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.