Dazzle Ships

Sheepwalker or Tribe leader - What's your role?

Whilst I've not read Tribes yet (unfortunately I've been bitten by The Wire bug and seem to only want to watch this on the commute rather than expand my mind!), the TED talk above is a nice 17min summary of Seth Godin's latest contribution to the world of marketing thinking.

Interestingly, I was in a pitch last week where one of the questions was 'What is the benefit of Social Media to us'.  We answered the question pretty well (I thought) but how I wish I'd seen this video earlier.  I think my answer would have been even more passionate and focussed on the fact that a key benefit is to connect with other likeminded individuals and create movements that relate to the clients service thereby elevating their poisition to that of Tribe Leader. 

It's clear from examples used such as Apple, Microsoft and Toms Shoes that it is possible to be more than just a.n. other brand shouting louder than your competitors but to be more requires a different approach.

By moving away from a rabid desire to convert the masses and instead embracing a world where advertisers connect with the few who can spread the word, relationships can be deeper, more meaningful and more powerful.  By making this switch, we can be more relevant, better know where we should be challenging the status quo and have a more enriching (socially and monetarily!) experience. 

Maybe we should all stop working towards developing communication strategies and instead twist our thinking slightly so we are focussing on how we can develop 'movements' for our clients?

At the very least, I think there is more fun to be had as a Tribe leader than Sheepwalker.  What's your movement going to be?

Bryan aka ThePersuader

Data is the sword of the 21st Century...

...those who wield it, the Samurai.

Thus spake Google in the 'President's Address' earlier this week, as they set out their vision for the year ahead.  It's jolly interesting reading, setting out their 5 big goals for this year and is, as you'd expect, grand in scope, reflected in its title 'From the Height of this Place'. 

Mark Howe's been toeing the party line in his Media Week blog, opining that data is the new black and it's something we've been banging on about for ages and ages.

But all is not well.  We're not going to say 'We told you so' because it's not our style (see what we did there), but for the last year we've been warning about a data backlash from consumers.

The evidence for this is mounting up, the latest being Facebook's climbdown yesterday over their proposed new terms of service.

Just as early marketing forays into social media were marked by consumer protests about the commercialisation of social spaces (see any of Mark Earls' excellent posts on the subject here, or even the article in today's Campaign), the debate has now moved on to the commercialisation of data. 

It can be traced back to the government's losses of personal data, the publication of SuperCrunchers last year, even the remarkably prescient (and excellent) BBC drama The Last Enemy, which we wrote about here: 

So, whilst we are swooning about the possibilities of all this lovely data, we've completely forgotten about consumers, who feel, rightly in my view, that the government has no business prying into their business.  And marketing people certainly don't. 

And when marketing people do address the issue, it's the darkly Orwellian BBC trails talking about 'the database'.  Way to go.  That'll get people on side.

In short, we need to stop talking about how data helps us sell stuff and start talking about how data helps people get better services.  There's a few examples (Last fm, for example), but we need more and we need to overtly explain how data gets used to improve services for consumers, not make more money for clients. 

James Martin, in his excellent 'The Meaning of the 21st Century', recognised that 'today people worry about privacy - that their computers know too much about them.  Tomorrow they'll worry about the opposite : we'll want a personal machine that knows everything about us so it can offer us the best possible assistance'.

For the record, I think he's right.  But we need to rethink our approach to 'data', focus on how we can use it to make people's lives better, and actively promote it in this way. 

I'm sure Google believe that they, and their agency and client partners, are 'the Samurai' in the quote above.  They're not.  Consumers are.  The sooner we recognise this, the sooner we might start winning the argument.

 

-- Toby

The book that isn't (yet)

 

Stokes has written a fair amount here about Chris Andersen's much touted new book 'Free', so you should all  be familiar with the basic premise.

The latest salvo by Anderson came in the form of an article in the WSJ last week.

The gist of the argument is basically the same as reported by Stokes, but there's some really interesting examples of companies actually doing this stuff.  Let's hope they, and the idea, survive the recession.

Read it here, and start thinking about this stuff now.

(Don't forget the comments, there's some good stuff in the comments)

--  Toby

Do people trust newspapers?

As many have commnted before me, righteous indignation seems to be the stock-in trade of many of our national newspapers. 

The 'Sachsgate' affair at the BBC, a classic storm in a teacup if ever their was one, saw the press flexing their indignation muscles as hard as possible, and driving complaints about Brand and Ross' behaviour to over 10,000, after an increasingly hysterical campaign by that champion of decency and responsibility, the Daily Mail. 

The fact that certain members of Parliament felt it necessary to wade into this affair is both a refelction on the power of the press to shape the agenda, and the reduction of our political discourse to populist gestures and soundbites.

At the moment their ire is largely directed at the recently bailed out banks, and the question of bonus payments.  I personally think they're on more robust territory here, but the same righteous indignation is clearly at work, leading to idiotic non-sequiturs from those who should really know best as they struggle to keep up with the editorial.  I'm referring to Andy Hornby's admission to the Treasury Select Commitee today that "The bonus system has proved to be wrong.  Substantial cash bonuses do not reward the right type of behaviour".

This is, of course, nonsense.  He's confusing theory and practice.  It's not that the bonus system didn't work, it's just that bankers were bonused on the wrong things.  In this respect, it seems perfectly clear that the bonus system does work, it was just implemented wrong.

I confidently predict that most of this wil be lost on most of the press - the headline on tonight's thelondonpaper probably being pretty indicative ("We're sorry for being such bankers").

Maybe though a report published today by the Media Standards Trust will give the press reason for pause and reflection.  According to research for the MST conducted by YouGov, only 7% of the population trust newspapers to 'behave responsibly'.  Banks, incidentally, scored 13%.

And trust in what the papers report also seems to be looking shaky - only 43% of people claim they can trust what the broadsheets report (down from 65% 5 years ago), 18% for the mids (down from 36%) and 15% for the red tops (up, remarkably, from 14%).

These are pretty bleak numbers.  Like I say, maybe they'll stop and think.

-- Toby

The last yard

Sorry to those who thought this post might be about the incredibly average Adam Sandler film (The Longest Yard), but I am actually refering to 'the last yard' between consumers and the shop shelf - far more exciting, I am sure you will agree.

As marketers, we tend to know our consumer inside and out.  We conduct TGI research, run omnibus surveys, track buzz online, read articles and record vox pops. In fact, If you haven't recently put together a slide with the title 'A day in the the life of Jane', what have you been doing!

Anyway, back to the last yard.  Kevin McCormick, OMD's shopper marketing consultant, recently met with the Head of Trade Marketing at Pepsico and it was interesting to hear that his biggest concern going in to the recession, was that while we understand the consumer, we do not fully understand the shopper.  By this he was refering to that moment in store, when we are confronted by many different brands, and we actually make our choice. It's an interesting point, especially given that the Deloitte the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) 2008 report, highlighted that 16% of people leave a store with a different brand to that which they intended to buy, 33% do not make a choice until in store, and 1 in 10 leave without buying anything.  Millions and millions of pounds are thus being lost, or if your feeling Christmasy, not gained in that last yard.

Thinking about this, I was interested to see last week that P&G made two announcements.  Firstly, they have invested £5m in a 1% share in Ocado, and secondly they have started to sell direct to their consumers online.

 

Why?  Well, as quoted in the Marketing magazine article about just this, a P&G spokesman stated that 'We're interested in the unique shopper knowledge available with Ocado, and we see it's model as a fertile ground for more ideas'.  The same is obviously true of their move to sell direct online. 

The P&G move is a lesson for us all.  In a recession, consumers are doing the one thing we always hoped they would; they are actively considering their brand choices.  Rather than fear this, we should view it as opportunity to reaffirm what our brands stand for.  It is also a time when you really need to understand what is going through their minds in that last yard. 

- Sam

Brand Value

 

This year, more than ever it seems, the high street retailers are looking to instil a perception of value with consumers in order to kick-start Xmas shopping. We’ve seen many of the big names running value events with 20-30% off a wide range of products for a day or more. There’s little doubt from my elbow-fuelled experience in M&S last week that these tactics work in the short term, but in the long term, price-cutting ends up trading the value out of a brand and business.

This requirement for bottom-line value is something that preoccupies many of our clients and is a subject that has very much come to a head in conversations about 2009. Retailers are putting ever greater pressure on manufacturers to drive down prices to consumers through promotion in order to stimulate sales. Our challenge is to help our clients create (the sense of) value for consumers whilst maintaining (or ideally, increasing) price.

Value is a perception, not an absolute. It is unique to individuals, but of course moderated by social norms and expectations. We were thinking the other day about all the ways in which an fmcg company might offer value to consumers, and the list is quite long and varied when you get into it, from ‘altruistic’ value such as donations to charity or Innocent’s tree-planting scheme, to ‘virtual’ value as Sam described a little while back on this blog, to ‘lifestyle’ value where other aspects of consumers’ lives are supported (e.g. Walkers’ Brit Trips – adding value to people’s leisure time), and plenty more.

All this came to mind again when reading this post in the consistently excellent Neuromarketing blog, which discusses how to create a sense of value through portfolio management. Put simply, people become prepared to purchase a product A at price X if that price is framed in some way as of good value to them. This can be achieved by advertising a ‘superior’ product B (that may not have that many more advantages to it) at a greater price Y, thereby making price X seem good value for what product A offers. Product B can basically be a decoy, a product that no-one would buy, but its job is to aid the value perception of A.

This has a faint whiff of duping the consumer about it, but there’s no denying that it feels familiar in terms of how we go about shopping. This is particularly true in this day and age of internet shopping and the huge amount of information and comparison that this involves. I for one now find myself spending much longer over major purchase decisions in general, but get a flush of joy when I see a product at a price that I think is good relative to the cost of ‘superior’ options. This often acts as a real purchase pathway shortcut.

There’s a load of other factors that we need to think about if applying this kind of thinking to any one market. Competition is clearly one – if the market is cluttered then it’s unlikely that consumers will just compare price X to price Y within your product portfolio, and the effect can be easily undercut by the competition (though the power of brand is likely to play a big role here). How heavily framed is the market in terms of price expectation? It’s more difficult to believe that launching a very expensive packet of crisps is likely to make the price of a standard bag more resilient, since the value expectation in crisps is so deeply ingrained. Compare this to a market like new technology, where the pace of development blunts the ability for norms to get set.

Add to this the whole area of choice paralysis – you don’t want to give people too many choices in a range of products for fear that they’ll find the computation of value too difficult and defer choosing altogether.

We’re all going to be asked to have an opinion on how to drive value concurrently for both consumers and our clients’ businesses in the next year, so worth thinking about how the market you work with is set up and what a brand can offer.

-- Alex

The Curse of Knowledge

Thanks to my old gaffer, Mark Palmer, who encouraged me to get off my arse and get cracking with Made To Stick, which has been sitting in my 'to read' pile for about a year now.

I'm only a couple of chapters in and am loving it.  I'll hope to do a full review when I've finished, rather than a load of little updates, but one thing I've already read really struck home and picks up on some of the stuff we've written about before.

The authors talk about the 'Curse of Knowledge', what they mean by this is, essentially, that once you know something it's very difficult to imagine what it's like not knowing it.  They illustrate with a great story, which you may be seeing coming to an Ignition session near you soon.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton got a PhD in psychology from Stanford for the following very simple experiment.  She asked people to pick from a list of twenty five famous songs and tap them out on a table top.  Thse people were the 'tappers'.  There were also 'listeners' who, obviously, had to guess what the song was.

This is the interesting bit.  The 'tappers' were asked what proportion of the songs the 'listeners' would guess correctly.  They reckoned 1 in 2.  The actual result.  1 in 40.  That's quite a miscalculation.  The reason for this is simple, when the tapper tapped out a song they were singing it in their heads.  The taps were just a bit of added percussion to their own personal soundtrack.  They couldn't hear what the listeners heard, which was, pretty much, just a series of random taps.

Try it.  But be warned, being a 'tapper' is absolutely infuriating.  You simply can't believe that the listener can't understand what you can so obvioulsy hear.  This is the curse of knowledge.

Now think about the process we go through with our clients.  We work for months on new launches.  We know exactly what the product spec is, and how it stacks up against the competition.  We know what the communication strategy is (we probably even came up with it ourselves). We understand the media plan in its entirety, knowing exactly which channels start when and how the story unfolds between them.  We've seen the ads dozens of times, in all their iterations.

And then we're completely infuriated when consumers don't get it. 

So get fresh eyes on everything you do.  And if they really don't get it, don't argue with them, try to persuade them you're right or dismiss their stupidity.  Take on board what they say and refine your ideas till they stick.

-- Toby

Seth's 3 boxes

Some of you will remember me posting about the 3 Boxes after the Vegas jaunt earlier this year.  We liked this way of looking at things for its simplicity and flexibility.

So when I read Seth Godin's post about Reacting, Responsing and Initiating, I couldn't help but be reminded of it.

The post divides our time into, wait for it, 3 boxes, labelled as above.  His contention, with which I would agree, is that we spend most of our work time reacting and responding (he defines the difference in the post - you'll have to read it).  Actually, we should be spending more time initiating, but this is the easiest thing to push down the list.

The other advantage, of course, is that the more time we spend initiating, the more we force our competitors to react, giving us even more time to initiate.  And so on.

Think about this.  And think about what you do all day.  Then think about what your clients do all day.  Are you initating or reacting?

Remember to focus on the important stuff, not just the urgent stuff.  They're not always the same thing.

-- Toby

Another Paradigm Shift?

In May of this year, amid much hoop-la, Fox unveiled 'Remote-Free TV', a 'paradigm-shift' in TV advertising, according to Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly.

What this meant in practice is that in two of its big Autumn launches, JJ Abrams' Fringe and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, would have restrictions placed on ad minutage, airing about half the number of ads that would normally appear.

Whilst perhaps not quite the 'paradigm shift' you may have been expecting, it was, nonetheless, a brave move.  In a highly commoditised market, cutting minutage and charging a premium of around 35-40% was clearly a risk.  Just ask GCap.

Well, Fringe debuted in the US last month (and is currently showing over here on Sky).  And it appears, at least initially, to have been successful.  As you'd expect there were some tough negotiations, but they managed to get through higher CPT increases.  Perhaps more importantly initial research findings seem to be pointing to increased audience engagement with both the show and, most importantly for us, with the advertising.

So, 92% of viewers stayed with the programme through the commercial breaks, compared to the ususal 87%.  More impressive are some of the early tracking stats.  Ad attention is up 31%, likeability up 61% and unaided recall up a whopping 250%.

It looks, then, as if Fox could be onto something with this approach.  I think it makes more sense on TV than on radio as active channel hopping is much more prevalent (as the marvellous ad from the 1950's above illustrates nicely).  But before we get too carried away, a couple of words of caution.

First, whilst it is undoubtedly refreshing for viewers to only have ad breaks of, on average, 1 minute 18 seconds (against 3m 16s on the rest of the network), let's remember refreshment doesn't last.  At the moment this is the exception not the rule.  They've used some nice tactics such as flagging up the length of the break ('Fringe will return in 70 seconds...') but if this approach becomes more widespread, viewers will simply recalibrate their expectations.  This will only lead to more downward pressure on ad break length, thereby destroying the advantages both viewers and advertisers get.

Secondly, I think there's a real danger that we're falling into the classic media agency 'numbers only' approach.  There could be something more obvious at play here.  Here's a rundown of the ads that appeared in Fringe.

They sound pretty good to me.  Maybe even the sort of ads that people wouldn't mind watching.  It seems almost embarassing to have to say it, but I'm going to - Let's not forget the impact of the creative work.  And let's hope that these impressive sounding early numbers don't get destroyed by people piling in with dreadful ads. 

Perhaps agencies could even club together and buy whole breaks of 'good' ads?

That really would be a paradigm shift.

-- Toby

Halve your advertising budget

Strategy is about compromise. We can't influence everyone we'd like to and we can't use all the media channels we'd like to at every stage of the path to purchase. However often I think many comms planners try to get too close to this. Ultimately our job is to make some tough calls. Should we focus on one audience or community? (Non-users, those who are easiest to influence, or maybe passionate fans of the brand?). Should we ruthlessly focus on certain elements of the pathway? (Focus on getting on the consideration list, focus on trial or maybe just nip in there at the purchase decision occassion and steal the sale?). Should we focus on less media channels, dayparts or appertures? Or within this focus mainly on certain titles or properties? (Breakfast only, Sunday night TV, Online at lunchtimes or say bar events on big night outs?).  Or should we just focus over a shorter time period or for example all on one day?

With a big(ger) comms budget it's tempting to cover more bases and potentially spread influence out too thinly. So here's an exercise that might encourage us to work out our priorities:

Halve you comms budget, come up with a strategy, ideas and plan on this budget. Now double the plan up. You may have just found it much easier to compromise.

Stephen