Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Continuing in the series on CorpTech business cards here is my lot:

No, this is not some exotic beach in a far flung place; believe it or not it is a beach on the island of Tiree, situated on the west coast of Scotland. This has been the destination of the Kerr family summer holidays for longer than I have been around. Key activities taking place during these hols include: mackerel fishing in attractive wet weather gear, creeling for lobsters and crabs (tasty) and collecting random ‘treasures’ on beach walks.

This is Hector Kerr, the surrogate ‘son’ in the family and my Dad’s loyal companion. Here he is hanging out on the living room chair in Tiree – it is only on his holidays that he is allowed on the furniture, and even then it is only if my mother is firmly out of the room.

Here I am sporting some pretty epic sunglasses and looking like a bit of a cool kid. Don’t let that fool you though, I was a huge bookworm as a child and apparently ‘very solemn’. My mother, for reasons known only to her, decided to cut my hair into a mullet from an early age so here I like to think I am using any method possible to distract from my 80’s male haircut.

So here I am breaking the rules slightly and including a photo from my latest Paris holiday. Okay okay, so I did not exactly take the picture myself but I’m pretty sure its capture went something like this…’Oh, look at that – Cameron take a picture’. And thus I am claiming it as my own.

According to the recent Future of Communications survey Ruder Finn conducted, the answer is yes… though eventually and incredibly cautiously.

The ‘cautiously’ part is hardly surprising - in the regulatory environment that surrounds healthcare communications, especially prescription products, caution prevails.  Facilitating greater dialogue around prescription medicines raises a whole host of issues from the interpretation of promotion versus non-promotion through to complications around adverse risk reporting.  This cautious attitude is further amplified by the nature of the regulations surrounding digital communications. Although some regulatory bodies, like the ABPI in the UK, have taken steps to try and set down rules governing digital media, they are still peppered with ‘grey areas’.  Where some industries have already taken the plunge and are happily doing backstroke, the healthcare sector has only just rolled up a trouser leg and dipped a toe in the water.

It is important of course to exercise caution, but the ‘eventually’ bit of my answer is also important.  Not only must healthcare companies start to embrace digital communications in order to stay relevant, but if this does not happen, it will miss out on a consistently growing audience and medium with which to reach them.

Market research tells us that patients, carers and healthcare professionals use the internet more and more for health information.  In fact at a nurse advisory board I recently attended, the majority of the room stated that they often go online during consultations with patients to look up queries.  They of course had some favoured, trusted sources, but they were Googled nonetheless.  I also think of myself and my family - I’ll often consult the internet prior to consulting a GP and older members of my family have carried out extensive research on their conditions to find out more about their treatment options.

Information is out there, whether pharma companies want it to be or not, and people are accessing it.

The healthcare industry is full of intelligent and sophisticated marketeers who recognise this ‘evolution’ is taking place and want to be part of it. Our own experience tells us that some pharma companies are doing great work monitoring social media and reacting to issues. But the key word is ‘reacting’. It is the proactive work that is difficult and the bottom line is nobody wants to be first to run a big digital campaign.  But proactivity doesn’t have to mean taking risks. Healthcare will eventually fully embrace the digital age but it won’t be done in great leaps but small incremental steps.  Only by doing these small steps will regulatory departments, who are key to this change ever occuring, come on board.

So what do we mean by small steps? It’s doing a few simple things well.  Maybe that is sponsored links on google to ensure responsible web sites appear at the top of searchs when people look for counterfeit products. How about non-branded educational videos on Youtube, more of these are starting to appear now. Holding online advisory boards on secure networks, which are far more cost effective and allow flexibility for the participants. We could go on.

The way patients and healthcare professionals search for information and interact with each other has changed.  Therefore it stands to reason that how healthcare companies communicate with these audiences also has to change. This will happen and, to a certain extent, is already happening but it will take time and it will take a lot of small steps.

Parliament is facing a crucial time, the new Speaker is facing a crucial time. Recent events surrounding MPs expenses have left us all thinking how did it come to this and how did this go on for so long without anyone noticing.

All MPs need to consider how this looks to the public - claiming allowances for moat cleaning, for mortgages already paid off, for other border-line goods and services, regardless of whether the rules allowed them or not, does not look good and does not help with forging closer links between politics and the people of Britain.

The question also has to be asked not only what can be done about it but what can be done to prevent it happening again?

Michael Martin came in for pretty robust criticisms from MPs and from outside the House. It is rare for such outright defiance of a Speaker to be seen in the House of Commons. Regardless of the necessity of the Speaker to stand down, there are many people who will regret the manner in which it was done.

How much is this down to MPs really thinking that the Speaker is the best option to save their own hides as a convenient scapegoat  after so many of them have been caught with their hands in the till?

There have been suggestions that Michael Martin was not up to the job, that he was lacking in either the intellectual capacity or the authority to command respect in the House. These allegations may have some substance and perhaps time had run out for him.

The question remains though, to what extent was the Speaker perceived to be the problem or representing the blockages to reform?

There is a big task ahead for the next Speaker to help to begin the process of restoring faith in politics, Parliament and the role of MPs - it would have helped if MPs hadn’t put themselves in this mess in the first place.

Before I started my first job, my Dad told me that ‘common sense never went out of fashion’ and the same could be said for the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years on. I had signed up to blog about one of the theses (number 83) in the book via this site.

Ten years later and providing the media with preferential treatment in comparison to consumers seems more ridiculous. My friend Paul Armstrong’s Twitter feed @themediaisdying chronicles the slow death march of traditional news media.

According to ReadWriteWeb the US newspaper industry suffered a 16.6 per cent decline of advertising revenue during 2008. A recent panel of senior media executives at the McGraw Hill Media Summit couldn’t even agree on what the nature of the disruptive problem the news media is even facing, let alone come up with an effective solution.

If you want a clearer definition of the problem the news media is facing then American academic and writer Clay Shirky has an excellent analysis on his blog entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. paidContent recently featured former WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin outlined what kinds of content that news media could make money from (and are therefore more likely to create in the future in order to pay the bills):

—Daily emails with actionable information, like the best-and-worst traffic routes during rush hour.

—Sites that offer real-time intelligence about the real-estate market.

—Survey sites that accept user submissions about the best-and-worst teachers in local markets.

—In-depth coverage of local government, including publishing bills and video.

This is all non-news content which runs an end game on traditional media relations from a PR perspective.

Contrast this with how companies have performed when they have directly engaged with audiences.

Robert Scoble was christened Chief Humanizing Officer for Microsoft by The Economist back in 2005, who described him thus:

Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.

Former FT journalist Tom Foremski put it on a more commercial perspective:

Mr Scoble created many millions of dollars in positive publicity for Microsoft, on a salary of less than $100K. I don’t think WaggEd could have done a fraction of that, for 100 times the payment Mr Scoble received.

Through his blog Scoble spoke directly to customers, replying to their comments, empathising with their problems and becoming their advocate internally at Microsoft.

Dell has managed to move on from the ‘Dell Hell’ debacle through a more proactive stance in social media engagement and its use of a Salesforce.com CRM Ideas platform (a prediction market infrastructure) to power Ideastorm - a way of listening to consumers and allowing them to have a direct impact on product decisions. In the first week, Dell had 500 ideas from customers, this had grown 2,500 within the first month.

JetBlue managed to change the media agenda following its Valentine’s Day 2007 crisis by having CEO David Neeleman address customers directly via a video on YouTube. Disintermediating the traditional media allowed JetBlue to move the debate on, from how bad the problem still was as the airline recovered; to what JetBlue was doing to rectify the problems. Many US news channels ran the YouTube video on their coverage.

More recently, Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s Pizza was obviously paying attention to the JetBlue debacle and wasted no time going on camera to apologise via YouTube directly to consumers over the ‘bogie sandwich’ video created by two (now ex-)employees of the fast food chain.

So when Becky and I recently met with a client, the counsel we provided them was: in order to future-proof their marketing in a time of disruption, community needed to be their marketing, because as the title to this post says an organisation needs to take its millions of stakeholders as seriously as a prominent news journalist.

This is cross-posted at my personal blog renaissance chambara.

Michael Vaughan is delighted at being made to go on Twitter

English cricket is not known for its innovation and dynamism, on or off the field. Our lack of cricketing prowess will be demonstrated to the world (again) in the Twenty20 World Cup this summer and as much as I’d love England to win the Ashes the chances are at best slim.

Yet I was strangely cheered this morning by news that the England and Wales Cricket Board are to use Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as part of a wider marketing initiative this summer. With no football tournaments and no Olympic games, cricket has a chance to engage with a much wider audience than it does usually and it is encouraging to see such an austere and conservative organisation as the ECB willing to branch out and use social media for this purpose.

Cricket definitely has a perception problem with many people incorrectly assuming it to be stuffy, boring and only followed by old men. This is emphatically not the case and any steps to engage with a younger audience are to be applauded - if the ECB can use social media then so can anyone. I just hope they get some of the players involved as I’d love to read the thoughts of @KP “I wouldn’t have done it that way Straussy”, @vaughany “@Vaughanny is disappointed to have played at that wide one” and @belly “given it away again, gutted”

Although this piece covers POM-to-P drug switches (taking a prescription only medicine, POM, and making it available through Pharmacy, P) the principles discussed apply to any form of product launch, so please read on even if you’re not involved in a POM-to-P switch.

You may have read in the media about the launch of an over-the-counter (OTC) weight loss pill called Alli. Previously only available on prescription the European Commission announced at the start of the year that it could be made available through pharmacy. I have a lot of experience in POM-to-P switches and have followed Alli‘s progress with great interest. Alli will soon be available from a pharmacy near you so I thought I’d take this chance to review the coverage it has received to date.

What has been fascinating, and ultimately what prompted me to write this blog, is how the media, and then the public, have reacted to this announcement. This is a classic demonstration of no matter how hard you work to get a responsible, non-sensationalist message out to the public about a product, when you finally make an announcement what actually gets printed can be very different.

Exhibit A – The Daily Mail, 6^th Jan, runs the following headline “Diet pill helps woman drop a dress size”. ‘Drop a dress size’, could this be any further from what a diet pill for the clinically obese is designed for? It makes it sound like it’s a quick fix to get you from a size 12 to a 10 for your holidays. I’ve checked the GSK release about this announcement and it largely contains responsible messages like “lose weight gradually and steadily” and “in conjunction with a reduced calorie, lower-fat diet”. It never mentions or even alludes to the ‘drop a dress size’ opportunity at any point. When the story eventually appeared online 2 weeks later the headline was thankfully changed to a more appropriate “£1-a-day anti-obesity pill is going on sale without prescription”.

Exhibit B – That week a colleague of a friend of mine sprints into her office and proclaims, with some excitement, that there is a new pill that is going to help her lose weight. To provide you with some background my friend works in a highly respected profession and her colleague is someone I would put in the “successful, intelligent, rational human being” category. Furthermore, despite having two children she is at most a size 10 and if she wanted to lose weight it would be for purely personal rather than medical reasons. Now if someone like this can reach such a conclusion then where is the hope for others? Now I’m not saying it was the Daily Mail’s fault but coverage like theirs surely contributed to such a conclusion being drawn.

Exhibit C – The Daily Mail (yes again), 26^th Jan, runs the following headline “Revealed: The true cost of the £1 diet pill hailed as a weight-loss wonder drug”. Hang on, 2 weeks ago you were the ones “hailing” it as such. This article was about the ‘terrible side effects’ this treatment has. Well, it is true it does have nasty side effects but these are well publicised, so why didn’t they mention them 2 weeks ago when they were ‘dropping a dress size’. Whereas the first article focused very heavily on the positives, this article solely covered the negatives, again not what you’d describe as balanced coverage.

The worst part of this is that it is the media that are always quick to criticise Pharma for inappropriately marketing its products but it should really take a long hard look at itself before it starts wagging its finger.

So what’s the answer? How can we navigate our way through this minefield and gain balanced coverage for POM-to-P drug launches (or any product launch for that matter).

Well the truth is there is no simple answer. It’s always going to be hard to gain balanced coverage, especially in areas such as weight-lose where people are desperate to believe that there are quick fixes.

What you can do though is stick to the following:

• Plan for milestones – Understand when the media touch points are (in the case of POM-to-P switches it is during consultation, when the licence is agreed and when the product is launched) and prepare for them.
• Stakeholder management – Ensure you have undertaken a wide ranging, solid stakeholder management campaign. Knowing who will say what and when is half the battle to predicting media coverage.
• Due-diligence – Anticipate the sensationalist angles the media can take and pre-empt them i.e. this pill is not about dropping a dress size it is aimed at…
• Stay close to the media – Know what they are writing / broadcasting and when. If you don’t feel it accurately reflects your story, react quickly.

I attended an industry awards dinner last week and, as is customary with these events, much alcohol was consumed and much debate was had.  I’m writing this because one of these debates struck me as more interesting than most.  Can Brand PR really deliver?

The question was posed by the head of marketing for a global company with a long list of well known brands, so he’s well placed to make such an assertion.  His exact comment (obviously filtered through the hazy fog one tends to have following such an event) was this; “if it is a choice between spending 100K on Brand PR or buying a 100Ks worth of additional media, I would take the media spend every time.”

His point I thought was incredibly valid.  Here’s an in-house marketing person who is judged on sales and sales alone and who must ask himself always; “is this money well spent and will it deliver increased brand awareness and therefore increased sales?”

This got me thinking.  Is there truly a place for Brand PR in these current gloomy economic times?  Can we all put our hand on our hearts and say Brand PR has delivered time and time again?  I thought not. The bottom line is Brand PR is difficult.  Trying to get your brand intrinsically linked to a story is no mean feat.  Why? Because Editors don’t want your brand there and certainly not if it is saying anything positive.  They can smell a PR story a mile off and want your brand forcibly removed from it.

Can Brand PR, and I’m being specific here, no one is questioning whether other types of PR e.g. crisis, financial PR etc work, but specifically can Brand PR, show value against other, more guaranteed, forms of marketing.

The answer is categorically, Yes…sort of.

The classic PR answer, I know.  But I say ‘sort of’ for a reason. It can work but provided it is undertaken in the right way and, more importantly, for the right reasons.

So the first of these is the right way.  I see two fundamentals to Brand PR:

1)    Through the line campaign themes - If you don’t have one consistent theme that is running through every aspect of your campaign it is hard to get good Brand PR.

2)    The brand must be integral to the story - If you have 1), it makes 2) much easier.

If you have a consistent marketing theme running through your campaign and a creative angle that intrinsically links your brand to that theme, and therefore the core of the story, you can get great Brand PR.  Most importantly you can get Brand awareness above and beyond that which a straightforward advert could achieve.

Two great examples of this.  The first is the recent ‘Take a Benylin day‘ campaign.  A campaign that was clearly helped by a complaint from the Federation of Small Businesses which rocketed it on to the 10 o’clock news.  Either way it can’t be denied that it was based on a solid and creative idea that ran through the line.  It also boasted a link up with the British Chambers of Commerce which helped provide credibility for the campaign when the criticisms started flying.

Another example is the comparethemarket.com campaign ‘compare the meerkat‘.  No one would deny these are clever adverts but this theme is carried all the way through the communications.  The meerkat even posts on Twitter and has a Facebook site!  This raises a further important point.   With the diversity of communication mediums at a PR practitioners disposal there is so much that can be achieved with a good creative theme.  A creative theme, I hasten to add, that doesn’t have to be driven by advertising but can start from any one of the marketing disciplines.

So if the first consideration is the ‘right way’ the second is the ‘right reason’. The big question to ask, and this is my final point, is why are you doing this?  That should really drive whether you undertake Brand PR or not.  If it is to get a simple brand message to a hard to reach audience, then a bit more media spend might be the answer.  However, if it is to educate consumers / professionals about a broader issue relating to your brand, demonstrate 3^rd party endorsement or create a brand experience over and above that which can be achieved in a simple advert, then Brand PR should definitely form part of your marketing mix.

So can Brand PR deliver?  Yes it can.

A number of my colleagues and I went to an lecture from Thomas Gensemer, part of the online team behind Barack Obama’s grassroots and fundraising success. Arguably, Obama’s online campaign will become the ultimate case study of the benefits of online campaigning and Gensemer was a significant contributor to this success.

What was personally interesting was that the basis of the Obama strategy lay in the importance of constant personal contact and simplicity. Gensemer made the very valid point that regular email newsletters, no matter the quality, are rarely consistently read by the majority of recipients. There were 7000+ messages sent out to Obama supporters over the course of the campaign and all averaged less than 300 words, all with the aim of getting “feet on the ground”.

The ultimate objective of the online campaigning was to create local, on-the-ground activism, so each request was aimed at getting the recipients to do something, whether that is volunteering at the local campaign office, knock on doors, leaflet or donate money. Hence, the huge amounts of funds raised and the huge number of volunteers and local organisers.

The individual touch was also vitally important and this was achieved through personalised replies. If a volunteer replied to one of the mail-outs, Gensemer said that their aim was to get a personalised reply back within 3-4 days.

It was a fascinating insight into online political campaigning, but the beauty of its simplicity means that aspects of the strategy could potentially be transferable to a good deal of what we do as public affairs and public relations professionals.

Much of our work is issue related, or can at least be linked or incorporated into issues. Therefore aspects of the Obama online campaigning strategy could be transferred across the areas of politics, global advocacy, patient group outreach, product promotion and the list goes on.

Therefore online campaigning and interaction is a fantastic tool and if done properly, can be extraordinarily powerful and transferable to a number of sectors. It is certainly something we, as communications specialists should all be getting a handle on.

I am possibly the world’s least qualified person to comment on design. A bizarre portrait of Mike Gatting prompted the following comment from my 2nd year art teacher: “despite Paul’s obvious lack of ability he tries his best.” Pretty damning stuff.

Despite this lack of ability I am still going to spout forth on the recent Pepsi logo. The design brief was leaked onto and reveals the ‘thinking’ behind the new design. It’s all about the earth’s gravitational pull synergising with the gravitational pull of Pepsi. Obviously.

As a tech PR guy of many years, working with designers and brand strategists is something that comes up from time-to-time. Sometimes it is illuminating, sometimes I think ‘what on earth are you banging on about’. But this really takes the biscuit. Is this representative of design briefs generally?

Pepsi

Anyway, the outcome is the smily logo you see above. It’s positive I guess, although it certainly doesn’t look like it has had the finest design minds working on it night and day. What do you think? Which brings me back to what prompted me to write this post - do any rebrands or brand launches meet with acclaim? The London 2012 logo got universally panned and it would seem that companies that choose to spend thousands of pounds are actually on a hiding to nothing. Everyone is a critic and the internet provides everyone with a platform to share their opinions. Although its got people talking about it’s brand, maybe Pepsi could have spent the money more wisely…

John Lydon enjoying some margarine

Much of my PR experience has been in business technology so the opportunity to use a celebrity to endorse a product/service has been thin on the ground. However, I am fascinated how brands choose celebrities and what effect they then have on awareness/sales/buzz and also on why public figures choose to endorse certain products – apart from the filthy lucre of course.

There have been two recent advertisements that have really surprised me - John Lydon for some margarine or t’other and Iggy Pop for a car insurance firm. Two of the most anti-establishment figures around in their seventies heyday and possibly the least likely people to pop up on TV advertisements - who would honestly have picked them as brand ambassadors? Yet both ads have attracted a lot of attention, and according to Brand Republic the John Lydon one has been hugely successful, with an 85% increase in sales. If you had said to Johnny Rotten in 1977 that he would end up hawking margarine on TV he would have had some choice words to say to you. And he would no doubt defend his right to do so now, but he remains an unlikely brand figurehead despite the campaign’s success.

The same goes for Iggy Pop and whatever car insurance it is he is flogging. I am not even sure that Iggy Pop is famous enough to do an ad like this. Anyone that had heard of him and knew his music would be vaguely appalled at the thought, whilst everyone else would be wondering who that weirdo is, ranting about the ‘gift of time’.

It is rare to see credible celebrities doing work of this nature but if it works I guess the brands aren’t complaining. Are these former punks really so short of a few quid though, that they are willing to compromise their musical legacy? Do John and Iggy really use the products they are endorsing (I think Iggy’s insurance premiums would be off the scale, what with all the, ahem, lifestyle choices he has made)? In a way it seems unfair that say, Eva Longoria can advertise ice cream and people don’t think any less of her (not that she looks like a choc ice has come within a yard of her) but for musicians and/or ‘edgy’ personalities it seems much more of a sell-out.

Or maybe other people aren’t as sensitive about punks in adverts as me.