Archive for June, 2008
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How Precedent will change the world…
Now the British summer is finally approaching, we at Precedent are casting aside the umbrellas, stocking up on the sunscreen and swapping the morning traffic jam for a gentle amble or relaxing bicycle ride instead.
The idea came from this website: www.changeyourworld.org.uk it’s a really great website from Sustrans, showing how you can use your daily commute to do your bit for the environment.Suntrans are hoping to encourage, us (i.e. lazy commuters) to ditch the car for just one journey, and walk, cycle, or use public transport instead to help reduce car traffic by 10%.
So go on - take your first steps now at www.changeyourworld.org.uk
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BR (Blog Relation), a new way of marketing communication
“To succeed in luxury car market, you should get rid of negative and cheap brand image before you launch your new sport car ‘KOUP’ next year.”
This was one of comments on Kia’s international business blog, Kia-Buzz (www.kia-buzz.com). Since it was opened in September 2007, bloggers from more than 155 countries have visited the blog and left comments on Kia’s new vehicles, motor shows, design issues and marketing strategies. The company staff listened carefully what people say and sometimes they ask questions to them. There have been lots of controversial topics and debates since they started the blog.
To manage its blog effectively, Kia carefully selected 11 blog writers within the company, from different departments and regions. Some of them are graduate trainees and some others are manager levels, and the company thought having writers with different backgrounds and age groups can help understanding customers with various occasions.
The blog has become one of the most cost-effective Internet marketing tools, due to companies’ growing need to interact with potential and existing customers. One of the earliest and the most influential company blogs was Fastlane (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/), a company blog in General Motors (GM), managed by Bob Lutz, the vice president of the company. It was created in January 2005 to listen customers’ complains about one of GM’s car brands, Pontiac. When Fastlane was launched, many consumers were amazed because Bob Lutz and professional staff wrote posts, listened what they said, answered questions and reflected their opinions on real products!
Until a few years ago, having a home page was everything in Internet marketing, to deliver a company’s message to consumers and give them a nice company image. The growth of Internet has been encouraging consumers to be actively involved in companies’ marketing and production activities. They are not just sitting and waiting for the products and services anymore, but also they try to give their opinions on productions and companies’ activities directly.
These active customers, also called pro-sumers, demand high level of access and interaction in the company’s decision-making process, and blog was the best place for them to communicate directly to companies. This new trend on web is called ‘BR (Brand Relations)’ that covers the area that Public Relations could not reach-approaching each customer’s mind directly. According to this trend, a blog is one of the quickest, easiest, and most cost-effective ways to listen directly what customers want.
However, is it really useful? Should every company start a blog?
A blog is a completely open space, so if someone starts to talk about a specific topic, others can freely react with their comments. It is a place that totally relying on public opinion, so it is hard to predict what kind of reactions that public will make on a post. This means, sometimes it is much more difficult to manage a blog than a website’s contents management. Debates are often happened on company blogs between consumers, but also between a company and consumers, and how the company reacts can contribute or damage its brand image, because even though a blog is just a blog, people who write comments and join debates can be serious and they have a power to spread the story and comments.
Therefore a blog should be considered as a seed of conversation that can create either positive or negative buzz and it is treated as a part of Marketing and Branding tool. Then these points might need to be discussed fundamentally before launching a blog:
- Who is going to visit the blog? and who should be the writer of the company blog?
- How they should react when there is a negative comment?
- How a company should reflect and monitor people’s raw opinions on their strategies?
- What kind of topics need to be selected and discussed?
Yes, it may be just a blog that anyone write anything, but depending on how to manage it properly, it can be a key tool of integrated marketing communication, a really effective new media tool that helps developing communication plan in traditional media channels, or a good contribution in developing brand equity by focusing on consumer involvement and preference enhancement.
