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Archives for July 2008

Website or Blog – Daddy or Chips?

Daddy or Chips ?

A long time ago, McCain posed this question which still reverberates in the minds of us old enough to remember it – and young enough to have been worried by it.

Now there’s a new question … website or blog?

Like Daddy or Chips, the question is unanswerable, because you may be able to have both. In fact, you almost certainly should have both, if you can.

Occasionally I’m asked what the difference is between a website and a blog – and usually the starting point for the answer is straightforward:
[Read more…] about Website or Blog – Daddy or Chips?

10 Questions to Ask to Develop Your Brand Internally

A critical component to developing a business brand strategy is ensuring that your employees understand that brand strategy, buy into that brand strategy and live that brand strategy.  In fact, one of the first steps you should take as you develop your own brand strategy is to look within your own company. 

Ask your employees to confidentially respond to the following questions:

  1. What word (or words) come to mind when you think of our brand?
  2. What does our brand stand for in the minds of consumers?
  3. What should our brand stand for in the minds of consumers?
  4. Do consumers trust our brand?
  5. Do you trust our brand?
  6. Do you purchase our brand?
  7. Do you recommend our brand to friends and family?
  8. Do you like telling friends and family what company you work for?
  9. Do you think our leadership is focused on delivering our brand promise to consumers?
  10. What other brand do you think does a better job than we do?

Asking your employees to answer the above questions will give you an idea of where your brand currently stands in their minds and where you need to make changes in order to have any chance at convincing them to buy into your brand strategy.  In other words, if they don’t think the company lives the brand strategy at the executive level or overall, then it’s highly unlikely they’ll be willing to live the brand strategy that is passed to them from upper management through training sessions, special events, etc.

In other words, your employees need to believe in your brand strategy to live it.  Begin building your brand internally first.

What other questions would you add to this list?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts with Corporate Eye readers.

Squirrels of Sustainability

I’ve got a bit of a height thing. When I’m more than eight feet above the ground I start to feel all a bit funny inside, as though I shouldn’t really be there.

This means I have several “challenge your boundaries” moments each year as I run up and down ladders to clean windows, repair shed roofs, lop encroaching branches off the council’s trees, and so on.

Yet whenever I return to terra firma, nothing serious has ever happened and quite what got the emotions all worked up remains a mystery.

Languages provide another “ladder moment” and my knee-jerk reaction is to reach for the nearest online translation website. This is especially shameful if the language is French as I have a reasonable if rusty grasp of it.

So I was relieved to find myself quite happily ploughing through a French website, almost oblivious to the fact it was a different language.

The resulting understanding of a brand new certification scheme for financial products was well worth pushing my boundaries a little further.

Going Beyond Commitments
The story begins in 2005, when Friends of the Earth (FoE) analysed the environmental practices of several French banking institutions.

One of those cited as lacking credibility was Caisse d’Epargne whose logo, incidentally, is an idealised squirrel. The bank took the criticisms seriously and made a commitment to improve its practices.

Two years later it launched the Bénéfices Futur (Future Benefits) framework for a sustainable future. This in turn has led to many initiatives, including the opening of the first French bank accessible to deaf and hard of hearing.

Caisse d’Epargne
Financial Certification Scheme

At the same time it entered into collaboration with a number of bodies, including FoE, WWF and the French environment agency, to produce a certification system for financial products.

This summer that certification system was launched. And boy, is it good!

Fast Moving Financial Goods
The scheme rates savings products in three categories, displaying the results in a schematic similar to that used for the energy efficiency of Fast Moving White Goods (i.e. fridges, freezers, washing machines, etc).

The three categories are broadly defined as follows:

  • Security: how secure is the capital invested. Considerations include the variability of the product’s interest rate and the riskiness of the underlying investments.
  • Responsibility: how the underlying investments are judged against social and ecological ethical standards. Considerations include the administration of the savings scheme itself as well as the behaviour of the organisations invested in.
  • Climate: how the underlying investments are judged against climate change benchmarks. Considerations include a bank’s own emissions as well as those of any product invested in throughout its lifecycle.

The innovation behind this scheme is precisely that which was envisaged in “Green without Sustainability”: the introduction of a non-financial based methodology for measuring performance.

In addition, this scheme goes far beyond those measurements which are in common use today.

For instance, car manufacturers are usually measured according to the emissions produced during the manufacturing process. This scheme measures them according to the emissions produced during the lifetime of their product.

There can be no misunderstandings about what has happened here: this is a huge and ambitious step forward whose consequences will be far reaching and lasting.

Following The Leader
It’s all very well for one bank in France to introduce such measures and many environmentalists will instinctively look for the greenwashing angle.

Most greenwashing stems from companies’ desire to bring sustainability under their marketing aegis, instinctively trumpeting their successes while concealing their failures.

Caisse d’Epargne
Sustainability Overview

This is one of the reasons transparency is such a key feature of sustainable business practices. If you are open about what you do and how you do it you cannot be accused of deception, and so are much more likely to gain trust in the longer term.

Caisse d’Epargne understands this and has taken the unprecedented step of publishing the scheme’s entire methodology, in all its mathematical eye-crossing glory.

The bank and its partners are now calling for other financial institutions to look at adopting the scheme themselves. It’s difficult to imagine how other institutions are going to be able resist this call, especially given the international reach of FoE and WWF.

Ripples Across The Pond
As the scheme spreads, pressure will increase upon companies to adopt sustainable business practices. Before too long, this pebble dropped by Caisse d’Epargne in the pond of commerce will have created waves upon shores near and far alike.

The only hope is that as this happens financial institutions use common sense and use this scheme rather than trying to invent their own.

Otherwise they may find themselves feeling as embarrassed and stubborn as I did when I discovered the English translation of the bank’s website and documentation long after I’d finished writing this post.

C’est ma vie*, and I’m used to it. However, Finance has to wake up now and realise how creative it’s influence could truly be. Driving that realisation must be an understanding of how serious of our situation truly is.

* Such is my life

Viacom – The Mrs. Kravitz of the Internet

Remember Mrs. Kravitz, the nosey neighbor from the 60s television show, Betwitched? If there was anything going on in the Stevens’ household, you can bet Mrs. Kravitz knew about it!

Privacy issues on the Internet have long been a debatable topic for quite a while. Users take great offense to being “Big Brothered” and having their viewing and purchasing habits scrutinized under watchful, bullying eyes.

In a consumer-angering move, Viacom sued Google-owned YouTube to the sum of $1 billion dollars for the right to access their customer’s information regarding their viewing habits and IP addresses. Needless to say, this move got quite a few people upset enough that some are taking action. What’s even scarier is that Viacom feels that they have a right to this information, without having even gotten permission from the users. They want to “see” what the viewers are viewing and from what ISP address they are viewing it from. Consumer’s privacy issues will possibly be compromised and every move we make will be noted by the great Viacom.

Mrs. Kravitz is watching. 

So, how does Viacom feel about being called names like bully, or watchdogs or worse, meanies? In their defense, they noted on their website the details of what they will be extrapolating from the information derived from the YouTube files:

A recent discovery order by the Federal Court hearing the case of Viacom v. YouTube has triggered concern about what information will be disclosed by Google and YouTube and how it will be used. Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to Viacom. Viacom will use the data exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against You Tube and Google.

Viacom has been in discussions with Google to develop a framework to share this data. We are committed to a process that will not only comply with the Court’s confidentiality order, but that will also meet our commitment to the strongest possible internet privacy protections.

It is unfortunate that we have been compelled to go to court to protect Viacom’s rights and the rights of the artists who work with and depend on us. YouTube and Google have put us in this position by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and by profiting from copyright infringement, when they could be implementing the safe and legal user generated content experience they promise.

Viacom states that they will only use the information to prove their case of copyright infringement against YouTube, and for nothing else. It is likely that people are not upset about the idea that they (Viacom) wants to protect their material, but that they are accessing files and then will “dispose” of the private, intrusive information portion. Likely not. Viacom has somehow successfully tainted their name in the communications industry and to the average consumer as being nosey – Mrs. Kravitz’s style.

“By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression,” Google said in answer to Viacom’s March 13 suit.

This change will drastically affect the way consumers view the entertainment media. They will hesitate before they download or participate in surveys. They will think twice before they upload materials onto certain web portals. Finally, they will always wonder if someone, somewhere is watching their every move, noting their most intimate written thought or images or looking out at you through their stadium-sized computer monitors.

Yes, someone will be watching. And you’ll only wish that it were Mrs. Kravitz.
 

 

Is Microsoft’s Brand Strategy Poised to Fail Again?

Last month, I wrote a post called Microsoft – A Case Study in Failing to Meet Customer Expectations where I discussed three of the main reasons that Windows Vista failed and Microsoft’s brand reputation has been less than stellar in recent years.  Each reason related to failing to meet customer expectations, one of the most important things successful brands must do.  Today, I read an article on The Register demonstrating that Microsoft still hasn’t seen the light.

At Microsoft’s worldwide partner conference this week, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows consumer product marketing, Brad Brooks, blamed much of the tarnished reputation of the Microsoft and Windows Vista brands on Apple and the “lies” told in the popular Mac vs. PC Guy commercials.  According to The Register, Brooks said during his speech at the conference, “Today we are making a statement and drawing a line right here that we are going to do things differently. That we are going to tell our story.”  Notice there was no mention of failing to meet customer expectations with Windows Vista.  Instead, he simply stated that, “WindowsVista is a good product.” [Read more…] about Is Microsoft’s Brand Strategy Poised to Fail Again?

How to identify the focus of your strategy

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see at a glance how your strategy explanation is going to come across?

Wordle is a clever tool which displays words from a piece of text in different sizes depending on their frequency in an image. Just for fun, I’ve run the text that summarises the strategies of BP and Shell on their respective websites through this tool, and come up with the following images …

BP Strategy
Shell Strategy

Although they are quite attractive images in their own right, this does let us see quite clearly the differences between the two.

The most important words in the Shell image are:

Shell, new, billion, resources, capacity, increase, year

The most important in the BP image are:

performance, people, operate, restoring, close, gap

Without even needing to read the text, we can see that there is a difference in focus between these two companies. For Shell, it is all about increases in capacity; for BP it is all about people and performance.

Note that although the biggest single word for Shell is ‘Shell’, and for BP, their name is one of the smallest words in the image, this is probably due to the way that they have phrased their text. I stripped out people’s names, but not the names of the companies. And I’m not claiming that this is a piece of detailed analytic work – but I do think that it reveals what the main messages of your text are, based on the words used.

If you ran your strategy statement through the same tool, what would the main focus look like? And is it what you intended?