A case study of how wrong social media can go is when a Guardian reporter recently set up a Twitter account in the name of Shippam’s Paste. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/shippams-paste-ben-twitter-shippamspaste Purporting to be a new marketing intern, “Ben’s” naïve tweets displayed his company master’s voice telling him what to do rather than listening to and engaging with his audience. Whilst this has, and will continue to become, an iconic case study, it is true of so many brands and companies up and down the country who “do” social media because they’ve been told to (by someone looking to sell a ‘how to’ course), because they perceive it as free (whoever said ‘time is money’) and/or because they (or their kids) want them to be seen as ‘cool’!

Social media in business is no different to any other marketing communication channel in that it has to be used as part of an overall strategy. You wouldn’t put up a 48 sheet poster on the A4 on a whim or take out a double page spread in the Daily Mail so why on earth do you put you and your company’s message out into the world via social media without first going through the marketing fundamentals:

• Who am I?
• What do I / my brand stand for?
• Who do I want to talk to?
• Where can I find them?

If the answer is that the right place for your brand to engage with its audience is via social media (and defining which branch of social media as they do NOT all do the same job) then fine. Set a strategy, walk your walk and talk your talk and you should win through. But if you sell technical products or services to multinational conglomerates across the other side of the world, posting a status update on Facebook might not do it for you!

Engaging in social media takes resource commitment. There’s nothing worse than a brand that puts itself out there and says it wants to engage with people… and then doesn’t. If people don’t like what you do, don’t take the comment down or cover it up (unless it’s defamatory), admit your mistake and show how you resolved the problem. A customer who has a complaint properly dealt with is still likely to continue to be a customer and others will be impressed by your honesty. If someone poses a question it must be answered quickly – within an hour, not a week. When suggestions are offered, don’t just dismiss them out of hand, engage with the person as to what you can and can’t do with the idea, always giving reasons. Remember, whatever you say id there for all to see and will remain accessible for a long time so it needs to always be in keeping with your brand strategy and what you stand for.

I looked up an online dictionary definition of ‘social media’ and it said, “forms of electronic communication (as web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).” NO IT ISN’T! They are using “sharing” in much the same way as traditional media is about “broadcasting”. The clue is in the name. Social media is …social! You don’t meet a friend and talk at them for five minutes and then walk away not letting them get a word in edgeways (OK, you might all know someone who does – but how does that make you feel on the receiving end?) Most social interaction is about engagement and that is not token engagement but real, genuine, two-way communication.

Social media may well be the right answer for you – but make sure you ask the right questions first. If you need help setting a strategy, give the Marketing Mentor a call.

Are you on the side of journalists needing to have their sources or are the latest allegations involving tapping the phones of murdered children, rather than just people in the public eye like politicians, mean the line has well and truly been crossed?

Brands such as Halifax, Ford, Saiinsburys, Mumsnet, Co-op and Virgin Holidays have all decided to go with the public mood and pull advertising from the News of the World. But what should the Press Association do? Or the government given that so far Rupert Murdoch’s News International has chosen to do nothing?

This is a classic case of crisis PR. In my view Murdoch has to make a public apology and sack Rebekah Brooks and anyone else tainted with this fiasco. The company must also spill the beans on its relationships with private investigators and wash its dirty linen in public. Then perhaps, and only perhaps, the News of the World can survive this.

I’m in no way a SEO expert but I do take the time to fill in the boxes on my database website so that I list all the relevant key words based on the manufacturer, a description of the item, the official title and catalogue number if it has one, the condition etc. Yes it’s a chore, given the number of items on my site, but it works. Lilliput World is found on the first page of Google for many of the relevant searches like vintage lead, Britains lead farm and Timpo lead.

For those of you who think I’m talking another language, these are all vintage miniature (mainly 1:32 scale) lead figures that were children’s toys in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s – until the use of lead for children’s toys was banned as they realised it was a unhealthy if children sucked their toys! But that means that they are now desirable collectables for adults who want to remember childhood past.

Anyway, having sent out my monthly newsletter (you can sign up here if I’ve made you interested) and had an article published in GiddyLimits this month about “Barbara Stopher’s big strides in a small world”, I thought I’d do a detailed key word check amongst my competitors and see if I was missing any SEO tricks.

And that’s when I found all the totally non-relevant words that some people add to their listings to try to get them up the rankings; for example, since when have Rolex watches, Christmas presents and holidays had anything to do with a small lead figure? I know Goggle is trying to expose and penalize these abusers; it is a very shoddy practice.

Given marketing is all about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and answering their needs and wants, how do they expect a customer to feel who is looking to buy a quality watch and ends up on a page of little lead people? Disappointed, annoyed, frustrated; so that makes two of us! Describe your items properly and then the right people will find them. In the words of a famous meerkat, “simples”.

Fortunately, unlike many of my clients, who jump in at the communcation end and don’t know / forget about all the strategy that should come up front, I was guilty of the crime the other way around. My strategy is, and always was, sound but my communication, i.e. my website, was talking about a type of service I offered a while ago and it hadn’t caught up with the new Barbara Stopher offering. But now it has and you can check it out for yourself.

I guess the two main areas that weren’t on the old version are my marketing health check where I can review your strategy, making sure that it is in line with business objectives and that the results are measurable. I can also take that one stage further. So that, if you use marketing agencies for PR or design for example, I can review their performance and make sure that they are still “fit for purpose”. If not, I can manage a pitch process for you so that you DO have an agency working on your business that will deliver not only great creative work that is on strategy but also sound ROI.

As a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and ex Chair of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Marketing Communications Group, I care about this industry. So I want to make sure that people who offer services under the “Marketing and PR” banner do so with the right amount of strategic background, insightful thought and commercial knowledge so that you, as their client, get the best possible results.

So, if any of this reflects your situation, get in touch and let’s start talking.

Can’t be bothered to write it down? Seems too much trouble? Then I’d argue that you either don’t really know what you are looking for and the chances are that what you get will not be what you wanted! If you really think about the following and put it down on paper, it will offer a road map to your designer:

• your brand positioning (what specific benefit do you offer?)
• what makes you different from your competitors (how can you differentiate yourself to be more unique?)
• who your target audience are (be as specific as possible but also realistic in terms of how you can access your defined group)
• what attitude statements you can apply to your potential customers (what do they like doing / have in common?)
• your brand personality (are you a fun brand or a serious brand?)
• your style and tone (are you about entertaining, educating or inspiring?)

And also be specific about where are you going to use the design (on business cards, on the side of a lorry, on a T-shirt?) – it makes a huge difference to the design style!

Yes designers are creative people and will naturally go off on design journeys but you only have yourself to blame if you haven’t give them the parameters in the first place. And it will put you in a much better place to critique their designs and refer back to the brief if you’re not happy.

It was back in January 2008 that Kerry Katona was finally dropped from Iceland’s advertising campaigns after reports of her alleged drug taking became too much for the frozen food chain. Chosen because of her status as one-time ‘mother of the year’, Katona seemed to epitomise the brand’s slogan ‘That’s why mums go to Iceland’, but the reality was somewhat different.

More recently, the golden boy Tiger Woods’ tarnished private life lost him the brand ambassador roles with both Gillette (lending a whole new meaning to ‘the best a man can get’) and AT&T (when ‘scoring birdies’ in the US PGA Tour had nothing to do with golf clubs!).

But brand owners don’t always drop celebrities going through a rough time. When Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine use was on the front of all the newspapers she suffered the blow of having her contracts with Chanel, Burberry and H&M cancelled. Conversely, Rimmel kept Moss on and rode the storm. Whilst possibly not back to her peak of popularity, Moss has since rebuilt her reputation and now has a clothing line in Top Shop and her own perfume.

A new celebrity tie up announced this week leaves me rather perplexed; Victoria Beckham was appointed the creative design director at Range Rover with her first project being the new interior of the Special Edition Range Rover Evoque. The brand owners say that this is a smaller, sleeker vehicle so can only assume Victoria is doing her own version of ‘Pimp My Ride’ for size zero fashionista WAGs?!

A great article that includes this and another 11 celebrity endorsements that went wrong is on T3 http://tinyurl.com/34vvbmm and includes the classic of Bill Wyman endorsing a metal detector (not very rock and roll but perhaps because of The Rolling Stones ‘Money, that’s what I want’?).

Back to the everyday, Morrison’s is another supermarket that has used celebrities to raise their presence, particularly in the south. Who can forget Denise van Outen and Top Gear’s Richard Hammond wheeling their trolleys across open countryside to get to the fresh food in a Morrison’s supermarket. In a change of strategy, their new ad, which breaks mid July 210, uses children instead of celebrities. So is the power of the celeb fading or are there still sufficient numbers of us gullible enough to believe that Sharon Osbourne shopped at Asda to keep this phenomenon alive?

Jumping on the Frank Lampard goal that was not given in the England – Germany game because the linesman from Uruguay did not see it, Asda have grasped the marketing opportunity and are offering anyone with a Uruguayan passport a free eye test!

As reported by Marketing, the first two newspaper ads capitalising on the defeat ran the day after the game by two car companies. Kia ran an ad in The Times to promotes their seven-year warranty with the headline “Oh well, at least our warranty beats the Germans”. Nissan chose The Sun to promote its GT-R with the headline “One match the Germans didn’t win”. Read more at http://tinyurl.com/2dznawa

Interestingly, the Nationwide sponsorship of the England team runs out at the end of June, just days after the crushing defeat. Their exclusive renewal period ran out earlier in the year but they claim that the brand is still in talks about the future. At least Sunday’s dire result should have brought the price down if they are still interested!

If not, who else could take up the mantle? Here are just a few of my suggestions but feel free to send me your own:

• An obvious choice would be Avis who could adapt their well-known brand slogan to, ‘We must try harder’
• Or, how about an oil company (topical industry at the moment!?) with Esso’s old slogan ‘Put a Tiger in your Tank’!
• A tea brand makes sense – either the about to be revived Tetley Tea Folk for ‘the Gaffer’ or the PG Tips chimps (needs no further explanation!)
• Or how about Bahlsen’s Messino that is trying to steal share from McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes brand with the slogan ‘the future’s oblong’
• And back to sport, Nike’s brand slogan would sum up what we all think ‘Just do it!’

Well, yes it would but how would you market it to gardeners and lovers? A name is an identifier, a shorthand designation that sets one person, product or service apart from another. And, as such, it does matter what that name is as it can either enhance the reputation of that to which it refers, or it can damage it absolutely.  Otherwise why did Marion Michael Morrison change his name to John Wayne?!

It’s the same in marketing. Your name is the first, and most important, part of your brand. A strong name helps you stand out and convey your brand values. A weak or inappropriate name can work against everything else you do to build a position for your offering. So it’s interesting to explore why some of today’s infamous brands started life with very dubious brand names:

• Google was launched in 1996 as BackRub. It was quickly (and thankfully) renamed by founders Larry Brin and Serge Page in 1998
• Pepsi-Cola was the brand name in 1898 for a product that had launched five years earlier as Brad’s Drink after a young American pharmacist called Caleb Bradham
• Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was the original name for Yahoo, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo. It was soon renamed to the acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

And then there are those brand names that we all think are fine, only to have their powerful brand owners change them on us, usually with the intention of enhancing the brand’s global domination:

• In 1990 Mars changed the name of its popular peanut chocolate bar from Snickers to Marathon and eight years later did the same thing with fruit chews Opal Fruits, renaming them Starburst
• In 2001 Unilever chose to change the name of household cleaner Jif to Cif, apparently to help Hispanic and French speakers pronounce it better
• Only last year, the UK’s biggest insurer turned its back on its Norfolk roots to change its brand name from Norwich Union to Aviva

And now we have another contender as Charmin toilet tissue is dropped in favour of Cushelle, with its big cuddly bear icon morphing into a koala! The name change is part of an agreement made during SCA Hygiene’s acquisition of Charmin from Procter & Gamble in 2007.

Changing a brand name is not a cheap exercise, not forgetting the discarded consumer goodwill for the previous incarnation. So why do it? It all comes down to getting the long-term brand strategy right in the beginning. If you are already a global player, like Unilever or Procter & Gamble, you should really be thinking of appropriate global brand names at the outset and avoiding costly rebranding exercises further down the line.

It’s true that global branding can bring cost savings by producing a single global advertising and marketing campaign for all countries. But there is also a well-respected view that global branding can be counter-productive. Advertising campaigns produced by the so-called ‘lead’ market can look very alien in other markets. Often being dumbed down so as to minimize cultural differences, these global campaigns can appear bland and not relate directly to any market, giving local brands an advantage.

Another reason given for a brand name change is to distance the brand from a negative experience. Personally, I think this is misguided. It assumes we all have very short memories and cannot tie up the two identities. In this way, not only does the new brand bring its old baggage with it, but it also risks alienating us even further as we think they may be trying to get away with something! It is better to invest the resource that would have gone into establishing a new brand in overcoming the original brand’s difficulties.

So, the lesson is that a brand name should be for life and therefore deserves careful thought and planning to avoid future costly changes. Would a rose smell as sweet if it had been called a stinker?

It seems such a missed opportunity for retailers who are in the perfect position to identify their consumers and engage them via social media. Retailers should be engaging with customers to supply more of their needs and thereby secure a larger share of their expenditure. Farming their existing customers in this way would be a much more cost effective exercise than looking for new customers or, even worse, just waiting to see who wanders in!

Schultz’s diagnosis of the company’s problem is that growth had been seen as a strategy when, in fact, it is merely a tactic. By putting too much of the company’s focus on growth, mistakes were made that were disguised, when they should have been investigated and corrected. His solution is to go back to his original inspiration of the ‘romance of coffee-making’ and cater for the communities that Starbucks serve with an individual, non-corporate look.

The first experiment of this new look was in London’s Conduit Street that opened in November 2009 (see photos at http://tinyurl.com/ye79s8r). It looks more upmarket, with great attention to the furnishings, and the coffee counter has apparently been designed to emphasise the brand’s coffee authority. There are due to be another 100 of these individual refits across the UK by the end of 2010.

Whilst, in this new look, the corporate branding is much more recessive, even tasteful, in Seattle, USA, Starbucks has gone a stage further and is trialling three totally unbranded stores that have been designed to resemble independent local cafes. Critics have dubbed these outlets as ‘Stealth Starbucks’.

Fundamentally, I believe Starbucks has two marketing problems in the UK. Firstly, the brand needs to engage with its consumers and deliver the type of coffee experience they want. It can’t do this by refitting stores to ‘pretend’ to be a local coffee shop that will be rejected when people realise it’s really global brand Starbucks. They should look at the challenger brands that have grown up in their wake and see why consumers. In many cases, have a closer relationship with some of these.

Secondly, and most importantly for me, they need to look at their product. I am a real coffee drinker. I drink my coffee black (ideally a double espresso) and unsweetened, not frappuccinoed with fruit juices and cream! So I actually TASTE what I drink and Starbucks coffee is not good! I can only really liken the thin flavour and strange aftertaste to the comparison between real 70% cocoa chocolate and American chocolate like Hershey’s. There is no comparison.

So, if you’re listening Mr Schultz, marketing is all about the product too!