Corporate Eye

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Archives for 2011

Define Your Brand Promise

It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about the basics of branding here on the Corporate Eye blog. As marketers and brand strategists, we often get too busy to do the self-checks on our brands that are necessary to ensure we haven’t veered off track.

In other words, you need to ask yourself if your brand is still living up to its promise?

At its core, every brand is a promise to consumers. That means, a brand promises something to consumers based on consumer expectations that are built through perceptions over time. What do consumers expect from your brand? Do those expectations match your brand promise? Does your brand promise the right things to consumers?

Brands must evolve as consumers evolve. A stagnant brand is unlikely to survive over the long-haul, particularly in today’s fast-paced world where consumer preferences and expectations can change overnight.

If your brand continually meets consumer expectations for it based on their perceptions of the brand promise as it relates to their experiences with your brand, then you’re on the right track for long-term success. However, if your brand does not meet consumer expectations for it based on its promise in every consumer interaction, then consumers will become confused with your brand. They’ll turn away from your brand in search of another brand that does meet their expectations in every customer interaction.

Consumers can’t become emotionally involved in your brand if they don’t feel secure in its ability to meet their expectations. That means they won’t be loyal to your brand and they won’t talk about your brand to other people.

Bottom-line, living your brand promise is critical to your business. Not only does the strength of your brand promise open doors to sales today, but a brand that consistently meets consumer expectations benefits from repeat sales, loyalty, and word-of-mouth marketing that advertising dollars can’t buy.

Don’t discount the value that a powerful brand promise can deliver to your business for years to come. Define your brand promise, live your brand promise, and spot-check your actual performance in terms of living that brand promise periodically. Be ready to adapt and evolve, but always remember that consistently meeting consumer expectations is paramount to your success. You can’t change your brand promise without taking time to change consumer perceptions and expectations at the same time.

What does your brand promise to consumers? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

The Corporate Website: All Work and No Play?

Gamification is a hot topic at the moment, so I went to a seminar hosted by Infolab21 from Lancaster University, and led by Dr Paul Coulton to find out more about it, and to find out whether there any way this could be part of the corporate website. (I posted a response to the first one of Dr Coulton’s presentations for Infolab’s Brunch Bytes season—about social media— earlier this week).

For most stakeholders—and for most websites—the corporate site is purely a repository of information; somewhere to find the latest news, reports and share-price.

But some corporate sites aim to be more engaging, at least in some stakeholder areas, including such elements as blogs, live-chat and other more-or-less-asynchronous discussion elements.

Some corporate websites include games and other challenges—almost always in the Careers section—and some companies have added game elements to the recruitment process. Games and gamification aren’t the same thing, of course, but it is interesting to see an element of fun on the corporate site.

But gamification?

Dr Paul Coulton offered a definition of gamification as:


Using game mechanics to encourage engagement in an activity that might otherwise be considered a chore or boring

Hmm. Surely there’s no such thing on a corporate website?

His alternative – and preferred – definition was:

Encouraging certain user behaviour using games as a lens

Now that is a definition the corporate site could work with… And if we look more closely at a few of the simpler elements involved, the chances are that your website already includes some of these things; though a full-blown structure of challenges and rewards is unlikely to be an option.

According to the Gamification wiki, features of gamification include:

  • Letting visitors know what others have been doing on the site.

    Recent-blog-posts widgets let visitors know what the company has been doing; but recent-downloads, rate-this-page and popular-pages widgets are increasingly common on corporate sites, and show what visitors have been doing.

    Potential additions could include popular-videos, or popular-images, or even recently-shared-pages.

    Or what about including a ‘you might be interested in this’ or ‘other people who loaded this page also looked at’ section at the end of a page, with genuine related links based on the visitor path or search query? I think I’ve seen this one recently – do remind me where in the comments!

  • Allowing visitors to identify themselves.

    Avatars: an avatar is a visual representation of an individual – sometimes a photo, but not always. If you allow comments on any part of your site (CSR blog, perhaps) do you show people’s avatars?

    The ability to add an avatar for commenters is probably the furthest a corporate site is likely to go with this one. Most visitors won’t be interested in being identified.

  • Including intentionally hidden features (Easter Eggs).

    I’m sure you’ve seen this as part of a retail promotion, and while highly unlikely to happen in the investor relations section, this could be used in the graduate recruitment section: perhaps as a scavenger hunt/quiz, to help students find out more about the company by driving them through various carefully chosen pages of the website, or from social media outlets to the corporate site and back again.

  • Enabling unique experiences.

    Some companies enable people to create an account, to personalise their landing pages, and to create collections of items that they are interested in (on a corporate site, usually called bookmarks, briefcases, folders…). Perhaps the next step is to enable people to create and share the URL to their collections of your content with others? If you know of anyone who already does this, do please let us know.

  • Leaderboards

    It’s unlikely that people would want to rank on a leaderboard in any of the main sections of the corporate site (even if they might for a game in the careers section). The person who’d reviewed the share price the most often? I don’t think so. However, a leaderboard for ‘most frequent commenter’ just might work, if you get enough comments.

  • Keeping the visitor informed about their progress or change of status.
    A progress bar, for instance, to indicate how far through an activity your visitor has got. These are commonplace in retail, as you step through the shopping cart; but in corporate sites? How about a progress bar to indicate how far through the application process your potential recruit has got?

    I haven’t spotted this kind of experience on a corporate site, but how about ‘There have been 5 new press releases since you last visited: do you want to see them?’ (filtering out the ones already seen). Some websites have experimented with enabling the visitor to identify themselves as of a type (e.g. journalist) and then presenting them with relevant information on their next visit. If people have created an account, then it should be possible to filter new content based on their expressed interest.

  • Displaying a visitors activity.

    I have seen this one occasionally: a widget displaying your recently visited pages; or your recent downloads. If registered for an account within the careers section, then you might be able to check which jobs you’ve applied for, and what their status is; or if required to register to see corporate images for download, you might be able to see which images you’ve previously used – though this would be less useful.

OK, so it isn’t putting together an international team of warlocks, were-beasts and night-elves to hunt for the Shadow Troll; but it is all adding the potential for engagement to the corporate website.

And that is probably one of your metrics for success.

The Beautification of CSR | Renewing CSR 1/3

To borrow from The Goons, “listeners who are listening…” will know that I get a little wound up about the phrase “ethical business”.  Ethics, I say, shouldn’t come into it because that’s a cultural issue and business is all about the technical management of money.

Hence my preference for sustainability: it simply widens the scope of technical accounting from money to other things.  Academically this is also a moral stance, but then so I guess is the expectation that a business should generate profits.

However, here’s a third strand of how business should address their impacts, courtesy of the National Trust and renowned professor of philosophy at the University of London, AC Grayling.

[Read more…] about The Beautification of CSR | Renewing CSR 1/3

Recommendations Are Still the Most Trusted Form of Advertisement

In a new report by Nielsen that tracked advertising spending and effectiveness in the United States during the first quarter of 2011, 76% of consumer respondents indicated that recommendations from people they know are the most trusted form of advertisement. However, even the opinions of people that consumers don’t know are important. 49% of consumer respondents to the Nielsen survey indicated that they trust opinions published online by other consumers, including strangers.

What does this mean to businesses?

In simplest terms, you need to get people to use and then talk about your brand. The social web provides a perfect place to do this. By engaging with online influencers and your brand’s target audience through social media tools and websites, you can start conversations, join conversations, and guide conversations in the right direction. Not only should you encourage consumers to write reviews on your own website, but you should also ask them to do so on your Facebook page, on Twitter, and on local sites like Yelp.com, MerchantCircle.com, Epinions.com, or similar sites that are popular in the countries where you do business.

Consumers don’t always trust ads, but they trust other consumers who have real experiences with brands, products, and services. Take some time to connect with online influencers who have the attention of consumers in your brand’s target audience. Reach out to them and get on their radar screens. Ask them to try your product and review it online (be sure to follow regulations related to consumer endorsements — CFR Title 16 Section 255 in the United States).

Think of it this way. You can spend thousands or millions of dollars on advertising, or you can work on building word-of-mouth marketing related to your brand through consumer conversations and recommendations on the social web. The latter takes more time, but it costs a lot less and can be far more effective over time. In other words, ads are great for short-term results, but social media and online word-of-mouth marketing can benefit a brand for years to come.

What is your company doing to generate word-of-mouth marketing and consumer reviews for your brand online? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Importance of Media Studies: Next Steps in Social Media

‘Next Steps in Social Media’ was the title on the programme; the speaker (Dr Paul Coulton) had apparently wanted to call it something much more earthy…

This was a seminar organised by InfoLab21, and I don’t remember academia being so much fun. For example, Dr Coulton has a database full of tweets referencing the Royal Wedding (what insights is he planning to mine from those?) and showed us a number of slides tracking the flow of tweets and Facebook likes during the course of the X Factor.

Popular culture? Well, yes, but a long way from the popular perception of media studies. His analysis demonstrated, for example, that the volume and rate of tweeting about the X Factor was not reflected in behaviour and in the actual results: one candidate, although with a significant quantity of social approval, actually received fewer votes. However, even if social approval can’t be used to predict the result, business decisions can usefully be made—and no doubt are being made by the media moguls—by analysing the difference between the demographic using social media to express their views, and that which acts.

The seminar discussed theories of how social networks are designed to meet some of our basic psychological needs. For example:

  • Facebook supports the need to maintain close ties within a group by ‘grooming’ behaviour; small social interactions that recognise the ‘other’ as significant, and reassert the ties between individuals
  • Twitter supports our love of gossip: he said this; she did that; pass it on.

If you can understand something of human psychology, then you can see how our behaviour on social networks can be – and is being – manipulated into behaviours that can benefit someone else, such as a company. Often these behaviour manipulations are overt, or can easily be spotted with experience… if you do X, you’ll get Y and we’ll get Z.

But sometimes it is less clear to the individual. Without at least a superficial understanding of some psychological theories of reinforcement, for example, individuals may well remain ignorant of the extent to which they are being manipulated: such as by being rewarded with badges for repeated behaviours (for growing 5 different kinds of tree in Farmville, for example, or by returning repeatedly to check in at the same location to retain their mayoral position via FourSquare).

In another example, people may not be aware that they are training themselves into addictive behaviour by repeatedly checking for new email, or retweets; the intermittent reward is more satisfying than if they were rewarded every time.

Manipulation is of course true of offline activity as well, and for all that our children are categorised as digital natives, this kind of hidden persuasion online may remain hidden from them, just as it may be offline. My father tells of a colleague who educated his children to ask themselves ‘what’s the lie?’ every time they saw an advert. While I wouldn’t go this far, I do think that an understanding of how such things work is valuable.

And that, I think, should be at least part of the point of ‘media studies’.

Will 2015 Be the Year Display Advertising Investments Beat Search Advertising?

New research from eMarketer reveals a prediction that might surprise you. According to the eMarketer data analysis, display advertising investments are on track to surpass search advertising investments in 2015. Of course, that’s assuming that current investment trends stay the same over the next few years.

The chart below from eMarketer shows how display advertising and search advertising spending is expected to play out through 2014. You can see the gap closing as display advertising spending is expected to keep growing year over year while search advertising spending is expected to start flattening out after 2014.

eMarketer makes the point that more companies are investing in display advertising (particularly with the growth of online video display advertising) for brand-building rather than keeping those budget dollars in direct response search advertising. In fact, spending on brand-building online advertising efforts will grow faster than direct response online advertising over the next four years.

It’s great to see a greater focus on branding by companies, particularly as it relates to budget investments. A strong brand can weather many storms, so investing in brand-building today can only help a company in the future. Considering that online ad spending is expected to grow by 20% in 2011 in the United States alone, this is definitely an area that brands need to prioritize in terms of strategy, planning, and budgets. Display advertising should be just one component of an online brand-building strategy. Social media marketing, content marketing, and traditional marketing should be fully integrated for the most successful results.

Is your company shifting online advertising budget dollars from search to display or from direct response to brand-building? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the trends predicted by eMarketer related to online advertising and branding.