Brands or promises have largely been perceived as the domain of marketing departments and their advertising agencies. Up until the1990’s, we lived in a world where most firms were looking for magical communications from their marketers to change the behaviour of passive consumers. The ways of assessing the health of your brand were to check out your communications and how they were impacting consumers. It was called a Brand Audit. And it was a communications skill.
Today’s Brand Audit requires a range of skills and disciplines. Communications skills are probably the least important. Social media in particular has changed the landscape for managers in a way that is still evolving. The nature of brands has not changed (they are still promises that need to be delivered), but the ways of managing them in our transparent world has become infinitely more complex.
Brand Management 1.0 from the traditional world was characterised by old media; static, one way communications; single audiences, usually the consumer; messaging grids and design guidelines. A focus on promise making from the marketing department.
Brand management also failed to noticeably adapt with the developments in the web. Very few brands took advantage of the vast opportunities of Web 2.0. There was no Brand Management 2.0 or corresponding changes in how brands are managed. Now it is already time to move on to Brand Management 3.0, the demands of which are different:
- An understanding of your brands role in the worldwide conversation
- A dynamic, ongoing brand narrative , not a static one
- Marketing growth objectives as well as risk and reputation management guidelines
- Engagement through listening, as much as engagement through creativity and communications
- A focus on fans as well as foes; not just segmentation and audience frameworks
- An acknowledgement of the creative power of the consumer and the value of co creating solutions
- Treating employees as a social force and the irrelevance of management silos
- The need to balance brand promises in communication, with the ability for the organisation to exceed promises
- The importance of real time and speed of response
Colin Woodcock’s blog http://branduniverse.wordpress.com/ in his piece on Brand Planning in the community makes a number of the same points.
Yet it seems that many organisations are still hoping that their advertising or communications agencies will bring them a silver bullet – even if means chasing the consumer around the online world! We live in a very different world today; a world where consumers are more in charge. Where they can choose what they want, when they want, often at the price they want. Organisations need to respond to this world they cannot control. The best way we (and many other leading organisations) know, is to be clear about who you are, what you stand for and the benefits you promise to your stakeholders. Simply, making a promise and then being sure to deliver on it!
Is it time for a Brand 3.0 Audit?
It’s an exciting time Promise as the countdown begins to a new ITV drama that many hope will replicate the success of Cold Feet. Married Single Other is a 6-part comedy drama scripted by ex advertising executive Peter Souter, and features screen favourites such as Lucy Davis and Ralf Little. The first episode screens tonight, the 22nd February at 9pm, and our fingers will be very much crossed as Promise had a hand in shaping the script.
Making successful TV is a hit and miss business. Creative / cultural products are notoriously subjective and the sum of attractive parts does not always a whole make. Creative industries economist Richard E. Caves, whose Creative Industries (2000, Harvard University Press) is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the complexities of culture as a business, appropriately calls this the “nobody knows” principle. In the US, where TV pockets have traditionally been deeper, more extensive testing and piloting is the norm. In the UK actually trying before you buy is much less common. So anything that can help de-risk the creative commissioning process is a boon.
We’ve been pondering this conundrum for a while so were delighted to be asked by ITV to help them work with the Married Single Other script. The approach we’ve evolved for dealing with creative content at script / concept stage is based on a proprietary need states model (based on deep drivers) combined with some elements of narrative theory (particularly the work of Greimas and the structuralist school). It’s a model that allows us to explain character relationships, narrative hooks and different kinds of stimulus orientation. For example, thinking about TV generally, we find that some viewers seek overarching narrative lines, while others tend to favour high energy thrill-seeking content (think Jack Osborne-type shows). When we reviewed Cold Feet, it became obvious that certain features, such as what we called ‘regressive spaces’ (the pub, the kitchen, the wine bar), underpinned the success of the story-telling.
There’s probably no substitute for real-life evaluation: the proof – in creative industries content – is almost exclusively in the eating. Involving viewers is another way in, whether through pilot evaluation or early-stage concept evaluation. But script development work with a strong psychological framework can also make a valuable contribution. Ours was developed through observation of viewer behaviour and close reading of successful precedent, but we know other approaches are possible. We’d love to hear your experiences of this kind of work.
Wired Magazine have recently showed the world their recent development – a new digital platform for print media developed in collaboration with Adobe.
The following video highlights some of the philosophy behind the technology and possibilities that it opens to the stakeholders.
If you can’t see the video, please click here.
To me it seems like a big step towards both readers and advertisers. It’s also a completely new level of interaction and a great example of how technology can create communities around the product and enrich material by experts and enthusiasts around the world.
2010 and the launch of iPad will certainly bring some changes to the media landscape.
Admiration for a Trickster
Yesterday I had an encounter with a Trickster. She came knocking at my door and had I not been scammed a few years ago by a young girl asking for money for the nightbus to get home, I’d have been less on my guard. The more I think about the conversation the more I realise it was full of rather clever ploys and cues - the kind that NLP and Derron Brown could make whole books and TV shows out of. But also the kinds of cues that Behavioural Economists like Dan Ariely are constantly reminding us about.
The Scenario
Trickster: Hello, sorry to bother you….
Me: Hi there!
Trickster: I’m your neighbour, you’ve probably seen me around, I live at number 38 down the road [trickster dangles keys as if to say, look these prove I live there]
Me: OK. [listening hard]
Trickster: …this is really embarrassing… I’ve lost my contact lens and can’t drive. I need to get to Enfield. I need to borrow £8.50 for a cab. For 45 minutes.
Me: I’m sorry, I just don’t know you…
Trickster: OK. [moves off quickly to try next door]
What this can teach us?
Before writing off some of these tricksters as worthless scoundrels, it’s worth reflecting 3 basic principles that make them actually among the world’s most cunning communicators:
- use specific referents: the precision of the money amounts, times and places my trickster mentioned (£8.50 / 45 minutes / Enfield) diverted my attention from the logical gaps in her story that I only later managed to unpick (it’s more than 45 minutes to Enfield and back for instance)
- physical anchoring: repeated gestures, pointing and general brandishing of the keys created kinetic drama and also helped make her account of being locked out more convincing (I didn’t immediately think to check that her keys were in fact door keys, car keys or whatever)
- personalisation: ‘I’m your neighbour’, ‘I live just down the road‘, ‘you’ve probably seen me around’ all made it harder to disagree with the appeal and harder to overcome the feeling of duty and neighbourliness that she was appealing to
Study, practise and utilitse these 3 tricks in your next presentation and I guarantee you’ll be more convincing. The line about the neighbour might not wash, but I’m sure you’ll find an equally good equivalent.
Any company should by now have learnt that its customers can talk about them, to massive effect, without their permission. (As the HuffPo says here, it is kind of a leap of logic to think that United Breaks Guitars lost the company 10% of its market capitalisation, but it certainly wasn’t good for them.) But today we can also pretty effectively organise without their permission. We can use functionality like Facebook groups to mobilise many people quickly. So far the manifestation of this has mostly been in the form of ‘stop energy’; most efforts have essentially threatened boycotts, often in an attempt to prevent the introduction of some new initiative. (For example 2007’s “Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-off” campaign, as recorded here by the Times and in this book by Clay Shirky.)
And, of course, firms are learning to combat this: Sometimes by actually doing stuff differently and treating their customers better – there’s greater pressure now to behave yourself because you never know when your short term plan to save a buck will be turned into a YouTube sensation and hammer your reputation; but mostly by applying traditional PR in a new context. Firms are re-learning for the internet age the need to be proactive and seek out dissatisfaction (dissent?) before it spreads. This involves getting out there on the web beyond their own customer feedback surveys.
One lesson for companies in the Facebook-Twitter age is that it’s probably not sensible to try to replicate a social media phenomenon on your own website. Don’t build a snazzy platform – a massively interactive website, a customer service forum – and try to bring consumers to your site in order to find out what they think. Instead go to where they already hang out, listen to what they’re saying in those places, and respond to them there. I think Twitter is the easiest of the new media to do this with. By setting up a few simple searches you can see whenever anyone mentions you and respond directly and immediately. The Wi-Fi hotspots guys Boingo once replied to me when I slated them on Twitter and I’ve loved them ever since.
Companies can combine this traditional PR end – go to where your critics are and counter them quickly – with new means for achieving it when they recognise the web 2.0 truism that, whether they like it or not, their own staff are already blogging and chatting and interacting with customers and potential customers all over the web. 11 years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto told companies how to capitalize on this emerging fact. Firstly companies should recognise that markets are conversations and that people like talking to people, not ‘brands’ talking to ‘demographics’. Secondly they should empower their own staff to get out there and join the conversation.
This does of course mean ordinary staff talking directly to customers, with all of the human imperfections that that entails, i.e. all of the things that would be avoided if a company attempted to strictly ‘manage their image’ and only let the CEO and a handful of spokesmen talk to the real world. But it should also mean – if as a company you’re doing your job right – that your staff are talking to more people, with more passion and more authenticity than any press spokesman could ever muster. The Cluetrain’s point was that in the internet age, that’s better business.
This has further implications for any company thinking about their presence on the web. For most companies (and especially those whose actual sales take place somewhere other than their own website, for example on a third party platform or actually face-to-face) the purpose of their website should be very straightforward. There’s often no reason that a company’s site should be anything more than a place for customers to get a bit more information about what’s being sold and to be reassured that the company is legitimate. It should contain a list of product information and a list of references. The real action – reaching out and connecting with potential customers, listening to them, helping them find the other information they need so they’ll buy from you, building community and making them want to buy from you repeatedly – takes place elsewhere.
One of the really significant things, then, about the social revolution that all this new technology is driving is that companies need to think differently about their employees. Every employee faces every customer. The key, I’d say, for a company that really wants to embrace the digital century is to align the interests (and personal brands) of their staff with the objectives of the company. In terms of their presence on the web, rather than directing the energies of its staff to maintain this company blog or that company Facebook account, a 21st century company might do better to help its people build their individual skills and reputations, set a big vision and a big goal, and then let its people go after that goal in emergent not determined ways. In a phrase stolen from the greatest HR policy PowerPoint ever made (it’s not a high bar but this is genuinely a great read), staff should be highly aligned but loosely coupled.
The reason that this is not woolly hippy talk that we’ve all heard before, since the sixties at least, is that previous arrivals of new technology have only slightly lowered the transaction cost of organization. The internet and social media have dramatically lowered this cost (this observation attributed to – who else? – Clay Shirky. Man, I should read some other books once in a while). It’s now more possible than ever before to coordinate a group’s objectives, without controlling the means by which it achieves them.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Author of The Little Prince
.jpg "Etihad")
A belated Happy New year from the Promise Blog! We have had an extremely hectic start to the year, with a group from Promise spending most of last week in Sydney, working on a co-creation project for Etihad, the national carrier for the UAE.
Etihad are a fantastic organisation and great for us to work with. The airline is only six years old but already has a fleet of over 50 aircraft, a powerful global brand and this year was awarded ‘The world’s leading airline’ by the World Travel Awards. The organisation uses co-creation to help drive innovation in new products and services, and despite its rapid growth is still nimble enough to implement change quickly and effectively.
The airline market has changed massively in the last 10 years with the introduction of low-cost carriers and the erosion of the power of traditional national carriers. The international long haul market is far more open now and choice and loyalty are being driven not simply by National allegiances or points programmes but by educated consumers making choices based on product quality, innovation and price.
In our work in the sector we have found that Etihad is one of a number of airlines which may well have been off the radar previously but is now well known and respected. Today carriers such as Qatar, Etihad, Singapore, Jet and Kingfisher are all well and truly in our air-space as consumers. Why? Because they offer great quality, new thinking and are rapidly developing the size of their networks to ensure that they are more relevant to more consumers around the world. It would seem that as in many aspects of the global economy, the balance of power is heading east.
Of course, that rule does not apply to JAL (Japanese Airlines) which is just about staying air-born at the moment but is looking to emerge from bankruptcy with a vastly smaller fleet. It is also true to say in the UK that despite a prolonged period of turbulence, there is still a great deal of residual appeal for British Airways while Virgin also remains a strong brand. From talking to consumers in Sydney and the UK though, the reputation of American carriers among international travellers is going to be more difficult to mend.
Of course the industry is going to have to change further in the next 10 years. As we all are. The winners will be those who continue to listen to customers, to innovate and push ahead with both the quality of their offer and increasingly, I would wager, the efficiency and environmentally friendliness of their product.
We’re going to be going a bit quiet on the Promise Blog for a week or so. Everyone is taking a break from co-creating for a couple of days. My experience is that the co-creation philosophy doesn’t work so well in a busy kitchen on Christmas morning. Dictatorship is the accepted wisdom in this particualr scenario.
We will of course be keeping our eye’s open for anything that interests us, and we think would interest you, over the holidays and we will resume blogging in earnest in the New Year.
In fact, we already have a bit of a plan for January, so here are a couple of things to look out for on the Promise Blog in 2010:
- Building fertile environments for co-creation - A series of five pieces on setting the scene for co-creation and getting the most out of the people you are working with, whether internal or external. This will be coming out on the second week of Jan.
- The Expert Forum: Ten co-created trends for 2010 – A synopsis of our next Expert Forum, which will bring together 30 consumers and marketers to think about the key issues and opportunities for brands and businesses to look out for in 2010. For this one, you’ll have to wait until the end of the month!
- What Christmas served up for the retailers - what were the succesful retail strategies for Christmas 2009?
Thanks for your interest in us and our work during 2009! We are lucky that we work in an area that fascinates us and that is changing all the time; so expect more information, opinion and new thinking from Promise next year. In the mean time, have a fantastic Christmas and best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2010 from all of the team in London and Washington!
