Aug 22, 2011 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Media is now “free”, you can make a commercial and put it up on youtube and work/hope to attract an audience, a significant difference to buying time on TV, where you are paying for the delivery of an audience to your advertisement, assuming not too many of them can time-shift to avoid it.
Most ads on youtube and other free media fail to generate viewers beyond the immediate family of those who made it. Some however, generate a significant audience, and a very few deliver a huge audience, one that chooses to watch, and have therefore the potential to delver a brand proposition with enormous authenticity.
This commercial for Dove achieves this rare double, powerful positioning, and a wide audience, almost 13.5 million views to date, although a few, like me, are hardly in the target market, but it is one of the very rare few where they got far more than they paid for.
Aug 5, 2011 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Tesco is the leader in the field of retail social media marketing, as noted in the past, but have really outdone themselves with this experiment with a virtual store in railway stations in South Korea.
The speed at which innovations are being tested, and if implemented is increasing, but usually we would expect a smaller business to be sufficiently agile to try some of this stuff, but Tesco is building a really impressive track record.
Australian supermarket retailers are in the dark ages by comparison, although some of the smaller food service retailers are starting to move with location and coupon promotions, but I would expect Coles particularly, now managed by a veritable cricket team of ex-Tesco Poms to make the running amongst the big boys.
Aug 3, 2011 | Branding, Leadership
Really good brands often display remarkable resilience to the depredations of those who do not understand what makes a great brand, and from time to time, one is resurrected by insight and hard work.
I am not a gardener, but the most appropriate metaphor appears to be a gardening one, someone who “really understands” comes in and heavily prunes the almost dead roses to the exact size and shape necessary for renewal, and come the spring, a newly vigorous plant arrives.
Such a resurrection has been evident in the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. Founder Howard Shultz re-emerged from retirement as CEO after the management that followed him stuffed a great business, did some radical pruning, and Starbucks is now again a great business, whatever you may think about their coffee.
In England a few years ago, there was a Starbucks on every corner in the West end, and the coffee was rubbish, to be avoided, but the near death corporate experience has renewed the chain in the UK, perhaps requiring a revisit next time.
It takes a very strong leader to acknowledge the mistakes of the past that led to the weakening of a brand, and usually there are many mistakes, often small and logical when viewed in isolation, but profound when seen as a whole. This leaked memo from Shultz is such an acknowledgement, and served as the “burning platform” from which the changes to rebuild the Starbucks brand could be launched.
Jul 28, 2011 | Branding, Marketing
Sometimes asking a customer, or potential customer what they want is a bad strategy, as they can only respond from the perspective of what they already know and understand.
When you have something different and unknown to offer, there is not much point asking, you just need to get trial.
The elBulli restaurant run by Ferran Adria has been voted the best restaurant in the world for some years now, it costs a fortune, is very hard to get to, and has anything but a conventional menu, yet thousands are turned away each week. Chef Adria ignores customers, and they love him for it.
Several times over the years I have launched products that were genuinely new, and learnt very early on not to do any quantitative research at all, and no qualitative work unless those involved could see, touch, feel, and use at least a close prototype of the finished product. Only then can they offer an opinion worth listening to, but even then, there is little you can do to prototype the power of the brand which may evolve over time.
To continue the elBulli example. Had Chef Adria put some plates of curry ice-cream in front of a group of a group of people who ate at 5 star locations, and told them how much a trip to his restaurant would cost, and by the way, it was a 2 hour drive through treacherous mountain roads to get there, and they would have to wait 6 months for a booking that had nothing to do with when they may want to eat, it possibly would not get a gold star from the research group. How is it then that it is judged the best, and is probably the most famous restaurant in the world?
Just when you thought you had the rules of marketing nailed, something like this comes along!
Jul 19, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Procter & Gamble is a huge branded consumer business, but seems to be able to maintain the agility and innovation capability of an SME. Supermarket retailers have to be nervous when they display a determination to build a direct business model for their brands, and when they start talking about “qualified retailers” it is music to my ears, having struggled in an unforgiving Australian FMCG duopoly for years. It is the other side of the coin from retailers developing their own brands beyond Housebrand status, noted previously.
P&G tried with Amazon, and the effort had its challenges, so they are quietly widening the approach with this facebook collaboration, creating a new descriptor in the process, “f-commerce” and recruiting Wal-mart as a “qualified retailer” (not bad for a start)
This also ticks facebooks boxes, as it is a strategy to monetarise their huge base of connections to consumers, and sets them against Amazon in the e-fulfilment business.
Poor old Microsoft, increasingly it seems to have missed the boat. Just a decade ago the US government had them in court trying to break them up to give others a chance.
What’s the old saying about roosters and feather dusters?
Jul 18, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
There is a new boy on the block to match Colgate, P&G, and other international brand owners, but one who does not play fair, one who controls access to consumers, removing their options of choice. Tesco. A retailer with the clout of Tesco that comes from its scale, with its ability to determine which products consumers will see on shelf, is aiming to develop international housebrands in competition with its suppliers.
Some will see this as just commercial common sense, Tesco leveraging their hard won position with consumers, whilst others will see it as the death-nell of brands, something to be opposed by any means.
I suggest it is neither, but neither is it something in the middle, there are other dimensions to the decision that will determine the outcome:
- Will a retailer be able to develop the deep consumer understanding that feeds a sustainable marketing, brand and product development effort necessary to build a real brand as distinct from labels on shelf?
- When a consumer has a problem with a Tesco branded product, and Tesco fails to manage that problem in a satisfactory manner, will the consumer just move to an alternative product, or move to an alternative retailer?
- Will the presence of Tesco branded products on shelf in a category further remove the incentive for proprietary brands to invest in category growth, and will the further removal of that support damage category profitability for Tesco? This profitability squeeze appears to be happening currently in many categories being demolished by retailer housebrands, will it just get worse?
This development is a logical evolution of the path retailers have been travelling for some time, the only real question is weather evolution accepts the change in the model, or will the model, having evolved past the point of sustainability, now wither and die in the face of more effective competitive models.
