Archive for the ‘branding’ Category

Dear Ferrero,

When your customers are your biggest advocates and love to spread the good word about your brand you’re doing something right. When they’re willing to share with their friends and their friends’ friends about their love for you you’ve nailed social media. However, when they’re willing to set up and participate in a national day in your honour then, dear Ferrero, you’ve reached the holy grail of social media.

As you know World Nutella Day was set up in 2007 by someone outside your organisation. Like a lot of people she was - and is - a big fan of your chocolate hazelnut goodness. So-much-so she wanted to bring together like-minded people to share their love for your brand, Nutella. And share the love they did.

A Facebook page of almost 40,000 fans, a Twitter following of almost 7,000 and an independent website full of news around that sacred day where “Nutella Lovers Unite” each year on 5th February.

Not bad considering:

1. It cost you nothing
2. These are people who love your brand and would defend it
3. These people are doing your work for you in an independent and thus more believable way than you ever could
4. It will help you increase sales
5. Did I mention it cost you nothing?

So, like Coca Cola when two fans set up their Facebook page and grew it to 3 million fans did you embrace them, thank them and invite them down to your HQ to tell them what a steller job they’re doing and how you can help?

No, quite the opposite actually. You sent a cease and desist and put yourself in the position of the big nasty brand and are undoing all the good will some of your most vocal and ardent fans see in you. So, Ferrero, here’s what you could have done:

• Embraced the community. You could help set the guidelines and provide brand guidance
• Sponsored World Nutella Day. Make it bigger. Make it better. Make it official!
• PRed the hell out of it. Be seen as a superbrand adapting to the ever-changing ever-complex media landscape
• Hire the founder of World Nutella Day. She’s doing a better job than you are

But you didn’t, Ferrero, instead you chose to slap the lawyers on to it and now your fans are reacting. It’s not too late though, you can turn this thing around. Come visit us for a chat.

Whilst my taste in fashion goes more to A Bathing Ape and S-Double rather than Ermenegildo Zegna I respect the way Zegna do business.

Zegna haven’t gone down the same road of online promotion that brands like Burberry have with massive efforts on their Facebook page, instead they have taken a much more pragmatic approach to building their client relationships. In this podcast with Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé, Gildo Zegna talks about reducing the amount of above the line spend that they do and increasing the number of in-store events.  The rationale this approach was interesting: as well as the usual consumer insights, Zegna shared this bit of consumer psychology:

Go and meet the customer, talk to them, even if he doesn’t buy anything he will come back next season. Because next season he will be poor not to buy, or not to enjoy.

Zegna uses in-store collated email lists to drive this very analogue networking process as part of the dialogue with the customer. Not everyone needs to do everything on Facebook; particularly if you want long-lasting, high-touch, narrowcast relationships. In Facebook parlance, its not about likes or the followers; but gaining TRUE friends for the brand.

Over the past few years I’ve had lots of discussions with friends and ex-colleagues about  whether their employers see value in their blogging efforts, networking efforts or whether they see it as a distraction from the commercial elements of the role.  Even in today’s social and search driven world, many companies don’t seem to “get” the value that their company’s brand can get from the individual brands held by their rising stars.

This article from Jay Fry at Poynter, examines just that.  Jay focuses on media organisations (but much of it is applicable to PR agencies IMO) :

The age of the individual brand was inevitable, a natural consequence of the way digital media has remade our reading habits. In print, columns have a home on a section front or on the opinion page, but online the basic unit of reader consumption isn’t the section or page, but an article — or a video or podcast.

When readers search for or share columns, what’s found or shared is a single article. Meanwhile, writers spotlight links to their own work on their Tumblrs, share them with their Twitter followers, and hope for comments on their Facebook fan pages — all activity that spotlights their individual brands and pushes the institutional brand deeper into the shadows.

How then can smart employers ensure that their agency’s brand benefits from the halo effect created by individuals?

…in the print era, there was no such thing as a reader who picked up the paper, turned instantly to C3, read one article and threw the rest in the trash. And the higher individual brands rise, the more likely someone will try to pick them off, or that individual will begin to think of himself or herself as distinct from the institution.

How then can smart employers ensure that their agency’s brand benefits from the halo effect created by individuals?Jay identifies four ways in his original article and I think they can all apply to the PR world….here’s how:

Identify your most valuable individual brands.

For PR agencies, this means identifying who are your most well-connected account staff and who has developed a solid (on and offline) network around them of contacts that could benefit the wider organisation?

Turn centrifugal force into centripetal force, or at least balance them.

See how you can accommodate the interests, passions and direction your rising stars want to go in within the business.  How can their hobbies/external interests be applied within their jobs? Be interested in their interests. Look for commercial ways to support their ideas and digital personalities.

Make your individual brands into institutional gateways.

Work with your high-profile employees to become links to your organisation’s brand. Encourage them to explore ideas across both blogs or sites, look at ways you can cross-post or feed content into the company homepage and LinkedIn pages, share materials across the individual’s own and the company’s Slideshare accounts. Involve your rising stars in the agency’s ’s social media strategy so they get to input and co-develop how their own brand interacts with the wider agency footprint. Don’t scare employees off with guidelines and rules, ultimately, search is driving people to your site so look at ways that the two parties can collaborate and share traffic and content.

Get really good at building brands.

Help your existing employees build their brands to levels of those you’d target were you hiring/replacing them.  it is cheaper to build up the people you have than hire new, agencies are always looking at ways to retain staff and keep retention levels high. It is also great practice to work with staff on their personal brands encouraging the halo effect to spread throughout the organisation.  People remember people, not company names so prospects will often search down an individual and not an agency anyway. Help your staff become easy to find and impressive in digital terms and it will only benefit you as an employer in the long run.

Important to remember though that just as you gravitate to people with high public visibility, so do others in the market so make sure you are looking after these people from an HR perspective too. Don’t underestimate the importance of good HR practice, appraisals, remuneration and above all, interesting projects to work on. Building the brand is one thing but keeping the value high relies on relevant and recent achievements so make sure your staff are getting the opportunities, support and clients they need to stay high-profile.

This is cross posted with my own personal blog