What can baby lotion, nappies and yeast extract teach us about brand advocacy? Maybe, baby, Mum knows best.

It has been a while since I’ve blogged, owing to the happy distractions of organizing a wedding, going on honeymoon, and my wife and I preparing for the arrival of our first baby. We have a couple of months to go but already there has been a lot to learn and plenty to do, not least completely re-organizing our home, and starting to get stocked up with baby-related products.

Yes, this blog entry is all about baby stuff. It’s what’s dominating our waking thoughts at BlackLab Towers. The process of stocking up with baby products has revived my thinking about branding, reputation and public relations. In particular it has got me thinking about the importance of advocacy in the marketing and PR mix.

I realize that I’m about to address the Holy Grail of marketing and PR, namely spreading good word of mouth. It’s elusive, difficult to get, and even harder to maintain. Its value is often tough to quantify but it’s incredibly valuable. My experience alone, albeit as an unscientific sample, testifies to this value.

Consumer choice and PPB syndrome

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to baby stuff, I’m a complete ignoramus. This must be the typical status of many first-time dads and mums to be. In fact it’s so typical that it leads to a high incidence of PPB amongst this demographic group. What’s PPB? It’s pre-parental bewilderment and it can be quite overwhelming.

For instance, before the birth of their first child, a friend of mine, and his wife went to a large Mothercare store in suburban London to scope out prams, cots and other supplies. His wife was freaked out by the variety and choice of products. Many she didn’t previously know existed, and many she wasn’t sure she even needed, but felt as though she should buy items, just in case. She was so overcome that she ran out of the store in tears.

I sympathize. The other day, while out shopping, my wife was looking at a device that clears a baby’s nose when they get a cold. I don’t recall having or needing one of these when I was a baby, and I survived. However, we both stood staring blankly at each other, wondering if the item was essential and whether we’d be bad parents if we didn’t buy this over-priced piece of plastic that clears away baby snot.

Voila. Two cases of debilitating PPB, brought on when customers enter a world of which they previously hadn’t been a part, in which they had taken no interest and which they know next to nothing about.

The cure for PPB: Brand advocacy

So what’s the antidote for PPB? Quite simply, we unleash the power of brand and product advocacy.

Obviously, there’ll be those posh papas and mamas who’ll be emulating the glitterati in their buying decisions. Those with the spending power will no doubt be keeping an eye on what the Duchess of Cambridge is choosing for young Prince George, and will be doing the same. Celebrity product advocacy starts at the youngest age, it seems. For those that can, what a nice and easy decision-making process.

However, for most of us mere mortals, a more organic process of advocacy is what influences us. Mrs.BlackLab has been speaking to friends with children to find out what their recommendations are, plus she’s been online on numerous mum and baby forums, in order to gather opinions. Add to this the views of the couples in our birthing classes, and she’s being bombarded with information. Some of it is good and some of it borders on collective hysteria, and it is challenging to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It’s enough to make anyone’s head burst into flames, quite frankly, so the obvious place to turn to clarify the situation is to call upon your own experience (however limited) and to seek advice from your nearest and dearest, especially your own mum and dad.

When this happens, an interesting dynamic occurs. Your memory and your parents’ advice inevitably recall familiar brands and products. You find yourself gravitating towards them even though others may be just as good or better. You simply have no idea. Nevertheless, many of you might understand the wave of relief I feel when, for example, I see the comforting Johnson & Johnson logo on the familiar pink baby lotion bottle, the golden baby shampoo  (no more tears, aaaah) and the white baby powder shaker. In their presence, all the other brands blur into the background, and the tension and unease created by the packed rows of unfamiliar product names just melts away.

This is the power of brand heritage and that relief I feel is a deep-seated feeling of trust. Trust in these products, these brands, what they stand for and for shared heritage, that of the brand itself and my own personal history. After all, these are the products that Mum liked. You can’t argue with that. It’s marketing and PR gold. When it comes to bringing up baby, Mother knows best, right? At least to a complete parenting novice like me. It’s why I love Marmite, because Mum fed it to me when I was an infant. For decades it was advertised as “The growing-up spread you never grow out of.” As far as I’m concerned, never a truer word has been spoken.

So what does this mean for marketing and PR?

Clearly, what we see here in my anecdotal way is how effective advocacy is and how important it is for brands, products and services. Furthermore, I think we can identify a hierarchy of advocacy.

Firstly, there’s celebrity advocacy. Great for the advertisers and us PR bods to get the products on the telly and in the papers.

Then there’s group advocacy. It’s always taken place, but social media is instrumental in helping it to flourish. When Mrs.BlackLab gets recommendations and advice from her groups on Facebook or elsewhere, she taps into a community that shares her experience and interests. It’s a great place to canvass opinion, even though the majority of the members of the group are not personally familiar to you. It’s online word of mouth and it’s very valuable.

But the most valuable advocacy remains real good old-fashioned word of mouth, from those you trust the most: friends, family, colleagues and close contemporaries. Like the group advocacy, these guys of share your experience, but more than that, they actually know you, what you like, what you want and what you need. When they make a recommendation, you really listen.

When a brand has a heritage with these advocates, when you can trust it as much as the people who are recommending it to you, then you are on to a marketing and PR winner.

I’d love to write more about this, but now I must go to the baby supplies shop to peruse the prams, cots and breast pumps. Wish me luck!

What marketing, PR or advertising techniques have had most impact on you as a consumer or customer?

What companies and brands do you trust and why?

What influences you most in your choice of brand or company?

What would turn you from simply a loyal customer to an active advocate of a brand or company?

What goes wrong when campaigns go right? – The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

This week, I’m focusing on a success story: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. 

 David Beckham takes an ice bath for ALS

As PR practitioners and marketers, what can we learn from it, and what do we discover about the pitfalls of success? In short, what goes wrong when campaigns go right?

This campaign has captured the hearts, minds, involvement and most importantly the pockets of countless people worldwide, with a simple viral stunt-based campaign. You’d probably need to be unconscious for the last month or more not to notice it, and it’s likely that everybody knows someone who has tipped a pail of iced water on their head and posted a video of it on the Internet, for charity.

Without a doubt, it has been an extraordinary success. As the end of August approaches, it is estimated that the campaign has raised in excess of US$88.5m in the USA alone, and much more besides elsewhere. Australians have raised $700,000 since the challenge went viral in July, according to Australia’s Channel 7 News, and on the other side of the world, British participants have raised in the region of £700,000 sterling. The funds continue to rise. 

Glitterati from the worlds of entertainment, sport, fashion, business and even politics have spontaneously got involved and filmed themselves being doused in freezing water. The public has loved seeing the likes of Leonardo Di Caprio, Gwyneth Paltrow, David Beckham, Jose Mourinho, Kate Moss, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and George W Bush in uncharacteristically undignified videos of themselves getting soaking wet. Even the cast of the new Star Wars movie are getting involved. Just like the general public, they have been carried along on the wave of the Ice Bucket challenge. Celebrity endorsement on this scale would normally cost millions of dollars.

In terms of awareness, according to The New York Times, people shared more than 1.2 million videos on Facebook between June 1 and August 13 and mentioned the phenomenon more than 2.2 million times on Twitter between July 29 and August 17. With this level of public involvement, and donations rocketing, inevitably awareness of ALS has risen enormously. Hats off to The ALS Association. It has done a grand job.

Quite a lot has already been written about why the campaign has been such a success, so I won’t dwell on it, beyond noting that it is simple, fun, easy to participate in, has a strong call to action, and involves personal invitation and interaction, a perfect combination for viral success. Nevertheless success doesn’t come without its challenges, and it’s these that present some other interesting lessons that we can learn from The ALS Association’s campaign.

Firstly, it could be considered a bit unclear what the campaign was saying. From a personal perspective, I had to look up what ALS is, and learned that it stood for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Despite the many videos of wet friends and celebrities I have seen, none of their videos explained that. In fairness, I wouldn’t have looked at all if it weren’t for the campaign, so arguably it did its job. However, it demonstrates what happens when a campaign is so successful that its reach outstrips its original aims.

ALS is the North American name for the neurodegenerative disease, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, but in countries like the UK and Australia, it’s known as Motor Neurone disease. The fact that the campaign highlights ALS suggests that it was targeted towards North America. In that territory the message was clearest. In territories where the condition has another name, education about the condition may escape some people’s notice. I assume that this is therefore a case of a domestically targeted campaign that has gone international, more by accident than by design.

What we learn from this is that in this world of globally available information, it is very easy for marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns to cross national boundaries. Crossing these boundaries can often involve crossing cultural and linguistic lines, where knowledge that can be assumed in one territory cannot be assumed in another. Furthermore, what is acceptable in terms of messages and imagery in one territory may be considered culturally unacceptable in others. In my career, I have learned that what is considered fun, eye-catching and attention-grabbing in Western Europe or North America, may be considered risqué or even offensive to audiences in India, or in religious Muslim countries, for example. It’s therefore important to factor in when a campaign might go viral, extend beyond its intended boundaries, and whether it could confuse, upset or alienate different populations.

Secondly, the campaign has been co-opted, often unofficially, by individuals seeking to raise awareness for other issues or charitable causes. In the UK, there have been many cases of people doing the ice bucket challenge for other great causes such as cancer research. In the US, movie star Matt Damon’s widely publicised ice bucket challenge involved him using toilet water, and was an opportunity for him to raise awareness about lack of availability of clean drinking water and sanitation in developing parts of the world. 

Elsewhere, the challenge has got political. Palestinian journalist Ayman al-Aloui has initiated the “rubble bucket challenge”, a variant of the ALS campaign involving pouring buckets of rubble on one’s head. As Al Arabiya news reports, al-Aloui says he is doing this as an act of solidarity with the people of Gaza.

On the one hand, this trend highlights just how effective and powerful the ALS Association campaign has been. On the other, it demonstrates how a hugely popular initiative can be used for messages other than its original aims. Arguably, through no fault of its own, in fact precisely owing to its success, the ALS Association has lost some control of its campaign’s message. Perhaps this is a price you pay for success, but it’s something that is worth considering when campaigns are being dreamed up.

Furthermore, the more popular and visible a campaign becomes, the more obvious a target it becomes for criticism, however well intentioned it is meant to be. Some commentators have complained that the challenge itself has no logical connection to the cause it is publicizing. I think that this criticism is rather sour-faced and lacking a sense of humour. There’s no harm in raising funds and awareness about a serious condition in a fun and light-hearted way.

More serious are the religious objections that have been raised. As The Independent in the UK has reported, leaders of the Catholic Church in America have voiced their objections because the money raised by those taking the challenge could be used for embryonic stem cell research, which the Church considers immoral.

Similarly, campaigners for animal rights have raised their concerns about the possibility that donations may go towards experiments involving animal testing. Leading the celebrity charge for this point of view is Pamela Anderson, and off the back of the ALS Association’s highly visible campaign, this cause / criticism is also enjoying some high profile media coverage.

Once again, the ALS Association is a victim of its own success. Criticism would have been far less forthcoming if its campaign hadn’t enjoyed such widespread coverage and participation. Again, arguably, this kind of thing is an inevitable by-product of success.

Overall, the lesson learned is that the stronger the campaign, the more conscious we must be about ways it could be misconstrued or undermined, as it becomes a bigger target.  Issues management becomes an essential part of even the best and most well-meaning campaigns. It’s no surprise that some of the most successful organizations and brands in the world expend considerable resources on issues management, despite having some of the most successful marketing, advertising and public relations.

Why does Apple want a bigger bite of the social media pie?

This morning (5^th August), Marketing Week broke the news that Apple has appointed a social media supremo, Musa Tariq, to lead its digital marketing.

Tariq, previously at Nike and Burberry, is considered to be a pioneer of harnessing social media for brands, and in particular is known in the industry for his development of communities and viral content.

Until now, Apple has been relatively slow to engage fans in this way, and its social media presence has been relatively limited for such a prominent consumer tech brand. So why the change, and how significant is it?

I think that there are two main implications. The first, for Apple Inc and the consumer tech industry. The second, for the marketing industry as a whole.

What does this mean for Apple?

Apple had a rough ride in the first quarter of this financial year, according to analyst Brian Blair of Wedge Partners in The International Business Times. He attributed this to a slowdown in the smartphone market, slow demand for the iPhone 5C and the lack of a marquee new product to launch.

Although Apple’s CEO Tim Cook remains optimistic for 2014, this appointment suggests that the company perhaps feels the need to engage consumers more in order to help bolster its performance. And its chosen means to do this is by turning towards social media and shared content.

What does this mean for marketing?

In marketing terms this is just as significant, arguably more so. It demonstrates just how powerful social media and shared content have become as marketing communications channels.

Furthermore, what this hammers home is something that is already undeniable: content is King. 

Tariq has been widely credited with successful campaigns for Nike and Burberry involving online video teasers and real-time visual tweets. Both forms of communication are eminently shareable, with viral potential. They add value to users’ experience, giving them compelling and fresh content that entertains, informs, excites and inspires.

Add “educates” to that mix and you have the recipe for good content. Consumers, users and followers now demand and indeed expect such content that adds value to their experience. Straightforward advertising and promotional messages are no longer sufficient or satisfactory without it.

This requires a fresh mindset for many brands and companies if they wish to remain at the front of their audiences’ minds. I think it means that companies cannot simply be a factory for their products and services; they must also become factories producing innovative and genuinely interesting content, because that’s what hooks an audience.

• How far do you agree?
• Do you think Apple has made a good move with this appointment?
• What changes do you think are necessary for companies to best benefit from social media and shared content?
• What steps has your company taken in this direction and how successful have they been?

I ‘d love to hear from you and get your perspective.

Getting the content right for marketing with the newest technology.

Is it all just a case of “the Emperor’s new clothes”?

Do the more things change; the more they stay the same?

And what has Ryan Gosling got to do with all of this?

The other day, during a moment of reflection, it occurred to me how fast and how drastically my world has changed, thanks to technology, how I’ve adapted to it, and how those reaching out to me as a reader, customer, or consumer, have had to sweat blood to keep up with the pace of change.

In danger of sounding like a grandfather pointing across the city and saying to his grandchildren, “I remember when this was all fields,” it seems only a heartbeat ago when my consumption of media, advertising and marketing was considerably different to what it is today.

Six years ago I had a Blackberry – the old blue one with the grey screen, and I thought I was cooler than Ryan Gosling, because I could get my emails on the move, and even check the internet . . . slowly . . . very slowly.

Forgive the reference, and the wafer-thin excuse to include a picture of the ridiculously talented and unfeasibly handsome actor. I’m hoping it will help get your attention ;-)

Before this, my mobile phone could call and text people, and that was it. And if we go back into pre-history, I finished a PhD without having access to the Internet. To get my information I visited large dusty buildings called libraries that held thousands of terabytes of data in individual packets called books and journals, made of an ancient tree-pulp called paper.

I consumed news by reading newspapers and magazines . . . hard copies, each purchased separately. My consumption was limited to what the editors of these publications chose to publish and it was limited to when it was feasible to read it, at home, at my office desk, or on public transport.

In the last five years, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21^st century and the world of smartphones, mobile Internet, and apps. My consumption of information has increased, and comes from a wider and wilder variety of sources, shared often through social media. These sources are text, audio and video and are often interactive, inciting my comments and responses, encouraging my participation. I write my blog and consume others, so I have become more than a consumer. I am part of what I consume.

I’m pretty certain that my experience is quite typical, and it’s something that savvy marketers have sought to keep pace with. With the introduction of Google Glass and the imminent arrival of smart watches, a new evolution is upon us. Whether these technologies will be widely adopted remains to be seen, but what is certain is that if they don’t, others will soon follow in their place, and marketers must keep up with change. 

 

Raj from "The Big Bang Theory" with his Google Glass, proving that moving with the times isn’t rocket science

 

New media are constantly being dreamed up to deliver messages, and messages are being tailored to these new means of delivery. Brands are now just as likely to create compelling promo mini-movies for sharing on social media rather than typical adverts. Just think of the amazingly creative output that the likes of Adidas, Nike and Beats by Dre released for the World Cup.

Arguably the march of technology makes real Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim, “The medium is the message”, because changing media changes the shape of messages. Twitter vindicates his thinking. The imperative of publishing something significant in 140 characters or less barely existed before Twitter, outside of tabloid newspaper headlines.  Now look at its power and reach. And consider the salutary tale of Kodak, who failed to move sufficiently with the times, and who suffered as a result.

Furthermore, we are bombarded with information 24/7 on increasingly personalised devices. This deluge of information seems to require ever shorter and punchier sound-bites, in what some would see as a reductio ad absurdum that has resulted in a never-ending torrent of banal tweets. However, is this really the case?

When it comes to the crunch, as much as we’ve become information junkies, whether it be for political news, sports results, celebrity gossip or the newest, most cutting-edge product and entertainment releases, we want to know that what we’re getting is the real deal. In short, we want good quality content from the best sources. But with this proliferation of information and sources of information, how can we be sure that we’re getting it? Is the stuff we’re seeing, hearing and reading from all over the place often insubstantial hearsay, rumour and nonsense,  just like the Emperor’s new clothes?

Example: As a fan of Tottenham Hotspur FC, I have seen numerous online sources throughout the late spring and early summer, that claim to have leaked pictures of the club’s new football shirts for the 2014/15 season, produced by Under Armour. The official release isn’t until the end of this week. I have no way of knowing if what I have seen is the real product or not, or whether the sources of these leaks are reliable. Consequently, I crave the real thing. Yes, this might be a cunning guerrilla PR tactic by Under Armour, in order to raise fans’ interest (who knows?), but it still leaves us wanting the authoritative release.

So, those soothsayers that have endlessly rung the death-knells of traditional media may be mistaken, providing that traditional media continue to heed the warning to adapt or die and providing they continue to provide the best quality content. Why? Because these media themselves, (such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, the Financial Times, CNN, the BBC to name just a few) are brands in their own right. Alongside “big” newer names, like Mashable, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Venture Beat, to name but a few, they have built up a reputation and a level of trust amongst audiences for the content that they provide. Nowadays, reputations can rise and fall faster than ever, for sure, but it remains true that they must be earned, so through the cacophony of noise, these names can continue to have a larger influence than most, providing they remain nimble and providing their content remains good. So, the more things change, the more they stay the same. What’s important is that good content is King.

Brands can learn a thing or two from this lesson. By becoming sources of great, reliable and authoritative content that’s flexible for all devices, and that adds real value to their customers' experience, they can remain front of mind with consumers, and maintain their value with their precious target audiences.