7. December 2009
A new year is nearly at hand and a indeed a new decade. There's endless chatter in the industry about the changing marketing landscape. The hyperbole aside, it's clear to just about all now that brands have to behave differently than the once did if they are to thrive.
With that in mind we have developed a framework for understanding how brands should behave in this brave new world. We describe this framework as brand TARIF
T: Truthful It's easy to find out if a brand is buying milk from Grace Mugabe or freezing its fresh chicken in Sau Paulo and shipping it by air to Buckinghamshire. We expect to be told the truth. Better to tell uncomfortable truths and have a debate about them than try to sheild us from the facts - it just won't work and then we feel we've been duped. Be honest.
A: Attentive Our parents don't like to worry the Dr with their coughs and colds and expect they're in the wrong when the bank says they've missed a card payment. But more and more we're aware of our rights and that companies are not infallible and we expect the brands we deal with to treat us like we're important to them - or at least like we count. There are lots of channels now by which we can speak to brands - no longer do we rely upon the Contact Us in the website footer or the call centre. Facebook groups and pages, Twitter, blogs and forums. We're talking - brands had better listen.
R: Responsive And we expect what we say to be taken seriously and for brands to respond to it. Simple as that.
I: Interesting Not that it's all customer service and involvement. Rather like a romance, we still want brands to be interesting, to entertain us, to help us edit our choices and to woo us.
F: Forthcoming And we don't want to do all the work. We want brands to tell us what they're up to, include us in their plans and to occassionally suprise and delight us with news and innovation - perhaps letting us dedicated brand fans in on the secret a little early.
So there it is. Our brand TARIF. More on this and measuring success in the new year. There'll be lots of debate and plenty of ways for you to join in with it. So watch this space.
Photo courtesy of
The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
16. September 2009
We were asked this question recently and thought it might be worth sharing our response more widely.
Whatever the hype about social media there are some undeniable truths we need to accommodate in today’s communications landscape.
Firstly, we all now have a platform, if we want it. It’s easy for us to make our opinions public and widely share our experiences. Alas, for some brands, this more often than not means that their failures are highlighted; in a world where we’re all our own publishing empire we all know that news sells and bad news sells best. Online communications takes on a role which looks ever more like a hybrid of PR and customer services. A discretely placed ‘contact us’ in the website footer really doesn’t cut the mustard any more.
The second truth to accommodate is the uncomfortable one, for both brands and the agencies that serve them, that “we” no longer dictate the conversation. It’s already taking place, whether we like it or not. But with intelligence, tact, wit and sensitivity we can steer the conversation and change its outcomes, both at the micro individual experience level and at the macro brand impression level.
Both of these issues point to websites which are more about listening, less about selling, less about bigging up the brand, more about making heroes of the fans, less brochure, more after sales support; less David Ogilvy’s “we sell or else”, more Dale Carnegie’s “how to win friends and influence people.”
Social Psychology and behavioural economics are revealing the truth that we trust our friends more than we trust brands, and our ‘lazy minds’ prefer to abdicate decision making to the group rather than waste cognitive effort thinking things through for ourselves. What this underlines is the need to be where our audience is and talk to the group, not draw in the individual and hope to irrevocably persuade them. So website efforts become an outreach programme, rather than a publishing enterprise. It also means we need to think about what success looks like very differently. It’s ‘net promoter score’ thinking, rather than ROI modelling.
This transition we are seeing in the role of websites can be seen as: -
Informative -> Immersive -> Participative
Brands have mostly moved beyond the ‘informative’ stage of pure brochureware providing a handful of key facts. They’ve moved to large Flash based entertainments; immersive environments where the customer is wooed and seduced, or so the brand hopes. Increasingly a media savvy and cynical consumer base is now looking for more of a two way street and an equal footing with the brands they decide to engage with. And that means participation and the expectation on the part of the consumer that not only can they talk directly and individually to the brand, but that "the brand" will sincerely respond.
This clearly points to very different architectures and build paradigms to those we have seen in recent years. It means that we have to think of the company website more as a channel than a publication, more of a tool than a brand asset and more of a shared platform for the consumer as well as the brand than a simple one-way broadcast mechanism.
Moreover, the key implication is that for many brands, their ‘website’ presence won’t even be on their own website, the role of the domains they own being to point customers and prospects to the many other places where the brand is participating in the wider conversation taking place online.
2. July 2009
As well as fantastic content, the presentation of it is superb. If for some reason you've missed it / been putting it off, watch it now. It's a very rewarding way to spend an hour.
12. May 2009
Our planners think they're so very, very drole!
22. October 2008
We're loving the campaign Microsoft are running - well, it's at least caused heated debate between our Mac-mads and the Windows-wed. The campaign site allows you to join a gallery of folks testifying in video and still images that they are a PC user and also stating another fact about themselves - tapping into that all important need to self-brand, join tribes and promote one's image, voice, ability to play bohemian rhapsody on the spoons etcto the world. We all know Macs and Mac people are uber-cool and MS can never(?) take that on. So this campaign very cleverly starts with something Microsoft can own. The fact that the vast majority of computer users doing use a MS powered PC. It celebrates both their ordinaryness diversity, and significance. It's great. Once you've uploaded your photo or video to their gallery they moderate the assets then send you a link so you ca see yourself starrring in an ad. Here is our very own Steve Taylor, starring thus.
10. October 2008
Martin, our MD and Ben, our Planning Director wrote an essay for the Campaign supplement on Direct Marketing that recently appeared. It looks at the issue that the rise of 'digital' as a marketing channel is coinciding with threat of recession. In their essay they argue that agencies can deal with both challenges by avoiding lazy formulaic thinking and instead of viewing the crunch as a negative, flip it round and find the opportunities it presents. You can read the whole essay online at the Campaign site here.
25. March 2008
Brand owners have always found ways of tracking public opinion. Back in the pre-digital days, polls, surveys and focus groups were the best way to gauge the public mood, while the birth of the internet added website hits, page views, clicks and impressions to the measurement pot.
The difference in a web 2.0 world is that brands can understand what customers do, say and think in real time. Social networking sites, blogs, wikis and forums enable users and consumers to get together to praise – or criticise – a brand at their convenience. It goes without saying that brands need to be aware of how to deal with these developments both for reputation management and as a way of measuring marketing effectiveness.
But with so much chatter going on, how can you find out how your brand is perceived online? Google Trends is a good place to start, and allows anyone, for free, to look at search trends on Google. It shows the frequency with which your brand has been queried on the search engine or referenced in Google News within a given timeframe.
It’s the perfect channel for tracking buzz around new product campaigns – at CMW, we’ve been using it to follow the progress of our client’s new car launches. This is a really good way to use Google Trends as it effectively shows the cumulative effect of all the channels being used by the brand. It’s incredibly detailed and even correlates search frequency peaks with relevant news items. The service also allows users to compare their trends with those of competitors or other brands.
It’s also important to keep track of what’s being said about your brand in the blogosphere – and how often. Various sites allow you to do this, with Google Blog Search one of the best known.
Another useful site is Blog Pulse, which works almost as a combination of Google Trends and Google Blog Search. It allows you to search blogs worldwide to find how often your brand has been mentioned. You can even create graphs of trends over several months and compare up to three search terms to see how your brand measures up to the competition.
The one thing that these sites can’t do is tell you how much of the chatter is positive, and how much is negative. But that’s where Opinmind can help – the site trawls through various blogs and compares positive vs. negative mentions!
Of course, blogs and Google are not the only places where users and consumers get together to discuss brands. Tweet Volume is a great way to measure how many times (if at all) your brand is being mentioned on Twitter and allows you to compare your brand ‘noise’ with competitors. A search on photo-sharing site Flickr will reveal how often your users have tagged their photographs with your brand name.
While these alternative measures are fun ways of tracking your brand’s online visibility, brands of course still need to continue to track metrics around their website. Most site owners now have regular reports from their hosting company on page hits, unique visitors to the site, new visitors etc, but Alexa enables you to aggregate some of these into one place. Alexa also lets you compare your information with up to five other sites and look at stats across a period of up to five years (where data is available). You can even and copy the resulting trends graph onto your own brand site, if you want to.
In the end, however, while there are a number of ways that brand owners can track internet chatter, none of them are fool-proof. For some of the measures (such as Tweet Volume), your brand needs to generate enough of a ‘buzz’ to be picked up at all. It is also important to note that since the net is a worldwide entity, any ‘chatter’, whatever the channel, may not necessarily be UK-based.
It’s important to remember that most of these measures merely demonstrate the volume of internet buzz, and not the content or tone of any coverage, negative or positive. Nonetheless, they all certainly worth bearing in mind and, as with everything else online, as they add more features and iron out teething problems, will become indispensible marketing tools. A savvy marketer should get to grips with this new measurement world sooner rather than later.
14. March 2008
Traditionally, marketing has been divided by a line. We either work above it, below it or through it. We are on or off it.
But the time has come to draw a line under that line and to accept that in today's fragmented marketplace it is no longer meaningful. Consumers don't see a line. They simply react and respond to ideas that engage them - regardless of how they are delivered. And they react and respond even more actively to ideas that don't engage them - by opting out, turning off, or switching to something else.
Technology may have brought marketers new and clever ways to target and get our messages across, but it has also given consumers countless ways of tuning out. There has been a power shift. The consumer has his finger on the 'no thanks' button and can reject your message in an instant. And for good, if we're not careful; an opt out can be a one-way ticket. Which is why the emphasis must now, more than ever, be on powerful ideas that engage your audience. The aim should be to develop open conversations between consumer and brand.
We talk about the nirvana state of DM/digital as being 'one-to-one' communications, and technology gives us a fantastic opportunity to target, to measure who's doing what and to serve up relevant, contextual advertising and content. This is an important part of that customer journey.
But my message is treat both your consumers and technology with respect. Don't abuse them with over communication or irrelevant or weak content - tempting to some because of digital's cost-effectiveness. Make sure you deliver powerful ideas that are part of a compelling customer journey - if you don't you could be at the back of the line.
This piece by Martin, our MD, was published in Revolution, March '08
13. January 2008
Simon Jenkins has written this excellent article which reminds us that the internet is a means to an end. It's other people we like to be around and the internet provides a set of tools to help us achieve that.
"...but the value of the internet is in guiding them to congregate in affinity groups and form new relationships. Human beings, above all, seek an encounter with other human beings."
It's a good thought to have top of mind when planning campaigns and designing online experiences. Is what we're building useful to the ultimate human desire to be with and be accepted by and liked by other human beings? It's quite a good insight into understanding the whole mentality behind props and why people pass on youtube clips and ... errr, blog about stuff. Look, I found this interesting thing! It tells you how wonderful and super I am. Please like me, please! The timesonline article is here.