Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Brand Conversations – Is Anyone Listening? (And If So, Do They Care?)

It can be quite hard to be clear about the effect social media has had on brands and the broader marketing landscape.  Some people would have you believe that the online global conversation that social media has unleashed is a revolution that brands simply have to be involved in if they are to stay relevant.  Others say it's only really significant within specific, albeit important, areas of marketing such as customer service.  Either way, there can be no doubt that social media in its many guises has changed people's habits and expectations and therefore it remains an area of ongoing fascination for brands who pride themselves on being close to their consumers and the marketplace.  However, for such brands to join the conversation in a credible way...

Does Fail-Fast Make Sense For Big Brands?

‘Fail-Fast’ is a software development mantra that has slowly permeated into other areas of the commercial world.  However, it doesn’t translate to mainstream marketing – yet.  The term is bandied around a good deal these days but basically refers to a project management style where, instead of excessive pre-planning, an idea is quickly put into practice and monitored closely.  The focus is on the continuous examination of performance and smart, speedy reaction to the marketplace.  In light of poor results, the aim is to iterate, change direction (sometimes euphemistically known as ‘pivoting’) or kill off the project altogether.  Thereby preventing long, drawn-out 'zombie' projects that suck up valuable resources before anyone notices they have joined the walking dead.  Crucially, to work effectively Fail-Fast requires an environment of constant, real-time feedback loops - which is exactly what you get when launching new initiatives, for example applications, onto the web or into purely digital media.  However, most brand marketing environments don’t look anything like this.  They remain approximations of what might be happening, in contrast to networked and digital media that show what is actually happening.  For instance, in the UK, the audience, cost and efficacy of TV advertising is determined by the British Audience Research Board (BARB) and its Television Measurement Service which is a panel composed of 5,100 homes.  Far from being a software-driven mirror of actual events, BARB's panel doesn’t measure...

That Distant Rumble Is Big Data

‘Big Data’ is the phrase of the moment in tech circles which probably means it will be appearing on the to-do lists of marketing folk soon.  The expression refers mainly to the oceans of information being poured continuously onto the open web and social networks by ever more connected consumers (aka people).  This tsunami comes in the shape of comments, images, scans, tweets, likes, views, posts, videos and a kaleidoscope of other digital expressions.  However, whilst people's everyday lives are providing a big piece of the pie, the scope of Big Data goes much further.  Less obvious but just as vast are the intelligence flows that stem from our web browsing behaviour or location signals from smartphones.  Other component parts include corporations publishing market information , governments opening up public data for others to use, or vast social platforms that encourage smart developers to weave new applications and services.  The result is a share-and-compare economy where people, companies and organisations trade digital views, opinions and information in order to help make decisions - commercial or otherwise.  As ever, this creates challenges and opportunities for marketing and brand folk.  But there’s no shortage...

What's The New Normal For Big Brands?

What's the ‘New Normal’ for global brands?  By which I mean that following the collapse of global finance, the ensuing reshuffle of the world’s powerhouse economies and rapid growth of vast technological platforms, what do global brands care about and to which companies and sectors are they turning for assistance? I keep returning to three thoughts. Firstly, that corporations and brand-owners’ aims haven’t really changed a great deal. They want the same business outcomes, such as awareness, sales, loyalty and product differentiation, that create and support Mega-Brands and the shareholder dividends that follow. Secondly, media and marketing remains in the throes of huge waves of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter alluringly called ‘creative destruction’; the painful process by which one economic order is gradually replaced by another.  In the context of media and marketing, creative destruction has come in the form of digital IP technology breaking open the barriers between previously separate industries to create a single global platform upon which vast new networked media oceans surge.  Finally, most global corporates have been quietly shifting their investments into fast-growing markets for years. Now, as growth falters in Europe and the US, these booming economies seem to promise a golden future. Many such as Brazil, India, China and Indonesia see the creative destruction of technology, media and telecomms as a welcome opportunity. They invest enthusiastically in new...  

When The Big Idea Becomes Marketing's Big Problem

A few years ago I sat in the office of a much-admired Digital Creative Director when a call came through from the mega-media shop that his agency was linked with via its global network.  When the DCD saw the number flash up his shoulders slumped and he rushed around to find someone to answer the call and say he wasn’t available. He then switched his mobile off and we sped from the building for a long lunch, over which he explained his reaction.  For the best part of five years he’d been taking those calls and a pattern had been established that he could no longer bear.  It went something along the lines of the media powerhouse explaining they’d had a terrific brief from a client at MegaCorp and it needed some digital input.  However, it would then emerge that the brief had already been answered and the client had bought a concept in the shape of an above-the-line campaign.  So the digital agency was actually being brought into the process a few months after the brief had landed and was being asked to provide a digital execution of a TV spot.  “Sometimes they just say, ‘make it go viral’”, said the DCD with the look of someone who’s been given a plate of old mutton and asked to give it a lamb makeover.  I was reminded of this conversation a few weeks ago whilst talking to a creative team from a widely-regarded digital agency, also associated with a large parent network. One of them half-joked that...

Get In When It's Messy

As Gordon Moore’s Law continues to drive cycles of technological development, it can be tempting for marketing folk to wait until the resulting merry-go-round has stopped before trying to get on. However, in reality, if you choose to wait you may well find Silicon Valley’s carousel just keeps on spinning.   My own shorthand for this is that, when it comes to understanding developments in networked media, it’s best to get in when it’s messy.   When the web service or innovation is in the early days and the rules are being written.   That way you get to understand the reality of a new development and the ideas behind it, rather than waiting for someone else to write up the best practice manual.   For example, when blogging began to makes its presence felt within media and marketing circles, it was largely dismissed as a pastime for the lonely and the confused.   What possible benefit could come from letting readers actually give you their opinions? ‘My readers are like the cast from the bar in Star Wars,’ a journalist once told me, ‘why would I want to speak to them?’, he exclaimed.  This type of viewpoint led to people who wrote blogs being categorised, initially, by the marketing industry as a group suffering from rage issues and bad breath - regardless of what they were blogging about.   For some, the ‘blogosphere’ became shorthand for a modern version of the ‘great unwashed’.  That has obviously all now changed, and even the most erudite commentators employ blogs as their personal platforms where they can interact with enthusiastic and well-informed readers.   In short, those who got into blogging when it was messy benefited from their early experience.   Twitter was a similar example where it was best to hold your nose and jump in when it was messy, learning from experience, rather than ranting about the evils of people talking to each other in a 140-character format.   Just a few hours on Twitter in its early days revealed it to be a promising, accessible tool for creating communities of people who were organising themselves around their passions.   Today, of course, no marketing exec worth their latte would suggest Twitter is a waste of time.   And the platform has gone onto to become a love-in for celebs and media players around the world.  Then there was Facebook, that initially appeared to be a WASP-driven club for American frats sharing holiday stories about the Hamptons and their latest drinking escapades.   However, just investing a little attention...

Why Earn When You Can Pay?

It’s been five years since I wrote a manifesto called, 'What Is Open Source Marketing?' where I tried to hint at a different view of media based on the trends emerging at the time.  My main suggestion was that the, ‘love affair between big brands and mainstream media is over,’ and that the Open Source Movement gave an idea about where we might all be heading.  Namely, into a people-powered, super-collaborative world where only the only way to garner meaningful attention was to offer channels through which people could participate with your brand.  Unsurprisingly, some of these observations proved to be correct while others were overblown.  Vast open networks where people can collaborate in whichever way they wish have miraculously appeared.  However, TV networks remain just as powerful, albeit without some of the kudos, and have largely resisted any change - to date.  Meanwhile, the marketing industry has roadtested a gazillion 'open' campaigns, with varying degrees of success.  On the positive side there is the most overly-used, yet still rather dreamy, example of marketing openness, Nike+, a largely open platform where people upload detailed personal information about their running lives to a massive American corporation in exchange for community.  The benefits of ‘openness’ to the sports giant have been considerable as explained by Nike-dude Roberto Tagliabue shortly after its launch: 'As of February, 2008, Nike+ members have run over 50,000,000 miles, logged over 14,000,000 runs and issued over 450,000 challenges. We created the world’s largest running club at nikeplus.com. 40% of community members who didn’t own Nike+ ended up buying. That is pretty tangible.'  And on the less splendid side, there is Walmart’s social network - The Hub.  Only ten weeks after the big launch, the site was shut down after a poor reception because it seemed no one wanted to give this other massive American corporation any information about themselves at all.  (In fact I don’t think there’s any mystery here.  The Nike brand was already part of grassroots running communities everywhere, whereas Walmart were seen to be paying lip service).  Which all begs the question why do some open projects work and some do not?  Clearly there has been no shortage of debate on this subject online over the past few years.  However, I thought the blog post by Jono at Mozilla Labs offered a succinct critique - ‘Openness is a lot of work’.  He observes that overuse of the ‘open’ label has meant that, ‘people are starting to attribute near-magical powers to it.'  Furthermore, 'Openness is a policy choice, not a replacement for old-fashioned hard work. I happen to think it’s a good policy choice in many cases: An organization that is open to outside ideas and criticism will learn faster about its own mistakes. It can build more trusting relationships with its users, because it doesn’t have to keep secrets. It attracts self-motivated contributors, and it get more diversity of viewpoints. There’s that old mantra about how, ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’”.  Jono then decries the rise of some marketing crowdsourcers who assume that just the act of setting up a blog will bring Nike+ style benefits to any project, when the more likely outcome is virtual tumbleweed and awkward client briefings as an analysis of the participants reveals a list of agency friends and family.  ‘Successful open organizations aren’t just unorganized mobs,’ he notes. However, it seems that lessons are being learnt. I put up a Tweet about Jono’s blog post this week and a very lively, little meme began, powered by people who seemed all too well aware, maybe after difficult experiences in the area, of the challenges that ‘openness’ represents for a marketing industry that still prefers to pay than earn.

We All Love The Bazaar Now

Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar remains one of the most powerful analogies for the world of media and marketing today. In case you aren’t familiar with Raymond’s work, he explained how in the world of software design, for many years, engineers spent long periods locked away creating huge operating systems in institutional settings that were then wheeled out into the real world for people to admire and to obey.  However, the open source movement changed all that with online systems much more like global street bazaars allowing programmers to gather in informal networks and collaborate on technical projects in an organic manner, adding a little stitch here and a patch there, and always feeding their knowledge back into the main market, which remained forever in public ownership.  For many years Big Brands operated in exactly the manner of Raymond's Cathedrals, building towering spires that required Brand Architects and Guardians to maintain their sanctity.  However, in the shadows of these vast edifices grew global online Bazaars made up of people who found they could organise themselves around their passions, as oppose to the demographical pews ordained by the marketeers.  And gradually the flocks flocked out of the Mainstream Media Cathedrals into the hustle-and-bustle of these online markets.  However, this was just the beginning and people quickly realised that they could not only hang out in the Bazaars but could also bring their own soapboxes along in the shape of blogs.  And eventually, as these little soapboxes grew into giant social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, the Bazaar morphed into a global conversation.  One where people trashed the Big Brand Cathedrals as they pleased, or even helped build new ones, ignoring the pained grimaces of the Brand Guardians and Architects who could only see desecration wherever they looked.  However, that’s now all changed.  Big Brands have come our from behind their lecterns and are fully signed-up...

Nothing New Under The Sun

For a long time the marketing industry closed its eyes to the impact of networked media.  And while it looked the other way, Messrs Brin & Page ate its lunch and built the largest media company in the world.  Over the last year or so, however, possibly because of the Google experience, the marketing industry has done a U-turn and the consensus is now that the world has indeed changed forever.  So which view is right?  Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere in between.  A thread of my client work over the last few years has been challenging the notion that the maturing web means we should forget everything we’ve ever known and start again.  Forget the idea of brands, stop using TV as a medium, assume that the customer has morphed into a new type of being, accept that complete transparency is the only choice, believe that the only workable price point is free.  Only a total reboot will do, some claim.  However, this binary view of the world overlooks that while much has changed, more has stayed the same.  Corporations are still operating in markets where consumers are looking for value and trustworthy suppliers.  People are still motivated by the same needs – keeping up with the Jones’, caring for their families, exploring the world, self-expression, ambition, fun.  It’s just that the markets they use to find satisfaction have been rewired. ‘The problems which are not changing are human problems - which remain the same,’ noted Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google last year.  Take for instance, the social net de jour - Chatroulette.  It’s a perfect example of the many new wonderful and unexpected things that are emerging as a result of open networked media and widespread broadband access.  Built by an individual, using powerful distributed technology that now sits in bedrooms all around the world, it offers a P2P-experience that undermines traditional views of private and public identity and drives new types of social interaction.  And what is this remarkable bleeding-edge innovation used for?  Letting young men check out hot girls!  Whizzy new kit, same old motivations.  However, that's not to underestimate the ingenuity and scale of the new markets that people will build when they find their needs unmet.  I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Rushkoff last week and hear him speak about his belief that...

Time To Spread The Love (Not Blow Your Wad)

With the mind-boggling degree of innovation occurring in digital technology and networked media, it’s very easy to forget that, in commercial terms, we are still only talking about markets. And markets are still just made up of people.  The other commercial task that hasn’t changed is the need to deploy resources to work within the marketplace to realise specific aims effectively.  Such as building sales and keeping shareholders content.  What is changing, as every marketeer worth his Cluetrain now knows, is the nature of that marketplace.  However, these changes are still yet to be fully reflected in the marketing industry because the most important cog of the business - media finance - continues to lag the trends driving networked markets.  Big marketing shekels remain driven by two words – reach and frequency.  An approach akin to asking as many people as possible out on a date until one or more of them falls for the smooth new chat-up line.  And this view of the world is all about size.  Bigger.  Louder.  Harder.  The problem is that in the new marketplace this approach doesn't build relationships - it wrecks them.  Of course, awareness is absolutely vital for any brand, particularly a new one.  And there’s always going to be a need to get out the big guns out and fire away at the marketplace to remind the world that a brand still means business.  But consumers (aka people) are fed up with brands only offering them a one-night stand, time after time.  Just think about the financial services industry where enticing offers are sprayed around, only for the love to be slowly withdrawn once the deal is done.  The bank’s rate of interest gets lower and lower until it just fizzles away and the corporate desire for new accounts on the bedpost grows.  Which leaves consumers more cynical and determined to stay footloose.  Or to become ‘rate tarts’ as they are tellingly known by the industry.  For brands to break this Tiger Woods lifestyle, they have to change not only their ways but also, crucially, their means.  And that means a very serious redistribution of their cash.  For if a corporate or brand is only in town occasionally for a night out on the campaigning tiles its long-term reputation suffers.  These days consumers see reliable brands as being there for them 24x7 - when they need the help and support.  And how can a brand do that if it spends its marketing wad on the first night?  It’s not easy changing long-standing behaviour.  But unless brands spread their love, attention and cash throughout the year, and are able to hold some back to respond to people's demands, no one will believe their clever words and lovely promises.  In the world of marketing and brands, the size of your wad still counts.  But in marketplaces driven by networked media, people are more interested than ever before in how you use it.