Well, for their event, Nascom asked me to create a challenging presentation, so I thought I would explore the real failings of retail further and, more importantly, find some possible fixes. Not only did I find concrete data and examples showing just how bad US and UK retail is doing economically, but also some great examples of what some stores and brands are doing to try to make retail better using new technologies and approaches.

You can check out the entire presentation here, complete with speaker and case notes.

I was reminded of this just yesterday on Facebook in a very personal way. Facebook has over the years received a variety of praise and criticism. Some people argue that it’s gotten too big for its britches. While I would argue the opposite. That just as this world needs a single site to collect and host the sum knowledge of humanity, here I refer to Wikipedia, the world also needs a single site where everybody can find and connect to the people they want to. That’s the true singular reason behind the rapid growth of Facebook -people searching to make and maintain connections with friends and family.

The story that hit this home so clearly and emotionally to me was the incredible discovery of a message on my Facebook account from somebody who I thought was lost to me forever. The is the story of my niece, who vanished 21 years ago somewhere in Southern California as the result of some incredible ill-conceived legal ruling by an incredibly moronic Californian custody judge. As the years went by, our side of the family moved and went international, making us hard to find. And for years it seems my niece has been searching for us. But now, because Facebook has become the single point of contact for everybody in our family, no matter where they live, she was finally able to discover her long lost father and family.

There are some miracles in life we can’t explain. The cancer patient who suddenly is cured. Or the cripple who can walk. Here we have a miracle enabled by technology. Where a person, who has felt disconnected, lost and lonely for a lifetime, can suddenly discover an entire family that they previously only dreamed of.

As we continue to look for ways to leverage social media for business, let us remember that in the end we are connecting humans to humans. Whether they are customers to suppliers, marketers to consumers, friends to friends or family to family. And it is in this vastly increasing web of very human connections that we will see global social change happen leading to the blossoming of a new moral and ethical center of businesses and of intercultural social tolerance.

He makes some very interesting points about building connections between people within the product itself. As a conversational marketing strategist, I naturally find this very relevant because, the majority of time, both products and retail experiences constantly fail to create opportunities to connect customers to customers; almost as if their marketing directors are afraid of having customers talk to each other.

But this thinking is akin to sticking one’s head in the sand, because customers ARE having these conversations everyday in forums, blogs and twitter streams, mostly without the brand’s participation. So here’s the rub, marketing directors either need to accept this fact and adjust their product, approach and ideally their entire business structure, or continue to struggle in a world that will become increasingly hostile.

Doesn’t seem much like a choice to me, but it still amazes me how many consultants and marketers alike think that old ways of doing business – make a website, buy a print, radio or TV ad – will draw people in to buy and do business. What they don’t see is that the main reason people are probably still doing business with their brands is because of:

a) previously good personal experiences,

b) lack of choice

c) Word of Mouth from other customers

and NOT from overpriced ads.

There are far more cost-efficient ways of doing business today. But it does mean accepting that change has happened and that it’s time to embrace new options. And Seth gives plenty of cases in point.

Is this the future of retail?

In the run up to Christmas, and the mad post-Christmas sales dash that followed, it seemed that the only thing anybody in Cambridge did was shop.

There are two malls in Cambridge, the Grand Arcade and the Grafton, and I live almost precisely between these two shopping meccas. In the days before and after Christmas, there must have been a few hundred thousand people coming in and out of Cambridge.

I realise that the Cambridge economy is fairly booming. According to official reports,  Cambridge retail pulls in just over a £1 billion each year. In the run up to Christmas, the average retail footfall increases by 30% with people spending on average between 2-4 hours of their time shopping (according to a 2008 city government customer survey).

One billion is a hefty amount of money, and more importantly, it’s a hefty amount of man hours going into shopping as an activity as opposed to doing something more philanthropic, such as working up solutions to world hunger, or even using the time to improve ourselves and our lives.

Which brings me to the interesting observation three Cambridge stores; the Apple Store, Build-A-Bear Workshop and Levi’s.  When you watch people in these three different retail environments, you see completely different behaviors.

When you wander into any Apple owned retail store, you immediately notice that people are not just looking at products, they are actively using them! Apple stores are now famous for perfecting Experience Shopping. The notion is that when you have a high-involved product like computers, the best way to sell them is simply to let people experience them in real life conditions. So Apple retail has counters loaded with Macs connected to an in-store wi-fi service that anybody can wander in and start to use.

You therefore see a lot customers dropping in just to check their email, twitter and Facebook accounts, or to surf the web and chat with friends over IM.

An Apple store patron surfing the web

Towards the middle of the store, you have a series of gaming computers loaded with some of the latest Mac-friendly games. Here teens and kids as young as 5 are parked on cushions, playing games for up to an hour at times.

Gaming corner in the Apple Store

Apple is also famous for turning their retail into learning centres. Apple staff regularly hold training sessions throughout the day. At one, I witnessed two pensions learning how to create home movies on i-Movie. At another, I witnessed budding musicians learning how to use GarageBand and USB keyboards to create their tracks.

Wait a minute! These people aren’t really shopping! They are learning, communicating, researching and enriching their lives, all the while, realising that this is what the Apple brand enables. In essence, Apple uses its retail to demonstrate its brand promise every single day. Sure you can still buy at the Apple retail stores. But shopping itself has been made more subtle and de-prioritised to focus on brand experience. The end result is that people feel like they drive the interaction rather than the other way around.

How the approach is working for Apple? In the US, Apple tops the charts in retail sales. Whereas brands like Saks Fifth Avenue are earning $362 per square foot a year, Apple rakes in a chartbusting $4032! They are almost twice as profitable as Tiffany’s & Co famous store in NYC. (source: CNN Money 2007)

Still, some have argued that the Apple approach towards experience centres isn’t for everyone. And so it seems. Nokia has tried for years to emulate Apple’s retail format with their flagship stores and has failed. In part, Nokia really didn’t understand what Apple did. They never successfully made their retail about brand experiences. Their stores were often poorly staffed. Or had too little space in some cases. In the end, Nokia has recently decided to close its flagship stores. So if Experience Retail isn’t the answer to all brands, what are the other choices?

Let’s move across the hall from the Apple Store in Cambridge to the Build-A-Bear Workshop. Whereas Apple is all about experience with the brand, Build-A-Bear is all about brand participation.

Build-A-Bear using kids in store to help them decide on future products.

In fact, their central products, the bears and stuffed animals, are purposely left as unfinished products. Instead, kids are involved in “creating” their own custom product, from choosing the animal casing, which can be anything from the classic teddy bear to lions, leopards, dogs, bunnies and unicorns, to stuffing, fluffing and sewing it. They are even asked to groom and dress their toy in any number of available outfits, all of which cost extra of course.  The kids are then given official adoption certificates and are asked to name their toy. My daughter chose the Jack Russell Terrier toy and named him affectionately, Mac, after a neighbour’s golden Labrador and now treats her toy as her real pet dog.

What Build-A-Bear hit upon was the realisation that kids like to create. No, they love to create! By offering an interactive, family oriented experience in store built around participation, Build-A-Bear doesn’t become just another shop selling you more stuff, they become a treasured childhood experience.

Today, Build-A-Bear now even lends out its Workshop for Built-A-Bear birthday parties where creation becomes the focus of a birthday experience. Personally, this is going a bit too far for my tastes, but I can imagine a lot kids wanting a birthday party there, especially if that becomes their first Build-A-Bear experience.

A Build A Bear birthday party

I would love to say that all of the retail stores in Cambridge are as interesting and involving as Apple and Build-A-Bear, but sadly they are islands in oceans of dreadful shopping. The remaining stores are still living in the retail stone age, focused solely on using sales to drive footfall, offering crazy discounts to get people to buy. While neighbouring stores plastered 70% off signs on their windows, the Apple Store and Build-A-Bear Workshop didn’t have any, and yet, their stores had as visitors as ever.

Is it simply because of their unique formats and products that Apple and Build-A-Bear could make experience and participation retail work, or could it work for other brands as well. To answer this question, let’s look at the Levi’s store, which sits just a few doors down from Build-A-Bear.

Historically, Levi’s can be said to have led the industry with creating in-store experiences. Their famous $20 million flagship store in San Francisco, which opened in 1999, had cutting-edge technology, interactive attractions, and high-quality music and video. It was described as being “part theatre, part art gallery, part museum, part cinema and part rave.”

Greg Ercolino, president of Ercolino Productions, a New York-based technical consultant and systems integrator who designed the store described it as being  “…like a film festival. People want to be entertained, they want to learn something new, they want to experience something.  To do that, you have to be interactive and show them things they haven’t seen before.”

The store features a live DJ/VJ booth for audio and video artists to perform. Activities and attractions at every corner of the new store, such as the four video periscope stations near the main entrance which allow customers a virtual — if not voyeuristic — tour of each floor. Then there’s the 3D body scanner that lets customers get a custom-fitted pair of Levi’s and the “shrink-to-fit” attraction — one of the store’s odder features — that dips you and your new Levi’s jeans into a special bath, then blow dries you and your pants in a human dryer until they hug every curve just right.

Taking custom-fitting even further, the Levi’s Original Spin Program allows customers to choose from a range of cuts and styles and have a pair of jeans custom tailored based on their exact measurements and preferences.  There is also a “Factory Area” where they can watch Levi’s staffers embroider a custom design on a pair of jeans with a 15-color thread embroidery machine, or burn a photograph into them with a special laser-etching machine.

In addition, the store features a range of other multimedia and interactive attractions including CD listening stations, Internet stations, and “Attitude Pods” — specially designed audio/video entertainment chairs

Was any of this impressive, ground-breaking, hi-tech, personalised and entertaining retail experiences in my local Cambridge Levi’s store? No. Not a single one. In fact, the Levi’s Cambridge store looked pretty much like every other fashion store in Cambridge: a small retail space with a bunch of clothes and a few changing rooms.

The more important question is did all of this impressive retail kit improve Levi’s fortunes? Again…no. Sales and profits at Levi’s have been plummeting for years.

In 2008, they saw profits plummet by 98% in the second quarter, which they blamed on weak consumer spending. In the first quarter of 2009, they saw a 50.5% profit drop, which they again blamed on consumer spending. Though they did finally see a sales peak of 5.5% by the end of the third quarter, they were still struggling in the so-called “tough economy.” Meanwhile, sales in Apple stores soared, as did those of Build-A-Bear. Weak consumer spending? Or maybe consumers were just being more selective about where they spend their money.

So, while Build-A-Bear and Apple have made experience and participation based retail models work, why didn’t it improve Levi’s fortunes?

One reason is that their flagship model was impossible to roll-out to all of its hundreds of global retail stores, mainly because, as in Cambridge, most Levi’s retail stores are small. The other problem is that Levi’s still doesn’t own most of their retail outlets, a situation they have been trying to improve since 2005. The main problem in my mind however, is that none of the 3D scanners, video periscopes and other whizzbang store gimmicks were core to bringing the brand to life. Sure you could get your jeans blow-dried to your skin. Or your favourite design laser etched onto your jeans. But is this why you buy Levi’s? Is this what the brand is about, customisation?

Back in 2007, when I was planning for a new campaign launch, I hit about a golden truth about Levi’s. Levi’s is probably the ONLY brand in the world that one could with confidence say was present in every major revolution, youth movement and key historical event that has happened in the last 60 years. Such is their absolute ubiquity that you can be almost certain that somebody participating in or witnessing a historical event or mass movement, was wearing a pair of Levi’s jeans. This impressive heritage with historical moments and youth movements is what the brand is about. It’s history as witnessed by people wearing Levi’s.

What Levi’s and other retailers should be looking for, are ways to bring their brands to life and involve people at retail with their brand experiences, not just product ownership experiences.

With Levi’s this would translate into to creating centres of “history through my eyes” and customised every shop in the world with witnessed history as it happens, providing innovative ways for people to share, talk about and even create memorable historical moments.

With other brands, it’s high time they start to rethink and reinvent. Shopping as it stands cannot be maintained indefinitely. And replacing it with more experience-driven shopping that aids in self-actualisation and real personal or community growth is the key to maintaining strong performance in the challenging years to come.

Sources:
Consumer expenditure in Cambridge

Cambridge consumer shopping survey

Levi’s sales performance

Levi’s San Fransisco Flagship store

Problems with the Levi’s Flagship store

Recently completed my company presentation on what HolyTornado! does. Took a while as I had to do the graphic design solo. But am quite pleased with the first result. I will be updating this as the company and its services evolve.

The new consumer journey

A while back, I attempted to create a model the way companies need to leverage new marketing to engage today’s consumers. I looked at a number of interesting approaches, but in the end opted to build around the idea of a marketing spiral.  I’m sure there are a number of other ways to illustrate the consumer journey other than using a spiral, but this is what I came up with. If anybody wants to take another stab at this, please do and let me know where you post it. Read on to discover how you can use this model to define your new marketing program.

Today’s consumers start with an Initial Considersation Set. Martin Lindstrom’s brain scan research in his groundbreaking book, “Buyology,” clearly shows that we all have an initial consideration set for every product category, many of which are completely unconscious. We choose a brand of shampoo simply because we are used to choosing it, or because on some unconscious level, our gut tells us that it’s better than the others for any number of reasons which we spend less than a few seconds consciously thinking about.

“It’s natural.” “It has a secret formula.” “It’s scientifically proven.” “I like the way it smells.” “It makes my hair feel nice.” “It’s cheap.” All these statements and a near infinite variety of others, which are completely personal to each individual, contribute to our initial consideration set.

Martin Lindstrom’s research also reveals that changing these ‘consideration sets’ is harder than it looks. In some cases, it even requires truly radical events. It took a global recession to turn affluent middle class shoppers into price savvy buyers. It took an end-of-the-world scenario involving climate change to get people to start considering carbon footprints when looking to buy a new car.

Advertisers historically have used creative disruption as a way to “open our minds” to another possible consideration set. For decades toothpaste that cleaned the teeth and kept them healthy was enough for us. Suddenly however, advertisers have effectively convinced us that we actually want toothpaste that doesn’t just clean, but makes them white, because we all know, white teeth are healthy teeth. The same consideration set has now been given a qualifier, healthy teeth = white teeth, so I need whitening toothpaste.

On the Internet, transparency means that marketers have to think and behave differently, because people can quite simply use Google to research a product to find out if it actually makes our teeth white, or even if white teeth are healthy teeth. Which is why where Affinity comes to play. Affinity is about building emotional connections between brand and consumer. To build affinity in today’s online world, marketers leverage social media strategies targeted around Influence and Advocacy.

Although common social media lore is that some people are better influencers than other, BzzAgents in the US has found that anybody can be an influencer. An influencer happens to be somebody you know or meet who says the right thing at the right time. You might happen across somebody on a train who is reading a book that looks interesting because a) they are laughing their head off and b) you are bored stiff reading the same old celebrity trash in the Metro. So you might think, “if I had that book, I wouldn’t have to read this lousy newspaper.” This is precisely the experience BzzAgent discovered when it sent out its agents to promote some of the latest reads. At the end of the day, building an emotional bond with consumers is all about trust. And that trust starts more often than not, through somebody else.

As we continue down the crazy funnel of consumerist choice, we move towards having Conversations. Back on our train, you’re likely start up a conversation with the book reader. “So is that a good book?” You might ask, though the roaring laughter would probably be a dead giveaway. In more structured mechanisms, brands can create opportunities for conversation using Presence & Participation, by participating in or even hosting conversations on their own blogs and in existing blogs, review sites and forums. These conversations can have a massive benefit. Your consumers get to talk to real people who speak like real people, not like an aggressive PR agent on a mission or a call centre in Bombay.

The next step in journey is to facilitate their Participation with your brand by creating Visibility & Distribution. This is achieved with seeding content and leveraging advertorial placements, content partnerships, relevant sponsorships and other forms of content generation around the brand. The key is to think like Coca-Cola. “Be everywhere the customer is thirsty.”

Use social listening to map out all of the places people are looking for content about your brand, and ensure your content is there. Going back to our toothpaste example, our toothplace marketer should find everyplace online where people might be looking for information on ‘clean and white teeth,’ then make sure they have positioned the right content to help consumers in their research.

The Engagement step is crucial. Even if the consumer walks away believing everything they heard about your brand and product, they will do more research and participate in further conversations or interactions with the brand. In fact, the higher the cost or level of complexity the product or service is, the more research consumers do.

So once you have seeded loads of content across the Internet, you need to make it easy for people to search and find it. Discovery & Search of content is so important that brands who get it spend disproportionate amounts of their budgets on search engine performance and optimization. Keyword optimization, social topic and taxonomy analysis, content submission to multiple social sharing sites, the use of rich metadata on content and content linking are all techniques that can be employed to make it easy for people to find and engage with your content.

To ensure that the content does what it needs to, i.e. convince the consumer that you have the best toothpaste for instance, it’s best to leverage the consumer’s voice as much as possible and target against consumer passions (fashion, music, film, whatever). The more relevant you can be, the more focused your message is to your audience, the more likely you will be included in their final consideration set.

In other words, if you can get a hundred ordinary people to test, record and talk about your toothpaste versus other brands, the more likely people will add it to their brand list. To ensure credibility, it’s best to foster conversations not just on your site, but on trusted forums and communities that editorially make sense for your brand.

After all of this interaction with you, your content, other customers, our buzz agents and the average guy or girl on the street, the consumer finally buys your product. Great! Job well done! On to the next one. Right? Wrong!

Winning a consumer is only the first round. Imagine what will happen if the consumer’s experience with your brand is completely not what he/she expected, or worse, is just plain awful. That disappointed consumer will write about those awful brand experiences. Other customers will jump on the brand-bashing bandwagon and the individual and collective experiences will get shared to every living person they can reach ensuring your brand is not on anybody else’s initial consideration set.

Sadly, bad reviews outnumber good reviews in just about every category. This is basic psychology really. People who feel cheated want justice. Because they are unlikely to get their money back, they will enact justice by trying to prevent others from making the same mistake. So they become detractors. Detractors can destroy a brand’s reputation online, which is why it’s important to make sure the product experience lives up to the hype. The good news however, is that detractors can be won over surprisingly easily. It often just takes a brand that is willing to listen honestly and is sincerely willing to try to do better.

Most agencies recommend social listening however as a way to find out want people are really saying about your brand, and observing as away to learn how they use your products; all with the goal of tackling negative word of mouth and to improve their marketing to consumers. The general problem with this advice is that the real reason to listen to word of mouth is not to rush into a PR campaign whenever you hear harsh criticisms, but to collect ongoing feedback and communicate these as insights to the product teams with the mandate of making better products and services. That’s the message you want to communicate. “Sorry, we listened. We are making it better.”

Naturally, if you have a great product, your toothpaste makes teeth brilliantly white, your book is a brilliant piece of literature, then social listening will give you the genuine testimonials of real consumers. Best of all, they’ll be testimonials delivered not necessarily by you, because let’s face it, how many people trust testimonials by marketers, but rather by consumers directly to consumers. All you had to do was make sure that a) you have a good product and service and b) you are in the right places having the right conversations and supplying the kind of content people need to understand and believe in your product.

I recently came across this article and couldn’t resist talking about it see how I have spent the last 6 months helping Nokia plug their Ovi applications store. However as an Ipod and Nokia owner, I know the real value of mobile apps. I use them everyday to check the weather, check train times, find out what’s playing at my local cinema, find out where I am or how to get somewhere, check my mail, keep track of time I spend on projects and much more. I keep discovering new apps all the time to the point where I feel I am actually getting some kind of mobile app overload happening.

As a dad however, I can appreciate the idea of a application that translates a baby’s cries into something more understandable like, “I’m hungry, feed me.”

I remember reading baby books which all mentioned how mothers eventually can tell the difference between one cry and another. But what about dads? To me a screech was a screech. Sure I could tell the difference between a mild night disturbance versus a baby in pain, but these are extremes. It’s all those cries in between that drive you mad with uncertainty and anxiety. After all, you want the little one to be happy all the time. You want to protect and make them feel special. But how can you do that when you have no idea what’s wrong?

Well, for all the new dads out there, I truly hope this mobile app from Biloop Technologic works. Just one word of advice however, if your wife doesn’t know  why the baby is crying and you do because of this application, don’t tell her. She will hate you for it. Instead find a clever way to “lead her” to find the reason that you already know thanks to this application.

As a marketer I am however surprised that the brand managers for Pampers or Johnson & Johnson’s didn’t think of this first. What a huge missed opportunity to create lasting brand value. Didn’t anybody pay attention to Kraft’s success?

IPhone Application Translates Babies’ Howls

Posted using ShareThis

Like the latest fad in fashion, Conversational and Community Marketing is all the rage in marketing today. So what’s so special about it? Do you really need to be bothered, or can you happily go about your business and ignore it?

None of us can escape the fact that the Internet has changed many things for businesses. In my earlier post, I talked about the growing importance for total transparency in everything from a company’s behavior to their pricing and profit margins. Guiding this need is the every growing Internet population of ‘Prosumers’, or rather ‘empowered shoppers.’ Although the size of the prosumer population has never been officially measured, we can figure it out by looking at people’s online behaviors.

For instance, if you look at the last years results from Forrester’s Technographics surveys, you see that:
•    10% of the UK online population read blogs
•    17% watch user generated videos
•    12% participate in discussion forums
•    and 20% read online reviews.
These are all behaviors of empowered shoppers. Let’s focus on the last point, the 20% who read reviews, which is the most common indicator of an empowered consumer.

Related US study by Forrester shows a similar breakdown of behaviors.

Nielson Netview estimates that there are 34,151,628 online Brits. So 20% of that figure is roughly 6.83 million Brits who we can classify as acting like prosumers. Granted, that still means there are still a good 27.3 million other online shoppers you could target. But consider this. If every one of the 6.83 million empowered shoppers talks to just 3 other people, your ‘informed shopper-base’ suddenly grows to 20.49 million shoppers! Suddenly, that 27.3 million has shrunk significantly. So it’s probably safest to treat everybody like a prosumer and get on with business.

Let’s look at it from another angle. What if 80% of your prosumer base doesn’t like your brand and trashes your products online? You have a serious problem on your hands, even if that 80% represents just 1% of your customer base. Because that 80% will promote their negative opinions to the rest of your customer base, encouraging them to flee in droves. On top of that, the percentage of the prosumer population is actually growing. So by next year, that 1% will increase to 2% and so on.

So what can you do about it? Well, first you can start by listening to your customers and take their pulse of how they feel about your brand. There are a number of buzz trackers and listening platforms out there, but the one I prefer, both for cost efficiency and for their ability to scan in multiple languages is that offered by Attentio. To get a quick idea of what the Attentio Brand Dashboard can do, check out their website at Attentio.com or give it a go at their public buzz monitoring site, Trendpedia.com. For some sample results, check out this review I made for Lexus a few years back while I was working at Lateral.

Excerpt from the Lexus Hybrid Debate

The Brand Dashboard continuously trawls a wide range of online sources, from blogs to forums, newsgroups and social networks, looking for certain keywords that you define, which act as flags of potentially relevant conversations. As there are literally millions of sources to scan, most listening tools work as a “present to forward” looking information source. In other words, to get the most accurate results, you need to set it up in advance and let it run for several months. Backward looking scans with Attentio are possible but are typically limited by the length of time articles and comments remain online, currently between 3-6 months on average. With Lexus, I scanned a number of keywords related to the brand, but also the names of competitor’s brands and common words used around hybrid technology. This allowed us to get a good feel for what people really thought of Lexus’ Hybrid cars.

Some companies I know, now utilize this type of data to complement their ongoing qualitative and quantitative research as it provides a higher level of reliability than what they get through focus groups and panels. After all, people are far more likely to tell what they really think in sites like TripAdvisor than in any focus group you run.

Listening however, is only the first step. You also need to be able to respond to opinions online. The most effective way of doing this is to empower and encourage every employee in your company to participate in social networks, forums and blogs where the conversations are happening (which you can also identify using your Brand Dashboard). The advantage here is that your employees are typically your best advocates. So let them talk and share their opinions and knowledge. There are examples of companies who have done this to remarkable advantage.

The first is Microsoft, where practically every employee blogs about something, most related to their specific profession. There are currently 262 officially tracked blogs in their directory across a mind-boggling array of subjects. These blogs are effectively are helping Microsoft to redefine their approach to be more “customer focus” through one on one interaction with customers. In many cases, this ability to have real conversations with customers is helping Microsoft to fix errors and improve products at a faster pace than ever before.

Another great example is Redfin, a US based estate agency. Redfin’s CEO, Glenn Kelman took the US real-estate market by storm last November when he decided to be completely transparent about the US real-estate industry. As such, he publicly exposed every dirty trick estate agencies use to sell you a property. His blog was almost a “how-to” in avoiding the cons that most British still face when trying to purchase property. With 300+% year-over-year growth in unique visitors, Redfin has been the fastest-growing major real estate website in the U.S Redfin has also increased its market-share significantly as a result of its game-changing approach.

Redfin and Microsoft are both examples of companies who have mastered Conversational Marketing.

Another surprising example was McDonald’s in New Zealand. Selling burgers is easy. Selling McDonald’s to a group of cynics and non-believers is a different proposition altogether. In 2006 this was the situation McDonald’s found itself in. No matter what it had been doing and saying over the previous years around its health, quality and nutrition initiatives, people were still viewing McDonald’s food with wariness and mistrust. Nothing seemed to stick, sink in or sway public opinion in favor of a company that was trying to break free of its past. This was hurting the organization, not only from an image standpoint, but also with regards to the bottom line. McDonald’s decided it was time to get on the front foot and set the record straight about its food and they way it behaves once and for all.

Peter Bush, the CEO of McDonald’s Australasia had the right idea. ‘If we could sit down for just five minutes and tell our story one to one with the consumer, McDonald’s wouldn’t have the brand issues we have today.’ His conversational approach become the seed to their Take a Closer Look campaign, in which people’s conversations and concerns were displayed in the ads against McDonald’s irrefutable facts. Essentially, McDonald’s leveraged conversations around its own myths as the basis to start conversations with its customers.  The result was that 70% of people who had seen the campaign believed what McDonald’s was saying. Ultimately, people reported that the ads made them feel better about eating at McDonald’s.

The New Zealand campaign was eventually followed by a larger, online initiative called Make Up Your Own Mind, in which consumers could literally ask any question to McDonald’s and they would answer it with facts. Unfortunately, when I challenged them on their continued decline of their food quality in many restaurants I visited, their answers were cut and pasted from other questions people asked, word for word, making it sound like the work of PR people. When further questioned about their support of aspartame in their Cola’s, their answer was literally right from the official apartame website: hardly a non-biased, credible source of information. The lesson here, always assume that your consumers already have done their online research. Brand sites like these are typically the last resort, not the first port of call.

Community and Conversation are often mixed in today’s marketing lingo, however they shouldn’t be. Although they are linked, they aren’t exactly the same. The McDonald’s campaign used Conversational Marketing, but it didn’t create a community. In contrast, Bugaboo strollers clearly has created a community of involved like-minded parents on its site, effectively leveraging people’s real conversations and stories within its communications to foster a sense of participation and brand ownership. When you link Conversation and Community to brand strategy, you get a robust brand platform from which you can engage today’s growing base of consumers who want to be involved in the shaping of the brand.

The resulting benefits of participation and ownership can add significant value to the brand, seeding it with real human experiences and emotion that reaches the long tail of your consumer base. Considering that 49 % of people made a purchase based on friends recommendations on social media property (Razorfish, 2008), social media can be viewed as an important channel and tool to interact, manage and enable these brand communities.

If this strategy appeals, does this mean you should run out and create a community? Not at all. What most digital agencies won’t tell you is that you actually don’t need to build your own community. In fact, unless there is a clearly unmet nascent consumer need for your community, you are much better off partnering with an existing community than building your own. Start by looking to see which fan created communities already exists around your brand. You may be surprised to find a few. Brands such as Apple, Nokia, Saab, Ford, Harley Davidson, Suzuki, Asus and many more all have dozens of fan created brand communities that you can interact and partner with. On top of this, there are thousands of niche, vertical communities around every passion you can imagine. Many of which could very well serve your existing customer’s interest and needs. And most of these verticals are heavily under-funded and some corporate partners could be very welcomed.