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Category Archives: Branding

How to Use Facebook for Your Small Business

Leveraging Facebook to generate leads, increase site traffic, and even make a little money is every small business owner’s goal. But in most cases, it’s not as simple as getting on once a week for an hour, posting a bunch of ‘interesting’ information, and getting on with your life hoping that the leads will start flowing in.

Facebook is a remarkable tool for creating a ‘buzz’ about your small business and inviting new friends to check out your services, but done in the wrong way Facebook can also hurt your overall brand Continue reading →

X-Shops: Fast and Reliable Ecommerce hosting

Google to launch Groupon competitor

(Mashable) — Google is preparing to launch Google Offers, the search giant’s Groupon competitor, Mashable has learned.

We have the documents to prove it — one of our sources has sent us a confidential fact sheet straight from the Googleplex about the company’s new group buying service.

“Google Offers is a new product to help potential customers and clientele find great deals in their area through a daily email,” the fact sheet says. Continue reading →

X-Shops: Fast and Reliable Ecommerce hosting

Alternatives to celebrity endorsement

alternative-to-celebrity-endorsementBy Simon Harrop, BRAND sense agency

Celebrity endorsement is big business. Top celebrities, and even the minor ones, receive truckloads of cash (Justin Timberlake got £3.4m for his ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ one liner for McDonalds) and publicity for a comparatively small amount of work. So it pretty much makes sense from their perspective. But what about the brands? Is it really in their long term interest, and, more importantly, are their better alternatives out there that can have a more positive impact on a brand’s equity? Well, the simple answer is that while most celebrity/brand partnerships may give a short term sales boost, they rarely improve long term brand equity. This is because most campaigns, while visually stimulating and brilliant at creating a brand image, fail to create an emotional impact with consumers by incorporating all the senses.

It’s not hard to see why brands are attracted to celebrity endorsement. Celebrities bring a much needed human angle, especially to fairly ‘cold’ products like razors or ‘chore’ jobs like shopping which aren’t particularly enjoyable. A brand that got it right here would be Gillette and its partnership with David Beckham. A fairly mundane daily task for millions of men was transformed into an important grooming process associated with the self control, success and precision of a top footballer. And when things do go wrong for the brand, as with Bacardi dropping Vinnie Jones following his drunken behaviour, the incident is quickly forgotten about.

The real problem is that too many brands have a myopic focus on short terms sales and ‘awareness’. With this mindset they are logically driven towards ill conceived celebrity endorsement campaigns. Virgin is a classic example of a brand that hasn’t thought about its brand personality before matching with a celebrity. Virgin Media, previously associated with the subtle Uma Thurman, has now opted for “in your face” (according to Virgin media Chief James Kidd) Ruby Wax. Virgin clearly hasn’t distinguished between its product sales and brand strategy; otherwise it would have matched with celebrities that hold consistent values. Too many celebrity campaigns contribute nothing to brand equity and are short term gimmicks – the result is consumers become confused about the brand proposition and emotionally detached.

What about appealing directly to senses such as taste, touch and smell? This would have a direct emotional impact on consumers because these senses bypass the rational part of our brain. The fact is that 83% of current marketing expenditure is focussed on the eyes alone, despite the fact that 45% of consumers say smell is the most important sense they use when judging a brand (according to research carried out by Millward Brown, the market research agency). Brand personality can be expressed in so many ways – through the smell of a fragrance, the feel of a Coca-Cola bottle or the taste of a quality wine. Yet so many brands limit themselves to a TV advert with David Beckham or Jennifer Lopez.

So how have brands integrated touch, taste and smell into their campaigns? Well, lets take a well known brand: Coca-Cola. The strength of the brand was always based on its ‘smashability’ i.e.: if you broke the product/logo could you still recognise the product. With its distinctive contoured glass shaped bottle it was easy to recognise a Coke bottle. This was a positive part of the brand which endured over decades, until Coca-Cola decided to replace the glass bottle with aluminium cans. Not only has Coke lost a unique part of its brand, but it has started to associate itself with celebrities on a short term basis. The current celebrity endorsing Coke is Wayne Rooney. You can see the logic (with the build up to Euro 2008). But it’s only a short term association – where, I ask, is the long term brand building and understanding of what most closely touches human emotions?

But what about those instances where celebrity advertising is supposedly credited with resurrecting a brands financial fortune? Take Marks & Spencer’s. Its share price and sales have skyrocketed supposedly as a result of the advertising campaign featuring Twiggy, Myleene Klass and other faces. Yes, its sales did rise during the glitz of this campaign. But commentators forgot that the environment within M&S stores also improved dramatically during this period. The lighting, layout and background music was all transformed to make it much more appealing. The product lines were enhanced and the general atmosphere appealing to all the senses was improved. With this added sensory appeal consumers felt that the message being promoted by the adverts matched reality – a powerful combination.

Sainsbury’s is another brand that has got it right. The Jamie Oliver deal was said to have resulted in an extra £1 billion in sales. Jamie’s involvement undoubtedly had an effect. But what about the sensory side? For example, there was the new ‘Taste the Difference’ range, which utilised packaging that appealed to the sense of touch and had a better taste and smell. And Sainsbury’s sorted out the distribution problems that had plagued the stores for years. Celebrity endorsement can and does work, but unless it is accompanied by practical sensory changes on the ground (in the shops, in the product design etc) it will only have a short term impact.

Some brands can reject celebrity endorsement outright and emerge in a better off position than their rivals. An example of a brand that has got it right is Singapore Airlines. Statistically the airline provides no more legroom than any other carrier. Yet in survey after survey flyers consistently vote Singapore Airlines the best carrier. Could this be in part due to the branded fragrance that has been subtly infused in all its planes? This smell is integrated into the hand towels and sprayed in all the cabins before passengers’ board. The reason is that smell has a direct emotional impact on consumers, bypassing the rational part of the brain, making consumers feel good. A branded fragrance – now isn’t that cheaper than paying a celebrity?

Then there are the brands that can rely entirely on celebrity endorsement without making any changes on the ground. Michael Winners endorsement of Esure is a good example. Winner built brand awareness for an intangible and rather boring (insurance policies) product so the logic was clear. In general what these examples teach us is that celebrities can and do work for brands if certain conditions are met. Of primary importance is that the values of the brand and celebrity match. But it goes deeper than that. Unless brands wake up to the fact that most products have a strong sensory side which is communicated through touch, taste and smell (as opposed to just visual and audio) they will continue to make promises through their celebrities and then under deliver when consumers experience reality. So it is of primary importance that brands establish a strong sensory side, and then consider celebrity endorsements. Overall, what these examples teach us is that matching the correct celebrity with tangible sensory improvements is a powerful combination – one that marketers have ignored for far too long.

Time to return to “feeling the quality”

By Simon Harrop, BRAND sense agency

Lets be honest, the majority of marketing activity simply doesn’t work. Eight out of ten product launches now fail. It’s a staggering statistic when you consider all the millions being spent on launches, advertising, point of sale, direct marketing and whatever other tool is plucked out the marketing kit bag to help get the public buying. Each year traditional forms of marketing become less and less effective. For example, in 1965 over 33% of US consumers could recall specific TV adverts, by 1990 that figure had fallen to only 8% and today? Well my guess is that less than 5% of the TV watching public will recall an advert.

How is this failure possible in our current age of widespread marketing expertise? Haven’t we had centuries of selling to get this right? Aren’t there more people involved in marketing and branding than at any other time in history? Some critics point to the rise of Tivo, multiple channels and cynical consumers who have now created an ‘anti-marketing shell’ for their subconscious. All good points but ultimately they miss the main issue which is that marketers have somehow forgotten how to make a successful sell. Namely they have forgotten the need to appeal to all our five senses (touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing) when attempting to sell something.

In short, they have got stuck in a mindset that all marketing activity must be focused on appealing to our audio and visual sense. In fact 83% of all brand communication is to the eyes alone. Like idiots to the proverbial lantern, we have fallen under the spell of TV advertising, we have been seduced by print and are now entering the heavy petting stages with the Internet. Touch, taste and smell have been forgotten. Well, not quite forgotten but certainly relegated to the Vauxhall Conference and then had the pips squeezed out of it by the suits from finance. When it comes to selling, whatever happened to the concept of ‘feel the quality?’

Well, one explanation is that the power that the marketing director once exerted over the look, feel, smell, sound and taste of a product, and the environment in which it is sold, has mostly been lost to other directors around the board room. Marketing directors of yesteryear may not have set out with a deliberate strategy of appealing to consumers through all five senses, but by using common sense and a belief in quality, they were more successful than their modern counterparts and most importantly, they held more clout.

Today the head of retail, finance, IT and operations is likely to have as much influence, if not more, on the interaction with the customers as the marketing director. This has all lead to a general reduction in the quality of the brand experience enjoyed by consumers.

And the public aren’t stupid, they know! They can be made to watch as many clever and shiny advertising campaigns as marketers will throw at them, but they increasingly see a real disconnect between visual advertising that urges them to embrace the lifestyle promise of the brand, and the reality of the pretty crappy products they are sold and the rubbish customer experience.

A customer sitting in a new Virgin train ‘super loo’ doesn’t sit there thinking about the brilliant advertising campaign for Virgin trains, but how the loo probably isn’t working, looks dirty, feels very cheap and is, well, not very super at all. A Barclaycard customer who spends half an hour listening to a slightly out of key version of Greensleeves whilst trying to get through to a cut price call centre in Bangalore isn’t sitting their considering how clever the marketing people must have been to have formed a marketing partnership with The Premiership, but instead how tight the company must be to not invest more in better call centres.

Don’t worry though, as long as we marketing people keep upping the millions spent on marketing and branding, as long as we keep linking in with the latest celebrity pop idol then the consumer will come flocking right? Wrong. The public know they are being sold a pup and any new product that isn’t good quality will quickly join the eight out of ten new launches that fail.

But its not just new launches that can get it wrong. What about existing well know brands? What about one of the biggest brands of all – Coke? Here is a brand that has literally spent billions on teaching the world to sing, on ensuring that we buy the ‘real’ thing, and encouraging us to ‘live on the coke side of life’ (that’s the latest strap line by the way.) Advertising agency owners have made their fortune on creating glossy, star studded global campaigns that adhere to probably the strictest brand guidelines in the business. And, whilst all this was going on, Coke managed to throw away one of their most distinctive brand identities – the ice cold iconic glass coke bottle. A bottle that the public loved. A historical masterpiece. A piece of cultural iconography, if you will, and would you believe it they chucked it in the bin.

You can almost imagine the meeting at which the senior VP’s became convinced that plastic bottles and cans would be better, cheaper and easier to lug around. That small saving per bottle means tens of millions of dollars of extra shareholder value they thought! Well possible it did in the short term, but in the long term it’s proved to be a disaster. Now a coke can or bottle is indistinguishable from the myriad of other competitors on the shelf. Oh, and that unique secret coke recipe? Well they had a go at changing that as well. Hmm. Predictably the result has been a fall in sales.

You see, the public liked the way the bottle felt in their hands, how it pressed against their lips, they likely the memories of youth it held for them, they perceived that thanks to the glass bottle the drink was also original, unique and even colder (it isn’t). So, in essence, here is a brand that threw away its unique ability to appeal to all five senses (bottle touch, taste and smell of the drink, sight of distinct black liquid, sound of the bubbles and the satisfying ‘glug’ when drinking an ‘ice cold Coke.’) I am happy to report that today the Coca-cola organisation is returning to its core values and is re-introducing the bottle. Well done to them for some long called for clear headed thinking.

But, it’s not just the manufactures of FMCG’s that can cock it up. Even the makers of luxury cars can have a go at buggering up their brands. Up until the 1990s Mercedes Benz was the byword in luxury and quality. This car maker’s excellent engineers and designers built high quality cars that would last a lifetime. At which point they handed them over to the marketing department to sell. Pride, workmanship and a quality finish were all key ingredients to the magic Mercedes tradition. Cars were known for their first-rate feel, the sound of a quiet purring engine and the heavy clunk of a well designed closing door. The cars also boasted a unique smell of quality leather and wood.

And then someone within Mercedes decided that their old fashioned fussy focus on quality, which happened to appealed to all five senses, was outdated. What was needed was more cars, cheaper cars, a wider range of cars to capture more of the car buying public, all promoted through shiny adverts that showed just what a modern and exciting car maker Mercedes had become. A sort of ‘equal opportunities car maker’ if you will. The engineers sadly nodded their heads and got on with the business of cutting out the quality in order to bring the prices down. Within a decade Mercedes had lost their reputation for creating quality cars. The doors didn’t clunk, wood and leather had become well, a bit plastic and the engines sounded rougher. The cars acquired an unenviable reputation for breaking down. Disappointed life-long Merc buyers started lingering around BMW garages and pretty quickly sales were down for Mercedes and sky rocketing for BMW.

Today? Well Merc is back to doing what it does best. Building cars aimed at a certain sector of the market willing to pay more for that touch, that smell, that sound and that beautiful body. In short Mercedes have gone back to quality that appealed to all the five senses.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that these sort of incidents are rare. At Brand Sense we run a course that helps Marketing Directors to rethink their approach to marketing expenditure. Of those Fortune 500 company marketing directors with whom we have worked, the majority have immediately revised their intended marketing expenditure to approximately 50% visual spend and 50% on utilising the other senses and investing in the quality of the product.

And directors are waking up to the fact that splitting responsibility for the customer experience across multiple directors leads to a disconnected poor quality experience. The marketing director’s power is once again on the rise.

I will leave you with one startling fact. Studies show that smell (of your product and sales environment) is actually more important than sight and sound in the purchasing process. In fact a sense of smell emotionally affects humans up to 75% more than any other sense. Big brands are finally waking up to this and many of the major world brands are now looking at how they can influence, improve and even ‘own’ their smell in order to maximise sales. The question I have for you is when was the last time you stopped thinking about advertising and started to think about the smell of what you sell?


What role can sensory branding play when it comes to online marketing?

By Simon Harrop, BRAND sense agency

Many offline brands have woken up to the importance of marketing activity that appeals to all five senses, rather than just the traditional senses of sight and sound. Research proves that touch and taste has an equally important impact on the purchasing decisions and brand loyalty of consumers. And surprisingly, smell is the most important sense as it has an instant impact straight on the cortex limbic system the part of the brain controlling emotion and memory (cortex is rational thought) and can emotionally affect a person up to 75% more than any other sense.

Brands such as British Airways, Coca Cola and Mercedes Benz are waking up to these discoveries. Today they are thinking more about how their products and marketing activity can reach and satisfy all the senses, rather than just creating the latest clever advertising campaign starring today’s talk of the town celebrity. And more big brands are looking to engineer their product so it appeals to all the senses. In practical terms this means they are focusing on improving the physical touch and feel of their products (Marks and Spenser’s), introducing patented smells (Singapore Airlines) that can be associated with them as a company or utilising food within their marketing (think of the latest and very popular Skoda ‘cake car’ advert.) Sterile TV and print advertising is increasingly replaced by experiential marketing, with consumers actually interacting with the product and human beings. A minor revolution is set to take place. If creating a digital strategy was the key objective of the last decade, then get set to see ‘brand sensing’ dominate the next ten years.

But what can online brands do? Most have no physical environment in which to sell, no taste they can engineer and no associated smell. Most are stuck with the look, and occasionally the sound of their customer interface. Maybe they will just have to sit this particular revolution out?

Well maybe not. The problem that the marketers of online brands have is not so much the lack of opportunities for sensory contact with their customers, but their over emphasis on the digital customer interface. That’s understandable given the massive amount of focus, time, energy and love lavished on integrating the latest technology or introducing the coolest interactive designs but it has been at the expense of other key elements in the purchasing process. The all important actual physical delivery of the product; be it a book, ticket, lawn mower or insurance documents has for too long been a sad secondary consideration, which many e-marketers would actually be happy to dispense with all together if they could! To recall an earlier dotcom phrase, its time for a ‘paradigm shift’ in thinking.

E-marketers are only limited by their imagination. The physical delivery of the product presents an opportunity to appeal to a customers sense of smell, touch, sight, sound and even touch. Yet many online brands will simply settle for a cheaply branded box with which to ‘get the product out.’ E-marketers must think harder, and invest more, in this crucial aspect of the customer experience. Using better quality, quirky and scented packaging would help to deliver a large increase in brand loyalty and demand. Environmental concerns aside, those brands that have introduced the ‘e-ticket’ or printable papers (for example insurance companies) should get back to traditional print and postage.

And why stop at just the delivery of the product. Many online brands have got themselves stuck in a mind set that because they operate online, they should only be marketing online through the like of Google, banners and affinity marketing. In fact the exact opposite is true. Pure online brands need to make an extra special effort to utilize forms of marketing that allow all the senses to be reached and stimulated. Hats off to Lastminute.com for its recent marketing campaign. Rather than just throwing more money at Google, they took a bold step to promote themselves using field marketing by giving away branded mini bottles of sun cream. In an instant they had provided potential customers with a long term promotional device that looks fun, smells nice and feels good.

Online brands should start their marketing planning by thinking about direct mail and experiential marketing. Two routes to market which allow them to reach out to more of the potential consumers senses. All other forms of marketing should be secondary. Couple this approach with an improved brand experience in the physical delivery of the product and they might be able to keep up with their traditional offline brand rivals. Maybe online marketers can be revolutionaries too?