It's Friday, go watch a mash-up

'It's entirely familiar, but it's never been heard before.'

I think that neatly sums up one main reason good branding and advertising are able to influence people. It's also how music producer DJ Earworm described the wonderfully weird mash-up listening experience at the IDEA conference hosted by Ad Age and Creativity .

Note: the video may not be available to nonsubscribers by next Friday, so get in the groove now.

Of course, in marketing as in music, you can't just paste together familiar elements and expect something inspiring to spring forth. And I'm not implying that advertising (B2B or otherwise) is 'entirely unoriginal - you have to take everything from somewhere else,' as our good DJ notes mash-ups do.

But putting the right twist (and degree of twist) on images, sounds and sayings that are already psychologically sympatico for your audience - whether through the design, the message, medium, or strategy - can be alchemically influential. I'm sure many people have said this kind of thing more eloquently than me, so feel free to comment and list them.

Now how does this fit in with our embracing of WOM and other changes in marketing? Erm. Sideways, maybe?

Go on, get into the groove...

Continue reading It's Friday, go watch a mash-up.

It's Friday, go watch a mash-up

'It's entirely familiar, but it's never been heard before.'

I think that neatly sums up one main reason good branding and advertising are able to influence people. It's also how music producer DJ Earworm described the wonderfully weird mash-up listening experience at the IDEA conference hosted by Ad Age and Creativity Online.

Note: the video may not be available to nonsubscribers by next Friday, so get in the groove now.

Of course, in marketing as in music, you can't just paste together familiar elements and expect something inspiring to spring forth. And I'm not implying that advertising (B2B or otherwise) is 'entirely unoriginal - you have to take everything from somewhere else,' as our good DJ notes mash-ups do.

But putting the right twist (and degree of twist) on images, sounds and sayings that are already psychologically sympatico for your audience - whether through the design, the message, medium, or strategy - can be alchemically influential. I'm sure many people have said this kind of thing more eloquently than me, so feel free to comment and list them.

Now how does this fit in with our embracing of WOM and other changes in marketing? Erm. Sideways, maybe?












Continue reading It's Friday, go watch a mash-up.

The world's changing

Paul Kalbfleisch, VP, Branding, for Blackberry attended our E3 conference last week and he recounted the story of how the Blackberry got to be named Blackberry. There was nothing unusual about the situation, it was how the business, Research in Motion reacted that is noteworthy.

Continue reading The world's changing.

A plea to Mother IS

The biggest challenge we face with some of our larger corporate clients is no longer persuading sales or marketing to 'go digital' and use new technologies to improve their competitive advantage - they're all well aware of the need and the benefit - it's negotiating our way through the strict rulings laid down by their IS departments.

Continue reading A plea to Mother IS.

Service innovation through co-creation

Andrew Needham of Face has a really interesting article in October's Admap pointing out how some go-ahead consumer product companies like Unilever are using their customers to help them develop their products. There is a strand of thinking that customers and consumers don't really know what they want and if we always rely on them to tell us, we would never invent anything new. Like Henry Ford said, if he had asked customers what they wanted - they would just have asked for a faster horse. The advocates of this thinking (usually big-brand agencies) regard the only useful customer research is as crash test dummies - ie to test stuff after its been invented.

But it depends how you use the input from your customers and consumers and the way you deal with it. The Economist Intelligence Unit published a paper called The Digital Company 2013. They believe that customer-driven innovation will become mainstream by 2013.

If all this is true for product innovation then how much more real and important will customer co-creation be for service innovation? Services more than products are a series of interactions between the individual and the offering. It is continuous interface between the users of the service and the people providing it. So who is going to be better at deciding whether the experience was a good one or a bad one - the agency or the user? As the Design Council's RED Paper 02 says "A top down innovation strategy is no longer appropriate for solving today's complex problems". And this is even more so when you are solving today's complex service problems.

How you involve the user to co design the services they will use, and how you can get them to truly co innovate rather than just ask for a faster horse, is more to do with the techniques you use and the way you ask the questions. But the successful service companies will work out how to involve their customers and users and they will be the most innovative companies of the future.

Continue reading Service innovation through co-creation.

Building brands in a new world order

Had the privilege recently to spend 3 days with some of Europe & North America's more progressive agency minds doing what we all like to do - pontificating about the future - and it was enlightening and scary at the same time. The theme was reacting to and driving change. The focus: our clients' customers. The challenge: helping them to recognize and react to what is round the corner.

The fear? That everyone would become shocked into over-reacting to the credit crunch and the general slowdown in the economy, rather than taking a step to the side and looking beyond and to start planning for the rebound.

We've seen significant changes in buyer behaviour even before the current crisis and this crisis is only likely to amplify those changes. This creates opportunity for those willing to look. Opportunity to not only be one of the first to react to or even anticipate the rebound, but to have developed new strategies for the new world order, whilst others follow using the same old marketing techniques.

The saying "fortune favours the brave" could not be more appropriate.

Continue reading Building brands in a new world order.

Name and shame

One of the first lessons in Marketing School (a bit like Hogwarts, only less likely to capture a child's imagination and based in Hammersmith) is how to name new products. The advice goes roughly like this

Make the name:

• Usable
• Meaningful
• Distinctive

It's all quite simple and it all came back to me when I saw a poster for a car called a cee'd. That's right, a cee'd. No, not a ceed, or indeed a Ceed. A cee'd.

How? Why? Who sat round a boardroom table and dreamt this one up? Those responsible should be named. And since the readers of this blog are regularly involved in naming new products and services, I thought it was worth analysing this carcrash of a naming exercise and asking how the name 'cee'd' measures up against those three objectives.

Continue reading Name and shame.

It ain't what you get it's the way that you get it.

Have you noticed how really good service makes you happy? Whether it's dealing with a restaurant booking or using a mobile phone, your experience really makes a difference to whether you go back there or renew your contract.

So why don't companies and organisations take more care in how they put together that customer experience? If you were buying a razor, you'd understand that a lot of research has gone into how to design it. Making it fit your hand. Making it look good. Making it do its job properly. But when it comes to services, people just put them together. There is a tendency to offer the service without really thinking about who is going to use it and what their experience would be.

Continue reading It ain't what you get it's the way that you get it..

Hey, it's Friday. Go play Brand Tag.

Give in to your Friday fidgets with something useful, entirely relevant to your work, and fun. The Brand Tags project is it - and now there's a version just for UK brands. People, what more do you want?

Okay, here's a bit more: a short while back, our Creative Director, Dave Thomas, found the  newish Brand Tags site just as we were starting work on a Very Big Campaign. Typing in the name of the Very Big Client returned a tag cloud of one-word associations that loads of people have when they see the brand name/logo. How useful is that? Well, it made for a nice little piece of backup to our proposal, anyway.

So that's how it works - either you type in a name, or you let the site flash up a random logo, and you type in the first word that pops into your head. Then you can see all the word associations other people have input to the site, too. Neat, eh?

The US version has the most major brand names indexed at the moment, so if you don't find one you're looking for on the UK site, go on over to the Dark Side.

Didn't I tell you to go play?

PS: Big Client is PayPal. It's no secret, really.

events for the future

Base One hosted their first event on the 10 September. It was part of our Beyond series, titled Beyond Search. We invited a load of clients, key contacts and prospects along for a 9am-1pm session. I like to think it was a huge success (as I was the organiser). The thing that really struck me was the relevance to our Beyond thinking - and how perhaps these types of events/conferences/workshops, whatever we like to label them, are going to become one of the best ways to inspire the word of mouth promotion of services in the future.

Is this one of the rivers that my colleague David Thomas is referring to in his Word of Mouth blog post? Getting people together who fill similar roles within different companies is a sure fire way to inspire debate and simply get people talking.

Watch this space for the video take of our Beyond Search event - for all of you who missed out on the day...

The rise of B2B Rich Content

The use of video and rich content across the web is now ubiquitous. Just look at BBC Olympics coverage: I watched most of it online - often live - rather than on the telly (not during working hours of course), and could access highlights for any event, at any time. It was great. I now expect this functionality on websites.

That's a high profile example, but this trend is coming to B2B too. For instance: highlights of b2b events can and should be taped and streamed online. I don't want to read a boring long, text based case study, I want to watch customers talking enthusiastically about the company I'm considering. I don't want to download a technical PDF of how to do something, I want to watch someone showing me. I want to interact.

It's all far more engaging for prospects and customers, and brings far more proof to what you say.

And now there's another reason to develop this content, as highlighted at the Beyond Search Event at the Tate Gallery this week: with Universal Search, rich content will now be indexed and appear in search results alongside traditional entries. These entries standout against others and mean users are far more likely to click on them to visit your site.

The barrier is that this content takes more thought, determination and time to produce. And will cost more also, though the increased return should balance this.

Because of this though, I think it represents a real opportunity for those prepared to embrace this: while others find reasons why not to do it, it gives those who are determined a chance to move ahead of the pack.

Continue reading The rise of B2B Rich Content .

Demand Generation the next big thing for B2B?

I read the latest edition of B2B Marketing magazine cover to cover one evening this week (a great read) but was left feeling a little uneasy. The cover story is positioning demand generation as the next big thing. But what is it? I had heard of it but have always thought it was just about taking a structured approach to how you capture prospects and nurture them before (and after) they are passed to sales. So why give it a title?

To make sure I wasn't missing something I did some research in the blogs. I didn't find much of an answer and indeed I was left feeling that (as with crm all those years ago) it was a label given to something familiar in order for some software and service vendors to make it easier to sell their product.

However I did find something useful. A blog entry on the Marketo Modern B2B Marketing Blog by Sean Monahue at last years Demand Generation Seminar in Boston outlining what he believes are the Top 5 challenges for B2B Demand Generation Marketers (i.e. all B2B Marketers). Worth a look and mostly about search.

Continue reading Demand Generation the next big thing for B2B?.

Who do you think you are talking to?

It would seem that the medium, more than the actual message, of a fairly innocuous piece of DM could, in theory, destroy a brand.

A recent study of drivers, who had a tendency to decorate their vehicles with stickers (bumper and other) were found to have a greater likelihood of road rage and aggressive behaviour. It is just one more thing to think about when building a campaign. Do you really want aggressive, short tempered brand advocates running amok like a scene from Mad Max?

(photo credit)

Honest expectations

Allow me to share two experiences today which underline how customer satisfaction is all about expectation.

It happened when I took my car in for a service. The service representative smiled warmly and made a point of explaining to me that they would clean the car, inside and out, as part of the service. Fantastic. I wasn't expecting it so, at that point, my satisfaction went up. Good old Citroen. But when I collected it, I had the same dusty old dashboard, leaf-littered footwells and child-smeared windows.

Now here's the point. Even though they had done a perfectly good job of what I'd asked them to do (the service), I was disappointed in them. Bad Citroen. I felt like I wanted to complain. And that dissatisfaction only came from the fact that they had mentioned it and raised my expectations - when they didn't need to! (It wasn't like I was going to take my business elsewhere.)

And this got me thinking about whether we do the same on our web pages. How often have you clicked because you've been promised something only to be let down? Wouldn't a little more honesty have been better in the long run? I think it is our duty to be vigilant of this however much we want to talk up the benefits.

And remember there can also be merit in underpromising (perhaps better described as overdelivering). As a copywriter, I find it hard to tone down the sales copy sometimes, but it makes people feel really good about your brand when you get more than you expected.

Which is exactly how I felt when the garage rang to say I had been overcharged by £90. They were very sorry, Sir, and would credit my card instantly. Sorry? I was delighted. Good old Citroen.

1001 Books to Read Before You Die...and Wikinomics

Once upon a time, there were 100 Books to Read Before You Die (according to Penguin Classics). This year, a professor from Sussex University encouraged 105 critics, editors and academics to up the ante to 1001.

With all of that meaningful literature yet to be pondered, plus my own unlisted backlog of wanna-reads, must I, or anyone in B2B marketing, read Wikinomics?

Let's take a quick tour of the pros and cons. You can even download a free sneak peek of Wikinomics (the 33-pg intro) first.

Continue reading 1001 Books to Read Before You Die...and Wikinomics.

First blog post ever...

I have never written a blog before. In fact, it scares me somewhat. I am a blog virgin. I just have to "get writing", they tell me. Once you have written one then you will get the hang of it. But I am way behind the rest of the world AND (as it appears) some of the professional "bloggers" that have come out of the woodworks from our agency. So here it goes, time to catch up and become a blogger...

Because I find it so hard, I have been thinking a lot about the purpose of blogs and where they fit into the business world.

Continue reading First blog post ever....

Why is web usability such a tough sell?

Cost and timescale are usually the main reasons given for leaving usability out of a web project. It's true that testing a site is going to take time, and therefore money, but if anything is scalable, it's usability.

Plus, it is vital to deal with any usability issues before you're too far through a web project. Address them too late and you're definitely looking at much more of a time/cost implication than a little usability attention would have incurred.

Let me show you how it is possible to have your web usability cake and eat it, too...

Let's start with usability testing. Whilst more testing generally equals more results, a new site can be effectively tested during the design phase by just a handful of participants. If you're clear on what you need to achieve with your site, then it's easy to ask the right questions or set the right task to flag up any potential issues, regardless of the number of test participants you have.

You can also scale back by using a heuristic approach: have a single usability expert examine your site against a list of accepted principles and standards. The discussions started by a heuristic approach can help the whole team to focus on the primary goals of the site and reduce the barriers that stop users from eaching those goals. A web project often has a KPI of increased conversions and each barrier removed helps you get closer to achieving that.

However the real sticking point is often the perception that focusing on standards and conventions (a key part of web usability) impacts negatively on design: that a usable site is an ugly site. Standards and conventions are boundaries that we all have to work within when trying to complete any task, online or offline. And when it comes down to it a website is a tool to help the user complete one or more tasks. But how you apply those standards and conventions is not fixed and that's where good design comes in. A great design which goes against usability principles isn't going to get the audience it deserves.

So with all this in mind, usability should be a essential part of your web project making sure nothing gets between you and your users. Not a tough sell at all...

Non-stop advertising

Fact: It takes 14 hours and 40 minutes to fly from Dubai to Sao Paolo.

Fact: The longest commercial is 14 hours and 40 minutes.

This is not really surprising as the commercial in question promotes the Emirates new route, and is a monologue by chatterbox Brazilian Fernando Ferreira about his homeland, its culture and whatever else takes his fancy. Creative directions like this are perfect for the online message, and for creating a stir.

I've also heard rumours of non-stop flights between London and Sydney soon. Although listening to an Ozzy go on about how much better they are at cricket, rugby and just about everything else might just be a bit too much for anyone to bear.

B2B marketing in the petabyte age

This month's lead article in my very favourite magazine Wired posits that we are now in the petabyte age. This heralds 'The End of Science' as we know it. 

The central theory proffered is that with the massive amount of data that we now have, we no longer need to use the centuries-old 'hypotheses->experiment->prove/disprove' empirical approach to make new discoveries, we simply need to analyse and understand what this data is telling us to make advances in the future.

Hmm, at first glance for the B2B marketer of a digital persuasion this sounds very nice indeed. All we need to do is glean this information then give them to the data geeks, then voilà, the answer! Pass me those log files...

But here lies the issue. How do get the answers from all this data? Google may be the undisputed #1 as it worked out to be the most efficient way of organising the web, and even it can't claim to be definitive (e.g. see Knol - an attempt by Google's head of search to fill the gaps in information he says exist on the web). The analysis seems to lag way behind the gathering. We still find that we need to use - shock horror - real people to get the most insightful information when researching. Data gives you statistics, results, validation, but can it give you insight? Can it tell you how people behave and interact with your products?  

If Wired are right, the answer is probably yes, but we just aren't very good at doing it yet. In the near future perhaps those that can create tools to visually interpret data, but in a meaningful way that relates back to actual people and their behaviours, will be very powerful.  Watch this to be inspired.

wom vs big spend advertising

QR codes - has B2B got the picture?

They always say that it's the pioneers that end up with the arrows in their back. So why be on the leading edge?

A case in point occurred to us the other day when talking about using QR codes as a response mechanism. For those who don't know (and where have you been for the last two years?) they are two-dimensional barcodes, that can be scanned with a mobile phone to provide a URL which then delivers the user to a given website.

A typical use might be to provide a QR code for a new album, which directs the user to a site where they can download a sample of the music on offer. A bridge from the physical world to the online world - and a whole lot easier than remembering a long and confusing URL. In certain consumer markets - especially in more technical ones - they're reasonably well-known and well-used.

So - it's great technology, but what about QR codes as a response mechanism for B2B campaigns? There are lots of questions. Is it appropriate? Do enough people know how to do it? Are their phones able to do it? Maybe the answer is 'no'. But with every month that passes, the answer gets closer and closer to 'maybe'.

You could argue (and you'd be right) that most people are unable to deal with QR codes at the moment (whether through lack of knowledge or lack of suitable mobile phone). Which makes it a pretty damned poor response mechanism. But using new techniques like this makes a great statement. And at some point, one of the major B2B brands will start doing it regularly. And surely it's worth a few arrows to steal a march on your rivals?

Continue reading QR codes - has B2B got the picture?.

Anaesthetic anyone?

There's an interesting report just released by McKinsey about the adoption and satisfaction with Web 2.0 technologies. Whilst I'm not keen on the label of Web 2.0 and the bundling of these technologies into a category, it is an interesting snapshot of how Enterprises are recognizing the potential value (slowly), including an analysis of what gets in the way.

We have a couple of clients who have tentatively dipped their toes with the idea that they will evaluate performance and then make a decision whether to dive in, and we know (if we're honest) they haven't really got it. Yet. In this report there's an analysis of dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 and a perception of the barriers. Those that are most dissatisfied identify the biggest barriers as being:

• My company's leadership team doesn't encourage the use of Web 2.0
• My company's culture doesn't encourage the use of Web 2.0
• My company doesn't understand the potential financial return from the use of Web 2.0
• My company doesn't provide sufficient incentives to adopt or experiment with Web 2.0

This highlights some of the challenges facing those of us who believe in the potential. We have to be clear about our arguments. We have to engage businesses at the highest level and we have to paint of picture of just what is possible.

Coincidently, I heard an interview on the radio this week with the author of a book that charts the development of medical sciences and recounts the resistance the Victorian "so called" medical profession offered to things like general anaesthetic. Apparently, at the time a good surgeon was one who was best at restraining patients through the pain, and so they saw the idea of an anaesthetic as a threat to their prowess. It was the surgeon who was known as being the fastest who could see the benefit, as it enhanced his reputation.

To me this suggests that we will have more success in introducing new techniques to B2B marketers who recognize their true role as building sustainable brands and reputations, not supporting sales or creating brochures. If you are one of those, please put your hand up.

Continue reading Anaesthetic anyone?.

SEO or PPC?

When a new client comes to Base One wanting to increase their position in search engine results, there are two options:

pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

vs.

search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO means optimising a client's website so that search engines can bring it to the top of their organic results page when potential customers type in relevant queries. These results are known as organic results because the engines find them naturally - there is no money exchanged between sites and engines (stay tuned for PPC below!).

The Base One SEO assessment typically includes analysing a client site for visitors' usability, reviewing the types of links the client site holds, altering the site's infrastructure to make it more search engine-friendly, and other top secret techniques.

Pay-Per Click on the other hand, is just that - clients paying for every click their site receives. You probably recognize the neat little 95-character boxes from these advertisers, which turn up on the right side of the search results; these are called paid results. 

When trying to reach top placement in paid results, there are two key components. First is the "bid" and second is the client site's quality (engines do not give away exact %'s on which factor is more important). A client bids on keywords relevant to their website's products, competing against other sites bidding on the same keyword; whoever has the higher bid and better quality site is placed at the top of the page. Base One works hard to build a strategic, well-coordinated PPC campaign so all relevant keywords are covered within each client's budget. 

Each method, PPC and SEO, has its drawbacks. In PPC, if you bid high enough, a brand-new or poorly constructed site can be placed at the top of the PPC results, but this will mean high costs and will be expensive to maintain. SEO is a slower beast, needing time to be register in search engines as a worthy and relevant piece of content that deserves to be at the top of the results pages. But in the end, it's virtually free.

Plus, users are more likely to refer to the organic results on a page, so clients have a greater chance of being clicked on by ranking higher in organic results. SEO improvements can also improve a PPC campaign's quality score so that clients don't have to bid as high; instead they can rely on their site's quality score to put them at the top of the paid results page.

Ultimately, both tactics deserve space in a client's search plan. To immediately increase traffic a PPC campaign can be a great catalyst, during which time implementing SEO tactics can improve the organic listings of a client's site. Eventually, depending on the competitiveness of the industry, PPC can form less of the equation.

Corporate commenting: creepy, or only natural?

The New York Times recently flagged up this issue, which was probably overdue to appear, in Griping Online? Comcast Hears You and Talks Back. Comcast, a US cable services company, not only has a full-time staff to trawl blogs and other social media for customer complaints, it has a policy of responding immediately online - by commenting on a complaining customer's own blog, for instance.

Well, why not, you might say - if it's a public blog or Tweet, everyone's invited to chime in. But at least seven Comcast customers have called the practice 'creepy'. It's one thing for companies to respond promptly to customer complaints on the company blog, quite another to up periscope on customers' own turf.

But maybe it's just the shock of the new. I admit it seems vaguely Big B