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Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius

The Importance of Internal Brand Advocates

One of the concepts I teach in my books and at speaking engagements when I’m asked to talk about branding is the importance of creating internal brand advocates and giving them the freedom to talk about the brand they love and believe in.  Your employees are your most powerful brand advocates.  If they don’t believe in your brand promise, why should consumers?  Companies need to make sure their employees are not only educated about the brand image, message and promise but also that those employees have a reason to believe in it and want to talk about it.

I read an article from Ad Age today that talks about this very concept and it’s shocking to me that companies don’t understand that building internal brand advocates should be a strategic imperative, not just a social media marketing tactic that’s getting some buzz of late.  This is something that should be ingrained in the company culture, not an afterthought.

How many companies can you think of where the employees will not only talk about the company they work for but advocate it, defend it against negativity, and evangelize it?  There may have been a time when companies like Google might have been able to make such a claim, but it would be challenging to name good examples of companies that cultivate a sense of internal brand advocacy in everything they do today. While companies like Pizza Hut, Overstock.com, and Kraft have been using employees in commercials and marketing initiatives lately, how many of those employees are truly brand advocates?  That’s the real question.

So think about your own company and how much more powerful it could be if your employees truly believed in the brand promise.  The word-of-mouth marketing true internal brand advocates could generate is exponential.  It’s amazing all companies aren’t on the internal brand advocate train.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts about developing internal brand advocates.

Image: stock.xchng

Brands, Bloggers and Consumers – 2010 State of the Blogosphere

Technorati has released its annual State of the Blogosphere report, and the results from 2010 tell us that blogging isn’t going away anytime soon.  In fact, the world of blogging is growing to include more and more influential voices every day.  This is an audience that can have a significant effect in word-of-mouth marketing and brand advocacy, but according to the report, 64% of bloggers believe they are treated “less professionally by brand representatives than are the traditional media.”  In fact, only 33% of bloggers who responded to the Technorati survey indicated that a brand has ever approached them to write about their business, products, services, and so on.

Sounds like a significant opportunity is being overlooked by most brands.  Instead of brands engaging bloggers who have established broad reaches across the online space, many brands are still ignoring bloggers.  Given the fact that, as the 2010 State of the Blogosphere reports (see the chart below), bloggers are more than willing to write about brands they approve of, proactively interacting with them can only help a brand.

2010-State-of-the-blogosphere

More specifically, bloggers write about their personal interactions with brands (both online and offline) and about company rumors they hear as evidenced by the data in the chart below.

2010-State-of-the-blogosphere-BRANDS

If they’re already talking about your brand or brands like yours, why not give them more great information to share?  Find the bloggers that are talking about products and services related to your own brand and interact with them.  Building a band of brand advocates with the help of online influencers, including bloggers, can have a significant impact on your long term brand goals.  It’s amazing what an online conversation can grow to.  Use those conversations to your brand’s advantage before another brand does.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and share your opinion.

Keeping Yahoo! Brand Value Alive

yahoo_logoI read an interesting article about Yahoo! last week on BrandWeek that asked various business experts to weigh in on whether or not new leadership is the band-aid needed to bring the company back to its former position of strength.  The responses were all fairly similar and match my own feelings about how to fix Yahoo!  The consensus seems to be that Yahoo! lacks focus.

Focused brands are powerful brands.  They own a word or phrase in consumers’ minds and deliver on consumer expectations for the brand promise with every brand interaction.

The question these days for Yahoo! is — what does the Yahoo! brand promise?  The answer is unclear.  Is Yahoo! a search company or a media company?  Is it a news organization or an editorial organization?  Consumers aren’t certain, and that leads to confusion.  When consumers are confused by a brand, they turn away from it in search of a brand that meets their expectations for it again and again.

So what can Yahoo! do to save itself?  There is far too much value in the Yahoo! name to let it go, and one can only point the finger at ineffective leadership insofar as that leadership doesn’t demand focus.  Yahoo! still attracts eyeballs and it still attracts advertisers, but the muddled brand is at a crossroads.  It’s time for Yahoo! to pick a path and get going.

I wrote a book about the value of the Playboy brand, and the Yahoo! story isn’t too dissimilar from the Playboy story in that it’s a brand that lost focus.  I don’t discredit Yahoo! from moving away from search into new directions, but the brand lost itself along the way just as Playboy did.  That’s a common problem for publicly-held companies whose stockholders demand double-digit growth year over year.  Only time will tell if the appropriate changes can be made to re-focus both brands on promises that not only allow the brands to survive but thrive over the coming years.

What do you think?  Can Yahoo! be fixed?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Lipton Makes Brand Guidelines Fun with an iPhone App and a Million Dollars in Virtual Sales

lipton-millionaireLipton is a well-known brand that promises decent tea.  but Lipton had a problem.  As DDB Hong Kong describes, “Lipton approached us with a problem: no one was reading their brand guidelines. However, when was the last time anyone got excited by brand guidelines? … We created something completely unheard of — brand guidelines that are actually fun and engaging.”

How did DDB Hong Kong do it?  They created an iPhone app and gave every Lipton brand manager in the Asia Pacific region an iPhone.  The “Lipton Millionaire” app included an interactive version of the “Lipton Voice” brand guidelines to study and a game which challenged Lipton brand managers about their knowledge of the Lipton brand and allowed them to compete against each other in a virtual game to win one million dollars in virtual sales.

According to DDB Hong Kong, knowledge of the Lipton brand is at an all-time high and excitement and belief in the brand promise from the most powerful brand advocates — employees — is undoubtedly higher, too.

You can check out the Lipton Millionaire video here or check it out on the Lipton Millionaire website.

What do you think?  Would an iPhone app help your brand managers better understand your brand guidelines or help turn them into powerful brand advocates?  It worked for Lipton.  It’s unfortunate that the effort only involved brand managers.  While they certainly need to understand the brand guidelines, all employees should be educated about the brand and why guidelines are important.  Afterall, an employee doesn’t have to be a brand manager to be a powerful brand advocate.  Give them the chance to learn, embrace, and believe in your brand, and they just might advocate it for you.

Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

New Brand Marketing – More Facebook Likes Equals More Savings

Consumer products companies and retailers have been watching the success of social shopping site Groupon, and now, they’re trying to generate similar success through their own social media marketing efforts.

Groupon is a site that offers local shopping discounts to site members with a catch.  The offers are very good, but shoppers can’t get a deal until they get a specific number of other people to take that same offer.  As more people join an offer, the better the deal gets.  Groupon launched in November 2008 with 400 members, and today, Groupon has 25 million subscribers in 29 countries.  With those huge numbers, it’s not surprising that most of the offers on Groupon attract enough users that they can cash in on those deals.

In recent weeks, many big brands have launched their own attempts at group buying and rising discounts, primarily through Facebook.  Four such promotions are described below (via BrandWeek):

  1. Walmart: Walmart placed Facebook ads for its new CrowdSaver service offering an 18% discount off of a plasma television if they get 5,000 Facebook likes.  5,000 people quickly liked the Walmart Facebook page.  Ultimately, Walmart will open the discount to all consumers, not just people who clicked the Facebook like button.
  2. Jack in the Box: Jack in the Box is running a promotion called “Be My Rich Fan” where the company created a virtual nickel jar and deposits a representative nickel each time a new person likes the Jack in the Box Facebook page.  Over 213,000 people liked the Jack in the Box Facebook page before the promotion was over and the pot had grown to over $10,000.  When the promotion ended, one of those followers won all the money in the virtual nickel jar (in real money).
  3. Healthy Choice: ConAgra Foods’ Healthy Choice brand offered a “progressive coupon” on the Healthy Choice Facebook page giving people who liked the page 75-cents off of their next purchase of a Healthy Choice product.  As more people liked the Healthy Choice Facebook page (the number tripled within 25 hours of the promotion’s launch), the coupon got better until it reached it’s ultimate level of “buy one get one free” within three days.
  4. Barilla: Barilla offered a coupon for its Wasa Crispbread that grew in value as more people liked it on Facebook.  Within a few weeks, the number of Facebook likes for Wasa Crispbread grew to nearly 8,000.

facebook-coupon-wasabread

Clearly, if you offer savings, people will come, even if that discount seems small.  Just look at the results for the 75-cent coupon for Healthy Choice!  Even the ultimate buy-one-get-one-free coupon for Healthy Choice only equates to a few dollars!  How engaged will those consumers stay in time if your brand doesn’t continue to offer coupons and other useful information?  That part of the story has yet to be experienced.  Will those thousands of Facebook likes turn into long-term, sustainable sales?  Drawing attention and getting Facebook likes is just the beginning.  It will be interesting to follow these brands in the future to see if they can retain the levels of interest they drew with their crowd couponing.

What do you think?  Can you implement these types of tactics in your own business?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Marketing Society Votes on Top Brands of 2010

The Marketing Society is a U.K.-based non-profit organization owned by its members — over 2,500 senior marketers. According to the Marketing Society website, “over the past 50 years it has emerged as one of the most influential drivers of marketing in the UK business community.”  Each year, the Marketing Society Awards for Excellence recognize the best-of-the-best, including the top brand.

Voting for the Marketing Society Top Brand of 2010 is open, and the winner will be decided during the Marketing Society Annual Conference on November 18, 2010 at Old Billingsgate, London, when 1200 marketers will choose the winner by live text vote.

You can check out the nominees for 2010 brand of the year below:

Marketing-Society-2010-Brand-of-the-Year

The nominees are very diverse and as you would expect from a U.K. based organization, there are a number of U.K. brands on the list.  For example, Hovis (bakers with a long history) and John Lewis (a range of quality department stores owned by employees and much loved by Brits) are not well-known (or known at all) in the United States.

It will be interesting to see which brand takes the title as the top brand of 2010 by the Marketing Society voters.  There are some interesting brand stories included amongst these logos, from the creative advertising of Old Spice that resurrected a brand to the rising global influence of the Twitter brand, each of these brands is included in the list of nominees for a very different reason.  Which one actually deserves to be named brand of the year for 2010?

What do you think?  Which brand would you vote for and why?  I’m not from the U.K. and am not very familiar with several of these brands.  Therefore, my vote would go to Twitter for the way it has changed the world of communications and achieved widespread use in 2010.  Leave a comment and share your thoughts on who should be named 2010 brand of the year.

Image: Marketing Society