The Magic 8-Ball

In our personal relationships we have certain leeway to be, well, a bit crap once in a while. Friends and family judge us in the round; keeping some sort of mental tally sheet whereby all those times we go the extra mile and prove our loyalty give us a free pass for the time we forget their birthday (sorry mum).

However, as consumers, it seems we are the fairest of fair-weather friends. Last week The New Yorker charted the spectacular fall from grace suffered by Netflix following its disastrous decision last summer to split the DVD and internet-streaming portions of its subscription service – effectively doubling the price for customers who used both, some of who had been with the Netflix for a decade. As errors of judgement go, this one was truly catastrophic– by the end of 2011 they had shed 75% of their share price.

Looking back further this does seem like a one-off slip, if a massive slap-stick one, in and otherwise flawless track record. Up till then they had done it all right – pioneering a genuinely consumer centric service, attending to the details to make it work as seamlessly as possible, and giving away access to their streaming service via a free, multi-platform app rather than trying to sell a specific device. In relationship terms they were the boyfriend/girlfriend that made your mates laugh, were loved by your parents and consistently rocked your world in the bedroom even after 10 years of monogamy – they were the complete package.

However, all the brownie points they accumulated over the years seem to be less meaningful than a James Blunt love song in the final analysis. In fact, all this goodwill may have actually worked against Netflix. The higher our expectations; the more bitter our disappointment when they are dashed. The worst thing you can ever do is make people who feel loyalty to you think you are trying to exploit their fondness for you. Upfront greediness consumers can deal with – try and slip it in through the back door and you’re a million times worse than the honest crooks.

The purpose of building loyalty is not so, at some point down the track, you can squeeze your customers for all they’re worth. It’s about playing the long game and building a brand with longevity. If you want a long term relationship and not just a fling you must, I repeat must, act with genuine and scrupulous fairness day-in-day-out, without fail. This is what brands like Google have done so well – managing the shift to monetising services slowly and carefully so customers get used to it – and continuously developing a pipeline of new free services to add value now and be the cash cows of the future.

Do this and your business and your customers will develop in tandem – the way all good relationships should.

Economic doom and gloom, never far from the front pages, was back with a vengeance this week. However, while this caused us a political and media storm, our guess is that the ‘Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ probably absorbed this news without even breaking stride. The last quarter decline was -0.2%. Not good news to be sure, but a number it’s hard to get excited about, and wholly  anticipated.

Out 5^th annual ‘Moody Britain’ report – detailing the shifts in the mood of Britain through the recession period – launched in last week’s Independent on Sunday (click the image to see a PDF). And, the adjustment to the ‘new normal’ of perpetual financial uncertainty was one of the key things we found this year. People expect the ‘great recession’ to last, on average, for another 6 years. Uncertainty is already factored in to the way people are feeling. And the really interesting news is people are feeling substantially better this year – and more hopeful than they have at any time in the past 5 years – including before the recession hit.

People are tired of misery and are unbattening the hatches and looking to enjoy themselves again. This doesn’t mean a return to no-holds-barred consumerism – but a desire to have responsible fun (sounds like an oxymoron – but there you have it!). Brands need to ask themselves now how they can lead this move towards positivity.

We will be releasing the full report in the coming weeks – and blogging on more of the lessons for what we can learn from the direction of travel the nation is likely to see over 2012 – stay tuned!

Health and Safety – never have two words, on the surface so comforting and warm, been so scorned and derided. Ties banned from your school in case kids garrotte themselves – violates Health and Safety I’m afraid. Candy floss off the menu at your local fair because of those wickedly sharp sticks – sorry chum, Health and Safety. Traditional cheese rolling event cancelled – you guessed it, Health and Safety.

To the media it has become is purely a pejorative; a cover-all phrase to explain all wrong-thinking nonsense emanating from government regulations. This narrative that ‘Elf and Safety’ is an affront to common sense – the last refuge of feckless, jobsworth civil servants, bureaucrats and administrators – has pervaded for so long it’s become received wisdom.

However, it turns out a lot of these claims were, for want of a better phrase, utter cobblers. Seemingly a huge range of people, from the local councils to your local restaurants have been using Health and Safety as a default excuse not to do things that were complicated, or controversial, or expensive, or… well, they just couldn’t be bothered to do. And this week the usually taciturn chaps at the Health and Safety Executive collectively rose up to say “not in our name”. They have formed a Myth Busters Challenge Panel. Now if someone cries ‘Health and Safety’ you can take it to the Panel for a ruling – genuine violation or mere unwanted inconvenience.

This initiative is the latest in a growing trend in organisations that aim to speak truth unto power. The Institute for Fiscal Studies have been doing a bang up job of holding the government to account on…well, accounting, for more than 40 years now. They have been joined in recent years by others such as Daily Mail Watch (and its sisters Express Watch and The Sun: Tabloid Lies), and Channel 4’s ‘The Factcheck Blog’. Today it is now become common to see news cycles move from announcement, through debunking and ridicule within a few hours.

If it’s becoming harder to get away with announcing or reporting lazy, biased or downright untruthful things it can’t come a moment too soon for the British public. We have just finished travelling the nation for the 7^th instalment of our annual ‘Mood of the Nation’ survey Moody Britain, and the feeling that today you ‘can’t believe a word they say’ was a common refrain(watch this space for our full report on Britain today). This leads to a cynicism about the public sphere that threatens to paralyse reasoned debate about the real issues the country faces.

Underlying all of this is the democratisation of information and the ability to share that the internet age has brought. Moves like the setting up of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) shows that politicians  are finally beginning to come round to a default ‘open’ position, and the rest of us must get onboard too. Our advice? Get way ahead of the game and go to the other extreme – be honest first time, every time. Chances are you’ll have to fess up eventually anyway when people start sniffing around; the transparent route is much less painful in the long run.

Being an open book has never been so appealing – if you never fib you’ll never be caught out.

From Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from Southend to South-Shields, the nation has felt united this week in a very British way – in righteous indignation and outrage.

The subject of our collective ire and sputtering exasperation: the Daily Mail’s Samantha Brick. Alongside the likes of Liz Jones she is one of the leaders of a new cadre of ‘confession columnists’ whose shtick is to parade a pantomime version of themselves in front of the world. Her articles from earlier in the week, ‘’There are downsides to looking this pretty’: Why women hate me for being beautiful’  was a classic of the genre. In it she outlined the trials and tribulations of being, well, straight up gorgeous. All the unwanted attention, bottles of champagne, etc. – trying times indeed.

The internet response was immediate, overwhelming and uniform: Over 5000 comments on the Mail Online website, top trending topic on twitter and the subject of several Facebook groups (plus a deluge of personal email according to Brick herself). Opinions varied between seeing her as being: a) self-deluded, b) mentally unbalanced or c) self-deluded and mentally-unbalanced. None of it, however, was anything but apoplectically derisive.

Now, we’re not going to get into a critique of Ms. Brick’s appearance – taste is individual after all (and frankly people in glass houses should not be lobbing bricks). However, what we will venture is that this response is exactly what she and her bosses at the Mail were looking for when she penned the nugget of insanity. She comes from a brand of journalism that considers any response and attention to be a positive, regardless of its tone – It’s basically the mass media equivalent of internet trolling.

So she, and the Mail, wins then? Well, if you judge success purely in terms of quantity of hits then maybe. But to suggest there are not good and bad forms of attention is just naïve. After all if popularity was all about how many people paid you attention Sir Fred Goodwin would be one of the most well-liked men in British history.

The real lesson here is that any idiot can get attention if they are prepared to say absolute anything to get it. However, the ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ approach is a dangerous one. The Mail has carved out a large and extremely fruitful niche for itself in being the cheerleaders of national outrage. However, in this case they seem to have forgotten there is a difference between being outraged by something you read and being outraged with something you read. As a media organisation that is dependent on companies wanting to be seen alongside their content, that could put them on pretty thin ice.

Brands and advertisers need to keep a close eye not only on the popularity of the media they advertise on, but also the content. Hitch yourself to the wrong wagon and you might find the outrage turned on you.

If a week is a long time in politics, the one just gone must have felt positively glacial for Tory top brass. Seemingly adopting an ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ approach to communications disasters , they followed the ‘granny tax’ and ‘millionaires’ budget’ with ‘diner for donors’,  ‘pastygate’ and rounded off the week with a call to fill our jerrycans – a word that most people thought had gone out of date with the lindy-hop and ration cards. If not Cameron’s  ‘worst week’ (as the Sunday papers are likely to claim), then certainly his most hashtagable.

If one so wished, it would be possible to fill a complete ‘idiot’s guide to communications’ using examples from the past week. However, to seize on just one, let’s take a look at how Number 10 managed to turn crisis into catastrophe when the Sunday Times published the Conservative Treasurer, Peter Cruddas’ claims that ‘premier league’ donations (a snip at £250k) could get you a seat at the Cameron dinner table were damaging enough, especially when hot on the heels of a budget used to paint them as ‘the party for the elite’. But their response was a classic in ‘kicking yourself while you’re down’ communications.

To be fair they started well –Cruddas was a dot on the horizon before it was possible for anyone to call on him to go, and Tory bigwigs were queuing up to lay in to him in the press. So far, so good. However, when calls came for Number 10 to release the names of people who had attended the private soirée’s in Sam and Dave’s flat –they switched tack, and stonewalled. To the press and Labour party this was a red rag to a bull. And, after two days where it was clear the pressure was not let up, and they were forced to climb down. The finale was Cameron washing his dirty laundry in front of a speech to the Alzheimer’s Society. It was hard not to cringe.

The instinct to ‘control the story’ at all costs is strong, but it’s often counterproductive. You see frequently see all kinds of organisations attempting to restrict and manage information in a that makes them look, at best, arrogantly dismissive and, at worst, like they had something to hide. If Number 10 had thought rationally they would have realised they could not withhold the list forever. And when they did cough up it proved to be a damp squib. All they succeeded in doing was to amplify and prolong a negative news story.

When you’re caught with you hand in the cookie jar, its best to fess up on your own terms and get ahead of the story. People are actually quite reasonable. They don’t expect you never to make a mistake, and if you approach your errors humbly and transparently, you might even gain their respect.

To quote from the update of business guru extraordinaire Dale Carnegie’s book- How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age :

“When we recognize and admit our errors, the response from others is typically forgiveness and generosity. Quickly the error is diminished in their eyes. It is only when we shirk responsibility or refuse to admit our errors immediately that we raise the ire of those around us and the original misjudgement seems to grow in importance and negative effect.”

This week’s BusinessWeek provided the following sage advice to anyone considering setting foot in the political bear pit:

“If you think you want to be President someday, there’s a simple step you can take now to help your chances. Go to a Web registrar like GoDaddy. Search for the domain name that consists of your last name preceded by the word “spreading.” If it’s available, buy it. If it’s not, hope that the person who already owns it shares your political views.

The “spreading” meme is, well, spreading. It was started by opponents of Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s somewhat questionable views on homosexuality. And has now been taken up by enemies of fellow Republican Party contenders Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (whatever else happens, the Republicans are going to have a candidate with an awesome name this year).

To recap, this trend consists of:

1. thinking up a novel, and ideally disgusting definition for the name of a person whose political views you find abhorrent  (in the case of Rick Santorum really disgusting – be warned).
2. starting a website with this definition on the front page and then
3. using social media campaigning to get likeminded haters to search for that person’s name on Google and click your site – thus propelling this definition to the top of Google’s rankings, and causing untold humiliation for your opponent

Now, I imagine that, for most of us, this will not seem like a big issue – what with us not running to be president and all. But this illustrates a common issue faced by businesses and people when trying to manage their public persona.

Being the primary season, these guys were probably only thinking about which of their policies would be strongest to rouse the Republican base, and how to deal with the relatively modest barbs of opponents of the same stripe as them. Instead Rick et al have found themselves on the sharp end of coordinated and damaging national campaigns from people who – a few years ago – might have been handing out leaflets in just a single city. Google have now acted to downgrade these sites in search results – but this has probably only drawn more attention towards them from press reporting of the intervention – giving them a second wind.

The tendency is to focus purely on how people respond to what you do and what you say and how. However, this approach supposes that you are communicating with people in a vacuum. In reality, a huge range of others are generally talking into the same space, on the same issues that we are. So we need to think, not only about how convincing our communications are, but whether they are set up to be heard, and win, over all this noise.

Anyway, we off to search for ‘SpreadingPulse.com’….fingers crossed is still available.

 It’s Valentine’s week, and love is in the air. So, not wanting to ruin our reputation as grade A spoilers and contrarians, we’ve decided to focus this week on infidelity. It’s not really our fault – the blame goes to Thinking Allowed, which this week had a faith-in-love destroying interview with Eric Anderson, author of The Monogamy Gap.

Anderson’s book looks to answer that age-old question – why do people cheat? And wow is there a lot to explain! Research from the early 1990s shows that 72% of married men and 70% of married women cheat on their partners. Cheating, it appears, is not just common – it’s the norm.

But what is behind all this unfaithfulness? Well interestingly, it is not a sign that relationships lack feeling.    In fact the contrary is true. After a few years in a relationship, when cheating is more likely to take place, our loving feelings actually tend to have deepened. Anderson puts our propensity to play away it down to a purely physical desire for excitement and passion, after the initial flame of a long term relationship has cooled.

A couple of times recently we have written about the emotional core to brand relationships, and how great brands build genuine affection from consumers. What this research should get us thinking is whether this affection is enough to keep lovers of your brand from playing away!

The trick here is not to allow your brand to become routine and boring. From time to time you are going to need to spice-up your relationships, even with your biggest fans. If you don’t, you might find their head has been turned by that flashy new brand or store.

So ask yourself; is it time you took your loyalists on a second honeymoon?

This week our eye was caught by an edition of the relentlessly wonderful On The Media (the inspiration for more of our posts than we care to admit) devoted entirely to the newly public social media behemoth – Facebook. Among the numerous segments of interest was a piece on the ubiquitous like button, asking the eternal question – how much do we like (emotion) what we like (button)?

The problem is this: we like all sorts of different things – friends statuses, news articles, fanpages, and so on – and boy, do we like to like! 93% of Facebook users like something at least once a month. It’s obvious not all these likes can express the same sentiment. The like button is a blunt instrument. There are no gradations of like – to anything on Facebook you have only 2 options – to like or not to like. So how can people tell whether it’s something you really like, or something you just sort of like?

This is particularly an issue for brands for whom social media is now a fully-fledged comms channel (if generally wholly confusing for marketers used to 30 second ad spots). Now social media is mixing it with more established channels it’s got to start paying its way. Which raises the obvious question – how much cash is a ‘like’ worth? And particularly what’s it worth by the marketers yardstick – TV-viewer eyeballs. This has been guiding marketing investment since Nielsen began measuring TV ratings in the 50s. As new media has emerged – it has had to fit in. PR firms have developed their “Advertising Value Equivalency” metrics, and efforts are now under way to find and equivalent for social media engagement.

Personally, we think this is a mistake. The effort to button down the ‘value’ of social media is almost certainly pointless, and possibly damaging. Even advertisers haven’t nailed the value of their product yet. Measuring eyeballs -or recall, branded recall, or whatever – are at best poor proxies for the true impact marketers are trying to have – increasing affection for their brand, and propensity to stick one’s hand in one’s pocket. John Wanamaker’s infamous quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – is as true today as it was in the 20s.

Social media has lots of sound metrics already; ones that truly measure consumer engagement rather than passive viewership. But, even though they might be useful, I urge you to resist the desire to count more stuff. Branding is essentially about meeting an emotional need. And advertising works best when it connects with people on an emotive level – inflaming their passions, whetting their appetites. Trying to measure the emotional impact of advertising is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.

The brilliance of social media marketing at the moment is it is unencumbered by the weight of ‘how we’ve always done it’. It can just be brave and ground-breaking. If we rush to quantify its impact, we risk hemming this creativity into the need to hit an ad pre-testing norm – and who ever wanted to be a norm. One great benefit of social media is it’s usually not as punishingly expensive to create content as with traditional media. We can afford to play with it, and not pay so much attention to the need to inspect success and failure under a microscope.

So we might fail a bit more, but the wins will be that bit more amazing.

We recently produced a ‘year ahead’  trends presentation, expanding upon the shifts in habits and behaviours we foresaw in our Britain 2012 Manual, as well as other trends we’ve identified that will shape the consumer zeitgeist. It should arm you with what’s hot and what’s not in 2012. (SPOILER ALERT: QR codes are not).

The deck is embedded below to peruse. However, to get the full benefit of the commentary you should view the presentation on the Slideshare website , selecting the ‘Notes on Slide x’ tab below the slideshow itself. Additionally, it’s available to download on the same page.

Happy reading!

In case you haven’t heard about this (maybe you’ve been in a coma or holidaying at with an Amish community or something), I’ll fill you in. Last week a pair of pictures did the rounds on the internet. The first showed a letter to Sainsbury’s from a 3 year old girl called Lily saying she thought Tiger Bread should be renamed Giraffe Bread, with it looking more like a Giraffe than a Tiger in her estimation. The second was a response from Sainsbury’s customer services thanking her for the letter and agreeing that, yes, on reflection it does look a lot more giraffe-like than tigerish. Lots of people cooed at how cute the little girl was and what a thoroughly nice chap the guy from Sainsbury’s (Chris King – aged 27⅓, as his letter informed us) seemed to be.

By early this week the story had disappeared and then, on Wednesday, Sainsbury’s announced the rebranding of Tiger Bread as Giraffe Bread….available in all good Sainsbury’s now. Bang – most shared story on the BBC website, trending on twitter – two-for-one coverage, masses of goodwill towards Sainsbury’s – a brand manager ultimate wet-dream.

Now, I’ll bet good money that the following scene is being played out in marketing departments up and down the land today: “Those complete gits”, they’ll be saying (or something equally colourful). “Here we are blowing millions on advertising– above the line, below the line, through the line, what-have-you – and bunging a PR firm 50k a month. And these guys land countless column inches of the softest publicity ever – and they’ve spent all of 3 quid!” (Note: they gave the girl a £3 gift card – so really this was a voluntary fee).

And doubtless all of these conversations will end like this: “Ok guys, let’s get some coffee in, lock ourselves in ‘The War Room’, and brainstorm ways we can get people to do this sort of thing for our brand – let’s roll!”

My advice to these people is – don’t. Don’t try to make people say nice things about your brand. Don’t even think about it. It won’t work, and you’ll just end up feeling bad about yourself. Social media is not just another marketing channel for you to buy in to. And consumers will not be ‘made’ to do anything – try; and you stand a better chance of alienating them.

Success on social media is organic.  And, more scarily, it’s random. Don’t forget this story originally had nothing to do with Sainsbury’s. It was all down to the little girl’s mum posting the letters on her blog back in June last year and, from there, the ephemeral flows of social media pushed it around for seven months until, for some reason, it took hold and reached a critical mass, and finally broke into the mainstream media. No customer insights, no brand planning, no ad strategy, no creative, no marketing budget, no PR amplification – this bypassed our industry wholesale. Basically Sainsbury’s scored the marketing equivalent of a Euromillions win.

Now before you think I’m going to suggest we all pack up and go home – I’m not. While Sainsbury’s couldn’t and didn’t ‘make’ this story bubble up from the social media melting pot – it was their human customer service that fostered it, and their quick witted move to rebrand that turned a success into a triumph. There’s still room for well-planned and well-executed marketing – it just requires a new mind-set. To stick with an agricultural metaphor – it’s like moving from trying to grow the prize marrow in the village fete, to growing a field of sunflowers. It’s not about lovingly nurturing one idea, but about keeping a favourable consumer environment and sowing seeds of quality content as wide as possible. If we do that – we’ll end up with some extra tall sunflowers because some ideas will catch on.

A few basic tips for how to begin to succeed in this new world:

1. Join in – If you’re not on social media yet (and yes, lots of brands still aren’t) go out right now and open a twitter account, a Facebook fan page and a MySpace account (sorry couldn’t resist a little joke)
2. Think like a friend – start listening and engaging with people talking about you and about your area of expertise – not because you’re trying to sell them stuff, but because you’ve got something relevant to say. Twitter is not a place for “3% off” deals.
3. Invest in content – people listen to other people on social media because they share interesting and amusing stuff (think cat videos) – if you want to get stuff shared it had better be seriously good, although that doesn’t mean expensive (think cat videos)
4. Build conversations – follow up on shares, thank people and make them feel like you care.

Best of luck!