Archive for the 'Brand communication' Category
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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.
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Universities and branding
What is a university? The answer, it appears, depends very much on who you talk to. To an academic, it is a self-governing community of academics who put the pursuit of knowledge above and beyond anything else. To a university administrator, one of the many professionals who have been drafted in to run Britain’s higher education establishments in the last few decades, it is a large, complex business. To a government minister, it’s part of a long-term solution to transform Britain from an industrial nation into a ‘knowledge economy’. To a parent, it’s an investment in a child’s future. To a business leader, it’s a source of commercially valuable research and high quality graduates. To a prospective student, it is ‘me time’ - a three year adventure in independent living and making new friends that is the reward for putting up with thirteen years of compulsory education.
With so many different - and often conflicting - points of view, how exactly does one communicate a university? With difficulty, always mindful that whatever one says about it, someone will hold exactly the opposite point of view.
What a university is, in fact, is a kind of patchwork made up of an odd assortment of pieces. Nobody really planned them: universities are, next to the church and the military, amongst our oldest national organisations and they have simply grown that way. Conceived by a mediaeval mind for purposes quite different in practice, if not in concept, to the ones they fulfil today, they have evolved haphazardly into the institutions we know today. Our oldest universities are now approaching 800 years and still going strong - no British university, once granted its Royal charter, has yet gone out of business.
If we can talk about a university ‘brand’, it’s something quite different from the commercial brands we’re familiar with. There is no ‘unique selling proposition’ in higher education: the university’s ‘offer’ is its people, and they are constantly moving around from one institution to the next, collaborating far more often than they compete. Schools and courses and research and even the student experience don’t vary greatly from one university to the next - whatever supposedly distinctive attribute one finds, there is almost certainly going to be at least one other university in the country that can match it exactly.
The one big difference - and one that universities themselves are often uncomfortable with - is place. Unlike businesses, universities can’t simply relocate (although several have opened new campuses in different parts of the country, or even the world). Universities are in a historic relationship with their cities. And, in the case of our historic universities, this is sometimes an uneasy, standoffish ‘town and gown’ relationship. The new universities have often chosen to exploit this, cultivating stronger relationships with their cities, working hard to forge relationships that their older counterparts have taken for granted (and it is a curious feature of the UK that many of our cities now have both old and new universities).
The university brand thus has to be something that allows all the university’s stakeholders to see what they want to see in it - it needs to have something of the nature of a blank canvas, onto which they can project their own meanings and associations. It also needs to reflect a place name that may, in every other respect, have little real connection with the university itself. For international audiences, whose grasp of the geography of these islands may be sketchy, to say the least, it’s often easier if that place is already known - for instance, because the city has a premier division football team.
Branding universities sounds as if it is about presenting and packaging universities in the same kinds of ways as commercial brands. It is, however, the exact opposite of this - it’s about adapting the language and techniques of branding to work for an institution as rich and complex (and as indefinable) as a university.
Interestingly, universities aren’t becoming more like other large, complex organisations. Other large, complex institutions are becoming more like universities.
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It’s difficult to ignore the hype about the new London 2012 Olympic logo
For me, you can’t beat the simplicity and style of the Tokyo 1964 logo, a beautiful red sphere above the Olympic rings and condensed upper case sans serif type. But… love it or hate it, there are a couple of positives about the new logo.
1. It’s very, very different to any of the previous ones - not a torch or leaping man in sight.
2. It has loads of mileage in digital media and promo materials. Having watched the brand videos, it’s easy to see how the jagged zigzags following young footballers or scaling the Tate Modern is an approach which has legs. The low-tech style is a refreshing change, and the angular devices and multi-coloured approach should make the t-shirts and other Olympic goodies very distinctive. Whether this increases the risk to the public of fits and migarines as the games approach remains to be seen.
3. It’s getting talked about like no other logo I can remember - and didn’t someone once say that all publicity is good publicity?
Branding is a tough business. Clients commissioning branding know they’re sticking their heads above the parapet. When we rebranded Middlesex University the brave new ’signature’ had its instant fans, but it tok a while for it to be loved by all around the university. It was a brave step that paid off in the end.
Commissioning a new logo and leaving an old one behind has been likened to bereavement. Presumably this one feels more like giving birth to Frankenstein’s monster.
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Beta minus the brand
Courtesy of UX Magazine, comes a link to the very of-the-moment Museum of Modern Betas. The site lists the ‘50 most anticipated applications in the webosphere, as measured by the number of bookmarks at del.icio.us’.
It’s a nice, very simple idea. But what is most striking about it, looking down the list, is just how awful the naming of many soi-dissant web2.0 projects are.
Remind me, when exactly did we decide that branding wasn’t that important?
It is said that imitation is flattery, but I’m not sure quite how flattered Flickr would be by its many vowel-shy imitators out there.
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Hanging out on MySpace
A client of ours has been trying to reach one of the most sought after demographic segments - the unpredictable teen market. Their previous campaign hasn’t been very successful and they are now questioning their traditional approach in favour of new methods.
MySpace, the largest online social networking portal on the web, often pops up (this time being no exception) when the word online marketing is in the same sentence as the words teens and tweens , and with fair reason, it’s where a lot of them hang out. 70 million to be exact (adults included). And it’s not only our client that is taking notice. It is estimated that marketers will spend $280 million on social network advertising in the U.S. this year (imediaconnection).
So why are companies and marketer so eager to throw money at MySpace? I believe the key lays in the ever so popular teen phenomenon - “hanging out”. Teens are basically on MySpace because their friends are their and they want to hang out with those friends. I did a lot of hanging out when I was in my teens (but in a more primitive way), at friends’ houses, the local cafe or even at ‘our’ tube station. We didn’t really do anything, but hanging out was important to us because it (according to Danah Boyed’s interesting research on Identity production in a Networked Culture)allowed us to build relationships and stay connected. We were a quite typical teen group and as with most teens our daily hanging out sessions were quite private (do you remember the “No trespassing” and “Private” sticker on your door?), it was just us, no parents, no teachers and definitely difficult for others to join in.
Things have changed now. The groundbreaking thing about MySpace is that it allows companies and brands (or anyone else for that matter of fact) to join in, hang out, socialise, build relationships and connect to teenagers in a way that just wasn’t possible in the mid nineties (when I was in my teens). I mean, we would have been pretty surprised if Burger King came to one of our local hang out spots and interacted with us as anyone else in the group.
Today’s teenagers are not surprised, at least not the ones that are hanging out on MySpace. Burger King, Gatorade, The U.S. Marines, The Learning Channel, Cingular, Wendy’s, University of Warwick all have profiles or characters on MySpace that are looking for friends, some successful, some not (just like in school!) Wendy’s character ‘Smart’ is one of the successful. He is 28 years old, likes Hip-Hop, Rock and has 78 812 friends. Lvl145.christian and ‘come to darkness!!DWW are two of his friends, and they say ” I love Smart” and “I would soooo eat that”.
You’re not following me? It’s a fictive character (created with the purpose to sell hamburgers) that is hanging out with his/its ‘real’ friends, duuh!
