Retailers need to checkout social media

February 11th, 2010

According to a survey of 100 UK retailers by dotCommerce http://www.dotdigitalblog.com/ecommerce/464/ most retailers are failing to utilize social media to exploit the opportunities it offers to engage consumers. Nearly 60% of retailers have no social media presence at all! Even for the 42% that do use social media, only 32% with a Twitter or Facebook account are promoting this on their website and a mere 12% use more than one social media channel. For those that are using social media, Twitter is taking over from Facebook as the channel of choice. Retailers using Twitter are mainly using it for push marketing with 73% using it for announcing product updates, 62% for marketing and 58% to promote company news. It seems that neither large nor small retailers have embraced the idea of blogging with only 10% small and 6% large retailers having a blog.

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!

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Marketing is all about product too!

January 22nd, 2010

Following the Guardian’s interview with Starbucks founder, Howard Schultz (http://tinyurl.com/ycffluw) there has been a lot of tweeting about the rights and wrongs of his strategy for Starbucks. The fact is that Starbucks ranked number 90 on Interbrand’s 2009 list of global brands (http://tinyurl.com/3e9lyp), down five places on a year ago, coinciding with a 16% decrease in brand value; so something has to be done.

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!

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50 but not out: targeting the (slightly) older consumer

January 21st, 2010

I went to a very interesting group discussion with a group of other, well, that was the point, what DO we call feisty, successful, purposeful women over 50? (Any thoughts please send to me on Twitter @BarbaraStopher) We’re the baby boomer generation and are pioneering what people of our age can do. In our youth, people in their late thirties / forties were ‘middle aged’, a derogatory term that conjured up a pastel twin set and a tight curl perm.

The women I met were as far from crimplene and perm solution as the weapons of mass destruction were from reaching Britain! A more trendy US term for women like us is mid-life, which at least suggests there is more to come! But are we the sort of people who want to be categorized and labeled?

The trouble is that marketing and advertising for the big brands is in the hands of relatively young people. The new IPA census (http://tinyurl.com/y9t5aau) shows that 45.2% of advertising agency employees are aged under 30, with another 37% being between 31 and 40, 12.7% between 41 and 50 and only 5.2% over 50. Perhaps that’s why I heard colleagues talking about a brand wanting to target the grey market and the immediate solutions that sprang to these naïve young minds were Saga and bingo!!

But we have to admit that we are a difficult target group to reach. We complain that there is nothing representative of us in the media or targeted to us as a niche market but then, in the same breath, we also want to be part of the crowd, shopping in the same places as everyone else and not ghettoized. Is that because we are truly rewriting the rule book or because we don’t want to admit to getting old(er)?

I have just received a newsletter update from Springwise with their top 10 business ideas for 2010 (http://tinyurl.com/ye5hx2j) and there it was again; a newly launched company called Ruby Slippers (www.rubyss.co.uk) that claims to stylishly renovate homes, combining good design with practical functionality so that the effects of ageing are invisibly catered for. Now I know that this service will be valuable for some and is targeted more at those over 65 but I’m just a bit concerned at how much ageing I and my fellow (now what was that collective term for 50+ feisty women again?) are supposed to do in the next 10-15 years?!

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What’s in a brand?

January 13th, 2010

In the Interbrand survey of global brands by value for 2009 (http://tinyurl.com/3e9lyp), it is probably not surprising that over half (51%) of the world’s biggest brands are based in the USA with Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft and General Electric staying in their same 1 – 4 slots as last year. But why should the USA dominate over half of the world’s brands when they only account for less than a quarter (23.6%) of the world’s GDP? Two other countries that punch above their weight in the brand stakes are Germany, with 11% global brands versus 6% GDP, and France, with 8% global brands versus 4.8% GDP. And what about us Brits? Where else but in the middle of the road with 4% global brands versus our 4.4.% GDP; our first entry is HSBC at number 32 with no further entries in the top 100 until Smirnoff at number 83!

So why don’t we in the UK punch above our weight? We are praised internationally for the quality of our TV advertising yet we are more keen to ridicule brands for the most irritating ads of the year as published by Marketing Magazine (http://tinyurl.com/yc5acdh). Number one of that chart was GoCompare.com with the over-inflated opera singer. This was an in-house produced ad as were the ads at position five (confused.com) and seven (WeBuyAnyCar.com), also for internet brands.

The price comparison industry is over ten tears old and visitor numbers to some of the largest sites fell by 30 per cent in the first four months of 2009; so it’s no surprise that GoCompare.com and confused.com are battling it out in the irritating jingle stakes. It’s undeniable that irritating ads stand out; GoCompare’s own consumer research boasts a 200% increase in brand awareness since the activity began in August.

But the ten million dollar question is… does awareness translate to sales? Previous annoying ads, such as Cillit Bang, created sales spikes that could not be maintained post advertising. In fact, Cillit Bang has just been voted the UK’s most disliked brand name according to a survey by branding consultants G2 (http://tinyurl.com/yesbqbb)

A poll by TellyAds.com (http://tinyurl.com/yaxwe94) for the most popular TV ads of the noughties had GoCompare.com at seventh position with the only other brand to appear on the most irritating AND most viewed top 10 lists was Churchill, the world’s most famous nodding dog. Top of the TellyAds poll was Cadbury’s Dairy Milk ad featuring a boy and a girl with dancing eyebrows. But where has the most viewed ad got Cadbury? A hostile take over bid that is being given more likelihood of success, despite warnings of up to 7,000 job cuts, with the withdrawal of Ferrero from the race.

So, what’s in a brand? A brand allows you to give your product or service a personality and there’s nothing to stop your brand being as important to your specific target audience as the giant brands are to theirs. In fact, the more specific and ‘niche’ you are, the more you can gain a competitive advantage over the big guys. These are often called challenger brands. Think of Innocent versus Tropicana or Apple versus Microsoft. The key thing is to engage with your audience and, ideally, not irritate them to death!

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The cost effective way for SMEs to find new business

December 14th, 2009

Many small to medium companies are experiencing flat or declining sales in these difficult times and see new business as the holy grail, the answer to all their problems. What sometimes eludes these business owners is that new business does not have to mean new customers.

In fact, it is more cost effective to your business to ‘farm’ existing customers, by providing additional product and services to someone who has already bought from you, and therefore knows the quality of your offering, than to ‘hunt’ for new customers who have no experience of what you offer. Indeed, the cost of keeping an existing customer can be as low as one fifth of the cost of finding a new one.

You can farm existing customers, by identifying more of their needs and providing a relevant solution, rather than hunting for new customers, whose needs you don’t know. So, on the understanding that it’s better to farm an existing customer, it makes sense that new products or services should be based on offering either a better solution to current customers’ problems or solutions to other problems that they have.

Business success is all about retaining and developing the right customers for your business. If you treat them right, you can make live customers into loyal customers and satisfied customers are good word of mouth advocates for your business. If you don’t, the chances are that they will lapse and you will eventually lose them. To stop live customers lapsing, do you know when they should next be likely to buy?

A piece of research in the US asked why customers stopped buying from companies? Was it price or quality? Had they changed location? 68% respondents ticked no specific reason. So they conducted further research amongst this group to try and find a reason and the main response was ‘because they didn’t keep in touch’! So regular contact with your customer base is critical

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The dangers of social media for small businesses

November 26th, 2009

There is no doubt that social networks have become far more relevant to consumers than traditional branded websites. The perception of the power base has shifted as consumers feel they have assumed control as individuals and can voice their opinions freely. In some ways this is marketing utopia as the holy grail for a brand or company has always been to identify and engage directly with their consumers. But, in the wrong hands, this new freedom can be a minefield for any company, let alone a small business that may have neither the skill nor the resource to be at the cutting edge of these fast moving developments!

As a result, companies looking to engage with social media can break some cardinal golden rules:

  1. Engagement with social networks is STILL marketing and therefore all the usual rules apply about setting your objectives and deciding the elements of your strategy – it is not good enough to just ‘put stuff out there’ and see what happens. You have to carefully think through your campaign in the same way you would any other element of your marketing activity and ensure that, whatever you decide, it is measurable against your objectives. Otherwise, what’s the point?
  2. There is a perception that, because anyone can access social media free of charge, there is no value in engaging professionals to do the work for you. That view is very short sighted as why would a small business owner be up to date with all the nuances of social media and, even if you are, is your time not better spent doing whatever your specialism is? You could apply the same logic to bookkeeping. As business owners you need to have a working knowledge of your accounts to run your business but I am sure most of you use a professional third party to do the detailed work?
  3. Consumers in social networks demand honesty and transparency. So DO NOT set up fictitious accounts pretending to be a fan of your product or service; you will be found out and it will not be to your benefit. A much better solution is to be open about who you are from the outset and engage with your customers honestly. If you handle a complaint or negative post about your brand or company well, you are more likely to convert the complainant to your business than if you either ignore or try to block them.
  4. If you set up something where you are inviting interaction or questions, say a facebook page or blog, then make sure that you or your chosen supplier are organised to monitor instantly and informed on how to reply. There is nothing worse for your company’s image than to have actual or potential consumers trying to engage with your product or service and feeling ignored over days or even forever. Better not to be on the network at all. Also remember that this is a fast-moving medium and needs to be constantly updated to make it current.
  5. If you are personally interested in social networks and have a private facebook or twitter account, think twice before you link these to your company’s social media presence. It obviously depends on who you are and what you do but would it help or hinder your professional choice of a potential supplier if you could also see what they do in their free time?!

I believe that we are only at the beginning of how the social media revolution can inspire and inform our marketing strategies and that there is an exciting future ahead for businesses and consumers alike. So, as business owners, let’s not enter the arena without remembering the tried and trusted marketing principles learned over many years of consumer engagement.

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the power of integrated campaigns

November 25th, 2009

On the face of it, an objective to engage with young people about the very real dangers of skin cancer and the wish of a corporate energy supplier to be perceived as green and caring about cost efficiencies, seem to be poles apart! But the 24th November’s CIPR Marketing Communications group event ‘Putting PR at the heart of integrated campaigns’ proved that the two campaigns have more in common than you would first think.

Both Limelight PR’s ComputerTan campaign, in partnership with McCann Erickson, for skin charity Skcin and Blue Rubicon-led Green Streets campaign for British Gas proved that, for a campaign to be successful, it must be truly integrated. Which, as explained by Limelight’s Patrick Barrett, means more than adding PR to a creative idea. According to Neil Daugherty of Blue Rubicon, neither advertising nor PR can stand alone. Both need to work together but, in his view, the PR agency needs to be more ‘ballsy’. PR practitioners should shape the narrative and manage reputation and advertising should amplify the message.

Both campaigns used a rich mix of traditional and innovative PR techniques to deliver a rounded campaign and yet both had their challenges to overcome. In the case of Skcin, was Limelight brave enough to hoax an entire set of journalists with the ComputerTan idea? Barrett decided it was, on the basis that the underlying message was a serious one and that it was for a charity, not a commercial brand. With only one exception, the journalists accepted their approach. For Green Streets, Daugherty had to handle the challenge presented by British Gas increasing prices by 35% during the campaign! But, unlike ComputerTan that was designed as a short, sharp campaign to drive web traffic, Green Streets was an 18-month customer engagement campaign, playing the long game.

One key point for both campaigns was that the clients were prepared to take a risk. Skcin had to convince its charity trustees that using the fake device of ComputerTan would engage the young target audience in a way they would find accessible and yet still get the real message across that sunbeds are dangerous and that five people in the UK are killed by skin cancer every day. British Gas had to be brave enough to engage with their consumers (and staff) who, as it turned out, rose admirably to the challenge and provided them with an amazing group of British Gas advocates and a rich bank of case studies.

So, the overriding message from both teams was that integrated campaigns are the way forward and that PR has a big opportunity to take the lead role, especially as implementation should be around engaging with, rather than shouting at, the target audience.

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Free 15 minute consultation

September 29th, 2009

Having set up, run and sold a successful SME business, there are a number of ways I can help support you as the business owner to help business grow.

Please call (07545 620011) or email me (help@barbarastopher.co.uk) for a FREE initial 15 minute consultation to see how I could work with you to help your business grow.

Barbara by 1mageTalk_3932

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That’s ASDA [Katie] Price

September 29th, 2009

On the eve of breast cancer awareness month and as a breast cancer sufferer myself, it was with complete incredulity that I saw Katie Price had been chosen by ASDA to promote their Tickled Pink campaign. I failed to see how having huge, false assets was any qualification to appeal to women who have been touched by this disease. But then it was what Katie did next that put the cherry on the top! She made a comment about her ugly breast scars from her various cosmetic breast operations without any thought for those of us who bear these scars involuntarily but are grateful to be alive. At least ASDA dropped using her under the pressure of public anger but surely for next year they can find a face for their campaign that has some empathy with women affected by this disease.

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I’m a Business Boosterologist!

September 11th, 2009

Last week I went for an audition to see if I qualified to be a Business Boosterologist to help run joint CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) / Business Link workshops for SME owners in the East of England and – guess what – I got the job! So, for any of you in the East of England – look out for your new Business Link event brochure and come along to see me in action! For those of you in other areas, or who can’t wait, check out my specific SME business support offering at http://www.barbarastopher.co.uk/sme-uk-business-support.aspx

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