Posts filed under ‘brands’
The new 5Ps of marketing
Fran Walton writes:
Earlier this week, we presented our latest research on the post-recessiom UK consumer, Feeling The Pinch 6, to clients in London. The overall message is one of gloom: 43% of consumers think the UK economy will get worse in 2012, and 46% plan to spend less. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that brands can do.
So here are our new 5Ps for marketers:
- Protection. How can you reduce the risks of purchase, or help consumers manage risk in other parts of their lives? 63% of consumers now agree, ‘ I find myself thinking twice before making even the smallest purchase’. An interesting example is the German peer-to-peer insurance company, Friendsurance, which reduces insurance costs (and fraudulent claims) by letting people create groups of 15 people to help cover an insurance claim.
- Practical. How can you empower people and help them to be self-reliant? 58% of UK consumers agree that ‘Since the recession I feel a greater need to be as self-sufficient as possible’. One response, from the Spanish food company Gallina Blanca: if you send them a a list of the ingredients you happen to have at home, they’ll suggest a recipe.
- Purpose. How can you help consumers make new connections or make living with less a positive experience? 53% of UK consumers now agree that ‘since the recession I have learnt how many things I can do without and still be happy’. Sainsbury’s ‘living well for less’ campaign captures this well. It’s not just about the food. It also means making the most of the good things in life, sharing moments or maybe cooking memorable meals together. And without paying the earth.
- Permission. How can you help consumers feel like they are achieving something worthwhile? Perhaps depressingly, 53% agree that ‘some of the goals I had before the recession are now probably out of reach’. Say it ain’t so! The French business Onefeat has a model where you set some goals, or ‘missions’, and get support from your friends to help you achieve them.
- Pride. How can you help people take pride in small things or help people to be proud to be part of their community? In our qual research for Feeling The Pinch 6, one of our respondents observed that ‘the value of working with your hands seems to have been forgotten about’, also a theme of Matthew Crawford’s surprise best-seller. Transform Your Patch, launched in January. in which Pepsico and Britvic have teamed up with the charity Groundwork, is an ambitious scheme to create new parks and playgrounds and football pitches from waste land across the UK.
Of course, a lot of these are small things, but one of the lessons of the recession is that small things matter. The other lesson is that it’s more important than ever to be able to stand in the shoes of your customers and see the world through their eyes.
The picture at the top of this post is from the Swedish co-operative Lantmannen, which has a scheme which pairs singles to share leftover food. It is used with thanks. To find out more about Feeling The Pinch, and our research on consumer attitudes to the economy in Britain and Ireland, please contact Fran Walton.
3 February 2012 at 1:32 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
A future of advertising
Andrew Curry writes: I have been meaning to post this for a while, but better late than never. The Wire, which is the in-house magazine of WPP, our parent company, had a feature in its last issue on how advertising would change over the next ten years. 16 contributors, 150 words each, you know the kind of thing. The editor warned us off social media as being too obvious, and I stayed away from data analytics because others in the group know far more about that than I do.
Sadly, the whole piece is behind a firewall, unless you happen to work for a WPP company, although it would seem like a good opportunity to showcase thinking within the group. But here’s my contribution:
Advertising is being squeezed from two sides. The generation of millennials now cresting into adulthood, brought up with screens surrounding them, can de-construct an advertisement quicker than you can say “Roland Barthes“. There’s no trick you can play without them noticing it, storing it, and tagging it for the next time. Governments meanwhile, squeezed for budgets, have noticed that the public purse tends to pick up quite a lot of the costs of private consumption, and are increasingly willing to regulate advertising in an increasing range of categories, darkening markets or persuading companies to darken their markets themselves. Sao Paolo passed its ‘clean city’ legislation which banned outdoor advertising four years ago, and it has huge support from its citizens. Other places have followed suit, if on a smaller scale, an early sign that Adbusters’ Mental Environment Movement is just starting to gain traction. Advertisers will be able to say less and less about less and less. End of message.
The picture of Sao Paulo is from the blog Out of Home Media, and is used with thanks.
Pride and confidence
Will Galgey writes:
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the launch of the WPP BrandZ report on the Top 50 Chinese Brands, which Oliver blogged about here, and I wanted to add some thoughts to his post.
When I was last in China a few months ago, I came back from breakfast to find my hotel room being cleaned. The maid, who spoke no English, beamed a broad smile and immediately started trying to tell me something, gesticulating with her fingers to make the number ‘two’ and pointing at the television, which she had tuned to CNN. My Mandarin was no better than her English, and it was only after she left that I saw the news that China had just overtaken Japan to become the second largest economy in the world.
The story exemplifies for me the intense pride the Chinese have in their country and its achievements, which we also see in our proprietary Global MONITOR data. (How many Britons, or Italians, or Canadians, would know or care about their country’s ranking in the world economic league table?).
Many commentators conclude that this national pride will increasingly lead the Chinese to turn inwards, and favour domestic brands over their western counterparts. But this is wrong. The reality is that the Chinese are sufficiently self-confident in what it means to be Chinese, and their ability to choose selectively from other cultures, that they are actually very open to other cultural influences and don’t bristle at the idea of accepting western brands. In our Global MONITOR survey, the Chinese (along with Saudis) are the least likely to feel that ‘our society is too Americanised’.
But simply playing to notions of status and elitism through an association with the West is no longer enough for western brands looking to succeed in China. Chinese consumers are now far more savvy about price and value and are adopting a much more sophisticated attitude to brands – both foreign and domestic.
It sounds obvious, but both foreign and local brands must remember the difference between what it takes to claim the indoors and the outdoors. Haier and Lenovo do well in China because their products are kept in the home, while Nokia and Chanel do well because they’re on public display. Of course, this is a crude division – and becoming more so every day. To cross it requires a much deeper analysis of the underlying values and attitudes that are driving consumer needs and wants in China, something we are currently helping a number of clients to get to grips with.
The picture at the top of this post comes from an article on Chinese brands in Business World, and is used with thanks.
9 February 2011 at 12:58 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Winners and sinners in the Superbowl ads
Alex Steer writes:
I’ve been in the US a few months now, and still know nothing about American football. So when I watched the Superbowl last night, I watched the advertising. I was looking for ads that showed some insight into how consumers here are thinking and feeling in the recovery. There were some clear hits and some obvious mis-steps. Here’s my (personal) take on the most expensive 30-second slots in the advertising year.
Some winners
Everybody was talking about Volkswagen’s Passat commercial before the game, and with good reason. On the surface this endearing spot about a small child in a Darth Vader costume does no more than use some human interest to sell a minor product feature (remote engine start), it tapped into an insight about our desire for technology to fit around our lives in subtle, even ‘magical’ ways. Its gentle tone hit a sweet spot for consumers who are seeking more humanity in the marketplace.
The insight behind Best Buy’s ‘Buy Back’ offer was really smart. They recognized that if consumers are no longer in recessionary lock-down, they’re weighing up their spending (especially on big-ticket items) much more carefully. Best Buy is helping its consumers feel more futureproof, and that matters. The ad, with Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber, was one of the most catchphrase-worthy of the night. (‘How many bloody Gs are there?’)
Verizon kicked off its ad with an almost-too-close parody of an iPhone 4 commercial – ultra close-up, heroing the product, a little overblown – before getting to the point: ‘Does your network work?’ Demand for utility is really strong in the US marketplace at the moment, and Verizon deftly exploited a gap between consumers’ opinions of the iPhone and the AT&T network, often criticized for poor call quality.
The real winner for me in terms of insight was Chrysler, with its ‘Imported from Detroit’ ad. It wasn’t the only car marque to run with a ‘made in the US’ message, but it was the only one to explore what that means in the United States now. More an ad about Detroit than Chrysler, it was one of the few spots of the night that showed foresight as well as insight, using Detroit (and the car) as shorthand for a recovering nation’s sense of injury, self-reliance and determination. There’s a lot of discussion – and divided opinions – about this ad in our US offices today.
Some sinners
We’re a bit divided, too, over the Motorola Xoom piece, which tried to do to Apple exactly what Apple did to Microsoft in its famous ‘1984’ ad. I don’t think it reflects a genuine insight into how people think about the iPad. For that reason it’s less strong than Windows Phone’s amazing ‘Season of the Witch’ and ‘Really’, which tapped into exactly how a lot of us feel about smartphones.
Like the VW spot, Chevy’s ‘Status’ commercial was a fairly human take on a minor product feature, but it the feature was baffling. A voice that reads your Facebook status updates as you drive feels like an awkward attempt by a car to borrow the brand halo of a social network, but just when enthusiasm for ‘always on, always sharing’ feels like it’s waning.
My worst offender, by far, was Groupon, whose campaign idea, ‘Save the Money’, is based on the idea of treating money like it’s a precious resource. The insight’s not bad, but their three ads badly misjudged US consumers. By making light of the threats to whales, Tibet and forestation, they seemed shallow and self-obsessed, and worse, prompted an immediate backlash online. Even if consumers find environmental concerns slipping down their list of immediate priorities, it doesn’t mean they want to mock them.
In all, it feels like the most-loved ads were those which had a powerful and durable insight behind them. The Superbowl’s the one night of the year when we pay real attention to the ads, but we expect those ads to be paying attention to us, too.
Millennials and money
Alex Oliver writes:
We’ve been out and about talking about the millennials generation and their financial attitudes and behaviours. At the Financial Services Forum event in the City of London recently I presented some of our proprietary research about the millennial cohort growing up and ‘coming of age’ with lifestyles to match. Millennials are now fluent consumers and intuitive users of technology, and are clearly adept at navigating the increasingly blended worlds real and virtual, work and play, but their self-stated lack of engagement and frequent misunderstanding of financial matters is stark. Tough economic times, alongside a general lack of interest in managing their finances means millennials need support to weather the storm.
But although this ought to be an opportunity for financial services providers, there is something of a mismatch between the brand values and service propositions which millennials look for and those which financial services providers tend to have. Millennials want to see ‘authenticity’ in brands, and they want easier access to services (for example when they’re ‘on the go’ or using dead time to catch up. There are some easier wins for financial services providers – for example, they may be able to nudge them to some good but low engagement behaviours (such as saving more for retirement) by smart service design. But there’s potentially a big win here. The provider which gets this right, at a time when many millennials are financially squeezed, could capture a cohort of customers for life.
The picture is from dcist, and it’s used with thanks.
China’s top brands
Oliver Wright writes:
BrandZ has recently released its flagship reports on the value of global brands, and took the moment to launch a companion report on the Top 50 most valuable Chinese brands. Given China’s buoyant economy, the results are bound to be of interest to companies looking to expand into new markets.
A glance at the top 10 brands is revealing. China Mobile is in top spot, with large banks taking many of the remaining places, rounded out by Tencent (also known as QQ; an instant messenger and mobile provider) and local language search engine Baidu – Google doesn’t figure in the top 50. Although China has the reputation, at least in the West, of being a large exporter, supplier of components, and the manufacturer of so much of our ‘stuff’, the top 10 are almost exclusively service providers with a strong national base. Of course, this is unsurprising, given the necessity of these services in a rapidly expanding economy.
Looking further down the list, there are a couple of internationally recognisable brands. Most will have heard of Tsingtao beer (35), one of a number of alcohol brands in there, but how many could claim to recognise ChangYu (22), an premium wine brand? Haier (29) and Lenovo (16) have both made an impact in the US, with the former increasing its (albeit small) international business by fostering a reputation for reliable but affordable appliances. But Midea (25) is another appliance brand with a larger brand value than Haier, built on a different strategy: its growth has largely come from focusing on China’s many tier 2 and 3 cities, where the presence of other brands is limited.
Retailers and apparel producers also feature further down the list. But like other Chinese brands seeking to establish themselves internationally, value remains the overarching brand association outside of China. Within China, of course, consumers are becoming more brand conscious; 53% shopped with a brand shortlist in 2010, compared to 41% in 2006.
However, as Kunal Sinha of Ogilvy notes, Chinese brands with an international presence are a marker of quality for consumers back home. Tom Doctoroff also makes the important point that many of these brands have yet to test their mettle in their home markets against international brands, as relatively few have had much impact yet. There’s still a lot to play for.
‘The Man’ and Burning Man
David Gunn writes:
Each year has its personal symbols, the few things that you might recall 5, 10 or 20 years later. For me, 2010 will be probably be remembered as the year i eventually went to Burning Man festival.
I first came across the festival during a Henley Centre project for Arts Council England back in 2003. We were looking into alternative organisational models for the creative sector, and Burning Man was an intriguing case. Nominally a festival amongst many others, it is far more than this. A temporary city of 50,000 people that appears for one week in the Nevada desert, and disappears without a trace. A “gift economy”, where things aren’t bought or even exchanged, but offered freely by all. Temporary encampments and neon motorcades, dust storms and sociological debate, bicycles and all-night dancing.
Seven years later, I eventually got to visit in person. What struck me was that all the things you hear about don’t really matter. The gift economy, the imposing artworks, the harsh environment of the desert playa, all of these are little more than “necessary pretexts” – ways to access a certain quality of experience, a sense of playful freedom. We started most days with little idea about what would happen, and any plans we did make would inevitably fail, overshadowed by the joys of random discovery – cycling in solitude, playful conversations with strangers, getting lost in the dust and wind.
As everywhere else, brands are finding ways to inch in. As we arrived, i watched two undercover executives from an alcoholic beverage company arrive in an RV filled with crates of alcohol to “gift” to fellow travellers. Not surprisingly, this kind of activity is frowned upon throughout the event, and some actively oppose it. But more broadly, it is a classic case of brands being unable to respect a different type of community, a type of experience that they simply cannot (and should not try to) co-opt.
That’s not to say companies can’t learn something from an experience like Burning Man. But rather than trying to take a product out to Burning Man, they might do better to bring a little bit of it back into their own organisations. Organisations tend to think that their success pivots on the ability to answer consumer needs. But in an increasingly stable and controlled world, events like Burning Man demonstrate people’s appetite to be outside their comfort-zone, to be challenged and renewed. And it may be a little late in January to be pushing for resolutions, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more companies skip the worn-out promises, and actively engage people in questions, disruptions, challenges. They might just thank you for it.
This is a guest post by David Gunn. He now runs the specialist cross-disciplinary creative organisation, Incidental. The pinhole photographs, also by David Gunn, are published here under this Creative Commons licence.
11 January 2011 at 10:20 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Leaders and futures
Walker Smith writes:
I was privileged to be asked to speak at the Marketing Society’s annual conference, which was held earlier today at the Royal Opera House. On such occasions, you catch your inspiration as it strikes, and as I was starting to write my speech, I saw the news of the death of Ted Sorenson, a close adviser to J. F. Kennedy before and during his Presidency.
That led me to thinking about leaders and leadership, and what followers value in leaders, so we commissioned some research especially for the conference to try to find out, testing around 27 aspects of both leadership and brands with a sample of more than a thousand UK adults.
Perhaps it’s not a surprise to find The Futures Company saying this, but it turns out that people do value leaders who have “a clear vision of what the future will look like” (it’s 9th in the leadership ranking, with the top cluster) and believe that a leading brand “anticipates the future better than its competitors” (6th in the brand ranking). The charts are below.
But to fulfill this objective, that vision needs to be a proper vision, one that is clear, inspirational and helpful. Mere prediction doesn’t help, and predictions by experts are even less helpful. (The psychologist and business professor Philip Tetlock demonstrates in his recent book that expert predictions were not only more likely to be wrong than right, they were worse than chance; in other words, experts would be more accurate rolling the dice.)
The point is to understand the forces that are shaping the future, and to shape from this an aspirational future based on a clear view of the opportunities – and the risks. People want and need purpose, and they look to leaders to help them to find it. Indeed, purpose is one of the great challenges of business today, and the importance of future-focused purpose is clear from our research.
And this one of the leadership lessons from JFK. We remember his aspirational ambition, in 1961, “of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth”, by the end of the decade. It took eight years and another two Presidents, and Kennedy had been dead for six years by the time Armstrong and Aldrin got there. The vision that he articulated through his leadership outlived him.
The image at the top of the post is from the Wikimedia Commons. The two charts are courtesy of The Futures Company, and are published here under a Creative Commons licence.
The brand and the digital conversation
Andrew Curry writes:
I was invited to Munich earlier this week by the insurance group Allianz to talk to its Brand Council about the brand in the age of the digital conversation. The company’s just launched its ‘One’ campaign, which promotes engagement with consumers through sharing. The emphasis is on real people in authentic situations giving or sharing useful advice or a valuable experience. Digital and social media are a central part of the process.
There are two things that companies seem most concerned about when they jump into social media. The first is that they are merely opening up a new channel for criticism and complaint, and they will be overwhelmed by this. But these conversations happen online whether or not the company decided to be involved, as BP discovered, spectacularly, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The second concern is that consumers are interested only in price when they engage with companies online. It’s certainly true that the internet has created a whole new category of intermediaries whose only story is about discounting, and that the insurance industry (selling low involvement, abstract, commoditisable products) is particularly vulnerable to them.
But despite the recession, our Global MONITOR research shows that people are more willing to buy branded goods provided they are persuaded that they are getting value from them. And they need to be convinced of those benefits, in authentic everyday language, without being confronted by corporate-speak. Get it right, and you create a virtuous circle, as in the diagram at the top of this post. Get it wrong, and you get punished for it.
Elsewhere in the financial sector, Nat West has attempted to regain trust with its ‘Customer Charter‘, which has provoked as much scepticism as admiration. But in the digital age, markets and brands are conversations, and conversation is missing from the Nat West model. Their campaign could have run any time in the last 30 years.
In contrast, some of the early Allianz campaign executions involve their customers talking, in branch, unscripted, about what’s important to them. There are risks here, but at least it feels like a company stepping into the 21st century.
A version of this post first appeared on the blog of the advertising and marketing portal WARC, with which The Futures Company has a strategic relationship.
12 November 2010 at 9:32 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
The new normal
Jo Phillips writes:
We are officially ‘out of the recession’, but uncertainty, and even fear, remains. The fourth wave of research in our UK consumer tracking study Feeling the Pinch (which Fran Walton and Eleanor Cooksey launched at a breakfast briefing in London last week) shows that consumers are in the ‘doldrums’ – a place which is both quiet and uneasy, a place where you are stuck. Two-fifths of consumers say they are worse off than last year (the same proportion as in November 2009) and just under half know someone who has been made redundant in the past twelve months.
With Wednesday’s Spending Review ensuring that job cuts are never far from a front page, and rising prices meaning that people need a bit more money to feel like they are staying still, it’s no wonder that consumers remain anxious. But we believe that this new reality is starting to stick. We’re seeing a deeper shift in consumer outlook: welcome to the New Normal.
With the New Normal comes our new acronym, SCANT, to help organisations and brands understand current consumer attitudes and thereby navigate this sea change. Here’s a brief introduction:
- Scepticism: many brands have been so focussed on price through the recession that they have stopped talking to people, leaving a trust void. 77% of consumers agree that the banks serve their own interests, not the interests of their consumers, and 58% now have less faith in the government to tackle the big issues of the day. Brands urgently need to rebuild trust.
- Control: 65% of consumers agree ‘it is important for me to get a greater sense of control in every aspect of my life’ (up a very sharp 13% since November 2009), and 60% feel a greater need to be as self-sufficient as possible since the recession (up 9% from November). We’re seeing people’s relationship with time change fundamentally. Pre-recession, people would do almost anything to save time, including spending money. Now they are willing to use their time to gain greater control. Brands need to help consumers feel in control of their lives again.
- Acceptance: 53% agree that this recession will change consumer culture for ever (up 11% on November), and 45% that ‘some of the dreams I had before the recession are now out of my reach’. Categories that may have been seen as essentials may now be considered to be luxuries. Brands which are affected by this change may need to reposition themselves. Waitrose is a great example of a brand that has found a way to tell a different story.
- New aspirations: 53% agree that ‘Since the recession I have learnt how many things I can do without’ (up 5%). Expectations have been re-calibrated. People are focusing on smaller, everyday treats. One example of a business that has responded: as flying becomes an increasingly unpleasant experience, with security and health concerns, Virgin has positioned its “Upper Class” offer as taking these frustrations out of flying.
- Treading carefully: 60% agree that they have ‘become more likely to consider the potential risks of a decision they make’. People think twice before buying. And so the warranty has become the new battleground for the car industry. Kia opened this up with a 7-year (or 100,000 mile) warranty earlier this year, and Toyota later introduced a 5-year warranty. Since then Vauxhall has announced a ‘lifetime’ warranty (which also turns out to be 100,000 miles). We expect this sort of security to become part of a new relationship between organisations and their customers.
There are limited places available for a repeat of this breakfast briefing on 9 November. To find out more please contact Karen Kidson.
18 October 2010 at 5:40 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
