This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all [...]
This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all gone horribly wrong, but some simple, old-fashioned marketing meant that Abarth managed to achieve it’s goals for the weekend.
Until recently, I had never heard of Abarth. The marque is part of the Fiat group which also includes Italian sports-car classic brands such as Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and of course Ferrari. One of the reasons that the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB was created was to increase the awareness of the Abarth brand, but also to hopefully drive sales.
Here are some insights from the weekend.
1. Understand your audience.
I know. It’s fundamental right? But this simple piece of advice is overlooked time and time again, often by consultants trying to sell a technology or process that has no relevance to your stakeholders. Abarth had several audiences to relate to throughout the weekend including; motorcycle fans, professional motorcycle teams and riders and specialist motorcycle media.
Make no mistake, a car brand at a motorcycle event is risky. Bike people are a very close community, extremely brand loyal and passionate about their sport. Luckily, the Abarth brand has motorcycle credentials – the founder, Karl Abarth, starting his career as a motorcycle mechanic and racer. The Trofeo Abarth 500 GB event poster paid homage to this history and thousands of these posters were given away during the weekend to bike fans.
In the paddock, Abarth hosted a party with a live band and invited riders, mechanics, the media and volunteer track marshals to experience hospitality usually reserved for VIPs. For the cost of a beer, the brand bought great word-of-mouth that created ambassadors on forums and social media.
2. Simple is often the best.
While a lot of online buzz focusses on new marketing techniques like ’social media’, brand building is a much more broad discipline than just ‘clicks’ and ‘follows’ and ‘links’. The simple marketing tactic employed during the weekend to build awareness was to give away hundreds of flags. All around the Cadwell Park complex, children, and some grown adults, literally flew the flag for a brand that they had probably never encountered before. Not quite ambush marketing, but certainly the Abarth scorpion appeared in a lot of photos and even on live tv coverage.
3. Do your homework.
It would have been so easy to evangelise about how the 30,000 strong crowd could have got together on Foursquare, but when the venue isn’t even listed, then you realise that urban, high-tech marketing may not be the best way forwards.
Does it work? Yes it does. How do I know? I have proof. See my next blog about a case study that has big implications for sports sponsorship.
I’m a big fan of Twitter search. I have a cool plugin for Firefox that brings back the latests tweets for a search term and displays them above the same results for Google. It’s one of the reasons that Google is rumoured to be building similar functionality, to bring back real-time, real-people sentiments. But does Branding have to change in a world where only plain text is available? Without the fancy logo that surrounds your brand, can your customer find you?
Here’s an example to illustrate my point. Once upon a time there was a wonderfully innovative mobile phone brand called Orange. Famously, millions of dollars were spent to come up with the catchy strap-line “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange” and the brand became a case-study for marketing students of the 90’s.
But what happens to Orange when you take away the strapline and type just the brand into Twitter search? The results include chocolate sprinkles, a county in California, termites, Orange juice, orange rolls etc…
Try the same test with Vodafone. Type the single word with no qualification into Twitter and every single result refers to the mobile phone / internet brand.
Why is this important? Well increasingly, smart branding people are using sites like Twitter to monitor brand sentiment. The power of having an uncensored feedback loop from your customers around the world allows marketing people to tweak the mix to satisfy the needs of their audience. Monitoring brand sentiment on Social media platforms is in it’s early days, but it is a lot easier when you have a distinctive brand.
Try it for youself. What do you get when you type your brand into search.twitter.com ? Is it a lock-out? Is the whole page filled with people talking about you, or is it muddied with other things?
Or why crowdsourcing is trendy, but not always good…
Seems that a lot of social media evangelists, many of whom have almost no business experience, are proclaiming that crowdsourcing will spell the end of advertising and branding as we know it. The fact that many of these self proclaimed experts lump advertising together with branding in the first place suggests that they don’t really have a handle on marketing in the real world and are merely spouting something they read in a retweeted link to a blog somewhere (just like this one).
Those who would sign the death warrant of the advertising agency cite social media stunts run by large brands where their agencies were dropped in favour of contributions from the wider world. One oft-quoted case is that of the Unilever brand, Peperami. Many of the Twitterati have lumped the project in with consumer-generated ‘new flavour’ polls and revelled in the oncoming doom for traditional agencies. There is no doubt that ‘traditional’ agencies are struggling to come to terms with the new world order and many are bereft of new ideas, but what most social media tub-thumpers have missed is that Unilever themselves believe that the creative will probably come from professionals rather than consumers.
Noam Buchalter, Marketing Manager for Unilever’s Marmite, Bovril, Pot Noodle, and Peperami brands said in a recent interview:
We’re not really keen on the idea of fully open and public sourcing, as Walkers did on their recent crisp flavour campaign, our undertaking is to enter into a rigorous and serious creative process. The brief is relatively open, but people will have to work hard on their ideas, and part of the brief is also to produce print ads. It is open for everyone to enter, and we are hoping that many professional creatives will take part.
So in some cases, crowd-sourcing may lead to new ideas and the discovery of brilliant creative work. It’s also pretty cheap. The ‘prize’ offered by Unilever for the Peperami campaign was £10,000 and it’s hard to imagine one of Unilever’s preferred supplier agencies charging such a low fee.
Let’s not get carried away. Unilever have spent millions of dollars and tapped some of the best marketing talent in the world to establish the Peperami brand. It is therefore no surprise that creative minds can come up with new material given the brief. It would be a brave brand indeed that left their corporate identity to the crowd.
Incidentally, the ‘Walkers’ campaign alluded to was not so much a branding exercise as a mass-market focus group. There is no doubt that the internet and social media tools can help poll huge numbers of people very quickly, but how is a brand manager (a title also soon to be defunct according to some) to weigh a vote from Twitter user “sxychk25″ against letter writer; “Loyal customer from London”?
My own view is that crowdsourcing can reveal new creative talent in the way that the X-Factor reveals music stars, however these stars are probably not going to be ‘consumers’. Most brands aren’t lucky enough to have consumers that are so fanatical that they will give up their day jobs to do marketing for a large corporate without being properly compensated. While listening to your audience is important, the true marketing experts will still be required to synthesise the feedback and integrate it into the long term brand vision.
Brands that have established their core values will be able to take advantage of crowdsourcing in a more productive way, because consumers will be conditioned to working within the confines of a brand personality that has been created through millions of dollars of traditional advertising.
Finally, there is always a danger that crowdsourcing will lead to a dull average. Brands that are not well understood by consumers and have a mass market appeal may be tempted to please everybody and as a result fail to differentiate themselves sufficiently.
Marketing is changing, and social media is providing a way for brands to engage their consumers and develop relationships with them. Branding by consensus though will ultimately lead to watered down, politically correct, boring marketing. The strongest brands will be the ones that give their consumers the perception that they have an input but who have the courage to set their own vision and follow it.
IT technology was supposed to make things easier. ‘Work smarter not harder’ is the slogan for the information age. But just as you think you have understood it – how to make the most of email, how to measure click-throughs and page impressions, the geeks invent a new thing. Or they rename an old thing and make everyone else seem foolish. How many of these terms do you understand: Web 2.0, RSS, twitter, UGC, personal media…
The latest buzzword is ‘Social Media’. Ask 10 people what social media is and you will probably get 10 different answers. The term ’social media’ is misunderstood by many. From nowhere, social media consultants have appeared selling their opinions on reputation management and sentiment engineering. Whatever you call it, the technologies that allow huge numbers of people to create, publish, share and comment upon content (images, text, video, audio, gps co-ordinates), are important for sports marketing and PR.
One of the services receiving a lot of interest at the moment is Twitter. While on the surface the functionality seems simple, almost banal, the power of millions of people saying what they are doing, feeling, thinking at any one point in time should not be underestimated.
Let’s compare two examples. Imagine a sports entity; a pro-sailor, a team, an event organiser with a large company as a sponsor. This entity also has a traditional PR company working to maximise the ‘coverage’ of news and activities and in turn help the sponsor achieve their goals of exposure or association or some other objective.
Example One – the Traditionalists.
In example one, the traditional PR company is measured on more old-fashioned metrics like column inches, television screen time, radio brand mentions. Even in 2009, there are PR companies that believe that national newspaper coverage alone is enough to determine the success or failure of a campaign. There might be historic reasons for this. News used to be determined by powerful editors and specialist journalists. Developing relationships with these people determined whether your story was featured or not.
More recently this PR company has been forced to learn new methods of distributing the news – via email – usually in the form of a PDF, so that it can not be easily changed or manipulated. For these promoters, the only website mentions that are worth talking about are BBC.CO.UK or TheTimesOnline. Bloggers aren’t real media.
To this company, Social media is the devil. If taken to its end, social media makes a PR company redundant. If the talent can communicate directly with their fan base, what role is there for PR, or journalists, or editors for that matter.
While this is a hypothetical example of a PR company, it is a thinly disguised collection of behaviours that we see daily in the sports marketing industry. Not all are anti new technology; some just find it overwhelming and alien.
Example Two – The New World of PR.
In our second example, we imagine a PR company that understands how media is changing. While the traditional press and television is important, they understand that niche sports like sailing are more frequently being covered on other platforms. More importantly they understand the value of the network effect. Instead of all news going through a handful of gatekeepers, the content is free to appear wherever it lands. Some of the concepts in the new world are the same as the old world – things like reach, reputation and influence. But in the new world, these relationships are not as straightforward.
Much has been written about Stephen Fry’s 120,000 twitter followers. Obviously if Mr Fry twitters about something he raises its awareness and delivers thousands of ‘eyeballs’ to the story. You might then be tempted as a PR company in the new world to target Stephen Fry, but that would be to ignore the fact that Stephen Fry also follows other people. So imagine a person who has only 5 or 6 followers, but those 5 or 6 are followed by thousands.
PR company number two has spent time developing relationships, not just with traditional media, but with influential bloggers in their space. They understand that a small blog read by 100 people can be very powerful if those 100 people are an exact match to your target audience or they influence thousands of others.
PR company number two also understands that the new world is not a one-way broadcast. This is not a Sunday broadsheet that states – this is the news and there is no more. This is more like talkback radio. If the people disagree, they can say so. In public. With an audience.
PR company number two is asking questions like:
Obviously PR companies don’t work in a vacuum. They are representing brands and personalities that may not yet themselves understand the value of these new media. If a client tells you that their objective is to have a photo on the front page of the paper, do you sell them the benefits of bloggers? If you don’t someone else might.
All of this assumes that you want to communicate externally. Social media principals are just as important, perhaps more so, when communicating internally, but that’s a subject for another blog.
Pilote Media are offering Social Media Clinic for companies who want to learn more. The free 30 minute sessions can be held, in London, via phone or skype conference. The aim is to provide honest, down to earth advice without the jargon. For more information see http://www.pilotemedia.com/social-media/
