Dot Comms

Put simply the Gruen Transfer is when the confusion of a shopping experience sets in wearing down our determination, changing the consumer from a destination shopper on a mission to purchase a particular item and instead turn into an impulse shopper who wanders through the stores.

Gruen Tranfer is named after Victor Gruen who invented the modern shopping complex: the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota. The delicious irony of it all is that the Austrian was a committed socialist in his younger days. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

This post sprang out of a Twitter conversation that was started by Graham Brown. Graham felt that the term brand manager no longer had meaning in the modern marketing world. But what to replace it with?

This threw up a number of related questions that I decided to attempt and start to answer here.

So what is a brand? Even answering this simple question incorporated a number of different facets. It is not only about physical items and customer experience, but also about the perceived origins of the brand from Häagen-Dazs faux European name, to the precision engineering of German car-makers, Swiss watch manufacturers and the fine tailoring of Italian men’s suits.

The brand is also affected by context. Audi is a luxury car brand, but for many years in China it has been associated instead as the vehicle of choice for government officials rather than dynamic entrepreneurs or the rich and famous.

I remember going to a mobile phone exhibition a number of years ago and was shocked to see a Japanese lady decked out in a well-tailored suit of Burberry check. In Japan, Burberry was seen as a sophisticated luxury brand, however my perception from experience in the UK was the Burberry is passé through its association with football casuals and copycat ‘townies’.

It could even be the absence of something. A good example of this is the absence of modern farming chemicals in organic food has created an artificial perception of improved health benefits for these products.

So what parts of a brand does a brand manager manage? The design and delivery of their product or service and elements of the marketing mix, such as promotion, distribution and reputation management. But many of those items are in some ways out of the brand manager’s control. You can distribute a product but the way it is presented and sold is often outside your control, you can create advertising but the way stakeholders interact and interpret it is out of your control.

The are things that a brand can do:

• Coach - providing help and advice to get the most out of a service and celebrate success
• Pathfinder: a great example of pathfinding is Innocent Drinks and the way that they handled their involvement with McDonalds
• Curator - highlighting community knowledge and ensuring that it is organised and accessible to all. I was involved in working with colleagues in a former role doing this for HTC through a wiki for their smartphones
• Community leader - creating partner alliances (for instance Apple’s app store for the iPhone), investor in products to meet the community’s need, facilitate co-creation with consumers (MyStarbucksIdea) and crowdsourcing tasks with the community (TfL flickr pool)

This has an effect on strategy moving it from a traditional western command and control style business strategy to an emergent strategy based on company thinking, consumer dialogue and behaviour combined with the dynamics of the market.

So a brand manager no longer manages but influences ‘a brand wrangler’ who tries to steer the direction of the consumers, but can’t necessarily stop stampedes in different directions. It is often easier to steer the company than steer the brand. This was originally posted over at my personal blog.

Due to increased shpping costs: the cost of containers, fuel, insurance, improved worker’s conditions in China and increasing costs for lines of credit some are wondering whether manufacturing jobs will be located closer to the market for a number of products. This move back to local manufacturing has a name: nearsourcing according the New York Times.

Some companies have been very smart in product design and process engineering so have managed to nearsource rather than outsource, a great example of this is the shoe company New Balance and hi-fi company Schiit.

Whether this will become a real trend though is a bigger question, many post-industrial countries like the UK have their manufacturing eco-system so hollowed out that they couldn’t take advantage of nearsourcing if they wanted to as they no longer have the knowhow, staff, plant, electrical grid, railways and base industries to take advantage of it.

If one thinks about the UK, the government had to give 50m GBP to INEOS in 2003 in order to keep chlorine manufacturing going in the UK. Chlorine is one of the basic chemical building blocks required for modern industry and very hard to transport due to its aggressive chemical nature. Could the UK become a shadow of what it used to be from an industrial point-of-view? I don’t think so.

This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

Today sees the disappearance of The Times and The Sunday Times behind the dreaded paywall. An introductory offer of £1 per week for the first 30 days, and £2 per week after that is the only way you’ll get to see what both news sites have to offer. But how likely are we to fork out for content, and will we really miss anything if we don’t?

The staff at The Times seem very confident – at a recent PR Newswire Meet the Media event Tom Whitwell, Assistant Editor of The Times with responsibility for online, saw no reason why the paywall would turn people away from the site. Tom suggested that peoples’ attitudes towards paying for content have changed drastically in recent years; people no longer have qualms about paying £9.99 for The Times iPad app or spending a cheeky 59p on the latest version of Angry Birds for their iPhone. What will attract paying readers to the site, according to Tom, is its wealth of specialised content and the feeling of being part of a closer relationship between the reader and writer. I particularly liked his comparison of paying for content to watching live music – would you rather see your favourite band for free at Wembley, or pay a small price to see them in a smaller, intimate venue?

But not everyone agrees with Tom. The Guardian recently published the result of two surveys into reader attitudes towards print and digital media, The first, from Ipsos, saw a meagre 11% of online adults stating they would choose to access their news digitally and only 3% saying they would opt for a monthly online subscription. An overwhelming 77% said they had no interest whatsoever in paying for news content online. The second survey, compiled by YouGov, had similar results with 83% of respondents saying they would refuse to pay for online content.

Quite contrasting views I’m sure you’ll agree, and as The Times is the first non-specialist UK newspaper to head behind the paywall, we have no real comparison to show who is right. I feel that there will need to be something pretty spectacular on the site to encourage me to pay – what about you?

Earlier this week, I was at a lecture at the RSA where Sky’s Adam Boulton was in conversation with Stephen Green, chairman of international banking group HSBC. They had both just returned from the G20/G8, which provided a backdrop to discussions on financial turbulence, money and morality. The presentation was especially interesting as it took a long-term historical view: King Edward III was noted as the first British sovereign to default on his debts; Franciscan thinking from the middle ages on poverty versus wealth was quoted; the ebb and flow of world trade was examined. You can watch the RSA’s video of the talk here. Well worth a look.

Mr Green was questioned on his book, Good Value: Building a Better Life in Business. He gave his perspective on the current macroeconomic climate, talking about a clear rebalancing to the East. He says ‘emerging markets’ is a misnomer, preferring the re-emergence of markets. China was the world’s largest economy until 1820 – before the growth of super powers – and was the dominant economic power in 18 of the last 20 centuries. Over a generation, he says, we will see the rise of the ‘new G20’ states, and the relative marginalisation of the G7/G8.

However, he is positive about the opportunities for business offered by this rebalancing. Companies that plan responsible, sustainable business strategies, in tune with the cultural needs of growing markets will thrive. Real CSR will have real impact.

As a spokesperson for the global banking community, Stephen Green is impressive. Highly engaging and authoritative, without a hint of arrogance. He expertly batted away questions inviting comment on BP’s current problems and focused on broad issues of strategy and morality. As an ordained Anglican priest, his views on ethics in business are especially interesting. From a reputation manager’s perspective, he is a valuable asset. A thought leader with original, coherent thoughts and a distinctive view of the world. Good value.

I spent my formative years in agency life working with a senior colleague who loved champagne and fine wine - and a weakness for new shoes. Alcohol is often a good social lubricant when building relationships with influencers, but it is lethal when it is mixed with a journalist looking for a story.

Whilst Stanley McCrystal may appear has a footnote in the history of the war on terror for his championing of counterinsurgency warfare tactics in Afghanistan, his most prominent mark was made with a number of cases of BudLight Lime on a coach from Berlin to Paris.

This is where Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings got the juicy material for The Runaway General feature which nuked McCrystal’s career.

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe alcohol and public relations don’t mix. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

Today’s Financial Times has an article covering Mark Zuckenberg’s presentation at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. In it Zuckenberg talked about four countries that Facebook doesn’t have a lead in: Japan, South Korea, Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

The authors seem to think that Zuckenberg’s remarks about ‘Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries’ was aimed at conquering these markets. Facebook would need to be very careful to avoid the graveyard of previous efforts by companies like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in these territories.

All of these markets have established communities on products and services that are in many ways superior to Facebook. They have cultures and online behaviours that are markedly different than peers elsewhere, in the case of Korea there are technical standards and three out of the four countries have unique legislative environments.

As Google and Yahoo! have found to their costs, success in China may bring a backlash in their established western audiences.

The challenging geographic focus steered discussions away from other factors that maybe affecting Facebook’s slower growth:

• How have privacy concerns affected their business? How has it affected engagement levels and the user utility?
• How does the user experience suffer from negative network effects of too much noise? Try searching on a particular topic and wading through the morass of groups and pages now available
• Is Facebook now suffering from a lack of clarity of purpose as it has undergone service bloat?
• Are partners and collaborators concerned about being zucked?

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

You may not have heard it, or it may not have clicked yet, but the “Wavin’ Flag (The Celebration Mix)” by K’nann is a huge plug for Coke and because it is charting, everyday the BBC is giving free air time to Coke’s jingle. Coke are one of the official World Cup sponsors, so their branding is already everywhere and this song is just part of their massive product promotion. In doing so, Coke gets the product placement award for the day and the BBC gets the sucker award.

The advertising is pretty obvious. Right at the beginning of the song, K’naan sings the coke jingle.

If you’re not convinced, have a listen to the very last musical section of this Christmas Coke advertisement.

The song was originally put out by the artist on his album Troubadour, before being added to a charity album for the Haiti Earthquake, but because of the overtones of national pride, it fitted pretty perfectly as an anthem for the World Cup this year. The original mix didn’t have the jingle at the beginning and the lyrics were apparently somewhat darker. However, with some slight amends and constant airplay on TV through Coke commercials, it has become the theme to this years World Cup and a singles hit (as I write this it is currently number 3 in the UK singles chart)

What confuses me is, why is the BBC playing the Coke version? Surely there can be edits that leave out the Coca-Cola jingle? I personally don’t have a problem with Coke using a clever marketing ploy, I’m more concerned that the BBC has either been duped, lazy or has an ironically disturbing lack of popular culture knowledge.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

Nate Lanxon over at Wired (UK) put forward his case for why the Nokia 3210 is the greatest mobile phone ever made. Many of his points about the 3210 certainly are valid and point to flaws in the current range of handsets by many manufacturers, Nokia included.

I personally don’t agree with Nate that those factors made the 3210 the world’s best handset. At the time when Nate was rocking a 3210 I was a dedicated Ericsson customer having first used an Ericsson EH 237 back in 1994. Their handsets had a superior build quality, usually based around a magnesium alloy chassis (apart from a PF768 I had in grey plastic) and an operating system that allowed you to modify your phone to your hearts content. I remember programming in The Prodigy’s No Good Start The Dance as my ringtone on an Ericsson I888 using a list of numbers I had found online.

The phones were also able to be accessorised with with high capacity batteries and offered early data connections via IrDA, ideal for my Palm PDA at the time. Ericsson also managed to do a decent vibration alert which served as an effective under-pillow alarm clock.

My last and best Ericsson phone was the T39. At 86 grams, the smallest lightest phone I have carried. It came with the slim and fat batteries, the fat battery providing a good weeks charge and was one of the first mainstream phones that allowed you to roam effortlessly. My previous I888 and T28 world handsets only allowed you to roam on 900 GSM networks in Europe and 1900 GSM in the US. Whilst it was small it didn’t skimp on features such as Bluetooth and voice-operated commands.

I would argue that for me the Ericsson T39 handset was the best mobile phone ever made. However I am willing to concede that at least one Nokia model could contest this. The merger between Ericsson and Sony brought about some mediocre product design: a trend that has continued to this day in terms of their industrial design if not their software on many of their models.

So I branched out to a Nokia 6310i. The Nokia 6310i has been popular with road warriors for a long time. It is robust, has a ridiculiously long battery life and was the acme of user experience design in the menu system. Because of its popularity, an eco-system has built up around accessories for the 6310i and refurbishment since Nokia no longer makes the phone. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

2009-07-23 20.03.09.jpg, originally uploaded by bradley23.

Running a live demo for a client yesterday, we noticed that Michael Jackson though deceased was still alive in the hearts and searches of music fans around the world.

In fact he was kicking musical butt in terms of interest levels, still the king of pop. This was originally posted over at my personal blog.