Engaging advocates - Yahoo! Summit
Yesterday I went along to a Yahoo Summit, which was based around a new study they have released (together with ComScore) on Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media. (I’d love to link to an online version but can’t find one).
However, before we got to the meet of the day (numbers, lots of numbers) we had a Keynote speech from Scott Bedbury, author of A New Brand World. Scott was worked for Nike and Starbucks, two companies whose brand marketing push way over their weight resulting in a high level of influence. Working his way through a well practised speech, Scott showed us some good and bad steps in the way those brands built themselves up. here’s key points from his talk. (much of this is in the book)
- every brand has promises and values. As a brand and a company you are accountable for meeting that promise, meeting those expectations. For a publically traded company, this includes financial promises but those aren’t everything.
- You have to find the HIGHEST common denominators for your marketing. especially with a global brand. Product is a starting point - what does it mean to people. For Starbucks, the challenge was not about the coffee. With training and the right equipment anyone can make the coffee and can make it the same in every place. the challenge was how would the brand make you FEEL. And once they identified that, all decisions were driven from that core insight. For Starbucks, it is about being the third place; that place outside of home and work where you feel comfortable. They used words like oasis, relationships, learning, spiritual, laughter to describe the third place. (Interestingly, Starbucks is the number 1 place for first dates in the US). The first couch in a Starbucks was against the policies current at the time - they were too afraid people would linger.
- Great brands connect to something that is timeless and meaningful. They connect to something that is bigger than the company and profit.
- Most marketing is unremarkable (a clear Seth Godin reference). To be unremarkable you need to pretest a lot, go through committees, be safe, remove the possibility of blame. Neither Starbucks nor Nike tested a lot. They did a lot of research, gathered a lot of info and customer insights but on the advertising, they just went for it, tried new things.
- Three key things are RELEVANCY, CREATIVITY and EMOTIONAL CONNECTION.
- In 1987 when he started, Nike were not in a good place. 92% of their revenues were from athletic men, they were not doing too good. W&K were briefed to do a new ad, with the focus on the product. Instead, they took a risk and came back with Revolution.
- There were no storyboards, just a lot of film students doing action shots, with most people in the ad being agency or Nike employees. The ad cost $900k, with a $2.8M media spend. Impact was a greater driver than frequency.
- Next up was Walt Stack, a far warmer and humorous approach to doing the men running ad. This was followed up by an ad focusing on women, Joanne Enrst imploring women to just get out and do all kinds of sports to keep fit and trim. Unfortunately the end line on this one (’don’t eat like a pig’) caused a lot of issues and led Nike to re-evaluate their approach to the women’s market. The Jock strap superbowl ad took a different approach - but still failed. Within Nike, there was an attitude of being allowed to make mistakes as a requirement for meaningful innovation, so they did not fire W&K but worked with them to improve. In fact they appointed the 45 strong agency to be the global agency, so the realtionship must have been working.
- Over 300 ads were done, with many different executions. But everything came from the same place. And that goes for when you do online. You can’t have jarring shifts in tone and message when you move into this channel, it needs to fit in with everything else you are doing.
- The end game you are after is passionate brand advocates both within and outwith your company. Not just the dollars. You have to demonstrate a little brand humanity. You have to show something unique and remarkable. To demonstrate this, Scott showed us the Nike Morning after/y2k commercial. Developed after he had left, it made him proud of the team he had developed there.
He then opened up to questions. the first: How did you role out the Starbucks idea internally? the video describing the idea was shown first at a key manager meeting - and to every new employee for the next five years. One comment after the first showing was that it reminded them of how they were in the business of serving people, not coffee. This idea was behind all of the future business decisions - what was the brand experience and how do you continue to serve people. Now you have a team of about 100 looking after the music, all to bring the brand experience to life.
All in all, a superb talk which spoke to a lot of what i believe in. Marketing is more than just getting the message out about the brilliance of your product. Even if it is the best in the world, it still has to have a story behind it, an experience that people can believe in, a way to tap into the emotions. And following up the intro, we moved into the study about whay getting people to believe and advocate your brand is better of the bottom line profit.
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POSTED IN: Branding, Engaging the Customer
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