Johnnie Moore is a marketing consultant and facilitator based in London. As well as 20 years of marketing experience he's trained in psychotherapy, NLP and Improv. Find out more at his blog.
Andrew Lark's more than 18 years experience of all facets of marketing, branding, sales and communications spans technology, Internet, telecommunications and consumer sectors. There he has led award-winning programs and teams for brands such as Dell, Sony, SBC, IDSoftware, Nortel, Microsoft and Sun. He is a thought leader and innovator on the convergence of brands, communications and social networking technologies. Find out more at his blog.
Jennifer Rice is a strategist and evangelist for relationship-centric brands. She brings 15 years experience in brand strategy, customer insight and marketing communications, and has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Verizon, Alcatel and Corning. Her current passion is exploring how brands are being impacted by blogs and other social technologies. Her company blog is What's Your Brand Mantra?
John Winsor is the author of Beyond the Brand: Why Listening to the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business and the Founder/CEO of Radar Communications, a consumer-centric consultancy. You can find out more about him at Beyond the Brand.
About this Insider
BrandShift explores key trends in branding such as customer
experiences, market conversations and social technologies. Our goal is to
help executives and brand managers evolve their brands to thrive in the new
customer-driven marketplace.
My friend James Cherkoff has written a Change This Manifesto: What is open source marketing?. It's good stuff. Disclosure: I am horribly biased. (James and I are running a workshop together in March).
Jon Strande comments on Larry Lessig's experience of flying his millionth mile on United, and them not noticing.
Imagine had United taken the time to reward an obviously loyal customer even in the smallest way, say with a Thank you card on his seat when he boarded the plane.
Imagine the post he would have written had they done something really nice for him...
This coincides with the arrival of my pack from United, confirming that I have (after many years of being just a very ordinary passenger) recently gone back to Premier status.
Hmmm. A few years ago, I really got hooked into these frequent flier schemes, but now I am much less convinced. When they tell me I get 5" more economy legroom than the hoi-polloi, I don't so much celebrate as think, crumbs, if I don't keep this status I may switch to an airline that gives all its economy passengers a bit more legroom. This may be a carrot today, but there's a stick in the background for tomorrow.
Many of the other benefits are potentially more hamster wheel... get more miles by getting your mates to fly with us; earn more miles by spending more money at our hotel partners etc.
I wonder about the frictional cost of maintaining these elaborate schemes, an expense the budget operators cheerfully do without.
I see they've also included a book of vouchers to give to staff in recognition of good service. When they did this a few years back I quite liked it. It changed the game in Business Class from see who can look least excited about the service cos that will make you look more important to let's see who can enjoy this flight the most. Maybe it's just the passing years but now the little voucher scheme starts to feel like... more hamster wheel.
It's funny, I think of myself as unsentimental about brands but I feel sad that United are struggling. When they took over from PanAm on the transatlantic routes there was a palpable sense of pride about them. Ironically, they now feel a bit like PanAm did, sort of struggling to maintain a past grandeur.
I don't mean to seem ungrateful. After all, I only qualified for this treatment by flying on Singapore Airlines in the Star Alliance. So it's nice to get the recognition and the Alliance seems a smart idea.
I think that in larger organisations it's inevitable that things get bureaucratised and made into systems. The thing is, that can only get you so far in delivering a good experience. I also think that when times are hard, people tend to become more anxious and more wedded to systems. (And that's a pity, as probably innovation and risk taking are likely to be the best ways out of the hole). I sense there is a sort of denial going on at United. I think their people are trying hard but are demoralised; somehow the confident blurb (eg "the best frequent flyer programme" seems implausible to me). A bit like someone putting on a brave face... you don't really believe them and it creates distance - the opposite of what loyalty might be about.
I see Kathy Sierrra is posting some more smart thinking today about creating a spirit of caring. I wonder what sort of caring behaviours the high-ups at United are generating today?
Neville Hobson posts an interview with Michael Wiley of GM to talk about blogs and other new media. Wiley:
To get beyond our old ways of communication with a new direct line of communication to all stakeholders. Typical communication is issuing press releases, talking to the media, who re-purpose your messages for you, and there's no way for customers to get their thoughts back to you. We've been wanting to create this direct line of communication so that our various stakeholders aren't going to message boards to talk about us - they have an opportunity to come and talk directly to us. We're big into getting feedback from our customers, employees and others, taking their comments to become a better company and develop better products. We're really getting some excellent feedback. Just about every discussion we have on the FastLane blog, we've had an excellent dialog.
Blockbuster's getting sued for false advertising claims (from Adrants):
Blockbuster has been caught with its pants down regarding its new "No More Late Fees" ad campaign. Unbeknownst to most, the video rental company's largest campaign to date amounts to a lie... New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey filed a lawsuit last Friday claiming Blockbuster did not disclose the reality of its new program.
While it's all in the fine print, Blockbuster's program does not do away with late fees. It simply recategorizes them into a "sale" on the eighth day. If, after 30 days, the video is returned, the charge is credited but then the company imposes the well known, "we'll do anything for a buck" trick and charges a restocking fee.
Ouch. Talk about a great way to destroy brand reputation. One of the tenets of the BrandShift philosophy is authenticity. I think the folks at TrueTalk have done a great job in defining a few key terms related to authentic conversation (go there for more):
- Honesty: We mean what we say.
- Transparency: We don't pretend or hide our true motives.
If this lawsuit has merit, then Blockbuster fails on these two items. I've seen the Blockbuster billboards: "No more late fees." They're trying to compete with NetFlix without changing the way they operate. Somehow they think that changing the label from "late fees" to "sale" changes the meaning of the transaction. Great example of putting lipstick on a pig.
I believe that all companies should start asking themselves the question, "Will this activity build or betray trust with our customers?"
U.S. trust in corporations is high; equivalent to China and Brazil
There is a significant “trust discount” for major U.S. brands operating in Europe and Canada, but not in Brazil and China
UK trust in major U.S. companies is the lowest in Europe
Problem most acute for iconic American brands
Problem can be repaired
No “trust discount” for Asian or European brands operating anywhere in the world.
Technology companies seem to have a halo effect compared to other industry sectors.
Edelman deserves Kudos for a) doing marketing and thought-leadership, something that most PR agencies seem to be asleep at the wheel on; and b) for a really timely piece of research. One quote really captured my attention:
"Sacrifice control and perfection of a message for speed and free-flowing discussion. The paradox of transparency holds that companies benefit more when they disclose fully what they know - bad or good - as soon as they know it. This is truer than ever."
This is also the paradox-trap brand marketers are stuck in. All but a few are trained to the max in completeness. Completeness of thinking. Completeness of research. Completeness in creativity. Completeness in everything. The phenomenon of social networking technology and behavior plays to incompleteness. It's all about dialogue. Conversation. It's about discovering the brand rather than presenting it as final. The new priority for brand marketers will be maximizing time-to-conversation and incompleteness.
Andy Spade hits on this - kind-of - in the most recent issue of FastCompany. Amongst a few of his rules:
"BRAND CONSISTENCY IS OVERRATED. The brand doesn't have to look the same, but it has to feel the same. An element of newness and surprise if important for every brand.
BRANDS SHOULD HAVE SOME MYSTERY. Customers should never understand the whole picture of a brand"
Edelman's Trust Barometer hits on another key point:
"Employees and "an average employee like me" are more credible than CEOs."
Brand Communicators are still way over-vectored on the c-suite as a vehicle for brand building. This is a subject for a much longer blog - which I'm working on - but the role of the c-suite in informing and building the brand is clearly being undercut by Blogs which are a revolutionary force in this respect. They run against what communicators have so long fought to do - keep the voice of the employee under wraps, driving market attention towards a select few senior spokespeople.
As blogs liberate the voice of the company they'll, somewhat ironically, become the most potent force for restoring the credibility of corporations as brands. Look no further than Scoble at Microsoft to see this in action...
The survey also found that Television and Newspapers were more trusted sources of news in the US while in China, the Internet is more than doubly trusted than newspapers. Will be interesting to see where Blogs factor in this in future surveys.
Either way, Brand Trust needs to be entirely rethought in the context of social networking technologies. But it's not just about applying the technology to marketing campaigns. It's about rethinking the act of branding. The context in which brand communication takes place has changed forever.
Johnnie, I love the idea of “!” and “?” in your comment under the last post. David Weinberger’s idea reminds me of the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? It uses both points in the title of the movie. Have you seen it? If not, it’s worth checking out. The movie explores the connection between quantum mechanics, neurology and human behavior in an interesting alchemy.
One of the segments that really struck me was how our neural networks in our brain work. As we all know, the human brain is able to function with a high level of complexity. We can react to numerous stimuli in our environment at the same time, and can be incredibly intuitive, making decisions on the fly about what things mean and what should be done about them. Hence, our intuition is fueled by repeated experiences, from which we form associations. Learning from our experiences, our responses become programmed for new situations.
The movie suggests that the neurological basis for this kind of learning can be understood in terms of a process can called “long-term potentiation.” This new age sounding idea means that connections between nerve cells are strengthened when stimulated repeatedly.
So, if you have a meeting every Monday morning at 10:00 AM at which donuts are available, your stomach will trained to start to grumble soon before ten. (remember Pavlov’s dogs?). A neural pathway linking the meeting and donuts is established and strengthened through repetition. This is classical psychological conditioning. The problem develops when we become trapped with the habituated activities of our lives, going to meetings, answering emails, etc. making it much more difficult from breaking with your routine and get out of our offices to interact with others.
It’s hard to change anything, let alone co-create, if we are physically addicted to our routines. Maybe companies and brands also suffer from long-term potentiation, making it more difficult to change and evolve with the environment around them.
I like to think that I'm a very tolerant, non-judgemental person, but there is a certain kind of person that really irks me: the brand whore. Yes, I wear name brands, but not to define who I am or what I'm worth, as the brand whore does.
I've been marketing for so long that I've probably seen every cliche there is when hospitals or doctors or new services are marketed. Having written copy for ads, brochures, presentations and news releases I've also been complicit in cliche madness for which I humbly ask for forgiveness. Here are a few of my healthcare favorites
I really like the idea of facilitation how that creates the foundation for dialogue. David Boehm, the British physicist, has suggested a concept of dialogue as the glue that holds a community together that seems to make sense. He describes the nature of dialogue by saying:
“I give a meaning to the word dialogue different from what is commonly used. The derivations of the word suggest a deeper meaning. Dialogue comes from the Greek ‘dialogos.’ Logos means the word, or the meaning of the word. And dia means “through” – it doesn’t mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people. The picture or image this suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and between and through us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. This shared meaning is the glue or cement that holds people and societies together.”
Jennifer, I think you’re right. It is about community. Through facilitation and dialogue brands can play a powerful role in creating meaning in their communities.
We've been chatting about co-creation in previous posts (here, here , here and here). In my mind, good co-creation is about facilitating self-expression. I wrote in this comment:
Today's recipe for success appears to be: To serve as a facilitator for people to do, say or experience what they want. Because the underlying dissatisfaction in society today is having too much shoved down our throats. Witness the revolution of the masses. We want control.
So I really enjoyed reading today's Cool News in Reveries. The lead story's all about customers co-creating their radio-listening experience.
At Mercora.com, for instance, consumers "can create playlists of their favorite music, and with a few clicks of the mouse, 'broadcast' them over the internet to fellow users."...
The appeal to listeners is pretty clear: "When you've got only 30 slots on a radio dial, you're going to be programming to a lower common denominator," says Raghav Gupta, coo of Live365.com, another P2P radio station. "This opens the world to much more variety and diversity." P2P radio fans also "like the sense of community that comes with listening to playlists compiled by other listeners. Some say it reminds them of rifling through a friend's CD collection." At Mercora, consumers even have the option of joining a chat among fellow listeners as they enjoy the "broadcast."
Tom Mara of KEXP, a Seattle radio station, thinks traditional radio should pay attention here: "It's no longer a case of a person in a booth broadcasting to people anonymously ... Now we need to figure out new modes of interaction -- not only between the listener and the station, but between listeners."
What a beatiful example of co-creation and customer communities.
After rereading Johnnie's post on the Perils of Research and the following comments about fear I noticed the Blink on AJ Hoje's comments including: "Perhaps business people should junk the language and thought patterns of business- and adopt the language of poetry." The combination of reading these together reminded me of a piece of prose from Ranier Marie Rilke that I included in the preface of Beyond the Brand:
"Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.
And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence’ something helpless that needs our love."
AJ, Thanks for reminding us the power of the beauty and vulnerability that poets can provide us.
In Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (Wiley & Sons), released this month, the author... is back with a painfully comic look at how big corporations are bullying the little guy and locking down culture with the backing of one-sided copyright and trademark laws.
Dustin makes an interesting observation to John's post, Co-creation Part 4. With the example of Build-a-Bear in mind, he says sometimes a great service organization doesn't do things customers don't want to do, but
They do something the customer doesn't want/know how to do ON THEIR OWN. Coming from an art/design/marketing background, I don't want to program the back-end of an elaborate website. I would LOVE to be involved in the collaborative process of that programming though. I would love to pick the brains of the programmers to find out what is truly possible and have some hand in shaping the functionality of the website. Back to Build-A-Bear. How many adults/kids would want to do that on their own? Yet the store thrives by FACILITATING the experience. Service companies need to facilitate the experience in a way that makes it enjoyable for the client.
I like this thought. Getting clearer about whether you're an agent (we take it off your hands for you) or a facilitator (we help you to do it) may be quite helpful to marketers.
For instance, when it comes to phone calls, BT (the UK telecoms giant) used to pour vast amounts of money into ads saying how marvelous it is to talk to people, posing as a facilitator of conversation. I thought this was patronizing nonsense. I want my phone company to be an agent: to make telephones work really well for me and not to dress themselves up as pseudo-therapists. Where facilitation may apply is in innovation - three way calling, integrated voice messaging etc etc.
Dustin's Build a Bear is one example of taking an agent market (here's a bear!) and creating an experience. That's an idea that could work well for others, and badly for some; there are some things I just want done, thankyou, and the less fuss you make doing it, the happier I am.
Some people talk of the brand as a place. Companies like eBay and Amazon are uber-facilitators, they've shifted from the business of just doing things for you, to helping to get things you want.
(What makes this interesting is that the goalposts move. One example: I used to just want my rubbish removed; now I want to know more about how it is recycled. I used to just buy Salmon at the supermarket; now I want to know a lot more about how it is caught. I'm becoming more interested in the inner workings of these businesses.)
On a related matter (as Hannibal Lector would say) it's interesting that we talk about advertising, PR and research agencies. That suggests an outdated business model. It used to be that companies would like to leave the sordid business of talking to customers to the ad men. The tedious chore of listening to them could be left to the researchers. Any direct contact could by hygienically removed.
I think what we need now are not agents that get in the way of the customer conversation but facilitators who help to enhance it. That is an enormous shift of mental models away from manipulation towards authenticity, one that some in the business will struggle with and that many others are going to relish.
Here's an interesting professional parallel. In the legal profession here in the UK, there is a big effort to shift disputes from the hideous Dickensian world of the litigators (the ultimate "agents": we'll be beastly on your behalf) to that of the mediators, folks who try to facilitate a solution that isn't a dumb second-hand battle in which those with most at stake are represented by those with a financial interest in obfuscation and delay.
I think the same thing is likely to hit the marketing trade, and the PR agencies in particular. There'll be less emphasis on speaking on behalf of clients in bland press releases, and more on helping clients speak for themselves with more authenticity.
I've been thinking more about market research recently - partly after an interesting chat with Peter Hutton and also from conversations from our very own John Winsor, who's a bit of a radical on the topic.
I used to make a very nice living from qualitative research, but became more and more disillusioned. More and more often, I realised how little value businesses were getting from it.
What I'm enjoying about this blog is the quality of comments. I find this rather liberating as I don't feel my post has to be a frightfully balanced review of the topic but can be a bit of a "conversation grenade". That's the spirit in which I'm pulling out the pin and lobbing out these three points. And I'm quite sure John W will pitch in soon after...
1. Avoidance, not curiosity
So often, research is commissioned as an act of politics. For instance, a marketing director wanted me to research financial advisers in the London area. When I asked why, he revealed that... well really he wanted to test some consumer ads quickly, but he didn't have time to do consumer recruitment, so IFAs would have to do. (That in itself is a pretty questionable shortcut). Then it turned out that he wanted to test direct reponse ads - where it's nearly always simpler and cheaper to do a split run and see which ones work in the real world, rather than gather the questionable predictions of consumers.
After running through the pitfalls, what emerged was the real reason for the study. The director wanted his agency to change strategy, but didn't feel able to get them to change and needed research to back him up. Of course, research is usually crap for this since it lends itself to multiple interpretations. And instead of a scary but real conversation with his agency, he was willing to throw money at a highly artificial conversation with a group of absolutely marginal relevance.
That's an extreme case of a phenomenon I've seen a lot of. Scratch many research briefs and you'll find a conversation that needs to happen inside the business. An elephant under the table that's not being talked about.
And when research is done to prove a point, as a substitute for a "fierce conversation", when there isn't genuine curiosity, I think it's likely to be a waste of time and trouble.
2. A fake conversation.
Boy did I become tired of focus groups. How weird that the nearest some marketing teams get to customers is to observe them from behind the safety of a one-way mirror in a focus group facility. And that's assuming they are observing, rather than knocking back the beers, checking their emails or continuing their internal politics while the conversation goes on next door.
I harboured a secret desire to stick the camera in the viewing area and do a debrief on the pyschology of what goes on in there. It would probably be way more interesting than telling people about the consumer conversation. For more insights, here's a great article on my own site, written by Leapfrog Research: What are the main issues facing viewing facilities? (Word format).
As for quantitative research... the effort to squeeze people into those agree/disagree batteries has its uses, but it so easily traps us into trying to put numbers on things that defy measurement. And it's another way of keeping the customer at a distance in a one-way conversation loaded with the marketer's preconceptions.
3 Obsession with the explicit
The third problem is that market research fixates on what can be made explicit in a relationship. Yet there is so much evidence that way more happens in real human conversations than might appear from the words exchanged. For a crude example, just consider the difference between reading email and meeting someone over coffee.
Malcolm Gladwell's Blink has some great stories illustrating the ways in which we deceive ourselves, so that asking us why we do things (which is often what market research does) can be a truly awful guide to what really motivates us. The danger here is that some researchers will leap on this as on opportunity to sell deeper expertise, complicated methodologies attaching electrodes to brains etc in the preposterous belief that if you drill deep enough you can find out "what's really going on".
OK, maybe that may turn up something interesting... but just look at the shabbiness of this as a way of conducting a human relationship. It continues to treat customers as objects to be "done to" and experimented upon.
What this seems to miss is that all human relationships, however "scientifically" managed, are two-way streets. When we set ourselves up as objective researchers we delude ourselves, for we ourselves are affected and influenced by what we do in a myriad of ways. And what happens inside a marketing department that treats customers as objects? I think you'll find that they expect each other to be treated as an object too... and think what that does to the quality of conversations inside an organisation.
When we go out and actually talk with customers, cutting out the middleman, we expose ourselves to more than just an exchange of information. We allow ourselves to be changed, to be moved, perplexed, provoked, saddened, cheered and to experience a real connection. Perhaps that's what some marketing deparments are afraid of ?
Seems Allison Johnson, uber brand marketer for HP is heading to Apple. Of course, a "source" says it's nothing to do with Carly's departure while Allison say's nothing and Apple is probably (and justifiably) overjoyed but saying nothing as well.
I just noticed a nice post on Customer Evangelistsby Jackie Huba today about citizen marketers, those people who decide to share their passion about a brand. This is a another good example of co-creation. However, when the people gain the power to market your product, they choose how to spin it both postively and negatively.
People are moved by greatness... by madness,... by beauty and magic and love and terror. Perhaps business people should junk the language and thought patterns of business- and adopt the language of poetry. Instead of "building a profitable business" how about "creating a great beautiful & elegant works of art". Business as a collaborative art project.
Instead of developing your brand.. how about developing your genius (ala Thoreau). Instead of following a mission statement (ugh), why not follow your bliss.
A propos the recent post on whether sponsorship is bunk, Freddie Daniells has a wry observation on B&Q's sponsorship of Ellen MacArthur's round-the-world yachting record.
Jennifer, great definition of co-creation! I really like the way the meaning of co-creation is being refined. It is really evolving through the participation of so many great minds in this co-creation process. I wanted add to the dialogue providing some context for the struggle I have had over the past 18 months or so, trying to get my own arms around the subject. Last year, when I was writing Beyond the Brand, I struggled with developing a meaning for co-creation. Originally, the purpose of the book was to de-bunk the $1.2 billion focus group business and offer an alternative. While writing, I realized that there was something much bigger going on at the fringes of the way companies and customers were interacting. In this search, I took a great deal of inspiration from the alternative sports market that includes skateboarding and snowboarding. Here, everyone actively participates in a chaotic dance of co-creation between manufacturers, consumers, pro-athletes and retailers. After this exploration, I got so turned on by the concept that I wanted the title of the book to be, “How to Co-Create from the Bottom-Up.” Alas, my publisher didn’t get it and won’t go for it. So, in an effort to add to the dialogue, I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts I wrote last year. Here are some quotes from Chapter 4 of Beyond the Brand:
“Many companies focus their strategic thinking around current market needs by getting into a conference room and divining the future (or attempting to). It’s a very inside-out or top-down approach. In a reversal of this traditional process, exceptional companies use an outside-in approach, or bottom-up strategy, to focus their thinking on engaging in a dialogue with the other members of their community, allowing them to co-create innovations with their customers. This holistic, organic strategy allows companies to continually recontextualize and reframe their brand, making necessary adjustments as the community and customers evolve.”
“A bottom-up strategy of co-creation takes the open source philosophy a step further. First, it’s about loosening the control over the strategic process and focusing on guiding it instead of owning it. It’s about inviting the right customers, suppliers, and employees to participate in an open, informed process based on solid guiding principles. To do this well, companies must focus their strategic energies on building consensus and communities. The strategy has to be human. The focus has to be on the quality of the input into the strategy and the communications of those ideas to the community. Companies must focus on being evolutionary.”
“Disruptive innovation fueled by bottom-up (co-creative) learning means companies must participate in an open way within their community. This requires true corporate transparency, in everything from marketing to manufacturing, and a more long-term, sustainable outlook of the community in which they participate.
Companies that are able to make the transition to providing honest, original, culturally relevant materials and products will win. People will carefully weed out and broadcast to their peers those companies and brands that they do not trust. Many companies have discovered that being deeply connected to their community is good for their brands. In this new era, brands will have to become good, creative citizens of the community in order to survive.”
I hope this helps the dialogue evolve further. I think we are on to some thing big here. The more great minds we can get involved in this evolutionary process, the more fun it will be!
Lastly, did anybody see the February 14th cover of Forbes with the title of “Why Companies Need Your Ideas?” While I think the article, “Have It Your Way,” is an example of “shallow” co-creation, the ideas we are riffing is bubbling up in places like the cover of Forbes, nonetheless.
Thanks to everyone's contributions on defining the concept of co-creation (here and here), I think we're arriving at a pretty good place. Here's where my head's at now:
"An open, ongoing collaboration between employees and customers to define and create products, services, experiences, ideas and information."
Open brings in the idea of transparency, so that non-participants can easily see the collaborative process. This, in my mind, eliminates traditional customer research from the definition.
Ongoing implies that it's not a one-time shot at obtaining customer input and then taking the rest of it in-house. Anyone can participate at any time.
Collaboration brings in the spirit of teamwork. Employees and customers are peers in the process. In many cases, the company simply serves as a facilitator of the process.
Products are probably the most clear-cut application for co-creation: open-source software, Lego Factory, Google's API
Information is probably the next obvious application: epinions.com, Amazon.com, marketingprofs.com forum
Experiences: This gets a bit more fuzzy. A good example is probably Apple iTunes/iPod customized playlists... the company provided the tools to allow customers to create their own music experience. We could get really fuzzy here and say that because a brand is an idea in the minds of customers, then all brands are co-created. But I won't say it, because I think it's confusing the issue. Any more tangible examples of co-created experiences?
Services: This is another tough one. Typically a service company exists to do something that a customer doesn't want to do. Again, would love some ideas on how service companies could work with customers to co-create.
Ideas: What we're doing now. I love co-creating the idea of co-creation!
My friend Tim Kitchin makes an interesting observation today. Tim thinks a lot about how organisations create mutual advantage for stakeholders. He asks if Corporate Social Responsibility activity is a way of avoiding carrying out the core business responsibly.
Some interesting nuggets starting to emerge from BP recently, crystallising a move away from CSR, and maybe even CR, and treating responsibility as business as usual.
"We aim to create mutual advantage through ALL our relationships..."
Seeking to determine the balance of win:win relationships means understanding the nature of responsibility.
I've long held a smouldering belief that huge amounts of CSR (or CSI) activity is bunk or "greenwash". It's too easy for businesses to invest a sliver of their profits in worthy causes but not take responsibility for the detailed impact of their day-to-day operations.
In fact, let me see what happens if I try to kick the door open even wider. Maybe most sponsorship is bunk. For instance, I see that Guiness is the "Official Beer" of the Lions (Rugby) Tour of New Zealand. Budweiser slaps its name all over the Superbowl. Why?
Is it so great that sport gets funded this way? Especially as the vast majority of the money floods to the big ticket sports and sportsmen? What's wrong with Guinness and Budweiser that they're owners are not willing to stand or fall on the quality of their beer and let me decide for myself which sports to support?
Is it because of branding people, who can never be content with selling us goods for what they are, but pursue ever increasing profit by ever-inflating efforts to stretch the meaning we attach to mere stuff by posing with the stars?
An investment bank marketing director once proudly told me that they would be sponsoring the Tate Modern (London Modern Art gallery). Becuase he felt that this sort of creativity meshed well with his "brand image". I said it would be better to put their money into being creative instead of posing with (or as) people who were.
Are we really so willing to support corporates in these sorts of vanity exercises?
For years, branding gurus of all shades have lured businesses into striking these kinds of poses. I fear this is simply a distraction from doing what they're supposed to do, and doing it well.
Imagine you're trying to buy a new car. You want to have a conversation with the salesman about safety statistics or whatever. And he keeps changing the subject to last night's football. You'd start to feel pretty wary.
That's the impact of most corporate sponsorship and CSR on me. It makes me wonder: what are you trying to cover up? After all, it's not as if many organisations have reached the point where their customers are really satisfied with the service they get on the basics. So how come there's time and energy left over for this kind of thing?
Do you know what I think this is really about, in my darker more cynical moments? Strip away a few bogus spreadsheets, dubious powerpoints with buzzwords and ROI in them, and some half-baked bits of market research... and I believe you may find one thing: a bored marketing director, lacking in self-esteem and longing to have a beer with Tiger Woods or some other star. Dying to keep up with his mates at the golf club with stories of the glamorous events and people he's been seen at and with.
Ok, it's not quite this simple. I'm not sure I want to rule out philanthropy for companies... but I am deeply suspicious that marketing gurus have hijacked it and mutated it into another way to not be straight with us.
I've noticed the faintness of the praise with which some bloggers have linked to this particular blog. I don't blame them. I think a lot of stuff done in the name of branding sucks. Unbelievers are very welcome to the services at this church.
That’s not us. It’s those really nasty marketers over at McDonald’s who afronted the Blogsphere by creating a fake blog. How dare they undertake a marketing stunt on this hallowed ground! How dare they extend their brand into our space in such a juvenile way! Out damned fake blog! Out!
Ok, so I’m exaggerating a little. But not much. If Brandshift does nothing else than explore the intersection of branding and the Blogsphere it will have served a very useful purpose. That marketers look to extend their brands through the Blogsphere is inevitable. That they don’t quite get the spirit of this place and challenge it’s boundaries is equally inevitable.
The comments my blog drew earlier last week seemed to echo this. Jeremy made an interesting and unreported observation:
It was inevitable that there would be - and have been - fake blogs. But, the bigger picture is so what? Is this really going to affect our lives that drastically? McDonald’s is auctioning off the fake fry, and raising funds for the Ronald McDonald’s House Charities - that's what matters at the end of the day.
The trick is going to be seeing blogs in the light they were intended to be seen in. They might be juvenile. They might be pathetic. But we’re an equally diverse and weird bunch. All eight million plus of us.
If I were to offer a critique - strictly from an execution perspective - it would be on two fronts:
First - brands can’t just be about awareness. This is Kevin’s point:
...the fake blog shows a complete misunderstanding of the medium. The technology is designed to create an open, honest dialogue with customers. Fake blogs say "we just want awareness. We just want control over the medium. This is how we do it. By throwing money at a fake blog.”
Second - all great brands are close to transparent. The negative noise could have been easily avoided by McDonald’s simply stating that this was a fun blog written by fictional characters all in the name of profit and good. Lesson here - don’t inflame the Blogsphere by making these kind of obvious mistakes.
This new medium - these new communities and conversations - are set to reshape branding. Brand marketers have been stuck on transmit for decades. The smart ones who looked to have the very act of marketing become a conversation were quickly isolated as guerilla or viral marketers. The Blogsphere changes that. Use it to simply transmit, or purely for stunts, and you miss its enormous potential.
Brand marketing. Branding. Lovemarks. Call it what you will. All flavors have made a sharp shift back into community building and conversations.
So, while I did think McDonald’s fake blog was kind of silly, I did think it was silly funny. But I do wonder how much more McDonald’s could have gained by being transparent and even explaining the cause. They might have got to have fun while mobilizing support for their Brand like never before.
And here’s an open invitation to anyone from McDonalds reading this. Give us your thoughts. This is a conversation as well. And I’m lovin it.
We've been having a great dialogue about co-creation. What I love about blogging is that your feedback helps me hone my own thinking. I'd like to propose a tighter definition of co-creation:
"Products, services or content that's created by non-employees."
I think this definition helps distinguish it from customer research. Research simply identifies the problem that needs to be solved. Co-creation allows customers (or non-customers) to own a part of the solution. It's a form of outsourcing that involves letting go of preconceived ideas about our products, services, customers or industries. It also means loosening our white-knuckled grip on our brands.
Examples of co-created products are listed in my earlier post: open-source software, Google's API and Lego Factory.
Another example: media companies could use the co-creation idea by providing a forum where anyone can submit articles for publication... and instead of someone at the company selecting the best articles, they allow readers to vote on the best ones.
I'd enjoy brainstorming with you on co-creation ideas for different types of companies. How could a professional services firm apply the concept of co-creation? What about someone in the hospitality industry? Or a retailer?
Alright! We're already getting into some juicy conversation in John Winsor's recent post. There's a comment that I'd like to bring to the forefront because it's an oft-misunderstood idea: co-creation.
"...good products are good products, they don't need transparency or co-creation. Co-creation is what people on the outside want when they want to associate themselves with cool products. You don't let the slimy masses in to medocritate the product, you keep them striving to be a part of the clique."
There are different levels of co-creation; how far you take it depends on your product and industry. Here are a few terrific examples of deep co-creation:
1. Open-source software. No explanation needed.
2. Google's new API for online ads. An article in eWeek reports:
"There are a lot of things Google hasn't thought of that people could do with their ad campaigns," said Nelson Minar, a Google software engineer. "One of goals is to enable advertisers and third parties to create tools for their own purposes."
3. Lego's Lego Factory, where kids design new Lego models using a Digital Designer and submit them to competitions. This is a primary source of ideas for new Lego products.
In each of these cases, no one made assumptions about what customers wanted. Customers were brought directly into the process. In shallower levels of co-creation, customers aren't directly involved in designing products... but companies still seek to understand customers' mindsets, desires and unmet needs.
Apple is one of those anomalies where one man had an aesthetic vision, created a company and products in his own image, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. If you think you can replicate Apple's success in this fashion, go for it; but I'd suggest that some form of co-creation is infinitely easier. BTW, I do believe that Apple's brand is a form of co-creation: the "in-crowd" that formed around the Apple brand was created by customers, not by Apple.
Companies who view customers as "slimy masses" can never be successful in the long run; it is those customers who make corporate existence possible. Customers smell arrogance like a dog smells fear. Microsoft is a great example of a company who became incredibly successful based on following their own vision... which ultimately resulted in customer resentment. Now with over 1200 Microsoft employees participating in the blogosphere, the company has actively, publicly entered into dialogues with customers. Robert Scoble gets a ton of suggestions from customers and passes them on to the right folks internally. Microsoft is beginning to co-create.
Does this mean we should always do what customers say? Of course not. But we should always be listening to them to ensure that our products and services maintain relevance in today's rapidly changing environment. We design products and services that people will buy... and we find out what people will buy by listening, observing and participating in dialogues. There's a terrific example of this in the book "Hardball" that discusses how Whirlpool co-created their new line of appliances by deeply understanding the life of a woman named Gail.
If anyone has other examples of co-created products and services, I'd love to hear about them. This is a tidal-wave trend; customers want to be heard, and they will buy from those companies who demonstrate a willingness to listen. Sure, we could say that co-creation is just pig lipstick for customer research... at the shallower end, perhaps. But the concept of co-creation goes much deeper and farther than the traditional idea of research. In co-creation, customers truly feel like they are a part of the company (family, ecosystem, etc.) and that their voice is heard.
I feel like I'm a bit late to the party! Sorry. First, I'd like to say it's an honor to get to have a dialogue with Jennifer, Johnnie and Andy. I'm really looking forward to this journey of co-creation. That's what I love about blogs, and I think this plays into Pig Lipstick. I've been riffing a lot about The End of Branding as We Know it on my blog. It seems that many companies forget that their products and brands aren't owned by themselves, alone. Hence, if you're customers think you're selling a pig, it's still a pig, no matter what color the lipstick is or what brand attributes the lipstick provides! Companies have to get out from behind the shield that they preceive their brands provide and start being more transparent, willing to co-create their products with their customers.
I hope BrandShift can help energize this co-creation, creating a vibrant dialogue around deepening the connection between companies, customers and communities for the benefit of all.
Since Johnnie brought up pet peeves in his last post, here's one of mine: renaming something unpleasant to get more mileage out of it... AKA, putting lipstick on a pig.
Chris Lawer points to a Peppers & Rogers article on Voice Marketing. He quotes from their latest paper, interestingly titled: "At the Eye of The Storm: How Retail Chief Marketing Officers can Deliver the Optimal Customer Experience."
Retail marketers have a range of interaction tools to choose from to get the job done. An emerging option is voice marketing. Voice marketing helps retailers strengthen brand and communicate with customers more effectively by combining pre-recorded, telephone messages with professional voice talent. Designed to connect with existing customers, voice marketing allows retailers to accelerate their relationships with individual customers and capture higher value.
A voice message is typically a 35-second pre-recorded audio message that sounds like a live call.The messages are left on answering machines or voice mail systems...
Hmmm... last I checked, that was called "telemarketing." And it's not an experience that customers want to have. Is the outbound TM industry really deluded enough to think that a new label is going to save them?
I see this pattern all the time in "rebranding" efforts. Hey, I know! Let's design a new logo and create a new ad campaign, and... ta da!!! We have a magically new brand. Um, no... you dressed up your current brand in different clothing.
Rebranding, when done by an ad agency (oh, excuse me... "marketing communications firm,") is nothing more than pig lipstick.
Rebranding, when done by an executive team that's passionate about driving change throughout the organization, is true and believable brand evolution. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking a fancy new label, logo or campaign is going to fix our ills. It has to be an inside-out process.
(update: When I went to copy the trackback URL, I noticed that Johnnie already ranted about this subject on his blog this morning. Great minds think alike :-))
This new blog prompts me to think about some of the changes I'd like to see in branding practice. Here's one.
I'd like to see more opinionated marketing people.
No, not opinionated about the minutae of technique, but opinonated about the products and services they want to promote.
Too often, marketing folks act as if they are morally neutral and interested only in helping organisations communicate. Oh, they may turn their noses up at tobacco companies, but on the whole they show a willingness to work for anyone with the money.
I'd like to see marketing people take a bit more responsibility for where they put their talents. I'd like to see more organisations defining themselves by their attitudes, something beyond bland platitudes about customer service.
I'd like consultants to go beyond making predictions about the future as if they are merely neutral observers, and start taking responsibility for putting their efforts behind organisations they really believe in.
Too many agencies work with clients they secretly dislike or even despise, hanging on only for the money. The same goes for marketing people, who flit from company to company every couple of years, all the while issuing homilies about customer loyalty.
Dan Gilmour's been writing good stuff on the end of objectivity in news media. I'd like to see an end to the same kind of pseudo-objectivity in marketing.
A few years ago at at my high-school reunion, I met a guy who I swore I'd never seen before. Clean-cut, nice-looking guy. He must have seen me glancing at his name tag and his face, because he approached me and said, "No, you probably wouldn't recognize me. I used to be one of those long-hair druggy types who never showed up to class. I cleaned up and went to med school. I'm now married with a child on the way."
Wow, how people change. So do ideas.
Branding is an idea.
The traditional view of branding worked just fine back in the 70's and 80's when times were simpler, slower-paced, and we didn't have the proliferation of products and media that we have today.
But the traditional view of branding no longer works in today's context, and there are many who are trumpeting that "branding is dead."
I don't believe that branding is dead... any more than I believe that long-haired druggie from high school is dead. He's still alive and well, albeit in a new, virtually unrecognizable form. He changed to fit the times. He changed for his own happiness and survival. We all do.
And that's what BrandShift is all about. Helping brands to "grow up" and mature in the real world of tempestuous change and customer demands.
What does it mean for a brand to mature? The same thing as when people mature... we become more honest, direct, transparent. We become better listeners and communicators. We stop seeing ourselves as the center of our world and begin to see ourselves as part of an interconnected whole. We move from following rules to making value judgements.
The BrandShift contributors are all passionate about helping brands through this transition. We'll not only discuss the theory of branding, but also the practice. We'll have podcast discussions with CEOs and brand owners on how their brands are evolving in the new economy... growing pains and all. And we'll cover the new social technologies and discuss their impact on brands.
If there's anything specific you'd like for us to address, please tell us. If you have specific questions on the subject, please ask. We want BrandShift to be your resource for all things branding.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
