Marmite shortage "Marmageddon" by Global Culture

And so I think we’ve changed some of the ways we shop and how we socially engage while shopping and afterwards how we talk about our experiences.

Have you done these things in a shop:

• Photographed an item you like but aren’t ready to buy yet
• Compared prices in store with online websites
• Recorded price or size information on your phone rather than writing it longhand

I nearly got kicked out of a furniture store yesterday.

Wanna guess why?

He was caught red handed photographing some of the merchandise.  Not with malicious intent but with a view to comparing it to the space available in his house to fit it into.

The storm of commentary proves that this is not an isolated case.  I’ve done exactly the same thing – photographed price tags or descriptions in order to get dimensions or colours or to show it to friends before deciding to buy.

Retailers – When you review your mobile marketing strategy (see our posts here and here) think hard about how you can encourage your customers to buy and share the experience all the steps along the way through photography.

P.S. have you noticed how Pinterest is full of boards about things people want to buy in the future?

easy.  Today we showcase a client and their challenges and a book and a blog post.  Together they give you the one principle you need to write a B2B online brand strategy.

How to get customer community integrated into your marketing

Three things we read and discussed coincided this week:

1. Planning with the Silver Fern Farms marketing team
2. Reading The B2B Social Media Book
3. Commenting on Confused of Calcutta’s blog post – Musings about communities and prices

Start with the blog post - there are three main points: Everyone in the community is a customer; Communities expect a range of prices for each product or service; A connected community converges to act as a single, composite customer.  

Take the range of prices – some customers are happy to read free offerings; others will contribute to comments or test purchase items while others are avid fans.  The Silver Fern Farms team were discussing how to organise messaging across different geographical marketplaces – not all their range is sold in each country. [They sell lamb and venison in supermarkets.]

Treating all the customers and prospects as a single, composite customer enables us to deliver into separate marketplaces with variable messaging.  Yes, we do not use the same message to each group.  BUT we know the customer is smart and can read.  Being clear about what products are available in which supermarkets matters.  It builds awareness of the wider product range and helps customers appreciate the global nature of the Silver Fern Farms business.

Is B2B any different for online?

Slant these ideas into the business to business B2B world. This is where I find clients have the greatest problems “coping” with a singular community.  And ironically, this is where the greatest opportunities exist for B2B.

Read this quote from the Book

Most B2B companies live with fear. The fear of giving away too much information, saying something wrong, giving competitors an advantage.

But I know B2B companies have another fear. Integrated messaging.

This is perceived as hard to do.  Mainly because of the territoriality of the agencies and staff who service the brand.

Each market, each customer, each group of buyers fits into a hierarchy of customer-types. From the inquirer who wants to read for free but not participate up through to the possible purchaser.  Your brand needs to set up its marketing to allow and

enable each customer type to engage at the participation level the customer chooses.

I wrote that in bold because this principle is the key to your strategic marketing plan.

How does engagement work in practice?

Set up a range of marketing activities that allow any customer from the vast pool of possibles to enable customers to get what they need.

Think of it as a staircase, each step has an increasing level of engagement and possibly a higher price.

When planning your online messaging think of your brand’s online presence as if it were a niche magazine.  You should aim to be the best ‘trade journal’ magazine you possibly can be.  Dominate your niche and the customer will figure out which of your offerings (from free to paid) she wants and where/how to acquire for herself.

The Customer Experience Deficit White paper

Online retail experiences have to become brand specific, highly relevant and personalised to each shopper. Retailers need to make better use of existing resources, skills, people and technology.

Their thesis is that by failing to provide an integrated customer experience, brands are losing out on possible sales.  The main sectors losing out are groceries, electronics and fashion and the leading edge are in Wines, stationery/books and entertainment.

Read the full blog post and report.

We all get loose ends and links that break on websites. It’s a fact of online marketing life.  So don’t stress – take our 3 steps and make the most of a bad situation.

How to make the most out of an error

Accept that these things happen. Now try and put it right for your readers.

• Apologise – first things first, say you’re sorry that the visitor has been inconvenienced.
• Signpost – send them to other places where they might be able to find the content they want e.g. your archive or a search box
• Be wryly humorous, if you can. Take a look at all these excellent page designs- many will not be suitable for your brand (some are downright obnoxiously rude) but they have a common theme of originality, humour and reinforce the site’s brand values.  Like these two below
  

  Mock-Microsoft error page

  .

Urban Outfitters errorHumorous error page text

They do the grunt for you.

Now all I need is to go register the name…. there’s a handy text download file option that gives you the URL you could get for each one.

Just don’t expect me to know what they all do!

NameCheck social media name availability

Here’s an extract from their recent email about Privacy.

Ignoring an EU decision, Ed Vaizey has not required that advertising agencies ask customers to opt-in before using tracking cookies to collect their data. Instead, he’s stated that people can ensure they “consent” by changing their browser preferences. How someone can give “consent” without knowing what’s happening, and be expected to withdraw consent when they work out what browser preferences are, is beyond us. …Read more

There are great discussions in the comments thread from Owen Blacker, Gervase Markham and Jim Killock – we recommend you read them.

This has obvious implications for lead generation and reverse IP mapping for business development experts.

For brands who are growing  and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing.  Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.

Why you need better marketing

The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing.  These are good signs.

You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.

Hire versus buy: the dilemma

There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.

Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.

Costs are usually the determining factor

It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.

Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice.  Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.

A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer.  You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates.  Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com.  I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.

Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work.  They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance.  Could this work for you?  Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.

In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do

• Advertising – do it yourself or hire
• Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
• Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
• Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
• Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
• SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
• Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
• Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
• DIY or hire a market research company?

• Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
• Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
• Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
• Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
• Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group

#agileagency

How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology.  Code is now on a par with content.

Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues.  Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement.  We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.

Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products

Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients.  Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.

Webb - campaigns are humdrum.

Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes

Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.

Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.

Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation.  Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on.  Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.

Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.

Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company.  E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website.  Someone turned that brand round.  The danger is to think the core product is what matters.  We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers

Malbon - Three things in summary

1. Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture.  Because inside tech the world is your company.  Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
2. Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos.  The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
3. Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of.  Brining the two worlds together is great.  Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.

Also covered by RachCreative

Related articles

• Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
• SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)

• Kyle Monson – Editor JWT
• Brian Clark – President of GMD Studios
• Bob Garfield – Advertising Age
• David Eastman – CRO JWT North America
• Shiv Singh – Head of digital, Pepsico

Eastman: Everyone understand the brand bit – the journalism is an editorial approach to brand buildling – thinking engagement and transparency over messaging and control.  It’s a non-fiction attempt at advertising which people would rather engage with.  From an agency point of view it’s about thinking as publishers rather than marketers.

Clark: I think everyone would prefer advertising to be like  content rather than the other way round.

Monson: Been a journalist for 6 years.  We are making journalists more relevant rather than less because this skill of publishing is more relevant than ever.

Garfield – the marketing maven part of me says ‘interesting’ and the journalist in me makes me want to punch you in the face.

Singh – this is a clear imperative.  Important.  The definition is all about real time marketing – as life happens.  

This is a JWT event…. demonstrate your bona fides.

Monson: Who’s doing good stuff?  MacDonalds 5 years ago.  Mormon.org is running – turning their brand over to church members to say why they are members of the Mormon church in video.  They aren’t editing it at all just deciding whether to run or not run.  Representing the brand to the world.

Clark: MacDonalds took a PR agency solution the Moms programme.  They took 8 mothers to where they grow the potatoes all on video.  ”the mom says they use real eggs?”   This is custom publishing (a print industry) this has been around for years and has been created using the same process.  [interesting....I disagree]  The process how a brand and a content editor can work together is ‘muscle memory’ and can happen.

Singh: We compete with everything else for consumers’ attention we have to act and think the way someone who is writing a status update does.  We can’t just launch something about co-creation – it has no resonance or meaning for consumers or us.  If it’s not aligned with our values it has no meaning.  It’s about the resonsnce between our brand essence and values and where they meet together.

Eastman: The bigger picture is everything is becoming digital and becoming media and when everything is media it’s becoming marketing.  When everything is marketing how should brands and agencies behave with each other?

Garfield: Advertising goals are awareness and persuasion. In Social Media the goals are credibility and trust.  How do you forge a relationship around sugar water?

Singh: None of us have a deep relationship with this building.  Our relationship is with SXSW which is at the Austin Convention Centre.  With Pepsi the relationship is with the brand, it’s often the moment and what the drink evokes.  Goes beyond the product itself.  The Pepsi Refresh Project – we gave away $20m to good causes.  This wasn’t philanthropy budget but marketing.

We saw a lift in persuastion, brand health, brand equity.  People who voted / participated formed a closer relationship.  We are scaling it up for 2011 because it worked for us.

Clark: Ford Bold Moves was part-documentary enabling film crews to access new places like board meetings, plants being closed and part-journalism they agreed not to edit what the journalists wrote.  Point, counter-point articles.  Debate about what Ford should do to turn the corner.  Because  we let them say what they believed, they were willing to work with Ford.  Ford uses a lot more real people, informal tone of voice, got away from “sheet metal porn” and into more real stuff.  This can still be seen today.

Monson: Aggregation is hard – pulling in negative news stories is a hard nut to get clients to agree to.  We’ve got Microsoft to hire freelance journalists and publish things that MS doesn’t agree with – they post a response post to these articles.

Clark: I disagree – third party content exists already – why are we still talking about bad things on the internet being an issue?  It’s here.  don’t be afraid of something that isn’t a glowing testimonial.  A good review should be showcased. 80% might be as good as you’re going to get.

Singh: That misses the point.  If I publish 25% of my content that’s bad about my brand just to show I’m transparent it is inward looking even if consumers think we ‘get it’.  I think it’s about adding value to consumers’ lives – the 183,000 ideas submitted gives us insight into what matters to people in the country today.  This is an example of doing something new but adds value.

Garfield: Chrysler “I find it’s ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity but nobody knows how to f** drive!”  The employee got fired from the social media agency.   This is a pretty good line about Detroit.  Does highlight how vulnerable a brand can be – careless candour, morbid humour, maligned conduct.  How to reconcile the control freakdom of brand management versus individuality of social media.

Singh: It was by the PR agency – they got fired as an agency by Chrysler.  If we as brands want to take brand journalism seriously the jounalists need to be part of your organisation and they know brand values.  Chrysler didn’t have an employee tweeting on their behalf – if he’d been an employee he might have said the same thing and he shouldn’t have been fired.  They should have taken this opportunity to fix the driving issues in Detroit.

Eastmen: without the word f*** it is a perfectly acceptable sentiment.  Doesn’t this say more about the reaction from Chrysler – they look slightly foolish for having over-reacted.  Not particularly smart.

Monson: It’s a Public Relations thing – this is a tweet that the public actually related to and they fired the guy for it.

Singh: To think that in social media a brand can have a big fat anonymous voice [is wrong].  A tweet error mistake hapens. we know our executives also make errors.  We’re all human.

Garfield: The guy should have gotten a raise.  The tweet is about the community – it made a human connection.  Are we engaging as people or as brand messangers?

Singh: if Chrysler had their other 300k employees tweeting about what they think about driving in Detroit that would have been authentic about the brand and the city.

Eastman: in 1990 Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia and they managed to keep it secret from the populace of Saudis – now the social media transparency makes that impossible.

Monson: employee social media policies.  Write as if your boss isn’t reading over your shoulder.  As consumers we are very good at avoiding advertising.

Eastman: Should a cereal have a twitter account?

Monson: but who are the 1100 followers?  Are they relevant to the brand? [these guys never work in a niche].

Singh: I don’t think the number of followers are a measure of active engagement.  I think we all need to ask Twitter and Facebook to move away from followers as the core metric.  But daily engagement or active engagement gives much more value.  Can they improve the public metrics?

Monson: is there a direct relation between attention and quality of writing.  The Internet is tooled to respond to ‘awesome’ not to respond to quality and it could be terrible.

Eastman: there’s a backlash beginning with un-friending happening.

Q&A

Schwartzkopf new home page is all focused on content (Oscars hair styles) all produced by Conde Nast editors.  After 4 weeks we have 10x more usage.  Is it the wrong idea to employ journalists in agencies?

Clark: Use custom publishers, second bring someone in-house to cross fertilise to colleagues; or freelance writers.  Brands can do the same thing.

TimeWarnerCable Blogger – what’s the best way to teach people storytelling skills that doesn’t just say ‘this sucks’?

Monson: Are you doing conversation monitoring?  Pick up themes and how you turn those into contents that can draft off what your readers are talking about.  You need a mix of proactive and reactive content.  You guys have gotten involved with me when I was in despair from my twitter feed. You encourage me to complain by responding to me.  Is this a good idea?

Singh: One role of customer journalist and social media can’t be merged.  The training for customer journalist is not the same as customer support.  Acknowledge the differences.

Garfield: I disagree the public sees one brand, Pepsi not separate job titles.

We’ve been takling about content creation not about journalism “non-fiction” content by brands.

Monson: I agree.  What about non-fiction narrative as a definition of journalism.

Clark: if done right you are holding up a lens to show what’s happening in the world.  Ad agencies put vaseline on the lens andgetting them to buy in is a key change.

Eastman: we are talking about agencies and brands doing things in a different way – agency hire different skills.  Ultimately what you call it doesn’t’ matter.  We know there’s an interest in doing this.  Clients think they can do it themselves.  When we talk about editorial calendars, real time responsiveness, the implications of legal then they realise they need an agency.

Related articles

• Chrysler dumps agency linked to F-Bomb tweet (windsorstar.com)
• Employee canned after sending out F-Bomb on Chrysler’s Twitter account
• Brand Journalism: “It’s a Trap!” (adgeek.us)
• SXSWi Video: JWT’s David Eastman (clickz.com)
• Chrysler red-faced and fuming after employee posts obscene tweet against Detroit drivers on company’s official Twitter feed (dailymail.co.uk)

The client is Feedblitz.com – an RSS to email service provider.  A very neat tool that enables marketing newsletters and blog RSS feeds to be merged into a single site service.  The advanced functionality is very useful.

Take a read about what they wrote about the project.

Creative Agency Secrets has worked on

• User interface redesign
• New site features
• Logo redesign
• CRM customer analysis (value ranking and customer needs analysis)
• Marketing communications – to come later.

We congratulate Phil Hollows and the Feedblitz team on the work so far and look forward to an awesome relaunch… more anon.