J Walker Smith and David Bersoff write:

We’ve just had a piece published in Admap where we argue that the challenge of context is the biggest challenge facing marketing – and until it’s addressed, everything else is a waste of time.  Research at Columbia University  illustrates why. In a web-based experiment respondents were asked to listen to and rate unknown songs by unknown bands, then given the opportunity to download as many as they liked. One group of respondents made download choices independently. The other group of respondents made download choices after first being told, in different ways, choices made by previous respondents. The influence of others turned out to be far more important than the individual’s own opinions.

The implications? As the Columbia team noted in their summary, most studies “view the individual as the relevant unit of analysis”. But “when individual decisions are subject to social influence, markets do not simply aggregate pre-existing individual preferences”. In other words, when context is missing, the research results are wrong. Both marketing, and marketing research, will have to change to keep up.

Fragmenting technologies, and fragmented markets, have disaggregated the audience for marketing, and the mass market has splintered. But we’re still using models that were developed when mass media was dominant. Now that people are ever more deeply embedded in narrowly drawn networks of information and influences, contextual reference points play a bigger role in moulding choices. People are surrounding themselves with input they have chosen. The result: people get more of exactly what they want, but are closed off to other ideas.

What this changes for marketers is that they must actively manage both ads and the context for ads, and managing context becomes a primary consideration, not a secondary one. In turn, this calls for an attribution-based marketing model, not to displace persuasion, but to nest it in the bigger picture, like Russian dolls inside one another. Attribution works by shifting how people think of themselves, rather than how people think of brands.

Attribution-based marketing aims to make people attend to alternative aspects of themselves. When people see themselves in new ways, they adopt new reference points for calibrating their opinions, and then behave in ways consistent with their new sense of self. Persuasion must still get the brand message right; attribution sets the context within which a brand message can succeed. The implication for research is that it needs to understand its users’ reference points as well as their opinions. It doesn’t do this well at the moment. It’s a big challenge, and also a huge opportunity.

Alex Steer writes:

In Cape Town, ‘This is Africa’ is normally a sort of verbal shrug. It’s what you say when you see a road that’s more pothole than tarmac, or when a breakfast meeting finally starts at noon. In the last few months, though, ‘This is Africa’ has taken on a rather different meaning, as every media channel, and every brand, scrambles to ‘welcome the world’. This is Africa, and this is Africa’s World Cup.

The more optimistic see it as a chance for one of Africa’s most successful countries to show that the whole continent is coming of age. The more pessimistic see the World Cup as a cynical commoditisation of the idea of ‘Africa’: a cheap shorthand of Lion King imagery and broad cultural stereotypes lending a false exoticism to a Euro-centric and hugely commercial football tournament. The evidence for the prosecution rests on the shambles of ticketing, which either incompetently or viciously priced the vast majority of South African and African football fans out of attending matches.

If FIFA had paid more attention to its hosts, it might have avoided mixing bland pan-Africanisms with repressive corporatism. If brands are paying attention, there are a few deeper lessons they might draw about South Africa’s new consumers (the ones that didn’t make it to the stadiums) – lessons that even consumer research sometimes misses, to its cost.

The first is the need for specificity. Just as vague nods to ‘Africa’ will not wash, neither will any brand proposition that is not explicit about why it deserves attention. FIFA’s major sponsors are spending hundreds of millions on media and global brand campaigns – yet an increasing share of purchasing power in South Africa is in the hands of millions of low-income consumers who are driven by a fundamental conception of value. Brands thrive because they offer low cost, quality, safety and personal status. Global sponsor? Nobody cares.

The World Cup has also revived the lingering stereotype of the ‘new African consumer’: young, upwardly-mobile, black and with disposable income. This isn’t confined to advertising: hugely popular soap operas like Generations and Rhythm City are dazzling cocktails of social issues and fetishisation of commercial success that make Dallas look tame. These ‘new consumers’ look remarkably like the old ones, though, and there are some signs that the use of aspirational ‘black diamond’ images to sell existing products to new target audiences is wearing a bit thin.

‘Emerging consumers’ do not think of themselves as if they were playing catch-up with richer ones – or as if they were the same as each other. The smarter brands are segmenting these markets attentively, and looking for genuine insights. Asking the wrong questions can lead brands astray. Few low-income South Africans, for example, report having life insurance (24%) or investments (17%; see Global Monitor), in part because they do not associate these labels with membership of informal burial societies or stokvels (rotating credit unions), widespread in these markets. Insightful financial services brands are developing formal versions of these, tailoring their products to their new (not ‘emerging’) consumers.

If the World Cup has given us anything, though, it is the sound of the vuvuzela. Raucous, unfamiliar, disruptive, it’s an apt metaphor for the new South African consumer landscape and its challenge to brands. You can’t block it out, you can’t change it, and you’d be churlish to try. Sorry, brands of the world, but you’ll have to get used to it. This is Africa.

Alex Steer is a WPP Marketing Fellow and worked in our London office in 2009. He is currently a planner at Ogilvy Cape Town and rejoins The Futures Company in New York in September. The picture at the top of this post comes from the internet guide to Cape Town, and is used with thanks.

Denise Hicks writes:

Lobbyists 38 Degrees are one of the many organisations that have become heavily involved in protesting against the BBC cuts. In response to the huge amount of opposition, particularly to the potential closures of 6music and the Asian network, 38 Degrees have managed to raise enough money to launched a billboard campaign in protest.

They have just posted a first concept of the proposed billboards on their site and are asking for public feedback.

Now it’s not a great concept in my opinion and pretty much misses the point. As you can imagine, akin to a YouTube commentary, the feedback is varied and entertaining, with comments such as…

• ‘Poor miserable counterproductive lack of imagination.’
• ‘it’s very white’
• ‘I’d suggest that you start again from scratch.’
• ‘Driving past will cause confusion and accidents ala the wondabra advert’
• ‘I think it’s lovely’
• ‘I would suggest just typography – big letters “NO TO BBC CUTS!” or somesuch’
• ‘does it need to be “clever”?
• ‘The DDM (Detracting Demographic Monkees) are at it again’
• ‘You have paid an ad agency for this? If so, I am very disappointed. May I suggest you talk to some other companies instead? Airside are superb’

See what you think… I’m sure they’d be grateful for any (constructive and informed) thoughts!

Andrew Curry writes:

We’ve been sharing some of the puzzlement about the ‘Britainthinks’ posters which have appeared since the New Year. The claim on the website is that “Britainthinks is an independent space where the opinions of the British public can be publicly expressed.” But it turns out that they’re actually a cunning plan by the ad industry to promote the value of outdoor as an advertising platform. So, obviously it’s worked, since we’ve been exchanging emails and I’ve been moved to write a blog post about it.

But the slogans they’ve chosen to provoke Britain to thought seem carelessly unimaginative. The ‘Career Women Make Bad Mothers‘ posters had to be pulled after a howl of disapproval on Mumsnet (more than a thousand posts at time of writing) , which I suppose goes to prove the point of the Outdoor Advertising Association’s chief executive that outdoor can drive online traffic. Be careful what you wish for.

And as for ‘Educashun isn’t working‘ (see what they did there?), for people of my generation it inevitably recalls – no doubt deliberately – the Saatchi campaign which elected Margaret Thatcher in 1979. So much so that when my son asked me about it I told him (before I’d found out about the OAA’s thumbprints) it was probably put up ahead of this year’s election by a group which supported the Conservative party.

Every fortnight The Futures Company holds an internal breakfast meeting, the MMM (or Monday Morning Meetings), to share knowledge and ideas. In our last meeting before Christmas the MMM team put together a quick brands and advertising quiz to test how much the company had been paying attention to British brands and their ad campaigns during 2009.

Here’s a selection of the questions from the quiz. We think a good score is more than half – the answers are below the fold, if you feel the need to cheat a little. Just click on the right or left hand side of the slides to go forwards and back.

Question 1.

• Dorset Cereals’ award-winning recipes were launched as cereal bars in January 2009.

Question 2.

• Jack Daniels’ advertising push in 2009 included this tube advertisement that put a face to the eponymous distiller.
• No one REALLY knows the date of Mr. Jack’s birth but it is customary to celebrate his birthday in September – yes, he gets the whole month. A town fire destroyed the courthouse records, and conflicting dates on Mr. Jack’s and his mother’s headstones have left his date of birth in question.

Question 3.

• The one time Sex Pistols’ singer John Lydon promotes Country Life as “Just great butter”.

Question 4.

• Volkswagen proves its German efficiency by subbing its print campaign to within an inch of its life to reveal a simple message.
• Each poster reveals over-worded text describing the efficiency of the brand’s BlueMotion technology. The text has either been crossed through or highlighted to leave just a simple statement.

Question 5.

• TEA.
• Yorkshire Tea says it tastes “hundreds of teas a day so you can enjoy a proper cup of tea every time”.

Question 6.

• Have a break, have a FAIRTRADE Kit Kat.
• Kit Kat has announced it’s finally got the Fairtrade stamp of approval for its four finger bar.
• It’s all part of Nestlé’s sustainability initiative – ‘The Cocoa Plan’ – which will see £65m invested over 10 years.

Question 7.

• New ads for Coca-Cola’s sustainability brief will be emerging shortly.
• The Wakefield plant is billed as one of the most environmentally-aware plants in Europe, sending no waste to landfill.
• To tie in with the UN Climate Change Summit, Coca-Cola also announces all its new coolers and vending machines will be free of hydro fluorocarbon by 2015.

Question 8.

• Pampers and Fairy have pledged to donate funds to Unicef for tetanus vaccines for babies and mothers in need worldwide.  One vaccine is promised for each product purchased.
• So far Unicef has received funding for more than 100 million vaccines.

Question 9.

• It’s Vodafone’s ‘World of Difference’ project – part of the Vodafone Foundation.
• In the UK, funding was given to 500 people to spend two and a half months working for their chosen local charity full-time.
• The programme also operates in 13 other countries worldwide.
• In addition, the ‘World of Difference’ international programme funds volunteers to work for charities in other countries for anything from two months to a full year.

Question 10.

• It’s Martin Lewis!
• MoneysavingExpert.com is visited by 8 million people every month.
• 3.8 million people subscribe to the weekly ‘Martin’s Money Tips’ email.
• In 2007, Lewis started providing template letters for consumers to send to banks appealing against ‘unfair’ charges on his website – by summer this year 6 million people had sent them.

Question 11.

• Waitrose Essentials range launched in early 2009.
• Within three months the products accounted for 13% of the store’s food sales.
• Consumers responded to M&S’s comparison ads in November by …. shopping at Waitrose.  Sales for the week of the ads were up 17% on the previous year.
• Waitrose is widely hailed as the UK’s fastest growing supermarket chain, defying the recession.

Question 12.

• Axa UK is considering alternative names for some of its pension products as part of an initiative to tackle negative perceptions among young people.

Stacey Yates writes:

This engaging advertising campaign, supposedly from the future, was commissioned by Greenpeace and revealed at Copenhagen airport last month in the run up to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference.

The series of posters display photographs of world leaders, manipulated to appear ten years older, saying sorry for not having done more about climate change. Some haven’t aged well. The aim: to make us – and them – think about the consequences of not taking climate change seriously enough.

I think it’s a successful campaign that resonates with what we do at the Futures Company when we ask people to position themselves in the future, and testament to photography’s immediacy in communicating a convincing truth.

From top to bottom: Obama; Brown; Lula; Sarkozy. Agency: Arc Communications/ Concept, design, creative direction: Toby Cotton/ Airport photos of the ads in situ: ©Christian Aslund/Greenpeace

Sophie Stringer writes:

Stepping through Waterloo Station on my way to work the other day a sprightly looking girl in luminous green leggings and a white t-shirt passed me a sample for Bassetts ‘Soft and Chewy’ – as seen in the picture.

These energisers, the packaging tells me, are ‘delicious citrus flavour pastilles with B vitamins and CoQ10’.  The packaging looks pretty feminine (and the sample pack  – as someone pointed out – bears an unfortunate resemblance to a packet of condoms), and the pastilles themselves are in a blister pack, Strepsils-style.  The instructions are to pop one a day, or up to three if you’re in need of an extra boost. There’s theory as well as method: the associated leaflet advises that ‘avoiding the slump’ is ‘not about a quick fix, it’s all about maintenance’.

Bassetts already makes a range of chewy vitamins for different ages, and for ‘all the family’. But this is the first time I’ve seen a specific product for adults, and also the first time I’ve seen fortification for energy promoted with a vitamin product.  The inclusion of Coenzyme Q10 is also a novelty.

So why launch this now?  The product certainly responds to our burgeoning desire for peak performance, along with concerns about the health effects of pick-me-ups like cola or coffee. It also speaks to the resurgence of time-pressured consumers in the wake of the financial crisis. It’s not enough any longer for supplements just to be good for us; they need to work hard and be focused about the needs they are addressing, it seems. But at the same time, there’s some pleasure to be had in the eating, unlike the yeasty smelling vitamin C tablets of yesteryear.

They are probably better for you than mopping up the spare biscuits as you leave a meeting, but I’m a bit suspicious about the proposition: things which sound quite similar to confectionery promising an energy boost might be treading close to a sugar rush, and Bassetts’ efforts to dissuade us of this – with box and blister pack – make them feel oddly medical.  And Bassetts can’t help but evoke Trebor Bassett, and as it happens the Bassetts’ parent company, like Trebor Bassett, is part of the Cadbury group.

Will it take off? The trends are on its side, but it may take time to persuade consumers of the value of this particular solution. The jury’s still out.

Andrew Curry writes:

We’ve been having a bit of an argument in the London office about dixons.co.uk advertising which has been running on the London underground. The picture, above, captures the flavour; lots of text in which a trip to an identifiable department store to look at some upmarket consumer electronics is descibed quite affectionately, with the final line, in Dixons’ branding, “then go to dixons.co.uk to buy it.”

The argument is about the ad’s effectiveness. On the one hand, it’s right on trend. Work we did for AOL a couple of years ago identified the way in which consumers shift between online and offline channels increasingly seamlessly as their customer journey develops from awareness to purchase and maintenance. And our post-recession research shows an increase in ‘savvy shopping‘.

On another hand, the copywriting about the department store experience is sufficiently warm that it reminds you of the service such stores offer – and not everyone is as transactional as the ad tries to suggest, even in a recession.

And on another: the argument is about the effectiveness of this for Dixon’s. Its own stores, now closed or rolled into the Curry’s Digital brand (full disclosure: absolutely no relation), were a byword for customer indifference. And online, Dixon’s is not the cheapest supplier.

In fact the ad polarised office opinion – an impromptu survey showed that half the people who responded liked it, and half didn’t. The half that didn’t tended to be older and better-off.

And I have to say that I’m in the second category. The ad’s strapline, “Dixon’s; the last place to go”, is clever, but it’s too clever for its own good. For me it taps in, almost too precisely, to a whole lot of brand associations which – were if I Dixons – I’d have preferred to leave dormant.

Alex Steer writes:

Starbucks hasn’t had it easy, at least for the past decade. But whether being attacked by Naomi Klein for alleged anti-competitiveness in No Logo in 2001, or more literally attacked by demonstrators during a rally in London in January, Starbucks has always toughed it out. Until the recession, that is.

In late 2008, McDonald’s set up a giant billboard outside Starbucks HQ in its home town of Seattle. Proclaiming that ‘Four Bucks Is Dumb’, it advertised McDonald’s new line of (less expensive) espresso coffees. It was a well-timed campaign, and to judge from its share price, Starbucks spent three months in shock.

Its new strategy, announced last week, suggests that the coffee giant still has the caffeine jitters. It has opened three new outlets in Seattle – without any Starbucks branding. 15^th Ave. Coffee and Tea and its sisters look and feel like independents. The muted press release from Starbucks says that the unbranded stores offer ‘new opportunities for discovery, a high level of interaction and a deep connection to the local community’.

But these things – experience, interaction, community – are central to Starbucks’s brand. Hiding the brand suggests a company with an identity crisis. Perhaps Starbucks has been told that, in a recession, consumers retrench to the familiar and local. This may be true, but research from the US and elsewhere suggests that reports of a ‘bonfire of the brands’ are somewhat exaggerated.

The fuller story is that, for American consumers, price matters more. It’s no longer the poor relation to quality and convenience. But price isn’t everything. The brands that thrive in the downturn will be those that offer quality and experience at a fair price and give consumers what they want – for example, acting on the recessionary trend towards going out for breakfast, not dinner (good news for coffee houses).

So four bucks may not be bad – if they come with a little bit more of a bang. Starbucks needs to show its consumers that it understands this. But to build this trust, it needs to keep on being Starbucks.

The picture at the top is of Rob Brandt’s ‘Crushed Coffee Cup’ design, and is used with thanks.

Andrew Curry writes:

I’ve been watching quite a lot of ITV4 this month, because of its Tour de France coverage, which means I’ve seen a lot of the current ad for the VW Passat. It’s a curiosity for two reasons; first, it’s clearly been made, inexpensively, for the British market, rather than being a ‘Euro-ad’ with English voiceover, and second, because it has a clear ‘recession’ storyline. Man leaves large bank-type building with his work things in a cardboard box, which promptly sheds its contents onto the pavement, leading to a little cameo story along a closure-laden high street before (at last) he gets to his car, singing all the way (more than a nod to Morecambe and Wise) about the power of positive thinking.

There seems to be a sting in the tail; the cheery sheep, nodding along to the song through the bars of their truck are clearly on their way to the slaughterhouse. With the implication, of course, that our hero might also be on the way to the knacker’s yard.

Strongbow has also been having fun with the financial crash, and has buried a treat or two on the internet. You’ve probably caught their Henry V pastiche in which a Kenneth Branagh lookalike makes a rousing speech to the assembled tradesmen of England (gasfitters, dishfitters, etc). We recently came across a second version in which Henry’s gaze alights on a group of bankers – and he is lost for words. You can see here what happens next.