand up to that level of inspection, we’d never get out of bed.
How many of our views could not be reversed without damaging our overall framework? What if – for example – it turned out that the world wasn’t round. I don’t mean flat, or polo shaped but, lets say it’s actually shaped like an egg. I’d carry on my life with little disturbance. So which of our truths aren’t like that. Could George Bush be a quiet genius with a dastardly plan to fool the world? Perhaps that’s taking things a little too far.
I was lucky enough to study under Michael Welbourne many years ago (and millions of brain cells ago) at Bristol University. One of his central beliefs and areas of study was about the role of testimony (telling) in knowledge transfer. In fact, having been told something by a source we trust is the source of much of what we regard as knowledge. So what has changed recently isn’t perhaps the nature of knowledge but the nature of testimony. Historically we may have had to have been told something directly to believe it (and incorporate it into our ‘knowledge’). Now we can co-opt whole knowledge frameworks, and whole authority frameworks straight off the web.
As seen on Web 2.0
Posted: May 28, 2007 Filed under: advertising, brand, marketing, media, meme, web2.0 1 Comment »
Antony’s Map, Monitor and Engage mantra was a great rule of thumb for brand marketers looking to take their first steps in social media. Unlike most 1-line solutions it has the benefit of being usable and meaningful; providing an actionable plan for sometimes very hesitant marketers. First of all work out who your community is, then track what they’re saying about you (and everything else) and then – and only then – consider how to engage with them. Easy!
It (or this approach at least) also led to few practical mapping/monitoring tools, often called “webmaps” such as Jon‘s and one from Spannerworks. I’ve heard of two or three others, and just today seen this interesting post from a staffer at VML, who are using their seer solution to alert brands to problems (unhappy conversations) so action can be taken. The Wall Street Journal discussed how Seer was used by Addidas to spot a problem with its Predator boot which led them to provide customers with care advice. Perhaps it would be preferable for customers to be having those conversations directly with the brand but this is a good second best.
More importantly than the fact they’re clearly getting better press coverage, VML certainly has won the battle for the coolest (if not strikingly useful) visualisation.
Stop me if you think that you’ve HERD this one before
Posted: May 13, 2007 Filed under: advertising, books, brand 2 Comments »I hardly ever give up on a book. There was a Kate Atkison book my mother gave me for Christmas four years ago but that’s about it.
Well Herd has stopped me in my tracks. This feels like real shame because I think the idea behind it is brilliant and the key insight is central to understand who we are as a race. And the author, Mark Earls, has clearly really put his back into it.
Apparently, The Guardian described the book as “Like Malcolm Gladwell on Speed”. Well that’s exactly right, although I suspect not in the way it was intended. Take the clear, insightful, reasoned writing style of Gladwell and make it verbose, egotistical, aphoristic, incoherent and go on too long, and you have Herd. For a writer who tells us there is no well defined concept of ‘I’, he is certainly fond of the pronoun. And some of the misadventures in reasoning are blinding. The works of Descartes, Hobbes, Adam Smith and Thomas Kuhn are covered in a couple of sentences each. The golden rule hypothesis, the source of language, autism and many more huge discussions become minor supporting characters in the grand Earl’s hypothesis that… we are a social creature.
A good summary of some of the key thinking of the book (and it’s application to CRM) is in this adliterate post.
In short I think the conclusions are right, if the journey slightly tortorous:
- People are social. They value social interaction and are made stronger by it. It is central to how we learn and develop.
- Market research is likely to be unreliable. Because people don’t really understand their own motivations, certainly not when quizzed outside a social context
- Consumers-to-consumer is more powerful than business-to-consumer (and of course, it is now possible en masse for the first time in history). If you can generate word of mouth marketing, it will be effective.
- Be more interesting
- Let go of the brand
- Don’t try and manage what can’t be managed. Be realistic about how much you can control and refocus your efforts on doing the things you can control – product, production etc – better
A couple of Bullmore quotes which I’ve had lying around for ages that seem to top that off:
“Brands… are made and owned by people… by the public… by consumers”
The image of a brand is a subjective thing. No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand.”
Like Cluetrain, Herd seems to describe what is happening with consumer empowerment and brands, without providing concrete advice to marketers about how to respond (if we can all agree that “co-create”, “be more interesting” and “harness word-of-mouth marketing” are not really practical advice). It’s easy to see why many marketers feel threatened by all this, as it marginalizes or makes impotent much of what until recently has been the day job.
I really like the idea that the new marketplace reduces “gaming”. What does that mean? Well in SEO gaming is obvious, it’s trying to artificially drive traffic to your site, despite not really being relevant. Indeed you can think of Google’s primary mission online to be to reduce SPAM and to fight against people who are gaming their system.
Now look at how they are looking to deal with video advertising (advertisers pay more for unpopular pre-roll ads). Isn’t it possible to see the empowered consumer network as a force against gaming in advertising – where that could mean the telling of lies, the telling of irrelevancies or using other mechanics which mislead or overpower consumers? This means we will drive out relevance and efficiency in consumer brand selection by forcing brands to communicate honestly, relevantly, interestingly and engagingly. And how do we do this? Together, using the internet.
Can I count the ways
Posted: May 9, 2007 Filed under: advertising, brand, fake, google, reputation, viral marketing 3 Comments »I see from the fact that it is still everywhere that Ask.com is not taking a great deal of notice of the massive amount of negative feedback to its truly awful information revolution campaign. Well, aside from the fact it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I’d think it’s important we dig down into the detail of this whole sworded episode which must have left google quaking in their boots:
- It’s not accessible (iframe on home page)
- It’s not even accessible to engines (Ask hasn’t indexed the first sentence on the main page)
Although funnily enough, Google can see it – if not ranking it very highly!
- It’s got that whole “fixed height” thing that people from traditional media make digital agencies do becuase they think “people won’t scroll”. Ironic if the client’s a search engine.
- Loads of nonsense text on the home page
- Dropped navigation on “Why ask” page
- The sign-up page is white text on a yellow background – completely unusable (am I the only person who’s signed up? – I had to use my decoder ring)
- No t-shirt (due to high demand, I’ll bet)
- Flogs and fake video blogs – full on, invented human beings with obnoxious invented marketing nonsense in them (Sell a couple more t-shirts and buy a copy of Cluetrain chaps).
- Some fairly obvious fake comments.
- Same title on every page (tut tut) and system generated page names !!! ?
- Really annoying interface errors (scroll bars in the middle of pages, non-standard search buttons, incorrect ident top left)
- The word “revolutionistas”
- Spelling Google with a lower case “g”
- Ask doesn’t even qualify as the “other search engine”. That’s Yahoo or Windows Live. Ask.com is the “unused search engine”.
- This is supposed to sound like the way “real people speak”
“What could possibly make a sociology graduate, a computer engineering dropout, a silent expert of monkey peer groups and a genius handyman come together? Sheer determination & a shared passion to evolve the way people search, and a common love of jammy dodgers.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and take my medicine.
In the money
Posted: April 29, 2007 Filed under: advertising, brand, engagement, viral marketing Comments Off
The Carlsberg ad campaign has always been extremely entertaining and memorable. It’s what Russell Davies describes as generous or rich, as opposed to simply being the “big” idea of which ad men are so fond. In 2004, this was successfully adapted to a very nice “french disqualified” viral email idea (if you know me you’ll know how much it hurts to say the ‘v’ word). The latest incarnation, spotted on Flickr by Leo Ryan at RMM is a sort of piece of viral activity started offline which travel online. A bit like the Microsoft Vanishing Point game but a lot more subtle and with not all the discussion activity necessarily online, Carlsberg appear to be hoping the £10 will do more than just go into someone’s pocket – it will make it into public discourse. I’d love to know what happens, and clearly it’s all inlne with the rest of the advertising.
Yet, while the advertising idea here is big, rich, deep, generous, memorable, famous and all that, does it motivate you to buy the product?
One follow up on Flickr says a great deal
If it only cost them fifty grand (which is a snip for advertising) then potentially the five thousand people who discover one of these on a friday night will tell all their mates. Still wouldn’t make me drink Carlsberg though…
Having said that. Perhaps it only cost them £10 and they got lucky!
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