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calorie versions such as 'Fusion', 'Lights' and 'Extra Lights' which, despite over £3m launch spend in marketing, were withdrawn quickly afterwards due to bad sales.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!

On Coffee, Spills and Service: Customer Focus the Starbucks Way

A couple of weeks ago I was in Dallas, and had a minor coffee-based incident.  Someone bumped into me in Starbucks, and the almost-full drink I had in my hand did a spectacular impression of a waterfall down my (luckily water-resistant) coat, over my bag, and finished by cascading onto the floor. 

Before I’d even had a chance to react, the Starbucks staff swung into action.  One Barista immediately escorted the clumsy bumper away.  Another came straight to me with cloths (and genuine concern) to check me for damage, get me to wipe off my iPhone which had been in my other hand, and help me clean myself up.  Whilst I was doing that she moved my bag to a table near a fan (“for your coat”) and then mopped the coffee on the floor.  A third Barista nipped out and put a ‘wet floor’ sign near us, and then made a replacement coffee to my exact prior order.  By the time I’d wiped the coffee of my coat, my phone was dry and working, I had a comfy chair waiting for me near a fan with my bag and a replacement drink, and no-one slipped in the pool of coffee.  It was seamless, accomplished without discussion and skilfully done.  Within a few minutes they had a grateful if slightly soggy customer, and everyone else feeling secure in the vicinity that “a good job had been done”, thus validating their choice of café.

And the whole thing was a beautiful example of a working brand and corporate culture.   

Starbucks is an interesting company.  They are a chain selling what is a fairly basic product which has created a high value offering through customer service over and above the actual product itself.  Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks: “We’re not in the coffee business, serving people.  We’re in the people business serving coffee.”

Starbucks is aware that their coffee isn't the best on the market (although it is very protective of it), but that’s not their unique selling point.  Everything about Starbucks is about the experience; from the ambience, to the furniture, to their additional services like the free wifi (one of the first businesses to offer this to their customers).  It’s supposed to make people want to go there and spend time, and the coffee is in many ways incidental.  Despite the mixed reactions in the UK, it’s why they ask your name for your coffee: to personalise your experience and acknowledge you as an individual rather than just the 12^th customer ordering “a small skinny latte”.  It’s the extended 7 Ps to the nth degree.

One of the areas where Starbucks puts a huge amount of investment is in their staff.  There is a basic understanding that many people who work at café chains are likely to be school leavers, and so will not necessarily have the skills to deal with angry customers day in, day out with the required ‘Starbucks attitude”.     

Most customer-facing organisations will give training on how to deal with irate customers usually with an interaction model such as ‘Laugh’ (Listen and Empathise/Acknowledge/Understand/Give Solutions/Hit home with Follow-ups).   They also try to employ people-focused staff who genuinely care about the customer experience.  Overall. this means customers will get sympathy and an attempt to solve the problem with tact and care.

Starbucks does the above, but goes beyond this.  A key foundation in their training is scenario planning: not something that many customer-focused organisations will do and certainly not at a basic level.  Scenario planning is the idea of creating the story of a series of possible or plausible events for businesses at a strategic level, allowing possible responses to be crafted with an understanding of potential options.  Starbucks has rolled this out to an operational, staff level.

Practice and scenario planning make it much easier to react in a crisis without feeling under pressure, personally under threat or lost.  It also makes the whole reaction faster and more effective because the thinking has already been done for you, and when you are dealing with employees with less experience, that can be critical.  Getting a customer to wipe off their phone before their coat isn't something that would be immediately obvious to do, but a broken phone will have more of a long term effect on their perception: clothes can be washed but phones can’t.  By examining what could go wrong in advance, many of the standard pitfalls can be avoided.

In my case, there probably was already a scenario plan with the key elements of: “potential injury” (burns) “potential property loss” (phone), “upset customer” (soggy with no coffee), “potential disturbance” (had I decided to be terribly non-British and cause a scene for being bumped), and “potential safety hazard” (slippery floor).  The issues were dealt with in order of priority, with each Barista taking a key role.  It was noticeable that the floor was dealt with last, once the safety aspect was covered.  By covering potential scenarios in advance, there was no confusion as to what needed doing and in what order, and the low key delivery ensured the least disturbance for anyone else there.  

However, there can be drawbacks to this approach.  The most obvious is the inevitable resource drain.  Compiling a lot of potential situations takes time and personnel.  Since the world is an infinite place, the task can expand to take as much time as allotted and still need more.  Scenario planning can easily become a full time job in any organisation, and drawing a line where diminishing returns on staff time become clear can be tough.  With regards to the Starbucks example as this goes down to a grass roots level, training all of your staff – repeatedly – at all levels is taking them away from their core roles and means you will need more staff to cover that time. 

There’s another more insidious drawback as well: by training them to react by rote, there is a removal of some of the basic processes of problem solving.  You know that saying, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and feed him for his life?  What happens if your beautifully drilled staff comes across a situation not covered in the scenario training?  It’s a toss-up: is it worth having near perfect service 95% of the time, with a potential 5% possibility for complete confusion, or to have mostly good service with problem solving ability 99.9% of the time?

It's a strategic choice, and no matter how you slice (or pour) it, it's a choice on how you want your business and employees to function.  So far, Starbucks has worked amazingly: it's worth billions and is one of the most recognised brands in the world.  At the same time, I am less convinced of how it would work in something like a consultancy, research or any kind of more in-depth creative role.  If you need to foster people's own free thinking skills, programming them for reactions does seem limiting.

And me?  Well, my day went on as planned, and if I had a vague eau de cafe, everyone I met was polite enough not to mention it.

Blanchard's Situational Leadership Model

A couple of days ago, I ran my team through a whistle-stop tour of Blanchard's Situational Leadership Model.  If you've never seen it, it's a really good way of looking at task/goal oriented behaviour especially when managing people.

It's very different to traditional management and leadership theory.  The key premise is that people move through different stages with any task, no matter who or how skilled you are: it's just the speed you move through the stages that varies.

The stages are: 

1. The Enthusiastic Beginner/D1 (Low competence, high commitment).  This is where they are very motivated and require a huge amount of support, but don't really know what they are doing.
2. The Disillusioned Learner/D2 (Low competence, low commitment).  This is where the person has started to realise what they don't know, but isn't there yet, and the initial enthusiasm has worn off.  They can get frustrated more easily, and often feel there's little to show for their efforts. 
3. The Cautious Contributor/D3 (High competence, low commitment/confidence).  Here, the person can do the job but don't have confidence in themselves yet.
4. The Self-Reliant Achiever/D4 (High competence, high commitment).  The person knows what they are doing and is self-managing.

A good way to understand the model is to think of a project away from the office such as painting your bedroom.  You start full of enthusiasm, convinced it will be the most wondrous bedroom in the world when you are finished.  You toy with the idea of transfers, murals and multiple tones having poured zealously over interior decorating websites and magazines, and have a plan written down.  However, a few hours in, with paint dripping in your hair, splodges on the floor and one wall looking like a remnant of a sixties acid trip, you've lost all motivation. You are close to throwing the brush and phone your best friend in tears; they encourage you, telling you it'll be OK and giving you tips that you write down, such as using a roller and thinning the paint.  You use their help and grimly keep going.  Gradually the walls get covered more easily, and you even start correcting your early mistakes with a third coat.  Your friend pops round to check you haven't committed Hari Kiri with a paint scraper to find a very credible bedroom.   Impressed, they tell you so, which spurs you to finish of the edges and snagging jobs.  And once you've finished, you realise that it's actually all fine, that you can do it, and you're off to paint the kitchen.   

What makes this model different to a lot of leadership theory is that it asserts that each development stage has an associated leadership style that compliments the situation.  The idea is that you adapt your leadership style according to where the person is in order to help them effectively; hence the idea of situational leadership rather than always having one style of management.  This is where the axis of support and directive behaviour comes in.  You modify the amount of direction and support, depending on where they are in that curve.  The advised styles are:

1. Enthusiastic Beginner/D1 = S1 Style.  You need to provide specific instruction, direction and attention, like a task or check list in easy steps.  They will be the ones that have lots questions regarding the task from the large to the small, but are generally full of interest and engagement.
2. Disillusioned Learner/D2 = S2 Style.  The person still need direction and to a lesser extent help structuring a work/task plan, but they need lots of praise and recognition for the things they do manage to ensure that their contributions are recognised and help with positive reinforcement.
3. Cautious Contributor/D3 = S3 Style.  The person still needs support in the form of recognition or praise, and you need to be available for brainstorming and discussion of problems, but there's a step back from the directive style to let them find their own way.
4. Self-Reliant Achiever/D4 = S4 Style.  This is essentially delegation; the person knows what they are doing and how to do it.  

What I really like about this model is that it recognises human behaviour without judging, and offers a good management solution.  No-one is expected to be immediately competent on this model, and motivation is understood to ebb and flow without censure.  

It's worth noting that the model is not the easiest thing to implement, because it involves constantly being aware of where people are with regards to specific projects, and they can easily be a D4 in one task, and  D1 in another related topic simultaneously.  As a manager, you need to be able to pick up the cues when discussing various projects, and accepting the need to be agile as you move around topics. But if you can track where people are on the curve, then it enables you to support them in the most appropriate way.    

The other thing about the model is that it offers a neutral and safe language to approach issues that could be potentially painful going forwards.  This is why I shared it with my team: it's a lot easier to go to a manager and say “please stop delegating at me!  I'm currently a D2 with this project!”, or “I don’t need a task list but I’d quite like to chat things through before I go ahead: I'm feeling a bit D3?” that to have to admit to feeling lost or lacking in any enthusiasm.  We're going to try and use it as a mutual language, and see how it works.  

Wish me luck! 

Cellulite, Palm Oil and Orang-utans? Why Social Media and Over-Regulation Doesn’t Mix

Nutella, the famous Italian chocolate spread and chocolate sweets manufacturer is currently in a lot of PR hot water in France at the moment.  It’s an amazing example of how not only to completely cock-up your social media campaign, but to actually damage your brand as well. 

The concept of their "Say it with Nutella" campaign was pretty simple.  Nutella decided that for PR purposes, they would make a small web-based application where you could type in your name, and it would display a picture of a Nutella pot with your name on instead of the brand name.  You could then post it all over the web to your heart’s content, secure in the knowledge that everyone would know how much you love the chocolate and hazelnut goodness.  This had already been done in Italy with great success.  

A gif containing a set of some banned
words thanks to Rue 89.  Apologies
to the easily offended souls out there!

Of course, when you release something into the wild, you have to accept that a small minority of people are going to try and subvert it.  Just think of the Nike ID campaign where you could get your name embroidered onto your trainers: an MIT Student caused Nike huge amounts of negative publicity by asking for 'sweatshop' instead of a name, and went public with the back and forth emails when Nike refused.  And as a rule, the internet is far worse for this.  Nutella seem to have been aware of the danger, and took steps to protect themselves.  Thus people who tried type in something not entirely wholesome got a 'this word is not allowed' message.  Except, more and more people kept experiencing this, way above what would normally be expected, and some really weird words seemed to be banned.

At which point, someone technologically savvy went into the code to investigate what was restricted.  With a little bit of ingenuity, they managed to pull the full list of blocked words.  From my perspective, there were four groups:

1. Obscenities: this is actually relatively morally defensible as a majority of Nutella’s key audience are probably under 18 or buying on behalf of children who have access to social media.
2. Trademarks, such as 'Coca Cola' or 'Microsoft': again, reasonable on legal grounds because theoretically Nutella could be seen in breach of copyright should the images be spread on social media.
3. Words which could be theoretically be used to contravene the French laws on hate speech, especially the 1990 Gayssot Act, which includes a five year fine for holocaust denial, and criminal penalties for defamation based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any handicap .  For Nutella this meant banning words such as 'Hitler', 'Muslim', 'Judaism' and 'Lesbian' (but not 'gay' strangely).  Whilst the fact you can't put 'Jew' onto a image of Nutella jar has been picked up by the British media and decried as evidence of discrimination, it is almost a direct lift from the legislation and is defensible, if ill-judged. 
4. And finally, what can only be dubbed as the “Oh God we hope no-one brings these up” topics, and include things like ‘obesity’, ‘fat’, ‘palm oil’, and ‘orang-utan’.  And this is the major cock-up because you cannot justify censorship based on paranoia of your own working practices.  Nutella have listed and blocked every topic where they feel vulnerable, and these exact topics have been distributed all over social media.  It’s like the classic joke when someone tells you not to think about elephants and suddenly all you can think about are grey pachyderms, except this herd is going to stomp all over your brand equity.  

So now on social media, there are a lot of questions.  Why is Nutella so worried about palm oil?  What are they doing over in Borneo/Indonesia?  Are they deliberately destroying rainforest areas for their plantations?  Is it more likely to cause obesity than other chocolate spreads?  To make the situation worse for the company, the current French internet game of the month seems to be to try and get around the restrictions.  Maybe you can’t do Orang-utan, but what about Oran-gutan?  Or Oranutan?  And once people manage a work around, they post it proudly on social media, reinforcing the message and linking Nutella obesity and rainforest destruction as well as more swear words than you can count.  

The problem for Nutella is that the internet is a realm of looser of societal rules.  Whilst no-one would consider breaking into an office to rifle through a computer to look at concept artwork for a campaign, anything on the internet is seen as fair game.  You can’t put restrictions on anything beyond the bare minimum because whatever you do will be publicly scrutinised so has to be defensible, and there are a lot of people out there better at programming than your average corporate web department.    

This fiasco illustrates some very basic rules of online marketing:

• If you are going to use something, you need to have a basic understanding the technology and its limitations.  I'm pretty sure that had Nutella realised that it was even possible to get the full list, they wouldn't have done it. 
• Expect anything interactive you put onto the web to be potentially subverted by a small minority and don’t panic when it happens.
• Keep a level of perspective.  So what if a couple of people write ‘Obesity’ on an image and post it on Facebook?  It would be gone from most people’s feeds in an hour and be forgotten.    
• There is a skill in dealing with ‘hecklers’ with a modicum of grace: if you can do so, generally these things are over quickly and don’t affect your core audience.  In other words, keep your cool.  One or two images with a comment on palm oil aren't going to put off your standard consumer.  Sadly, people have a level of unconscious blindness over things they don’t want to see when it involves giving up something they want: see things like Climate Change vs car use, or the demand for meat over conditions in battery farms.    
• And the cardinal rule: if you can’t defend something, don’t put it on the internet.

In the almost-words of the infamous 1980s TV advert; “Ah, Mr Ambassador, you are really spoiling the jungle with your Orang-utan murdering, obesity-causing treat!”.

Augmented Reality: Viable Channel or Virtual Pipe Dream?

Last week I went to a breakfast presentation by one of our suppliers.  It’s a nice thing to do occasionally, especially as it starts at 8.30am so you get into work at a reasonable time.  They showcase some of their new handy services and their customers get free croissants, coffee and networking opportunities.  This one was on Augmented Reality.

Augmented reality (in marketing terms) is where you use technology to give a real life interaction/touch.  It usually involves an App and a Smartphone or equivalent where you scan something in real life with the camera on the phone, which then gives you additional options/interactions in the digital arena.  QR codes were a form of basic AR, as was Blippar. These generally took you to an additional website or video with more information.  Blippar was slightly more advanced in that it offered 3D images overlaid onto camera images, but was confusing as no-one ever really knew what they could scan.

AR has moved on since then, and now is a lot more interactive.  It’s also starting to get embedded

The IKEA App promotional images

into standard media so you don’t need things like special codes.  One of the best examples is the current IKEA catalogue.  Firstly, you download a free App of the app store, and get a paper catalogue as well.  If you then hold your smartphone over an image of the product in the paper catalogue, it will create a 3D rendering of that product on your phone screen, whilst allowing the camera on the phone to show whatever you are looking at even when you move away from the catalogue, and say, look at the room.  The product is then superimposed on the background.  The idea is that you can see exactly what the sofa you’ve picked will look like in the corner and if it matches your curtains.  

Red nose day is very much in on the action as well, assuming you have the Taggar App: if you scan the 2015 badges, you will unlock Harry Hill showcasing additional content including jokes, real time photo additions and games (you can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EdiH0i2-po).  

But you can do more than that, oh yes!  You can augment your business cards so that a little miniature avatar of yourself appears standing on the card doing a pre-filmed presentation (you do it on greenscreen) when your card is scanned.  You can run sneak previews of products when KOLs get certain ‘toys’ in the post or at KOL events (scan this engine, and see a 3D rendering of the new car due to be launched in 4 months).  You can embed games into postal mail, so that when a client opens a brochure, they can run their phone over the images and voilà, a game appears!  The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

Lots of the audience really bought into this, and were asking for more information, got really excited, and started uttering the classic buying signal that most sales people dribble over: "I have a project this would be perfect for!"  And yet, I couldn't join in.  It felt like I was alone on an island of cynicism, the Grinch in the room, because no matter how I thought about it, as a useful communication tool for my industry, it's just not going to work.  

What you are looking at isn't a shiny toy.  Instead you're changing people's habits: essentially, you're looking at a possible game change changer.  Due to that you have to consider:

1. The Adoption Curve 
2. The propensity of your target audience towards a new thing in this arena
3. What are your targets' current habits?
4. Does this fit with the image/brand you want to portray?

1. The Adoption Curve

The Adoption Curve

What is the Adoption Curve?  This is another of those Marketing 101's, and was mentioned in fair detail in the video in the last post.  What it demonstrates is that people do not take on new innovations or products at the same rate: important and because each group needs different messages and support within your campaigns.  

You'll notice that very few people buy into new things when they are first available.  Not everyone queues outside the Apple Store for that new iPhone; and how many people have an Apple TV?  Newness will appeal to less than 15% of your audience.  The rest want variants of reassurance, recommendations and solid proof of having seen the product in use.

And AR is definitely in the Early Adopter, if not Innovator phase.  You see that mass of people cowering behind the sofa from the scary new thing?  That's the rest of your target market who will never see your beautifully crafted AR content because by the time they are comfortable with it, it'll be out of date.

2.  The propensity of your target audience towards a new thing in this arena

It's also worth bearing in mind that people have different Adoption Curves for different areas.  If you're working for Apple, well, your key opinion leaders are going to be technological communication innovators anyway.  But you might find your surgeon who is willing to use the very latest surgical developments and tools can't programme the annoyingly spangley TV the kids demanded, or the environmentally conscious driver who insists on buying the newest hybrid car isn't fussed about the newest forms of social media.

Just because you sell new products in one area doesn't mean that your customers will be willing to adopt new methods of communication, and if you work in a more traditional, conservative industry you're going to hit that barrier twice as hard.  This is why you need to consider who your audience is, and what their preference is for communication.  Obviously, people are individuals, but certain personalities tend to be disproportionately drawn to certain industries: your average regulatory manager isn't going to be a wildly creative adrenaline junkie.  There's no point in making amazing materials if no-one ever sees them.  

3.  What are your targets' current habits?
So what does your target audience do? What are their communication habits?  And how similar is it to what you want them to do with Augmented reality?

How habits are formed: the reinforcing habit loop.

Habits are an evolutionary short-cut to cut down on the need to think and analyse every situation.   It takes around 60 days to form a new habit, and is a little like self-conditioning based around three stages: the cue, the behaviour and the reward.    One formed, habits get imprinted on your neural pathways and are incredibly hard to change.

Within marketing and PR, the most successful communication tools are those that complement what you already do because it's a habit.  So if your audience checks FaceBook every couple of hours, then working on social media is a good way to go.  If your audience always checks their physical post, then you're likely to use a postal mail campaign.  Does you audience watch a medical dramas?  Then put a TV advert into the middle of House (if you have the money).  It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people forget this.

In order to use AR, you need to do a number of things outside of your normal habits:

• Get the App: this is a barrier in itself as it involves going to the relevant App store, finding the right App, downloading it and working out how it works
• Scan things using that App that you wouldn't normally scan like a business card and brochures etc.

You can already see the problem, can't you?  You're asking your customers to do complex processes which are totally outside the scope of their normal practice just to push a marketing message: to make a new habit.  Yet seeing marketing materials probably isn't enough of a 'reward' to be habit forming unless they get a real kick out of seeing something new and exciting (then the reward is linked to self esteem at being at being a pathsetter).  The only people that might are your "innovator" group in the adoption curve above, which is only about 2.5% of your audience.  This is why QR codes and Blippar failed: they didn't get people into the habit of using those apps by default, so when the audience did, it was a conscious effort, and easily ignored.  

I will add a coda that due to the nature of the adoption curve, the one exception is in the teenage market, because the very fact that most of the adults around the technology will not be interested or able to access it (due to having to get a new app) makes it instantly appealing.  But apart from that?  Not ideal for a mass market.

4.  Does this fit with the image/brand you want to portray?

Everything, ultimately, comes down to your brand and brand image in your communications, and this goes for channel/location as well as what's actually in it.  Want to be see as a family friendly drinks company?  Well, you're probably not going to give away samples in a strip club.  Want to be seen as eco-friendly?  You're probably going to use recycled paper if you do have to do a mailshot.

So if you want to be seen as technologically advanced or cutting edge, then yes, you could develop some AR materials as long as they came with huge rewards (such as prizes only winnable through the AR medium), as long as you did a lot of marketing on the side to get people to know it's there and how to access it.  But you're marketing the concept of AR and using it to boost your image rather than having it as an enhanced communication tool.  If it's for a more conservative industry?  I'd be wary. 

Overall, I like AR as a concept.  I think it's pretty cool as a toy and a way to stand out if you work and are pitching to a technologically innovative audience, or one who particularly like to feel like part of an elite sub-culture, but right now at this point in 2015 it's not ready for mass use as a standard communication tool.    

And, much as I like them, no amount of free coffee and croissants is going to convince me otherwise!