Will Galgey writes:

Trust in organisations and brands has been declining steadily as consumers have more information and are more sceptical. There’s also striking evidence that attitudes have shifted, certainly in Europe and North America, as a result of the global financial crisis. But if trust isn’t enough,  how should companies respond? We’ve been collaborating with Millward Brown, the WPP company which runs the WPP brand equity research programme BrandZ, to try to answer this question.

Our joint research produced new insights into consumer behaviour and attitudes which should help shape the behaviour of companies and their brands, and new metrics to help gauge the effectiveness of these actions. In summary:

• trust is still essential
• but it needs to be combined with customer recommendation to be effective
• which generates the ‘equation’, Trust + Recommendation = Success.

And since both levels of trust and willingness to recommend can be measured in research, the quantitative wizards at Millward Brown have produced an index, the TrustR score, based on global consumer research, which indicates how effective different companies and different brands are in different markets.

There are some surprises in the data – Pampers tops the chart globally (and is also number 1 in the UK, France and Germany), while China Mobile is in the top 10. And Nokia, which tends to get written off by American commentators dazzled by Apple and Google, is top in 8 of the 22 countries covered by the study. The research shows a strong correlation between TrustR scores and brand financial performance.

The good news is that the TrustR report is free to our clients, and comes tailored for specific markets and specific categories. If you are a client, the consultants you usually work with can arrange for a copy to be sent to you. If you’re not a client, and are interested, please email us at betterfutures[AT]thefuturescompany.com, and we’ll see what we can do.

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.

Emily Pitts writes:

Is the concept of luxury is stuck in the past? Leafing through the high end magazines, it looks so. It’s quickly apparent that 2009 ads sell the same products, and rely on the same concept of luxury, as they have for years;  the traditional face of luxury is still impenetrable, aloof and other worldly. Whilst classic luxury pieces from Chanel or Hermes will continue to resonate as high quality investment items for a small group of rich consumers, the emerging values of the new “everyday luxury” market are quite different.

The Dutch design collective Droog suggest that “Luxury is really about scarcity“. And what’s scarce? “Care, silence, fresh air, slowness”. Brands that help consumers achieve some aspect of this in their lives will be connecting to a changing notion of luxury, as values around responsibility, community and self-reliance are emerging as the new consumer lifestyle aspirations. Though in part this has been provoked by recession, Futures Company research tells us that greater numbers are re-assessing what’s important in life; hence the spike in volunteer numbers, career breaks and socially responsible career choices such as teaching. Some brands in other sectors are successfully tapping into these desires; luxury may have look outside of the sector to learn.

The personal connection with the product that Nudo achieves by allowing customers to adopt an Italian olive tree from which they receive their own oil for a year, linking the consumer with the producer, is a good example. The Harrods allotment features webcams that allow consumers to view their food as it grows, which would certainly offer ’slowness’. Burgerville supports local farms and businesses, thereby appealing to consumers’ growing social conscience.  Brands that allow consumers to express their creativity are also prospering. Increasing numbers of knitting clubs, Anya Hindmarsh’s bag customisation service and the Observer Woman’s  ‘Designer DIY’ series run this year bear witness to this.  In the luxury market, Clarins offers a customised skin cream, My Blend, in a small number of top end stores. Personalisation is also a feature at the ‘uber-bling’ end of the scale, as Peter Aloisson’s jewel-encrusted mobile phones demonstrate.

But the challenge for many luxury brands is to move beyond this. Selling a de luxe designer handbag for its link to a wider set of values than brand cachet is not necessarily an easy bridge to build. Louis Vuitton made a good attempt with its ad campaign (picture at the top of the post) that focuses on the journey rather than the bag; the promise is, perhaps, that our personal journey can be as interesting as that of Gorbachev. Competitor brands need to follow suit, and re-adjust their focus on the part of ‘scarcity’ that really means ‘luxury’ to today’s consumers.

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.

Alex Steer writes:

The avocado pear’s name is the product of selective memory. Our word for the South American vegetable comes originally from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, which means ‘testicle’. This unfamiliar word was borrowed into Spanish, but mishearing and confusion with the easier-to-remember word for ‘advocate’ or ‘lawyer’, avocado, led to this being used for the pear. Avocado was borrowed into English in the late 17^th century, and has stuck.

The avocado has in recent weeks found itself at the centre of a standoff between two supermarkets. Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer have launched TV adverts – commemorating their 140^th and 125^th anniversaries respectively – in which they each appear to take the credit for introducing the avocado to Britain. The avocado is now an advocate in supermarkets’ increasingly fierce battle for market share, but it is arguing the case for both sides.

There has been no shortage of ads harking back to the past recently – Sainsbury’s, M&S, Hovis, Persil – and no shortage of commentators noticing this. Most have identified that behind these campaigns lies a perceived yearning by consumers for the securities of nostalgia and tradition. Hovis’s strapline – ‘As good today as it’s always been’ – resonates with wary, recession-weary shoppers who are longing for a little sanity. Nostalgia brands are brands that have stayed the course; brands you can trust.

But Sainsbury’s and M&S are not just saying they are reliable retailers. They are saying they are responsible, ethical ones, and that they always were: employing women, helping the planet, doing their bit for the war effort. These campaigns are histories, written to appeal to the values and good citizenship modern consumers seek from brands.

The demand for corporate social responsibility is relatively new, and it’s hard for older brands not to look like they’re jumping on today’s bandwagon, compared to new brands who have built CSR into their blood and bone. By framing their histories in terms of modern values, retailers are telling consumers that, unlike the avocado, they were always advocates, representing quality and fairness. It remains to be seen if consumers will buy this, or conclude that it’s all a load of ahuacatls.

The picture at the top – a photograph of a painting – is borrowed, with thanks, from Betweenland on flickr.

Andrew Curry writes:
Suddenly, ’sorry’ seems to be the easiest word, at least in London. Quite apart from politicians saying sorry, eventually, about their expenses, we’ve had Marks and Spencers saying sorry for charging more for bigger bras, and (as Andy Stubbings has mentioned here) the London Evening Standard saying sorry in an extensive poster campaign for, well, for pretty much everything.

It’s true that the Standard’s branding is discreet and it’s mostly done by typography, but it seems as if the paper is saying sorry for being complacent, predictable, negative, and out of touch among other things.

As ad campaigns go, it has the merit of getting them talked about (as this post demonstrates) although for this non-reader the Standard was always a smug evening paper which pandered to the prejudices of its core audience in the commuter belt.

Indeed the whole campaign, prompted by the arrival of new Russian owner and new editor, feels like they’ve done some focus groups with lapsed readers and slapped the findings straight on to the billboards. (Which saves the inconvenience of a debrief, I guess).

Will any of these work? I think the M&S apology will – it’s a simple issue with a simple remedy. I’m sceptical about the other two. In the face of their respective declining markets, both paper and politicians will find that saying sorry isn’t enough.

The picture at the top, published under a Creative Commons licence, was taken by renaissancechambers, whose photostream is here.

Pessimism is an often underrated emotion. In this dismal economic climate, brands like Schweppes (with their series of woodcut style print ads that send up British political figures) and even the Evening Standard (with their “Sorry” bus and tube advertising) have sought to capitalise on consumer discontent and, most probably, a simmering resentment towards our political and economic institutions (for a wonderfully vitriolic example of this anger, see Matt Taibbi’s ‘The Big Takeover’).

However, no mainstream brands appear to have done this as explicitly as Shredded Wheat in the US. The “Progress is Overrated” print ad above is part of a campaign by cereal manufacturer Post to publicise the simple, unchanged origins of their product. As you would expect, the long-copy form and type-setting feel of the print ad are wantonly old-fashioned, conveying “back-to-basics” message (although the slapstick tone of other campaign media feels at odds with this). What is especially interesting about the copy, however, is that it namechecks waste concerns, resource shortages and the impact of climate change as evidence that we have not progressed (though curiously no mention of the financial crisis. The people who buy Shredded Wheat are mainstream American consumers, many of them mums buying for their kids. The tone of the campaign (by Ogilvy & Mather in New York) implies that research has found this attitude reasonably prevalent in the target audience, which suggests that consumer discontent may be quite widespread.

While it may be difficult for established brands like Schweppes and Shredded Wheat to reinvent themselves as the Voice of Discontent, I think there is a substantial opportunity for less well-known brands to take this on, in the way that Mountain Dew reinvented itself as the ’slacker’ brand in the midst of the corporate greed of the 1980s. With so many brands offering similar messages of solidarity and empathy with consumers at the moment, it might be that pessimism proves a smarter and more distinctive position.

The picture is borrowed, with thanks, from Noise Between Stations.

Image by Andrew Lockhart

Andy Stubbings writes:

Much has been written about the effect that Barack Obama might have on perceptions of Brand USA; it’s also worth considering what it might mean for American brands. Much of the explicit Obama-related marketing during the election campaign and before the inauguration was fun but gimmicky; from Ikea’s invitation to redesign the Oval Office with flat pack furniture, to Pepsi’s in your face Yes You Can message; to Ben and Jerry’s ‘Yes Pecan’ flavoured ice cream, with initial revenues going to the non-profit Common Cause. Part of the issue for brands wishing to capitalise on the “Obama effect” is that the President remains something of a cipher (a long-standing theme in Obama coverage) and appears reluctant, perhaps understandably, to define himself too hastily.

But perhaps there’s a deeper story at play here. In a long reflective piece (opens in pdf) the management thinker Charles Hampden-Turner describes Obama as “the leader who reconciles” apparent opposites: continuity and change; cooperation with opposition; victory with self-sacrifice. What is intriguing about this is the suggestion that, in the context of current uncertainty, leaders and brands that can manage a massive national cultural transition by reconciling opposites do well.

Indeed, Douglas Holt, Professor of Cultural Branding at the Oxford Said Business School argues that iconic brands are built by seizing on “cultural contradictions” and reconciling them: whether that be a divide between young and old, black and white, or continuity and change. After the noisy simplicity of the Bush years, it may be that some quiet ambiguity from America’s leader – and from its leading brands – is the smart strategy right now. Any thoughts from American readers?

The image at the top of the post is by the graphic designer Andrew Lockhart.

Jake Goretzki writes:

Jake Goretzki writes:
The world of brands has always had a lively lexicon (those ‘wheels’, ‘onions’, ‘keys’ and ‘prisms’), but I came across a new face recently when I was listening to BBC World Service’s ‘Global Business‘ – the evocatively named ‘zombie brand‘.

Zombie brands are dead and delisted brands which retain emotional value, decades after they’ve been buried – and can, with clever handling, be reanimated by adapting yesterday’s positioning to new trends while retaining core truths.

The example which the programme cites is ‘Brim’, a decaf coffee in the US with an unforgettable jingle (something about ‘goodness to the brim’) that has, apparently, been resurrected as a vitamin-enhanced coffee. Brim, it is claimed, had been retained in the American collective memory as an idea of a coffee ‘that you could drink and it would not be bad for you…even good actually’. The Ford Taurus and Coke Tab also fit the bill.

In Eastern Europe, countless decommissioned Communist-era favourites, many gradually returning, behave in similar ways. Back in the UK, I hear the wailing of our own brand zombies – and nostalgia websites are teeming with them. Can it be long indeed before the dream return to the shelves of Spangles, this time single source and fairtrade? My hopes are still alive; sorry, undead.

The programme, presented by the incomparable Peter Day, can now be heard online.

The Brim poster at the top of the post is courtesy of Gasoline Alley Antiques.

Counterfeiting has, in all likelihood, been around for as long as currency itself but as the exchange of goods and services has become more complex, so has the trade in fakes. The forger’s business goes well beyond banknotes, art and documents these days. Everything from aircraft parts and microchips to pharmaceuticals and even baby milk powder can be, and is, reproduced for an illicit profit.

Globalisation and the internet means that our exposure to the phony has increased dramatically in recent times (the catchily-named International Anti-counterfeiting Coalition says the problem has grown 100-fold in the past two decades). The Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau, run by the International Chamber of Commerce, estimates that the fakes business accounts for between 5 – 7% of total world trade, worth around $600 billion a year. And while it’s generally in the interests of such organisations to talk up the threat from fakes, by way of comparison, global advertising revenue runs at around $70 billion a year.

Asia is undoubtedly one of the principal sources of the world’s fake brands, while China is the largest contributor. Counterfeit products could account for a sixth or more of all products made in China, representing 8% of China’s US$2.6 trillion GDP. For the largest global brands it’s a large and growing concern. It’s also quite a tough business problem, since they typically hope to expand in markets which apparently originate much of the imitation merchandise.

And much of the anecdotal evidence suggests that in a post-modern world consumers are getting more tolerant about fakes. A survey last year by a British law firm deduced that one in eight Britons had bought a fake handbag or watch over the previous twelve months. The three most-purchased fake products purchased were Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Burberry.

These cultural attitudes are likely to be reinforced as economies stall. Louis Vuitton, according to the 2008 brandz study by our sister WPP company Millward Brown, has a brand value of $25.7bn. This is a substantial figure, and only a small dent in this from the sales of fakes is a significant problem. It seems more likely that they’ll have to learn to live with it, as Microsoft did when it tolerated copies of Windows circulating in China because it realised it might build a long-term market for the company’s software. There is some good news on the consumer side: the survey mentioned earlier found that almost a third of the buyers of fakes said that the experience made them more likely to buy the real thing.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is from judo rather than boxing; to find ways to work with the grain of the counterfeit business, rather than trying to confront it.

The image at the top of the page is from the Chinese site jjunda.net, which has a whole gallery of pictures of fake products.