Social Media (Part II)

It's an old image but a good one

You looked at the last post. You worked out the basics of your social media, looked at your audiences, understood your resources, and nailed down what you want to achieve and sorted out what sort of voice you want to have. Excellent!

Now you need to do is choose which social media channels you want to use that will compliment that. So what do they all do? How are they different? And isn't it all about Facebook anyway?

This is a very basic overview on some of the most recognised services (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn) to help you get some ideas, but with any sort of investment, further research is definitely recommended, especially if the habits of your identified audience does not match any of the channels listed below.

Additionally, this is very biased towards Europe: for example YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and more are all banned in China, so localisation of your strategy is super important!

Facebook

Facebook is without question the biggest and most active social network on the web, both in terms of name recognition and total number of users.

With nearly 1.8 billion active users, and over a billion people using Facebook daily, it's a good medium to reach a large number of people. The spread is fairly wide, with users throughout age ranges (often topping more than 70% in various countries) with a bias towards female-identified users.

It's also versatile with pages, groups, and targeted advertising, with it's strength is in its business to consumer reach. Facebook can be used to share photos, videos, important company updates and more, allowing for a wide ranging relationship. It's excellent for community building in many forms and bringing customers together. Advertising can be tied to demographics and locations, and is very good for local sales and brand awareness. Additionally, the site can be more low-maintenance than other social networks as it has a lower expected posting frequency than something like Twitter, and with the business features enabling scheduled posts it means you can be a little less tied to the pages, and people will scroll backwards on your page to look at prior entries.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest online search engine after Google, has over a billion active users per month, and is heavily used as a resource for how-to content. The largest demographic of users is 25-34 year olds and 45% of users have some form of higher education.

If your customers and audience are asking questions, YouTube gives you the chance to provide unique, personality-filled answers to these questions and problems.

To use this, you must have the resources to have a good video editor. Whilst some companies choose not to, moderation of comments is a must. You can also engage via vloggers (video bloggers) who have dedicated channels with subscribed audiences, although they must always declare they have been sponsored and you are likely to need to pay depending on your industry.

Instagram 

Instagram is owned by Facebook, and is a visual social media platform based entirely on photo and video posts, and has nearly 400 million active users per month. It's all about the images, and offers easy-to-digest and aesthetically pleasing content. Images tend to be aspirational: beautiful images of travel, fashion, good food and such like, but there are images across the board. Companywise, if what is being sold can be visualised in an appealing way, this could be a good channel.

So who uses it? Well, Instagram has a bias towards a younger demographic with more than half it's users under the age of 30 with an equal gender split. More than 80 million photos are shared daily on instagram, and the platform, like snapchat, is almost entirely mobile. Instagram has a passionate community and has one of the highest engagement rates for brands, 58 times higher than on Facebook; however, it can be hard to find a niche. Company messaging needs to be heavily visual, and social media managers need to be good at photography and video editing.

Twitter

Twitter allows the sharing of short updates of 140 characters or fewer (ideally no more than 120 to allow for retweet handles) along with other media such as pictures, videos, URL links etc. By mentioning usernames in your posts, you can get the attention of other users and is one of the easiest ways to connect. It has around 319 million active monthly users, around 23% of internet users, and is slanted towards a more male-identified user group.

Twitter is effective for getting out news in a clear, concise fashion, skipping over the delays in press releases and other more traditional media, and is used as a resource by journalists. It creates a feeling of immediacy and access to a wide range of stakeholders, including knowing exactly what industry experts are looking into hour by hour, new developments, and can be a useful tool for handling customer service. Content is easily shared through retweeting, and creating the right tweet with the right hashtags can result in going viral very quickly. Along with LinkedIn, Twitter is one of the most professional/B2B focused channels.

It's worth being aware that Twitter is one of the most time sensitive mediums after snapchat. As Twitter moves so quickly, tweets tend to get lost quickly, so it's not the place for beautifully crafted content, and timing can be key to reaching a target audience. It also requires a quick response time: if a complaint comes via Twitter it needs to be at least moved onto private messages within a few hours, or face potential escalation. It is most easily handled through the use of apps like Hootsuite, allowing scheduling and easier searching.

Snapchat

Snapchat is another visual social media network which can only be used on mobile devices. It has 150 million active users, with 71% of are under 34 and around 70% are female. Whilst this has a large gender and age bias, in the UK more than 25% of smartphone users have snapchat installed. Users can send videos and photos to one another (which are deleted after 10 seconds), or post content to their public Stories, which disappears after 24 hours. As posts are so temporary, content is accepted to be a little more rough and ready than some other networks. Stories can be useful, but only users who have added a business can see their content.

Snapchat is excellent to create story and interactive content with a specified and engaged audience in a less formal setting, especially as the app includes chat features, messaging and other media content. 

LinkedIn

Whilst LinkedIn started as a professional networking site, it is now a knowledge and information-sharing hub. It has more than 35 million active users per month, has an older slant age range than most social media with the biggest demographic just being between 30-49, with the 50-64 age range just behind and is slanted more towards male-identified users. Users have the highest education level of all sites, and generally the highest incomes.

It allows professionals to showcase expertise, publicise awards, form professional communities, give business updates to relevant and interested audiences as well as network. LinkedIn via it's blog functionality has the best opportunity of enabling companies to become thought leaders through original content, and users tend to spend longer per page than in many other sites. It also provides a repository of information about a company and is a standard port of call for anyone doing any sort of research. However, it's worth being aware that it has one of the lowest engagement rates of any social media: simply put, users won't click a like for the sake of it, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Of all the social media, LinkedIn is the most focused on business to business and professional in tone: this is most certainly not the place to put up pictures of your cat unless you work in some sort of animal health industry.

*

There are of course, many other channels, but this is a place to get started. And when looking at which channels you wish to engage with, always remember that it's better to focus on one or two channels, than try and cover a gamut and get overwhelmed.

Have fun out there!

On Social Media (Part I)

I recently finished a 12-month contract for a medical publishers, which was interesting and probably deserves several posts of its own, but in the meantime I am currently in the process of sorting out another position. In a recent interview, there was a question on social media and which channels they should be using.

Who let all these guys in here?

Whilst there are an ever-increasing number of options, there are a number of core platforms that have managed to maintain users and market share, and it’s choosing between these that can cause grief.

So how do you know which ones you should be using? Well, it's a combination of a number of things and there's no one good answer because different channels have different pros and cons.

Before you start to register your name on YouTube or Facebook, you need to ask yourself these questions:

1. What do you want to achieve? This is obvious, but are you looking at improving customer care, or are you trying to make a way for people to place complaints? Are you trying to create a way to keep people up to date with your company and products? Do you want to encourage conversation or build relationships? Do you want to establish yourself as an authority? Each one of those aims leads to a slightly different media channel.
2. Do you meet an unmet need for your target group? Whatever your aim is, as with any digital project you should aim to meet an unmet digital need to give people a reason to look at your social media, even if that is to give a good communication channel to your potential customers.
3. Where do your target audiences go? If you know who your target audience are, try and identify where they already go to. People are creatures of habit, and it’s much easier to hijack off an existing habit than make them go to somewhere different. Perhaps Instagram would be perfect for your goals and targets, but if your target market all use snapchat, then go there. Hunt where your targets roam!
4. Your available resource (staff): Doing any sort of social media takes a lot of resource in terms of time. You are looking at a minimum of three and a half hours per week: half an hour per day with an extra half hour on Monday and Friday to initially plan the week and assess how the posts went at the end for each channel. Additionally, the higher the interaction and speed of reply needed, the more your staff need to have flexibility be able to respond to social media, so the staff cost goes up. Additionally, you need to consider where your staff are physically: responding can be more difficult if they are field-based rather than desk-based, and how will you manage holiday cover? What do you have the staff resource to do?
5. Your available resource (Money): YouTube is a fantastic channel, but unless you are doing videos on your smartphone or have basic recording equipment in your office, videos (both animated and film) will cost you money to produce. Similar with high quality photography. You need to be aware of ongoing costs in the channel/s you choose.
6. Frequency: How much do you have to say? Do you have exciting news every day that you want to convey? Are you mainly reposting existing articles/videos/opinions? Some channels need more new content than others and you need to bear that in mind.
7. Company fit: Some channels are more formal, and some are more informal. This can be tweaked, but if you have a couple of options it’s worth trying to use one more in keeping with the ‘tone’ of the content and the vision you have for your communication. 
8. Industry fit: Are you in a highly-regulated industry? Do you need all marketing collateral to have regulatory approval? Does your company culture like to check all communications before they are sent out into the wider world? The stricter the controls you are under, the slower the channel you want on social media. You can get away with a 24 hour turn around on Linked-In, but that’s not going to fly on Twitter where more than an hour could spell the difference between a PR success or a disaster.

Once you have a clear idea of your aims, your targets with their habits, your available resource and how you want to be perceived, you then need to pick your channels.

As this post is already getting fairly long, more on the channels themselves in Social Media (Part II).

10 Key Things on Conference/Event Management

Recently, a friend and I were talking about events as they had been putting their 2016 event calendar together.  It read like a non-discerning socialite's calendar: not only are they attending everything, but most of the time they don't even know why.  Consequently, much of their marketing budget (and time) is allocated to event spend but in 12 months, I expect that they'll have a tough time justifying that decision unless they are very lucky with how the market develops.    

Events and conferences can be brilliant, but they can also be a resource drain.  If you're going to do them, you really need to do it properly.  Consequently, here's a handy list of 10 things to bear in mind when organising events for your company.  It's not an exhaustive list, but it's a start.

"Isn't this is coordinated dance class?"
How were they to know they were
supposed to stop the rebels?

1. Know why you are there!  As with any marketing action, you need to know why you are doing it.  Are you there to generate leads?  Make sales? Connect with key opinion leaders? Create brand awareness?  Knowing what you want to achieve right at the start will allow you to judge the event is a good idea and fits in with your overall marketing strategy.  There's no point if it will not help your business.  Knowing your overall goals will also help you to judge the approach and style you need.
     
2. Have measurable key performance indicators.  Once you have defined your goals and know why you are doing your event, you need to have a more tactical way to measure your successes (or not) which tie into your strategy.  
• For example if you are going to an exhibition and your overall goal is lead generation, then have a set number of leads you would like to acquire and agree the figure in advance.  Be ambitious but reasonable, bearing in mind how many hours are available and the number of your staff.  If you are going to a two day conference (around 14 hours in total), you have three staff at any point, and a lead will take 10 minutes to gain, optimistically you are looking at an absolute maximum of  around 100 leads.  If the exhibition has 250 relevant visitors, a stretch goal might be 50 leads - that's a 50% success rate and 20% of the visitors.  Will that work with your goals?  Is the number too high/low?
   
3. Be brand consistent.  This runs throughout the process, but events are a form of communication in and of themselves.  Everything you do should have your brand in mind; from what you do at the event to the size of stand you need.  It's easy sometimes to just think of branding when actually putting up graphics, but you need to think about what you're doing as early as possible, even if it's just in broad terms.  You need this vision to be able to plan what happens in and around your event.
   
4. Have a budget plan.  How much do you have to spend on events overall?  Have an idea of what you are willing to spend on this specific event within that budget (looking back at your KPIs!) and stick to it.  Events are easy to overspend on, so having a budget allocated early can make all the difference.  You might have to scale back some of your grand ideas, and even not attend some events completely, but you'll prioritise and the total outcomes are likely to be more positive than if you spend without thinking.
   
5. Book and cover your paperwork/organisation in plenty of time.  As well as eating money, events can be resource heavy and need to be organised in advance.  Exhibitions often open

   

   How not to approach event planning

   their booking system a year in advance, so the earlier you can book, the better.  Plus, once it's booked in the diary, it will give more of a level of realism to its existence and lead to point 6...
   
6. Have a checklist of tasks.  Boring, but essential.  Once it's in the diary and you have you aims and rough outline, you need to get into the nitty gritty.   Events have so many facets that it's easy for something to slide, and when something goes wrong at an event it's instantly noticable.  This is everything from booking electrical sockets to wifi, to ordering stands and organising rotas and hotels and tick them off as they are completed.  Remember sales staff often get booked up months in advance so ensuring the event is in the diaries will stop additional problems.  
   
   
7. Lay out your stand in advance. If you have a physical presence somewhere such as a stand at an exhibition, lay it out in advance.  Put masking tape on the floor in the right dimensions, and set up you stand/promotional stall to check it all.  Does the foot flow work or does the layout deter leads from coming and talking to you?  Do all the lights and electrics work?  Are the graphics clean and in good condition?  Do the cables reach and how many extension leads will you need?  Does your plinth cover up your logo?  It will take a day, but it's definitely worth the time.  Plus, you can take photos for the conference guide if necessary.
   
8. Write a conference guide.  It's easy to get wrapped up in your own plans when living them day in and day out.  Various staff members will be attending who have not been involved in your meticulous planning, and will have no idea what it is going on.  Write a conference guide to send out to them a couple of weeks beforehand with details that will be useful, such as:

• The aims of the event and what it is planned to achieve with how it will be measured
• Images of the stand with descriptions of the sections and what they are for.
• A timetable of events both generally and related to your area
• How social media will be used
• A copy of the staff rota and who is in charge of the stand/emergency contacts on any day
• The addresses of the event and the hotels 
• Depending on the event, you could consider including etiquette guidelines
  
  There's a lot more that can be added, but it will depend on time and the event.

9.  Brief your staff beforehand.  Even with a conference guide, you need to go over some of the key points in person to make sure everyone is on the same page, either the night before or early on the day.  It will make all the difference.

10.  Have someone responsible for the event there.  Even with the best planning, things can and will go wrong on the day.  You (or a known representative) need to be there from set up to pack down to make sure everything goes according to plan and help with any crises that arise from sudden illness of staff to broken items or non-arriving stands.  Make sure everyone attending knows who that person is and how to contact them, and be prepared for a busy few days with comfortable shoes.

Good luck!  

The Pharmaceutical Market: "But aren't they all Evil?"

Working in marketing in the medical field, I have occasionally been drawn into discussions about the 'Evil' pharmaceutical companies, usually accompanied by finger-wagging and frowning.  I generally deal more with devices and non-prescription supplements, but it's still something I feel quite strongly about.

"Which ones do you believe are evil?" I will ask.
"All of them!" will inevitably be the answer.  "I mean, they've had a cure for cancer for ages and the pharma companies won't sell it because they'll loose money from all the people who aren't ill anymore! And none of them will make a cure malaria for Africa!"

This isn't an uncommon reaction.  The pharmaceutical industry is demonised more than most by the general public, with possibly the exception of the financial sector.

I'll give you a made up example.  Imagine if Yves Saint Laurent bought out a new £20,000 dress in a haut couture show which is beautiful and suits most people.  This cannot be afforded by many, but everyone accepts that it's the design and the work behind it that costs.  It will be lauded, worn by celebrities and shown in fashion magazines. Teenage girls will put pictures of it on Instagram with 'My Dream Dress' and fashion bloggers will gush in a positive way. Several months later, generic fashion chains create versions of it, and sold at a cheaper price to suit mass market.  Everyone wears it, and it is hailed as a triumph.

Now think of the same made up example in the pharmaceutical industry. Novartis bring out a new drug against Dementia which is amazing and will save many lives. It cannot be afforded by many which is criticised, but it will be noted in the press as a great step forwards, those that have private health care will say how amazing it is, and reports will go into clinical journals. There will be a public backlash against how unfair the pricing is and there will be petitions on government sites demanding the new drug is made available for specific people by their family members. Protest websites sites will be launched about Novartis destroying lives just for their own profit levels by sitting on the drug.  Several years later (could be up to 10 depending on the patent and the difficulties of manufacture), other drug companies come out generic versions at a cheaper price to suit the mass market.  Everyone uses it, and it is incorporated into medical regimes, and everyone talks about how great the drug is, now it's affordable as Novartis isn't hoarding the research.

Sounds familiar?

The reason is simple: with drugs, it's one of the industries where the actions of a few can have life and death ramifications on many.  Not getting a dress isn't going to kill you.  Not getting access to new drugs might, and that makes everyone invested and emotional. In no other industry is maximising shareholder value a dirty word to the public.

The core issue is rooted in our current free market/capitalist system.

Costs and times are variable, but it shows
a good basic example summary

• Governments do not fund intensive medical research; it's generally individuals doing things like doctorates or funded by charities for specific illnesses.  There are no specialist labs funded by the public into Dementia Research, for example.  This means that research has to happen in the privately funded (either business of charity) sphere.
• Drug development is hugely expensive. Even the cheapest drug will cost millions to licence. According to the TCSDD (Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development) last year, the average cost for developing a human prescription drug that gets mass market approval is around $2.6 billion.  That's £1.7 billion in UK money.  And I'm not even touching on the drugs that start development and then don't make it in the clinical trials.  
• It's massively time consuming.  Drugs can take 20 years+ to develop and trial, which is a huge amount to time to be investing your £1.7 billion with no return.
• In order to try and enforce a level of competition companies can only patent a drug for a limited amount of time (unlike something like Coca-cola: the recipe is still secret after over 100 years) and so have to recoup their huge R&D costs within the first 10 years, and ideally have some extra to be able to: 
• Hand over to the shareholders to show the company is viable and should still be supported.
• Invest in the next set of research for the next drug to help people and create a profit.

What this means is that for new research to happen, pharmaceutical companies have to be able to cover their costs in the first ten years before the generics come and take market share.  It's not a case of exploitation but simple economics. Should the companies be forced to drop the prices of their products in those first golden years, or provide a lot free, then they will simply stop developing new drugs. So the child on the latest petition might be helped, but untold numbers might not get the benefit of later research on the next project.  It's a sad case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one.

The other option is to extend the period where the patent is protected so the costs can be clawed back at a slower rate (the 25 year mortgage vs 15) but that has the trade off that the price point moves to be affordable to a greater range of people, but still not mass market, and again, somewhere, someone who needs the drug won't get it.

For the reasons of recouping costs, it's also the reason that complaints against holding a cure for cancer are ridiculous: no amount of potential return on radio therapy drugs which are into generics would recoup billions in research. There may have been promising research that failed at clinical trials, but to get that far the relevant companies would have lost millions.

Money is a strong decider in many business decisions.  It's not always the ultimate decision maker because it depends on what the raison d'etre is for the business (and some have much more altruistic mission statements), but in pharmaceuticals due to the sheer scale of the money involved, investment dictates research.  Whilst it would be amazing and laudable for companies to afford to research drugs for the sake of it, there just isn't enough money to justify such high levels of spend.  If your target market can't afford to recoup those costs (such as a disease that hits poorer countries) then sadly it just won't happen.  In all honesty, we're much likely to find a cure for Diabetes than we are for Ebola, because of the populations - and their related incomes - that are affected.

I am aware that the above paragraph is likely to cause discord, and that is exactly what I mean when I talk about expectations being different for medical companies.  We don't demand that Kurt Geiger ships shoes out to countries where footwear is limited, nor do we demand that airlines give free flights in third world countries for poorer citizens who cannot afford to see their relatives elsewhere.  I'm not saying the dependence on market forces is wrong or right, simply that pharmaceuticals are businesses, not public concerns and resources.  In an ideal world, research to cure illness would be open access, and available to everyone immediately.  But that's not how capitalism works, and once you start to discuss ideas of getting governments to fund research through extra tax, it becomes a political and not a business issue.  

However, I would like to finish on what has turned into a slightly depressing post on a positive note.  One of the reasons I like working in marketing in the medical field is that I honestly believe the products enhance the lives of the people or animals for whom they are intended. Medical devices, therapies, drugs, supplies: all of them help people (and animals) live longer, healthier lives and sometimes, save their lives completely.  Money funds investment, yes, but every investment that works is an improvement overall, and ultimately, everyone wins.  It's painful that the route to research involves choices based on market forces and return and that some people will suffer, but in the end, patents run out and then everyone gets cheap access to drugs that will save lives, from penicillin to ibuprofen and aspirin.  And that - enabling some very clever bods to create new therapies to save lives and keep doing it - is what it's all about.

Oasis and the New Honesty Marketing Campaign

I've been amused lately by the new Oasis campaign. If you haven't seen any of the latest campaign, the main tagline is "It's Summer.  You're thirsty. We've got sales targets".

Honesty Marketing at it's finest

Well, do they say honesty is the best policy, but is it likely to work?

The history of Oasis is a little muddled.  It was originally launched in 1966 by Volvic under the name 'Pulse', but poor sales led to its rebrand as 'Oasis' in 1990.  Its history then gets a little complicated, but in essence it was acquired by the then Cadburys-Schweppes who launched it into the UK in 1995. It was then acquired by Coca Cola Enterprises in 2005 along with a number of other European drinks brands.

Oasis has been positioning itself as a "healthier soft drink" solidly for 20 something adults who are happy to pay premium prices for a relatively standard purchase - in this case, squash from concentrate. By suggesting itself as an alternative to water rather than something like Coke, it links the brand to healthy options and positions itself firmly in the health category.

They also have access to a lot of the Coca Cola distribution network; if somewhere sells Coke, they are likely to sell Oasis and include it in their deals.

There were product problems that needed fixing when CCE acquired it: Oasis used to have a heavy sugar content which meant it failed originally as a healthy option.  This was eventually sorted by reconfiguring the recipes, but there were several false starts on the way with low calorie versions such as 'Fusion', 'Lights' and 'Extra Lights' which, despite over £3m launch spend in marketing, were withdrawn quickly afterwards due to bad sales.

So far, so good.

However, Oasis does have a problem in that it's never quite seemed to manage to fix its brand image

The ill-fated and pulled Cactus Kid campaign

in a clear and coherent fashion, despite obvious heavy investment from CCE. Numerous advertising campaigns have been and gone with varying levels of success and memorability.  Do you remember the "Chug it?" adverts, the first after CCE took over?  They pretty much sank without a trace, so it's not that likely.  Or the 'Cactus Kid' campaign the year after, which had a wide multi-media approach including adverts, videos, websites and a whole fake mythos, which was abruptly pulled after complaints to the ASA that it encouraged children to drink Oasis instead of water?  There have been more, but all fairly without impact.

Still, CCE isn't going to abandon Oasis to its fate.  The global soft drinks business is falling as people look for healthier options; soda consumption globally is now equivalent to what it was in 1986 having been falling steadily since 2005.  In additional, Coca Cola has been targeted specifically by health groups such as the CSPI in Amercia (the Center for Science in the Public Health) partly due to its high profile and market share.  To counterbalance, CCE has been adding non-soda companies to its portfolio in the last 7 years to try and diversify their risk, including investing in 5 smaller companies and buying 3 more.  It owns companies like Glaceau (who make SmartWater), Fuze tea, Zico coconut water and Honest Organic tea.  Even the flagship brand itself is feeling the pressure by releasing new formulations such as Coke Life which replaces sugar with sevia, although this still hasn't been launched in the US to date.

Oasis, as a brand in the right place at the right time is a potential goldmine, if they can just get the right messaging.

The latest campaign has been created by 'The Corner' agency, and have gone into what is called 'insane honesty marketing' and 'humanised marketing' (thanks to Cuco Creative for the terms and some of the info in the next couple of paragraphs). It's a big change from some of the glitz and style that they've delivered previously.

This shift is designed to appeal to millennials; i.e. people who reached adulthood around 2000, so will now be in their 30s and who value transparency and honesty in the communications from big brands rather than slick presentations. So Oasis are changing their emphasis slightly from 20s to 30s: not something they would do lightly and without a lot of consumer research. The Pioneers of this sort of thing were companies like Innocent with their smoothies and vegetable pots. It's also notable in companies that actively engage in social media, especially those that have a distinct personality and human voice.

The ultimate payoff of this strategy is trust: if a brand is willing (or at least seen as being willing) to be open about their weaknesses, then when they talk about their strengths, the listener is far more likely to believe them.  It's a known phenomenon known as the Halo Effect.

The likelihood is that this campaign will be more successful than their previous ones, and this time they are looking at a segment with more disposable income and more health-consciousness.  They are also more likely to have children, and so be under more social pressure to provide healthy options for lunches and outings. My guess is that the next push is likely to focus on health benefits, which will be more believed than previous claims after this initial bout of honesty.  So my feeling is that yes, it will work, as long as they can maintain whatever claims they make and continue with the human messaging.

I'll be interested to see how it goes!


     

On Awards and the Importance of Localisation

Last month, the UK Team won an Internal Marketing Award (First Runner-Up) for a campaign that I ran at the end of last year.

Presenting the elevator pitch of the relevant UK
Campaign at the Awards Dinner.  There was a black and white
theme: I don't usually dress in monochrome!

It was an interesting process.  Each of our corporate offices were allowed to enter up to two marketing projects which we felt were particularly noteworthy from the last calendar year.  Submissions had to include information on strategic relevance, target markets, implementation, ROI (both qualitative and quantitative) and anything else particularly relevant.  Each marketing team in each country reviewed the circulated submissions and ranked them based on a number of specified criteria, a little like the Eurovision Song Contest.

The idea is for the global business to exhibit some of the best ideas with the aim of consideration for implementation elsewhere, as well as to give a level of recognition for the efforts involved over the past year.

The very different approaches showcased the unique properties of each country's markets.  I suspect this was also reflected in the scoring as well as different countries will have scored partly based on personal experience, and that in many cases the same project could have wildly differing marks.

Looking at the different projects and assessing whether or not we could use them in our own markets highlighted one of the key considerations in any global company: the importance of localisation.  Many of the projects were extremely good, yet would not be applicable in the current form to other territories.

Often, large global companies will create campaigns to be used in their subsidiaries.  This is important as it ensures brand continuity, clear consistent messaging and cuts down on the work needed on a local level.  However, no campaign should ever just be adopted without a level of analysis and evaluation for appropriateness against the target audience.  Culture, habits, phrases, communication and channels will all need to be checked.  In top down campaigns, localisation is often perceived as a threat to the brand; a dilution which causes damage.  However, without the flexibility to localise, most campaigns are dead in the water.  Brands need to be able to be recognisable whilst still meeting the different needs of the segments they are trying to reach.    

Badly localised adverts are common, especially on television.  Beyond bad dubbing and using obviously non-local locations, there can be inherent cultural issues.  Proctor & Gamble, who are generally fairly savvy, got it very wrong when they used an American advert in Japan which showed a husband walking in on his wife bathing and touching her.  Whilst in the US this was seen as sweet and a depiction of married intimacy, in Japan it was viewed as an invasion of privacy and was felt to be in very poor taste, depicting a bad marriage due to the lack of respect being demonstrated.

Communication channels too can be overlooked: a basic issue for any global social media campaign is that both Facebook and Twitter are currently banned in China, and have been since 2009.  Many countries have bans on blanket emails, and opt-in/opt-out countries will have very different approaches to e-Blasts and electronic CRM communications.

Translation/phrasing blunders can happen, and even within the same language localisation can be needed: for example US/UK spelling varies, and extraneous 'u's can be the difference between someone engaging or disengaging on a piece of text.

If you know your segmentation and your targets (your ST of the STP mantra), your campaign has to fit them in all aspects.  And using the indigenous marketing personnel is one of the best ways to do so.

And on that note, I'm off to go and put the Award Certificate somewhere!

Why You Should Bother With PR

For various reasons lately, I have been in discussions about the use of Public Relations within a company.

PR is an interesting area. It's dogged by a relatively poor reputation outside of its own industry: if marketing is "The Poster-Making Department", then PR is the "IT Girls and Champagne Thursday Slackers". Even if PR is seen as effective, then the broad stereotype is one of a 'charm and smarm' offensive via networking with the 'old boys' out of reach of mere mortals.

One of the biggest issues I've found is that PR Agencies are a little like Italian restaurants: it's it's rare to get a bad one, very easy to get a mediocre one, but quite tough to get an outstanding one, and unfortunately, until you've had a good experience, you don't know what you're missing. Which means that many companies have employed PR agencies due to not having the expertise in house and have been disillusioned by uninteresting results, tainting their view on the whole exercise.

According to Wikipedia, Public Relations is all about managing the flow of information between a company or an individual to the public. This is a pretty broad and consequently not that useful.  Personally, I think that The Chartered Institute of Public Relations' definition is more punchy. Paraphrased, PR is all about reputation: the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. The goal is earning understanding and support, and influencing opinion and [buying] behaviour.

But surely that's just marketing?

Well, yes, communication does come under the remit of marketing, and PR is part of the marketing tool kit. And every marketing campaign should have a communications plan.  But beyond that, PR has a very different scope and skill set to a more traditional marketing campaign.

Marketing is by it's nature is targeted to specific, limited segments. Audiences are categorised by multiple parameters, with the intent of creating messages that will appeal.  One of the first rules of marketing is that you can't be all things to all people.  Every day, marketeers have to make calls on 'Opportunity Cost' of their limited budgets - a term economists use for the next best thing you sacrifice.  In the same way that if you buy a new phone the opportunity cost might be a television upgrade, every marketing campaign you run to one audience is another one you can't create for someone else.  This is where ROI (Return on Investment) calculations often come into their own.  Brutally put, will my company get more money if I do option 1 or option 2?

Communication/PR works in the other direction.  It is much wider and aims to talk to as many of your business stakeholders as possible; often ones which have less of an immediate ROI but still have a say or influence.  It's using as many channels as possible to get the widest range of messages out there.  Whilst marketing funnels messages down the key people, PR is there to widen the net and aid your potential growth in the longer term.

PR has other advantages too: due to getting the right information to the right contacts, mentions of products, people or services are often seen as more credible coming from a third party.  It builds trust, and allows stakeholders to feel more engaged with you and the various audiences.  It speaks very much to a brand's image if the language and messages are consistent that fixes it without needing advertising.  It's also usually cheaper: whilst there is a people/time resource cost, press releases, phone calls, contacts and social media management are often free or low cost.

So if it's so great, why isn't everyone doing it?

Well, the main downside of PR is hard to measure.  Ultimately it is there to help communicate messages, and unless you do mass market surveys, you can't always tell if your attempts have been successful.  Looking at increases in sales over a PR campaign duration will always be hit by confounding factors, and even the actual measurables on something like social media (clicks, likes, shares, views and so on) only goes so far, and falls short of a convincing argument in a boardroom.  It can be difficult to get someone good to do the PR, and assigning it to the marketing assistant or the cheapest local agency without thought as 'it's just press releases' is a sure-fire way for it to fail.  All of this means that it can be hard to justify a spend on an agency or on an in-house PR person when you cannot see an immediate result or have gotten bad results in the past.

Plus, sometimes you do just need the money elsewhere.  PR is always one of the first cuts in any budget rationalisation.

In the end, it all comes down to personal judgement on questions like:

• Where are your audience and do they already buy from you?  
• Do you need to start developing different segments in the market and seeding ideas before going into a marketing push? 
• How clear are your messages in the market place? 
• What is your brand awareness? 
• Are there key audiences you simply don't have the time to engage with? 
• Can I measure at least some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for success?
• Can you defend the choice to use PR to the senior management?
• And most important: what is the opportunity cost of PR for the company?

It's not an easy choice, despite my pro-PR stance here, because it will always be hard to defend even with analysis and ROI calculations, and can leave you personally exposed.  At the same time, sometimes you just have to put your money where your mouth is.  Wish me luck!