Stop! Product promotion alert

A ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority against Mondelez UK Ltd,  the makers of Oreo biscuits, which had paid YouTube bloggers to promote its famous brand, means that in future vloggers must indicate that they have been paid to promote a product. Whilst the very cheesy examples provided in a BBC article about this made it quite clear that some form of promotion was taking place, it begs a wider question of how many vloggers are being paid to more subtly promote a range of brands; and how much do consumers know about this.

I believe the practice is widespread, but may be unknown to most consumers. We know the power of opinion leaders and of eWOM - electronic word of mouth - to influence consumers on their choice of product. But the fact that some vloggers have been able to garner vast audiences with very little more than an engaging personality and an acute sense of the zeitgeist and what appeals to young people like themselves, means that social media has become a very powerful tool for engaging consumers and positioning brands. Many vloggers have received free product samples, as well as cash, and have been incorporated in more elaborate campaigns - such as the one used to promote pop band the Shout Out Louds. These undoubtedly have a significant impact on their viewers, evidenced by the number of views and "likes" they receive.

It appears that the regulators of traditional media are now beginning to catch up with the digital world.

P.S. This blog is not endorsed by any major corporation, but I am open to offers.

Getting the right measurements

I found an accessible guide to online marketing metrics from digital leviathan, Google.
The main takeaway in my view is to value your best customers. Many times when I consulted for companies, no matter what industry they operated in, when I asked them "Who are your most profitable customers?" I would receive a blank stare and an apologetic response to say that they were looking into this and it was very difficult to find the data, etc. The emphasis with many businesses is to find the next customer, chasing transactions, rather than trying to understand customer lifetime value or even attempting to segment their customers effectively. Investing in these areas of your marketing planning and development could offer greater insights to your customers' behaviour and significantly improve your
marketing ROI.

If you can't beat your enemy, attack its friends

Greenpeace led a highly effective campaign to persuade Lego to abandon its joint branding initiative with Shell.

Over a million people signed a petition to persuade Lego not to renew its contract to supply Shell-branded Lego products. This raises some very interesting issues.

1. The opportunity for brands with a poor consumer perception to associate themselves with a highly credible brand can be positive. By doing so, Shell were looking at distracting its customers from the negativity surrounding its brand. Much like organisations choose to use celebrity endorsement as a way of associating themselves with a much more glamorous and desirable personality, this form of co-branding can help normalise the perception of the lead brand.

2. Pressure groups, like Greenpeace, have the opportunity to target a broad range of stakeholders of the organisation against whom they wish to protest. Clearly, Lego were not happy to see their brand being tarnished any further. The video above provides a rather shocking example of how Lego's brand image can be distorted.

3. The YouTube video (above) was reportedly Greenpeace's most successful viral campaign. This shows that if the content is well-executed and correctly targeted, social media's power to influence is as strong as ever.

So we can re-write the adage that "your enemy's enemy is your friend" to say " your enemy's friend is your enemy".

Demographics User Group Conference 2014

Back in the office after the Demographics User Group Conference yesterday. I met some great people and reconnected with old friends. This was an excellent meeting of minds for those focused on data analysis, customer insight and the open data agenda. There was an impressive roster of fellow academics and people from a wide range of commercial companies. Some key takeaways for me:

1. Every organisation is wrestling with the issues of how to extract, manage and analyse data, in order to find meaningful insights.
2. Customers are willing to share their data, but the benefits need to be clearly visible and must add value to their lives.
3. Whitehall has an appetite to engage in open data sharing, but acknowledges the challenges of transparency, trust, education and good communication.
4. There is some stunning work being supported by the ESRC with their Masters students' competition.
5. The genie is out of the bottle in terms of data sharing and we academics will benefit greatly by greater collaboration with industry.

I also had a chance to discuss my dynamic pricing research topic and received a lot of encouraging suggestions. I'm looking forward to following these up.

The most Boring Ad Ever Made?

Leica Cameras, the most expensive consumer camera brand in the world, has recently produced this advert - which they call "The Most Boring Ad Ever Made?"- to mark the launch of their latest camera, the Leica T.

What it does well is show the reverence and craftsmanship that is applied to the manufacture of its products. You will get the feeling that your new purchase has been lovingly hand-worked - just look at all that filing! In white gloves, no less.

But what does it actually say about the brand? That the most important thing they can say about their new product is how they make the case? This is especially relevant when you realise that this is a largely electronic device and the electrical components and its new lenses, the basis on which Leica has made its name, are manufactured in Japan.

There is no mention about image quality, product features, ease of use, etc.

But maybe that is exactly the point. This is not just a camera: it's a Leica. It's all about the brand. I suspect there will be some customers for whom the technical details are irrelevant. Possessing the brand will be much more important. Not too dissimilar to that other well known computer, mp3 player and mobile phone manufacturer, which sells very expensive products that perform as well as any other (and I m writing this post on a Macbook).

Is this a direction other brands should adopt? If you can distil the essence of your brand to one or two key attributes - like craftsmanship - then it could work. The key is to identify those attributes that are hard or impossible to imitate (a Japanese brand could not claim this level of hand-working) and be able to demonstrate the proof of these attributes.

By the way, the new camera costs an eye-watering £1,350. Lenses are extra. Other Leica products can cost considerably more.

P.S. The company also produce a digital camera that only shoots in black and white. No, I am not kidding.

Does what it says on the tin...

Here is a great example of a company demonstrating its product is as good as it says it is:

Sony Bottled Walkman Video

By putting its waterproof mp3 in a bottle of water and then selling it via a vending machine, Sony show it can be innovative in its packaging as well as its distribution. Not being a regular swimmer, I can't comment on how useful it is to swim with headphones on. But kudos to Sony.

Computer knows best?

In his latest book, "Average is Over", Tyler Cowen, an economics professor from George Mason University in Virginia, states that, in future, only the top 15% of people will prosper, in a hyper-meritocratic society. The remaining 85% will remain forever impoverished, consigned to a life of low wages and low chances of progression.

His claims are based on the fact that this top tier of people will be those who accept that computers are better at making decisions and have greater depth of knowledge than the average person. He says: "Humans who believe they know best are wrong and will be punished in the workplace for their arrogance."

He does make an interesting point that much information exists online, but only those who are the most self-motivated to interrogate this information will be able to take advantage of it.

But is he right? He seems to eschew the power of intuition, of learned behaviour and of the cognitive power of the brain to adapt to the environment and make sense of it. Moreover, could you trust a computer to make ethical decisions for you? How valuable would a computer be at analysing the evidence in a murder trial, when it could not interpret the defendant's body language?

I still believe there are some limits on what we can expect computers to achieve on our behalf. But there is, similarly, a large proportion of tasks that we can consign to a device that can analyse and evaluate much faster than humans can. And that never forgets anything!