About marketing, but mostly stuff about how stuff communicates
Lyrics from Stereotype…
He’s just a stereotype
He drinks his age in pints
He has girls every night
He dosen’t really exist
This is sad I know. Going to The Specials on my birthday, on their 30th anniversary tour and drawing comparisons with the problems of research.
Posted in Research
I’m sorry to break the news but it’s true. Social media experts will become less relevant in the next 6 – 12 months when brands realise that you have to be a social business first, before you do the media part. But not to fear, they can always become social business experts.
I don’t mean to be funny either, I would prefer people to work in social business than media and thankfully people like David Armano are doing exactly that. Putting some rigour around the subject and taking it to a far more helpful place.
I’m not having another social media expert whinge, I’ve admittedly done a bit too much of that lately. I just want to highlight and praise a company doing it well – that company being Tesco.
Not only did they hold an innovation day (TJAM) to discuss its API and invite developers with great ideas to improve the online grocery experience, they are in the process of renting out allotments to customers. Yes, a supermarket, in the business of selling food, is renting out land so people can grow their own and not use the supermarket so much. Not only that, you can buy chickens and chicken coops – isn’t this made of awesomeness or what?
Posted in Social brands, Strategy
Now I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in these unbranded coffee shops but my gut says they are solving the wrong problem.
I’m not a Starbucks hater but I do prefer getting coffee from my local independent. Why? Because Darren, the owner, actually wants to know my name and have a chat and those that work in Starbucks are told to, probably through some horrible training manual. Starbucks just can’t compete on personal service and make its staff care. I’m not saying they don’t care at all, just not as much as Darren. Making stores unbranded will not change this.
Full marks to Starbucks for trying, but it just doesn’t feel particularly authentic when they create this chain of people who each shout out your name and order every time a cup gets passed along. First up by the time it gets to the end my name has changed, but it’s as if they are announcing it to everyone else apart from me.
If I was Starbucks I would do more ‘doing stuff’. Like its live music, book clubs and coffee tasting activities – but different. The problem they have had in the past is that these activities are really about getting column inches and the perception of being more about the local community. Check out the little Starbucks event/store locator, I couldn’t find anything happening in London or Sydney, not even in Seattle.
Starbucks needs to whole heartedly handover its stores to the community. Size and location are the main selling points for Starbucks, make the most of it rather than feeling bad. How many people would love to host something in these pieces of real estate? Let customers run everything and change the emphasis so it’s honestly about the local community. Authentic people, make authentic brands.
Posted in Positioning, Social brands, Strategy
Number one is stop titling blog posts, with top ten lists. I thought I would do this to get some reach and make a point. But before I finish the list, here is a minor whine, it’s not the cult of twitter that’s getting a bit tedious, I like Twitter, it’s the twitter cult that bugs me.
Now is it just me, or is there this weird group of fanatics growing that think they are influencing the whole of mankind in 140 characters? Seriously, it’s like a cult with chapters and stuff. Yes it’s important, rapidly growing, but let’s get some perspective and just a touch of rigour around some of the claims being made
- Apparently a marketing campaign is only successful unless the cult says so. In fact the cult is becoming a whole new segment to target your campaigns at. Think of Skittles and Moonfruit.
- MJ was officially dead only when the cult said so
- The cult has even delivered democracy to Iran through turning their avatars green
- Most recently they have single handily ruined Sacha Baron Cohen’s life by saving the world from his latest film Bruno
It’s this last one that pushed me over the edge and the media has to take some of the blame for link baiting the cult and feeding the beast. They title things in really sensational ways, even if it’s not related to the point they are actually trying to make. Why? They know that the cult will see it in their RSS reader, take in the first 4 words, then incorrectly Tweet about it claiming another victory for social media over evil and artificially inflate the impressions for advertisers. Get down to the 3rd or 4th paragraph of both of these articles, here and here, it isn’t really just about Twitter, it’s about today’s speed and potential effect of communications, Twitter is a small part of this.
The most salient quote of these articles is this: “Film marketers look at weekly declines in ticket sales to judge fan buzz. In recent years, those “drops” have widened significantly as communication has speeded up thanks to the internet and, more recently, social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook”. Backed up by this research.
So to get back to finishing my list…
2 – Crunch some numbers before you join the cult. A bit budget I know but using socialmention.com, for every negative comment about ‘Bruno’ on Twitter, there are 3 positive ones. So why didn’t sales rise if the cult is so influential? In Oz Bruno’s first weekend has done over 50% of its nearest funny rival The Hangover that has been running for about 6 weeks.
There is at the very least only about 600K active people on Twitter in Australia, and that’s being generous. There is nearly 6m on Facebook. If something influenced sales it was the latter
3 – Look at the wider context of Twitter and the way people use it.
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values” Mcluhan The 60s some time
4 – Compare Apples with Apples. Bruno is a higher cert than Harry Potter and even Borat in some countries. It’s even school holidays. Bruno is almost cult in itself and has a smaller potential audience.
5– Follow interesting people not the cult, your experience will be much more fulfilling.Use them as a filter for great content, not bombarding you with crap. It’s the people that influence you not the tool.
Sorry about the rant!
Posted in Communications, Digital Strategy, Strategy
Recently I’ve been feeling like I’m going mad (and it seems I’m not the only one), mostly over a very basic concept called marketing. Now I’m pretty sure that in my first week of marketing school I was taught the 4Ps (or 7Ps depending on who you talk to). You must know them, it’s arguably the oldest, most basic concept relating to marketing. They are called product, price, place and promotion and no I’m not going to explain them.
So why do I feel like I’m going mad? Whilst not in the same guise, it’s mostly because people are talking about product and place as something revolutionary that has just been invented by a new wave of Social Media Punks and unmarketing gurus. All that has changed is the emphasis away from promotion and towards the rest of marketing.
Yeah things have evolved, there are new tools to use, certain things are less relevant and people’s attitudes are changing. But that’s great, who wants to be doing the same things throughout their career. A lot of what is relevant now more than ever isn’t new, it’s never just been about advertising, it just worked more effectively than it does today. People expect more than promotions from companies which means we need to better at marketing.
A sociogram is not a social media consultant supplementing their income of an evening; it is a visual representation of a network, that identifies the flow of information and the varying strength/relationship/reliance on one another. It’s useful predominantly because it gives you an indication of the actual relationships, on and offline, rather than the one size fits all preconceived notion around ‘influencers’.
I also say planners, because social media experts are well experts, so they will know about this already. I used to draw sociograms all retro, with a pen and stuff, however this week I came across a budget, but helpful little tool that makes it as easy as. Enjoy.
Posted in Communications, Digital Strategy, Sociology
Will wrote a great post a few weeks back that amongst other things highlighted how Adam Morgan’s challenger theory from his book, Eating the Big Fish, is largely misunderstood. This week has shown that you don’t have to be the little guy to be a challenger, it’s all in your mentality and the way you behave – my case in point? Microsoft. It’s about time, but this week has seen them get some balls.
1 – Microsoft Office moves online
2 – Microsoft plan on opening retail stores nest to Apple
3 – Microsoft is voted UK’s number one consumer brand
4 – Bill Gates is producing some fighting talk
And then the ‘challenger’ doesn’t seem quite so David anymore
1 – Apple responds to Microsoft ads with legal action
2 – Apple blocks Palm Pre’s iTunes synchronisation
I like a good brand fight.
Posted in culture, Divergence
Because it has no point. And in a world where everything has to seemingly have a point, it’s great to see something so pointless making people laugh. Why not join the Facebook group and lie down pointlessly.
Posted in Communications, Digital, Divergence
‘Influencing the influencers’ is fast becoming one of those really annoying phrases that I hear a bit too much at the moment.
I have a number of problems with this statement. First of all it suggests that there is a one size fits all, Holy Grail of a strategy and that is to appeal to the cool, ‘hype connected people’. You know, you infect the select few that have a blog and are on Twitter and hey presto, you have yourself an epidemic.
I’m a different strokes for different folks kind of guy so I don’t really fall on either side of the Gladwell or Watts fence, but I have to say, Watts is largely underrepresented in marketing column inches/blog posts/tweets. Whilst Gladwell champions the ‘law of the few’, Watts suggests things are more random and that a middle range of connectivity (mass market) is more effective than those groups who are highly connected i.e. some groups can be too highly clustered, connecting to each other and not across other groups in the population, hence things don’t spread.
Think of Susan Boyle. This didn’t spread because of the few and I don’t believe that 5 years ago she would have been able to have got the exposure she did this year. Five years ago she may have got some good figures on Youtube, but the very thing that catapulted her to stardom was how media channels and distribution mechanisms, shared and overlapped with each other like never before. The same is true with MJ’s recent departure. Stuff needs to move between the small hyper connected to the large moderately connected. From the online to the offline. It wasn’t a handful of viewers that told their friends about it on Facebook, it’s much more complicated than that. Media just didn’t work together as it does now.
Whilst age old, I always thinks of Fallon’s Cadbury’s Gorilla case study. They created the first 90 second TV spot with the web in mind. Knowing that people would be searching for it on the web, as soon as it aired it was on Youtube. They didn’t ‘seed’ it before hand, or give a sneak preview to a select group of influencers. They went straight for the heart of the network that they want it to end up in.
It’s all very well identifying the few people who are believed to be the influencers but it’s irrelevant if they are not connected either directly or indirectly to the rest of the population. This is a fundamental point, that is fundamentally ignored and something we need to try and design for. So when someone says you we need to influence the influencers, ask them ‘who are they really?’ And ‘then what are you going to do next?’
Posted in Communications, Digital Strategy
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