GrooveLab

Building a Better Brand Relationship

It's no secret. A shared quality of great brands is their ability to build relationship with their customers. Now, the relationship I'm talking about is more than doing business together. Transactions do not guarantee a relationship. Relationships are built over time. They require care and nurturing, and are the product of continual dialog based on shared interests. When you think about it, it's no different than the relationship advice you get for your own significant other(s) in your personal life. And while brand relationships can flourish and evolve over time, they require ongoing brand engagement to keep things interesting and relevant. Engagement can come in many forms. Today, with the new consumer culture that social media provides, we can engage with customers in truly innovative ways. What’s more, often the engagements are led by customers themselves. Take a cue from these notable brands and see how they are engaging customers.

Kettle Chips

Kettle Chips kicked off its fifth annual “People’s Choice” awards with a new twist. This year, they launched a national Create-a-Chip Challenge, engaging audiences to enter their own inspiring flavor creations. Groove 11 brought the concept to life with a website and virtual chip kitchen, allowing users to get inspired and whip up their own flavors. Audiences can then vote in the flavor gallery. The campaign wound up last week with more submissions then expected and more votes, hands down, then previous years. Kettle turned the flavor creation to audiences and they came out in force to engage with the brand. See the winning results.

Dawn

Dawn dishwashing soap gives us a great example of cause marketing. Only this time, the cause chose the brand and not the other way around. In 1978, Alice Berkner, founder of the International Bird Rescue Research Center which helps birds recover from oil spills, discovered that Dawn dishwashing soap actually worked better than any other major dish soap. According to the Center's Executive Director, Jay Holcomb, it cut the oil faster than anything else. It took Dawn several years before they actually championed the cause. But by that time, consumers were already keen to the gentleness and effectiveness of the product and, of course, the images of all those cute baby birds splashing around in suds. Today, Dawn is actually highlighting decades of saving wildlife on their packaging and in their ads. And they are engaging like never before – donating $1 to wildlife groups each time a bottle of Dawn is purchased and the consumer visits the website.

Mobile Apps provide a whole new arena for engagement (more on this later). One notable app that has caught my eye and which I've downloaded is Kraft Foods iFood Assistant. This app is rich with video, suggestions and several appetizing features. It goes way beyond pushing a brand – it engages users to actually use the app frequently – and it goes further by getting users to interact with Kraft online.

The audience is listening. How will you design engagements with your brand?

Getting ready for Brand ManageCamp

In an ideal world all of my clients (and potential clients) are at the MGM, Las Vegas with me for the next two days of Brand ManageCamp. The real opportunity here is, of course, to connect the dots. The dots between the power of a well-branded organization; the decentralized and fragmented transformation of media communications; the way conversations (two-way dialog happening in real time), are forever changing traditional advertising and marketing (and even WOM); and how my clients' ability to capture the effects/mood/results of those conversations and to react/respond/re-engage will determine their ultimate success. The dots from my brand (who I am) to my customers (who I'm in dialog with) to our meaningful, measurable relationship (loyalty and advocacy) will be discussed over the next 48 hours. It's going to be juicy.

Advertising, marketing and PR organizations are finally being asked to put some skin the game - to get paid by the success or failure of their work. And many are resisting. They do so at their own peril. Because in the new media communications environment, where everything is two-way, real-time dialog, advertising, marketing, and PR firms need that data to help their clients survive. They need to know that what they're saying matters to the people with whom they are conversing. If not, those people will let them (and everybody else) know about it. By that time it's too late. How can these firms be in a conversation and not care about how the other person is feeling, what they're thinking, who they trust, or what they need? I don't know. And neither does anyone else at this conference.

I'll be doing my best to connect the dots with you. Hang on. It's going to be an illuminating ride.

Sean

Two Brands finding their way back…to their customers

 

Starbucks & Bud Light are fighting back. These two iconic brands lost their way and as a consequence sales slipped. Check out these articles Business Week, Ad Age and Wall Street Journal.

So how did they get here and how do they get back?

Change comes to the Event Industry (for the past decade)

Change is the only constant. So you can imagine my disappointment when I attended an event industry summit recently where change was talked about, but oh so slow to come. The same topics were being discussed that have been on the event industry’s radar since the late 1990s. Here’s a sample of hallway chatter:

“We must change the exhibit floor to be more customer-centric.”

“Customers are looking for more engaging environments.”

“Getting people to come to an event (audience acquisition) is/has become more challenging.”

...Really...?

Keeping Your Brand Virgin

Have you flown Virgin America? If you haven’t, make a point to book your next flight w/ them. I just flew the airline for the first time, San Francisco to San Diego. It’s refreshing to see an organization innovating and living their brand promise.

When you do fly Virgin, you will experience brand management at its best. We’ve seen this before. A decade ago w/ JetBlue, “bringing fun back to flying” and with Starbucks two decades ago, “bringing the third place into our lives.” With the Westin Hotel chain, “heavenly (white) beds “– a first in the hotel industry. All of those changed their respective industries. Virgin has done it here, and even better. The innovation, the customer experience, the consistency of the brand, and the timing – the worst recession since the 1930s, makes this a real stand-out.

The planes are hip, without being too W Hotel-ish that it turns off the under-30 crowd. The ease of ordering food, listening to music, logging on to the Web, and the interaction of the employees with the guests, make for a pleasant experience beyond anything anyone is doing at this moment, not just in the airline industry (notorious for being a horrible business w/ many uncontrollable elements – think oil prices and thin margins), but in any industry. What makes this such a standout is how Virgin has coordinated all of the touch points to work together to reinforce the brand. Beginning with the staff (solid training) to the décor  of the planes (simple design), to the check-in and website (consistent look and feel), it works seamlessly. All of it maps to reinforce a brand that is authentic and delivers a Customer Experience above anything in the marketplace. It raises the bar on the entire industry, effectively highlighting just how bad the other (United) airlines are.

Well done, Virgin!

How NOT to extend a brand

I saw an interesting retrospective online the other day, about all the wonderful ways Mattel has expanded the Barbie brand over the years. Of course, not all of these ideas were wonderful. Many of them were far from it, and these three are cases in point.

Meet Pooper Scooper Barbie. Complete with little piles of poo.

I honestly did think this one was a joke, but apparently the joke's on me. Because everyone knows little girls love to recreate animal attacks after they have a tea party. I suppose Malibu Barbie will soon be coming with a plastic Great White and break-away torso for those times when she strays into the shark-infested waters off Southern California.

I’m afraid I don’t know the name of this particular model. Moulin Whore Barbie, perhaps?


So let this be a lesson to us all. Brand extension can be a great thing. It probably means you're doing something right, enjoying success, gaining audience, all that good stuff. But for heaven's sake, please do it responsibly. Because there's nothing worse than expecting to win over 7-year-old hearts and minds with an iconic brand by having angry reptiles peck the icon's eyes out.

The Power[ade] of Brand

All this talk of branding...does it really work? Of course it does.

Case in point: New research recently published in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise showed something pretty cool.

People who were shown a bottle of Gatorade were able to raise one leg for 149% longer than those shown a bottle of water. Study coauthor Ron Friedman, Ph.D. says the boost probably occurs because of the inherent association between Gatorade and exercise, which cues our brains that it's time to work hard.

He goes on to say that advertising has reinforced this link, and it would probably work for other beverages that are strongly associated with endurance and hard work. [Coffee, anyone?]

So if you periodically question the principles behind the Groove brand ball and Customer Purchase Funnel, check out the data. If just looking at a well-branded product can change people's response, imagine what delivering an intelligently constructed, relevant brand experience for your audiences can accomplish. 

 

The Brand Trust

by Rick Barsotti

With the speed at which information travels in this Connected Age, comes a strong demand for What’s Hot, the Buzz of the Month, and the Flavor of the Corporate Quarter. Right now we see lots of requests for social networking and community building; a couple of years ago orders flew in for Flash modules, and tomorrow, with the dawn of fragrance-enabled cell phones, we may be asked about our olfactory capabilities.

It’s important for our agency to stay current with the latest technologies and innovative marketing vehicles so we can help our clients find available white space and express their brand in new ways…with some serious caveats. We don’t do cool creative just to do cool creative. We recognize that trends will pass, but a brand promise must sustain over the long haul. Meaningful relationships between a brand and its constituents are formed over years and decades, not a single touchpoint or business quarter.

Marketers and business executives marvel at the time and discipline it takes to create a meaningful connection with a customer. Groove chants it takes seven to ten clear, consistent, unambiguous touches to move a customer from awareness to consideration, to preference, to purchase, then to loyalty. We communicate this repeatedly so clients understand the patience and commitment it takes to build a relationship. Getting a customer to purchase a product or an employee to buy into a change management process does not happen overnight. Who was it that said “Trust was not built in a day”? And as my Mom taught me, nothing worth having comes easy.

So, as we move away from a functional and transactional mentality toward a relationship and trust model, we begin to take more care with each interaction with a customer. Each touch becomes an opportunity to create an experience that communicates a feeling or engages the senses in ways that reinforce a brand promise. These experiences must be authentic expressions of the brand, else we risk confusing the customer, or worse, creating distrust.

It is through this lens we see more clearly that relationships are not built on gimmicks or trends at all, but on fulfilled promises of well-set expectations. Don’t get me wrong, we like cool things as much as the next agency. In fact, at Groove we believe that with imagination we can make anything happen. But as we have evolved and grown ever more committed to our client relationships – and the success of their relationships with their own customers –Groove has become most passionate about making trust happen. It is the motivation for all we do for our clients. Thus, one day, when one of them inquires about our capabilities around fragrance-enabled cell phones, we will have done our research. And we’ll come out smelling great.

What's a BYY?

Twice a year, everyone at Groove 11 gathers in one room [a rare occurence] for a two-day off-site meeting called BYY. It stands for Best Year Yet, and gives us a chance to focus on all the things that make us who we are. It's a forum in which we discuss and debate the fine points of client service, internal processes, and cool stuff like that. I could divulge more details, but then we'd have to kill you. Yes, it's that secret. [Okay, maybe not kill you. Probably just flick you with a rubber band. Ouch.]

We recently held BYY 2008 1/2 at the fabulous Cavallo Point lodge. This pic only shows a few of us, but to see a few more, click on the photo album along the left side of the page.

Glub Glub Glub

One of my new favorite subjects is how architecture can align with brand. Rainey and I saw a terrific presentation on this a few months ago, during which the presenter showed how the layout, foundation, landscaping, and architecture of various corporate headquarters around the world aligned with the company's brand. What a great way to live your brand. And to make it easy for every employee to do the same. It can only make you better in so many ways.

So it's nice to see it happening at the Olympics, always a superlative venue for design as well as sport. The Olympics isn't exactly a corporation [depending on who you ask] but the theory applies nevertheless. This is a photo of the National Aquatics Center in Beijing aka The Water Cube. It's semi-transparent and has bubbles all over it. It also has an interior layer and an exterior layer of film to create the effect, between which air is constantly pumped. I'm not sure why, but it's rather impressive.

Learn more about the Water Cube here. You can even play a game to complete the membrane structure yourself.