Posted by Lena O’Shea
Abigail Adams the U.S. First Lady in 1776 famously said – “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to forment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation” – this got me thinking about female engagement; how we reflect what really matters to them, and how our campaigns represent the ideals and motivations of women today.
The fairer sex has arguably undergone the biggest transformation of a century. Earning more than ever before and increasingly taking the role of provider, they have also been unable to shake off the expectations of the traditional role – immaculately turned out, brilliant cook, perfect host and inspirational mum. While having it all has its up and downs and these are regularly played out in the features pages of broadsheet newspapers, it firmly cements women’s place as the essential consumer to engage with.
The ‘mumsnet’ generation make around 25,000 posts on the website’s forums every day leaving little doubt that recommendation, advocacy and comment are helping shape brand sentiment and perspective. But are women collectively realising their weight in gold to brands trying to talk to them? With 80 percent of purchase decisions made by women they should do.
It is sometimes easy to forget that men and women can operate very differently and we can lose the basic triggers that enthuse and motivate. Brands need to capture our twenty to thirty-five year old ‘millennial woman’.
A study by Euro RSCG UK, US and France found a distinct move away from the idea of gender equality in that women are far more comfortable embracing traditional values fought against by their mothers, as women strive for a work life balance that enables them to experience everything life has to offer. Furthermore a recent study by Reuters found despite the economic climate and corporate culture, the millennial women’s emphasis is more on self-fulfillment and the ‘joie de vivre’, placing career secondary to this. One can only assume that the post feminist age has meant that the battle of the sexes is now an alien concept – maybe we have ‘Girl Power’ to thank for that.
It’s all too easy to think that a campaign aimed at women simply needs a celebrity face to engage and whilst the tactic can work, the rationale behind it needs to be based on an insight. Our millennial woman sees a ‘celebrity’ as a peer – positioning them like a friend with the ability to share tips, chat and experiences, whether through social media or strategically engineered editorial angles, this can ensure your message holds true.
The women’s focused Levi Jeans ‘Shape what’s to come’ campaign seemed to hit the nail on the head in helping women to be heard. The campaign around utilising female ‘mentors’ has been applauded by bloggers and has created a true ambassador programme that understands that the ‘journey’ rather than the destination is key to unlocking resonance.
As guardians of our clients’ consumer engagement, Abigail Adam’s warning ‘to pay attention to the ladies’ is as valid today as ever. To have any real affinity to women, brands need to show that they ‘represent’ the spirit of a women first and foremost, that campaigns are up to date with how women’s lives operate now… and that maybe men have had it right all along – women are difficult to understand.
Posted by Justine McGuinness
Controversial or unique postings can go viral rapidly. Spinning out into cyber-space and having a life of their own for years to come.
Great promotion, if it is a positive piece of coverage about your product or service, similar to a good piece in a national paper. But what if the posting is nasty, a lie, defamatory or designed to damage your business?
Managing a corporate or an individual’s reputation on-line is tough and, because of the rapid growth in social media, it is becoming harder.
Over time tell a story
The art of building a good reputation on-line and maintaining it includes time and honesty. In a ‘crisis’, time is the one thing people feel they do not have, which is why it is important to prepare for the worse and hope it never happens. Some of the pitfalls can easily be avoided or minimised by careful preparation and planning, others can be solved with technical support or legal action, but critical to managing your on-line reputation is developing your unique and genuine story.
Stories involve emotion, detail and colour, not just facts. It is the complete opposite of corporate speak, when words such as ‘objectives’ or ‘vision’ are commonplace. A good story can be a strong case based on evidence but it has to be much more than a list of examples. It has to be simple and understandable by the people you want to have a relationship with – you’re forging a connection – ideally saying something that is different but has a good ‘plot’!
A genuine conversation
Far stronger than a corporate responding defensively when someone makes a negative comment (for example marching into a forum and ‘shouting the facts’ – an approach bound to irritate forum members and is likely to result in a high level of abuse) is a subtler approach. It is about having an authentic conversation.
There is a bus company in rural Wessex that does this quite well.
As a result, their rebuttal work comes (often first) from their fans on Facebook, who they regularly chat with as if they were sitting at home chatting over a cuppa. Jokes are shared, including comments about the looks of certain drivers. But if there is a problem with their service a message is out on Twitter and Facebook quickly. The information they post is genuine; mostly pretty ‘un-spun’, even raw, written by technical experts (such as members of staff who manage the routes). The content has value to the reader. Critical to their reputation is that their content is trusted. As a result their local reputation has improved as they have built their on-line reputation.
Of course having a conversation is impossible if you don’t know it is taking place or to whom you need to talk. Companies have to know what is being said about them, by reading customers’ comments, industry blogs, taking part in forum discussions and actively monitoring their on-line reputation. From knowing who is saying what, the next step is to start to have a relationship with those people with the aim of converting critics to fans.
Protecting or enhancing your reputation on-line takes preparation, time, honesty and, above all, persistence.
Post by Sam Richardson
We love to be entertained. In fact, we demand it. As we crave distractions from everyday life, entertainment has now become an essential part of our lives, not a luxury. We sit up and take notice of entertainment, whether it’s a band on a stage, a pop-up cinema in a backstreet, or an attention-grabbing installation at an airport. Why? Because it is happening live, and live experiences are intrinsically entertaining.
So how do we define entertainment in a brand context? At the fully involved level, brands create, programme and build wholly-owned experiences at a range of locations and events. But you don’t need your own structure to be entertaining. At a lower investment level, brands can become entertainers by putting an entertainment-led premise at the heart of their campaigns. It’s a simple and obvious point to make, but brands that make their communications entertaining stand out from the crowd because people actively and emotionally engage with the experience.
The evolving nature of entertainment is an opportunity for brands. The relentless assault of messaging, advertising and content, combined with our shrinking attention spans and thirst for instant fixes, means that brands need to work harder to get noticed and to build themselves a compelling personality. The question is, why aren’t brands better at it?
In general, being emotional and human is not something brands do well. But it is where the rewards of long-lasting relationships lie. Brands must work to understand motivations of their audience to know what kind of experiences will be well received. The opportunity to engage with people through entertaining experiential is alive and kicking, but it doesn’t always deliver against the potential. This is often because it lacks emotional punch and resonance due to lack of research and audience insight, or just poor creativity, production and staffing.
People love being entertained because it makes them feel alive. Brands should connect with the audience with energy, positivity, wit, creativity and empathy, exciting the audience to feel genuine emotion. To be entertaining, brands must be confident about putting themselves in the spotlight and creating a living representation of what they stand for, which is more real and genuine than any advert. In an age where we are increasingly reliant on technology to deliver relationships, it is this real human contact that we all look for and cherish. This is shown by the ever-growing demand for live experiences, evidenced by the explosion of the UK festival scene.
What started with music festivals has now expanded to festivals celebrating increasingly broader tastes, from vintage fashion to extreme sports. People are hungry for entertaining experiences. Consumers expect brands to be an integral part of this scene, with an established role to play. In fact, they appreciate that brands provide experiences that would not have been there without their investment. As the world of entertainment has evolved, brands now have every right to be involved, even when the brand or its products have nothing to do with entertainment.
In order for brands to really make the most of this opportunity it’s important to realise that entertainment is not just about the big event over a day, night or a weekend. Brands should look to entertain us over an extended period of time with marketing activity before, during and after the live experience. Effectively integrating digital and social media delivers anticipation before and sharing afterwards, creating longevity and importantly ROI. It deepens the relationship, the entertainment and the emotion. Experiential’s best practitioners are integrated marketers with a big idea, media neutral’ approach.
Entertainment gives brands the opportunity to build genuine emotional connections with their audience, as new experiences are created, shared and developed together. Experiential is created by the brand, the emotion is felt by the consumer. When this happens, brands are certain to have a growing number of inspired and loyal advocates amongst their fans.
Sam Richardson is Managing Director of neon.
www.neoncomms.co.uk
Post by Lydia Hoye
Thanks to all that attended the Kazoo roundtable; “How can brands provide platforms for youth to shine and be seen in a positive light?” held at the end of last month.
Between the youth experts and brands that came along, we talked for a solid hour and a half about how we engage this seemingly elusive demographic through our own insights, research and common sense.
We kicked off the session with a statement from a ‘youngster’ about their view of the inspiring youth engagement initiative Orange Rockcorp, “We (youngsters) see that this activity treats us as ‘people’ rather than as ‘young people”. This statement really set the scene for our discussion.
Brands sometimes forget that our youth are just consumers at a particular stage in their lives. They think of them as the ‘cool’ crowd, those that are trailblazing the trend but the mass majority of youths that brands are trying to reach are simply mainstream kids from mainstream backgrounds whom, if communicated to as just people, will align themselves with brands for the long term.
Too many brands seem to misunderstand the idea of ‘tribes’, making it all too easy to pigeon-hole these consumers in order to speak to or about them. It’s not about what they look like or what music they listen to, it’s about simply understanding them as people and from a brand perspective creating opportunity and self-worth. Uniting youth with a narrative, taking time to engage them first and then building on the relationship is paramount to bringing them into the fold.
Brands can greatly benefit from embracing and supporting budding or young talent and those brands that have this understanding have given Britain’s youth the opportunity to create, build and in truth belong to something good. (For examples of great youth creation campaigns see Brett Booth’s previous post ‘Pyramid, Tea and the Vortex of influence’).
With mostly negative media coverage of the UK youth (e.g. ‘young people addicted to gaming’) there is a real opportunity to buck this trend and for brands eager to align themselves with the youth of today to focus on understanding them as people first.
There are a number of bright lights ready to be switched on, brands just need to understand the fuel required to ignite them and to encourage them to gravitate towards the flame.
Special thanks to Brett Booth (brett__maverick@hotmail.com @BrettBoothLDN)
Post by Brett Booth
There are a lot of pyramid models out there, some of which are used to illustrate theories and beliefs about community dynamics and the flow of influence in both the on and offline worlds. It just so happens that for what I wanted to ponder and share in my first piece for Kazoo, a pyramid of sorts also fits the bill.
You may well have seen or heard about the models where a population or audience are proportionally divided as follows; 1/9/90, where the 1 percent sitting at the top are said to be defined by their behaviour as creators, the 9 percent by their influential status and ability to champion and endorse creators output and then there are the 90 percent. The 90 percent are believed to represent the mainstream, within which there are varying levels of responsiveness and willingness to engage with new ideas, products or initiatives.
These models can be useful in that they act as a reminder to all that there really is only a small portion of true creators, even though the tools of creation are increasingly accessible. Working with one of the soft drink giants earlier this year it wasn’t that surprising to learn that such a model still sits at the heart of their recent endeavours in youth marketing. It’s at this point where observations of how these different tiers interact could also be illustrated in the same framework. Creating another layer, an overlay that accounts for the hyper rate of interaction between creators and influencers, could help to illustrate and emphasise an opportunity that exists for brands. In my mind, the visualisation of the way these groups actually behave around ideas and culture is much like a vortex.
It is a bit like stirring a cup of tea. When you do, you create a vortex, around which the contents of your mug swirl. The more you stir, the stronger the vortex, as it pulls the surrounding contents into the centre and down before releasing it into the larger body of liquid.
In the context of the 1/9/90 pyramid model, the centre of the Vortex sits at the meeting point between creators and influencers, occurring as a result of greater and greater micro-cycles of influence between these groups. As the incidences of exchange and interaction increase, a gravitational force begins to pull in peripheral, less engaged types. But even amongst the less engaged a hierarchy exists with those most likely to adopt a trend or respond to a movement generally being the most susceptible to the force, joining the swirl sooner. As with anything that is fuelled the right way, continued growth only creates greater strength and widening reach. The advent of social media has of course proven the most pertinent propellant to date.
In certain areas of culture these vortex-like swirls of influence have existed forever. In fact any natural point where ambassadors of a movement have naturally congregated will have formed the centre of a swirl around which trends and ideas have spread. Skate spots, parks, websites and chat rooms, a music or art scene, a neighbourhood. These are contemporary and more established platforms on which members of the top tiers show, share and influence the future direction of their community. In such places a new idea or source of inspiration advocated by one will typically be put to the test, adopted or dumped. Again, social networking and the increasingly fluid broadcast of opinion and feedback means that, once sparked, these vortices spin faster, grow quicker, spread wider and reach larger numbers than ever before.
The latest example of such a swirl is happening as I type this. Within the last few weeks Justin Bieber’s ‘U Smile’ ( http://soundcloud.com/shamantis/j-biebz-u-smile-800-slower ) was stretched to an epic 35-minute ambient sound trip that was subsequently touted by many a music commentator as genuinely awesome. This piece of music has had something in the region of 800,000 plays at its original Soundcloud distribution point alone. Widespread coverage added fuel to the fire, bringing popularity and excitement to the concept of drastically slowing other pieces of music to achieve equally stunning or comparable effect. As a result people are talking about this being the birth of something much bigger.
If we think of events like these in this way we may be better equipped to conjure our own engagement points around which these vortices form and grow. Brands understanding this may have a better-weighted shot at being centre pin of successful engagement, should that be their objective.
Then it’s a matter of knowing what it actually is that consumers will most likely congregate around at a particular point in time, which brings me on to the efforts of some brands that do suggest a grip on the culture of influence and its vortex like behaviour.
There are a number of recent efforts by top global brands that could sit quite comfortably here as examples, from Levi’s Craftworkers campaign ( http://leviscraftwork.com/craftworkers/ ), which integrates the usage of it’s London flagship as an exhibition space for young creative talent, to Converse and Dazed Magazine’s Emerging Artists Award ( http://www.dazeddig
ital.com/projects/converseart2010/Default.aspx ). But with a couple of successful years under its belt, one of Red Bull’s cultural initiatives spring to mind. I’m talking specifically about the Notting Hill Carnival party that the drinks brand has hosted for the last three years during Europe’s biggest street festival. By consistently delivering a very relevant line-up of DJs and producers operating at the cutting edge of their sound, combined with all the elements that are deemed vital for the ultimate party (summertime, outdoors, free drink, free food, amazing sound system, clean toilets, genuinely hyped audience), Red Bull have solidly placed their event at the heart of an already exciting calendar fixture for many a dance music enthusiast. It is a qualified success. Through the hype and praise the event never fails to generate a maelstrom of talk amongst a carefully targeted creative and influential crowd. This year’s story of online guest list subscription alone says it all; 5,000 online places were filled in the space of 49 seconds, at which point the guest list closed.
Such a display of willing engagement simply underpins wider knowledge that young consumers today are not averse to brands operating in this way, particularly in the cultural sphere, as long as their intentions are well founded with relevance, providing an experience and in some cases opportunities for those opting to engage.
More importantly, the Notting Hill Carnival party is just one of the music based events under the bigger umbrella initiative of the Red Bull Music Academy ( http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/academy-info/ ). This is the brand’s 10-year strong international platform designed to harbour inspiration, exchange and collaboration amongst rising stars and established music icons. Very few brands come close to the efforts of the energy drink giant in successfully facilitating culture and influence in this way whilst seeding their brand at the heart of it all.
Another example that seems to be responding to this and is working towards creating a swirl is the recent partnering of a global tech brand and an equally wide reaching youth media owner. Intel and Vice delivered The Creators Project ( http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/en-uk/ ) this summer. A hybrid of international touring exhibition, showcase, seminar and good old-fashioned booze fuelled party. The key was succeeding to draw a combination of those sitting in the top tiers of the art and youth culture pyramid, both creators and influencers. Supported by an online portal, an armoury of media and plugged appropriately into the social media mainframe, Vice’s thinking fits perfectly with the idea that sparks will be sown, responses shared, thoughts nurtured and a vortex around all this will flow.
But, it’s just the start for the Creators Project. With the first round of stops just about ticked off, its growth and ability to reach and engulf a yet to be engaged mass will rely heavily on the length of the effort, reinvestment, consistency, quality and relevance of related media. If Vice’s vision and Intel’s ambitions are as strategically on-point as they hope then there should be a bunch of new ideas and exchanges occurring out there right now, spurred on by the Creators Project experience and fuelled by the many touch points and digital artefacts it leaves in it’s wake. To fully evaluate success we’ll have to wait for the next rounds of the beast.
Like Vice and Red Bull, if you know who and where the different groups of your audience pyramid are, you are pretty much halfway there. Now it’s a matter of finding something relevant around which to start stirring or just the right trigger to tempt such a step. In fact, if culture is your cup of tea, but you are yet to see solid reasoning to grab for the stirring implement of your choice, then consider what the recent announcements about cuts in public funding could mean. They will add a timely twist to the tale particularly as it will impact many organisations and initiatives, not least those of the arts and cultural sectors, and likely create a void as the platforms available to creators are scaled back and culled.
From this point on brands have an even greater opportunity to play facilitator, and in doing so place a taste of their brand at the centre of a vortex around which culture can be credibly created and celebrated.
On that note I think I’ll flip into Creator mode myself and reach for the PG Tips.
Brett Booth is a consultant on consumer cultures and insight with a particular wealth of experience in youth and young adult markets.
Post by Jessica Newsome
Over the past decade, when times were good, did PROs become lazy? It seems that media relations was too often reduced to an unimaginative stunt and a blanket press release randomly issued out.
It is a truism to say what our industry does is ‘sell’ stories. Yet it seems too many practitioners over the boom years forgot the power of good and creative media relations – some even forgot how to sell a story. Over the past two years, times have been tougher; good PROs have been working harder and, as a result, have had to deepen their media relations skills. It’s fair to say that media relations is not all fluff; there is grunt there too.
When asking journalists what three words they would use to describe PR people in the industry, words such as ‘helpful’ or ‘useful’ regularly came up, but so did words such as ‘nuisance’, ‘young’ or ‘stupid’. One consumer magazine editor revealed that he relies on PROs as the source of 90 per cent of what he writes or is published, but that only 40 per cent actually ‘get it right’. His complaint is not unusual – PROs do not know or do not bother to understand his publication.
Have many agencies forgotten the cardinal rule? All media relations activity has to be focused on a clear result for both the client and the journalist. A well-constructed media strategy will have the desired end result as its linchpin, be dynamic (changing as the media or business climate develops) and should help the agency and client deliver intelligent media relations. Media relations without an overriding strategy is a waste of money and effort.
Disappointingly, too many PR people also seem to confuse pulling names and numbers from a bought-in media database with developing contacts. A big journalist gripe at the moment is that agencies are using interns as if they were staff with years of experience to sell in stories.
The good news is that, as a result of sloppy practices, those PR people who are ‘getting it right’ gain disproportionately more coverage for their clients. As another journalist explained, once a PRO demonstrates they are a reliable source, giving relevant and well-timed material, particularly if their follow-up is solid, the relationship develops and inevitably they gain more coverage for their clients. In other words, simply relying on ‘journo-mates’ won’t guarantee coverage; there has to be some ‘grunt’.
Within the past few months, there are signs that the media are building up the number of reporters and writers are once again developing specialisms, rather than having to cover everything, which has been more usual over the past two years. This is easing the pressure on a number of journalists, who are once again coming out of their offices to meet PROs – but make no mistake, they still expect solid reasons to make the effort.
While the economic climate is still finding its feet, clients understand the value of quality PR when they experience it. We have found with our clients that, as they
have cut back on marketing spend, they can see the impact of robust media relations on their bottom-line, particularly when it encompasses digital and social media.
While this puts greater pressure on PROs, it means campaigns that have clear strategic media relations are resulting in what we are paid to do: get column inches (online and offline) to deliver sales and raise brand awareness. I predict that over the second half of 2010 and into 2011, the agencies rolling up their sleeves and getting on with creative media relations will be more important to clients than ever.
