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...

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...  

Will Google Ever Be Cleverer Than Mumsnet?

Now that networked media offers us infinite choice about the way we slice and dice our questions, queries and requests, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed.  While trying to book a holiday this year for myself, my good lady and two small daughters I found myself with so much information and so many options that I felt like I was playing three-dimensional chess.  That country with this accommodation for price one or this country with that accommodation for price two?  Booking through this service directly with separate flights or that agent all-in?  Whilst this country’s currency is strong against the feeble pound its prices are lower than that country which has a weaker exchange rate but is more expensive.  This resort is a longer flight but the weather is good, while this option is nearer but will there be sun?  And last, but not least, there was my five-year old’s very specific request for a pool with a curly-whirly slide.  After a week or so of research using what felt like about four hundred different websites and services, we had narrowed the choices down to about twenty-nine and I don’t mind admitting that my brain froze.  Camping in Wales, I thought? ‘I’ll look on Mumsnet’, said my good lady.  Now I know that Mumsnet is a vast community and has become the UK’s barometer for what is and is not acceptable in terms of parenting, as well as who should be the next Prime Minister.  However, I wasn’t too sure that it would be much help in solving our cryptomatic holiday quandary.  However, about thirty minutes later I received a link to a resort that I opened with very little enthusiasm only to discover the most perfect place imaginable that met all the criteria and some.  ‘It’s got a good write-up on Mumsnet’, was the message that came with it.  And that I believe is what Clay Shirky is referring to when he says that...

Who Will Survive In The New Networked Media Oceans?

Media companies used to exist in their own separate waters. The newspaper industry was the newspaper industry.  TV was TV and so on and so forth.  Each of these unconnected territories had a few super-predators that were top of their respective food chains, untroubled by the small fry. This was also true of technology and telecoms. However, in recent years, the tectonic plates have shifted to reveal a single networked media ocean into which all media, technology and telecomms companies are gradually being drawn.  The result is a gory realignment of the food chain as these corporate animals, so used to roaming their own backwaters as unchallenged predators, thrash around to establish who will survive.  Some will maintain their status.  Others will be usurped by sleek new species and left to wonder where it all went wrong. The tectonic shift was, of course, driven by rise of the Internet and the Web, and more recently the Moore’s Law-powered growth of online computing power aka the cloud.  The reason the undertow is so powerful is because, increasingly, this new networked media ocean is the sea to which consumers themselves are heading.  But why didn’t every big media and technology beast notice the plates were shifting to create this vast new habitat? Simply because they had...

Marketing's 'Big Bang' Is On The Way

There are some huge technological changes coming down the line that haven’t quite hit the marketing and media industry as yet. However, like massive waves a long way out at sea - they are on the way. Think about the effects of the ‘cloud’, or in other words, the limitless amounts of storage space that the web provides and the speed at which people are filling it up with personal information, creating scrapbooks about every tiny aspect of their lives for clever folk to analyse and decipher. Or the rise of the mobile web driven by new types of groovyware that mean we can log onto digital grapevines wherever we are and snack on a mixture of tips, opinions, offers and suggestions, all personalised to our own specific interests and passions. Or the reality of products being linked to the web and providing information about themselves. All huge waves that are about to crash onto the doorsteps of brands and global businesses seeking to maintain the mainstream audiences that drive their revenues, balance sheets and state-sized market valuations. When trying to understand this kind of epic-style change, I’ve been wondering about other industries that have dealt with similar levels of disruption. The one I keep returning to is the global financial services industry that underwent its so-called ‘Big Bang’ in the middle of the 1980s, with its epicentre in the City of London’s Square Mile. The specific date of the ‘Big Bang’ was the 27th October 1986, an event driven by the Tory government overhauling the way the London Stock Exchange was regulated. The primary changes consisted of...

Digital Grapevines

It can be very difficult sometimes to understand what new technology actually means when it comes to changing the way people lead their lives.  Partly, this is because technology is created by techies.  By which I mean that the clever folk who create new widgets are, naturally, more interested in the gubbins inside the box than what consumers (aka people) are going to actually do with it. This leads to the classic marketing error that the technology industry makes on a continual basis – talking about Features Not Uses.  Nowhere is this viewpoint more prevalent than in the world of smartphones, tablets, mobile and wireless web development. The mobile space has a lot of the standard desktop web jargon but with its own additional lexicon bolted on for good measure.  For instance, Geo-Location, Augmented Reality, BBM, Accelerometer, Bluetooth, QR codes, RFID, or the cryptic, ‘Web of Things’.  And let’s not even get into the world of wireless OS upgrades : Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyon and now Gingerbread.  It's enough to make your Google Goggles glaze over. However, now that smartphones have finally become a part of the mainstream, ten years after the UK’s 3G licence auction, it’s helpful to think what they mean in terms of people's lives beyond Steve Jobs’ bank account and the VC-driven, jargon-heavy dreams of Silicon Valley.  One aspect that’s of interest is that people now are increasingly connected to their friends and family - all the time.  This may sound obvious but it’s a fairly new phenomenon with far-reaching consequences.  People from small villages...

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...

Shiny Shiny Syndrome

Why do brands that spend gazillions and employ teams of econometricians to ascertain the specific nuances of demographic reach and frequency in traditional media throw all of that out of the window when it comes to digital?  I’m sure you’ve been there.  The brand manager who pours over TGI, BARB and planning schedules to wring an extra juicy rating or nudge up an index by a few points throws all caution to the wind when it comes to online channels.  ‘Just make it go viral,’ or ‘we’ll need an app for that,’ is as far as the analysis sometimes goes.  This can lead to the unbecoming site of a stampede of brands running from one web service to another, driven purely by trend and fashion.  A world view I refer to as ‘Shiny Shiny Syndrome' (SSS).  For example, a few years ago, when Second Life was in its ascendency, there was a trend for big brands to open shops in the metaverse.  The fact that Second Life was created by a bunch of people who were trying to get away from the restrictions of what they saw as an overtly commercial First Life was ignored.  Also, the reality that the avatar-driven, bizarre world of cyber-geeks and punks was only accessible to a tiny group of people with super-fast machines and chunky bandwidth was lost in the rush to be first.  More recently a similar view seems to have held sway when it comes to the iPhone or anything that comes from the Whiter, Brighter and Lighter Church where Steve Jobs reigns supreme.  Companies and brands who in the morning were waterboarding their above-the-line media agencies in a vat of latte to drive their TV spots harder, spent the afternoon launching an application into the AppStore, ignoring the fact that none of their customers own, or maybe have even heard of, an iPhone.  Of course, this isn’t true of all marketers.   Many obsess about the latest SEO techniques and the ROI from their Paid Search campaigns. However, SSS is still not an uncommon mindset.   I think the reason for this is an excessive focus on technology.  We’re all prone to losing our sense when High Priest Jobs gets on stage and starts waving his latest creation around.  However, only when you get back to first principles, focusing on your customers and how they are using technology in their lives to find brands they can trust and services that offer good value can you create helpful market insights.

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.