To coincide with the brand’s 75th anniversary, Calor Gas, the bottled gas brand, is rolling out its first TV advertising for a decade. Calor is looking to target an estimated two million UK households which do not have access to mains gas.I was watching the new series of ‘Build a New Life in the Country’ on Five last week, (BMC - what an amazing house they created!) and noticed the sponsorship. I am not sure the Q&A type approach really worked, but Calor will also launch a series of programme idents, as well as a digital marketing campaign to back it up.

In addition, the brand is launching a microsite to support the sponsorship, while ads will appear across Five’s website. (BMC – I wonder what they are spending and why Calor chose Channel 5?).

Jon Tanner, sales and marketing director at Calor, said the new sponsorship was vital in raising awareness of the brand on its 75th anniversary.

I keep coming across more and more sponsorship activity featuring in marketing plans. Are sponsorship, social media and SEO the 3 main marketing initiatives at the moment? What are your thoughts?

I was reviewing sponsorship as a marketing initiative earlier as
Bath Marketing Consultancy is in talks with Cancer Research UK and I remembered that MasterCard is a major sponsor of a number of high profile events such as UEFA Champions League and the Brit Awards.

It also agreed a deal to become the Official Worldwide Partner and official payment system of the 2011 Rugby World Cup back in February 2009 as the last RWC, which saw South Africa crowned world champions for the second time, hosted by France two years ago, attracted a cumulative global audience of more than 4.3bn viewers.

What do you think of corporate sponsorship? Is this an initiative that has yielded the required objectives such as brand recognition?

Drop me an email or leave me a comment.

Before Christmas, Ad regulators upheld more than 700 complaints about an ad for an Olay product after Procter & Gamble admitted that a photo of Twiggy had been airbrushed and were therefore ‘socially irresponsible.’

The ad, for Olay Definity eye illuminator, claimed the product could help women achieve “younger looking eyes”.

The ASA ruling said: “We considered that the post-production re-touching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve.”

P&G said that it was routine practice to use post-production techniques to correct for lighting and other photographic deficiencies, but also admitted there had been some minor retouching around Twiggy’s eyes and had now replaced it with an ad which was not airbrushed.

However, the ASA rejected complaints that the ad was socially irresponsible because the use of post-production techniques could have a negative impact on people’s perceptions of their own body image.

It said: “We concluded that, in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience.”

Bath Marketing still think she looks amazing airbrushed or not!

Thoughts on Choosing Customer Service Software

The most important thing to remember when selecting Customer Service software is to choose an offering that supports your company’s brand perception. It is not the goal for all companies to offer the most ideal customer experience that vendors try to sell you. For example, the expectations of users of a discount airline is not “over-the-top” service, but service that is streamlined, and heavily reliant on web self-service and email. On the other hand, a luxury retailer’s service offering is very different – It should be white-gloved service, reliant on personal contact that is tailored for a particular customer.

In evaluating Customer Service software you must also understand your customer’s demographics, and their communication channel requirements as baby boomers for example, have very different communication needs that the more tech savvy Generation Xers and Y’s. Finally, you need to understand the communication channel requirements that your company can afford as channel costs differ widely. Web-self service and email costs are typically a fraction of those for the “live assist” channels of chat and phone. Irrespective of the communication channels that you can support now, you must architect your offering so that channels are not siloed, that corporate knowledge is shared and that alternate channels can be added at a later time as the need arises.

Once your Customer Service system is implemented, you need to measure its efficacy and tune it using a balanced scorecard approach. You need to measure key performance indicators – for example, the cost of delivering customer service against the satisfaction of your customer base, the compliance of agents to company policy and generated revenue. These measures then need to be mapped to the overall customer perception of your company to ensure that the chosen Customer Service systems are supporting and not eroding your brand image. And finally, you need to be agile enough to change your service offering based on customer feedback and the gathered metrics.

More than four out of five (84 percent) chief marketing officers (CMOs) allocate less than ten percent of their budgets to experimenting through social media and non-traditional communications channels, with more than half (55 percent) allocating just five percent or less, according to a study by The CMO Club and Hill & Knowlton released today. By contrast, according to a recent study(1), the number of adult Internet users who have profiles on social networks quadrupled to 35 percent in 2008, from eight percent in 2005.

Our research shows that seven out of ten CMOs say they have medium or high levels of comfort in dealing with non-traditional media, yet few are adopting these strategies for their own brands, missing out on learning from and contributing to the conversations that are taking place online.

“Marketing used to be a linear process, with a discussion flowing from the CMO to the target audience. In today’s digital age, communication has evolved into a new model that requires active listening and engaging in numerous conversations,” said Pete Krainik, CEO, The CMO Club. “CMOs are finding the additions to the job more challenging and the need to lead beyond the marketing department is critical for their success.”

Adopting social media policies

According to a survey of its members, three out of ten (29 percent) of CMOs report having a social media policy that is widely adhered to within their company and a further 31 percent are currently developing a policy. Implementing these policies is proving to be a challenge, with just over a quarter (26 percent) of CMOs stating they have a policy but it is not complied with within their companies.

“Bloggers are the new media trendsetters/reviewers for products and services, a trusted voice by those who follow their posts,” said CMO Club member Ted Rubin, chief marketing officer, e.l.f. Cosmetics. “If you empower these consumers to evangelize your brand, establish yourself as a trusted source and give them the tools, they will run with it and lend you their credibility.”

Added member Erin Hintz, vice president, worldwide consumer marketing, Symantec Corporation, “While the social media world is new territory for all companies, we already have some best practices with our Norton brand that many CMOs can glean from. Our company has striven to deliver transparency in this space and we work hard to ensure employees understand their role and responsibility.”

Lack of integration

CMOs report a lack of managing or interacting closely with departments within their businesses and, more importantly, with those responsible for communicating with key audiences. Nearly half of all CMOs questioned (48 percent) said they have no formal interaction with the department responsible for NGOs. More than a third (39 percent) do not formally liaise with their investor relations departments, and only around a fifth (22 percent) do collaborate with those responsible for liaising with financial analysts.

“I have found that in the past several years, my job has required greater collaboration with colleagues running other departments to create a more unified brand message to all of our audiences, both external and internal,” said member Kent Huffman, chief marketing officer, BearCom Wireless. “Today, brand and reputation go hand-in-hand, and no company can afford not to work seamlessly as a team.”

Gauging stakeholder sentiment

The majority of CMOs (95 percent) formally track the attitudes or opinions of their customers to their brands, falling to seven out of ten (69 percent) among potential customers. Other non-revenue generating stakeholders take second priority: four out of five CMOs (84 percent) do not gauge the opinions of NGOs; 59 percent do not gauge the general public, and a third (32 percent) do not formally gauge sentiment among their employees.

“The marketers’ job is increasingly challenging and many CMOs still are learning how to engage audiences beyond their customers. Everyone is an influencer in today’s marketplace,” said MaryLee Sachs, US chairman and worldwide director, marketing communications, Hill & Knowlton. “Building advocacy by engaging all audiences can lend a tremendous amount of credibility to any marketing program. A holistic approach helps forge new paths to customers, generating brand loyalty and building critical relationships.”

Brand alignment

Currently, only one out of ten CMOs utilize a digital dashboard to disseminate branding or customer data internally through a “real-time” delivery method, while 44 percent of CMOs report using and sharing this data formally on a quarterly or semi-annual basis.

“As we experience this business transformation, CMOs are seeing that they need to focus on three key areas in order to maintain relevancy with their customers and consumers,” said Krainik. “First, expanding internal collaboration is essential; second, timeliness of monitoring and sharing customer data is critical – they must move quicker; and finally broadening their perspectives and formally engaging new external stakeholders is imperative.

I frequent two local coffee shops in this college town, one part of a regional chain that’s been around for many years, and the other a new franchise belonging to a national chain (not Starbucks, which is simply not for me). I enjoy spending a little time each morning at either one before work, charging up for the day. But both of them have given me reason recently to think about the different faces businesses show to their various constituencies, and how that can create brand identity problems. In the first case, I noticed a sign in one of the shops, obviously directed at the baristas, but easily visible to ordering customers, exhorting the former to “upsell” the latter on an item more expensive than whatever they had asked for. In the second case, I learned from a new employee at the other shop that she had been trained that her goal at the counter was to make the customer feel guilty about patronizing the competition. What struck me about both of these tidbits is that (despite the semivisible placement of the upsell sign) they represented formal communications to employees that customers are not intended to hear. In and of itself, that’s fine. An employer has a different relationship with her workers than she does with her clientele. It’s not appropriate for me as a patron to hear the staff getting reprimanded for not cleaning up after last night’s shift. But this is different. It’s a kind of subterfuge that, once out of the bag, can only result in dissonance in customer relations. It’s a misalignment of the values of the enterprise, and stands in the way of having everyone on the same brand page.

For coffee shops, the problem is simplified. They have a small number of constituencies: customers, a handful of employees, suppliers, a loan officer, a landlord — that may be it. But for a large university, the mix is more complicated. We have a variety of distinct types of students, a large and varied payroll, faculty, trustees, legislators, international partnerships, you name it. Keeping track of the faces you show to all these different groups is a huge task even if you don’t intentionally prevaricate. The answer lies in spending the time and effort to get to know who you are — through a dedicated brand identity audit — and presenting that identity confidently and consistently to everyone.

For a good resource on alignment in the branding of higher education, I recommend Rex Whisman’s Brand Champions Blog.

Something wonderfully strange has happened to Air New Zealand – they’ve developed a personality! Following hot on the heels of their nothing to hide ads, comes their bare essentials in-flight safety briefing. I often rave about VirginBlue adding personality to their safety briefings, but AirNZ have successfully stripped away almost everything except the personality!

This is a great example of brand authenticity. They’ve taken what is already a catchy ad campaign and embeded it into their service proposition. The behind the scenes video shows how the campaign has engaged the brave staff in the ad, and my experience last weekend confirmed it (minus the body paint). The staff on my flight from Auckland seemed to be having more fun, the announcements felt less scripted, and they were giving out double helpings of cookies/lollie mix as standard (always a winner for me).

The customers are getting in on the act too, with a website to let them confess their own ‘nothing to hide’ stories. Putting the advert, safety video and bloopers on YouTube has added to the buzz, with overseas media like the NY Times and Daily Telegraph sharing the story.

The outcome has been game-changing. Airlines regularly struggle to get even a captive audience to watch the safety briefings. Yet AirNZ have already gained  3.5 million armchair viewers! Now that’s world-class thinking!

Early in my career, I had to break down and buy a decent pair of dress pants for meetings.  I walked out of a prominent men’s store the proud owner of a pair of pleated wool trousers.  But not just pleated, or even double pleated: those beauties were triple pleated.  Further, the pleats were inverted.  Yes, for that brief moment in the era of Crockett and Tubbs, I owned it.

Of course in today’s flat-fronted times, such effusively-extravagant bunching of fabric around a male waist ranks as only slightly less abysmal on the “I’ve Quit Trying” fashion scale than say a home made Snuggie.  Because fashions change in dizzying, arbitrary ways, and that sometimes costs you a pair of perfectly functional pants.  

Changing fashions apply to our business as well.  Reviewing my TV reel, anyone can chart my forays into Morphing Mania, the Tony Scott Chocolate Filtered Phase, the CG-Enhanced Animals Era, the ‘I Loved Napoleon Dynamite‘ Period…

Today however, fashion whims extend beyond the obvious realm of advertising creativity to advertising’s less obvious creative realm of media and platforms.  Today’s new thinkers denounce the time-honored Interruptive advertising model as hopelessly dated, a relic of an earlier era of one way communication.  And to a certain extent, I agree.  Newer notions of Brand Alignment or Brand Bridging that seek to create contextual empathy with consumers as they connect them to or affiliate them with our brands seem much more forward-thinking and thus earn millions of words in industry press and blogs.  We need to encourage this kind of innovation, to re-imagine where and when and how we can engage consumers in meaningful ways.  Often, this calls for the greatest acts of creativity in our workday.

But unlike the rigid world of haute couture, where the ‘in’ stands rigidly defined and the ‘out’ lies hopelessly marginalized, most advertisers should avoid sweeping judgments. Because like it or not, old fashioned or not, irritating or not…the interruptive model still works.  Television still works.  Radio still works.  Transit posters still work.  The old interruptive model even works in new media iterations like pre-rolls and page take-overs.  As do new platforms like social networking and experience marketing.

Opinion leaders in advertising need agendas, they require outspoken, inflamed ideologies to champion.  Such ivory tower conceits draw readers and fill seminar seats.  But practically speaking, down in the actual trenches of commerce, in our imperfect workaday world that lies thick with the muck of situational decision-making and budgets compromised on both time and money, we don’t face an either/or decision regarding ad models; it’s both/and.  Just like we don’t face an either/or decision regarding creative mediums; it too is both/and.

It’s convergence.  These days, it’s all convergence.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

A Sony executive once put, the major difference between a Sony television and others is solely the design. Certainly didn’t add the story each brand tells, as well as sales people at the buying decision moment and many other factors. True that quality is often apparently equal at the sense of a normal consumer, but when brands simply forget their marketing at the point-of-sale is something that amazes me.

In this case I mention what I realized at a electronics store other day. Some brands such as Apple, correctly invest in making product videos and carefully positioning them at key points inside the store. Other brands, correctly put their own product videos at their own television set’s making it obviously aligned, like Aquos by Sharp presenting images from ocean life (curiously not in the picture example above). Worst then becomes when a television set displays other brand product videos.

In a very quick analysis on primary perceptions, a corporate video with a Samsung logo on the top displaying quality images and wonderful scenarios makes people think it is a Samsung television – the eyes first catch the glimpse of the TV screen, not the small logo at their base. Then when consumer realizes that this same TV is a Philips one, their first impression was already recorded and the brain previously started automatically to process the brand value plus its associations, leaving this next perception to a corner where is going to be more hard to change, specially to impact. If you want to give your competitors an advantage, follow the example above, if you want to earn yourself an advantage at a key moment where purchasing decisions take place, invest in marketing at the point-of-sale rather than many mass market waste tactics.

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One topic that has interested me for years is the concept of brand alignment.   Think about the brand promise made by any particular company . . . United Airlines tell us to “Fly the friendly skies.”   Home Depot says, “You can do it, we can help.”   Now think about whether your experience with that company lives up to its brand promise.  Has your flying experience been friendly?  Have you gotten help the last time you went to this particular store? 

Firms often spend a lot of time and money communicating their brand message to the public, but little effort making sure that their employees get it.  This disconnect is a significant problem since it’s the employees who actually interface with the public, consumers, and clients.  Author, speaker, and humorist Elizabeth Freedman provides some great suggestions for how to help employees internalize your company’s brand in her article Building the Brand from Within.

In future posts I’ll discuss many more of the factors that contribute to brand alignment (or misalignment).

One of the best articles that I have read in a long time is on User Generated content and the future of Online Business in the latest Inc. magazine article on Threadless, a user-generated t-shirt company from Chicago. In it they describe a model currently being analyzed by the Harvard Business School as the future of online business and possibly business as a whole.

As the current generation of social media savvy consumers evolves from myspace, facebook and twitter to embrace mobile media and content on-demand, very soon (if you haven’t noticed already) we will begin seeing a major shift in how content is produced and requested by audiences.

While many large corporations have already jumped on the band wagon and started blogging or hiring ad agencies to produce blog worthy videos for viral marketing campaigns via YouTube combined with innovative micro sites, already they have lost major footing and decreased their brand equity by missing one critical component: Truth.

The key to successful user-generated content, will lie in brand alignment and authenticity. Telling the truth with regards to your brand, who created your WOMMA campaign and what your intentions are. No longer, will traditional advertising or corporate entities be allowed to hide behind empty promises as we enter a generation of savvy consumers ready to do the online research, google the product and find out what other consumers are saying.

The truly successful online business that creates a model of flexibility and open source collaboration, while not able to control the process, may end up creating an online thinktank capable of producing results 10x better than a traditional corporate structure. It is entirely possible that in this virtual workforce future, we will all be creators, designers and inventors collaborating with one another to solve commercial and global problems in real-time on a scale never seen before.

Hill is president and owner of Incitrio, a boutique branding agency located in Sorrento Valley.

In a blog post meant for free-lancers, Dave Navarro suggests that most don’t know the answers to the following questions:

1. Why Do You Enjoy Being My Customer?
2. What Else Do You Wish My Business Did?
3. Who should you tell about my business?

It’s not just free-lancer who cannot answer these questions. It’s many, many businesses. And many of those that can provide answers have not amalgamated the information with their marketing strategy.

We are all familiar with the “elevator speech,” those carefully crafted sentences that organically relay important messages about our business. Sometimes we work so hard to craft them, we forget about the main message. Ourselves. Our audience is going to pay much more attention to our personal brand than the elevator speech, no matter how eloquent. Here are four simple, but often overlooked elements of personal branding that will make your elevator speech resonate.

1. How do you look? Appropriateness is the obvious guideline here. Make sure you have on the right clothes and are appropriately groomed for the occasion. Otherwise, the dissonance in your brand will kill your message.

2. How do you smell? I think that the best place to be is in the center of the spectrum, odorless. If you stink, that’s a no-duh turn off. If you are drenched in cologne, you might impress some people, but you run the risk of offending others. Why take the chance?

3. Practice the speech so that it’s completely you. Change the words to fit your personality. Actors do it all the time. The last thing you want to do is recite.

4. Engage your listeners. Don’t preach. Share. If your speech sounds too much like a commercial, fix it to sound like more like you are sharing information. Use stories or be like a journalist and get put information in a quote. (“I have a customer who wants us to train her husband in being on time…”)

Ultimately, you are the message. You are being instabranded no matter what. Do your best to make sure that your audience is building the right kind of mind space about your personal brand.

Posted by Harry Chittenden

I recently saved a couple of articles on current thinking in psychology. While neither is on branding, they both demonstrate first how brands are constructed in the mind and secondly how the mind uses brands to make decisions.

Scientific American published an extensive article by Phillip E. Ross called “The Expert Mind.” The theme of the article is that experts, like chess masters, are mostly made, not born. They gain their expertise through “effortful” study. In other words they are highly motivated to learn a highly complex subject.

Ross surmises that the mind learns in “chunks.” Chunks are big identifiable collections of information that the mind can calculate in a single stroke rather than deal with each individual piece of information separately. He cites this example:

Take the sentence “Mary had a little lamb.” The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one’s knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.

Isn’t one of our goals in branding to do what we can to organize for the customer the information about the brand into a usable, attractive chunk. Couldn’t you characterize “favorable impression in the customer’s mind” as a happy chunk?

When the customer is ready to make a decision about the brand, he takes the chunk from his memory and brings it to his conscience mind for analysis. Right? Well, probably not. Johnjoe McFadden in Guardian says that the conscience mind rarely gets involved with complicated decisions.

He tells of an experiment in which an experimenter named Libet asked subjects

…to perform a simple task, eg wiggle their little finger, at a time of their own choosing, and measured accompanying brain activity. Surprisingly, Libet could detect brain activity that predicted imminent finger wiggling nearly half a second before the subjects were aware they had decided to wiggle their finger!

We think that we make decisions when in fact the decision has already been made by our subconscious! The mind, faced with a decision, withdraws the chunks it needs, makes the decision and then shares it with the conscience mind.

Moreover, each time a customer has an encounter with the brand the chunk is modified to accommodate for the new experience.

Branding lesson: know what the brand’s chunk is and then work hard to make coherent, attractive contributions to your customer’s chunk, both in marketing and more important in serving his or her needs.