Alex Steer

537 words | ~3 min

This is a presentation on Starbucks' digital strategy by Alexandra Wheeler, their digital strategy director. As you'd expect, it's pretty much the last word on how Starbucks does digital.

Did anyone else read it and think... well, obviously?

As you'll know if you've just read it, Starbucks is the 'most engaged' brand online, but there's absolutely nothing surprising in the presentation. Assuming there's not some secret that they're keeping from the world (and, let's be honest, there's not), Starbucks has built its online presence and reputation purely by doing all the basic stuff that every single social media opinion piece goes on and on about.

Talking to their customers online, responding to comments and queries fast, posting entertaining content and inviting interaction and creativity under their banner.

It doesn't involve Nasa, solid fuel boosters or competition with the Soviet Union. It's not rocket science. So why does it work so well?

Firstly, because it's Starbucks. Despite all the hype, there are pitifully few examples of strong brands being built through digital communications. Starbucks, as well as being a strong business, were already a strong brand with a consistent identity, look and feel, and a meaningful place in people's lives (usually, somewhere between home and the office when a reliable caffeine hit is needed). They found a way to capture that in their online presence, using enthusiasm for the brand to drive enthusiasm for the digital offer, which now feeds back into enthusiasm for the brand.

Secondly, because they actually do it. They do it a lot; they do it everywhere; they put effort and time into it. They treat is as both a broadcast medium and a public relations and customer service channel. They were there before they needed to be (unlike Eurostar or Domino's, for example), and they threw their weight behind being good online citizens, so they soon became part of the crowd, not an interloper. And now they've made it, they don't let up, which suggests that they do what they do for the love of the medium and the benefit of the community. There's clearly no need for Starbucks to work as hard as it does online - it could get away with far less. But the internet is a creative culture that thrives on extra effort that can't entirely be justified economically, so Starbucks' sheer graft wins them respect. It feels like a brand staffed by people that care about making the internet the greatest nation on Earth.

So Starbucks describe their core philosophies in all the usual terms: be about relationships, be authentic, build coalitions, make commitments, provide content, etc. I think they're doing it right, but analysing it wrongly.

If you want to be as good as Starbucks online, it turns out you need to...

1. make things people like;
2. provide them efficiently and without hassle; and
3. work really hard at serving the community.

In other words, online success is driven by social responsibility.

Surprise.

257 words | ~1 min

Here's a thought.

I'll go mad if I hear another marketer claim that online social media has empowered consumers to talk about marketing. The implication is that they didn't do this before. This is a little like claiming that the birds didn't sing until someone recorded them singing.

Social media channels have done more than improve the general audibility of people's conversations (about everything). They have shifted the balance of power away from those people and organisations who traditionally had access to mass broadcast media, including marketers. This is pretty obvious.

In South Africa they use the term 'historically disadvantaged', which seems ripe to be applied to those of us who can now be heard through social media.

As in post-repressive regimes, the historically disadvantaged users of media suddenly find they call the shots by weight of numbers. They also have little to lose, so their demands for change can be far greater.

Marketers will never again be able consistently to beat ordinary amateur users of social media by any measure of creative excellence. Ever. This is because spending power is nothing compared to weight of numbers. Just as no amount of money can buy you perfect health, yet all of complex life evolved for free, so the internet is always more creative because it can afford to fail thousands of times for every success. No organisation can budget for experimental failure like this.

The thought is this. If you advertise, your main competitor is now the internet. And that's a bit like playing charades against God.

753 words | ~4 min

Karl Marx's idea that commodities are objects which have a use value raises some questions for planners thinking about the future of media channels.

In Capital, Marx gives the example of a coat to demonstrate the labour theory of value - the notion that the value of a commodity in a market depends on the useful labour that went into its production. There are problems with the labour theory of value (see here), but more interesting is the underlying assumption it makes: that objects, especially commodities, are manifestations of ideas about value.

Take the coat. Any coat is a manifestation of the idea that there is value in being able to keep the body warm and move around at the same time. This idea provides a mandate for function - 'something should exist that keeps the body warm without inhibiting mobility'. This, in turn, dictates form. A specific coat will be a manifestation of various ideas of value which govern its exact form (e.g. presence or absence of a hood, thickness, length, material, colour, cut), combined with the influence of copying as a short-cut to invention which stops has having to invent the coat over and over again.

If I make my own coat, my own ideas mandate its function, which together with my resources governs its form. If I make a coat to sell as a commodity, it's influenced by my ideas about other people's ideas of value, measured largely by how much they're willing to exchange or sacrifice to get the coat I've made. As a tailor I have to work out which ideas of value to subscribe to, before I can know what the function of my coats will be (e.g. should they be fashionable, hard-wearing, costly or cheap, etc?), as this determines the form.

This is where we make the leap from Marx to media.

What happens if we treat media like commodities in Marx's sense? That is, as items of exchange whose form is ultimately determined by ideas about other people's ideas of value.

When we do that, questions like 'What is the future of magazines?' look rather odd.

We're used to defining magazines by their form: collections of bound pages, intermediate in size between pamphlets and books. Or by their function: as compilations of short to medium-length texts and images, usually on a common theme, frequently topical or current in nature and entertaining or superficially informative in style.

But what is the idea of value in a magazine? Suppose it's the idea that there is value in having access to entertaining and superficially informative topical content which is portable in nature and which can be enjoyed in short bursts without requiring intense focus of attention.

The important question, then, is: is this idea still valuable? If it is, then we can see what kind of function is mandated. We might find that there is still room in the marketplace for a commodity that fulfils this function. We might, alternatively, decide that there is not: that we are now all sufficiently well-connected and well-resourced that we can compile our own entertainment without the need for curation.

If we find there is still a useful function, we examine our resources. Here's where an existing function may take on a very different form. In the 18th century magazines took on the form they still have today (more or less) because printed paper sheets were an efficient and cost-effective delivery vehicle for this idea of value. At risk of summing up the entire digital revolution in six words: this may no longer be true.

So maybe we need to start planning for the future of media not even with function, but with the idea of value. We also need to accept that old forms die hard, as whole economies are geared up to create them. But there may be creative potential even in this. As ideas of value change, the world ends up littered with zombie forms. Just as warehouses became flats in Britain in the 1980s and vinyl LPs are 'upcycled' into handbags in South Africa now, so zombie media can be appropriated as manifestations of new and different ideas of value.

And if this post has left you with the image of a zombie Karl Marx in a coat reading magazines... good.

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Below is the latest version of 'What the F**k is Social Media Now?' presentation by Marta Kagan at Espresso - Brand Infiltration.

I'm a planner with a particular interest in social media and in trends and futures, so I get a lot of exposure to presentations like this. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of this one.

The good stuff first: it's beautifully presented. And it has comedy non-swearing, which is always a plus. In terms of designing decks that people want to spend time with, it's a classic.

But that just makes it a very well made blunt pencil. Like many 'ooh wow social media' decks, it starts with a terrifying barrage of big numbers, just in case anyone hadn't noticed that lots of people are using social media channels. But I'm not convinced there's much more to it than that. As an argument it's organised paratactically. Lots of facts are stacked up, and the reader is left to conclude that the sheer scale of social media changes everything. Which it may do, but if I'm a confused marketing director I'm none the wiser. There is an obligatory 'so what should you be doing?' section, but the answers are one-liners, often one-worders, like 'listen' and 'engage'.

The result is a presentation that comes across as a bit smug. If you are as super-savvy as its authors, you can feel good about yourself. If not, you feel inadequate. It ends with the PowerPoint equivalent of a business card, so maybe the objective is to pitch by force of accreted facts, but I wonder if that's really the best way to get your audience on-side. The overall effect is to shout 'I know so much about social media it hurts', without ever saying 'Here's how we use all this homework to solve your problems.'

It is worth a read, though, if you're a planner. The design work is excellent, and it's a useful summary of up-to-date facts.

659 words | ~3 min

A post on Wired's news page yesterday covers the issue of funding and spending by Wikileaks, the website that publishes leaked documents and protects whistle-blowers. It was prompted by an anonymous message to the PGPBoard discussion group by a 'Wikileaks Insider' querying the use of money by Wikileaks, which has received 400,000 euros in donations via PayPal and bank transfers since December, but spent only 30,000 euros of this.

The Wired story is commendably even-handed, and clearly well researched, with (to me) fair evidence from the Wau Holland Foundation, the third party which handles the donations, that abuse of funds is not taking place. However, with the spectres of inefficiency and misuse laid to rest, it's fairly mute on the matter of why Wikileaks is receiving so much more than it spends.

In this sense it misses an important point which applies more generally to non-profit organisations, and which is important to me as a planner and an ex charity analyst. So here it is in bold.

Non-profits need reserve funds to cope with unexpected events.

That's not hard to grasp, and neither is the detail: anyone with a savings account should get it intuitively. Strategic planners often break down future events by probability and impact. For most organisations, from a community centre to BP, reserve funds need to scale in accordance with the potential impact. Fixing the community centre roof will cost less than dealing with a Gulf Coast oil spill, unless you're really being ripped off by your builders.

Probability doesn't affect the requirement for reserve funds so much, except in a yes/no way when combined with impact. If an event would have a huge impact but has a very low probability, you don't bother putting money aside to cope - hence the lack of a market for Alien Death Ray Insurance. Assuming you only set aside reserves for events that have a reasonable probability of impacting on your business, there are two other factors I'd suggest you need to consider: frequency and regularity.

People who live in glass houses and throw stones all day should get window insurance and have their glazier on speed-dial, because broken windows will be frequent and regular (one per throw). People who live in trailers in Tornado Alley should get trailer insurance because the frequency of trailer destruction is relatively high, even though irregular (tornado activity being hard to predict). People who live in stone-floored houses in Cape Town need electric fan heaters in the cupboard because every winter it gets cold, even though it's only once a year for a few weeks (regular but infrequent). People who live on the San Andreas fault with its irregular, infrequent catastrophic shifts are really just kidding themselves.

What about Wikileaks? It's almost the perfect model of a non-profit which needs to insure itself against highly probably, high-impact, highly irregular events of unknown but potentially high frequency. Wikileaks is effectively living on the San Andreas fault, but it's not kidding itself. Nobody in Wikileaks knows whether, on any given day, a government or corporation is going to launch a vastly expensive lawsuit against the organisation which could shut down its operations by court ruling or by forcing it to spend all its money on legal fees. But they know that it's likely, given the nature of their work.

On the evidence, the financial decision-makers at Wikileaks know how much they don't know about the future, and are planning accordingly. Without the benefit of more information, I'll be tentative, but it may turn out that Wikileaks are doing exactly the right thing with all that money.

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My post on New consumers, new rules: branding the World Cup appeared on the Futures Company blog on Thursday.

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The title of this post pretty much sums it up. A lot of brands and organisations treat social media as if, as its name implied, it were primarily a media channel. This is a mistake.

By this, I don't mean to rehash the lesson that surely everyone in marketing must have heard by now - that brands should not just use social media to broadcast messages. This is obviously true: for a sample, look at the Twitter feeds or Facebook fan pages of a lot of brands, which seem to function largely as repositories for press releases, with little or no two-way conversation happening. This is not the point I'm making.

Rather, the important mistake a lot of brands are making in social media is to assume that what they say about themselves has any weight of authority behind it at all.

Think of it this way. If you book a load of TV spots in which to run an ad, those spots are the primary TV space in which your brand is discussed. There may be a few tactical ads from your competitors which mention you disparagingly, and you may be mentioned on a few TV programmes. Unless you're BP, and everyone's talking about you, it's genuinely true that in media your own brand messages will be more prominent than other people's mentions of your brand. In media, in other words, the buyer calls the shots.

Social media channels are virtually costless to use. What's more, there is very little extra benefit to be gained from paying. Yes, there are banner ads and keyword ads and expensive search engine optimisation and bungs to bloggers and even more expensive digital campaigns, but the hard truth is that you can't out-shout the rest of the internet. And if all the other users of a media channel decide to start talking about you, and can afford to do it, then your life takes a rather unexpected turn. This happens occasionally in paid media: it's happening to BP at the moment. Typically, in 'antisocial media' like print and TV, the duration of the effect for a given brand is fairly short. Once journalists and commentators and activists and other brands have stopped talking about BP, they'll move on to something else.

In social media, by contrast, where the amount of media is not constrained by the size of the channel (virtually limitless) or the cost of communication (virtually nothing), the noise for any individual brand can be sustained. However loud you can shout, you can always be shouted down. It's a little like being BP, all day, every day.

Of course, there are ways of dealing with this kind of mayhem. They're not advertising solutions, though, but solutions from 'crisis PR'. The name is a giveaway. When everyone else is talking about your brand in mainstream media, it's typically a crisis: a high-intensity, short-duration and potentially damaging experience. In social media the intensity is still high but there's no guarantee the duration will be short. It may also not be as negative. Many of the actors in social media may be saying positive or neutral things about you.

So don't just think about doing 'social media activity', like you would print or press activity. Yes, be proactive, execute, do good work using those channels. But underpin that with a constant vigilance as if every day required a low-level version of the sort of thing that happens during crisis PR campaigns. The surest way to do this, and to ensure that events don't actually go critical without you noticing, is to invest in good monitoring of social media channels (hence the relevance to this blog, hence why I'm writing this post). If this sounds like an expensive sell, it needn't be. If you like, consider it as part of your advertising planning cost, since sensitive analysis can lead not just to a tactical understanding of who's saying what, but to decent insights that can inform your creative work in social media.

In short: listen first, then you'll know how loud to shout.

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I was discussing earlier today some of the problems with measuring the clarity of brand propositions through quantitative research. Tracking whether or not people out there in the world 'get' your brand and its messages is very desirable, and therefore widely done.

The problem is, how do you know what to ask? One answer is to get the brand manager or agency planner to set the questions. Suppose you are responsible for Fizzy X, a low-sugar fizzy drink brand that is targeted at the premium end of the (low-sugar) fizzy drinks market, and whose advertising positions it as the perfect choice of fizzy drink for young high-income twenty-something urban professionals who strive to get the most out of life. (Before you say it, no, you'd not be the only brand to have seized upon this idea, and yes, there are lots of problems with it as a positioning.) How do you test whether all this is getting through to people? Some of the statements you might ask respondents to agree/disagree with are fairly unproblematic: 'Fizzy X represents value for money'; 'Fizzy X tastes good'; 'Fizzy X is low in sugar'; 'Fizzy X is good for you'; etc. These questions can also quite easily be asked of other brands within the category (e.g. Bubbly Y and Zippy Z) for comparison.

How do you test all that stuff about high-flying twenty-somethings, though? Planners and marketers tend to call these 'extrinsics' - elements of the brand that are not strongly connected to the realities of the product or service. Marketing surveys often come straight out and asking for agreement/disagreement with statements designed to test awareness of these extrinsics. So you might see a survey for Fizzy X which includes the statement 'Fizzy X is for young people', or 'Fizzy X is for people who are going places', or even 'Fizzy X gives me confidence'. Sometimes these questions will be asked only of Fizzy X. Sometimes they will form part of a list of extrinsic questions derived from a marketer/researcher's perceptions of all the brands in the category, with each question asked for each brand. So, if Fizzy X's positioning is very up-and-coming and Bubbly Y's positioning is very sports-heavy, the survey might include the statements 'This brand is associated with sport' and 'This brand is for people who are going places', with no prizes for guessing which brand is likely to score highest on each measure.

Here's the problem. Even the least thoughtful consumers are likely to think about price, packaging, and maybe other intrinsics like health benefits when choosing between brands. They are likely to have reasonably clear views on intrinsic statements like 'This brand offers good value for money'. Honestly, though, when faced with a statement like 'This brand is for people who are going places', most of us will not have thought about it for most brands. (The brand managers of the world will be lucky if most of us carry these thoughts around for more than a few categories - cars, for instance, and certain categories of fashion. The extent to which extrinsic thoughts are attached to different categories is itself an interesting question - why can we associate a brand of car or watch or spirits to James Bond, but not a brand of baked beans or window cleaner?) The problem is made worse by the fact that the statements are devised by market researchers and brand managers, people who spend all day thinking about their brands and their personalities.

Ask people to respond to extrinsic brand statements (for which they have no ready answer) in the same way as they respond to intrinsic ones (for which they do) and they will assume they should have a ready answer. They will answer under a sort of mental 'exam conditions' in which an 'erm, I suppose' becomes a 'yes, absolutely', and an 'erm, I never thought about that' becomes a 'no, absolutely not'. This is a recipe for either happy brand managers or unhappy ones when they get the research back, whereas what the brand managers deserve to be is unclear, none the wiser, feeling much like respondents generally feel about their brands. These researched statements may give options for levels of agreement ('agree strongly', 'agree', 'unsure', etc.), but I've yet to see one with an extra box marked 'Who bloody cares? It's only a fizzy drink.' This seems an unfortunate omission.

So here's a thought. Rather than relying on brand managers and planners, briefs and brand manifestos to come up with brand clarity statements and questions, why not base them in part on what people are already saying about your brand out there in the real world? As what is said in social media becomes increasingly reflective of the breadth of good and bad things people have to say about brands (and about everything else), social media intelligence becomes an increasingly useful and sophisticated tool for measuring brand clarity, just as it is for measuring awareness and sentiment. Good monitoring might reveal, for example, that a lot of people in your target market talk about Fizzy X as the drink of choice for vulgar acquisitive rich kids that nobody really likes. Since this is rarely the kind of thing that brand managers and planners want to admit to themselves, the statement 'I hate people who drink this brand' may not have made it onto the survey, but maybe it should.

The idea of 'brand clarity' supposes that brands are best understood by their originators. Better monitoring may reveal not only areas of unclarity, but fundamental divides between in-house perceptions and those of the public, and may even imply that the guardians of the brand are the ones whose perceptions are in the minority.

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Just finished reading McKinsey's briefing 'A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing'. In brief, it recommends assessing (not really measuring) WOM impact by factoring in the volume of messages and various aspects which come together to form the impact of messages.

The aspects of impact are 'Network: Where are they talking?', 'Message content: What are they saying?', 'Message source: What is the trigger?', and 'Sender: Who is talking?' The second of these ('Message content') involves a judgement of whether or not what is said represents a 'Relevant key buying factor' for consumers.

Though this will appeal to marketers who are ultimately very sales-driven, this heuristic seems to undervalue damage to brands. A message that says 'Brand X is poisonous' obviously contains a 'relevant key buying factor', but does a message that says 'Brand X uses suppliers who use palm oil that is diminishing rainforests and leading to greater food insecurity in South America'? The latter may lead some very rainforest-minded consumers to avoid purchasing Brand X's products, but the total damage done may not translate quickly into sales. It may take years of incremental bad news for consumers to turn against Brand X and favour Brand Y. Alternatively it may lead to avoidance or restriction on purchasing in the whole category, if consumers come to perceive that the whole set of brands in the category are similarly undesirable. Or it may not affect sales much at all, but may damage the credibility of Brand X in a way that pushes up its required marketing budget by diminishing return on investment.

Identifying 'key buying factors' means knowing a lot about how consumers are feeling and thinking, and the impact of those thoughts and feelings on their purchasing decisions. The heuristic is only really useful, then, if you have a lot of data and insight to back it up. Otherwise there's a good chance your analysis will be wrong, and will turn a measurement tool into a rather formalised wild guess.

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Catching up on a bit of reading, I've noticed a lot of futurists considering the perceptual impact of the grounding of flights due to the Icelandic volcano eruption. My Futures Company colleague Andrew Curry summarises the kinds of reperception that are taking place, and Gideon Rachman (in the FT) smartly observes that the frustration normally felt by the poor or disenfranchised has briefly been extended to everyone by the impossibility of getting off the ground.

But there's an odd strain of nostalgia running through much of the output from this volcanic sub-genre. Even as writers imagine possible futures, some of these futures seem to resemble versions of the inaccessible past. They are, to pinch from William Empson, versions of pastoral.

We catch glimpses of these pastoral worlds of slow movement in for example, Doreen Massey's essay, 'Is the world getting larger or smaller?', republished by Open Democracy (and linked to by Andrew). She argues, fairly persuasively, about the effect that the creation of rapid travel 'hubs' has had on communities that fall in the spaces between and so remain away from the main currents of globalised life - though this is by no means a new phenomenon, even if the hubs are now nodes in a vastly larger network. I'm not sure if I agree that in a fast world 'there is no question of the pleasures of movement or travel': rather, I suspect the feasibility of rapid movement has enabled the emergence of less pleasure-orientated categories of travel - like business travel, for instance - that were previously confined either to small distances or to small constituencies of people, such as merchants. Was mercantile travel ever a pleasure?

To deny that travel is a pleasure to be savoured now implies that once it was, and that there is, in the words of Christopher Reid's 'Second Genesis':

a pang too, at the back / Of the mind: a loss... a lack...

Nowhere is that more strongly felt than in Alain de Botton's essay 'A world without planes', published on the BBC Radio 4 website (of course). The essay imagines not so much a future world without aircraft as a long-past world, a tribal culture at which 'children would gather at the feet of old men' - a world for which aeroplanes and all of modernity were part of their inaccessible past. De Botton's planeless world feels as though it exists in the aftermath of some terrible war, devoid of a generation of rushing young men. In a world without planes, he writes, 'we would admire them like small boys do, and adults no longer dare'. The world without planes is at once an old world (located in the future) and a childish one (located in the past), living a second childhood. If De Botton means at all to imply that the world he has created is senile, he does so subtly; if not, he ignores the sad, gentle mockery that the term 'second childhood' has always carried with it, and its fatalism. His prose unwinds with a languor that fits the slow world he invokes.

To my partial reader's eye, this slowness can never be a welcome return to 'a wisdom that [our] medieval pilgrim ancestors had once known very well'. This is the meander, not of a world that is slow, but of a world that has been slowed. (In aviation terms, we already live in a slowed world, with the demise of Concorde. Of all people, Jeremy Clarkson writes surprisingly powerfully on this.) I tend to disagree forcefully with futurists who advocate return to the predecessor states of ecologically unsustainable systems. Carbon-intensive electricity generation is unsustainable, but it is worth fighting to develop better systems before we get the candles out of the cupboard. I cannot support the ultra-local food movement because if applied everywhere its impact on marginal populations (not to mention marginal costs) would lead to mass starvation. A world without planes is a world in which aid takes months to reach disaster zones, in which displaced relatives cannot return to family emergencies, in which we content ourselves with less. And that's not good enough.