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
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John pointed me to a great new blog, HR's Brand New Experience. Regina wites about how good brand architecture involves organizational development, and how HR is (or should be) an essential part of the strategy alignment and execution process. Here's a snip:
Most of the agencies I have dealt with have not been able to provide the appropriate resourcing and/or expertise to be able to take their brand/rebranding efforts to this level.
Is the physical design and environment taken into consideration? Is the pay system involved if people’s behavior needs to change? Is the performance management system changed so that people are informed of new expectations of behaviors? and then given feedback on same? and then paid accordingly? Are work processes redesigned so that people can deliver “a brand experience” to customers? Are managers trained to help people deliver brand experiences? to recruit the right people who can deliver it? Does the HR department live the brand in it’s delivery of services to internal customers?
Creating and implementing a brand architecture is hard and a lot of work. Trying to change consumer behaviors based on a your brand is even harder. Adding the necessary components internally to change employee behavior is equally hard and daunting. But one can’t happen without the other.
I’m finishing the edits for my new book, SPARK, and came across some interesting insights from Michael Jager, Creative Director of JDK, a design firm in Burlington, Vermont whose claim to fame is their work on Burton Snowboards.
“To me the essence of leading, following or nurturing a culture of innovation starts with the depth of your belief in differentiation and the importance of differentiation. What drives it? Is it your desire for progression, something that you need to do to be successful as a brand, as a consumer product, or as an individual?
It goes back to a respect for differentiation. It means the willingness to take that risk and not be afraid of it but also finding pleasure and desiring progression.
The idea of progression is what I’ve used to help guide my thinking. To me, having a commodified existence is pretty painful and useless. People and companies that are followers instead of leaders don’t necessarily always stay on the path to commodification. Certainly, it’s not a very exciting place.
You can certainly be a second place company following innovations and tweaking other people’s ideas and remain in a place beyond commodity but I don’t want to be one of those people nor work for a culture like that.
It’s far more interesting to become an inspired protagonist in a market. And, by taking that position, it means that you need to be deeply connected to the culture that your products exist in and the people that use them; yet rely on your intuition about where things will be.”
We've written a few times about brand pull through - where one brand (iPod) pulls another through in its wake (iMac). Accoring to Good Morning Silicon Valley the brand pull-through at Apple is exceeding forecasts:
iPod, therefore iMac: And here I thought iPod's halo effect was just spillover from Apple CEO Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Turns out I was wrong. According to a new survey by Morgan Stanley, Apple's iPod is funneling customers to the company's PC business. The research outfit surveyed 400 iPod users and found that 19 percent expect to convert from PC to Macintosh. That's twice what Morgan Stanley expected. "We believe the Mac conversion rate within Apple's iPod customer base is roughly double what the market expects today," Morgan Stanley analyst Rebecca Runkle told clients "... The street still underestimates the power of Apple's iPod." Indeed, Runkle noted that forward intentions indicate the Mac conversion rate could track closer to the 25 percent range going forward. If Apple plays its cards right, it could soon control 5 percent of the desktop computer market.
This is all food for thought, and perhaps a new metric for brand marketers - the extent to which one brand is driving loyalty and recommendation effects in another category. It also proves - again - the power of brand synergy, or, how different products benefit from a common brand experience and halo. We celebrate the difference and buy the similarity.
"We" companies are built by and for a community of users..."They" companies are traditional companies that seek to optimize profitability at the expense of everything else.
Microsoft is the poster child for a "they" company. Craigs List is the poster child for a "we" company. Apple used to be a "we" company. I love Apple as I've blogged about many times. I still do. But Apple is not a "we" company any more.
One of the comments by Matt Schulte goes on to say:
I think Apple has always been a "they" company. I think the "blogosphere" and a more media-savvy public is making it more difficult for the "public-facing" part of a company to present/market themselves as a "we" company, when their actions say "they" company. People have been preaching "transparency" as a part of the code of doing business today, and the blogosphere is bringing that transparency to businesses whether they want it or not. So...the divide between how a company presents itself to the public, and what kind of company it 'really is' is dissolving...companies are getting transparentized. Zap.
"Zap" is right. All this talk of transparency reminds me of the classic scene in The Wizard of Oz where Toto pulls back the curtain on the wizard. He's furiously working his controls and microphone to operate the big talking head: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
If you believe that transparency is a fad, or an option, or a warm and fuzzy buzzword, think again. What you believe doesn't matter. There are millions of Totos running around the blogosphere; they've got good noses for men behind curtains. And nothing pleases them more than to see another talking head fall.
My definition of a brand is an idea in the minds of your customers... and that idea is formed by what you say and what you do. As Matt pointed out, the blogosphere is shining a bright light on the gap between how a company presents itself and who a company "really is." Social technologies like blogs and community forums are forcing us to completely rethink the traditional tenets of brand management.
Transparency will happen to your company whether you like it or not. One obvious question to ask yourself is, how embarrassed will you be when your curtain is pulled back? If there are aspects of your business practice you'd rather customers not know, you might consider addressing them now. For example, in the land-line telecom industry, there are taxes and surcharges you're paying on your bill that are not mandated by the FCC and not passed on to the government; phone companies can discount the line price, jack up the fees and make the same amount of money while giving the illusion of a discount. Another example is Blockbuster's new "no late fees" program, for which it's now getting sued for false advertising claims. Bottom line: if you've got a business practice that you feel needs a "marketing spin job" to get customers to buy it, then it's time to reconsider. Gone are the glory days when you could safely hide behind a curtain.
But even if you have nothing to hide, chances are that customers are still distrustful. And they're tired of 'business as usual' where they don't have a voice. At this point, your best option is to come out from behind the curtain and make friends. Be proactive. Reveal the humanity behind the talking head. Start a company blog, or enable your employees to do so. Engage in dialogue. Become a "we" company instead of a "they" company. These open actions, more than anything else, will differentiate you from your competitors who are hiding behind official press releases, suing their customers and refusing to listen.
So in light of this new transparency trend, what does it mean for companies like Apple that have depended on keeping new innovations a secret until launch time? Are secrets (even good ones) possible -- or desirable -- in the new transparent marketplace?
This piece is an extension of a piece I'm running on my blog. With a twist. Over the past week I've written on the government's use of tax payer money to produce and promote video news releases (VNRs) - essentially press releases masquerading as news. And the failure of media outlets to report them as such.
I've been thinking about this on two fronts. The first in terms of brand integrity - especially in the light of recent coverage suggesting that the democrats are going to undertake a re-branding exercise to become the party of truth. And Second, in terms of the right to brand propaganda.
Brand Integrity is Rooted in Behavior
Right now the Government's integrity is under attack. Bush appears ambivalent, willing to laugh this one off.
At last weekend's Gridiron dinner, Mr. Bush made a joke about how "most" of his good press on Social Security came from Armstrong Williams, and the Washington press corps yukked it up. The joke, however, is on them - and us. -- Frank Rich, New York Times, March 20, 2005
It just isn't funny. What we have - occurring in nearly every corner of communications - is a massive failing of ethics. This failure is not just undermining the standing of politicians and parties, it's undermining America's credibility around the world. Today, The New York Times draws (a pretty extreme) parallel between Enron and the current Bush administration:
The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived,
unquestioned, for years. How? As the narrator says in "The Smartest
Guys in the Room," Enron "was fixated on its public relations campaigns." It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many). In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company's Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay.
"We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in," a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling" even though "some of the computers didn't even
work."
If this Potemkin village sounds familiar, take a look at the ongoing "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security with ordinary citizens for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president's town meeting; campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration's pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style. -- Frank Rich, New York Times, March 20, 2005
A Right to Brand Propaganda
Much of this behavior is dismissed as a right. A right to generate propaganda.
A month or so ago Alan Kelly penned an interesting piece for PRWeek on the right to propaganda. There isn't anything wrong with propaganda. We do have a right to promote everything from positions and products. The right to inform the public should be protected at all costs.
But the airing of VNRs as news stories - without any credit to their origins - suggests a new standard is needed if this right is not to be confused with that of engaging in duplicitous activity. And if you want to skip the intermediaries - media, analysts, opinion formers - there are plenty of ways of doing so (blogs being a great example). But what is wrong are attempts to knowingly avoid transparency and dupe the public. Ethics are at the core of the issue. Here behavior undermines the brand.
The Propaganda Paradox
This is the paradox of propaganda - whether for bands, people, or positions... Those with one position rarely agree with the manner in which the other is being propagated. What are lies and wrong-doing by one group is more than often perceived as fair by another. And to them, those that engage in it should be censured and punished. I was chatting with a friend - an avid Bush supporter - on the VNR issue. His view was that the onus was on the media to report the source of content and that if the media had been reporting fairly anyway they would have reported precisely what was in the VNR. He has a point, although one I don't agree with.
While I'm not making excuses for those engaging in these acts, the media are also failing us. Their lack of diligence in reporting has allowed many of these spurious acts of propaganda to take place unchecked. While higher standards are needed in public and corporate communications, they are also needed in the media. The brand intermediaries need to stand-up and be accountable for their role in disseminating information.
At the end of the day all great brands are build on authenticity. And this is why the system - I hope - is self policing. Through the top-tier media and blogosphere, those engaging in unauthentic communications will be caught-out. Their lack of truth and transparency exposed. And their brand tarnished.
All of this points to the vital role media and the blogosphere has to play as a watchdog and commentator. I wonder if we'll look back on the opening of this new century as the period in which we faced and dealt with the ethics crisis in business, communications and government? Or will we just shrug this all off as fair game in the pursuit of propaganda? I hope not. Sadly, various parties in our Government seem willing to do so, apparently oblivious to the damage it is doing to their brand, and ours.
Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.
But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful. By Amy Joyce, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A01.
While it's a subject for a much longer post, I've long held the view that Execs can benefit from thinking of themselves as brands, and managing themselves as such. That doesn't mean they are brands - although some argue that a person is as much a brand as a product, especially one so much in the public eye as a Steve Jobs. There's no question in my mind that blogs (depending on execution) can either enhance or detract from the Executive's brand. She gives a couple of good examples of how in one instance the communications appears painful, and in another, hip, cool and wired.
Plenty of quotes from Jonathan Schwartz, COO, Sun Microsystems. He gets at the core issue of communicating via blogs - and in fact, of building any brand - authenticity. "Authenticity is fundamental," he said in an interview. "Blogs get pretty dull if you just blog your products. There has to be something personal."
As brand communicators work with Execs on their entry into the blogosphere, they should focus on authenticity. While the Exec is communicating on behalf of the company, it's them doing the communicating. Their blog can't be a marketing vehicle or alternate news distribution mechanism to PR Newswire. It's a place for them to engage in conversations with the market, and for us all to get a better feel for who they are and what they care about.
Blogs are arguably the most potent communications vehicle out there for the Exec to build their brand in a deep and personal way. And when done right, enhance the company's brand as well. That's a win-win.
Could otherwise be titled, "Clueless in Government", but...
Washington Post reports that the issue of transparency and news dissemination is getting a little murky in DC:
The Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office, said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government's role in producing them.
That message, in memos sent Friday to federal agency heads and general counsels, contradicts a Feb. 17 memo from Comptroller General David M. Walker. Walker wrote that such stories -- designed to resemble independently reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them without editing -- violate provisions in annual appropriations laws that ban covert propaganda.
We appear to have a right to do propaganda, but what about covert propaganda?
The legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert,' regardless of whether the content of the message is 'propaganda,' " Bradbury wrote. "Our view is that the prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency."
GIVE ME A BREAK! They really believe these VNRs - with PR people pretending to work as baggage screeners - and packed full of propaganda - represent pure reporting - by that I mean, the don't advocate a particular viewpoint. Well, in that case, lets get rid of the media all together.
I need to go cool-down somewhere... the parting quote from the story says it all...
"Whether in the form of a payment to an actual journalist, or through the creation of a fake one, it is wrong to deceive the public with the creation of phony news stories," the lawmakers wrote
BusinessWeek reports that the Dems are thinking about rebranding. About time.
"Two articles I have read in the last 24 hours--one in The New Yorker about Joe Biden and Nicholas Kristof's op-ed piece in the New York Times today--specifically talk about the Democrats "re-branding" themselves. I have an idea: Dems could stake out being the party for "The Truth" between now and 2008.. David Kiley, BW
MIT Tech Review reports on Sun's blogging efforts saying that they are in "blog heaven". Aren't we all...
Suns Simon Phipps, whose job title is chief technology evangelist, says that researchers and developers can swap more ideas, build better software, and meet customers needs faster if they are active in online communities, where blogs play the dual role of soap- and suggestion-box. "In a world where you must speak with an authentic voice," says Phipps, "the obvious way is to let the people you most trustyour employeesspeak directly to the -people you most want to appeal toyour customers." According to Phipps and Schwartz, not only do Suns blogs show customers that the company is paying attention to their concerns, but they have also become a major channel for communicating with programmers outside the company who write crucial third-party applications that run on Suns hardware and operating systems.
I was cruising blogsphere today, doing some research for SPARK, when I clicked on Jake McKee's About page on his communityguy.com blog.
When talking about the work he is doing with LEGO Jake says, "We are working to change the company's approach to one of marketing with consumers, rather than marketing at consumers."
That sounds like co-creation to me!
How can you be more paticipatory (with) and less communicative (at) with your customers?
A great blog on how to get beyond the bullets of PowerPoint, Keynote or whatever your fancy might be. And some interesting comments on the opensource presentation project the FireFox team are undertaking. The use of a Wiki to create the presentation is an interesting idea. Could be a great way for brand marketers in large organizations to start accumulating thinking for the next vision pitch or messageboard - so long as they listen to Cliff and start with the story...
PRWEEK: Put into your own words what you're attempting to do [with the media transparency channel]. BERLIND: Established media is coming under attack as a result of some serious and unfortunate gaffes in credibility. The timing of that coincided with the uprising of an alternative source of information: the blogosphere. Leading up to the WebCred conference at Harvard [where established media and bloggers met], there was a lot of clamor about journalists needing to be more transparent. I took that to heart, and said, "Well, my credibility has not yet been called into question, but it's probably only a matter of time that it is." A lot of people were talking about transparency, but not many were practicing it. The only way we were going to move the needle on transparency is if someone starts doing it. The best definition I could come up with for transparency was to un-obscure that which is obscured. Generally speaking, the press obscures the raw material behind the work they do. You can only trust that the editor and writer didn't misquote or edit the interview to change the context. Every media channel has a channel where they broadcast content. Channel 42 on my cable network is CNN. Why can't I change the channel to 41 to see all the raw material? Just to keep them honest. Maybe practicing transparency means establishing your channel where all the polished content is, and, then, establishing a parallel one where people can get at the raw material.
I’m editing some more interviews for SPARK and came across this great quote from Scott Bowers, SVP of Marketing at Oakley:
“The brands that are ballsy enough or are brave enough to say, ‘You know what – we’re selling way too much product to the wrong people; we need to change the language of our brand, change the face of the brand, and get brave in product design again,’ the companies that are capable of doing that can thrive a lot longer as a brand versus those that get safe and complacent and start chasing numbers and quarters.”
As a Kiwi I've seen the enormously positive impact that a brand (Lord Of The Rings) can have on a country. And, the same in reverse - clean, green, beautiful NZ on agriculture and biotech. Seems all is not so well in the U.S. A recent GMI poll reported in The Atlantic Monthly flags that it isn't just the US Govt that is taking a hit overseas these days... U.S. brands are in trouble as well.
Roughly 20 percent of people surveyed reported consciously avoiding American products in response to U.S. foreign policy. The brands most at risk, the study noted, are those that have America; or American; in their name (such as AOL and American Airlines) or are considered quintessentially American (such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's). The Atlantic Monthly, April 2005.
The news you watch tonight might just not be coming to you from your fave media outlet... David Barstow and Robin Stein report in the The New York Times today that video news releases (VNRs) have been masquerading as news all over the place. I'm sure the PR folks behind them are just delighted that media outlets are happy to take this prepackaged content and let it run, unleashing on the unwitting public their version of reality. So much for transparency. Given the hole this story has exposed I'm certain plenty of brand communicators are thinking hard about a VNR as part of their next launch...
Friday's ruling in favor of Apple has deep implications for brand communicators. Now I'm no lawyer and experience tells me that different corporate legal counsel will come at this one from different directions. So, take this as you will.
AP: Judge: Apple can press Bloggers on sources. A California judge on Friday ruled that three independent online reporters may have to divulge confidential sources in a lawsuit brought by Apple Computer Inc., ruling that there are no legal protections for those who publish a company's trade secrets.
The Judge seems to have not bought into Apple's argument that Bloggers are not Journalists, preferring to sidestep the issue all together. As I've stated on my blog, I don't believe bloggers are journalists unless they are blogging to what they regard to be a media blog. But that doesn't mean we're not entitled to report and to all the protections of the Fifth Amendment. And, the blogosphere shouldn't be confined by traditional notions of publishing. Suddenly, anyone who has information in the public interest must check with a company to see if it is a trade secret? To which the response is naturally, yes.
There are so many worrying things about this ruling. The least of which is a Judge ruling on the nature of content. "Even if the movants are journalists, this is not the equivalent of a free pass." Kleinberg firmly defined the trade secret information as stolen property. Assuming that all information belongs to someone else, where does this one stop?
Anyway, enough of the rights rant. So what are the implications for brand communicators?
Communications policy takes a new twist. Most documents carry the line "Company Confidential - Not For Distribution". I suspect many will start to add "Trade Secrets". Dan Gillmor said it well, "Reporting on business, if this bad ruling is upheld on appeal, will be a great deal harder in the future. Companies will simply slap "trade secret" protection on everything they do, and any reporter who gets a scoop on anything the company doesn't want the public to know about will be under a legal threat."
More enforcers raise their ugly heads. In a challenge to independent journalism - and reporting in general - more companies get more aggressive on leaks and use the Apple ruling to aggressively pursue and plug leaks. I'll be the first to admit to being on the receiving end of leaks. It's incredibly frustrating. At the same time I always had enormous respect for media who cultivated sources and were aggressive in reporting. I suspect the ruling will open the door to any aggrieved company pursuing journalists it doesn't like. This is going to get personal.
Advances & NDAs are the next to be challenged. For decades companies have attempted to manipulate media coverage via negotiated advances, exclusives and NDAs. Apple is one of the grandmasters at this. So what if the information has been given to a range of selected outlets? Is it still a trade secret then? Perhaps the Judge's ruling will have the unintended effect of reducing these practices if information is regarded to be fair game once in the public domain? This is one for the Lawyers but its important.
New additions to blog policy. I know companies are rethinking blog policies in the light of the Apple ruling. Thou shalt not disclose trade secrets is being added to the list. Very specific language is being crafted into employment contracts related to disclosing trade secrets to non-traditional media sources.
Brands will be defined by how they handle the blogsphere. How would you have dealt with the leaks Apple faced? I'm an Apple fanatic. I've only bought Apple for years. But all of this has made me much less loyal than I once was. What I'm also surprised at - from a company that is meant to care so much about its community - is the lack of dialog. As far as I can tell there isn't an Apple blog in sight providing perspective on the issue. Your reputation will be partly defined by how you react and act in relation to leaks. Apple has tarnished it's reputation.
These are just five of the implications of this absurd but critical case for brand communicators. I'd love to build a list of other implications and then publish them as a whole. Drop your thoughts into the comments section... I'll leave you with Charles Cooper's comments from his C/Net column:
The real subtext is this: Apple is directed by a collection of control freaks who would have found themselves quite at home in the Nixon White House. The big difference being that reporters had the constitutional freedom to report on the Nixon White House.
Apple has been an infuriating company for me to cover over the last two decades or so. I adore its technology but can't stomach its overreaching sense of entitlement. Other tech companies deal with leaks all the time. Nobody's happy when their discussions wind up as fodder for the rumor mill. But that's part of the give-and-take that's defined the technology business for decades.
John Winsor opens the first chapter of Beyond the Brand with this quote from Stephen Jay Gould:
"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question."
Here are some stories that come to my mind:
We know what our customers want.
Everyone in our company understands our mission.
Customers care about our brand.
If we relinquish control over our brand image, it will be a disaster.
If we allow customers and employees to speak their mind publicly, it will be a disaster.
We're the experts, so we have nothing to learn from outsiders.
And the list goes on. What are the common assumptions floating around your company or department? Hint: they will be the ideas that cause the most internal resistance. Who will be brave enough to ask... What if we're wrong?
At the very least, open up enough to test some alternatives on a small scale. You just might surprise yourself.
Let me first say that I am a great fan of KFC and have been known in recent history to quite literally "live off" the stuff for stupidly long periods of time. Recently, however, I have been forced to make the harsh decision to boycott the restaurants. I have even gone as far as to blog my decision, much to the disbelief of most of my friends who know that I'll likely starve as a result.
I am one to stick to my principles, and I am also not one normally swayed by advertising. However, the recent "operatic" campaign is just so painfully awful that I have chosen never to set foot in a KFC again until they are removed from the television. The whale-mouthed screacher who takes a full 30 seconds of "woooaooaooaoohhh" to tell her colleague that he can't have her mini-fillet burger is a bigger deterrant for KFC than Supersize Me was for McDonald's...
Incidentally, I also think that another of the ads was rather ill-advised. Who on earth thought that having a bunch of "African Americans" singing about fried chicken was going to help shift burgers? What next? Watermelon desserts and a kids meal with a toy butler that says "Yus, Massah?".
IT may go down as one of the biggest rebranding disasters in corporate history.
When, in September 2003, Luqman Arnold, then chief executive of Abbey National, declared the institution was “turning banking on its head” by shortening its name to Abbey and slapping a lower-case logo in pastel shades on its branches and product literature, there were a few raised eyebrows. In Scotland there was much gnashing of teeth as it emerged insurance brands Scottish Provident and Scottish Mutual were for the chop.
The exercise – which brought an end to Abbey’s famous “couple under an umbrella” logo – was overseen by brand agency Wolf Ollins at a cost of some £11 million. It was led by former Abbey director Angus Porter, who when at Mars rebranded Opal Fruits as Starbursts, and recently left the bank with a near £1m pay-off.
In marketing terms, however, the rebrand was a clear disaster. Last year, pre-tax profits in Abbey’s core retail business shrank by 20% to £814m compared with 2003 and there was another big slump in market share. New mortgage lending is also down year on year from 9.9% to 3.1%, reducing its overall mortgage share from 10.7% to 8.6%.
£11m is a lot of money to waste on wishful thinking.
Jonathan Korzen, Audible's PR guy, responded 121 hours into my experiment started below. He wrote me a nice note. I'll let you know how the interaction goes from here.
John Winsor is too shy to promote his own website here, so I'd like to applaud his experiment. He's waiting for a reply from Audible.com to a complaint he's made. And he's running a timer in the top right corner of his blog to show how long he's been waiting. At the time of this post, it's showing 38 hours.
I'm pleased to say that Brandshift's RSS feed (here) is now set to give you the full entry, with a comment and trackback count. For our hardcore fans, there is also a comment feed (here) - I think the comments on this blog are often the best part of it.
Don't know what RSS is? Try this explanation of the whole syndication/newsreader/aggregator mullarkey.
A great post from Evelyn - Neuromarketing: A brave new (branding) world - giving a piece of her delightful mind to those marketers who think of consumers as laboratory rates to probed and prodded, under the ludicrous guise of understanding them better.
Marketing To Your Mind, a show in which good spirit Alan Alda's mind is scanned with magnetic imaging as he is presented with cool (iPod) vs. non-cool (Buicks) to look at while we get to see activity in his frontal lobe.
That part of the brain is used to reflect on yourself and how you might be viewed by others — and it often lights up when subjects imagine themselves using the particular product on display. "I think that's an interesting result," Asp says. "You don't just buy a product for its own sake, isolated from the rest of your world. It's actually a very social act and we're showing the world who we are by buying these products." Consumers take a lot more into account when they decide to buy products than dry economic theories of utility and cost might suggest.
I wrote about neuromarketing last year on my own blog (here and here) in which I disagreed with the basic premise. I think the problem with most marketing research is that it's reactive instead of proactive.
If I'm in a focus group and you offer me a choice between a snake, a roach and a June bug, I'm quite likely to pick the snake. Not because I'm a huge fan of snakes, mind you... I just think it's better than the alternatives.
...There are plenty of ways to understand your customer and learn -- before you test -- that a cat is preferable to a snake.
Besides reactivity, my other issue is that... duh, isn't it obvious that iPod is cooler than a Buick? I don't know how much it costs to do MRIs on a bunch of customers, but there are a lot of equally effective ways to find this out at a fraction of the cost.
I'm not averse to new technology; there will probably be some interesting applications for neuromarketing, and it's helping us learn more about the brain. But I think it's more important to actually engage customers on the front end. The better you know your customers, the less need you will have for fancy gadgets to test stuff that you've already spent a lot of money to develop. Seems like people will try anything rather than just sitting down and having a conversation.
People often think that blogs, forums, wikis, and other tools are community. In actuality, those tools are just that - tools. They can help you to build community, but they aren't actually "community". When we talk community, we're simply talking about an interaction, a connection. Blogs or forums are a way to initiate and sustain that interaction.
He defines community as:
A group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.
Great definition. I agree that blogs, wikis and forums are tools. But I'm not sure if I agree with the qualification that it's about relationships developed over time. For example, I write a blog post that generates discussion: readers make comments on both my post and on other readers' comments. I've formed a community, but it will only last a day... 2 days if we're lucky.
I see community as a group of people who come together and interact based on a shared interest. But that community may not result in relationships, and it may dissolve in a day. Or an hour. The interesting thing about the web is that is facilitates dynamic engagements; there's an ebb and flow of connections that form, dissipate and reform into new configurations.
So let's form a community around this idea of community. What do you think about all this?
Reveries has an interesting article about a French newspaper written for kids... and edited by kids.
Most other national daily newspapers in France are losing readers "in droves," but Mon Quotidien, a newspaper for kids, is "growing steadily," reports Emilie Boyer King in The Christian Science Monitor (3/1/05). "To make sure the newspaper reflects children's interests, kids from schools around the country take part in editorial meetings twice a week." They "apply for the jobs by calling a phone number printed in each issue," and are "chosen on a "first-come, firsted served basis."
"We always go with what the children want," says Olivier Gasselin, deputy editor-in-chief. "There are no vetoes." Sometimes the results are a little bit hard for the adult editors to accept... And that's exactly the way Francois, a 10-year-old editor likes it: "If it was [adults] who chose, it wouldn't be the same," he says. But for the most part "Mon Quotidien doesn't shy away from hard news," such as the proposed European ban on the display of Nazi symbols, and prisoner abuse in Iraq. The kids didn't like the pictures, but "all agreed that the news was important and should be mentioned."
...An American version is now being tested by the Miami Herald, and the Associated Press is also planning "to syndicate the newspaper's formula."
An important aspect of co-created brands is recruiting your customers to do some of the heavy lifting. Co-creation also means not assuming that you know what your target audience wants. It's all about relinquishing some control, which is a bit scary.... but does pay off.
I’m bummed! A year and a half ago I signed up for the Premium Listener program at Audible.com. At the time, I was stoked to listen to a few books on my iPod. It seems however, between writing and traveling, I wasn’t downloading the two books a month that came with the subscription.
So, a year ago I tried to cancel my subscription. I went to the Audible website and did everything they asked me to only to find a $19.95 charge on my credit card the following month. I finally picked up the phone and called. After the usual 5 minute wait I talked to a fairly responsible sounding person who said they’d take care of it.
Five nights ago my wife, Bridget, leaned over and said “What’s this charge on our credit card for $19.95 from Audible?” It seems that the friendly customer service representative didn’t, in fact, do what he said he’d do! So much for building trust.
Being in Mexico writing, phone calls are a bit expensive so I went back online to Audible’s site and was promised a fast and courteous response in 48 hours.
So, here I am 5 days later, out 240 bucks and no one to listen to me.
Hello, I’m a Customer. Is anybody home? I used to think your service was pretty cool. Now I’m starting to get bad!
Forget about co-creating, how about doing what you promised or at least sending an auto-response to my email!
Is Audible, and many other brands for that matter, too busy to listen to their customers? Are they really ready for the power shift that’s happening? Before companies, like Audible, can ever think about improving their products and services with the help of delighted customers they might want to think about creating satisfied customers first.
We’re living in lumpy times in the Brandsphere! Welcome to the Wild West.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
