Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Measuring Word-of-Mouth Marketing

There is an online debate in the marketing world related to measuring word-of-mouth marketing.  The online and offline buzz surrounding a brand or product has been nearly impossible to measure accurately, but the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is trying to do just that by developing a standard metric system to accurately measure the success of all word-of-mouth initiatives.

Some marketers and brand managers argue against creating this type of metric saying that true word-of-mouth is earned by spending time, money and effort in building a relationship with customers.  I have to concur with that theory, but at the same time, with the explosion of viral marketing and social media marketing, both of which lend themselves perfectly to word-of-mouth marketing and generating an online buzz, there certainly is an abundance of new opportunities to connect with people through the social web. [Read more…] about Measuring Word-of-Mouth Marketing

7 Steps of Advertising Success Drive Word-of-Mouth Marketing

I’ve been talking over the past week about emotional involvement in brands and how that type of connection to a brand can lead to deep customer loyalty.  What comes from customer loyalty aside from repeat purchases?  Typically, loyal customers are also very vocal about the brands they love and generate a great deal of free word-of-mouth advertising for those brands. 

Earlier this week I wrote about the 3 S’s of Customer Loyalty and how to create an emotional involvement to your brand by focusing on those 3 S’s.  Today, I’d like to share my 7 Steps of Advertising Success to show you how your advertising efforts can lead prospective and existing customers down the path to loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing.  In other words, with each tactic executed as part of your overall branding and marketing plans, you’re moving people through the 7 Steps of Advertising Success as follows: [Read more…] about 7 Steps of Advertising Success Drive Word-of-Mouth Marketing

3 Steps to Generate Emotional Involvement in Your Brand

As a follow up to my post earlier this week about how emotional involvement in a brand drives brand loyalty, today I will provide three steps to generate emotional involvement in your brand.  I call these three steps the 3 S’s of Customer Loyalty.  It’s a concept I first introduced in my book that was just released in the U.K. (coming to the U.S. in August), Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon.  By ensuring your brand offers customers the 3 S’s of customer loyalty, customers will become emotionally involved in your brand.  Let’s take a closer look. [Read more…] about 3 Steps to Generate Emotional Involvement in Your Brand

Handling a crisis at Primark

Embarrassingly bad news across the broadsheets and on the BBC Panorama programme … how should you handle this?

Primark Ethics Site

Primark, a cut-price clothes retailer, have had some ongoing bad press about their suppliers over the last couple of years, but there has been more over the last week, with bad news about the use of child labour to produce their goods – and a major television programme tonight highlighting this issue.

According to Primark, they have cancelled orders from three factories in Southern India for failing to meet their ethical standards by subcontracting embroidery and sequin work to children working from a refugee camp. Primark have also withdrawn the garments from sale.

This is deeply embarrassing, and could just chip the gloss off the prediction that Primark will soon oust Marks & Spencer as Britain’s favourite clothes retailer, as it reaches over 10% volume share of the market.

So how have Primark handled this crisis online?

The main Primark site is not beautiful, but they have a large link from their home page to a separate website on Primark’s ethics. From here, you can:

  • watch a video explaining how they can sell things so cheaply
  • review their ethical strategy
  • read their code of conduct
  • read news about the action they plan to take on breaches of their ethical code
  • read a Q&A section
  • contact Primark with your comments.

The video is clearly purpose-made for this site, as it deals specifically with supplier relations, and isn’t a generic piece of corporate video. And the rest of the content is of a piece: on-topic and targeted. Impressively, some of the FAQ available from this page are directly related to this issue:

  • How can you assure me that I should still shop at Primark?
  • Do you regularly drop suppliers for ethical reasons, even if this potentially costs workers their jobs?
  • What have you done about this to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

As we all know, FAQ are often not updated very often, or even very relevant, so this is commendable.

Interestingly, the contact form offers the chance to opt out of having your views published at a later date on this website as part of a discussion. Perhaps Primark have plans for some form of onsite feedback? Perhaps a forum, or other means of user-generated content?

Whatever your views on the issue, this is a commendable way of dealing with the problem, both online and off.

It is upfront — no need to hunt around to find discussion of the issues — and up-to-date — the FAQ indicate that this is fresh content. Also, the ethicalprimark.co.uk domain name was only registered on 30 May 2008, so I suspect this site has been put up in direct response to this current crisis. In general, I think that experts would recommend that preparations are made for a crisis in advance, and kept dark until needed, but if this site has been put up in the last couple of weeks, Primark have done very well indeed in addressing this issue.

Primark is owned by Associated British Foods; there is no mention of the current furore affecting Primark on the ABF website.

Driving Customer Loyalty Through Emotional Involvement

Perhaps the single most important aspect of developing customer loyalty is emotional involvement in your brand. Customers who feel an emotional connection and response to your brand are inherently loyal to it. Let’s look at a few examples.

Star Trek

The Star Trek brand is one that fans are deeply loyal to. In fact, Star Trek fans are borderline obsessive. Loyal fans attend conventions, buy products, dress in costumes, play games, and learn languages related to the Star Trek brand and corresponding universe that has grown around it. Now, that’s loyalty! [Read more…] about Driving Customer Loyalty Through Emotional Involvement

Using Networking to Target Graduates

Are you looking forward to the milkround again?

Here’s a different approach to targeting particular students at particular universities that might just be what you’re looking for …

Web Worker Daily recently described a new tool (from Affinity Circles) to help Fortune 500 companies target specific graduates – down to particular universities, educational background, year groups or work experience – and communicate directly with their targets about job opportunities.

This works by harnessing the power of social networks. Members send messages about jobs or other opportunities to their peers, universities send announcements to members, and outside companies like pay to send job postings to potential candidates.

Why is this news? Surely graduates use Facebook and LinkedIn?

Affinity Circles say that an online community sanctioned by a university promotes a higher degree of trust than an open community such as Facebook or LinkedIn; and that because it is members-only, there has been an element of preselection by the university; and that because it is members-only there is more privacy for the candidate. No candidate is identifiable by the recruiter until they identify themselves as interested.

From the candidate’s point of view, it’s the online version of the old boy (and girl) network for getting a foot in the door to places that don’t need to advertise and to talk to other alumni at that company to find out what it is really like to work there.

For the companies who participate, it’s a way to find potential recruits who may not be actively looking for a job, or simply to tap into a group of preselected candidates, thus reducing recruitment time and costs.

So should you seriously consider this?

It looks as though the only universities that Affinity Circles have access to at the moment are US-based, so this won’t be useful for everyone.

And I wonder why Affinity Circles are promoting this to Fortune 500 companies; I would have thought that this kind of advertising could be useful to many other, smaller, companies as well.

Nevertheless, I think that this is potentially a very useful way forward, and I think that Affinity Circles have astutely identified the current problems with online recruitment: that there are too many job boards with too little preselection of candidates and that the current set of wellknown networks offer too little by way of targeting and privacy.

Their solution, to use existing private networking circles, is a good one. I wonder what private networks currently exist in British universities …